New Tropico games aren’t appearing as quickly as my brain thinks. This is simply that I now perceive time at such a pace that the world is a dizzying blur around me. If you’d held a knifegun to my headthroat and demanded a release date for Tropico 4, I’d have tried to second-guess myself and suggested late 2012. It was in fact August 2011, and I am an old, confused man, unsure why the Christmasses won’t stop happening. Anyway, my confused rambling aside, Tropico 5 is appearing a very appropriate three years after the last time El Presidente reared his undemocratic city building head, and is now accepting applications for its March beta.

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Shooting at each other is something we’ve been doing in sixteens for many a year. But clubbing each other to death is so often more personal. Skara: The Blade Remains is looking to fix that, in what they wildly inaccurately call a “massively multiplayer online versus game”. 16 is lots of people in a fight, but it’s not “massive”, you sillies. It does, however, look pretty decent for an alpha only eight months in the making.

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The first thing I noticed about Nova-111 is that it has a full-blown, always on-screen Science Meter. That is a bonfide part of the game>. “Alright,” I thought to myself and probably said to some modern mutant wizard who is cursed with the blessing of hearing all human thoughts at once, “we’re off to a solid start, but is this game good or just cute?” So I dug deeper. Nova, I discovered, is a real-time/turn-based explorer mash-up that a) allows you to break the rules of both real-time and turn-based existence with all manner of abilities and b) integrates that conceit into its plot. I’m so delighted that I don’t care if all the mind crime mutants in the world know. Trailer in the beneathplaces.

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Early access survival game Nether seems to have earned plenty of positive coverage in the past few months, and you can perhaps see why: an atmospheric apocalypse aesthetic, hordes of not-quite-zombie mutant things, and brutal PvP. It rings that survival combat bell pretty loudly. It does, however, bear an uncanny resemblance to a game which was not so popular, and was not particularly good – WarZ/Infestation Stories – which didn’t go down well at all. Furthermore, a number of readers have pointed out to me that both Infestation and Nether trademarks were filed by the same person. What could it mean?

I decided to have a play and judge the game on its own spooky merits.

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Kain might be off raising, um, someone else in the distant reaches of who-knows-where, but that doesn’t mean his legacy can’t live on. Kinda. Nosgoth is a solid-looking free-to-play multiplayer shooter set in the Legacy of Kain universe, and it offers asymmetrical vampire battling galore. But is it actually coming along well, or is Square Enix just trying to shove a square peg into a Kain-shaped hole? If you’re starved for both souls and information, Nosgoth’s closed beta is about to get up and running. The best news of all? You can join in! Maybe.

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How many types of Steam sale are there? The huge seasonal ones, midweek discounts, daily reductions and bundled packs all vie for the attention of your eyes whenever they crop up on the front page. It s almost impossible to buy a game that isn t subject to price cuts so low that I m beginning to suspect that Crazy Eddie has taken over Valve HQ.

Apparently, the current sales cannot sate the clawing hands of the hungry public. Developers will now be able to set discounts on their own releases, in what Valve describe as another effort to shorten the distance between developers and customers . There are rules to prevent an apocalyptic salesplosion and I have listed them below.

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Poor old Craigypops. He was so looking forward to X: Rebirth. But wot he got was a buggy mess of a poorly conceived game, and one in such a state he couldn’t see a way out for the project. Developers Egosoft are hoping otherwise, and have released a trailer explaining the fixes and changes that are new in the next patch.

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I do so love it when the Internet bequeaths unto me bounties of gorgeous promise that weren’t even on my radar mere seconds ago. Such is the case with Rustclad, an alluringly mysterious point-and-click adventure that’s made entirely out of hands. No wait, that’s not right. Oh, oh, haha, I get it now. It is handmade>, which is to say that most of its graphics are scanned from sculpted and found real-world objects. It’s a crazy cool modeling technique that’s been used to great effect in games like The Swapper, so I’m excited to see what sorts of results it produces here. For now, though, there’s a rather attractive trailer below.

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Aw, Redlynx and Ubisoft, you really shouldn’t have. I know we’ve had our ups and downs (and loopty loops and explosions) in the past, but now you’re releasing Trials Fusion the day before my birthday? You really didn’t have to do that. One small quibble, though: you failed to include any mention of Nathan Grayson’s Rad Birthday or the accompanying Impossibly Sexy Karaoke Partython anywhere> in your trailer. No, no, calm down. I’m not angry with you. Everyone makes mistakes.

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In Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 you play as Dracula, who over the course of many tortuous cutscenes is established as one of the most powerful beings in this game’s universe. Phenomenally mighty! Even god’s afraid of this guy!

Then a few hours in you’re told not to step on leaves in case they rustle, and attract some goatman who’ll instakill you via cutscene. It’s the worst stealth section I’ve ever played in anything, ever, and topped off by the fact that immediately afterwards you rip goatman’s face off with no trouble whatsoever. A small part of a huge game this may be, but it amply demonstrates why LOS2 totally sucks. … [visit site to read more]