Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’ve realised that the relative complexity of the Shotgunity project might be distracting from a central idea I’ve wanted to get across in this series, namely that it’s easy to make games with the Unity tools. To prove this point, today, together, we’re going to make a clone of a giant in gaming ancestry, we’re going to make Pong in a post. And not even an overly long post at that. Grab a copy of Unity and meet me after the cut.

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Every dog has his day. Some days, you have to be a dog.
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Now, that would be something. AND IT WILL BE. While the 360 release of Introversion’s Darwinia+ isn’t RPS’ business, their launch event at BAFTA crosses over into our world for three reasons. Firstly, it’s a developer Q&A whose topics include “Which is better, Xbox or PC?”. Well, PC, obv. Secondly, I’m actually the chair and will be both prying truth from the Introversion boys and selecting raised hands from the audience. Thirdly, you get a free drink if you buy a ticket. Yay drinks! Anyway, it’s on February 19th and tickets are available now for a fiver each. Do come.

Robots, tanks, super-weapons, more robots, more tanks. An enormous explosion. You probably know the sort of thing, but it’s still worth having a gander at Gas Powered’s latest, Supreme Commander 2, in action. Can it actually innovate as Mr Taylor intends? Can it still keep our interest with ludicrous sci-fi death machines? Well, probably.
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This broke a couple of days ago, but it’s the sort of thing worth mentioning in the Public Record Of PC Games that is RPS. I’ll keep it short. Remember Hellgate closing? And then to open in the lands of not-us? Well, now it’s to return to the lands of us. When I say “us”, I mean “RPS”. Not trying to start some kind of race war against anyone from South East Asia, where Hellgate was already going to happily play around. I leave the starting of race wars to Walker. Or Jim. Or, if he’s in a particularly bad mood, Alec. I will never start a race war. Except against the 100m dash. I hate that with all my heart. DIE SHORT SPRINTS, DIE.

Er… question is begged. What about those life-time subscribers, eh?

Limbo looks amazing. We’re all certain we’ve posted this video before, but there’s no evidence of that on the site. Indeed, the short clip is three years old, but Limbo is up for the Technical Excellence award at this year’s IGF, and the trailer is haunting and brilliant. So throwing caution to the wind, risking that snorted comment, below you can see why it’s been nominated, and join us in wanting to see whether the game is able to pull of such seemingly natural movement. I mean, when he jumps, he jumps like he doesn’t have springs in his shoes and isn’t made of floaty polystyrene. That alone makes this game stand out.

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I’ve been playing through the early parts of Larian Studios’ recent RPG Divinity II in my spare time, with a view to writing up a detailed piece on it for RPS when I beat the full game. It’s been an uneven experience, because while it’s an inferior experience to both Risen and Dragon Age, it has kept me coming back to it. I’ve been coming back not so much for reasons of enjoyment, but because of stubbornness. I don’t want this fucker to beat me… But maybe it has.
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It’s just a brilliant, brilliant idea for a game. Jurassic Park: the management sim. Most attempts at bringing Spielberg’s dino fantasy into interactivity concentrated on the action: the running, the jumping, the shooting and even on the being-a-Velociraptor thing. They had their moments, but they were so staggeringly ignorant of what the Jurassic Park concept really was. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, so it’s far too easy to slam all those developers for not stumbling across the total sense that a tycoon game made for the license. After all, I can remember desperately wanting to shoot digital dinosaurs around the time of the films too. I wasn’t a subtle child.

Operation Genesis flickered somewhere in my peripheral vision back when I was reviews editor on a magazine. At that time, its two core attributes were things to be scorned: Jurassic Park 3, two years previous, didn’t lend much dignity to the movie series, and if I threw a rock in the air I’d hit at least five cheap, lousy tycoon games that we couldn’t/wouldn’t find the space to review. A Jurassic Park tycoon game? Gotta be awful. Gotta be. What a fool I was.
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The seven stared at each other. They had been in silence for minutes now, each muted by the time to come, their voices curled in their throats like dying mice. Around them was darkness. A darkness which at least offered the illusion of safety. It was their sheol, betwixt inevitabilities, offering perhaps the thinnest sliver of hope of rescue before their fates concluded. Their time was over, but in the darkness this single moment whispered lies about the possibility of their lasting forever.

L and S went first. The other five watched uselessly as the pair faded from their bleak view, unable to do anything, but worse, unwilling. Better them than us, each thought.

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An episode otherwise known as “Let’s get Speedo”.
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This excited me when I first heard about it, and excites me even more now that footage has been released and I can see it in motion. Mode 7 Games’ first game Determinance was something which I think most of RPS feel the team over-reached themselves by going full-3D realistic 3D. Frozen Synapse couldn’t be more different. It’s a simultaneous turn-based game with really iconic looking graphics. Think of a non-e-mail-based Laser Squad Nemesis with Introversion’s 80s-neon aesthetic. And if that leaves you confused, the following footage should explain all…
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