Vagante, That Spelunky-Style RPG, Is Now On Kickstarter

Kingdom Come: Deliverance – Alpha Version Releases On September/October

Video-News

Toren – Zelda meets Braid meets The Last Guardian – Gets New Gameplay Trailer

August 19, 2014 John Papadopoulos 9 Comments

Swordtales, has released a new trailer for Toren, the upcoming dark fantasy adventure game that brings poetry to life in an epic journey about growth, discovery and overcoming great hurdles. Toren is scheduled to release on PC, Mac and PS4 in early 2015. Continue reading →

 

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Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare – Third-person Option Coming After Launch

August 19, 2014 John Papadopoulos 6 Comments

Michael Condrey, co-founder of Sledgehammer Games, has confirmed that a 3rd person option will be coming to Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. While this option won’t be available at launch, this option is expected to become available after the game’s release. Continue reading →

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Metro 2033/Last Light Original Versus Redux – First Comparison Screenshots & Video

August 19, 2014 John Papadopoulos 21 Comments

Metro Redux’s embargo has just been lifted and people have already started sharing comparison screenshots and videos between the original versions of Metro 2033/Metro: Last Light and Metro 2033 Redux/Metro: Last Light Redux. Continue reading →

Screen-News

Pro Evolution Soccer 2015 – First Screenshots From PC Build Unveiled

August 19, 2014 John Papadopoulos 11 Comments

As you may already know, the PC version of Pro Evolution Soccer 2015 will be basically a hybrid of the old-gen and the current-gen versions. And today, PES’ European Manager, Adam Bhatti, released the first screenshots from the PC build. Pro Evolution Soccer 2015 is currently planned for release on PS4, PS3, X360, Xbox One and PC on November 13th. A PC demo is also planned for release prior to the game’s launch. Enjoy! Continue reading →

Screen-News

Toren – Zelda meets ICO meets The Last Guardian – New Screenshots Released

August 20, 2014 John Papadopoulos 0 Comments

Alongside its new trailer, Swordtales has released a new set of screenshots for Toren. Toren is a dark fantasy adventure game that brings poetry to life in an epic journey about growth, discovery and overcoming great hurdles. The game is planned for a 2015 release on PC and PS4, and is inspired by Zelda, ICO and The Last Guardian. Enjoy! Continue reading →

And I agree on both things. Hell, the 34UM95 (the current, non cuverd version) costs 800 €, so I can imagine how much these will cost.

But a man an dream, right?

Dreaming is good, of course if we are dreaming

Blizzard don't expect World of Warcraft subscriptions to grow again

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World of Warcraft subscriptions have fallen again, Blizzard reported two weeks ago. WoW player numbers peaked in the wake of Wrath of the Lich King, but have been falling year-on-year ever since.

Mists of Pandaria offered a brief upsurge, but Blizzard aren’t even counting on one of those come Warlords of Draenor’s release in November. WoW is still the biggest subscription MMO in the world, but it might never see another peak.

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How a working 1kb hard drive was built in Minecraft

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Notch might not have finished his second intended opus, 0x10c, but it was far enough along for us to identify the common threads in his games: home, the frontier, and a love of coding.

Budding computer scientists long ago recognised that last part in Minecraft’s redstone circuits. Here’s their latest achievement: a functional hard drive, built without recourse to Minecraft mods.

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Atari's latest PC reboot is Alone in the Dark: Illumination

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Alone in the Dark is getting another reboot, and a subtitle that can’t be written in a sans-serif font without looking like roman numerals. Illumination is a PC-only game due out in the Autumn.

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Jonathan Blow and friends to fund Rainbow Six-ish tactical FPS Due Process

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The Indie Fund is the closest thing independent development has to a guardian angel. Founded by some of the beneficiaries of the very first indie boom (Braid’s Jonathan Blow, World of Goo’s 2D Boy), its loans are designed to help developers make enough money to self-fund their next game.

After Monaco, Dear Esther and Antichamber, the Fund's latest catch is Due Process: a multiplayer tactical shooter in which players spend as much time drawing up plans as they do shooting each other.

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Valve voted the company developers most want to work for, ahead of BioWare and Ubisoft

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More developers would like to work for Valve than be successful indies, a survey published this week reveals.

The International Game Developers Association asked more than 2,200 devs who the most desirable employer in the business is - and the sadistic minds behind City 17 and Aperture Science won out.

