By Alec Meer on April 23rd, 2009.
The expansion to Katauri Interactive’s glorious, beautiful, deep, clever, irreverent and very silly 4X game is on its way fast, but it’s not here yet – so I got all clappy-happy when I spotted a demo had hit the tubes yesterday. Except it’s in Russian. Hmm. Arrogantly, I presumed myself so familiar with the menus and mechanics of the first game that I’d have no problem mastering this one.
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By Kieron Gillen on April 23rd, 2009.
I tried hard to get a quote from 90s-chick-flick-for-blokes Swingers, but failed. And then I considered a Thin-white-rope gag… OH THIS DOESN’T MATTER. What matters is that Champions have revealed one of its new travel powers. And it’s one which any City of Heroes veteran would crave. Yes, it’s doing the impractical Spider-man/Daredevil/Anna Mercury zipline around a city-scape one. Footage of this is beneath the cut, and you can still register for the Beta.
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By John Walker on April 23rd, 2009.
Making a rare guest appearance on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Eurogamer‘s Editor bossman Tom “Tom Bramwell” Bramwell was recently visiting 2K Marin, the developers behind BioShock 2, and interviewed lead environment designer Hogarth De La Plante and senior producer Melissa Miller to find out some more details about what we can expect from the enormously anticipated sequel. They discuss the role the ocean is going to play in the game, how Rapture has changed in the ten years since the original game, why defence is going to play as big a part as offence this time, and what it’s going to be like to be a Big Daddy.
By Alec Meer on April 23rd, 2009.
The problem with the leaked Game Informer cover a few weeks back, and the reason a whole bunch of folk, myself included, reacted to it with knee-jerk negativity, was that it appeared to tell a complete story. You’re back in Rapture, and the Big Daddies are now ladies. Oh God, must it really be so obvious?
As it turns out, that’s only a fraction of the story. It’s barely even the story at all, in fact – in the name of attention-grabbing marketing, that single, strangely self-contained image discarded all the more interesting questions around Bioshock 2. Even now, having yesterday seen the game in action and discovering nothing’s anywhere near as simple as it had seemed, I’ve a very clear sense there are a great many more questions yet to be posed – let alone that I’ll discover their answers any time soon. Which, really, is why Bioshock 2 is so exciting to the breed of gamer who we like to think reads this site.
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By Kieron Gillen on April 23rd, 2009.
Ino-co are currently at work on finishing Majesty 2, but it’s not all they’ve been up to. They’ve released a sequel to the generically-named yet lovely turn-based strategy game Fantasy Wars. And now they’ve only gone and released a bally 700Mb demo, containing the tutorial and the first campaign mission. And you can get it from here. Or even here. Or here. I had a play of some Beta code a few months ago, and it doesn’t seem to have lost any of the Fantasy Battle charm, despite the fact it’s about Elves. I hate Elves. If it takes your fancy, you can buy here. And you’ll find an official game-o-play video and a user-made game-o-play video below…
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By Kieron Gillen on April 22nd, 2009.
What I know about Damnation can be pretty much summed up in two facts. Firstly, it’s got some kind of steampunky cowboy setting. Secondly, it’s got one of the most blatant examples of gaming underboob seen in recent times. What if I wanted to know more about how its development worked? Well, I could do journalism and go out hunting for RED HOT FACTS. Or I could embrace the aging corpse of Web2.0, sit on my soft buttocks and watch developer commentaries over footage. Join me, fellow fatties.
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By John Walker on April 22nd, 2009.
During my travels to deepest Czech Republic (look countries, can you pick names that work in grammatical sentences please?) I gathered you all the Mafia II information I could carry in my arms, providing what might well be the most detailed preview ever in the history of the universe. But I still wanted more. More! So I got hold of associate producer Alex Cox and had him answer all sorts of questions about the game. We find out about the choice behind the setting, the logic of a narrative game in a sandbox world, the background behind new player character Vito and why AI will play such an important role in the game. Read on.
By Jim Rossignol on April 22nd, 2009.
Graphics wizard and solo MMO developer Eskil Steenberg has just posted up a couple of videos from GDC. The first shows a substantial amount of footage from the game itself, with Steenberg playing around in the game world, building, deploying items, creating infrastructure, setting off remote radio bombs, sabotaging AI manufacturing plants, exploring deserts, and so on. Amazing stuff. Perhaps even more impressive, even for the non-technical among us, is Steenberg’s tools demo footage. Go watch. Original trailer here.
By Jim Rossignol on April 22nd, 2009.
Funcom’s contemporary dark fantasy, The Secret World, is an MMO with a cliffhanger ending. So says its creator, Ragnar Tørnquist. In fact, it’s claims like this that make this one of the most significant MMOs currently in development. Hell, with CCP not having released any details at all for World Of Darkness, this is probably the most interesting forthcoming MMO we’re aware of. Anyway: braving the nightmarish audio confusion of my echoing speakerphone interview setup, Funcom’s project lead took some time out to talk about the game, with its conspiracy theories and modern mythologies, and his feelings about high heels. Of course I didn’t start by asking any relevant questions, and asked about Anarchy Online instead.
By Jim Rossignol on April 22nd, 2009.
Left 4 Dead will update with Survival Mode if you restart Steam, and it’s reportedly rather brutal. Dead Air and Death Toll are also now playable in Versus mode (which I think is actually more interesting than the new mode, but hey, that’s just me.) Anyone playing? How long have you managed to stay alive? I’ll try and post some more useful thoughts when I get a proper game of it.
By John Walker on April 22nd, 2009.
There’s controversy surrounding the 2004 Microids adventure Still Life. Because controversially some people think it wasn’t astonishingly disappointing. Not disappointing in the way most crazypants Euro adventures are, but disappointing in the sense that it was a murder mystery game that didn’t have an ending. It just stopped. When they ran out of money. The ludicrous claim was put on the game’s website that, ahhhh, it was the beginning of an ARG you see. Which it wasn’t. And Microids very soon dropped dead. Well now they’re back! And Still Life 2 is coming soon, with a demo out. And it’s astonishingly disappointing. But in an interesting twist, it is disappointing in the way most crazypants Euro adventures are.
