Look, they might as well call off The Game Awards. I thought announcing Pony Island 2 during the pre-show would be hard to top but to follow that up with the announcement of World Of Goo 2? Pack it up. We're done. The sequel to our favourite game of 2008 is due to launch in 2024, bringing not just new puzzles to build things from goo but exciting new fluids too. I can scarcely wait to cover my goo in goop. Have a peek in the trailer below.
]]>Whether you like to visit space, indulge in an RPGs or a grand adventure, get spooked by horror or get uber techy with hacking, the chances are that there's also a puzzle game for you - hence our list of the best puzzle games on PC. The queen genre straddles many others, so our list of the 25 best puzzle games has all that we just mentioned and more. Take a look to find a new favourite puzzle game today.
]]>Did your science teacher ever let you play around with non-Newtonian fluids? If not, my condolences. You missed out on some of the greatest fun you could have at school. I remember holding a big ball of starchy goo, balling it up and turning it over and over in my hands, marvelling at its strange rigidity. And then I'd stop playing with it, and watch with childish glee as the slop slowly seeped through my fingers, its form reacting immediately and satisfyingly to my touch.
I felt that same glee when I played Tower Of Goo Unlimited back in 2005 - the prototype that would three years later become RPS's game of the year for 2008. It was well and truly a prototype, a single level with the aim of building the highest possible tower out of sticky balls that were connected via long strands of wobbly guck. It was silly, and messy, and confusing, and marvellous, and I realised very quickly that I needed a proper game like this in my life as soon as possible.
]]>Nerves have been sufficiently jangled as of late, not least thanks to the slew of action packed games that have landed in recent months. I crave an altogether more sedate beginning to next year, and so my mind turns to games in which violence, reflex or any other kind of unblinking attentiveness takes a back seat.
]]>As the fuzzy denizens of earth pivot to non-existence, we will soon be left with an unclear memory of the animal kingdom's bizarre court. The elephant, for instance, what even is it? I cannot help with that question, I’m not a marine biologist. But what I can offer is a tour of endangered videogame wildlife. Otherworldly creatures you can’t find beneath the rocks of reality or swimming in the ponds of tangibility. It is the least I can do. So, here you go. A safari of the 9 weirdest animals in PC games.
]]>I whoo, you whoo, we all whoo for World Of Goo. Following the recent update that brought a "gentle remastering" making it play nice on modern systems, 2D Boy's modern-day classic puzzler is now free for keepsies on the Epic Games Store if you grab it within the next fortnight. That's not a pun. While I think of World Of Goo as one of those games everyone must have played by now, given how great it is and how often it's been mega-cheap, but... it's ten years old so I many won't have played it. Hey, youse, it's real nice and it's free right now.
]]>That wonderful World Of Goo, a modern classic of a puzzle 'em up, gets polished up for the present day in a new free update. Coming over ten years after the game's release, the update brings support for modern widescreen resolutions, art reworked to look better at our shiny new high resolutions, less bugginess on modern operating systems, interface improvements borrowed from newer versions like the Nintendo Switch release, and other welcome tweaks. Loading it back up just now, gosh, World Of Goo really is still charming so I'm glad that returning is now less of a bother. Epic will be giving the game away free in a few days too.
]]>Tomorrow Corporation, them folks behind Little Inferno and the upcoming 7 Billion Humans, and whose staff have the likes of World of Goo, assorted EA things and Henry Hatsworth on their storied CVs, are at it again. 'It' tends to mean playfully exploring the outer boundaries of what makes a game a game, but apparently their upcoming Welcome To The Information Superhighway "is shaping up to be one of the more game-like games we’ve made." It's also, it would seem, shaping up to be a road trip though a vibrant interpretation of the best and worst of the internet.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
It is literally impossible that World Of Goo is from SEVEN YEARS AGO. That absolutely, categorically cannot be the case. There has simply been a malfunction in chronology. We had that world exclusive review maybe three years ago at most.
]]>We're seven years old! (Actually, we were seven years old last month, but we've never been much for punctuality.) And so by way of celebration we've curated the latest weekly Humble Bundle, and that means we've chosen some of our most beloved indie games from the past seven years for the Pay What You Want sale. An esoteric bunch, but so very beautiful, all. If only there were room for all the delights of those many wonderful years. As ever, some of the money goes to charity, too: we chose EFF and Medecins Sans Frontieres. Find out more, below, or simply click over the the bundle itself.
]]>Welp, I guess that's it, then. We can't escape it. The Steam Summer Sale's returned, but honestly, can you remember a single moment before it began? Was there ever a moment before it began? Maybe we're trapped in some infinite, Groundhog-Day-style loop of spending, obligation, and guilt. Maybe we'll never escape. Maybe this is the least threatening eternal hell loop ever conceived. But oh well, because look at all of the savings!
