By John Walker on August 25th, 2009.
Just a quick one to say, one of our favourite games of the year is now up on Steam. Time Gentlemen, Please! can now be bought worldwide at £3, $5 and 4€ via Valve’s pipe. Zombie Cow have smartly bundled it with the first game in the series, Ben There, Dan That!, so you can play through both fantastic adventures super-easily. Read Alec’s review here if you’re still hesitating, and check the list of incredible reviews on their site if you think we’re just madfaces.
By Kieron Gillen on August 25th, 2009.
Starting a day with the ex-editor of legendary videogames website/gaming-community Oskar Skog mailing us is always a fine thing. He writes, lamenting the lack of Trials HD for the PC – bastards! sez us – but thinking Mad Skills Motocross will act like a helpful methadone. While he thinks it not Trials match, he thinks it more of a combo of Excitebike, Excite Truck and Trials, including a level-editor. You can get the demo here. The full thing is just under 20 quid, which does seem a trifle pricey, but the level editor certainly is attractive. I haven’t played it – RUSHING AROUND! – but Skog has as fine an eye for an arcade game as anyone I’ve ever known. Footage follows…
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By Kieron Gillen on August 25th, 2009.
Kotaku picked up on the dutch site Gamer.nl reporting that Pyro are making a new Commandos game. Blues News turns to Babelfish, which gives…
“We go certainly busy with new commandos, the time are there ripe voor” , said a spokesman of Pyro studios against Gamer.nl. the new title returns to the basis and will do think of the style of commandos 2. The game then real-time strategiegame will be, and no first-person shooter such as the last commando commandos-game, commandos: Strike Force from 2006. According to Pyro studios the overstap to 3D a bad choice was.”
However, since then Pyro has denied it, saying they never said such a thing. They’d like to do one, but turning it into a quote is wishful thinking. Who to believe?
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By Jim Rossignol on August 25th, 2009.
Did we mention we were rather warm in our anticipation of The Old Republic? John had some pretty hefty preview thoughts to unload after E3, and we’ve been eager to learn a bit more. It seems IGN scooped the internet on that count, with a four part, twenty-minute developer walkthrough of parts of the game, including the early bounty-hunter, smuggler and Sith sequences, with lots more besides. Posted below, it is. This is heavy spoiler territory, obviously, so those of you who are definitely on course to play this game might want to avoid it. On the other hand, that bit where he walks out onto the surface of Hutta…
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By Kieron Gillen on August 25th, 2009.
Michael Nørskov points me in the direction of this. It stars the elephant from Achievement Unlocked and is a metagame tinged piece of platform puzzling. It’s called This Is The Only Level. And it is. But it’s an awesome level and some of the puzzle solutions worked into it are plain brilliant. Others are funny. The best are both. Saying any more would spoil ‘em. You really should play it.
By John Walker on August 25th, 2009.
Due to adverse weather conditions and abnormal levels of volcanic activity, we’ve yet to bring you thoughts on the Tales of Monkey Island episodic adventures. Alongside the remake of the original by LucasArts, Telltale are currently producing five chapters of a brand new story for the hapless pirate, written and coded by many original LucasArts developers. The first of these, Launch Of The Screaming Narwhal, has been out for just over a month, and the second part has just appeared. (As Alec reported yesterday, you can now buy them individually in the US at least.) Here’s some thoughts.
By Jim Rossignol on August 25th, 2009.
With Portal being so successful I had rather expected there to be a load of first-person puzzlers to come along in its wake. We’ve had few glimpses of its influence here and there, but I do wonder whether Twin Sector is the next game that could truly be seen as a first-person puzzler in the style of Valve’s comedy space-bender. Set inside a cryogenic containment facility where things have gone rather wrong, Twin Sector tasks you with using the power of physics to enable your female protagonist to fix a wonky reactor. You will, naturally, need to figure out what else is down there in the techno-tombs with you, and why it wishes to foil your efforts. Happily the guiding voice of a helpful AI is there to help you jump through the hoops.
Assuming independent German devs Headup can pull off the physics puzzles satisfactorily, this could be a great game, as well as a splendid tech-demo for the Havok physics systems on which it is based. Twin Sector is reportedly out next month, and the trailer is entombed below.
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By Kieron Gillen on August 25th, 2009.
Sad news which broke last night. Luckily, I was already drinking vodka. Via the medium of twitter, Colin Solal Cardo of Gamesyde posted: “I got confirmation at Cologne’s Gamescom that Beyond Good & Evil 2 is on hold for now. No idea if it’s def or temporary but it sucks.” It does, indeed, suck. 1UP bring up an old Ubisoft quote that it was never certain anyway. I suspect worldwide recession hasn’t exactly helped a marginal game like BG&E. See what everyone thought was test footage for BG&E2 beneath the cut…
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By Jim Rossignol on August 25th, 2009.
Links for two different games arrived in my inbox recently, both of which use the printed page as a backdrop. In the case of super-hectic shooter Scraap (above), it’s simply a page of text for the background, but in the case of Fig.8 – a browser game on Yo! Arcade – you are piloting a bicycle through a printed technical drawing, and the type is the obstacle. Scraap is a simple scrolling shooter of the most derivative kind presented in a fresh way, while Fig.8 is a beautiful concept, and it captures that oddly dry abstraction of technical drawings in being rather dry and placid. Both games end up being a little infuriating, but it’s fun to see designers playing around with different art-styles in this manner.
By John Walker on August 25th, 2009.
A montage of Borderlands footage has appeared at Games Trailers. It doesn’t look the most official of videos, but it contains excellent examples of the frenetic nature of the game, as well as showing off the concept art-style graphics at full speed. Borderlands is one of the games to brave the pre-Christmas storm, set to appear on the 23rd October, which is four days before my birthday and thus ideal. You can see the frantic action below.
By Alec Meer on August 25th, 2009.
There was a bit of a kerfuffle a while back over Telltale’s Monkey Islands not being entirely treated as episodes. In that you could only buy them as a job lot, despite the staggered release dates. Like, duh. American internet-folk will be glad to hear they no longer need to invest in five episodes up-front if they’re not entirely sure whether the series is for them, as Amazon is selling these bite-sized retromanced adventure games individually. $8.95 each, which as far as I can tell is in keeping with what Steam and Telltale’s e-store charge for single Sam & Max, Strongbad et al instalments. Hopefully this breaking up of Guybrush’s bulk will spread to other services and continents soon.
