My pal Warwick threw down the gauntlet last night. After a few pints of Spitfire in the White Hart in Henley, he bet me twenty quid I couldn’t sneak the names of twenty RAF aircraft into a single Flare Path intro. Being a hawkish fellow I was tempted to take his money, but, in the end, resisted his hectoring and declined the challenge. Flare Path takes its role of wargaming/simulation sentinel far too seriously to indulge in juvenile word stunts.>

Beyond the break, I take a swift look at The Few (a valiant attempt at a two-layer Battle of Britain RTS) cause havoc with Automation’s just-unveiled car designer tool, and nervously scout Door Kickers’ latest batch of maps (many of which remind me of places I know in Lancaster, Halifax, Stirling, Sunderland, Stranraer, Bombay and Hyderabad).>

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If all goes according to plan, Wasteland 2 will be one of the most reactive, choice-driven games to grace PCs since man first rubbed two sticks together and invented the keyboard. Everything from juicy bits of dialogue to party members to entire locations can vanish or appear in an instant, all thanks to your actions. And wastelands, well, they tend to be pretty nasty places, radiation-scorched cesspits of violence, prejudice, and, er, waste. So naturally, some characters are going to hate you for simply being, well, you. inXile’s hinted at the system in Kickstarter updates, but I found myself exceedingly curious about how it’ll all actually come together. Here’s what the developer told me.>

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Hand-crafted point-and-click The Dream Machine is taking Swedish indie devs a lot longer to make than they’d planned. So it’s a shame that this extended development is really the series’ only weakness. As Chapter 4 finally appears, almost two years after Chapter 3, the story of Victor and Alicia is pretty hard to have remembered this far on. But it’s worth remembering, because this continues to be an absolutely superb experience. Here’s wot I think:>

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The Steam Greenlight machine keeps right on churning, and I have to say: it’s getting a little> more efficient. Initially, batches of new games were wheezing out in sickly trickles, but now we’re getting 15-game shotgun bursts every couple weeks. There’s still plenty of room for improvement of course, and it remains to be seen whether or not Valve can keep pushing this pace, but it’s good to at least see some baby steps in the right direction. With that said, let’s dive into this week’s selection. Standouts include Syndicate spiritual successor Satellite Reign, the ever-popular (and hilarious) Viscera Cleanup Detail, open-world zombie sandbox 7 Days To Die, extremely ambitious god game Maia, and quiet, thoughtful ghost romp The Novelist.

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Against all odds, Civilization Online – a completely non-turn-based, non-strategy MMO in which you play as a glorified grunt in a grand game of global conquest – sounds super fascinating. Its creators are calling the civ-on-civ sandbox “a big social experiment,” with leaders kicking and fighting their way up the ranks by any means necessary. Meanwhile, players can collectively choose whether to pursue war, peace, technology, or any other number of paths to server-wide victory – at which point everything resets. What a concept, right? Oh, but there’s a catch: for now, XL Games’ bonkers ambitious reimagining of Sid Meier’s legendary brainchild is sticking with an isolationist foreign policy. Yep: it’s a Korea-only release.

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A question for you: which game have you enjoyed most so far this year?

A second question for you: What games are you most looking forward to in the remainder of 2013?

Speak!

Are you ready to be positively buried> under amazing games? Well too bad. Games are largely distributed via non-physical means now, and that’s a weird thing to do with them anyway. Take your sick, fetishistic disc orgies somewhere else. (Note: RPS does not actually discriminate against fetishes. Just physical media.) There are, however, a lot of brand new, positively excellent games suddenly populating our hobby’s infinitely expanding sea, and you should really just probably play all of them. I quite liked what I played of Papers, Please, the consolefolk enjoyed Guacamelee, and everybody with air in their lungs and a beating heart in their chest loves Spelunky.

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There are times when the RPS Action News Team 3000 is just too busy. Like that time I missed posting about Half-Life 3′s secret crowd-funding effort because I was cleaning the bath (it failed, btw). At those moments, when developers are emailing us exclusives and wiring money to our Swiss bank accounts, we just want the developer to step-up and do the job for us. That actually happened last night. Chris Hecker wanted to talk about Spy Party, but when he e-mailed me I was, er, having a nap. When I came to, my hair was in no fit state for the sort of journalism that RPS demands, so I asked him for a few notes. Well, yada yada yada, he interviewed himself about the upcoming art update to his wonderful game. I intend to do a proper interview with him about Spy Party, but for now here’s Chris Hecker journalisming Chris Hecker. Hard. (more…)

Our previous look at the Unreal Engine 4 in action was the hyper-dramatic Infiltrator demo. It was sci-fi, it was 50 bajillion shades of grey, it was quite a spectacular piece of machinima that I totally want to play. This time around, there’s almost no action or budget: just a couple of members of the development team talking about the engine’s material layering capabilities. Where before the soundtrack was dramatic and swelling, here it’s a dude saying things like: “I can see that adds a lot of flexibility to the art pipeline.” Games! (more…)

Neverwinter’s first big content update, Fury Of The Feywild, is with us in just a couple of weeks. The actually rather good free-to-play MMO peculiarly failed to gouge me of cash as I played through it, so I’m pretty tempted to head back in to look at the new bits and bobs – they’ll be free too. There is, at last, a trailer showing some footage of it, albeit very briefly.

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