Rock, Paper, Shotgun

You might recall that last year we enjoyed the impressive but imperfect strategy title King Arthur, with its mixture of turn-based and real-time elements, and its use of epic magic. This year Neocore have returned to their Crusades theme, with Lionheart: Kings’ Crusade. Also: an epic metal theme-tune. Stirring stuff. But we’ve also pinched GT’s walkthrough from the floor at E3, in which Neocore’s producer Zoltan Varga explains some of his games’ more interesting features, such as cover on complex historical battlefields, and the ability to send thousands of tiny men to their death, over and over. Sigh.
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Yay, a lovely way to bring the week to a close, too. Frozenbyte have released a teaser-trailer for their multi-character puzzle platformer sequel, Trine 2, and it is magnificent in its storybook cuteness. Also, it looks as if the team are being even more ambitious and inventive with the formula than ever before. Exciting!
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I’ve given myself 37 minutes to write this post in. You won’t learn anything new from it.

Kieron’s covered the problems with MMO reviews in a reliably masterful way, and there really isn’t much to be said beyond it. All I can do is repeat some of what others have touched on a thousand times previous, with different words at a different time, and with my own sense of awkwardness and upset. I don’t have an answer. That doesn’t make it any less relevant.

Today’s drama has been unpleasant, both personally and in terms of feeling really awful about how the two fundamental sides of the games criticism divide – the creators and the commentators – see each other. That’s (almost) all I’m going to say on that specific matter.

What I will offer is comment on why that kind of situation can ever develop, which unavoidably becomes the eternal bete noir of how games journalists can possibly review MMOs.
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It’s the social web game du jour! It’s hilariously goofy. Basically, Dot War allows you to take 2 twitter account icons and wage a war against one another, by a process that transforms the icons into incy soldiers. It’s a little like Gratuitous Space Battles in that it’s the layout of colours in your icon that determines which mix of the various soldier types you get – so your chances of winning against any given opponent. It’s especially so in the easy mode where the troops go and fight automatically. There’s more skill in the mode where you get to give orders and so are able to squeeze a win. The aim is – basically – to do more damage to the opponents crystals than they do to yours. You don’t even need a twitter icon to be yours to fight – just enter in any names. You can see it in action below, and to start you off, you pick fights with RPS, Alec, Jim, John, Quinns and Me.
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There are no more molehills. Just bigger and smaller mountains.

So Valve sent out a press release cancelling one event and hinting at a ‘surprise’. It was a way of adding the tiniest bit of flavour to the otherwise blander-than-bland world of press releases. It was so out of the ordinary, in fact, that nearly every major gaming news website in the world instantly started up the rumour mills. What on earth could this surprise be?

It’s tempting to absolve Valve of all sin, because really, none of this is their fault, at least directly. The problem is they’ve made a reputation for themselves by creating ever more elaborate ways to reveal their games and any new developments. Just a month or two ago we got the Portal 2 reveal after a few days of brilliantly enigmatic ARGs from the game itself. So it only makes sense that if they tease something, it’s going to be something big.
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Neil Castle, the community officer at Realtime Worlds, has got in touch to deliver an official statement about the APB review embargo issue which we looked at earlier today. You can read the statement below.
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Interesting one this. I can only presume it’s a leak of the demo, because it’s in none of the usual sites, and mainly being distributed by torrents. Still, you can get a direct download of Sniper: Ghost Warrior’s demo via TechPoweredUp, so I’m going to blog it. It’s nearly a gig and a half though. The game promises to be the most realistic sniper experience ever – though Alec, sitting in his watchtower, shooting at pigeons and/or poor people would probably disagree – and runs off the Chrome 4 engine which you may know from Call of Juarez: Bound In Blood. Some demo footage follows and there’s more info on the site…
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An epic Civ V trailer sits below the click, and it contains plenty of game footage, as well as featuring the dev team talking about their plans for the fifth in the absurdly popular strategy series. Interesting that modding is at the forefront of their angle of attack this time, something that they say was inspired by modder responses to the previous game. Anyway, go have a look, I think this is one of the more interesting videos we’re going to get this week.
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Videos of Littleloud’s contribution to Channel 4′s British Indies initiative has surfaced online. The Curfew is a graphic adventure set in the near future with a satirical Civil Liberties theme, built on the technology which powered the previous BAFTA-winning Bow Street Runner. There’s a minor conflict of interest on this one, which I should probably make clear before progressing: I wrote it.

So – er – yes. Explanation of the game and the videos follow…
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Review embargoes are a very normal part of games journalism. Companies will put restrictions on when publications are allowed to talk about games before they’re released. For previews this is done to control the dissemination of information. For reviews it’s to allow certain publications to have an exclusive, or more muckily, because they don’t want negative reviews to appear too much in advance of the game’s release. It’s potentially murky territory, but since it’s their game, they get to choose the conditions in which they make them available to magazines and websites before commercial release. It’s not unusual for everyone to be told, “Reviews of game X may be published at 5pm on the 26th”, and then you’ll see all the sites have their reviews appear at once.

What’s far more rare is a company attempting to control the publications of reviews after a game has been released. Especially not ten days after. This is what Realtime Worlds are astonishingly trying to enforce for APB.

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The indie heroes at Pixel Prospector should have been happy with 190 free Indie games, BUT OH NO. They just had to go and push it to 235. The video – posted below – neatly includes an informational hover at the bottom of the display so that you can find out more about the pictured game. It is epic. Go take a look.
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