Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Just over a week back, Jim and I found ourselves recommending you play The Ball. A full-length first-person puzzler, which costs £15. “But £15!” you cried. “That’s enough to get almost one large pizza at Dominos!” You already know you like a large pizza at a price so unbelievably high that it makes your insides clench, but how are you supposed to know if you like The Ball? Well, listen, okay. It’s possible. There’s now a demo. It’s got a few levels, and one of the Survival maps, which seems like a reasonable chunk to whet appetites.

Question: how do you feel about chopping men up with swords?

a) Fruity
b) Disgusted with yourself
c) Will there be Achievements?

If a or c, you’ll probably like Cursed Crusade.
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Remember Beyond Black Mesa, the remarkable-looking Half-Life fan-film? You’re probably hoping to see more of it, I suspect. Well you can’t. Not unless you work out my fiendish puzzle, something no human has ever done before. You have no chance.
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Guy Fawkes: the last man to enter Parliament with honest intentions. (As someone said on Twitter earlier, but I’ve already lost who it was. Sorry, that person). Let us celebrate/flagellate the man who tried to take down British government, either by setting fire to things and making sky-flowers, or by creating virtual sky-flowers.

Embedded below is a fireworks simulator for you to dick about with. I found it via typing “fireworks games” into Google, so cannot vouch for its origin, age or truthiness. It’s also more a tech-experiment than a game, as such. I can vouch for it being a surprisingly scientific recreation of creating explosions in the night sky, however.

I don’t care if you tell me off for posting this. Fireworks! Yaaaaays!

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Imagine if Professor Xavier decided that fighting battles so that the battles might stop was stupid. Imagine if he gave up fighting evil mutants. Imagine if, instead, he decided to bring about the acceptance of mutants with the power of love. Imagine a Brazilian man made a sim game of this for his brother’s Birthday using RPG Maker 2003. That is Marvel Brothel.

This is, without a shadow of a doubt, a weird game. Imagine trying to satisfy the voracious sexual appetite of The Incredible Hulk. That’s the kind of game we’re dealing with here. But I’ve not yet mentioned the weirdest thing about it.
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It takes a big man to admit when he’s out of his depth, and I’m a very big man indeed. I’ve tried three times to figure out what on Earth I should be doing in the Sail Simulator 5 demo, but all I do is flap around in circles, and then try to ram a boat. By the looks of it, someone who knows their jib luff from their main tack might be able to fathom it. Or someone who reads the instructions.

In the demo you can play some online multiplayer, much around wtih the Stentec Laser dinghy (which sadly doesn’t include firing lasers), and enjoy sailing around Treasure Island (which sadly doesn’t include any treasure). It has very pretty, if someone repetitive, sea. And that’s my expert opinion. You can get the full version here.

That was odd. My plan for the afternoon was to download and play Marvel Brothel. Instead I put on the new Alan Partridge, entered a kind of autopilot and ended up downloading and playing historial turn-based strategy game Bronze, of which you can get the demo here.

Despite being the kind of game Alan Partridge might enjoy, Bronze is pretty interesting. The base concept is a kind of enhanced Go- you need to capture as much of the board as possible, and you do this by putting down different developments. Army camps capture all tiles around them except farms, forts protect tiles, ziggurats capture farms, towns capture all neutral tiles around them, etc. I kind of enjoyed myself, plus missions are interspersed with vague history lessons. Curious? Give it a shot.

If I had to compare RPS’s relationship with interactive fiction to something, it would be an ex-girlfriend upstairs that we drop in on when the weight of the world has got us down. IF is always there for us, waiting, pouting, fascinating, erudite, a bit sexy (but not very sexy).

Earlier this week we heard about IF author Andrew Plotkin’s plan to quit his job and write IF full time. He created a Kickstarter page with the aim of raising $8,000. That was five days ago. To date he’s received a total of $18,862, with two people pledging more than $1,000. I got in touch with him to ask about the project, his new game, and why he’s so hooked on IF. In return, he made me look up Higgs boson. I am no smart. If you’re at all curious about IF, this is a must-read.
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EA has announced Battlefield Play4Free, which will be released in Spring 2011 and will offer you guys Battlefield… for free! It’s from the makers of Battlefield Heroes (which you can also play for free), will feature 32 player action and will combine “the most popular maps from Battlefield 2 with the familiar classes and powerful weapons of Battlefield: Bad Company™ 2.”

Fighting will “earn in-game currency to spend on a massive array of devastating weapons and equipment.” Are you ready for my guess? Here’s my guess: You will be able to buy in-game currency with real money. Pow. A teaser trailer lies in the grubby foxhole below.
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1up has the scoop on Spielberg’s cancelled project with EA, the game best known as Project LMNO, as well as an early “visual target” video which I’ve embedded after the jump. It’s all pretty fascinating stuff, but I’ll summarise.

Project LMNO was to be a contemporary game where your character first breaks an alien-looking girl called Eve out of a military base, and then you spend the the game fleeing the FBI, with the girl fighting alongside you and evolving depending on how you treat her. She wouldn’t have been able to speak, but in times of need would be able to project images into your mind. The team use the example that “storm clouds would appear when she was in trouble.”
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They’re calling this the lullaby trailer, which means it’s soundtracked by a spooky rendition of a children’s song. Nothing spookier than that, eh F.E.AR. franchise? Better than being soundtracked by inappropriately shouty rock music, anyway. We’ve seen a fair bit of Dead Space 2 already, and I think it’s fair to say that it looks a good deal more ambitious than the original. Actually, with the infested city and so forth, I am getting a bit of a Bioshock vibe from the environments, but maybe that’s just me. Also, I’m afraid I am one of those freaks who was able to put up with the interface wonkiness on PC and still rather enjoy the game, so I am certainly looking forward to this hitting on the 25th of January.
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