Rock, Paper, Shotgun

In my morning trawl of the internet, I find myself double-taking. I see that there’s a demo of Qwak on the Mac. Which excites me, not just because I’m excited by the rhyming of “Mac” with “Qwak” – but because I can’t believe someone’s remade the ancient single-screen platformer. Surely it’s just someone re-using the same name… but no, it’s the original, remade, by original developer Jamie Woodhouse. And I somehow missed the PC version coming out towards the end of last year. Fucking hell. Qwak was simply one of the best games that Team 17 ever published and its Bubble-Bobble-sheen remains beautiful today.
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The guys behind the Gothic games, Piranha Bytes, are having a crack at an entirely new – yet nevertheless rather familiar-looking – fantasy RPG. It’s called Risen, and it’s a medieval fantasy RPG. Nevertheless the developers claim that they are using the opportunity to do something fresh: “The newly won freedom is being utilized; a new mythology leaves room for new and original ideas.” The game will apparently have a “dirty and used” Mediterranean feel to it, and is set on a Volcanic island. So far the visuals do look pretty impressive – I’ve posted a bunch of environment trailers below. Whether the game will end up being a satisfying RPG, however, is far from clear: let’s see some in-game footage!

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The UK’s gaming newsdesk, VG247, has a comprehensive round-up of EA’s recent financials, including that $1.08 billion loss for past financial year. There’s a whole bunch of other information in there, going a long way into clarifying EA’s business practices over the past twelve months. Most relevantly to our deskbox platform, the majority of EA releases last year were on PC. More interesting still was the admission by EA CFO Eric Brown that digital downloads on PC would become the dominant force in gaming. “The PC is becoming the largest gaming platform in the world,” said Brown. “Just not in a packaged-good product.”

Also revealed in the figures was that Spore sold 2 million copies, and that Warhammer Online had 300,000 subs at the end of March.

We have all played Plants vs Zombies by now. And we all have a favourite plant, right? Maybe it’s the triple pea plant. Maybe it’s the sweetcorn catapult that lobs hunks of ghoul-paralysing butter. Maybe it’s the impressively apocalyptic Jalapeño pepper. For me, there is no question. Tall-nut is my super-unit, the answer to all my problems, the nemesis of all zombies. My one true love.

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Lovers of mid-90s point and click adventures that were rather more far flung from Lucasarts’ safe frontiers may be interested/delighted/appalled to hear that Gobliiins 4, a new sequel to Coktel’s olden comedy puzzlers, is now doing the rounds. The use x on x/room escape formula remains roughly the same, and the three inept lead characters from the original Gobliiins also return (though I always preferred Gobliins 2′s warring pair). And there is also a demo. Yes, a demo!
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PopCap’s latest, Plants Vs. Zombies, certainly won our attention with its lovely promotional music video, and drew us in further with an intriguing and hilarious trailer. But what about the game itself? Can it deliver on the giant pile of cute promises? Find out wot I think below, in Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s review.

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This is rather beautiful: a series of famous movie environments – including BladeRunner, Aliens, and I Am Legend – recreated in the Unreal 3.0 (apparently) and Crysis engine, over on Incrysis.com. These were pulled from the original competition threads over at the Game Artist community forums.

EDIT: Full submissions thread here.

The other Capcom game that has been confirmed for PC is Dark Void. The jet-pack-happy science fiction shooter is being developed by previously successful air-combat game developers, Airtight Games. They produced Crimson Skies: High Road To Revenge on the OldenXbox. What we know at the moment is that the game is set in a dimension on the far side of the Bermuda Triangle, has Nikola Tesla in it, and features both hoverpacks and jetpacks, for aerial combat. The trailer (below) isn’t much more illuminating about all that, but the game does look both aerial, and pretty (I’ve posted a couple of new images below) with its Unreal Engine 3.0 environments. Possibly one to keep an eye on.
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A spot of interesting news regarding Dragon Age: Origins. Bioware and EA have announced that the game will be coming out without Securom DRM, or any other form, beyond an old-fashioned disc check before loading. This means the old-skool fantasy RPG won’t require any online authentication at all, and thus will have no install limits. Another sign of EA’s changing mind about game protection.

Blues News reports the story, picked up via the official Dragon Age forums, where Community Coordinator (come on community, follow me in groups of four) Chris Priestly describes the announcement as “good news.”

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This is really neat. Picked up from Indie Games. They had Jim Munroe go to GDC with a press-pass and write up his experiences in the form of a text adventure. It’s actually more of a text-based game than a text adventure (i.e. you shouldn’t be having any problems with the parser as long as you REMEMBER the instructions at the start), and actually somewhat splendid. You can play it online in Java here, for the java-hating here and for those who use an IF interpreter, its actual code is here. And some more explanation follows…
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It’s a national holiday here in the UK, so the Hivemind is in the “off” position. We’ll be switched back on tomorrow. In the meantime we suggest you go and play Spewer, the new platformer by Edmund McMillen and Eli Piilonen. In it you control a tiny creature that uses vomit as propellant. We think you’ll like it.

Direct download here.