Rock, Paper, Shotgun

By Jim Rossignol on May 20th, 2012 at 11:00 am.

Sundays for waking up in Luton. Luton? Really? Yes. Luton is actually nicer than you remember. At least 67% nicer. I mean it. Anyway, Lutons aside, it’s time for some words on videogames and things.

• PopSci on Sniper Elite V2′s gory killcam: “And that’s part of the what makes Sniper Elite V2 so interesting. It is easily the most graphic, violent video game I’ve ever seen, but the violence is relatively realistic, not cartoony. The game has the dubious honor of humanizing Nazis more than any of the scores of WWII-era games, films, and books that came before it: these are not anonymous targets, dispatched from far away with the tug of the R-trigger: once you see testicles exploded, fingers severed, an artery slashed open by the force of your bullet, that you shot, from your own gun, you feel the effects of your actions in a way I didn’t expect. The original idea might well have been to create the most extreme, violent period shooter ever made. Blood! Guts! X-rays! But the effect is the complete opposite. You’re not yanking a cartoon ninja’s spine out of his body with your bare hands, or stabbing a shrieking purple alien with a glowing light-sword. You’re killing people. And that’s a messy business.”

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By Lewie Procter on May 19th, 2012 at 12:07 pm.

This weekend, as every other, I’ve had a poke around the internet to find you the best deals on PC game downloads. Read on to investigate my findings. There’s all sorts of things on sale right now, including some of my absolute all time favourite games. For notification of gaming bargains across all platforms throughout the week, hit up SavyGamer.co.uk. Read the rest of this entry »

By Adam Smith on May 18th, 2012 at 10:00 pm.

If you don’t have a muscular clicking finger a lot of the discussion around these parts may be a little disheartening as of late. It’s all Diablo this and Grim Dawn that, and maybe Exile the other. How about a bit of Torchlight II to go with all that, or as an alternative to Blizzard’s biff ‘em up? If you haven’t already had a chance to play the Tochlight beta, this weekend could be your lucky two days. Runic have announced that this will be their final stress test: “We’ll be sending out many more beta codes to those who have already made their Runic Games Account. Haven’t signed up yet? Go for it now! Creating your account is always your best chance to receive a beta invite – especially this weekend.”

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By Adam Smith on May 18th, 2012 at 8:00 pm.

Gas Guzzlers: Combat Carnage is sort of a 3D Death Rally, or at least that’s what it looks like and that’s reason enough for me to be quite eager to see if that’s what it plays like. Customisable cars with guns on top drive around and pretend to race each other while actually only really caring about exploding one another. It’s out in just four days today if the press release that just landed is to be believed more than the official website. Apparently it’s a “fast-paced addictive combat racing game”. A shame then that the trailer below spends two or three minutes adjusting its mirrors before actually igniting into anything that could be described as “fast-paced”.

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By Adam Smith on May 18th, 2012 at 7:00 pm.

With their Guile haircuts and their baggy jumpsuits, the original members of X-COM couldn’t suppress an alien if their lives depended on it and, boy, did their lives ever depend on it. The new XCOM are all about suppression though. There’s nothing they love better than pinning some hapless sectoid behind a car and then flanking the mind-probing little bastard. Of course, all this suppression and whatnot is change and change can be more frightening than a chrysalid in a confined space. Here is a developer diary that intends to explain why modernisation is not necessarily the enemy you know.

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By Adam Smith on May 18th, 2012 at 6:00 pm.

At its best, King’s Bounty took Heroes of Might and Magic on in its own castle courtyard, stormed the battlements, kicked the po-faced paste out of the venerable old king who sat there wheezing through his life, and then married a zombie and rode off on a spider-steed with the vocal inflections of a country gentleman. Overworld exploration and basic strategic army building, turn-based combat, levelling and loot – it had all those things, but at its best it also had all the bonkers stuff. Legends of Eisenwald aims to be a similar game but takes its theme and atmosphere from a different place, dropping the fantasy cliches of smug elf and bearded dwarf, and aiming instead for a truly gothic late medieval experience.

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By Jim Rossignol on May 18th, 2012 at 5:00 pm.

No, not The Cloud as in the internet, but actual clouds. Actual imaginary game clouds. Although it’s also an online game, so I suppose both interpretations are true. Guns Of Icarus is a massively multiplayer game of airships, you see, and the footage below is straight from Muse Games’ beta testing moments, complete with the player voice-comms captured for illustrative hooting. In it the airships batter each other with big steampunky guns, and watching them come crashing out of the sky is a joyous thing. The game is currently in closed beta, and you can sign up over on the website.
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By Jim Rossignol on May 18th, 2012 at 4:00 pm.

Cliffski’s complex take on the tower-defence genre has arrived on Steam (and can still of course be purchased directly from the developer) and that event has been celebrate with a bombastic new trailer, which you can see below. Well, I say bombastic, and that’s true of the battle bits, but it is also honest, showing you a quiet bit where Cliff is clicking through the many menus that allow you to endlessly customise the titular tank battles. Anyway, it’s out, and you can read a bit about what Tim Stone made of the game over here.
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