I’ve decided on my favourite thing. It’s when American fantasy refers to “the Midlands”. In Travelogue, you can “change the fate of the Midlands”. Oh, if only that were possible. For instance, I would begin changing the fate of the Midlands by dropping bombs on Stoke On Trent until it was entirely obliterated, and then salt the earth on which it stood such that it could never grow again. Then I’d make it the law that if you call anyone “duck” you get your head chopped off. These options aren’t available in Travelogue, a text-led, map-based RPG from Urban Hermit Games.

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There is a brilliant, subtle pun in Foul Play that took me way to long to figure out. Mediatonic’s cartoonish brawler is launching on PC today, and in it the Victorian daemon-hunter Baron Dashforth recounts his life story as a stage show. It is the Foul Play of the title, see? How that slipped past me I’ll never know. Perhaps I was too taken with the dashing and daring Baron as he refights his life for the audience’s approval, where how you fight is more important than simply winning. (more…)

I’m all about urban freestyle, me. I’ll walk down a street with all manner of leg movements, stepping up and down curbs, dodging left and right to let others past, and occasionally flipping out and laying down a phat left turn as I enter a shop. AND YET WHERE IS THE GAME ABOUT ME? There’s a game about Julien Dupont, for goodness sakes, and he has to use a motorbike for his antics. Urban Trial Freestyle looks like a bouncier, tricksier Trials, and is about to appear on Steam.

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It’s been more than a year since Adam first picked up the whiff of Windforge on the tradewinds. It’s a 2D exploration game where you can craft anything then attach a balloon to it and call it a ship. Where you go from there and what you do is entirely up to you, which means I am intrigued. I thought I’d hunt it down: I took a great whiff of the air to attempt to triangulate its position. Big mistake. All I got was the whiff of rotting whale corpse and the urge to shout Europe at the sink. Explanatory trailer below. (more…)

If Arma 3 is a chunky military stew, then Arma Tactics is what’s left if you end up getting engrossed in a game of sports (everyone loves sports, yeah?) and leave the pot on. A reduced (and possibly burnt) tactical tagine that was previously only announced for tablets and phones, because they can’t handle the big stuff. Well that’s benefiting the PC: the resser-uppers at Bohemia have been on the case, bringing the turn-based close-combat strategy game to us this October. (more…)

A previous attempt at describing space shooter Ring Runner ended up with my keyboard being taken away from me. It was for my own good: the game is basically every game ever bundled up into a top-down shoooter. After entering the third day of describing it, the RPS CMS worriedly informed the authorities: I was gently removed from my seat, my hands clawed and my eyes locked open, and Adam took my place. I got better, so I’m allowed to tell you that Ring Runner expanding with a free a DotA-inspired mode. Ring Runner: Space Defense League will be free to everyone who bought the original, but it’ll also be released as a standalone paid-for game as well. (more…)

Ludeon Studios send word of their forthcoming space colony game, RimWorld, and by Uranus it looks like Our Kind Of Thing>. In short: it’s Prison Architect reworked as a space colonisation game. In long: it’s a great big Bullfrog/Dwarf Fortress-inspired indirect control game, which makes the game developer in my curse that Ludeon thought of it first. If anything shall make small piles of real world dollars, it’s this.

Trailer and some thoughts south of here. (more…)

In the wake of the terrible shootings in Washington on Monday, today’s Mirror front page looks like this. Call Of Duty blamed. And the paper is certainly not alone. Meanwhile, a couple of weeks ago we were hearing how gaming improves multitasking skills, keeping our “brains younger”. Except last week we were told that multitasking is bad for us, and “computers weaken our brain”. However it’s approached, the mainstream media really doesn’t seem to know what to do with gaming.>

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I’m rubbish at history. Personally, I think it’s all water under the bridge and we should just let bygones be bygones. But I’m pretty sure that Hitler didn’t die in a JFK-style assassination attempt in 1942. And I’m also relatively convinced that Germany didn’t sign a pact with Japan, and then attack the US on two fronts. I mean, maybe they did – my history teacher was a lovely lady, but she spent most of her time telling us about the Spinning Jenny. That’s what’s being claimed by Timelines: Assault On America in its latest trailer, anyhow.

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Robots! They walk among us. Admittedly, they’re not particularly inconspicuous about it, given that they are both GIANT and in possession of a decently hefty marketing budget that allows them to plaster websites with megaton banner ads and titanic, lavishly produced trailers. It’s almost like they want us to know> that they’re stomping about, tracking rust and guts all over everything – even the new carpet (!). I guess MechWarrior Online has “launched” now or something, so I suppose that makes sense. It’s looking snazzy, but its community has been in a state of open warfare with developer Piranha for the past few months due to a lack of communication and direction changes that don’t align with what many players spent money on. But hey, at least Piranha is restricting the perhaps too-casual-friendly third-person viewpoint a little bit. That’s something, right?

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