Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Presumably as some sort of reaction to The Month Of Infinite Strategy Games we’ve just enjoyed, today I was gripped by a strange and peurile urge to go shoot an awful lot of men in the face. And in the game. Eventually, that urge turned out to be best scratched by Defense Grid: The Awakening, which made for a rather ideal halfway house between relatively cerebral RTS and the wanton killing of FPS et al.

En route to that though, I spent a cheerfully blood-crazed couple of hours with freebie flash games the Thing-Thing series. Blood-Drenched Rag Doll may have been a better name for it.
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More than renewed, in fact – Gamesindustry.biz reckons it’s had cast-iron confirmation from a source that EA and Starbreeze (Chronicles of Riddick, The Darkness) are, as speculated last year, working on a brand-new Syndicate game.

Which is happy-hands-in-the-air time for long-term PC gamers. As long as they don’t mind that (most probably) no-one from the original Syndicate team will be involved. And that the odds of it being a zoomed-out strategy kinda thing rather than over-the-shoulder mega-death fun are practically zero. But it’s a highly respected developer with a history of morally-ambiguous protagonists, tackling an ever-beloved theme of semi-malevolent corporations treating humanity with near-total disdain – it’s very unlikely to be Syndicate as we know it, but it certainly seems like a smart pairing.

Asking around the RPS Castle chambers if anyone had anything to add to the news that there were some new Diablo III screenshots (click on the pics), Jim Rossignol immediately ran to the projection whiteboard and thoughtwrote, “there are two Diablo games, but now there is three of it.” This is the reason you visit RPS, and not other sites that apparently persist with existing. But look again, gentles, the inventory system has had a bit of an overhaul.

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RPS didn’t go to GDC. Leigh Alexander did. So we thought it a good idea to get her on the yap-machine to ask her about her experiences. Bit of an experimental RPS-cast this one, being done over Skype. Will the sound quality be enough for the audiophile RPS listeners? I think it’s okay – did some noise-reduction and leveling which seems to polish it up, though there’s a smidge of drop-out right near the end. Ah, that internet wireless. Anyway – you can download it direct here, it has an individual net-home and here’s the iTunes page, while the full running order – in case you want to skip past the bits where Leigh insists on talking about consoles – is beneath the cut…
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Tim Schafer hosted the Game Developers Choice Awards this year and he made funnies while distributing awards to the best and brightest in the industry. You can watch an hour of the proceedings below, courtesy of Gamespot. Go World Of Goo! Full winners list is here.
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The voiceover guy for the new Black Prophecy trailer sounds like he’s going to burst out my speakers and recruit me directly into his interstellar crusade. Calm down, mate! The trailer apparently shows combat between the two main factions in the game, as well as the obligatory spooky alien faction at the end: The Restorers. Woo. We’ll hopefully have an interview with the team behind this absurdly pretty space MMO some time next week. In the meantime, go sign up for the beta.
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This year’s GDC wasn’t all unhelpfully cryptic teaser trailers – it was also a chance for enthusiastic developers of lesser-known fare to demo their wares first hand. F’rinstance, this awkward but illuminating talk from one of the Turkish chaps behind the splendid, inventive, horse-centric RPG Mount & Blade, showing off exactly what to expect from the forthcoming expansion, Warband. Significantly enhanced graphics and siege-orientated multiplayer, primarily – both of which seem, from this video, to mean an even better game, and one that neatly papers over its more obvious cracks.

WARNING: the guy doing the presentation does have an unusual beard.
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[Ah, been a while. I did a series of Post Mortems for PC Format over a few years, chatting to a dev a month about the development of a game. I've republished the vast majority here already, but I find there's a few left over like this one with Deep Red in 2006 about Monopoly Tycoon. It's one of the games which I felt as if I was just about the only person in the demi-core-gamer demographic to actually get it.]

Monopoly Tycoon wasn’t what anyone expected. With the licence of a family-favourite boardgame of Christmas plutocratic warfare, you’d expect something entirely traditional. What resulted wasn’t just a brilliantly conceived reinventation – but also a brilliant game of financial warfare from Deep Red, who’ve gone on to explore similar entrepreneurial terrain ever since. Looking back five years, we chat to Managing Director and Deep Red founder Clive Robert about how the game came together.
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I would be telling a big, fat, dirty lie if I claimed to have much idea what was going on in this psychedelic, deeply experimental one-man indie, er, thing. What I do know is there is no artwork in it per se. No textures or model files or what have you. There is only maths – maths which, via the magic of procedural generation, becomes the graphics of SYNTH‘s weird, quasi-wireframe, quasi-hallucinatory world. Of the game’s 30Mb filesize, some 99% is uncompressed sound-samples; the rest is a sprawling, randomly-generated alien terrain made of pure code.
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Fallen Earth is a post-apocalyptic MMO. Back in October the Fallen Earth developers sent out a press release announcing that the game was “content complete” and that it would now enter testing. In December a link on the Fallen Earth forums indicated that forum members will be able to participate in the very early testing stage of the post-apocalyptic MMO. And yet we’ve still not mentioned it. The reason for this is because it has had a relatively low profile: the scraps of information on the lo-fi website, a few screenshots, and this trailer are pretty much all the material we have to go on. You’d think they’d be surfing on the back of that Fallout 3 hype-wave, or something. Anyway, press blurb states that Fallen Earth is “set near the Grand Canyon in 2156 after a deadly plague wiped out most of humanity, the game features six factions, a classless advancement system, and a unique crafting feature in which players can make 95 percent of game items.” Intriguing. Go take a look at that trailer below, and we’ll see if we can rustle up an interview with the people behind it.

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A couple of hours into Merchants Of Brooklyn and I’m considering fetching that brick from the front garden. I could beat myself around the face with it. Perhaps a trip to the hospital will put things into perspective. Perhaps not. Merchants Of Brooklyn is beautiful, brutal, horrendous and infuriating. It looks fantastic: often colourful, occasionally monstrous, always stylish. The ultra-detailed cartoon visuals, where everything is outlined inked and outlined, certainly promise much. A cyborg neanderthal gladiator using the dismembered limbs of his enemies and a transforming bionic arm to defeat the future Mob of Brooklyn – these ideas promise even more. And then there are the crash bugs, the instant deaths, the quicksave attrition. Why oh why.

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