This is the most splendid of news. If you don’t know Hero Academy, it’s a turn-based, two-player tactical game from the chaps behind Orcs Must Die and if you are now wondering why> you haven’t heard of it, it’s because it’s an iOS game. Except on August 8th it’ll also be a PC game, as it’s coming to Steam and allowing cross-platform play. Opponents are played asynchronously, so you take your turn, inform your opponent and wait for a response. This means you can play loads of games at the same time and with its chessy appeal, you’ll probably want to. I shall welcome it to my PC with a smile and, oh look, Valve have provided an exclusive team. Trailer below.

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The gentlemen of Tomorrow Corporation (Kyle “World Of Goo” Gabler, Allan “Worked At EA” Blomquist, Kyle “Henry Hatsworth” Gray) have announced their game will be called Little Inferno. Look, that’s the clever logo up there, where the i is a match, and there are fingers are holding the match. Could that be the player’s own fingers? Possibly, because the cryptic clues that TC have revealed about their new game is that it will be “strange”, that they are aiming for a Winter release, and that it’s about burning stuff. How do we know that last bit? Well, because they close their announcement with a series of questions, the last of which is this: “What would you most like to set on fire?”

Oh, now there’s a question>.

There are loads of games that I’ve continued to revisit over the years. I used to keep old PCs around the place, like time machines, always ready to conjure up a command line prompt, and autoexec.bat and config.sys files in need of tinkering. I never play Populous anymore though, neither it nor its first sequel, so indie homage Reprisal is the closest I’ve been to those deilightful days of my youth for many years. It’s great. The worst thing about it was its insistence on living in a browser and not allowing a right click to lower land. Sounds like a small thing but, damn, it’s annoying. Well, a desktop version fixes that, although only the demo of this new version is free.

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You, sir or madam, the one with the face; do you like to engage in social activity at but a moment’s notice? Perhaps you are pleased by the idea of meeting with readers of this fine periodical in an establishment well-suited to the enjoyment of light conversation and dark beverages? Or maybe you prefer your conversation dark and your beverage light. All can be arranged. Tomorrow, the RPS Social Club meet in London at their habitual haunt, The Blue Posts. All is discussed on the forums. The week after Rezzed occurs for more social interactions, and if those are both a bit too South>, I may arrange a gathering in Manchester this summer provided there is demand for such shindiggery.

WARNING: SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION POST AHEAD. LOVE YOU GUYS!>

So for the past two years I’ve been multi-classing with game dev studio Big Robot, and we’ve been doing some stuff, which we’ve talked about before on RPS. The thing we’re most excited about, though, is what we’re working on right now, which is called Sir, You Are Being Hunted. It is a procedurally-generated first-person, open world game, with some sneaking, some shooting, some tweedpunk adversaries, and plenty of fleeing in terror. We’re now making excellent progress towards something playable, and have a few images to show for it.

More on this below.

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Gosh! I’ve just read the small-print in my RPS contract. It seems Flare Path’s remit includes sports> simulations. Strictly speaking, for the last 45 weeks I should have spent as much time in dugouts and bunkers as dugouts and bunkers. My weekly screenshot selection really should have featured as many wingmen, props, and Tigers, as wingmen, props, and Tigers. Thank God the Hivemind usually naps on Friday afternoons. All the same, a change of tack would seem sage. In today’s column not one but two> games with cast-iron connections to current sporting events. (more…)

Super-ambitious sandbox MMO The Repopulation has raised a bit of cash on Kickstarter, and that’s helping to propel them forward into their alpha test. The game is intent on doing things a little differently, allowing players to mess about crafting and building bases, and not just questing and all that usual MMO fare. Being set on an alien planet where human forces are struggling against both the locals and each other, it’s looking disturbingly like doomed sci-fi MMOs Earthrise and Tabula Rasa, but perhaps these chaps can get it right. They’re only a small team, and taking on something vast, so they could do with your help – assuming, that is, that an open-ended space MMO with both PvE and PvP possibilities actually grabs your interest. Sign up for the alpha test just here.

Trailer south of here. (more…)

Sometimes, videogames are confusing. Except with Diablo III, in which case they’re always> confusing. Most recently, Blizzard’s opus – made up of one part hack, one part slash, and one part commerce - introduced a baffling up-to-72-hour set of restrictions for new players. Among those, however, two – a halt to all progress beyond Act One and a demon-tickling level cap of 13 – basically turned the full price product into a glorified demo. Fortunately, however, a new patch has looted those items and put them up for sale on the auction house of non-existence>.

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I’m a sucker for games that use my music to procedurally generate things. I could, for instance, go on about how great Audiosurf is for days, but that might be a better fit for my soon-to-be-launched video side project, Nathan Goes On About How Great Audiosurf Is For Days. Dot Biz. Symphony, though, takes a similar philosophy and makes it march to the drum of old-school (read: non-bullet-hell) shmupery, spitting out all manner of different enemies that react and attack to your music’s beat. The short version? It looks like something I could lose hundreds of idle hours to. And the long version – well, minus a couple hundred hours or so – is after the break.

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Skulls of the Shogun may have tickled your angry bone> when 17-Bit announced that the turn-based battler will be a Windows 8 exclusive, but there are some> benefits to that decision. Foremost, as the developer told us, it means getting to launch simultaneously on PC and Xbox. And now, another rather nice silver lining has made its way out from behind all the rage clouds: Skulls of the Shogun gets to be the first game with cross-platform multiplayer between PC, Xbox, phone, and tablet. I can’t think of anyone else who’s done that yet, so I suppose that makes this a pretty big deal, huh?

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