The message for the games industry is clear: you don’t have to have pretensions to art – because here is a game that could not be more unpretentious in an artistic sense – for your game to have a serious message. Even the manshooter can be about something, without having to carefully distance itself with irony or hyperbolic absurdity. But crucially there is also scope to do shooters differently on a mechanical level. They do not have to be linear rollercoasters, nor multiplayer menageries. They can be slow. Even contemplative. -Jim Rossignol, “On The Importance Of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.” @ Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Most of the key people involved in this publish, on the game team and our platform side, have been here very long days and every day leading up to this. I just had to tell some folks that had been here for 30+ hours to go get some sleep. If there was any way I thought we could be certain you’d be able to play with everything correct tonight, we would have done that. -Rich Lawrence, SOE CTO, on the EverQuest II F2P downtime

No, I did all the art, I did all the sound effects, I wrote every line of text, I wrote every line of code, I wrote all the manuals, the prequels and all the way up though Ultima 4 were almost entirely solo endeavors, in every aspect. It was a one-man band. -Richard Garriott, in interview with IndustryGamers

“You just sit there and watch the explosions,” Gilliam said. “I couldn’t tell you what the movie was about. The movie hammers the audience into submission. They are influenced by video games, but in video games at least you are immersed; in these movies you’re left out. In films, there’s so much overt fantasy now that I don’t watch a lot because everything is possible now. There’s no tension there.” -Terry Gilliam @ Hero Complex

Goats vs Nazis, then, is the latest game project to kickstart their development with the platform.

I don’t even know where to start – or end, for that matter. Certainly, Goats vs Nazis looks to be one part game, nine parts marketing campaign – heck, that’s exactly why we’re mentioning the project on the blog! The actual novelty value of juxtaposing goats to nazis is obviously up to the funder/player/developer to decide. If you DO feel that it’s a good idea, then off to Kickstarter you go!

As if Goats vs Nazis wasn’t enough for just one post, I also stumbled upon Jay Tholen’s Dropsy. Dropsy seems – by my estimation, anyway – to be a Windows-bound point and click adventure game about a… clown… that is manic, depressive or both? The hero, “hand-less, unintelligible, and questionably human” … “will also encounter colorful characters and mind-stretching logic puzzles in surreal, off-kilter landscapes”. Sounds a notch like Toonstruck to me.

Other than that, I haven’t the faintest idea as to what is going on here. But fret not, for there be video! The Kickstarter video gives you a fantastic idea of what you might be getting. (You’ll be getting crazy, that’s what you’ll be getting). Keep in mind that Mr. Tholen has set the funding bar for the game very, very low indeed, so don’t be afraid to pledge just because the measly sum of $225 has already been fulfilled.

P.S. Can’t believe I just wrote this post.

In addition to the most egregious issues with texture popping above, Vsync, Anisotropic filtering and texture quality settings were only added in a patch. The first (1st) and only (1) patch. Certainly, omitting these more fine-tuned customization features in this day and age is not in the least unheard of, but finding the paragons of the PC platform since 1991 – Id Software – as the offending party is rather inconceivable, even in a gaming world where Crytek, Epic and Rockstar Games have long since bailed out.

The texture popping above is related to the game’s texture Auto-Balancer, which somehow tends to load and utilize 4096k textures instead of the much crisper 8192k (or the gargantuan 16384k textures that take most of the game’s 21659 Mb install size!).

More puzzling yet is the inability for players to bind numpad keys properly – especially the number 5(!?) – leaving left-handers in a proverbial bind. Different mice and keyboards are exhibiting various symptoms as well.

Let’s not even mention the 64-bit executable. …or lack thereof. Let us however mention the missing idstudio level editor, which is apparently dependent on the very same 64-bit .exe.

To wrap up this terribly clever post before things get utterly out of hand, we could take a look at the game’s collector edition (check out the comparison photo on the left), which comes bundled with a Rage comic that not only is 2/3 the size of the normal issues, but also only contains 2/3 of the Rage story arc. Boom!

Glorious October Carnage Sale! In celebration of a fantastic year (releasing Avadon and putting out our first titles on Steam and the iPad), we are permanently lowering the prices of everything we sell by 20% or more! Even better, for the entire month of October, all of our products for Windows and Mac will be 10% off!

