Vehicles that look like scaffolding on wheels are doomed to fail. Drop them on an obstacle course, no matter how simple, and they’re likely to struggle with simple concepts such as ‘moving in a straight line without toppling over like a giraffe wearing roller skates’. That’s why it’s sensible to attach rockets to them so that they can at least collapse in a glorious heap, spindly segments shattering and pirouetting through the air. That’s the vehicle, obviously – don’t do that to a giraffe, or a vehicle in fact. People would get hurt and/or cross. Crashtastic allows you to construct pretend vehicles and put them through their paces destroy them. Preorder to receive immediate alpha access.

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You’d think robbing an art gallery would be fairly straightforward, especially if there are four robbers working together to pull off the job. But when one of those robbers sets off a noisy hand dryer in the bathroom, and another one falls through the skylight, knocking himself out on the hardwood floor beneath, you should probably take some time to reflect. Just not now. Because right now there is a helicopter shooting at you.

Yes, I played Payday 2. Here are some thoughts.> (more…)

A seagull on the roof screeched and gave me an irretrievable sense of self-loathing this morning, and I opened up Zwan, a game designed for the Bosch Art Game competition, and bellowed my whole disquiet with the world into it like some anguished moose that has just been shot by Todd Palin. I have never been so unsettled by a game, and it reminded me of what an effect mood can have on our experience of games, of music, of anything really.

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I covered Contract Work’s close-run Kickstarter finish in back in April and now the game is ready for release. Well, it’s ready for early release, which means you can play it right now and pay $2.99 to unlock the current version should you so desire. The plot and setting led me to expect a side-scrolling Deus Ex but Contract Work is much more like a side-scrolling Syndicate. Despite upgrade elements that allow for stealthier or more violent approaches, it’s a game about being a gun for hire and the gun is the central tool. Well, guns>, to be precise. You are guns for hire>. The action is fast, as waves of enemies spawn at the map’s edge and head for their objectives. Sometimes you are the infiltrator, sometimes the defender, but either way there is a great deal of robot-smashing to be done.

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I’ve founded religions, spied on my neighbours and sent a spaceship in search of a new home on a distant star. The promise of a Brave New World was enough to bring me crashing back down to Earth though, and I’ve been making new friends, meeting old enemies and creating great works of art. This latest expansion takes on the greatest challenge of all – injecting some meaningful activity into Civilization’s end-game. I’ve spent a week uncovering its charms and chores, and here’s wot I think.>

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Often the sun rises high over the whitewashed walls outside, the warmth in the tiles seems to glow, the birds sing by the fuschia flowers on fallen pot plants, but you can’t actually forgive yourself. When you look at the pretty sweeping lines of the blue petals on the table cloth you think darkly of how deeply inadequate you are, of how you have never measured up to your peers, of how your talents are failure and eating cold pizza at eleven in the morning. Why have you put on a dress this morning? The bra that fits you well? Why did you put on earrings? Who will see them? It is at this point you wish to punish yourself, and you open a game that you want to punish you. You open 3 Blind Mice, for Improper Children, and throw your earrings at the screen. You are alone and you deserve to be. (more…)

Every day RPS is perplexingly bombarded with press releases for half-arsed Flash games aimed at some unknowable make-up-and-horses-loving audience. Why they send this stuff to us we do not understand, but today Cara and John decided to take a look. Firstly at Selena Hair Care, because it promised it was “unique” and “fun”. Here are their adventures.>

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Nothing is sacred in Hyrule: Total War. Nothing>. I mean, for one, the genre’s not action/adventure, which is a change of pace for Nintendo’s elven master of blades and obscure wind instruments. But also, the Medieval II: Total War mod seems poised to run amok like a bull in a holy grail shop. The still-unfinished project (newly on version 3.0) has put out a new trailer that depicts all kinds of series blasphemy. Presumably dead Link. Presumably dead Zelda. Ganondorf and the chain chomp dog from Link’s Awakening delightedly playing fetch together in a daisy field. With Link’s severed eyeball>. OK, maybe that last one isn’t true, but the new trailer is full of crazy wonderment, and you can find it below.

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Spelunky is very, very tough. Sometimes, it’s downright mean. But it pushes you so hard because it cares>. Because it wants to see you do better, maybe even excel. It can only teach you so much, though. Eventually – through perseverance, hard-earned wisdom, and spelunking deep into the hardiest reaches of your own heart – you’ll master all it has to offer. Unless… no, that’s crazy. It could never happen in a million years. But hypothetically, let’s say Spelunky added a PC-exclusive daily challenge mode. One where a single death took you out of the race, but a new adventure appeared every day. Could we engage in scandalous acts of spelunkery forever>?

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KING Art’s The Raven: Legacy Of A Master Thief comes out today. It’s a really lovely adventure, well worth getting hold of. We grabbed hold of the German developers to learn more about why they wanted to make such a gentle game, their inspirations, and why they picked an elderly man to be the star of their game.>

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