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The unfortunately named Bloxorz is loads of fun. Clearly it should have been called "Blockotron" or "Slabflip 2000", but I guess it's too late for that now. The idea is to get your block slotted into the hole (and in the game!) without tumbling to your death. I know how you hate Flash games, but believe me when I say you'll like this one: there's something slightly misleading about its perfect geometry, and the odd pulsating noise in the background makes me uneasy... Also I'm not sure what's going on with the orange squares, so it might be best to read the instructions instead of shouting "yeah, yeah" and throwing your arms in the air, like I did.

Found at the peerless TIGSource, of course.

Okay. Am I the only person to find this advert for Timeshift rather peculiar?

Thanks, Game Trailers. Thanks.

They've chosen to make an advert for a videogame mostly in live action. Sure there's some CGI in there but... whatwhat? Exactly how can that be said to advertise a videogame in any way? Isn't it just a little creepy? Perhaps it's not an advert at all, and they've accidentally broadcast an ultra-violent power-rangers fan movie.

Casual games? Forget that silly old name - we've found a new one!

OMNI-GAMES!

Coined by a new Scottish site - cobimobi - it's the work of Cobra Mobile, a company that previously only released games for your telephone. Now they are creating games that work on formats from the PC to the iPod, hence the grand name.

I've been working in PC Gamer's office for the last couple of days, and with half an hour free at the end of the day, Tim told me to hammer out a blog post for them based around the game of World in Conflict we played at Lunch. Which Tim won. Frustratingly.

Here's a bit which stands alone out of context...

One of my favourite wins in World in Conflict was on a server where I was on the USA team, and the USSR were on a long winning run. It was close, but they just had a slightly better team. But I suspected they weren't *that* good, and decided to try something suicidal. They used their artilery well, so - playing Armour - I ignored the capture points and rushed for the backline to harass their support units. Two helicopter units chase me around the backlines as I annoy the couple of support players. I'm killed relatively quickly, but I've opened up enough space for my side to just sweep the map. By the time I've respawned my army, we're claiming the final command point. A crushing defeat after a string of such close-victories had the USA scratching their head. I left, grinning enigmatically to find clan requests in my account next time I logged in. Result!

I'm not sure what I was trying to do with that title.

In the big ol' interview with Ken Levine which we launched the site with, I mentioned that other bits of the transcript found homes elsewhere. The biggest chunk of it has emerged, as PC Gamer republishes online my interview with Levine which is in their current print edition. It deals with controversy, developers reflecting culture, the price of a legacy and a splash of Randian philosophy. And here's a quote.

"If you look at the '60s, you'll see Vietnam movies like John Wayne's Green Beret being made. And you go to the '70s, you have Apocalypse Now. From this ultra-patriotic unquestioning thing, we're moving to a stage where games are getting mature enough to reflect the zeitgeist a little. BioShock is reflecting the confusion I have."

Exciting news for every reader! Browsing Ragnar Tørnquist's blog, I spied in the comments links to something I'd never thought might exist:

The Longest Journey Cosplay.

First there's alvane's April Ryan:

Valve's Orange Box will be released on 12th October (and apparently the 10th in the US) and it gives us a number of reasons to be cheerful. It's a bundle of games – and that's something we don't often see these days, especially when all three games are brand new. We can look forward to Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal all at once: which one will you play first? You can barely imagine another developer being able to do this: to deliver three different games, each with its own palette of potent ideas, for release on the same day. Valve are beginning to scare me.

After the clickhop: some rambling thoughts on the Valve box of goodies. (Because I am a thought-rambler.)

RPS-roving reporter Quinns has been crying over this, so I have to share. It's the first footage for THEY (Whose name doesn't appear to actually have capital letters in any of the press we can find, but seems to demand it), being developed by Metropolis Software who you may know from the incredibly lovely, no really, honest, Aurora Rising.

Here's the trailer. To avoid spoiling it for you, the (er) critique is beneath the cut.

