System Shock 2 might be getting a re-release on GOG and Steam

It seems classic horror shooter and BioShock precursor System Shock 2 may finally be available for purchase again soon. An article on FleshEatingZipper reveals the news and points to the site for Night Dive Studios. The only problem is that the studio’s page conspicuously lacks contact details or a firm announcement, so we can’t verify the claim just yet. We certainly hope it’s really happening.
FleshEatingZipper reports that unnamed sources told it a “new development/publishing studio will be handling the release,” and later updated the article to specify Night Dive as that studio. Night Dive’s own site describes it as specializing in “finding classic, abandoned, and forgotten PC games and bringing them back into the hands of gamers,” but that’s about all the information it offers.
We were able to dig up a Facebook page, as well as the LinkedIn profile of Stephen Kick, a former Sony Online Entertainment character artist who is listed as CEO of the new studio. We’ve contacted Kick for more details, and will update this article should they be presented.

Ghost Recon Online gets Assassin’s Creed III items for cross-promotional cosplay

The first of three Assassin’s Creed III Tyranny of King Washington DLC episodes releases next Tuesday, prompting Ubisoft to initiate tactical cross-promotion operation “Put Hoods in Ghost Recon Online.” From today until March 1st, 11 Assassin’s Creed-themed items are available for unlock or purchase in the free-to-play tactical shooter’s open beta.
There are five new Recon class items—the trademark assassinatin’ hood and four pieces of body armor—and six Abstergo Industries weapons: the F2000 SP AC, Fiveseven AC, MG36 KV AC, P90 C AC, Sentinel SR-1 AC, and Pentagun SP AC.
I’m going to imagine the hardened recon specialist below was called to action in the middle of putting on his PAX cosplay outfit.

Not a bad look, but I’d rather see Connor strut around 18th century America with an AR-21 and microwave emitter.

Triumph for Tux: Half-Life, Counter-Strike get Linux support

The Steam pages for Valve classics Half-Life and Counter-Strike have been updated with small, penguin-shaped icons. No, they aren’t unsubtle emblems of a secret flightless waterfowl cabal, but they do signify newly added Linux support for both FPS games as part of Valve’s compatibility push.
Valve recently released a Linux version of Steam and has since been retrofitting older games to run on the open-source OS. It’s a neat affirmation of the company’s goal to broaden the choices for PC gamers, but not everyone is convinced—id Software’s John Carmack believes Linux is a useful tool but bad for business.

It’s Monday, but that’s okay, because you can absorb The Plan now for free

In case Limits and Demonstrations wasn’t contemplative enough for you, the developers behind first-person scared baby sim Among The Sleep, Krillbite, have created a serene curious wasp sim called The Plan. It’s free, and only a few minutes long, but quite lovely, and asks important questions about what it means to be a wasp in a world full of leaves that hate wasps. Sit back, and BRACE FOR SOOTHING AMBIENCE.

Tomb Raider video shows 11 minute murder corridor

Tomb Raider’s less than a month away (out on March 5, to be precise). In case you’re not sold on the idea of a youthful Lara making a rough-and-tumble entrance into the hard world of adventuring, Square Enix have put out 11 minutes of narrated in-game footage showing her killing her way out of a crumbling monastery complex.
I’m a bit worried. Most of the footage they’ve put out has funneled Lara down a continuous narrow corridor broken up by scripted tumbles, wobbly AI moments, a persistent smattering of quick-time events and stretches of non-interactivity. There may yet be surprises beyond the small sections that have been shown so far, or so I hope. The island is structured around hubs, and is populated by bonus tombs that Lara can, y’know, raid, for shiny bits. That’ll be the subject of the next video, apparently. Take a look at the latest one below.

