Rock, Paper, Shotgun

This is interesting: a “3D realtime raytraced dungeon crawl”, called Tomb Of The Aztecs. It’s both a classic randomly-generated Roguelike, and also a rudimentary FPS reminiscent of the early days of textured 3D gaming. All of which disguises the fact that this is some very clever design indeed: auto-generated maps that allow the raytraced 3D screen to spring forth. It’s the kind of thing that big old commercial games couldn’t even conceive of doing in the current climate. It’s a shame it’s not a slightly more sophisticated dungeon-crawler (not much in the way of loot or stats), but it’s a fun concept piece. And it does suggest an angle of attack other ASCII heroes might one day take. [Via the all-seeing Indiegames.]

So Take 2 Interactive (2K Games) finally got around to discussing their end of financial year stuff, and as well as a load of money stuff being discussed, more relevant news about release dates emerged. Bioshock 2 will hit on October 30th in Europe, and November 3rd in the US. It also has a new teaser site. Woo. Mafia II meanwhile has been delayed until at least October 31st, and could be any time between then and April 30th 2010. Borderlands is still scheduled for a “fourth quarter” release, and Max Payne 3 is due in Winter 2009.

And that sounds like a hell of a line up.

Alec and Jim have both had the pleasure of some time with Arma II recently, and so we sat down to discuss our impressions of the formidable-looking soldier game. We even allow ourselves to get a bit giddy before the cynicism sets in. Could Bohemia’s soldier game really be as incredible as it seems? Four-player co-op in a sandbox world appears impressive enough, but with everything else that’s going on… well, what could it mean?
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This is the kind of thing we’d normally leave for LewieP to herd into his weekly Bargain Bucket post, but if we wait to mention it till Sunday, most of the great offers will be gone. So, call this the RPS Bargain Jar or something. Quite a few of you have griped about digital store GamersGate‘s general design over the past few months, and it seems they too were aware of their fugliness. There’s just been a big old redesign to make the site sleeker and noticeably faster – and, if you ask me, just a little bit GoG-esque. Shiny! And, thank Vonnegut, it doesn’t demand to install yet another icon into our heaving system trays. To celebrate, they’ve a week of ultro-discounts – a new price-slashed game each day, plus a particularly splendid one lasting the course of the week. Buy buy buy!
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Game Politics picked up on this, and you should go over there to read more, but the forthcoming PC game Rendition: Guantanamo is using ex-actual-detainee Moazzam Begg as a consultant. Using consultants in games with a realistic setting is, of course, nothing new, but this is certainly something very intriguing. I’ll be following it carefully. Until more details emerge, here’s the trailer from earlier in the year…
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I’m absolutely intrigued by a video posted on IndieGames for a game called PaperWorld. It’s apparently entered in the Swedish Game Awards, and somehow in the Norwegian Game Awards too. But there’s no website for the developers, PaperPeople, nor any more details I can find other than the description on the YouTube page. But check below to watch the video, and see if you find yourself wanting to know more about it too.

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Taking a good old crack at making an exciting upcoming videogame game as unexciting as possible is this short, strangely detached look at one of the classic baddies returning in Blizzard’s upcoming Diablo sequel. The Fallen Ones are coming back, as proven by a new video that is, to my mind, very much trying to reassure crazy fans that their treasured murky colour palette isn’t entirely replaced by – oh grud don’t make me say the bad words – ‘WoW gayness’.

More casual Diablo fans will remember the Fallen Ones as the little impy guys who resurrect themselves in huge numbers unless you nobble the Shaman lurking at the back. New (I think) to their first 3D iteration is the splendid Lunatic – a toad-chested chap who, at a guess, stabs himself in the fiery belly to wreak high-temperature havoc on anyone close enough. The video beneath the cut shows concept art and some brief in-engine animations of the various Fallenses – it’s frankly a dull piece of footage, but it’s there to excite the fans, not to sell the game to a new crowd. Two more screenshots to pore over too, which also seem deliberately dark.
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On a recent visit to Codemasters I had a chance to play DIRT2, and to talk to the lead design team. They explained to me how the game is intended to appeal to a wider, US-dominated audience, and how the core of rally-game realism remains in this rather more excitable racer for the extreme-sports generation. There’s also a lovely picture of me sat in one of the most expensive gaming peripherals I have ever been strapped to.
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Someone is going to be livid. Battleforge, EA’s card-trading, deck-based online RTS – which was a full-price game a couple of months ago – is now free to play. (The server is taking a pounding at the moment, and it’s achingly slow.) Anyway you can now get the full game, with two full decks, and full access to all content since release, for nothing. You have to level up in both PvE and PvP before you can enter full trading stakes, but that’s a whole lot of game for free. As an RTS Battleforge is slightly cumbersome, especially in PvE, but I can’t fault the balance or possibilities for deck-construction. Being able to build an army with the cards you’ve meticulously scraped together is surprisingly rewarding. It’s a genuinely interesting experiment, and I hope the move to a free-to-play model brings in a few more people who might get a kick out of that sort of thing.

This would be the most self-indulgent post in the world (well, aside from when Kieron talks about his cartoon strips and Jim about his Eve book) if we’d made the game in question ourselves. Fortunately, we haven’t, so it’s merely one of the most self-indulgent posts in the world instead. And why not?

Reader Giblethead2000 works on a theory that it’s possible to guess who’s written any RPS post simply by reading it. He’s right, of course – Hivemind we may be, but Gillen’s are the ones full of basic grammatical errors, Jim’s are the ones without jokes, John’s are the ones about crying, and mine are the ones whining at absurd length about things that don’t matter. Nonetheless, let’s put it to the test with Giblethead’s cunning clone of the site… Death of the author? More like guess the author…
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Up now on Eurogamer (yes, you’re allowed to read it even if you’re not a Europerson) are the word-fruits of my recent hands-on time with a near-finished version of ArmA II. It’s the second spiritual sequel to Operation Flashpoint, nasty old Codemasters having nicked the name from original developers Bohemia Interactive Software, but reportedly it’s the first true sequel – the first ArmA having been something of a stopgap release primarily aimed up updating the tech available for the enthusiastic community to tinker with. Arma II, though – that’s definitely a whole new game. And an incredibly ambitious one too, as you’ll read in my EG piece. I’m massively excited about it, even if I am a bit frightened by the obtuse controls and punishing difficulty – but unlike ArmA 1, I reckon I will get into this. Read why here.

We’ll also have some bespoke RPS coverage on ArmA II soon – Jim and I are going to sit down and have a chat about our individual impressions of what might be a landmark videogame. Beneath the digi-hurdle, you can find some recent footage of this huge, strange thing.
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