Cor, what a month for fighting games on PC! Last week brought the announcement of a port for Dead or Alive 5 Last Round, which’ll be the series real PC debut, then yesterday saw the PC release of BlazBlue: Continuum Shift Extend (well, sorta – I’ll explain). Next week will bring The King of Fighters ’98 Ultimate Match Final Edition too. You might deduce from the lengthy names that these are refined versions of their parent games. Anyway, I’m glad to see that the BlazBlue and KoF series have done well enough on PC to keep coming.

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Grigsby, Billings, and Brors are to PC wargaming what Stock, Aitken, and Waterman are to pop music… what Freeman, Hardy, and Willis are to shoe retailing… what Rock, Paper, and Shotgun are to outdated Anglocentric intro references. They started making hexagonal militaria in the days when Tyrannosauri and Triceratopses grappled, and dragonflies the size of Dragonflies dragonflew. Their latest release, War in the West, is their biggest and most elaborate design yet. Suitably intimidated, I spent Monday and Tuesday eyeing the colossus through fieldglasses, and Wednesday and Thursday prodding it with a long stick. … [visit site to read more]

Prepare to download jubilation and dispense judgement, agents: Satellite Reign has arrived on Steam Early Access.

The game’s been covered a-plenty on RPS since it was teased all the way back in May 2013, and that’s undeniably been helped by its promise to be the successor to long-forgotten series Syndicate. I said long-forgotten. What’s an FPS?

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One of the many things that impressed me about Psychonauts all those years ago was the fact that it was funny in a way only a video game could be. That it used its medium and our expectations thereof to make the kind of jokes that, say, film could never really pull off.

Still, Psychonauts was first and foremost a game, whereas OverPowered is one elaborate joke wrapped around an insanely difficult platformer.

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Well then, here it is: the second game from Minecraft developers Mojang. Scrolls officially launched yesterday, after almost two years in paid beta. The virtual collectible card game/board game was never going to be the next Minecraft, and they never intended for it to, so hey, let’s forget all that and talk about what it is. It’s out, for starters, at a new lower price of $5 ( 3.20-ish).

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See this here? This is a bargepole. It is, I would say, approximately ten feet long. What I’m doing with this bargepole is very deliberately not touching something with it. Even if said bargepole were a hundred feet long, I would still be very deliberately not touching something with it. That something is a crowdfunding attempt for a game called ‘STALKER Apocalypse.’ The people making it previously tried to make a game called Areal.

Yeah, the Areal that got abruptly pulled down from Kickstarter because it made all kinds of dodgy promises about being a spiritual S.T.A.L.K.E.R. sequel. “Stalker is just a word”, apparently. Uh. … [visit site to read more]

One minute you’re making Commander Keen and the next you’re Knee Deep In The Dead. id Software might be known for their violent first-person shooters but there was a time when their core franchise was all about a young lad called Billy Blaze fighting daft aliens, bouncing around on a pogo stick, and collecting chocolate bars and bottles of pop. Flying Wild Hog, creators of Hard Reset and the brill Shadow Warrior reboot, are undergoing a form of the id transformation. But in reverse. From ludicrous gibs to JUJU, a cooperative platformer that is as bright and breezy as Billy Blaze himself. It’s out now.

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As an admirer of cities, I enjoy wandering around a city looking for its history in little tells, in the curve of streets, in clashes of architecture, in demographics, transportation, building sites and boarded-up shops, guessing at its planning and improvisations. I like building my own cities in games too, thinking I’m so clever and know everything, then after a few hours I take a step back and realise “oh god it’s all just a huge horrible mess built by an idiot.” Still, I suspect the prettiness of the newly-announced Cities XXL might have me whipping out my t-square to try again.

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Major update: Cor, this didn’t go well! Currently the Steam Winter Auction is a big “nope”. Head there now and you’ll see a message saying there have been “some issues” with it, and it’s closed until they can fix it. Those issues, we’ve heard, are that bugs meant people were getting millions of gems, and the whole economy went kaput. Of course Steam’s fervent community was going to find exploits right away, and it looks like they found the mother lode. Quite how Valve will repair everyone’s sales, swaps and crafts in the last 12 hours it’ll be interesting to find out. I expect a lot of strops.>

From today, until next Thursday, Valve has just announced they’re running a Steam Auction. This is a way for users to trade (“recycle” they say) unused items in their inventories for “Steam Gems”, which can then be used to bid – from next Monday – for games in an auction. Because it’s come to this.

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As the festive season approaches and thoughts inevitably turn to gifts and giving, to those we love and cherish and want to keep safe from all the horror and the hurt, I can’t help but recall Captain Blackadder’s priorities at such moments. So, that’ll be me. Or rather you. Look, what I’m trying to say is that it’s nearly Christmas, graphics cards look cheap, so I suggest if you’re struggling for frame rates, now’s a good time to give yourself a treat and knock that particular problem on the head. Meanwhile, Samsung has wheeled out its first affordable SSD with 3D memory. Sounds exciting. But is it? … [visit site to read more]