Rock, Paper, Shotgun

This may be a hoax, I’ve no idea. But it’s a holiday here today, so that’s the right sort of day for posting suspect things. Thanks to @PaT2090 for linking us to what was allegedly briefly appearing on Ellis Savannah’s Facebook page (L4D’s Ellis, of course). An apparently intro screen for Half-Life 2: Episode 3. See it in full below.

It’s a fake. Of course it is. It’s ages old, too. But, see, all your rude-faced people calling me names – I haven’t seen every image of everything on the internet, and so, you know, can be fallible. I’m sorry to break my non-omnipotence to you this way, but there it is.

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RPS Rule for the day: if it doesn’t have hexes, I’m not posting it. MasterBoo comment-threader sent us a very polite mail about Star Relic a couple of week backs. In fact, so polite and self-deprecating that I presumed it would be rubbish and didn’t check it out until this weekend. But it’s not rubbish! It’s nifty. It’s basically a simple two-player strategy game which you can play online here and I’ll explain it properly below…
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Speed is POWER. But speed is also DEATH. Gain power, gain speed, gain death. Alex Bethke’s Starfall, created for the most recent Experimental Gameplay Project contest (theme: High Velocity) is as simple as a videogame can be, and that is exactly why you’ll be playing it for hours.
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It is a rare month that I don’t fondly wish for a resurrection of Dungeon Keeper. It is a rarer month still that I hear of a resurrection of Dungeon Keeper and then kinda wish I hadn’t. Details are squeaking out about EA’s mysterious (and possibly China-only) Dungeon Keeper MMO and, well, you’re not going to like them. That said, there are a few glimmers of promise, and enough that I’m fighting the fanboy urge to scream, hiss and make tastelessly overblown statements about what EA have done to my childhood.
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I think it was Schizoslayer who pointed me at this, but I only had a chance to play it now. It’s Fractal, and it’s really quite neat puzzler from the makers of Auditorium. The idea is simply you have a limited number of new hexes to push into a grid, which displaces all the other ones. Form larger hexes formed of smaller ones to score points. Elegant and looks great. There’s a web-demo for you to play, but the full version will cost you fifteen dollars. GO FOOTAGE!
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Remember Every Day The Same Dream, the affectingly maudlin indie chronicle of an office worker’s unhappy life? Patryck Senwicki and Tamas Kiss certainly do. So much so that they’ve turned it into a short film. While you should probably play the game before watching this, its themes are fairly universal. Those themes being ‘modern life is rubbish.’

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We had hoped to bring your our Alpha Protocol WIT by now, but a series of unfortunate circumstances means that it’s much delayed. You might even have your own Thoughts to Wot below. So here is a description of the first hour or two, which isn’t a very pretty sight. I’m absolutely sure things much improve after this, especially now I have the game in a state in which I can play it at all. So yes, this is especially negative. No, this absolutely is NOT our review of Alpha Protocol, and anyone who says it is gets a dead arm.

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File under ‘slightly spurious’, but it’s worth having a chin-scratch about the mounting evidence. Back in January, a Crytek level designer revealed via LinkedIn that he was working a “Not announced Online MMO FPS” (so that’s doubly online?), at which point the gates of silence swung shut. Now LinkedIn’s at it again, with a Crytek senior IT manager proclaiming to the world his involvement in “Designing, testing and implementing as part of the development team the systems infrastructure for an MMO online game.” On top of that, Crytek have recently registered a clutch of domain names involving the word ‘Kingdoms.’ Something is up. Something… Planetsidey?

It seems like only yesterday that my retrospective of bonkers genre-blurred Fahrenheit appeared on Eurogamer. A ha, my little joke there. It was yesterday! It’s a Bank Holiday, my brain is on holiday. I replayed the game five years on to see, well, all sorts. Any of the ideas hold up? Anything been picked up by others? Still as completely trousers-down, purple-hatted batshit insane? Well, of course. The intro:

Here’s my impression of David Cage brainstorming ideas before making a game:

“Okay, it shall be set in a regular city, slightly in the future. Our character must get through his day, while becoming embroiled in a strange mystery. A peculiar girl is stuck in a tornado, and the player must rescue her before all the water in the world turns to stone. Aliens attack. At the end it rains cars.”

While Heavy Rain stayed in reality, Omikron and Fahrenheit begin with a facsimile of a recognisable life, and then dive headfirst into a swimming pool of insane.

Read on here.

And I don’t mean games of The Road – that’s an entirely different kettle of misplaced licensing. I mean this: the road movie is a fruitful, interesting genre for film, and even TV, but what is it’s equivalent in gaming? Could it have one? Or are all linear games basically just that classic story-as-journey? Are shooters our road movies? Maybe, but perhaps there’s something in the nature of travel in videogames that makes it difficult to execute something authentically “road”. More essentially redundant thoughts below.
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Sundays are for getting back from the MCM Expo in the very early hours, having sung songs featuring the word money replaced by the words “Lunney” (As in, awesome-if-famously-intimidating cartoonist Liz Lunney) all the way home (e.g. Mo Lunney, Mo Problems, Lunney Can’t Buy You Love, Lunney Lunney Lunney), snatching a few hours of sleep then getting up to do it all over again. Except still finding time to hammer out a list of the (mostly) games related reading from the week, trying not to link to some piece of pop music.

• The PCG blogs had a good week. Tom’s eye-rolling at Bioshock 2′s gold-club game-mode is cute enough, but Craig writing about why he doesn’t play Halo any more is genuinely striking. When people tell stories about games, they rarely choose ones which paint them badly – unless, of course, you’re the sort of game-trolling sociopath who uses such things as a badge of honour – so it’s interesting to see Craig do that.

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