Thanks, Game Trailers.

I don't speak French, so that joke probably doesn't work, but I thought it worth a try.

Our link-chums at Kotaku found this. It is, quite literally, like nothing you've ever seen before (at least hopefully). Footage is Not Safe For Work. With Capitals. I mean, it's not Warren-Ellis-Don't-Look-link bad or anything, but it's about as out there as (say) Battle Raper. Probably worse, in fact. I'm not sure if there's actually a scale for these things. Maybe we should make one, on which this would score a nine, as we're famously hard-markers on weird-shit perversion.

So instead of finishing off the work I was supposed to do this afternoon I spent an hour attempt to make any kind of headway in Gridblaster. For some reason Gridblaster breaks the videogame-processing parts of my tiny brain. It seems no more complicated than your average retro-shooter, but for some reason there's just too much going on for me to cope with.

It looks innocuous enough - it's the Bomberman map with added shooty stuff - but it's hurting me.

And I can't deal with it. I have to stop. Perhaps it'll be okay for you.

We understand that some of our readers are fond of a sport called Foot-to-Ball, played by young men with fashionable haircuts and uncomplicated wives. Part of its underground popularity has been fueled by the long-running rendition of the sport in videogamingvision by a small, independent company know as Electronic Arts.

Rumour has it that there is to be a new iteration of the game this year, which with forward thinking is titled "Fifa 08". It will once more recreate the simple rules of this Sunday afternoon activity, even going so far as to find out the names of those who have signed up as members of the various teams, and including them as a kind nod to the dedicated.

If this is all too much of a muddle, perhaps you might like to have a brief sample of it all in the form of a Demonstration Download, available from Electronic Arts' website here.

Disclaimer: Only "Americans" can get free stuff.

Ubisoft have decided to release three of their older games for free, albeit with a few adverts tacked on for good monetary measure. Get them via these games via these Gamershell links: Far Cry, Prince Of Persia: Sands of Time, and Rayman: Raving Rabbids. You also need a free Ubi.com account to get the buggers working. RPS recommends both Far Cry and Sands Of Time, but we're a little less enthusiastic about the mouse-spasming mini-games of the Rabbids.

A freed game, yesterday.

When my lottery numbers finally come-up and I start assembling the dev team for Total Transport Simulator (a combo plane/train/automobile/ship sim) Pierre-Michel Ricordel is going to be the first person I call.

He's the bloke responsible for extraordinary freeware truck sim Rigs of Rods. Imagine a hybrid of 18 Wheels of Steel, Bridge Construction Set, and Garry's Mod, and you'll probably just strain your brain. Far better to download the thing, together with a few choice add-ons, and experience the amazing vehicular physics first-hand.

Don't quit before you've driven a Tatra lorry into the belly of an Antonov cargo plane then taken off, messed around with at least three types of truck-mounted crane, and tried a spot of rock climbing in one of the big-booted, insanely flexible, crawlers.

Until you read this anyway.

(That was cheap - Subconscious Ed)

Shuddup. Anyway - Guild Wars: Eye of the North went live this weekend. I'm playing through for a review at the moment, and I had to - due to an Hilarious Internal Communication Error - actually go and buy a copy. This made me pay a little more attention to a Special Offer thing that Guild Wars has been waving in my direction every time I've booted it up recently. It's a free mission pack, set around four sections of the Guild Wars Mythos (We get a Gwen: The College Years mission, basically). You get it when you spend more than Seventeen quid (or twenty-six dollars for our not-getting-abused-due-to-exchange-rate colonial friends) either in the Guild Wars in-game store or the PlayNC store. In other words, buy the expansion pack direct from them and you get extra content the chump in the street doesn't have. Laugh at the chump in the street! Laugh at him with his sweaty features and charmless, extra-contentless demeanor.

We already wrote about the annoucement of this sequel to the never-hit-it-big GTA-like. Now we offer almost as few words about the first trailer for it.

