Garry Newman has released the alpha for his new game, Rust, a sandbox survival title with some world-construction elements. It blends aspects of games like DayZ with Minecraft, and while it’s currently in a bit of a rough state, a lot of the alpha testers are reporting some good times.

Like other survival sandbox games you’ll need to hunt your own food and make your own clothing, but one of the key differentiators in Rust is that you actually have to build your own shelters. Once you’ve hatcheted some trees down, you actually need to assemble them into pieces and then build your shelter in your own way to keep the beasts out.

Currently the monsters are zombies, but Garry posts that these are just placeholders and will change in order to keep it differentiated from DayZ.

“We haven’t released an update for a while. A long while. Because we decided that we didn’t want it just to be DayZ – which is what it was looking like,” writes Garry. “We knew we couldn’t build big dense cities. We wanted to change direction and have the players build the world. We also hate zombies and are going to replace them with other NPCs at some point.”

“It’s not the best looking game in the world – but we’re not too concerned with looks until the gameplay is fun. So we have a free and open alpha here: http://www.playrust.com/ – when it asks you for a code just type in numbers until it lets you go to the next page.”

I’ve tried to register and the site doesn’t seem to proceed past that page, but perhaps you’ll have better luck than me. I’ve heard on places like Reddit that registration is closed, but there’s no notice on the official page, so… who knows? Anyway, give it a shot!

Source: PC Gamer

When an open-world Mad Max game was teased last week, the Australian journalists wondered among themselves whether the game’s main character would actually feature an Aussie accent.

There’s no real surprise here: no. He doesn’t. Mad Max has a grizzled, American tone. Thankfully, it was the only real disappointment of a behind-the-scenes demo shown to games.on.net on the E3 show floor.

InterWave Studios are looking to crowdfund the last few months of development on Dark Matter, a Metroid-esque sci-fi side-scrolling title.

Dark Matter is a 2.5D survival horror title where you make your way through an abandoned deep-space exploration vessel. InterWave claim that the focus is going to be on exploration, puzzle-solving and combat rather than jumping puzzles.

Health and ammunition will be scarce, and it’ll be up to players to craft it for themselves using scavenged resources rather than expecting it to drop out of downed enemies.

“We have taken Dark Matter as far as we could on our own,” say the developers. “This is not an arbitrary limit set by greedy management: it simply is the time when we run out of funds, and are forced to release prematurely, or shut down.”

“Dark Matter deserves better than that.”

Check out the Kickstarter page and, if you agree, chuck them a few dollars.

Source: Kickstarter

The rumour from earlier this week that Fallout 4 has been shown behind closed doors at this year’s E3 has been squashed by Bethesda.

“We showed three games at E3 – Wolfenstein: The New Order, The Elder Scrolls Online and The Evil Within,” said the company in a statement to Kotaku.

“We did not show any of our games behind closed doors.”

Sorry everyone. I mean, Bethesda didn’t deny they were making Fallout 4 — they almost certainly are — but they didn’t show it. Ah well.

Source: Kotaku

A sequel to Hotline Miami has been announced by Dennaton Games and Devolver Digital. Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number is due out later this year and will be the last in the series.

The game will reportedly follow “an escalating level of violence through multiple factions born from the events of the original game — all within the confines of blistering combat, the unmistakable visual style, and another powerful and intense soundtrack that pushes you to the limit and forces you to question your own thirst for blood.”

“Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number commands you to step into the murderous minds of several distinct characters – each with their own motivations and methods of execution – as storylines intersect and reality slips away into a haze of neon and carnage. Witness hundreds of new sprites and animations in lush new areas to clear floor-by-floor, and harness a variety of savage new weapons to satisfy your murder lust.”

So it’s about killing, then. Good. Here’s a trailer!

(more…)

Fighting zombies is as much a part of video games as collecting coins in Mario, or madly trying everything in your inventory in a point-and-click adventure. Wolfenstein, as one of the first and most popular FPS titles, represents a huge steppingstone for the industry.

The team behind the latest iteration of the franchise, Machine Games, is attempting to recapture that same sense of joy gamers had when they first encountered the original in the early 1990s.

Based on a hands-on demo played by games.on.net on the show floor, we believe they’re showing good signs of succeeding.

It is with regret that we announce today that games.on.net forum regular and passionate gamer MrMoilT passed away last Tuesday night after a long battle with leukemia.

Our admin brimlad describes MrMoilT as “an avid gamer, passionate and dedicated to all the games that he played,” and that “even in hospital in Melbourne he managed to continue playing games on his laptop and would join us on ts for a chat about his treatment and his passion, gaming”.

I’d like to ask anybody wishing to convey their sympathies to head over to this forum thread. I’ll be closing the comments on this article.

Our sympathies to MrMoilT’s family and loved ones.

Troubled zombie MMO The War Z has apparently figured that a good way to leave all those controversies behind and to stop people confusing them with DayZ or perhaps World War Z is to change their name to Infestation: Survivor Stories.

As explained on the official forums, “Effective today, The War Z has changed its name to Infestation: Survivor Stories. This change has come about primarily as a result of some confusion and trademark issues with a similarly titled property.”

“While we were reluctant to rename the game so long after launch, especially with nearly 1 million registered players, it was ultimately decided to be in the best interest of our existing community as well as future players in order to eliminate confusion. Please rest assured that this will in NO WAY affect you as players. The only difference you will see is the change in logo and website. There will be no interruption of service or change in content.”

Source: Infestion Forums

A brief leak that publicly exposed Valve’s internal project tracking software has resulted in a number of mailing lists used within the company being released.

Notable mailing lists inside Valve include a Half-Life 3 group with 42 employees attached, a Left 4 Dead 3 group with around 70 people attached, and other smaller groups such as “Cries Unheard”, “Microbe Wars” and “The Grange”. Some joke groups also clearly exist such as “WUBWUBWUB”, “gayben” and “yo dawg”.

The list of lists was uncovered by Valvetime.net and has been copied into Pastebin. You can see it here.

Source: Valvetime (Thanks, Stefan)

Australians woke up this morning to the bewildering news that Microsoft had performed a complete about-face on the hotly controversial issue of its Xbox One always-online DRM and game-locking strategies.

The latest Steam beta has been discovered to contain some interesting text strings hinting at the possibility of game-borrowing appearing in the future.

If you update to the latest beta (Steam > Settings > Beta Participation) and then look in Steam/Public/steamui_english you’ll find the following UI strings:

“SteamUI_JoinDialog_SharedLicense_Title” “Shared game library”
“SteamUI_JoinDialog_SharedLicenseLocked_OwnerText” “Just so you know, your games are currently in use by %borrower%. Playing now will send %borrower% a notice that it’s time to quit.”
“SteamUI_JoinDialog_SharedLicenseLocked_BorrowerText” “This shared game is currently unavailable. Please try again later or buy this game for your own library.”

Exciting times ahead! Hopefully an official announcement isn’t far off.

Source: Facepunch (thanks Stefan, JaMbO)

I’ll always remember Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow Over Mystara as a beeping, flashing arcade cabinet, sitting forgotten in the lobby of Valhalla, one of Perth’s only two Nerd Stores. Nobody ever seemed to play it, but every so often I would drop a coin or two in as I went past on my way to thumb greasily through sourcebooks for games that I, on my pathetic 13-year-old pocket money, could not possibly afford.

Fast forward to 2013: I have no less than 50 Dungeons & Dragons sourcebooks on my living room shelf, and Shadow Over Mystara has been bundled together with Tower of Doom and re-released in HD for just $15.

The times, they are a-changin’.