Psychonauts 2 won’t be funded by Notch

It was almost a year ago to the day when Notch publicly proposed to Tim Schafer. No, not that sort of proposal. This one: “Let’s make Psychonauts 2 happen.”
But any plans for a follow up to Tim Schafer’s weird and inventive platformer were put on hold when Double Fine launched an adventure game Kickstarter. Now, in a thread on Reddit thread, the Minecraft creator has revealed that he’ll no longer be funding a Psychonauts sequel.
“I somewhat naively thought “a couple of million” was two million. I had no doubt in my mind that a Psychonauts 2 would earn that money back easily,” Notch writes. “Turns out they wanted 18 million dollars, haha.”
While the Reddit thread was celebrating Minecraft’s success – Notch himself made over $100 million from the game in 2012 – he admits that the complexity of making such an investment would have been too much of a time constraint.
“I don’t have the time at the moment to even try to get educated enough to make an eighteen million dollar deal. Perhaps in some distant future when I’m no longer trying to make games, I could get into angel investing.”
“I’ve made one private investment into a game so far, at 100k, and it’s frankly a lot more work than I thought.”
A statement by Double Fine said the company was “excited about the prospect of making a sequel to Psychonauts, but we’re currently focused on making our Kickstarter game and haven’t been able to budget it out. Once we get around to it, we’ll likely explore alternative funding methods that will require multiple sources to make it a reality.”
You can read more about Minecraft’s success in our Making Of feature. It includes Markus Persson saying things like, “I think I was already fucking rich by the time I realised, ‘I’m gonna be fucking rich.’”
Thanks, Venture Beat.

Steam database update: Dyad confirmed for PC; no plans for Halo 3 release

Our interest was piqued when a giant list of games surfaced on the Steam Apps Database yesterday. Still, we warned caution – Steam’s registry is notoriously unreliable and full of scraps of codenamed test projects and old deals that never worked out. And that scepticism was heightened this time, thanks to the database updating in response to newly created Game Hubs, including for Halo 3. It all seemed too strange to be true. And it was. Partly.
In a statement to Eurogamer, a spokesperson for Microsoft said, “We currently do not have plans to release any ‘Halo’ titles on Steam.” So that’s that mystery solved. But not everything in the list was fiction. Last night, RPS spotted that Shawn McGrath, creator of the Playstation Network’s musical arcade tunnel racer Dyad, had confirmed that the game would be arriving on PC in March.
He did so in this rather despondent announcement video.
The announcement may not have happened in the manner its creator would have liked, but it’s still great news. Dyad is an odd beast – a game in which you hook and lance your multi-coloured enemies to build speed and complete a variety of objectives. It’s a hodgepodge of systems that, when layered over each other, create something frenetic and intense. Here’s a more representative trailer for what the game offers.
Despite a confirmation and a denial, we’re still not any closer to firmly predicting what games from that list will actually arrive on Steam. Although, to speculate, I’d say rhythm-game-as-reverse-schmup Retro/Grade was a pretty strong contender. It was released around the same time as Dyad, so presumably any exclusivity deal made is also coming to an end. At the other end of a spectrum, I wouldn’t expect Total War: Caveman to be a thing that even exists. Although, thinking about it, it would be pretty great.

Sim-plicity: I am a naked Hugh Hefner

Having retired from world-saving heroics, Christopher Livingston is living the simple life in video games by playing a series of down-to-earth simulations. This week he’s throwing parties, taking naughty pictures, building a magazine empire, and doing it all while naked as a jaybird.

Quick history lesson for you youngsters reading this: Hugh Hefner is a wealthy publisher who made his fortune founding a men’s magazine called Playboy that featured pictures of nude women. For even younger youngsters: magazines were these things made of paper that people bought when they wanted to look at pictures of nude women before the Internet was invented and filled with pictures of nude women. And, for those of you so young you haven’t been born yet, the Internet was a thing we used for looking at pictures of nude women before the images were holo-beamed straight into our cranial implants from the pornography satellite orbiting Jupiter.
Okay! This week I’m playing Playboy: The Mansion, a game from 2004 that simulates the life of the world’s most famous skin baron, Hugh Hefner. I’m playing in Classic Mode, which begins with Mr. Hefner trying to build his Playboy empire from scratch, though it is a little odd that Hef already has his mansion with the iconic Playboy emblem on the door when he hasn’t even published a single issue. As I stroll around my luxurious home, there are a number of top-heavy women to interact with. I can even dress them up, or more specifically, order them to take most of their clothes off.
At least that’s what the game wants me to do. I, however, am a forward-thinking gentleman who has grown weary of traditional gender roles. So, I decide instead to dress Hef in the smallest swimsuit he owns and paint it flesh-colored, rendering him seemingly stark naked. So now, the man is the naked one, and all the women have clothes on. See what I did? I flipped the script! The objectification of women is a thing of the past! You’re welcome, society! Enjoy your new behavioral norms!

