Screenshot from The Ultima 6 Project

I’ve said it once and I’ll doubtless say it a lot more times: blessed are the dedicated nerds.  Ultima 6 – The False Prophet was my first “holy shit this is so cool” gaming experience growing up.  Unfortunately it’s an experience that has been lost to us for many years with the demise of DOS prompts and PC speaker sound.

Team Archon have come to the rescue of nostalgic geeks like myself though with The Ultima 6 Project.  For the past four years they’ve been working on a mod for Dungeon Siege 1 that will recreate the original Ultima 6 experience in 3D.  Version 1.0 has just been released, 20 years after the original game came to our screens.

Visit The Ultima 6 Project website for more information.  Obviously I’m pretty excited about this, more info as soon as I manage to track down a copy of Dungeon Siege.

Daawwww

Howdy y’all.  This week’s new releases are brought to you by the Campaign for a Cure for Broken Plugins.  Support them so they can support us to get our site running properly again and we can banish the fail whale from the front page.

We’re still working on the problems in their absence, by the way, and hope to be back to normal soon so that you can all click “read more” and … well, actually read more than just the index page.  Here’s this week’s Australian releases in the meantime to tide you over:

• DeathSpank (July 13, PSN – July 14, XBLA)
• Deadliest Warrior (July 14, 360)

There’s also a bunch of new stuff on Steam for PC gamers that, unless I’m blind, bypassed coming soon and went straight to new releases including Transformers: War for Cybertron, Theatre of War, Rig n Roll and King Arthur – The Saxons.

Ready for some four dimensional puzzle gaming?

Second on my platter (perhaps even tureen?) of puzzle games to review this week is Puzzle Dimension, the debut game from Swedish team Doctor Entertainment.

The object of the game is simple.  Scattered around each level are a number of sunflowers.  You roll an ornate orb over any flat surface to reach these flowers, and once collecting them all make your way through the exit portal.  It sounds simple, but the reality is far different.  There are a host of different obstacles the game will place in front of you, and gravity is multi-directional.  This means that is just a few movements you can find yourself rolling underneath the surface of any puzzle, much like the old figure eight optical illusion … or David Bowie in Labyrinth.

In fact maybe the Labyrinth analogy is more apt, considering you treat each level like it’s own maze.  Each level requires a great deal of forward planning, logic and experimentation to complete.  Some levels have multiple ways in which to complete them, some levels have a very specific path you’ll have to discover for yourself.  The difficulty ranges from the easy to the fiendish, and could easily inspire the occasional rage-quit.

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Ah, the ubiquitous Final Fantasy artwork

Games like Final Fantasy XIII come from a pedigree not unlike a royal family. It has elements of all the JRPGs that have come before it, including the bastard children that are never really mentioned and improvements made through breeding out negative elements. You get duds and revolutionaries, bigger wars, bigger guns and prettier women in less clothing. But after a little while, you realise that you’re looking at breeding cousins and that the faces are starting to all look a bit samey. You start to notice grandiose loopholes in the history and it all gets a bit convoluted in parts, trying to figure out which country in what timeline affected which scantily clad lovestory.

FFXIII is trying to be an elegant game, with high concepts. It’s nonlinear story is rife with terrorists and freedom, enemies and victims, death and fear. We start off on a train of rounded up ‘tainted’ people (called l’Cie), who are undergoing a Purge. But that’s really all the information we get before being thrown into a fight, which crashes the train and sets in motion the events which lead to the main characters being infected with the brand of the mysterious and supposedly evil fal’Cie. They must now complete their focus or mission, or risk becoming Cie’th – twisted agonised creatures who were once human l’Cie. If they complete their focus, they have an eternity of being a giant naked crystal to look forward to.

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Simple art matches the simple gameplay

It seems I’ve got a full plate (maybe even a platter?) of puzzle games to work my way through this week, starting off the the pleasantly simplistic Chains.

Created by Ivan and Philip Traykov, Chains is something of a tech-demonstration for the game creation platform AGen, which they’re also currently developing.  The AGen engine’s aim is to make the integration of game code and hardware simpler for developers in a 2D environment.  As an advertisement it’s surprisingly convincing too, as the vector graphics do a good job of translating the sophisticated physics engine running behind the scenes.

But don’t let this talk of tech-demo and advertisement put you off, because these are only things that are going to be interesting to aspiring developers.  What should grab everyone else’s attention is the fact that Chains is a highly enjoyable puzzler game with a friendly price tag.

The game is a traditional colour matcher, that makes use of a series of different challenges to keep the gameplay fresh.  Each level spawns coloured bubbles that have to be chained (see what they did there?) together to clear and gain score.  There are twenty scenarios all up, from simple score chases to rather complex balancing acts and speed clearings.  Where one level might ask you to complete chains of increasing length, another level might set you the goal of creating an exact score using bubbles of varying size.

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This week’s Australian releases list is brought to you by Brevity. Mmmm, Brevity.

• Monkey Island 2 Special Edition (July 7, PC)
• Club Penguin: Elite Penguin Force (July 8, DS)
• Crackdown 2 (July 8, 360)
• Dragon Ball Origins 2 (July 9, DS)

Happy gaming y’all!

OK, so this level doesn't look so difficult, but it gets more complicated

CONTEST NOW CLOSED, WINNER DRAWN – Congratulations to Twitter follower @Aranchine!

Thanks to Jesper Rudberg and the crew (well, the one other guy) at Doctor Entertainment, we’ve got a copy of their new PC puzzler title Puzzle Dimension to give away to one of our readers!

Puzzle Dimension bills itself as a puzzle game that will help train your spatial awareness, which is a little difficult to explain but makes sense when you see the game in action.  Players roll a golden orb around a floating platform trying to collect all available sunflowers, but platforms become increasingly complex and three dimensional as the game progresses.

I’m currently working my way through the game for review, the verdict will probably be up in the coming week.

Until then, if you’d like to score yourself a free copy of Puzzle Dimension then get yourself onto Twitter and post the following!

Hey @ACDiplomat I’d love a free copy of #PuzzleDimension! Follow and RT to enter! http://bitly.net/cHonGF

Then sit back and cross your fingers!  The winner will be drawn midday on Tuesday 6th of July, Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST).  I’ll announce the winner on site, and also on our Twitter account.

Contest Rules and Conditions:

1. Open to entrants worldwide, one entry per person.
2. Entrants must retweet the above message and be following the @ACDiplomat Twitter account to be eligible.
3. Winner will be selected at random.
   
4. Entrants must own a Steam account to redeem game code.

Best of luck everyone, and thanks to the guys at Doctor Entertainment.  You can check out more details on Puzzle Dimension over at the Steam store.