Machinarium: Beautiful Hand-Drawn Artwork

I picked up a bunch of games for next to nothing in the Steam Summer Sale these past few weeks (resulting in spending no more than £6 in total-bargain!). Machinarium was one of them.

A point and click game loaded with puzzles, quirky but beautiful hand-drawn animation and a cute robot, I am loving this at the moment.

I also found out that Machinarium was created by Amanita Design, creators of a bizarre, surrealist, sometimes disturbing but equally enthralling point and click browser game Samorost(<-click to play it!), which I loved when I was younger.

I definitely recommend giving this a play. The demo is up on Steam; so download it! http://steamcommunity.com/app/40700

One of my favourite aspects of Machinarium is the artwork, some of which you can see below. (Click an image to make it bigger).

Music Monday: A Writer's Dream (Alan Wake)

Today's Music Monday track has been taken from Alan Wake. 

Alan Wake is a survival horror style game that features a writer struggling to escape from a long bout of writers block...and a mysterious presence on the island he is holidaying at with his wife. Acting almost as a homage to Stephen King novels and David Lynch's TV series Twin Peaks, Alan Wake is an excellent game.

Check out this track, "A Writer's Dream" below. As always, let me know what you think in the comments!

Terraria Confirmed For Xbox Live & PSN

Indie hit Terraria will be released for Xbox Live Arcade and PSN in early 2013, publisher 505 Games has confirmed.

Originally released in 2011 on PC and Steam, Terraria is, like Minecraft, a sandbox game that combines crafting and exploration. Minecraft was a huge seller on Xbox Live Arcade, proving that this block building gameplay is well loved by gamers. It's no surprise that Terraria is now following suit.

The console versions will have additional features, but as this has only just been announced, there are no further details. These should follow shortly though.

Steam Greenlight Launches

Steam Greenlight, Valve's new community moderated service, has gone live.

Greenlight allows developers or publishers to post information about their indie games currently in development. The community then vote on which games they would like to come to Steam. 

Currently, there are 497 games available to vote on, including popular indie games such as Slender. Community members will also be able to provide feedback on each title listed so developers can choose to have their game reflect these concerns, praises and ideas if they so wish. 

Each game will have information, screenshots and aspects each indie game promises to include if their game is given the green light. 

L4D 2's Cold Stream Delayed

Left 4 Dead 2's latest DLC has missed it's 24th July release date. Valve headed to their Twitter page to tweet an explanation. Taken from one of their tweets, Valve stated that "We are working with MS on a release schedule. We don't have an ETA yet, but we hope to have it out soon. It will be 560 Microsoft Points."


Entitled "Cold Stream", the DLC includes a brand new campaign, and will also import four of the five campaigns over from Left 4 Dead:-Blood Harvest, Crash Course, Dead Air, and Death Toll. No Mercy had already been ported over in the previous DLC, The Sacrifice. 


Steam users will already have access to the new DLC for free. Let's hope it's released on the Xbox 360 soon! 

Valve Release "Teach With Portals"

Valve have released a set of educational tools for Portal 2 called "Teach With Portals."


Teach With Portals has been developed alongside teachers, with the aim to provide students with educational science, technology, maths and engineering aspects. Children will be able to play the game and use the specially crafted tools provided to learn more about physics, maths and more. 


Currently the programme is in beta, and is available to download via Steam for free. 

Great Humble Bundle Released

Like playing great indie games? Well, look no further than the latest Humble Indie Bundle. It's a good one!


The Humble Indie Bundle allows gamers to donate as little or as much as they like to walk away with 4 (or 5, if you decide to pledge more than the current average). Proceeds go towards two charity's-EFF and Child's Play Charity, whilst also giving the purchaser the option to contribute to the games developers.


The five games on offer are: Amnesia: The Dark Descent, Psychonauts, Limbo, Superbrothers: Sword and Sorcery EP, and the game you unlock if you pay over the average is Bastion.


Each game also comes bundled with their soundtracks, and the games work on Mac, Windows, Linux and Steam. 


Not only is this all for a great cause, but the games on offer are excellent. Plus, seeing as you decide the price...you could be walking way with quite the bargain here. Go check it out!

COD: Modern Warfare 3 FREE On Steam This Weekend

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, a game designed by a professional that has probably gone to college for graphic design, will be free to play on Steam all weekend.


The multiplayer section of the game will be free to all players with registered Steam accounts from Thursday, 26th April at 6pm (GMT). Activision will be revealing some new Call of Duty news next weekend, which people have rumoured to be Black Ops 2 related. 


So, if you fancy some free multiplayer action, get on over to Steam tonight!

Valve to Release A Console?

The Verge has reported that Valve is getting ready to release their own console. The 'Steam Box' will reportedly rival the Wii U, Playstation 4 and the Xbox 720. According to the source, Valve have a few publishers and developers working alongside them, the console may be announced at next week's GDC conference.