In his blog, Vogel also outlines his motivations for the change in the company’s overall pricing structure:

A LOT of money is being made by selling games for cheap. So now , instead of selling our games for $25 or $28 (!!!), we’ll sell them for $20 or $15. I know this still seems like a lot, but I haven’t backed off on the key thing I’ve long said … People Who Write Niche Games Can’t Charge a Dollar. If you’re making a pretty, shiny, highly casual game with cartoon squirrels and you think you can find a million fans for it, go ahead. Charge a dollar. You’ll have to. But if you write games like mine? Low budget, old school, hardcore RPGs with lots of content? If I charged a dollar for it, I’d have to sell a copy to pretty much every interested human everywhere to have a chance of making money.

The end result of the price drop? Geneforge 1-3 go for 15% and 4-5 for $20; the same pricing structure applies to Avernum, too. Throw in the extra 10% October discount and you’re looking at some pretty cheap stuff. Avadon, now $20 on the website, is actually cheaper still on Steam right now, so you might want to take a look at that, if you’d like some extra DRM to go with your games!

“Ah, but The Indie Stone is a brave-faced stone.” -Brendan Caldwell

In what can only be described (in suitably hyperbolic tones) as the most unfortunate development process ever (Duke Nukem Forever, you say? Ptsch! Ptschhh!), the Indie Stone have had their dev laptops stolen. According to the team, the latest update – and as such, months of work – to Project Zomboid was lost due to the game being backed up between the two stolen machines, yet seldom externally. A massive, repetitive witch-hunt by the gaming community subsequently ensued on both Reddit and Twitter, resulting in emotional distress, self-flagellation and many a brain cell lost.

Yes, perhaps the lost data should have been backed up better, but after such a costly setback, the isometric open-world zombie survival game developers need all the financial and emotional support they can get. It’s not like “Backups!!” weren’t the first thing they thought when the severity of the situation first unraveled.

The burglary is only the latest episode in an inexplicable series of unfortunate events; the team has had their Paypal funds held hostage by the evil bank-like corporation (also experienced by the Xenonauts team as well as Mojang); only shortly after the Paypal debacle, the Indie Stone also got a similar receipt from Google Checkout, who blocked new orders and revoked access to their funds.

A man blows himself up in a car next to the aforementioned flat; their expensive web servers crash. A development build leaks.

Once the team finally gets back on track, solving their issues both with Paypal and  Google Checkout by ingeniously pairing joke games to actual pre-order subscriptions – then, the burglary.

Gosh, these hard-headed, brave-faced guys, they’ve got stones all right, having already promised to “come back stronger”! You should preorder Project Zomboid now – just to tempt the fates, spite the gods, piss off the demons and so forth. Surely something somewhere is trying to put and end to Project Zomboid. Let’s not let it, shall we?

I can vouch for the two main games which are excellent offerings, but Trine in the secondary bundle is also a good time. A beautiful 3D-rendered game in which you are confined to a 2D plane, Trine is a platformer with physics-based movement and puzzles. Frozenbyte are set to release a sequel within the next few months, so this is the perfect opportunity to catch yourself up before then. Frozen Synapse, as I have covered in brief before, is a slick tactical combat game with both a decent singleplayer campaign and a plethora of multiplayer modes. The included soundtrack has a great cyberpunk feel and is reminiscent of Alexander Brandon’s work in Deus Ex. SpaceChem is a gem of a procedural puzzle game hiding beneath a nerdy chemistry theme. Speaking as someone who was always terrible at chemistry, this game is worth your time. It’s best to try the free demo and see for yourself, because the game looks more intimidating than it actually is. My best attempt at a description is that you create a reactor by means of flowchart tools in order to produce target outputs from a given input. Oh dear, you had better try that demo, it’s much more fun than it sounds, I promise. You’ll see what I mean when you finish your first reactor and then go back and obsessively try and tweak it til it is more efficient than anyone else’s in your friends list.

So go on, do it and thank me later.

For those potentially coming fresh off Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the cyberpunk action-adventure of the moment (also included on our list of recent cyberpunk titles), Flying Wild Hog’s début throwback FPS Hard Reset might take some getting used to. After all, the game’s name could and should be taken in reference to its status as an earnest homage to “all those forgotten Dooms, Quakes, and Painkillers”.

What the ex-members of CD Projekt RED, People Can Fly, City Interactive and Metropolis do is literally drop the you onto a dank, bleak futuristic alleyway, with barrels and crates strewn across the street, glowing power-ups beckoning. Efforts to interact with this architecturally impressive scene will prove much in vain, however, with items merely bumping, bouncing and rolling about; If you discover an explosive barrel or a glowing transformer, you can rest assured its only function is to act as a stationary tool for tactical destruction.

Stuff blows up. Big time. End of story?

