Rock, Paper, Shotgun

An lo! there was a cry from the pits. The turn-based-devil-’em-up Solium Infernum is now available to purchase. If you don’t want to throw cash down blind – and you probably should at least feel it out – there’s a demo available for you to play, which you can get here. To get a feel for the game, here’s my first-impression notes, though Tom Chick’s ongoing diary will be splendid at introducing some of the concepts you should be thinking about. There’s a manual in the actual game directory. Also, while there’s apparently a default player-archdemon, but it doesn’t appear for some systems – mine included. Vic suggests a basic martial demon, in which case, I’d throw down Martial 2 and Charisma 3. Make him a Duke and have Wrath at your aim. More on the Cryptic site and I multiplayer diaries when we get a game cooking with hellfire.

I appear to be coming over Tim Stone. And before a horrible image is conjured in the communal RPS-reader mind by that sentence, I better progress to the point quickly. A demo for Operation Barbarossa – The Struggle For Russia is now available. There’s over 150 upgradeable units in the full game and prominently features hexes – which will be a theme for my blogging today. If the demo takes your fancy, you can buy it from Matrixgames’ site. As per-usual for wargames, there’s no video available. Instead, let’s show some colour footage of the actual Barbarossa invasion, which is disturbing for at least two reasons. Firstly, it’s footage of the invasion, complete with lingering shots on corpses. Secondly, the Nouveau nazis in the video comment threads.
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Steam’s got some sort of mad Christmas Turkeytime sale on at the moment, tearing big chunks of money-flesh out of a different clutch of titles each day until Monday. Keep an eye on the deals here, as we’re not going to post about it every blimmin’ day. What did your last slave die of? This one’s worth its own mention though – 50% off the complete pack of every THQ game on Steam, whose total discount now rips £183.33 off the price of buying each game individually. That’s the complete Red Faction, Company of Heroes, Full Spectrum Warrior, Titan Quest and Dawn of War lineages to date, Saints Row II, Stalker, and er, Juiced 2 and Frontlines Fuel of War. £26.50 to Brits, $50 to Americans and €50 to the rest of Europe. WE WIN! FOR ONCE, WE WIN! Essentially, 18 games for the price of buying Red Faction Guerilla or Dawn of War II on its own. Good’un, this.

This is very lovely, in a vaguely malevolent way. It’s a narrative puzzle game of minimal dialogue and hand-painted graphics, a little in the vein of Samorost. Hansel is an idle, blinkered boy-child, and Gretel his industrious, concerned sister. She feels it’s imperative to escape their angry, abusive mother (and subjugated father), and thus puzzling begins. The puzzles are simple but thoughtful, and as a more visceral bonus, usually involve whacking something with your catapult at some stage. The look’s what really makes it, though – cutout, waterpainted shapes moving in pseudo-stop motion, evoking vintage Eastern European animation.
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Update: This all seems to be a matter of crossed wires. So far DX3 has only been announced for PC, but there’s no confirmation of exclusivity.

Rumours are circulating that Eidos’s Deus Ex 3 is to be a PC exclusive. This originates from a story on Bit-Tech today in which they (no longer – Ed) comment,

“It has been confirmed that the game is a cyberpunk prequel to the first game though and that it won’t be getting a console release due to the complexity of the game.”

However, they don’t state where this was confirmed, and the peeps on the Eidos forums seem equally surprised. “Only the PC version has been announced so far,” notes ‘René’, one Eidos Montreal’s community types, continuing, “The magazine coverage we had last year were all PC… I dunno where that website is getting its info from!” (Thanks to Phill for the nudge.)

Here’s my theory for how Telltale works out their pricing structures for their episodic adventures: They get a big wheel, almost as big as the one on Wheel Of Fortune, and they label each segment with things like, “$8.95 a month” or “$34.95 for the whole season only”, or “Sell the first four chapters individually, then at the last moment change it so you have to buy all five to get the last chapter, then realise that’s insane.” When first launched the new Tales of Monkey Island adventures had landed on the second choice, somewhat questioning the purpose of episodes. Fortunately a month or so later someone at the company must have given the wheel a nudge, clicking it over to the first option, with all five episodes now available individually from Telltale’s site (but not on Steam). With the final episode five coming out on the 8th December anything could happen with that crazy wheel. But whichever way it goes this time, they’ve put together a fun trailer reminding people of the story so far, in case people lost track over the last five months. Do I really need to point out it therefore contains spoilers? No? Good.

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(Yes, I know there are, in fact, no Stroggs in Quake 1).

Flash: what can’t it do? Well, it can’t fix the wonky big toe I’ve got as a result of kicking a rock when I was 13, that’s what it can’t do. But it can run a remarkably smooth version of the original Quake in a browser. Mouse support, the constant bane of Flash games, is a little off – you have to hold down the left button to activate mouse-look, meaning firing happens with Control, but it works pretty well nonetheless. Quake’s still surprisingly good-looking after all these years – or is that I’ve become so accustomed to brown games lately that The Forefather Of Brown now looks like part of the herd all over again?

With the triumphant release of the 1.4 patch, The Nameless Mod total conversion for Deus Ex has finally been announced complete, a whopping seven years after its inception. Seven years! What were you doing seven years ago? I think I must have been a tiny baby dressed in hammer pants, struggling to beat my brother’s Galaga high score. And yet these were seven years well spent- with 13,000 lines of recorded dialogue, 20 new weapons, 100 tracks of new music and a playtime of between 15-20 hours, The Nameless Mod is by far the largest Deus Ex mod ever made and a bizarre one at that.
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(As revealed by Kieron’s, Jim’s and my recent run-through of the entire thing in online co-op).

This!

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Oh, I’m getting wise to that Magitech now. Strength & Honour 2 is a rome-period wargame which has a new – gasp! – 1.7 Gig demo available to download. I glance at the screenshot and think… isn’t that the same engine of all those Eastern-set games? Why, yes, that’s what it appears to be. Which I thought when looking at their Takeda 3, reminding me of Sango 2. It’s the icons at the bottom that nail it. Anyway – I’m digressing. Interesting points? Well, rather than being purely Western-Europe-centric, it models as far as China if you fancy going all Alexander The Great.

Just picked this up from Worthplaying. Stubbs the Zombie: Rebel Without A Pulse is now available for zero monies. All you have to do is go to GameAgent here and enter the coupon code ASPYRTHANKS to remove the charge. It’s a comedy-action adventure in the Halo zone which I reviewed when it came out, and didn’t really think much of. It’s a golden rule of games criticism: if a comedy game involves your emitting of gases produced in your anal canal as an attack, it’ll neither be i) good ii) funny. Still – the retro-sci-fi setting is quite imaginative and… oh, I give up. Here’s the trailer!
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