Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Lookit! Despite RPS selling out buying in, things Carry On As Before. Like our Mount & Blade: Warband warband, complete with our own server, voice comms and everything! It was the second of our ‘proper’ Training Knights last night and once again our 64 player server was impressively full. EG may have taken our ads responsibilities, but they’ll never take our freeee-dooom!

Once again a huge thanks to everyone who showed up. It’s one thing to get a bunch of chaps to show up to an event, another to get them to come back again. Ta awfully. Report below.
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Forgive me: this week’s Mod News is a little more rushed than usual. The last week has marked my switch from “filthy student who writes about games sometimes” to “oh my great goodness, I need to actually start making a sustainable living out of this now.” Are you an editor? Then you should probably give me some work. I’ll do it on time, and everything! But anyway: among the panic, here’s some mod news I’ve managed to collect.
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Valve have sent out a transmission announcing the cancellation of their E3 Portal 2 event, and its replacement with “a surprise”. As press invitations go, it’s an odd one. I’ve posted the text below…
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Here and there RPS folks have been asking about Perpetuum Online, the Hungarian robo-MMO that is currently in closed beta. No doubt by now a few of you have made it onto that beta, too. I’ve been on there for a while, and I’ve been intrigued by what I’ve found: a constantly evolving sandbox MMO that is more reminiscent of Eve that anything else, and with an art-style and world design that is refreshingly atmospheric. To find out a little more I took some time to chat to Szelei Kis Gergely, from Avatar Creations, about his company’s aims for this independent MMO project. His responses, as well my time with the game itself, leave me feeling quietly excited for its prospects…
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Some F.E.A… FEAR 3 footage has appeared, showing the peculiar contrast of the two co-operatively playable characters. One expertly shoots with guns, the other seems to be sucking out souls and casting magics. Which is an unquestionably new approach to the spook-em-up series, this time in the hands of Day 1 Studios, rather than previous developers Monolith. You can see the video below.

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Cheap Punning Rule #48 – if in doubt, tautology. What other Cheap Punning Rules do you know, beautiful readers?

Anyway, the point: Atari has opened up beta signups for its driving/infinite wealth MMO Test Drive Unlimited 2. You should sign up. Why? Because the first TDU was by and large excellent, exploring fascinating and fundamental concepts of virtual-world existence that the vast bulk of MMOs simply ignore. Those being self-indulgence, posing and being completely free of responsibility. Allow me to explain why below.
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It’s a big day for RPS – ‘big’ as in ‘we will hopefully no longer have to eat our own toes for sustenance.’ It’s a big day for me too, in exactly the same way. Today was my first day roaming the halls of Gamesindustry.biz as their scruffy new Deputy Editor. If you don’t know the site, you should – it offers smart and sober coverage of the games industry itself, from an objective and high-accuracy perspective. This means I will be dealing in a strange new currency, rarely to be found on RPS – ‘facts.’ I will be rounding up many of these ‘facts’ on a daily basis at GI.biz, as well as nervously talking to some astonishingly important people.

This means I am handing in my RPS badge and gun effective immediately.

Nah, only kidding. I wouldn’t take any job that kept me away from this place. Could do with a hand, though. By which I mean ‘games’.
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Blimey, news about us! What does it mean? Well, you might have noticed that our adverts are a bit nob. We’ve been working on fixing that so that we can both make a bit more money and look a little less like we’re run out of a shy teenager’s attic. Eurogamer have stepped in to help out, which means RPS is soon going to become bigger and maybe even a bit better. And prettier, too, probably. We’re still editorially independent – we still own the site and control all the content – and will remain a bastion of PC gaming righteousness. We’ll just be doing it from a golden helicopter-fortress over the Bahamas. Any questions? Ask ‘em below. (I also put the press release down there, to show off.)

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PCG have just put up four screens from the new Deus Ex 3 trailer which will debut on the 4th. As in, Friday. They’re also bragging about 21,500 (Count ‘em!) words of preview, which hopefully are all different, and not just Tom Francis cutting and pasting the same paragraph again and again and again. As is his wont. Anyway, go look here or skip below to get my initial impressions.
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There’s increasing amounts of interesting UDK stuff trickling out. I haven’t had a shot at this, but it’s conceptually pure enough to appeal. Sanctum is another mod-turned-stand-alone, and it’s basically a tower-defence game in first person. This immediately makes me think of the late 90s wave of action/strategy games, which of course makes me somewhat fuzzy and nostalgic, before that warm feeling gets crushed with a crushing sense of age, obsolescence and ever-encroaching death. You can download it from here, follow its development here and watch its trailer below…
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