Hard Looks

In its outstanding presentation, achieved with a tailor-made in-house engine called Road Hog, Hard Reset presents most importantly a functional façade. The environments are immaculately detailed and flesh out overtly familiar sights for any fan of cyberpunk: The city streets are grungy and gloomy, littered with machinery and debris. Above, a stunning skybox; a vast sprawling future city booming with electronic activity.

At ground level, there is plenty to take in, with dynamic neon lights, signs and electric blue arcs providing mood. In an interesting visual opposition, detail textures are high-resolution while generic world-building textures remain smudgier, illustrating the griminess of the surroundings. For a pure-bred corridor shooter, Hard Reset offers a surprising array of locations. As paradoxical as it sounds, the game’s otherwise generic hallways, streets and corridors remain engaging throughout – at the very least for the very generous 5-7 hours of play the game has on offer, perhaps thanks to the game’s solid aesthetic sense.

While players might not experience much of the city outside the designated corridor, they are certainly able to hear it: Terrific sound design is utilised just as much for combat and action as it is for world building. Interactive advertisements and vending machines are multi-purpose, serving not only as electrical conduits to snare enemies with, but also in creating a sense of place and belonging.

Patrolling hovercars whir past overhead, sirens blaring, with public service announcements imploring players not to vandalize public property (you will vandalize public property). The combat sounds are both heavy and meaty metallic, with satisfying *thunks* and *clanks* and *fizzles* of exploding machinery. In this way, the sound effects accentuate the physicality of Hard Reset’s combat, wherein robots topple over, skitter and crash all over the place. Explosions feel appropriately devastating.

Excellent environmental music by Wojchiech Blazejczyk, ambient and atmospheric, plays in the background intermittently. Heavier, industrial-infused electronic beats are dropped in to heighten the intensity of combat while the more tonal and textural synths are reserved for the quieter moments.

The Flash-animated motion comic cutscenes – clearly done on the cheap, but well enough – stylistically develop slightly as the game proceeds, from slightly tacky to relatively nice. In-game storyline exposition is achieved via radio transmissions, though the gravelly, foul-mouthed main character only speaks during these animated cutscenes. The voice acting itself hardly leaves a lasting impression.

Hard Restart

Old is the new new. Hard Reset inhabits the kind of standard cyberpunkian fare where corporations rule the day, personalities are digital and rogue robotniks are rolling and hating on the streets. Players fill in the shoes of the good Major Whatshisname, working as robot enforcer for yet another Corporation – with a capital C, right? Right! – and nothing, dear readers and players, is ever as it seems.

The names, the faces and the places – Bezoar City, Sector 6, CLN-16, that sort of random thing – are certainly there, but frankly, the game’s exposition is a disjointed, comedic, and often simply nonsensical mess, its dialogic substance formed mostly of curse words and detached technobabble. (Once Greek mythology gets dropped in, one cannot but smile. It’s all very silly, yes, but also curiously endearing.)

“Bezoar this, Sector that” is all pretty much beside the point, though: After all, there are plenty enough bright neon lights and signs, shady streets and exploding robots; that’s as elementary and as visceral a cyberpunk gaming experience as it gets. Klaudiusz Zych in fact states in interview that “[The plot]’s not something you have to pay attention to if you don’t want to – you could just storm through the levels.”

You can indeed clickety-click through cutscenes as soon as the game is done loading the subsequent level. “It’s a shooter, who cares about story!” Some context, a looming MacGuffin, is all you need to kick some shiny ass metal butt. But an uncomfortable feeling lingers, a regret that emerges from this collision of beautiful sight and sound in comparison to the lack of substantial narrative, with the knowledge of merely going through the motions, passing through these corridors and arenas, never once truly connecting on a more sophisticated level with this admittedly fascinating and visionary place.

Despite its obvious narrative failings, Hard Reset does nevertheless create a terrific sense of “being there” given the richness of the world and the physicality of the combat. Sense, it never once makes. It doesn’t… have to?

Hard Shoot

Precognition, shooting experience and luck. These three dimensions play the largest part in the action, which proceeds with minimal bouts of exploration interspersed with waves… and waves… and waves of enemies. Any one battle, poorly anticipated or assessed, can and will result in getting sandwiched and/or cornered. Individually, enemies are seldom very tough, but especially the very first attempt at each major fight can be a tough pill to swallow.

