Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It’s late at night after the unveiling of Bioshock Infinite by the time I sit down with Ken Levine to talk about the city of Columbia. What follows is a discussion which takes in how the themes of the game resonate between 1900 and today, how Irrational think they took the binary Little-sister choice as far as they were interested in already, dances elegantly around the question of whether this shares a universe with Bioshock 1 or not and expresses sadness that people aren’t going to totally get the name until they’ve finished the game…
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Something for the weekend, sir? May I recommend Part-time Angle Grinder Hero? You can download it from here, then load it by dragging the 14mb .swf file into your browser. It is an epic tale of love, drinking, and angle grinding. But mainly drinking. And angle grinding.
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Cor, it’s all go this week, isn’t it? Here’s the first ever official look at Deus Ex 3 in-game content, along with lots of other pretty cutscene gubbins. You are all commanded to interpret it below.

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Unreal-powered shooter The Scourge Project has a demonstrational download version. It’s here at 1.5gb.

Jim: 4-player co-op, we should all grab that, for hot co-op action.
Alec: Nice.
Quintin: Oh it’s fucking terrible. I reviewed it for a mag. It’s properly abysmal. Cyberpunky Gears of War with tedious level design, shoddy shooting and awkward mouse support. If we played it together we would never play a videogame together again.
Alec: That only makes me wanna play it more.
Quintin: Nooo!

While I’m finishing off the transcript of the Levine interview, I thought this may be of passing interest. At certain press events, you can find yourself given what I’ll describe as gumpf. Having a house already brimming with literature, Skaven and literature about Skaven, I tend to give it to a passing tramp. However, noting that some of the actual repurpose Bioshock: Infinite propaganda posters were among them, I dragged ‘em with me and took some quick cam phone shots. Also, some of the other stuff, which may reveal some fine detail of what Irrational are up to. Possibly.
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…if 10,000 people sign up to the Steam group. Hmm, I’m a little conflicted by this. On the one hand I want you all to sign up so that Men Of War: Assault Squad can have an open beta, simply so that you can see how awesome it actually is. And on the other, well, they should just have an open beta! I’ve already rambled a bit here about how superb the co-op missions are, and I feel like I should talk more about the special units, such as conscription for the Russians, or the epic tank battles, or the incredible details that make the thing come alive. I’ve been playing the hell out of the closed beta and it’s sitting at the top of my contenders for game of the year right now. I know certain other RTS games are dominating the headlines, but this is ten thousand times more absorbing. It’s going to be a nutritious feast of a game. I’ll write more about it next week. In the meantime, go sign up!

Cast your mind back. Back! Back to the distant, murky, forgotten times of July 19-22nd 2010. Life was so much different then. We could have been anything that we wanted to be.

We were also talking excitedly about Recettear, the Japanese indie game that had you playing the owner of a cheerfully stereotypical RPG shop. All we had to go on was a demo. Now, we have a place in time in sight for the full version. Ho!
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Rock, Paper, Shotgun will be down from 9am to 11am (approx, UK time) on the 13th August. This is so we can transfer to our spanky new server, which hopefully won’t crash every hour. It’s a dream.

RPS has grown extremely quickly, and we’ve far outgrown the server we’ve been on. The utterly extraordinary folks at Positive Internet have done miraculous things to keep us online for the last year or so, and will continue to do miraculous things as we do our best to outgrow the new server. If you have any hosting needs at all, we without hesitation (and let me stress, without their ever asking us to plug them, and even though Nick’s so horrid to me on our podcast) recommend you use Positive Internet. They’re not only extremely competent hosts, but deeply ethical, and have gone beyond the boundaries of expectation in their support. We can’t say enough good things about them. They are, as they say, good.

About five minutes into my demonstration of Relic’s Space Marine I realise what I’m looking at is a 3rd person shooter that draws heavily from Gears of War, so I ask an obvious question. “Is there some kind of cover system?” Relic man grins. “Actually, the team has an internal line about that. We say, ‘Cover is for Pussies.’”

I don’t take my eyes off the screen, but my ears do a double take. “We do have this though,” says Relic man. With the press of a button he sends Ultramarine Captain Titus running straight through a low wall of cover like a wrecking ball, and begins hacking apart the orks on the other side with his chainsword. “Oh,” I hear myself say, mesmerised. “Right!”

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id’s Todd Hollenshead has told Eurogamer that they will no longer be licensing out their tech, starting with id Tech 5, for third-party developers. Unless their game is published by Bethesda. While it’s perhaps not unusual for a publisher to hold onto their own tech, it seems a long way from id’s past to keep their new middleware to themselves. The company has a rich history of not only licensing out their engines, but then releasing them as free software after a few years. However, this change comes after the company was bought by ZeniMax, owners of Bethesda, in 2009.

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It’s rare as a games journalist that you find yourself sitting in a hall, knowing you’re there for an announcement, without a single clue what the game actually is. You’ve always got theories. And – yeah – I had some, but none that I’d dignify with a word like “theory”. “Guesses” would be as far as I’d go. So when the trailer rolls, it’s a surprise in all sorts of ways. And since there’s a chance this is the first place you’ve heard about the game, we’ll like to recreate the experience for you guys. So, head below for the video they unveiled the game with…

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