Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It appears the word “EXTREME” is the thread in my linkposts today. ANYWAY! Paweł Dembowski dropped us a line, noting that details on another canceled Fallout game have come to light. If the sources are correct, it was only in development for a few months by 14 Degrees East in 2000, and appears to be a Hidden & Dangerous-inspired tactical shooter. As in, four men, free switching between them and all that. Also, aimed for the original XBox, but since it’s only of historical note worth mentioning on this most PC of blogs. There’s some story details here and some mechanic-based stuff in the sidebar here (UPDATE: And some more here). This sort of stuff happens in developers all the time – a couple of months, then killed. I’d love to see a mass list of The Games That Could Have Been from our favourite developers.
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Wrestling games are a somewhat console proposition. Back in the day, any teen-orientated games mag would just lob the latest wrestling game on the cover, knowing it always sells. However, not all wrestling games are bashers. Grey Dog’s Software’s is a highly PC Wrestling game, in that it’s about numbers. No terrain, but you can’t have everything. Yes, it’s the latest version of the wrestling management game, complete with a demo. The big change seems to be the addition of narratives to the matches, so you can set up storylines and similar. So John would like it. I had a quick crack now, and didn’t really get very far, progress curtailed by a slightly clumsy interface and not knowing anything about wrestling. Anyone played the older ones and have anything to share?

You need no more information than this. Until Thursday Steam has one of the loveliest games ever, Psychonauts, for £1. It’s hilarious, it’s so beautifully written, and it’s bursting with invention and ideas like nothing else. And if you want to complain that the platforming is often a bit dodgy, I reply with: IT’S ONE POUND. A pound.

A pound. (Or two dollars.)

Why not? Everyone loves it when our crazy comments page numbers thing kicks in. Ubisoft have taken their senses and posted them into outer space. Responding to the public outcry for more draconian, inconveniencing copyright management, they have replaced Starforce and announced their new PC-only DRM system. One that requires you be permanently online in order to be able to play.

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After all that Garriotian goodwill generated by Kieron’s welcome ‘hey! Remember Ultima?‘ nostalgia-tickle over the weekend, brace yourself for a shock. EA have brought Ultima back at last! Yipee yahoo hooray! Except… it’s not Ultima.
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We get sent a lot of emails from people asking to write for us. Some want money, so we hiss at them until they leave us alone. We’re unbelievably poor! If we give you some of our money, we’ll surely die. Many don’t want shiny gold, merely prestige and appreciation, and while we’re pleased to be thought of so highly (you make us feel like a natural woman) we’re still not up for posting unsolicited submissions. RPS’ tone is important to us and if we open the door to one thing, we’ll never be able to close it. Like that scene where they turn off the ghost storage machine in Ghostbusters, only with crazed rants about Bioshock instead of skeletal taxi drivers.

But! We really would like to support budding games writers – reviewers, interviewers, feature writers, diarists… People who want to write about videogames. So we’ve created a new section on the forum specifically to showcase them: the Writer Hive.
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An awful lot of indie games come our way. Some of them are great fun. Some of them are properly great. But what about the floaty spaceship platforming adventures of the worryingly named Bob Came In Pieces? Read on to find out wot I think.

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RPS’ War In Hell is over. The ruler has been decided. But the real ruler of hell remains – and he’s Vic Davis. He’s Cryptic Comet, and between Solium Infernum and his previous Armageddon Empires, he’s positioned himself as the most interesting strategy computer game designer in years. We thought it the perfect time to catch up, discover how Solium Infernum is doing, ask about the seemingly divisive pricing as well as uncover the first real details on his next game…
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Yeah, it worked.

After four (count ‘em) years, Serious Sam Forever releases something. It’s planning to basically be a total conversion to run the old games in the Croteam’s Serious Engine 2 and… wait, I don’t want to think about it too hard. Relevantly, they’ve released a MP demo with four maps and game modes. Which doesn’t sound very interesting, until you realise it’s got a fancy bot system that allows you to have more players than usual in a level. How many?
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What appears to be a zombie-site is stealing all our content and republishing it. Which happens a bit, but this particular site is also hotlinking the grabs, which is adding insult to injury, so after they (obviously) refused to stop doing it, we’ve decided to do this and see if it ends up on their site. Because it amuses us. It wouldn’t grate that much if they were smart enough to put us in the “PC Games” category of the stolen content, but they’ve put us in the “MMO” section. Which part of “PC Gaming Since 1873″ is hard to understand, eh? Anyway – if you’re reading this on the other site, do come over to our real home. We have a nicer lay out and comment threads where people post. And aren’t vile little parasites, obv.