Combative situations are foreshadowed in several ways; there will often be an upgrade station waiting, a closed door to be opened or an electronic shield turned off, and exploding barrels and machines shining in the distance. Often there will also be something intriguing going on in the distance, a little robot scurrying ahead, signalling an imminent encounter. On the “Normal” difficulty, the game is very manageable, (This is why there also exist “Hard” and “Insane” modes.) and indeed many of the rocket-spraying, forward-dashing robots can be avoided with a rudimentary understanding of positioning and circle-strafing, and obviously the streets the are littered with highly necessary environmental elements for electrocuting and blasting the enemies. You can and must create traps with stasis fields, slowing down the advancing onslaught.

Tactical positioning and planning do play a major part in the very biggest of the shoot-outs. Less useful for the player’s survival is a comically short-lived dash, which is often barely enough to get away from enemies, and more often still a fine dandy way of getting caught up in the environmental rubble, a trash bin, a protruding fence, or worst case scenario, an exploding barrel. Bang! Reload. Admittedly, a prolonged run key would have made the game all that much easier. Crouching is not included.

The lavish suite of weapons available consists of two main categories, projectile and energy -based. The two guns, initially an assault rifle and a plasma blaster, neatly transform into the different weapon subtypes, such as a shotgun, a grenade launcher or the compulsory RPG. The upgrade route is altogether familiar and very much resembles that of the Power to the People stations in BioShock. Shooting does have an extra dimension to it, as the forever forward-dashing enemies have to be held at a distance. Many of the weapons have an unlockable secondary fire for this very purpose, and sometimes switching weapons for such defense is key to your survival.

Switching between the subtypes as well as the categories is slow and cumbersome, and often the game is reliant on planning out your each weapon switch beforehand. The switcher also does not loop, instead scrolling back and forth only, which is absolutely an added headache in the heat of battle, especially as the different modes of either weapon are hard to differentiate visually. The game will also fail to register some of your switches and changes, and especially the bigger, more explosive weapons take extremely long to reload or re-energize.

Each these weapons – as well as defensive measures – can be unlocked and upgraded once you discover and amass enough experience pickups, improving them or adding features. As these are littered, for the most part, in the scenery, the game very much rewards a little bit of old-fashioned exploration. Those willing to seek out secret areas will be vastly better-equipped.

The developers make much noise of the engine’s capabilities for havo… Havok, having tailor-made “the Road Hog engine for the kind of game that [the team] wanted to make”. Indeed, the Hog manages to create a nice enough illusion of destructibility and mayhem even though realistically speaking not all that much gets blown up; beyond a few utterly, beautifully destructible sequences interspersed among the game’s more ordinary scenes, what the Road Hog, a powerful little steam engine if any, does very well to cover this fact up.

Upgrade management as well as general terminal usage are self-contained in the game world a lá Dead Space or Doom 3. The decision not to break the ludic experience with yet another tacked-on interface is a great way of preserving and even enhancing immersion, as the terminals are tactfully made. What does potentially break immersion, however, is a constant battery of holographic backsides plastered over the landscape.

Hard Rest

Hard Reset’s PC exclusivity surely denotes no “Press Start” in the menu, right? Right. In addition to its robust configuration options, ranging from controlling input lag, changing cutscene volume (Wow!) and utilizing a gamepad (though who would, right?), you can also designate a specific monitor to play on in your hardcore dual-, triple- and quadruple monitor get-ups. In addition, the game’s performance is top-notch even on a more modest rig, as Hard Reset performs extremely well even on the highest ‘Ultra’ settings, hovering between 40-60 FPS during most scenes. In the most chaotic of moments it drops right down to sub-20, but the game remains playable even if one doesn’t have the heart to change a thing for those few rare occasions. On a slightly newer system the game slowed down only in the two most demanding scenes and remained playable throughout. The only knock on the engine is that pretty as it is (see image on the left), its stylish and animated main menu is dreadfully slow to navigate with each click taking some seconds too many. Fortunately, the developers have listened to player feedback and have included a “fast menu” option in a recent 175mb patch.

Worst for last: As most of you have heard by now, Hard Reset does not contain a save game function (unless you delve deep into the game’s configuration files to bind the quicksave, which does supposedly exist, but is unbound and unadvertised). Instead, checkpoints. CHECKPOINTS. CHECKPOINTS. Let it be in bold. Strangely enough, checkpoint ‘saves’ can be loaded at will, but actual saving is not possible.

As up in the arms as I am about this (in principle! PC players are above all wo/men of principle!), the checkpoints are fairly well-sprinkled out and are not so much an issue as they are an annoyance. But just one single problem with loading and/or saving can nevertheless have a devastating effect on progress. For instance, after crashing to desktop after nearly completing an end-level battle, I found myself set back three big fights and some fifteen, twenty minutes of play. Fortunately for me, the game had just loaded the wrong checkpoint, but what of other players facing similar situations?