]]>Indiegames notice that Crayon Physics Deluxe developer Petri Purho and Martin Jonasson, creator of Jesus vs Dinosaurs, talked about tweening and juiciness at the Nordic Game Indie Night 2012. What's your favourite sort of juice? Orange or mango maybe? Or more likely it's jaunty music, uncannily large eyes that blink on impact with projectiles, and a little bit of delay and wobble. Confused? All is explained in the fifteen minute video. Purho and Jonasson have built a simple Breakout clone to which they can add layers of 'juice' and you can play with the program yourself.
]]>...Which I don't say to demean the fine contents of the latest Humble offering, but simply because there are slightly fewer games than usual, plus it's primarily an Android phone offering, albeit with PC/smug expensive PC/beardy defensive PC versions of the contents also available. Which is, of course, why I'm posting it. They're calling it the most cross-platformish bundle they've even done. Contents this time around are:
Anomaly: Warzone Earth (reverse tower defence), Osmos (cellular absorption puzzler), and EDGE (cubist physics puzzler). Pay over the average - currently in the $10 zone - and you'll get World of Goo too.
]]>Indie games and hats: two things which are very much RPS' bread and butter, yet never the twain shall meet, which seems an oversight. David Lien wants to change all that. He plans to create an indie merchandising business, and as such has already snagged the blessings of the goodly gentlemen of 2D Boy to make these semi-official World of Goo hats. Hats!
]]>Azazel was nosing at Spoon in a professional capacity, but thought it worth mention because of its gamey-aspects. "It appears to do some virtualization jiggery-pokery which can stream apps to any Windows desktop via a browser," says he. To which I replied "MOTHERSHIPS!" and he looked at me with the disappointed gaze I've learned to suffer. If you want to get the plug-in, it's here and you can try a load of IGF-esque games. It tried it, and it's quite literally World of Goo, without installing, after a gap for streaming. I can predict a brave future with less installing in it, but with a gap for streaming. We are quite literally, living in the future.
]]>Perhaps you need to hear some good news. Here's some now. You might remember we told you about the Humble Indie Bundle. (We really did. Could people maybe stop emailing us about it now? Please?) You can get World of Goo, Aquaria, Lugaru, Gish and Penumbra Overture, DRM free, for whatever price you choose. It's $80 worth, at the price of your choosing. And now it comes with Samorost 2 as well! You can choose what proportion of what you pay reaches the two charities the project is supporting, Child's Play and The Electronic Frontiers Foundation. And that's not the good news. The good news is they've so far, in one week, been voluntarily paid $1,066,880, with 31% of that reaching the charities. Even more, Aquaria, Gish, Lugaru HD, and Penumbra Overture have now pledged to become Free Software - i.e. their source code available for anyone to use in any way they wish, published under GNU licenses.
]]>Media reportage still has it that Radiohead's pay-what-you-want experiment a couple of years back was somehow a disaster. Independent gaming has roundly proved the lie: more devs than we can keep up with have offered PWYW deals recently, so clearly something's going right. It's good news for gamers too. The Humble Indie Bundle, though, is yer bona fide motherlode. World of Goo, Aquaria, Lugaru, Gish and Penumbra Overture: a collection of the last few years' finest indies, yours for however many groats you think you can spare. Phenomenal, basically. Better still, a third of the proceeds go to Child's Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation apiece. Well, by default, You can request that the whole lot goes to charity if you like. Games and kindness: a winning and natural formula (and one that the shrieking anti-games media will never, ever cover.) The deal's over here, and below the cut is a knowingly rubbish half-rap to promote it.
]]>It's first thing in the morning here in the land they call "America". In a country where Mythbusters is on TV before 8am you know everything is magical. Also magical is the video the boys at 2D BOY just spotted showing World Of Goo in real life. It's a really beautiful thing, and it's below.
]]>As expected, 2D BOY have published details of their World Of Goo First Birthday experiment. Offering the game for whatever price people wanted to pay (previously it was $20), this meant people could get a copy for as little as $0.01 or as much as fifty million squillion space dollars. (I believe that's the upper limit.) Originally this was intended to last for a week, but has now been extended to 25th October. And being a rather open sort they've announced how many copies they've sold so far, and indeed how much people have been paying, along with much more. It's an unprecedented amount of detailed sales information. Its significance shouldn't be underplayed.
]]>How much would you pay for World Of Goo? Is the question 2D BOY are asking to celebrate its first birthday. For the next six days you can choose how much you want to pay for one of our favourite games of last year, whether it's 1p or a million billion pounds. It's also a chance, they point out, for those who previously acquired a copy without paying to return and offer something for their entertainment. Head here to get a truly stupendous game for whatever you wish to pay. It will be fascinating to see how this works out.
