Rock, Paper, Shotgun

After eighteen months or so of beta, Quake Live has finally announced its subscription plans. You can still play for free, but you can also sign up for $1.99 a month, or $3.99 a month options (although these are “billed annually”), which give different levels of access the clan management systems, freeze tag, match stats, and so on. The full details are below the cut. In some ways I wish I still had enough time for Quake III for this to be attractive to me, but my monthly hour with the railgun doesn’t really justify it. And, while it’s interesting to see such an old game repackaged and sold like this, much of what made the original so attractive to me – IRC pickup games, specific maps (Spider Crossings!) and mods – hasn’t made an appearance here.
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While we wait for CCP’s comment on the current player-outrage within the Eve community (more on this soon, I hope) we could pick over this recently-posted article on Gamasutra, in which one of Eve’s key architects, Dr Kjartan Emilsson, discusses the benefit, technical challenges, loopholes, and programming horror of a single-shard MMO.

Such a player-driven system doesn’t strictly require a single shard to function, but it is catalyzed by the extended size inherent to single-sharding. A small economy will be manipulated by a few strong players and exposed to large fluctuations and instabilities. The larger the economy gets, the more resilient it becomes. Once beyond those instabilities, it truly starts to reflect the macro-economic landscape of the game-world, becoming an all-pervading, autonomous, and ever-changing mass of social content that no designer could ever think of hand-crafting.

It’s interesting to see this addressed from a technical and design standpoint, but also interesting because it is such an unusual approach. I wish we saw more such epic undertakings within the MMOs. Go read.

Candella Software send word that they are developing a new racing game, Cargasm. A flavour of the announcement: “During races, players will be constantly exhorted to go faster by a bevy of Cargasm Girls. If they are fast enough, players can collect these ravishing maidens for their own personal Cargasm Harem.” It also boasts a photorealistic central London to race around. That’s going to make someone’s day, I hope.

Anyway, the “gasm” suffix has, of course, found a home in games before, with Wargasm, and probably others I can’t bring to mind. Inspired to push the idea further, I asked my Twitter followers what other ways the ‘gasm suffix could find its way into the gaming lexicon. The results, such as they are, are below.
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The previously-covered Kyle Pulver dropped us a line to say that his previously released and previously covered (just not by us) depict1 now has an easily accessible flash version everyone can play. And in the monday-morning flash-game tradition, everyone really should. At first you may think it’s a one joke – but a funny one joke – game, but it builds into some genuine counter-intuitive puzzling while keeping expertly working its gag up to its delightful conclusion. The full walkthrough follows, in case you get stuck.
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It’s thanks to Alec that I played King’s Bounty. Seeing turn-based combat in KB: The Legend my “Ew! Strategy!” alarms went off and I moved on to the next game on the list. But having read Alec’s My Zombie Wife piece, I felt I should give it a go. It’s fabulous. So when exploring the retro-weighed shelves of a nearby gaming store, finding the original King’s Bounty for sale meant a guaranteed buy. Except, well, it was on Megadrive. “Traitor!” shouted Kieron at me, repeatedly, all last week as I played. I’ve written all about it, and it’s almost entirely true for the DOS version too – a game I heartily recommend getting hold of. And the Megadrive version emulates beautifully on PC, I found out when taking screenshots after playing it for a few days on a real Megadrive on a television with a refresh rate low enough to give me a headache. There’s no good to be found in traiting. You can read my Eurogamer retrospective here, where I find much love and happiness in the game. A game with the most brutal game over message I’ve ever seen.

“Oh Mad Mohan,

You have failed to recover the Sceptre of Order in time to save the land! Beloved King Maximus has died and the Demon King Urthrax Killspite rules in his place. The Four Continents lay in ruin about you, its people doomed to a life of misery and oppression because you could not find the Sceptre.”

Sundays are for chewing over the defeat of the Bavarian Illuminati, The UFOs and the Society of Assassins by the Network, considering another couple of tea and another couple of levels of Starcraft 2 and compiling a list of the fine (mostly) games related reading I’ve come across this week while trying to not link to some piece of pop music or something. That’d be horrible. I hope I don’t do that.

• This was probably the biggest talking piece of the week in chattering circles. In short: Apparently Activision by matter of policy don’t have female leads in their games.
• First Person Observer reports on Batman slowly learning how to fight Crime in his recent Arkham adventures.

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Valve hired IceFrog, a developer of Warcraft III mod Defence of the Ancients a while back, and since then there have been persistent rumours that they might be making the mod as a full game. This then seemed far more likely with the surprise announcement of Alien Swarm a couple of weeks back, having hired the mod team who made that too. And now a tweet from voice actor Jon St. John seems to confirm the existence of a DotA project.

Jon St. John is the gravel-voiced man behind those Evil Dead-nicking Duke Nukem remarks. If voice actors are being hired on the DotA project, then you have to wonder at the scale of the project. Perhaps Valve will be moved to reveal some news by the leak… Ah ha ha ha.

You know, if you stop and think about it, PC gaming is in such a fantastic state at the moment. Never before in all my years clicking on keyboards and pressing the buttons on mice has there been a time when such a rich diversity of high quality and interesting video game software available for such crazy low prices. The deal of the week this week has a strong (positive) anti-pirate message attached to it, and I think that the excuses that anyone use to justify piracy are dwindling. There’s not really much reason to pirate PC games these days, pretty much anyone who can afford a computer can afford to take part in the international network of shared experiences that make up PC gaming. Wave the flag, and consider purchasing these items. Also, go to the (still slightly broken..) SavyGamer.co.uk.
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A Eurogamer story earlier today got RPS a-chatting. Basically, it was the news that the original Rayman actually spent five whole years on the UK Top 40 charts. That’s 269 weeks. Worms had a 239 week appearance. Theme Park had 172. Loads of more stuff in the article, always interesting – in terms of what sells lengthily rather than immediately. What the feature doesn’t mention is what actually links those three particular games. They’re ones who existed as five-quid PC budget games indefinitely. There was a time in the UK where you couldn’t go into a shop – in fact, didn’t always have to be a game shop – without seeing piles of the big conked little fella there. And, it’s also worth noting, that PC-sales never get their new sales cannibalised by the (non-Top-40-influencing) second-hand market, which is another reason why you end up seeing this enormous longevity in some games.

One Mr Azri reminds me of the existence of Grim Dawn. It’s being created by veterans of the sadly missed Iron Lore – who you’ll remember from Titan Quest. Last time I checked there was no images, but there’s a mass of early Alpha shots to nose at now, as well as talk about its features such as destructible scenery, building characters from five skill-classes and NPC-faction-relations. Oh – and multiplayer. They’re also giving the option to pre-order now, for twenty dollars basic version or pay more to get special editions (and your name in the credits). I strongly suspect this will be worth keeping an eye on so – er – I will. I’m a bit of a Beholder in terms of the amount of eyes I’m able to access to keep track of RPGs. Very handy.

‘Art Deco’ is basically the only school of design I’m at all familiar with. My own approach to design in any regard doesn’t go any further than “make most of the colours the same.” So when I see something that’s Art Deco, I become slightly excited. I recognised a thing that I know! I can sound very vaguely learned! So has it been with Civilization V, a beta build of which I’ve cuddled up to over the last few weeks. “The menus are Art Deco,” I say whenever anyone asks me what the game is like. Then I nod wisely. Then they ask me about hexagons, and I punch them in the teeth.
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