Hello. I’m Naked Hugh Hefner. Please enjoy this professional handshake.

Oh, wait, I forgot I still have to take a bunch of pictures of nude women for the magazine. So, scratch all that.
I won’t lie: taking photos of naked computer women with comically large breasts is fun, though it really has more to do with that fact that taking pictures of anything in any game is fun, because I have a thing for in-game cameras. For instance, I’m still playing The Hunter (the sim from last week) and I took some pictures of a moose last night. And it was fun! (Also, for those wondering, I did finally bag a turkey.) And, to avoid having to spend time in Photoshop putting black CENSORED bars over all the Playmates’ exposed nipples, I invented my own minigame where I try to block the nudity with objects in the mansion.

This photographic technique is known as “Austin Powering”

I would think the horny readers of my magazine would be dismayed to open the centerfold and see a woman’s nude parts obscured by a lamp or a plant, but the magazine is selling like gangbusters and some guy keeps popping onto my screen to excitedly declare each photoshoot more successful than the last. In fact, it doesn’t seem to matter in the slightest how much skin I actually show in the pages of Playboy. My readers seem to love the mental challenge of imaging breasts they can’t see on women obscured by furniture.

Would this pose be sexy even without the giant candle? It just looks uncomfortable.

I start hiding the women behind ever bigger objects, such as hedges or doors, but it doesn’t seem to matter. I’ve basically turned Playboy into a home furnishings catalog and my fans can’t get enough of it.

If you buy this issue will you get to see her OTHER shoulder? Hmmm? (No.)

Besides watching cartoon women writhe around on a bed while I position the camera behind bookcases and walls, there are other things to do in this sim, relationship things, like make friends, form business partnerships, and acquire girlfriends. They’re all accomplished by a long, involved, complex relationship interface where you click a button two or three times and someone falls in love with you. I make a joke, they laugh. I flirt, they swoon. I discuss the stock market, they fall head over heels in business with me. It’s like The Sims, only you never have to go to the bathroom and no one ever rebuffs your advances, be they amorous or contractual. There are dozens of different people in this sim and their personalities can all be summed up as: Yes.

It’s been a pleasure doing naked business with you.

There are also other features that have to be added to magazines, such as interviews and articles, but they’re boring because I can’t take pictures of them, so let’s get back to the racy boudoir shots I’ve been taking, like this one :

The famous Door Issue of Playboy. A classic.

And this one:

Yep. It’s a nude woman behind a nude statue. DID I BLOW YOUR MIND?

And this one!

Sort of proud of this one, actually.

Of course, all is not well in the mansion. Surprisingly, stripping every woman naked, having sex with all of them on various pieces of furniture, and selling their pictures in my magazine results in some serious consequences.

Like a new lamp.

Apart from being rewarded with furniture for cheating on my various girlfriends, Hef also has to spend a considerable amount of time soothing egos, mending relationships, and talking to staff members. There are celebrities and sports heroes to rub shoulders with and writers and musicians to woo. This is all time consuming, though not particularly challenging, and after throwing my forty-eighth party it just starts to get a bit tiresome.
Conclusion: Well, it’s sort of fun being Hugh Hefner, though they shipped this sim with the difficulty level set at “We Shipped This Sim Without Including Any Difficulty”. Magazine covers featuring 3% women and 97% doors sell fifty thousand copies. Within a minute of meeting someone for the first time, they are either my friend, my girlfriend, my business partner, or all three. Visiting female guests, be they models, writers, athletes, or other professionals, can be talked out of their tops and sprawled nude on a couch within moments of walking in the door. I guess the charms of naked Hugh Hefner simply cannot be denied.