One of Team RPS loves Mafia, the other three float between 'meh' and 's'alright', depending on whether they remembered to have breakfast that day, so we're expecting some arguments about this. Given both Mafia games are stablemates of Bioshock, whose lead developer Ken Levine recently took a vicious swipe at games that use extended cut-scenes, it'll be interesting to see whether this sequel takes the 'stand here and listen for ages' approach of its precedessor or not.

Of course, it's also set in close to the same time period as Bioshock, so if 2K could get Mafia's developer Illusion Softworks and Bioshock's developer Irrational talking, perhaps there'd be some Andrew Ryan easter eggs in there. There won't, of course. But someone might say 'mook', just like Frank "What accent was I supposed to be doing again?" Fontaine does.

It's the 12th birthday of Command & Conquer today - which means you only have to wait another four years until you can sleep with your copy of the first game (according to UK law, in case you're a shocked US reader. Although I'm not rightly sure if any country actually has laws about physical intimacy with plastic discs).

But what if you don't own a copy of the first game? Well, then you'll be wanting to download it for free from here. Somewhat uncharacteristically, EA is now offering the entire game (both GDI and NOD campaigns) for non-bucks, to anyone. It's like Satan offering to give Sisyphus a lift up that hill in his Satanmobile.

So, go for it. Just don't come moaning to us about the archaic interface.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is now available on Steam. It was one of the most interesting and atmospheric PC games of this year, and you really should play it - if just to have an opinion on it. It's up there for just $30, so give it up to the Ukrainians. Needless to say, I'll be talking more about Stalker later in the year.

In the meantime: what do you want to see from the Stalker expansion pack?

[Another of my Making Of's from the vault. I was pleased that I got a chance to do this too - it's much easier to get a developer to talk about their previous game when it's one in a series which they've making a sequel to. It just ties into the whole PR cycle. Trying to get an interview just about something outside of that is a little trickier, and Eric Flannum was enormously gracious with his time. This is a slightly expanded version from PC Format's original, with some extra material. I replayed it last year actually, and lobbed my piece on Sacrifice's merits over on my blog a while back. If you like this, you may like that too.]

Sacrifice is one of the most distant landmarks in the PC gaming atlas, in an area marked “Here Be Dragons”. While spectacular, few people went there, and those who did came back reciting fantastical tales of strange vistas, genre-blending RTS/Action mechanics and a frankly wicked sense of humour. To game historians looking back from the far future, it’s going to prove as mystifying as Stonehenge is to archaeologists. How on earth did they build this?

Well, like everything, it started with an idea. “The inspiration was originally from our lead programmer, Martin Brownlow,” Eric Flannum, now at Arenanet tells, us, “He got the opportunity to start a team at Shiny, and basically able to make any game he wanted to. He’d also had the idea for the Sacrifice terrain engine”. The game he wanted was, essentially, a radical update of ancient Julian-Gollop spectrum classic Chaos, but in 3D.

If Walker's easily prone to tears, my own emotional foible is being governed by extreme worry. Paranoia, even. This may be evident by the occasional panic in this feature I wrote a while back for PC Gamer UK, which has just been lobbed online.

'Are Games Killing Us?' is the question it poses. "Yes, but slowly and horribly" is the reasonably inevitable answer. For a good couple of weeks as and after I researched this piece, I couldn't sit at a PC for more than ten minutes without having to stand up and nervously pace about the room, until the imagined leaden feeling in my legs that definitely, definitely meant I was doing to die of Deep-Vein Thrombosis subsided.

By way of illustration, here is a picture of a dead man in a game.

Okay, there's obviously a lot still being said about in the gaming space about Bioshock. Being a crazed obsessive, I'm still reading most of it. But, if you have to read one thing after completing Bioshock, this is the one. It's Chris Remo's extensive interview with Ken Levine, which goes through all the elements of the game and is pretty damn good. And let's have a non-spoilery aggressive quote, eh?

