You’ve got a few days to wait before Technobabylon [official site] officially launches on Steam, but in the meantime publishers Wadjet Eye have sounded the Free Stuff klaxon and are offering a tasty morcel of demo for the price of a mere link click.

Remember this game? It might jog your memory if I say “that thing what was Blade Runner meets Police Quest.” Technobabylon is essentially a throwback to the olde point-and-click adventure of the 90s, built for the bleeding hearts of cyberpunk fandom like myself. The game will hit PC on May 21st for $14.99, but you can download a nice little demo for free from both Steam and its website.

… [visit site to read more]

Last year I spoke to Joel Levin, creator and co-founder of MinecraftEdu, a school-friendly remix of Minecraft [official site] which is designed to be used in schools. Levin spoke with eloquence and hope about how the blockbuilding game can be used to teach children internet etiquette, patience, general learning skills, and every subject from science to history to foreign languages. Below is an excerpt of the interview which charts the initial inspiration for the software and which is full of good, inspirational examples for how to make “screen time” healthy and useful for kids.

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Happy third birthday, Diablo III [official site]. Why it feels like it was only yesterday you were a little tyke that wouldn’t load on my computer. Now look at you! All grown up and making, ah, cow puns.

In celebration of the anniversary, Blizzard are breaking the fourth wall, giving a cheeky wink to the camera, and calling upon something called The Cowpocalypse. … [visit site to read more]

It’s only a few couple of days away! The final adventure of Geralt of Rivia, and CD Projekt’s chance to prove that they can take the RPG skills they’ve honed in the first two games to a sweeping open world. We’ll have a review up for you as soon as possible, but until then, here’s some CliffsNotes to get you up to speed on what’s happening, where to buy it, and why you haven’t already seen a WIT.

… [visit site to read more]

Sundays are for this and only this.

• This was the best thing I read this week: a pixel artist renounces pixel art. It’s one of the creator’s of mobile game Auro talking about game art, communication, and how audiences and critics appraise certain styles of work. Or more specifically, how even incredible art and animation> will be criticised if it fails to conform to meaningless and arbitrary technological buzzwords like “HD”. It’s a fun read, well illustrated.

… [visit site to read more]

Professional League of Legends [official site] player Austin “LiNk” Shin has recreated that scene from Office Space where they dropkick a jet printer except instead of a trashing printer he has written an 18-page letter to the public about why his Counter Logic Gaming teammates are jerks.

You can read the treatise, which Shin released to Google Docs, in full here. It’s extensive. The letter covers his three-year career, including running away from home and dealing with the havoc of team drama, particularly from one Yiliang ‘Doublelift’ Peng.

… [visit site to read more]

Only in Rust s [official site] dark wasteland would you ignore the obvious practical and safety issues of wearing a lit candle on your head. Which, I suppose, is what makes Rust’s dark wasteland so appealing. Stand up straight; the last thing you want is hot wax dripping down your face.

This exercise in masochistic torture is just one of the many new additions to Rust, as detailed in the latest Devblog. These weekly blogs give each member of the development team an opportunity to show off what they ve made this week and plan their week ahead. It s like being right in the studio for their Friday meetings, but with presumably less beer.

… [visit site to read more]

It s been quite a while since we last posted anything about Toren [official site], but in the time the game seems to have become more beautiful. And also more released.

You can get your grubby paws on the puzzle adventure right now for just 6.99 on Steam, GOG, and other places and begin your quest to the top of the tower. It’s not just climbing steps, though. We’re promised plenty of tricksy puzzles, along with more than a few skuffles with a certain black dragon guardian.

… [visit site to read more]

I’ve got a quiz for you!

Part of this arduous labour that is my job is to take an awful lot of screenshots. And once taken, they need names. Now, a better person than me would have some sort of System, which would make them so incredibly easily organised, labelled, and rediscovered. But I am not a better person than me. I’m me. So it is that I give them three or four letter names that I ludicrously believe will mean something to me more than four minutes later. Then, they get dumped into a section of my screenshot folder entitled “OLD”, which after almost eight years of RPS stands at exactly 30.0GB big. 30GB of 100k-ish cropped screenshots, poorly labelled, archived for Later Use. Let’s see if you can figure out what the bloody hell they all are.

… [visit site to read more]

We’ve still got a year or so to wait before we can get our hands on the consumer version of the Oculus Rift head-mounted display – tech which, as an amateur consumer marketer, I propose somebody ought to rename Matrix Face. But the crew, who have been quietly tinkering away in VR, have just released everything you ought to know about Oculus VR’s recommended PC specs:

… [visit site to read more]