The Steam Box apparently will include 8GB RAM, an NVIDIA GPU, and a Core i7 CPU. The console will run any standard PC titles, and allow services such as EA's Origin to be used. 

Alan Wake Heading to Steam in February

Alan Wake is on it's way to the PC next month, it has emerged. Remedy, the games developer, confirmed the news in an FAQ, which confirmed that the release will be a port onto PC portal Steam. 


Alan Wake PC will not be using Games for Windows Live, but will include cloud saves and Steam achievements. The FAQ did not detail an exact release date, or the game's price, but Remedy assure gamers that more news will be available nearer the February release date. 


Both DLC's from the console version, The Signal and The Writer will also be bundled in with this release. For more information, head over to the FAQ. 

Bastion Hits Half a Million Downloads Mark

Supergiant Games has a lot to celebrate this week, after their hugely successful Xbox Live Arcade/Steam title made it to the 500,000 downloads mark. 


Bastion benefited from a serge in downloads over the holiday period on both the Steam and Xbox Live Arcade platforms, which the team have announced in a celebratory post on their Supergiant Games site. The team state that "When we set out to make Bastion, a sales number like that seemed astronomical to us, so it feels great to have hit that mark. It goes to show that a lot of folks out there like what we’re doing and want us to keep going, which is great, because we intend to stick together as a team and do just that."



Not only has the downloads hit an impressive milestone, but Bastion has also been critically acclaimed, been nominated for Game of the Year awards, and has gained special mentions on a whole host of gaming websites and publications.


It seems that Supergiant Games will be off to a promising start to 2012!

GLaDOS to Feature in Defence Grid

Many of you may have completed Portal 2 some time ago, but today fans are able to get their hands on some more Portal action once again...in a Defense Grid expansion. Oh, and everyone's favourite cake-fiend, GLaDOS, is also making an appearance once again.


Entitled Defense Grid: You Monster, this is the first full story expansion for Defense Grid, which can be downloaded on Steam and the Xbox Live Arcade as of today. GLaDOS also stars in this 8-level expansion. 


GLaDOS tests players skills and changes the rules as they battle it through alien hoards. Defense Grid: You Monster also features 35 challenge missions, new achievements and a promise of over 15 hours of new game play. 


Defense Grid: You Monster is available to download today for 400 Microsoft points on the Xbox Live Arcade. Enjoy!

Brink Free Play Weekend on Steam

That's right folks, this weekend Brink is free to play on Steam from now until Monday 10 AM PST.  


Those that play it this weekend can purchase it for a whopping 75% off, as part of a celebration between Brink's new clan and tournament features. Players will now be able to able to create and manage your own Brink clan on the website.  Once you have chosen a name for your clan and registered it, it will get a dedicated profile page, which will display a list of members and a breakdown of your clans statistics.  Using this page you will also be able to invite members and toggle your clans recruitment status, as well as set the privileges of the members within it.


Clan leaders will also be able to battle other clans in the brand new clan matches mode.  Once a match time has been agreed, Brink will automatically create a match set at that time and issue invites to the clan's members.  A leaderboard system will also be available, as well as a schedule which will remind players of their upcoming games. 


The outcome of the clan matches will determine the ranks of both participating clans.  The winning clans rank rises, while the losers drops.  All matches on the global clan ladder will be 5 vs 5 and shall use every map that the game has to offer, to keep the games varied and fair.


If you wish to create your own clan, or join a pre-existing one, visit battle.brinkthegame.com for more information.

Skyrim Patch Coming Tomorrow

Bethesda have been hard  at work on the first Skyrim patch ever since the game was released, and tomorrow players will be able to download the patch to enhance their game.


Entitled Update 1.2, the patch fixes a few of the epic RPG's reported issues. These include texture fixes, fixing animations, and other minor annoyances that some gamers have reported in their play-throughs so far.


The full list is detailed below.

• Dragon corpses now clean up properly.
• Fixed rare NPC sleeping animation bug.
• Fixed textures which did not properly upgrade when installed to the harddrive.
• NPC sleeping animation bug has been fixed.
• The skeleton key will now work properly if the player has no lockpicks.
• Fixed a rare issue where dragons did not properly give souls after death.
• Projectiles now properly fade away.
• Fixed occasional bug where a guest would arrive to the player's wedding dead.
• Fixed issue where dragons would not attack.
• Dead corpses are no longer cleared up early.

Bethesda will continue to monitor any surfacing issues that players have been reporting, so no doubt there will be more patches to follow. 

>Xbox 360 Achievements.

Saints Row The Third Community Creates 1 Million Characters

THQ and Volition announced today that the Saints Row: The Third community has created more than one million characters in the Saints Row Initiation Station.

