Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Have we ever posted about Dungeons & Dragons Online before? It’s not an MMO that ever seems to make the headlines and, let’s be honest, most of us either thought it was already closed or was living on borrowed time. In a fairly audacious move, it’s instead gone free to play – rebranded as DDO Unlimited, and pitching itself as “the world’s first free-to-play MMO to offer the quality graphics and robust features previously only available in premium subscription based games.” Hmm. Is that strictly true? Grrrrubish as they were, didn’t the likes of RF Online and Archlord have that? Of course, it’s precisely because DDO is not rubbish that makes this surprise move so tantalising…
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Yeah, we totally forgot to take photos of a draughts game when the Lady and I were in Hydra.
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Being away means that I’m enormously behind on the indie game situation. There’s about half a dozen open tabs plus e-mails marked as IMPORTANT for me to investigate. I’ll be catching up as well as I can, but the first thing I took a look at was Ancient Galaxy. And it’s… interesting. My mental note-pad is covered with scrawlings like “Outcast”, “Early Tomb Raider”, “Quasi-Star Trek”, “System Shock” and lots of other similarly intriguing things. It’s basically an oddly late-90s feeling action/adventure – in that it swaps elegance for piling on ideas and mechanisms. It’s a very PC action/adventure, in other words. The shareware version can be got here, and there’s some more thoughts from my quick play beneath the cut…
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Even a week after the announcement, the news that there’s to be more Monkey Island still seems hard to believe. LucasArts, once an adored development house, has become known in recent years for little other than churning out Star Wars themed products of varying quality. Attempts at new licences during president Jim Ward’s realm failed (possibly in no small part because they very were attempts to create new IP, rather than just damned fine solo games), seeing the company once more fall back into the space flick’s safety net. Last year saw Ward step down, and in April he was replaced by Darrell Rodriguez. A man who, if the murmurs I heard at E3 are true, is genuinely trying to see the company rediscover its roots. Then there’s the news that Telltale are to be making brand new episodic Monkey Island games, with original LucasArts developers on the project. Reimagining the original Monkey Island is an important act for a number of reasons.

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It’s amusing how calm Just Cause 2‘s lead developer is as he narrates the most ludicrous sequence of events I’ve ever seen in this footage. The trailer was insane, but this is just silly. If I have to die, I want this dude to choreograph it.

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The other PC-based MMOFPS (or is it a PWNS?) at E3 was CrimeCraft. It’s operating along rather similar lines to APB: a gang-based theme, with guns, hip hop stylings, and ongoing RPG elements. Sadly there’s no open world combat, because the game is driven by story-led PvP and PvE in instanced missions. Despite being “massive” and being powered by the Unreal 3 engine, the footage here seems a little uninspiring, with sub-Gears of War combat and dreary environments. If it can’t offers ome of APB’s living world dynamism it seems unlikely to be the MMOFPS of the next couple of years. That’s not to say it won’t be a success, because I think gamers are more than ready for some hybrid games in the MMO vein. Anything with guns and persistent characters is going to get a fair shake. CrimeCraft is already offering beta signups, so that might be worth a look.
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Hah – got you! You totally thought this was going to be some 8,000 word rant against Sony’s widely-loathed DRM, didn’t you? Oh, there’s enough of them on the internet already – I’m quite happy to say limited activations are horrible and stupid and everyone involved should know better, and leave it at that. This sorta-RPG webgame game goes further, pitching the devil-DRM as the ULTIMATE EVIL in a world also populated by the villainous likes of the RIAA and Disney Corp. Or so Brain Chef pretends to be, anyway. It’s fooled a fair few sites with its devious subterfuge… Below: mild annoyance.
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Chinese whatnows?
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Update! Now with non-hideous video!

Sometimes, you just don’t need to think up a funny headline. In this cause, the subtitle does its own job. The sauce… OF DEATH!

If you don’t know the John Woo-inspired mod Action Half-Life, you should immediately go and read this. Once you done that and then finished lamenting that there aren’t more mods with the same kind of fun!fun!fun! ethos, you can then go and nose trepidatiously at the just-released sequel, which relocates the kung-fu, Max Payne leaps and strangely gentlemanly brutality in the Source engine.

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This was announced last week, but when I checked, I couldn’t actually find the comic. Except now I have. Mr Linky, signing up. Anyway, popular army-recruitment device America’s Army is now doing a free comic. Which you can read the first issue online now. Now, I haven’t read it – I don’t really understand comics, so wouldn’t want to offer up an opinion. Besides – if I read it, didn’t like and said something like “America’s Army is useless”, we’ll probably get invaded. But I found this review of the comic by comics-gossip-wunder-waffen Rich Johnson at his new blog Bleeding Cool. Any good, Rich? “Not so much Generation Kill as Generation Kill Me Now” says he. Maybe not then.

Of everything I saw at E3, APB stood out as the project with the greatest concentration of inspiration. Ignore the surprisingly crappy images that have been released so far – this one deserves your attention. During the presentation a colleague sat next to me leant in and said, “Bloody hell.” A minute or so later I replied, “This is the first original idea I’ve seen all week.” It’s very easy to think of APB as an online GTA. It certainly is a game focused around either committing or preventing crimes in an open city. But what makes APB stand out is just how damned smart it is.

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