And so it all comes full circle. Blizzard’s games may have been the MOBA genre’s none-too-pretty spawning pit, but League of Legends, DOTA 2, and the like took the torch – whether Blizzard wanted to pass it or not. So it’s not entirely surprising to see people like Greg “Ghostcrawler” Street, former lead systems designer on World of Warcraft, at Riot. Sure, Heroes of the Storm is a thing, but it’s still nascent, larval. For better or worse, LoL is an empire, and now, it seems, a destination. Street enters as lead game designer on LoL, so he will likely be calling quite a few shots as time goes on.

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After months upon months of sidestepping the issue, EA and Maxis have finally seen fit to give SimCity an offline option. Victory! At least, for folks still soldiering on with the beleaguered and – to be perfectly honest – not terribly interesting city builder. But while we wait for modders to laugh off Maxis’ suffocatingly stringent guidelines and finally make the game great, some questions still need answering. Foremost among them, why the not-so-sudden about-face when the company once claimed that separating SimCity from its precious servers would be nearly impossible? According to the developer, it’s because rewriting the simulation to function offline took nearly six-and-a-half months of hard work.

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Dancewall Remix is one-part Japanese game show, one part Kieron’s ghost. The former because it’s about fitting your form through the human-shaped holes in oncoming walls, albeit incorporeal ones. The latter because it’s about striking poses and pulling shapes in front of your computer. It does the latter using your webcam to track your movements, and it’s up on Steam Greenlight now. Check out the faintly terrifying trailer below. (more…)

Catlateral Damage delighted me when it first sauntered onto the scene and calmly wreaked havoc on everything we idiot humans hold dear last August. Its central thesis, the message it hoped to spread to future generations like so much toxoplasmosis? Cats are jerks, and if you leave them alone they will inevitably start breaking all of your things. But what are games if not the 21st Century’s great equalizer? And so, Catlateral Damage allowed you to take on the role of the cat>. Revolutionary! But the game didn’t stop there. Oh no. It’s continued to evolve every day since, and now it’s resurfaced on Steam Greenlight with a whole host of new and upcoming features.

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I want to talk about the click .

I saw the click just a few days ago, playing a game that the other player hadn t ever played before. It s a click you can see, like a switch flipping behind a person s eyes. What s better than seeing a person you like finding enjoyment in something? It s amazing when you see it – really satisfying. Yes, even when that click goes click at a point when the other player is HAMMERING you into the ground. It s also a click you can feel, and I want to talk about the times I ve felt it and I hope you ll maybe share some of the times you ve felt the click too.

Click to read on. (more…)

It’s finally here. Well, if you were a backer. After almost two years since Tim Schafer kickstarted Kickstarter as one of the primary tools for funding independent videogame development, the Double Fine Adventure, Broken Age, is in players’ hands. With $3.3m raised, from 90,000 backers, and a year and a half more development than they planned, the first point and click adventure Schafer has made in twenty years will be out proper on the 28th, but the “beta” is with the backers today. Double Fine have asked both backers and press to hold off talking about most of the game until that latter release date, and it’ll be interesting to see how that goes. But for the moment, here are some early impressions of the first stages of the game.>

Edit: Splendid news. Double Fine have lifted the embargo, and we’ll be able to bring you our review very soon.

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Metal Geaaaaaarrrrrrrr?!?!?!?! On PC? This particular collision of worlds – masters of espionage infiltrating the home of spyware, cyborg ninjas running amok in cyberspace – isn’t unheard of, but it’s far from the norm. Then again, Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance isn’t your average Metal Gear game. It dispenses with stealth almost entirely, favoring combo and counter-heavy action over tippy-toeing and mullet-rocking. But does the extra helping of over-the-top insanity gel with Metal Gear’s, er, also insane (but in a different way) universe? And how does the long-awaited PC port hold up? Here’s wot I think.>

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Years of only seeing the “VR” suffix in fiction has made it feel futuristic and unreal, but now it’s popping up everywhere. Valve have just quietly slipped support for virtual reality into Steam, letting you use their Big Picture interface while wearing a headset. It’s called SteamVR of course, and it’s in beta. (more…)

In a post on the Starbound blog, the game’s development team have outlined coming fixes and additions to the next version of the game. Good news: they’re adding a permadeath mode, for those who want to add a little more risk to their galaxy exploration. Bad news: they’re kickstarting this new permadeath mode by wiping the entire universe, including player’s ships and characters.

It’s like playing alpha games is already a kind of permadeath mode. (more…)

Let’s put words to it: 2013 was the year of the roguelike; 2014 is the year of the survival game. Whether they’re still in alpha or not, this feels like DayZ and Rust’s moment, and there are a dozen games on the horizon hoping to get in on the fun. The Forest is one of them, putting a significantly different singleplayer horror spin on the foraging formula.

In an interview with Eurogamer, with Endnight Games’ creative director Ben Falcone, laid out some details of the game’s story and NPC AI. (more…)