Rock, Paper, Shotgun

In this latest guest post on RPS Chris “Evo” Evans looks at China, the net, its politics, and the future of censorship. Plenty of China-facts await.

It’s the most populous country. It’s record in freedom of speech is, to politely refrain from using the full range of ours, patchy. China’s net-censorship is amongst the worst in the world. They also really like their MMOs. They’re big on gold farming – the biggest, in fact. So there’s a lot we know about China, but we don’t often think how it all ties together. For the past twelve months, as part of my degree in Modern History and Politics, I have been living in a world of Chinese Whispers, writing a dissertation on Chinese Internet censorship. I didn’t have a chance to properly examine games, censorship and the Chinese Government during that project, and so I’m grasping the chance to do so now.

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Yes! Next panel.

It was a panel whose title (“Is Digital Distribution The Saviour Of The PC Game?” non-shortened version fans) didn’t exactly promise much which anyone who hadn’t been following the PC recently didn’t already know – but in actual fact, it proved to be the most relevant and interesting session of the entire of Develop for me. High information bandwidth, basically, with Charlie Barrett (Kalypso Media), Dorian Bloch (Chart Track), Richard Keen (Direct2Drive), Mark Morris (Introversion) and David Nottingham (Lucasarts) chewing over the issues and revealing a lot of sexy speculation, anecdotes and numbers.
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This puzzlicious Half-Life 2 mod is causing quite a stir, at least in our swollen inbox. “This year’s Minerva“, say some. “Mod of the year?” say others. “Has reinforced seams in order to contain dangerous quantities of awesome”, said an essay-length endorsement. “Try it… or GO TO HELL”, said a shorter, scarier one. Well, we’re all going to hell anyway, because of that thing we said about John’s mother, but might as well take a look nonetheless…
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Walking around the house very slowly with a fish bowl on your head. Listening to Nick Drake’s final album while eating roast clanger. Showing your bare buttocks to perfect strangers… there are  numerous totally valid ways of commemorating the 40th anniversary of the first human lunar trespass. Me, I’m going to honour the crew of Apollo 11 by spending my lunch hour researching Saturn V rockets and turning M. Dietrich into the best damn astronautess NASA has ever seen.

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The LucasArts peeps reveal the motivation to have Star Wars: The Old Republic be a fully voiced MMO, in a video below. None has done it before (although it’s not the only MMO in development aiming to do it), and it’s a huge task. Especially in a game that’s essentially two games, since there’s no shared quests between Republic and Sith campaigns. It’s hundreds of thousands of lines.

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I don’t know how many of you saw Ken Block showing off on Top Gear the other week, but it strikes me that his crazy rally action course was pretty much what Codies are aiming for with Dirt 2. The two recent trailers back up that idea, with a Utah dirt-track sequence, and a look at one of the over-the-top rallycross events, in this case a course built around Battersea power station. I had a play on one of these super-urban tracks the other week – having just played a very traditional Croatian backwoods rallytrack previously – and it was looking incredibly snazzy, and definitely a big step up from the original game – something that wasn’t totally clear on the woodland track.
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This week will be punctuated by some guest-posts from writer chums of RPS. The first of these is by Lewis Denby, and is about Galatea by Emily Short.

I’m writing this with a tear in my eye.

I don’t cry at games, really. I’ve been close a couple of times before – Dear Esther’s conclusion was particularly heartbreaking, and Braid’s general solemness made it somewhat emotionally draining – but I’ve just played through Galatea for probably the twentieth time, and it’s still so marvellous, so perfect and so tragic that I find it impossible to remain unmoved.

Still totally caught up in the moment, but honestly? Nothing’s this good in videogames. Nothing.

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Sundays are for jet-lag, 110 degrees Vegas heat, and crouching on an old friend’s apartment whilst being harried by her dog. Also compiling a list of the notable games writing from across the week while trying not to lob in a link to one of the most glorious noble follies of Eighties pop music.

• Game Set Watch sidles up to another one of our writers, gets them drunk and then takes them home to have their wicked way with them. This time it’s our man in Canada, comrade Quinns, starting a new column – BATTLE KLAXON! – which seems to be about whatever is in the inside of his funny little noggin. This time it’s how Warhawk is an overlooked pleasure. And it’s certainly overlooked. I can’t find it on the PC release schedule anywhere. Man!

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Two weeks ago I didn’t have the faintest idea where Great Inagua was. Now, thanks to Air Hauler, a rather splendid Flight Simulator add-on that transforms FSX into a globe-spanning courier sim, I know every crinkly mile of its dragon’s head-shaped coastline.

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Sorry, we’re a bit late with this because the world ended yesterday. What, you didn’t notice? Guess the shining ghost of Elvis didn’t restore your memory when he rewound time itself to undo the apocalyptic damage caused to the Earth’s core by the invasion of the hamster-demons from Xerces XII. Tcch. Oh well. Put it out your mind and play some bargain-price videogames instead – selected as always by Savygamer‘s LewieP.
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The really rather special LucasArts adventure, The Dig, had me getting my retro hat and trousers on for Eurogamer. It begins,

Seeing the 15 to 20 year-old point-and-click adventures appearing in Steam’s top sellers warms my heart. There is still an audience for these games, and they don’t need them to be in 3D with volumetric physics and dynamic downloadable content. Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis has, unsurprisingly, sold the most so far, but for me the game I was drawn to uncover from the archives was The Dig. Not because I have fond memories of it – I had almost no memories at all. But because when The Dig was released in 1995, it carried the weight of six years of expensive, over-hyped development around its neck, and was played under a cloud of preconceptions and prejudice.

I feel that I should restate where I write in the piece that I discuss events throughout the fifteen year old game, including the ending. People seem to be missing this, and then getting cross. It’s not a game that would have been interesting to write about if not discussing its entirety. So don’t read page 3 if you’re about to play the game. Or read it anyway and yell at me.