I didn’t get a chance to see Strike Vector at the phenomenally busy Gamescom event in Cologne last week, but I rather wish I had, because it looks simply splendid. The fly-and-explode game has some of the finest concept art I’ve seen, and that’s been transmuted into an extraordinarily pretty sci-fi flight combat game, as you can see in the trailer below. We can only hope the play is as tight as the look.

The game is inbound for some time in early 2014. Can’t wait. (more…)

Huh, the spellcheck on here knows the word ‘Wolfenstein’. Good job, dictionary attendants. Anyway, the reason I’ve had cause to use that peculiar faux-Teutonic title today is that I played an early press build of the latest game in the series, Wolfenstein: The New Order, at Gamescom.

It was a strange experience, not least because it seemed so desperate to remind me that Nazis are evil. Have we forgotten that already?>

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Oh goodness gracious, Super Hot is a great, ultra-stylish game concept. Now, I use the word “concept” because there’s not a whole lot to it yet (such is the nature of many 7DFPS standouts, sadly), but what’s here is a brilliant, almost puzzle-like take on time manipulation in first-person shooters. In short, time slows to a near-imperceptible crawl whenever you stop moving, enabling you to dictate the pace of, well, everything. It also looks really, really cool>. Dancing between bullet storms with the greatest of ease – pausing to just marvel at the dust fleck of certain death mere millimeters from your forehead – is a magnificent feeling. Only problem is, it makes things rather easy.

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True fact: I was raised by cats. True fact the second: my first word was “meow.” I’m not joking about that, either. Point is, I very much get> the cat mentality. I grew up around them, and I understand the tiny acts of terrorism they are capable of unleashing upon their small domestic worlds. And let’s face it: we, as humans, probably have it coming. I mean, how dare we> ever leave the house or not be in a specific spot at an arbitrary time or not clean the litter box every 15 minutes or let the sun go down and ruin their sunbeam or pet them the wrong way or pet them the right way for too long? In these cases, the only answer is swift and frighteningly calculated retribution. Time for Catalateral Damage. Time to break some shit. Poor, oblivious humans. How else will they learn?

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So there’s this bit in Gone Home, in your younger sister’s closet, where you find a copy of a game called “Got Your Number!” It’s based on a real world game called Electronic Dream Phone. No, it really is. Cara found a copy. And played it. For science.>

Dear diary: today I played 1996 Electronic Dream Phone for 1-4 players with some friends and some older guy who let us use his living room! It was like, super fetch (note to self: is ‘fetch’ happening?). It’s a game sort of a like a shit Cluedo, only instead of murderers there are twenty four boys and no weapons. Diary, who made this game? ED KEY????!!! Unless you count the Electronic Dream Phone itself as a weapon, which I have been considering, and I think I could probably bludgeon a small mammal to death with it if I needed to.

The idea is that you get three boys in your hand (eyooo!) and then you take turns to call them individually on the Phone, picking up extra boys as you discard the last ones. The boys on the phone give you a clue as to which boys do not> fancy you. There is only one guy who fancies all of the ‘players’. It is a process of elimination to find out who this slutly stud is. The first person to guess correctly and call the guy in question wins. I played this game on two different occasions and on both the phone’s technology was too primitive to let us finish the game. Sniff. Technology.> (more…)

Peasants of the Rock, Paper, Shotgun domain, I am infatuated. I have fallen deeply, irrevocably in love. Her charms are many: a name long and flowing, full of confusion and wonder. An original look that picks her out of any crowd. Vocabulary that’s reduced me to little more than a muttering wreck, in awe of verbage I could only pray to match. And a voice, dear reader, what a voice. Come, be quiet, and just listen to Hot Tin Roof.

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The trailer for arcade flying game Altitude0 [sic] begins with the question: “Flying… looks easy?”. Now I’d like to challenge that very notion right away, because flying does not look easy. It doesn’t because it isn’t. I can say this with 100% certainty because I am currently not flying. I tried and landed in my neighbour’s prized azaleas* and my neighbours are angry and I’ve lost my security deposit. That challenge is made because Altitude0 thinks it needs to claim that its version of flying, where you speed very quickly through very low gates, is adding the challenge back into the world of flight. I’d have pointed out how bloody hard it is in the first place, and that doing it at this speed is ridiculous. It’s not easy, but it is multiplayer, free-to-play, and out now. (more…)

When we lose one of our senses, Nature compensates by giving us a huge fucking axe. >What to expect when you’re expecting hive spiders. >Angels of mons pubis.>

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Sundays are for starting up that old Minecraft server and looking at the palatial constructs you built a year ago. I missed you, golems.

• Confessions Of A Failed Indie Game Developer: “When I say I started building a game, this isn’t strictly true – what I actually built was a graphics engine. The game design gradually formed as I was working over the first couple of months. I knew that my art skills were greatly lacking, so I had a vision of a stark first person sci-fi setting, with simple geometry, small rooms and no human characters – the game mechanic based on switching between alternate universes and changing the direction of gravity in order to solve puzzles. If this sounds a little like Portal, you’re right – that game was a huge inspiration for the project.”

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The endless endlessness, it never ends! In the beginning, there was Endless Space, and it was endlessly space-y. Recently, we also told you of Endless Legend, which is another 4X strategy set in the same universe, only all fantasy-fied. But let’s not forget about Dungeon of the Endless, which Amplitude teased shortly before getting sucked into the time-distorting, endlessly cacophonous Gamescom hypehole. At that point, all we had to go on was a rather painfully un-endless trailer, which cut off right before we found out what was HASHTAG BEHIND THE DOOR WOOOOOOO. But now… oh, now we know. And I can guarantee that you will be shocked and surprised probably>.

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