Shadowrun just keeps on returning. The cyberpunk RPG has has various game adaptations over the last few decades, but it was the Kickstarted Shadowrun Returns which most nailed the concept. Narrative and choice expanded in excellent follow-up campaign Dragonfall, which then saw a further improved Director’s Cut, and after all that devs Harebrained Schemes had a loyal enough fanbase to pull off their third successful Kickstarter, even in an age where there’s a lot of worried muttering about the future of crowd-funding for games. No such worries for Harebrained co-founders Jordan Weisman and Mitch Gitelman, whose upcoming Shadowrun: Hong Kong was funded in less than two hours and now has over $600k pledged – six times> what they’d asked for. Blimey.

Earlier this week, I talked to the pair about why they went back to the Kickstarter well, what they’re doing differently this time, how they’ve been able to make story an increased focus, what the community’s up to with the Shadowrun editor and being sent free pizza. … [visit site to read more]

Being in a motorbike accident is, I’ve been told, terrifying and awful, just awful, the pits, ugh, frightful, I really don’t think you’d like it. Yet watching a motorbike accident is, I’ve seen on You’ve Been Framed>, a rib-tickling barrel of laughs. Tempering the horror of the first with the joy of the second, Trials Fusion now has online multiplayer to go with its local play. Nine months after the game came out, you and seven other folks can finally zip, flip, and shatter your hips together.

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Note – this series has primarily been for RPS Supporter Program members-only, which is why you probably can’t find most of the rest of ‘em, but I unlock the occasional chapter for everyone (along with many of our other initially subs-only features).

Raised By Screens is probably the closest I ll ever get to a memoir glancing back at the games I played as a child in the order in which I remember playing them, and focusing on how I remember them rather than what they truly were. There will be errors and there will be interpretations that are simply wrong, because that s how memory works.>

The last chapter was dedicated to my brief, complete immersion in point and click adventures generally, but among the slew of comedy puzzlers I devoured at that time, one particularly stands out. For many years, I’ve reflexively said its name when asked what my favourite early 1990s PC game was (or at least my second-favourite; my most beloved game of all time will be discussed in the next chapter, and will hardly be surprising to regular Rock, Paper, Shotgun readers), but until very recently I’d never thought about why. For the longest time, I said its name purely from fondness – whenever I thought of that era of gaming, this was the title that I simply felt warmest about when I conjured its sights and sounds in my memory. It’s time to try and discover why that is. It’s not purely because I regularly find myself whistling the incidental music.

… [visit site to read more]

Though my Battle-of-Jutland-through-the-eyes-of-a-ship’s-cat war movie remains unfunded, untitled and largely unwritten, I have mentally sketched out the final scene.

EXT. FIRTH OF FORTH. DAWN.

Passing under the awesome edifice of the Forth Bridge, the bruised and battered HMS Warspite is pelted with coal by disappointed railway workers. Tickles, asleep in her customary spot atop ‘A’ turret, wakes and dashes for cover. Scampering across the bloodstained, shrapnel scored deck, she is struck by a flying lump of anthracite and drops down dead. As the camera rises incorporeally into Warspite’s swirling smoke plume, we see Able Seaman Peters run to where Tickles lies, and fall to his knees beside her.>

THE END … [visit site to read more]

Red Faction Guerrilla is a cracking game for rolling around as a giant space asshole, smashing every building to the ground and giggling at its destruct-o-physics. But what then? What when everything is smashed and only you remain standing? You can’t smash yourself, Hammerman.

Why, you rebuild it so you can start smashing all over again! Something I did not know RFG has, because it was limited to multiplayer, is a gun which rebuilds smashed things. Now it’s in singleplayer too, as Nordic Games are admirably – and somewhat puzzlingly – still patching it.

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Getting really good at tough action games is something that rarely happens to me. To be brutally honest, it has only happened once during my childhood with Manic Miner, many years later with VVVVVV and a few days ago with Riser. Now, I am not certain as to why this simple, procedural platformer really got to me, nor why I really got it, but I know there’s the very real danger of me mainly loving it due to it being kind to me. Do please keep this in mind.

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The turn-based sneaking, leaping, climbing, stabbing, swinging, and sword-flinging of Ronin caught our eye last August with a free prototype, and my it’s come a long way since then! A new trailer shows slick sequences of its cyberninja scaling buildings, smashing through windows, dodging bullets, and stabbing the heck out of cybermen. Tomasz Waclawek’s game caught the keen eye of publishers Devolver Digital too, as they’ve announced they’re helping bring Ronin to release later this year, fleshed-out and fancied-up. Really, come see how cool this murder looks:

… [visit site to read more]

Did you know that every time you hid in a closet while you were playing Alien: Isolation or Amnesia, you were doing a little homage to Clock Tower? Sure, you might have been doing a little whimper or wee at the same time, but the act of hiding instead of hunting and killing is SO Clock Tower.

Sure, Clock Tower may not have been the first game to do hiding in a closet* but it’s a Running Away game with a long shadow and some folks of the PC persuasion may not be familiar with it. That may be about to change.

… [visit site to read more]

Precipice starts bloody and ends abruptly. That sounds like life in the cyberpunk future to me all right! It’s a free adventure game about a weary private cyberdick called in to consult on a bloody murder case involving a synthetic lady, poking around at evidence and drawing a conclusion.

It’s been years since I had the patience to finish an hours-long adventure game, but I’ve been quite taken with short ones lately. Adventure games like this, Void & Meddler, and a lot of the Freeware Garden‘s brief blooms make them exciting again for me – short, punchy things.

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I love puzzle games. But it s not beating them that s the exciting part: it s understanding them.

Whether mulling over a cryptic crossword or somersaulting through Portal s portals, there s a moment of epiphany which, for me, pretty much transcends all other moments in gaming. But how do you design a puzzle to best provoke that eureka moment? What gives a puzzle its aesthetic, its pace and texture? Why does one puzzle feel thrilling while another feels like a flat mental grind?

I ve asked three of my favourite puzzle game designers to demystify their dark magicks: Jonathan Blow, best known for the puzzle-platformer Braid and currently hard at work on firstperson perplexathon, The Witness; Alan “Draknek” Hazelden, creator of Sokoban-inspired sequential-logic games, including Sokobond, Mirror Isles and the forthcoming A Good Snowman Is Hard To Build; and Jonathan Whiting, a programmer on Sportsfriends and collaborator with Hazelden on Traal, whose own games are a regular Ludum Dare highlight.

… [visit site to read more]