Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Global Agenda requires you to change your mind. Despite being built in the Unreal 3 engine, and despite looking really rather fine, it presents itself as an MMO. It’s a third person view of your character, with a tray of icons along the bottom of the screen, health and energy top left. But try and play it like an MMO and you’re going to end up dying rather a lot. This is fast, it’s proper action, and until you accept both genres melded into one, you’re going to be rubbish at it. Or at least I was. And then it clicked.

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3000AD’s new simulatory shooter has a demo, and you can get it here. It’s a mere 290mb. The demo includes a bunch of instant action scenarios and a taste of the various careers in the game. More info can be found over on the blog. We understand from the most recent postings that the game itself is imminent.

Gearbox big chief Randy Pitchford was grabbed by GameTrailers and he unloaded his explanation of Borderlands, which you can see below. What’s interesting about this is how the pitch for the game has subtly changed. Originally it was much more “co-op shooter with loads of guns”, and now it’s “concept art shooter with RPG elements”. Pitchford flags up Fallout 3 and Bioshock, but the game footage that accompanies his chatter demonstrates that the game is nothing like either of them, in fact it’s got more of a multiplayer feel going on, and I wonder to what extent the FPS-Diablo-with-guns principles of it are actually going to make the game into a kind of co-op dungeon crawl. The persistent character stuff still intrigues me, and although I’m less excited about this game than when it was announced, I’m looking forward to the October release.
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Ack, how did we manage to miss this? Oh yeah – it must be because we don’t care about PC games one jot. So did you see that Ratchet & Clank XII, eh?

Pfft. SupCom 2 is a fascinating endeavour – partly because it’s a sequel to a game that scared away half of the people it wanted to appeal to, and partly because developer Gas-Powered Games teaming up with Square “…” Enix is about the most improbable match-up since Howard the Duck and Lea Thompson. Uber-hardcore RTS meets incoherently self-indulgent auto-mythologising: whatever will happen?
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So many battles, so little time. EA/Dice already seem busy alternately delighting and outraging their fanbase with the much-delayed casual shooter Battlefield Heroes and sorta-remake Battlefield 1943, so dropping an apparent Battlefield 3 into the mix seems like a special kind of madness. Then again, perhaps a full sequel, expanding rather than simplifying or repeating the remit, is the way to win back men’s love. I have precisely zero information beyond EA CEO John Pleasants (he’s not a pheasant plucker, he’s a pheasant plucker’s son) dropping a sly “I’ve had the luxury of looking at Battlefield 3 over at DICE in Sweden and was highly impressed by the way the team is working on that product“, so every word of this post I write is essentially killing time until it looks long enough to publish. Oh, there we go.

BF3 then: whadda we want?

Fucking Ludo.
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It’s time again. Alec and Kieron, bringing unsexy back. Convening in a North London flat, supported by packets of tea and the speeches of General Patton, they strive to talk about topics of import to the PC nation. From Sims 3, to Left 4 Dead 2, to adventure games, to remixing classics to a worrying amount of time trying to psychoanalyze John Walker and an even more disturbing length of time chewing over matters sexual like four year olds. You can get it from here, see its internet page here or join iTunes here or follow on RSS here. You’ll find a full Episode breakdown below…
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Jim saw this over on the ever-good Indie Games blog and prodded me in its direction. It’s called Takishawa is Dead and is a short, if punishing, indie platformer with a kind of Psychonauts meets 3D Ant Attack feel to it – the latter mainly due to the manually-rotating camera and bits of how the 3D tech look. I turned from it pretty quickly – its very much in the school of platforming that digs falling to your death repeatedly – but it provided a stylish gaming wake up to the day. You can follow its development here, or download its 3Mb file here. Teeny! Teeny! Oh – and video below.
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There were surprisingly few disappointments at E3 this year. Most trips behind a closed door revealed something new and exciting, or reinforced enthusiasm for an ongoing project. EA’s demonstration of Dragon Age sadly did not. If the content shown was indicative, it seems reasonable to worry about with the forthcoming old-school fantasy RPG. I’m just hoping it was not.

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Electronic Arts have announced that the new Sims title has “sold thru more than 1.4 million PC/Mac units within the first week”, and that makes it their most successful PC launch ever. Given that last month’s top selling PC game in the US was The Sims 2 Double Deluxe, it’s a fair bet that The Sims 3 will continue selling in the months and years ahead. And there should be no surprise about that, The Sims 3 is an incredibly well designed and silly soap opera of a game. Seized by my normal Sims-response malevolence, I set up a family of nightmarish redneck freaks, complete with horrifying clown-faced patriach (above), and I was intending to do a couple of posts about their trials, tribulations and inevitable psychiatric collapse over the coming weeks. But the problem is that I can’t get near The Sims 3 when it’s running, probably because I still haven’t built my girlfriend that gaming PC I’ve been promising for the past two years… Hmm.

At least if the gossip spinning out of an alleged Game Informer cover story is to be believed. Via VG247, we have a low-res photo of said possible cover, showing Mr Payne looking more than a little worse for wear. A follow-up story on Deeko condenses what it claims are the salient points of the feature – our Max is down and out in Brazil, addicted to painkillers and living in a “fully-destructible world.” Sound plausible? And if it does, how do we feel about Rockstar moving the poor lad from his traditional home of New York to Latin America? Sounds good to me: potentially very colourful, as I’m not sure I can stand many more grim’n'gloomy-looking shooters.