By Kieron Gillen on August 19th, 2010.
Time for a relaxing web-game? Well, e7 is partially it and partially not. As in, it’s more than just the sweeping over the alien environment in a stylish-reduced-palette style. Just difficult enough to be worth playing, I quite dig this. Woosh! Woosh across the landscape! Also, floor-deformation and bouncing. Thanks to Bakka for pointing at me. Play it here.
By Kieron Gillen on August 19th, 2010.
Delirium Wartner pointed the Beta of the Tripwire-signed indie game Dwarfs at me, and I’ve had a quick crack at breaking open the soil and quite like it. While the title will bring Dwarf Fortress to mind, it’s much more like Diggers (and, of course, the recent Delve Deeper). While there’s multiple modes, the key one is the arcade one which generates a random underground and charges you to explore it without being over-ran with goblins, released water or unleashed lava. My main reservation is that the direction arrows you create influence both the incredibly weak diggers (who you’ll want to keep away from combat) and the handy warriors (who you’ll want to guide towards it), but it’s agreeably chaotic, gold-chasing. You can get the beta from here. I suspect Delirium got the link from Indie Games, so let’s link to them and show this video…
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By Jim Rossignol on August 19th, 2010.
Quinns mentioned the intriguing-sounding MMORTS, End Of Nations, in his survey of the first day of GamesCom. Massive tanks, apparently. This is what Petroglyph (C&C veterans who made Universe At War) did next. There’s now been some footage released of the PvP aspect of the game, which allows multiple players (15 vs 15) to battle against each other and AI forces on a huge battlefield. A pretty traditional art style there, but it does look fantastic. Looking forward to marching a righteous RPS horde into this one.
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By Jim Rossignol on August 19th, 2010.
Elemental – War Of Magic arrives next week, bringing with it a feast of 4X fantasy strategy-RPG happenings. Stardock have released a launch trailer which gives you a flavour of the game, and you can see that below. Personally, I’ve found it fascinatingly intricate, but a little tricky to get to grips with in the beta of the game. I’ve found the pace of things and the escalation of a events a little overwhelming, and I hope the balancing and tweaks that have been going on over the past few weeks will ease that. We’ll have a properly detailed look at the game soon, nonetheless, hopefully with some time spent examining the game’s multifarious multiplayer.
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By Alec Meer on August 18th, 2010.
Dragging myself by the knuckles across Cologne’s pavements to reach my Portal 2 viewing, I reflected upon how much easier this would have been had I eaten at any point in the last four days. I had tried my best, plucking small kernels of tarry fluff from the thin carpet I had slept on. The bouncer/landlord who watched me at all times felt this was taking unfair advantage of the hotel’s facilities, and duly evicted me. I thought of calling Quintin, who had earlier talked of eating quail’s eggs by the dozen from plates made of narwhal horn. Could he spare just one egg? I thought of how he would sneer at my ragged clothes, my £3 haircut, my clear poverty. I was starving, but I could not possibly face his contempt. I dragged myself on, to Hall 7. I might not be able to eat, but I could at least see a new videogame from Valve.
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By Quintin Smith on August 18th, 2010.
I woke today with a sense of purpose. Actually, I woke with a hangover, immediately threw aside the silk sheets of my luxurious accommodation and knocked over several half-empty champagne bottles on my way to the marbled bathroom. But it was there I found my sense of purpose!
GamesCom! Games! Shitloads of them! I’ll be posting full-bodied previews next week, but for now here’s my roundup of what I saw today.
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By Jim Rossignol on August 18th, 2010.
There was a problem with the rather clever space-battle fleet manager game Gratuitous Space Battles. It was this: there was no campaign mode. I’ve no idea how you would fix a problem like that, but fortunately one man development army Cliffski has plenty of ideas. One of them is relevant: he’s going to add a campaign mode. He explains: “The GSB campaign is a singleplayer ‘conquer-the-galaxy’ style game, where you build up vast space fleets and kick interstellar ass. Rather than set, pre-determined fleets to battle against, the game utilises the fleets designed by other GSB players to provide an endless variety of opponent, so you will be pitted against real carbon-based intelligence on every step of your path to galactic dominance.” Read more about this extraordinary move here. It will be paid DLC, price TBC.
By Jim Rossignol on August 18th, 2010.
Woo, the GamesCom Portal 2 demo has been filmed by clever Germans and uploaded, somehow, to the internet. I just don’t know how they do it. I’ll try to figure that out, and meanwhile you can watch the events below – it’s stuff we’ve seen bits of before, but still, looking lovely – while digesting the news that Stephen Merchant has been cast as Wheatley, the thinger that helps you along your way in that game, Portal 2.
Yes. Portal 2 will be released February 9, 2011. That’s news, too. I’m high-fiving in solitude, here. Clapping? Oh.
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By Jim Rossignol on August 18th, 2010.
The trailers, they cannot be stopped. We’re rushing around in the guts of Castle Shotgun, using giant steaming glue hoses to try and prevent more trailers from oozing their way into the machinery, but we just can’t fight them all. Here’s another, right now, from Codemasters! It’s for F1 2010 and contains an extremely slick look at the tracks, cars, weather conditions and all that stuff that should – Gods Of Game Development permitting – make this the most compelling F1 game in years. (Fingers crossed, eh?)
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By Jim Rossignol on August 18th, 2010.
Runic want to stress something to you: Torchlight II has co-op play in it. No, it really does. You might say it doesn’t and hold your breath until you turn blue, but it still does. Here’s a trailer to prove it. Oh and the game is out early next year. Before Diablo III, anyway.
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By John Walker on August 18th, 2010.
While I’ve not ever been captured by the Need For Speed series, I really am looking forward to Hot Pursuit. Developed by Criterion, they behind my all-time favourite driving game Burnout: Paradise, the footage below shows quite how much it looks like their previous epic. Which certainly makes me extremely happy. The video shows not only quite how lovely it looks (and then imagine it with some anti-aliasing on our magic boxes), but also the way the multiplayer will allow you to taunt other players, and race on the fly.
