Abstract first-person puzzler Fract has been going through some changes. Jim had words with creator Richard E Flanagan over a year ago and the future direction of the project wasn’t entirely clear back then. A new developer diary tells us a little more about the spectacular route this interactive synthesiser of a world has chosen to follow.
2012: what a funny old year. It’s one in which we get remakes of both X-COM and Jagged Alliance, and now it looks like there’ll be multiple mech games too. First there was MechWarrior Online, then there was MechWarrior Tactics, and now there is Reign of Thunder. Coming from the steady but Xboxen hand of MechAssault pilots Day 1 Studios, RoT is a free-to-play affair due for launch later this year. No confirmed platforms, but ‘free to play’ and ‘PC’ seem to go together like dogs and lamp-posts (no, I don’t know which one equals which) so I’d be very surprised if Reign of Thunder didn’t walk this way. Our first glimpse of it marches through the storm below. Wow, that> was a horrible, mixed metaphor-blighted sentence if ever there was one. (more…)
Is it a coincidence that turn-based RPG Telepath RPG: Servants of God was released on Feb 14th, 2012? 20 divided by 12 is 1.666666666666667. Basically 1.6. What’s the multiplication symbol? An ‘x’. How else is ‘x’ used? When we say things like ‘an x number of boats’. So if we were to say an ‘x number of 16 (derived by multiplying 1.6 by ten) we get ‘a 20 of 16′. If you remove the ‘a’ and ‘of’, you get 2016. Ghostbuster’s II predicted that the world would end on Valentine’s day, 2016. What could this mean? It means the Middle-Eastern flavoured tactical treat Telepath is out now, obviously.
In my life I’ve shot about 100 bullets and taken about 12 billion photographs, so why are the stats in games skewed towards bangthings? I’ll tell you why: Gov’t funded Big Ammo have been lobbying to have guns replace photographs in all games. Doom was originally about photographing demon families for their Christmas cards, until the developers were visited in the dead of night. Then it mysteriously became about killing things with bullets. Check the game code. It’s all in the code, people! Well brave soldiers Retro Affect are fighting the good fight with Snapshot, their bullet-free platform game where you use photos of the environment to solve puzzles. Five minutes of Zapruder-beating footage is right here. You can’t stop the signal!
I’m in two minds about this multiplayer shooter from the ORION: Prelude team that somehow isn’t ORION: Prelude. Is ORION: Dino Beatdown a brilliant name for a game, or is it a horrible name for anything? One thing I do know, despite the laudable presence of dinosaurs and> jetpacks, I’d be a lot happier if the dinosaurs were actually using the jetpacks. As it is, this is a game of cooperative shooting in which teams of men must survive in massive environments populated by hordes of hungry monster-lizards. And despite my quibbling, it looks pretty damn good.
For all I know we’ll be running a similar headline with a slightly larger number every week for the rest of the year, but Double Fine’s crowd-funding experiment does appear to be slowing down now. Still: $2 million. $2,004,877 to be precise, from 59,854 nostalgic backers. That’s a big fat budget for a 2D adventure game, and hopefully they’ll spend it on making something stellar. Or at least something tiny and rubbish but that ships in a box made of solid gold. (more…)
I thought writing about else { Heart.break() } would prove to be a novelty, but three days later here I am, telling you about another game that lets you fiddle in its innards. I am now the official RPS expert, sorry “expert”, on games that allow you to alter their code: Code Hero is a Unity engine game where you have a code gun that shoots Javascript, and hopes the players learn enough from the action. According to the the devs: “Code Hero is an FPS where your Code Gun shoots code directly at a target and executes on impact. It references the target so you can act upon hitObject in your code or just hit.point if permissions are denied.” If you could see the face I’m making trying to comprehend that, you’d probably be calling for an ambulance. Video of it below.
Alan Wake might not be an unqualified success as far as survival horror games about narcissistic fiction authors go, but it’s a well-intentioned affair that very much did the technical legwork for its recently uncancelled PC version. And it’s paid off for Finnish developers Remedy, who report that Alan Wake PC was profitable within 48 hours of release.
PC! Profit! Do you hear that, publishers? (more…)
Normally we use the made-up term ‘Diablolike’ to mean a game in the vein of hacky-slashy dungeon-crawling, but in this instance I use it to mean ‘a game that really, really wants to look like Diablo III.’ From colour palette to fonts, the look of Dungeon King is to my mind as shameless as a guy wearing one of those ‘dip me in chocolate and throw me to the lesbians’ t-shirt, but I post it because it’s quite the technically-accomplished piece for a browser/Flash game. It looks great, the essential running around and chopping up monsters stuff is fast and fluid, and it’s got its compulsion loops running at maximum efficiency: you won’t want to stop until… well, you won’t want to stop. That’s the point. (more…)
I’d been meaning to try Starfarer since Jim first wrote about it and when I noticed that an update had added the beginnings of the campaign, it seemed only polite to indulge in some tactical ship-bothering. I was hoping for something that mixed my favourite parts of Space Rangers 2, Space Pirates and Zombies, Gratuitous Space Battles and Strange Adventures in Infinite Space. Basically, all my favourite top-down space games. The current version, which is available to anyone willing to part with a $10 preorder, is shaping up to be rather splendid, but can it really be the best bits of the best things? Observe.