To illustrate how delightful/horrifying (delete according to taste) Dota 2‘s complexity is, I like to point to patch notes. Dota 2 and its monozygotic mod twin are still being balanced after a decade, with small changes coalescing into big effects on how we play the game. Have a gander at the changelog for Friday’s sizeable Spring Cleaning update, which affects almost every hero and lots of items with small changes that should ultimately shake the game up for months to come.

… [visit site to read more]

Rich Stanton has been playing player-driven space MMO Eve Online – read parts one and two here. In this third and final part, Rich joins a corporation and goes to war.>

In Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma> an idealistic young Italian called Fabrice del Dongo runs off to join Napoleon’s army, and ends up at the Battle of Waterloo. He gets bonked on the head, sees soldiers running around, shoots a retreating opponent, and gets stabbed in the leg by one of his own side. The whole thing’s a mess, Fabrice has no idea what’s going on, and he returns to Parma broke and dejected, wondering if he really was at Waterloo. By the end of the novel he’s an old man, and spoken of with reverence as one of Napoleon’s key captains.

Reader when Brave liberated the HED-GP system, I was one of their key captains.

… [visit site to read more]

The PC release date trailer for green-thumbed shooter Plants Vs Zombies Garden Warfare is utterly preposterous. Of course it is, you might be thinking, it’s a video promoting a third-person shooter Plants Vs Zombies spin-off. The trailer doesn’t show the actual game though, choosing instead to put the Origin logo front and centre. This is a video in which a zombie logs into Origin, has a conversation with Origin in which the store offers to load up a Match 3 game, and then finds out that Garden Warfare is due for release on June 24th. The good news about the delayed launch is that we won’t have to speculate as to whether the game was designed to allow for the introduction of microtransactions at a later date – they’re arriving next week.

… [visit site to read more]

Last Life is an exceedingly promising looking cyberpunk noir adventure game being published by Double Fine. As is often the case with these things, you’re solving a murder. As is significantly less often the case with these things, it’s your own. The game’s utopian, dystopian, MarsTopian future posits that humans have figured out how to 3D print new bodies, thus making The End significantly less… final. It’s an interesting conceit for a mystery plot, but it turns out that the rabbit hole runs much deeper for creator Sam Farmer. An abiding love for transhumanism practically bleeds out of him, and there’s a very good reason for this: he’s been struggling with a chronic disease for most of his life. His health issues are always right behind him, lunging to drag him down, hold him back. But this life doesn’t offer do-overs, so he’s done holding back. >

… [visit site to read more]

The roguelike-like spirit has meandered across video games history for a few years now, turning old things new with a little roguelike RPG kick, and now it’s hit the unusual host of wonky ’90s shareware FPSs. Rogue Shooter: The FPS Roguelike launched last Friday, looking and sounding like something from the dark corners of a 1996 cover disc but pleasing with procedural generation and oodles of items and stats crafting and all that.

A hearty launch discount brings it down to 3.49 on Steam and a demo’s that-a-way too.

… [visit site to read more]

The Eldritch Cases: Dagon is an embellished adaptation of Humbert Percival Lovecraft’s The Shadow over Innsmouth, although it might be more accurate to say it’s a mash-up of some of his most popular works. Herbert West will make an appearance as the villain, for example, and some of Pickman’s models might well show up. For those who enjoyed Dark Corners Of The Earth until it started shooting from the hip a little too often, Eldritch Cases has the advantage of being a point and click game. In a genre not known for gunplay and panicked escape sequences, it’s fair to expect a greater emphasis on investigation and puzzling, although that could well mean reconstructing cuneiform tablets via the medium of sliding block puzzles. Let’s hope not!

… [visit site to read more]

Although Survarium shares some DNA with the magnificent, terrifying ecosystem of S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the Lost Alpha standalone mod is the closest thing to a new game in the series we’re probably going to see for a good while. What began as an attempt to restore content cut from the original release of Shadow of Chernobyl has become a total overhaul of the game, with sections redesigned and reintegrated, and changes to elements other than maps. It’s been in development for five years and is now available, slightly earlier than originally planned. There are download links (including an official torrent) over at Moddb and you won’t need to have the original game installed to play. I want to spend my day in the Zone.

… [visit site to read more]

Last week’s DevLog Watch was an hour-long GIF of me, sat on my couch, stuffing my face with a bank holiday-worth of olives and chocolate. Development stalled when I became too full to eat anymore, but the column is back this week with new games from old developers, new developers, old journalists, and, uh, new sources of old archives…

Stealth Breakout! Stealth spaceships! Unconcealed Escher!

… [visit site to read more]

Divinity: Original Sin may not have the big name backing of, say, Pillars of Eternity or Wasteland 2, but the gorgeous-looking chip off Ultima VII’s block has impressed us time and time again. Rare is the role-player that offers this degree of choice and reactivity, not to mention a world of spontaneous, non-scripted orc wars and clairvoyant cattle. Larian’s spent years (and nearly $1 million in Kickstarter money) putting all the pieces in place, and now it wants you to knock them all down like a particularly careless Godzilla. Divinity will be out in June, but you can try the Early Access version – which just received a lumbering ogre spider of an update – right now.

… [visit site to read more]

What’s up gamers! It’s your girl Alice at Game, Gamer, Gamegun coming at you with the hottest new games and game news for gamers pumping straight into your brain like a mad doctor making a Frankenstein yowwww it’s electrifying! Hey, it’s a new week so we’ve got to get this going the right way: with a good kick of caffeine bzaaaap! But hold up! (OBJECTION!) Before you chug that Dew, let me tell you Morning Coffee is where we’re getting our caffix today.

Like a good cup of the magic brown, the hot new walking simulator will slam through your system in only a few minutes then kapow! we’re ready for the day. And hey, we gamers have better things to do than wait around to install anything, so let’s cheer our gamer cry of “Vid vid vidyay!” because we can even play in a browser to jam the gaming goodness straight into our brainslots.

… [visit site to read more]