Rock, Paper, Shotgun

UPDATE: Trailer embedded below.
Interesting-looking family game? Yes, I am typing those words. Which makes me uncomfortable. And a bit uncertain about life. Anyway, Create from EA’s Play studio is a multiplayer puzzle game for which the theme of “creativity”. Explanatory video on the website shows it to be a bunch of painting, level-furnishing, simple tinkering, and physics tweakiness, and could be fairly interesting. Solutions to particular levels can be unique, and clever ones can be uploaded and shared via the website. The EA release says: “The more players explore the game, solve level-based challenges, and customize their world, the more rewards will be unlocked. Creativity will be unleashed as players design environments with easy-to-use brushes and tools, including textures, props and animating objects that bring the scene to life.” The game is due for the “holiday”. The fun is guessing which one.
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There’s a new video up over on the main Lego Universe site which shows a bit more of the building procedures in the game. For me it’s this stuff – rather than the standard “hit bads for XP” MMO material – that is really interesting. This is kind of a CG mock up, rather than in-game footage, but it’s worth browsing over this and the other videos there to get a broader picture. I get the feeling that the quest stuff is largely going to be secondary, and that – if we’re lucky – it’ll be the user-created content aspect of LU that will really shine. I’ve got my fingers tightly crossed for this one, not because of LEGO so much, because developers NetDevil have much to prove.

The perennial questions of the harm that games may be causing us and our children are extremely troubling. Every week seems to bring a new survey or study that demonstrates links between gaming and problematic behaviour, with renowned psychologists, sociologists and publicists explaining to us what it is we need to be scared of. Over the last fifteen years I have been studying this data and reading these papers, and I am now ready to publish my findings. Below is the result of a decade-and-a-half’s research, and I think will once and for all answer the questions every parent, teacher, child and teenager should be asking.

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Been meaning to play this for a while but finally – ahem – found time. Stream is basically a short-form Braid with a monochrome Flashback-esque aesthetic. The device being you can create a portal and send yourself back in time, leaving a ghost doing whatever you were doing. Use it to dodge guards, keep doors open and so on. It’s a lot fiddlier than Braid, which becomes an annoyance in the more complicated multi-stage puzzles, but it’s still well worth a shot. You can get it here and see some footage – in the form of a full spoiler-filled walkthrough – below…
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Attention, soldier! Stand up straight! Take your hands out of your pants! Both of them, God dammit! Fileplanet are giving away beta keys for Company of Heroes Online, Relic’s free-to-play reinvention of its award-winning RTS with added hero units and persistent development of your army. I’ve got my key and word on the heavily-shelled street is that this is really quite good, so I’ll be posting a more detailed investigation later in the week.

RPS’ ways are mysterious. How do you get us to post about something? You stick 40k figures in it. Or Transformers. Frankly, if you put Impactor in your game we’d probably end up skinning the site in your game’s honour. Anyway – 40k models for TF2. “Coming Soon” says the Youtube-page-notes. “I miss Impactor” cries our inner six-year olds, embarrassingly. Footage follows.
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Thanks to Terry for bringing ESSENTIAL INFORMATION to us which we must DISSEMINATE immediately. As part of the current Assembly GameDev compo the maker of the immortal Sumotori Dreams has released a new game. Archee continues his muse (“Drunken Real Time Physics” has a certain ring) with Tricky Truck. It’s basically a micro-Stunt Car Racer with articulated Lorries, with you having to park your enormous vehicle at the end of a course. Not as funny as Sumotori Dreams, but more of a real game, I recommend giving it a try in hard mode, where you have to drive inside your truck and rely on checking out your mirrors and looking around desperately to stop yourself careening into harm. Go gets.

Peering back through time, my retrospective hands seized upon Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation, which I use as an excuse to explore the Tomb Raider series a little. It contains a paragraph that says this:

Lara is, let’s not forget, a truly dreadful person. Much has already been written about how she’s a grave-robbing thief, uncaring about either history or wildlife. And despite her having encountered dinosaurs, dragons and giant killer statues, she’s utterly blase about ignoring ancient texts warning of terrible plagues being unleashed upon the Earth if she takes one trinket or another. Screw Earth! She wants the shiny thing! Yeah, just steal it Lara. No one minds if you KILL EVERYONE ON EARTH. But of course Von Croy is the baddy, because he tried to do the world and its history a favour by killing her when she was a squawky teenager.

The rest is here.

“Cliff Blezinski, bless his heart, has no idea what it means to run across a battlefield underneath machinegun fire.” This is very true.

Ubisoft’s Clint Hocking once again demonstrates the pulsating mega-brain that will hopefully soon result in a game that isn’t a weird Far Cry sequel, in this rather special Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab talk. It’s from last October, but seems no less relevant for it. Discussed: war movies, hockey fights, Gears of War, Duke Nukem breaking the fourth wall without breaking immersion, how online functionality can augment immersion, and blurring the line between real and fake.
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The first trailer for off-road racing sequel Dirt 3 was shown during ESPN’s X-Games coverage last night, and you can see it below. Needless to say, it features Ken Block’s fancy Ford Focus racing about a bit, suggesting different environments for vehicular athletics. Phwoar, eh readers?
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Sundays are for waking up late, and hopefully purging the last of the jet lag, and then compiling a list of the fine (mostly) games related reading that crossed your path this week, while trying not to link to some piece of popular music or something.

• Probably the feature which made my eyebrow raise most. Jeff Vogel of long-standing indie-RPG company Spiderweb talking about why he’s okay with people pirating his games. Sometimes.
• And here’s the post-mortem of Gary Marple’s Gravity Core. We get a lot about the indie success stories. Here’s the opposite, talked about with striking candour.
• Simon Parkin writes a piece called Maps for Boing Boing. Primarily about Final Fantasy VII, but not. Few things please me more than seeing a peer limbering up and taking a big swing. This is Simon taking one hell of a big swing. Bravo.

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