Rock, Paper, Shotgun

This week, a mod made me properly gasp. I turned a corner in a cave network to suddenly emerge in an enormous opening, water cascading down the sides of the rock, crashing into the pool below and sending the water churning in turbulent waves. It looked absolutely astonishing. I’ll be writing about what I’ve played of Robert Briscoe’s upcoming Dear Esther remake elsewhere in the near future, but suffice it to say: it’s shaping up to be absolutely extraordinary.

But that’s not this week’s mod news. This is this week’s mod news…
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This video (below) from Game Informer’s visit to Bioware is clearly grossly unrepresentative of what the finished game is going to be like, but it does contain lots of chatter from the devs, and a brief glimpse of a battle going on in the new game engine. Not looking particularly finished, but it’s there nonetheless. It also demonstrates that games really are made by guys sat at desks, and not by cackling EA money-bots in a city of darkness in the caves beneath California.
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We’ve pointed out before that wingsuits are one of the most awesome things in life that don’t appear often enough in videogames. Fortunately one of the contributors to our random Unity project, ShotgUnity, has realised that and is making a game about them all on his own: Volo Airsport. It’s fairly basic right now, but bravo. Go visit his site and show some support. Lovely work-in-progress video embedded below.
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Free Left 4 Dead 2 for people who got banned, eh? That sounds okay. You can read Gabe’s letter of apology to banned people below.
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You can get it on Steam, because the game itself is all snazzed up with Steamworks n stuff (matchmaking, steam achievements, stats, etc). The demo features a slice of Kane & Lynch’s ultraviolent criminality for you to sample, something which Io’s Niels Jørgensen describes as “tension and excitement not found in other games”. Why not see if you agree with him? For all we know this could be exactly the tension and excitement found in Armadillo Run. But anyway, I’m hearing good stuff about the full game, especially the multiplayer, which Quintin was yammering about last night. We’ll take a proper look at it soon. In the meantime, download, judge!

As you may be aware, a little game called StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty was released tonight. Alec? Probably best you back off. These fine folks aren’t interested in a liveblog of the single player campaign. They’re not interested in the game. These guys? They want to know about the midnight launch at the Game branch in London’s fashionable Oxford Street. They want the glitz, the scoop, the drama. Lucky for them, I was there!
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I should be at the StarCraft II launch party in that London right now, but poorly-timed trains have done for me, so we’ve sent Quinns instead. Which does at least leave me free to install and play the copy of the game I picked up earlier today. Once the activation servers turn on, anyway. OH THEY’VE TURNED ON OH GOD WOO GO.

Here’s a blow-by-blow account of my exciting Installing And Then Playing A Videogame adventure.

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Paradox Interactive’s latest strip of historical beef jerky, Commander: Conquest of the Americas, has a brand spanking new demo available for download at FilePlanet. CotA casts players as a European power scrabbling for colonies in the New World at the start of the 16th century, meaning it’s all turning a profit while remembering to fight your wars. Or the other way around, if you’re a jerk. I’ve had a quick look and it seems plenty engaging in a biscuity, Paradoxy, straight-laced sort of way, so why not give it a shot?

“The loyal PC audience is incredibly important to us here at Relic,” says a guy. Or, to put it in other, MORE EXCITING words: the Warhammer 40,000 third-person action game Space Marine is coming to PC, despite formerly being pitched as console only. Oh yay! Oh yay!

And the screenshots? The screenshots look great.
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UPDATIER: See this.

UPDATE: Some consideration of whether this is actually a VAC problem, or simply MW2 being a bit nob, can be found here.

We’re getting word that over the last week a slew of Modern Warfare 2 players have been banned from the game by Valve’s Anti-Cheat software, or HAL VAC for short. You know, the same software found in Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead 2? The one that issues irrevocable bans that Valve will not remove or discuss “under any circumstances”? Well, a great deal of this freshly-banned crowd are claiming (screaming, really) that they’ve never cheated. Ever. Making this a bit of a sticky situation.
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It’s important when co-editing a major independent gaming website to remain impartial, and most of all, not use the site for your own personal gain. Fortunately I’m a maverick who won’t play by the rules, and I really want to play Attack On Pearl Harbor on PC again. The original game came out in 2007 on PC, and quickly clicked with me. Based on the Second Mega War events between the US and Japanese, it was a heavily arcadey dogfighting game from Legendo, that ignored accuracy and physics and focused on ratta-tatta-tat entertainment. It was bouncy, springy fun. This year a complete remake (new engine, new physics, new controls, new everything) came out on WiiWare, but not on PC. And remembering it, having played some DogFighter and Heroes Over Europe, I decided to look it up again.

And it has vanished. So I decided to find out why, and see what I can do about bringing Attack On Pearl Harbor back. “Convince us to create a new version,” says Legendo boss. So we will! It’s time for a campaign! Please click on and help me with this.

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