Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Crikey, as if you didn’t have enough to play this weekend already! Frozenbyte have released the first part of their forthcoming physics platform puzzler as a demo. It’s 460mb, and you can get it here. The full game is apparently out on July 3rd, and you can, should you be so inclined, compare your impressions of the demo with my own thoughts on the full game, which are here. Please do play this one, I thought it was splendid, and Frozenbyte are definitely a developer you should pay attention to.

This is pretty much straight news-blogging. It’d be easy to editorialise on it, but I suspect you know exactly what I’m going to say. Australia is already known for its lack of an actual real 18/R rating, so banning any game that would get over a 15 here. It’s also known for its [forwarding - Ed] net-censoring, with active network-level blocking of sites [being proposed -Ed]. It’s being reported that they’re bringing these wonderful developments together, wanting to block access to sites including any content that doesn’t hit that 15 rating, including everything from shops that will ship real games to Australia to flash games to any other downloadable adult-rated game. Do read the full story, which does explore some of the implications – like, say, World of Warcraft not being rated in Australia due to being an online game. So… is that going to be banned? We’ll follow this one carefully.

Actually, let’s editorialise a bit: Piss Right Off.

After a rather extended beta and much delay, the free cartoon FPS from Electronic Arts/DICE has finally arrived. You can play it here, for no pennies. Impressions below.

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I’m upset no publications asked me to review this. DON’T THEY KNOW WHAT I AM? Still, it does mean I haven’t had to stick with an experience that’s roughly analogous to someone repeatedly poking a pen into my eye while muttering things I can’t quite hear. Instead, just an hour – well, more like two by my count – has been enough to form a staunch opinion about this robo-movie tie-in.
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We’re not exactly the biggest fans of Harry Potter here at RPS, because we’re grown-ups so prefer to spend our time on grown up pass-times like videogames, painting Skaven and marching around chanting that we are playing army, asking people to join us until a girl tries to join us, at which point we inform them loudly that no girls are allowed. But EA have released a demo of their latest videogame incarnation of the bespectacled mage. It’s about 600Mb or so, and you can get it here. Scanning its press release, I find the following line: “Players may even get sidetracked by Ron’s romantic entanglements as they journey towards a dramatic climax and discover the identity of the Half-Blood Prince” which makes me think that Ron is going to blow his load messily before discovering who the half-blood prince is. Lucky old Ron, I say. Anyway – trailer beneath the cut. Woo!
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Update: Mirrors and some troubleshooting tips in this thread.

The demo of soldiering giganto-sim Arma II, which contains a surprisingly large chunk of the full game – including a limited version of the extremely versatile scenario editor – is now available. Get it here.

The demo comes to just under 3gb, but it’s an essential download for those of you who want to check out compatibility and performance issues before buying. And anyone else vaguely interested in the game, obviously. I’ve been caning the full thing for the best part of two weeks, and I’ve kept delaying the RPS review because, well, I just keep finding more stuff to do in it. I’ll stop tinkering and post full impressions early next week. Launch trailer and full demo content details below.
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I do love me an evil lair, and the latest trailer for Champions Online shows off some of the evil lairs that we’ll inevitably be cruising into with the RPS Superchums spandex-lovers guild when the game comes out later this year. Plenty of game footage, lots of ludicrous creations, and splendid enemies: giant robots with laser eyes, the “ultimate psychic super-soldier”, dudes with silly overwrought mucus-gargling evil voices. Yeah, I’m probably going to be playing that one.
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I’m going to try and keep these diaries a little shorter. This does mean a) varying hilarity, depending on the situations I’ve genuinely encountered and b) my promised visit to the city is delayed by a day. If it’s any consolation, that entry will involve trying to steal diamonds in front of children.

A note to anyone thinking of building a fort: do not build a fort with easy hillside access. It kind of defeats the point.

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ACE Team have just announced plans to release a new batch of free DLC for our well loved Zeno Clash. It’s to be called The Pit, and will offer three new Challenge levels for leaderboard competing. ACE explain, “Destructible floors and traps await the skilled who want to reach the bottom of the pit alive.” This will be accompanied by a 50% off deal via Steam over the weekend, for any who missed the super-fun first-person fisticuffs the first time. There’s a video of the new content below.

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I actually turned the RPS-chaps into Sims 3 characters when I had the preview code, but I’ve been a little behind in getting the full code so I could upload them up to the main servers. You can download all four of us from here. You can totally force us to make out. It’s awesome. Some more details on exactly what you’re downloading beneath the cut. Also repetitive use of the “And In The Game” gag.
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Big business announcement day, then. EA will merge Mythic and Bioware to create a new MMO and RPG division. The new division will apparently be headed by BioWare boss Ray Muzyka, while BioWare’s other co-founder, Greg Zeschuk, will become Group Creative Officer. Mark Jacobs, the outspoken boss at Mythic, will apparently be leaving the company, and has made no announcement about future plans.

This internal rejiggery will not affect any of the Bioware games currently in development (Dragon Age, The Old Republic, Mass Effect 2), but it clearly has some broader implications for the future. Not least of which is that someone is getting quite serious about taking on Blizzard in that millions of dollars of MMO subscriptions business. Hmm.