Jim, John and Nathan are all out at GDC for RPS right now, but the lack of any news from them so far leads me to presume they are all either dead, kidnapped, hungover, hiding or trapped inside a branch of The Cheesecake Factory. So, while I’ve not been out there to see and thus usefully report on any of the following myself, I can at least once again do what is approximately 19% of my daily job, and resize video embed code to fit on our website.

This time it’s looks at what we can expect from Crytek’s Cryengine 3 and Epic’s Unreal don’t-call-it-4 Engine 4. I think you’ll all agree that Golfzon (above) is what we most want from the game engines of tomorrow. And if you don’t, some of the other stuff in there might well be more to your tastes. (more…)

1. NEW GAMERS JOURNAL – INTRODUCTION

See the Raven.

Watch the Raven as it watches you.

Time is running out for you. The Raven, one of many, will watch forever. Your eyes, however, will close.

Welcome to this week’s column about board games.

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Mojang’s collectible digital card / turn-based strategy game Scrolls has been fairly quiet, publicly at least, since sort of winning, sort of losing their battle with Bethesda over the right to use a common English word. No longer, though – after an extended private alpha period, they’re going to put the beta on sale late next month. As with Minecraft, it’s a chance to pay less but receive an unfinished game – though it will of course receive all the updates right up to (and presumably beyond) full release. (more…)

They did it last year, and they still haven’t finished their game so they’re doing it again this year. Desktop Dungeons was/is a brilliant little mash-up of rogue-like and puzzle game, and the devs have been working on a dramatically expanded version with a metagame, character persistence and all sorts. In honour of GDC, because, er, I don’t know, they’ve made the beta version of the game free to all for the duration of the conference. (more…)

Look at that! It’s the first screenshot from Legend of Grimrock 2 and it’s one of the worst pictures of a dungeon I’ve ever seen, right up there with the Mona Lisa and Magritte’s not-a-pipe-nor-a-dungeon. After creating some top notch dank dungeons for their first RPG, Almost Human appear to have slipped up and the dungeons in Grimrock 2 will apparently contain some trees and blue skies, and crenellated turrets peering from on high, just around the next bend in the path. Of course, it’s entirely possible that the picture isn’t a dungeon at all and that the game is undergoing a design overhaul. Let’s consult the development blog.

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Today is International Stop Hating Things Day. Do you hate things? Do you burn> to say how awful you think they are on the internet? For one day only, stop it. Stop hating things! You’ll feel better. And I’ll even give you a reward for it – a free copy of Peggle Deluxe. No, you’re not allowed to hate it. That would contravene the rules of International Stop Hating Things Day. (more…)

Blood will have blood, living by the sword often leads to death by the same and men are frequently brought low by their own violent yesterdays. Mollieindustria’s latest release, The Best Amendment, is a tactical top-down shooter that ponders the act of using a gun to stop a gunman. At first it works, one on one, but every new level has an extra enemy and those enemies are the player’s previous incarnations; ghosts performing terrible acts that blur the line between self defence and aggression. Eventually, the man in white has become a dozen men in black, bullets fill the air like bees around blossoms and there is nowhere left to hide.

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4500 words, and I still feel I didn’t get anywhere near close to covering everthing I wanted to about BioShock: Infinite – that I made lengthy generalisations but not enough specification of the smaller, or at least subtler, details and events of a game which consistently barrages the player with imagery and ideas. Here are a few I missed, just to get them off my chest. Could maybe, possibly be said to contain some minor spoilers, depending on how absolute you are about these sorts of things. (more…)

It’s a bad day for Square Enix, latter-day publisher of Tomb Raider, Hitman, Deus Ex and Thief, as well as those dreary Final Fantasy things. Citing “slow sales of major console games” as well as uninspiring business from its arcade machine arm, it’s admitted that its recent monies “substantially fall below its plan” and its president Yoichi Wada has fallen on his sword as a result. (more…)

The last time I played Wildstar, Carbine’s upcoming MMO, I had a decent time but I was left anxious about how close it stuck to the numbers, numbers, numbers model and why its Explorer path was so much like a late 90s platformer. Now it’s increasingly looking as though they might just have been sitting on the good stuff, like a hen made of veteran MMO developers incubating an egg of semi-sandbox play. Er.

Best forget that analogy. Instead, take a look at this player housing video – while the numbers, numbers, numbers stuff is very much in evidence, so is tantalisingly freeform DIY. (more…)