Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I was planning on actually diving straight into serious work today, thinking I’ll swiftly lob up a new demo post. However, watching the trailer for the just-released Hegemony: Phillip Of Macedon something caught my eye and I thought I’d give it a quick crack. Looks kinda-Total-War-y with a more robust control system. I better check if it is that. It’s not that! It’s actually something else, which is also kinda nifty and certainly enough to make me recommend anyone interested in novel RTS-games to give a try. Video and further thoughts follow…
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You’re fired into battle at a speed just shy of making the stars in front of you blur into parallel lines, an ever rising tone in your ear letting you know that your suit is coming online.

The HUD flickers into life on the inside of your visor, letting you know your orientation, the position or your nearby team mates, locations to hold and take. You’re in the thick of it.

That was a metaphor for something, but we’ll come back to that.
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If I had my way, Portal guns would appear in all other games. Far Cry 2, Dragon Age, World Of Goo, Freecell, the lot. And they’d appear in real life. Imagine how great things would be if I had my way. However, if the modding project of one Pawn from 3-PG manages to escape some awkward obstacles, we could soon be seeing a mod that allows the Portal gun in Team Fortress 2. Called, rather wonderfully, Team Portress, the video below explains how the gun works in game, first demonstrating what it’s capable of, then showing you the weapon in a proper game. The catch? According to the poster, Valve has recently introduced a ban on custom items being given to players to prevent the anarchic distribution of hats.

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Mafia II is the year’s most anticipated game about watching lavish cutscenes, driving to places and shooting people then watching more lavish cutscenes before driving to places and shooting people. Expect vast quantities of gloss and pizazz from this one. Oooh, I’ve never written the word ‘pizazz’ before. It’s fun, isn’t it? Anyway: I believe our man John ‘Giggles’ Walker will be presenting you with a write-up of his forthcoming hands-on time with the PC build in the not-too-distant, but in the meantime here’s a few of the devs (including Czech guys dubbed into English) talking about and, more importantly, demonstrating some of the finer points* of this highly anticipated driving/shooting/watching game.

*I.e. “smashing men’s faces into car doors.”
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Allow me a small, silly vignette apropos of nothing, but one that I found oddly touching – a demonstration of the place game characters can take in our lives today. Tired of Windows Photo-thingie’s slowness, I finally got around to installing Google’s photo management app, Picasa 3 today. It had itself a good old scour of my hard drive, as is its wont, and duly formed a library of all the image files thereupon. Then I spotted a tab at the top marked ‘People’, which accessed some prototypical technology that scans pictures for faces and attempts to recognise recurring folk.

Clicking it presented an army of neatly cropped and zoomed faces. Family, friends, colleagues, girlfriends past and present, Elvis Presley, random work shots of devs like Randy Pitchford and Tim Schafer… And, included without comment amongst them, a legion of game characters from the hundreds of screenshots scattered across my PC.
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Portal is completely free to play until May 24th. Not that you haven’t already bought it. Right?

Get it here. Even for Macs. (Mac version of Steam is out too.)

Azazel was nosing at Spoon in a professional capacity, but thought it worth mention because of its gamey-aspects. “It appears to do some virtualization jiggery-pokery which can stream apps to any Windows desktop via a browser,” says he. To which I replied “MOTHERSHIPS!” and he looked at me with the disappointed gaze I’ve learned to suffer. If you want to get the plug-in, it’s here and you can try a load of IGF-esque games. It tried it, and it’s quite literally World of Goo, without installing, after a gap for streaming. I can predict a brave future with less installing in it, but with a gap for streaming. We are quite literally, living in the future.

Remember a couple of years back when it seemed Ubisoft were using a No-CD crack to make their Direct 2 Drive versions of Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 work? Well, news reaches us via LewieP and Torrentfreak that apparently the Steam-version of Rockstar’s Max Payne 2 incorporates the No-CD crack of the now-defunct Myth group. Or, at least, that’s the only feasible explanation of why the group’s ASCII logo appears when nosing at the executable in a hex editor. Torrentfreak cover the story in more detail. In short: oh dear. In less short: oh deary, deary me.

The mod scene’s been impressively varied this week. This means only a quarter of the news below the jump has anything to do with Half-Life 2. That might sound like a lot, but, y’know. We’re usually talking about ABSOLUTE DOMINATION. Still, my favourite snippett comes from Valve’s good old game, and is a delightfully silly new release that manages to be simultaneously awful and brilliant. Whatever could it be? Clicking below will reveal all.
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Hang on, I’m just going to fix an old article about Dead Space 2.

“The horror sequel, which isn’t fully confirmed for PC, but is… or is it? Yes/No.”

Better.

So yes, after going back and forth more often than a Nick Clegg deciding a Prime Minister, Visceral Minds and EA have settled on releasing the game for PC some time at the beginning of next year. Unless they change their minds again. Which they might. Last month’s trailer is below, just in case you missed it.

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Remember hyperbolic space MMORPG Black Prophecy? Well, having had a really rough ride with finances and so forth, it’s now all set to be released, and is in closed testing. You can sign up to the beta over here. I’m not sure what your chances of being accepted are, as I understand there is limited space. If you need to recap on why this game is interesting then check out this old interview we did. It’s a bit PR-speaky, but the slightly blurry game footage (below) backs a lot of it up. It’s going to be really interesting to see if Reakktor can pull this one off. I fully expect broken stuff on release, but maybe, just maybe…
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