]]>Okay, we've done the World of Goo Soundtrack before, but this is something else. Imagine if all electricity just disappeared and we were reduced to a feudal state. How would you bring back memories of that most glorious goo-featuring game? Well, you'd gather around the piano and have someone play its music. But how would they know it? That had me stumped too, until I saw on Indie Games that Sebastian Wolff has put up all the sheet piano music for the game on his site. Quickly! Print it out before electricity disappears. It could happen any second. And for those who foolishly consider me as a Cassandra, watch Mr Wolff play the songs below. It's really rather lovely.
]]>If any reader of any website is likely to have World of Goo, you have to suspect RPS readers are. We did the first review! We never shut up about it! However if for some reason you don't, Steam are selling it for 75% off this weekend. That's just over four quid. Go get it.
If you're feeling even four-quid skint, also over at Steam, Unreal Tournament 3 Black is free to play all weekend - plus 40% off the full game (Making it just over eight quid). It includes the Titan Pack, which is a hefty newly released expansion for the full game which includes lots of stuff which I'll lob beneath the cut. As it really is a load of stuff, including the word "behemoth"....
]]>2D BOY are offering a really interesting glimpse into the process World of Goo went through, on its way to become the cuddly bundle of ludicrous loveliness that made us crack our ears with smiling last year. These will apparently be in seven stages, and the first is available to download from their site today. It's a single room, containing some very primitive goo balls, which begin to show some of the characteristics that would form the final game.
]]>In good good news news, 2D BOY have released the soundtrack to World of Goo. Anyone who has played the game will know what a fantastic score the game has, and quite how sickeningly talented Kyle Gabler is to have written it all himself. What price would you pay for the lot? Well, it's free.
]]>Just a quickie - my interview with the lovely chaps at 2D BOY is up on Eurogamer today. We discuss how the game got made, the reasons behind some of the more esoteric decisions, and learn some important facts about the mysterious Allan Blomquist. It's a fun time.
]]>To quote from the great prophet: IT'S CHRIIIIIIISSSSSSSSTTTTTTMAAAAASSSS!!!! What we really need is a really, really good game. In fact, our game of the year.
For the 12th game of Christmas, my true blog gave to me...
]]>My eight-second attention span means that I often go to post stuff four or five times before I make it all the way through to the moment of actually typing it into the RPS interface, and this video by David Rosen of Wolfire is once such much-delayed info-trinket. Thanks to the half dozen people who forwarded the link!
]]>The post yesterday reporting World of Goo's 90% piracy figure drew a surprising response. The P-word regularly generates comments threads that scare our hosts, but this one was odd. It became a discussion about whether one could disprove the 90% figure, and then extrapolating this to reach peculiar conclusions. Some could see this as people claiming there were far fewer stab wounds than first predicted and therefore there hadn't been a murder. Others might suggest that fighting over the exact number is completely irrelevant, as that's not the point of the issue. Now 2D BOY have responded with new look at the figures.
]]>2D BOY have posted about the piracy World of Goo has suffered since launch. After Ron Carmel mentioned the figure - 90% - in a comment on RPS this week, the story was picked up across the internet. And it's shaken a lot of people.
]]>Updated below.
Good news, Euro-people. World of Goo is officially reaching our shores this December. Now, obviously you're sensible enough to have bought the game directly from the 2D BOY site, so haven't had to wait. But you might know someone silly enough to have not done that for some stupid reason, and now you can let them know the news.
]]>So, gaming on Apple machines. Clearly Paganism of the most heinous order, but as it's nearly Halloween let's deign to acknowledge it. Anyone do it? Happy stories/horror stories? Despite owning a (hilariously battered) Mac myself, it's not something I've ever especially considered. I was fairly surprised to walk into a computing store in Canada last year and see ranks and ranks of slightly old or slightly silly Mac games there, so I know there is stuff available, but personally I'd stuck to oldies - I've got Mac copies of the first two Fallouts - and, er, casualies. Woo Peggle, etc. That, I'd surmised, was pretty much the outer limit of it, at least unless I had one of those hilariously costly high-end Mac desktops that people with tiny beards and expensive spectacles buy. Two Macish stories which suggested the more mainstream Apple systems are rather game-blessed of late caught my passive eye today, though.
]]>...was playing World Of Goo using my iPhone as a virtual mouse:
I am geek, hear me make weird, smug nasal noises. (Also, I apologise for my face.)
]]>This is mainly of use to the cynics (and the evangelists, of course). Anyone who's even slightly vulnerable to purple-prose will have already worked out how to buy it and done exactly that. If you haven't - well, what are you waiting for? A demo? Well, wait no more. It's currently spreading across the net, but let's point at Filefront for this 33Mb slice of splendidosity. It's the whole of chapter one, which made me start ranting about it all those months ago. You will too.
Well, almost probably. A couple of tiny thoughts plus some more Goo-in-action-video-footage follows...