"Honestly, any writer could write a 20-minute cutscene. I hate those as a gamer. I skip them. Those games, I don't know what the hell is going on. I'm not going to sit through those. But in Half-Life, I know everything that's going on. That was a big inspiration. I know more about City 17 than I know about any Final Fantasy world.

Even a great game like Okami, it has 20 minutes of "blah blah blah" and I just want to kill myself. It's not fair to our medium, it's so self-indulgent. I think we have to work harder. Trust me, it's a lot harder to do what we did in BioShock than to do a 20-minute cutscene. I could write that stuff all day long.

I have to admit that the MMOs we can expect in the next year don't really excite me. The one that I hold a candle for is the mystic-barbarian romp Age Of Conan, which was beautiful-if-awkward when I played it earlier in the year. The developers at Funcom are keen to create a combat system which doesn't just have you press a button and wait for the turn-based hitting to occur. Their solution is the 'combat rose' which allows you to pick your melee swings for both attack and defence, via a small mouse and key graphical interface. It didn't really seem to work when I played it - one swing was much the same as another - and I understand that, after the closed beta, this was one of the systems that the team are reconsidering. The game has, it seems, been delayed until next year. Perhaps the beta did its job.

But there's more to this beast than a weird control system, as I'll report after the jump.

This is a piece that was previously published in The Escapist. It's a favourite of mine. Not only because I got to further seal my fate as gaming's crying fool, but also because it offered me an opportunity to interview the fantastic (Uncle) Charles Cecil about one of my favourite gaming moments.

Confessions of a Crybaby

I am a crybaby. And I don’t care what you think. Well, that’s simply not true, is it? If I didn’t care what you think, I wouldn’t be setting out to write a piece, on a widely read website, explaining why the crybaby gets the best deal. I deeply care what you think. In fact, if you don’t like me, I may… sniffle… come on, let’s get on with it.

I think anyone who might take the stance that games cannot make you cry is either a sociopath, has never played Angel of Darkness and tried to walk in a straight line, or simply a big, lying coward. Begone, cowards! Today is the day of the ludicrously emotional – we shall triumph and probably get all weepy as we accept our victory.

Let me put things in context. I can’t watch a Muppet movie without crying (please, no jokes about Muppet’s Treasure Island – I’ve deliberately never watched it). Not just in the amazingly sad bits where only evil monsters made of angry stone wouldn’t shed 14 buckets of salt water, but pretty much all the way through. There’s just something about them, something about the love behind them, the passion that fuelled (past tense, thanks to their vile murder via the Disney purchase – more crying here) their very existence. The purpose of this aside? To hyper-stress what a sap I am. The sappiest of the sappy. It’s established. We can progress.

After the hurdle: Interview with Charles Cecil.

This is probably the SHMUP! equivalent of Oasis and Blur releasing a single in the same week, but Hikware - of Warning Forever fame - have put out their latest enormo-blaster, Cyclops, while we were still recovering from ABA game's latest blast. And it looks like this...

Okay. I'm half-lying. They've been out for a few weeks now, but I wanted to wait until I had a chance to actually play Cyclops to actually put it into context. At least on my initial play, it's not in the same league as Warning Forever (Which is the Shadow of the Colossus of the SHMUP! except with none of the tedious fucking around with the horse, and about as good as a freeware shooter gets), but it's certainly its own creature. It's primary mechanic is that you're stationary, with enemies approaching from all side. Your weapon is an enormous beam-thing, which annihilates all and sundry. The "all and sundry" is the key bit - it also takes out incoming projects. Since after firing it needs to recharge and your turning speed is stictly limited, the game's based around you priotising incoming vectors and all that. It takes a little long to get going for my liking - I'm of the Robotron-school of Arcade games, where if I'm not mentally exausted by level 5, it's too weak for me - but I still think it's worthy of a little attention.

Cyclops can be downloaded from here and if you haven't actually played Warning Forever, for the sake of the eternal Arcade Fire, get it from here.

