Awesome Friday!

I can’t stop playing Absolute Drift, and in order to properly explain why, I have to tell you a little story.

Continue reading…

The makers of Incredipede and Pineapple Smash Crew, Colin Northway and Rich Edwards, have thrown a line to the many, many people who love games but maybe don’t have much disposable income.

Continue reading…

As I got into bed last night I slipped my hand under the covers and something buzzed against it. I instinctively yanked my arm away while something black and striped and angry crawled out from underneath the duvet and headbutted the light in determined repetition. I wish I could say that my response was calm and measured, but it was more like Free Willy jumping out of the aquarium with a high-pitched yelp to match. It was dealt with.

Now, imagine that scenario but you’re in the middle of a swarm of hundreds of these bastards and all you have is an machine gun. Or replace the bugs with zombies, or lizard men, or tiny red demons, or mechanical spiders that split into more spiders, and more spiders, and more spiders, when you destroy them. Welcome to Crimsonland, where Borderlands meets Earth Defense Force in a bloodied frenzy.

Continue reading…

I had a dream as a boy, fuelled by Star Wars and Dan Dare and Thunderbirds: spaceships, yawning through the void of space, taking me from one adventure to the next. Games have always been a way for me to realise my childlike flights of fancy, allowing me to feel the grace and freedom from unrestricted flight and adventure that normally wouldn’t be possible.

And then Space Engineers came along and it’s basically the game of my boyhood dreams.

Continue reading…

Well now, this is interesting. There have rumours circulating for a long time that Half-Life developers and operators of Steam, Valve, are preparing to shift into home console production with a TV box that would let you play all your Steam games from the comfort of your sofa. The hype train gained even more speed last week when owner Gabe Newall said that open-source operating system Linux was “the future of gaming” and they were working on a way to get it into people’s living rooms.

Continue reading…

T.C. Sottek Writing for The Verge:

Valve is trying to build a game console that you haven’t seen before: something that brings the PC (the big thing sitting on your desk) and the traditional console (the little thing sitting under your TV) together into a single device. A device that will run Valve’s Steam platform: the biggest digital game distribution service on the market, with upwards of 50 million users. (By comparison, Xbox Live has somewhere around 40 million subscribers.) But what does that really mean?

[…]

Based on what Valve has told us, its Steam box will — like a console — be something small and quiet that you can fit near your television while you kick back on the couch with a wireless controller. Like a PC, it will let you buy and download your games as many times as you want without needing any discs, and choose from a vast library of free game customizations. The Steam Box will also include a few unique twists, like controllers that can passively sense your feelings (biometrics), and wireless technology that can connect the console to several rooms and screens in your house at the same time.

Valve is shopping for the right ingredients — the features, parts, and partners — to make the Steam Box a reality. But why would a software company like Valve, known for its game-making chops, want to bake its own consoles and controllers? Let’s look back at 2012 to find out.

It’s a long article so be sure to get comfy before you sit down to read, but do sit down to read because it’s a nice rundown of everything that seems to be going on.

I, for one, can’t wait for this thing.

[source: the verge]