That’s right: It took yours truly a full ten minutes to realize that the door in front of her in Amnesia was not, in fact, a puzzle, but rather a thing on hinges that opened when pushed. Which apparently does make it a puzzle of sorts. To be fair, my sanity meter was, at the time, on its slide from crystal clear to “slight headache” to “hands shaking.” Literally.
My point is, it’s time for you all to go play the recently released demo for Frictional’s Amnesia: The Dark Descent, because so far I’m loving it. A new game from the makers of Penumbra, Amnesia promises a piece of survival horror where light is scarce and every second is a battle against madness. In less dramatic terms, it’s a puzzle- and stealth-based adventure game with scarce resources and clever physics, making copious use of fog and shadows to unsettle both your character and you.
You’ll be taking the role of Daniel, a self-made amnesiac trapped in a maze-like castle and haunted by a malicious shadow. The enemies themselves stay mostly out of sight (because remember, if you can see them, they can see you), so you’ll spend the demo fighting a much more insidious enemy: Your own psyche. Daniel’s sanity is depleted both by staying in the dark and by witnessing unsettling events, like the fleshy mass that has begun to grow on the castle walls, and his mental state determines how well you’ll be able to control him, so you’ll be looking out not only for monsters but for candles, tinderboxes, and lantern oil. It’s very much like the opposite of Thief. Too little sanity, and Daniel lays down like an exhausted child, refusing to go any further until you’ve given him some light.
Amnesia will be released on September 8, and the demo is available for all operating systems (including Linux!) either through Steam or directly from their site at AmnesiaGame.com.
Fans of PC digital downloads might want to head over to Direct2Drive for some great looking deals. For those of you who aren’t die-hard steam fanboys, over the next 4 weeks you might find something previously missed. So, what’s on offer? Check it out:
Use the coupon code PAX to save $5 on a $15 or more order.
End of Summer Sale – 2 games on sale every day for 30 days.
D2D Turns 6! – A weekly offer every Wednesday of titles available for $6. This weeks the games on offer are:
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic
Jedi Knight Bundle
Achtung Panzer
Titan Quest Bundle
Defense Grid: The Awakening
Tropico 3
Tropico Reloaded
Football Manager 2010
Penumbra Collection
My personal picks would be KOTOR, Tropico 3 and Football Manager 2010. The same deals apply to the UK and EU site at £6 and €6.
Late To The Party is a series where we take a look at a game we’ve just completed, perhaps a bit late, that you probably completed ages ago. It’s a chance for those who have finished it to reflect and discuss. Be warned though: FULL SPOILERS are discussed in the full post.
In psyching myself up to play Metroid: Other M, I came to the realization that my entire youth was a sham. It was a misspent haze of Mario, badminton, Gushers, Saved By The Bell, and Home Alone-inspired maps of ingenious ways to foil would-be intruders. There are some who would say I accomplished much. I blazed trails through the woods as secret pathways for discreet neighborhood travel. I penned a Broadway caliber play on the ins and outs of catching a Leprechaun. I toiled day and night through bloody fingertips to construct the K’Nex Big Ball Factory. I invented snowcream, and later discovered that almost the entire world had stolen my idea.
But it was all for naught. I never played a Metroid game.
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Why is it that I embrace the advent of Mac gaming, and smile when people tell me “I’m a Mac?” The answer is simple. I’m not a slave.
Throughout my life I’ve been a die-hard PC user. My father introduced computers to our home when floppy-boot IBMs set you back $3,000 — Treasure Mountain!, Captain Comic, and Hero’s Quest were staples of my childhood. Since college, I’ve even been a PC evangelist, suggesting to friends and family that PCs offer great value compared to alternatives. Naturally, I’ve been tied intimately to the PC “ecosystem” as an avid PC gamer. I’ve custom built my last three PCs from individual components after feverish research. I’ve used Macs in the past, I’ve briefly owned an iPod, and in recent years I tend to avoid Apple products like the plague. I long ago abandoned iTunes for Winamp and Zune. Xbox 360 tends to be the preferred console of my free time. I loved Windows Vista. To any outsider I would appear to be the biggest Microsoft fanboy that ever lived (except, of course, for this guy). So why is it that I embrace the advent of Mac gaming, and smile when people tell me “I’m a Mac?” The answer is simple.
I’m not a slave.
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Capcom loves to keep gamers in the dark for a while to let speculation build — just look up the numerous threads concerning the roster in the upcoming Marvel vs. Capcom 3. It’s a great technique for building up hype for an upcoming product, but sometimes it can just be plain cruel. A couple months ago, Capcom-Unity posted a trailer for an upcoming Mega Man game, Mega Man: Universe. The trailer was crafty and entertaining, featuring claymation versions of Mega Man, Ryu and Arthur from the Ghosts and Goblins series. But the trailer failed in one aspect for me, since it had no actual game play footage! Fans were hyped but had no idea of how the game would actually play.
