Rock, Paper, Shotgun

You’re unlikely to have missed that CES was going on last week, and it coughed up a few gaming bits and pieces. One of these was a demo of the rather shiny-looking Lego Universe. The all-seeing record-o-brain of GameTrailers was there, and it delivered the five walkthrough videos you can see posted below. It shows the character creation, glimpses of the world, the importation of Lego constructs, and so on. It’s interesting that you can see a lot of the seminal Lego Star Wars design influence in there. It’s going to be for kids, it seems, but also for very big kids. A mixture of the basic run-about-smashing-stuff fun of the previous Lego games, with co-op building, competitive building, action stuff such as racing and combat, all combined with the user-generated input that Lego is clearly going to inspire in generations of plastic-brick-layers. Go take a look.
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The Sims 3 Create-A-World Tool, which is a tool for creating worlds in The Sims 3, is now available in beta. EA says: “Design Entire Worlds – Players can choose terrain patterns, vegetation and neighborhood accents like water towers and lighthouses, then place lots and roads to create something totally unique.” It actually looks fairly impressive, and appears to be a free download update for the game. There’s also a large PDF walkthrough which shows off some of the features and teaches you how to use the tool. The tool appears at the same as the Hi-Tech pack, which can be used to furnish the houses in your landscapes with contemporary furniture and consumer gadgets.

I’ll be doing a Wot I Think about this later in the week, with any luck, but I wanted to do a quick post to bring this to your attention as it’s just been released. VVVVVV is the first full-size “real” game from Terry “distractionware” Cavanagh who you may know from the previously-hailed Judith and Don’t Look Back. VVVVVV is an imaginary 80s classic with modern formalist brilliance – as Braid is to Super Mario Brothers, VVVVVV is to Jet Set Willy. If you don’t want to download the demo, you can play it online at Kongregate and then buy it from here for nine (count ‘em!) quid. Lots more to say, but I’ll leave you with the footage…
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Browsing through the recently released demos, Cyber-Wing caught my eye, mainly because it claims inspiration from the generally-credited-with-father-of-RTS game Herzog Zwei. To modern PC-eyes, it’s more like the games like Hostile Waters and (the relatively modern) Battlezone than what we think of as an RTS, based around building units, then controlling them as you go out to kick ass. I haven’t had a chance to play it yet, but in terms of influences, that’s quite the caliber. The demo can be found here, and there’s a whole more info on their site. I especially like the nervous disclaimer of “Cyber-Wing is not a sequel to Herzog Zwei nor is affiliated with TechnoSoft or Sega. It is no more similar to that game as Call of Duty is to Counterstrike.” Its price? Five dollars. Crikey. Anyway – video follows.
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I’ve been meaning to check out the enigmatically named Flash game Basketball for a couple of weeks, after spotting it via Mr Parkins’ blog, but first it wouldn’t work, and then I forgot. I remembered again! I’m glad I did. This is rather fun. As the canniest amongst you may have deduced, it’s a game based on an element of basketball – a sport in which you must put balls in a basket.

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Since Age of Decadence is showing progress towards release, I thought now would be a good time to mention that it’s not the only thing that Iron Tower Are up to. Cyclopean is a Lovecraft derived RPG set in Arkham and involving – oooh – things with tentacles, things man was not meant to know and extreme adjective abuse. It is Lovecraft, after all. It’s clearly long way off, but here’s some concept art and here’s some of the in-progress 3D models. It’s certainly a classic setting for an RPG, but always a tricky one. What sort of things would you have in a Lovecraft RPG? At least it cuts down on the books you’re meant to read as in Lovecraft YOU SHOULD NOT READ THE BOOKS.

French games site NoFrag has some rumours about the next Blizzard MMO, which we know has been in development for some time. Blizzard have already said it will be quite different to World Of Warcraft, but could it be a science fiction MMOFPS with some kind of social element? That’s what NoFrag’s “secret sources” are saying. This is an interesting idea, and totally plausible. After all, people forget that WoW seemed like a risk for Blizzard when they did it originally. The MMOFPS area represents a similar risk: an area that has been dipped into, but never aced. Additionally, that social element. You could see how that might work: life in a science fiction society, where lovable robots and cute aliens can hang out and play Space Chess, but also go on shooty missions. It sounds like a pretty good bet, but the sad thing is we’re not going to hear any kind of confirmation from Blizzard for quite some time.

Roll your speculation, people.

Sundays are for finishing off an epic videogame play-by-mail battle, trying to shake a nasty lady gaga obsession and compiling a (particularly enormous) list of the interesting (mostly) games related reading from across the week, without linking to some manner of hastily lobbed up you-tube entry by the alt Lady Gaga. Go!

• Do look past the questionable writing – as all readers of RPS should be more than capable of being – and the EA_SPOUSE-echoing words of the Wives of Rockstar San Diego is an ugly picture of development.

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Happy 2010 folks. How much did you manage to “save” over Christmas? In the wake of the epic steam sale that was, you may be hoping to avoid splashing out on some cut-price interactive entertainment software, but nay, I say, nay! Spend more (in smaller chunks) play more, that’s the bargain bucket’s new year’s resolution.
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Don’t let the new year and that crisp blanket of white covering Blighty lull you into thinking you’ve got a fresh start, readers. Some things have continuity, some things linger and refuse to die. Things like Rock, Paper, Shotgunity, the game we’re making using the freely available Unity development suite. Get back into the groove with Build 05 after the cut.

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There’s power in legacy. It’s a power, a significance, this industry is only just old enough to offer. Which makes it peculiar that publishers so often seem determined to conceal it all with the incessant anonymisation of acquired studios. As Ubisoft, EA and 2K (among others) buy and rename studios, we’re left with a collection of studios that presumably present well on a Power Point demonstration in a shareholder meeting, but do little for allowing gamers to associate a particular studio with a particular legacy. I think the importance of this has been severely underestimated. We seek out the films from particular combinations of actors or directors, we buy the next book by the same author, and I think that very often people are loyal to studios. There has to be a huge audience who would have bought anything with the name “Irrational” on the box, who aren’t going to remember 2K franchise they were. Oh, wait, that example’s no good any more. No more are they 2K Boston! Game Informer reports they’re Irrational once again.

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