Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Sunday is a day for trying to make my gaming PC start booting again. Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe I can procastinate, making a list of some smart and compulsive games reading I found this week for the RPS-readership’s delectation, and try my damn hardest not to include some pop song or another. Yes, I think I can.

• Crispy Gamer’s Critic In Exile columnist Scott Jones asks “Is It OK to Finally Admit That I Didn’t Really Like Fallout 3 All That Much?” Example quote: “I know of a least a half-dozen writers who included Fallout 3 in their top-10 lists who, I know for a fact, didn’t invest more than three or four hours in the game (if that), and still felt compelled to vote for Fallout 3 — let’s go ahead and say it — because it felt like the right thing to do.” Honestly, I’m astounded and really don’t know where to begin. Well, don’t know where to begin politely.

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Just a quickie to mention this latest offer over on Steam: All of the Steam X-Com catalogue for $4.99 in the US, and £2.99 in the UK. It’s reportedly only on sale for this weekend, although that’s not made clear on the Steam site, and I suspect that’s a pack that we might see cheap again in the future. That’s some classic gaming for very little and hey, at that price you don’t have to feel guilty about not bothering to play Enforcer. Hooray!

Late last night, as I drove around frozen South Western England delivering inebriated people to their homes, I got to discussing F.E.A.R. with one of its fans. The sequel, he said, was one of the games that really excited him for 2009. While I definitely appreciated the original game and its expansions, they’re also games that I feel contain a weird tension that they never quite get past. The Fear Fan talked about that moment on the ladder, or that moment where you get clubbed in the face. I raised the invisi-ninjas as the best sections. These are great scary moments within the game, and they’re scary because you’re relatively helpless. The rest of the time, however, you find yourself being an unstoppable super-man who can slow time. How, then, do things remain scary?

I can’t help thinking, then, that the Elite Powered Armour that is shown off in this latest F.E.A.R 2 trailer does exactly the opposite to what is best in its game. It even says so in the trailer: “The Solution To Everything You Fear.” Surely that’s missing the point of making a horror shooter? Maybe that’s just me.
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I’m a complete sucker for Hidden Object games. The likes of Mystery PI engross me far more than a respectable gun-toting, army-controlling, murder-solving games player should admit, but there’s something cathartic about scanning a cluttered screen for the improbably placed list of objects. Especially for those moments when you finally find the umbrella hidden in the scene at the park, when you realise it’s the size of a building. Big Blue Bubble’s Masters of Mystery: Crime of Fashion takes the casual game’s themes, but does something slightly different.

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Quick post on this one. News reaches me from staring at forums that King’s Bounty is on sale this weekend from Gamer’s Gate for twenty Euros. As much as we love the game – it’s Alec’s favourite of last year, after all - after the cheery collapse of the Pound Sterling, forty Euros is a lot for anything. At twenty it’s a total bargain. Hurrah for advanced capitalism.

This is one I played over the break, but didn’t have a chance to write up until now. I waved it in Walker’s direction, suspecting it’d prompt one of his posts about how it’s a game which made him cry over the sheer beauty of it all like the Monkey-Wrench puzzle in Monkey Island 2 (Or something). Except… no. The job’s down to me. The wonderfully evocatively titled I Fell In Love With The Majesty Of Colours is a short narrative adventure with multiple endings and a real dream-like sense of play. Some short thoughts beneath the cut.
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As sure as the spinning of the Earth, the ageing of a man and the fury of a Metal Gear Solid 4 fan at finding the game isn’t at the top of someone’s game of the year list, there are expansions for every Command and Conquer game. Red Alert 3 – a game that seemed a little lost in the tidal wave of big Winter releases – is next to get the add-on treatment, with a little number EA are calling Uprising.

It’s specifically focused on the single player/co-op modes, by the sound of it – featuring four new mini-campaigns, one of which they’re describing as something of a dungeon crawler mode. I.e. it’s possibly doing what Dawn of War II is doing. Trends are funny things. Oh, and they’re promising an even larger Hollywood cast, which means Kieron and Leigh will probably get to talk about mammaries again. Below the info-hurdle, a snippet of footage and ENTHUSIASTIC SHOUTING NERDY MAN going into more detail about what EA claim is one of the best C&C expansions they’ve ever made. Given the underwhelming C&C3: Kane’s Wrath, that’s a bold promise.
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Capcom are so predictable! If it’s not a game about a young lawyer solving murder mysteries with the power of his glowing necklace and dead boss possessing the body of a 15 year old girl, it’s a game about herding sheep with a UFO. Just typical. The latter is Flock, a completely barking mad-looking puzzle game that… well, I couldn’t have summed it up better: it’s herding sheep with a UFO.

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Ooh, not long now until Dawn of War II. The shiny, RPGy Warhammer 40,000 real-time strategy argy-bargy hits on February 20, but turns out that just under a month before that we’ll get to play with the beta. Given disc mastering times and whatnot, I’d imagine by “beta” they actually mean “demo, but beta sounds so much edgier and exclusivier”. I still blame Google for this bally beta fad. Nonetheless, you’ll get to tinker with a multiplayer client including five maps and all four of DOW II’s races – that’s Orks, Eldar, The Chuckle Brothers and Tyranids – on January 28th. Better yet, if you own Dawn of War 1′s final expansion Soulstorm, you get to bite into that juicy beta burger on the 21st. Perhaps it’s an apology for Soulstorm being a bit flaccid?

In either case, the beta’s accessible only through Steam, which means login-hating loonymen are out of luck. More fun info-morsels about DOW 2 beneath the cut. (Man, ‘cut’ is getting old now. Anyone care to dream up an alternative?)
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Hulk-meets-GTA open-world absorb ‘em up Prototype has been heavily delayed, with the game now due for release in the summer of 2009. (Assuming we have a summer this year, and that hasn’t been cancelled due to budgetary constraints). The free-running organ-burster remains a contender for high accolades of action-game excellence, especially when contrasted with the other lacklustre run-and-jump games from the past 18 months. The pedigree of developers Radical Entertainment is pretty good, having impressed us with Hulk: Ultimate Destruction back in the previous console generation. All this means, of course, that the hype machine has been set spinning again with a superb action-splatter trailer to kick off the year, which is posted after the jump. The staged demo of this game at GDC 2008 was one of the highlights of the conference for me, and I still have high hopes for the finished game.

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One of the most intense Ukrainian games destined for our hard-drives in 2009 is Men Of War, which I’ve been lucky enough to have some time with over the past couple of weeks. It’s rather similar to previous games Faces of War and Soldiers: Heroes of World War II, but since that’s not exactly the most universal reference point I’ve written some impressions of the new game beyond the jump. They should give you some idea of why this particular RTS is so interesting.

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