Rock, Paper, Shotgun

…but the PC version is delayed! I know! That never happens, right? Ubisoft has just dropped the bomb about the no-longer-November release, claiming it’s so they can “deliver the best quality game”.
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Pirhanha Bytes – the venerated and cheerily mad studio behind the Gothic RPGs – are backbackback with next month’s Risen. I’ve spent a little time with some preview code, and they’ve just released a making-of video. See how I kill two birds with one stone. I am Bird-Killer, killer of birds.
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I’d not spotted Grappling Hook before, until I saw the demo appear. Now I’m wondering why we haven’t heard more about it. The creation of one-man dev team SpeedRunGames, more intimately known as Christian Teister, Grappling Hook is a first-person puzzler centred around a – wait for it – grappling hook. And as I might have made clear before, ALL games are improved by the addition of either double-jumps or grappling hooks. Grappling hooks doesn’t quite have a double-jump (there’s an extended jump instead) and as such falls short of angelic perfection. But despite this, after playing the demo I conclude it’s pretty damned fine.

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We’ve been following the development of Volition‘s Sci-fi open-world terrorist freedom-fighter game for a while. But now, finally out on the PC, we can review say wot I think…
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I’ve been thinking about this game for the last couple of days. Which is, I suppose, the point. Lose/Lose is a basic shooting game… but: “Lose/Lose is a video-game with real life consequences. Each alien in the game is created based on a random file on the players computer. If the player kills the alien, the file it is based on is deleted. If the players ship is destroyed, the application itself is deleted”. Oh, the humanity. More of what I’m sure will be termed art-wank in comments thread on the page. What I’m thinking about isn’t actually the questions it’s posing, but how it could be to have twisted to actually have proper gameplay appeal. You’ll find thought quick thoughts plus footage of the game in action below…
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Nothing playable yet, but Steenberg has released a test client that will (via the menu screen) show how well his impressionistic multiplayer game will run on your PC. It’s kind of tantalising and frustrating to download this and not be able to log in, but by running it you’ll be helping Steenberg out by gauging interest and general PC specs for his potential audience. Also: pretty.

Steenberg says that the beta is “close” perhaps “just a matter of days”. Woo.

Go watch the video, or check out the new screenshots, to remind yourself of why we’re excited.

Splinter Cell: Conviction has released a super-gruesome trailer to make clear its release date. The 2nd of the 23rd month of the year. Which I believe is called Fructosember, of course originally named after the Roman god of naturally occurring sugars. Wait, hang on, it’s that backward American dates thing isn’t it? They meant the 23rd of February. Who picked that? Do you Americans write the time as 56:05? No! Wait, but that would be more right. Oh God! It’s all falling apart!

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Runic/Perfect World have this evening revealed a new class for next month’s dungeon crawler, Torchlight: the Alchemist. And they’ve done so with a really rather pretty video, which you can see below. The new Diablo-ish from veteran Travis Baldree (Fate, Mythos) has me very much looking forward to the 27th October when it comes out.

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Bah: The PC version of Borderlands has been delayed until October 26th in the US and October 30th in the rest of the world. Why WHY? “Optimization”, that’s why. Perhaps even optimisation. Stupid PCs and their different cogs.

Hurrah: While talking to MTV Gearbox creative director Mikey Neumann said it took him a rather long time to get through the game. “It took me about 100 hours. More the second time, actually, and that was to find every single little mission. I wanted to do everything.” (How long until the 20-minute speedrun, eh?)

We’re probably going to get to play the game before release, and “preview” it. Soon thereafter: judgement.

So The Witcher 2′s video pitch to publishers was leaked last week, and we’ve all been asking a lot of questions. CD Projekt have now answered some of them. No, that’s not the final voice acting, and yes, it’s a new engine: “The game does not use the Aurora Engine anymore. We developed a brand new engine dedicated to creating games with the design and features we love. The new engine is fully scalable and, well… kicks ass.”

We contacted CD Projekt to ask even more questions, but they’ve declined to say any more at present. (Although RPS will be first in the queue, obviously.)

The sequel to Microprose/Cyberlore’s 2000 RTS/RPG/management game has just hit, this time handled by one of Russian omni-developer/publisher 1C’s many studios. I confess I’ve never played the first game, but I was intrigued enough by this decade-on sequel to take a nose…

There’s something rather scathing about Majesty 2. It tears away the pretend philanthropy and nobility of fantasy heroes, leaving the terrible truth of what we really play most RPGs and MMOs for. We want gold, and we want to watch a bunch of numbers increase – because we are greedy and self-obssessed. And Majesty 2′s AI-controlled, massively selfish heroes turn the mirror on us.
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