Rock, Paper, Shotgun

This doesn’t actually do much other than say that there is a career mode in Shift 2 – which you could probably have guessed even if you’d been living on a remote island since the 1970s – but it’s the footage of the game that really made me pay any attention: Shift 2 looks extraordinary, and the focus on GT racing makes it about as perfect for my automobile tastes as anything else out there. Electronic Arts are really starting to churn the kind of racers that I can agree with.

This, the 17th Need For Speed game, is out at the end of March.
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Rock-solid lightweight strategy title Greed Corp is out now on Steam! Yes. Technically it was out yesterday too, and the day before that, and, er, about another 50 days before that. Actually, this one’s a double-whammy of incompetence because I was informed of this release by an RPS reader who also excitedly told me about a Greed Corp Steam sale which ended about 4 minutes before he sent the email. Anyway. Greed Corp is good, and if you dive across the misty gap that separates the two halves of this post, you’ll find yourself some more info and a goofy PC launch trailer.
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Something we rather want to do on Rock, Paper, Shotgun is write about Magicka. It’s one of those games, not a giant AAA mainstream release, but a small project that captured our attention. We’d been watching it from the corner of our eyes during development, and then Quintin fell completely in love with it when he previewed it last week. Our looks were forward. And then it was released.

It’s been a real shame to see what should have been one of those feel-good stories become something completely different. A tale of bugs and woe and disaster. One Paradox has responded to by offering all Magicka DLC as free until the end of the month. As they fight to patch it into something playable, we decided to take a look at the game in co-op between ourselves. Except for Quintin, who organised it then remembered he’d bought tickets for the opera or something. So Jim, Alec and John set forth to adventure.

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Reality Pump’s RPG sequel arrived in mainland Europe back in November, but won’t reach the US and UK until next week. Publisher Topware Interactive seems to have disappeared off the face of the Earth this week and haven’t replied to requests for review code, but as the European edition also includes the English version I imported a copy of that, applied the three patches since launch and got cracking. As far as I can ascertain there are zero differences between the two versions, but apologies in advance if there proves to be some major change.

I’ll be reviewing it – if you want to call it that – in stages. This’ll be the first one of those, then.
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Cynical people, naff off. I adore the Lego games. With the possible exception of Lego Indiana Jones, they’ve been amazing creations, packed with wit and detail like little else. Lego Harry Potter should have been in our 2010 Calendar, and it was only because I didn’t play it until too late that I didn’t know to argue for it. So news of Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars is to be met with delight. Good – I hope everyone’s changed their minds and agrees with me now.

One particularly lovely thing about the games is that there’s no recognisable dialogue at all, instead everything communicated through peculiar speech-like noises. The video below shows the actors in the studio willingly looking daft to create these noises, along with snippets of the forthcoming game.

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But actually the open beta only started today for Europe and North America. Was what went before a closed beta? A shy beta? An alpha? I just don’t know. Look, North Americans can sign up here, and Europeans here. Although it looks like you can still access North American servers from Europe, if you want, so that is a pleasant surprise.

Unexpectedly, World Of Tanks isn’t really a world populated by tanks, in which tanks wear suits and go to work and do the shopping, but more like a highly populated tank fighting arena-ladder-championship system, where tanks can team up to explode each other with carefully balanced ordnance. Some tanks are good at long distance hammering, others are small and fast and shooty. None are much good as healers, and some of them aren’t good tanks, which seems odd. So World Of Tanks is a kind of long distance boxing fraternity for overweight tractors, based on Platonic World War II tank concepts. That’s what it is. Yep. It is also free to play. I’ve posted a video of what happens in World Of Tanks below. (Oh and also the actual trailer.)
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News, hot news from VG247! Bethesda’s announced release dates both for Brink and co-op adventurous dungeon adventure Hunted: The Demon’s Forge. Americafolk will be getting Brink on May 17th, us Euroguys will receive it three days later on May 20th, and Hunted will be landing at the beginning of June.

On the one hand, this means we’ll be playing Brink in less than four months! On the other, four months is a long time. A lot could happen in four months. Your PC might get a wasp nest in it. On the subject of Brink, if you haven’t read my impressions piece you might want to. This is a game worth worrying about wasp nests for.

Patch naming might be a lawless and uncharted field, but this is still the dumbest thing I’ve heard all morning. Back in November, Korean MMORPG Aion received its 2.1 patch. Today, it’s received… its 2.1 patch, part 2. Does that mean we’re playing v2.1(pt.2)? Foolish devs!

(Edit: Aha! RPS commenter and all-around clever human Kitz informs me that this is because us foreign types received the original 2.1 Korean patch in instalments, for some reason. Thanks, Kitz. Thitz.)

What is interesting about both iterations of the 2.1 patch is that they make this famously grindy game less grindy, so if you just wanted to play a fun game where you character flies around on a pair of modular wings, now might be your chance. Back in November the developers “significantly” increased drop rates, and with 2.1 pt. 2 they’ve lowered the quantity of materials required for crafting and increased the rewards you get for finishing campaign quests. Each patch adds lots of new crafting recipes, too. I’ve re-posted the trailer for the expansion, Assault on Balaurea, below. It has many wings in.
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Morning my chirruping and greasy internetlings. Did you know that download-only multiplayer shooter Breach has been released? Alright. But did you know Eurogamer has also published my review? Yes! It’s like some kind of coincidence. In the review, I say things like this:

The English language has one four letter word which is more beautiful, more important and more heartening than any other. You know which word I’m talking about. It’s a word that can bring weightlessness to a lonely spirit, that can chase away the dark, that can come to define you existence. I bet you want to hear it right now. There’s no shame in that.

Read it (and find out what in the crap I’m talking about) here. Also, you can watch an absurdly well put-together launch trailer below.
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Huh, not sure how we missed this before now. PCG points out that Excalibur – those kings of random simulation publishing – released Dive To The Titanic, or DIVE to the TITANIC, to give it the proper formatting, which is a game about piloting a deep-sea mini-sub to explore the wreck of the Titanic. The trailer (in the depths below) is ludicrously hyperbolic, and the game looks pretty full on. Vicarious claustrophobia feelings, ahoy!
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The gentlemen of BigDownload have posted a video of Darkspore’s editor stuff in action, which you can conveniently see below. As you are probably aware, this part of Darkspore is based on the creature creator technology developed for Spore, only the idea for Darkspore is that the things you create in terms of monster morphology have direct implications for your abilities in the game world. Go take a look for some more details.

Also, the trailer reveals that the game is arriving on March 29th, 2011. So not long to wait.
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