Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Mr Meer is out in the snowy wastes today, trying to find his homeland. So it falls to me to point out this excellent interview with Chris Taylor, following the recent Supreme Commander 2 preview.

Eurogamer Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Alec Meer, Hero Journalist: Do you feel like conventional RTS has given up and is moving on – so many people just can’t do the multiplayer now?

Chris Taylor: We’re definitely focusing heavily on our story and our single-player game, we want to make a really rich experience for somebody who doesn’t want to go online and fight other people. Should we be moving away from base-building like in some other games? I actually think base-building is really fun, and an important part of the game. Innovation doesn’t mean we move away from that. Innovation means we do things like add strategic zoom, we have really cool Experimental units and half-baked systems and systems that really make the game more lively, but not at the expense of the core RTS experience that we’ve learned.

Read it all.

I like “Blimp Wars“. Not that I’ve played the casual blimp-warring game yet – it’s only just launched and, at present, no-one’s online. But I like that it’s called “Blimp Wars”, and in RPS’ sickly world, that’s enough to post about it. It’s about Blimps, at war, which I think we can all agree is the natural state of the blimp. There is nothing more depressing to man’s nature than the sight of a blimp at peace. You can go sign up and play here, or watch a trailer to get the vibe for the steampunkian design-you-blimp-and-fight below…
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Oh dear, I’m not the smartest of all the men, and I’m often easily confused, but… ooh, a bee. Also, I’m really struggling to get my brain around Bittos. It’s a new puzzle game that’s due for the Wii, but out already for the PC, and there’s a demo of it available. I’ve watched the “how to play” tutorial twice now, the second time shouting at the screen, and I’m not entirely sure what’s going on.

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Okay, I am just working through game links here, so apologies for the volley of random Flash game links. This one is extra-plus awesome however, and discovered via the ultra-fertile sediment that is the TIGSource forums. Realm Of The Mad God is a “massively co-op fantasy adventure”, and that means acutely lo-fi multiplayer killing of ghosts and stuff, helping random people as you progress. You put in a name, choose a class, and off you go. It’s as basic as it could possibly be, and completely superb. Play!

It’s not easy being a swan, as this webgame, Endless Migration, is quick to point out. If it’s not the swooping jumbo jets that get you, it’s the Zeppellins. This is a kind of reverse shoot ‘em up, where you must gather a migrating flock and stay alive as storms, aircraft and other hazards batter your numbers. On my first run my flock survived a mere 23.4 seconds. Hmm.

VVVVVV is the year’s first controversial Indie talking point. Soon, everyone will have an opinion. Too difficult? Too short? Or just too wonderful? I take my time to sit down and play distractionware’s first real commercial game and tell you Wot I Think…
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Today in Cruel, Existentialist Browser Game News is this tragicomic little ditty. It’s free, it’s pretty, it takes about a minute to play, and I really don’t want to spoil it by writing much about it. Life is hard.

I’ve been playing with (semi-)free auto-machinima-maker app Xtranormal this morning. This is the result…
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The preview/hype campaign for Zero Point’s upcoming ‘AAA indie’ shooter Interstellar Marines continues to be interesting. Following on from their Unity-powered 3D scene thinger, they’ve now made a browser-based minigame to show off some of the tone and feel of the thing. Sure, it’s just about shooting pop-up targets – an FPS tutorial stage writ large – but they’ve made it more than the sum of its cursor-onto-cardboard-face parts.
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OK, we’ve posted rather a lot of Mass Effect 2′s approximately 3178 different trailers to date and thus should restrain ourselves from hereon in, but I can’t help but mention this one. Last year was fascinating/horrifying in terms of Bioware marketing – with Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 both they alternated wildly between trying to appeal to the more traditional RPG fan and then to some sort of marketing-envisaged additional crowd, some mass of potential players who just needed a bit more unconvincingly-animated sexual intercourse and past-its-outrage-by-date goth metal and then they’d surely pour untold millions of Eurodollars into these games. Supremely easy to scoff at, but also supremely rational. Money makes the world go round, and we’d be fools to believe Bioware thought any differently. And yet the most recent clutch of Mass Effect trailers suggest a return to traditionalism- and the most recent even seems to be making amends.
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Set cliches to cliche, something about beaming, where no sentence has gone before. Cornish pasties for heads. Red jumpers. There – that meets the government required minimum quantity of Star Trek references, and a fine is once more avoided.

The big news is: Star Trek Open Beta opens today (12th Jan) at 10am PST (2am proper time), letting all sorts of riff-raff into the universe.

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