In contrast to Atari, which is putting more faith in outsourcing, publisher THQ has just announced the formation of a new internal development studio called Incinerator.

Numbered among Incinerator's employees are veterans from Sony's Twisted Metal series and Rockstar's Midnight Club games. At the moment, the studio is developing Xbox360 and Wii versions of the racing game Cars, based on the Disney/Pixar film, as well as other unnamed titles for next gen systems.

Before you try Portal, the upcoming bonus game/tech demo that Valve is shipping with Half-Life 2: Episode Two alongside Team Fortress 2, try out Nuclear Monkey's original.

Created as an end-of-year student project at the Digipen Institute of Technology in Washington, Narbacular Drop is a first person puzzle game utilising a similar example of portal technology to that seen in 3d Realms' recent Prey. For those unfamiliar with this new technique, it's a little tricky to explain without scaring people with quantum physics terms like "worm-holes". To put it as simply as possible, a portal is made up of two doors that the player or other objects can see and move through. Now, these doors can be placed anywhere, so if you were to place the entrance and exit on opposing walls of a square room, you could look through the entrance door and see yourself from the exit door looking into the entrance. Confusing, no? This also allows for all sorts of interesting possibilities when it comes to moving around a level, such as dropping through the floor to land on a higher platform and the like. It's a concept that takes quite a bit of getting used to, both in theory and practice, but once mastered, it's a lot of fun.

Narbacular Drop tasks the player with simply reaching the level's exit, using the portals which can be placed on any stone surface from any range with a mouse click. The challenge comes from the fact that the player is unable to place portals on metal surfaces, which generally make up large portions of each level. The game is quite short - only around eight levels - but it's just enough to get a handle on the concept of the portal technology, and to make one even more excited about Valve's upcoming spiritual sequel, Portal.

ND is a free download of a mere 25.6 megabytes. It's available from the Nuclear Monkey's web site but given the massive upsurge of hits the site has received since the announcement of Portal, it is frequently down due to exceeded bandwidth limits. Fortunately there are a number of mirrors hosting the game.

On a final note, a quick warning. People who get any degree of motion sickness from first-person games may find Narbacular Drop to be too much. While we highly recommend you give it a try anyway, PC PowerPlay takes no responsibility for any necessary cleaning bills or replacement of vomit-filled hardware that may be required after playing this game. Have fun.

ArenaNet, developer of Guild Wars, have announced a third installment in the series following the success of Guild Wars: Factions. Nightfall will introduce two new classes, the Dervish and the Paragon. Players will have a chance to try the new content out for free on the weekend of the 28th July.


Taking place just a week after the City of Heroes/Villains "Double XP Weekend", it's time to start formulating conspiracy theories regarding NCSoft's diabolical scheme to rob MMORPG gamers across the world of what little spare time they had remaining.

FiringSquad has interviewed Stardock's president and CEO Brad Wardell about the company's new publishing plans.

Stardock is the developer behind the recent space strategy Galactic Civilizations II, and is currently working on expansions as well as the slow burning MMORTS Society. But not content with development, nor with its range of desktop software, nor even with its TotalGaming.net online distribution service, Stardock Entertainment has announced plans to establish itself as a full-blown publisher.

The Michigan-based company is happy to keep its operation relatively small for the moment by funding a select few independent games and giving them the love and attention they need to succeed. In the interview with FiringSquad, Stardock's main man Wardell says a transparent and trusting relationship with developers is one of the company's goals:


Stardock has made itself a friend to many PC gamers for shipping GalCiv II with no copy protection, and comments like Wardell's won't do their reputation as a publisher any harm either.

Horrormeister Clive Barker teams up with Codemasters

"I have seen the future of horror and its name is Clive Barker." - Stephen King.

Following up from his critically successful 2001 game "The Undying", horror/fantasy veteran Clive Barker (Hellraiser) has teamed-up with UK-headquartered publisher Codemasters to develop an upcoming PC/next-generation game called "Clive Barker's Jericho". The mature title, scheduled to ship in late 2007, will apparently feature an open world where the player will be able to explore multiple story paths simultaneously.


Barker's most recent venture into video games was a cross-platform property titled "Demonik" that was meant to be turned into a movie, co-produced by Barker and John Woo, developed by Terminal Reality and published by Majesco. Unfortunately this title had stalled earlier this year.

If The Undying is any indication of what Clive Barker is capable of with the right development team behind him, Jericho promises to be a title worth keeping an evil eye on.