By John Walker on May 12th, 2009.
Damnation may look as dumb as a box of rocks, but I’m looking forward to it. As the latest trailer – below – shows, it’s being made on an enormous scale with astounding amounts of detail. And if they can stick to promises that you can break through doors and windows, that’ll make getting around a lot more refreshing. The new bits and pieces shown today are about the enemy organisation, rather meekly called Prescott Standard Industries.
By Jim Rossignol on May 12th, 2009.
In typically backward fashion, I managed to arrange a Q&A with FrozenByte‘s Lauri Hyvärinen before I’d actually played their gorgeous platform game, Trine. Yeah, I’m a pro like that. Anyway, I’ve had a blast with our preview version of the game, as described here, and Hyvärinen makes things a bit clearer in his replies to my questions. He talks about the nature of non-essential co-op in the game, Crayon Physics, and the possibility of supporting “multiple mice and keyboards” for PC. Read on for more about this intriguing game, which looks like it belongs somewhere on the Venn diagram where Diablo, Lego Star Wars, and Crayon Physics overlap.
By Alec Meer on May 12th, 2009.
Presumably as part of a major fight back against its own upcoming spiritual sequel Champions Online, NCSoft’s venerable superfolk MMO City of Heroes/Villains (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – still the most fun I’ve ever had in an MMO, even if it’s a rare day that I venture back into it now) has announced a big-ass new expansion, Going Rogue. One that purports to fills in that morally grey gap between hero and villain. I always thought that was ‘politician’ or ‘gym teacher’, but seems as though it’s a little more complicated than that.
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By Jim Rossignol on May 12th, 2009.
This flash game over on Adult Swim is a fun time. In Pizza City you take on pizza delivery tasks, driving around the pixelated city in a manner reminiscent of the GTA games. Collisions mean damaged pizzas – and disgruntled hippies/body-builders. As you get more cash you can upgrade to better cars, refuel, and so on. But damn, I wish they’d tipped like that when I was a pizza delivery boy. Maybe it was because I was terrible.
By Jim Rossignol on May 12th, 2009.
This is a fairly specific aspect of the forthcoming space-combat MMO, but I think it’s a fun one. Plenty of people have said something like “I wish there was a space MMO with real-time, Elite-style ship controls”, and now we have two coming in at once. Black Prophecy, from Reakktor, and Jumpgate: Evolution, from Net Devil. Both companies have had dodgy MMOs in their past, so we’re hoping they can pull out the stops this time around. Black Prophecy is certainly looking like the more visually accomplished, high-spec game, at least from the images we’ve seen and this game footage trailer. Anyway, two new images from the game below, and you can click up on that header image to get the full shot, too.
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By Alec Meer on May 12th, 2009.
Oddball birdman-punching game Zeno Clash has just received its first downloadable content – the option to use its beautiful, absurd character models in the world-conquering meta-game/toolset Garry’s Mod. Go go crazy, surreal fantasyscapes!
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By Kieron Gillen on May 12th, 2009.
Yet more nuzzling for the glorious Eurogamer corporate udder. Tom “Tom Bramwell” Bramwell ordered me to go and observe the forthcoming Spore malarkies. And I brought back words and opinions. There’s some stuff on Wii-game Spore Hero, but I concentrate on Spore Galactic Adventures which… well, it could be onto something. I can’t really paraphrase the argument to a couple of sentences, but I’d recommend you work through it and see what you think. While I suspect Spore’s burnt all its goodwill in the RPS comments thread, it does present a fairly novel away forward from what Spore actually became.
By Jim Rossignol on May 12th, 2009.
LucasArts have announced that they’re making another game of their Clone Wars animated series, and this one is headed to PC. It’s called Star Wars The Clone Wars: Republic Heroes and it’s an action game featuring the exploits of a Jedi and a Clone Trooper. It does sound a lot like they’re taking their cues from the success of Lego Star Wars, with the game being “built around two-player cooperative action, the accessible controls and family-friendly gameplay.” Jumping, shooting, hovering, sabering trailer posted ‘neath the click.
By John Walker on May 12th, 2009.
After the announcement of Eidos’s Thief 4/Thi4f sparked some controversy over the replacing of letters with numbers in game titles, and after some suggested that perhaps E may not equal 4, we decided to delve a little deeper to see what other titles Eidos might have coming up. Read on for this world-breaking, possibly slightly untrue news.
By Jim Rossignol on May 11th, 2009.
A fairly large chunk of space colonisation gaming came crashing down on demo sites over the weekend, and I’ve been having a bit of a play. It’s called Light Of Altair, which I believe is a reference to a star, rather than an assassin. In it you colonise planets with a caricatured building interface, setting up life support, industrial systems for trade, and so on. You start in our solar system and, via the gift of narrative, head outwards. It’s functionally pretty, but the overall design of it is bugging me somewhat. I had to kill the music after about thirty seconds, and the fact that I can’t click to deselect my current build object I find oddly like having something stuck to my hand. Get off! I don’t know that kind of user-interface synesthesia/transference is called, it probably doesn’t have a name, but it’s not the first time I’ve experienced it. Anyway, I seem to have got stuck on the second level of the demo, and I’ve no idea why, which can’t be a good sign. Hmm. You can download it here, it’s 98mb.
By Alec Meer on May 11th, 2009.
A couple of readers have recently asked us what we make of Velvet Assassin. Which is understandable: no-one should trust their own opinion, only ours. Only two of RPS have played it, and suffice to say neither of them are in any hurry to ever play it again. Which, essentially, means it’s silently suffered the Dread RPS Pointy-Finger Of Judgement, and thus will pretty much never be posted about here. Except for this post, obviously.
The game, fundamentally, is Splinter Cell in the 1940s, but its successes and failures in that regard are not what proved to be a talking point for us behind the scenes. What we did discuss (as you may have picked up on from the podcast before last) was the character the game’s protagonist was based around. Hesitant moral deliberation follows.
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