A New Year, A New Bundle As ‘The Indie Gala Magicka’ Bundle Goes Live

Multiplayer shooters are ten a penny these days, but ones with this much history – originating as a super-popular Half-Life mod – are rare. Add in the fact that Unknown Worlds are a tiny indie team producing graphics on par with the best AAA studios, and Natural Selection 2 becomes a far more enticing treat than most.

The game is still penned in for a Summer 2012 release date (so ‘any time now’, strictly speaking), and while things could slip further into the year, it seems unlikely. Especially as they’ve chosen the peak of June to release a new and impressively well-produced trailer. Catch an eyeful of alien bio-goo and caseless space-machinegun fire below.

Exciting stuff, showing off a whole lot of terrestrial and aerial combat. Keep in mind that all of this runs on Unknown Worlds’ own proprietary engine. It’s a rather fancy piece of kit, with a much greater focus on dynamic lighting (so that aliens can plunge regions of the map into darkness) than many of the big commercial engines out right now. This trailer in particular is showing off the latest map, Docking, and will apparently be available to beta pre-order folks as of Build 210.

The game is currently available for pre-purchase from the official site for $35, which gets you Steam access off the bat. We’ll be digging deeper into the alien hives for a full review once the coveted Version 1.0 rolls round. Skip watching the skies, though – keep your eyes on the ceiling. Never know when something might come scuttling overhead.

At first we thought how much more “super amazing” can a wagon adventure get than The Orgeon Trail? We soon found ourselves corrected upon watching the trailer for Super Amazing Wagon Adventure. The outset is the same essentially – you play as three emigrants travelling west along a wagon trail. Then guns get involved, lots of animal slaughter and things quickly escalate from there.

So here’s the rundown – Super Amazing Wagon Adventure plays out in a set of randomly complied short “scenes”. These are switched between every 3-30 seconds, so you could blowing up buffalo, then outrunning an avalanche before running over snakes. These scenes all sit comfortably within 2D shooter territory, so the variation isn’t hugely vast as a lot of the change seems to be what you’re shooting at and sometimes what with. Mind you, the list provided by the developer does get quite crazy: “Face bears, buffalo, wolves, bandits, eagles, vultures, scorpions, snakes, spiders, bats, coyotes, avalanches, aliens, unicorns and more!” There’s also random moments of time travel to be encountered.

There are moments when you leave the wagon and continue the slaughter on foot, and from there you’ll have to dodge around the whole screen shooting in all directions. Death seems much more likely in these scenes, with characters getting mauled by various hostile creatures. Why let these characters be anonymous though? The trailer encourages the player to create their friends so you can laugh at them when they die horrifically. It seems you can name them, choose their gender and choose from a list of facial features, all within the game’s pixelated existence.

The developer also reckons that the game will provide you with hours of playing time, but that seems to rest on whether or not you’re into unlocking various things. New wagons with special weapons and other “characteristics” are available if you complete certain challenges. If that’s not enough to keep you going, then maybe just finding out more of the game’s differing scenarios will float your boat. No? How about Survival Mode – facing against infinite creatures for as long as you can.

As with many games with trailers emerging this week, Super Amazing Wagon Adventure is being entered into the Dream.Build.Play competition. You’re more likely interested in the information that it is heading to XBLIG this Summer and will also make its way to PC if the demand is there. You can keep up to date with the game over on the official website.

I’ve heard everything there is to hear about Retro City Rampage  Hell, I have honestly been beaming with anticipation, wondering just when I would get my paws on the 8-bit retro-inspired GTA-like. Now that I have finally taken a couple of 8-bit cars for a spin, I can happily recommend this game to anybody – excluding kids, because there’s shitloads of killing going on and that’s probably not good for kids (right mainstream media?). I had the pleasure of trying the game out on a PS Vita after chatting with Leonard Paul, also known as FreakyDNA, who worked on the game’s superb soundtrack. Leonard was casually leaning by the area where the game was displayed on the PlayStation show floor, my colleague and good friend, Erik Johnson, worked some of his charm and I was able to meet the man behind so many righteous chiptunes.

