Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Good Old Games has a page where you can nominate classic games you’d love to see appear on their site. Then if others agree, they can vote to support this game. The theory being, the more votes, the more interest GoG realises there is in procuring the rights to a particular game. There’s some naive voting going on, with people asking for games that are actively on sale, like The Secret of Monkey Island or Planescape: Torment. However, appearing on the list with 4603 votes is Outcast. It’s available now.

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There’s a new game mode arrived for free-to-play cartoon shooter, Battlefield Heroes. It’s live on a new night-time map. EA says:

In this fast paced game mode you and your allies must capture and hold the rocket and keep it from enemy hands. Jump in with gusto or rocket fuel and make sure your enemies do not get the upper hand and claim the rocket for themselves.

You can see a bit more about it in the trailer, which I stuck down there in clickland. (Grumbling about the cost of micropayments continues, it seems – anyone familiar with current state of play?) Also: JETPACKS!
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Monday, train, Oxford. Tuesday, train, Waterloo. Wednesday, train, Brighton. Thursday? I don’t remember Thursday. Friday, train, Paris. Saturday, train, London. Sunday, train, Brighton. Repeat/mix/repeat/train train train. Small orange tickets everywhere. Map print-outs to places I’ve never been before, will never go to again. Long-distance job, long-distance relationship too, home is only the place where my bed happens to be. Glamorous? No, exhausting, hollowing. Yellow light on grey skin, slumped in a frayed, greasy fabric seat. No, I don’t want drinks or snacks. Yes, here is my ticket, the one I’ve showed you and your machines time and again, again, again. Bored/tired/bored. Too many papers, too many books, too many MP3s. Games. I need games. Games that use my mind, that focus, sharpen and obsess it.

Slay. Slay is perfect. I shall attempt to gather up the pieces of my travel-maddened brain and tell you about it.
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The idea was simple: take five food items from World of Warcraft and turn them into five real-life, practical recipes, for fun. This idea was complicated somewhat when Mr. Rossignol pointed out to me that it had been done before, primarily by a site called The Tauren Chef which sells its recipes online instead of giving them away. The solution, once again, was simple: do it better than everyone else, and for free. Read how Intrepid Girlfriend and I got on after the jump.
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And it’s apparently going to fix the browser issues, hooray. PC Gamer post the full change list, which doesn’t specifically seem to mention any changes to weapon balance, although they are promised. Could this be a nerf to the medic’s Light Machineguns Of Doom? I hope so. Bloody healers. DICE aren’t going to reveal the weapon tweaks just yet, as they want “unbiased feedback”, whatever that is. I suspect there might be a game on the RPS servers to investigate the changes. Join our Steam group so you get a message thingy when we’re playing.

For the last month, UserCreated have been presenting a series of short essays about their 20 (count ‘em!) unmissable mods. It leans towards the last decade, but bar one ludicrous failure of judgment, it’s a credible look at the entire width of possibilities inherent in mods, both in the hyper-popular and the artcore. Go see what you think. And, rather than just shouting THEY’VE MISSED ACTION-FACE-BIFF-VIII!, why not lob up your own short list of unmissable mods in the comments? 20 would be overkill, I suspect, but I’d be interested to read what your own selection of essential mods would be.

On Friday, Develop reported that Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli sees the end of free demos. Complaining about the expense, he notes that “A free demo is a luxury we have in the game industry that we don’t have in other industries such as film.” Of course, he’s entirely right. The idea of showing a small edited part of the experience to give a taste of the full thing is unknown in films. Which is a shame, because if there were only such a thing, they could show several of these “film-demos” before the main feature and so give ‘em a little more exposure. Stepping aside from the sarcasm, there’s a lot of the aforementioned forseeing in the Develop piece, which is well worth reading. Meanwhile, I foresee an angry, eye-rolling comment-thread.

I can’t wait to see if these games are good, because then I can use the phrase “time-lauded”. In fact I’ve probably already used it. Anyway, the first footage from the BBC’s free-to-play adventures with The Doctor has materialised on the distant edge of the YouTube nebulae, and we’ve embedded it below. Daleks make threats that their sink plungers can’t cash, or something.
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Give me 1200 words. I’m going to make you pre-order something you’ve never even heard of.
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Fourteen years old, Toonstruck has dated in some respects, primarily the scan-line FMV. But being cartoon, in others it remains as lovely today. The main trouble is how hard it is to get to run, requiring DosBox with special instructions, or Virtual Machine. Or better yet, and I’m increasingly tempted to do this, building a box out of ancient PC parts and installing Win 95 on it. Like Day Of The Tentacle, as I played it for Eurogamer I couldn’t help but take screenshots of everything. Below are but some of them. (You can have fun giving yourself a seizure by scrolling the first few images and watching them strobe.)

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Eurogamer currently sports my retrospective of Toonstruck, the 1996 point and click adventure starring Christopher Lloyd and some cartoons. I went back to it having forgotten if I even liked it 14 years ago, and was absolutely delighted to discover that it’s fantastic. I say things like:

“In looking back at some of the best (and worst) adventure games of the eighties and nineties, it’s too easy to remain within the archives of LucasArts and Sierra. Perhaps Westwood’s Bladerunner gets quickly remembered, Cecil’s Broken Sword games, and someone will recall Adventure Soft’s Simon The Sorcerer games. But what about The Legend of Kyrania series, also from Westwood? Access’s Tex Murphy games? Microids’ Syberia? And what about Burst Studio’s Toonstruck? Why isn’t everyone talking about it? It’s absolutely bloody brilliant..”

And it continues here. Also, I can’t resist doing a gallery for this one either, so that’s coming up.

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