]]>We've had a few people contact us regarding World of Goo's sudden unavailability on Steam for European customers, so this is just a quick post to explain what we know. The game, which yesterday went straight to the top of Steam's top sellers chart, has different publishers in the US and UK for the boxed versions. The US boxed game is available now, while the EU box won't be appearing until around February 2009. There appears to have been some confusion regarding the contracts here, which 2D BOY are looking into. In the meantime, European customers can buy the game directly from 2D BOY with no problems whatsoever (and then just mount it in Steam, for goodness sakes).
]]>World of Goo launches today. In fact, if you look at the 2D BOY website, it seems to have quietly launched already. Buy! It will also be appearing on Steam, Direct2Drive, Greenhouse, and Beanstalk as the day goes on.
Despite their crazy pre-launch weekend, 2D BOY's Kyle Gabler and Ron Carmel generously spared some time to answer our questions about the process of developing the game, the complicated life of the independent developer, and why it's so very important to care deeply about your game (rather than your cat).
]]>Hurrah! World Of Goo is finally announced for Steam. It launches on 13th October - next Monday - alongside the launch on 2D Boy's own site. You can read our world exclusive review of the game here. Still not convinced? Try Eurogamer's review.
Aaaand, if you pre-ordered it, and are all upset because you wanted it on Steam, look happy. You pre-order magic key will unlock it on Steam too, come Monday. Add to that the news that it's integrating with Steamworks, and will be launching with eight achievements. And there's lots more places to buy it too...
]]>World Of Goo has a release date, both on Wiiware (in the US - it's getting a retail release in Europe, apparently), and PC. That date is: 13th October. So less than two weeks. Oh boy!
2D Boy have confirmed for us that those who pre-ordered the game will be getting their copies as soon as this Monday. Kyle Gabler told us,
"We're going to start sending out PC copies of the game to people who pre-ordered this Monday, October 6. Pre-orderers will also have access to Mac and and Linux copies, but those builds are not ready yet, only the Windows version for now."
]]>This is something special. This isn’t just the small matter of being one of the best games of the year, it’s also the emergence of a stellar new talent in gaming. World Of Goo is so stunningly designed, so beautifully illustrated, so precisely programmed, and so completely adorable that any of the greatest development companies in the world would be proud to release it. That this is a tiny indie dev’s first release – it is beyond belief.
Small blobs of Goo, when put near one another, form rigid bonds. Connect enough of them together and you can build towers and bridges along which unconnected Goo can saunter. The goal in the majority of levels is to see particular balls of Goo reach a pipe opening, into which they are satisfactorily sucked. There’s your raw concept. Now apply four hundred million gallons of imagination.
]]>World of Goo is so clever and so inventive that it actually scares me a little.
]]>Some World Of Goo semi-news. While the boxed PC edition has been confirmed for the first week of November, we can confirm that those buying it digitally will be able to get it in October from 2D Boy's site, and to-be-announced online distribution portals. The indie devs can't yet pin down exactly when in October, but we've played it from top to bottom and can tell you there's nary a need for another moment's development. It is, beyond belief, wondrous.
]]>It was only the other day that I was loudly lamenting the lack of more World Of Goo. What can be taking him so long? How could he tease us with that first chapter, and then no more for such a long time? Just how long ago did we place our pre-orders again? But phewie to the extremes, 2D Boy has declared the game has gone gold.
]]>I'd seen the trailers linked, but didn't realise one of the World of Goo was a new one until Chris Evans mentioned it. And - blimey! - it really is something, showing a load of new bits and pieces from later in the game...
]]>The results are in, with the winners announced for the 2008 IGF Awards.
The standard of entries this year was just stunning, and when we've tried to pick out our favourite of the top prize entries, it's been impossible. For us it came down to three. Audiosurf has taken over our lunchtimes (and mornings and afternoons and evenings) this week, and is obviously a triumphant achievement. Crayon Physics Deluxe is so charming and serene, while letting you feel like a wizard as your drawings come to life. And World of Goo evoked memories in us of the first time we played Lemmings (a high compliment indeed). Winners lie beyond.
]]>I wasn't expecting my preview of IGF-Grand-Finalist nominee World of Goo to go up yet, but it has. Which is lucky, as I no longer have to bite my lip about getting really excited about it here. In it, I start like this...
Having played through the preview code of this, the first twenty percent of the full game, I found myself desperately looking around for someone to tell about the thing. Except it was after 1am and no-one was awake, so I just paced and growled and generally acted as if someone had put a bunch of termites inside my head, and I had no way of getting them out. Thank the Lord of Eurogamer that I get to tell you lot about it, as otherwise it'd be straightjacket time.
And pretty only get increasingly giddy. Go read the rest, then come back and I'll find some more stuff to say.
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