Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Shock news, everyone. Bethesda Software – or rather Bethesda’s sinister overlords Zenimax Media Group – now own id Software. As in Quake/Wolfenstein/Doom id Software. It’s a wantonly strange turn of events for a veteran PC studio that’s always been fiercely independent (well, depending on how you feel about their unending sequel-suckling upon the Activision money-teat). It is not, however, necessarily bad news, for all the fact that the internet just exploded. Below, a short statement from id’s big-haired money baron Todd Hollenshead, some quotage from Lord Carmack, and, oh yes, some rampant speculation.
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Chronic Logic dropped me a line, mentioning they’d just released a major update for their strategy game, Kingdom Elemental: Tactics, improving the interface, revamping skirmish, new challenge levels, user-created stuff and lots of exciting sounding improvements. Or rather, they would be, if we knew anything about the game, but we’ve never played it. There’s only two ways to solve that. One: find a player, excise their brain with scalpels and merge it with your own with brain-glue. Two: Read the rest of this entry »

This is something I’d normally save until The Sunday Papers, but I think there’s a debate here you comments-threaders would enjoy. After reading Tom Chick’s interview with the Sims Producer MJ Chun where she elegantly ducks a question on why they don’t include religion, Troy Goodfellow starts wondering about – er – the problems of – er – being a Good fellow. He thinks a strict idea that religion or faith should be popping off to Church on a sunday is misplaced anyway. And there’s little in the way which the sims are twisted which allow to pursue humanity’s non-materialistic side.

But look at the Sims trait list. No altruistic only ambitious. No kind hearted, but there is mean spirited. No generous, but there is mooch. Hopeless romantic, but no celibate. All the best virtues are lumped into one large “Friendly” category that is used to force you to make your Sim accumulate friends. The “Good” trait is the catch all for the Christian virtues we’ve been raised one. Not that the traits are everything, but they do – in general – point toward characteristics that are about gathering, collecting and self-improvement. They are a representation of how the game sees story telling.

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(All the images in this post click through to the full size version.)
Mr Payne is older, twelve years older, and living in Brazil. He’s no longer a cop with nothing to lose, and instead is a bodyguard for a wealthy Sao Paulo family. Rockstar have sent over a bunch of images of the new game, showing our favourite emotionally-tortured slow-mo diving dude in the process of dealing with Brazil’s unpleasantly-armed urban underworld. The game is being developed with the RAGE engine which powered GTA4, although with some modifications, including “brand-new particle physics technology to deliver spectacular, highly advanced close-quarters combat” and “an intelligent cover system”. Rockstar also report that “Bullet-Time, an addiction to painkillers, mature themes and Max’s ever-present internal monologue” will all be present in the new game. So that’s good.

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The story so far is here. I’ll admit I’m still honing the tone of this ultro-series, but I suspect anyone turned off by the rambly first part should dig this one more.

I didn’t have to wait long to find some new trousers. There’s a pretty simple rule if you’re looking for trouble (and the cash rewards that usually result from it) in a place like Vvardenfell: find a cave. Nice people don’t live in caves, or behind sinister doorways built into the mountainside, or stalactite-chic, or whatever you want to call it. Bandits, skeletons and trolls do, however, and those are all guys I can stab in the face with impunity.
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Balance issues have been making DoW II players frown and cuss, and Relic have been busying themselves making a super-patch to fix it all. It’s almost ready, and the guys have released a battle report (below), narrated by designer Jonny Ebbert and balancer Clint Tasker, to demonstrate some of the fundamental changes. You can keep an eye on further developments over on the DoWII devblog. Even more interesting, perhaps, is this in-depth report by Game Replays, who went out to visit Relic to check out and report on the 1.4 update. Yep, they’re taking it that seriously.

Thanks to RPS regular Sub Edii for the tip off.
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Time for adventures! As you’ve probably gathered, I’m embarking on a series of diaries documenting my aimless exploits in Morrowind, the third Elder Scrolls game and predecessor to the, ah, divisive Oblivion. Armed only with a bunch of mods* and an entirely cavalier attitude towards lore and saving the world, I finally set off to Vvardenfell. In this first instalment – fighting ducks, plummeting wizards and accidental trouser-loss.
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Here’s a gorgeous little puzzle game to warm your cockles. Called Use Boxmen, it’s a deceptively simple Flash game, requiring a decent amount of smarts. There’s tones of Cursor*10, a lot of platform nous, and an interesting play on multiple lives to complete a level.

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One Life Left is back! Well, it was back last week, but we didn’t mention it, because we like to provoke a kind of brooding loathing between us and them, think of us the Sharks and Jets of videogame discourse. Is tragedy going to arise when Anne Scantlebury falls for Walker? Oh, it surely will. Anyway – we decide to mention it this week, because there’s a PC-related song 44 minutes into it, from the oft-amusing Doyouinverts?. It’s about Gordon Freeman of Half-life fame and you can listen to it here. If you skip forward 44 minutes, anyway. Also, in the spirit of full disclosure, here’s the mail Ste sent us…
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This morning’s trippy maths-cleverness comes to us via Indiegames, where they flagged up fractal 3D space shooter in progress, Polynomial. It’s a beauty, although somewhat slow paced at the moment. The game contains “mathematically generated fractal scenery and models”, which can be created first hand using the in-game editor. The results are rather spectacular. And I particularly like the Mandelbrot Set as an Eagle nebula type skybox. It’s only a 3mb download, go take a look. And watch out for the dynamic reactor setting, apparently having that switched on can cause dizziness.

Alright – let’s make this precious. Upon my first introduction to my impending Morrowind diary series, the resulting slew of comments threw up two important mistakes on my part. Number one, the Giants mod is a really, really bad idea. Number two, I’d totally overlooked the vitally important (in the beauty stakes, at least) Morrowind Graphics Extender. After a hard day of farting about with ESM files, I’ve finally got what – I hope – is the ideal Morrowind build for my planned journey of cheerful incompetence. Beneath the cut, a more or less complete list of the frightening number of mods I’m now running, and a fairly stunning before and after comparison. Without a doubt, the goodly men’n'well-let’s-be-honest-it’s-pretty-much-all-men [oops, apparently there's a ton of female Morrowind modders, and now it appears some people hate me. Sigh.] of the Morrowind modding community have done jawdropping things to this olden RPG.
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