Rock, Paper, Shotgun

This is an interesting trailer for Dreamkiller, if you’re interested in poorly imagined juxtapositions of media. It goes a bit spooky bed-time story to start off with, setting up a splendid atmosphere of psych-horror and then: Painkiller-esque ultra-death. According to the brief “Gamers will take on the role of Alice Drake, a psychologist with the extraordinary ability to enter the minds of her patients and combat the ravenous foes haunting their dreams. Utilizing a host of fantastic weapons and her own special abilities, Alice confronts our common demons only to discover an even deeper menace reigns within.” And that means dreams of miniguns, dreams of bulbous-headed baby monsters being fragged into the beyond, dreams of baddies going boom.

Actually I used to have FPS dreams when I was playing Quake III regularly, but these days I seem to have more RPG and RTS dreams. That means something, but I just don’t know what.
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This is both impressive and – in the gaming space – unprecedented. In a move which echos Radiohead’s honesty box for the download of In Rainbows, Beautiful Game studios have announced that from now until release, if you pre-order the game, you can pay what you like. There’s a £2.50 transaction fee, but you can pay a penny on top of that and get the game. Crikey. The video which announced this and some assorted quick thoughts follow…
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EDIT: No platforms are confirmed for this other than “console”, we’ll get more info as soon as possible.

So CCP have revealed just what the mysterious Dust 514 actually is: a console action MMO featuring “first-person shooter and RTS-style gameplay”, set in the Eve Online universe. Disappointing, eh? But there’s an intriguing twist: PC and console games will be able to interact, and the faction warfare map that gets decided in space on the PC, will also decide the map in the console game. There’s more, as Gamasutra reports:

Players in the PC MMO can “fund mercenaries and give them goals” in the console title. CCP’s Petursson hope that “these communities will meld over time”, expecting specific Dust 514 corporations to start with, but eventually social structures that bridge across the two. He quipped of the new game and the relationship between the two titles: “While the fleet does the flying, the infantry does the dying.”

So PC gamers get to be the space-bound commanders of the console foot-soldiers… That isn’t going to help our elitism complex, is it?

Anyone who has played Ben There, Dan That! and Time Gentlemen, Please! will know why to be excited to hear there’s to be more from the mad-walking heroes of time travelling point and click adventures. From an outside glance they’re 2D scratchy indie games made in the AGS engine, but then you need to sit up and take notice when you realise the second game, TGP, has a Metascore of 89 (five reviews listed, but many other 9/10s should be added). We officially liked it a lot. Why this very day Zombie Cow got in touch with us to let us know that after meetings and alcohol, they’ve decided to continue the series, this time episodically.

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Relic are meanies! Meanies! They go and make an exciting-sounding MMO-esque follow-up to Company of Heroes, complete with persistent online characters and ranks, and then they only go and restrict it to China. Meanies!

Oh, wait. They’ve just revealed a way for us Western-types to have a crack at it, and for free too. Cuddlies!
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One Michael Todd drops us a mail about his submission for the ever-delightful Experimental Gameplay Project, as part of its August-long ‘Bare Minimum’ contest. I read it. I click on the link contained in it. I play the game it leads to. Why yes, I would jump off a cliff if somebody asked me to. Fortunately, there is no nasty surprise in this case – instead, an ethereal real-time strategy game that’s stripped to the bone in terms of its mechanics, but with a style and pace that somehow makes it feel nothing at all like an RTS. Why, even John Walker might enjoy this army game.
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If you spot something just below the water when you’re out at sea, you can bet it’s a plastic bag. But when it’s not, it’s often a gigantic submersible warship. And we know how you like those. Fortunately for you, U-boatisoft send word that their greatest submarine game is back, and now with first-person elements (possibly RPG elements?) where you can walk around your ship as the captain and “become a real leader”. There’s a trailer, which I’ve posted below, in which the captain suggests that “this is the strangest game ever.” Not quite, but we’ll grant it is a little odd. Silent Hunter V game boasts a dynamic campaign, more help for people who found the previous games too hardcore, and some very detailed underwater boats. Developed by Ubisoft Romania, the big bad menace of the seas will be burst from the depths in early 2010, probably. I’m sure we’ll fish some more details out of the depths very soon.
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More hyperbolic hyperbiff inbound from Blizzard, who are going to be causing fanmen to punch the air and whoop at Blizzcon later this week. It’s time for the Starcraft II trailers, and we have a CGI sequence with Zeratul up to his Protoss-business in some space-ruins – not Blizzard’s best, but okay – and then plenty of in-game footage, showing off storyline, environmental effects, and tiny men shooting each other unto death. Also robo-things with lasers for eyes, which usually go down okay in the Rossignol household.

Other SC2 news includes: No co-op campaign, and some kind of DLC, as well as a “trial”, which will be released after the game hits the shelves/internet.
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This has been on my list of things to look at for a while, but it’s been promoted due to Tom Chick’s rave about it in his latest Rush, Boom Turtle Column for Crispy Gamer where he argues that if you go past its surface lack of charisma you’ve got a genuinely new approach to the modern RTS. What is it? “For lack of a subgenre as convenient shorthand to explain what it does, let me give you this: AI War is a grand strategic tower defense 4X RTS,” claims Chick, “How’s that for a mouthful?”.

A mouthful indeed. I download the demo to suck and see.
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I picked up this snippet from Richard Cobbett’s twitter last week. Oddly, as one of his touchstone games, Cobbett’s got nothing extended written about it I can find, so let’s go with his twitter barrage to explain it: “In case you never played it – and you didn’t – TLE was a really cool real-time adventure set on the Orient Express just before WW1. It had about six actual puzzles, but phenomenal attention to detail, and some really nice bits of design. For instance, if you had to avoid someone, you could just lock yourself in your room and wait for them to leave. It sold about four copies.” He’s right. I’ve never played it. However, as one of the more interesting lost-works from a major designer (Mechner=Prince of Persia), it lingers. And lingers with Mechner too, as he made an attempt at a screenplay for a prequel in 2002.
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Questions, questions, always questions. This week we want to know about your PC-building habits. Don’t build PCs? Tell us! Just use a laptop? We need to know. There are few questions below, so please do us a favour and fill them in. It’ll take mere seconds, and you’ll probably be reward in PC gaming heaven. Probably.
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