Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp. Stomp. Following up from Jim’s post a little while ago, The Thing That He Said Was Happening Has Now Happened. To whit, a reiggered version of Mechwarrior 4: Mercenaries can now be downloaded and played for no-pennies, courtesy of proactive fan/developer collective MekTek. Yep, they’ve priced this juicy bone from the very jaws of the slavering Microsoft hound, which means all it now costs you is 1.7Gb of bandwidth. It comes with a clutch of MekTek’s improvements and additional units, weapons and the like too. Yeah, you’d better be grateful.

Download links and setup guides await you here. Stomp. STOMP.

See this axe? Yes, the imaginary one I’m holding, made from laserbeams and impossible fury. Well, I’m going to grind it.

I quite like Transformers. Ergo, I am quite looking forward to Transformers: War For Cybertron. One of the Transformers I most quite like is Shockwave. Shockwave is a playable character in War For Cybertron – but only if the game is pre-ordered from Gamestop. Or, if you’re all goody two-shoes and want famed Autobot Jazz, you can only play as him if you pre-order the game from Best Buy. There’s also Demolisher if you get it from Amazon, but whatever.

Basically: aaaaaaaargh. Angrytank, roll out.
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Yesterday I told you wot I thought of the first half of the GTA IV: Episodes From Liberty City, The Lost And Damned. Today it’s the other half, The Ballad Of Gay Tony. Having played it from beginning to end, I feel rather equipped to let you know Wot I Think.

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Well, 10 years, which is BFF! in corporate terms. News broke of this yesterday, with the aforementioned 10-year publication agreement to bring Bungie’s next game universe to market. Bungie will keep intellectual property rights and remain independent. Obviously, this is enormous industry news, and there’s no real details yet – I wouldn’t be surprised to see some at E3 – but this is relevant for one key reason. This is a multi-format deal. And something which hasn’t been mentioned explicitly yet… well, the PC (and the Mac, for that matter, given Bungie’s roots) are other formats. It’d be good to have Bungie back with us. Question, is what are they doing? What would you like them to do? The MMO angle is brought up repeatedly, certainly. Personally, I’d be a little disappointed if they split from Microsoft just to make another Sci-fi universe…

In other notes, analysts are reaching new levels of incisiveness with this one.

Now this gets interesting! Despite sites claiming that the game definitely was Call of Duty: Vietnam earlier, PC Gamer reveal that the site for Call of Duty: Black Ops is now live, though impossible to actually get into. And they claim that when the “Black Ops” rumour originally broke, it was a Cold War game with missions from all across that period culminating “in the famous 1980 storming of the Iranian Embassy in London by the SAS”. Who is right? Who is wrong? We’ll know tonight when the trailer rolls. My money’s on Call of Duty: Shaking That Booty, where Activision cross two of their biggest franchises in a shooting/rhythm-action game.

UPDATE: Black Ops confirmed. But will it be a Vietnam black ops/cold war black ops/booty-shaking ops game? You have to suspect Cold War. A Vietnam Black Ops game would be… questionable.

News breaks that the latest Call of Duty game will be unveiled tonight on Gametrailers. It’s called Call of Duty: Vietnam, it’s being made by Treyarch and – er – that’s it. Vietnam based games have… well, they’ve traditionally not fared as well as other operational theatres. You have to kind of feel sorry for Treyarch operating under a double shadow – both the continuing high-level corporate drama of The Infinity Ward Wars and having to try and make a game that actually works out of a setting which has proved incredibly awkward to translate. I have to wish them luck, and hope they can do something to skew the numbers on the traditional “In World War II the average mark of the combat game was 82%… it Vietnam it was 49%” style gags. Which sounds like a cue for a song…

UPDATE: Except the news which break has broken! See here.
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Well, the first 20 minutes of it. But right here. Lucasarts have gotten into bed with streaming browser game specialists InstantAction and come up with a clever special edition of the Special Edition of The Secret Of Monkey Island which fits neatly into an RPS post. This doubtless, was their sole intent for it. Expect more games converted to play within RPS posts, starting with Crysis 2 next month.
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Dan Kelly alerts us to the (apparently) now fixed bug which slipped in with the last TF2 update, which allowed you to build as many sentries and dispensers as they choose. “There’s something very cool about watching 40 sentries simultainiously bleep and take down a heavy,” he notes. You can follow the chaos on the TF2 forum, with lots of people doing their own ludicrous, glorious, game-ruining gun spam. And some footage with Spose’s NSFW I’m Awesome as a soundtrack follows…
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Of all the cars wot go fast few are as complicated, or generate as much Newtonian excitement, as F1 cars. No one knows this better than Paul Jeal, Codemasters senior producer, and a veteran of the Geoff Crammond era F1 games. It seemed advisable to ask him questions about F1 2010, and so that’s what I did. Read on for our quick pit stop of facts.

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I am sadface, king of sorrow. Dino-biffing remake/sequel Off-Road Velociraptor Safari HD has been more-or-less cancelled. Boo! High concept heroes Flashbang seem to have had a hard time of things lately. Double-boo! They’re not sure whether or not their future holds more absurd delights such as Minotaur Chinashop and Time Donkey. Boo-to-infinity! Best of luck to the good ship Flashbang/Blurst, whatever they do next. You have entertained us fantastically, gentlefolk, and we look forward to you doing it again soon.

Footage of what ORVSHD could have been like is below…
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At either end of 2009, two “episode packs” were released for the 360 version of GTA IV: The Lost And Damned, and The Ballad Of Gay Tony. As of a week or two back, the two have been released together for the PC, not requiring the original game to run. It’s an awful lot of game. I’ve finished the both, and so it’s about time I told you Wot I Think. First up, The Lost And Damned. (Be advised – there’s a picture of a man’s front bottom in this article.)

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