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Nice, but I'd still prefer the 3 monitor setup.

Gamescom 2014: The Indie Games Roundup

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At a trade show with more than 340,000 attendees it’s hard for a developer to get noticed, especially if you don't have the budget to build a booth large enough to house a tractor.

We scoured high and low to find these developers around Gamescom. Some were easy to locate — they’d bought a stand on the Indie Megabooth or set up a shop in the business centre — others had ninja’d into the convention, building pop up meeting spaces in the cafes or out in the smoking area. Wherever they were we tracked them down and inspected their wares.

We can’t write a full preview for everything we saw but, to make sure as little as possible slips through the cracks, here’s a rundown of the games that stood out.

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Don't Starve Together closed beta planned for September

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Perhaps starvation isn’t so bad with friends. Maybe one chum can tap out a tune on the xylophonic ribcage of another.

A select group of Don’t Starve players are going to find out within the next month. That’s the timeframe Klei have given themselves to push multiplayer update-cum-sequel Don’t Starve Together into closed beta - just as they sneak Invisible Inc. onto Steam Early Access.

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So many tears: here are seven minutes of The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth in co-op

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McMillen and co. are nearly done transplanting The Binding of Isaac from its restrictive Flash trappings to a new engine. Somewhere between A and B, the gorecore Zelda-like has picked up 16-bit graphics and local co-op.

Let Edmund and Danielle McMillen lead you through several of its dank and, frankly, disgusting rooms.

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Some new Star Citizen stretch goals

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Having just reached a mind smearing $50 million in funding, Star Citizen is now far and away the most successfully Kickstarted game project in history, easily surpassing the Dizzy, Bomb Jack and 3D Monster Maze fundraisers. With the money he's amassed, Chris Roberts could buy a T-rex skull and still have enough cash left over to buy a dinosaur-sized crown for it to wear. He could build a house and then knock it down, for a laugh, every day for a thousand years.

Luckily for Star Citizen backers however, Chris and his team are instead hard at work developing all new $350 spaceships with barely functioning interiors and no means to actually pilot them. Hey, one day perhaps!

But since hitting their most recent milestone, developers Cloud Imperium have seemingly run out of stretch goals to offer players. Reaching $50 million rewarded players with three unique alien languages for the game's three unique alien races, each one designed and crafted by professional linguists. But what will we get at $60 million? And what will drive loyal backers to $70 million? Cloud Imperium haven't yet decided, so here are some suggestions, from me!

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ESL One Cologne: 856 years of Counter-Strike was watched by nearly half a million people

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EMS One Katowice was a pretty big competition, pitting Counter-Strike: Global Offensive teams against each other in one of the largest eSports tournaments at the time. But that was back in March, and ESL One Cologne recently broke records for Counter-Strike viewership, outdoing Katowice by almost 160 percent. 

Viewership, both in-game and through Twitch, reached a whopping 409,369 people, all watching world-class teams compete for the $250,000 prize pool. 

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Sienna Storm: a spy thriller and digital card game from Deus Ex and Knights of the Old Republic 2 devs

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Kickstarter pitches are often a bit like CVs, but I suppose when the lead writer for Deus Ex and Invisible War, senior designer for Knight of the Old Republic 2 and Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer and the designer of Magic the Gathering: Tactics and Star Wars Galaxies: TCG join forces, it would be silly not to their pasts. 

Sienna Storm is what they are creating, a spy thriller and digital card game. Interest piqued? 

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Celebrate Final Fantasy XIV's anniversary with free game time

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Final Fantasy XIV is celebrating its anniversary, and Square Enix isn’t content with just the existing subscribers partying. From 11AM GMT on the 22nd until September 1st, anyone who has purchased the resurrected MMO can jump back in game for free.

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Hellgate is quietly attempting a comeback through Steam Greenlight

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You might remember Hellgate: London as the online action RPG built by ex-Diablo devs back in 2007. There was a big build up, but when it launched there was no bang. It just fizzled out. In 2008 the developer, Flagship, closed its doors and by 2009, the US and EU servers had been shut down. 

But then in 2011, new owners HanbitSoft brought it back. It was being played in Korea and was relaunching - with a name change to Hellgate London: Resurrection - in the US. But nobody seemed to notice, and it fizzled out again. But after seven years of not quite grabbing players, it’s making another attempt. Hellgate appeared on Steam Greenlight yesterday.

