Castle Empire Online – Open Beta
Ubisoft and Blue Byte‘s browser-based strategy MMO Castle Empire Online (formerly known as The Settlers Online) is now in open beta in Europe, with registration available through either Facebook or Ubisoft’s UPlay system. The game has been available to players in the US, Germany, France and Russia for some time, but is now available in the UK.
In Castle Empire Online, players gather resources, build and expand their city and raise an army.. you can group up with allies and join guilds, and trade.. or simply conquer all who stand in your path!
Minecraft 1.1 is out!
Mojang have just released the latest update for Minecraft, bringing us up to Minecraft 1.1!
This update adds new features and makes a few tweaks to existing features, as well as the usual bug fixes.
Amongst the new features are bow enchantments, new recipes for golden apples, language settings, world type options, and for creative mode, spawn eggs. Tweaks have been made to the biome generator too, meaning smoother transitions between different biomes.. beaches, smoother hills and so on.
Spawn eggs come in different colours to represent different mobs and villagers, and by placing one as you would any other block, this allows you to place mobs and villagers into your world. Note that you will need to be on a mode other than ‘Peaceful’ for the hostile mobs to appear.
Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City
Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City is the latest installment in the Resident Evil series, under development by Slant Six Games and Capcom.
The campaign places you in the role of an Umbrella Security Services soldier, having been sent in to Raccoon City to destroy all evidence of the T-virus.. including any survivors. Here, you will face US soldiers come to find the source of the outbreak, and Umbrella’s bio-organic ‘weapons’, as well as the usual zombies!
The latest video shows off some of the action..
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar-qKACbnkg]
During the campaign, the player will be able to make decisions which may go against the series’ canon, such as causing the death of Leon S. Kennedy or Claire Redfield! The campaign mode can be played alone, or with others in the four player co-op mode.. there’s also a multiplayer mode with USS soldiers versus the Government’s Spec Ops.
Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City is set for release on 23rd March 2012.
Diablo III on Consoles Too?
Diablo III is confirmed as being developed for consoles as well as the PC and Mac, according to this tweet from Blizzard’s Community Manager, Bashiok.
Although a console version has been mentioned in the past, it had not been confirmed until now. Director Jay Wilson has previously said that if they were to build a console version, it would be from the ground up rather than a port.
“We don’t want to port it,” said Wilson, Diablo III’s director. “We want to build it for console. There’s a key difference. Certainly, a lot of things get brought over, but a port is trying to take a PC game and graft it onto a console.
“Our goal, is to make a game that feels like it’s natively made made for a console. If we make it, we want it to feel like a Blizzard game and that we built it for that platform from the ground up.”
From VG247, via Game Informer‘s magazine.
Update: Bashiok has now said that the earlier tweet wasn’t meant to be an announcement: “We’re still exploring a console version, but more importantly working on the PC/Mac version.”
Bethesda and the Fallout MMO
The ongoing legal dispute between Bethesda Softworks and Interplay, publisher of the original Fallout series, in regards to the Fallout MMO, is finally over.
Interplay had already planned to make a Fallout MMO before the 2007 sale of the franchise to Bethesda. As part of this agreement, they retained the right to develop the MMO, although with specific requirements for funding and deadlines. Unfortunately, it seems that Interplay were unable to meet these requirements, and the companies have reached a settlement in court which reverts the license for the MMO back to Bethesda Softworks.
Although Bethesda now have the right to go ahead and make the Fallout MMO themselves, there has been no indication from the company that they will do so.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown
XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a reimagining of the original turn-based strategy originally released in 1993 under the title UFO: Enemy Unknown, by Culture Brain and MicroProse.
In the original game, the player manages X-COM, a secret organisation set up to deal with the threat of extraterrestrial invasion. Through the game, you meet and fight different aliens, learning more about them and their technology, before preparing an assault on the alien’s base. This was followed by a number of sequels and compilation releases, but the original was the most popular and successful, winning IGN’s #1 PC Game of All Time in 2003, 2005 and 2007, as well as high positions in the Best Computer Game of All Time by PC Gamer across several years. The game and X-COM series have a large fanbase, including some of the Firaxis team.. so the new game will have a lot to live up to!
XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a strategy game, and as the commander of X-COM, you are faced with handling the global response to the invasion of Earth: resource management, research and development of new technology, and defense, including management of the soldiers themselves, although Firaxis have said they are removing some elements of micromanagement which they considered tedious and uninteresting.
Another XCOM game is being developed by 2k Marin, developers of BioShock 2. Titled simply XCOM, this is a first person shooter and takes place earlier than any other game in the series, when the aliens are just making their first attacks on Earth. This game was to be published in 2011, but has been delayed.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown is under development by Firaxis Games, published by 2k Games, with release scheduled for late 2012.
Terrorhedron
Terrorhedron is an eight player, 3d co-op tower defense game by indie developers MCRO Games. This tower defense game is rather different from other tower defense as in Terrorhedron, you build and program your own turrets!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7KQ1ee0pB8]
You can building turrets from a set of 3d building blocks, with 4- or 6- facing platforms, then a choice of seven types of turret: laser, EMP, Plastic Pulse, Photon Pulse, Energy Vacuum, Plasma Beam and Finance Generator. You can program each turret to prioritise different enemies; faster moving targets, those closest to the turret or the end of the maze, or the strongest, which gives you a lot of choice in terms of strategy. Target the strongest enemies at the beginning of the maze, leaving the weaker targets to be mopped up by later turrets, or use the EMP to slow them all down and allow more firing time..
The enemies in this game are coloured spheres, with different strengths and speeds. As they take damage they change speed, with the weakest targets turning green and travelling at a set speed, but higher strength balls becoming either faster or slower. You have 100 lives to start with, and although you regenerate a life per round, later on you encounter enemies which are worth a lot more, so your setup of towers has to be able to cope with the changes of speed as well as enemy strength.
Terrorhedron is available via mcro.org, for just $5.
Diablo III Release Rumours
Best Buy have posted a release date of February 1st for Diablo III, with the date listed on the website as well as in a shop display in Rochester, Minnesota.
Although we’d love to see the game out sooner, Blizzard haven’t actually announced a release date beyond “early 2012”, and we’re still waiting for the news from the official Diablo III site itself!
Update: Bashiok, Community Manager at Blizzard, has confirmed that Diablo III does not yet have a release date.
The Binding of Isaac – The Wrath of the Lamb
Edmund McMillen, co-creator of dungeon crawler The Binding of Isaac, has been talking about the development of a huge, sole expansion to the game.. The Wrath of the Lamb!
The Wrath of the Lamb will add more items, characters enemies, alternative chapters, and a new end boss.. all in, there will be “about 50 percent more content”! After this, Edmund says, there will be nothing else left to add.
Development for the expansion is in the early stages, so it won’t be out for a few months yet!
Q.U.B.E. goes live on Steam!
First-person puzzle game Q.U.B.E. (Quick Understanding of Block Extrusion), by Toxic Games, is now live on Steam!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iABxhj0ExA0]
Players begin the game by being dropped into an all-white room, and with little instruction, they must find and use coloured blocks to solve the puzzle and discover the way out of each level. Q.U.B.E. has drawn comparisons with Portal.. but you can see for yourself by trying out the demo.
Toxic Games is a UK-based independent games developer; Q.U.B.E. started out as a part of the developers’ student project in 2009.
Q.U.B.E. is also the first Indie Fund game to be released! Indie Fund is an investment fund backed by a team of successful indie developers, providing the investment new indies need to help cover ongoing costs and get their game finished. Other games being backed are Steph Thirion’s Faraway, Robert Briscoe‘s re-imagination of Dan Pinchbeck‘s Dear Esther, and Pocketwatch Games‘ MONACO.