Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Judith is a short narrative game by Terry Cavanagh and Stephen Lavelle. It’s a strange little story that is somehow all the more creepy for its extreme lo-fi 3D telling. I can’t really add much more to it than that, aside from finding it oddly familiar. First-person and pixellated it is, and yet Wolfenstein it is not.

I’m going to post some thoughts on PC Braid later, but until then, here’s some exciting news. Jonathan Blow has just posted the instructions for getting the Braid level editor working over on the Braid blog. In a state-the-obvious-way, the ability to play whatever the community comes up with makes me enormously excited for the future of PC-Braid. It’s a fully functional editor, allowing you to fiddle with all variables – the example level features a fast Tim – and import whatever you fancy. I suspect you can now fastforward to the future where RPS makes a Braid level with a series of sketches of phalluses. Because we’re very mature. Go play.

Let’s start the day with a little webgame shootage, eh? The Mysterious Mr Macgregor pointed me in the direction of – deep breath - Robot Dinosaurs That Shoot Beams When They Roar. In it, you play a robot dinosaur who shoots a beam when they roar. Roar longer, beam gets weaker. Roar in short bursts, sounds very silly. Either way, it enlivens a basic yet charming left-right scrolling shooter. Also, a choice of two dinosaurs: Tyrannosaurus X or Dinomite. They shoot beams when they roar.

If you look at a British £2 coin, you’ll notice there’s a motif in the design of one of the circles that shows a series of interlocking cogs. When the coin was originally launched, the Royal Mint declared that these cogs represented “the evolution of technology from the Iron Age to the internet”. Another thing you’ll notice if you look carefully is there are nineteen cogs, an odd number, all interlaced, thus any attempt to use this mechanism would lead to its snapping and spraying bits of cog everywhere. (Unless it were on a Möbius strip, supernerds.) This is the sort of thing you’ll become expert on after playing a Cogs for a while.

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I’d have enjoyed Fallout 3 a whole lot more if it had more than three colours in it. Fortunately, an enterprising modder felt the same way, and has taken it upon himself to restore the chlorophyll to the wasteland’s washed-out world. On paper, making the trees and grass clinging to life in a post-nuclear landscape a healthy shade of green sounds absolutely ridiculous, but in practice it makes an incredible amount of difference to a game that often coasts on limited artistic imagination. It doesn’t end up looking like Oblivion 1.5 – rather, it still looks very much like the devastated wasteland it’s supposed to. It’s just that, now, plantlife’s doing okay for itself even if humankind isn’t. And it makes me want to explore so much more.

Grab this green and pleasant mod-ette from here.

The second expandalone (YES I SAID THE DEVIL-WORD) for Relic’s sumptuous World War II RTS hit our excited PCs late last week. I duly celebrated Easter by killing a lot of men in it. Is it the meaty expansion we’ve been praying for, or money-grabbing tokenism? My hammer of ultra-judgement falls on it below…
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Beyond Unreal have picked up on the Mirror’s Edge community discovering something interesting. More details in the link, but basically involves copying the wxRC and wxRes folders from UT3\Binaries to Mirror’s Edge\Binaries and then running the Mirror’s Edge executable with an editor modification thingy to the file’s properties. Here’s a custom map the community have magicked up. You may have to be quick, however. Chatting to our industry contacts, you apparently have to pay an additional fee to ship a game with UnrealEd, making them suspect it’ll be patched out sooner or later. Which is a shame: if any game could do with some user-generated maps, it’s shining-in-speed-trial-mode Mirror’s Edge.

Well that cocks up my release-day review, doesn’t it? Thanks to Gamestop inexplicably releasing the game early at retail in the US, the release of digital download versions of Demigod have been brought forward to yesterday. Brad Wardell explains the kerfuffle over at his Impulse blog, as well as pointing out that this whole mess should, in theory, “maximise” piracy rates:

“…it was Easter weekend. And many of us had just finished a good solid 8 weeks of massive crunch and were looking forward to the weekend to recover. Instead, we found ourselves back at work having to turn on and configure the multiplayer matchmaking servers… we’ll get to actually see the effects of piracy. Since we know Demigod is an outstanding game with a wide appeal with equal retail and digital distribution to other titles that came out this year with similar demographics we can see how well it sells compared to them.”

Thoughts? I’m liking Demigod very much. Rook SMASH! And if you’re going to get it before you read a more sophisticated verdict than that, buy it on Impulse. We’ll post some more detailed thoughts later in the week.

Last week we took some time to interview Marie Croall, the Content Team Lead for post-apocalyptic MMO, Fallen Earth. The question and answer exchange covers some detail about what to expect from the game world, including PvP and “classless advancement”, as well as a word on why it’s important for low-budget boutique MMOs like this one to aim low and stay fun for a core audience. I’ve posted the recent trailer again too, so you can glimpse the thing in action.

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Embedded below is a huge video trailer for the forthcoming action MMO, Global Agenda, featuring its executive producer Todd Harris. The video covers a huge amount of material, discussing everything from the way in which the instanced combat missions are linked together to divide 60-man PvP raids into half a dozen smaller, mission-based systems, to the over-arching construction of bases by player factions. Harris says “not just more power, but more options” when talking about player advancement, and then goes on to explain that newbies can compete with older players in PvP. This makes me like him. I’m still a bit foggy as to what makes the game “spy”, but the “fi” part might just work. Also: Jetpacks!

Global Agenda is scheduled for release in late 2009.
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Three ways to ensure your tank game vanishes without trace in Western Europe and the US: Set it during the Yugoslav wars of the early Nineties. Fill it with Russian driveables. Give it a silly title. T-72: Balkans On Fire (later renamed Iron Warriors) sold like stale buns west of Beograd when it launched in 2005. A bit of a shame that, because it’s actually a rather solid armour sim. It’s certainly worth the paltry £1.49 Steam are currently asking.

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