Tomorrow Corporation’s sinister digital fireplace, Little Inferno, arrived on Sunday, and I’ve been warming my hands by its cold light for the past couple of days. Here’s wot I think.>
I played War of the Roses, and I liked it pretty well. I also died a lot. But before long, I found my ornate steel shoes sloshing through syrupy pools of repetition. There’s only so much frantic deathmatching and all-over-the-place point-capturing you can do before you start to see cracks in War of the Roses’ armor, and that threshold is woefully low compared to other multiplayer fight-o-fests. Fortunately, Fatshark’s throwing its oh-so-characteristically sharky girth into setting things right, and we’re finally about to see the results. Come Wednesday, you’ll be able to take the exceedingly high-stakes Pitched Battle mode for a spin.
Waking Mars is pretty special game. Part-Metroidvania, part-Mars-gardening-simulator, it’s certainly not Just Another iOS Port. As Rab pointed out, it’s got enough ambition to make countless triple-A sequels blush, resulting in complexity that punishes impatience, but never without reason. But where did it come from? How on Earth does one dream up Mars gardening? According to Tiger Style’s Randy Smith, it all started with National Geographic. And from there, well, things ended up in a very, very different> place>. >
Update 1 – there’s been some kind of breakdown in communications here, as it transpires that Terry Cavanagh isn’t as cool with this game as we first thought. While the Open Hexagon dev was given a blessing to make a game ‘inspired’ by Super Hexagon, he was explicitly told that it couldn’t be a clone. And yet… So, if you like Open Hexagon please be sure to give your support to the creator of the game it so liberally borrows from once Super Hexagon itself arrives on PC.>
Update 2 – the creator of Open Hexagon has apologised profusely for releasing his clone game before the PC/Mac version of Super Hexagon, and attempted to explain why he got the wrong end of the stick.>
Hello, you. The Hawken beta gets into full swing today, and I think you might want a key, because it’s looking rather good. Fortunately for us, Meteor have provided an RPS “superkey” with ten thousand uses. That means the first ten thousand of you to enter it into the Hawken site will get your eager paws on the controls of a robot today. Get going!>
The key, instructions, and a trailer, are below. (more…)
I wanted to make a picture of one of Far Cry 3‘s tigers crying gigantic crocodile tears (or maybe one of its crocodiles crying tiger tears – or just tigers) for this post, but I’m rubbish at Photoshop. So, um, use your imagination. Awww, isn’t that sad? That tiger – in addition to the fact that a gun-toting madman is cavorting about his island home and burning everything to the ground – now has to worry about inconsistent connection speeds and host disconnects. Truly, there is no worse fate. But perhaps there’s hope? While Ubisoft tied cinder blocks to dedicated servers’ shoes and hurled them into the ocean, it was fairly upfront about why it thinks its alternative solution will be just as good.
As we just mentioned, Double Fine have launched a unique Humble Bundle to let people vote from 23 game pitches to decide four that will go on to be made into prototypes. I spoke to Tim Schafer earlier this evening to ask how this came about, and how such a thing will influence the company. In this first half of the interview we talk about the Bundle, what makes a Double Fine game, and why they’re so keen to show these early stages of game development.
Double Fine’s Amnesia Fortnight has become a fairly well known event by the developer. For two weeks every year, everyone at the company stops what they’re working on, and get together in small teams to create prototypes for new game ideas. And since 2009, all the games the studio have released have been born from these creative weeks. The likes of Costume Quest and Stacking came out of this elaborate brainstorm. This year they’re doing it differently. “We’re letting the world in on it,” explained studio head Tim Schafer to me this evening, in an interview to appear later tonight. Via Humble Bundle, we get to vote on the 23 pitches to pick the four that will be created as prototypes. And then the whole process of developing will be live-streamed, with the finished projects available to everyone who paid.
When the Doublefine Adventure Kickstarter was in full flow, Castle Shotgun was filled with bemused exclamations. “Where do people find these funds when men such as we can barely afford caviar sculptures?” Jim cried in obvious distress. “Tim Schafer is undoubtedly wearing a money-beard”, Alec grumbled, envious. “We shall never see the like of this again,” came John’s conclusive statement. Then he hiccuped but it sounded a bit like he was saying ‘never’ again quite dramatically. Shortly afterwards, we saw the likes of it again and now Star Citizen has raised more crowdfunded cash than any other game (almost $6 million) and it’s not quite over yet. To celebrate, here’s a nifty video showing what happens to concept art if it eats its greens.
A subject I’m hearing about increasingly frequently is people not playing games to deal with real life issues, but rather developing games to deal with them. And it’s always a fascinating process. A really superb story on NBC today highlights a project by Lars Doucet, who’s making a game that tries to capture the experience of living with Tourette’s Syndrome.