The Initiation Station has been available to download for free on Xbox Live, Playstation Network and Steam, and allows players to create their own character which they can share online, and use when Saints Row: The Third is released on the 18th November. 

“The characters we’ve seen are mostly ridiculous, often hilarious, and always over-the-top. And now there are a million of them,” said Kevin Kraff, Vice President, Global Brand, THQ. “With the crazed creativity we’ve seen in only one week, we can’t wait to see what’s to come. One million is just the beginning.”

1.2 million people have played the Initiation Station so far, with many players opting to create a character in non-traditional colours such as green, red and silver. In this press release, THQ stated that currently 24 characters have been tagged by users as "God", although there are plenty of bizarre, wonderful and wacky characters available to view. 

Review: Audiosurf

There are plenty of rhythm games out there-take Rockband and Guitar Hero as prime examples, but there are many that somehow escaped the radar. Audiosurf may be pretty successful now, but upon it's release, it could definitely be classed in the underdog category.


Released on Steam, Audiosurf allows players to experience their music collection in a fun and addictive new way. Audiosurf takes (almost) any song and incorporates it into the game. Perhaps the most fun comes in waiting to see what kind of track the game has generated depending on the song, and it is so easy to get absorbed for a long amount of time in the gameplay. 


To look at, Audiosurf is very similar to racing game Wipeout, but this is no straight forward racing game. Players use either the keyboard or mouse to move a futuristic looking craft left, right or to the middle on a floating track in order to pick up brightly coloured bars. The bars coincide with your chosen musical track, and the distance between them decreases the faster the track is. Slower songs tend to make your craft float slowly uphill, whilst faster songs or segments rapidly build up pace downhill. Like other rhythm games, faster songs are definitely much more fun, but a real sense of challenge lies in many of these tracks.

To put it simply, Audiosurf's main objective is to collect points as you navigate your craft through a track. Blocks can often be cleared by matching colours into groups of three, thus allowing the bricks to disappear. Bolder colours, such as red and yellow are worth more (these are considered the trickier blocks to hit), and the more blocks you collect without crashing into a fake one, the higher your combo score will be. A little bit of fun competition between friends is added in the form of scoreboards, where players can aim to beat their friends scores on particular tracks.


Although Audiosurf is a lot of fun, it isn't without it's drawbacks. First of all, the game has a tendency to lag on some of the faster songs. This in turn makes the track fall out of sync with the music a little, which can be somewhat frustrating. Occasionally the game generates blank tracks with my chosen music file not playing, or it freezes midway through a song. Again, a little frustrating, but thankfully this is not too common. The last downside is the syncing issue. As previously mentioned, Audiosurf analyses your music to generate a track, but sometimes the blocks do not follow the beat particularly well. 

Apart from a small variety of modes to plough your way through, Audiosurf isn't a particularly large game to perhaps many people. However, this seems completely irrelevant when it is so easy to immerse yourself in this enjoyable musical experience for long periods of time. The game is not without it's glitches, which seems a terrible shame considering that for the most part, the gameplay is satisfying enough. There is never a shortage of tracks to mess around with, as Audiosurf allows for the majority of songs in a users library (I've only found two songs in my iTunes library deemed incompatible so far), as well as weekly free downloads of tracks via Audiosurf radio. 


Music fans will probably love this somewhat relaxing experience. The vivid HD colours combined with music of your choice is appealing enough. It does suffer from a few technical issues, and may chug a little if your system isn't that powerful, but Audiosurf gives you a brand new way of experiencing your own music. Oh, and it's pretty cheap on Steam too. 

Rockin' Android Ventures Onto Steam

Recently I was emailed a press regarding Japanese independent games publishers, Rockin' Androids latest ventures.

As from the 30th August 2011, Rockin' Android have begun to release a host of their most popular titles on PC games platform, Steam. The first title to be released was the Gundemonium Collection. The Gundemonium Collection combines a trilogy of arcade-style shoot 'em ups. Each game holds a very Japanese-steampunk feel, with an added dose of cute. 

The collection contains Gundemonium Recollection, GundeadliGne and Hitogaga Happa. Steam users will be able to access a variety of new features, including remixed music from DM Ashura (some may recognise this name from Dance Dance Revolution), co-operative play has now been included on the Steam system, and achievements have been added. 

The company have already had hit releases on the PC and Playstation 3. So why is Steam the next choice? Adam Milecki, Editor/Media relations for Rockin' Android says that "When it comes to PC gaming, Steam is unmatched for it's convenience and selection. Rockin' Android has an array of great independent PC games from Japan, and Steam is the perfect home for our games." 

I am currently in the process of playing the games through on my Steam account, so a review shall follow shortly. In the meantime, more information can be found at Rockin' Android's website.