Continuing my abortive attempts to understand Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn, the remake of the venerable MMORPG.

Today I killed a llama. No-one seemed to mind. I also killed a goat and a horse, but a frog beat the hell out of me. The fact it was called 'Bogling' rather than 'Frog' is, in retrospect, a reasonable clue. Later, when it got dark, I killed a cougar that I was convinced was trying to steal babies from cots or something. I've yet to see any other cougars, so now I'm a bit worried I've killed the only big cat in New Haven. I'm not supposed to be killing endangered species - I'm supposed to be a ninja, noblest of all the warriors. Except I'm a ninja that still can't hide.

Full-on ninja-versus-llama action: the stuff they couldn't show in cinemas!

After the jump: the murderous healer and the great shoe drought.

A fun piece of nonsense I wrote for PC Gamer in the current issue's Extra Life has gone online today. It's a guide to cosplaying Lara in Tomb Raider: Anniversary. In the game, I mean. I'll leave Kieron to write a guide to cosplaying as her in real life.

Anyway, it's deeply silly and surprisingly fun. And yes, one of them has her in the nude. But she's FAR cuter as a tiger.

I met Gabe Newell a while back when I was reviewing Half-Life 2 or something, but I completely failed to interview him. Well, he was distracting me - I had a game to play! And my dictaphone batteries were probably dead. Anyway, I shook his hand and said that I was just fine, thanks. Comrade Bramwell from Eurogamer.net is a little cannier than me, and when he met Mr Valve at the recent Leipzig computer games convention he sat down to ask him all kinds of searching questions.

Many of the answers to those questions are contained within this expansive interview. Bramwell and Newell discuss things such as the problems with DirectX 10, the fact that Portal and TF2 look awesome (more on that later in the week, Valve-fans), and the fact that Gabe didn't know how much his games cost to make. There's loads more too, so click up there to read it.

But not all facts were disclosed. No, because Newell also talked about unified gaming and the nature of the PC, and we have those quotes right after that click-hop.

DISCLAIMER: We're not affiliated with Eurogamer, right. We just know them, and sometimes work for them. Okay - so if they go and do something crazy and dangerous right now, it's nothing to do with us.

This may be the first in a short series, or it may be a one-off post of disheartened misery. Either way, you'll soon be able to make pretty exact estimates about how much willpower I have. As mentioned yesterday, I've had a strange, some might say futile and insane, desire to take a poke around the Ultima Online overhaul, Kingdom Reborn, for a while now. It's the father of the modern MMO, and, not being seriously internetted in its heyday, I'd never played it previously. So, I was curious to see how it compares to its many colourful children. It was released this week, and so I did.

After the jump: becoming 0.2% better at hiding, and accidentally turning into a rabbit.

When you're browsing news, trying to stay abreast of the developments in the world of PC Games, you're looking for something to stop you dead in your tracks. Something unexpected, that demands an immediate response. Escape From Paradise City managed to do so in a way which no game since Devastation has done so. I can only gawp and blink and run to Wordpress to blog a story.

Here's the "thing". It's one of its three playable characters.

It's Sean Connery! Sean Connery on Steroids, admittedly, but undeniably Scotland's most Sean-Connery son. And now I stop to look, those two lurking in the background look kinda familiar.

PC Gamer UK have posted up my review of Medieval II: Total War Kingdoms. I say things like this:

These four campaigns represent a gigantic amount of new material. It's all presented brilliantly - new animations and cinematics for each of them, and a unique front end and rack of options. This feels like four expansion packs rather than one muscular bundle. The smaller changes mean they all feel different to play, and the tiny tweaks and foibles mean it's not quite like Medieval II any more.

And we've linked this before, but it's worth reiterating that they got the inside scoop on Empire: Total War. Yes, it's got ships in.

Our absolutely favourite game trailers site, Game Trailers, have put up an interview with the 'military advisor' from Call Of Duty 4, Hank Keirsey. Watch him speak:

Thanks, Game Trailers.