Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Huzzah! The Cities XL demo is here, 1gb in breadth, for you to download, play, and then weigh on the platinum scales of consumer judgment. The new city-builder with an online dimension seems like it’s been in beta for about 47 years, but it’s actually only a few weeks. Nevertheless there’s been a marked improvement since the early wobbles, and this limited demo gives you a taste of that improved game with a city restricted to 22,000 inhabitants, built in a choice of three of the twenty five landscapes across the three teeming planets of the game.

I do believe we have a Cities XL interview in the pipeline, so keep an eye out for that, should you be buildingly inclined. Full demo info here.

Heroes of Newerth has been in Open Beta for a while now and the opinion-blocking NDA has now been dropped at last. As such, a perfect time for Beta-Boy Phill Cameron to SHARE BRAIN THOUGHTS via WORDS.

Man, I’m really impressively bad at Heroes of Newerth.
Read the rest of this entry »

I was just browsing some email, having just been booted off my gaming PC by the Mrs so that she could play FarmVille on Facebook, when I noticed that the PC actually does have a contemporary full-blown farming game: Farming Simulator 2009. From last month’s press release: “Become a farmer and experience the thrill of driving heavy modern farm equipment as you try and feed the world! Choose from a variety of vehicles and implements, and explore the huge, over 4 km², island.” Phwoar. More informatively: “The German version of this product shifted a massive 100,000 units within its first five weeks debuting at number one on the Media Control GfK chart.” Now that’s some credentials. I was just about to pick up a copy and start singing appropriate songs when I discovered: there is a demo.
Read the rest of this entry »

Late last night, Comrade Ariana forwarded me the webgame joy of Canabalt at me. It’s a one-button velocity-based randomly-generating oddly-atmospheric parkour webgame and is – as another friend puts it – probably what Mirror’s Edge should have been like. I got 2900-odd last night, but my skills seems to have atrophied overnight. I also recommend turning down the sound to the bare minimum (“-” reduces it) and play it to the sound of Music Go Music’s Warm In the Shadows (Youtube link or Spotify one), as it’s leisurely propulsiveness – and sheer length – seemed to compliment the game elegantly. No, really.

I’ve been thinking about quests. Quests in RPGs. More specifically, what I want from a quest. As we’re wandering through the ancient lands/secret base/alien world, there’s a fairly good chance a local is going to ask us for a favour, on our way to complete a larger task. I adore this structure, this idea of having larger and smaller aims, an important journey, but time for diversions. There’s something specifically soothing about it – a to-do list of adventures. But if I could pick my consequences, what would they be?

Read the rest of this entry »

1UP only have a bloody exclusive, so we’re going to have to link to them. Curse them and their exclusives and their fashionable haircuts. They’re doing a week of DeathSpank coverage starting with a preview, including the aforementioned screens. Ron Gilbert does an Adventure Game/Action-RPG cross-breed based on an office running joke which just wouldn’t stop. I’m excited by this. More of this kind of thing. And more when we know anything which isn’t based on 1UP’s bloody exclusive. Bloody 1UP.

In this, the second part of my series looking back on five years of Eve Online, I tell the tale of two lost Empires, and the solo-corporation that emerged far stronger from their ashes. Part one is here.
Read the rest of this entry »

Shattered Horizon is a rather clever physics shooter from Futuremark – you know, those chaps who make benchmarking apps to gauge how buff your PC is. Their game, as it happens, is also about the high end PC, being tuned for Vista/Windows 7, and requiring DirectX 10 as a minimum. It’s a “multiplayer first-person shooter with unique freedom of movement and realistic zero gravity combat.” And that means fancy-shootin’ in the surrounds of orbital space debris: jet-pack spacemen with guns fighting inside the wreckage of the moon and various space stations, which is a premise I can dig. Zero-g combat could be ludicrously silly, or just rubbish, it’s hard to tell. Either way, the batch of new screenshots posted on the main site look fairly promising, while the teaser tailer (posted below) is frankly a bit dodgy. Apparently there’s a “technical beta” taking place right now, which suggests that, even though there’s no release date confirmed, the game can’t be too far off. We’ll bring you some more details when we see them spinning through the cold vacuum of the internet.
Read the rest of this entry »

One of the last bits of video material to turn up from GamesCom is this trailer for Men Of War’s expandalone, Red Tide. This is interesting purely because it’s more Men Of War in the form of twenty-two more missions, but the lashings of new vehicles, sea-based challenges (including six landing assaults) and some unusual combat scenarios mean it’s rather alluring for Men Of War vets. I’ll be particularly keen to see how they handle sea-based fights. The original game was so inventive with the way it brought battlefields to life that I can only assume a similar level of detail will be in evidence here. No release date yet, but we’ve been told that will be confirmed “soon”.
Read the rest of this entry »