It seems like every week or so an new major gaming title is coming out on the iPhone platform.  This one has me very excited.  I loved C&C I had pretty much all the titles and Red Alert was one of the best, remember the Attack Dogs & the Tesla Coils?

The iPhone version will be out on October 23rd late October. No word on whether that is for the rest of the world or just the US, but here’s hoping. There’s in-game video here.

It’s going to be an RTS, with resource management and unit command and 12 levels. With this & World of Goo on the iPhone, I’m never going to be bored on the train again!

Update: Looks like Apple’s efficient app review process has delayed the game’s release.  Colour me surprised.

2DBoy, the makers of World of Goo, have announced that for the game’s 1 year birthday they are making it available at any price.

This is a great idea.  This game is brilliant, it’s entertaining, funny and at times really hard. For an independent software company who have refused to poison their software with useless DRM, this is a masterpiece. You want to get this game, and at any price, it’s a bargain!

If you haven’t seen this game before, you can download a demo. For a description of the game, I defer to Games Radar

The premise, like any good puzzle game, is simple – you need to guide a certain number of blobs across increasingly treacherous terrain. The catch (something else every good puzzler needs) is that the blobs have to stay connected like a giant matrix, so you have to literally build them across the stage. Grab one blob with the remote, move him outside the lattice yet still close enough to latch on the rest of his buddies and so on. Eventually you’ll find a pipe that sucks up the goo and moves it to the next stage. Later you learn that the pipe connects to the World of Goo Corporation, a benign-yet-ominous overseer that uses the goo for drinks, cosmetics and, ahem, personal lubricants. Basically, a mix of Mom’s Friendly Robot Company and Slurm of Futurama fame.

If it were just a matter of linking blobs together, there wouldn’t be much of a challenge, would there? That’s where the physics porn comes in – your various goo creations will behave as a real-world object, bending, falling and teetering depending on their height and length. One early level had us balancing a goo-bridge out a frog’s gaping mouth, with spikes lining the ceiling and floor. If we made the bridge too long, it started to droop and touch the spikes, killing all our precious goo. That’s where pink blobs (balloons, more or less) come into play, and with proper placement, we used them to levitate key areas of the bridge until the end-of-level pipe appeared.

Also, while you can’t read their blog at the moment due to the huge amount of traffic they’re getting, they announced there that an iPhone version is coming too. Awesome!

We have it running well on the iPhone 3GS, and with a little luck we hope to get it running smoothly on the 3G as well. Hopefully more news on this soon.

Kyle Gabler the co-founder of 2D Boy a while ago posted the soundtrack for World of Goo on his site. You can download the whole thing for free.

Beginning in July, Steam users can set up their own personal Steam pages and profiles, create and join groups, schedule games with friends, review who they’ve played with, see how well everyone played, chat with groups, chat via voice, and more. These new community services and features can be used with all Steam games, which include new releases and classic titles from leading publishers and independent developers.

Valve Announces Major Update for Steam

While this may seem like YASN (Yet Another Social Network), this one actually makes sense.  Steam has expanded in size recently, taking on Capcom.  And Counter Strike is still one of the most played network games.  Giving players the ability to create an identity within the Steam network that is more than just their name, is a good idea.  I imagine we’ll soon see widgets that can be used on blogs, iGoogle & Desktop aps to display game scores & rankings.

The 7th Columnist has video of 2 multiplayer maps for Halo 3 – Epitaph & Last Resort (aka Zanzibar Mark II). They look brilliant. 

He also has a full video of the Gamekings interview with the Bungie guys.

I love the soundtrack, the way it slowly builds up from a haunting choral tone and then breaks into the Halo theme, I really need to get a 360!

I couldn’t agree more. 

Looks like it’s “games I’ve been waiting ages for” week. Starcraft 2 has finally been announced by Blizzard at a special event in Korea.  There’s no release date yet, so we may yet be waiting a while. So until then, check out this 1UP page for more details, demo videos and a few in-game images.  The official site has a whole bunch more screenshots & details on the game units (it only has some of the Protoss at the moment).  We also know that this will be a PC-only game.  Not surprising as RTS games don’t tend to port to console all that well.

Blizzard have done quite well in the past. They’ve stuck to a fairly niche market with the War/Starcraft and Diabolo games and they seem to be more interested in expanding the games they have rather than developing competely new games.  Not common in the games production business, but it seems to work for them!

I saw a trailer for Team Fortress 2 ages ago & I thought it could be great.  These videos leave me with little doubt that it will be a heap of fun.  Make sure you watch the second one all the way through, the rocket-jump gymnastics at the end is classic.  Definite party game, good to see a FPS that isn’t taking itself too seriously too!

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