As with many indie games – intriguingly, the game followed an all-new fast-track promotional style by Evolve PR, whom also supplied The Slowdown with a review copy – there was minor worry that Hard Reset might not quite reach its proper bloom over the course of its modest length. This fear is and was, for the most part, unfounded. Though the game definitely stays the course throughout, the difficulty level offers a fine curve; while players will quickly learn the ropes, the game never becomes a repetitive experience thanks to the broad array of weapons and environments available. Larger-than-life surprises are not to be found here, but essentially, the game is well-paced and -structured. If you’re thinking Drug Wars (or Merchants of Brooklyn, as the game was called), you shouldn’t.

The game also has achievements, of course – all 80 of them – which cover both natural progression and additional challenges. Flying Wild Hog’s Hard Reset is available on Steam today; a demo can also be downloaded right now.

Gemini Rue
Fans of Blade Runner may recall that the original movie tie-in game was a point ‘n click adventure. This indie offering from WadjetEye Games, recently covered in more depth by Martyn, wears its inspirations on its sleeve but has confidence to explore new ground. With its moody art style and an immersive soundtrack, Gemini Rue sticks close to its neo-noir roots and offers an intriguing dual narrative following the parallel journeys of two protagonists, mysteriously linked in some way.

Frozen Synapse
I’d been a fan since the beta, and on release it managed to impress even further. Games tend to only occasionally foray into virtual worlds as part of their gameplay, but Mode 7 Games’ Frozen Synapse takes place solely in a virtual world. A “simultaneous turn-based strategy game” with both a singleplayer campaign and multiplayer mode, Frozen Synapse manages to fuse itself with its established world – the interface and your interaction with the game is part of the game’s internal fiction, a smooth transition into the story not unlike that found in Introversion’s Uplink. Assisting an underground movement in their cause to topple a megacorporation, you plug yourself into the system and command every action of your peons in infiltration and combat. If that isn’t cyberpunk, I don’t know what is.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution
Eidos Montreal’s prequel to one of the best games of all time is only a week away, and I’m excited to say the least. Human Revolution is rich with artistic flair, its “Cyber-Renaissance” aesthetics exude a glowing gold-black motif that pervades every screenshot. The dense cityscape of Shang Hai draws similarities to the futuristic metropolis in Ghost in the Shell and the rain-drenched downtown streets in Blade Runner. The cyperpunk influences don’t stop there, though: the game’s key theme is transhumanism, and the gameplay involves modifying your body with cybernetic augmentations to grant you new abilities. Another staple of the literature, hacking, is abundant here too, allow you to compromise security systems and computer terminals.

Hard Reset
A surprise announcement a few weeks back revealed Hard Reset, a sci-fi shooter that is to launch only a month from now. It’s not often that games have such a short pre-release marketing cycle, and it could prove to be a good move by industry veteran supergroup Flying Wild Hog to keep the buzz fresh in the minds of gamers. Described as “a marriage of Painkiller and Diablo”, Hard Reset is a PC-only shooter from the school of over-the-top action games like Painkiller and Serious Sam. It doesn’t look like it will be faithful to any particular genre mainstays but it certainly has dystopian and futuristic-looking environments and a host of sci fi gadgets and weapons, so there’s that to look forward to.

Prey 2
The first Prey from Human Head Studios was a mishmash of portals, aliens and Native American mythology. The sequel looks to eschew almost everything but the name, but rather than be an obvious franchise cash-in it seems to have taken an identity of its own. Very little media has been released thus far but word is it appears to be a cross between Assassin’s Creed and Blade Runner. An open-world cyberpunk game? Can it possibly be so cool? We’ll have to wait and see, in the meantime have a gander at the screenshots and concept trailer.

E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy
This is an odd, odd beast. We’ve had a brief look at it before, but even after launch it’s not so easy to describe. E.Y.E is a sci-fi fantasy RPG shooter using the Source engine, featuring an overwhelming number of options in terms of character customization and environmental interactivity. I haven’t yet had a chance to try it out, but from what I’ve seen of it, cyberpunk elements comprise just one part of its many aspects. Not only is it possible to hack enemy turrets for your own use, but it’s entirely possible to be hacked yourself, at which point you have to fight back to regain control. A very interesting indie title that may be worth a closer look.

Otherland
This “cyberpunk Lord Of The Rings” MMORPG was only just announced the other day, so we don’t know much at all about it other than it will be free to play, it is based on a series of books by Tad Williams, and that it is expected to release in 2012.

