Oh goodness gracious does Halfway ever look fully scrumptious. Think XCOM’s brand of spooky, dread-dripping turn-based tactics but in spaaaaaaaaaaace>, and you’ll be on the right track. It’s also far more intimate, with you struggling through dank corridors to take back your ship from a mysterious alien force. So maybe there’s a little, er, Alien in there as well. It is, however, much more overtly story focused than other games in the genre, for better or worse, though what I’ve seen so far definitely lands in the former category. Oh, and that interface. Mmmm, yes. Do you think “Will you marry me?” is an appropriate ice-breaker?

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I think I’m hovering over Nempnett Thrubwell, a village near Bath that I went on a road trip to after discovering there was a place called Nempnett Thrubwell. I know it’s there, because I’m on a Minecraft map that was created by the Ordnance Survey people, and if your job is to make maps then you probably know where all places are. But all I can really see are blocks. Lots and lots of blocks. That is until I start to pull my character into the air. The higher I go, the more sense I can make of the world they’ve made: a Minecraft map of Great Britain, built from their mapping data. It’s yours to download below. (more…)

The dead just won’t go away. I’ve tried calling a re-exterminator, setting out traps with bait, asking them very nicely – everything. But still, they linger. I can’t complain too much, though. I mean, The Dead Linger really does have quite a lot going for it, what with its planet-sized sandbox of undead survival, fully interactable environments, and wrenches that are used not for wrench things but for merciless bopping. The only problem? It is a bit creaky and kind of entirely hideous. Or at least, it was. Fortunately, those lingering (and perhaps occasionally walking, and hopefully thriller-ing) dead are in for a major face-lift. Developer Sandswept has announced that alpha update 10 is coming to Steam Early Access, and it’ll be sporting a fresh new coat of sticky red paint to mark the occasion.

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If anyone knows how to decorate a medieval-style home, it’s Richard Garriott. He does, after all, have a reputation for taking up residence in actual, factual castles. And so it seems all-too-right that the man, the myth, the (tarnished, due to a perhaps not entirely needed Kickstarter) legend is now walking us through the Hoarders-worthy halls of his Shroud of the Avatar abode. Like snowflakes, however, every nigh-impregnable war fortress is different – an expression of its owner’s most delicate soul. Ponder your own plans as Garriott indiscriminately stacks everything with masterful finesse> after the break.

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Tripwire is set to release a new free content pack for Rising Storm – the Pacific Theatre cousin of Red Orchestra 2 – and it’s called Island Assault. The name implies much. I had a play with it over the weekend, and I’ll tell you about that experience, below. (There’s a trailer, too!)

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London-based (and nearby) RPSers, we strongly advise hanging out with other RPS readers at The Blue Posts this coming Saturday. The regular gathering could be especially busy thanks to the Eurogamer Expo* taking place in the city this weekend! Keep an eye on this forum thread for social club news.

*Come and play Sir, You Are Being Hunted if you are at the Expo!

I am, frankly, surprised that it’s taken this long for someone to recreate Star Wars‘ Death Star trench run – which has filled starry eyed younglings with dreams of space combat since time immemorial – in Oculus Rift virtual reality. I mean, it’s a quintessential touchstone of sci-fi geekery, and what is Oculus Rift if not an extremely overt attempt at realizing our childhood fantasies of the fuuuuuuuuuuuuture? Plus, if EVE: Valkyrie has proven anything, it’s that people will go gaga for eyeball-first dives into star-dolloped expanses. Personally, I kind of just want to strip away the action altogether and play Star Pacifist: Space Observer, where one mouse button makes you go “Oooooooooo” and the other makes you go, “Aaaaaaaaaaah.” But this will do quite nicely for now. Video below.

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Maia really does sound insanely marvelous, doesn’t it? It’s got all the complexity of a whirring, churning management simulation paired with the more down-to-earth-space personal side of something like The Sims or even Dwarf Fortress. The game’s planet is a harsh, unwelcoming place, but it greeted Adam with a brain-warming embrace. He quickly fell in love, and – via the ropey spinal strands of our official hivemind apparatus – so did the rest of RPS. But when can you pluck your own bendy straw into Maia’s thick systemic stew? Well, you’ve still got a bit of a wait ahead of you, but December’s not that> far off.

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This is the latest in the series of articles about the art technology of games, in collaboration with the particularly handsome Dead End Thrills.>

Grid 2 may have vandalised one for the sake of selling The Most Expensive Game Ever That Isn’t This (£125,000 plus whatever it takes to scrape that grotesque livery off), but gaming’s real answer to the BAC Mono is the hip, gorgeous, and ever so slightly mad Project CARS. With barely-legal performance for a game still in alpha, its exposed wishbones and dampers only add to the sense of crowdsourced cool. Mmmm, those naked springs. (more…)

The crowd appears to miss the space sims of old and would very much like to fund new iterations of interstellar conflict simulators. With Star Citizen and Elite: Dangerous both raising enormous sums of cash, it’d be easy to think that only the largest vessels are of interest, but there’s plenty of space to go around, and some of it should be filled with the small and the strange. Enter Kromaia, which is certainly looking rather strange, but also rather large. It has a “navigation system…entirely driven by physical forces…Fluid displacement for novices and, for experts, impossible turns and extreme dodging, combined with boost, while moving over the real speed of sound.” I once bumped into somebody else’s car while moving at 5mph. Novice systems for me.

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