Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’d love to sit in on a game-name brainstorming meeting some time. Like The Thing, But in Space? “Nah, too prosaic.” DoomShock? “Might be true, but we don’t really want to get sued, do we?” Stampy Guy In A Funky Welding Mask vs Horrible Flesh Beasts From The Stars? “That’s far too exciting. Can you make it blander? Y’know, like really bland – so bland that people forget its name the second they hear it, and forever refer to it as ‘thingy, the brown one with the guy in the funny hat?’” How about Dead Space? “I’ve forgotten it already! Bingo!”

The odds were against poor Dead Space from the start. That said, the popular misconception is that this spooky FPS-but-with-more-shoulder shooter didn’t do terribly well. This affords it an underdog status, and the devoted, word-spreading fans that accords. The reason I’ve been playing it recently is, in fact, an impassioned monologue by an oft similarly-opinioned friend as to how great it was.
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Oh baby. Racing action from the careful uncle of the car world: The Volvo. Sadly it doesn’t feature the box-like 1970s versions driving themselves to wonky destruction in a derby, but instead some kind of concept car with a heavy metal riff soundtrack. Boo. But! It’s being developed by SimBin, who did the GTR games, and it’s going to be released for free on May 26th. That sounds a lot more interesting indeed. The official website is here. Trailer below.

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Okay, I promise I won’t post any more FUEL trailers until at least next week. Maybe the week after. But the first of these two game-footage spools really does give an impression of how free and open that game world is, although it’s a bit of a shame that whoever is driving keeps bouncing off the scenery. But, you know, this is one of those games where it’s probably not going matter to how good the race action is, because I’ll be off trying to leap over some crevasse I found. Anyway, go see… (And if you need a reminder as to why we’re interested in this, check out our interview.)
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The past week of my gaming time has been dominated by Stalker mods: downloading, testing, crashing, deleting, reinstalling, and even a few hours of playing. For Shadow Of Chernobyl there’s pretty much a one-stop shop for changes, which is the extraordinary Oblivion Lost mod. It’s a comprehensive, colossal piece of compilation modding, much of it done by the author, and the rest factored in from across the community. It isn’t to everyone’s taste, especially since the list of changes is immense, but it includes drivable vehicles, sleep, alcoholism, and reworked NPC behaviour. (And that means grenades, annoyingly.) Oblivion Lost is, given the difficulty of combining and over-writing various Stalker mods, a worthwhile download – but it also completes Shadow Of Chernobyl on a profound level. This is modding at its finest. The problem for me, however, was that the Stalker I wanted to return to wasn’t an augmented Shadow of Chernobyl, but a fixed Clear Sky, which I hadn’t played since the pre-release review version. Could it be time to go back?
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The recent Eve Online competition was our most popular event ever, with hundreds of entries from all across the globe. Thanks to everyone who contributed. The competition is now closed, and the winners are detailed below.
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After a few unofficial leaks, 2K have made sure there’s a far more comprehensive set of game footage trailers for Mafia II. Three of them, in fact, which you’ll find below. The show the truncated mission that was shown to press behind vast stone doors earlier this month, which show off the three main aspects of Mafia II. There’s the walking and driving around the remarkably detailed streets, the way the cutscenes work, and some of the shooty-gun-bang action. You can read more details about it all in our preview and interview.

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This is worth watching. Alpha Protocol, Obisidian’s modern-day spy RPG, has a bunch of different options and approaches open to you, but it seems that the way you approach a mission will depend on the “handler” you decide to have run your operation. In the following video we see a mission played through under two different handlers, each one with a rather different approach. We also get to see some of that espionage stuff in action – illuminating stuff. This is one game for 2009 that I can’t wait to get some hands-on time with.

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Another fascinating video from the GDC 2009 Experimental Gameplay Workshop has turned up over the weekend. Programmer and designer Scott Anderson (who is developing the idea with Steve Swink) demoed Shadow Physics, in which a shadow character interacted with the shadows of objects within a puzzle, thus moving the “real” objects to complete his objectives. There’s a podcast with Anderson over at IndieGamePod, and the video of the demonstration is below. Anderson reports that the game at least a year from completion, but the idea he’s working with looks clever indeed.

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WWI boffins came up with various solutions to the Western Front mud problem – floating roadways, artillery shells that spread sawdust, boots in the shape of boats, snorkels… By far the cleverest though was a device called the Aero Plane. Essentially a winged car made of kindling, piano-wire and old big-top canvas (hence Richthofen’s Flying Circus) these machines allowed soldiers to fight and stay clean. Rise of Flight, the beta of which I’ve been dabbling with for the last couple of days, celebrates this momentous military breakthrough in an uncommonly realistic manner.

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I’ve been playing Knights of the Old Republic making all the most evil choices possible. Like you do. Written up in three parts, the final chapter of Simon Evil’s wrongdoings has now appeared on Eurogamer. You can read parts one and two by clicking on these cleverly placed links. Here’s an excerpt:

“It’s interesting how picking the evil choice that destroys a woman’s life, or kills an innocent, or sees families slaughter each other, has a very different emotional effect than aiding the enslavement of an innocent tribal race. All are obviously deeply evil, but I think I’m able to compartmentalise the more individual actions more easily, mentally filing them under “terrible thing I did in a game”. Even though polluting the Kolto would have devastating effects across the entire galaxy, I think it’s still pretend enough to laugh off. Oppression struck deeper. I was still delighting in making the evil choices, but here on Kashyyyk I was feeling those familiar pangs from the first third of the game again.”

Carries on here.

Sundays are for sipping tea with sun falling the wide windows of a rented Krakow apartment, thinking about things which need thinking about and compiling a list of articles from across the week (mainly) related to videogames, while trying to not link to the first single from the new album of one of my favourite bands. Again. Go!

• Mr Parish ex-EGM announced GameSpite Quarterly, where he writes elegiacally about the death of print magazines and so sets forth and starts working towards a Quarterly Print-on-Demand collection of essays. It’ll all go online eventually, but for those with a nostalgia or fondness for physical artifacts, they can get this first and nuzzle up to the paper. Hmm. Print on Demand collections for a niche fanbase? That’s an interesting idea…

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