Alec and Adam lurked on opposite sides of the supermarket car park, lying on their bellies, waiting, watching. Each knew the other was out there somewhere – but where? Slowly, they crawled forwards, occasionally hiding behind a trolley rack or starting as an orange plastic bag fluttered past in the gentle evening breeze. Suddenly, Alec was caught in the light of a cash machine, and Adam wasted no time in seizing the opportunity. He reached to his side, and brought up his specially-silenced keyboard. ‘Meer!’ he shouted. ‘You can’t run any longer. It’s too late for you now. It’s time. Time to talk about what we each made of Jagged Alliance: Back In Action.‘ Alec froze, hesistated. He thought about making a break for the pool of darkness behind the wheelie bins, but finally he accepted that he could be fugitive no longer. ‘Alright, Smith, you’ve got a deal! But keep those hands where I can see them.’> (more…)

Something felt wrong when I glanced over the announcement of Dungeons & Dragons Online: Menace of the Underdark. I dismissed it as just another expansion pack for a free-to-play MMO, but that felt wrong. Digging around uncovered what was troubling me: DDO has never >had an expansion pack. It was released in 2006 and went free-to-play three years later, but even then it’s been a low priority thanks to server sizes and Turbine’s Lord Of The Rings Online Tolkien all the people. Because of that, the list of additional content is rather chunky. It’ll be out on June 25th, but you can pre-order now. (more…)

I feel a weight of the pointlessness of trying to convince a hardcore gaming audience to give their money and time to a casual game. Clearly there’s a lot of prejudice, a lot of it earned by the crappy nature of so much of the casual market, the rest I’d argue pure snobbishness on the part of gamers. Obvious breakthrough exceptions, invariably published by PopCap, can crossover, but otherwise words like “hidden object” tend to have people click straight past. I think it’s a shame, because I just had a lot of fun playing Dark Strokes: Sins of the Fathers.>

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If I were asked to list the things that I most enjoy, pointing, clicking and playing with words would probably all be in the top ten, along with ‘almost any pizza’ and ‘a good book that makes me feel clever without actually being too challenging on the old skull-mush’. Therefore, I’ve developed an immediate interest in Spellirium, which claims to combine Boggle and LOOM, being an adventure game in which combat and puzzles are solved through wordplay. Hopefully, it’ll be compulsive in the same way that Puzzle Quest is but with more developed story parts. There are a few work in progress videos, with no sound, two of which I’ve inserted below. Did I mention it’s from (one of) the creators of Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure?

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No. Nooo. Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo way. Destructoid writer but not X-Files creator Chris Carter (who is probably incredibly bored of that reference) has been doing a bit of maths, which immediately makes him a more capable human being than I am. The purpose of this mathleticism was to collate all the disparate bits of DLC, pre-order bonus, unlocks and whatnot available for the upcoming marketing monolith that is Mass Effect 3, and just how much it’d cost someone to lay hands on the whole shebang. Take a seat before you read the next line.

$870/£550/€650. Whaaaat.>

It must, however, be pointed out that much of that horror-price stems from having to buy bonus code-sporting hardware such as special gamepads, keyboards and headsets, or Mass Effect 3 merch such as multiple action figures and iPhone cases. (more…)

So, this video is just 12 minutes and 54 seconds of one of the Nexuiz developers running around a shiny FPS arena commenting on the guns and how the game plays. But its simplicity is the perfect way of presenting the equally simplistic online shooter they’re making: a game where the focus is fast, fluid killamajigging still has a place in my dark, dark heart, and Nexuiz is just that. It has a sticky mortar gun that fires a globby explosive at an enemy that detonates after a few seconds: I like watching people panic, because I’m actually not a very nice person. Video, ho! (more…)

I have no idea if triangular noir-adventure Flatland: Fallen Angle was specifically inspired by 2011′s meme-tastic Bastion, but I do suspect we’re likely to see quite a few games that borrow its narrate-as-you-play mechanic over the next year or so. Flatland has that, albeit with a narrator who doesn’t exactly offer the same gravitas as Bastion’s Ruck, but it also has a guilt-wracked triangle on the run through a top-down, two-dimensional city, pursued by similarly pointy guards and in search of dark justice.

I tip every hat I have ever owned and ever will own to its title pun, too. (more…)

Brian Fargo has been talking about the past and future of the Wasteland sequel that he hopes to fund through a Kickstarter campaign, and as many suspected he hasn’t suddenly decided to put forward the idea because his eyes sprang out of his head and turned into dollar signs after seeing this action. Nothing of the sort. In an interview with No Mutants Allowed, Fallout’s co-creator explains that the design was already coming together but “publishers just had no interest in a party-based RPG and they felt like they would need to go up against the production costs of BioWare which are in the tens of millions of dollars.”

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Industry legend Tim “Industry Legend” Schafer has been at the front of gaming news for the last couple of weeks. After the twitterstorm that followed Notch’s somewhat speculative offer to fund Psychonauts 2 came the record-breaking Kickstarter project, that saw Schafer’s company, Double Fine, raise over $2 million in a fortnight. I spoke to him over the weekend to find out how the process has been, what the intentions are for a new 2D adventure, to reflect on the classic adventures of the 90s, and to see if there were any other dream projects he has left. In the first part of this two-part interview we discuss the reactions to the Kickstarter, the role dads play in playing adventures, and where things are with Psychonauts 2. Tomorrow we’ll go into the lessons learned from Schafer’s previous adventures, memories of Day Of The Tentacle, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango, and how that will affect design today.>

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I must confess that I’m immune to whatever charms Blizzard’s games possess. If I am a waterdrop then Blizzard are a water lily pad, scattering me across their surface – I just want to be absorbed by the gaming nymphaeaceae, but I can’t. But while my fingers don’t quite click with their games, my eyes do. So I got excited when they decided now was the time to release a load of skills videos for Diablo 3. The 20 skills on show are mostly new, so if you have the beta you won’t have encountered most of them. They’re unencumbered by the alteration runes, so this is raw rarr! I love the dancing voodoo doll that distracts enemies enough for the players to mash their face, and if I played it I’d use that all the time. (more…)