Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It might be the lack of sleep, or the caffeine I’ve used to prop my brain open, but the glimpse of robo-customisation in the new Front Mission Evolved trailer (below, via Big Download) made me a bit giddy. Also: roller-skating robots in the classic Japanese urban robo-war style, big guns making noise, and wanzers (that’s the mechs) doing circle strafing in the classic This Game Is A Shooter style. Front Mission Evolved my be ejecting much of the heritage of its parent series, but there’s a vague chance that it might just be an entertaining robot-biff game, and we are so, so lacking in that department these days. Also in wanzer news (for which there is a dev blog): Front Mission Evolved has been confirmed for a September 14th release date.
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Interesting times for racing games, what with the fantastical feature sets of Blur and Split/Second, and then open-worldiness descending this summer in the form of Test Drive Unlimited 2 (and, I suppose, in the form of the Need For Speed MMO). Eden Games have sent word that there’s a limited sign up for the beta phase of the new Test Drive Unlimited, although no details on exactly what that entails. Presumably, getting to play some of the game early, and for free, which is reason enough to take a nose. And the game is looking pretty interesting: the same drop-in open world island as before, and – unusually – the ability to get out of the car and walk around. What’s that good for in a racing game? Epic, pointless journeys perhaps? Maybe… Anyway, looks like sign-ups require Atari.com registration. Yay.

Blizzard supremo Frank Pearce has told VideoGamer.com, “We need our development teams focused on content and cool features, not anti-piracy technology.”

It accompanies the announcement that StarCraft II’s single-player mode will not require constant online connection to Blizzard’s Battle.net. Describing DRM as “a losing battle”, Pearce states that their company is far more interested in creating an online community that will endorse and support paying customers.

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I have this glove that can manipulate objects through time. So I’ve been excited to follow the progress of Singularity, a game that I can identify with. However, now they’ve revealed that the glove in the game can also fire giant bursts of “Impulse Power”, which makes mine look like last year’s iPhone. It can also fire time bubbles to trap your enemies. I could do with one of those after yesterday. You can watch the glove-based action below. Along with a few other bits and pieces about the glove that have appeared in the last couple of weeks. It’s set for release at the end of next month, but I could of course just get a copy whenever I wanted by reaching into the future and grabbing it. I don’t, because of embargoes.

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Let’s start the day with something which made me smile last night, via 1UP. Adam West in a guest editorial of Videogaming and Computergaming Illustrated. Key quote…

In the same way a painting allows us to gaze upon the faces and souls of people from another age, or a book permits us to linger on the thoughts of great figures from history and fiction, videogames can expand our awareness of the world as it is, was, or might be. The medium is still in its infancy, but read this again in a few years and see if this prediction hasn’t come true: as videogaming grows, we will grow.

If only as many non-gamers could look at the form with a similarly open mind. You’ll find the rest here.

Lovecraft? I LOVE CRAFT! TASTY CHEESE!* Anyway… The Darkness WIthin 2: The Dark Lineage has a demo out. How do I know that name? A quick google takes the place of my all-too-feeble memory, and reveals it’s the point and click adventure I played the demo of back in 2007 to see what it was like to be John Walker for a day, and decided I hated it. And that was a fun comment thread. Anyway, new demo out, more details on its site and a little footage follows…
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We’ve mentioned Pixel-lab’s Channel-4-helped forthcoming indie-games conference before. Now we’re mentioning it again. Right here. Because World Of Love has just announced a whole load of new speaker-folk, including Sophie Houlden, the Introversion folk, Amy Casson, Stephen Lavelle, Tom “nullpointer” Betts, Gobion Rowlands and – er – Me. You can get tickets here for sixty-five quid except – er – it’s sold out. So making this post pretty rubbish. Pah! Well, they do say they may open some more tickets in the next month. Who’s going?

Preparing for a much-needed Windows reinstall, I’m currently unearthing all manner of old pieces from my freelance past. Many are… well, you know how it can feel to read something you wrote many moons ago. For the sake of all humankind, most of these documents must never see the light of day again. This heartfelt paean to the original Half-Life’s zombies (originally published in PC Gamer) remained reasonably proud, however. So, after some heavy jiggery and some light pokery, here it is…

Half-Life is credited with doing a great many things to save the first-person shooter from the Doom-derived rut it seemed stuck in during the late 90s – its perspective, its sense of place, its uncutscenes, its Rick Dangerousness – but rarely given so proud a nod are its zombies.
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1c and DigitalMindSoft have sent word that there is to be a new game in the Men of War series: Assault Squad. This is intended to be an expandalone focusing on the skirmish, co-op and multiplayer elements of the existing game. There will be new multiplayer maps, and 4-player online and LAN co-op. It’s also going to expand the feature set a bit for your little men, with hero units, “remote controlled bombs that can flatten entire residential blocks, airstrikes able to destroy incoming tank columns, special “For the Motherland!” charge attacks.” Even more interestingly: “the ability to buy individual soldiers to suit players’ needs the ability to buy individual soldiers to suit players’ needs.” Full press release below, and I’ll have even more details next week, along with some assets. Exciting!

(I spoke of my love for the original Men of War here, and also in a secondary bonus ode published by The Escapist, here.)
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A wargame dev can disappoint his customers in thousands of ingenious ways. Getting the armour thickness wrong on a Panther glacis plate usually works, as does neglecting to model Russian anti-tank dogs, Polish cavalry, and Bren gun tripods. Strangely, one of the least used methods is steep pricing. Command Ops: Battles from the Bulge a game I talked about excitedly earlier in the year has just vaulted out of its halftrack and sadly, the initial hubbub seems to be more about the price than the promising AI advances.

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Remember Dogfighter? Well, its Beta has just started, with a whole load of keys available for you to download. You just need to enter your e-mail here, and you can take to the sky with gun-biff. And as a note to subscribers, the link I sent out yesterday is different to this, with a completely different reservoir of keys. So if all the ones on the public one disappear, you should try the private link. Also, anyone who subbed between yesterday and today who hasn’t got the link should drop me a mail and I’ll get it at you. Anyway – enough house-keeping. Anyone played it yet? Thoughts?

EDIT: AND THEY’RE ALL GONE!