Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The announcement of a new Stalker game, Call Of Pripyat, offers an intriguing prospect. It’s a trilogy-completing work – with Clear Sky acting as prequel – and it proports to show what took place in the zone after the events of Shadow Of Chernobyl. The initial announcement seemed to promise a great deal: enhanced A-Life, more freedom, and more survival conditions to consider. But what else is in there? And what did the Ukrainian company learn from Clear Sky? GSC’s Oleg Yavorsky took some time out to answer our questions, and to reveal a bit more about Call Of Pripyat. Foolishly, I forgot to ask about the mystery of the bread. (The images in this article can be clicked on for their full-size.)
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As anyone who saw my cheery nervous breakdown/The Sunday Papers will know, I was at the MCM Expo yesterday, as part of my other life. It’s a London pop-culture convention where about 20,000 people cram into East-London’s ExCel to give each other free hugs (Actually, post Swine-flu and meme-aging, Free-Huggage seemed to be thankfully down). Its subtitle is “Movie/Comics/Media”. It generally leans heavily towards major sci-fi franchises and anime/manga. When I’ve been a guest I’ve shared the Green room with all sorts of people from Heroes and Battlestar Galactica, who I had no idea who they actually were, not having watched either. But Bubs from the Wire was there once. Man! Er… but, while it’s peripheral to the occasion, there is some signs of PC-related stuff to talk about. And in a break from standing at our table and making threatening gestures at Marc Ellerby across the row, I went to have a nose at them.
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Infinity Ward have been teasing us with er teasers over the past couple of weeks, and the now the full trailer is finally here. Modern Warfare 2 a first person shooter videogame, featuring the misadventures of unpleasant terrorists and the Men Of Action who intend to stop them. The footage is heaving with clues as to the kinds of scenes we can expect to see in the game – a street full of fleeing civilians particularly caught my eye, along with that zip-line to helicopter moment towards the end. Go take a look. The game is out on November 10th.
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Sundays are for… Sundays are… for. Okay, try this again.

Sundays are for crashing into bed after serious drunken Stafford Wedding dancing, having a scant few hours sleep, be up before 8 to get a train which somehow finds a route from the Midlands to Euston which takes three hours, going to a big hall full of thousands of people dressed as Death Note characters, limping to the pub for a couple of desperate hairs of dogs, crawl into a train, get dragged home and then pushed in front of your computer to try and compile a list of interesting reading from across the week for the RPS readers, while trying to avoid posting a piece of early nineties pophouse that was dropped at the wedding and warning the audience that if anyone says anything about the grammar, spelling or anything else in this formed-through-denial-of-physical-pain-post then next week will be the first skip-week for the Sunday Papers ever, you bastards.

• Brad at Stardock has had an interesting week of blogging. Firstly, a big long post about what the hell happened with DemiGod. Secondly, he canvases opinion on a design choice in their forthcoming Elemental. As in, which of two economic systems would the gamer prefer. Following the debate, it’s clearly neither going to be option 1 or 2 – but rather an option 9 or 45 – but I’d be interested in hearing which way the RPS readers lean.

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The nice chaps and chapettes at Moscow studio Digital Dimension Development have chosen to bow-out with a magnanimous flourish rather than a bitter “It was pirates and publishers what killed us!’ rant. BASE, their scandalously under-marketed Jumping Off High Things simulation, has been handed over to fans in a final act of goodwill. You can grab the full version here or a lite build (missing the hefty El Capitan venue) here. Read the rest of this entry »

Dear lord, is it really another bank holiday? What’s wrong with this country? Best to spend it gaming, anyway – and here’s a few money-saving morsels selected for you good people by Savygamer‘s prime minister of penny-pinching, LewieP.
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Quite a few people mailed this work in progress video in, so thanks to you all. It’s a Men Of War mod called Battletech: In The Shadow Of Giants, which drops Battletech mechs into the Men of War maps. Posted below is what the mod team have currently currently released as a demonstration of how the mechs might look or work in the engine, and it’s splendid. This is the kind of mod that really makes me glad of the flexibility of modern game engines. Go take a look, I think you’ll be surprised. Not sure what the smoky end bit is about, but hey.
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Now we seem to have a website again thanks to Earth’s greatest hero, Johnathan at Positive Internet – everyone switch your hosting over to them now – we can post a podcast! Jim and John gathered, and words were exchanged. We recorded them. Now you listen to them. It’s so simple it just might work.

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Damnation is the first release from Blue Omega Entertainment, a game that began as an Unreal 3 mod, then spotted by Codemasters was given a proper budget and developed into a full scale game. But how good a game? With excitable press releases and promises of being “the first vertical shooter”, and quite a bit of attention given to the ludicrous costumes, it sure caught our attention. Having finished it this afternoon, here’s wot I think.

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I’ve been out of the TF2 scene for a few months now, as all that focus on achievement-whoring and increasingly technical play turned me off the game somewhat – paranoia I couldn’t keep up with The Kids as much as anything else. However, the combination of a masterful marketing effort and the promise of new toys that didn’t require incredi-skill or soulless grinding to attain lured me back in today. Clearly, I’ve had a great time – the current free weekend means there’s a palpable excitement on the servers, and some of the community maps that have sprung up during my time in the wilderness are pretty spectacular. (There’s one with biplanes in the sky and an underground ice cave which was particularly gorgeous). The new weapon unlock system though – not so keen, and you may have caught some folk venting in our other TF2 threads.

Top bit of info to know before your bonce explodes in rage, however – I bounced a quick mail to Valve’s very own Saxton Hale, TF2 lead-guy Robin Walker, who reckons there’s some sort of bug in the system that’s meaning people aren’t getting unlocks even after hours of play. “Not at all how it’s tuned,” apparently. Which is, I think, the first time I’ve been relieved to hear a game has a bug – it means the problem will get fixed. Read on for my thoughts on the change and word on how it’s supposed to work from the goodly Mister Walker.
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Despite our immediate early support, it seems that the masters of capitalism have decided Brutal Legend is not for the likes of us. So let’s do something about it. Let’s keep storming Doublefine’s headquarters and threatening Tim Schafer with the insertion of obsolete 3D-cards into much-needed body-orifices. As a Plan B, forumite Ulix has made a petition demanding Brutal Legend PC. Sign it. You may think that internet petition never change anything. But I think you’ll find that an internet petition was actually instrumental in the emancipation of women across many western states. It worked then, and can work again. Sign the petition here. And watch the trailer beneath the cut, then probably want to sign it again.
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