Rock, Paper, Shotgun

[Metafilter informs me it's been a decade since the release of System Shock 2. Probably best to have a mini-tribute to a perennial landmark in the historical terrain of PC gaming, yes? First, if you haven't read it, here's our Making Of article about the game where we interviewed Ken Levine. Secondly, a piece on Shock 2 I wrote for PCG164 which has been online for a while, but never here. So here's a (slightly tweaked) portrait of Shock 2's villainess, RPS' poster-girl for evil meglomaniacal AI, featuring some frankly disturbingly dense pun-based allusions. Hail the perfect, immortal machine...]

Every videogame has a villain. Not every one has a villain like Shodan. Not every one has one which… well, let’s show her at her best.
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I’ve not had the chance to watch all of this yet, because the idea of observing moving images whilst listening to dialogue seems like a frightening impossibility to me. What will they think of next? If you, however, are convinced you can embrace this ‘video’ medium, perhaps you should watch Second Skin – a 90 minute documentary about how and why people spend so much time in online worlds, and some potential repurcussions of it. Online relationships, for instance – one guy reveals that, upon finally meeting his Everquestian beau in real life, she threatened him with a knife. To counter that kind of thing, there’s the raw, racuous of joy of one couple’s wedding conducted both in the real world (“henceforth you will no longer be two, but one”) and in-game (“from this time forward, you will share the name “Soulslayerrrrrrrr”).
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A few weeks back I went to see Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising at Codemasters HQ. While I was there I had a chat with executive producer Sion Lenton, who had quite a lot to say about Codemasters’ take new on the military shooter. What follows is my transcript of that conversation, in which Lenton talks about the balance of realism in the game, the “documentary” feel, the horror of war, and responsibility of making a serious war game accessible to the majority of gamers.

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We mentioned the time travelling madness of Darkest Of Days yesterday – the game in which you travel through history, undoing the damage another naughty temporal traveller has done, ensuring certain people live, while many others are mowed down by completely inappropriate weapons. Well now you can see it for yourself via the pleasures of a demonstration module.

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Nolan Bushnell, the Old Man Of The Mountain Of Videogames, whom we saw chat to a crowd in London recently, has put his name to a new, free TPS/FPS/RTS hybrid game: Battleswarm: Field of Honor. I know! Here’s the lowdown: “Battleswarm allows up to six players to take control of soldiers in team-based, first- or third-person shooter mode, arming themselves from a huge arsenal of high-tech weapons and armor. They compete in discrete missions versus up to four Alien Commanders, who control hundreds of bug-like units in real-time strategy mode. The Alien Commanders must build hives, breed units, and manage their forces in missions to overwhelm the human opponents. Players can create guilds, buy and sell items, and level up their characters.” The game has a rather strong Starship Trooper vibe, with armoured space-types fighting large, insectile bugs. You can check it out in the rather poor-quality trailer below. But we can better than that: the beta is already in progress, so you can go sign up. I’ll have a crack at it later and see if I can come up with some useful impressions.

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A surprise new TF2 update has arrived, and it has absolutely no class. In fact, it’s about as daft an update as you could hope for, with Day 1′s offerings giving you eighteen new hats, and a new Arena map. “After setting a new standard for Lack of Class in an FPS with the addition of Jarate (the jar-based Karate),” explains the TF2 blog, “we’ve raised the bar on lowering the tone even further with the first ever Classless Update!”

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Now here’s an especially strange little tale. The actor responsible for the voice of Serious Sam (i.e. like Duke Nukem, but not) has major money troubles. To fix ‘em, he’s selling his gravelly tones for a mere buck a word. Maybe you’re a game developer in need of a cheap voice actor; maybe you’re a mod team about to make the critical mistake of getting your sister’s lisping boyfriend to record all your project’s dialogue. Maybe you’d just love a personalised, unique Serious Sam voicemail message. Or maybe, just maybe, the idea of getting a part-time stripclub DJ called ‘John J. Dick’ to record any dialogue you ask of him is too good an opportunity to pass up.
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While I’ve been having a right old laugh in the beta for Section 8, as detailed here, we’ve not heard much about the single player game, until today. ‘Neath the click is a trailer that SouthPeak sent over, which features the TimeGate team talking about their single player campaign. It’s not clear how linear it’ll be, as it looks like it’ll be a bot-driven series of objective-based battles to intro you to the game concepts, and the story of the battle between the two factions. The game footage in this clip has it looking fairly awesome, anyway, with some serious robo-stomp tango. They’re obviously proud of the mech smashing humanoid opponents, and I was pretty stunned when I saw that happen for the first time in-game.
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A million hellos, and fifty welcomes to a new podcast. Jim and John (or “Jihn” as the tabloid press now call them) gathered their arms and legs together and produced a brand new audible recording. And yes, this time it is indeed audible! There’s no rational explanation found in science or myth for why the last one sounded like bad dogs, but it’s back to its usual just-about-good-enough standards. In fact, this week the audio quality is so high you can detect every microscopic creak from John’s creaky chair. This is good. No, it’s good.

In a Twitter Questions Special, the lusciously industrious pair take your queries upon themselves and proffer responses to invigorate and delight.

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Something that’s fairly unwise to do while (apparently-possibly-maybe) suffering from swine flu and its attendant raging fever: playing a puzzle-based videogame that cheerfully perverts physics in the name of mind-bending. The innocuously-named Boxgame is the latest from Sophie Houlden, the feather-ruffler behind the satirical Linear RPG, but this time around it’s very much its own game rather than commentary on someone else’s. I don’t quite understand it. But I do like it.
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Since it was being euologised by Demiath on the forum, I decided to download the demo of this highly-retro turn-based RPG. It uses the D20 Open Gaming Licence to accurately translate something that’s worryingly close to the real D&D experience. It’s combat driven with splashes of dialogue, but the fact the rules are sophisticated enough to allow tactics means I found it compelling – if somewhat hard, even once you’ve battled past the interface. Certainly the sort of thing which works best if you’re a veteran of all things polyhedral. The full thing’s fifteen dollars, but you can get the demo here. More beneath the cut…
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