A personal highlight of Rezzed for me was when I trapped The Guardian’s Keith Stuart in a corner and repeatedly stabbed him with a sharpened blade. He tried helplessly to run between each swipe, staggering dazedly away, but I relentlessly pursued, moving faster, unfaltering, utterly determined to fulfil the demands of my dark passenger. “That’s for working for a lily-livered pinko scum leftwing weasel rag!” I exclaimed, as I plunged the knife into his spine. “That’s for helping that traitor Snowden to destroy democracy!” I snarled as I connected with what I think was his neck, but honestly it was getting hard to tell by that point. So much blood.> “That’s for the indulgent Shoreditch coffee shop!” I reasoned as I struck harder still. “That’s for being so awful to cuddly Uncle Rupert!” I bellowed as I carved a scarlet tunnel through to his liver. “That’s for all those spelling mistakes!” I screeched as the last of his gravy ran to the floor. “And that,” I intoned with satisfaction as I turned on my heel and walked away, “is for continuing to give bloody Tim Dowling the opening column in the Saturday magazine.” Yeah, I know Keith’s just the paper’s games guy, but I had to start somewhere, right?

Later, I played a couple of rounds of two-player murderer’n'victim chase game Silhouette. (more…)

It is, however, only a screenshot of placeholder art for the X-COM co-creator’s remake of wizard wars classic Chaos, but it is nonetheless a fine thing to see this new vision of the landmark Speccy game taking shape.

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So it seems like there will be two contenders for the Hey, We Forgot About Syndicate In All This Nostalgia> throne. One is Cartel, which Paradox are now beginning to tease fairly strongly, and the other is a fragment of information squeezed the news that Syndicate Wars man (and so appropriately named for a ’90s developer) Mike Diskett is UP TO SOMETHING. The first images of the thing he is up to, Satellite Reign, have appeared on a Swedish site, fz.se. They’re just concept art, but Oh My God concept art. Satellite Reign, which is without much doubt an impending Kickstarter, could well cause me to inject drugs into my augmented espionage agent once it is announced.

HOW ABOUT THAT FOR A EUPHEMISM.

More images below. Click for slightly larger. (But not much larger.) (more…)

I was just eating some Hobnobs and thinking that I’d seen enough space games for one week, but I was wrong>. Not to eat delicious biscuits, of course, that’s always right>, but wrong to think that I’d seen enough of the flying, exploding stuff. I mean maybe they’re not spaceships as such, because it seems like atmospheric combat, but they’re certainly flying flipping things with weapons and zooming about in multiple dimensions. Yes, ignore my intro: Strike Vector looks shit hot, and if their Greenlight trailer (below) doesn’t set off a whirling green alarm in Steam HQ then there is something wrong with the way Valve installed their whirling green alarm system, and they should get that seen to.

Is it fair to say it looks like the Hawken of dogfighting games? Well, there, I said it. Wanna fight about it? (more…)

If, like me, you are a kind of cyborg, you might recall that one of Arma’s keenest community leaders, Andrew ‘Dslyecxi’ Gluck, has been overseeing some of the trailers for the alpha of Arma 3. That’s true now that the game has entered beta, too. His latest work is SITREP (pronounced as if you are giving orders over the noise of gunfire) which covers some ground we’ve already seen – the clever simulatory embellishments of Arma 3 – as well as explaining what that long alpha thing was all about. The idea of it all, I believe, is to entice you into the beta, via their store.

Yes. (more…)

So, to recap… Leisure Suit Larry Reloaded is a 2013 remake of a 1991 game based on a 1987 game based on a text adventure from 1981 about a guy with his head in the 1970s. Yow. Ordinarily, that would lead to the question “Why?” This time though, the answer is simple: “14,081 Kickstarter backers donated over $650,000 to make it happen, so shut up.”

There’s no arguing with that, really. But are the final results worth the faith?>

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Odds bodkins! The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is pretty and make no mistake (the last time screenshots came out they were pretty enough to make Jim swear, but I told my mum I was on RPS this week so I’m not allowed to). It’s blooming pretty as a picture, and my codlings are tingling. They’d better festinate this game out ASAP, I don’t want to be sat here rod-jockeying while I’m waiting for it to arrive. Say hello to my mum, everyone! (more…)

Two things to note in regards to this latest The Bureau: XCOM Declassified video. Actually, make that three things because it’s worth mentioning that the name becomes worse every time I have to type it. It’s not the worst use of a colon this side of an alien probing session, but it is a tad cumbersome. I’m also increasingly wary of the stop-start nature of the command system and, yes, I know that may seem a strange complaint coming from a man who loves all things turn-based. I guess I just want it to go the whole way and be> turn-based. My final objection, before dropping the video onto your screen, relates to the setting. The nifty period style doesn’t seem to extend beyond the hats – the rest comes across as more futuristic than actual XCOM.

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Hooray for the person who decided that dragons can have jetpacks. I get the impression that the from that moment on, Divinity: Dragon Commander was set on a path to Sillyville. Any further questions about lore were probably answered by the lead developer pointing to artwork of a dragon blasting jets out from his backpack and then a shrug. It’s a decision that ends at the inevitable cul-de-sac of an overly verbose and racist lizard man trying to get out of having a party with an imp, as is shown in this video. I’d imagined this offshoot of the Divinity series to be a lot less personable, but there’s plenty of of political maneuvering in 30 minute play through, as well as a pile of characters to talk to and make plans with before the Dragons are released. (more…)

I know how I will die. I am reminded of it constantly, and without sympathy. One shrinking white oblong, to the upper left of my vision, taunts me with the rapid decline of my oxygen; another, upper right, expressionlessly cackles at me with its ever-diminishing power supply, showing me the encroaching demise of the Capsule that keeps me alive. (more…)