For the uninitiated, Retro City Rampage is very reminiscent of the first couple of Grand Theft Auto titles. It has an old-school feel down to the core and spreads it through the visuals, sounds and most of the gameplay. The game mode I stumbled upon first gave me two minutes to do as much damage to people/the city/cars/police as possible – thereby: the rampage. At first, I played awfully and failed to reach any of the game’s high score thresholds, but a bit of practice soon remedied that. I ran around shooting people as you might expect, blasting them with a shotgun or a handgun, then using a katana to cut their 8-bit limbs, but the real game changer was the super-effective rocket launcher which led me to my high score.

I was surprised but very glad to find this much fun within just a couple minutes of picking the game up. One thing to mark up though, and to be honest this is probably native to the Vita, the controls took some getting used to. That being said, Retro City Rampage feels as if it should fit on any device, any platform and any OS quite comfortably. Hopefully, using controls that were more familiar to me would alleviate that issue – the game was also available for play on the show floor for Xbox but I stuck to the Vita since it was a completely new experience.

In any case, I ran around killing people and blowing cars up until I had my fill – although, really, I hadn’t – but I backed out and decided to try the Story Mode. Now, it’s pretty difficult to pay attention to story with all the hubbub at E3, but it seemed obvious that it parodied specific games and general tropes of video games past. It was great to see that Retro City Rampage wasn’t just a one trick pony and borrowed gameplay mechanics from other games in its retro concoction. This seems to bode well for story missions, which will surely be varied to keep gameplay fresh and exciting, all while throwing references to video games and its culture over its shoulder.

In the five minutes of play I was able to get from the story mode, I traversed the map while completing objectives and entering buildings, or entering an area might jump me into a separate stage with separate rules. For example, after running over a bunch of 8-bit pedestrians, I stepped outside and entered what was a platformer/side-scroller area straying from the top-down GTA gameplay. This is equally good news for the game’s 30 challenge levels, which will hopefully carry this torch we refer to as variation.

For me, Retro City Rampage felt amazing but not quite perfect on the Vita. Then again, I don’t own a Vita and have seldom had a chance to play it. Either way, it was fun as hell. The consensus is that the multi-platform release of the game is expected to boast big sales (at least, for indies) and attract plenty of love from press and gamers alike. From presentation to gameplay, Brian Provinciano’s Retro City Rampage is polished through and through – and the good news is that we should be getting our hands on it this summer. Get ready to rage!

You can find more about Retro City Rampage on the official website.

Toxic Games have got in contact to tell us all about a few news things concerning their first person puzzler Q.U.B.E. – the soundtrack release, the 1.2 version and a Collector’s Edition release in Germany.

It’s been a while that we’ve heard anything Q.U.B.E. shaped, apart from our interview of course, but Toxic Games have made up for that by bringing three pieces of hefty news for us to tell you. First of all, they’ve announced that they will be releasing the Q.U.B.E. soundtrack on May 4th for $5.99/£4.99/€5.99 on iTunes, Amazon and Steam. This will contain over 30 tracks from the game (that’s quite a lot!) and some special tracks to go along with that too.

Secondly, they will be releasing a Collector’s Edition of the game in Germany, Austria and Switzerland in collaboration with Headup Games, which will come with some special extras including the soundtrack. A release date hasn’t been announced but it’s expected in Summer 2012.

Lastly, Q.U.B.E. has been updated to the 1.2 version which fixes many of the bugs in Sector 7 of the game and allows you to customize your keyboard layout. Oh ans they want you to see this:

More information on Q.U.B.E. can be found on the game’s official website.

Capybara Games have released the long awaited and much needed PC version of their award-winning adventure title, Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (S:SS), which is available right now on Steam with 25% off!

Those iDevices are lovely, aren’t they? Finnicky perhaps, but lovely. Electric computers on the other hand, well, don’t get us started – we’re rather passionate about those. Which is why the release of S:SS on to those love-boxes of ours is so, so exciting. Named, awarded and bore in stone as one of the artiest art games and best iOS titles in all of the years, S:SS has now been realised as a proper point and click adventure title!

Where might you find such a wondrous port of said game? Well Steam of course old chap – there’s a link right here. You want more good news? Well listen up! You also get the soundtrack from the game with your purchase. Want even more good news? Okay then – to celebrate the game’s release, S:SS is on a 25% off sale for the next week making it just £3.99/$5.99. Oh and those with Macs, the game will be with you before the summer!

More information on Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP can be found on the game’s official website.