The news beacon of Electronic Arts has been lit, signalling the approach of a large story-driven DLC for Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. The expansion, called The Legend Of Dead Kel, takes place on the island of Gallow’s End, where you can “claim ownership of a vast personal estate” and also kill new monsters with new and interesting weapons. There’s been lots of work put into the player-housing stuff, and EA explain that “Gravehal Keep is more than just player housing, it’s a massive estate with multiple buildings and a full retinue of retainers, each with their own back stories, side quests, perks and quirks.” So that told us. We thought it was just> player housing. Stupid.

The Legend Of Dead Kel will appear on March 20th.

If a game doesn’t have a connection to my favourite dark matter infused vacuum, I’ll usually take the time to write a letter to the publishers, developers, neighbours, suggesting> a rethink. Sometimes it works, sometimes I get my door kicked in by a SWAT team and taken to a ‘facility’ for a rest and a cup of tea. Take Gamigo’s Nexus Conflict: It was originally a fighting game about two phones, a classic in the making you might think? But upon hearing about the burgeoning international movement known as SPACE!, they reworked the game according to my themes: it’s now a strategic MMO in the Black Prophecy universe. You know, in SPACE! Beta details and trailer are below. (more…)

Oof. High-street retailer GAME’s troubles are deepening, with reports that Electronic Arts will not be supplying them with games, including Mass Effect 3. Pre-orders the store has already taken for the title will only be refunded in store credit. While both EA and GAME have yet to confirm, the official Mass Effect 3 website has updated informing anyone that has pre-ordered ME3 to reorder the game from Amazon.co.uk, Play.com, Zavvi.com and ShopTo.net.

It’s not looking good. (more…)

Putting aside everything else that Risen 2‘s RPG heritage might suggest, I have to say I appreciate the efforts made with that fantasy pirate theme. It’s occasionally silly, but certainly harder-edged than your Pirates Of The Caribbean fare. There’s something reassuring about this continued focus on jungle islands and salty sea-dogs, particularly after the shipwreck promises of the original Risen. The world the Pirhana Bytes team have crafted is both vivid and atmospheric.

Needless to say, I’ve been sacrificing precious hours of my life to a preview version of it, so I urge you to read on to find out more about its buried treasures.> (more…)

Welcome aboard Microsoft Flight gfwlivesetup_4d5308d2e0000001_DIR.exe. Our free-to-play sim set in the skies of Hawaii, but we’ve been redirected to land on a strip near Tim Stone’s house. He’ll be trimming the review rudder for us sometime this week. We offer complimentary Big Island, planes and missions. Drinks and light refreshments, such as additional landscapes, planes and missions, can be purchased from our Marketplace. If you’ll look out your window to the left, you’ll see the launch trailer. And on the right, that black mountain spitting blood-red lava into the air, engulfing the ‘Limping Kitten Cattery’ in choking, sulfurous, acid rain is GFWL Mountain. There’s no way to avoid it. The stick has locked. We’re going innnnnnnnn! (more…)

A year ago we spoke to Zero Point about their extraordinarily ambitious Unity-powered tactical sci-fi shooter, Interstellar Marines. They told us about how they were largely relying on the support of the community, and pre-order packages, to get the game made. To that end they’ve been releasing a few bits and piece of technology to their pre-ordering folk, and the biggest release so far appeared yesterday, and is detailed in a video below. Deadlock 0.3.0 is a multiplayer game mode that should, the devs explain, give players a better taste of the vision they have for the game. It’s also the first thing that Zero Point have released in some time, so it must come as a relief to those who have shelled out cash for the project. See below for more. (more…)

A new Baldur’s Gate game? Wuh? That’s the news that greets my eyes when I look at Eurogamer. This is, apparently, coming from former BioWare developer Trent Oster, who worked on the original BG, as well as the first Neverwinter Nights. His new company, Beamdog, is a digital distribution platform, brought to wider attention recently via the release of MDK 2 HD, and this, GameBanshee claims, will be the source of new Forgotten Realms chat-n-chopping. And how do we know any of this is happening? A Baldur’s Gate website.

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Hooray! A sequel to Blendo Games’ delightfully inventive cubist spy mini-opus Gravity Bone. Thirty Flights Of Loving appears to be dripping with the same visual and sonic style as its most excellent predecessor.

Double-hooray! It’s being made in conjunction with the good folk behind the newly-resurrected and much-missed Idle Thumbs podcast! Lob ‘em $30 via Kickstarter to help them get their show back on the road (though at $105,000 raised to date they’re in a pretty happy place already) and you get Thirty Flights before anyone else does. If you don’t want to do that (admittedly, it’s a high price if you’re not primarily there for the podcast), the game will be released separately later.

Triple-hooray! The first-ever trailer for it is below.

Quadruple-hooray! Includes pseudo-Jeff Goldblum-based action.

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J.U.L.I.A. is an adventure game set in a distant solar system, as well as the name of an AI in that game. There’s a giant bipedal machine in it called Mobot, which is probably my favourite thing about the demo that I just played. The plot is about humankind’s search for extra terrestrial life, for which purpose a crew have been dispatched to the backend of nowhere and, wouldn’t you know it, when they arrived things went terribly wrong. As the last survivor of the mission, astrobiologist Rachel Manners must travel to various planets to discover the (probably) awful truth. She’ll also have to play a lot of minigames.

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First-person puzzle ‘em up Antichamber took one look at physics, shook its head, sucked on its teeth and then set to work rejigging the whole sorry show. And why shouldn’t it? Aren’t you tired of the space contained between four walls having to match up, size-wise, with the area as viewed by an outside observer? If a man chooses to enter a maze and turn left at every junction, why shouldn’t the maze be nonchalantly rerouting itself behind his back and then turning into a psychedelic lightshow? Yes, Antichamber, your approach to physics is erratic and haphazard, and that is why you continue to be of interest. Trailer below.

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