It has been announced that Leisure Suit Larry creator Al Lowe has left developers Replay. In what is turning into one of the more peculiar and uncomfortable stories, it seems that Lowe has chosen to leave the company at the same time as news of a sex offence by the company’s president, Paul Trowe, has emerged. Trowe was arrested in October last year for showing “harmful materials to a minor”, and plead no contest in April this year. He was guilty of showing a film of gay sex to a 15 year old girl, in a matter that’s as convoluted as it is sad. And it seems this might just be one small aspect of a very bizarre story.

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GRAPPLING HOOKS! It’s pretty simple, every developer out there. If your game doesn’t include a grappling hook, then you are making a bad game>. This isn’t complicated, and it’s about time everyone started taking some notice. Like Red Knight Games have with their forthcoming Grapple Knight. (Cheers, Indiegames.) Forthcoming, that is, if people will chuck them another $4k AUD or so. There’s a demo to incentivise such investiments.

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Blackguards is a turn-based fantasy RPG from German outfit Daedalic, based on the Dark Eye roleplaying system. It’s out on Steam Early Access now, and is due for a full release next month. I tried playing it earlier today, for a brief spell. Did it make me want to continue playing? One way to find out. Well, you could kidnap me and ask me by force, but I’d rather you just read this, to be honest. (more…)

When last we left The Walking Dead’s Clementine, things were, er, not going well. And now, as they so often do in Telltale’s heart-wrenching game of choice and zombie brain-(the other kind of)-wrenching, they’ve gone from bad to worse. And then worse to worst, and then worst to worst-er-erest-er-blarghcry. Give your cringing muscles a warm up by watching the full Walking Dead season two episode one trailer below. Something tells me you’re gonna need them.

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Everyone knows that the scariest things aren’t actually monsters themselves. It’s the horrors lurking in our own runaway imaginations, creatures of such impossible (and impossibly specific) phobia that our only recourse is to head for the hills long before we ever see them. That’s the power of a great horror environment. SOMA‘s Upsilon research facility, for instance, creaks, groans, and whines quietly to itself like a child who’s afraid of the dark. From there, your mind does the heavy lifting. Watch below, and then read about Amnesia: The Dark Descent developer Frictional’s core design pillars for its sci-fi madhouse.

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They could rebuild it. They had the technology. Better, stronger, faster. (more…)

I like how, now that the great winter triple-A avalanche of ’13 has subsided, every> major alpha or beta scheduled for “late 2013″ is dropping all at once. Oh, hey there Starbound, of course we can hang out all weeken– oh, could you hold on a sec’? I think I see Wasteland 2 over there. Just gonna pop in and say hi for a couple seconds. Shouldn’t be too– Dungeon of the Endless? Is that you? What brings you to my inbox, which is stuffed like a turducken full of a Russian-doll-esque procession of smaller exotic birds? Yeah, we can chat for a bi– [David Braben lands a fully functioning Elite: Dangerous starship on top of my house]. God damn it.

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I can’t have been the only person in the world who found The Testament of Sherlock Holmes thoroughly entertaining, can I? They probably wouldn’t keep making the damned things if that were the case, but I don’t know anybody else who enjoys Frogwares’ Holmes adventures. There have been some rough entries over the years, but between Lovecraftian insertions, uncanny Watson and some clever deductive techniques, there have always been aspects of the series deserving of closer scrutiny. I’m hoping Crimes & Punishment, which introduces CHOICES OF JUSTICE, will be a decent mystery, building on Testament’s investigative systems.

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Walker’s recent post on the prima facie petrifying plummet in PC sales got me thinking. Or rather rebooted a thought process I’ve been mulling lately. Just what is happening to the PC? You can make a strong argument, for instance, that we’re entering a golden age of PC gaming. Faster graphics, cheaper ultra-HD screens, the new consoles as thinly disguised PCs, VR technology – the next five years or so are going to be fabulous. But there are also signs the wheels are falling off the entire enterprise of the PC as a computing platform. Then there’s the ever-present threat of Moore’s Law hitting the wall. Can we say anything concrete about it all (the future of the PC, not the looming wall)? Prepare yourself for a multi-topic treatise… (more…)

Carbine Studios was founded in 2005 and the past eight years have been spent building the tech and content for their first game, WildStar. A cartoonish sci-fi MMO, WildStar’s main aim is to acknowledge the multitude of reasons why people play MMOs, and cater to each and every one of them.

Come watch the final class trailer, introducing the game’s robot-spewing Engineer, and I’ll explain what I mean. (more…)