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Overkill's The Walking Dead takes place in the comic universe, but with new survivors

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During a Reddit AMA with Overkill producer Almir Listo, a few details about the Payday 2 studio’s recently announced Walking Dead game managed to escape. 

The co-op survival horror game was revealed last week. “We are staying true to the original, gruesome storytelling that Robert is famous for and that we know that the fans of The Walking Dead love,” said Overkill. 

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Hitting the bottle: Brainiac gets his own Lego Batman 3 trailer

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Classic Superman villain and intergalactic arsehole Brainiac is the big bad in Lego Batman 3: Beyond Gotham - which at this point really should just be Lego DC - so it’s only fair he get a trailer introducing his particular brand of Galactic domination. 

It’s bottles, by the way. That’s his thing. He likes putting cities in them, most notably the Kryptonian city of Kandor. But now he’s getting greedy and he wants to put worlds in bottles. It all probably started with putting ships in bottles, but then his hobby took a dark turn. 

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Resident Evil: Revelations 2 box art and screenshot make a brief appearance

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Resident Evil: Revelations is great. It went a different direction from the last two core games, putting a focus back on horror and enclosed spaces. Initially developed for the 3DS, it spawned enhanced ports on other platforms, including PC. While there were some control quirks, it was an otherwise excellent port. 

So it’s good news, then, that it looks like Resident Evil: Revelations 2 is in the works. 

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Avalanche Studios – “2015 set to be the biggest year”, “several surprises planned for next year”

Na'Vi Dota 2 squad has "lost its leader": Puppey moves on with "no regrets"

One of Dota 2’s most popular teams has lost a “great strategist” and captain, Clement ‘Puppey’ Ivanov. Puppey has led his team to the finals of Dota 2’s International on three occasions, but will now continue his career in competitive Dota elsewhere.

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Watch a man and his elephant go clay human shooting in Far Cry 4

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There’s a feverishness to Far Cry that seems to seep from the games into the Ubisoft staff making them. Executive producer Dan Hay has been working on the series for three and a half years, and has finally reached the Heart of Darkness. Or should that be Far Cry 4’s Shangri-La?

“You get to this point in the game where you leave the dev behind and become the player,” he intones.

“You can pick up a grapple, you can grab a piece of meat and you can basically become a hunter, and you can climb on top of an elephant, you can get on top of a mortar and you can nuke guys from above.”

There’s a little of that madness in the footage below.

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Hi-Rez: Steam free-to-play games have a discovery problem

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Smite seems destined for years of prosperity. A simpler, third-person take on the MOBA, it’s backed by Riot Games owners Tencent, $600,000 in Smite World Championship prize money, and the plaudits of our Fraser in his Smite review.

But it’s not on Steam. According to developers Hi-Rez, that’s because it’s harder to promote a game on Valve’s storefront if it’s free-to-play.

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Minecraft Bukkit project lead quits, Mojang take over

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The team lead of Minecraft mod Bukkit attempted to shut down the project this morning, over concerns with Mojang’s pay-to-win crackdown and his ability to continue distributing the mod. But within minutes, Mojang had quashed his worries about EULAs and picked up development of Bukkit themselves.

“Warren over at bukkit seems to have forgotten that the project was bought by Mojang over two years ago,” tweeted Minecraft lead Jeb, “and isn’t his to discontinue.”

Minecraft staffer and original Bukkit lead Dinnerbone will now see the mod through to its 1.8 release.

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Metal Gear Solid 5's online base infiltrations look absolutely hilarious

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If the worst PC news to come out of GamesCom last week was the Rise of the Tomb Raider’s Xbox deal, then the best was probably Metal Gear Solid 5’s Steam release.

Finally, we’re invited to visit Kojima’s wilfully absurd corner of the stealth genre. Finally, we get to watch videos about strapping unconscious strangers to helicopters so they can be lifted into the sky. Like this one.

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Is World of Warcraft's Robin Williams tribute a genie NPC?

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World of Warcraft players petitioned Blizzard last week in an effort to memorialise Robin Williams as an NPC. Williams had talked about his fondness for the MMO in interviews, and nearly 11,000 fans signed the request for an in-game character who would tell some of the actor's best-known jokes, “so that he may continue making us smile long after his passing”.

The WoW dev team said they were “taking care of it” - and now a genie character has appeared in the game’s files. Could it be?

