Time for a confession: I’m not a Quake guy. I’m not a Quake guy to the point where I haven’t even played Quake. It was old hat by the time I was all in on video games and I chose the wonderful Unreal Tournament over Arena due to preferring better games. But here I am, intrigued and somewhat astounded by what modder Simon O’Callaghan has managed to do with the seventeen> year old engine. Essentially, In The Shadows is a semi-conversion that adds a stealth system and whole new campaign to the aging beast, but it also hits some specific me-shaped buttons. Sneak past the break for a video and a little more in-depth explanation.

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Given there’s nothing I hate more than my friends and the things they think, social media has an odd place in my heart. It ensures I’m invited to parties where I can refill my body with vital fluids and praise the gods of dance in my own way. But it also means I have to read people’s opinions, look at pictures of their grandmothers and painstakingly plan their deaths. There’s no win condition, just an endless grind. What I need is a life with an end to it, a goal I can strive to and easy ways to beat my enemies there. What I need is Redshirt.

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It’s Gamescom, one of the many firework-enshrouded peaks of game convention season. You know what that means: glitz and glamour galore. No, the Hollywood-style antics don’t quite reach the fever pitch of, say, an E3, but there’s still plenty of triple-A chest-thumping to go around. And so, Ubisoft has rolled out another movie deal, this time for not-even-out-yet open-world hackomancy thing Watch Dogs. Technically, the game’s title now has an underscore in it, but I refuse to write it that way because it looks hideous. Anyway, like all videogame movies (except ones based on franchises no one cares about), it’ll probably never come out. But let’s listen to a bunch of executive types be super optimistic anyway!

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I spent a couple of hours playing FUEL with a friend last week. We hopped online, spawned some quad-bikes, and just drove across whatever part of America we were supposed to be in. It had nice trees. So I’m really interested in The Crew, Ubisoft’s open-world driving game set in a Frankenstein’s monster of America, particularly the ‘social driving’ features. I know ‘social’ isn’t a cool buzzword, but if all it means is I can see what a friend’s doing on a map of America and plonk my car down next to theirs, then I’m perfectly happy to do so. I hope it means I can plonk my car down in front>, though. Mwahahaha. Mwahahahahaaa! MWHAHAHAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Hah!

An encouraging video of The Crew has just skidded into first place in my heart, and it is below. (more…)

Being a Scotch person, I suffer a daily indignity of idiots asking me to say words that that have the letter ‘r’ in them. ‘Murder’ is a particular favourite. I honestly don’t know what’s so funny about hearing the word ‘murder’ coming from someone with a Glaswegian accent. When you hear it up there, it means you’re either watching Taggart, you’re about to take a broken bottle to a vital organ, or you’ve met my dad. You don’t want to do any of those, frankly. I was reminded of this as I watching the Murrrrderrrredrrr: Soul Suspect trailer, a game about the ghost of a detective solving his own murrrderrrrerrererrrering. (more…)

OH MY GOODNESS I AM GOING TO GET TO BE LEGO SPIDER-MAN.

Ever since my days running up and down the playground on all fours, aged 5, I have so desperately needed to be Spider-Man. But the vidjagames of him have never captured his personality for me, their seeming to have been very ahead of the books by giving him a personality more like Doc Oc’s than the chipper, cheery scoundrel I endlessly wish I were. Who better to capture his silly side than TT Games (are they really> called that now?)? None better. That’s who. He’s one of eighty-nine billion Marvel characters lined up to appear in this Autumn’s LEGO Marvel Super Heroes, and now there’s a trailer revealing that Dr Doom shall be working alongside Loki to be their undoing.

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Ever wanted to do SCIENCE!? Not that namby pamby regular boring “science” where things are actually done properly and real discoveries are made by years of painstaking stat-tracking. (like Valve’s development cycle without the hats). No, I’m talking about the exciting world of SCIENCE(!) where SCIENTISTS in LAB COATS sprint through MASSIVE PARTICLE COLLIDERS at ever-increasing speeds. That’s the premise of Boson X a “rotational runner” where you must guide yourself through an infinitely expanding experiment by leaping from platform to platform. I’ve had a play of a preview build and there’s a beautiful trailer available so long as you don’t accidentally create a black hooooooooo…>

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Just think: two million years of evolution got us to this point, give or take one divine intervention. Hundreds of billions of humans have lived and died to get the world to the state it’s in now. We’ve sent men, women, dogs and monkeys into space. Mapped the globe. Put the internet and all of human knowledge into every pocket. Landed on the moon. Made Bulletstorm. And after all that, all those struggles and triumphs and long rainy days the best name Crytek could come up with for their free to play multiplayer shooter is WARFACE?! WARFACE! >Say it out loud and listen to how ridiculous> you sound while you watch the trailer below.

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It’s important that everyone stay calm and do as I say.

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After Ed McMillen quietly announced The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth last year, the snazzy, SNES-style remake of the disturbing rogue-like has been fairly quiet. Almost as if it were locked in a basement, hidden from the judgmental gaze of society who wouldn’t be able to just stare at the awful, lumpen horrors it possesses. But it turns out I’m applying the game’s fiction to the development process, which is a huge error. I’ve still to see the game in action, but the atmosphere of the live-action trailer they’ve just released is pitch-perfect. Low-fi and utterly horrible. Please watch it with the lights on. (more…)