Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I go last because I’m ugliest. That’s just the way it works at RPS. So after Jim, Alec, and Kieron, it’s my turn to try to pick a collection of games that have defined me as a gamer, and indeed defined me as a person. It’s a daunting task.

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Jim and I both had brief, torrid love affairs with last year’s indie-but-shiny, berry-obsessed tower defence title Defense Grid: The Awakening. We weren’t alone – it hit #3 in the Steam charts back in October. Now this defence game is on the offence again, having made the jump to a boxed version for the online’n'DRM-fearing crowd. Seems as good a time as any to sit down with its developers Hidden Path Entertainment and chat about the whys and wherefores of this lovely wee thing, and what they’re working on next…
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It’s back after a seven year hiatus. IGN has the full scoop, and they report that developers Piranha Games have some ambitious plans, including 4-player co-op. They’re also going to try and make the full range of mechs significant within the game via recon and intelligence missions: “it’s not just a race to the heaviest, most powerful mechs. The designers want to reward you for picking a mech and sticking with it — you will gain experience and become better at piloting your chosen mech, and that will translate into better accuracy and damage with weapon systems. This way, a player could specialize in a light mech throughout the entire game if they choose. It also means there are multiple playthroughs with different mechs.” No release date as yet.

Lengthy CG -but-clearly-target trailer below.
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Now this is excellent, excellent news. The Experimental Game-ugharghit’snotarealword-play Project, which you may remember as being co-founded by Kyle ‘Half of 2D Boy’ Gabler and Kyle ‘Henry Hastworth on the DS’ Gray, went the way of Marmite-flavoured Mini Cheddars some years ago. This was sad, because it was ace. Its brief: “discovering and rapidly prototyping as many new forms of gameplay as possible.” To seek out new genres and new strategy games that weren’t Civilization, to boldly go where no major publisher had gone before. Specifically, for one-man developers to create games in just seven days. Its loss was a terrible one, even if many of its contributors went onto great things.

It’s back.
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Picking the handful of games that made me is somewhat tricky. Not picking the games that made me, but picking the handful. The house of my gaming past is on fire and I only get to grab what I can carry? That’s not how I think.

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Funcom send word that they are promoting the encroaching one year anniversary of Age Of Conan with a chance for lapsed subscribers to see how the game has changed in the past months. And it’s expanded fairly extensively, with a region full of giants, a “cityscape”, and loads of tech fiddling, including the DX10 stuff. The re-evaluation offer apparently contains no subs obligation, and will be entirely free for Age Of Conan owners for the next two weeks. Here’s the link.

Polish role-playing epic The Witcher: Enhanced Edition has a muscular new patch. It flexes its 369mb torso to remove DRM, the CD check, to fix a couple of tech issues and to add in five of the best community-made scenarios into the game, for more fantastical adventures. You can download it here, but I can’t find any confirmation of whether it updates automagically on Steam, but I have to assume it will. Maybe. I’m waiting for an answer from CD Projekt, but does anyone know?

Still no word on The Witcher 2, and we can only hope it’ll raise its wolfish head soon.

Oh, Peggle. I remember when you were just an innocent wee lad, our precious little boy, wouldn’t say boo to a goose. Now you’re out there in the big wide world, rubbing shoulders with the elite with nary a backwards glance. Just don’t forget that you’re still, you’re still Peggle from the block.

Yes, we’ve had Official Orange Box Peggle, Disappointingly Similar Sequel Peggle and Played Within World of Warcraft Peggle. Now we get, simply, World of Warcraft Peggle – 10 free, standalone bonus Peggle levels.
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This morning’s meaningless distraction on the face of towering mountains of real work is the Crush The Castle variant, Fragger, also on Armor Games. It’s a fun time: lob grenades into the increasingly complex levels to blow up the dudes contained therein. Limited resources make it tricky as you get further in, but you can continue to the later levels anyway, it seems. Really lovely clean and clear interface and controls on this one. Go frag. (Actually, makes me wonder if there’s an entire siege sub-genre waiting to happen beyond these games: mod the new Red Faction engine to give us Crush The Castle 3D, where you travel across the globe destroying history’s greatest entrenchments with giant siege weapons.)

The demo for the first Tales of Monkey Island episodic adventure is available now. As indeed is the game. It seems so soon after the first announcement that it exists. This time you don’t appear to be able to buy the episodes separately. Instead Telltale want you to commit to the full five episode series in one purchase.

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Just a tiny snippet of almost-news before bed. Valve have slipped out the information (via IGN) that joining Left 4 Dead 2′s arsenal of melee weapons is a cricket bat. The awfully British sports-stick will be yet another way to brutally smash zombies out of your path. Having previously played with both the axe and the frying pan, I can assure you that the melee combat is something pretty special. With the freshly regioned bodies of the Horde, taking aim before lashing out brings gruesome rewards. While no one’s seen the cricket racquet in action, it seems safe to assume that aiming at legs is going to produce something dreadful. As for faces – there’s a hint in the pic above. Click on it to see the full version available on IGN’s site, with a fat IGN logo on it to ruin your desktop. (In case you’re wondering about the lack of cricket puns here, Orlando Parfitt used them all up in IGN’s story, leaving a global drought for all other sites.) Read all our Left 4 Dead 2 coverage here.