Despite being a new IP, Dragon’s Dogma is a game clearly influenced by the heavyweights of the third person action RPG genre which have come before it. Much like the first Darksiders did, it wears these colours with pride, showcasing some of the best aspects of the games it imitates. The storyline takes the familiar ‘chosen one’ route, the demo kicking off with the player’s goal being to traverse a fallen castle in order to destroy a dragon. There is an option to create and edit both the main character and a companion known as a ‘pawn’ using a system which provides many choices without the levels of customisation becoming overwhelming, something which never made much sense given that the hours of time spent crafting a character goes to waste once they are wearing full body armour. The demo provides two options: the Prologue Quest and Countryside Quest, highlighting the gameplay in interior situations and on the expansive overworld respectively. Read the rest of this entry »

The hunt for the ingredients to the perfect horror game is as arduous and trap-laden a path as the one we end up walking when that experience comes together. The rustling bushes. The distraction of fast moving shadows. Mundane combat that stumbles gracelessly into dull repetition. The shock of cheap scares. Those looking for the true call of horror find it somewhere else, wrapped up neatly in nine simple, blood ridden words. “Is it really going to make me do that?” As a community built Half-Life 1 mod, Cry of Fear arrives with as much an opportunity to solidify genre clichés as it does to break free from them. Fortunately it manages, early, to scare that other form of fear away. Read the rest of this entry »

“You were right, Fido. That didn’t taste good at all.”

A recent WiiWare developer has emphatically ruled out creating further content for the service. Beamdog ported decade old BioWare shooter MDK2 to the platform in 2011, but as reported by Gamasutra, the studio has been repeatedly frustrated by Nintendo’s approach to downloadable games.

Beamdog founder Trent Oster revealed that it took nine months for the platform holder to approve MKD2 for release. “We’d get a bug, fix it, wait two weeks while Nintendo tested it, get a new bug, fix it, wait two weeks. After nine months from our first submission, we passed certification.” While he acknowledged that the process resulted in a better outcome, he felt that it should have been achieved “in a much shorter timeline.”

Worse yet, the game failed to generate any income for studio. Nintendo requires its independent WiiWare developers to meet minimum sales thresholds in order to qualify for royalty payments. Beamdog fell short of its 6000 unit target and thus hasn’t received a red cent for its work. Oster, who also cited the 40MB game size restriction as an issue, concluded that the Wii simply “isn’t a good platform for developers”.

While the likes of LostWinds and World of Goo have flown the flag for WiiWare, it has struggled to match the offerings of rival services such as XBLA and PSN. This is particularly true in Australia, where we receive only a fraction of the titles released overseas.

The toll increase didn’t go down well with the locals.

Kickstarter has hit it big. Thanks to Tim Schafer, developers have seen the potential in crowd funding and have flocked to the service. Being quite interested in the phenomenon, I’ve been looking for the right game to slap my hard earned dollars on. Well, I found it with Grim Dawn.

Grim Dawn is an action RPG being developed by Crate Entertainment, a tiny group of programmers and designers who used to be a part of Iron Lore. If that name sounds familiar, then you probably played their biggest game, Titan Quest. It was a huge hit on the PC and flew the flag for the genre while Diablo was having an extended holiday. It introduced a great mythical setting and some wonderful features that have since become staples.

The creators of Grim Dawn have turned to Kickstarter to fund the game in an effort to get it released sooner rather than later. Chasing a modest total of $280,000, they have already reached the halfway mark. As always, if you chip in, you get some nice rewards. For my $35 donation, I will receive a copy of the game, access to the beta and some in game items. It is certainly a nice bonus for my relatively small outlay.

If you, like me, want to see what these talented guys can come up with, head over to their Kickstarter page. Hopefully we’ll all reap the benefits with another great game.

Disclosure Policy for Kickstarter and Similar Programs: Black Panel staff and contributors will always inform you if they have backed the game they are discussing.