Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Dawn of War II, sequel to Relic’s much-expanded Warhammer 40,000 RTS, was released to shelves and fat pipes just a few days ago. After a long weekend snuggling up to it, here’s wot I think of its explodey delights.

According to the Sacred Creed of games writers who genuinely care about games writing, it is not the done thing to dedicate several paragraphs of a review to a game’s graphics and sound. Books shall not be judged by covers, pop bands not by their singers’ facial hair and a man not by what socks he is wearing. When it comes to Dawn of War II however, it’s incredibly difficult not to dwell obsessively on its excellent aesthetics. Once in a while, it’s fine to be shallow.
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Not much time for contemplation on a weekday. Rush-hour traffic, panic, work-a-day-blues, screaming, zombie-wars, knife-fights, crying, etc. But Sunday? Sunday there’s all the time to sit back and chew over the thinky-writey-stuff from the week. To that end, I compile a list of stuff which caught my eye, while trying to resist linking to tracks from the first gig in years from one of my favourite bands. Oh yes.

• This is great. Steve Gaynor of 2K Marin takes apart FEAR and FEAR 2 to illustrate first-person shooter level design principles. Clearly of interest to anyone wanting to look at the craft, but also shows how things like “Improving AI” don’t really matter by themselves nearly as much as you’d immediately think. (Via @Harvey1966)

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As mentioned in the last podcast, for Eurogamer I decided to perform the horrendous task of playing the original Knights of the Old Republic, making all the most awful dialogue and action choices available. The first part of this story, covering Simon Evil’s actions on Taris, is now up. It begins like this.

“There’s something you need to know about me. I’m a good guy. I’m a generally decent person. I have my many faults, and certainly my large share of means to be irritating, rude, and bothersome. But ultimately, it’s fair to say I’m a kind, reasonable individual. I’m not the sort of person who, for instance, would usually be found mocking victims of bullying, endorsing racism, or murdering victims of sexual assault.”

And continues here.

Great – it looks like I’m going to get to use my ‘The smell of the greasepaint, the roar of the Krauts.’ strapline again. Theatre of War, one of the more wargamerly WW2 RTSs of recent years, is about to spawn a sequel. Going by this hot-off-the-compiler Russian-language demo, that sequel will please a lot more grogs than its parent did.

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Rather out of nowhere, along with two artwork desktops, Bioware have posted the first teaser trailer for Mass Effect 2. As you might expect for a barely announced game, there’s no gameplay footage here, but instead a rather worrying implication. Well, it’s an interesting surprise so I’ll not spoil it. It’s below.

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If I were making a trailer for the brilliant Sins Of A Solar Empire I would definitely show the best feature in the game: the extraordinary long zoom from space craft out to solar map. It’s the kind of camera wizziness that puts Supreme Commander to shame. It’s the thing that makes the game as impressive as it is. Instead, the new movie for the expansion, Entrenchment, shows off the exploding spacecraft, and their laser combat. That’s all good stuff, but it’s not the crux of the game. Come on trailer-making folks, let’s see genuine game footage. We’re all gamers here.
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Friday brings us another community CP map by Sean ‘Heyo’ Cutino, CP_Egypt, and an update for previous community map, CP_Fastlane. There’s also the details filled in for the achievements on yesterday’s page, including spoilers for next week’s weapon reveal via Russian site www.hl-inside.ru and the spoilsports at PC Gamer.

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For a few seconds, when watching the trailer for this forthcoming adventure game, I became a little over-excited. Text explodes onto the screen: “HE IS SMALL! HE IS CRUEL! HE IS…” I’m on the tenterhooks. Surely someone hasn’t made a videogame fanfiction adventure about our own Alec Meer? But no. It’s Ceville, who appears to be some medieval-esque ruler with a sinister tache and staring eyes. It’s a comedy adventure game from Germany. Which seems like a set up for a joke, which proves that Sun-esque xenophobia is terribly ingrained somewhere deep in my Psyche. I’m sorry. I’ll stop blogging now before I paint my face with a union jack and start gabbling on about two world wars and one world cup. Er… you can get the 500Mb or so demo here and the trailer’s beneath the cut.
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February is, it seems, the official month of killing tiny soldiers, and today in particular is St. Man-Squisher’s Day. This fine Friday has already seen the launch of Dawn of War II – which I’m alt-tabbed from right now, excitingly – and now we also get to behold the majesty of the new Total War game. The 2 gigabyte (lawks, lummee, won’t somebody please think of the children etc) Empire demo’s just gone live on Steam, ahead of the launch of the whole epic shebang on March 4th. We shall, of course, be sharing some sort of opinion on ETW cometh the hour, but let’s be honest, the odds of it being anything less than spectacular are tinier than a vole’s pinkie finger.

Beneath the magical clicky words, details on exactly what’s in this here demo.
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It looks like all those folks who didn’t get into the closed beta will finally be able to taste the latest version of the finest deathmatch game of them all time. Via ESReality: “We’re opening QUAKE LIVE to the general public as an open beta the evening of Tuesday, February 24th.” The teaser splash page at the Quake Live site confirms it.

I shall see you there. (Thanks to Alex for the tip.)

More Codemasters material from their recent US press day: a second FUEL trailer. This one is significantly less impressive than the last one, although it shows a bit more detail of the racetrack areas within the 5000km2 terrain of the game world. it’s really hard to guess the quality of the game at this stage, and I’m somewhat sceptical. Nevertheless, the idea of a post-apocalyptic North America to race around in appeals to be on some very basic level, and the game is going to have to be deeply crap to put me off playing it. Eurogamer have a brief overview of the game here, and report that “players will also be able to create their own races on any part of the map, and share them online.” It sounds like the core races are going to be playable a standard event-by-event race too, if you want to skip the open worldiness of it.
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