Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Blimey, I had almost forgotten to mention that Star Wars: The Old Republic definitely has spaceflight in, but a fortuitous poke in the ribs from Kieron reminded me. Better still, it turns out there’s a trailer (embedded below, auto-playing for some reason) to illustrate this fact. The brief montage of space whirliness shows some of the shoot ‘em sequences in action, each with familiar and favoured visual themes of asteroids, close-to-capitol-ships, and upper-atmosphere conflict. And yes, shoot ‘em up. No comprehensive recreation of X-Wing for you, sir, this is more of a linear arcade blast. And, hell, it barely matters what it looks or plays like, because it’s got the noises. More on this soon.
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So if you missed the press conference streams earlier, here’s the Dead Space 2 stage demo featuring a crazy rocketman sequence. (Plus unhappy-looking guy playing it on a gamepad.)
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This news breaks as sharply as the sound of a bolter-magazine being slammed into place by the palm of the righteous. Just announced is that there’s a second incoming expansion for Dawn of War II. Set a decade after Chaos Rising, rather than being stuck with the Blood Ravens, you get to choose your side. Which sides do you get to pick from? Well, as you may surmise from the enormous jaw bellowing at you above, one will be the Orks. Also promised are new multiplayer units and a whole new faction. Which sounds like a cue to link to our Dawn of War 2 sweepstakes article again. Go Jokero! Anyway – the expansion will be out in the first “bit” of 2011 and the first trailer follows…
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Oh, this is getting sadder. Following on the news of Yesterday’s redundancies than Develop report their company sources that the company has entered administration. If no new investor can be found before an unspecified deadline, the company will enter full liquidation. Develop say their sources say the game will likely live on, if only in the hands of another developer. Full story here. I’d also like to direct you to a comment which appeared in the RPS thread yesterday, from someone professing to be an “ExRTW”er talking extensively about their experience with the company and the problems it faced.

EA’s press conference might not have coughed up much of interest with regards to Crysis 2, but the unblinking eye of GameTrailers has managed to grab a developer walkthrough from the developers. It features a fight with a great big alien robot, stuff exploding, and some clear game footage. Much better.
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UPDATE: Three new screens below, click for full image.

I’ve posted the Dragon Age 2 CGI trailer from EA’s press conference below, via PCG. It features some fancy fighting, and doubtless at least half a dozen other clues about the full game. DA2 is out March 8th for the North Americans and March 11th for the Europeans.
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The EA GamesCom 2010 press conference has been wrapped up – and there was no Battlefield 3 showing – but there is some interesting material in there. I’ve quickly jotted the relevant stuff below.
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The Medieval trading business is going to be well catered for in the coming months, as Patrician IV (see trailer below) is out next month, and Kalypso have – in partnership with Gamigo – also just announced Patrician Online. They explain: “The browser-based game, which is planned for 2011, will be based on the well-known trading simulation series The Patrician. Thousands of players can experience the glory days of the Hanseatic League and build up their own trading empire. The focus of the game will be on trading goods between players and creating effective production chains.”

My production chain is particularly effective. That’s what I tell the ladies, anyway.
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Okay. It’s lunch-hour in the UK. I want to play The Balls, and need you chap’s help. Basically, it’s a scrum-game by Cryptic Sea – which is the genre title I’ve plucked out of my head for things like Transformice. Played on a server with up to 100 other balls (or 4 people on one machine), you play a tiny eponymous ball racing across real-world environments at a micro-scale. You either race, or smash stuff up or eliminate one another. In other words, Transformice meets Micromachines, with a sinister 50s horror theme. You can get it from here – it’s currently in a brand new 0.57 version – and there’s a server running in the US. There’s dedicated server software stuff if anyone wants to set up their own. Anyway – some video of the previous, not as fancy looking, version follows. Download and join me. I want to experience the sort of 100 balls of jiggling chaos I haven’t seen since the last Future Christmas party I went to.
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As well as announcing that Lost Planet 2 PC will be hitting on October 15th, news reaches us that Capcom have released a tech-demo for the game. You can download the 1-Gig thing from here, which includes a DirectX 11 Benchmark (and a non-DX11 one) plus a “gameplay test”. Wait… “gameplay test”. That means it’s just a demo, surely? Well, no. It means there’s a benchmark of a cutscene and a benchmark of some in-game action stuff. Anyway – go gets if you wants. Head over to VG247 to see some grabs or… well, I was looking around for a video to link to the masses of console ones, and hit one called “Lady Pirates”. That sounds interesting. Pirates, who are ladies. So, with no further ado, here’s some lady pirates…
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And this is the second of Microsoft’s PC games, confirming the very Age-of-Empires-looking leak of “Spartan” is actually Age of Empires Online. It promises Co-op and player-versus-player multiplayer, plus persistent online empires, a jolly new look and will be due for 2011. The closed beta is already running, and you can sign up for future Beta stuff already, if you wish, here. There’s quite a lot of stuff on the site, so worth nosing, but one thing on the FAQ did catch my eye. “Will there be a retail product, or will Age of Empires Online be available as a download only?” “It will be digitally distributed.” Which strictly speaking doesn’t say it won’t be in shops, but by omission implies it’s download only. There’s a trailer on the site which doesn’t appear to be embeddable anywhere else, so you can go and have a look at it there for now, along with grabs and concept stuff.

The third PC Game is Fable 3, which we already know about. Anything else worth knowing? Well, all are on Games for Windows Live, obv.