Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The second-sequel to the cult classic Soldiers: Heroes of World War II launched last week, and it looks like it’s going to be one of those games that comes and goes without attracting a big audience. Which would be terrible shame. Like King’s Bounty or Sins of a Solar Empire, this is a game that’s pure PC – something only possible on this proud platform, but without being wilfully obtuse about it. Or at least that’s the idea behind this freeform strategy/squad shooter/roleplaying game – allow me to judge whether it’s the case or not…
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Each new Prototype trailer has us giggling like children at the gorish ludicrosity of it all. Running up the sides of buildings, caving in heads on the sides of buildings, throwing cars at helicopters, morphing into a giant fisted madman. These are just some of the things we do when we’ve watched them. A little joke for you there. Below is the latest trailer, which gives you a top 10 reasons why you should want to play it. And frankly, they had us with “Projectile Dysfunction”.

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This was announced earlier in the week, and normally we’d wait until there was more information before saying anything else, but Tripwire Interactive are apparently getting this co-op zombie game on Steam in the near future. So probably best to know what The Makers Of Red Orchestra Did Next as early as possible, I think. Co-op zombi… yeah, it does seem somewhat familiar, but Killing Floor, as John Gibson tells IGN, was originally a mod back in 2005. It seems to be six-players, more wave-based than the cinematic routes of Left 4 Dead and features some shambler zombies. Hurrah for slow moving freaks you can beat up. And before the inevitable John Walker gag, let’s skip to a relevant feature list from the press-release beneath the cut…
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With somewhat odd timing, Luc Martens wrote to me to mention that Divinity II: Ego Draconis’ “real” site has gone live, and was probably worth a plug because we hadn’t mentioned the sequel to the cultish-hit Divine-Divinity since it was announced. The odd timing was that I was reading Drakensang‘s manual and had just hit an advert for Divinity 2 and was thinking i) Well, that’s some well chosen demographic selected advertising and ii) Whatever happened to it, eh? Well, it appears it launched a website. Well done them. And as a reminder of what it’s all about, the launch trailer’s beneath the cut.
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Things you can’t do in an RTS generally include: attacking your opponent in the past, undoing the future actions of your units, building things in the future and sending the back to a previous point in a game. These are all things you can do in Achron. The developers, who unveiled their idea at the 2009 GDC Experimental Gameplay Sessions explain it thus: “Achron is the world’s first meta-time strategy game, a real-time strategy game where players and units can jump to and play at different times simultaneously and independently.” It’s a game that takes the impossible notions of cross-time war that we see juggled so cleverly in time-travel science fiction, and turns them into a practical gaming model. This is seriously smart game design, and, potentially, it provides a model for “real-time” time travel in all kinds of games, not just strategy games. An explanatory trailer and press release await you below, and believe me, you are going to want to watch this.
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I found myself drinking with assorted comic people last Thursday, and found myself in conversation with the spouse of an artist friend of mine. I knew he was working at an MMO company, but I didn’t know which – and he reveals he’s working on Football Superstars, which I wasn’t really aware of but seemed exciting and since it was available to download and play now, I couldn’t see why we hadn’t already blogged about it. Bar RPS’ famous aversion to Foot-to-ball, natch – in fact, an aversion to even reading each other’s posts about it, as Jim had totally blogged about it and I hadn’t noticed. Now, I’ve finally played it and discovered that rather than the management game I presumed, it’s actually an action-lead football game, with a one-player one-actual-team player model. A handful of Impressions and video beneath the cut…
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Ooh, you aren’t half going to like this one, unless you’re horrible. You’re not horrible, are you? It’d be a shame if you were. I picked this’un up via PC Gamer’s Twitter, which suggests the latest social networking fadette has a useful purpose after all.

And Yet It Moves is almost a meta-indie game, combining (probably coincidentally) elements of Fez, Braid, Shift, World of Goo, Gumboy and Narbacular Drop to create a beautifully-realised physics platformer with character and inspiration that’s all its own.

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What happens when a prodigiously talented illustrator like, say, Nathan Jurevicius, turns his hand to designing a videogame? Well, it ends up being a side-scrolling action platformer with visuals that are so astonishingly good you could use them to start a religion. It’s called Scarygirl (site might be broken in Firefox). And this is seriously pretty stuff: a trailer that you will be CTRL-V’ing to everyone on your IM list in about five minutes time.

Via the awesome Indiegames blog, who reckon it will be free to play too. Blimey.

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ACE Team have released a Zeno Clash webcomic. Not sure if it’s ongoing – the last page suggests that it might be – but it gives us a touch more flavour of what to expect from the game. Zeno Clash is out in April, and we’ll hopefully bring you a startlingly witty and insight, perhaps even poignant, review of the game before then.

These twenty-four hour sales barely give us enough time to realise that they’re happening. I mean I do have to sleep half the week, you know. Anyway, Ubi’s Far Cry 2 – which I know is hotly debated, but I thought was splendid – is currently up on Steam for $15 until 9am PST tomorrow. Probably. Something like that. I should check, really. What I do know is that it’s a US only offer, and it’s £18 in the UK on Steam. It’s still expensive in the rest of the world though, which is rubbish. Also GoG, whose convenient sign-up link wot-we-are-advertising is at the bottom of our sidebar (eh, wink, nudge etc) have just announced a stack of older Ubi games on their roster, including Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Beyond Good and Evil, and IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946, with more on the horizon. Beyond Good & Evil is one of the RPS love-games. We’d buy it a pint and take it home in our van. (John even wrote longingly about it here.)

Well, this is a pleasant surprise. With EA’s embracing of online-activation culture, you’d have expected to see it turn up in Sims 3. But it’s not to be, as made clear by an announcement by Ruling-Sims-Monarch Rod Humble. “The game will have disc-based copy protection – there is a Serial Code just like The Sims 2. To play the game there will not be any online authentication needed,” says Rod Humble, “We feel like this is a good, time-proven solution that makes it easy for you to play the game without DRM methods that feel overly invasive or leave you concerned about authorization server access in the distant future.” While fans of freedom will be pleased, I was personally hoping for some DRM so prescriptive that it requires one of the developers to be standing behind you, silently watching, for the game to boot up. Man!