Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I should be very pleased for now ex-PC Gamer writer and fine fellow Tom Francis, whose lovely debut Gunpoint, made in his spare time over the last three years, has proven wildly successful enough for him to “quit jobs, as a concept” and grant him total creative freedom for whatever he wants to do next and for the foreseeable future. Instead, I feel physically ill with envy and crippled by self-loathing at my own failure to work on a game as yet, all compounded by worry that feeling that way is a sign that I am a bad person. I am attempting to purge all these unpleasant emotions by posting about Tom’s amazing news. (more…)

Every time a slip, leak or whisper emerges from inside the caverns of PC shop owners and former developers Valve, the gaming news press (us occasionally included) gets into a frothy frenzy at the mention of Half-Life 3. “Could this be evidence they’re working on it?!” everyone cries, tickling their own legs in excitement. OF COURSE THEY ARE! Of COURSE Valve is working on Half-Life 3! It’s not even vaguely feasible that they wouldn’t be! They’ve obviously been working on it, in some capacity, since HL2: Ep 2 came out. News would be if they actually bloody finished it.

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Yes, it’s happening. 

Hotline Miami 2 is indeed very real, and the neon-slathered sequel made quite the appearance at E3 last week. Or rather, um, outside it. In a parking lot. Inside a trailer. It was an oddball setup even by E3 standards, but it got the job done. A brand new sparse, acoustic theme song drifted through the wheeled bullet’s chrome-y confines, mirroring the first’s but with a hint of somber resignation. Dennaton’s Dennis Wedin quickly explained why: Wrong Number is the second Hotline Miami, but also the last. It’s been a wild, psychadelic, gore-and-teeth-spattered ride for Cactus and himself, but all things must come to an end.

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Meta-RPG Knights of Pen & Paper has been PC bound forever. Forever, I say! Ignore any evidence which might suggest that it has in fact only been PC-bound for three months, for you are being deceived by space-time gremlins. Fortunately their cosmic trickery has now been arrested, and the real world/D&D mash-up roleplayer has now completed its transition from portable telephonic devices to IBM-personal computer.

Er, by which I mean ‘it’s out now.’ (more…)

Shadowrun’s been away since time immemorial. It hasn’t had a videogame in ages – well, except 2007′s bizarrely out-of-character multiplayer shooter revival, but we don’t talk about that. As a result, however, The Rules dictate that Shadowrun’s next digital dalliance constitutes a return, and so it is with Shadowrun Returns. The technomagical role-player looks positively fantastic, so we at RPS are awaiting it with baited breath. That’s right: we’re actively making our mouths smell more appealing so as to lure it into grasping/maybe-licking range. And clearly, it’s worked, because Harebrained just announced that it’ll be out next month – and fully editable on day one, to boot.

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American McGee’s Akaneiro: Demon Hunters was Kickstarted only this February. Squeaking past its goal in the eleventh hour, it’s only four short months later that a playable build is available. For free, if you go to their own site. Or for money, if you get it from Steam. Huh? This whole odd situation asks some interesting questions about such models, and when is the right time to let people start buying your game?

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I had been playing Undertale’s free demo for two minutes when the memory of Space Funeral popped into my mind like a drunken Jack in the Box. Ten minutes later, I was ready to quit and around half an hour after that I’d completed the demo, which is a complete short story, and was glad that I’d persisted. It’s a weird adventure in the style of a JRPG, with random encounters, a silent protagonist, single room puzzles and turn-based combat. Stick with the demo through the alternately bizarre and bland opening minutes, and there’s a tiny world of wonder. If you don’t play until the depressed ghost makes an appearance, you have seen nothing.

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Pro Evo Soccer may have won next season’s foot-to-ball battle before it even begins. During an interview with Polygon, Andrew Wilson, executive vice president of EA Sports, revealed that the fancy new ball-jiggling mechanics of the Ignite engine will not be gracing the PC version of FIFA 14, which will instead be equivalent to the 360 and PS3 editions. Why? Well, PC conversion would be difficult because of the architecture of the next-gen consoles and “how the CPU, GPU and RAM work together in concert in that type of environment.” It’s like an abstract alien factory in there and the conversion wouldn’t be worthwhile because, Wilson claims, using the example of FIFA 11, “the majority of the gamer base that was playing the game on PC did not have a PC spec that would work with that”. Huh.

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I’m going to have a full interview about the strange, sad tale of how/why excellent TBS Skulls of the Shogun so bewilderingly ended up as a Windows 8 exclusive, and how it all went so, so wrong, up on the site tomorrow. Meantime, let’s share the good news – this ace, very funny and tight undead Samurai battler is now free from its Microsoftian chains, and will arrive on Steam & Humble for any PC that can handle it next month. And thank God for that.

It’ll have brand new stuff on its old bones too. (more…)

When I was a small boy, I was very excited about the idea of having my own car. Games had taught me that driving was fun*, whether through the twisting roads of Lotus III, across the ramshackle rollercoasters of Stunt Car Racer, or in the violent competition of Fatal Racing. Then my parents bought me a Nascar game and everything changed. The graphics blew my Spiderman socks off but the tracks didn’t have any unexpected curves, loops or jumps. That’s why I spent most of my time with the game driving the wrong way, trying to cause massive collisions and pileups. I haven’t played a Nascar game since and the impending arrival of Eutechnyx’ latest on July 24th probably won’t change that, but perhaps you are a fan of cars wot go round and round?

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