Good day to you, fine Internet. Lumenox Games send word that their beautiful 2D platformer, Aaru’s Awakening, has a new trailer, which you can find embedded below. It’s astonishingly pretty, and shows off the game’s key mechanic – teleportation – across some exquisitely hand-drawn levels. You really will want to take a look at this. But wait! As Alec previously noted, there’s also a demo over on the Greenlight page. That means you can play it.

Perhaps you should. (more…)

I love the disconnect of Arma 3. Look at the shot above. That APC is the IFV-6c Panther. You can tell it’s a scary beast because it has all those letters in front of it, and there’s that gun turret on top. And where have Bohemia plonked it? In front of a lovely sunset. It feels like a massive joke that got out of hand: “Can we recreate an incredibly holiday island?” “Yes we can. We can build beautifully a rendered Mediterranean island, with flatlands and rolling hills, tiny villages and huge cities.” “Great! Now let’s fill it with hulking war bastards and blow shit up.” And so they did. They’re so proud of it that they streamed an hour of their new island this weekend, and I have embedded it like an unexploded bomb. Except you may approach this. (more…)

As a recovering, relapse-prone power metal fan, I feel duty-bound to tell you about Karmaflow. On one hand, it’s a puzzle platform adventure inspired by the likes of Zelda, Journey, and Darksiders, but on the other, it’s an actual, factual power metal rock opera. Characters burst into glorious mane-tousling, guitar-combusting shred ballads, with voices provided by the likes of DragonForce singer Marc Hudson, Epica’s Simone Simons, and Cradle of Filth’s Dani, er, Filth. This sounds like the best worst thing ever.

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Goodness, Morphopolis sure is a sight to behold. I do not usually like bugs because I’m afraid they’ll crawl into my eyelids while I’m sleeping and lay eggs, but just look at that>. So much insistently strange color. So many rich veins of detail popping and pulsating with life. The point-and-click adventure treats nature not as a playground, but as a canvas for the grotesquely gorgeous. I just want to go inhabit that place. Problem is – based on a bit of the game I played at Rezzed – I’m not sure if it’ll let me. Trailer and thoughts below.

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You’ll be lucky if your first round of Headblaster lasts more than a minute. It’s not an unfair game by any means; it’s just that you’re working under some rather, er, strict> conditions. See, you have this headache. I doubt it’s anything serious – I mean, everybody gets headaches – but you should probably cram your gullet full of heaving horse pills all the same. Just to be safe. For some reason, though, the local law enforcement types really don’t like you. But you can’t stop to talk to them because goodness gracious your cranium is really> throbbing and your vision’s crackling like an old television and your skin feels like it’s covered in swirling stove tops and and and and…

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All I care about is my priceless collection of rand(3, 7) gems. >All the trees in this forest are humans.> FREEDOM OF SPELL.>

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Sundays are for listening to Nick Cave, early and loud enough to annoy the neighbours.

• US Gamer talk to Firaxis about Civ: “We made a lot of changes to the core game. Jon Schafer set out to really change the experience and bring out something new, because the core experience hadn’t changed too much,” admits Shirk. “It was always refined. In III and IV there were new systems added, but he really wanted to change and mix it up a little bit. When you’re developing a game, the whole team has bought into it and we really liked where it was at. It ended up being a stellar platform for us to build on, but we definitely have some pushback from our hardcore fans when it came out. They didn’t feel like there was enough there. Hopefully, we’ve satiated that, but we’ve learned a lot from that core development.”

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EXCITING DISCLAIMER: Sir, You Are Being Hunted is a game made by Big Robot, a small studio which I help run. I am also a founder and editor of this website. Had to mention that. Just so you know.>

Anyway! I was just thinking that I should probably mention the release date of the PC game I am working on, on the PC games website I work for. That just seems to link up somehow. So here we go: it’ll be available to download and play on Humble Store and Steam on the 19th of August. Holy crap that is soon! It’s an ‘alpha’ though, so it still has a few months to go before completion, as we’re only about half way through implementing all the robots that hunt you, and have two more biomes to set up. There may be minor glitches, too, but on the whole we’re really rather pleased with it.

You can be hunted, you can be horribly murdered by robots, you can drink tea, and you can escape from the islands. It works. And I think it’s beautiful.

Just in case you’ve not been following my witterings about the project, let me tell you a bit more about it, below.

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Where do you go when you want to buy the cheap games? Hopefully by now your immediate response should be to shout “SavyGamer Dot Co Dot UK“, and/or “The Bargain Bucket”, but who knows, maybe this is your first time round this part of town. Here’s the deal: Every Saturday morning, hangover be damned, I tell you about some of the best deals on PC downloads, right here on this very website, and then you can pop along to SavyGamer for updates on discounts across all platforms throughout the week. Here’s this week’s selection: (more…)

Do you like green goggles and Sam?>

I do not like them, Sam-Fisher-I-am.

Would you like more Splinter Cell: Blacklist trailers here or there? In a house? With a mouse? Would you watch them in a box? With a fox? >

I would not like them here or there. I would not like them anywhere. I do not like them in a house. I do not like them with a mouse. I would not watch them in a box. I would not watch them with a fox. I do not like green goggles and Sam. I do not like them because you’ve released so many goddamn trailers, Sam-Fisher-I-am.

Oh. Well, here’s another that pretty much accomplishes what all the others did, but more >succinctly and in a single go. Tehehehehehe. 

SAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAM.

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