Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Cloud gaming service OnLive has been, well, live for a while now. Yesterday it was announced that once the first free year is up, it will remain free, with no introduction of a subscription on top of the cost of the games, as I believe a number of you predicted when this was originally announced.

We’re excited because this opens the door for the OnLive Game Service to be used by everyone whenever they feel like it, whether for playing a full game on OnLive, or for just instantly playing a demo before buying a game for a console or a PC. Or, even for people just wanting to spectate games in the Arena or friend other gamers. Whatever interests you in gaming, OnLive provides it instantly, without complexity or hassle.

I’ve still not seen this tech in action. Any American readers actually using this yet? Any impressions?

The next game from Mousechief, scurrilous indie developers behind the award-winning Dangerous High School Girls In Trouble, has been revealed. Kind of. We know for certain it’s called Arcada Mia, and while mechanical details are a touch thin on the ground Mousechief describe it as not Civilization, not Puzzle Quest, not Oregon Trail, not King of Dragon Pass and not Passage, but “bearing qualities of each”.

More details plus the world’s most abstract screenshot after the jump.
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Remember how you were planning your whole November around the release of DC Universe Online on November 2nd? Well, now you’re FUCKED. The MMORPG has been delayed until “early 2011″. On the plus side, anyone who pre-orders the game before November 15th in North America will still get beta access by November 30th.

What reason could there be for a delay? I’ve come up with a few theories.
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Minecraft is to receive a big update on the 31st October, to celebrate it being four days after my birthday. And Halloween. It contains some features many have been waiting for, of fearing, including fishing, scarier monsters, and portal-based fast travel. And torches don’t last forever? The full details are below.

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm comes out on the 7th of December. Thank you for your time.

Could incredibly mundane-sounding games be RPS’s secret vice? Does being boring count as a vice? I’m not sure.

We posted about Cities In Motion’s launch trailer back in August, but it’s a transport tycoon game scheduled for release as early as Q1 2011. As of today, Paradox has announced that anyone interested in getting in on the beta can do so right here, so long as they do so before midday on October 11th. How can you resist? Just think of all those buses and subway systems running in an inefficient manner. Brr.

If it’s true that PC games are basically all about terrain, then From Dust – which Ubisoft assures us will appear on PC – must be quintessentially PCish. In it players directly manipulate the terrain to help the tribe of little computer people they are caring for. That means redirecting lava, flows, setting water running down different routes, and otherwise directly messing with topology. There are also some other, special powers that will allow more complex environmental effects, creating emergent situations. From what Guillaume Brunier says in this video (below) From Dust is a fairly experimental design (although you can see the precursors for it in things like Populous), and is leading to quite a dynamic development process. “We get the simulation and the game giving us back some answers that we didn’t even think about, so that’s cool.” Sounds cool, Guillaume. Looks better. Go take a look.
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Ah, time for fresh manshoots. The Medal Of Honor beta is open and ready to accept you. You should probably sign up there if you want to shoot some men.

What you should definitely do, however, is read Ian Bogost’s scathing analysis of EA’s decision to drop the “Taliban” name from their game:

“Medal of Honor is just another well-produced first-person shooter, one that invokes a recent war as a marketing gimmick to accompany an equally generic plea to “support our troops.” Playing as the Taliban never mattered anyway. It was just a menu item, so no big deal to remove or rename it. Just a marketing tag on the box. Just a clever hook to spin free publicity, and just an inconvenient but essentially irrelevant feature to drop when the Army brass raised its eyebrows.”

There are some big implications tied up with EA’s marketing awfulness, as Bogost explains. Read.

Inspired by IGN offering free office space to indie devs a few weeks ago, RPS launched a funding program for any struggling indie developers who wanted a helping hand. In summary, we offered to send them a biscuit. We’re not made of money here at RPS (except John, who is literally a pile of coins), so we were only able to send off one pack of biscuits. But send them we did.

The responses of those biscuit recipients are collected here. To a man, they proved themselves worthy of their prize.
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Sometimes, with enough time travel and science, it’s possible to play games from the past. For instance, last week I played Uplink. Then, having done this, I wrote about it. Eurogamer kindly agreed to publish this article on their website, and now I link to it. It’s the circle of life.

I think it taps into a nightmarish fear that we all must have experienced at one time. That thing we did, or may have done without knowing it, that catches up with us. Like that time I paid for a packet of Fruit Pastilles in pennies, knowingly one coin short, and the man in the petrol station said to me: “I won’t count it. I’ll trust you.” Mobil closed down a few years later, which surely has to be at least partly my fault, and I know that one day the policeman will knock on my front door. I’ll look up from the jigsaw puzzle I’m completing with my wife and our two children, and he’ll say, “Are you John Walker? I’m going to have to ask you to come with me.”

Read more here.

Assorted pustules of RPS spent the weekend at the Eurogamer Expo in London this weekend. While we were there, we arranged some characteristically ad-hoc and vaguely inept events for some of the readers who happened to be in attendance, which nonetheless – I think I hope I pray – turned out pretty well. As in, no-one died or suffered catastrophic organ failure, which is forever my personal benchmark for success.

And so it was that, earlyish on Sunday morning, I led a cartel of gun-curious readers past a phalanx of annoyed security guards, and managed to seat them down for a play session of Splash Damage’s Brink before the show kicked off for the day. It’s worth noting that Brink drew by far the biggest queues of the show, with some attendees reporting 2 and a half hour waits. But did the team shooter deserve such patience and passion? I shoved a microphone into the mouth-holes of some of the RPS readers (and contributors) who played the game that fateful morning, and listened to what they had to say about trousers and violence.

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