Samaritan
This last one isn’t quite a game – at least, not yet. At GDC 2011 Epic Games dropped this bomb on the industry, a video demo of what they envisioned as the next-gen game. Running on a monster rig, the stunning realtime sequence showcased the very cutting edge in visual technology offered by Epic’s Unreal Engine 3. Titled ‘Samaritan’, the video featured a trenchcoated man in shades, a walking trope of cyberpunk. It is a scene that could have been taken right out of Blade Runner or Ghost in the Shell, with cybernetic humans trading blows and gigantic robots joining the fray. Seeing as even the Gears of War series started out as a tech demo demo back in the early days of Unreal Engine 3, it’s possible that we could see a whole game fleshed out from this concept. Here’s hoping.

I am sure that’s not all that we can expect to see in the coming months. There have been numerous rumours over the past year of a Syndicate reboot, and they’ve reached a breaking point with an almost-certain expectation of some kind of announcement at Gamescom taking place in Cologne, Germany this week. The classic cyberpunk franchise sorely needs to return, let’s hope EA is working on it.

This time around the games are VVVVVV, And Yet It Moves, Hammerfight, Crayon Physics Deluxe, Steel Storm and Cogs. Purchasing the bundle gives you a unique link to download the games completely free of any DRM as well as bonus activation codes for Steam and Desura; additionally, they have thrown in a free trial of Minecraft. If that wasn’t attractive enough, the whole of Humble Bundle #2 will be available too if you pay more than the current average.

If it’s not quite obvious yet, these bundles offer crazy – nay, insane - value, especially considering that you decide how much you pay for it all. With all of the bundles I have found that I tend to be interested in only one or two of the games, the rest being merely ‘bonuses’ or potential surprises. Moreover, I tend to already own some of them in some form or other, so I’m paying for redundant copies, in fact. But the opportunity to send your money directly to specific developers and charities is a great reason to be part of this. The bundles have been hugely successful in the past, and I fully expect this one to reach similar heights.

I haven’t spent that much time with all of these games yet, but my picks of the bunch are without a doubt Braid, Revenge of the Titans and VVVVVV. I reviewed VVVVVV earlier this year, and found it to be a short but delightful platformer very much worthy of your time. Have a read through the review and consider the bundle worth it for this title alone. Creator Terry Cavanagh has recently brought a number of key updates to the game. It has been rewritten in C++ which apparently allows it to perform better on a larger variety of computers – including the Linux platform now. There has been talk of adding Steam Achievements as well in the near future. On top of that, included with the game is a level editor, allowing you to create your own levels for anyone to download and play. And a few people have already started – Terry has called upon a few of his peers to try their hand, including Minecraft creator Notch and VVVVVV soundtrack composer SoulEye. More recommended level packs are being regularly posted on his blog.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the value of the bundle changes over time – I’ve had to redraft this post two times to keep up with the additions – and in the past bundles bonus items were added up til the very end to incentivize purchases. Keep an eye on the Bundle twitter account for updates. At the very least the transparent live figures will prove to be fascinating, such as the top purchases and the average size of purchases from people on each of the three platforms. There’s still time: do the smart thing, name your price and play some fantastic indie games.

Mass Effect 3 was announced at last year’s Spike VGAs, along with a teaser trailer that set the tone for what is to come. Check out said trailer below. While the release date stated at the time was “Holiday 2011″, the game has since been delayed and will be out “in the first three months of 2012″. In the meantime, the game is set to have a grand unveiling at E3 this week, with a live demo likely to be shown during EA’s conference.

The images in the trailer will be familiar to anyone who has completed the first two games. An alliance soldier witnesses the destruction happening around him in what is barely recognisable as the Earth city of London, England. The Reapers have arrived and are wreaking havoc on the galaxy, starting with Earth. Meanwhile, Commander Shepard watches from orbit, end trailer with the throbbing bass of the original theme. ME2 ended with somewhat of a cliffhanger, and it looks like the third game is picking up right where it left off. Without going too deep into spoiler territory, Shepard’s mission in this last chapter is to unite the various races in the galaxy to help defeat the Reaper threat. How successful you are in rallying each army to your cause will determine the outcome of the war, with a granularity that will produce “degrees of success” as opposed to just one good ending and a bad ending.

You’re basically building towards greater and greater degrees of success, in terms of how you’re able to fight the Reapers … If you just rip straight down the critical path and try and finish the game as soon as you can, and do very little optional or side stuff … it’ll be a lot more brutal and minimal relative to if you do a lot of stuff. If you really build a lot of stuff and bring people to your side and rally the entire galaxy around you, and you come into the end game with that, then you’ll get an amazing, very definitive ending.

