Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The premise of recently-announced Korean MMO Noir Online is intriguing: the struggle for power between criminal gangs in 1930s Shanghai, complete with snappy suits and a whiff of prohibition-era Chicago. Sadly the reality of the game footage (posted below) makes it look rather more “collect 10 gangster spleens”. I guess we’ll find out for sure when the game arrives later this year.
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Sundays are about finding yourself awake in a child’s room, crawling downstairs to your friend’s computer knowing this is the best you’re going to feel all day and if you don’t post a list of interesting reading found from across the week while resisting linking to any music whatsoever now, it’s likely your brain will never handle it. Go! Go!

• Ex PC-Zone wunderwriter Log tells a story of improvised problem solving in Future Publishing’s toilets. Well done, Log.
• Kriss Daniels piece on the IGF Judges is more worth reading for the general point than the specifics of his argument. Putting aside the games journalist hate, he loses me on his determination to classify all designers as frustrated writers – which he compounds in the comments by being ignorant enough to argue that Jonathan Blow secretly would have preferred a book deal rather than doing Braid. Really? But as a general point – is the IGF judge selection criteria skewed enough influence the games which are hailed – it’s worth thinking about.

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Spend! Spend like your very life depends on it! But no, not on heroin and oversized black t-shirts. Spend on these cut-priced videogames, thoughtfully found once again by Savygamer‘s coin-conserving champion LewieP. You’ll note a couple of long-term RPS favourites are lurking amongst this week’s splendid bargains – including the most joyous news that the excellent Defense Grid: The Awakening finally falls below $10…
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I’ve been playing through a number of the Men Of War levels again for a second time, trying to feel like I’m somehow closer to mastering the game. I wanted to break down how one of the levels plays out to try and explain the game to people who haven’t yet played it. This afternoon my level of choice was an assault on a German hilltop entrenchment, before an attack on a fortified base. It takes about an hour to play through, and my first time around it was one of the most chaotic gaming experiences I have ever known. After perhaps fifty hours of play I should now be a veteran of the game able to breeze through this early challenge quite easily. Right? Wrong.

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Via VG247: a GSC fansite is reporting that there’s a “new” expansion (the first presumably being standalone Clear Sky) as well as a full new game from the company in the works.

In an online conference earlier this week, [GSC president, Sergey] Grigorovitch was asked whether the April 2009 calendar featuring the words ‘Call of Pripyat’ in Russian was an April Fools’ joke.

He replied that this was not a joke and would be the name of the second expansion. He added that this new expansion will be released later this year. Furthermore, a full S.T.A.L.K.E.R. title is also in development, although there’s currently no information on when we will hear more about this.

Good Friday does, of course, mean one thing: rotating abstract 2D worlds to aid the progress of a crazy-haired man made of paper. We ran a brief story about inventive, long-in-the-making indie puzzle-platformer And Yet It Moves a little while back, and since then the full game’s been released. We’ll have some impressions up on the site soon, but before that we had a chat with developer Broken Rules’ Project Lead Felix Bohastch, one of the masterminds behind a game that began life as a project at the Vienna University of Technology. Soon afterwards, a prototype of AYIM became the 2007 Independent Games Festival Student Showcase Winner, so this commercial version is, quietly, a highly anticipated game.

Beneath the jump, Felix explains the thinking behind the game, why it’s been so long coming, and why the physics-based platformer is a genre so weirdly beloved by indie developers.
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Religious holidays cannot stop us. The RPS Electronic Wireless Show reaches its landmark fourteenth episode, with Jim and John in one of the RPS Castle antechambers, huddled around the recording gramophone cylinder. BioShock 2, The Secret World and Dragon Age come under intense scrutiny, as well as answering questions from the tweeting masses. More information and vital links below.

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A while back, we made a Hivemind vow to steer clear of Second Life reportage, as it’s an MMO that so often suffers a ridiculously inflated, distorted profile in its press coverage, and we really don’t want to add to that. Occasionally though, there’s a story that isn’t about some past-it band holding a fake gig there or someone else revealing that they regularly have fake sex in it, and it’s worth a mention here.

In this case, it’s the news that The Trident Media Group, which is responsible for the much-milked Frank Herbert Estate, has dealt out a harsh smackdown to a few Second Life Dune Fans – demanding they remove all direct references to the books from their carefully-made Arrakis-inspired areas because…. because…. well, you tell me.
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Woah, woah, woah. Calm down, Excited Bob: this ain’t yer everyday beta. It’s a little different, this one – specifically, it’s to test the toolset for Bioware’s upcoming spiritual sequel to Baldur’s gate. The follow-up to the long-lived, enormously successful Neverwinter Nights modding kit, in other words. So it is indeed an early chance to play with the engine, but you’ll be making your own adventures rather than carving through Dragon Age’s story.

The good news, though, is that they’re not looking for veteran modders: rather, they want a range of guys, including total game-fiddlin’ newcomers, in order that the toolset really gets put through its paces. If that appeals to you, apply over here and cross your fingers. You’ll need to create a Bioware Community account first, however -and that happens here.

RPS is all about fighting underdog’s corner. Walker’s adventure games. Alec’s board games. Jim’s beard. As such, when we saw a PC demo of the much-maligned console action/adventure X-Blades had been released, I had to try it out so I could properly champion it if people’s cruel words were really misunderstanding the true depths of a woman in a thong running around with swords and yelping. Because they could be. I mean, people missed the point of the divine God Hand. Maybe this is is really a total treasure? I play it to make sure…
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Greenhouse have posted up the PC demo of Jonathan Blow’s time-fiddling, award-winning platformer, Braid. It’s 120mb and contains a sizeable chunk of the game, with an option to unlock the full thing in exchange for $15. And, well, it’s pretty damn good. (It even automagically detects 360 controllers being plugged in mid-game.) Thanks to Aaron for the tip. We’ll be talking at greater length about Braid next week.