Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Ooh, this is like Where’s Wally with Actual Game Footage. I think there might actually be a fraction of a second of game footage in this latest Front Mission Evolved trailer, somewhere between all the full-motion video stuff. See if you can spot it! In case you’ve no idea what is going on here, well, this is the latest part of Square Enix’s tactical RPG series, Front Mission, which has only gone and turned into a mech-based third-person action game. Quite a peculiar evolution, I must say. Still, it might be fun for a few minutes, and it’s out some time this spring. Mmm.
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One Emcee Slick brings us Borderlands: the rap. “When you’ve got seventy million guns / why use swords and knives? / I chose the hunter Mordecai / and now I’m level 45.” He knows it.

A Mass Effect 2 trailer you say? But those are more rare than the freckled unicorn! I’d heard rumour they were even extinct. But no, it is real, it is yours to watch below.

Has any game received more trailers? Better question: has any game had so many good trailers? This latest, and perhaps even last, is absolutely stunning. 150 awesomes. The game comes out on the 26th in the States, and then because of the NO REASON WHATSOEVER reaches Europe by the 29th. Well, I suppose you can understand their decision to make sure their game is on all the torrent sites for three full days before making it legally available to buy for an entire continent. Oh no wait. [Please smash your head into bricks here.] But despite this continued idiocy, the video below is a corker.

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If you sup with the devil, bring a long spoon.
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But just how big? Well, I’m glad you asked, because CCP have released a bunch of videos showing off the 3D hangars from Eve Online, which I’ve posted below. They’ve done it by race, so you get the full spaceship-porn effect of the various visual themes. What you don’t really get is the sense of scale for these things, so I’ve posted a Garry’s Mod video in which some bloke has dropped scale models of the Eve ships into the G-Mod sandbox. It really does give you a sense of the enormity of the really large Eve ships that you see in the hangar videos, as they disappear off into the Source engine clouds. (Header image from Eve comparison chart.)
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Those of you with a modicum of interest in Ubisoft’s latest iteration of the Silent Hunter series will probably interesting in seeing a bit of how the campaign might play out. Clearly this has been edited up with the action bits to be as fancy as possible, and won’t really get the hours of stalking enemies and peering through your periscope, but it does give an idea of the kind of events the game’s dynamic campaign should generated. You know the kind of thing: ships sinking, stuff exploding, allied commanders facepalming.
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Here’s a little quick thing for you while Quinns and I work on the penultimate (or is it?) part of Gameboys from Hell. Quinns has also done some hands-on-impressions of Love for Eurogamer. You can read them over here. It’s also worth noting that the first forty or so posts in the comment thread are a kind of performance art. Hurrah!

I’ve had this idea for a game! It’s a game where there’s zombies! Indeed, as vampires saturate the movie and book world, the zombies take over gaming. In fact, this zombie invasion is taking on a worryingly appropriate pattern, each undead game spawning dozens more. It can only be a few years before there are only a tiny group of non-zombie games, battling to survive in a world taken over by the lumbering creations. “Noooo! Call of Duty! Not you!!!” “RARGGLLLE GLRARGH! CALL OF DUTY: ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE!!” “Noooooooo!”

But I don’t care! Zombies are a brilliant enemy, and I’m happy to see people see who can use them in the best way. Another game taking a go is Zombilution. And rather pleasantly, this time you get to play as the zombies. There be demo.

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There aren’t many game design competitions that I feel a man of my total lack of game-design skills could possibly have entered, but TIGSource’s Assemblee is one. I curse myself for not submitting something – though in fairness I was moving house at the time, so drawing sprites in Photoshop on my laptop whilst sat in a removal van would doubtless only have resulted in nightmarish ineptitude. The super-clever concept is this: a little while back, any passing artists and musicians created and submitted a ton of original creations, with no specific game or aim in mind. In other words, they had no idea what their creations would be used for, or who by.

In stage 2, any interested programmers helped themselves to this cheery mountain of weird and wonderful assets, and mashed them into working games. Some of the results are astonishing.
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Good news, everyone. Last year’s sequel to the beloved, olden, indirect-control strategy game Majesty is to receive an expansion pack. Well, of course it bloody is. It’s an RTS. An RTS without an expansion pack is unthinkable. Where else would we get our new maps and units from? How else will we find out what ultimately happens to some supporting character we didn’t really care about? What else would we possibly do with that £15-25? RTSes get expansion packs? IT IS WRITTEN. That said, I wasn’t at all sure Majesty 2 would – despite being heir to a landmark game, it was a little underwhelming. A little too similar to its parent, and a whole lot too samey. Question is, does the upcoming Kingmaker fix any of that?
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Okay. Let’s keep this just the facts, as everyone knows what they mean. The tech specs for Bioshock 2 are out. They’re reasonable enough. There’s also some fun DRM. Online verification via SecuRom, with an install limit (15 machines, admittedly). To save the game or play online, you need to be logged into Games for Window Live. This still applies on Steam – so SecuRom and Games For Windows Live are needed in addition to the Steam client. Hmm.

UPDATE: 2K Community Manager Elizabeth elaborates over at the forums. In short, it will be doing the standard Games for Windows Live activation – as in, you can play and save games offline without achievements. SecuROM is only a disc-check method for the retail copy. While final details of Steam are forthcoming, that may imply it won’t be there. Hmm.

Comments thread… go. Let me and Edwin Starr provide the soundtrack.
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