Do you have plans for this evening? Do you have plans for any evening in the next, um, forever? Well, cancel them, because it’s time for war>. RPS wants you – yes, you, with the hair and/or complete lack of it – to enlist today and help us fight the good fight for all that is free and purple in PlanetSide 2. Can you do that? Can we count on you? Because we don’t have the budget for a bunch of rah-rah-rah propaganda posters and videos. Sometimes, instead of eating food, we just eat pictures of food. But we do have this launch trailer. Well, for now, anyway. I can’t promise I won’t eat it.

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Yesterday you’ll likely have noticed that Tim Schafer and Double Fine launched a new approach to a Humble Bundle, encouraging people to pay what they want for the chance to vote on what four prototypes the team would develop during their next Amnesia Fortnight. We then brought you his thoughts on why they were doing this, and what impact such things have on the studio. In the second part of our chat, we discuss how Schafer’s time is split between the Double Fine Adventure and running such a busy studio, the effect his project had on the Kickstarter phenomenon, why he thinks you make more money without DRM, and Schafer’s belief in what he calls the “good faith” of gamers.>

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Pretty much the type of comment I hate most here is “shame on you RPS for not posting about game/event x”. No, shame on you for being a plonker. But this time and this time only you are allowed to say “shame on you” to me. Why? Because I still haven’t played Introversion’s Prison Architect, even though I have a copy of the alpha.

Shame on me.

I do intend to correct this very soon though, and fortunately I’ll be going into a newly-updated build which corrects the notorious fog of war issue. (more…)

Retro-revival Kickstarters are no longer the sure-fire success they seemed to be a few months ago, it seems. Elite: Dangerous trails a long way behind Star Citizen’s incredible haul, Old-School RPG was cancelled, massively promising Bullfroggy god game Maia sadly may not reach its (frankly too high) target and Quest For Glory creators Corey and Lori Cole went right down to the wire for their adventure game Hero-U: Rogue To Redemption.

Make it they did, though – passing the $400,000 target with just four hours to spare. By the time you read this post there’ll be but half an hour left on the clock. Given the game is now definitely happening (well, as definitely as anything on Kickstarter gets), pledging now will mean you get your rewards, so the time for fence-sitting has at least passed. (more…)

Gosh. A trailer just fell out of a vent in my study and upon inspection it appears to contain footage of yet another multiplayer mode for Gearbox’s Aliens FPS, Colonial Marines. Along with aliens vs marines deathmatch and a co-operative campaign mode, objective-based team combat has also been promised, and Survivor, along with the already announced Escape mode offers just such a thing. One team controls aliens, which now come in different classes, and the other controls marines, who grunt and occasionally panic. And panic they should because they are doomed. Alien players respawn, marine players do not. Or if they do, they probably respawn as aliens.

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I don’t envy the folk at the IGF, having to somehow encompass a term and field that’s now almost as broad as ‘games’, not to mention the issue of (hopefully) avoiding a Rich Get Richer scenario as was some were concerned might be the case with Fez last year. With the judges currently doing their thing for the 2013 compo even as we speak (and, as one of them, I can attest to the fact that there’s some absolutely brilliant stuff in there: 2013 is going to a HOT year), the Independent Games Festival has made another big change. To whit (I don’t entirely know what ‘to whit’ means, but it sounds so good), introducing an Excellence In Narrative category. (more…)

There are spades for digging, blocks for building and a drill for tunnelling or demolition work. Ace of Spades a bit like Minecraft, you might think. Well, there are also rifles for shooting, grenades for exploding and sniper rifles for long range headpopping. It’s a team deathmatch game on large, destructible maps! But when I played it last week, Ace of Spades put me in mind of something else entirely.>

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The entire gaming world and its robo-dog is currently going from door-to-door and begging for cash, so a shaft of philanthrophic light amidst the Kickstarted darkness is a welcome one. We posted about Mario/McMillen & Refenes mash-up Super Meat Boy Galaxy last week, but it was unclear whether Aubrey Hesselgren would ever share more of his half-gag, half-tribute project with the world. Turns out, he will. BUT ON ONE CONDITION. That condition is cash. Of course it’s cash! This cash will not, however, go to the developer – it will go to The Samaritans. If SMBG is successfully ‘ransomed’ for £10,000, its prototype will be freed and released to the public.

Blood money, I call it! Blood money! And also a very smart idea. (more…)

The recent torrent of marketing and marketing masquerading as news surrounding the latest GTA V trailer came with one unsettling ommission – any mention of a PC version of Rockstar’s newest open world misanthropy odyssey. There’s still no definite news of a release for the One True Format, but Rockstar have at least not ruled it out when the question was put them. (more…)

There’s a still a certain resistance in myself I have to battle when mentioning The Walking Dead games. I’d allowed myself to become so prejudiced against Telltale’s games after their patchy resurrections of franchises that meant a great deal to me as a child, and it doesn’t help that the Walking Dead comics have often demonstrated attitudes I find to be highly unsavoury. But TT’s Walking Dead games are deftly done slices of tension and humanity, reimaginging adventure games’ abstract puzzles as gut-punch moral dilemmas. Tada! My prejudice is defeated.

I imagine a second series of these episodes is all but guaranteed at this point, but the final episode of the current one approaches fast. Will it resolve Lee and Clementine’s tale once and for all, or pull a Homeland and delay much-needed denouements and resolutions until a second series? All we can do for now is watch the finale trailer and comb it for clues. (more…)