Rock, Paper, Shotgun

People often wonder if nothing is sacred. Clearly not followers of the world of action RPGs, who’ll know that there’s two things which are Sacred. And now there’s a third, smaller thing: an Add-on pack called Sacred: Blood and Ice. VG247 noted that PC Games Hardware has the exclusive on it where you can hear the first news. It includes new levels, quests, areas, enemies, items and – waitforit – a chance to be a Dragonmage. OMFG! A Dragonmage. A bloody Dragonmage. At last. At… yeah, I’ve never played Sacred. Always being one to embrace bad wisdom, the first game’s famously bad cover-art put me right off. Any Sacred fans out there excited by the news and/or disgusted by my terrible evil prejudice against tiny-metallic-cup-bikinis?

Yengwa forwarded E4′s Steamshovel Harry claiming it’s hilarious and genius. He’s a wind-up merchant and so are Steamshovel Harry’s developers. That said, there’s a few things here I’d love to see a developer totally rip off. Gears of War with the Vocoder-treated briefing vocals would be amazing.

Oh dear, is it my turn to froth away about the most formative games of my past? All aboard for a magical mystery tour down my winding memory lane, then. I’ll tell you this much: I’m definitely no Jim Rossignol.
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As I mentioned in our recent podcast, I’ve been spending quite a bit of time in Battlefield Heroes, and I ended up doing a review over at Eurogamer. I say:

This free Battlefield game comes with two complimentary kneejerk responses. “Hey, this is nothing like proper grown-up Battlefield!” is one of them. “Cartoon? Team Fortress 2 is cartoon, therefore grumble-mumble!” is the other. Neither are actually relevant, because this is very much its own game, with its own innate delights, peculiar slow pace, poorly-executed class mechanic, and weird micro-transaction married to level advancement persistence.

The game disappointed me overall, because its an awkward mix of really genuinely fun stuff, and not-quite-there design. But then it’s also completely free, so you can judge for yourself.

In the great Operation Flashpoint 2 Vs. ArmA II debate, I’ll tell you which side I come down on. I’m on [the opposite side to you]. I can’t believe you think the other game is the better one! What about all the inevitable problems with AI?! It’s so unrealistic in your game that you can run so far/reload so quickly, and it’s just ludicrous that you [something about damage]. What ARE you thinking? In case there’s anyone who’s yet to pick a side (because it is AGAINST THE LAW to want to enjoy both), there’s a new trailer showing off OpFlash 2′s spooky night time paranoia, and a military tactics montage from ArmA II. The latter is of course already released, and you can read Jim’s review here. OpFlash 2 is due in September-ish.

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Find the story so far here.

It’s an unfortunate reality of Vvardenfell that very few traders can afford to pay anywhere near the worth of the kind of loot that seasoned adventurers bring to them. Stands to reason, really – after all, if they did have several hundred thousand gold to spare, they probably wouldn’t spend their days running grotty shops on a cursed island. It is, however, a source of great annoyance to me. Here I am, pockets laden with brutally effective Daedric weaponry from a hell dimension and lavish Indoril armour worth tens of thousands apiece, but I can only get a couple of thousand gold maximum for anything, if I’m lucky. The traders quickly grew to love me, much as I suspect they were all talking behind my back about how gullible I was. I suppose I’m helping to support local businesses, but frankly I’d never intended to be a philanthropic master thief.
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It’s a story I’ve been following since, in the aftermath of raising an eyebrow at the forty-quid British Direct-Download sales price of Cyanide’s Blood Bowl, a gentleman mailed me and pointed me in the direction of sites which just sell the serial code for Blood Bowl. Sites like G2Play and Online Key Store, charging fifteen euros and twenty dollars respectively. They’ve both been operating for well over a year, doing it for a variety of games, but I suspect the unusual combination of factors (price difference, smaller size of audience) has given it greater prominence. Cyanide are strongly objecting. LewieP from Savygamer has been doing the heavy lifting on this one, so it’s worth going and reading his hard work, but here’s the situation as I see it…

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It’s the big mod release of the moment, and it’s stylish enough to be worth a post. Running off the Source engine, NeoTokyo is a class-based team-orientated shooter with one eye staring longingly at their Ghost in the Shell box-set and the other at their Akira deluxe edition. Which makes you hope they’ve shelved it together, otherwise they’re going to be going all googly-eyed. You can download it from a mass of mirrors and you’ll find its incredibly elegantly done trailer beneath the cut.
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The most breakingest of breaking news, via the official Lucasarts twitter feed – which has been horribly teasing the poor, frustrated internet for the last few days about what, they promised, was a massively exciting announcement. A Day of the Tentacle remake? A new X-Wing/TIE Fighter game? Officially striking the Star Wars prequels from the record? The Loom 2: Loomier? Nah- they’ve only gone and lobbed a crapload of their classic back catalogue onto Steam. Rejiggered for XP and Vista compatibility too, no less.

What’s that strange noise? It’s thousands of 30-year-old men simultaneously having a Special Wee, that’s what.
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Last week we got to talking about the idea of our gaming education and influences: the games that made us the kind of people that we are today. Which was the game that made us stand on a table and say “O Captain, My Captain”? Which game bullied us after school and made us frightened of walking alone at night? Which game would a psychiatrist want to talk to after our first session on the couch? We’ve picked out a bunch of titles that stood out as defining in our lifetimes of button-mashing, whether good or ill. What will they be?

I’m stood at the deep end, and I get to go first.
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Chains is a remarkably good puzzle game that’s recently appeared on Steam. By linking together the titular chains of coloured bubbles you make strings of them disappear. At first glance this appears to be somewhere between a match-3 and those frustrating Same Game games where you have to clear the screen by removing groups of the same coloured blocks. However, while you could argue that description quite a distance, Chains has a hundred times more imagination than that suggests. It really is quite splendid.

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