Rock, Paper, Shotgun

You may remember that back in May, Kieron wrote a hefty hands-on preview of download-only future war multiplayer Blacklight: Tango Down. The mid-price game is for 360 LiveStation, PS3NetworkMax, and the PC via the ghastly GFWL. Well, folks, the game is now available. Except, er, no it’s not. Despite releasing a launch trailer boasting that the game is “AVAILABLE NOW”, the game’s site still says it’s coming “Summer 2010″, and GFWL certainly doesn’t have it in their store. Which makes their slogan, “DOWNLOAD THE FUTURE” seemingly a task, rather than an empty marketing phrase. So, well, the launch trailer is below. Somewhat pre-emptively launched.

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[EDIT: Actually this was also confirmed in February, as we reported here.] According to IGN, Dragon Age 2 has been officially confirmed by EA, although it had already been partially revealed both by a previous mention of another Dragon Age game in the works, and an inclusion of the title of the game in a Warhammer Online press release. Bioware had been teasing something, too, as their Twitter mentioned that today would be “great” for Bioware fans. So there might be more action when Americaland wakes up. In the meantime we’ve had our artists knock up an impression of the new Dragon Age logo.

Following Terry Cavanagh’s presentation of different lengths of indie game development jam at World Of Love, the guys at The Game Collective have come up with a novel length of time for their fourth games pageant: the next decade. Entrants will have ten years to come up with a game for the pageant.

So, deadline is on July the 8th, 2020.

Which is long-term thinking in a way that I like. (Although I am forced to wonder how many of these games will be rushed to completion in the final few weeks…)

Hey, good work Kotaku. They’ve brought to light the unannounced project from Robot Entertainment, one of the splinter companies who formed when Age-of-Empires creators Ensemble disassembled. Pretty much all the details can be ascertained from the screenshot – strategy game with role-playing elements. Kotaku also say that their sources claim that the game draws a lot from Age of Empires. Unsurprisingly. We’ll be watching this one closely? Groundless speculation… Go! My bet? Free-To-Play strategy/RPG combo, basically doing Battlefield Heroes with the RTS.

I’ve spent a fair bit of today thinking about Blizzard’s decision to enforce the use of real names on its forums thing, as anyone watching me yammer away on Twitter will already know. My ultimate conclusion is that, well, it’s insane.

Utter, utter madness.
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I’ve said it before, but I really like what Zero Point Software are doing with the little Unity teases that they are releasing for their game. The most recent is some “Advanced Combat Training”, which you can play over on the main site.

The training takes place two kilometers below ground deep inside a secret military facility. Here you’ll face an onslaught of challenging Combat Training Robot in a range of different training environments. If you succeed you’ll be one step closer to becoming a part of the elite battalion of Interstellar Marines secretly being established as first line of defense against other sentient species.

And they’ve trailered it for our convenience, below. Good stuff.
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Yeah, those racing cars are racing fast in F1 2010, although they’re actually the 2009 cars in this trailer, for reasons of commercial, sporting, and developmental intricacy. Codies show a bit behind the scenes of development, and that means highly detailed models of cars, the tracks they will zoom so precisely around, and a bunch of stuff about the challenges of working with F1 as a format. It’s also stuff that we completely interviewed Codies about earlier in the year. Yeah, we interviewed ‘em good. If only there was a developer that put this much time and effort into a racing game featuring badly-maintained articulated trucks with dangerous payloads and intoxicated drivers. Now that would be something.
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Following on from yesterday’s release of Moonbase Alpha (and Jim and my gleeful jumping around ON THE MOON!), we took the chance to ask some questions to Daniel Laughlin (Ph.D) of NASA Learning Technologies about the Moonbase Alpha…
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I was just reading the VG247 story about someone getting hold of their Starcraft 2 collector’s edition early, and then excitedly unpacking it all on video (and failing to get the game working because of the online aspect of it). The video’s below the cut, but the growth of special editions across the last five years is an undeniable trend (For extra money! And you can’t pirate a little key bobble in the shape of Shodan’s head, natch). I was thinking about what – if anything – makes me throw down for the full bells and whistles version. I often don’t, simply because I don’t have room for the gargantuan boxes… but I like that they exist. So, to throw the question to the floor, what attracts you to these editions? Do you often buy them? What would you like to see them? And what games in history do you wish had one – and what would be in it?
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So – no Alpha Protocol 2 then. This perhaps unsurprising news emerges from a C&VG interview with Sega West’s President Mike Hayes, with the relative meaty bits torn free by VG247, the finest jackals of the videogame press savannah. Key quote: ““Let’s speak very commercially; the game hasn’t sold what we’ve expected, therefore we won’t be doing a sequel”. Well, that’d explain it. The interesting thing for me though is how important he positions metacritic, stating explicitly that an RPG needs an average score in the high eighties to be a hit. While that’s arguably not true, it puts the blame entirely on the game simply not being good enough. Good, yes… but not good enough. I actually bought it myself, but only have got a couple of hours in, bouncing off the surface and having trouble finding the will to return to it. Still – it’s an obvious shame that an attempt to break the Fantasy/Sci-fi duopoly on the genre failed, because an accountant’s logic will mean that further attempts are even less likely. As in “Look what happened to Alpha Protocol”. My 70s punk RPG will never be. Despairing emoticon.

What would you do if you’d made an indie game, and suddenly found yourself impressively wealthy as a result? Build a castle out of diamonds? Buy a zoo just so you can eat all the animals? Or would you create an angel investment fund so you can help other indies get their projects off the ground? That’s the excellent choice that a number of successful indies (you can find out more about who in Alec’s piece from March), and the Indie Fund project is now alive.

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