Rock, Paper, Shotgun

StarWraith 3D Games have announced the launch of their new space game, Evochron Legends, along with a 50mb demo. From what I’ve played so far it seems a little rough around the edges, but the scope of it is quite startling – a full freeform universe with Elite style combat, complete with vast space stations and planetary surfaces. That combat does work, too, allowing you to go hurtle around in zero-G dogfighter combat. It’s time to break out the joystick and/or gamepad. The demo can be unlocked into the full game for $25. Trailer after the jump. (You’re going to want to take a look at this one, I suspect, as it shows off those planets and larger space structures.)
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Damn those awesome guys at Ars Technica, they’ve gone and done an article that we’ve wanted to do for years: MRI scans of the gamer’s brain. The results suggest that three areas of the brain are more active when the subjects thought they were playing against a human, an effect which is more pronounced in men than in women.

The human brain appears to try to parse the intentions of others by engaging its own decision-making process; in short, it appears to model another person’s mind by seeing what it would do if it were in that other person’s skull. The three areas of the brain that the authors identify are involved, in part, in making executive decisions for that brain’s owner, in addition to evaluating other people’s executive decisions. So, the fact that they’re busier when a person thinks they’re playing another human could also be interpreted as them focusing harder on an identical decision making process.

I can see it in your eyes. You want to download a 2.9GB demo. No, really, you do. Because ta-da, the PC release of Burnout: Paradise goes shopward in the morning, and entire game is available to download, for free, in a time-limited way. Perhaps from Fileshack, perhaps from GamersHell. Or maybe from NVidia. (Actually, the servers are crazy busy at the moment, and hopefully they’ll be echoed in a few more places. Post links below if you find them – but please, no torrents unless officially sanctioned.)

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Edit: reader research suggests this is free – see comments – but still no official response from Valve. We’ll let you know, but assume it is free!

Valve say: “The first L4D DLC – dubbed the L4D Survival Pack — is due for release this spring and introduces a new multiplayer game mode entitled, Survival, plus two complete campaigns for Versus Mode.” They also say: “In addition, for PC gamers and aspiring developers, the first Left 4 Dead release for the Source Software Development Kit (Source SDK) will allow the creation of custom Left 4 Dead campaigns that will be discoverable via L4D’s matchmaking system. The SDK update is also due for release this spring, and is free of charge to all owners of L4D on the PC.”

There’s also a new retail version of the game also due in the spring, called “Critic’s Choice”, with all that stuff to be included.

Oh my. VG247 have the news over here. “1943 features 24-player action over three locations; Wake Island, Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima.” There’s also a video (thanks Joystiq, love you!) which I’ve posted after the jump. I can see the “omg nerf bombers” forum headline from here. It does look like the game intends to revisit the World War II vehicular combat found in the first game with little change to the formula, and that’s a good thing. It will apparently arrive on PC “this summer”. Fantastic news.

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Yippee! A new trailer for Machinarium, and a garden full of snow. What more could a man ask for? Don’t forget we spoke to Amanita Design about the game just a short while back. This time we get to see some of the puzzling in action, including exciting stretchy robot techniques! Plus there’s a few new scenes that haven’t been shown before, each breathtakingly detailed and pretty. It’s below.

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In what is probably the biggest backstab in Eve Online’s rather stabby history, a director of one of the key corporations in key PvP alliance Band Of Brothers has turned out to be an agent of their biggest enemies, the Something Awful spawned GoonSwarm. The consequence of this is some huge in-game material losses, but also the disbanding of the alliance itself. This means that the sovereignty game mechanic which holds Band Of Brother’s galactic empire together has gone offline, leaving them horrendously exposed to attack. Worse, Goonswarm have stolen the name and ticker of an alliance that has been running for almost five years.

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It’s been an astonishingly busy few weeks and I’ve neglected to mention a few bits and pieces of work that fell outside the RPS net. One such was this mini-history of the Total War games, which ends with a little clue from developer Mike Brunton as to where the Creative Assembly team might go after Empire. Oh, and my review of Empire: Total War will be in the next PC Gamer UK. A world first, and all that.

Elsewhere, I’ve played through all the IGF Grand Prize finalist games, and written some impressions over here. Blueberry Garden is wonderful, but my favourite by far is Dyson, which we posted about last summer, but which has progressed somewhat since then and will hopefully go even further. The new v1.08 build is definitely worth a look. So, so relaxing. Mmm.

Also: I’ll have more Planetside War news tomorrow. It looks like there’s some kind of special event in the works, and a big push from this weekend. 8pm GMT Saturday Join us!

Two days ago, I built a mutant snow-panda. Whee! Sadly, I then suffered a phone call announcing that broadband installation in my new house, already long-delayed due to Virgin losing my application, had been pushed back a further eight days because of crystals of cold water on the road. Honestly, what a pathetic country this can be.

So I’ve spent the last week, and will spend the next one, on a miserable wi-fi tour through Burger Kings, friends’ lounges and the 10 square centimetre patch of my kitchen that can access an incredibly flaky paid hotspot. Worse, Steam’s reliably unreliable offline mode pulled a whiny fit, denying me access to all the games I’d cannily downloaded a couple of weeks back. With most of my boxed games in storage, my WSADing options have been strictly limited. In frustration, I pawed to the very bottom of dusty junk-boxes I’ve left unpacked for years. That’s when I saw it.

Daikatana.
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Early 2009 seemed awfully soon for Dragon Age. Especially when the console version wasn’t set until the other end of the year. It was nice to have things that way around for once, making us think of Bioware as friendly uncles who hadn’t abandoned us for our younger, more noisy cousins. Well, huff, as now they’re both set to come out together in the fourth quarter, which according to our calendar is “ages away”. Sims 3 was also due for this month, which didn’t seem realistic with the lack of hubbub, and turns out not to be. That’s now set for June. And Godfather II has been bumped until around April. Blimey, February suddenly got less interesting. Shed-load of Godfather II videos below, just for the heck of it.

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The Global Game Jam has led to absolutely many videogames being made in literally little time by totally complete strangers. Which to link to? Well, Karl Harris, one of the two (count ‘em!) composers in the team of Furballs has worked out one way. That is, mail us and claim to be an avid RPS reader. Is he an avid RPS reader? Who can tell, and certainly not us, because fact checking isn’t for punk-rock bloggers like us. Furballs involves cats, the favoured animal of 3/4 of RPS, which is also another big ol’ tick in its favour. You can get it from here (You’ll need all the XNA and Net3.5 and similar stuff too). And since it’s a two-players with one-controller game, I asked my delightful girlfriend to play it with me and then interviewed her. Which follows beneath the cut. Look, ma, we were lying about not doing any journalism.
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