Rock, Paper, Shotgun

By Jim Rossignol on May 24th, 2013 at 8:00 pm.

Bungie’s ambitious-sounding “sandbox” MMOFPS, Destiny, might not miss out on the One True Format after all, according to words spoken by writer and head of community Eric Osborne. In an interview with IGN he said:

“We haven’t said yes, and we haven’t said no… The more platforms we take on, the more work it ultimately becomes, and what we don’t want is to compromise the core experience on any platforms. We have a lot of people who play on PCs. We have a lot of appetite to build that experience. We haven’t announced it yet, but we’re looking forward to talking more about that kind of stuff in the future.”

So… do we want it? I really do like that concept art… But I am wholly indifferent to the CGI trailer, below.
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By Jim Rossignol on May 24th, 2013 at 7:00 pm.

Minecraft with zombies is, well, Minecraft, but it’s also pretty much what 7 Days To Die could be described as. It’s a take on the zombie survival theme that also attempts to deliver a world that is as malleable as Minecraft’s blocky elysium. You can dig, destroy, build, barricade, and all that good stuff, as well as doing the shotgun business against the hideous undead. It’s Minecraft and DayZ being entwined after some horrible accident in the laboratory of zombie genre-blending. The developers sum it up, as so many games seem to have been summed up lately, by saying: “is an open world, voxel-based, sandbox game blending the best elements of FPS, Survival Horror, RPG and Tower Defense style games.”

Don’t take my baseless hum of cynicism as a reason not to take a look at the trailer, however, because 7 Days To Die looks genuinely impressive, and I can’t see this not making a huge impact when it arrives.
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By Jim Rossignol on May 24th, 2013 at 6:00 pm.

I can see where this going. The Mighty Quest For Epic Loot is going to bludgeon us into submission with a series of amusing trailery missives, until we feel obliged to try it out. It’s is F2P, after all. But actually this latest trailer – the archer – shows a lot more of the game in-play than I’d expected. And it actually looks okay. At least as okay as Craig’s hands-on suggested it might be.

Hmm!
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By Nathan Grayson on May 24th, 2013 at 5:00 pm.

Shadows are total freeloaders. Don’t get me wrong: they look nice and all, but they don’t really do much of anything. Mine just tags along behind me, growing and shrinking at will, taunting me with its substantial insubstantial superpowers. But what if your shadow could be your superpower? That’s the premise of Contrast, a platforming adventure set in a “surreal 1920s dreamscape”. Your character, a little girl named Didi’s imaginary friend, can shift between the tangible foreground and a wispy world of shadows. The short version? She can jump off stuff she totally shouldn’t be able to jump off. It all looks nicely stylish, because shadows are also effortlessly cooler-looking than us. The jerks.

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By Nathan Grayson on May 24th, 2013 at 4:00 pm.

Final Fantasy’s naming scheme broke down the moment Square decided to make a second one, but that was only the beginning. Now we’re having a second go at a realm that’s a distant relative of a different realm that wasn’t supposed to be reborn 43845952 installments ago. The series has taken a long, strange road to get to this exceedingly confusing point, and the first version of Final Fantasy XIV was one of its lowest dips. To its credit, Square Enix quickly came to understand that after nobody bought it, and they’ve been hard at work on a complete revamp ever since. But were they able to salvage FFXIV’s best bits (a hyper-flexible class system, lavish story scenes, lovably fluffy horse birds) and reforge them into a sharp, sleek modern MMO? Sounds like we’ll finally (XXXVII Delta: Advent Crystal Cerberus Thunder Core) find out in August.

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By Nathan Grayson on May 24th, 2013 at 3:00 pm.

Second Chance Heroes looks like an aggressively silly thing. The basic idea is that modern society has made us terrible at everything, so when, like, 12 different apocalypses strike, we have to clone long-dead historical heroes to clean up our mess of irradiated alien fast food zombots. The game takes the form of a Diablo-esque ARPG, but with a billion outlandish locations and ridiculous characters to unlock. Yes, it probably screams, “LOOK AT ME, I AM GOOFY WARBLE WARBLE MOO” a little too loudly, but at this stage, I’m still definitely willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. Trailer with just the right amount of Abraham Lincoln after the break.

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By Nathan Grayson on May 24th, 2013 at 2:00 pm.

The psychology of being inside a car is kind of fascinating – in a twisted, human-limits-revealing sort of way. We tend to stop viewing our fellow road-hogging compatriots as people, preferring instead to focus on the galloping four-wheeled colossi in front of us. Other drivers become objects, impediments, enemies. Have you ever had one of those moments where you’re honking and raging, and then you finally pass the person ahead of you and briefly see their face? “Oh god,” I often think. “They look so upset. Did I do that? To another person? That’s fucked!” But I keep doing it anyway, because I’m in a soulless metal shell, and so are they. That, I figure, is why street racing games are never about anything other than competition, rivalry, and sticking it to the po-lice. It’s so easy to hate a car, run it off the road, and laugh. Need For Speed Rivals‘ title, then, strikes me as weirdly redundant, in its own way.

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By Jim Rossignol on May 24th, 2013 at 1:00 pm.

Grave news: The Flare Path has been delayed until tomorrow. But don’t look so sad, we’ve filled its usual 1pm Friday slot with news of a splendid-looking cartoon jousting and knightliness game, Last Knight. The developer lists features of this Unreal-powered adventure as being things such as ” A full-fledged adventure in the story mode” and also “Randomly generated world in the arcade mode (every game is different)”. That sounds intriguing as the game is based on “Jousting, platforming and navigating around obstacles gameplay”.

You can see all that in a video, below.
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By Jim Rossignol on May 24th, 2013 at 12:00 pm.

IMPOSSIBLY IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER: I run 3-man game studio Big Robot in my spare time. This post is blatant self-promotion of that happen-thing.

We’re busy getting Sir, You Are Being Hunted ready for Rezzed, which means that the playable alpha for our Kickstarter backers is not far away. Part of the work that we’re doing towards that involves new biomes, and I’ve made a video to show off one of those, which you can see below.
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By Nathan Grayson on May 24th, 2013 at 11:00 am.

ZOMBIES ARE EVERYWHERE. In the schools, under your refrigerator, buried deep within the collective cultural conscience. Especially that last one, which is probably why a new zombie game gets announced every 0.4674 seconds. That brings us to the current undead re-deadifier du seconde: Dying Light. It comes from Techland and takes place in a balmy, bloody tropical setting, but it’s not part of the Dead Island series. The main differences? Fleet-footed, Mirror’s-Edge-esque parkour and a Minecraft-like survival element. Don’t worry, though: you can still make an electrified machete.

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