Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It was the best of times; it was the worst of times.
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Brink is showing all sorts of potential. Back at E3 I was rather taken aback by the possibilities for blurring the lines of team-based online gaming and offering a linear narrative. And also slightly bemused by it all. There’s a big old preview here. Below is a video showing off the character customisation, but carrying with it a bunch of more useful information. The body type you create, it seems, isn’t just for your aesthetic pleasure, but also defines the role your character will play and the types of equipment he can use.

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The scores, of course, don’t matter. BUT THEY CLEARLY DO. Inspired by the analysis of Pitchfork’s scoring, Tom Armitage applies a similar methodology to Eurogamer. Go and admire his results here. It’s fun to click around madly, though the average score – 6.821 – will get quoted all over the place, I’m sure. What games scored lowest? See what the RPS writers did – John, Alec, Jim, Quinns, Tim and I. AND NOTE I GOT THE LOWEST AVERAGE OF US ALL. They’re all soft, I tell you.

Come here, I want to show you something. It’s this retro piece I’ve written for Eurogamer, about FPS Klingon Honor Guard. It contains passages like this:

I remembered why I so fondly recalled the mag boots. It’s the drifting. Walk forward to gather some momentum, switch off the boots, and then float to the next arm of the vessel as a shortcut, the infinite reaches of space above, below and beside you should you misjudge this jump. Or indeed actually jump. Make it, reach a stable platform, and you reactivate the boots and safely land. It’s sublime. That sense of absolute danger, converted to affixed security at the press of a button. I could happily play a game simply dedicated to this sensation.

You can read the rest of it if you go here.

Sundays are for swinging across the country in an enormous metal track-worm, then desperately trying to pull together a Sunday Papers before house guests turn up for a game of the just-bought Dominions and… what’s the Sunday Papers? Oh, you know, sweeties. You know. Let’s just hope I can get through this list of fine (mostly) game related reading before the urge to link to a pop song becomes overwhelming.

• Jordan Mechner was Prince of Persia/Last Express. Eric Chahi was Another World. They talk, in French. It’s translated at Gamasutra. Two auteurs on auteurism. Got to be worth reading, yeah?
• Julian Murdoch over at Gamespy talks about the Problem of Religion in games with a variety of designers, such as Molyneux and Ken Levine. Talking of which – seen that Irrational have started blogging?

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Once we get past early summer things get a little hazy. We enter a nether-realm of shifting dates and unclear prophecies. By then we’ll also have a whole bunch of games I haven’t previously mentioned show up in the intervening months, stuff that we didn’t have release dates for to place them in our line-up. This final post in our preview attempts to survey them all. To the future! (And check out part one and two if you haven’t seen them already.)
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There’s only one game that I have played in this weeks selection. Oh er. Lets see if I can successfully blag it, and convince you lot that I know what I am talking about. I think I’ll just rely on Alec for most of them. For more electronic cheapness get yourself over to SavyGamer.co.uk.
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Post Eleven of the Shotgunity diary – chronicling the progress of our Unity-based RPS game – and I’m starting to feel the cold damp breath of a deadline on the back of my neck. With only three weeks left on our schedule the process has become a mad rush to cram stuff in. The project, and the already busy mess of my brain, have both collapsed into deeper shaft of chaos. Still it’s Saturday, and that means you’re due Build 06. Find out what’s been making me sweat after the cut…
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Ah, how it’s grown. Where once Jailbreak hid its light under a bushel of reused City 17 character models, now it’s a bespoke, insane clash of dinosaurs and robots against cod-historical backdrops. It’s just hit its 0.6 release, and the Jailbreak Team seem to be treating this as though it’s the mod’s first proper release. Maybe it is, and any prior memories we have of it are simply a collective hallucination, like that time when poodles took over the planet for an entire Wednesday.
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There’s a lot of games to look forward to this year. Jim’s been writing about some of them today, in fact. (Parts one and two.) Amongst them is Just Cause 2, which has to be up there with Mafia 2 and The Old Republic in peak levels on my crazed antic-o-meter. Every video of the game makes it look like the most awesome fun toy (with that constant caveat: just so long as they don’t let the game get in the way). Their latest video(s) is a cute idea to show off how many different approaches you can take to a mission, with a choose-your-own YouTube adventure. The first part of it is below.

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Having just moved house into a place with broadband speeds that harken cruelly back to circa 2002 – the cost of living with normal people rather than fellow, bandwidth-hungry tech-nerds for a change – the last thing I’m going to be doing until I’ve begged, borrowed or stolen more mbps is playing games online. Which means I won’t have the chance to take Demigod’s newest Demigod for a look around in multiplayer just yet. It’s the second freebie semi-deity granted to the once-beleagured game, which is an excellent thing for Stardock (publisher, marketeer, explainer of Demigod) and Gas-Powered Games (its developer, yet peculiarly silent about the game throughout its life and pre-life) to have done. But, as with all things Demigod, new chap Oculus’ birth has not been uncomplicated.
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