You: SimCity… Network… Not this again! What are EA up to n– Wait. SimCity 4? Network Addon Mod?

Me: The latest SimCity might have been hamstrung by infrastructural problems, but there’s no reason your love affair with Maxis’ fair city-builder need end there. SimCity 4 has enormous cities. SimCity 4 had no internet requirement. SimCity 4 had… all the same traffic problems as the more recent release. But! It also had a vibrant modding community that’s still working on fixing problems and making the game better today. This pre-release (i.e. alpha release) of version 32 of the Network Addon Mod is testament to that. NAM improves the game’s pathfinding, fixes bugs in the base game, and adds “a myriad of new transport network items, ranging from ground light rail, to fractional-angle roads, to roundabouts, and much more”

Roundabouts! (more…)

January: too cold, too dark, too long, to purposeless, altogether too Janny. How shall we light our darkest hour? Videogames, of course. One of the wee blighters that shall attempt to warm our chilled cockles in the earliest days of 2014 is Might & Magic X: Legacy, which resumes the first-person RPG series after an 11 year snooze. After a period of ‘open development‘, it goes to full release on the 23rd. (more…)

Hyper Light Drifter is beautiful. Its loud yet effortless art direction screams a quiet confidence, a vision that’s both bold and incredibly vulnerable. I very much like what I see, and many, many others agree – to the tune of $645k, in fact. But looks alone don’t make a game. If Hyper Light Drifter doesn’t play well, then all the glowing pinks and passionate purples in the world won’t mean jack. And that would be very, very sad indeed. Go below to watch me play an early demo of the game and find out if it’s on the right track.>

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Earth is no more. Humanity is all but wiped out. Those few that survive are trapped in a tortuous hell of monstrous alien creation. So let’s have some fun! (more…)

I’m crouching indoors, peeking out of a window at a man in the street. He is carefully searching this row of houses, getting closer and closer, toting an axe and wearing what looks like a clown mask. He’s looking for me. I know this because I said ‘hello’ and there was no response. DayZ is about a zombie outbreak. But there’s a clown at the door, and the undead are nothing next to the living.

Hit the jump.

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We reported last month about FTL’s free, Chris Avellone-penned expansion, but now we know more about exactly what it contains. In a post over on the FTL site, the team introduce a new race of “metallic lifeforms” called The Lanius.

Just when I thought I had enough ways to get all my friends killed. (more…)

Earlier this year, Ubisoft surprised precisely no one by announcing that trigger-happy paranoia propaganda MMO The Division would, in fact, be coming to PC after all. You know, for three whole seconds there, I was kinda but not really a little bit worried. There is, however, a difference between an earnest PC development push and a port so sloppy it ought to be mummified in paper towels and flushed down the toilet. So where will The Division end up? Well, to hear developer Massive Entertainment tell it, there’s nothing to worry about here.

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Diablo III: Reaper of Souls‘ closed beta is now in full swing, and that colloquialism makes it sound like everyone’s singing and dancing along to big band music instead of hacking and slashing. If only that were the case. If only. But the clickity clacking Second Coming Of Loot is inching ever closer to completion, so Blizzard’s seen fit to issue a release date. That’s how game development works, doncha know. So then, got plans for March? Well, CANCEL THEM. Or don’t, because letting videogames dictate the pace and structure of your life probably isn’t very healthy.

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It’s October 2013 and I’m sitting in a large auditorium at the UK’s best games festival, GameCity, awaiting the reveal of the Off The Map competition. Student developers were given access to three different historic maps from The British Library as their inspiration: The Pyramids of Giza, Wiltshire s Stonehenge, or London around the time of the Great Fire in 1666, allowing them to interpret the information into CryEngine scenery and architecture. (more…)

The day mankind invents the flying guncar is the day our true descent into apocalyptic dishevelment finally begins. Or I suppose it could also guide us into the future proposed by The Jetsons, but regardless: flying cars mean flying cities which in turn both mean that something has gone horribly wrong>. The planet’s become uninhabitable, so humanity’s decided to stink up the sky too. I must confess, though, that guncar skywar looks way more fun than regular old infantry (or even plane) battling, so it’s not all bad. Well, except for the whole war part. But anyway, Strike Vector is coming along swimmingly (flyingly?), and its open beta is taking off in January. Trailer below.

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