Someone at EA isn’t having a good day. Mass Effect 3, which will presumably be announced in a blaze of hyperbole this weekend at those VGA things, got posted up on the EA Store. Oops. It’s gone now, but at least we know for sure what all that teaser nonsense was about.

VG247 snagged the blurb: “Earth is burning. Striking from beyond known space, a race of terrifying machines have begun their destruction of the human race. As Commander Shepard, an Alliance Marine, your only hope for saving mankind is to rally the civilizations of the galaxy and launch one final mission to take back the Earth.” I bet there will be some guns and/or chat involved in doing that. Maybe some zooming about in a spaceship to mix it up. Something like that.

Dejobaan, I hate you. I hate you because not only is the title of your latest game once again too long to fit into one of our titles and making a horrible mess of our tags (honestly, look at that disgrace below), this time it’s also far funnier than any headline pun we could make about it. So I don’t even bother trying.

“1… 2… 3… KICK IT! (Drop That Beat Like an Ugly Baby)”

UGLY BABY! Yeah, you win, Dejobaan. This time. (more…)

The other day I was thinking about games in which you would occasionally fall out of the bottom of the map. San Francisco Rush was good for that, on the console toys. You could spill out of the map and race around in infinite pale green. “I remember when games used to be full of glitches,” I thought to myself. And then I saw Portal completed in ten minutes and realised that they still are. You just need to find them.

In other news: Why would you find them? > Unless you were playing Söldner! or something, where that was the point of playing it. Ten minutes of your life below. Imagine what that means in minutes of his> life. (more…)

I would like to see the genre renamed please. “Match-3-or-more”. Matching just 3 is for loser wimps. I’m all about matching 5. The great-granddaddy of this ill-named puzzle favourite is Bejeweled, and PopCap have just released its third (well, nine hundred and seventeenth) incarnation, simply called Bejeweled 3. So has dragging gems into same-coloured lines changed dramatically enough to warrant yet another game? Here’s Wot I Think.>

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That’s Rogue as in Nethack and Angband, not Rogue as in Han Solo and backstab damage multipliers, alas. Courtesy of the IndieGames blog, Rogue Survivor is a zombie survival game from the Dwarf Fortress school of development- barebones interface and MAXIMUM FEATURES. It’s currently enjoying some rapid development, but you can already recruit other survivors, trade with them, use carpentry to barricade doors and windows and gradually work your way towards a Left 4 Dead style safehouse and/or taking on the mysterious creature that prowls the sewers. You can get it here, read the wiki here and there’s a guide to surviving your first week here. Warning! Movement defaults to the numpad. A Let’s Play video that highlights plenty of the game’s features lurks after the jump. (more…)

RPS is strictly a for-profit venture. There is no creativity here. No integrity. No love. We’re only here for the filthy lucre. There is no more beautiful word in the English language than ‘monetise.’ By way of proof, please pay your 48.7 micro-groat tithe to ACCESS THE TENTH WINDOW. (more…)

Dungeon-keeping dungeon-based dungeon game Dungeons has a new trailer out. We’ve put in the dungeon, below. Dungeon! Dungeoning aside, it’s looking pretty good. If they can get that oh-so-knife-edge balance right to produce the kind of continuous challenge we came to expect from… other games in a similar genre, then it could be good. Hell, you could help that happen, if you sign up for the ongoing beta test. Why wouldn’t you do that?

We also have a release dungeon: February 2011>. (more…)

The latest Arma II expandalone – Private Military Company – is out, a little later than scheduled. There’s a splendid launch trailer to celebrate this, below, which details a bit more about the story missions from this new campaign. I’m going to take a look at the full game as soon as I can. Meanwhile, check out our interview with BIS for more. (more…)

Our guest Azerothian Al ‘Bickers’ Bickham returns with more dispatches from WoW’s front-lines. Here’s the first chunk, in case you missed it.>

I’ll be honest, I couldn’t give a fig for most of the races in World of WarCraft. Apart from the big, Navajo-tromping, cow-faced Taurens. I kind of dig them. And the Trolls. They’ve a little Ska in their blood.

But give me an Orc, a Dwarf, a Night Elf, a Blood Elf, a Human… yawn. Terribly hard to get excited about. Which is why the hairier half of Cataclysm’s two new races, the werewolfey Worgen, has come as such a pleasant surprise. (more…)

One of my favourite things about the first Dead Space was that Isaac was just this very quiet, practical guy with terrible posture who shouted in disgust whenever bad things happened to him and who wasn’t squeamish about stomping the shit out of Necromorphs. A hero after my own heart. With Dead Space 2 he seems to be getting some all-star treatment, becoming this awesome character who embodies the brand, but I guess that’s OK because the new zero-G sections look loving awesome>. There’s only a glimpse of them in this new single-player trailer, but have a look and see what I mean. (more…)