Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’ve already giggled about this on Twitter, but the urge to nerd-share remains strong. I remain somewhere between cautious optimism and Great Fear about upcoming Transformers-does-Bad-Company action thinger War For Cybetron, but the below fan video switched me over to a big huge Want on the spot. All the stern-voiced macho posturing is removed and replaced with pew-pews, synth piano and Looney Tunes voices from Sunbow’s 80s Transformers cartoon. Is it too late for the devs to patch an optional G1-sounds mode in? Say it isn’t. Please say it isn’t.
Read the rest of this entry »

Oh, piss. That’s Macbeth. Anyway, the previously discussed Indie Hamlet Adventure has been released. You can download the demo here, which allows you to play the game for an hour before you have to pay to unlock it. I guess, anyway. That’s what normally happens. This is some high quality games journalism going on here. I’ll try and recover by pointing at another Hamlet game, this one a text adventure. I played a little of this a while back, and I approve of the general Bill and Ted “she’s your mum, dude!” approach to the material. Oh – trailer follows.
Read the rest of this entry »

Sundays are for drumming your fingers until the servers warm up on a closed-Beta of a game and compiling a list of fine (mostly) games related reading from across the week, while trying to avoid linking to some piece of irrelevant pop music. Go!

• In the week of the Digital Economics Bill, Rob Fahey writes about the triumph of the small over at EG/GamesBiz. Example quote: “…one of the serious, underlying problems with the Digital Economy Bill is simply that it legislates primarily for a market in which copyright and intellectual property resides with a handful of powerful, monolithic companies who can afford to take the kind of expensive actions against illegal downloaders and their enablers outlined in the bill. As Denki’s problems earlier in the week starkly illustrate, this is not where our economy is moving.”

Read the rest of this entry »

What a terrible week for special offers. I don’t think I’ve missed anything. *CONSPIRACY THEORY* Modern Warfare 2 free weekend has scared everyone off. There’s lots of repeated offers from previous weeks, and lots of games discounted a tiny little bit. Here’s my choice of the slim pickings, although there’s a belter of a deal of the week. Remember to follow SavyGamer for all the deals all the time.
Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of people mailed us about this. In short, reports have came in of Mythic’s billing system going mental and charging people multiple times for their subscription. Go to the forum to see some of the reports, with some people reporting hundreds of dollars being vacuumed out of their bank accounts. The official advice at the moment is that the vendour will reverse payments in 24-36 hours, and if it hasn’t by then, you should hit up your bank, who should reverse the charges (And if they don’t, you should phone Mythic Billing). They also promise more news on the issue next week which – considering some of the tales of over-draft annihilating woe in the comments threads – better include at least some conciliatory compensation to those affected.

While this seems to be a US issue, I suspect anyone with a Warhammer account probably should check their account.

Following on from Yesterday’s announcement, PC Gamer have published a mass of quotes that I didn’t have room to fit in my feature (Which is available in their current mag). Firstly, there’s a bunch from Simon Nelson, Multi-Platform Controller at the BBC, mainly talking about why the BBC is doing this. Clearly, worth reading for those wondering about the thinking behind it. The Second Article is cut from two conversations. One is chatting to Steven Moffat and Piers Wenger of Who fame on pretty much everything, including having Dr Who Doom Mods. The other is to Charles Cecil, Sumo and BBC Wales’ Senior Producer Mat Fidell. Lots inside each piece, but I’ll pull out some fun quotes beneath the cut…
Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I dunno. But it’s certainly worth doing a news post over. Joining the brave people who made a serious announcement on April 1st was Galactic Gaming Guild announcing their Full Ace Tennis was finally available to buy for fifteen (count ‘em!) Euros. If only there was a way to see whether the game was appealing to you before playing? Of course, in the days before the DEB we’d have all just pirated the full version before paying up if it took our fancy. However, in this brave new future of Secure Profitable Internet, Galactic Gaming Guild have offered a portion of their game to play to work as a kind of pirated-game surrogate. You can download it from here, and allows you to play – er – Tennis. Just less Tennis than the full game. Some Beta footage from last year follows, as it’s all I could find to link…
Read the rest of this entry »

You may remember in September last year, when – among the other splendid happenings, such as the first communications with the people of the Martian canals and the discovery that ancient Egyptians were the inventors of the popular dance “the locomotion” – there was The Whispered World demo… in German. And now – in the month when lasers appeared mysteriously from the nostrils of all Welshmen of greater than four years – there’s The Whispered World demo… in languages other than German. As in, English. You can also buy it from GamersGate here, for Earth money. Not filthy Martian coin. Oh – trailer follows.
Read the rest of this entry »

The internet is about to be ablaze with info from the recent Crysis 2 event in New York, which I totally didn’t get invited to. I’M NOT BITTER. Fortunately news-sleuth Pat from VG247 has a load of it, including an interview with Crytek superboss, Cervat Yerli. Not much concrete on the PC version, other than suggestions that it will be “best”. The impressions of the game sound impressive too, even if it is more aliens, and even if it did cause Pat to collapse into some kind of modernist experimental streamed free-association brain-burst:

Wall Street, through a tunnel and someone talking in ear, like fucking wow, epic scene of crumbling buildings and falling debris player drops out onto ledge and room gasps just fucking awesome zooms in Chrysler building and down onto street trees and burning cars marking enemies scanning MAXIMUM ARMOUR CLOAK ENABLED grab from behind, invisible sneaking round on rooftop shoots human enemy through something like solar cells distance marker on enemies…

Yeah. [There's also an interview with Mr Yerli, by the excellent Miss Alexander, just here.]

Over on Bit-Tech, chilli-loving young Joe Martin is embarking on an epic quest to document the far corners of the British games industry. He’s thrown up quite the gem for today’s instalment: a hefty look at Eidos’ unrealised MMO adaptation of the Fabled Lands choose-your-own-adventure books. (There’s a PC port of them here). A fascinating tale, both in terms of where the game itself was going, and as a reveal of the painful flipside to that early-2000s era of hyper-creative development. For every Giants: Citizen Kabuto or Sacrifice, there’s probably a dozen crash’n'burn cases like this.

Fancy a quick quote? “The Fabled Lands MMO might have had an incredibly advanced AI that acted as a digital gamesmaster. Hypothetically, this ‘AI God’ would have tailored the experience for each player, beefing up quests to meet skill levels – a technology that was likely beyond reach at that time.” Now, go read the rest.

Kieron’s resurrection project for his splendid Liberal Crime Squad diaries brought to mind something I penned during RPS’s salad days. At the time, our audience was just a small collective of PC Gamer readers: now we are old, fat and happy with the love of many. Thus, pray allow us to entertain you with whimsical tales from our childhood. In this case, my misadventures in the (at that time) just relaunched Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the most shoeless of times.
Read the rest of this entry »