Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Happy Jesus Egg weekend! I’m glad RPS has reverted back to 2010, or I was going to have to find out the details of a sale at WHSmiths or something. I’m back from PAX, and ready to serve up a metaphorical platter of PC game cheapness. As always, SavyGamer.co.uk is the where all the cheap games hang out.
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Blogging was all usual on April 1st here. Well, as usual if it was April 1st 1993. It seemed like a good idea. No, really. All the stories follow…
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A lot of people pointed this out to us. It’s an impressively well-done animation-insert of the Team Fortress 2 cast into the trailer of the recent Law Abiding Citizen. Next up, we request the introduction of Pyro and Spy into In the Mood For Love. Yeah, you heard. Until then, you’ll find Law Abiding Engineer below…
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Showing that a failure to understand human brains isn’t limited to their UI-team, Cyanide’s marketing folk decided it’d be a good idea to announce their Blood Bowl Legendary Edition on April 1st. But no! It’s for reals and everything. Basically, it appears to be an expandalone expansion to the game – and while it’s possible they’ll do an reduced price upgrade or even a Witcher-esque free thing, I suspect you’ll have to pay full-whack for what it offers. Luckily, what it offers is really quite exciting. Mainly, adding twelve new team types to the eight already in the game. This includes such joys as the Undead, Amazon, Norse and Ogres. They’re also promising new arenas, a story-lead single-player game and rules tweaks to keep it up to date with the Living Rulebook. Let’s hope they manage to work in some polish to the league systems (i.e. Any polish) and UI before its released near the end of the year. That said, the Vampire player in the shades above really is splendid. I fear the Skavenblighters will be coming out of retirement.

Road/River/Desert/Mountain Trip! After spending seventeen hours with Just Cause 2 completing the single player and doing everything and anything stupid enough to enter my skull, I’d discovered about a third of all the settlements in the game, and had only found one or two interesting locations that aren’t on the map. Obviously, this had to be rectified. The best way to do this is a tour of the Island State, allowing my curiosity free reign to take my anywhere that looked even remotely interesting. It took Jim eight hours to drive around the world of Fuel, a world more than ten times the size of Just Cause 2, so I didn’t think this would take me less than an hour. But how long? And what was out there?

I had a few rules first, of course. I couldn’t use any airborne vehicles, as that would completely defeat the point. Similarly, I wouldn’t be using any Agency drops, meaning that if I got stranded in the middle of a desert (or on top of a mountain) without a vehicle, I’d only be able to use my grapple and good old jogging power. Basically, once I was dropped at my starting location, that was it for outside help.

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Time to sit down and start singing about it going gold. Or, at least, the next version, which is as close as we get in the world of the ever-epic short-chap-simulation Dwarf Fortress. A list of mirrors can be found here and the full list of changes here. In short, lots of simulation improvement – including, intriguingly, souls which store an individuals mental attributes and skills. Also, fatness for tubby dwarves and – ooh – a massive expansion to the underground. Be a dwarf! Dig! Dig! Anyway, as I said, get from here, see tutorials from the last version here (i.e. obsolete, but enough to get the jist) and generally get stuck in. But Remember: initial releases tend to be a bit twitchy. It’s also interesting to read their April report, saying what they’re up to, including the amount of donations they get for hard-stats indie-number-crunchers.

There was a whole lot of April Comedicosity yesterday, but Variety reported on one thing which – if it happened – could have re-justified the whole sorry festival’s sorry reputation. Ex-Take Two Producer Jason Bergman reported that, on their schedule, April 1st 2010 was the day they were planning to announce Duke Nukem Forever had gone gold – and later confirmed it wasn’t a joke. Putting aside the obvious question mark whether 3D Realms could actually hit a date, imaging how that would have played out, with the argument and counter-argument of whether it was 4 Realzzzz does put a smile on my face. A shame.

We mentioned it was released earlier this week, but Mount & Blade: Warband now has a trial version (Or here). It’s basically the full game, which you can advance your mounted, bladed one up to level 7. After that, you’ll need to pay to unlock the full version. Honestly, if you’ve never played Mount & Blade, this is an ideal chance to start with its Horsey-Horsey Elite-meets-Rohan-isms, and a fine thing to spend your Easter weekend on which doesn’t involve eating your bodyweight of chocolate Jesus. Trial here and launch trailer follows…
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In 17 years, it will be 2010. The number 17 is important to us because that’s the age at which mother will finally let us buy our own clothes. Also, 2010 sounds totally sci-fi. We’ll defintely have jetpacks and laser-epiglottises by then. Having spent years deep in exhaustive, cutting-edge research, these are our top 17 (we do like that number) predictions for the future:
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Oh man, I can’t imagine loving anything more than Star Wars. Spaceships and robots and laser swords and that masked evil dude who sounds like he needs a throat sweet – those cool 80s films are the best thing ever. And I really like chess too: it’s like a 3D videogame, only you don’t need to wear silly glasses! So Star Wars Chess is a dream come true, maybe even the game I’ve been waiting for my whole life. The only way the universe could possibly get any better would be if they made some new Star Wars films. That would be so awesome.
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I know I’m always banging on about some obscure piece of Russian software, but mark my words: the next big thing in PC gaming will come out of the United States. Sounds like I am saying lies? Well screw you. I mean it.

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