20 years since the course of videogaming was set forever. 20 years since id created what may very well still be the most notorious game in history. 20 years since deathmatch became a thing. 20 years of guns, 20 years of keycards, 20 years of happy hell. 20 years of Doom, not the first first-person shooter but surely the foremost breeding stock of the genre. Happy birthday, old stick.

If only you could talk to the monsters on their birthday – now that would be something. Instead, Team RPS will have to reminisce about the big, brash first-person shooter that changed everything. (more…)

The Novelist is a narrative-led, sort-of-stealth, sort-of-point’n'click-adventure game by Deus Ex: Invisible War, Thief: Deadly Shadows, and BioShock 2 dev Kent Hudson (with playtesting help from a remarkable number of renowned developers, according to the credits) in which you direct and decide the fate of a tormented family who’ve gone to stay in a remote house for the Summer, in an attempt to resolve their respective career and relationship difficulties. But they are not alone… (more…)

No Man’s Sky is a space exploration game by Hello Games in which every dot in the night sky is a star you can actually fly to. This is not the game’s most ambitious claim>.

The game’s most ambitious claim – described as “Peter Molyneux-esque” by lead developer Sean Murray – is that the procedural generation of those planets is built “from a real atomic standpoint”. The chemical compounds in a planet’s atmosphere dictates everything from how light refracts from the nearest sun, to the colour of the grass, the minerals in the soil, and the behaviour of creatures.

Yesterday I wrote about what you do in No Man’s Sky, but there’s a lot of understandable skepticism about the game’s claim to generate a galaxy from code. In this lengthy interview, I spoke to the Hello Games team about how they hope to building that galaxy, from the rules of its procedural generation, to the challenges of making a pretty procedural galaxy, and where the boundaries are between generated and authored design. (more…)

A couple of weeks back I theorised that anyone watching the Catacomb Kids Kickstarter video would be won over within 55 seconds. Some people claimed otherwise, explaining that it took upwards of two minutes before they were feeding ten pound notes into their DVD drive. The project’s now comfortably funded, and extremely refreshingly developer FourbitFriday have said that they aren’t looking for specific stretch goals. Instead they’ve said that as more extra money comes in, it’ll just allow them to make a better game, hire more people, and make it over a slightly longer period. That’s a model that SO many projects could do with adopting. And now there’s some new footage to make you say, “Oh blimey”.

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Claiming that your game “brings fast, real-time, player-controlled space combat to the space MMO genre for the first time” is probably not the wisest opening salvo, because… Well, I’m not sure it really needs saying. Instead I’ll say that this post brings human-written words to the videogaming blogging genre for the first time and see how seriously you take me.

Such marketingballs aside, Entropy, a space MMO from the creators of Battlestar Galactica Online, sounds like the right stuff – a poppier, glossier, dogfightier Eve, perhaps. It’s out on Early Access now. (more…)

Valve have learnt their lesson from Diretide: don’t deny the Dota 2 community their holiday celebrations. That means that Frostivus is back. The holiday event is traditionally quite lovely. Last year’s Frostivus started normally before being taken over by The Greeviling, an update and game mode in which players can use their Greevil a secondary hero. At this point, I’d normally make a crack about how I don’t understand any of this and don’t care, but truthfully, I do> understand it. It’s just easier to be flippant than explain all the context. Instead, this time, I’ll take door number three and link to the Dota 2 wiki page about the Greeviling event.

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Hand Of Fate is a handsome Kickstarter project, a Tarot-themed RPG that looks like a tactical ARPG twist on Card Hunter’s deck-building formula. Despite the headline above, the game has nothing to do with the 1966 film Manos: The Hands of Fate, but too much time spent watching irredeemably terrible films in my teenage years has left the connection hardwired. With less than three days to go and $8,000 Australian Dollars to raise, victory is far from guaranteed for Defiant Development, but the premise is solid and the work that has already gone into the game is evident in the videos. A recent update announced that David Goldfarb, of Payday 2 and Battlefield fame, will be a ‘guest designer’ should the project go ahead.

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Plenty of people try to pull fast ones on the general gaming populace. Very few of them sit down for a pleasant fireside chat afterward. And yet, that’s exactly what the disappointment wizard behind infamous Fallout 4 “teaser” site Survivor 2299 did in the wake of a freshly canceled hoax campaign. Going by the name DCHoaxer on Reddit, he hosted an AMA that revealed why he did it, how much it cost ($990!), and what it was originally going to culminate in (a full-blown CG trailer). Hoaxcrafters and pranksters the world over, meet your new god.

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I’m not quite ready to declare privacy dead, but it’s reeeeeeeeeallly >not doing so well in this day and age. Each racking cough brings up phlegmy handfuls of news about intrusive government and corporate programs – not to mention services that have normalized broadcasting every aspect of our lives on public channels without really considering the consequences. Admittedly, I don’t think it’s all> bad (I use Twitter and Facebook all the time; I have no one but myself to blame for that), but many initiatives are absolutely overstepping our boundaries and rights. The NSA, especially, has hit a rather frightening point-of-no-return, and unsurprisingly, it’s taken to snooping around inside games on top of, you know, pretty much everything else.

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No, for heaven’s sake, you can’t just walk straight through the door – they’ll see you. Come, over here, there is another way, for those who know how to reach it. (more…)