SOE’s John Smedley has been busy blogging about their games, and he says this:

“…early next year we will have announcements about Planetside Next followed by a beta. I can say this – it’s coming along awesome. I can also say that the first beta testers are going to be current Planetside subscribers. I’ve gotten a lot of email from current players offering to help test the game and we’re going to take them up on it.”

OKAY. EXCITED.

There’s nothing behind today’s window on the advent calendar. Not a thing. I guess you’ll have to find something else to do with your Saturday, eh? Perhaps you could pick up one of those home beer-making kits. It’s only that you can’t read about one of our games of the year behind this window, because there’s nothing there>. (more…)

Sundays are for snow and tea and looking out of the window, wondering if we should go sledging. Snow. Great white heaps of the stuff. If only it were gold. Or instant coffee. Ah well, best ignore it, stay inside and pray we see another summer. In the meantime we’ll peruse some links pertaining to computational software entertainments, and maybe we’ll find something interesting. Maybe.

• Sam McGrath, formerly of Offset Software, and now of Fractiv, has been talking about the peculiar, difficult, but ultimately lucrative journey he had with Project Offset, the Intel-sponsored development that was supposed to bring us a game that would showcase Intel technology. There’s an interview on BigDownload here. From the interview: “The original vision might be summed up as a fantasy version of Call of Duty. CoD has such perfect execution in terms of delivering that cinematic experience and we wanted to achieve that in a fantasy setting with dragons, trolls, goblins, siege vehicles, etc.” And also: “veryone was setting their sights very high. Had Larrabee worked out exactly as Intel had hoped, our game would have been the flagship title demonstrating their new tech, which would be a huge thing. (Think Microsoft and Halo…)” All that, of course, didn’t work out.

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The sheer weight of spam being directed at RPS has proven to be too much. We’ve now moved over to comments being available for registered users only. We never wanted to have to do this, but the forces of evil were too strong. Sorry. Please register.

Try logging in and out again to deal with the peculiar “posting too quickly” bug. It should not appear again once you have done that. If it does, tell me.

UPDATE: For those wondering about spam still appearing, yes, it can still turn up because spammers can register manually and set their bots a-spammin’. It is, however, much easier for us to clear up like this, and there is also the added bonus that spam-o-tron won’t spam legitimate comments.

Oh, Hello. Sorry to barge into your young men’s website like this, but… you have girls here? Oh, how charming. Times do change. Oh, deary me. Anyway – I’m John Walker’s nurse, and the only way I could get him to lie down was to promise that I’d transcribe everything he said in his delirious state and put it on the Internet. Oh, I’m blogging? Oh my! What would Mavis say if she saw me now? Anyway! He tells me that the eighteenth game of Christmas is… (more…)

Winter has got its frosty grip on the UK. I recommend you stay in doors with a cup of hot tea, and play some of these lovely cheap video games. Do not go outside unless it is an absolute emergency. Some Christmas sales have already kicked off, although the big Steam one won’t be with us for a few days. Be sure to keep an eye on SavyGamer.co.uk if you want to make sure you don’t miss out on any of the epic savings this holiday season. Here’s this week’s selection: (more…)

This week I spoke to Vex Studios’ Ryan Wenke about their forthcoming UDK-based game, Jeklynn Heights. It’s a sort of spooky fairytale multiplayer game with visuals that look like something out of one of the Alice games, or a Tim Burton movie. If that wasn’t interesting enough, it’s also messing about with a number of concepts such as character progression and mixed perspectives. Wenke told me a bit about his studio’s esoteric approach to game development, and opens an invitation to you lot to sign up to the beta test of the game and find out what it’s all about. (more…)

As I wake up to a thick blanket of snow that I’m too ill to venture out in, and curse the skies for their endlessly cruel mockery, I do spare a thought for the Australians. In fact, a good half of the planet lives under the hegemony of the romanticised “white Christmas”, as their Peanuts cartoons and idyllic snowglobes contradict the lovely sunny day outside. This plight is also seemingly recognised by Team Fortress 2, which has just released an updated entitled, Australian Christmas.

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There’s been a tangy whiff of “hmm” around Dragon Age 2 amongst the PC faithful, with the game apparently headed in something of a press all the buttons kill all the monsters press them kill them press them kill them> direction we perhaps hadn’t expected from our beloved tactics’n'conversation opus. Turns out that perhaps we’ve got the wrong impression, though.

Now, while this video makes the bewildering mistake of primarily consisting of a chattering man filmed in near-darkness, it also very deliberately seeks to demonstrate that pause’n'play tactical combat remains present and correct in the PC version of the game. (more…)

Oh my goodness, I’m so ill. This is the longest I’ve managed to sit upright for two days. Something is definitely wrong with with human body when it cannot sit up without then needing an hour’s sleep. But such is my dedication to the wonder of RPS that I feel compelled to at least write something> before the week is over. So what more appropriate game name than I Must Run – an activity that if I were to try my legs would shatter like frail china, collapsing me to the ground in a thousand pieces. Although as you start the demo it adds the apposite tagline, “And never come back.”

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