Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Yes, the free-to-play Facebook Connect version of Sid Meier’s Civilization, Civ World, (which was mentioned in this interview) will enter a closed Alpha next week. No details on the game just yet, but interested parties can apply for a slot in the Alpha here. If memory serves the lot of you love Facebook games, you just can’t get enough of them, so I am sure that this will be good news and won’t at all result in grumbling. Right?

I deleted myself from Facebook, you know. Already my social life is in tatters. Some people say it’s because I keep trying to have sex with their cats, but I definitely blame Facebook.

Have you heard of Core Blaze? No, nor me. But it’s got both ninjas AND robots! There, I got my own attention. And it’s an MMO. Oh, I lost my attention again. But look how big their swords are! Now I’ve confused myself with homoerotic imagery. It also boasts some quite remarkable claims of adaptable quests, even depending upon the time of day they take place. Now I’m feeling sceptical. I’ve really run the gamut of emotions here. Now I don’t know what a gamut is. There’s a trailer below. Now I want to click.

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I’m being rude. I’m sorry. It’s just that the sheer intensity and earnestness of this video holds me back from taking the Razer Switchblade entirely seriously. Which maybe I should do, as essentially it’s a 7″ clamshell PC with special adaptive and touchscreen controls that in theory make playing ‘our’ games possible on something so minute.
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Saying “lots of indie games have been inspired by Portal” is a bit like saying “sofas are quite nice to sit on”, yet despite that ongoing cavalcade of tribute titles, I don’t believe anyone’s yet hit on the splendid idea of playing as GlaDOS. Oops, my mistake – a chap named Nerdook has.

While being a GlaDOS sim is doubtless its main draw, browser game I Am An Insane Rogue AI clearly owes a debt to all the great homicidal digi-brains (SHODAN and HAL particularly. I’m sure there’s some horrific slashfic about those guys out there somewhere. No, you don’t need to share it with us).
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Patents, eh? Aren’t they great! In a pretty spectacular act of what looks an awful lot like patent trolling, but we’re sure couldn’t possibly be, Walker Digital (no relation) are suing Zynga and Activision Blizzard for creating games that use what they claim to be their distributed electronic tournaments patent. Gamasutra and TechCrunch report that the numbers they want to claim in damages are so high they haven’t thought of them yet, but say they’ll have finished counting by the trial.

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Hmm. So we just read this: “Wargaming.net is glad to announce that the company’s MMO action game World of Tanks has set up the new world record for the maximum number of users playing concurrently on the same game server. The peak of 74,536 online players was recorded on January 5, 2011 by the Russian release version of World of Tanks.” Which is interesting, I suppose, because it shows how popular WoT is, and strictly speaking it is a world record, but it’s not really an interesting record in the same way that Eve’s concurrent users is (and Eve itself is lots of separate systems, each of which is essentially its on server, albeit connected to the wider world). WoT’s structure means that these people aren’t connected in a world, so much as available to the same set of games, something like that. When a server for a game like World Of Warcraft can have 70k+ people online and in the same space/world together, then we can get excited.

Still, ‘grats, WoT. The game has also passed one million totally registered users.

What do you own? Not “pwn”, you nu-gamer young person. But own. What do you pay for that’s yours to do with as you wish? Food, clothes, knitting needles. But what about games? When you pay money for a game, do you own it? Increasingly, not in any understood meaning of the word. Like music over the last couple of decades, we’re currently sleeping through having our rights as consumers taken from us, while the prices stay the same. If you buy an album, do you own that music? No – not at all. If you do anything with that music other than listen to it on the CD it came on, or as the files you downloaded, then you’re breaking an ever-more spurious collection of laws. And increasingly, gaming is going in the same direction. What was once considered sharing – and we’re not even talking about copying here – is now being treated as theft. And THQ, as reported by Shacknews, are going out of their way to prevent sharing or re-selling of Homefront.

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Fallen Earth is a game I keep meaning to return to, only to be held back by a lack of time. It was in a pretty good state when I played it last year, and it’s had a load of updates since there, including a significant overhaul of the PvP system. There was even a UK retail release recently, which got me as far as reinstalling it, but not quite playing it again – yet. Anyway, the post-apocalyptic MMO (this is the Fallout MMO until we get the Fallout MMO) has now revealed more content in a State Of The Game open letter from the developers. There’s a few major bits of content coming up soon, such as new NPC bosses, new locations, fixes to mutations and other balancing issues, but it seems the core of the work is going to be in fixing the wonky player economy, which Icarus want to be at the heart of the game. You can read the full update here. If you want to read my original review, go here, but it’s moved on a fair bit since then.

Indie puzzler SpaceChem saw a quiet release on the 1st of this month, and in the two hours this morning that I spent playing it I’m not sure I stopped smiling. I’ll be getting Wot I Think up asap, so for now I’ll be brief: this game is incredible. I think we might have just received one of the year’s best indie games in the first week of 2011.
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This is quite the thing, via Technabob: it’s a case in which to place a laptop, turning it into an arcade machine. The case hooks the laptop up to arcade-style control pad and buttons, while providing an extra slide-out keyboard beneath the main cabinet so that you can still use it as a PC. Frustratingly, this doesn’t yet appear to be a commercial project, and instead is simply a demo project by this chap. As casemods go, this is both practical (if you’re an arcade nerd) and awesome, and totally should be a commercial thing. There’s a video of it being demonstrated in action beneath the click.
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Rock, Paper, Shotgun is always first with the news. Apart from when we’re last. For instance, this Plants Vs. Zombies garden ornament collection first appeared in March last year. But I don’t care, because I just saw it for the first time, and no one else I’ve shown has seen it before, and it’s gorgeous. So there. They’re the work of a collection of people at Californian-based Moose Studios Pottery. You can see lots of individual photos on their Facebook page, which appears to be as official a website as they have. If you’re in Clovis CA, why not see if they have any left? (Thanks to Tina K. for the link.)