Wurm Online review

Wurm Online is a fascinating MMO, even if it’s not going to get a high score in a couple of pages. Don’t see that as damnation, because this is definitely one of those games where the red number isn’t everything.
This is a difficult MMO to join and enjoy. It’s also one of the few that dares to be its own game instead of following the usual well-trod paths. If you ‘get it’, as many have during its beta, Wurm is one of those rare games that can reshape your view of what online worlds should be doing and the freedom they can offer. If not, you’ll bounce off it, hard.
Wurm Online’s core game is about building and surviving in a player-made fantasy world, and if it looks a little dark, that’s because any game setting out to do that these days is going to be in Minecraft’s shadow. This one more than most, since Notch himself worked on it.

It’s a very different experience, however, for better and for worse. Starting with the fact that while Minecraft is essentially a squared-off sandbox in which games can be played, Wurm Online is an old-school RPG world that allows players to take charge. Alliances, politics, puppetry, religion and more are all part of the experience, as are PvE and PvP servers. You arrive with nothing, and through painstaking labour begin to build a sustainable life: creating shelter, hunting, and learning to cook. Play for long enough and you and your friends can dominate the landscape with a flourishing village. Or you can get lost in the dark and gnawed on by spiders. Your call.
Whichever server type you choose, the world you arrive in is completely player-built, and that’s impressive in itself. The very land can be terraformed, from flattening it to make space for a house to digging and paving a road across a mountain, or carving mines and underground passages. If you find a good spot with access to water and resources, and have everything you need to claim it by building a house, consider it yours for the taking.

That’s a staggering amount of freedom, and while your ability to knock the world into shape with a shovel and a saw is limited by time, stats and other restrictions, simply knowing you can do it means a lot. There’s also incredible scope for community-based play, where your ability to create high-end items is far more valuable than your ability to hit monsters, and great settlements can spring out of a few houses to impress enemies and newcomers alike.
The catch – and part of the satisfaction – is that getting to this point involves so much tooth pulling that Wurm Online practically doubles as a dental simulator. The graphics are terrible, and the interface even worse. It’s clunky to the point that a standard error message is – no joke – “Your position on the server is not updated. Please move slower.” You take injuries from stumbling down the slightest hill, and even simple wounds require crafted items to heal.
But oh, that’s just the start. Everything is against you here. Everything. For all the game’s crafting emphasis, you start off barely able to carry anything at all, and if you die, you lose your inventory unless you can find your corpse. In-game maps? Ha! You’re reliant on player-made signs to navigate, and any long journey demands that you craft your own compass. To give this its due, it all definitely adds to the feeling of being a settler in a dangerous new frontier, not just a visitor to another theme park.


Too many dangers, however, are caused by annoyances. The biggest being lack of in-game guidance. The tutorial only covers the raw basics before kicking you out, and openly admits it’s not complete yet. This would be easier to swallow if Wurm hadn’t been released in 2006.
Luckily, the Wurm wiki is on hand to explain everything, and it’s needed: the world simulation is surprisingly deep. Players with the right stats and equipment can forage for food, prospect for ore, build ships capable of sailing between servers, tame and breed animals (which will die of old age), and call on the power of the gods for spells and other bonuses. And that’s picking just a few examples. If you want to make, say, a new hatchet, you’re looking at chopping down the tree, carving the wood into shape, then mining to find some iron ore and running it through a forge.
Needless to say, this is very time consuming, and while the results may be satisfying, the processes never are. There’s no tactility to anything, from combat to tree felling. Crafting is a matter of sitting and staring for up to a minute as timers tick down, which may or may not result in success or skill boosts of a fraction of a point.

