Michael “Brog’ Brough, the cleverbrain behind Glitch Tanks and Vertex Dispenser, has gone and made a free puzzle game for you and me, on Mac or PC. It’s called Corrypt, and it’s got one of those simple game mechanics that grows up through the levels to produce brain-curdling complexity as you go on. Nor is it simply about puzzling – there’s a map to explore, and creatures to encounter and help out with their woes. As is typical with Brog’s work, it is lo-fi and beautifully conceived.

And even there’s even Some Noise>. (Which made me laugh out loud.) Go play it.

TF2′s Christmas update is a Big Rock one. The new Big Rock map will contain the Mecha-Engineer, expanding the roster for the Mann Vs Machine mode. Valve explain: “These Grinch-like Smissmas cakewalk destroyers can skip huge areas of the path with their teleporting ability, and also teleport other robots forward instantly with their “telling other robots about the teleporter” ability.”

There will also be new weapons. But you knew that. Right? There’s also a new comic. Hooray for holidays!

Yes, that’s right. It’s that time of year again. If you’ve been a good girl or boy, then Santa Gabe will slip down your chimney and deposit some really rather decent prices for PC games. The Steam Holiday Sale has begun, with the usual shennanigans of voting for deals, daily offers, flash sales, and astonishingly cheap publisher packs.

Mirror’s Edge for £3.24, Arkham City for £4.99, every Valve game in one pack for an utterly mad £25… You know the deal.

And an odd Easter Egg in there – for utterly bemusing reasons we’ve still not been told, the entirely finished, already in multiple languages Scribblenauts Unlimited, is at 33% off with an EU release date of the 15th February next year. Bonkers.

There’s been an awful lot of chatter about The War Z of late. Removed from Steam for not being in a state Valve deem suitable for sale, making false claims on their store page (then blaming the customers for it, somehow), banning people for criticising the game, stealing the League Of Legends Terms Of Service, and most recently adding an amazing line to their TOS that says agreeing to it voids your right to a refund! But what about the game?!

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Neocore’s action-splatterer, The Incredible [We'll be the judge of that - RPS] Adventures of Van Helsing, is looking pretty impressive. With four-player co-op and a follower system, it’s just as ambitious as other ARPGs out there, but also seems to offer something more, claiming of the follower that you can “Build and develop their hideout and place traps to defend it from waves of terrible monsters.” Which sounds interesting like a tower-defence sub-game. Anyway, the new trailer (below) shows off Mr Van Helsing doing death stuff in a resplendent gothic forest, and reveals a rather handsome engine. I’ve posted a dev video too, which shows off some other lighting stuff. (more…)

As Elite: Dangerous enters the final quarter of its long, long Kickstarter, the figure sits at £820,657. Still a good distance from the £1.25m they’re asking for. Will Frontier make it to the finishing line? Or is this going to be a higher-profile miss-kick? Only time will tell, of course, but Frontier are hoping they’ll pull through with a new teaser trailer (below) and a direct Paypal option for those folks who can’t or won’t use the core Kickstarter project. It’s important to point out that direct Paypal pledges don’t contribute to the overall Kickstarter goal, and will only really help (I suppose) if the target is otherwise reached.

Did you pledge? Will you? (more…)

Sheldon J. Pacotti, writer of Deus Ex, provided us with a very surprising, and very odd, indie game last year. Cell: emergence bemused me. It asked you to Fantastic Voyage your way through voxelly insides to fight off infection, and I couldn’t do it. But now the man is back with something quite different.

Described as “a free library of visual programming ‘blocks’ for first-time game developers,” Game Blocks is the result of something Pacotti built for an interactive writing course he teaches at the University of Texas. The idea being to encourage others to create non-linear storytelling in games. It’s a visually simple tool, based on BYOB, that lets you construct scenes without being stuck in a linear path, as well as include simple physics, and even platforming. Confused? There’s a free lecture below to explain!

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The holidays are a time of indecision. Who should you visit? What ugly, uncomfortable seasonal sweater should you wear? Which deity(s) should you dedicate your hedonistic blood celebrations to (aside from Horace, of courace)? And, most importantly, what will you buy before/after your relatives shower you with socks or rocks or whatever it is that passes for a universal gift these days? But it doesn’t end there. Oh no. There are, after all, 927.45 trillion videogames to choose between, so you may as well just start sobbing and curl up in a fetal futility ball right now. Unless… no, no. That’s crazy. But maybe… no. It’ll never work. Ah, what the hell: bundles! Both Indie Royale and Humble Bundle have new offerings up, and they’re quite tempting, if I do say so myself.

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I’ve talked a lot about the setting of BioShock: Infinite, but let’s not lose sight of what the game really exists for. To (Booker De)whit, shooting people in the face and magicking them to death. (Actually I’m also going to talk a whole lot more about the setting too, because I can).

The combat aspect of the game is broadly in keeping with BioShocks 1 and 2, though amped up noticeably, while the environments feel significantly more open and the bulk of your enemies are straight-up police and soldiers rather than the creepy, scuttling Splicers. It does perhaps feel a less distinct combat experience than its predecessors despite the dramatic, often open-air backdrops, which is partly because shooting soldiers is such a familiar 21st century videogaming experience and partly because the weapons available in those fourish hours I had generally cleaved a little closer to a traditional videogame arsenal, even though they were in theory from an alt-universe 1912. (more…)

Children of all ages, from Bronze to Instagram, anticipate Horacetide with a cloying sense of anxiety in their gut and a glimmer of fear in their eye. When will Ursa Infinita blot out all the stars and gleefully coil around our planet, bestowing the gifts of terror and trembling? No one can say, although some children believe that when the calendar ends, the world will too. Silly children. The next entry is thinking long and hard about those children, and what to do with them. (more…)