This is probably the most exciting game-related anything> I’ve seen in months. And yes, as the headline suggests, it’s entirely bonkers. Remember Zineth developer Arcane Kids’ Tribes-meets-Tony-Hawk thing Perfect Stride? Well, it’s just one of 30+ games (23 of which are already finished and playable) that’ll immediately be yours if you hand LA Game Space a pithy 15 of your bacteria-and-filth-ridden Human Dollars. Experimental Game Pack 01 also includes entirely new projects from the likes of Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi, Adventure Time (yes, the TV show) maestro Pendleton Ward, Hotline Miami madman Cactus, Kentucky Route Zero devs Jake Elliott and Tamas Kemenczy, and sooooooooooo many more. I’m not even going to pretend to be impartial on this one. Buy it. Buy it because duh.

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Well, I suppose it can’t all be good news. On one glittering, jewel-encrusted hand, Blizzard announced that Diablo III’s near-unanimously disliked auction house is headed for the great demon-ridden crypt of failed ideas, but this isn’t entirely a win. It’s good to know that Blizzard is filling in that abyssal fissure in Diablo’s foundation, yes, but many players were also aching to get a long-awaited feature out of the deal: an offline option. It seems like a no-brainer now that the auction house is on the way out and Diablo III’s console version doesn’t require an Internet connection in the first place, but Blizzard has told RPS that it’s simply not meant to be.

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[coffin opens] Hello! Hello? Can you… no, obviously you can’t. Someone> has set the dry ice machine all the way up to nimbostratus. I clearly specified cirriform! Fine! We’ll just let it clea – [sound of fan being switched on]. Really? This is amateur hour. Honestly… Well, at least I can read the autocue. Can they see me? Good. VELCOME! Aha-ha-ha-haaaa! Ha! Tis I, Plague Fearsome. I am your g[ho]u[l]ide on this DEADLY JOURNEY into the HEArT of HoRRor and broken k£yboard$. We have The Evil Within trailer for you. It puts “demon” in “demonstration”, and the “er” in “trailer”. For that is the noise I made when I watched this collection of eldritch cliches, this midnight gathering of unscary moments, this fleash video of awkward peril. Follow me as I drop to the paragraph below to escape its blunt and ticklish> claws… [Wilhelm scream] (more…)

Oh gaming industry, you and your spin-straining, whiplash-inducing about-faces. Not even two weeks ago, Blizzard resolutely declared that Diablo III‘s much-loathed auction house was in for the long haul, gunking up a crystal clear loot stream with the suffocating tar of commerce. But now? Well, the frigid giant’s completed its glacial admission that maybe a systematized undermining of Diablo’s very core wasn’t the best idea. So, come early next year, it’ll be gone for good. Yes, for real. Oh joyous day.

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Unless you’re reading these words on a device that doesn’t allow you to play Flash-based browser games, there is absolutely no reason for you not to toddle into another tab and start playing Card Hunter right now. If you have a terrible time, you can always come back, read the rest of this post and then jump straight into the comments to tell me how incredibly wrong I am. The rest of the post, you see, is made up of paragraphs of praise for one of the finest games of the year.>

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Messing around with gravity is not a very original idea in gaming-land. But doing it well is always very welcome. Inverto, currently in alpha, is certainly in the former group, and looking as though it may be joining the latter. A first-person puzzler, clearly heavily inspired by Portal, here you must make your way around its vast chambers by manipulating which way is down.

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I’m not a smart man, so when a person with a badge that says “scienceologist” on it sits me down and tells me a science fact, I have no choice but to believe her. She’s done all that sciencology work, after all. That’s what of University of Leicester’s School of Psychology did when they forwarded me their paper “Selectively enhanced motion perception in core video gamers”. With the help of a sock puppet and a book chewable corners, they informed me that that video gamers have a very specific perceptual advantage: moving backwards. (more…)

Hello youse.

I’m in a really good mood today, so I’m trying to blast this column down while the energy of pure positivity is flowing through me. Why am I in such a good mood? Well, there’s two reasons really. The first one is that I’ve realised that I am in complete control of my reality. I can do, or not do, anything I want. No law can restrict me, and no prison can hold me. That’s hugely liberating. I could have full sex with a microwave oven if I wanted to, and no-one could really do a thing about it. They’d just have to watch, from the point the door opens until the point we both go BEEP. The second thing to put me in a good mood is the PATHFINDER ADVENTURE CARD GAME, and you’ll be glad to hear it’s that I’ll be talking about after the jump. (more…)

QAOPSPACEBAR. That’s my youth. Five buttons. It all just came flooding back: hours spent hunched over my Spectrum playing Target: Renegade. The scrapey hit sounds, the malevolent drift of the motorbike riders, the axe-wielding bald guys. I’d forgotten about it until reading about the River City Ransom: Underground Kickstarter, an officially licensed follow-up to Technōs Japan’s NES era side-scrolling brawler River City Ransom. The pitch for the Kickstarter is below, as well as an explanation to why it made me nostalgic for a completely different game. (more…)

I apologise. While that title is technically correct, I will understand if you found it misleading. There are clues: the letters are in the wrong place, the image shows Saint’s Row IV and not Grand Theft Auto, and there’s the fact that it looks it’s suggesting a game that costs a hundrety billion krugerrands is being released for free on its release day. That was never going to happen! Those were all hints>. So what is this? GATV is free DLC for Saints Row IV. Like the original SR, it cheekily rides on the coat-tails of GTA, but in name only. (more…)