Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I have a lot of respect for those who see a new piece of tech, or a new online tool, and their instinctive response is: I wonder how that can be a game. That’s very much the approach taken to Google Maps by Australian indie team Binary Space. 2010′s Class 3 Outbreak will take place within the top-down view of Google’s mapping technology, where a zombie attack is taking place. A squad of humans as they try to stay alive in the real-world streets for as long as possible. It’s a splendid idea, no matter how omnipresent zombies may be at the moment. Take a look at the video below.

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I’ve been pondering looking into the role computers play in TV and movies, simply because it’s quite so hilariously silly. From Bones’ 3D hologram-o-machine (best I can find thanks to the joy of Fox) that can instantly conjure any murderous scenario the cast think of, to those peculiar PCs all film stars use that require only rapid keyboard inputs despite their clearly cursor-orientated design. I also find myself peculiarly interested in collecting together the names of all the Google alternatives films and television use. My favourite has to be the ludicrously clumsy “Finder-Spyder” that crops up all over the place, notably Heroes, Hung and Prison Break. Although Dexter’s “NetScope” is impressively wrong too. I mention all this after being pointed toward this fabulous site from the man who is responsible for so many of the more impressive interfaces you see in films, Mark Coleran.

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Cryptic, gravitas-laden teasers are of little use – genuinely seeing a game in action is all that matters when it comes to trailertime. So, it’s relief to be able to show you goodly human beans just what Splash Damage’s upcoming hybrid single/multiplayer shooter Brink really looks like. This video focuses specifically on the (optional) auto-jump/climb system they call SMART. It’s caused a bit of a fuss as Some Gentlemen have expressed that it must mean the game has been stupidised in the name of consolebox success, and similarly snobbish knee-jerk assertions. Maybe it will. But have you played it yet? No, you haven’t. So maybe it won’t. Gotcha!

This walkthrough vid tries to both explain and justify SMART’s existence. Does it help, Some Gentlemen? Oh, and it also does a sterling job of demonstrating that the uber-shiny screens we’ve seen to date really are very close to the real thing…
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I find myself reviewing Space Rangers 2: Reboot for PC Gamer magazine UK. Which is their business entirely, so you won’t hear any opinion on it from me here, bar linking to the review if it ends up online. But! It did create a little brain-tickle of worry that we hadn’t mentioned this revised version of the old multi-genre dear on RPS. Why should you care? Well, because it’s what many of the folks who are now known as Katauri Interactive did before the wondrous King’s Bounty: The Legend, and because it’s a game Kieron scored 9/10 to back when most publications were entirely dismissing it because it had a silly name and a low budget.
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Commander of the RPS Grande Armee, Tim Stone, posted about the final hours trickling away before the release of the Hist War demo. Well, that waiting is over, and the demo is available to download. Hurrah! Find some very old Beta footage of the game, a less appropriate film-link than the one Tim did and a book question below…
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The new Eve expansion, Dominion, is out this week, and it threatens to shake up the game’s territorial system to a degree that has not been seen since territory was formalised back in 2004. The new system will require more active maintenance for players wanting to benefit from holding sovereignty, and should reduce some of the “AFK Empires” we’ve seen in recent years. I doubt it will do anything to fragment or reduce the power of the existing power-blocs, however, since their player-owned structures will remain in places, and their immense capital fleets will still be able to project power across enormous reaches of space. I expect that it will simply produce more vassal entities, rather than genuinely allowing more access to 0.0 for smaller groups of players. Anyway, a glorious new trailer featuring a huge (and fairly true-to-game) capital-ship battle is out, and you can see it below. Delicious.
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We don’t often post about pre-release mods, but I’m making an exception for Postscript. Occasional RPS-contributor and Resolution top-dog Lewis Denby is working on a Half-life 2 mod. “File it next to things like Dear Esther and Radiator, probably, except more game-like than the former, and more formally-structured than the latter,” he says. In other word, short-form, experimental, character-driven narrative game mods. Since he’s written probably more extensively than any other critic on this sort of game – from the Path to Dear Esther, Denby’s been all over it – I’m intrigued to see what he ends up creating. You can follow its progress on its own site and the teaser-trailer follows…
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Sundays are for waking up in famously rich ex-pc-gamer ed Ross Atherton’s palace in Versailles – which is, perhaps inevitably, actually Versailles palace – sipping on fine tea and compiling a list of (mainly) games related writing from across the week for your delectation, while wrestling with Ross’ luxurious split-keyboard and trying not to include a link to some pop music delight hailing a much-missed journalist.

• Doctor Professor is addicted to fake success. He considers two different personality types – who he describes as either performance-orientated or mastery-orientated, and argues that his love of RPGs as a teenager absolutely fucked him up. Fascinating stuff and well worth, if only as a thought experiment.

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…The HistWar Demo

Originally commissioned by an ecstatic Lord Liverpool the day after the Battle of Waterloo,   HistWar: Les Grognards – wargaming’s Duke Nukem Forever – is now so close you can smell its pungent musket-smoke-and-baccy odour. The demo has been promised for today. How should a groggy fellow fill these last tense hours?

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Oooh exciting! The first ever build of what critics are literally calling “that thing Carey’s made” is here. Rock, Paper, Shotgunity is ALIVE!

Those who don’t read RPS every day might not have noticed we’re making a game using the newly-free Unity development suite. So to explain: twice a week for the next two months I’ll be posting about my experiences with the tools. This first week my aim was simply to get to grips with the suite, create a test environment and get one of our three super-duper weapons working. How did that go? Find out below.

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I am so tremendously looking forward to Mass Effect 2. I wasn’t for a while – I think I lost track of it all. I adored the first game when I played it, but as time’s cruel countdown ticked away I found myself incorporating into my memory too much of how other people would describe it, and forgetting the details. “Oh, those elevators!” “The combat wasn’t as good as it could have been.” “The side quests were rubbish.” Well, all of that is true, but goshdarnit, it didn’t matter. It was a fabulous thing, and delving into all the details about for the sequel has reminded me why I enjoyed the original so very much. Which combined with what an absolute world-exploding classic Dragon Age proved to be, has me anticipating BioWare’s sequel with fervour. It’d better be good, or there will be trouble. New videos are below.

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