Rock, Paper, Shotgun

If there’s one game this year that the leader of the Autobots didn’t expect to enjoy, then it was the next one you’ll find behind today’s door in the seasonally festive advent-o-calendar. He just loved it, and thanks to Hivemind’s cheery commentary, you can learn to love it too.

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The Zombie Island Of Dr Ned, Borderlands’ first piece of downloadable content, is now available. You can get it here (link dead at time of writing, which is a lot of use…) for retail versions of the game, and here for the Steam version. I’m not sure about other digi-download versions, but I’d assume the retail patch will work? Any ideas about that, comment below. I’ll have a play and report back if it’s worth paying the $10/£6.30. Trailer below.
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Here’s a really cute trailer for a game I’d not spotted before this morning: Bob Came In Pieces. (And with that name everyone should be grateful that it’s me who’s writing about it and not Kieron.) It’s a puzzle platformer that looks utterly charming, flying a small ship around, pushing the scenery, blowing things up, and of course collecting coins. The concept appears to be solving the levels’ puzzles by how you rebuild your broken ship, and thus what abilities it possesses. It looks like a really smart idea, cobbling together your ideal setup from the pieces you’ve found, and then using them in the game. Well, take a look.

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I return home from a noisy room in which a lot of people recognised my name but not my face to find an inbox full of strident missives about the latest Team Fortress 2 rumour/viral mill. This now fairly veteran game’s ability to generate headlines and gossip is incredible – Valve have managed to create a second meta-game/fiction that exists alongside but outside of the now very familiar team shooter. All power to them, obviously, but I’m consistently amazed at how deftly they’ve managed to create so hint’n'potential’n'humour-fatted a universe from the slim concept of Red vs Blue. This time, it’s a comicky book. A rather pleasing one, inevitably.
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It’s one of what I call a Simon Parkin Special. Or, at least, I will now. Picked up from his flashgame-hungry twitter, it’s Gimme Friction Baby. It’s basically a cross between Puzzle Bobble, Bowls and those men who pay other people to inflate their testicles with saline. You fire balls upwards. Wherever they stop, they expand to fit the space. Each ball can take 3 hits. You get hits for destroying balls. You lose the game if a ball bounces back at you. It’s pretty compulsive. It’s a Simon Parkin Special!

As Jim brain-farted last week, something has to follow/replace the current zombie trend, as its time basking in the golden light of zeitgeist can’t last forever. Giant robots seem a pretty good bet: a nerd-loved science-fictional touchstone that’s lately found traction amongst the streamiest of mainstream. That is, of course, due in large part to Michael Bay’s Transformers movies. The problem is 1) those movies are pretty bad and 2) their associated games have been really bad. But what happens when there’s a giant, shape-changing robot game, starring Mr O. Prime and chums, that isn’t churned out in a matter of months to coincide with a beyond-mindless movie? In other words – would it be totally stupid to start hoping that the newly-announced Transformers: The War For Cybertron could do for big robots what Arkham Asylum did for superheroes? A superb* Transformers game is the right of all sentient beings, after all.
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It’s the biggest news for kerzillions of people this month. The 3.3 patch for World of Warcraft has gone live. It’s enormous. I’ve actually cut and pasted the whole of the patchnotes below the break, just because it’s so amusingly hefty. It abstractly finishes the whole Wrath of the Lich king element. What’s interesting is that’s not entirely true. While the content’s there, it’s entirely all available. In Icecrown Citadel (outside Swindon) the gates to the next biffy bit opens in 28 days time, apparently. WoW.com calculates that means at the current rate, that Lich King won’t fall until April (Their guide to Patch 3.3 is a monster too). Anyway – the patch trailer and the patch notes follow. What does RPS’ WoW-faithful make of 3.3 life so far?
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Hell – now there’s a setting for a video game. Hell lets a game’s artists and writers run naked and wild and free, and in just-released indie strategy game Solium Infernum it also happens to tease out some hugely intelligent design ideas. I’m glad for that, because it balances out the damage done to my precious brain every time I see footage from Dante’s Inferno. Man, that game. You take not only a nonviolent epic poem but the single most nightmarish and psychedelic setting known to Western civilization and you use it to make… a God of War clone? Are you kidding?

By contrast, Solium Infernum is a turn-based, play-by-email creation, and it’s my second favourite game this year. Good year for demons, I guess.

As I said, it’ll be a while before an RPS Solium Infernum review, but Quinns reviewed it over at Game Set Watch. What that boy said. He’s not entirely stupid.

The man they call SAeN brought this to our attention. We bring it to yours. Sign up for the Empire: Total War beta is now open. Options apparently include playing the entire campaign with another player, co-operating and backstabbing at will and fighting the real-time battles against the AI, or have your friend take the place of the AI. Oh – and a AI faction nations improved too. Though we’ve heard that one before. [Visit Bobsy's lonely thread of love to find yourself a multiplayer partner, should you need one - Jim]

Having spotted this over on the almighty TIGSource I thought “looks interesting.” Having played it, I can now upgrade that to “is awesome.” Igneous is a kind of rock, which is interesting because Igenous rocks. Sorry. It’s actually a kind of Wipeout-with-a-jumping-head-meets-Sonic 3D. Something like that. It’s not easy, and you will plunge into magma. Oh, just go and play it, because everyone should. This fiery fruit of the Digipen Institute is 115mb, and can be obtained here.

We get quite a lot of bits and bobs sent to us in the mail. We don’t often mention it, as we like to keep our bribes on the down low. Oh yeah. Bags with an enormous badly-designed logo turn our heads. However, today a Guild Wars 2 artbook dropped through my letter box. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a game that’s had some of the most spectacular concept art in games it’s a hell of a collection, as well as a brief primer in the lore for their new game. It’s actually for sale via the GW2 site for twenty quid (or thirty dollars (or twenty five Euros)) and I suspect would make a fairly nifty Christmas present for a Guild Wars obsessed friend. Sadly, none of the other RPSers like Guild Wars, so I’m keeping it. Another chance to look at the latest trailer? I think so…

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