Run-blocker: Shadowrun Hong Kong gives tablets an ICEy cold shoulder

Number one super guy.

Seattle’s Harebrained Schemes are back at the Kickstarter well to fill their bucket again for more Shadowrun: this time they’re offering up Shadowrun: Hong Kong, their most blandly descriptive title to date, but with their track record I’m willing to issue an indulgence.

Hong Kong will be another standalone expansion pack for the throwback cyberpunk RPG but with one major difference. “We have elected to focus all our efforts on PC in order to deliver the best game we can,” says the pitch, “without the current processing and memory limitations of tablets.”

Well same to you, pal! What a snub. Harebrained’s support for tablets has always felt a bit half-hearted with the rebooted Shadowrun games, always coming months after the PC release and shaved of the user-created content elements. Now our preferred platforms have been kicked to the curb entirely. This is absolutely good news for those of us who still play games on PC, but tablet-only types are left in the cold.

Harebrained Schemes might be the most successful of the wave of nostalgia-powered Kickstarter projects of the past couple of years. The studio successfully razzed the 1990s cyberpunk RPG with 2013’s widely-admired Shadowrun Returns, which they then exceeded with the inarguably superior Shadowrun: Dragonfall — both of which came to iPad and Android tablets.

So why leave mobile high and dry for Shadowrun: Hong Kong? I’m sure that to a great extent we can take HBS at face value: they want to make a PC-native experience with lots of whiz-bang graphics and–I dunno–actual magic. But businesses don’t just leave money on the table for no reason. The unstated truth must be that the two Shadowrun titles must have sold poorly on mobile — or at least they’ve sold an order of magnitude more on PC. And that’s a shame.

HBS’s $100,000 pitch for Hong Kong has been live for about two hours and it’s already funded.

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Stetson on a Jetson: Space Marshals is a sci-fi western tactical shooter

Lose yourself to dance.

Impossible to imagine, I know, but we missed Space Marshals when it dropped last week. And that’s a pity, because it looks like it might be up our street.

Space Marshals is a tactical top-down sci-fi shooter from Swedish studio Pixelbite — but this doesn’t look like a frantic twin-stick bullet orgy. The pace looks downright sedate, at least by shooter standards. There’s also a couple of different approaches to gameplay: guns-blazing or sneaky-sneaky. There’s also a lot of unique guns and variable loadouts.

Most importantly, Space Marshals takes place in a distant future where cowboy hats are back in fashion. At least, I think those are cowboy hats. Might be Pharrell.

Space Marshals is $5 on the App Store (no IAPs) and it purports to be chapter one of a new episodic adventure. Watch a trailer after the jump.

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King Cong: Vietnam ’65 re-emerges with new look, new publisher

It’s either a parachute or a well deserved beach umbrella

Late last year when Vietnam ’65 was announced, I had a chance to play a little of a beta. It was a decidedly interesting asymmetrical wargame with the player commanding American forces and trying to root out a stealthy North Vietnamese & Viet Cong computer opponent. Shortly after the reveal, however, the game was delayed, citing an agreement with a new publisher.

If the old Nam ’65 had a problem it wasn’t the gameplay — it was the graphics. It looked less like a gritty grognard sim and more like you had invited Charlie out for a round of mini-golf. Now Slitherine is running the show and the graphics have an all new look that would make Eightball and Animal Mother feel right at home. The AI has been overhauled as well and they’ve also included randomly generated campaign maps.

Both the PC and iPad versions are heading to beta right now, so if you’d like to help run it through its paces, head over this way. Expected release is later this year.

Check after the break for another new screenshot as well as the original gameplay trailer from last year.

Fire mission

Less golf course, more Platoon

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Joint venture: Sons of Anarchy game trailer will be high on your list

I was gonna clean my room.

There’s a trailer out for that Sons of Anarchy game that Clancy first told us about back in December. Maybe you had a better read on this but I was expecting the forthcoming game based on FX’s biker drama to be a point-and-click adventure ala Telltale. That’s not what I’m getting from this video, which is a very serious affair full of moody lighting and portentous voiceovers. But considering that Sons of Anarchy is meant to be one of the edgiest shows on TV, what passes for shocking in this trailer is tamer than Free Willy. The trailer–which sets the stage with dangerous driving and an implied murder–wants to know “HOW FAR WILL YOU GO?” and then shows your character… lighting a spliff.

Call me a cynic but I’m not sure that smoking a substance routinely prescribed to glaucomic grandmothers qualifies as bad-boy behavior in 2015. The real bad decisions on in display in this trailer have more to do with the game itself: the commandment proscribing touchscreen FPSs has been carved into the tablets for a while now. Meanwhile, SoA’s creator Kurt Sutter has been calling this an “evolution in gaming” on Twitter. One gets the impression that Mr. Sutter does not play a lot of video games.

Watch the trailer after the jump, but the Pocket Tactics Skept-o-meter has pegged on this one.

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I came, I sawtooth, I conquered: New Stratolith video shows off oscilloscope-based hacking

Radio cure.

2014’s most geekily electrifying game announcement might have been Winning Blimp’s Stratolith, a game about hacking combat drones using an on-screen oscilloscope. I suspect that Winning Blimp may have won some sort of grant from an electrical engineering trade group to pursue this idea; perhaps there’s a soldering iron fencing game or a post-grad thesis advisor sim in the offing.

It’s been quite a while since we heard from Winning Blimp and designer Alex May got in touch over the weekend to correct that. There’s a new video of Stratolith’s gameplay, narrated by May himself who explains exactly how you’ll be hacking enemy units in this sci-fi RTS — namely by creating an oscilloscope wave that cancels out the control signal that the drone is receiving. It’s not as elaborate as the hacking in say, Uplink, but remember that you’re also issuing attack orders to your own drones at the same time — let’s see David from WarGames do that. Punk.

Winning Blimp are currently eyeballing a mid-2015 release date for Stratolith, which is coming to iPad and desktops. Follow Winning Blimp on Twitter and watch the new gameplay video below.

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