This, more than the complexity, makes Wurm Online a seriously tough sell. To put the experience in context, ten hours into World of Warcraft – admittedly a very different MMO – I’d saved my people from certain doom several times over and begun carving a legend as one of Azeroth’s great mages. In Minecraft, I’d built a ludicrous house with en suite lava flow, and visited awesome creations on servers around the world. In Wurm Online, let’s just say there had been lots of watching Netflix on a second monitor while my clicking finger went numb.
To make the tedium worthwhile, you need to play Wurm Online with other people. Back in 2010, PC Gamer had a thriving community within the game. They scouted the world to find the perfect home, and used Google Sketchup to plan their village. They then spent weeks building together, creating communal tools and setting up a kitchen for free food. Constructing just a single, small shack in Wurm Online can take a single player a week. With friends, it’s the closest you’ll get to experiencing a barn-raising without growing a beard and renouncing technology.
Unfortunately, my own experiences with the game were the loneliest hours I’ve ever spent in an MMO. Even seeing another player was a rare treat, while the in-game /who command showed a current server population of between 60-260 and only about 1,500 playing across the entire game on a regular Saturday evening. I’ve had more social games of Myst. After a largely solitary night of grinding my digging skill, I resorted to tying together all the duvets in my house in the hope that wrapping myself in their combined weight might feel like a hug. It did not.

Part of the problem is that while there’s no shortage of things you can build and craft, there’s limited scope for creativity. In Minecraft you can make Rapture. Or Westeros. Even Loughborough. In Wurm Online, you can only really make more Wurm Online.
Wandering the map, everything looks much the same. Most projects stood out more for how long they’d obviously taken their creators to complete than for what had actually been created. The underground canal proudly announcing ‘Over 300 man hours went into this’ still feels like a dark, rocky corridor whose makers had access to a fully plumbed-in timesink.
Inevitable as these comparisons are, they’re not really fair. Wurm Online’s options may be limited, but they’re also infinitely more advanced than anything available in most other MMOs. Also, after designing and building even relatively generic creations by virtual hand from trees and lumps of iron, you’re going to appreciate them much more than if you’d simply handed over money and plonked down a prefab. You have to get to that point first, and it’s a long trip.

The result is one of those games that may as well have a line of fire drawn between players who can’t believe anyone could possibly want to play it, and those who can’t see why anyone would want to play anything else. Wurm Online may be slower than continental drift, but it has incredible scope for those players willing to embrace its opportunities. It looks like the back end of a bus, but those simple graphics conceal immense depths that are only evolving as the game continues.
For me, while it’s a very impressive game, it’s unfortunately not one I actually enjoyed or felt the desire to play for the long haul. If the basic ideas excite you, don’t be put off. It’s absolutely worth giving it a try to see if it clicks for you as much as it’ll expect you to right-click for it.
Wurm Online isn’t free-to-play, but there’s an unlimited trial generous enough to give a good feel for it before hitting the stat cap. If you dare take its mighty challenge, it’s wide open and ready to receive new residents, with a nice grassy spot already waiting for you to start building your first house.
Expect to pay: $6.71 / £4.24 per month
Release: Out now
Developer: Code Club AB
Publisher: In-house
Link: www.wurmonline.com

Stop making horrible console ports – a guide

Broken menus, wonky mouse controls, single figure framerates – this is the familiar story of PC gaming prowess held back by consoles. We understand why it happens: console-land was where the majority of sales were, and thus the focus of development. But that reasoning has never seemed, well, reasonable: a trashy console port can knock a chunk off your Metacritic rating, sour a huge potential audience against you forever and lose you loads of sales on a platform that can be extremely lucrative if only you know how to approach it.
It’s really not that hard or expensive. After all, a pair of talented modders managed to make Dark Souls’ PC version immeasurably better within the space of an evening, and while devs might not want to spend resources making hi-res assets just for PC, there’s plenty of really basic stuff that can be done to not totally fuck up a game. Which, given the amount of time, love and money spent on these creations, is surely something that would please the developers and publishers as much as their beleaguered PC audience.
We’ve thrown together a list of tips, common foibles and fixes – add your own in the comments!

On release, Binary Domain defaulted to gamepad inputs which could only be changed by running a separate settings program. Gnnngggn.

