Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Today on Obscure Russian Strategy Watch we’ve got a blinder in the form of Real Warfare: 1242. It’s a kind of Medieval: Total Russian Bloom, in which blurrily-lit real-time soldiers do strategy in each others pauldrons, unto death. Awesomely the game is based entirely on the life and times of one of Rus’ most splendid medieval heroes, Alexander Nevsky, who famously thrashed European invaders and negotiated a useful not-getting-pasted pact with The Golden Horde. The 1c announcement explains: “The player’s goal is to direct Alexander Nevsky through meticulously recreated historic battlegrounds and achieve the greatest of victories by repelling the attacks of Teutonic and Swedish knights, bringing Lithuania to peace and eliminating every single invader in 1242.” The first video of the game in motion is buried beneath the rich earth of this post.
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This match report will be brought to you by the phrase “GFI fail”. But more on that later. Much more.
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This broke on Friday, but RPS were dividing and conquering across the world, requiring Kadayi – cheers! – to bring it to our attention. In short, Gamasutra reports that the coldness between Interplay (Original Fallout IP holders) and Bethesda (Purchaser of the Fallout IP) has crossed into an actual legal suit. However, it isn’t about the MMO situation, as described in the link. It’s to prevent any further distribution of the compilation Fallout Trilogy’s sales via Digital Download companies causing “immediate, substantial, and irreparable harm”. Do read the whole thing, and a little industry thought below…
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LucasArts are on quite the crusade to prove they’re no longer the grey men in grey suits working in a grey building and having grey dreams about billions of dollars earned from grey, lacklustre Star Wars games they’ve seemed to be for the last decade-plus. The re-release of a few beloved vintage titles onto Steam earlier this year won them a big old credibility pie, and now they’re showing off the first of a mooted several new IPs – indie-esque gamettes that hint at a return to their offbeat barnstorming of yore. First up is Lucidity, which is best described as Mario meets Tetris meets Crayon Physics Meets Little Big Planet Meets Ico Meets Lemmings Meets Braid. It’s dead pretty, and it’s betrailered below.
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Mount & Blade is going multiplayer and the beta is in progress as we type. We’ve taken a look at the very specific ramifications for that knight being another actual living person in the unforgiving horse and sword game we love so much. Will you be joining the Warband? Let’s find out.
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Videogames were always meant to be ludicrous, and Just Cause 2 captures the spirit of the insane quite perfectly with its absurd hyperbolic action sequences. As if being able to base-jump over a kilometer wasn’t enough, the game’s fundamental mechanisms – a grapple and a parachute – can be used together to create a consistent and instant option for getting vertical. Check it out below.
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Sundays are for working your way from Agatha-Christie-esque countryside across the country towards an eventual destination of evening Agatha-Christie Sunday Evening Cheesy Adaptations. But on the way I take a break to chew on pop-corn, sip tea and compile a list of some of the fine reading that came to my attention this week, present it for your delectation and try not to include a link to a couple of pieces of pop music. I must try. I must.

• Edge’s Making Of articles are always pretty decent, especially when it’s on a genuinely good game. You don’t get much more genuinely good than Deus Ex. The nameless Edge-hero chats to Warren Spector on the Doom where you could talk to the monsters.
• Point/Counterpoint: The New York Times’ Seth Schiesel thinks Rock Band: Beatles may be the most important game of all time. Conversely, Crispygamer’s John Teti thinks that the New York Times’ Seth Schiesel’s review of Rock Band: Beatles may be the worst game review of all time.

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Autumn wouldn’t be autumn in the Stone household without a spot of digital deer slaying. The following is a piece I penned a few years back for PC Gamer UK on the history and appeal of gaming’s least fashionable genre.

Throw a couple of logs onto the fire, pour yourself a glass of something warming, and come sit down here next to me. Comfortable? Splendid. Today I want to tell you about my penchant for a pariah genre. Today I want to talk of hunting simulations, a genus of games that’s been mauled, mocked, and lately, studiously ignored by British game critics. Read the rest of this entry »

A quick update on the Fly Gabe Newell story, where amateur L4D campaign maker Joe W-A is trying to raise the money to fly Gabe Newell and Erik Johnson to Brisbane, Australia, so they will call off their boycott of his mod. (Read the original story to make sense of this.) He needed to make roughly $2400 to achieve this. Rather incredibly he’s just broken the $3000 barrier. Gabe, you’re going to Oz.

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When the aliens abducted LewieP of Savygamer, they were interested in only one thing: probing him for cheap game deals. Fortunately he’d already uploaded them to the RPS mainframe, for your edification and embargainment…
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The latest Borderlands trailer is turgid with game footage: terrain, buildings, vehicles, bad-dudes, ‘splosions. It also takes an opportunity to introduce the four characters, with the soldier seemingly being all about guns, the siren doing stealth and area-of-effect stuff (possibly?), the hunter doing headshots, and Brick having some bolt-encrusted fists. Four-player co-op is the new two-player co-op, it seems. And I’m firmly in the pro camp on that art style. I even wrote an article about it.
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