Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Ooh, I hadn’t realised this went up: I reviewed Fallen Earth over on Eurogamer. I cause controversy by being fairly upbeat about it, but I think that’s because it’s not a review of the broken game we got at launch, but rather of the game as it is now. And that means there’s plenty of protest about it in the comments. Fallen Earth is rapidly improving, and shouldn’t really be judged on the state it was in at release. It has problems, granted, but I’ve enjoyed this more than many other things I’ve played recently. There’s a ten-day trial available if you want to make your own judgment.

Kieron: RIGHT! The Starcraft 2 beta is out. We’re all in, except John, who doesn’t want to be in. Is it the most anticipated RTS ever? Yeah, on the mass-cultural scale, probably. We’ll almost certainly be writing a load more down theline, but we thought it’ll be an idea to get those first impressions down. Does nothing compare to Starcraft 2?
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It’s been a slow week in mod news. Well, actually, that’s not necessarily true. It’s been a week of lots of things, but comparatively few interesting things. To the point where one of the links below is to bloody weapon renders, the absolute bane of Slow News Week on ModDB. A few nuggets of intrigue appear, though – have a read beneath the jump for this week’s picks.
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Hurrah! More of the critically acclaimed (by us) Radiator in the near future. Robert Yang sends news of its third part to debut in either March or April. One of the two, unless it doesn’t. What’s it about? Well, it’s called Much Madness and Robert describes it as: “You’re trying to escape a sinking submarine after stabbing your husband in the back repeatedly — to make matters worse, Emily Dickinson’s ghost keeps reciting those blasted poems of hers… Maybe drowning to death isn’t so bad?”. Bloody Emily Dickinson, that’s what I say. The trailer follows, but you can download the previous episodes over at Radiator’s site…
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Can Just Cause 2 really be as good as the expectations being raised by the trailers? Oh sweet hairless Moby on a tricycle, I hope so. But perhaps I’ve just stumbled upon the real reason behind BioWare’s marketing campaign for Dragon Age! They could have released it as a Disney movie tie-in third-person platformer and it would have felt like a better game than we were expecting. Avalanche haven’t thought this through at all well. And as further proof, below the jump are two more trailers for the game that radomaj demanded we post. Both made me laugh at loud and anticipate like a beast.

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New Borderlands DLC, The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, will be out on Thursday, priced at $10. Apparently this new pack is even bigger than the previous Island Of Dr Ned, and continues the game from where it ended, raising the level cap to 61. There are reportedly thirty new enemies in this expansion, and even a 4-player vehicle (pictured above). Some trailers below.
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A Lifetime Achievement award, that is! Just my little joke there. Sorry. You hate me now, don’t you? It’s late and the punning part of my brain has been asleep for hours.

Yes, the idmeister general is be honored with said accolade at the upcoming Game Developers Choice Awards (I swear that should have an apostrophe somewhere), for his “his contributions to the art and science of games”. Which is a rather lovely way of putting it, to my mind. He follows in the gong-grabbing footprints of Will Wright, Sid Meier and that Mario bloke, and can bask in the warm glow of knowing a panel of his esteemed peers – from the likes of Bioware, DICE and Popcap – nominated him for it. Well done, big John. Now go and make sure Rage is brilliant, please.

Details of the award and a spot of Carmackian backstory below…
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That was supposed to sound like a nice little rhyme. Alas, it just comes across as a really boring, proasic headline – they should have sent a poet. Anyway, the point is that the promised widescreen patch for Bioshock 2 is due tomorrow (at 2AM PST), and will address the returning BS1 oversight/disagreement/confusion that the field of view remained at 4:3 settings even when played in 16:10. Just writing that turns my brain to mush, as it makes me feel as though I’ve been stuck in a temporal loop since 2007, forcing me to continually write something about Bioshock and field of view into a WordPress page again and again. It’s good news for people with nice monitors, however – and as well as that there’s both a larger patch and some DLC in the offing.
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This broke on Friday, but worth bringing up here, I think. Remember the wide-spread eye-rolling provoked by the ludicrous piece of marketing gibberish that the atmospheric horror game basically wouldn’t work on the PC due to a lack of sofa-magic or something? Well, Remedy’s Oskari Häkkinen tells VG247 that’s more of a preference thing, and the real reason is that they’re a small 50-person company and don’t really have the staff to do both at once, at least well. They’ll sit down with Microsoft afterwards. My take? Expect to see Alan Wake PC six months to a year after the 360 release. They’ll want to maximise its console-exclusive potential then consider a port.

In the wake of the extraordinary news stories regarding UK PM Gordon Brown and his alleged bullying of staff, one man saw that this needed to be explored in gaming form. That man was Steve Hogarty. That game is Beat Down With Brown: Intern Overload. Kieron and John give it a Verdict below.

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It seems to be space-walk week here on RPS. We started off swooping about in the Shattered Horizon free weekend, and now we’re performing difficult space-tasks on the international space station, thanks to NASA’s Station Spacewalk Game. If you ever wondered where all that spare money is going now that Obama cancelled the second trip to the moon, well, look no further!