Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Are you a bit of a StarCraft 2 contender? Do you keep build orders in your wallet, eat nothing but egg whites and speak not of your poops, which have started resembling shaving foam? If so, I suppose you’ve probably heard this news already. Nevermind.

With the new 1.2 patch Blizzard has introduced a Master League for its sci-fi RTS, comprised of the top 5% of the game’s Diamond League (or the top 1-2% of the total players in a region). Blizzard has also revealed plans for a Grandmaster League, made up of just the top 200 players in a region. Personally, I’m hoping for all these numbers to keep extending in such a way that the very top of the league table somehow ends up linking with the very bottom in an ouroboros loop. I think that’d be swell. Thanks to BigDownload for the tipoff.

So I am going to rebuild my PC soon, and that got me thinking about the infinite variations of hardware, and I wondered how many of you guys are planning to upgrade or get a new PC, given this year’s avalanche of PC games. I mean, clearly it’s not the same as it was a few years ago, when the march of graphics cards went hand-in-hand with software that supported them, and we all started moaning about it costing £7000-a-month to run a PC, but I am still considering how top-notch I want The Witcher 2 to look, and whether I could get Call of Pripyat running at even higher detail levels on a fresh, rather more resplendent, machine. I can wait no longer for the computational newness. So…

EDIT: Argh, I can’t get polls working. Something has made the buttons stop working! This internet science is beyond me. Instead, I’ve posed some questions, below, that you can consider in the comments.
Read the rest of this entry »

How is everyone fixed for some shooting of men from around 7pm GMT on Sunday 16th? We shall play Team Fortress 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2.

The Team Fortress 2 Server: 85.236.100.107:27315, and you can find the RPS BFBC2 server by searching for “Rock”. I’ll create some Steam group event reminders and see you lot there.

Also, a splendid, selfless community type has volunteered a server for some games of Warsow. Anyone interested in that (for another night)?

Well this sucks. Those stupid idiotholes at Zombie Cow turn out to hate everyone in the whole world and have shelved their Time, Gentle,men, Please, follow-up, Revenge of the Balloon-Headed Mexican. SADFACE. I hate them.

Boo – it seems they’re doing it for the very sensiblest reasons. Dan Marshall explains, “It felt like we were going over old, worn ground. Again and again. We’ve done all this. We’ve seen it all before. There’s nothing fresh or new and exciting about it.”

Harsh thoughts. RPS chatted with Zombie Cow and we have the details of what the game would have been below. Cue funereal music.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bioware has revealed the plethora, the deluge of imaginary items they will be gifting to first-hand buyers of Dragon Age 2 and the game’s pre-order customers. Are you sitting down? Are you reading this on an empty stomach? Because if not you may fall down and vomit simultaneously.
Read the rest of this entry »

How would you, Simon Hawthorne*, like to see the official Dead Space 2 launch trailer? Well, today is your day in which you can do a thing that you are interested in doing! It’s below. It’s rated M for My Goodness, What A Lot Of Scary.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here is the news about F.E.A.R. 3: it has been delayed. Warner Bros confirmed last night that the spooky shooter sequel would not arrive until May. We are going to assume that is because Day 1 Studios are making it awesome. Also, did everyone know that Jon Carpenter was helping with the cutscenes? I’d missed that somehow, but there it is.

I really liked the original game, but the subsequent stuff has been a bit tedious. I’m rather hoping this, with its superstar plot people and “evolved cover system” might be a bit better. It’s troubling me a bit that the trailers have all been live action rubbish and stuff.

A GTA4 video which features “frictionless cars” has been doing the rounds. I post it here in case you’ve not seen it already. It’s moderately amusing in an ouch-but-haha-ragdoll-horror sort of way.
Read the rest of this entry »

Minecraft has sold a million copies. This is a game that’s only just entered Beta, that comes out later this year. A million. PC exclusive. All the money going directly to one very happy developer.

A million.

Mr Tony Gowland pointed us toward his clever puzzle-platformer, Tealy & Orangey, and I am glad that he did. It sees you controlling two jumping balls at the same time – they both move left if you move left, both jump if you hit jump, and so on – to create some fiendish conundrums of spatial puzzling. Initially their obstacle courses are simply in parallel, but then they begin to join up, and then things get complicated. It’s neat. You should try it.

We were told the PC would indeed be treated to Bioshock 2 The Protector Trials (whatevs multiplayer stuff) and Minerva’s Den (a really rather good standalone new singleplayer chunk), despite initial plans to axe it. WE WERE TOLD IT.

Then it didn’t happen. It didn’t happen for so long that 2010 became 2011. So we gave up. I know I did, anyway.

Now, four months later, we’re told it’s still happening. Well, okay then. Hell, sounds like we might even get that patch we were promised 20 years ago or whatever it was.
Read the rest of this entry »