By John Walker on July 7th, 2010.
Test Drive Unlimited was great, and not nearly enough people played it. For which you should feel just awful. There’s a sequel coming out on 21st September. Perhaps you’ve already signed up for the beta, checked out the details known so far, and I hope to goodness you’ve read Alec’s review of the original. What you should do today is watch the latest trailer showing off the islands’ environments.
By John Walker on July 7th, 2010.
The rebirth of Mythos – the splendid Fate-like MMO originally created to stress-test the Hellgate: London servers – still doesn’t have a release date, but is looking ever-more concrete. Travis Baldree’s game was the surprising highlight of Flagship Studios, before he went on to create the happiness that was Torchlight. Then it was all swallowed up in the ugly mess of Flagship’s collapse, and the muddle that led to its being owned by Hanbitsoft. Then there was that giant battle in the sea, the reverse volcano, and the Great War Of Swords. And finally, now in the year 3032, we’re getting ready to play all over again.
By Kieron Gillen on July 6th, 2010.
Hurrah! The previously covered Moonbase Alpha is available to play. You can go and get your copy, for free, on Steam (So has Steamworks supports for leaderboards and similar). Those interested in digging further will see NASA’s press-release here, and have more info on the game’s site and NASA’s portal. Anyway, Jim and I had a crack at the Beta last week, and had a chat about our time on our favourite lunar body…
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By Jim Rossignol on July 6th, 2010.
Big news for Battle.net users, and possible important implications for net privacy as a whole, via this posting from Blizzard:
anyone posting or replying to a post on official Blizzard forums will be doing so using their Real ID — that is, their real-life first and last name — with the option to also display the name of their primary in-game character alongside it. These changes will go into effect on all StarCraft II forums with the launch of the new community site prior to the July 27 release of the game, with the World of Warcraft site and forums following suit near the launch of Cataclysm. Certain classic forums, including the classic Battle.net forums, will remain unchanged.
More thoughts below.
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By Kieron Gillen on July 6th, 2010.
God help me, I like this. And I’ve also re-named it. It should be called Go Go Marine Squad, but I’ve added an exclamation mark and put it all in capitals. Creator Jan Willem Nijman can expect my consultancy fee invoice in the post. It’s a low-tech first-person shooter, with you controlling a marine whose sense-organs are positioned way outside his body, featuring destructible scenery, multiple weapon types and genuinely pummelling weapon sounds. Oh – and you can get a higher level view of the situation for strategic positioning (i.e. Getting behind them and shooting them). In a cut-to-the-core take on the FPS, it actually kinda reminds me of a micro-scale version of Amiga micro-classic Gloom. It’s about as dumb as toast, which can be a good thing in my book. You can get it from here or watch some low-frame-rate footage below…
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By Kieron Gillen on July 6th, 2010.
Well, Caesary is an online, free-to-play browser game MMO thing. I’m linking this because this is one of the worst, most amateurish trailers I’ve ever seen and has to be gawped at. Extended close-ups of the word “loading” – including the player cursor circling it whilst it waits in some attempt to kill the time, blank white screens, images uncentered with variable level of JPG compression, randomly justified comic-sans juxtaposed with melodramatic music on a lovely orange backdrop. And then the melodramatic music gets a dance-beat behind it! Marvellous.
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By Jim Rossignol on July 6th, 2010.
I have to admit that I am still a bit of a sucker for reading things made out of paper, but I routinely wish that Ctrl+F worked on them. It’s a good argument for having digitized, searchable versions of books on the web. I gave permission for that to happen to This Gaming Life a long time ago, and I’ve just discovered that it has now been uploaded to the net.
It’s a book about the relationship between gamers and the games they play, and it’s a book dominated by experiences with PC games. You’d like it. You can still buy those beautifully papery versions here in the US and here in Europe.
By Jim Rossignol on July 6th, 2010.
That’s “Volume 1: Revelations of Gipat”, to you. Allods’ first expansion raises the level cap to 42, adds 100 quests, and a new instance. The full patch notes are here, if you’re interested in the grimy details. As I understand it, this patch also removes one of the death penalties that had been annoying people so much, which should make things a little more playable. And it it’s free, obviously, because Allods is free-to-play.
By Kieron Gillen on July 6th, 2010.
It’s always heartwarming when one of these enormous mod-projects actually reaches the holy 1.0. They started in 2001. And now, in 2010, they release their complete Ultima VI mod for Dungeon Siege. You can go and get it here. I can only give them a hearty round of applause. And, alas, I mean it literally – I’ve long since lost my copy of Dungeon Siege, and it’s really tricky to buy online (You’re best off trying on a place like Amazon). No video of the finished version available, but here’s a little footage from the 5th out of 8th milestone…
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By Jim Rossignol on July 6th, 2010.
I’m not going to make a habit of linking to wallpaper releases, obviously, but I think the update for Id Software’s latest on Bethesda Blog might be worth an exception. They have all the normal sizes, as you might expect, but also two 25,600×16,000 images, and a marginally smaller 25,600×9,080. You know, just in case you decided you wanted to print out these wallpapers for some actual walls.
By Alec Meer on July 5th, 2010.
Is it advert, is it game, is it video, is it brainteaser? Chrome Fastball is all those things. It’s a promotional web-toy created by a little company known as Google, intended to convince us all to use the Chrome browser. Why, whoever would want to do that? We’re all so happy with Microsoft Internet Explorer whatever-the-hell-number-that-carcrash-is-on-now.
Yeah, it’s an advert. But it’s also a test of how well you know the internet: both its mechanics and its concept.
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