Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Fancy-lookin’ side-scrolling shooter A.R.E.S.: Extinction Agenda has a demo out. Apparently “you are Ares, the first Zytron immune robot.” So that sounds exciting. There are also massive explosions, boss-battles, and lots of running, jumping, and shooting, as you might expect from this kind of thing. For the purposes of your education, I’ve posted a trailer of the game in action below. There are combos and such.
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Where does a Necromorph keeps its eyes? According to the latest Dead Space 2 multiplayer trailer, about four feet behind its head. See, what I’m doing here is mocking the title, “Through the eyes of a necromorph” in a game viewed from a third-person perspective. Everyone involved now feels incredibly silly, and will probably quit their jobs, lose their families, and become destitute. That’s the power I wield. Games industry: think more carefully before you title your videos.

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It was not unreasonable to see the early footage of Red Faction: Armageddon and worry. After Guerilla’s open-air festival of smashing stuff it seemed so counter-intuitive to be claustrophobically wedged underground. What are we supposed to smash?! And then we found out about the Magnet Gun. Well, even more recent footage shows more good news. There’s still buildings down there for you to spectacularly knock down, and walls to break through like a Vic Mackey tribute band. That’s what’s important. Except now there’s aliens to fight too. Such recent footage exists below.

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The smouldering news-vixens of Big Download have taken note of a post on the Skyrim forums where a community manager confirmed that “Like the Elder Scrolls Construction Set for Morrowind and Oblivion, we plan to release Creation Kit so you guys can mod Skyrim.” Good news, good news. There’s still only one screenshot we can legally use for posts about Skyrim, so following yesterday’s post I’ve flipped it horizontally. I guess I could mod (photoshop) things into the same picture, thereby making it more relevant, but it’s very late and I just ate about fourteen potatoes. You lot want to have at it? I suggest adding: McDonald’s golden arches, Cliff Racers, Doom’s Cacodemon, Peter Molyneux or a bag of Milky Ways.

EDIT: I knew I could count on you guys.

We’ve got an interview with SpaceChem designer Zach Barth (of Zachtronics) going up tomorrow, but I’ve got to give you just one terrible tidbit now. Two years ago Zachtronics made a game called Infiniminer, which as you may or may not know was the game that inspired Notch to make MineCraft. Why did Zach make Infiniminer? Why did he stop making it? Does he now spend every night howling into his pillow, mourning for the riches that might have been his? Read on for these answers.
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The Dream Machine has already become one of my games of 2011 (despite being released in 2010, pedants). Its touching story and elegant point and click puzzles, combined with a gorgeous claymation and cardboard construction, puts it in a rare crowd: a great adventure game in the new millennium. Wanting to know a lot more about how it came about, and the thinking behind its design and narrative, I sent questions to one half of the development team, Anders Gustafsson. His engagingly detailed answers explore ideas of dream induction, the homogenisation of gaming, the role of voyeurism, and why non-interactivity isn’t passivity.

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Well, officially it’s “recommends closure,” but let’s not beat around the ruining-people’s-livelihoods bush here. Back in December, word arrived that Activision wanted to wash its hands of UK studio Bizarre Creations, the bunch behind Project Gotham Racing, Geometry Wars, The Club, Blur and 007: Bloodstone. While at the time that sounded an awful lot like shutting its still-recent (2007) acquisition down, they stressed that if they could find a buyer all may yet be well.

They didn’t find a buyer (or at least not one who offered enough, presumably). All is not well.
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Breach, the forthcoming wall-penetrating multiplayer destructo-shooter, is out on January 26th, and the team are showing off the various gadgets and techno-trickery that supplements the blowing-holes-in-walls bits, in a new trailer. For more information of rather more textual variety, please browse Quintin’s preview feature, where he talks about the game because he has seen it and so forth. Yep.
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The techno-chaps over at Ars Technica have posted an interesting story about the development of the ultimate Starcraft AI. Written by student Haomiao Huang, it’s the story of the “Berkeley Overmind”, which recently beat Starcraft pros a former Starcraft pro in head-to-head matches (although it is a way off beating the real current masters, it seems). Here’s a snippet: “In theory, a computer should be great at controlling many units simultaneously, since it’s not limited by human speeds. Indeed, there is a common misconception that because StarCraft is real-time, it must be game of reflexes. But while speed is useful and important, it is no substitute for knowing the right thing to do… To handle these issues and limit computational overhead, our agent uses artificial potential fields for unit movement. The potential field controller generates virtual forces that push the mutalisks around, balancing attractive forces on targets with repulsive forces on threats. Summing up the forces acting on a mutalisk gives a direction to fly, resulting in a simple but robust control scheme.”

A useful read for those of you interested in the subtleties of game AI, with some illustrative videos. Go read!

So apparently it’s not cool to make StarCraft mods with the StarCraft modkit – or at least not if you call them ‘World of StarCraft.’ That name was just begging for trouble, let’s be honest. Duly, trouble happened, it happened fast and it happened hard. After becoming a brief internet sensation, the creator of the StarCraft 2 MMO mod we posted about yesterday woke up to a clutch of copyright infringement notices from Activision-Blizzard, via YouTube. Ouch.
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Test Drive Unlimited 2 is due in about a month. I’ve had my hands on some beta code for a couple of days, exploring the racing-meets-affluence world of high-fliers. So if you’d be so polite as to click on, you can hear my early-day thoughts on the matter.

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