When they’re not spinning around and around in their expensive chairs, weaving hats, or thinking up other ways to not make games that people want (“Shall we all got to Hawaii this week, or shall we crack open that HL3 design document?” “Aloha! Aloha! Aloha!”), Valve’s brain drones are at least attempting to create a community of people that can earn a living from making and contributing to games. Sometimes it’s a bit broken, like Greenlight is right now. Other times it can be so successful that Valve can afford to share the wealth between organisations that contributed to the success, but had no way to monetise their involvement. So now, when a community item in Team Fortress 2 or Dota 2 is sold in either game’s store, it’s possible for some of Valve’s take to be directed to the likes of Blender and Polycount. Ooh, just thought up a new word for it: Valvetruism. (more…)

If you choose to spend your time reading RPS, you’ve surely noticed that the site is made of words. There are pictures too, but if you visit here just to look at them>, you’re missing the point. Hopefully you enjoy the words and chances are you probably enjoy games as well, and that means you may well be the target audience for a book of poetry about games. Poems are structural – a sort of word architecture – which makes them far more complicated than my paragraphs of witter. I don’t write cathedrals, I write party poppers. I do like reading poems though and when I received an email about an entire book of carefully arranged words about games, I was intrigued. Coin Opera 2: Fulminare’s Revenge has taken to Kickstarter to raise money for printing and you can read more on its page, or below.

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Oh, he just had to release this just as the RPS Hivemind was about to slump into its weekend-long coma, didn’t he? The punishment for that is a shorter post free from our usual witticisms. Actually, no, I’m going to twist the knife and say ‘bum monkeys more like’.

I don’t know if Gun Monkeys is fun or bum in fact, as I haven’t yet had the opportunity to play it – it was at Rezzed, but I was dashing about like a monkey with its bum on fire so I didn’t get the chance. The people who did seemed to be having a good time however, but maybe that’s just because they enjoying harming monkeys. Anyway, this “procedurally–Generated, physics-based, online deathmatch platform game”, starring murderous simians and the voice of the actor Kevin Eldon, comes from the studio behind Time Gentlemen, Please, Privates and the upcoming The Swindle, so it bears investigation, I’d say. (more…)

I don’t know your name, Man, but you came up to me at Rezzed and said the most surprising thing (for someone who had bought a ticket to a PC games event). You said this: “I haven’t played any games since about 1998. I think the last game I bought was Half-Life. What should I play to get myself up to speed with gaming today?”

Caught off guard, I just vaguely gestured at the show floor, and said “uhh”. Eventually I recommended you read this website. But wow. Okay. This article is for you.

And, given our audience, possibly you alone.> (more…)

As predicted, Satellite Reign has appeared on Kickstarter, promising to make the Syndicate-style game we always wanted. Watch these chaps get a million quid in no time. Slick-as-rain pitch video below. (more…)

I know the TrackMania games are known for being speedy, but this is making a mockery of everything I know about game development, as well as the laws of time and space. It was only last Friday that TrackMania 2: Stadium was released, and now they’ve announced the release date of TrackMania 2: Valley. It is coming out on July 4th, 2013. The new addition has 65 new tracks for the new rally style handling mode, and all the building blocks you’d expect from one of their games. Just, you know, next week rather than a few months from now. (more…)

FP likes his driving games the way he likes his Nineteenth Century literary heroines: lots going on under the bonnet, keen on cross-country rambles, accomplished on the pianoforte. Small wonder then that when he’s not being kind to servants or being cruelly misunderstood at dances, he’s usually to be found enquiring after the health of Spintires and Automation. (more…)>

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…)