I had died again. For the eighth time I had been murdered by a greedy neighbour. I sighed. It was time to switch servers and try it all again. Usually when you spawn on a Rust server, there are a few quiet minutes to get used to your surroundings and look around. Not on my ninth reincarnation. The very instant I popped into the world I heard a voice behind me, yelling.

“Who are you!”

It was more of a statement of rage than a question. Shocked, I turned and saw him. Silhouetted against the sky, a man stood atop a wrecked building, stretching a bow and pointing an arrow at me. His name was Blazing Bazing. He was completely naked.

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The most interesting thing about Reaper of Souls, the first expansion for Diablo 3, is that it’s an admission of guilt. Blizzard are one of the best developers in the world not only because it makes great games, but because it prods and tweaks and adds to them after release until they positively hum with glory. But Reaper of Souls isn’t a nip here and a tuck there. This expansion is Blizzard dealing with the reality that, in many people’s eyes, Diablo 3 just wasn’t very good. But can it be fixed?

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Struggling with success is always a hard sell for empathy. It’s all too easy to dismiss such expressions with an easy, “Oh, you poor rich thing.” But it is, of course, far more complicated than that.

Davey Wreden, co-creator of The Stanley Parable, has already written in detail about how phenomenon of his game has personally affected him, in an eloquent blog post last month. Since the release of The Stanley Parable, and its remarkable success, the lives of both of its creators have been turned upside down. At 25 and 20 years old, Davey Wreden and William Pugh, haven’t had an easy time. I spoke with them about their last six months, how the reaction to the game has affected them and their partnership, and how they’re dealing with it all. And Pugh’s desire to create a rivalry with Steve Gaynor.

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Anyone eager to spend a modest portion of their Friday shaking their head and tutting while a tactical halfwit sends virtual Soviet soldiers to their deaths, is in luck. A lend-lease version of the close-to-release Combat Mission: Red Thunder‎ has just been craned onto my bustling quay by my bustling stevedore, Steve Dore. Give me a second to finish my molotov cocktail, quietflowsthedon my ushanka, and retrieve my Bumper Book of Annoying Russian Clichés, and we can get started. Read the rest of this entry »

Right, then, it’s been an intriguing week or so in PC gaming tech. The virtual reality roadmap just got a rocket up the bum with the news that social network and moneybags megacorp Facebook has snapped up Oculus VR while Sony has injected additional momentum by showing off its own prototype headset for the PS4. Meanwhile, remember when you could buy a cheap Intel chip and overclock the twangers off it? Those days may be returning. Intel has apparently decided that it cares about we PC enthusiasts after all. Well, kinda. Oh, and Nvidia has another catastrophically expensive video card which you won’t be buying. Same old.

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GDC was jam-packed with brilliant talks, and I missed far too many of them because infinity appointments beckoned. One of the absolute best I *did* see, however, was Mass Effect 4 designer Manveer Heir making an impassioned plea to developers for more diversity in games. He gave a talk equal parts well-reasoned and resolute, arguing not that all games should change their icky ways, but that our industry’s predominate pattern needs to shift away from generic leads and hurtful stereotypes. ”I sincerely hope that you are ready for that challenge, because I sure as hell am!” he bellowed before being mobbed by fellow designers. I caught up with Heir afterward to discuss some of his talk’s finer points and how BioWare’s become more sensitive to these issues as time has progressed.

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It’s only been a month and a half since I wrote my mega-preview of Age Of Wonders III and spending around fifteen hours with a review copy of the game hasn’t done a great deal to change my mind about its many merits. It hasn’t extended its tendrils to tickle any deeper fancies either, although I’ll concede that the world is a little weirder and more wonderful than my initial expeditions suggested. I’ve spent many hours with the long-awaited strategy sequel and here’s wot I think.

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Plague Inc: Evolved, an unfinished but solid version of which is out on Steam Early Access now, is a strategy game about wiping out humanity.

At first I felt terrible, as the red dots denoting infection spread across the United Kingdom, into France, across the sea to Norway, and then the deaths began to roll in.

Then I grew annoyed at Iceland’s panicked closing of its airports. I frowned as my bacterial infection withered in the African heat.

Then I smiled as migrating birds carried the plague to the other side of the world, as the lights gradually went out in Canada, as Germany’s infrastructure collapsed in the wake of the mounting fatalities, and as China’s extinction dealt a savage blow to global research for a cure.
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Mike Bithell, creator of Thomas Was Alone, knows a lot about Robin Hood. As we sit in a Starbucks five thousand miles from either of our homes, his tank-like laptop greedily drinking electricity from the coffee store’s wall, I find myself scribbling notes not about his upcoming stealth puzzler Volume, but about how it wasn’t until King Henry VIII took a shine to the story that the behooded thiefster became a noble character. In fact, the whole myth was an excuse to see a few fights during the May Games festivities. He didn’t even give to the poor until the 17th century! “So when are you making a Robin Hood game?” I ask him. “This is it,” says Bithell, waving at the screen.

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Extrasolar is a browser-based game about controlling a lunar rover as it explores the surface of an island on a far-off planet, poring over the photographs it returns, and inadvertently uncovering a conspiracy as you do. It’s out now, and while paid upgrades are available it can very be much played for free – as such the below is a discussion of the experience, not the value proposition.

For the last fortnight or so, I’ve been playing a game for approximately three minutes every hour. (I’d like to say ‘apart from at night’, but thanks to my living on a noisy street and having a baby in the next room, that would be a barefaced lie.) I didn’t do much, myself, though the small amount of clicking and reading at my end did result in a remote-controlled rover travelling vast distances across another world, light years away from our own. So, in a way, I did a great deal.
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Now here’s a weird thing: when the news broke that Facebook had suddenly made Oculus VR’s reality much, much greener, you want to know what I was doing? Transcribing a last-day-of-GDC interview with… Oculus Rift’s resident wonderchild, Palmer Luckey. In retrospect, he almost certainly knew his company would be under Facebook’s globe-spanning blue umbrella come Tuesday, but that obviously never came up. Instead, Luckey spoke enthusiastically about Oculus’ future in gaming, his company’s research into interfaces that can simulate arms and legs in VR, all the while batting away assertions that Sony’s PlayStation VR mega-mask Morpheus is any sort of threat. So here you have it: one of the final Oculus interviews ever pre-Facebook. Let’s see how it all holds up. 

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