Fear is the event of the season. We shouldn’t be surprised. As Ol’ Grandfather Gillen pointed out so long ago, it’s something that games are good at. It might be the thing that they are best at. Amnesia: The Dark Descent was one of the highlights in that regard: a world where vulnerability and atmospherics smothered you like the pillow in the hands of a maniac. Its sequel, A Machine For Pigs, wants to pull off the same tricks. Only more. Only worse.

The horror? The horror? Here’s wot I feel.> (more…)

I wrote about first-person frightener Lucid: The Awakening last week, right before the game’s Kickstarter began. With only a fortnight-long funding period, the project has just over a week left to raise half of its required funding. That may sound difficult but the overall goal was only $2,000, which would apparently be enough to pay the core team a wage, allowing them to work full-time creating a beta version by mid-October. Whether they’d need more money to continue working on the rest of the game full-time after that isn’t clear, but the stretch goals suggest that is the case. Given the close proximity of the beta, it’d be encouraging to see a fully in-game video rather than the same trailer released before the campaign began. Here it is, in case you missed it.

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As we cast our ever-vigilant gaze to the starboard bow, we raise a brow to the sight of Starpoint Gemini 2 gently docking with Steam Early Access, a wild frontier station. We haven’t heard from the space sim/RPG since 2011, when it first appeared, causing Jim to express conflicted thoughts (interesting, but not necessarily enjoyable or robust). The game is now in full 3d and the Gemini system is a cohesive area, with no loading screens to break up the gaps between stars. Players captain one of around seventy ships, controlling a single vessel rather than a fleet, although wingmen will be added at a later date. The developer’s descriptions suggest there will be freedom to explore, salvage and fight, but it’s not entirely clear how early this early access is. Trailer below.

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Hinterland Studio send word of their forthcoming game, The Long Dark, which is an episodic survival series set in a post-apocalyptic future. They explain: “The Long Dark is a first-person post-disaster survival simulation, set in the aftermath of a geomagnetic super storm that has destroyed North America’s technology infrastructure.” Sounds fancy! There’s more: “Gameplay emphasizes exploration to gather resources and knowledge about the world, while mastering a deep survival simulation to overcome the myriad natural and man-made hazards of the new frontier. Players will also face difficult moral choices that will affect the outcome of gameplay, story, and ultimately, the course of humanity’s recovery.”

But who are Hinterland Studio? Well they’re Marianne Krawczyk, who worked on God Of War and LA Noire, Alan Lawrence, who just did sixteen years at Volition, and the ultra-talented Hokyo Lim, who worked on the art for League of Legends and Unfinished Swan. Reads like a strong list. The game is being supported by the Canada Media Fund, and will be hitting Kickstarter on September 16th.

Star Citizen just crowd-sourced a million bucks in about a week, and they’re up over $18m now, which unlocks “exclusive” starting star systems for backers. What does this money pile mean for this colossally ambitious beast of a game as a whole? Well, Chairman Roberts explains that it means it’s going to be even more ambitious>: “First person combat on select lawless planets. Don’t just battle on space stations and platforms… take the fight to the ground!”

Yes, having $20m means they’re going to throw in an additional planetary FPS segment for free. Not sure that’s really the best idea, since FPS isn’t really their focus (although there is apparently some ship boarding action planned) – obviously this will be made easier by it having Cryengine tools and first person walky bits like the hangar – but it’s interesting to see them go in this direction. Man, this game’s genesis is going to be one to follow, isn’t it? Time to stock up on popcorn, one way or another.

I rather enjoyed deck-based RTS Battleforge, but – I suppose, given today’s news, like most people – I didn’t spend much time with after those early weeks. I have to say I’d all but forgotten about it until I heard the news that it’s being shut down: “The decision to retire older games is never easy. We hope you’ve enjoyed playing BattleForge as much as we enjoyed making it and we wish to extend our sincerest thanks to all of our passionate and dedicated players for supporting BattleForge over the past 4 years. Those of you who still have a balance of in-game currency are encouraged to spend it before the game is shut down on October 31st and is no longer available for play.”

Seems it was so destined, but :(

One of the most interesting things from the DayZ presentation at Gamescom (which I still have to find time to write up) was Rocket explaining why they’re working on the kind of feature set we’re seeing in these videos of the standalone, and what that means for the game. Perhaps the most significant is item degradation and damage, because it’s one of the things that will push DayZ back into the direction of the taut survivalism that defined its early months. Rocket doesn’t want us to all shoot each other, because getting things that we’ve all gathered will be much more important. Shoot someone and you probably wreck his kit. Moreover, bullets are now individual items, and you will find less of them, so spending them on a noob for his beans will be a bad idea indeed. Watch the latest thoughts on this sort of thing below. (more…)

Something that was F2P becoming a straightforward commercial release certainly isn’t something you hear too often these days, but that’s what’s happening to Blackbird’s game now that Gearbox – who loaned Blackbird the Homeworld IP – got involved. A tweet from Mr Pitchford revealed: “With our investment, Homeworld Shipbreakers can be a proper commercial release. No need for F2P.”

So that’s interesting. I was kind of interested to see how they’d handle the free part, personally. But this is probably for the best.

Interactive Voguing Experience. Venusian gangster rap FPS. Collaborative hypersound fiction.>

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Sundays are for visiting in a castle in the Midlands. Alternatively, for getting stuck into words. For there are so many of them.

• London’s art and design museum, the V&A, recently put on a Minecraft exhibition. It was quite the thing: “Video games combine a lot of disciplines that the V&A holds collections in anyway, such as paintings, sculpture, illustration. We also have the performance collection, so we’ve got music as well, those kind of aspects. It’s actually a discipline that crosses a lot of our collections. From both a curatorial point of view and a learning programming point of view, that’s where we are coming from.”

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