Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Everyone hates FarmVille, apart from the millions of players who adore it. Your endless bitching about it dominating your Facebook feed and how it’s not a proper game and blahblahbloodyblah can now be turned into something like constructive criticism, thanks to gag-app FarmVillain. Pick a comically twisted faux-FarmVille status update, add it to your profile with a click, and confuse/horrify any friends and family who spend all day, everyday collecting sheep.

“You found a dead hooker buried on your farm. Oh my!”

Oops, we took our eye off the ball there. One post about Gas-Powered Games’ upcoming Kings & Castles, and then we completely ignored it. There’s a reason for that. It involves clowns and toast crusts, and the memories remain too traumatic to share with you. Now those dark times are behind us, so I feel comfortable in bringing you more of the Supreme Commander/Dungeon Siege studio’s excellently strange video blogs, documenting both the game’s development process and Chris Taylor’s grasshopper mind.

Last time, El Taylor was talking to the animals. Some 13 installments later, he’s showing off the game – and it’s looking quite lovely. Here be dragons! Also, chickens.
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If I even said this game’s title to delightful girlfriend, she’d probably get a little tearful, because she hates to think of the hurting of hounds. But this forthcoming game isn’t about two hungry dogs dropped in the pit in the back of an essex pub. No – Dogfighter’s about plane-shootiness. It’ll be out on June 14th on Steam for twelve quid. Since it’s an unproved dev, I wouldn’t normally post about it pre-release… but its trailer is actually really quite nifty, showcasing its arena-set flight-lunacy. Not as mad as Illusion Softwork’s great-lost-game (NOT REALLY!) Flying Heroes because there’s no teapots of death, but it’s giving it a good shot in a Crimson-Skies-kinda-way.
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The very lovely Bob Came In Pieces, the puzzle game in which you can augment your ship with bits and bobs found in the levels, has added an extra chapter in celebration of its being released for Mac on Steam. Levels for both the PC and Mac version, I should stress. It’s a completely free pack, six levels of physics-manipulating shenanigans set in a beautiful virtual reality world. You can see a trailer for it with your eye, if you’ll only click below.

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Sundays are for writing a very small intro to your collection of fine (mostly) game related writing from across the week, because you want to include a massive quote in the first story. Oh – I will try not to link to some noisy pop music. I will.

• Remember Magnasanti? The ultimate Sim City 3000 city? Well, Francisco Alberto points me in the direction of Vice’s interview with its creator, which is strong stuff. Example quote: “There are a lot of other problems in the city hidden under the illusion of order and greatness: Suffocating air pollution, high unemployment, no fire stations, schools, or hospitals, a regimented lifestyle – this is the price that these sims pay for living in the city with the highest population. It’s a sick and twisted goal to strive towards. The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don’t rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time.” Go read.

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Cheap week this week – a minimum spend of £15.21 will get you everything featured. I’m poorly so I am going to crawl back into bed now, but I couldn’t let you lot go without your roundup of the best special offers this fine weekend. Those of you who are of the Apple persuasion might want to keep an eye on the Steam Mac watchlist, where I am keeping track of which games are available for the Mac version of Steam. Make sure to keep an eye on SavyGamer.co.uk for cheap games throughout the week.
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Cryptic’s Marvel Universe Online project may have been cancelled (probably a good thing, given how uneven the one-time City of Heroes creators’ recent output has been), but looks like we’re getting a Marvel MMO nonetheless. It’s developed by one Gazillion Entertainment and its, y’know, for kids. Super Hero Squad is based on the popular animated series for rugrats, so don’t expect any Christopher Nolan grit from this. It also seems to be hung around a digital collectable card game ethos, so there won’t be much direct action. I imagine it’ll fall somewhere between Free Realms and Pokemon battles – looks cute though. The first trailer is below, heroes, and it’s a remarkably strange thing. HULK EAT TOAST.
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The best-selling game of 2009, Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, caused all manner of uproar, none of which managed to impede its steamroller progress in the slightest. Still, it’s good to hear that franchise-inheritors Treyarch have paid at least some attention to the complaints. Specifically, the lack of dedicated servers, which both denied us the modding and customisation we’re so used to and complicated online games hugely. Things will be different in COD: Black Ops, aka Not-Quite-Modern Warfare…

“I think dedicated servers are excellent. I don’t see any reason not to see them unless… well, I just don’t see any reason not to,” studio head Mark Lamia told PC Zone. Good to hear. But could you also ensure it has a decent singleplayer game, free of horrific grenade spam? And not, say, a workmanlike stomp that relied on a one-level gimmicky zombie mode for its success.

L4D2′s ongoing Mutation event-of-the-week giggles continue, this time pushing the legendary Gnome Chomsky to the forefront of the game. I hand you over the official description:

Last Gnome On Earth: Protect the gnome at all cost.
Do you crave attention? Want all the infected to swarm you and the gnome you are carrying? Then we have the game mode for you. The team needs to carry the garden gnome from start to finish in any campaign. The common infected hate the gnome and will swarm whoever is carrying him. Watch out putting him on the ground, a boomer explosion will send him flying!

Carnage, I suspect. In a good way.

Hasbro’s head of designing imaginary robots, Aaron Archer, looks incredibly tired in the below video. He shouldn’t be. He has an awesome job. I want his job. Anyway, here he is talking about the storyline behind the upcoming hopefully not-shit Transformers game, War For Cybertron. I’m not expecting amazing things from WFC, but I am genuinely looking forward to it in a massively nerdy way. Speaking of which, it’s overcast and I’m bored. I might go and buy a plastic robot. A backstory-explaining trailer (which also goes into why Megatron may be perceived as a hero) is below, and it’s also worth mentioning that Jetfire, Sideswipe and Thundercracker have been added to the playable roster. There are tons of the buggers now – stare at their profiles here.
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2011 will bring a second sequel to the castle-management series which famously outsells GTA in Germany, publisher Southpeak Interactive has announced. Firefly Studios return to the development chair for a title about which little has yet been revealed, bar “a significantly improved graphics engine and new gameplay elements.” This is presumably in addition to the previously announced MMO, Stronghold Kingdoms. If you don’t know anything about Stronghold, enlighten your brain with Kieron’s Making Of feature from a couple of years back.

Press release below, not that it’s super-illuminating. So I’ve thrown in a Stronghold Crusader Extreme video for good measure.

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