Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight will be released on March 16th, which means it might just nip into our gaming consciousness before Starcraft II’s “Spring” release. The fourth game in the series is probably going to have its work cut out to face down the Blizzardian behemoth, and with all the rumours of layoffs at EA, you have to wonder about the developmental fate of this beast. The first proper game trailer explaining in-game action has just surfaced, and I’ve posted it below. It’s looking rather vehicular, with a particular emphasis on stompy romping of robots. The trailer also points a beady-eye at the RPG elements which grace C&C4 for the first time. Like Dawn of War II, it’s taking that levelling-up thing quite seriously.
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Sundays are for stuff. Stuff and compiling a list of the interesting (mainly) games related reading from across the week, publishing them here and trying to avoid squeezing a lnk to some piece of pop music or another at the end, because that’s not what this list is for and I must try harder.
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Sundays are for stealing the Sunday Papers format from under Kieron’s nose, then using it to share simulation news.

• Gaijin forget to invite an evil aunt to the christening of their latest air combat sprog. The old bag retaliates by gatecrashing the ceremony and naming the newborn herself. ‘Henceforth, this IL-2 spin-off previously only available on consoles will be known as…  Wings of Prey!’ Not since Microprose’s Ailerons of Adversaries has a flight sim been so grievously monikered.   Read the rest of this entry »

Storms may be shaking the UK to pieces, and it appears the wind has been knocking prices over too. This week we have games with the biggest of budgets, the most advanced engines, and the highest numbers of pixels, and at the other end of the spectrum, a game about colouring things in. All here, and all cheap, it can only be the Bargain Bucket. Head to EdgyGamer.co.uk for more ways impulse purchase your way into debt.

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A gory torrent of footage and commentary on the upcoming Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising expansion pack awaits below. Seems as though this one’s building upon the admittedly limited scope of DOW2 in a whole bunch of ways, not least in terms of environments. There’s even a little Space Hulkiness in there…
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Some weeks back, I visited Splash Damage to take a peek at how their upcoming shooter Brink is coming along. Thanks to the invaluable assistance of Master Transcriber Jim Rossignol, I finally have a textual record of my interview with SD’s Senior Game Designer Ed Stern. Read on for an avalache of Brink-o-facts…
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Polish site Polygamia.pl send word that they’ve got their hands on some of the images from vapour-MMO Project V13, which would be Fallout Online, via the court case between Bestheda and Interplay. Probably not even vaguely representative of what said game will come to look like, if it ever comes to be, but worth a look to see what the Interplayians have been up to in their backwoods game shed.

Effseven pointed me at this. I haven’t played it. It’s a proof-of-concept demo-release of the full game which the mod team will be playing. It could be terrible. It… actually, I refuse to believe it could be terrible. The world wouldn’t be that cruel. It’s a single player FPS mod about Hitler getting dinosaurs with the inevitable consequences. From the moment when watching the trailer the newspaper headline “DINOSAURS! They Are Real And The Nazis Have Them” appeared, there was no way I wasn’t posting this. Good luck in finishing it, Sez I.
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This is sad, but not unexpected. FUMBLL have received a (fairly reasonably phrased) cease-or-desist letter from Games Workshop. FUMBBL has been the long-running online java bloodbowl client thingy, and been the premier way to play Blood Bowl for years. In fact, even now after the release of Cyanide’s game, if you don’t care about any of the bells and whistles – I actually think they do add something to the experience – it does a better job of simulating the game (Including all the teams, showing the maths better, etc). Of course, that FUMBBL is such a good league system, it does beg the question why Cyanide didn’t just copy it wholesale, y’know? Its timing is particularly bad for RPS forumites, as their league is just coming to the close. The question that’s on everyone’s lips is “why now?”. As in, they’ve been ignoring it until now. What pushed them to make the move?

A new game-footage trailer for Ubisoft’s game tie-in for sci-fi film Avatar has turned up on BigDownload, and tells things from players fighting from the alien side of the conflict. I’ve posted it below. The footage is set up by Patrick Naud, the executive producer, who explains that the game allows you to fight the conflict from both human and Na’Vi perspectives. Fairly predictable-looking action stuff follows, with the sticks and bows giving it a tinge of Turok. That said, we’ve heard that the full game is actually looking fairly promising. Not long to wait to find out for sure, of course, as it’s out on 4th of December.
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Two new developer diary videos for sandbox vehicular action game (comedy?) Just Cause 2 have landed, and they only serve to hammer home just how absurdly entertaining this game looks. The videos feature skydiving, grappling, and man-shooting, but also explain a bit about what all this ludicrousness is intended to achieve, which is to overthrow the dictators of the fictional island of Panau. Good thing dictators need overthrowing, I say. Go watch it look even more awesome, below.
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