Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Just when we thought E3′s videological seed was spent, Bioware release their multiplayer footage for The Old Republic, which I’ve posted below. The blurb explains: “Commander Narlock readies his troops for an Imperial assault. As he does, all four Republic classes; a Jedi Consular, Jedi Knight, Smuggler, and Trooper join together to assist in fighting off the attack.” And it’s pretty much as you’d expect for an MMO of this kind, except, perhaps, for that little Bioware dialogue sequence. No surprises in the combat bit, but I think SWTOR’s strength could be in the story and companion cleverness rather than doing anything mechanistically interesting too far outside of the standard MMO template.
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I’ve been away for two weeks, did you miss me? I’ve been hibernating, but I’m back, baby. It’s the fully rejuvenated bargain bucket. I hope you haven’t all gone crazy and started buying games at RRP in my absence. Valve, the sneaky devils, waited until I wasn’t around to start their big summer sale, but I’m on their case now. I’ve fiddled with the usual bargain bucket format a bit because no one is going to stop me. As always plug plug SavyGamer.co.uk plug. Let the bargainification commenciate.
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It’s about time everyone in the games industry did what I tell them.

So starting today, here’s the first of my Do And Don’t guides. Obey them, developers. Live longer.

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That’s a name, eh? Mr Lavelle suggested we take a look at this one. So I took a look, and it’s… something. Creator “Brog” says: “I went through a bunch of unfinished prototypes I had lying around, foetal games that will never see birth, and copied chunks of code out of each of them, pasted them into one file, and stuck some arbitrary interactions between them. There is a victory condition; it doesn’t make much sense, but it is possible to reach a “you win” screen.” And it’s a bit like playing a game of when a kid has mixed his baked beans with his trifle. Or maybe it’s actually a game that makes sense in some other register of consciousness, like if you’re an alien or a savant or something. Hmm.

What could have drawn four such strange individuals together? And why are two ready for combat, and the other two just sort of posing? And why are they fighting an angel anyway? All the answers can be uncovered in just-released indie-RPG Deadly Sin 2. Never played Deadly Sin 1? Don’t worry – like Final Fantasy, they’re all unconnected. Don’t know what it looks like? Well, look at the trailers below. Want to play it for an hour before throwing down cash? There’s a demo that allows exactly that. Rhetorical questions? No answers required. That’s why they’re rhetorical.
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And that’s it: the last two pieces of the Portal 2 footages are posted below. Meet “Propulsion Gel” and “Repulsion Gel”.
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Good news for fans of vroom. News reaches us that over Holiday Weekend until July 5th EA’s forthcoming online MMO racer thingy will be available to play. Just go and sign up here. It kicks off at 10am PST – which is 6pm in Blighty, meaning you can get home from work and get straight on the speedy-places. Anyway, here’s a trailer which features an unfortunate over-use of the word-awesomeness.
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The Steam summer sale thingamy is continuing to offer some ludicrously good prices, as it happens. I’ve just spotted some for which there’s only six hours left, which should fill in some vital gaps on your virtual shelf. There’s Thief: Deadly Shadows for £2.09, BioShock for £3.49, and Titan Quest Gold for £2.49. There’s also Dragon Age, about 80 hours of game, for £11.99.

I can’t get over Thief 3 for barely more than £2. This is one of those games that come 2014 we’ll be writing ten year retrospectives about. If you never did, you absolutely must right now. Just for the heck of it, I’ve pasted my review of the game from 2004 for PC Format.

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More bigwig fruits from my time at GameHorizon now, chums. I managed to snag an hour with Epic’s outspoken vice-president Mark Rein, who bought me a cheese sandwich, showed me prototypes of the Unreal engine running on iPhone, iPad and Android (platforms which he considers “the future”), and let me spam him with questions for GamesIndustry.biz.

Come the end of the interview, I swapped out my GI hat for my RPS hat (eight feet high, made of diamonds and love) and harangued him a little about Epic’s stance on the PC these days – they suffered a whole lot of shelling from the angrytank following some disparaging comments about the platform, and the revelation that Gears of War 2 wouldn’t come to our beloved boxes. For Rein at least, the idea the Epic are now anti-PC is a misconception…

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The beta itself starts on the 8th of July, but you can sign up today. It’s seems certain that you should read our interview and then go, fly! to register yourself for the beta. And then rest. Rest, brave reader. For soon you will have much work to do.

From the depths of the almighty Steamforums – via Simon Parkin, Via Kotaku – comes some fun reworking of Valves IP. One SF2-style is shown above, and an especially large shot multi-stage shot beneath the cut… but do follow the link to this venerable threadto see Fortcraft, The Legend of Sniper and more.
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