Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Wired, which is probably the best magazine that isn’t about PC games, recently ran a splendid article about the mechanics, finances, and theory behind piracy in the waters off Somalia. It’s a superb piece of magazine page design, which inspired me to have a little ramble over here. Anyway, the Wired team have now sent word that the feature has now been converted into a webgame, Cutthroat Capitalism, which places you at the helm of a pirate ship – well, a dot that represents a pirate ship – and sees you take on the role of hostage-taker and negotiator. Bag an expensive prize, and bargain for millions. It’s the reality of the process Somali pirates are working with, and the game they play for very high stakes, boiled down to essential to web-maths. Go take a look.

Remember Hammerfall? Around this time in 2007 it was gaining attention, picked as a finalist for the IGF Awards, and being generally rather a lot of fun. A physics-based 2D weapon-swinging game, it’s about aerial acrobatic combat. Or swinging your mouse around in circles. Two years have gone by, and the game is back on the horizon, now called The History Of Hammerfight. Fun-Motion spotted the new title, and indeed the accompanying demo.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tetris couldn’t have been designed with more serendipity. Not only did creator Alexey Pajitnov put together the most instantly recognisable and enormously popular puzzle game, but he designed it in the shape of a mobile phone. Now that’s foresight. And while the game is currently selling in its millions of squillions for the handheld market, it’s still reinventing itself for the PC. Tetris Friends is a free, online collection of popular Tetris game types (Marathon, Sprint, Ultra, Tetris 1989, Survival and n-blox, along with sponsored promo versions, currently plugging Ice Age 3). There’s also multiplayer modes, with two and six-player Battle mode, and five-player Sprint game. A few videos have appeared pushing the multiplayer games, which are below.

Read the rest of this entry »

An intensely shooty new trailer for Modern Warfare 2 has turned up, and I’ve posted it below. This one shows in-game footage from multiplayer, with its customisable killstreaks, and a glimpse of the AC-130 gunship. As aerial gun-platforms go, that’s one of the best. I’m not really sure of the appeal of the killstreaks thing – are there any COD4 multiplayer types out there who can comment? Incidentally, it seems that Activision have added the “Call Of Duty” prefix back onto the game for launch, but we’re not going to bother with it, because you guys probably know what we’re talking about.

Read the rest of this entry »

We mentioned The Saboteur last week – Pandemic’s Second Earth War game, following the semi-fictional story of a professional racing driver turned French Resistance pioneer. This week, courtesy of Comic Con and GameTrailers, there’s a video interview with lead designer Tom French (whose excellent beard means his head is the same both ways up, apart from the eyes/mouth thing), which includes lots of game footage.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve done some psychic research and are aware quite how many Diablo II fans there are reading. Loads of you. So there should be some smiles at the news that there’s an unofficial patch to finally let you play it at a decent resolution. If you’re still playing the game, and we know you are, you’ll know the frustration of the limitations. Fret no more! (The small catch is it means you can’t play online.) You can get the patch from ModDB, and then play the game in any resolution your monitor is willing to present.

Hey, you there! I bet you’d like to be amused, at least in passing, by ragdolls kicking the crap out of each other in zero-g. Am I right? I thought so, because that means you need to go and have a look at the Rubber Ninjas demo. (Via Indiegames) Ragdolls get kicked, dudes explode with poly-blood. It’s probably not going to get you to choke up the $19.95 for the full game, but it’s at least a pretty distraction from your cold, lonely isolation on the face of an uncaring planet, spinning through the deadly, infinite void of space.

UPDATE: Oh God, will everyone please read John’s article here, where this stuff is covered in detail. What follows is a review of a book, not an exhaustive article on game addiction, as should be plainly fucking obvious. Thanks.

This week I’ve been reading Game Addiction by Neils Clark and P. Shavaun Scott. This authorial duo have created a book that should not be judged by its cover, and should definitely be read by a wide range of folks who are interested in knowing a bit more about where gaming now sits amid general electronic culture. Scott is a psychotherapist who provided expertise and case-studies to the project, while Clark is an academic, gamer, lecturer and recovered game addict who seems to have done most of the word-laying. Game Addiction is probably the most important work yet written on the subject of habitual gaming, and draws together a wealth of information that I’ll be going back to for some time. Read on for some more thoughts on the book itself, and why that might just be a poor choice of title.

Read the rest of this entry »

That Syrian skirmish I AARed a few weeks ago is now available to all and sundry as part of the recently unleashed CMSF: British Forces demo. If you are either all or sundry, and thought my tank tactics timid, my employment of artillery artless, and my use of infantry infuriatingly infrugal, now is your chance to do better. Grind out glorious low-cost victories, then strut and brag via the comments section.

Read the rest of this entry »

The GameTrailers Flame-ringed Eye of Record-on was in attendance at San Diegeo Comic Con, and it happened to capture the soul of Valve’s Chet Faliszek, while also hoovering up tonnes of Left 4 Dead 2 in-game footage, which you can see below. Faliszek does the talky, while there’s also a load of shooty. And it rather reminds me why we love this game so much: violence, violence, quips and violence. The Charger is in there too. Beautiful stuff. I think you’re going to want to take a look…
Read the rest of this entry »

Sundays are for sitting in a darkened hotel room with your comrades in arms still snoozing, trying to compile a list of the interesting reading from across this week – and since I’ve been away, that’s a relatively sleight one – for the RPS readership’s delectation while trying to avoid sliding in a link to some manner of pop song. And then throwing some clothes on and heading back to my table on the Image stand at Comic-Con. Yes.

• Reading through this gamasutra piece on the charts about consumer research into buying upcoming games, and I hit an particularly eyebrow-raising snippet: “Elsewhere, Left 4 Dead 2 now ranks fifth among all upcoming titles, with the ratio of awareness to purchase intent the most notable statistic: six out of ten gamers who have heard of the title say they plan to buy it. Only Alan Wake, God of War III and Modern Warfare 2 have higher ratios. “This data point is the best indicator of franchises that have a passionate and loyal fanbase, and Left 4 Dead 2 has accomplished this feat in a remarkably short period of time,” says Williams.”. In other words, that boycott isn’t exactly catching on.

Read the rest of this entry »