Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The reverend of reductions, the bishop of budget, the primarch of (er) primark-esque prices, LewieP notes that Steam are doing another Indie Midweek thing which will be gone by the Bargain bucket at the weekend. Altitude, Bob Came in Pieces, Bullet Candy, Galcon Fusion, Gridrunner Revolution, Space Giraffe and Super Laser Racer are available for two quid a pop. You can buy all seven for a tenner, saving four quid. John loved Bob. I dig the hell out of Galcon Fusion, Gridrunner Revolution, Space Giraffe and Super Laser Racer. A tenner for those five alone is frankly ridiculous value. The other two could be great too – I just haven’t played ‘em. Go buy, before they realise they’re being mental.

This is a heavily revised version of an article first published in PC Gamer UK, last year. It’s based on a presentation given by Ray Kurzweil at GDC 2008, and subsequent conversations I had with the author Charles Stross and the game designer Eskil Steenberg.

This article began back in 2008, when I was sat in the audience for GDC’s keynote speech by futurist Ray Kurweil. “Games are the harbinger of everything,” Kurzweil was saying, as he delivered his take on the future of everything (with slight emphasis on games) to the assembled design-masses. The controversial technologist, who regularly talks about his hopes for technological immortality and transhuman ascension via artificial intelligence, was arguing that games were where the future manifested itself. “Ultimately,” he said, “they’re going to be competitive with real reality.” These were claims I’d heard a bunch of times before. Often, in the pub, during conversations with Kieron, as he gesticulated dangerously behind a glass of wine. Other times from developers, writers, and gamers. I realised, watching Kurzweil, that it was something I was going to have to write more about: just what kind of future do games promise?

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Jonathan Blow’s taken his time to openly discuss what he’s up to in the wake of Braid being a runaway hit (some of which’s profits he’s funneled into the Indie Fund, gentleman that he is), but now he’s allowing the world a little peek down his trousers of tomorrow.
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I was going to post this trailer anyway, as advance warning of Tim Stone’s forthcoming Wot I Think about Achtung Panzer: Kharkov 1943, which people are saying it could be the first genuinely groundbreaking tactical wargame since Combat Mission. Apparently. But when I hear that Paradox-chieftan Frederik Wester selected the music thinking about RPS, I could hardly not. He brings us footage of tanks, the shouting of Heinz Guderian famous book-title and Rammstein-esque synthy-Teutonic (despite being Swedes) racket from the band Raubtier .
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This week’s mod news is characterised by the inclusion of a couple of genuinely interesting looking mods for ancient games. And by ancient, I’m talking at least ten years old. What age were you ten years ago? I was knocking on twelve! Man! I hope I’ve now made everyone feel really, really old.

Anyway, the games in question are Unreal Tournament and, somewhat curiously, Half-Life’s first expansion Opposing Force. Find out what people are doing to them, and a whole host of other things, below.
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A new NPD survey, published yesterday, suggests the average amount of time spent in online gaming grew by 10% in 2009. The number of digitally downloaded games purchased also grew for the third year in a row. Well, duh. Perhaps the most interesting statistic, however, is that the PC still dominates online gaming: “The PC is still the most-used system for online gaming, with 85% of online gamers reporting using a PC for online gaming activities.” The overall population of people playing online has, however, dropped slightly, which seems kind of odd/unlikely to me, given the Facebook gaming boom.

David Souter sends word of the latest work by “Notch”, Minecraft’s coder-wizard, which should make the landmass of a Minecraft world larger than the entire planet. Notch says:

The world is 30 million blocks across. A block is one square meter. 30,000,000 meters is 30,000 km. 30,000*30.000 is 900,000,000, so the Minecraft world is nine hundred million square kilometers. The earth has a surface area of about 510 million square kilometers.

It IS larger than the earth, people!

Minecraft is also totally brilliant. Go try it out. (Picture via Casey Jamieson.)

Some indie games make a lot of money. Most don’t. Worse, many never even get off the ground because they have no funding. The freshly-announced Indie Fund means to change that – it’s an angel investment group set up by some of independent gaming’s greatest current luminaries (the likes of 2D Boy, Jon Blow, Flashbang…) and intended to help the next generation of indie devs get started on making wonderful toys for us lot to play with. I.e. more Worlds of Goo, more Braids, more Audiosurfs, more Solium Infernums… This is a good day. A fantastically, wonderfully, bloody good day.
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This is, I suspect, only the start of a story which is going to grow and grow. G4 broke the rumour yesterday that “a bunch of bouncer types” had showed up at Infinity Ward, following the Infinity Ward heads Vince Zampella and Jason West’s reported meeting with Activision in the morning – which they hadn’t returned from. Kotaku picked up that Jason West’s facebook account claimed to be drinking and no-longer employed. G4 uncovers that morning Activision had an SEC filing stating investigation into “breaches of contract and insubordination by two senior employees at Infinity Ward.” And now VG247 are reporting rumours that unpaid royalties to Infinity Ward was part of the cause of stress. Oh – and Tim Schafer says the best one liner about the whole thing.

Really, all we’ve got right now is theories. Though, like Rock8man at Qt3, Bobby Kotick’s hailing of “skepticism, pessimism, and fear” does tend to leap worryingly easily to mind.

Hopefully just your moral character, and not your hard-disk, as Absolute Power is the expansion for Tropico 3. Interesting one this, because I hadn’t heard much of the game after release so I had to wonder how well it had done for sales. Turns out it did this many: enough for an immediate expansion pack. How many is that? I just don’t know. Anyway, Absolute Power includes a “new campaign featuring 10 missions on a separate map with 10 islands which are also available in sandbox mode”, and an archipelago of additional buildings, roads, and other island-forming stuff. There are also new factions, and other bits to spice up the political side of things. No sign of an official web page for this yet, but the release date is approximately “summer”.

It is, quite simply, the best Bear-based driving sim of all time. It’s picked up a Nuovo nomination in this year’s IGF. It’s time to meet up with Justin Smith and give him a great big Bear hug…
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