Accessible settings
PC configurations are as many and varied as the gamers that own them. A PC game has to account for this with its range of settings. Have these options accessible in-game, and don’t require the player to drop back to the main menu to change them. Definitely don’t put them in a separate trainer which forces you to restart the entire damn game. (Hi there, Binary Domain.)
Resolution
For the love of Baal, let us change the resolution. And definitely let us change the resolution before embarking on a lengthy unskippable opening cinematic in enforced default shatto-vision. (I’m looking at you, Max Payne 3 – or trying to, anyway.) Better still, autodetect the native resolution!
Key-bindings
Let us at them. Particularly if, for whatever reason, you’ve decided to give charge of your keyboard inputs to someone who has never actually seen or used a keyboard before. How do you reach the main menu in Binary Domain? Oh, that’s right, it’s Enter. Of course. Then, when in the menus, you press space to select and F to go back. Obviously, in-game, F is the interact key – except when interact is space. Argh. Incidentally, Enter is not the PC’s equivalent of the gamepad’s A button – it’s the furthest you can get from both hands in normal FPS control mode. So don’t make it the compulsory key to dismiss pop-up messages.
Gamepads
Some games are designed for and best suit a gamepad. That’s cool. But for games which might easily be controlled by either a gamepad or a traditional PC set-up, please autodetect which system is currently under use. Most games seem pretty good at this now, but there are still some stragglers.
Framerate
Let those framerates soar free into the vast open skies of PC gaming wonderment. Also, let us fiddle with things like V-sync – with the vast array of PC hardware set-ups possible it is unlikely you will have guessed how to best optimise your game’s performance for any one PC. Why wreck your hard work with dropped or torn frames when you could just trust players to tweak the game to perfection.

FOV sliders, particularly in singleplayer games, should be a given.

Field of View
PC gamers typically sit closer to their screens than console gamers and this changes the effect of a limited FOV. Unless you are setting out specifically to discomfit and sicken the player, offering the ability to adjust FOV will only make people like you. You do want to be liked, right?
Alt-tab
If your game cannot do this, you are probably going to Hell, where you’ll be forced to troubleshoot for irascible Windows ME users for the rest of eternity. Sorry about that.
Menus
PCs typically come equipped with a mouse – the perfect device with which to gaily skip through menus. Please make use of it. Do not make us scroll through a gazillion options when a single click would do. Relatedly, make your menus pay attention to where the cursor actually IS. Console ports, like many carnivorous predators, seem to only sense movement. So you often see the wrong menu option highlighted and have to wiggle the cursor a bit to make it notice where you’re actually pointing.
Mouse support
Mice are not thumbsticks. This should be quickly apparent from their different shape. Do not duplicate the analogue stick deadzone with your mouse acceleration. (Got that, Dead Space?) Also do not impose momentum on mouse movements. My world stops spinning when my mouse stops, not a few seconds later, Syndicate. And don’t use autotargeting systems based on the assumption that there are 8 degrees in a circle.

Sleeping Dogs was a port done right. It also featured a man urinating into a toilet full of sick. A rare game indeed.

Social media integration
No.
Games for Windows Live
Don’t do it. You may think that we PC gamers object to GfwL because we are a prickly bunch who resent having to install yet another wedge of corporate molestation replete with its own superfluous achievements system, fragmentary friends-lists, cross-promotional guff, easily lost log-in details and so on – particularly when we are already so well served by Steam. All that might be true of Origin or uPlay, but it doesn’t come close to describing the genuine horror of GfwL, which remains one of the most ill-conceived and poorly executed pieces of software it is possible to install on your PC. It’s hideously designed, hugely unergonomic, painfully slow, intrusive and prone to complete failure in every single aspect of its operation. It’s just unbelievably terrible.
DRM
Piracy sucks. We know. However, the solution should never be to periodically lose players’ saves, punt them to desktop mid-game or prevent them from playing the game altogether.
Hi-res textures
Now, we’re not asking you to create an entirely new assets pipeline for the PC alone, but in many instances textures are created first at high resolution then scaled down to fit onto the itty-bitty consoles. You can make use of those on PC, you know.
Post-release patches
We salute your ongoing commitment to PC gamers by releasing fixes after launch. But don’t leave it until then to make your game playable. Don’t leave it until launch day, even. There are good business reasons for this: reviewers will be playing your undercooked code; you’ll burn your earliest purchasers and most loyal customers; you’ll lose momentum building a community among players (particularly key if your game has an online component); people will be more likely to pirate your game if they think it’s not worth the risk of an actual purchase.
Any more? Add them in the comments.

