Rock, Paper, Shotgun

hello! i am at san deigo comix con this week so am very rushed and could skive off but I feel bad so i am doing a quik post about a demo we have missed. It is a serius strattegy game with a reel historiman as a consultiant, and let’ss u play any nation in world. I fink tim sTone wuld like it as he is clvr like that. There r mor details on its cite if u want to c and below iz an early trailur. anyway – gotta go. VERY BIZY. Post in bit of rush, but sure no-one wil mind typos as this no get covvverage if I no did this and I wuld no post otherwisse. See you sooon. Miss you! xXx
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Reader Michael Cook sends word of Pixel Breakout, a teeny-tiny flash game which is both exactly what you’d expect and pleasantly surprising. For the 60 or so seconds it takes you to complete it, you’re pretty well rewarded. And yet now I am angry, because playing it’s reminded me of an old, freeware, overwhelmingly psychedelic Asteroids clone where everything you shot or touched exploded in a shower of pixels and tinny noise. I think it began with an A. Is that ringing any bells for anyone? It definitely deserves a post of its own.

EDIT: Spheres of Chaos! That was it. And I see Alec “Greasy Cheetah” Meer wrote about it a whopping three years ago, right here.

Shooty persistent-world type game Global Agenda has undergone a bunch of changes since launch, the biggest of those having just gone live within the game today. These include the “Open Zone” – which is a wide-open PvE space that you can go off and do missions in, a bit like a traditional MMO- and also, more significantly, the fact that there is no longer any fee to play. Buy it, and you got it, Guild Wars style. Which is good. The new patch also adds in 10-man raids, in which you defend the city against invaders. It’s interesting to see the PvE leanings within the game, perhaps because the PvE types got more out of it. The actual conquest part of the game was what I’d had the most hope for, and it doesn’t seem to be doing all that well. (Although I had pretty good time in the drop-in PvP stuff I did manage to play, it just didn’t have enough bite to stick around.) Worth checking out if you have the game, and hopefully they’ll do another free trial, too.

In what journalists are calling a “Dick Move”, Blizzard has announced that there will be no reviews of StarCraft 2 before lunch. Would-be reviewers are going to have to wait until after everybody in the office has had lunch before posting their review of the hotly anticipated RTS.

Wait, hang on. Sorry, I misread my RSS feed. Blizzard has announced there will be no StarCraft 2 reviews before launch. Before the game’s launch, on Tuesday, when the BattleNet servers go live. According to Eurogamer Blizzard was “unable to offer an official comment at the time of writing”, though they gather that it’s to do with Blizzard not wanting anybody to play the game without the full suite of BattleNet features. What did you have for lunch today, readers?

Ooh, ooh, it’s Mafia II. That’s the official song. I sing it because there are two more trailers, one of which features an interview with the splendid Director of Creative Production Jack Scalici. He discusses the story, the motivations, and the music. (If you want to read a lot more thoughts from Scalici, be sure to check out my feature on voice direction.) The second is an advert for NVidia. Oh, and don’t forget to check out our recent preview of the game.

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There are some fairly big names associated with Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, including Todd MacFarlane and R.A. Salavatore. It’s an action RPG from 38 Studios (a studio which is owned by Curt Schilling), and the debut cinematic (which was shown at SDCC10 this week) also mentions that Ken Rolston (of Elder Scrolls games) is involved in the design. It’s apparently a kind of action precursor to 38′s real project, which is an MMO set in the same universe. Anyway, go browse the lavish official site, and check out the trailer below. Interesting stuff. The game is due “Fall 2011,” apparently.
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Three new Lego Universe trailers have flickered their way into the dull glow of my consciousness, via Bluesnews. They show a bunch of in-game activity, and also a fully-grown Lego fan with his Lego. He really likes Lego. I mean I really like Lego, but this guy likes it at another level.
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It’s always good to see some more Dead Rising 2 trailers appear, since each appears to be more peculiar than the last. Two more have appeared for Comic Con, advertising the rather lovely looking resort of Fortune City, Nevada. The first is, well, literally an advert for the city. The second – it goes into more specific details about what more lively events could take place there.

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OMGesus! As of right now multiplayer shoot-athon Lead & Gold is undergoing one of Steam’s famous free weekends. Anyone who fancies a bit of cowboy gunfightin’ should (here we go) get downloadin’ right now, pardner!

If I’m honest, I never got on very well with Lead & Gold. The third person camera made me feel the absence a cover mechanic, the transparent spawning got on my nerves and I’d find matches often played out in an unsatisfying manner. But hey, that’s just me! And at this price it’s definitely worth a shot, so to speak.

The demo of Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale is one of the best things I’ve played in a while. A Japanese indie game pitching an RPG shopkeeper as the star… well, you can read all that in the last post. Given the slightly unusual nature of the project – it’s only available here thanks to a third-party translation company- I thought I’d chat to said translators about the why, how, who and what next. Interesting stuff – there’s this whole vein of (slick) indie gaming that we otherwise hear nothing about. Take it away, Carpe Fulgur’s Andrew Dice.

Why set up a business translating Japanese indie games? Love, profit, bit of both?

A bit of both, really. Should Carpe Fulgur prove very successful we do hope to take it beyond “just” indie stuff, although the Japanese indie scene is mournfully overlooked. There is a lot of what might be termed “naughty” content being produced by the Japanese indie scene, but it’s also where some of Japan’s future best and brightest are starting to make their mark and it’s almost criminal that localizers on this side of the pond won’t even give them a first look.
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There’s clearly going to be a lot of messing around to be done with Alien Swarm and its SDK, but one thing that can be messed about with immediately is the perspective. PCG spotted that you can play the game in first-person by enabling the dev console in the options and then typing:

firstperson
asw_hide_marine 1
asw_controls 0

Video of it in action below. There’s no ceiling/sky, obviously.
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