Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Oh God, I’m writing a second post about Twitter in as many days. One of you rabid anti-social networking types is totally going to come and kill me for this. (As a side-note, the craziest angry-reader threat I ever received was, in response to an admittedly hurried review of the Star Wars: Empire At War expansion pack, a claim that he was going to find my house, construct a giant wax statue of me outside it, then set fire to the thing. I remain deeply disappointed this never happened).

Anyway, no pimping of RPS-related info-flows this time. Rather, it’s an interesting ad-libbed experiment that verges on being both interactive fiction and alternate-reality gaming.
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Those folks participating in the AWOMO stress test beta can get hold of Tomb Raider: Legend for nowt. (That’s the game before last?) To get it you need to register with the new digi downloads service and then just get, er, downloading. The game will be free with an AWOMO account for a month from today. AWOMO is all about getting games super fast, and they claim of Legend that “we can demonstrate that players on an 8 Megabit line can be playing the game within 11 minutes.” Woo.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has uncovered information that suggests sleazy Half-Life star Gordon Freeman did have an affair with Alyx after all. And the cold-hearted scoundrel then broke up with her on her birthday night, at a party attended by her closest friends and family. Friends of Alyx have explained to RPS that the poor girl was devastated, as the bearded so-called “hero” walked out on her without saying a word. She is said to be recovering with her best friend Barney. We’ve contacted Freeman for comment, but so far the heart-breaker has had nothing to say.

There’s a bittersweet flavour to playing Bloodlines. It’s not because of the vampiric moodiness and the twilight tales that it tells, nor the real-world tragedy of its costly development finally undoing brave development studio, Troika. No, the sense of sorrow comes from the realisation that there’s nothing like this on the horizon. The idea is begged: why should there be so few games like this? Oh right, because it’s so very hard to do.
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After going very, very quiet for a few months, EA and DICE are reopening the Battlefield Heroes closed beta today. Which means if you already had a key, you’ll be able to get back into the new and improved version of the game when you receive an email. Should you not have a beta key, you can still get in line, with DICE planning to send out a few thousand invites in the near future. You’ll need to create an account here, then fill in the sign-up form here.

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There’s been plenty of predicition lately that the age of supermegapixelshaderooed blockbuster games on PC might be drawing to a close, in favour of lower-spec, lower-profile inventiveness from the indie, MMO, browser-based and casual scenes. What there hasn’t been is much hard data that reflects this possible sea change. The news that current 3D card king NVIDIA recorded an eyewatering $30 million loss last year (that’s after a $797.6m profit in the preceding year) could have something to do with it.
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Jonatan ‘Cactus‘ Soderstrom is one of the most prolific and interesting indie developers currently working. During the IGF judging sessions I was fortunate enough to play an early version of Mondo Nation, the compilation of Cactus’ series of bizarre, unsettling FPS puzzle games. These games are, I would suggest, about as close as videogames have come to the weirder elements of a David Lynch production. Cactus cites Mr Lynch, along with plenty of other esoteric influences, in the interview below. If you want to set the scene for yourself, and get a little flavour of Cactus’ mad humour, then perhaps you should play some of his games before reading onwards. Mondo Agency, Psychosomnium, or SeizureDome are all good places to start.

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Tom Clancy’s HAWX (High Altitude Warfare… Xylophones?) is due next month, offering you lots of shooty-bang action, shown in the latest trailer from the cockpit of your futuristic jet. Set in 2012, apparently nation states are coming to an end, and countries are increasingly relying on modern-sounding initialisms like PMCs (Private Military Companies). The Reykjavik Accords further legitimize them, we’re told. And this means you need to shoot stuff with a plane! Good heavens, let’s get to it. New video, and predictions for future Clancy games, below.

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As John revealed yesterday, as part of a transparent attempt to raise his own follower count (coughhere’smecough), RPS has a Twitter thing. We’re so impressionable. In fact, we’ve had the account for a while, more to bag the URL than anything else, but being stupids we haven’t thought of how to best leverage this exciting new web 2.5 sociopathic networking micro-blogging brainfart technology as yet. Read the rest of this entry »

While I really should write up my impressions of everything I played at the New York Comic Con, this will tide us over until the jetlag has abated. Anyway, the demo of The Farm 51′s WW1… but with undead has gone live. Hmm. WW1 with Undead sounds like some of the bits of the Darkness, when I phrase it like that, but it seems far closer to something like Painkiller in its cut-to-the-bone action and general hyperbolic tone. Anyway – it’s about a gig and you can get it from here. Also: “Set in 1917, the Great War has been raging for two long years and new recruit Simon Bukner, a US Army soldier, is the latest to face the harsh realities of war.” Three years, surely? Anyway, I suspect this is the least of the historical inaccuracies, y’know? Video follows.
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This rather puts Burnout Paradise’s sprawling cityscape into perspective. FUEL, Codemasters’ new open world racing game, features 5000km of open terrain. This new chunk of footage illustrates that to startling effect. We were already intrigued the massive space Codies were talking about, but this brings it home. Suddenly the idea that it really does have that much space in it seems real. Not only that, but it’s out in May. Oh my.

We’ll have an interview with the developers, Asobo Studio, very soon.

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