Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Today is a good day to be John Walker. Only joking. No day is a good day to be John Walker. Except the blessed day you die and it’s all over, thankyouthankyouthankyou. At least today is a day when things become a fraction less miserable. Remember when he reviewed Ice-Pick’s Quinns-favoured oddity The Void at Eurogamer, giving it 7/10. His main issue was that it was “It’s stupendously, unrelentingly difficult.” Anyway, Ice Pick have announced that a friendly modder called Throdax (No really) has made two patches that alter the game to either an easy or medium mode. Baddies are less bad. Sisters are more willing to open. Gardens can be more swiftly replanted. In short, difficulty undifficultiered. Problem solved! Some footage follows…
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When we wrote about the DotEmu beta opening we expressed enormous chagrin that, despite them claiming otherwise, Transarctica wasn’t available to download. Oh noes! Oh noes no more, as Frankie The Patrician noted that it’s up there now. You can get it now. Transarctica is a strategy game about enormous armoured trains in a new ice-age, and is one of the games that seems to stick in people’s imaginations, even if you’ve never played it. Got to be worth downloading for the files, yeah? Video follows…
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“We didn’t want to do another Doom, another Wolfenstein, but we knew that at its core it had to be a first-person experience.”

It’s a line I heard lead designer Tim Willits say twice during last week’s Rage demo, plus over a dozen variants on that theme: his lure to unsure packs of journalists who’d almost forgotten Rage existed. By id standards, it’s not been long in the making – but it’s been long enough that I can’t help but approach this latest demo with a very different mentality to those first videos back in 2007. Borderlands has been and gone, Fallout 3 has been and gone, Bioshock 1 and 2 have been and gone. This Winter, we’ll have another post-apocalyptic combat game to join those teeming end-of-the-world ranks. It’s created by id – Doom id, Wolfenstein id, Quake id. And, let’s be honest, Doom 3 id. How will they win our love back?

With prettiness and bullets, mostly.
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Modders are generally students, it would seem. Which perhaps isn’t too surprising, but is all too noticeable at the moment, as end-of-term exams and essays roll around. It means there’s still comparatively little to talk about, and what is here is typically a bit Half-Life 2 dominated, as a portion of the scene is. Still, there’s some reasonably decent mod news this week, for the first time in several BILLION YEARS, so I’ll not complain too much.
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GameTrailers is watching… The all-see floating tendril of the internet that is the GT cameras found its way in front of Id Software’s lead design chap, Tim Willits, who looks a decade younger without his moustache. He’s talking about Rage: the setting, the protagonist, the weapons, and all the extras that Id hope will make this more than a standard-fare FPS. It’s interspersed with some footage, mostly recycled, but with some weapon action I don’t recall seeing before. Clickwards for more.
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Media reportage still has it that Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want experiment a couple of years back was somehow a disaster. Independent gaming has roundly proved the lie: more devs than we can keep up with have offered PWYW deals recently, so clearly something’s going right. It’s good news for gamers too. The Humble Indie Bundle, though, is yer bona fide motherlode. World of Goo, Aquaria, Lugaru, Gish and Penumbra Overture: a collection of the last few years’ finest indies, yours for however many groats you think you can spare. Phenomenal, basically. Better still, a third of the proceeds go to Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation apiece. Well, by default, You can request that the whole lot goes to charity if you like. Games and kindness: a winning and natural formula (and one that the shrieking anti-games media will never, ever cover.) The deal’s over here, and below the cut is a knowingly rubbish half-rap to promote it.
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Mr Perkins pointed me in the direction of the newly-released Hero Core, from Daniel Remar who you may know from Ilj from a couple of years back. It’s the sequel to Hero, and I loved it within seconds of starting. A sprawling, non-linear shooter which will recall either old-skool NES or old-skool Ultimate: Play The Game, depending which side of the Atlantic you’re on. If you’re from elsewhere… well, you tell me. Go gets! Trailer follows.
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As Jim prophesied, so it has come to pass. Yes, I come here to link to a preview of Brink I wrote for another website. To whit, IGN UK, and specifically here. If, hypothetically speaking, I had written the piece in an incredible hurry because I’d stupidly but hypothetically forgotten what day the embargo lifted on, you might hypothetically be able to tell. Hmm. Here’s a non-hypothetical quote:

“Brink’s aim is to tear down the church and state separation of single and multiplayer, so you’re using the same disciplines, chasing the same goals and enjoying the same rewards however you play. This is, of course, the theory: other games are sniffing around the same idea, with Left 4 Dead arguably at the head of this young pack. With Brink though, there’s a real sense of no compromise. This is not two separate modes which happen to be linked by persistent unlocks and experience points: it’s one sprawling action game which you choose to play in your preferred fashion.”

Bethesda have also been showing off their newly-acquired Id Software game, Rage, which will now hit in 2011. (Note the teaser sites that EA spawned are vanished. Poor old teaser sites.) Mr Meer has seen it in action and should have some comments about it later. In the meantime you can click for grande versions of these here apocalimages.
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I think Alec is writing a preview for one of the other denizens of the game-o-sphere about this game right at this moment. I am sure he’ll link to it later. But anyway, the new bit of Fallout 3, which is being developed by the lovely Obsidian for release towards the end of this year, is called New Vegas, and it’s looking like it might please a few apocalypse-lovers. Bethesda sent over their latest images, and I’ve posted ‘em up below. Click for full size!
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There’s going to be a heap of Brink coverage turning up across the net this week, as Paul Wedgwood, Ed Stern and their Splash Damage crew have been off showing the game to European press in Paris. We’ll link to some of that in a bit, I suspect. Brink, the grapevine has it, was quite the star in an event that showed off Rage, Hunted, and Fallout: new Vegas. In the meantime: see these new images. Click for full size!
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