Hello! A polite notice for you: while we’re very proud of the community on RPS, which is most certainly smarter than the average bear, one of the reasons for it is that we strive to assassinate certain kinds of comment – though in recent months this clean-up job has become a taller order than in the past. Sometimes, people are baffled and/or outraged that this has happened. So, for the record: we do that, we always have done, we always will and you can’t talk us out of it. However, if you follow these three simple rules your words shall most likely be safe. In addition, you won’t come across like an awful or mad person. (more…)

….Cart Life, which scooped up an an impressive triple-whammy of Nuovo Award, Excellence in Narrative and the coveted Seamus McNally Grand Prize at last night’s Independent Games Festival 2013 awards. The warmest of all congratulations to Richard Hofmeier, whose affecting, brave game is well overdue for this kind of attention. (more…)

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Also, wow. NVIDIA aren’t the only ones doing remarkable things with videogame faces – Activision have their own take on a very similar real-time rendering concept – and indeed using the same bald, parfait-obsessed character. This is apparently all done on current hardare – a GeForce 680 can muster it at 120FPS, they say, although obviously that’s without anything else being rendered. More impressively, Activision R&D are demonstrating this face-sim at GDC, using a two-year-old laptop, whereas NVIDIA talked about their own tech needing a GeForce Titan. I don’t own a GeForce Titan. I might have mentioned that once or twice.

If you aren’t at the show, you can watch this surprising video. I should warn you that the phrase ‘frozen fruit’ may take on faintly nightmarish associations for the rest of your natural life. (more…)

Double Fine must be celebrating their crowdfunded adventure game’s birthday, or some other sort of coming-of-Broken-Age event, because the game has received lots of gifts this week. First it was an actual name and a website, and now there’s a trailer. Lucky Broken Age! Nobody has ever made a trailer about me and I’ve had more birthdays than I care to remember. This is my first proper look at the art style and I think it’s absolutely delightful.

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We made a mistake. It’s important as a website that readers can trust that we are up front when this happens, and willing to admit to our failings, and promise to address them. And as recently as last week, Rock, Paper, Shotgun let a woman write an article. We would like to apologise to our readers for any offence caused.

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Biomes! Double Craters! Height ranges! I apologise for shouting! This is totally cool, even for someone as RTS-unsavvy as I am. The Planetary Annihilation developers are very serious about the planets that make up the game’s maps, and have created the longest video ever> to show you all the attributes players will have control over when they make their own planets. You know how some trailers and videos have production values? Not this one? It’s just two guys with a game engine that makes painterly planets, and it’s really rather fascinating. (more…)

In today’s game news from another universe: Modern Warfare’s sensitive depiction of the banality of combat has prompted the Pulitzer committee to add a video games category. Half-Life 3′s midnight launch also brought with it Steam 2. And APB, the most populated and well-received action-MMO of its generation, spawning a cultural revolution and raising gaming to the highest artform, has a sister game in production: the action multiplayer shooter known as APB Vendetta. (more…)

What a thing Terry Cavanagh has done. What a thing. He’s only gone and inspired a new wave of game designers to go forth and do smart things with ultra-minimalism and design purity. Super Hexagon is and will be, I suspect a more important game than anyone expects, even though it’s already highly feted in The Right Circles. While there will doubtless be more cynical clones, there’s also so much to be explored in terms of simple shapes, reflex-based strategy and immaculate mastery of tiny movements. Chaotic, a free game by one amidos2006, will be one of Super Hexagon’s many, many children, and its approach is to look at Cavanagh’s game of precision spinning through the looking glass. (more…)

It’s just a scooch over a year since RPS first peeked into the indie tactical shooter, Intruder. It looked good enough to hang around the back of my brain, insistently waiting for me to remember to check it out again. And today I did. Intruder looks like the sort of game that you’d make if you loved tactical shooters, but don’t care about major cities or worry about dramatic plot twists. Just a couple of teams in a confined space with a lot of guns and gadgets. (more…)

It’s always interesting seeing how games come to be. Take Relock: it was inspired by Wolfire‘s excellent Receiver, a complicated gun sim that was made for the 7-day FPS challenge in the middle of last year. Receiver is excellent, but with Wolfire currently making a wabbit kung-fu sim, it’s unlikely to get much love. So Relock is here to give the people that loved Receiver something to be excited about, though it’s missing the oddball story, NPCs, and randomly created levels. So what does it have? (more…)