Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I picked up this up from Soren Johnson a few minutes ago. I offer without comment.

Going through the RPS mail from when I’ve been away, I hit upon Cooper bringing Air Pressure to our attention. It’s a conversion of Bentosmile’s original into Flash, and is a short visual novel with three endings. It involves GIRLS again. I should turn this into GIRLS! week at RPS or something. Actually… I’ve had worse ideas. Inverting the straight to the sexy approach and… nevermind. This is slight but atmospheric, and suitably open to interpretation. Go plays.

Neptune’s Pride is a slow-form multiplayer Strategy game. We got together with our friends from PC Gamer to play. Weeks of bloodthirst, treachery and violence on a galactic scale later, we stopped. Then took a few weeks to recover. And then we wrote about it. The results follow. They say more about the players than anyone would like to admit.
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It’s a Thursday afternoon, and that means it’s time to talk about cute animals kicking each other to death. We haven’t covered upcoming indie action game Overgrowth much on RPS, which is a sad side-effect of its much-adored precursor Lugaru arriving before the Hivemind had coalesced into being. Let’s correct that now, as it’s hard to imagine you lot wouldn’t be interested in a videogame about a rabbit roundhouse-kicking wolves. I had a quick natter with Aubrey Serr, Wolfire’s lead artist and John Graham, Wolfire’s self-proclaimed coffee operations officer, about what Overgrowth is, where it’s at and the highs and low of self-funded development. It’s entirely possible that some, all or none of these were dressed as kung-fu rabbits at the time.
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THE FEAR OF TOTAL ANNIHILATION! Ah, it’s so quaint now (Are you sure? – Ed). News reaches us of a turn-based, somewhat playful take on the material – it’s not exactly Balance Of Power. Us & Them: Cold War from Icehole has a hefty, time limited demo, so – especially since there’s not exactly many games like this – probably worth a look at it if you have an interest in this sort of area. Well, probably. The Borderline probably which we call “maybe”. The impressions that lead to that follow…
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Looks like the new BFBC2 patch (which just rolled out on Steam and has been available to non-Steamers for a couple of days) is chock full of problems. Tom Francis over at PCG has collated some of the problems people claim to be having, which includes crashes and connection problems. I can report that it’s crashed to desktop for me since I patched on Steam this morning, although I’ve had stability for three games in a row now, so maybe it’s okay. Hmm. (You can opt out of the patching on Steam, but that means starting it up offline, I think.) Which is probably a good thing, because I have stacks of work to and an interview to transcribe, but…

Anyone else having any issues?

Game Trailers have a good interview with the Alpha Protocol team, which has reawoken my interest in the game. I think a combination of a disappointing E3 and some hefty slips has left me a little unsure about this one, but the footage here, along with the confident suggestions of the game letting me play it how I choose to, reminds me this is Obsidian. I trust Obsidian! Hooray! Take a look below and see if you have the same reaction. The game is due 1st June, which is AGES away.

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Ubisoft, as part of their current PR campaign to win the hearts and minds of PC gamers, are taking a new approach. Not only will anyone wanting to play Splinter Cell: Conviction be forced to keep their PC permanently online (and hope Ubisoft’s own servers stay online over a weekend) if they want to be able to play the single player game, but now very disappointingly there’s no demo for the PC player.

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Below is a video showing exactly what an MMO isn’t like. Chinese MMO Loong: The Power Of The Dragon is soon to reach Western shores via Gamigo, and to mark this occasion comes a video filled with clips of swooping dragons and epic battles. every now and then there’s a split-second glimpse of what the game actually looks like. But you know, what else are they going to do? I’m really only mentioning this because I like the name. “Loong”. Just saying it, or even pondering how to say it, is an enormous amount of fun. Get up from whatever you’re doing and go say “Loong” to someone near by.

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Attention-getting top line: right now, I can’t think of a better love story in the western medium.
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The current British government and its friends in the entertainment industry want the power to regulate what we download – and to punish us if they don’t like it. This must not be; while the Digital Economy Bill is posited as protection of copyrighted content – an anti-piracy measure, in other words – its proposed changes to copyright ilaws are terrifying on a level far beyond Bittorrent. You must take a stand against it. Doing so takes about a minute.
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