Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’m back! Where have I been? Riding motorbikes and catching gut-diseases, mainly, but now I’m back and am once again lending a quivering hand to the murderous steam-threshing machine that is Rock Paper Shotgun dot com. So, let’s get started.

Nation of Reincars is an achingly tricky indie platformer/puzzler from Swedish developer Krimelo, whose previous work includes (I’m just stealing this off his blog now) Autocannibalism and Medi Climp. I initially read that second one as Medi Chimp, and my mind is currently blasting on all cylinders with ideas for what Medi Chimp would be like. Syringe-wielding primates aside, Nation of Reincars is an interesting bit of freeware that’s all about reincarnation.
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When the lovely puzzle game Toki-Tori’s demo was released, I decided to drop a line to Two Tribes to have a little exchange about their debut on the PC after years working primarily on the hand-held. Co-founder and creative director Collin Van Ginkel took a little time to share some thoughts…
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This is tricksie, but I think you may find Xong interesting. It’s basically a cross between Arkanoid and Rogue. Which is a bit of a cheat, but hits the key “bouncing projectiles to remove blocks” and “randomised levels” aspects of the game. Basically, the game’s aim is for you to i) kill all the baddies by dropping direction-guide-things in the path of the baddies to lead them down the black hole ii) change your puck into the correct colour to bounce at the key-lock-monster-centipede who is wandering around while not iii) dying or losing your last puck or similar. It’s genuinely quite abstract in that reprocessed early-80s-through-90s-filter way, and takes some getting used to, but it’s good to see people following Spelunky down its particular hole. For more have a nose at the Play This Thing review. You can pick it up for PC and the other two PCs here and there’s a remix compo going over at the developer’s site. Also worth popping along to the site to see the developer roll his eyes at people describing the graphics as ASCII or ANSI. I’ll describe the graphics as shit. Quote that one, eh?
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The Gears of War mod team who were trying to make a Terminator shooter have switched their efforts over to UDK, and the results are pretty fancy. You can check out their video, below, or actually go and play the thing by grabbing it from their Moddb page. I’ve not had a chance to look at it yet (Alien Swarm to play) but you won’t need UDK installed to make it work, so why am I mentioning it? A mystery. Also there are some fiddles in the install instructions, so pay attention.
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I’ve had my hands on a preview build of Mafia II, limited to four missions but with the whole city open. Below you can read my impressions at this stage, a couple of months ahead of release. You should be warned, at the end of this article is a picture of a lady with her boobies showing. It’s from the game, I swear.

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Mark Rein has said sorry to Cliff Harris over his comments at last week’s Develop Conference. The Develop website reports that Rein was mortified when he learned of Cliffski’s upset, and has written him an email to apologise. The text of the email is available in full over on Develop. Rein makes it very clear that he does support indies, and that his passion and big mouth got him into trouble. It’s an extremely contrite response, and one in which he makes his motivations for interrupting Harris’s panel very clear, along with explaining how Epic isn’t the enemy of the indie. How has Cliffski responded to this? I’d wager good money he’ll let us know in the comments below.

Thanks to Phill for pointing us toward Alien Black Hole. It’s the work, so the website claims, of an 8 year old called Ross, who using Game Maker published it on his site, Thunder And Lightning Games. Now, we were once 8 year olds, and we remember we spent most of that year laughing at farts, falling out of trees and running away from girls. (Please note the obvious joke being omitted here.) We’re a little suspicious. Because despite its extremely simplistic appearance, it quickly reveals itself to be a rather good idea. 8 year olds don’t have good ideas, do they? The enemies that follow your ship around, chasing you as you aim for the exits, also destroy the level’s walls when they get near. Soon those walls are in your way, so you’re going to need the pursuing enemy’s help. Smart, eh? It’s a very little download, you can get it from here.

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I really, really like this. Even though it arguably gets its core gag absolutely wrong. It’s the old pun about why RPG shops are happy to repeatedly buy and sell the same old crap to the same old heroes writ large, as a rather funny and monstrously compulsive strategy-RPG hybrid. The fact there’s an RPG in that… well, that’s what it gets wrong. The RPG shopkeeper gag is that they don’t know what the hell they’re buying, what animal arse it’s been pulled from or why the guy selling it is covered in bits of town guard. When the shopkeeper’s part of the adventure, they’re no longer the naive/mercenary money-grabber we’ve encountered in a thousand different games.

I still really, really like this. I played the (fairly long) demo through twice. Can’t remember the last time I did that.
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Servers are a bit busy, mind. Alien Swarm, of course, is a free game from the Black Cat team, who happened to have been eaten by the Valve monster. They’ve been making a nice home for themselves in its belly, and working on this, which is a shiny remake of the original. And free. We’ll play it later, probably, and have some impressions up tomorrow, maybe. That’s for certain.

That’s a pun, you see, because it’s made by Finnish game studio Nitro Games, but it’s also finished and available to pre-order. Anyway, Paradox Interactive’s latest historical naval war and management game, Commander: Conquest Of The Americas, is actually released on July 30th, and it’s the semi-sequel to East India Company. I didn’t really get on particularly well with EIC, despite feeling like it got the diplomacy stuff right, and the sea-battle stuff mostly right. I just sort of tired of the grind of it, and left feeling unpleased. Anyway, it clearly made enough headway and charmed enough of you lot to get this follow up, which sees familiar perfidious European powers vying to take control of the Americas. Bloody bastards. Trailer below, if you’re interested.
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Despite reading about it, and indeed writing about it, it’s really only watching the video below that has finally had me click over what this new Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light trailer game is really all about. Which is really nothing like Tomb Raider at all. But it looks an awful lot of Diablo-esque fun. The new trailer shows off intense combat, with minimal athletics. (The previous trailer was the other way around.). It’s a peculiar direction to have swung in, but a bright and interesting one. It’s supposed to be out sometime this Summer, but there’s still no specific date.

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