DO YOU own World of Warcraft, plus Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King but not> Cataclysm? Would that describe your situation? As of today Blizzard are offering you guys a free 10 day trial to sample Cataclysm’s doomsday delights. You’ll need a level 78 character to try out most of the new zones (which our man-on-the-inside Al Bickham writes about here), but failing that you’ll still be able visit the bizarre new Goblin starting area or the Worgen’s gothic home (which Bickham writes about here). So, yes. Go, go, go! Go and be delighted.

RPS has a plan. This plan will lead us to ULTIMATE TRIUMPH. If we take even a single misstep, however, all is doomed. We must be pure. We must be vigilant. We must behave.

Prepare for descent. Open the seventeenth window, and to victory! (more…)

What happens in the video? Well, it seems that a young castle is killed. Poor thing. It was quietly grazing on the mountainside and along came some castle-hunters and stuck a siege-machine in its belly. It was then skinned and the bricks were eaten by peasants. Nasty business.

In related news: I interviewed CA studio director Mike Simpson the other day. We talked about Shogun 2 and the problems with Empire and lots of other interesting stuff. Expect that interview on Monday. It’s a decent read. Now, go take a look at the fate of that castle. (more…)

Merry Christmas. Messhof has a new game out, and it’s called Pipedreamz. I’m going to go ahead and say that he named the game after the drug-pipe he uses to smoke his drugs! I am saying that Messhof’s games are weird. Messhof, if you want to sue me for libel then this is my email address.

Pipedreamz embodies the Californian dream of working in a burger shop, riding the waves, scarfing down tasty snacks and (more generally) trying to get as high a score as possible before you’re fired. Like most of Messhof’s games, the music’s amazing and it’s better played than described. It’s also not Nidhogg. MESSHOF! Snap whatever legal shackles are preventing you from releasing Nidhogg and release it. The people need it in their lives. Thanks to the IndieGames blog for the tipoff. Merry Christmas, IndieGames blog.

Just like that, Bloodline Champions has entered open beta! Anyone interested in downloading and playing the skill-focused arena game can do so here. Good news indeed. BC is my favourite out of all the Defense of the Ancients-inspired games that I’ve tried. It streamlines each match into a minute of white-hot combat, and the way it’s designed allows for displays of skill and cunning that make you want to stand up from your chair and salute. You can currently pre-order Bloodline Champions for £24.99 to get some special benefits when it comes out (whenever that is), so interested parties would be wise to try the game now. Thanks to Blues for the news. Open beta launch trailer follows… (more…)

So then. There was this leak of an internal schedule from within Blizzard, which we were a bit sceptical about and didn’t bother to post. It mentioned a game called “Titan” slated for the end of 2013. Then in these VGA interviews Frank Pearce of Blizzard admits that this is the next-gen MMO, but won’t say any more about it.

My bet? I’m confident that the MMOFPS rumours are true. It’ll be a sci-fi action game with hefty social and trade elements, and it’ll be a new franchise. Not World Of Starcraft, but close enough. Blizzard will be looking closely at APB, Firefall and everything else in that area, and then they’ll make their move. I think this ties neatly into the “No Subscriptions For CoD”, too. No, there won’t be subscriptions for that, but Activision can rely on Blizzard to create something else that we will pay subs for, something that will bestride the Halo/Gears space marine manshoot genre at the same time. It’s going to be bold, and it’s probably going to look like a big risk, just like WoW did.

Two Minecraft posts back to back! What’ll we do? Well, I suppose we’ll just have to deal with it. It’s all the fault of RPS reader SF Legend for pointing me towards FancyPack v1.4, a fan mod which expands on the game’s farming and cooking as well as adding piles and piles of new decorative items and furniture to the game, including a smoking chimney>. Yes. Ooh, and above you’ll see all the different bonecrafts you can make from skeletons. I had no idea Minecraft content mods had gotten so ambitious. More details on the pack plus a download link right here.

Bucyruss’ BiomeTerrain Mod is a modification for Minecraft that lets you fiddle with Minecraft’s world generation algorithms- anything from biome size and type to custom trees. Now, that’s probably worth a post in itself, but far more entertaining is this playful competition over on the official Minecraft forums where people are battling to create and post the best settings to use with that mod. I’ve made a gallery of the best ones below, and I’m going to try my hand at some VVVVVV-style naming. Above, we have Zarkauff’s Continental Rift, or what I like to call “Wet Tiers of Sorrow”. (more…)

I’ve dithered about posting this, because the acting and dialogue is… well, let’s go with “enthusiastic”, but the concept and the special effects are pretty stonking, by and large.

Beyond The Real Life is Who Framed Roger Rabbit with Warcraft, essentially. WoW machinima overlaid onto and blended with real-world footage. “Almost every shot is a combination of in-game items, characters, or environments with real life footage and special effects,” it says here. (more…)

Kieron posted about turn-based Steampunk dogfightin’ browser game Steambirds back in March, and now it has a sequel called Steambirds Survival! Fancy that. I spent the last 20 minutes trying and failing to get to grips with its homing missiles, but I still had fun. Man, I wish I could fly planes. Just think- while I am sat here at my desk, literally dozens of men the world over are sat at their planes.> Watery-sounding and somewhat underwhelming footage of Steambirds Survival beneath the jump, s you’re better off just playing it. Thanks to RPS reader Michael “Fingers” Nørskov for the tipoff. (more…)