Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Pocketwatch have been cultivating their seeds in their increasingly distinct stretch of soil for a while now. Wildlife Tycoon was a IGF finalist. Venture Arctic, its semi-sequel, while winning Gametunnel’s Sim of the year was somewhat overlooked, becoming most noticeable when it went free for a week around Christmas. But the third game of ecology strikes us as something which has a chance of finding an even wider audience. It’s called Venture Dinosauria and is an ecological management game set during the very last days of dinosaurs’ rule…
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Perhaps the most requested feature we half-promised to do on RPS is a beginners walkthrough for Dwarf Fortress. And, clearly, I’m never going to do it because I’m too lazy. Some gentlemen, as I discovered on Qt3 this morning, are not lazy. They are industrious, like dwarfs. For example CptnDuck, who’s done fourteen ten-minute tutorials explaining pretty much everything you need to know about Dwarf Fortress. So, if you’ve been scared before, download the game and get watching. And to help, I’ve embedded all fourteen (count ‘em!) beneath the cut…
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2009′s set to be a funny old year for MMOs. On the one hand, we’ve got The Old Republic and Love on opposite ends of the spectrum, both promising important, enticing changes to an often static genre. On the other, there’s the distant thunder of how badly 2008 went for so many existing massively multiwotsits – last year cost us Tabula Rasa, Hellgate, Mythos and RF Online. So news of a promising newish name on the virtual world block is definitely good news. Especially one that’s got robots in.
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I’ve just burned a little too much time on a very silly game about a very English sport – but it’s a fine opportunity for a little good-natured competition between RPSites. It’s pretty much what you’d get if you shoved cricket into Sumo Tori Dreams – that same comedy-physics sense of drunken, incapable men unwisely attempting physical activity. Only in this case there is actual skill involved too.

I’m currently watching Twitter-friends warring over high scores: the number to beat is 255, apparently. Can you do better? Yeah, you – you with the face. I certainly can’t.

Yes, this is probably the first and only time we ever post about cricket.

And the IGF shortlist has gone live. It’s quite the selection of games – some already released, some only hinted at, some not even online. But it’s worth remembering, there’s been a solid classic amongst the shortlist for every year of the competition. What’s this year’s World of Goo? Can’t wait to find out. The full list is beneath the cut, including links to all the site sites I could find. Some, as far as I can work out, don’t have a web presence yet.
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This is so very good. It’s also been around for a couple of years, but this is the first time we’ve encountered it. Someone working under the name VGMD, cut together all the cinematics and key scenes from Full Throttle to create an hour-long ‘movie’ version.

As we lament the standards of storytelling and voice acting in many games, this stands as an example to all. It should be required viewing when people start a new game. “Oh!” they’d say as it finished, “It can be that good?” You can download the video from Gamers Hell here.

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Electronic Art’s latest LOTR title – a third-person thing of swords and armies – stumbles rapidly towards us, with a January 19th release date. Some videos and such have turned up for our inspection, and so without further ado I must point you to the click, beyond which I ruminate on said assets and post a video of Tolkien talking about naughty elves. Go read/watch.

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When reading around Gravity Bone’s internet footprint, I found myself catching up with Game Tunnel’s Game of The Year (They gave GB their arthouse game of the year award). And when I’m there, I realise that I hadn’t played their Strategy Game of the Year, a little thing called Battle of the Tiles. A graphically unappealing indie turn-based strategy game? I’m so there. Opinions of the demo beneath the cut…
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This is the second part of my article discussing gaming in Russia, Ukraine and the other CIS countries. It’s based on a trip I made to KRI, the Russian game developers conference, in 2008. Go here for part one.

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Here’s a story that hit during our week off – it’s one you probably already know about, but as it’s potentially something that’s very bad news for PC gaming, it’s only fair and right to give you fine folks a convenient place to discuss it. Massively (thanks, Larington) has one of the better summations and explorations of what’s going, as they seem to have clever people with some grasp of law on their staff. RPS, by contrast, has a philosopher, a youth worker, a biologist and a literature graduate. We’re no good at this stuff.

The crux of the story, though, concerns patents 6,219,045 and 7,181,690. In (something like) English, those refer to “scalable virtual world client-server chat system” and “system and method for enabling users to interact in a virtual space”. There’s space for a lot of give and take in those descriptions, but you get the point – two fundaments of pretty much every MMO past, present, and probably future.
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Gracious, it’s been almost a year since we last mentioned Battlestations: Pacific. The sequel to Midway’s WW2-based plane-and-boat flysailing should be with us by spring, once again trying to evoke fond memories of Carrier Command (I’m told – I’ve never played it. I know! I’m unbelievable), this time in a battlefieldsea twice as big as Midway’s acreage.

Along with a new trailer (below, of course), Eidos have today announced a… well, I’ll use their words. A “new community-focused destination site.” I think that might be it for the English language. Pack it up everyone, it’s broken forever now.

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