Murder may not feature Dick Dastardly, but it really does do both cartoon villainy and nasty stares brilliantly, all the while teaching us historical lessons of the utmost importance. Also, that being stabbed in the back is an honourable way for a king to go and a most elegant political tool.
We don’t often post about screenshot releases, because there’s always a trailer that shows more, with less of likelihood of each frame having been doctored in Photoshop before release. Just Cause is the kind of series though where half the fun comes from how pretty it looks and the other half comes from tethering guards to rockets and standing astride vehicles as they launch over cliffs. These Just Cause 3 screenshots show a bit of both – and are obviously carefully posed – but I like to look at them.
Maybe you will also enjoy looking at them? You can click to make each one bigger.
The whole premise of survival games is unappealing to me, never answering a question I feel is important when everything’s swamped with radiation or zombies or radioactive zombies: why survive?> So as a distant observer of the genre, I tend to compare and break games down cynically. Most of Stranded Deep looks familiar – scavenging, crafting, building, exploring, hunting, and all that – but I do like how it’s using its setting of Pacific islands and atolls. Come watch a new trailer to coo and aah at diving, salvaging wrecks, and avoiding sharks.
Screened is a fiendish little free platformer in the vein of Super Meat Boy with a scratchy, itchy post-punk soundtrack that’s a perfect match: both are like fingernails run down a blackboard, yet both unavoidably draw you in.
The game was built for the Ludum Dare 31 game jam, the theme of which was “the entire game on one screen”. Screened spins its single screen out into multiple levels by moving around obstacles and barriers every time you reach the exit, with each new spin on the screen throwing new challenges into your face whilst laughing at your incompetence and displeasure.
Moving from the earliest steps toward the stars to space operas and sci-fi dreams that could be responsible for an expanded universe of spin-off novels, Distant Worlds has never seen a horizon that it doesn’t want to touch. It copes with the enormous scale by allowing players to pick and choose their responsibilities. Yes, the game was first released four years ago and, yes, it’s an expensive and acquired taste. But this is the most complete version of one of the most unique, enormous and engrossing strategy games ever made.>
Adam: They should have sent a poet. And a playwright, and possibly a novelist or two.
Every Sunday, we reach deep into Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s 141-year history to pull out one of the best moments from the archive. This week, we re-visit Kieron’s Dark Futures series, which spoke to the leaders of the immersive sim. This is part five, an essay written by Clint Hocking.>
Clint Hocking’s career started with sending his resume into Ubisoft Monreal “on a lark”. Six week’s later, he’s working on the original Splinter Cell, ending up as a designer/scriptwriter. After its enormous success, he rose to the position of Creative Director on Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory and Far Cry 2 before leaving this year to chase new horizons. Away from his game design, he’s a prolific essayist on his own blog. And in keeping in that, rather than a traditional interview, Clint has wrote us an essay…
Sundays are for catching up on emails, commissioning words about videogames, and plotting for a Christmas break. Let’s go.
Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>
Local multiplayer games have made an unlikely resurgence these past two years, meaning there’s half a dozen I’ve played and loved during the period. Gang Beasts is great though still feels incomplete. Nidhogg is great but I found, after years of playing the free version, that my enjoyment of its full release was shortlived. It’s TowerFall: Ascension, then, that I would recommend to anyone who wanted some single-screen gaming.
As quotable as 2001: A Space Odyssey>‘s HAL is, he’s not a character whose shoes – erm, digital footprint> – many games have allowed us to fill. Human Orbit promises to change this, enabling us to finally live out our ambitions of being an all-seeing, all-interfering artificial intelligence aboard a space station filled to the brim with squishy fleshbags.
A new trailer for the game has been released, and although it’s classic pre-alpha footage – jerky, unashamed of its typos and not exactly showing off in terms of visual fidelity – it’s a tasty little teaser for how the game might ultimately be played.
Here is my dilemma. It s nice, I think, to approach supporter posts with a desire to be more personal, more intimate, to shine the light on ourselves a little more brightly. Or to be even more self-indulgent than ever, if you d prefer to think of it that way. So when considering what to write about in my weekly supporter column, I like to think about what s going on in my life, pick a lens to look through. Except, four weeks ago my first son was born, and good grief, who wants to hear about that?
Oh my goodness, how many more games-journalists-becoming-parents can the internet cope with? And who is it for? People without kids are likely far less interested to read about an experience they don t relate to. People who don t want kids and never intend to have them can feel marginalised, excluded. People who want kids and haven t yet, or those who want them and cannot have them, can find the whole topic misery-inducing. (My wife and I were trying for three years before ours came along, and I can testify that it s really shit.) And people with kids already went through it, roll their eyes at the naivety of it, or don t want to be reminded of it. Can the internet hold another, How I game with my kid in my arm article, without keeling over and just collapsing on the floor?
Let s find out!