What Has Scared You?

"I may be merely generalizing, but there hasn’t truly been a genuine horror experience in video games."

 - Nathan Cheng, Are You Scared Now?

Metro 2033: Ghost of the Metro Trailer

aka 'hey, who remembers Ghostbusters 2?' "Thank you, Lord!" You know your love (your love keeps liftin' me) Keeps on liftin' (your love keeps liftin' me)... *cough* Where was I?

So I've been studiously ignoring the bleat of the Metro 2033 twitter feed and its torrent of trailers for a while now, ever since I first reported the announcement of the post-apocalyptic Russian shooter after I reported its announcement back in October. 


Anyway, long post short: cool new cinematic trailer beneath the cut. Watch it here for full sized HD goodness.

The Revelation: Dragon Age Comic

Here's something non-Valve related for a change of pace. Bioware have released The Revelation, an 8-page online comic for Dragon Age, created by fan Irma Ahmed (aka Aimo) and and Lead Writer David Gaider.

Aimo, as well as being clearly a huge fan of the game, is a very talented artist. Check out her DeviantART pages for various Star Wars, LotR and Dragon Age fan comics/art. Her official site is here.

Thanks to hedjeroo of Ashteroids for the heads-up.

More Portal News

Adam Foster has been confirmed as the creator of (at least part of) the Portal ARG. Also known as: I (and x hundred other people) flippin' called it!

Compare the images below, after the jump. The 1st and 3rd images, the clean ones, are taken from Adam Foster's Robots and Retro flickr set. The 2nd and 4th images, the 'corrupted' ones are two of those derived from the dinosaur sound files.

Portals Within Portals: Valve Releases ARG

It's times like these that make me love the Internet and its people.

As of yesterday (March 1st), Valve gave Portal a minor and cryptic update: 'Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations' along with a new achievement, 'Transmission Received' who's description was merely '?'.

This was just the beginning of a sprawling, exceptionally complicated ARG (nicknamed the Dinosaur Mystery after the name of certain audio files) which the gaming community turned all its power towards solving, with astonishing and ingenious methods. Read below for the full story so far!

Syndicate Meets Uplink: Subversion Revealed

Almost nine years ago an unknown bedroom-based trio of visionary graduates released a 20-something MB game about hacking government and corporate networks in the year 2010. It went ignored until it was reviewed in the foremost PC games magazine of Great Britain. The game of course was Introversion's Uplink, a game which has become a solid cult. While Introversion has gone on to bigger and better things, this year releasing Darwinia+ on XBLA, the loyal community has been begging for a return to the world of corporate espionage.

Last night, they delivered. At the BAFTA awards Introversion took advantage of the stage to demo their next game, Subversion. While the existence of Subversion has been known since May 2006, Introversion were tight lipped on what the game actually consisted of besides procedurally generated cities down to the level of individual sticks of furniture.

Katawa Shoujo: Forget Any Controversy

It's articles like this that make me A) want to shut up and stop pretending I'm anything like such brilliant writers as Leigh Alexander or B) go out and hug someone and tell them they're perfect the way they are. I won't talk talk too much here, just to add my own thoughts on the subject.

Mini-Review: Return to Ostagar

So the Dragon Age DLC Return to Ostagar has finally been released for PC. Not that it was immediately apparent; the announcement was made on the Bioware forums and left for the people of the Internet to disseminate. Anyway, review time. I'll assume you know what Dragon Age is and are aware of the events of the first act, otherwise not much of this will make sense and spoilers!