Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Update: Server is still up, so let’s get some Sunday afternoon games going for people who missed out on last night. Shall we try and fill the server again tonight at 8pm UK time?

Get the mod here, and make sure you get the .zip version for the Steam version of UT2004. If you’ve not played before, play the in-game tutorial!

The air wars were still raging when I dropped out last night, so do pop by if you’re able. Highlight of the evening was the mass suicide-boarding of an enemy battleship, leaving our battleship unmanned and drifting, only to be re-crewed via rocket-glider. Now that’s a videogame, yes sir.

Thanks to everyone who turned up last night, it seems Air Buccaneers lives again.

For more info look here and here.

Black Bean‘s new racer, V8 Superstars Racing, has a demo out. The touring car game is looking fairly buff, and this 391mb demo allows you to race around the Portimao racetrack in Portugal, aka Autódromo Internacional do Algarve. Download it here. The full game is out later this month. The hivemind is hoping that Black Bean will soon turn their attention to tractor racing.

This probably breaks the Trade Description Act on two points. Our final entry is neither a game nor magnetic.
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Bombastic cowboy (six) shooter Call Of Juarez: Bound In Blood is out on the 3rd of July. Don’t expect the bible ‘n bullwhip zaniness of the original game, but do expect a solid shooter with loads of blood, guts, and carefully orchestrated set pieces. Ubisoft have knocked out one more trailer before release, which you can find below, and it’s probably one of the best trailers we’re going this summer. And that’s not just my unnatural love of cowboy tunes talkin’.
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This caught my eye earlier, perhaps because it involves dimension-hopping flying ships. It’s a Russian MMO that is perhaps best described as being something like “World Of Fantasy Naval Combat On The Astral Plane”. Allods Online is a fantasy MMO in which players adventure in the astral, and take up arms for two factions which are duking it out in giant magical galleons. Between, presumably, bouts of grinding mobs of astral demons that are kicking about in the various locations you can travel between. The two trailers below introduce the game idea and show some of the ship-to-ship combat that players will be getting involved in. Intriguing stuff.
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While we’re all getting busy with Arma II, some exciting stuff is still happening with the original Operation Flashpoint, including the latest release of this remarkable-looking Warhammer 40k mod. The images certainly look impressive, and the modelling is high quality. Digging around in my game collection I’ve discovered that I no longer have a copy of the game, so I can’t drop into this to try it out. Any other OpFlash owners fancy trying it and reporting back in the comments? Let me know what it’s like. Direct download link, 458mb.

If you’ve been trying to keep up with the development and publishing of the Ghostbusters game, then you’ll be understandably dizzy. Victim of the Hadron Collider’s experiment to merge Activision and Blizzard (I think that’s how it happened), thrown between publishers like a radioactive ball, eventually picked up to be part of the misadventures of Atari, and then at the last second swooped in on by Sony like a mad buzzard, it’s been a deeply peculiar process. Then it got weirder. It’s currently on sale in the US on all formats. And in the UK and Europe? Due out today, it’s on PS3, PS2, and er, nothing else, the PC and other console releases pushed back to October. Then another twist – the Americanly released PC version turns out not to include the multiplayer features. What the cripes is going on?

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I wanted to get the final part of the Magnetic Family Board Game obsession out the way today, but things have been cheerfully broken. So instead, let’s fill in time with a little more webgame timewastery. When forwarding this to me, Simon Parkin said that I had to give it to day 5, after which, there’s no turning back. He’s entirely right. Again. It’s called Learning to Fly and it’s the story of a penguin, offended by a wikipedia page, who tries to prove he can fly. Maybe if he gets a glider. And attaches a rocket. And… well, it’s alternates between trying to maximise your flying while having the constant motivation of knowing whether you win or fail, you’re getting cash towards the next delivery from the ACME school of penguin-flight. Good fun.

I’m going to be taking a fairly serious amount of time to do a review of this, but I wanted to lob some preliminary impressions up here in the meantime. Blimey, BIS really have got that warzone feel nailed down. This is one of the most atmospheric games I’ve ever played, despite exhibiting a veritable alphabet of atmosphere-breaking elements. The most obvious of these being UNKNOWN. MAN. FAR.
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Cities XL is the French massively multiplayer cousin of SimCity. It carries genes from both genres: you create an avatar, and then you start a city on a vast, heavily populated planet. Populated, that is, by other player’s cities. It might just be where the city-building genre goes next. The closed beta is up (keys still available from some sites, according to the homepage) and we were fortunate enough to get some access. Needless to say, I spent quite a bit of yesterday bankrupting my city. No sign of a towering metropolis just yet, I’m just trying to make ends meet. More below.
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Just a quick post to let people get a-clicking first thing on this Thursday morning. Mikkel from Denmark was having fun with a couple of things on Armor Games. Crush the Castle we’ve covered before but I love traffic has been left unexplored until now. It’s a little like those locomotion-railway games but with cars, with you controlling the flow of traffic just with lights. Crashes are inevitable! Also, gives tiny facts about animals when you die, for no discernible reason. We approve.