Angry man shootyblams – that most noble of sports – are surprisingly complex business. To an outsider, it might seem like a simple matter of pointing your perpetually enraged avatar in a direction and pulling the trigger – practically killing with your mind>, except your mind is a gun – but sometimes there are other factors to consider. Loadout, map, and how best to demean your generally reasonable foes with hurtful language, sure, but also things of a more sinister> nature. Yeah, I’m talking about lag. Peer-to-peer connections topple, empires fall. What’s, say, a Call of Duty game to do? Yep: give up and get cancelled. No wait, sorry. Dedicated servers.

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You may have seen our mentioning Fran Bow earlier this month. A point and click adventure with an ongoing IndieGoGo campaign, and an available demo. Fairly standard stuff. But as Ben found when he played it, and I certainly did too, this is something incredibly disturbing. A tale of a 10 year old girl who witnesses the brutal murder of her parents, and then seemingly develops severe mental health issues. The demo, set in an asylum, shows the morbid, hideous version of reality perceived by this girl – a world of brutal death, mutilated children, and dismal hopelessness. It was too much for me – I found it very unnerving. And then I saw that one of the co-creators, Natalia Figueroa, mentioned that it was semi-autobiographical.

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When I play online shooters, the only thing that goes bump in the night is my mouse. If I get killed, I usually give the poor pointing device a fair old whack on the table, which I do to make sure it’s calibrated. It’s in no way a childish act of petulance that has sent at least one mouse off to Logitech’s “calibration support team” in bits and pieces. And the scream I let off is to make sure my microphone works. Anyway, those bumps will soon be joined by bumps of fear > and terror>, as Warner Bros. attempts to resurrect its horror shooter series F.E.A.R. as a free-to-play multiplayer game>. If there is true evil in the world, it’s found in the marketing meeting room where F.E.A.R. Online was first floated. (more…)

The Humble Origin Bundle is getting bigger. At the very moment you’re reading this, their team of slave-children are adding two more games into the mix, and they’re classics. Going into the record-breaking bundle are Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 – Uprising, and – coo – Populous. And at this point, Humble Bundle have revealed that since they began, they’ve raised a total of over $20m for charities in just over two years.

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Adventure games are making something of a comeback, floating on the sea of nostalgia while clinging to a life raft made from Kickstarter pledges, stretch goals, and hope. One of those out to sea games is Broken Sword: The Serpent’s Curse, the 2Dish return of Nico and George. They’re preparing to make land this Winter, and will probably have quite the story to tell. They’ll crawl onto land and breathlessly tell us about stolen paintings, the devil, and evil pizza delivery men with guns, and we’ll just nod and say “yes, mmmhhmm, go on” while pocket-dialing for help. A trailer for this is below. (more…)

The Youtube generation has a lot to answer for. We used to call these “Gameplay Trailers” but now those hip young kids have their “Let’s Plays” and their “unboxing vids” and the ancient golems of PR, marketing and development are racing to catch up. Creative Assembley’s latest Rome II effort has two rad fellows spitting rhymes (disclaimer: may not contain rhymes) and throwing info about new features in the strategy sequel. Then they realise what we’re all here for and get down to proxy-beating on one another via the medium of tiny digital men. Onward, to glory!

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Talking to the monsters just isn’t enough any more, things must be more complex. Gamers the world over cry-out for not only deeper interaction with their digital worlds but the ability to terraform them as well. Thus when earlier this month Sony Online Entertainment shocked the world by revealing Everquest Next might actually be relevant to the wider gaming community, its world-building utility Landmark was yet another pleasant surprise. Gamescom’s provided a platform to preach a little more information regarding the project and it’s just past this oddly destructible barrier.

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Watching this video of Battlefield 4′s multiplayer, as an EA producer views a huge battle for control of an island chain, reminded me of how I used to play Battlefield 2: I’d stay after work at PC Gamer, along with Tom Francis and the quietly brilliant Steve Williams. We’d load up a 64-man map on the LAN and mess about for a couple of hours. We’d be recording all this, then we’d watch it back, laughing at the demo. We were so cool. There’s an element of this in this narrated live recording of DICE’s ‘Paracel Storm’ map: the camera zooms around, taking stock of the mayhem as it happens, flowing like an unfettered war photographer. I’m not really bothered about the game, but I might just buy it for the spectator view. (more…)

STOP THE PRESSES. The most significant thing to happen in gaming news all year> just, er, happened. CryEngine has thrown out its number. No more CryEngine 3, 4, 8, 12, or XCVIII. Just a sleek, svelte, quietly confident CryEngine. It doesn’t need to boast with arbitrary digits to take on the likes of Unreal Engine 427,000. It’s gonna be just fine no matter what because Crytek has a bunch of military contracts… er, I mean, something something gun games blasto-men eye-popping weather effects yeah. There’s a trailer below that highlights some snazzy features. It won’t blow your mind or anything, but there are some gorgeous gears churning away beneath its graphical pixel beams.

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I enjoyed a recent demo of Shadow Warrior so much that I done maded one of them there vidya-trons about it. The first-person slasher drew me in for a lot of reasons: swords, wise-cracks, swords, swords, car-aoke versions of The Touch, swords, cutting monsters with swords, swords, s-words, and swords. And now, publisher Devolver Digital has sliced the game to ribbons and assembled a video of its own from the remains. The reason? To announce a release date, of course. And also swords.

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