Finally, we got our answer in the form of a new trailer with an introduction from Keiji Inafune, the creator of Mega Man. The video features short snippets of classic 2D, side scrolling, platforming action that we all know, love, and expect from the Blue Bomber; he climbs ladders, jumps over pits of spikes and bottomless death, and dispatches familiar enemies with his Mega Buster. Even better, the very end of the trailer confirms that Ryu from Street Fighter will be a playable character! Even though there are no hints as to what the title implies or what the story line could be, the trailer is enough to make me keep a close eye on this project.
Check the trailer after the break!
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Faux-Sho’ is a fantastical series offering a glimpse into the demented minds of our editorial staff. Really, who knows what you’ll find in there. We make no claims about the veracity of information that follows, but really, anything’s possible.
Roger Ebert, the famed film critic who once claimed that “video games can never be art,” has now decided to change his tune. In a recent blog post, and scattered throughout several dozen tweets, Ebert has revealed that, at the behest of the gaming community which has been diligently trolling the comments section of RogerEbert.com for months, he has started to give gaming a chance. Not only that, but he claims to have found himself “completely enthralled” by what he has seen.
So what was the culprit? Was it the influx of “arty/pretentious” indie platformers that have been hitting the Xbox Live Arcade, like 2008’s Braid, or this summer’s Limbo? Maybe it was one of the Xbox’s critically-acclaimed Triple-A titles, like Red Dead Redemption? In fact, Ebert’s metamorphosis actually took place at a recent Microsoft preview event, where the prolific newspaper columnist was specially invited to take part in an exclusive Halo: Reach multiplayer session.
Hit the read more link to see the rest of Ebert’s remarks.
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As announced at yesterday’s Apple product update, the exploration-based Epic Citadel is now available in the App Store, and looks to be just the first step in a comprehensive plan to bring the Unreal engine to Apple’s mobile products. EC, which takes you through a medieval village and showcases lighting, bump offset mapping, and texture blending, seems designed to take advantage of the larger size of the iPad, but works just fine on smaller screens.
If you have an iProduct, Epic Citadel is definitely worth a download; I’ve played around with it a little, and it’s a trip through a world that would look great even on your PC. The textures especially are dazzling, and the lighting is beautiful, although we have yet to see anything except architecture. As it is, the world EC presents is nice, but a little empty: No NPCs, and there’s no way yet to interact with the world besides walking through it.
We’ve got it on good authority, though, that Unreal has a lot more in store for us, including a fully developed Epic Citadel. Read the rest of this entry
Only a month after the scheduled launch in the United States, Pokémon Ranger: Guardian Signs will hit the shelves in Europe on November 5, 2010. As the third installment in the Ranger series, players will continue to capture and befriend Pokémon—even legendary ones—by circling them with the Capture Styler.
New to the series, you can now call Pokémon to your aid by drawing their Ranger Sign on the Nintendo DS Touch Screen as you investigate the actions of Pokémon Pinchers, who have been chasing and catching Pokémon.
With multiplayer missions and the chance to catch Raikou, Entei and Suicune in just two months, European Pokémon fans can rejoice! Whether you want to protect Pokémon or you can’t help but buy games full of cute little creatures (like me), it may be time to bust out the DS and start circling some legendary Pokémon.
Indie Quest is a column from a man on a mission. That mission? To locate, explore, and reveal the hidden gems of the gaming world: Independent games. Games without “suits.” Games with swelling hearts and fists full of swagger. Games evolving and innovating faster than you can say “Triple-A.” Join us as he descends into the gaming underground with nothing more than a notepad and his wits.
I can’t beat it.
213 deaths, now, and I still can’t beat it. You know how some people blaze through a game once and never play it again? That’s me. Guilty. With so many wonderful indie games to cover, I don’t have much time for sticking around for a second play-through.
Spelunky, accordingly, is not my kind of game. You die often. You die easily. You die so many times that the big, stupid death count ceases being a number, eventually, and transforms into a grim reminder of one simple fact: you suck at this. I like to picture my two-hundred corpses stacked high to the sky in an angry middle-finger of death from developer Derek Yu.
But I’m still playing. Here’s why: Spelunky is awesome.
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To say I’m a big MMO fan would be a fair assumption and the Guild Wars 2 “Manifesto” trailer released earlier this month got me as excited as a teenage girl queuing up to see the latest Eclipse movie (make sure you check out the GW2 trailer here). Info for Guild Wars 2 has been trickling out in recent months, teasing me at an increasing rate. Among the juicy bits are details about Guild Wars 2’s player professions (conventionally referred to as “classes” in other MMOs). Like any MMO, Guild Wars 2 will boast a wide selection of professions, and ArenaNet recently dropped full details on the fourth playable profession: the Necromancer.
Being the dedicated MMO player-come-blogger I am, I thought it would be nice to give our readers a round up on the professions announced thus far. Hit up the break and take a peek at what to expect from the upcoming Guild Wars 2.
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