Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Edit: It seems the threats to leave the country may well be the Telegraph’s conjecture, rather than Kotick’s intent. Either way, he’s cheesed off with the government’s lack of support for the games industry.

Activision may be taking their ball and jumping on a plane, in response to the government’s decision to make it as expensive as possible to make videogames in the UK, despite glee-facedly lying about doing the opposite moments before the election. The Telegraph reports that Bobby Kotick may want to up and leave to friendlier shores, now that there’s going to be no tax break for developers. The shy, retiring Kotick explained, “I think it was a terrible mistake. There are so many other places that are encouraging the video games industry.”

There’s 600 Activision employees in Slough, who have yet to deny rumours that this potential move is really an excuse to leave Slough.

BigDownload scooped the news, using their giant info-bagger (which gnaws endlessly at the heart of the ever-growing internet), that Civilization V designer Jon Shafer has been hired by Stardock to work on Elemental, the turn-by-turn strategy game that appeared last year to a chorus of mixed frowns, but is now probably fine after a bunch of patching, we still haven’t had time to check. Apparently awesomeness is planned for Elemental, so that sounds awesome. Go awesome! That’s what I say, like when a guy playing American football says “Go deep” or whatever. I say that to Quinns when he is racing another blog post to the blog line. Anyway, the Stardockians have also used their cash to hire Dave Stern, a novelist and editor, who will apparently be working on Elemental’s lore. There’s life in the old lich yet, it seems.

Trion Worlds’ new, hopeful MMO, Rift, has a launch date. Two, in fact. For North America the launch is 1st March, and for the Magical Land Behind Time Of Eurostate it’s March 4th. There’s a bunch of blather here about all the options and preorder things, and these basically amount of a headstart from Feb 24th, if you like to be the kind of person who zooms ahead, laughing, alone.

There’s also a glitzy new trailer with players talking about their experiences, and I’ve posted it below.
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That’s according to this tweet from the company that now owns the game. Last year’s biggest disaster is being transformed into a free-to-play title by the chaps at GamersFirst, who picked up the dead game for a bargain price when RealTime Worlds collapsed in September. For more details – and to keep an eye out on beta details promised for later in the week – you can check out this blog.

Kieron prophesised that the platformer renaissance was likely drawing to a close in his Super Meatboy thought-thunk just before Christmas, but while I suspect he’s on the money in terms of breakout, mainstream-bothering hits, I don’t think platforming’s going anywhere when it comes to small, experimental games. Running, jumping and optionally shooting/thumping remains an incredibly simple and most of all effective framework for toying with other ideas, especially in terms of narrative and aesthetics. The systems are straightforward and accessible, the development time and cost is low – you just can’t have that kind of efficiency at a small scale with pretty much any other genre.

Which brings me to Armor Games’ K.O.L.M., a game nominally about the running and the jumping, but actually about something else.

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I just played this to completion after reading about it on the list of finalists for the IGF Nuovo award for “unconventional game development”. A House In California is the story of a little boy who lives in a large house trying to get to sleep, which is about as effete an idea for a game as I’ve ever seen, and each chapter sees him being comforted by a different family member. Except our little boy already has one foot in sleep’s murky puddle, so the whole experience plays out very strangely indeed. Download it here, play it in your browser here, and read a walkthrough here.
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While we all settle in for the torturous wait for Skyrim, why not return to Bethesda’s finest hour, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind? I spent a good chunk of 2009 knee-deep in its bleak, strange, often crazed world for the Fool In Morrowind diary series – something I dearly wish I could have continued, but the need to make a real-life living rather got in the way. The news that there’s an updated compendium of graphically mondernising mods for this deep’n'dark RPG threatens to bring me back, however.
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God, here’s some news to rival yesterday’s some manner of Mass Effect 2 DLC is coming at some point story. Lionhead Studios have tweeted that they can’t currently reveal anything about the PC version of Fable 3, which had previously been scheduled for December, but they hope that they will be able to “spill the beans” soon. You’d better believe that when Lionhead finally does upend its precious beans, RPS will be right there on the scene, standing behind the protective perspex bean screen. That is all.

Updated: MS deny plans to release Kinect beyond the 360 – see below.

Yesterday we told you news of Kinect being used to play RUSE. Today: World Of Warcraft. With the 360 peripheral being realised far more excitingly as a piece of PC equipment, can it be long before Microsoft decides to change their uncharacteristic toleration of all this hackery into something legitimate? This latest hack is by the University of Southern California, as Wired tells us, building the Flexible Action and Articulated Skeleton Toolkit piece of middleware to allow them to play the one MMO to rule them all by waving their arms around. There’s an actual real-life video of it below.

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Yes! We’re receiving reports that Ubisoft hasn’t simply dropped its fabled online authentication DRM from future releases, but has turned it off altogether. This Reddit thread shows screenshots of PC gamers playing both Assassin’s Creed 2 and Splinter Cell: Conviction with no internet connection whatsoever following the latest patches. The only time you need an internet connection is now during installation [Edit- And each time you boot the game]. Presumably the excellent Settlers 7 will have received the same treatment [Edit- it hasn't. Not yet, anyway. Guh.] [Last Edit: Ubisoft has now confirmed the deliberate removal of DRM over at Shacknews.].
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This seems like an appropriate way to start the year. Deep Shadows’ FPS/RPG space-adventure Precursors was released to Russian-language markets just over a year ago, and recently it’s been playable in English by modding the Russian version. Now, however, that modded version seems to have been released via GamersGate, making an English version commercially available. If you’ve played Deep Shadows’ previous open-world offering, Boiling Point, then you probably have an inkling of what to expect from this. That said, it’s bigger and bolder than I could ever have speculated, and should probably be the first game that you consider buying this year.

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