Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Polish games mag CD-Action (who, according to these videos, seem to have their own drink?) have posted an enormous John Carmack interview to the web, and we’ve reposted it below. In it Carmack chats about Rage, stepping away from graphics to work on player experience, the problems of contemporary developments, the challenges of modding in the “post-Doom 3 era”, and so forth. Thanks to Pat at VG247 for the heads up on this.
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This is outside of our usual mandate, but fuck it. Tiger Style – who comprise of Ion Storm veterans Randy Smith (Lead on Thief: Deadly Shadows, co-designer of the Cradle, designer of Return to the Haunted Cathedral, that guy) and David Kalina (Thief: Deadly Shadows and – er – other malarkies) have released their first game for the Macintosh Individual Phone – or, Iphone. It’s called the Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor and is an adventurey-thing where you play a spider, bouncing around and making webs. And similar. Reviews so far are absolute fountains and it looks mechanically pretty novel. You can get it from here or watch the video below…
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The completely brilliant/insane idea behind Darkest Of Days is getting to time travel through various famous conflicts from the past, and mow everyone down with a machine gun. You see, the problem with guns in the Olden Days is they were rubbish. Only capable of firing one shot at a time, or very poor at targeting at a long range, they were such a faff and fiddle that by the time you’d managed to poke the pokey thing down the barrel there was a reasonable chance you’d be entirely dead. What they should have done, and what Darkest Of Days finally puts right, is arrange for time travellers from the future to bring them semi-automatic instruments of enormous death. It’s both tasteful, and delicious.

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Good morning, internet. We have a question for you: are you playing a multiplayer videogame on a regular basis? Whether it’s a racing game, an MMO, an FPS, or even head-to-head Tetris, we want to know. How many multiplayer games are you playing? How much time are you putting in? Please fill in the poll below and then let us know what it is you play in the comments. (Bonus points for recognising the header image.)
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I kan spel reel gud! Hear iz mi reevoo off Popcaps brand nu puzzle-actchun gaym Bookworm Adventures: Volume 2, wich haz mayd mee evun betta at spellink. I hop yoo lik it.
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Just in case you were wondering, the flurry of announcements we’re getting now is thanks to the big European games convention in Cologne, which I believe kicks off on the 19th. We’ll see lots of new games from European devs showing off there with their latest wares, including new Swedish development studio Fatshark, who have just announced their first game: a multiplayer cowboy shooter, Lead & Gold: Gangs Of The Wild West. It seems that the game is a third-person, team-based shooter constructed using Starbreeze’s Grin’s engine, Diesel. Rootin’ tootin’ trailer below…
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King Arthur, a supernatural “role-playing wargame” from Neocore games in Hungary, surely is looking neat (although rather similar to their previous Crusaders: Thy Kingdom Come). In the video below the excitingly-named Zoltan Varga explains a little about what that genre-mash means, and what the mystical medievalism of the game entails. Varga talks through the dialogue trees that knights will face, and shows how the game is a little bit like Total War’s turn-based vs real-time mix, only with more focus on the development of the individual knights.

Just so you have a flavour of the game, that guy above is lovely Sir Lancelot, and – as the video reveals – foot-soldiers are at risk of being dragged into spell-summoned hell-vortexes in the sky. Yeah, comedy cavaliers it ain’t. Go watch the video.
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Dave Gilbert first grabbed people’s attentions with his adventure game, The Shivah. His deft touch with the AGS engine, and ability to tell simply, emotional tales, saw him and his developer, Wadjet Eye Games, win a bunch of awards. The series he’s known for now, the Blackwell stories, has recently released its third instalment: The Blackwell Convergence. Here’s wot I think.

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The confusion caused by this being a game about crushing waves of tiny people with enormous boluses of snot despite its name – Gobtron – implying it’s more based on salvia-derived destruction, might have been enough to stop me posting this. The fact that the rapid drag-and-release system seems a recipe for RSI might have been enough to stop me. The fact that I’m very lazy might have been enough to stop me.

But all of these are overwhelmed by the urge to see the enormous pink smiling face of Gobotron looming over the RPS front page. Oh, Gobtron. I wish we were all like you.

RPS reader Robbie McKnight sent us a link to his new Unreal Tournament 3 map, which can be found here. He’s taken something of an unusual angle on things as UT3 maps go: everything is built in primary colours and pre-school Platonics. I like the sun best of all. Compare and contrast, if you will, with this map. The two ends of the UT3 mapping spectrum, perhaps?

There’s a video of Robbie’s work after the hop.
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Beneath the grimy click are ten million videos of DiRT 2 doing its thing. The one you probably want to watch is an interview with Codemasters’ veteran and Chief Game Designer Matthew Horsman talking about why the game has benefited from the work the team did on GRID. He chats a bit about the one hundred events the game contains, and explains why multiplayer enables players to have a lot more freedom in the kind of game they play, particularly with mixing up car and track types – allowing you to race buggies around the spectacular Battersea power station Rallycross track, or traditional rally cars around the deserts of California on the game’s wide open “raid” stages. Oh, and it’s all a bit pretty, too. Go and judge with your eyes.

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