Rock, Paper, Shotgun

[Continuing RPS' guest week, I give you Al Ewing. He's a one man infinite-monkey. His fingers spew universes. If you know him, it'll probably be for his 2000AD work. If you don't, you'll know him for this, a guide to Welcome Tape for the Great British Home Computer, the BBC Micro.]

Oh! The miracle of the internet! I thought I’d have to describe the majesty of the Welcome Tape in mere words, but fortunately ‘cpmisalive’ at YouTube has recorded enough of it to give you a taste. Admittedly, he’s gotten hold of the Welcome Disc for the Acorn Thingy – presumably some kind of Fancy Dan system that’s too good for mere tapes – but it’s the same stuff all around. Just imagine that to switch between programs you need to PRESS PLAY ON TAPE and then wait twenty minutes.
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You know how often it goes like this? “Super-Exciting Game IV was due to be released for PC in three months, but publishers Idiotsoft have announced it’s now to be exclusive for Dreamcast and not released in the UK until the new millennium.” So when it doesn’t, I think it’s worth noticing. 2K have announced a release date for Borderlands, 23rd October for Europe, and three days earlier in the US. This year. Despite other games coming out in the run up to Christmas. 2K told Gamespot they aren’t afraid of a little competition.

To find out why to be excited about Borderlands check out our E3 preview.

The first panel which was something of a disappointment. There’s a tendency for industry panels to turn into a reinstatement of the accepted wisdom (Or, at least, the accepted forward-looking wisdom). Even as someone not actually in development, there was little about the writing process which was new to me. That said, one of the panelists – James Swallow – is a writer on Deus Ex 3, and let out a few minor details on the process, which are worth reiterating.
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We’ve not mentioned The Saboteur, the next game from Pandemic, so with today’s announcement of a sale date of 4th December it seems about time. It’s a game about the second Planet Earth War, during which you shoot a species known as “Nazis” in a country called “France”. It sounds simply ludicrous to us. Oh, but tosh and fipsy to my dreadful British cynicism, it’s not as if there aren’t splendid WW2 games. And non-ironic-cor, look, it’s a mainstream game that’s doing something interesting with colour.

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Sam Raimi is to make a Warcraft movie. So, everyone probably has an opinion on that. The maker of two good Spider-Man films and one astonishingly awful one, along with some of the greatest cult horrors of all time, he’s obviously someone who can do both BIG and NICHE, which would seem appropriate for the license. If indeed it’s an appropriate license. You can read all the details of who’s producing what over on GI.biz.

But rather than an explosion of hate over a) there being a WoW movie, b) people complaining there’s going to be a Warcraft movie, and c) my saying Spider-Man 2 was good which it was, let’s instead put that energy to good. Which is the game that you really believe should be made into a movie, who should make it, and who should star in it?

Today’s guest emblogginator is the aubergine-educated Phill “The Poisoned Sponge” Cameron, who fills us on on the obscure annex of edutainment that defined his childhood: The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis.

In the book of my life, an entire chapter would be given to aubergines wearing sunglasses.

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Crayon Physics’ Petri Puhro steps up to bat for the Experimental Gameplay Project‘s current Unexperimental Shooter contest, in reliably bravura fashion. This Post-it Note colour-clash is his take on shmups, and it’s disorientatingly lovely.
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Paul Barnett’s special Paul Barnett show (subtitled “Or what I learned this year with EA!”) was characteristically scatter shot. Like a blunderbuss filled with nails, fragments of old CRASH cover-tapes and radioactive filings. The title’s somewhat deceptive, being less what he’s learned recently, and more a format for a general meditation on creativity and videogames. “Meditation” is a word, I suspect, Barnett would bristle at. As far as theorists go, he’s resolutely anti-theory. If you have to draw a through line via all his observations, it’d be that. Show fear and suspicion at those who claim to be able to put a neat graph over art.
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We don’t waffle much about Fallout 3 here, as it wasn’t a game that especially grabbed any of us. Which hardly matters a jot inna final analysis: the rapturous reception from other critics and gamers alike has meant Bethesda have cheerfully been DLCing up it to the eyeballs since release (with, I gather, wildly varying degrees of success). The upcoming Mothership Zeta caught my eye more than the others (aside from the ‘yeah, we did mess up Fallout 3′s ending’ admission that was Broken Steel), simply because it takes us out of that desaturated post-apocalyptic wasteland and onto a fully armed and operational alien battlestation, via the fun plot-twist of having you suffer alien abduction. Are there colours in space? Find out after the break…
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Catching up a bit here, but just before the weekend 2K released a new video for Mafia II. It’s not brand new, but rather the clip shown at E3 last… wow, it feels a long time ago, but only last month. In fact, it’s literally the E3 demo, with Denby Grace narrating it as it goes along. It’s like you’re there, man, like you’re in that stuffy little room with the uncomfortable park benches. It’s well worth a look, since it includes some really fantastic examples of the voice acting. Well, if you can hear it behind the bleeps.

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Gabe Newell has offered another of his interesting ideas. How about gamers fund the development of games? Sounds odd? Well, it might be clever for a couple of reasons.

Speaking to ABC’s Good Game show, Newell put forth the idea that the $10 to $30 million that’s traditionally invested in games could come from the audience who’s likely to buy it. Investing at this stage, he points out, could even make you a profit.

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