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Ancient Space: a Paradox-published RTS with a cast from Star Trek, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica

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In a decade of relative drought, StarCraft II has redefined the RTS as a competitive concept - but it was once a platform for great single player stories too.

Hard West types CreativeForge Games and Paradox clearly remember that: they’ve built a solo strategy game that charges players with charting the Black Zone that lies beyond the edge of the known universe, and commanding a fleet of actors whose work has spanned decades of television sci-fi.

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How To Train Your Drakken: Endless Legend's next playable race has been revealed

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If you’ve not got a scaly reptilian race with a name that’s evocative of dragons, then your fantasy game isn’t ready yet. Endless Legend isn’t ready, as it’s still in Early Access, but it’s one step closer with the introduction of the Drakken. 

Rob took a look at the pre-Drakken game earlier this year. He said Endless Legend shows Amplitude Studios building on lessons from Endless Space, the team’s space 4X game.

Take a gander at the scaly folk below. 

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Noir Syndrome is a randomly generated murder mystery game

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Noir Syndrome is a randomly generated murder mystery game in which you, a snappily dressed freelance gumshoe, have two weeks in which to identify and arrest a mysterious and unidentified serial killer. The game is set in a smokey, 2D pixel-art world with a lovely jazzy brass soundtrack, in a city populated by a finite cast of police, mobsters and regular Joel Schmoels, each of whom can be found strolling around somewhere, as brazenly persistent as you like.

Each time you play, the murderer changes identity, the clues point in different directions and the crime retangles itself, ready to be solved all over again.

It launched earlier this year for £4.99, but it recently received a content update that pushed it back into my Steam library. So here are some thoughts on it.

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Heat Signature: surviving in space for as long as you can

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Heat Signature is a game about flitting around a big procedurally generated galaxy, boarding ships, sneaking around and sometimes beating up guards. It’s being developed by Tom Francis, who you might know from Gunpoint, a game about breaking into buildings and sometimes beating up guards. Special trousers were involved. It was great. 

There’s a lot more to Heat Signature than being an intergalactic ne’er-do-well though, so I pestered Francis with questions to get the skinny on this space game.

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Renowned Explorers: International Society trailer sets the scene for globetrotting and artifact theft

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I once had a job where I had to collect postcodes and fill out maps. It wasn’t a very good job. Filling out maps sounds a lot more fun when you’re a Jules Verne-inspired 19th Century explorer, such as the ones found in Abbey Games’ Renowned Explorers: International Society.

It mashes together Indiana Jones with XCOM where enemies are giant scorpions and miffed indigenous people instead of aliens. And there’s a new trailer, which you can point your eyes at below. 

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The Vanishing of Ethan Carter: the case opens in September

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Gorgeous supernatural mystery, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, is due out next month. Developer The Astronauts announced a release date of September 25th today and you can grab it on Steam or through GOG. 

If you want to get a head start on solving the case, there’s now a 13 minute developer walkthrough of the start of the game. It’s absent major spoilers, and is simply very pleasant to watch (despite the blood), as Red Creek Valley is a treat for the eyes. 

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Script Kiddies: PvP hacking with a hint of tower defence

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I’m not sure if, in the darkest parts of the internet, there is a competitive hacking league, but if there is, I doubt it’s anything like developer Austin Dixon’s Script Kiddies. It’s a server hacking game with a bit of tower defence, where two of the titular script kiddies race up and down ladders, mashing buttons on terminals, all in an effort to hack the servers before their opponent.

And it looks rather charming. 

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Firaxicon: Firaxis is putting on its first official convention next month

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I’m not saying Firaxicon sounds like some sort of virility enhancer, but I am saying that it sounds like the sort of thing you’d want in an unmarked bottle which you would immediately hide if you ever bought it in a chemists. 

What it actually is, though, is the first Firaxis convention, which takes place in Maryland next month. 

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The Walking Dead Season 2 concludes next week, so prepare your emotions

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The Walking Dead Season 2 finale, No Going Back, is due out next week, on August 26th, Telltale has announced. If playing the last episode - you can see what I thought of it in my Amid the Ruins review - hasn’t left you an emotional wreck, then you can watch the launch trailer for the finale and properly feel like shit. Hurray!

It’s a recap, really, so if you’re a bit behind, best avoid it for fear of massive spoilers. 

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Path of Exile: Forsaken Masters Expansion Now Available