I’m not a violent man by any means and that should make me very uneasy about my fondness for gangsters, but I far prefer them to other murderous avatars. I’m thinking pirates, ninja, warfighters and bald space marines. That was reason enough to draw my eyes to Omerta: City of Gangsters when it was first announced and I’ve finally played through the campaign of this city-conquering strategy game. I’ve already swung a baseball bat at the demo but went deeper into the underground in the hope that I’d find something there worth clinging on to.>

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CS:GO‘s map workshop opened up this week, replete with the environmental tinkerings of its busy community. There are already eight pages> of maps to flick through. Valve are keen to get more up there, too, as they explain: “Don’t hesitate to get your rough draft up on the Workshop. You can update your map as often as you’d like, and players and servers will stay current. The best way to test a map is to get players in there, so publish early and publish often!” As headlined, it’s now 50% off until the 11th, so you can get a taste of the militaristic bounty for cheap, if you want.

Anyone playing this regularly?

We sent Brendan to see Wildfire Worlds a few months back, and he was moderately amused. Now though, you can get at the “cute paper society with riots” by signing up to the alpha. Anyone can take a look for free, but as devs explain, there’s a bigger version you can pay for: “You can interact on some new smaller test levels, but not in the big city. If you want to get your hands dirty in the big city and plop some little agents of destruction in there you need to buy one of the tiers with alpha access.”

Intrigued? Watch the trailer, below, and sign up. (more…)

You’ve got no excuse>. There’s a DOTA 2 group, for friendly lane-thrashing heroics, there’s a group playing marines and aliens (the 21st century’s Cops & Robbers) in Natural Selection 2, and there’s even a Wurm village going up. I am not saying that you have to play Firefall with poor old nCore, but you really should. And there’s always a chance for you to get involved in organised Mechwarrior nights. Hell, organise something yourself. I know the Planetside groups are always looking for squad leaders. And that Eve corporation is still going, against all the odds…

Running an organisation in a game that could do with RPS players? Want to play something niche and looking for partners? General sociability is for you.

Abbey Games have sent word that their astonishing-looking side-scrolling god-game, Reus, now has some gameplay footage to explain what’s afoot. In the game you play a planet, on which lives a number of giants, which you control. Via this gigantic creatures you try to make life good for the tiny humans that on the world. But there’s a balance to maintain: the greed of the little people is also your greatest peril. Lead designer Adriaan Jansen explains it better than I can in the video, anyway, so you owe it to yourself – and your fantasies of being a sentient planet – to take a look.

The game is due for release in the “second quarter” of this year. (more…)

I haven’t had a chance to play this yet, what with all the very important blogging I have to do, but it looks like a rare kind of fun. Real World Racing, for that is its name, is a Micro-Machines (or perhaps Supercars / Super Sprint) styled racing game, where the tracks are generated from real-world satellite imagery. Why hasn’t this been done before? Perhaps it has. Anyway, it’s here now, and it has a demo. Yes, sir.

Happy-making video with terrible music, below. And it looks pretty good in motion, honest. (more…)

Found the camouflaged pillbox in Proteus yet? Or the crashed G4M Betty? No, me neither. I’m starting to think that white owl is a wind-up merchant. From now on I’m only going to trust the crabs. I know they’re honest because they’re the ones who pincer-pointed me in the direction of a staggeringly beautiful Mars mod for Vehicle Simulator, a blue-chip flight model overhaul for Take On Helicopters, and a rather unexpected demo for HPS Simulations’ Ancient Warfare series. (more…)

Ragnar Tørnquist founded Red Thread Games with one immediate goal in mind: to finish the story he has been telling for a great part of his adult life. As this interview is published, the Kickstarter for Dreamfall Chapters went live a couple of minutes ago. In readiness, I had a long conversation with Tørnquist, Dreamfall co-writer Dag Scheve and lead designer Martin Bruusgaard earlier this week. The studio is new, the premises are new, but the team are old friends and Dreamfall veterans. In this first part of the interview, we talked about cold hard cash, going indie, Kickstarter and the state of the industry.>

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Creepily-named publisher Slitherine send word that they’re going to be launching a space-project management game with Buzz Aldrin’s name on it later this year (and his advice was sought in researching the development, apparently). In Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager you will be tasked with a sandbox management scenario in which you must train astronauts and their support staff, while at the same time doing R&D and dealing with politicians. It’s going to be heavy on the realism, of course, but there’s scope for fantasy too: “Develop the X-15 Space plane, the Sputnik satellite, the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo manned spacecrafts and in later episodes on to Mars! You are not limited to the missions that did launch – you can also try out many that were planned but that never left the drawing board. For example, instead of sending men to the Moon using the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous (LOR) approach used by Project Apollo in the late 1960s and early 1970s, you will be able to rewrite history and use either the alternative Earth Orbit Rendezvous (EOR) or Direct Ascent schemes.”

So basically giving us the space history we should> have had. Sigh.

The popular videogames in this instance being Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry series. Of the former, we can expect a new installment, featuring a new time period and protagonist, to arrive before next March. For the latter, meanwhile, apparently the wait won’t be as long as it was between Far Cry 2 and Far Cry 3. (more…)