Developer Frogwares has revealed the latest entry in their long-running series of Sherlock Holmes-based adventure games, one of which resulted in the most terrifying video on YouTube. While their previous games haven’t strayed too far from the Jeremy Brett school of Holmes, there are changes afoot for The Great Detective’s latest mystery, a couple of which appear more than elementary. This new game comes with a new Sherlock, who publisher Focus Home describe as a “more modern character perfectly matching the new artistic ambitions of the title.” The released screenshots suggest that statement can be translated as ‘Sherlock’s not wearing a coat’, an act which was close to scandalous in Victorian times. But the greatest change in Crimes & Punishments: Sherlock Holmes promises to be the new engine; Frogwares have pushed their own from the Reichenbach Falls in favour of the ubiquitous Unreal Engine 3. As for the mystery itself, well it turns out there will be eight whole cases for Sherlock to set his mind to, including “murders, disappearances” and “spectacular thefts”. However, the most interesting part is the addition of Mass Effect-style moralising, which Focus Home elaborate on below. “Each case offers real freedom to players, who will have to make important moral choices instead of simply enforcing justice by the book. All decisions have an influence in the game and affect your character’s reputation in addition to having realistic, sometimes unexpected, consequences. You will have to bear the weight of your choices, as Crimes and Punishments offers an exciting system of actions/consequences that forces players to think before acting by giving true depth to every decision they make.”

Cast your mind back to November, and you may recall that Double Fine were asking you to judge which game ideas they would turn into their Amnesia Fortnight prototypes, to be created during their traditional two-week brainstorming session. You chose the winners and, well, that was that – until now. Double Fine have gathered up the prototypes in a luxury special edition, available in both digital and physical form. The boxset/download features the five finished prototypes, plus a host of extra gubbins, including even more prototypes, the game’s respective soundtracks, and the documentaries.
The $30 two-disc box set – and indeed the $9.99 download version – features all five finished prototypes: Autonomous, Black Lake, Hack ‘n’ Slash, Spacebase DF-9 and The White Birch. But you’ll also get the original prototypes for Brazen, Costume Quest and Happy Song thrown in too, in addition to the aforementioned documentary and soundtracks. There doesn’t appear to be any difference in content between the digital and physical box sets – well, apart from the price.
If you donated money to the Amnesia Fortnight humble bundle last year, you’ll have already been given access to the finished prototypes, but it’s now time for the rest of us to get our dirty hands on the games. If, by the way, you’ve forgotten what those games were, the following Special Edition trailer should clue you in.
Thanks to Eurogamer.

New Sherlock Holmes game Crimes & Punishments announced, features moral choices

Developer Frogwares has revealed the latest entry in their long-running series of Sherlock Holmes-based adventure games, one of which resulted in the most terrifying video on YouTube. While their previous games haven’t strayed too far from the Jeremy Brett school of Holmes, there are changes afoot for The Great Detective’s latest mystery, a couple of which appear more than elementary. This new game comes with a new Sherlock, who publisher Focus Home describe as a “more modern character perfectly matching the new artistic ambitions of the title.” The released screenshots suggest that statement can be translated as ‘Sherlock’s not wearing a coat’, an act which was close to scandalous in Victorian times.
But the greatest change in Crimes & Punishments: Sherlock Holmes promises to be the new engine; Frogwares have pushed their own from the Reichenbach Falls in favour of the ubiquitous Unreal Engine 3. As for the mystery itself, well it turns out there will be eight whole cases for Sherlock to set his mind to, including “murders, disappearances” and “spectacular thefts”. However, the most interesting part is the addition of Mass Effect-style moralising, which Focus Home elaborate on below.
“Each case offers real freedom to players, who will have to make important moral choices instead of simply enforcing justice by the book. All decisions have an influence in the game and affect your character’s reputation in addition to having realistic, sometimes unexpected, consequences. You will have to bear the weight of your choices, as Crimes and Punishments offers an exciting system of actions/consequences that forces players to think before acting by giving true depth to every decision they make.”