Rock, Paper, Shotgun

This must be one of the most extraordinary interviews ever to be featured on a games site. It’s subject is Vasily Zotov, the creator of bizarre adventure title, Quite Soulless. The topics covered include Zotov’s strange art style, the reason behind his creativity, the status of the mentally ill in Russia, homelessness, the status of immigrants, and Zotov’s troubled move to California. Here’s a sample quote:

I am the different bee, I mean my literacy sucks, anyway I wanted is to create story, and I hate to be an artist (but I am capable of that), the games are my only window to literacy. I wanted to be a writer and was not capable of, may I say my games are not an art but this BRIDGE.

Zotov has a new game out, a free puzzle game called Space Spy, which you can get here.

Looks like we’re all going to need some cheering up after that last item, so how about some bleak Ukrainian apocalypse to give your day a bit of buoyancy? This new trailer for Call Of Pripyat flies through Pripyat itself – so I suppose it’s a kind of spoiler – but it gives you some idea of how large the new maps in this game actually are. I’ve yet to get there in my own playthrough of the game, which I talked about here, but last night I did discover a neat “looped” dungeon, which uses some kind of portalling to always bring you back to the same place – a kind of Escher level. Which is odd, because it’s exactly the kind of design I’d been looking to find in games recently, and here it pops up in a minor side-quest in Call Of Pripyat. Interesting stuff.
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At what? At a game about beating a woman. As in savagely, brutally, unforgivably, not as in “at badminton” or “in a round of cribbage.” It’s horrible, despite being nothing more than crudely looped video footage overlaid with a strangely undersized floating hand. As it spools hideously onwards, a voice demands you hit her harder, even as blood and bruises blossom gruesomely across her face. Horrible.

Shockingly, it turns out to be a Danish public service announcement about domestic abuse, designed to deter gentlemen who think of themselves as ‘gangsta’ from treating their girlfriends and wives with horrific, violent contempt.
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Since John or Jim don’t appear to be going to link to it, I bloody will. BBC News ran a story today about two swiss organizations doing research into war crimes. Which is a serious topic, and to be applauded. Except it’s actually research into war crimes in videogames. And generally, games comes across pretty bad. Blowing up churches and mosques is against international law, of course. “[We] call upon game producers to consequently and creatively incorporate rules of international humanitarian law and human rights into their games.” You can only imagine what RPS may say to this. Except you don’t have to imagine. They asked us, and Jim and John are quoted arguing games’ side. Go read.

We’ve not mentioned the passing of Pandemic. The studio will breathe their last with The Saboteur, due to ship in a couple of weeks. They were bought by EA two years ago in a two-for-one offer with BioWare for a mere $860m. It’s sad to see the creators of Full Spectrum Warrior, Battlefront, Mercenaries and Destroy All Humans closing their doors. Some of the company have responded in the only proper way, by creating an Office Space tribute, which you can see below.

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The v1.2 patch for Demigod is out, and it can be picked up on Impulse. It features a new character, the Demon Assassin, as well as a bunch of other fixes and features, such as AI options and a mod-manager. The second scheduled demigod, Oculus, will apparently appear “in the coming weeks”. The full change log for the patch is here, along with some videos and screens of the new demigod in action. I really should go back and play this online at some point, I’m pretty sure I’ve promised to about half a dozen times. That said, my guilt is assuaged by the fact that I’ve managed to get snared by another Stardock game, Sins Of A Solar Empire, while playing it for a retrospective last week.

I rather painfully hit a wall in Dragon Age a couple of weeks back, finding my enjoyment stymied by the twin tediums of getting killed far too much and getting bored of wandering endless dwarven caverns and elven forests that required an absurd amount of backtracking through narrow, empty corridors. (Really, would it be so wrong to turn on the instant map travel system in major areas once they’ve been cleared of enemies?) Finding myself with some free time, I headed back in today, only for the former problem to re-rear its annoying head. I knew what was causing it – I didn’t have a good healer. As well as that, my main character, a mage, was a mess of mixed abilities, lacking a core function, horribly prone to inflicting friendly fire with his more powerful attacks and running out of mana horrifyingly quickly to boot. He was screw-up, in short – a liability in every fight.
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This week I’ve been playing the English-language version of Stalker: Call of Pripyat. While the game is already out in Russia and Germany, the English version isn’t coming out until January. The version I am playing is therefore a preview build, and incomplete in a number of ways, mostly in UI English and some bits and pieces of presentation. What does seem to be complete, however, is the new and transformed zone, and its surly denizens. My impressions of this, the third Stalker game, follow.
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Here’s a capstone for one of the year’s biggest stories. Kyle Orland at Crispy Gamer looks at the turbulent history of the L4D2 boycott. “Did Valve change its plans to gain the approval of the masses, or did it effectively pacify the Internet throngs with nothing more than a couple of plane tickets and a hotel reservation? In other words, was the boycott successful? Well, it depends on what you mean by “successful.”" Well, obv. Luckily Kyle follows on to do the heavy lifting with a well-balanced piece. It’s a little revisionist about their early days – not touching on the initial frenzied nature of the group which lead to the initial press being so negative, rather picking up at the slightly-more-reasonable manifesto stage (Though the “L4D424FREE” point remains – to be polite – somewhat naive). I suspect what the boycott achieved will remain a controversial point. Personally, there was only one question which was never answered satisfactorily. Whole new campaigns was never realistic, ever (As in a standard MP level is a hugely different thing from a Co-op level in terms of resources). Why did Valve, even in an interview setting, imply it was.

Chances are if you played the wonderful Machinarium, you fell in love with the amazing soundtrack by Tomas Dvorak. If you bought the game directly from Amanita you’ll have got the soundtrack with it. If not, you can buy it from here. But if you did, you might have noticed a couple of favourite tracks from the game weren’t on it. The dancier stuff (apart from the breathtakingly beautiful By The Wall), including the all-important song the robot band plays, and the dubstep the pipe wrench listens to, for instance. Now you can get those five as well, along with EP artwork, for free from Amanita. And if you haven’t played the game at all, good grief, what’s wrong with you? You can get it from here for $20. Check out our review, and indeed those of a dozen others, if you need convincing.

Last month Jim did a pretty extensive interview with development suite Unity Technologies’ co-founder Nicholas Francis. It got me thinking dangerous thinks, bold game design thinks well above my station. Jim and I started talking about those ideas, and following the news that the indie version of Unity was to become free that final arbiter of involvement – personal cost – was swayed. We would make a game.

Yes, I’m going to try and make an RPS game, in two months, using the freely available indie version of Unity3D. You’re going to help, if you like. So begins Rock, Paper, ShotgUnity.
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