Rock, Paper, Shotgun

A while back, on a slow news day, I wrote a spoof story about there being only one man left at Infinity Ward. I’m started to wonder if it was prophecy. The Modern Warfare developers are rapidly running out of employees as more leave, many to join Respawn Entertainment, the new studio started up by former Infinity Ward top dogs, Vince Zampella and Jason West. The total number of IW employees who have now jumped ship or been pushed, at the time of writing, is 28. That leaves 75 remaining. And now things are getting even more strange, with 38 Infinity Warders, calling themselves the Infinity Ward Employee Group, filing a lawsuit against Activision for up to $125 million.

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Cult Of Rapture has some details on the forthcoming extras:

The Rapture Metro Pack is coming soon for Xbox 360, PS3, and Games for Windows Live for 800 MS Point or $9.99. The pack includes six brand new maps including areas rebuilt from the single-player game for MP modes. We also have three new achievements and trophies and have added the Rebirth Feature for players who have reached Rank 50 – using Rebirth, you can rank your character down to Rank 1 and receive a special mask.

Still no release date, however. (I have to admit I blasted through the single player, but didn’t bother to touch the multiplayer. Is it worth taking a look at?)

The next content patch for zero-G pew-pew game Shattered Horizon should arrive next week (May 5th). It’s called “Firepower” because it focuses on expanding the range of weapons available to the killer astronauts. The armaments in question should gradually appear on this page.

Trailer below. It’s a bit space-porny, and dudes get shot.
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Five years on from Guild Wars coming out and ten from Arenanet being formed, Guild Wars 2 has just launched their blog. Over the next few days, it’s going to be releasing the first solid new information on the game in ages – and we’ve done a two part (probably) interview to tie in. However, the first post by Mike O’Brien teases much stuff. You can go and read it here, or go to my cheery bullet-point-fact-digest below.
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This is totally retro. Armalyte! It’s an official remake of the classic C64 shooter. Being a Spec-chum, I never played it back then, but always looked at its cover-art longingly. Finally playing after all this time, I discover a fairly brutal R-type/Nemesis-esque game, with a perpetual shooty drone following you around and a constantly recharging hyperblasty thing. It’s an efficient remake with updated graphics – though oddly no “classic graphic mode” which I can see. My initial criticism about the demo would be that the enemy bullets actually look a little like power-ups, which caused an embarrassing death early on. It’s also retro in another really odd way. While you can go and get the demo here, you can’t buy it as a digital download. They actually ship the disc to you. Finally, at a price of £16.99, I suspect it’s not exactly going to attract many people who aren’t predisposed to indulge in a little 80s nostalgia. Video and links to other bits of coverage follows…

EDIT: After a rush of requests, they’re planing to actually do a digital-download option for a cheaper price. Will keep you informed.
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When you’ve got Eve Online’s senior technical producer on the phone, it’s rude not to ask him about his plans for that most righteous of MMOs. Here’s what Olafsson had to say about Eve and forthcoming expansion, Tyrannis. We also had a few words about console action crossover, Dust 514. (Am I convinced there won’t be a PC client? No, not convinced. CCP still saying it’s their console game, however.)

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Chris W saw this on BoingBoing last week. Hatetris is basically a game of Tetris which deliberately gives you the worst possible piece at any moment. And it really does. I just played now, and consider it a considerable triumph that I managed to get one (count it!) line. Play here. You can watch replays by people who are actually good, which you can get from here, plus the designer notes on it. I’ll be interested to see how well anyone else can do. Well done, creator Sam Hughes. You bast.

I’ve been looking forward to The Whispered World since PC Gamer’s Graham Smith returned from Cologne last year to tell me how lovely it looked. A point and click adventure into which a huge amount of love was being poured. It’s been out in Germany for a long while, but has now been released in English. My review of the game is now up on Eurogamer, and it begins like this:

“There’s a sensation familiar to anyone who knows adventure gaming well. It’s that moment when you’ve cracked a puzzle, and the game opens up. Suddenly there are two or three new locations to explore, new objects to find, and new puzzles to solve. Those mysterious inventory items make more sense in this new context, and previous unsolved puzzles receive that vital clue. They’re fantastic moments, stepping out of dark rooms into bright light. It’s probably the very hardest thing to get right in an adventure game. The Whispered World demonstrates one of the more frustrating ways to get it wrong.”

Below is the launch trailer, plus some other thoughts that – for reasons explained – couldn’t go into the review.

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I like playing the game: Guess The Genre From The Title. Although sometimes it’s just too easy. The freshly announced End Of Nations is an real-time strategy purely by its having three words in its title, one of them being “Of”. If it were called “Nations’ End”, then it would be a much harder round. That could be almost anything. But shock twist! It’s an MMO too. And you were so smug about it, too.

Pleasingly topical, the story is triggered by the economic collapse in the early 21st century, bearing a new organisation to rise up against the ensuing anarchy, the Order Of Nations. But they’re not very nice. Which means it’s time for revolution. And some really big tanks.

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This should be one long piece, but I’ve been distracted by going to France and arguing with Kieron about routing in fascinating but incredibly complicated boardgames. Figured I should deal with the spoileriffic stuff while it’s fresh, though. Conclusion tomorrow, chums.

The Passing: the long-awaited conflluence between Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2. There’s only one way to describe it.

Uh-oh.
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In the grand tradition of mods gone pro, such as Counter-Strike, Killling Floor and that unplayable Doom 2 level with 354 Cacodemons I made back in 1995, fantasy-themed Civilization IV uber-total conversion Fall From Heaven is going standalone.

How so? We don’t know. With what engine? We don’t know. With which publisher? We don’t know. WE DON’T KNOW. We know only that it is, in theory, enormously good news – Fall From Heaven has accrued the kind of status that a good 50% of people you mention Civ 4 to will immediately name-check it, so it’s not really a surprise that this is happening. There are any number of specialist strategy PC publishers who would be insane not to pick it up. Trailer of the still-existent mod version below, trailer fans.
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