- Casey Hudson, Project Director

Of course, the decisions you made in the previous two games will be at play here as well. How you dealt with Rachni Queen in ME1, for instance, will determine if they even exist in the third game for you to ally with, and either way there will be a certain opportunity open to you that was not available otherwise.

Fans will no doubt be eager to know which characters will be returning, and moreover which will be selectable as squadmates. So far only a few have been confirmed as playable, and there are hints that some will only be selectable for certain sequences. The tactical combat is reportedly much better, though personally I already found ME2′s improved combat mechanics to be a huge turning point in the series and made for some tight shooting. Given how closely BioWare listened to its fanbase in improving ME2 over ME1, I am sure that they will further refine the game systems to arrive at an even better design in ME3. The production of the ME2 DLC during the interim will certainly have been a valuable process for the studio, as is evident in their varying content and quality. The early screenshots shown here indicate a visual style pretty much identical to ME2′s – a desaturated colour palette and gritty textures. I’m sure with how well optimized ME2 was, ME3 will be able to deliver some spectacular scenes. One minor note I feel worth recalling is that film composer Clint Mansell, who produced a minimal and memorable score for indie sci fi flick Moon, has been signed to do the soundtrack, taking over the duties of Jack Wall. It will be interesting to see what his take on the established aural style will be.

More information is due come E3. There are rumours of more Mass Effect-related announcements; suggesting some Kinect functionality in ME3 as well as some kind of MMO in the works. Whatever gets revealed, I’ll be sure to keep you informed.

The last time we looked at Irrational Games’ BioShock Infinite, Martyn walked us through the newly unveiled teaser trailer and some of the early details about the game. Not much to go on in this all-too-brief CG video, a finely crafted reveal of the world of Columbia, but the details paint a grim picture. Posters touting the city’s motto describe an ultra-nationalist, xenophobic society, clearly the core philosophical theme to be explored by the game in true BioShock fashion.

Infinite takes place in 1912 on the massive floating city of Columbia. You take on the role of Pinkerton agent Booker DeWitt, on a mission to seek and assist in the escape of a young woman by the name of Elizabeth. It seems that she is no run-of-the-mill damsel in distress, however: your NPC companion has a mind and will of her own, and a host of supernatural abilities to boot. She will aid you in combat with her various powers, and you can choose to exploit these abilities at a cost not yet fully defined.

Along the way your progress will be impeded by enemies from either of the two warring factions, the Founders, the patriotic supporters of the city, and the Vox Populi, anti-capitalist Marxian thugs. And this wouldn’t be a BioShock game without some bizarre and distinctive icon; the Songbird may very well be this game’s Big Daddy. A hulking, mechanical bird-like figure with human hands that seems to serve as both Elizabeth’s protector and captor, the Songbird shares a unique relationship with your partner – not quite like that between the Big Daddy and Little Sister perhaps, but just as nuanced.

So that was what we gleaned from the teaser and the press materials during the announcement, but since then we’ve also been treated with a ten-minute uninterrupted gameplay demo, embedded below. Reminiscent of that very first demonstration of BioShock way back when, this video of in-game footage offers a fascinating glimpse of a unique new world crafted by Irrational.

One of the first things you may notice is the monologue that opens the video. One fundamental step forward that Infinite makes from the previous two BioShock titles is in the nature of the main character. In the earlier games the player controlled a cipher who had a personality and backstory, but no voice of his own; his actions controlled by the player and his mindset presumed by his puppeteer. But in Infinite, not only does Booker DeWitt have a past, he plays an active role in the goings on as the player progresses by voicing his thoughts at opportune moments. I see that most other sites can only name recent similar examples of the wry, quipping hero, such as those voiced by the prolific Nolan North, but my memory goes farther back to a much more likely influence on DeWitt’s expressive nature. That is to say, one of the fathers of the immersive sim, Thief, and its sorely missed protagonist Garrett. In that classic series it felt more like you accompanied the master thief on his journey, each tense moment a shared experience and your every triumphant move validated by his assured demeanour.

But I digress. We’re not 20 seconds into the video and we’re inundated with images of American Exceptionalism, an ominous introduction to Columbia. As DeWitt walks through a rundown alley a mechanical horse pulling a broken carriage stutters by. Reaching the streets we’re graced with a gorgeous view of open air, and a huge floating building towering over us. Short-lived wonder, though, as the structure breaks down before us and comes crashing down to the ground at our feet. The place is in a state of disrepair, this much is clear. DeWitt makes his way down the street and along the way we witness some haunting scenes, such as that of a woman sweeping the porch of a burning building, and a dead horse sprawled across the sidewalk.

