Rock, Paper, Shotgun

What are you doing this weekend? Well, if you’re less busy than me, you can play Ruse, the forthcoming Ubisoft strategy game. It actually quite impressed me at a recent press event, so diving into this Machiavellian game of bluff is something that I’d quite like to spend the weekend doing. Alas! But maybe your life is more pleasurable – yet empty – than mine, in which case I direct you to Steam. Download the client and you can play until Sunday. A chunky 20-minute video where the team talk about the improvements for the free weekend follows if you want a bit of hot developer goss…
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Alex from the Eufloria team sends word that the new version of the game, 2.05, includes a big old community map pack. The game now supports customs maps in the interface, and there’s apparently now some scope for truly inventive modding, with moving asteroids and other cleverness. The update is out on the site for non Steam users, and the Steam version will be updated shortly. I had a bit of a wordthink about the game last year, and most of what I said still stands.

So, while the Bond movie languishes in limbo, Activision have confirmed that the other new Bond game is called James Bond 007: Blood Stone. It’s being developed by Bizarre Creations, and will feature fancy cover-based shooting, hand-to-hand fisticuffs, chatting to sexy ladies, automotive racing sequences, and the voices of Daniel Craig, Joss Stone, and Judi Dench. There’s a reveal video up, which I’ve posted below. No release date yet.
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I think I mocked this Source-engined oddity when it was announced, because it had a silly name. It still has a silly name: E.Y.E. but it now also has some fairly interesting game footage. Christophe from Streum On Studio got in touch to say that: “Our game takes place in a dark and futuristic universe and the video shows several ways to solve a situation.” That situation, given that this is an FPS with RPG elements, is killing several men, but you see that done with guns, hacked turrets, conjured soldiers, little hoverbots, and some – er – menus. Surprising, promising. There’s some more info on the main site, and some terrible screenshots. Oh dear.
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DICE says: “The article published by PC-Gamer is not accurate. We are currently researching if Onslaught will be available for PC. No release date.”

Bummer. But don’t blame the messenger, eh? EA/DICE need to get their wires straight.

Listen up, near-forgotten supporting character fans: Half-Life: Opposing Force’s Adrian Shepherd is back! Just, y’know, unofficially. I suspect it’s the only way we’ll ever see anything else of the Gearbox-developed add-on’s soldiery hero-mute – and it’s also a snazzy way to see real life human beans interacting with Striders, Combine police et al. Beyond Black Mesa is set during the Combine occupation of Earth, and was made by a bunch of HL2-lovin’ film-makers with $1,200 made from their day jobs. Shoestring, then, but going on the trailer they’ve not done badly considering… Strider!
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“Grand strategy” game Storm Over The Pacific came out, rather quietly, in June. But a demo for it has just appeared in the last 24 hours. The game by Wastelands Interactive, which perhaps not surprisingly follows the Ultra Mega War 2 battles taking place over Asia and the Pacific ocean, can be bought from Impulse for a really rather incredibly expensive £39, or from GamersGate for a still rather AAA price of £35. And that’s just the digital download. However, perhaps this is exactly where you want to spend your money, and you can find out playing the demo. It offers you 15 turns of the Pacific campaign, but without the ability to save.

I zombie-walk into the back of the hall, to have Doublefine’s industry-legend^tm Tim Schafer on stage saying something along the lines of “You always have something to learn about hard drinking from the British”. As a pallid spirit powered solely by the ghost of spirits, I fear he has nothing to learn from me – bar, don’t do it. However, we do learn from him – not least, the first information of the four (count ‘em!) games Doublefine are working on.
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Speaking of MMOs, there’s one that we haven’t been able to take our collective eye off, which is this one: Guild Wars 2. The chaps over at ArenaNet have been revealing a bit more about their fantastical sequel this week, mostly in the form of the ranger class details. GameTrailers, that bandwidth-providing broadcast monster of the internet, has compiled the various videos into a single item, which you can watch below. It reveals that the ranger employs arrows. Yeah, you could probably have predicted that. But there is also a bear, a giant bird, angry seagulls, “whirling defence”, a giant ogre thing and some lovely scenery. Well, it’s looking pretty impressive, anyway, so go take a peek.
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Will Porter was editor of PC Zone in 2008, having worked on the mag for many years previously and since. Below he writes his eulogy for the first PC gaming magazine, that will be closing down after the next issue.

Hi! My name is Will Porter, and I’m here to deliver a stilted eulogy on the imminent demise of a magazine that shaped my love of PC gaming, my love of writing and much of what could laughably be called my career. I can’t help but feel that a lot of RPS readers will have, perhaps in older times, shared my love for PC Zone. As such I asked the RPS hive-mind for a platform on which to stand to address whoever present that wishes to celebrate its life. Or, indeed, tell us all how it was never as good as it used to be. I am aware that this site is to some degree the spawn of the auld enemy, those hateful bastards at PC Gamer, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

During the sermon there will also be a reading from Paul Presley, a surviving veteran of the PC Zone ‘Ninja’ Age, who wrote something lovely about the mag for its Issue 200 celebrations a year and a half ago. There will be coffee and tea in the foyer after the service. A minibus will then be provided for those wishing to head out and start burning shit down.

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There are a bunch of MMOs on the horizon that we’ve pretty much neglected in the past few months, and one of those is Final Fantasy XIV, with its bunny-ear girls, ludicrous hyperbolic fantasy and science-fiction architecture. There was a trailer at E3 (which I’ve slung below) but also a bunch of details about the game which arrives on September 30th. Interestingly, the game does away with classic level-based experience point progressing, and instead opts for a skill-based system which will, as I understand it, allow a single player to take on different roles depending on the skills they’ve gathered and the equipment they employ. The character will still become more powerful in terms of hit points and mana, however.

The closed beta started last weekend, and it seems that North American applicants can sign up here, and Euros and Japanese here, so you could potentially get a look at it if you were interested.
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