In an interesting, if perhaps ultimately less than ideal experiment, King ART games released their point and click adventure, The Raven: Legacy Of A Master Thief, in three chapters over three months. Seemingly modeling, well, nothing else, this chapter format has certainly obscured the game. With the final part out tomorrow, does this pick up the pieces after a very soggy middle? Here’s wot I think:>

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As the internet held its breath and the countdown reached zero, speculation in the RPS chatroom reached fever pitch. And after the announcement was made, John bellowed, “I PREDICTED THAT!”. He did, you know. Valve are releasing an operating system, SteamOS and this is what we know.

As we’ve been working on bringing Steam to the living room, we’ve come to the conclusion that the environment best suited to delivering value to customers is an operating system built around Steam itself. SteamOS combines the rock-solid architecture of Linux with a gaming experience built for the big screen. It will be available soon as a free stand-alone operating system for living room machines.

More below.

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It’s hard to say which of the WRC 4 trailers, handily embedded below, is more dramatic. The first, an announcement trailer, introduces its logos as if it were attempting to rally troops for battle rather than preparing to show some cars in a rally. The music throbs as the camera observes a car, poised and ready to rumble. And then, sound and vision combine in a frenzy of scorching beats and skidding vehicles. Very exciting. Following close in the treadmarks of the announcement trailer, there’s a ‘time of day’ video, showing differences in lighting from dawn to dusk. How could the simple passage of time be rendered dramatic, you might well ask. How about adding the music from the final battle in a fantasy epic, as the trolls rage? Perhaps.

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I played Rise of Venice at Gamescom, which is a bit like reading Aristotle’s politics while in the middle of a dancefloor at an Ibiza boat party. As I clicked through menus, filling my ship’s cargo hold with luxurious trade goods, a Saints Row booth spat dubstep at me and a twenty foot tall Titanfall mech suit watched from across the floor, spotlights caressing its form as crowds gathered to gawp at it. I didn’t spend enough time to share proper impressions but I can confirm that the trailer below is about as honest a piece of pre-release advertising as anything I’ve ever seen. A detailed description of how to buy goods and form trade routes, it is as dry as Venice is not.

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There are plenty of game developers whose work is predicated on strangeness, but it is perhaps Ice Pick Lodge who have most successfully defined themselves by making weird games and making games weird. That’s not to say all (or even any) of their games are particularly successful, just that Pathologic*, The Void and Cargo are each singular and deeply peculiar experiences. The same is true for Knock, Knock, their Kickstarted side-scrolling psycho-horror game. Yes, frustrated and worried Kickstarter backers, you can breathe a sigh of relief. Knock, Knock is a very strange, and – judging by this preview version – rather brilliant. (more…)

People in the know – this case Mr Stanton – tell me that Eden Industries‘ (who previously made Waveform) light-hearted RPG Citizens Of Earth is looking rather promising indeed. But what it is?> “It’s an RPG that places you in the shoes of the Vice President of the World! Citizens of Earth combines the modern setting and humorous tone of Earthbound with the recruitment mechanics of games like Pokemon and Suikoden.” And is it looking promising enough to raise $100k Canadian on Kickstarter? (That’s about £60k, Sterling fans!) That’s what the devs are hoping. Pitch video can be glimpsed below. (more…)

The old people who remember and love Chaos will doubtless soon be pointing younger folk at Chaos Reborn, which is to be a remake of the original by that genius Julian Gollop (who once gave me an unopened copy of Laser Squad for the C64, which I still treasure, despite not having seen a functional Commodore 64 in perhaps twenty years). The muscular news sentinels of US Gamer spotted that Mr Gollop has been writing about progress on a multiplayer demo of the new game, with an estimate of “soon” for its delivery unto the internet. Soon! That’s means it might just be closer than ages away.

It’s been a long, hot summer and there’s only so long one man can stare out over the Med and self-medicate-going-on-immolate on passable local vino (turns out that length of time is three weeks). The wi-fi was rubbish, anyway. So, I’m back with some regular updates on all things hardware related. And I’d like to kick off with 4K gaming. The best thing since the original bilinear-filtered graphics accelerators? Or, like stereoscopic 3D, just another over-hyped irrelevance that’ll give you a hurty head, an empty wallet and the sneaking suspicion that the tech industry is pathologically cynical? I’ve got the answers. (more…)

Battlefield 2 (and Arma) mod Project Reality was famed for its, well, realism, and grew a considerable following as a result. The astonishingly committed team have decided that their achievements now warrant a bit more than a mod for the next stage in multiplayer manshoot proceedings, and are embarking on a commercial project for the next version of the game. The Project Reality team explain: “Project Reality 2 (or simply “PR2″) will be a free to play multiplayer FPS PC game, based off of the critically acclaimed Project Reality modifications for Battlefield 2 and ARMA 2. Unlike our previous projects, PR2 will be a completely standalone game that will require no retail game to play.” The game will once again support an “Advance and Secure (or “AAS”) style game mode”, and the familiar commitment to realism, and this time will be constructed from scratch in CryEngine. Work began in 2012, but could take a while yet – the team are looking for help over here.

Toco Games’ infinite-running jousting type game Last Knight has all the knobs on that such a game could bear – like a story mode, customisation of your knight, dynamic weather, first and third-person modes, quests, and much else besides – but most importantly it has just landed on PC. You should check out the really rather flashy trailer, below. (more…)