Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Desktop Dungeons: an incredibly smart roguelike, which takes 10 minutes to play and turns roleplaying into something akin to a puzzle game. We went slightly bananas over it last year.

Suffice to say it’s been a strange year for South African studio QCF Design. Seems like a good time to chat to their boss Danny Day about just what happened, the curious moral debate around game-cloning, the welcome resurgence of roguelikes – and what comes next for DD now the dark doppelganger’s out of the picture.
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Friends all playing Game Dev Story on their iPhones? Bitter because it was originally a sodding PC game that only got translated out of the original Japanese for Apple’s fancypants lifestyle accessory? Nevermind all that. I’ve got something better for you. Games Journo Story (made in RPG Maker by aspiring UK games journalist Brendan Caldwell) is better than Game Dev Story for three reasons. (1) It’s funnier. (2) It’s only 15-20 minutes long, thus showing respect for your precious time. (3) It’s overloaded with all of young gun Brendan’s angst and desires, which pour into you like beer drunk from a wellington boot. (4) I’m in it. And so’s Kieron. (5) POP MUSIC!
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Unlikely commercial crossover of the month goes to Valve and Trion Worlds, who have set up a deal whereby people who pre-order the forthcoming fantasy MMO Rift will get exclusive melee weapons in Team Fortress 2: a “Sharpened Volcano Fragment” for the pyro and the “Sun-on-a-stick” for the Scout. There’s also a new TF2 achievement being added to the game, called “Riftwalker”, which you can earn to unlock a hat based on a frightening looking head-garment (pictured) that appears in Rift.

Presumably this won’t be the last time we will see creepy hats appear as consumer-incentives in TF2.

And now for the bad news. Blues reports that Battlefield 1943 has actually been cancelled for PC, despite prior news to the contrary. This forum post has the news: “We know some of you eagerly have been awaiting Battlefield 1943 and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Onslaught on PC, ” says Karl Magnus Troedsson. “I’m sad to say that these two titles are now officially cancelled. Instead, our talented teams will focus on delivering the greatest possible gaming experience in our next behemoth release. We’re confident this will lead to an even better experience in Battlefield 3, not only on PC, but on all platforms.”

So yes, the failhorn has also been sounded for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Onslaught on PC. In other news: not long until the Battlefield 3 unveiling. Fingers crossed, eh?

Last week Alec and Quinns were tasered, blindfolded, put in a black van, tasered again, tasered one more time for good measure and taken by Eidos for a hands-on session with Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The whole thing was very rude, our men report. At last they have recovered from the publisher’s powerful sedatives, and present to you a discussion about what they played and Wot They Thought.
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Mary DeMarle is the Narrative Designer and Lead Writer for Deus Ex: Human Revolution, an IMPOSSIBLY EXCITING game which we’ve just offered our first hands-on impressions of here. In the following interview she answers my questions on how she was working to make her characters human, how the conversation battles would work and whether the game is, in fact, a love story. Yeah, a love story. You read that right.
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We were careful to not give away too many specifics in our chat about Human Revolution’s opening level, but pray allow me to provide you with a lengthy description of just what kind of world this new Deus Ex 3 lives in, and the events that lead up to Adam Jensen becoming the bio-mechanical chatty deathmachine we’ve seen in previous trailers.
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A rather more story-based trailer than others we’ve seen, this latest trailer for Human Revolution explains a little about the origin and attitude of our hero-protagonist, Adam Jensen. That is one husky voiced fella…
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We can reveal that it is an on-rails shooter because, well, that is what is revealed in the art-trailer which Atari have just released. That trailer, as is the fate of all trailers, is entombed below this post for you to watch. It talks about how the super-abstract shield-egg-fly weirdness of the original has been re-imagined as an Anime-inspired shooter, with a touch of Avatar. Yar was a fly in the original, and has “evolved” into a cute girl flying a robot in this. I know, it’s as if the original game was basically irrelevant to what they are doing here.
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This is a public service announcement. At 4pm GMT (11am EST, 10am CST, 8am PST or “About an hour from now”) we’ll be posting a Deus Ex: Human Revolution info avalanche, or “infavalanche”. You’ll find your protective Infavalanche Goggles under your seat. If there are none there, don’t sweat it. Four out of five of our test subjects survived.

Vehicular multi-player combat game Crasher – from the awesomely-named studio Punchers’ Impact – now has a demo over on the Steam digital distribution network. I am downloading it! Will be it any good? I just don’t know, but I guess we’ll soon find out. The game’s blurb says “The usual mouse-controlled heroes are replaced by heavily-armed vehicles hurtling across huge maps at 150 mph” so that sounds like my kind of thing. Random game footage below – look at those tiny buggies fly!

UPDATE: It’s kind of dull, to be honest. Let’s read about Deus Ex instead!
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