Miner Wars 2081 is an astonishing thing, really. It’s a freeform mining, trading, and building game, based around the mining of vast voxel asteroids – and that can be accessed now at a sort of tech-demo level by preordering, with the full game due in the Spring – but it’s also going to be an MMO, which will apparently arrive in the Winter of next year. Yes, I can hardly believe it either, but that’s the plan. I’ve had a few glances at the steadily updated alpha client over the past year, and the work is certainly continuing apace, and you can see some of that in the awesomely narrated trailer, below. There’s apparently going to be a public demo before long, too, so we’ll keep an eye out for that. I suspect that this could be one of those games that really rewards a community getting involved, or at least it will be when that multiplayer aspect of it opens up. The satisfaction of chomping up asteroids and fighting off privateers as a group could be quite something. (more…)

The presence of videogaming matters in scientific papers has, of late, become a somewhat depressing prospect. With both formerly respectable/respected scientists making unsupported claims without evidence, and published papers basing conclusions on woeful errors and contradictions, the one place where you’d think you could look for balanced, reasoned thought on a subject sometimes seems to have abandoned us. But there is light. Nature, surely the most respected and popular scientific journal, has published a “Viewpoint” discussion on the subject of gaming’s effect on the brain in its Nature Reviews Neuroscience journal. Brains On Video Games is a collection of leading experts looking at the published material and discussing the matter with open minds.

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A little more of the new Bioware game was shown last night, giving us a glimpse of APCs. Meanwhile the various nodes of the internet were at work, speculating that the new game could be either Command & Conquer or even a Mercenaries game. Or even Army Of Two. It won’t be that. (I hope.) The best lead is the clue that was in this LinkedIn profile, which stated at the artist worked for Victory Games, which was formed from EA LA to make C&C games. Combine this with the apparent disappearance of Visceral, another LA-based EA studio, and you have a bunch of devs who could have formed into this new studio. This could, it is speculated, be a new Los Angeles-based Bioware studio working on the old faithful.

Sounds like a jenga tower of theorising to me. And I think it’s time for a new IP, anyway… We’ll find out soon enough.

Every time a new indie bundle is released, anguished cries echo around the Great Hall of Comments that is carved in the dark obsidian which forms the foundations of Castle RPS. The reason? The inhabitants of that grand place are often the proud owners of every game included in the bundle due to their uncanny ability to be ahead of the curve. Therefore, it is with some trepidation that I bring the news that Cave Story is only now available on Steam, seven years after its original release, albeit in a ‘plus’ form. It’s a lovely game, taking a Metroidvania template, then adding oddness and pretty pixels. I think it was probably partly responsible for that particular graphical trend in yon indies.

Who hasn’t played it yet? Trailer with delightful music below.

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Do you know, it was probably to me that John Carmack first revealed he was intending to release the Doom 3 source code. I’m pretty sure. During an interview for PC Gamer in late 2008, I asked him if he’d be continuing his practice of making previous code available once the next big engine was out, and he explained that with Bethesda now owning id he didn’t know if it would be more difficult, but he was “almost certain we will wind up releasing the entire Doom 3 code base once Rage ships.”

So, with Rage safely released, it’s finally happened, and published under the GPL. Not before an emergency recoding of the shadow tech, after BethSoft lawyers got the squits over a possible patent issue.

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The next instalment of boundlessly popular indie pay-what-you-will project, The Humble Indie Bundle, has announced its new bundle, which is dominated by the Introversions, and even contains some prototype things from them, like Subversion’s city generator. Yes, I thought that might interest you. The other games are: Aquaria, Crayon Physics Deluxe, Uplink, Defcon, Darwinia, and Multiwinia.

Trailer thing below! (more…)

Because why not? It’s Tuesday, after all. And I am not even going to make a bet with myself this time.

DON’T hit vote til you’ve ticked all the boxes, because it bugs out. But actually if you refresh you can still vote on missed ones. So it’s okay. Sort of. (more…)

So. I lost a bet with myself. Now I owe myself fifty quid. Thanks a bunch, Internet. I was certain, absolutely certain>, that the majority of you would have pursued mostly wizardly activities in Skyrim, what with all the magic and the magic college and everything. But not so. The majority of the twenty thousand people who polled in our Skyrim survey played as warriors, with mages (21%) coming in second. Amazingly, assassins and thieves were neck and neck for third place with 14% each. There’s a 13% bunch of hangars on who couldn’t actually figure out what they’d spent most of their time doing of course, but then this is> an Elder Scrolls game, so perhaps we’ll forgive the ambiguity.

Ooh, I can feel another poll coming on. Any suggestions?

You might well have noticed that Craig had a look at Spec Ops for us, and wrote about it. 2K have now also released a trailer, which contains a large quotient of noise and fury, ending on what appears to be a supernatural (?) note. It’s a bit weird. Go take a look. (more…)

The third Serious Sam game is released on Steam at 6pm today. TODAY! That’s so soon it’s almost right now. I guess we are working on a review of it. Are we? I am imagining that the other members of RPS are sort of shrugging non-committally in response to this question, but actually I have no idea, because I am sat in an annex of my kitchen typing this gibberish into the internet, and they are off being heroes in various corners of post-industrial England. Perhaps they actually are shrugging, but have no idea why, such is their psychic connection to the PC gaming blog… So spooky. Anyway, there’s a launch trailer below, and a hands-on from John over here. Read, watch, think, judge, decide. (more…)