Rock, Paper, Shotgun

“Why no demo?” is a regular plea around these parts, all manner of game-makers both independent and mainstream apparently believing that trailers and press releases are all that’s required to imbue a gamer with a sense of what their creation is like. Demos are on the decline, blighted by the twin forces of requiring extra dev manhours and fears that people may be so sated by their contents that they have no need of the full product. I think that’s poppycock, but unfortunately the games industry doesn’t listen to me.

What if there was another way to assess whether a PC game made your brain sing? Direct2Drive are experimenting, with a rental-via-download system. Pay to play before you pay, if you will.
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Time for me to be the badger of bad news. EA has confirmed to The Escapist that the Severed DLC for Dead Space 2, which adds 2 standalone chapters to the game that tell the story of whatever happened to Dead Space: Extraction stars Gabe Weller and Lexine Murdock, won’t be seeing a PC release. You can chalk that up with the Dead Space: Ignition standalone comic book/minigame release we never saw, which unlocks a new Hacker suit, a new weapon and some new audio logs in Dead Space 2. Thanks to reader Dominic “Domino” Tarason for the tipoff, who also informs us that the vsync mouselag that troubled some folk in the PC version of Dead Space 1 is still alive and kicking in Dead Space 2. That is all.

I love this, but I’ll be frank. It does not feature a man being propelled through the air by his own anus*. I gather from the 47 comments on Icarus Proudbottom down there that you lot are big fans, and that’s fine. I mean, it’s not actually fine, but whatever. If you want some of that hot scatological jaculate action, you’ll find it below. If you want a cute, clever, tough-as-nails, hynotising browser game then that game is Negative Spacecraft from Paper Dino, him of Haiku Hero fame. Watch the trailer below.
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Quickly, Batchildren! A mysterious French internet online websitepage has a frustratingly unembeddable new trailer from Batman: Arkham City, which will almost certainly be dragged off into a dark alley and given a sound kicking by the dastardly Mr Embargo any minute now. It features Batman and the Joker working together (whaaaaaaaaat), in a “punching hulking goons in the teeth” sort of way. It looks, to coin a phrase, “tight.”

Edit – there’s some speculation this may be fake. Maybe it is! Investigating/being bewildered by the strange lengths people on the internet go to will be fun regardless. Dialogue and character models are apparently lifted from the first game, and could have originated from the Unreal SDK. What do you think, detectives?

Edit edit – Warner Bros confirm it’s a fake. So there’s that. Let’s take bets on how long until it’s pulled, and on what grounds.

Want thee one of 1000 keys to get access to the Crasher beta? It’s a motorised arena combat multiplayer from Punchers Impact, pitching teams of five against each other in vehicular mayhem. Then what you need to do is be quick, and nothing more. Below, after more details about the game, you’ll find a form you can fill in. The first 1000 people to do so by 9PM GMT will secure themselves a Steam key, that will be magically emailed to you by a combination of wizardry and science, hopefully by tomorrow morning. You’ll know if you were too late, because you won’t get an email. And the crying.

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Codemasters has released a new developer diary for upcoming expandalone Operation Flashpoint: Red River. I think I have similar feelings to Jim about this one. Against my better judgement I am an excite, and will play this game just to be sure. Lots of info on Red River’s new features await you below, which include the addition of personalities and skills to your squad. Does that mean they’ll also be immortal? Will you lose a mission if they die? Will they only get knocked down by bullets, awaiting a friendly hand to hoist them back up? More information, Codemasters! Faster, faster!
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id have relaunched the website for their forthcoming outdoors-but-still-brown shooter, RAGE. You can plan ahead like a loony and pre-order a copy for the 13th September, when they’re saying it’s coming out. Which frankly scares me, id giving out release dates. What has Bethesda done to them?! It has to involve electricity and hats with wires sticking out. There’s three new screenshots, which are like bloody golddust for this game. The last time any were officially released was May 2010. Twits. So you can see them all giant and print them out and use them as duvets if you click on them below. (They’re quite big.)

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I adore the internet. All I have to do is tweet that there aren’t enough games that cause me to shout, “Out of the way, duck!” and into my email comes another game that makes me shout, “Out of the way, duck!” And it prominently features poo. It’s like my birthday, Christmas and a royal wedding all rolled into one. It’s called Icarus Proudbottom In: The Curse Of The Chocolate Fountain, and it’s about a man propelled through the air by an unstoppable spray of shit from his bottom. Dodging birds.

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MicroVolts, a third-person multiplayer shooter, has been rumbling along in beta for a few months now. It’s a hybrid of TF2 and MicroMachines, teeny little toys waging war in your back garden. Why do they fight? For battery resources, of courses. And for supremacy in the Micro World. Which is presumably just the world, but seen from lower down. It’s entering its second closed beta on the 28th, accepting applications for that now. And there’s a fresh new trailer of the frantic action to see below.

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What an absolutely useless week for mod news! In terms of updates and releases, especially. Where are all the hip happenings? I’m quite certain everyone’s going to shout at me for being so blind as to not have noticed this or that, but I’ve searched long and hard to fetch this week’s news, which includes Half-Life mods (it’s true!) and also news of an imminent Far Cry 2 mod. Read on!
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A couple of different sources have now contacted us to confirm that the unrevealed Planetside sequel/remake Planetside Next will support “thousands” of players across the battlefield, in a manner similar to the original. Given the appearance of a couple of different images based on models from vehicles appearing in the old game, it looks like Planetside Next will be a straight-up remake of the original concept, albeit it with a different balance, as apparently the Galaxy (pictured) will play an even more important role in the game this time around.

Another source suggests that the game will be scaled to support “low-end” machines as old as six years. (So by implication pixel shader 3.0 cards and higher.) The game will apparently be launching in March, with a beta starting next month. We are going to be all over this.