Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The wait for Splash Damage’s hybrid single/multiplayer shooter Brink feels oh-so-long now. From mutterings to concept art to proof of concept to concept to ooh-that-looks-ace to last month’s hands-on sessions (which RPS hasn’t actually yet had, mostly due to haphazard GamesCom scheduling on our part), the near-future team-barney has very much been made flesh. It’s been a long time coming, but all of sudden we’re theoretically now just a couple of seasons away from release. Spring 2011? Oh, that’d be grand. Here’s why the big-faced factional warfare game matters to its creators….
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Despite the PC’s unassailable status as undying gaming platform with an uncountable number of titles in its history, the exciting/chilling march of operating system progress has seen successive versions of Windows cruelly dispense with support for the golden, vital past. Most recently, the otherwise fairly splendid Windows 7 threw out Direct Draw support, leaving a slew of Windows 95-era games left in the emulation cold. A man has fixed this, and thus you should worship him.
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Frictional’s first full-length game, and a successor to their Penumbra series, comes out tomorrow. Amnesia is a combination of classic haunted castle horror with their unique first-person adventuring. Is it good? Is it scary? (Let me give you a clue: flipping yes, and oh good grief yes.) Read on to find out just exactly Wot it is that I Think.

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Friend of RPS Siri mentioned Ka-bloom to me, which reminded me I previously wanted to check it out. And it is a nifty, beautifully presented puzzle-game with the standard flashgame Role-playing game elements. In short, create chains of crystals and feed them to your flower-thingy. All those are technical terms. Made by Strongman games who, if memory serves, were the pair who cornered me at World of Love and ranted so much Terry VVVVVV Cavanagh went away and hid. And then bemused Jim on the way out by swearing at him repeatedly for being Jim Rossignol. Ah, if only journos could hold grudges. Go play here or watch the trailer below…
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UPDATE: Codes sent out! Thanks for entering.

Codes for you! But only ten. We’re going to have to devise some manner of competition to distribute them in a useful way. Head below the click for details on that. But what is Chime? Well it’s a musical puzzle game where the levels are set to soundtracks by Orbital’s Phil Hartnoll, Moby, Philip Glass, Markus Schulz and in the PC version, Jonathan Coulton. It’s pretty compulsive, and it’s also been produced by the initiative OneBigGame, so a chunk of the price of the game goes to charity. Hurrah for mildly addictive gaming philanthropy. I’ll write some more about it later in the week, probably. Anyway, head below for that competition.
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Okay, so wrap your head around this. IGN have done a short feature where they talk to Bioware Executive Producer Casey Hudson about the studio’s stat harvesting in Mass Effect 2. For their part, Bioware have revealed some of those stats, and some of them are genuinely mad. More people chose the Soldier class for Shepherd than all the other classes combined. Players skipped an average of 15% of the game’s dialogue. Two PC owners finished their copies of the game 28 times.

Click through for the full list of stats, including some interesting differences between 360 and PC gamers.
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After the mild success of our previous adventures in Arma II: Operation Arrowhead, we’ve decided to do one more event on the borrowed RPS server before it is placed on a flaming barge and pushed out to sea. The event will take place this Saturday, 11th August September, from 8pm BST. I will post a new password in this thread half an hour before we start. First come first served and such.

Up till now, browser game The Bible Online has escaped the unsettling gaze of RPS. No longer! The public beta went live yesterday (you can sign up here), so I figured I’d have a nose and see what it was like. And, well, this may be stating the obvious for anyone familiar with the Bible, but the most surprising discovery I’ve had so far is how violent it is.
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Mags closings are always a sad thing. I recall walking along a brisk beachfront in Tenby reading the final issue of Amiga Power and discovering I’d had my eyes pecked out by birds. If you’ve been sniffling over the final issue of PC Zone, perhaps you want something to remember this fine organ? Well, they’re auctioning off their office on Ebay. And, in an uncharacteristic move for PC Zone, rather than spending the proceeds on tasty booze, they’re giving the proceeds to charity. Gamesaid, to be precise. You can go and see their fine collecting of gaming malarkies here and if you fancy just giving some money without cluttering your house up with PC Zone’s junk, you can donate here. Go kindness! Go!

And, in case you missed it, here’s ex-Editor Will Porter’s tribute to PC Zone. We will never see its like again.

Eurogamer has found Gas Powered Games’ Chris Taylor in characteristically bullish mood arguing that thanks to the enormous explosion in Steam, he thinks the PC version of Dungeon Siege III will compete with the console ones, noting that “every major player in the world buying a PC gaming company” and leading to an exciting future. Example quote…

It’s a matter of time before you’re playing a game of the quality of a triple-A game that we know and love, like a Supreme Commander 2 or a StarCraft II, in a browser experience,” Taylor said. “There’s no reason that won’t happen within five to eight years. That’s one of the reasons PC gaming breaks out in that space. No installation. No grief. No reading the box and wondering if you have a 7000 or 8000 series video card and DirectX what? It just plays. It works. Wait till that happens full on.

Lots more excitement here. We’ve got our own Chris Taylor interview forthcoming soon. Soon-ish. Whenever Quinns transcribes it, anyway.

The beta for intriguing MMO RTS Ministry Of War is opening up, and you guys can get your access to this phase through this link – specially for RPS readers!

For a browser-based RTS it’s looking pretty complex, featuring a number of historical factions with their own hero characters, player-driven trading economics, PvP and Guild vs Guild battles, and the ability to travel about with your merchants, trading as you go. Developers Snail need as many people as possible for this next stage of their testing, so go give it a look.