Rock, Paper, Shotgun

One of the now free-to-use Unreal Development Kit showcase games is a cute-looking fantasy tower defence game called Dungeon Defense. It’s “a Tower Defense / Action RPG hybrid created entirely within the UDK in just four weeks,” by developers Trendy Entertainment. Apparently it supports four players, and offers a fairly typical tower defence experience, as you defend the dungeon from hundreds of invading monsters. It’s free, too, and you can download it here, so that’s got to be worth a look.

As we all agree, the most important thing in gaming is realism. It’s the only thing I want in a game, the only thing I care about. Just so long as the experience is as close to replicating reality as is possible, then I’m happy. For instance, just now I’m playing this game where I update a website with a video of a game. Oh no, wait! That’s actually happening! And demanding realism is idiotic! Phew. Which is why Just Cause 2 makes me want to hug everyone nearby and say, “Look! Just look!” If this game is crap, I’m going to find everyone responsible and kick them right in the knee. So, yes, new trailer.

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Hey! Stop that, you’ve got it wrong: this is not Stalker by another name. In fact, it’s not Stalker to the extent that, were you to say “Is this like Stalker?” to one of the ex-Stalker developers behind it, they’d probably punch you in the the nose, walk to the top of the nearest mountain and then scream in raw fury at the skies until someone shot them up with enough tranquilisers to knock out a blue whale. It’s very determinedly not like Stalker, and I can’t imagine how many times the poor dears have had to bat away the same questions and presumptions. Metro 2033 is a post-apocalyptic shooter set in mutant-strewn modern Russian, but it’s not open-world survival fantasy. It’s a strictly linear first-person shooter, albeit with a touch of shopping and soaking up the atmosphere of civilian settlements in between dealing death to things that go bump in the subterranean perma-night. It’s Half-Life, it’s Bioshock, it’s Call of Duty – it’s anything but Stalker.
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This is a big one. No, really. News reached me via Qt3 that Malba Tahan – henceforth known as Saint Malba Tahan – has created a mod for the original System Shock. As well as letting you configure keys and plays with resolution, it adds mouse-look to the game. System Shock is, frankly, one of the most important videogames of all time, and the difficulty in actually learning its pre-mouse-look controls the biggest impediment to people going back and play it now. With Malba’s work, that’s gone. Go see Jim write here to get an overview of the wonder of Shock and then, assuming you can get hold of a copy, go get the mod here.
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The trailer. The trailer never changes. Yes, the first teaser for Obisidian’s upcoming Fallout 3.5, New Vegas, has arrived. As has a release date, ish – this Autumn. I.e. yer traditional pre-Christmas silly-season, then. Find the video and some words about it above. I mean below. Gosh, you’d have thought I’d have learned that by now, wouldn’t you?
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You remember the TF2 Propaganda compo, yes? You remember the winner, yes? Do you remember the runners-ups? If you do, you’ve been to the TF2 blog before we posted this. If you haven’t, go look, and prepare yourself of future remembrance of the awesome array of talent shown by the TF2-community. There’s just some brilliant stuff and I salute them all. The top image is by the delightfully named metalpiss. I’d go see a doctor about that, man. It’s not right.

We’ve been playing the unusual MMO Mortal Online for the past couple of weeks, and Phill and I took some time out to talk about it. Read our thoughts on this strange spiritual successor to Ultima Online below.
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So here’s an odd thing. Cheyenne Mountain, the developers of the Stargate Worlds MMO, are about to release a team-based Stargate-themed shooter, Stargate: Resistance, via Firesky studio. Stargate Worlds, you might remember, has had extreme difficulties with funding, development, and all that stuff. Which kind of begs the question as to why resources are being poured into a (frankly not great-looking) shooter instead. Well, it seems that the company want to offer something to fans, and this is a kind of “look we really are doing something with the Stargate license” offering intended to appease the hungry Stargateers (Stargatians? Stargaties? Stargatistas?) Anyway, the game is out February 10th, on digital download, and the trailer is below.
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Upon emerging blinking into the, er, darkness after a binge-play to completion of Bioshock 2 (thoughts on which will appear here in a few days), I realise a) I still have to post something on RPS even though it’s gone 2am and b) I have no idea what’s next on my plate o’fun now that I’m all done with that and Mass Effect 2. So, in the spirit of doing mean things to two birds at once, here’s a few things happening in the near future (starting tomorrow, in fact. Well, today now) that should reignite my excitometer.
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Probably our major gripe with Gearbox’s many-weaponed first-person-roleplayer Borderlands was that hosting/joining multiplayer games was more complicated than painting a ceiling with a live scorpion. Four people dicking around with router settings is hardly gung-ho adventuring. A mere four months after release, they’ve finally fixed the networking problems that made the game’s super-fun co-op mode super-unfun. Or so they say. Actually they say this: “Multiplayer connectivity has been improved; users should no longer be required to forward ports to host or join multiplayer games.” Which is excellent, if depressingly tardy news. Does this 1.21 patch solve the problem for you? Tell us! Oh – that link in the sentence before last is purely for boxed copies of the game – Steam et al will update automagically.

Okay, we’ve created an agency in Global Agenda, because we’d like a crack at that conquest game, which I should point out is open to all players, even non-subscribers, until March. The agency is simply called RPS, and anyone should be able to sign up. So come join us if you’re in-game. (I’m rather enjoying the PvP games playing as a mercenary, but not sure about the PvE stuff, the rewards aren’t high enough.)