There’s someone on a bench, feeding crows, and another man under a pavilion preaching his patriotic cant. Only when DeWitt draws his rifle does the man react and shimmer with malevolence. There’s something supernatural going on here that will hopefully be explained at some point. Suffice it to say that both NPCs have at their disposal some powers that DeWitt can gain to his advantage, too. The man commanding the crows leaves behind a curious bottle, which upon drinking bestows DeWitt with the Murder of Crows “vigor”. Flashes of old BioShock here for sure, in the splicer-like enemies and the tonic-like vigors, though no doubt there will be a different explanation to all of this.

The scale of the environments is staggering, with enormous buildings floating in the air and expansive sky beyond. Spatiality – one of Irrational’s trademarks – is strong here, with various kinds of landmarks such as hotels and clocktowers in sight. There’s definitely some nifty new tech powering this game, a big step forward from engine used in the previous games.

There’s hardly any time to take all of that in, however, as a gunfight quickly escalates into a cannon fight, and DeWitt isn’t faring too well just picking enemies off in the distance with his rifle. To close the gap between him and the enemy, he has to make use of a new mechanic known as “the skyline”, a rail transportation system that connects each of the discrete floating islands of Columbia. It certainly looks like a thrilling way to get from place to place, jumping from one rail to the next, attacking enemies as you go. I recall that earlier this year at PAX East some of the Irrational developers gave a panel about the creation of Columbia, which featured some footage of an early version of the game with the rail system already up and running. It’s worth checking out if you’re interested in the genesis of the mechanic.

Back to our gameplay, anyhow. DeWitt lands in the thick of the combat, handling crowds that are surely larger in number than we’ve seen before in a BioShock game. DeWitt employs plasmid [sic] power after power, but it seems the hoard is too overwhelming – when suddenly Miss Elizabeth appears to even the odds. Summoning a rain cloud gives DeWitt the chance to electrify them all at once. Phew! DeWitt and Elizabeth make a good team, but the closing moments of the video present a couple of much tougher foes, the Handyman and the terrifying Songbird. It’s going to take a lot more to bring down these beasts.

That’s all we have of the game to date. Things are ramping up for an eventful E3; there will surely be brand new footage to see. The official site has been revamped, and who knows, there may be some additional marketing – of the viral kind, perhaps, in the same spirit as with previous 2K games. Lord knows I have obsessed over some of it already. Various previews that went live this week have discussed a new demo shown to the press, elaborating on the nature of Elizabeth’s abilities, and head dangerously into spoiler territory – even hinting towards the meaning behind the term ‘Infinite’ in the title. We’ll cover the new details once we see it for ourselves. Catch you back here during E3 week.

In the interview, McGrath recounts the early days of the project, telling that before they went to work at Intel, the team

…developed a graphically impressive, fully playable prototype, as well as developing core engine tech at the same time. Due to circumstances out of our control, the publisher we were working with decided to shift their company strategy in a direction that did not involve PC games, and our project was cancelled. Luckily, we had a very good contract with them that allowed us to retain the rights to our IP.

Wow, talk about a close shave there.

According to the interview, the team was originally approached by Intel to work with new graphics hardware codenamed Larrabee, and Project Offset was to be a showcase of the platform. McGrath speculates that had the Larrabee project come to fruition, Project Offset could have been as big for Intel as Bungie’s Halo was for Microsoft. But when Larrabee begun to saw increasing delays, the team started suspecting a looming cancellation in the horizon well before the inevitable news.

In hindsight though, McGrath calls the Intel contract “the best possible decision that we could have made, given the fact that our previous funding had fallen through, and that we had the opportunity to continue development of our game, and potentially ship it out to millions of customers.” Despite this, McGrath does chastise Intel as a games publisher, stating that “Intel simply wasn’t the best place for a game developer” and goes on to outline how the management structure wasn’t quite the ideal breeding ground for game development.

In addition to Lane Splitter, Fractiv also have a larger project in the works, called The Gunsmith, an action RPG/adventure game “with a Western vibe”. McGrath says that the game also contains “mysterious fantasy elements”. The team is currently targeting mobile devices (iPhone, iPad and Android) with the game, but are also considering both a PC and a console version. Here’s hoping the team does indeed choose to commit to the PC platform – in the meantime, you can follow the team’s progress at the Fractiv website!