The Spec Ops series has been going since 1998, although came to an abrupt end after eight games and an abandoning of the PC, in 2002. Now, a decade on, it’s back with Spec Ops: The Line. We sent Craig to take a look at an early build of the military shooter to see if it’s a welcome return.

Sand, like bullets, can kill a man. You need sufficient quantities, but it’ll eventually either crush, suffocate, or get in so many sandwiches that the victim grinds his insides away. Given the choice of what I’d rather die of, I’d go with a lead sandwich (bullets) over a sand sandwich (an actual sandwich with sand).

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As noted in this post (via here), Skyrim contains much of the rest of the continent of Tamriel in rudimentary form outside its mountains. bBorderRegionsEnabled=0 in Skyrim.ini and no-clip on does the trick. Thanks, commenters. There’s a huge heightmap out there, well beyond view distance, down into Morrowind, Cyrodiil, and Hammerfall. It’s a bit buggy, mind and seems unstable once you’re out of skyrim. Looks like it’s just a chunk of the world rendered around Skyrim for view-distance authenticity, rather than any possible expansion.

“Level with Me” is a series of conversations about level design between modder Robert Yang and a level designer of a first person game. At the end of each interview, they collaborate on a Portal 2 level shared across all the sessions – and at the very end of the series, you’ll get to download and play this “roundtable level.” This is Part 5 of 7.

When Davey Wreden made The Stanley Parable, a Source mod about the dissonance between game narrative and free will (among other things), it quickly went viral and surprised a mod community that thought Source mods were already dead. Now, he’s currently collaborating on an extended remake / reboot of The Stanley Parable and other projects. (more…)

Update: Confirmed as Dizzy: Prince of the Yolkfolk, but for iOS and Android only. Bah!

Dizzy: a smiling egg-man controlled in assorted platform-puzzle-adventures by old European men such as I back in the late 80s and early 90s. For some reason (perhaps because he wasn’t the figurehead of a console company; perhaps because the key devs left to start their own company; perhaps because he was, well, an egg), Codemasters’ one-time flagship character didn’t really survive into the 21st Century. But now the delicate wee fellow is apparently due for a return. What kind of return is a mystery: all we have to go on is this none-too-cryptic image at the brow-rasingly-named eggcitingnews.com. Are you willing to shell out for the yolkfolks’ return? (more…)

Start with the odd name: Take on Helicopters. At once a warning and an invitation, it sounds at first like a bad translation. After a few hours at the controls of its rotary-winged menagerie, the title ceases to sound strange and becomes a fairly accurate invitation. It asks, can you Take on Helicopters? Here’s wot I think.> (more…)

Any fool with a copy of AGS can make an adventure game, but only a select few come up with ones that are truly worth your time. Egress is a game about astronauts and disaster (I presume The Dig is in an inspiration, but it also evokes the likes of 2001, Event Horizon, Moon and Defying Gravity), and while it can err a little too much towards trial and error there’s a lot of clever stuff there, intermittently excellent presentation and an appropriately tense atmosphere.

Told from a claustrophobic first-person perspective, as well as delving into open sci-fi-horror and offering multiple endings, it gets across the anxiety and glacial slowness of lumbering around in a big suit in an unknown place really rather well. 50MB, free, from here.

RPS has an issue with Kickstarter projects, as we’ve mentioned before. We are contacted by very many developers who tell us about their wonderful ideas for games, perhaps even with a concept teaser video, and then ask if we can promote their Kickstarter so they can make it. Well, we’re afraid not, because that puts us in the position of asking our readers to give money to a game for which we’ve not even seen a screenshot. And we’re not okay with that. Then there’s the more subtle issue with games that do> have some content, and then want Kickstarter promotion, when we’ve no way of knowing that they’ll actually make the game. Such a situation occurs with Molecat Twist, from a four-person multi-national indie team who want a bunch of money to finish their game. Except, well, they’ve a working demo of the game you can play right now. So that’s> what I’m posting about.

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Dirigible fans might recall browser game Guns Of Icarus, in which you manned an airship as it took on aerial foes, and they might also be aware that the game is now being rebooted as a full-blown MMO, Guns Of Icarus Online. They’re likely to be unaware, however, that the first in-game footage of the reboot has been released. Until now: here it is.

Looking pretty atmospheric! Ahaha. Do you see what I did there? Between this and the Air Buccaneers remake it’s looking like 2012 will be quite the year for lighter-than-air combat.

Panzer Corps, a game I am more likely to eat than play, has just released a demo. Which is splendid news if you’re not a giant strategy wimp like me, but rather a brave, strong, firmly-featured type. Within the demo you’ll find six missions from the unenigmatically named Bootcamp Campaign, as well as the invasion of Poland (cripes) and “the first few turns of the Norway scenario”. It should give a good feel for how progression takes place. They’re also putting in a “limited” version of the scenario editor. Oh, and for the next two weeks the game is half price from Slitherine.

Battlefield 3 has patched itself on PC now. Remember when we all used to scream and shout about games that needed patching after release? It was this massive faux pas, and we’d all condemn any who released a game “unfinished”. And now sites report the “news” that a patch is forthcoming for a game, as if it’s a free DLC bonus feature for us lucky players. Well, hey. That’s what you get when you don’t revolt in the streets. So it is that the free bonus patch for BF3 is now out for PC, and brings with it a raft of changes, which I’ve meticulously repeated below.

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