The Reticule

Garry’s Mod is one of the wonders of the PC platform, it started off as a mod for the Source engine and has developed over time to become a game itself spawning user made game modes and mods. One of the most innovative aspects of GMod is Fretta. It is a gamemode base which you are able to develop your own gamemode on top of. Facepunch Studios, the company behind GMod ran a competition to find the Fretta mode that “people want to play.”

Dog Fight

Big cash prizes were up for graps, $5000 for the winner, $2000 for second place with third, fourth and fifth getting $1000. The winning game modes will be added to GMod in an upcoming update with the developers being given the chance to include Steam achievements and get their mode updated as part of future GMod updates.

Zinger

The winners were revealed yesterday and it is amazing to see what people have been able to make inside GMod. The fifth placed entry, Ascension is a 2D team based climbing mode, in fourth was Prop Hunt 2 where one team disguises themselves as a prop in the scenery while the other side hunt them down. In third was an ambitious title called Dog Fight which sees players fly to the enemy base to steal fuel to power a rocket. In second is Zinger, a golf game with rocket launchers in a cartoon setting.

Trouble in Terrorist Town

The winner is a mode called Trouble in Terrorist Town, everyone is a terrorist with a small number being a traitor. The goal of the traitors is to kill the innocent players using a combination of surprise and special equipment. The innocents have to figure out who has betrayed them by observing other players and putting together the clues found on any bodies you find. The game doesn’t end when you die, you are able to posses physics props and move them around the map to possibly impact on how the game plays out. As long as you have GMod and Counter Strike Source installed you are able to play, just look for servers with terrortown listed as their game mode. You can find out more about Trouble in Terrorist Town here.

A new free to play MMORTS has been released into the big wide world, its name, World of Battles. I say free to play, but of course that is never really the case any more, gems are the secret behind this game, purchase gems and it sounds like you will get a huge advantage over non-paying gamers.

(more…)

If you weren’t content with a Rollercoaster Tycoon movie then you might find yourself more appeased with Indie Game: The Movie.

(more…)

Tom Clancy is a weird fellow. For an author, the guy doesn’t actually do very much writing, having built up one hell of a reputation for his military detail and whatnot from back when he actually did write. Nowadays he makes money of selling his name to Ubisoft, and the crazy thing is that it works very well indeed. (more…)

For nearly a decade, Popcap’s flagship game Bejeweled has been the definitive casual game. Simple to understand and yet horrendously addictive, the game has appeared everywhere. From browsers to iPhones and even making an appearance in World of Warcraft, and spawning countless imitators and variants it seems that surely everyone has played it once by now. Yet here we stand with a brand new standalone flavour of the Facebook version of the game. Is it worth the dough, or is it ultimately a flawed gem?

For the 0.1% of the population reading this who don’t know Bejeweled, you’re given a 8-by-8 grid of gems from which you have to select gems to switch places with adjacent gems in order to get similar gems to match up in groups of three or more. Do this and the gems disappear, and the ones above fall down to take their place. In Blitz, a 4 match will produce an explosive gem, which when cleared will also clear all gems around it, regardless of colour. A match of five will produce a rainbow gem, which doesn’t have to be matched but when you click it followed by any colour gem, ALL gems of that colour are removed from the board. With these three methods you can cause massive cascades and rack up a massive score. The main pull with Blitz is that you only have one minute to get as high a score as possible.

You’re of course rewarded for managing to make matches without stopping thanks to a speed bonus, get enough of these in succession and you’re rewarded with the Blazing Speed perk, which for a short time makes every match explosive and really racks up the points, as of course do combo matches from falling gems falling into further matches, eventually making the grid a cacophony of exploding gems. Visually and aurally it’s very bold, bright and easy to understand. There’s a vibrancy that pours from the visuals, while not being overstimulating which could put you off further matches. Some gems also contain coins, which can be spent on up to three of five powerups providing extra time, a free multiplier and the chance to explode any special gems on screen, amongst others.

The main pull of Blitz is of course, the ability to import your Facebook friends, and compare scores. It’s good to know that a game like Bejeweled has such mainstream appeal, as it’s far more likely many of your Facebook friends have played it and thus their scores are there to be played against. You can track how well they’ve done on a weekly basis and I have to admit it adds a lot knowing that you’ve beaten that guy you used to know from school who you always thought was a bit too cocky… Of course there’s the obligatory posting to the wall options, with added replay functionality so once you goto Facebook you can see how your friend pulled that extra 100,000 points out of seemingly nowhere.

However, we get onto the main bugbear of Bejeweled Blitz – is it worth it? It gets a little hazy here. See, the only real extras that the standalone version provides is the chance to play the game in whatever resolution your monitor supports, and the Badges/Rank system. Basically like achievements, these are awarded for certain tasks such as destroying so many rainbow gems or getting enough Blazing Speed bonuses. For these two features plus one million bonus coins, Popcap are charging £15 at the time of writing. For these extras bolted onto a game which the real meat is playable for free on Facebook, it seems a very expensive privilege to play it on your own. Sure, it’s very addictive, an excellent timewaster and a lot of fun – but for this price surely Popcap should be offering something more substantial – it’s not as even as if you can post your badges or achievements on Facebook to brag about them, so they’re purely for your own sense of self worth.

So Bejewled Blitz then. It’s a great game, and I highly recommend you give it a go if you’re on Facebook. But whereas paying a premium may be justifiable for playing it on an iPhone or portable device that can’t use Flash, it’s really hard to truly advise you pay that to play it on a device that can just as easily play online for free.

I’ve been debating what to talk about in my latest blog, I thought I might just talk about some of the games I have been playing, but something else came to mind. The generosity of Valve. (more…)

Malta. It’s not a big country, but it has a lot of people. Tourists, citizens, scum and saint, Malta is full of them. With that in mind, it’s one of the best places in the world to disappear. You don’t “blend in” in Malta, it devours you whole. Just what I was looking for.

(more…)

Do you want to support indie games and charities? If your answer is yes, then I think you should take a look at the Humble Indie Bundle. You can pay what you like and decide yourself how much of what you pay goes to the developers and the charities.

(more…)