Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The incidental detail and little flourishes of scripted events are looking like the main thing that Metro 2033 has going for it. We understand that it’s all set to be a fairly traditional monster-shoot, but there’s no denying the loveliness of the ruined-Moscow in which it takes place, as you can see in the trailer I’ve posted below. I believe we’ve got some detail impressions of this in the pipeline, so expect an RPS brain-dump on the excitement-value of this game fairly soon.
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They sneak up on you, they really do. It’s already time for the BioShock 2 launch trailer. In fact, Mr Alec Meer is playing it as I type. It’s just around the corner, after seeming like perpetually a year away for about fifty-five years. So you should probably watch the very pretty pictures.

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Do you like smashing stuff? I do. Glasses, plates, Fabergé eggs, jars containing the souls of lost children. So games about smashing stuff make me very happy. Red Faction: Guerilla being the most recent highlight. And now thanks to the kindly stranger (I’ve forgotten who it was, sorry) who tipped me off to Rubble Trouble, I’m having a gleeful smashing afternoon.

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The true casualty of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 isn’t the hundreds of soldiers who die each round, or even the dozens of vehicles that lie strewn across the battlefield, slowly reduced to scrap and rubble by continued ordnance as they’re used as cover by desperate marines. The true casualty is the scenery. You’re presented with a pristine (or mostly pristine) landscape that is about to become a battlefield. The soldiers are like a horde of locusts, sweeping through for their conflict, leaving the entire place ravaged and skeletal, each building a carcass stripped of all its outer walls, and most its inner, until it’s little more than a few support columns and what remains of a roof. Bad Company 2 is devastation: arbitrary and completely unhindered.

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Hurrah! Robokill’s back. The original game had both Walker and I write a little around, and now there’s a sequel. In short – it’s a Smash TV/Robotron versus Diablo cross, with you upgrading your little mechanical fellow while working your way through a maze of rooms. While there levels and monsters are all new – and the monsters seem much smarter – almost everything we said in the original pieces holds true. As in, the pits are annoying (though there’s less of them) but it’s really good fun, the rumble of your multiple-guns builds up and it’s well worth playing, especially if you haven’t touched it before. Video follows.
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Everyone’s playing it. I’m playing it. John Walker’s playing it, even though he hasn’t worked out how to heal. Your mum’s playing it; she’s romancing Garrus, and he’s making her feel more alive than she’s ever felt before. So – why aren’t you playing Mass Effect 2? If the answer is ‘I’m already busy playing Dragon Age: Return To Ostragar at bloody last, and it’s frankly unfair of you to expect me to give every waking moment of my life to Bioware games’ then very well. Otherwise, you should totally enter our competition to win one of 4 Direct2Drive copies of the shooty-spacey RPG. Apparently a lot of people quite like it.
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One Mr Bock writes, a little sad there’s no external discussion of Estiah other than a thread on the Penny Arcade. I feel the same about the Neptune’s Pride Beta, so decided to have a quick nose and… yeah, it immediately has a couple of mechanics that look quite interesting. It’s a limited-actions-per-day thing, but there’s a neat Guild Wars-esque twist in terms of how combat operates. Worth a look, if you fancy that kind of thing. And a few thoughts about both this, and this kind of thing below…
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Jim and John gathered together aboard the RPS yacht to put right all that is wrong with everything that’s ever happened in the universe. Eschewing tweets in episode 38, instead we spoke about the contents of our head, from Mass Effect 2 and dreams of a different BioShock, to DRM and the peculiarities of mining in MMOs.

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Some Duke Nukem Forever footage has surfaced (and been posted below), via the all-seeing eye of the Big K. It’s got a fairly random soundtrack, although not entirely inappropriate, given the subject matter. There’s also some tumbleweed, which seems some somehow symbolic. It’s not clear what stage of development this was from, but I think we can assume it wasn’t the most recent build.
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Just a quickie to say that AvP Classic on Steam now features multiplayer support. When launched last month it contained the three campaigns and the skirmish mode, but the decade-old game wasn’t sporting online fights. And now, rather splendidly, it is. Using Steam’s overlay doodah combined with the in-game lobby, you can arrange games with friends for olden days style entertainment. There’s no dedicated servers, nor plans for any, but I’d suggest this is one occasion where an angry campaign might not be worth the effort. It currently costs a measly £3.

The third Stalker game, Call Of Pripyat, has been out in Europe and Russia for quite some time, but it has only just made the leap to English-language release. The UK version due on Friday. I’ve recently completed that edition of the game and my account of that experience follows.
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