Mojang’s fantasy card-deck battle game thing arrives next week! Scrolls, as it is so legally called, has been impressing a wave of beta-tester people with its tight production and carefully poised strategy mechanics. There’s a good chance that this will be the deck-building strategy of 2013. Not that there’s a lot of competition there, but you get the idea. Yeah. Anyway, it makes it official debut next week.

Fancy launch trailer below! (more…)

Fleish & Cherry In Crazy Hotel remixes dodgy old 1930s cartoons to produce a game that looks quite unlike anything else I can recall. It’s basically a tribute to that early era of animation, and “will be full of details and tributes to the history of animation and to the great artists of the time like Walt Disney, Ub Iwerks, Max Fleischer or Friz Freleng”. The proposed project comes in five chapters of environmental puzzling, but that’s going to require a bit of the old crowdfunding, of course.

Slightly awkwardly-voiced trailer below. (more…)

World Of Diving claims to be “the first online multiplayer diving game”. I say “claims to be” because I am sure I played an online multiplayer diving game before, but Google can’t conjure it for me, and therefore it does not exist. Anyway, I’ve always felt that deliberately going underwater with sharks was one of those things that was best left to Not Real Life, and so videogames seem like the perfect opportunity to do such insane things without getting gnawed on, or having to breathe salt water or anything. That, at least, gives this game a good reason to exist. But is it $75,000 worth of a reason? I cannot say. Not even with an Oculus Rift strapped to a man’s face. (more…)

Gunpoint is a game being made by PC Gamer’s Tom Francis. He’s a terrible human being, of course, prone to evil like no one else in history, but the game is quite good, in that side-on hacking, stealthing, gadgeting way that Tom has made his own. But you don’t have to take my word for it because there’s completely a demo. You can pre-order it for a mere $9. The game is out on Monday.

I’ve posted one of the more recent videos of Mr Francis explaining his creation, below. (more…)

It’s been a while since we heard anything from Beamdog‘s ‘Enhanced’ version of Baldur’s Gate 2, but their bossman Trent Oster just told ShackNews: “We’re hard at work on BG2:EE and it is going well… Phil (our design lead) mentioned to me there is over 350,000 words of new content.” These apparently constitute extra bits across the quests and story of Shadows of Amn and the expansion, Throne of Bhaal, which will ship with the new edition.

Whether all this work will match the experience of a modded version of the original game remains to be seen, of course. I understand that the reception for the enhancement of Baldur’s Gate was… mixed.

Face of Mankind is a hugely ambitious (but small-scale) MMO project that apparently started in 2001, and is now culminating in a Kickstarter. It makes some fairly lofty promises about being an MMO in which players can define their role, rather being structured by quests and so on. It is supposedly “grind free”, open-PvP, and has a player-driven economy. There’s a lot of stuff in there that Eve players would recognise, frankly. Take a look at the documentary-style pitch and tech video for a glimpse of what they’re trying to achieve, and how. (more…)

We all like a good neon-lit hacking game, right ’80s aesthetes? Good news then from Reality Council Games, who send word Wetware, a single-player game of computer war and espionage happenings. “In Wetware, you play at the helm of one of the world’s megacorporations, doing what is necessary to stay at the top and crushing anything that gets in your way. Hack in to rival networks, bribe journalists and sabotage the economy for your own gain.” Bribe journalists?! Goodness, I am not sure that such a thing could ever be possible. Good thing this is just a videogame, eh?

Video below. (more…)

I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting much out of City Quest. It certainly doesn’t look like much, and “retro”-styled games are a dime a trillion these days. But I also spied loving odes to the LucasArts and Sierra adventures of yore on its website, so I decided I’d have a go at its free demo anyway. I’m quite happy I did. City Quest is that rare brand of adventure that plumbs the scummiest depths of tastefulness, yet manages to emerge not covered in, well, crap. It’s an unrelentingly witty little thing, constantly rewarding exploration and “what if…?” thinking with scrumptious details and rapid-fire joke flurries. They’re not all winners, but the hits far outweigh the misses. More info and a trailer after the break.

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Ha, sorry. Not really. But it got your attention. And there’s a thin tendril of truth in it. It’s been a busy week in hardware and in my mortal hands I hold a laptop containing AMD’s Jaguar cores. The very same cores as found in the freshly minted games consoles from Microsoft and Sony. So what are they like and what does it mean for PC gaming?

Meanwhile, Nvidia drops a price bomb of the bad kind and Intel has some new chips on the way. Read on for the gruesome details. (more…)

Dust is not often a pretty thing. It’s grimy and chunky and prone to congealing in hairy globules on only the shiniest, most typically attractive surfaces. Also, it’s been locked in an eternal war with lungs since the dawn of time, and I consider myself a close ally of all things breathing-related since they keep me alive. Dust: An Elysian Tale, however, is a different story. Its hand-painted 2D stylings are utterly gorgeous, glowing with color and dancing with life. I want to play it right nowwwwww- oh, I can. Dust has piled on top of Steam, which – in addition to sounding like a physical impossibility – is very good news.

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