Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’m currently listening to some of Nico’s solo jazz stuff so I’m probably finding indie point’n'click claymation showcase The Dream Machine a little more otherworldly than it is, but it’s still got a lovely, mysterious tone to it. Anyway, yes- chapters 1 and 2 have just been released, with the first being completely free (you could be playing it within 5 seconds via this link to the game’s site) and the second requiring an €11 payment that’ll also get you access to chapters 3, 4 and 5 when they’re released. I’ve been playing for the last half an hour and I’m really impressed. If you’re a fan of adventure games, dreams or clay, check this one out. Cockroach Inc. have done a beautiful job. There are a few trailers out now, but I’ve posted the one with the least spoilers below.
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Bat Country is a great little browser game that tells the touching story of a helicopter pilot doing whatever it takes to get his men back, even if “whatever it takes” means defeating a whole sky full of massive bats, and even if you never find out who those ‘men’ actually are. You fly your craft around with the mouse, there’s a really nice bomb-throwing mechanic and the music’s pretty great. Have a play. C’mon, it’s Christmas! Let’s kill some bats! Thanks to the Indiegames blog for the tipoff. More bats please, Indiegames blog. I like bats a lot.

Or to use its full name, Dead Six: The Resurrection of Romance in the Skies. I’d have called it Dead Six: Love Is In The Air, but whatever. South Korean dev GPAX has unveiled its online arcade flight sim with a press release that wanders between sensible and eyebrow-raising, and also includes the term “mania fans”. Look, I’ve posted the full thing below the jump and bolded the important bits.
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You’re going to die. And all your little friends too.

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Not sure how I missed a new Crysis 2 video coming out a few days ago, I guess I was entombed in ice, my face silently frozen in a scream… Anyway, this is the best of the single-player footage shown so far, I think, with lots of alien-whacking, and plenty of general showing off of both features and visuals, all from the perspective you will actually play the game in. It’s a trailer all about how that nanosuit does things. And it does things with violence. There’s also a bit of sliding around going on, which makes me wonder if CryTek are wanting to demonstrate that they can compete with Brink. It’s still not clear whether you can carry around a terrified Korean soldier by the throat, however.

Yes, you will want to watch this one. Go!
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I think we mentioned that the Commodore 64 was being relaunched as a modern(ised) PC, right? As in the shell gets new internals? Well, it is. The official site tells us that: “It houses a modern mini-ITX PC motherboard featuring a Dual Core 525 Atom processor and the latest Nvidia Ion2 graphics chipset. It comes in the original taupe brown/beige color, with other colors to follow.” More specs here. The same company are planning to relaunch a bunch of Amigas, too.

Not quite sure if anyone I know if quite retro-tastic enough to get this, especially since it’s basically high-end laptop netbook power plugged into a monitor, but I guess the truth will be in the price, which has yet to be confirmed.

I had a bit of a blast on this last night. A few thoughts spring to mind: the map design is pretty good, although a bit chokepoint-heavy on a couple of the maps. I’m not that much of a fan of the flamethrower. It’s fun to use, sure, but you almost always get killed a few seconds after lighting up. Must make you easier to target or something. The overall Vietnam ambiance is great. Also, and I suppose I should have realised this, your level in BFBC2 carries over, which is a shame because I was kind of looking forward to having to unlock everything, and it’s already unlocked. Hmm.

We should have a server up later in the week, I will post when it’s sorted. For now: a launch trailer, with a deeply trendy interpretation of the Vietnam war. Mm, launch.
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SOE’s John Smedley has been busy blogging about their games, and he says this:

“…early next year we will have announcements about Planetside Next followed by a beta. I can say this – it’s coming along awesome. I can also say that the first beta testers are going to be current Planetside subscribers. I’ve gotten a lot of email from current players offering to help test the game and we’re going to take them up on it.”

OKAY. EXCITED.

There’s nothing behind today’s window on the advent calendar. Not a thing. I guess you’ll have to find something else to do with your Saturday, eh? Perhaps you could pick up one of those home beer-making kits. It’s only that you can’t read about one of our games of the year behind this window, because there’s nothing there.
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Sundays are for snow and tea and looking out of the window, wondering if we should go sledging. Snow. Great white heaps of the stuff. If only it were gold. Or instant coffee. Ah well, best ignore it, stay inside and pray we see another summer. In the meantime we’ll peruse some links pertaining to computational software entertainments, and maybe we’ll find something interesting. Maybe.

• Sam McGrath, formerly of Offset Software, and now of Fractiv, has been talking about the peculiar, difficult, but ultimately lucrative journey he had with Project Offset, the Intel-sponsored development that was supposed to bring us a game that would showcase Intel technology. There’s an interview on BigDownload here. From the interview: “The original vision might be summed up as a fantasy version of Call of Duty. CoD has such perfect execution in terms of delivering that cinematic experience and we wanted to achieve that in a fantasy setting with dragons, trolls, goblins, siege vehicles, etc.” And also: “veryone was setting their sights very high. Had Larrabee worked out exactly as Intel had hoped, our game would have been the flagship title demonstrating their new tech, which would be a huge thing. (Think Microsoft and Halo…)” All that, of course, didn’t work out.

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The sheer weight of spam being directed at RPS has proven to be too much. We’ve now moved over to comments being available for registered users only. We never wanted to have to do this, but the forces of evil were too strong. Sorry. Please register.

Try logging in and out again to deal with the peculiar “posting too quickly” bug. It should not appear again once you have done that. If it does, tell me.

UPDATE: For those wondering about spam still appearing, yes, it can still turn up because spammers can register manually and set their bots a-spammin’. It is, however, much easier for us to clear up like this, and there is also the added bonus that spam-o-tron won’t spam legitimate comments.