Rock, Paper, Shotgun

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Want to know why I haven’t gone to bed? It’s because of DeliriumWartner, and his recommending Doodle God. Which has nothing to do with doodling. It does instead have an awful lot to do with being godly. You’re given just four elements, earth, wind, fire and water, and by combining them the aim is to create 115. Which involves an awful lot of combining.

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Attention, fans of repeatedly shooting men in slightly different-coloured outfits. The controversy-tastic beta update to Counter-Strike: Source (the one with the -gasp!- achievements, -aiee!- stats and – shock! – a killcam) has now gone on general release. As in, if you own Counter-Strike: Source, you’re getting it whether you want it or not. Not tried the update yet, but going on the community response to the beta, it’s going to be messy.

You’ll also be able to kill people on Macs, who can buy the thing for their glowing fruit-emblazoned personal computers as of today. Yes, the hardest-dying of PC gamers can exact bloody revenge on those OSX upstarts. It’s going to be messy.

To celebrate, the game’s been discounted by some 66% – which equates to just £4.76 in UK groats. A few top-of-the-head thoughts on Mac gaming below…
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EDIT – Oh look, it is available after all. I am, as you might imagine, a teensy-little bit annoyed.
EDITEDIT – Activision have just confirmed availability to me. I was told the wrong thing earlier, basically. Sigh!

I’ve spent some time this week trying to track down a PC version of the upcoming (if you’re British) / now on sale (if you’re American) Transformers: War For Cybertron, because I’m a man-child who loves plastic robots. It’s due for release here on the 25th, but annoyingly it’s already on sale in the US.

Turns out, it’s not, in fact, due for release here on the 25th -even though sites such as Amazon are claiming it is. Many sites, and they continue to claim so even just one day ahead of release. But this is what I’ve been told by Activision: while the Xbox and Playstation versions will indeed squeak into retail then, the PC one is now delayed. Until when? Your guess: as good as mine.
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It’s been a decade since Deus Ex. A realisation struck me: the industry will now be peppered with people whose formative experiences were with Deus Ex. For them it was, in one way or another, inspirational. I decided to hunt down a few and talk to them, about what Deus Ex said to them, how it shaped them, what it taught them and how they bring it into what they make today. By which I mean, drop ‘em a line and say “Deus Ex, eh? Thoughts?”. First up are 2k Marin Designer Steve Gaynor (Bioshock 2) and Ninja Theory Senior Technical Designer Rob Hale (Enslaved: Odyssey To The West)…
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If you’re as observant as you are handsome you will have noticed that we’re trying to get things sorted around here so we can rid ourselves of the current questionable advertising and get in shiny, relevant stuff. That hasn’t quite happened yet, and we need your help to make it so. I’ve made a lovely survey thing to gather the data we need about the RPS hordes, and I’d really appreciate any of you taking the time to fill it out. We’re hoping it’ll be the most comprehensive survey of a PC gaming crowd ever conducted, and it’ll help us making RPS stronger, so that it can strip to the waist and wrestle with other, lesser blogs in a battle to impress the ladies.

Help us, Internet reading people, you’re our only hope.

Would you like to see some Medal Of Honour footage? I bet you would. I know what you’re like – you pretend you don’t want to, and then you’re all peeking around the corner, trying to take a look, hoping no one else is noticing. Well, we notice, and look, it’s fine. So you can see a bunch of videos, from the multiplayer beta, below. Don’t worry about it.

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British Indie Games Conference World of Love is this Friday. What does that mean? Well, mainly, indie developers are preparing to listen to wise minds. Plus me. I’m kind of reprising/updating my 2005 Freeplay Keynote “How To Use And Abuse The Gaming Press And How The Gaming Press Wants To Use And Abuse You” – which basically explained to devs how to get coverage. Since everyone will have probably read that, I’m not just going to do it – I want to very much do a 2010 take on it, of what’s changed since then. Anyway – part of the things I’m considering is actually doing a WORK SHOP section where I take a few indie games and say what I’d be doing with them to get them more coverage. What games though? Well, to make it more fun, I thought I’d throw it to the floor and see what games you’d like to see me cover. New and obscure is best, but hit me with whatever. And to stress, I’m not entirely sure I’m going to be taking this route yet. But I may be. And since the video will be stuck online, you’ll all see what I do eventually anyway. Hurrah!

Hello! I’m back. I think I’ve forgotten how to write words in sequence, which might be problematic. Not sure yet. What I’m almost certainly now terrible at, though, is scouring the internet in an attempt to compile a collection of interesting mod-related gubbins from the past TWO! weeks. Can I just show you my holiday photos instead? No? Okay. Well, go easy on me. I’ll almost certainly have missed a lot of wonderful stuff. Consider this a brief round-up of what’s been happening since I’ve been away – I’ll get stuck in properly again for next week.
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The_B’s just noticed that RPS isn’t the only people doing stupid things on the birthday of Deus Ex. Steam are having a 75% off sale, which ends at 3PST on the 23rd. 75% off is £1.50 each, or three quid for the pair. It’s the sort of price which I’d be tempted to spend just to have on my Steam-Account in case I can’t be bothered finding whichever box your original DX is in. Go gets. Unless you’ve got it already. Then don’t go gets, unless you want to go gets for a friend.

Taking a break from our overriding theme of wallowing in the early 00s, lets return to another early motif of the day. Rodents! Because a rodent features prominently in the just-released* trailer for the just-released** third episode in the currently actually-pretty-well-received series of Telltale’s Sam & Max. If you haven’t already, you can buy the series on the site and play all the current episodes, with the others arriving shortly. The demo for the first episode is still available, on PC and the PC-with-a-better-haircut if you want to try. And here’s the trailer. Hurrah! And worth asking: what’s people’s thoughts on the season so far?
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