Obviously we’ve known that Ron Gilbert has been working with/at Tim Schafer’s Double Fine for over a year now, but ON WHAT we’d regularly scream at the sky. Then Double Fine revealed they were basically ignoring the PC for all their games, and we crossed them out of our Christmas lists and spank banks, and got on with our lives. Then they threw us all by releasing Costume Quest on PC, raising hopes that further projects will also reach our shores. So it is that I hold hope in my belly that this Gilbert/Schafer project will be adorned by my PC. Because apparently it’s an idea that predates even Maniac Mansion.

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Remember World Of Warcraft? Coo, those were the days. Well, you may be surprised to learn the game is still running after all these years, and it’s still being updated! The latest patch for the Cataclysm update, as Eurogamer reports, is called Hour Of Twilight, and adds stuff.

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Update: Boo. The trial has been delayed. Now the 15th to 19th of December.

Nuclear Dawn’s multiplayer combination of strategy and FPS harks back to Savage and Natural Selection, with one player on each team taking the role of a base-building commander while the rest run around collecting resources and shooting one another. As might be expected, it’s the sort of game that needs plenty of players willing to form functional teams. Perhaps to that end, a free trial, accessible through Steam, begins December 15th and runs through ’til the 19th. In the hope that people might stick around, Interwave are also dropping the price of the game to $20. Do we have a Nuclear Dawn community here? I’m tempted to jump into the trial and see how the radioactive twilight suits my complexion.

Being the dedicated RPS reader that you are, you’ll remember that Alec posted about the short film Beyond Black Mesa back in January. The mini-epic took place five years after the events of Half-Life, featuring independence fighters in the battle against the Combine invasion. Well, director Brian Curtin is back with an even shorter short, an utterly gorgeous live action version of the opening moments of the original game. It’s below.

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Due for release next year, the aggressively titled R.A.W. – Realms of Ancient War looks a little Diabloesque in the four new screenshots below. However, a trailer almost as ancient as the very realms in which it takes place reveals it to have more in common with Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance. There are three exciting classes to choose from – warrior, sorcerer and rogue. I bet one of them is stealthy and has a penchant for ranged weaponry. There’s also a storyline about the ruined kingdoms of dwarves, elves and man, but guess what? A new and unknown threat is now rising! Let’s take a look and then guess what this fresh evil might be.

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Blue Byte and Related Designs recently finished their latest trading and building game, Anno 2070 – this time set in later part of the current century, in a world where climate politics underlie the tale of commercial striving – and released it onto the wild seas of the internet. I’ve been wading through its depths for the past week or so and I am now able to tell you Wot I Think. > (more…)

Good Old Games have been adding a bunch of EA games in the last few weeks. But today’s requires a post. They’ve got hold of the complete Ultima VII, widely considered to be the best in the Ultima series. (Argue!) So in there is all the extra bits and bobs, The Black Gate, Forge Of Virtue, Serpent Isle and The Silver Seed. For $6/£3.85. Which is nice.

“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 6 of 7.

Ed Key worked for 8 or 9 years in the game industry, then took a slightly less exciting software engineering job and moved out to the countryside. When he isn’t wandering through sweeping vistas, he’s collaborating with musician David Kanaga on his first official indie game: Proteus, “a game of pure exploration and discovery.” (more…)

A number of people have got in touch to let us know about a new study that has been published, identifying once again that violent videogames may have an effect on the brain of the player. It’s a finding that, in general, is worth taking notice of – last week I wrote about a meta-analysis discussion conducted by Nature that showed a consensus amongst researchers that there is a noticeable change in the brain after prolongued exposure to violent videogames. However, things get more interesting when you dig into who was funding it. Which turns out to be a campaign group who have some dubious claims of their own.

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A new update to SpaceChem has arrived, adding a sandbox mode to the brain-challenging indie wonderpuzzler. I haven’t tried it yet because I can feel a vein beginning to throb in my temple as soon as I think about the possibilities. There is a competition to find the best creation and this quote to introduce it doesn’t help matters:

I suspect that some people will be building molecular computers, but that certainly doesn’t mean that’s the only thing we’re looking for.

So, they’ll be building molecular computers, will they? If I load this up there’s a very real chance that it’s the last anyone will hear from me until I’m found with my entire face clenched into four square inches of pure concentration as new elements spew catastrophically from my motherboard.

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