Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Dan has been out in Dallas seeing what Robot Entertainment (risen from the ashes of Ensemble) are up to. They’re up to Orcs Must Die, and Dan got to play it.

It’s so easy to stereotype people. For example, everyone is always saying John’s a terrible healer. But if you need someone to provide a sop for your spiritual wounds… then he’s only a mostly awful healer. And he never claimed to be a good healer. AND no-one else here is much better; Alec thinks a field dressing goes on a salad. Likewise, it would be easy to stereotype Robot Entertainment. One might assume that they, having only recently been Ensemble Studios (the erstwhile progenitors of Age of Empires), would love doing even more minutely-researched, accurate strategy games as soon as they shook off the dead hand of Microsoft. One, if I may take the liberty, is dead wrong.
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I love it when I look at a trailer for a game and I both want to play it and have no idea what’s going on. My Country, My Name is from Brazilian indie team, Vortex, and looks like it may well be something of a satire of war. Two friends, Johann and Yohahn, escape from a conflict and form their own country on an abandoned oil rig, seeking refuge from the hostilities. But then almost immediately fall out over choosing the name. And so to the fighting. It will offer 2 to 8 player games, groups of mercenaries hired by the two warring parties to take out the other side for control of their rusty metallic homestead. Have a watch of the trailer and see what you think.

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Strategy Informer sends word of this, a photo posted by Eidos Montreal and subsequently picked up by French site JeuxVideo. You can find the original photo here. My feverish analysis follows.
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The latest patch for Team Fortress 2 is out, fixing one server crash exploit and added THREE new maps. Yes. But not made my Valve. No. Nightfall (seen above), Lakeside and Frontier are three accalimed community made maps, and if you’ll let me I’ll walk you through all three in turn. Nightfall by Aaron “Psy” Garcha is set in a lumber mill during a storm, just like Sawmill, though unlike Sawmill it’s a Payload Race map. What are the others? Just GIVE ME A MINUTE, wil you? We’ll get there.
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Xbox Live mouthpiece and all-around inoffensive man Major Nelson has word on the release date of the PC version of Fable 3 in his latest infodump. Americans will be getting the rebellion & kingdom management-driven third instalment of the series on May 17th. On the one hand, it’s coming to us 7 months late. On the other hand, we’ll get 3D support and a new, PC exclusive ‘Hardcore’ difficulty mode, just in case you felt like punishing yourself some more. In the same post Nelson announces the first sizeable piece of downloadable content for the game, Traitor’s Keep, which you can read all the details on below. It’s only announced for consoletoys just yet, but these packs have a habit of wandering our way eventually, like one-legged cats scrabbling their way home.
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Monday this week we had a surprise. A new Command & Conquer game! This was surprising on two counts. Firstly, EA had rather publicly given up on the series last year. Secondly, there was no build up, no tiresome PR campaign. Just POW! News! So of course it was an accident. The site so keenly spotted by VE3D was hastily pulled, the story buried. But fortunately by the magic of caching Alec was able to fetch the important details. Our hearts were set to Believe*. And now EA, perhaps sooner than they’d hoped, have made the news official.

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Earlier this week I took some time out of my merciless schedule of reblogging the trailers for the sequels to 2007 action games to have chat with Danish indies Zero Point. Game director Kim Haar Jørgensen told me about how Hired Guns, System Shock 2, and Deus Ex had all fed into the creation of their Unity-powered co-op sci-fi shooter, Interstellar Marines. You might have already encountered this “AAA Indie” project via Bullseye or Running Man, the browser-based mini-games that Zero Point have used to promote their title. The full game, however, is something much more formidable, as Jørgensen was to explain. It’s quite project for just a handful of devs, so I was keen to find out how they were getting on.

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It’s the era of the eight-year-long Kings Quest remake projects. With the Kings Quest episodic adventure, The Silver Lining, having recently released its third chapter, the peculiarly lenient Activision are also tolerating an even more overt reproduction of their IP – a complete remake of Kings Quest III: To Heir Is Human. And it’s completely free. They’ve ditched the text parser, brought the old 16 colour EGA graphics into something resembling the future, new background art, and even voice acting. Eight years of hard work. It’s slightly awkward that somebody already did it.

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Forget dragons and cyborgs! Cities In Motion has detailed transport infrastructure! Also, it’s out, and there’s a release trailer posted below to prove it. Furthermore… well, that makes me realise that we haven’t properly critically evaluated it as yet. It’s certainly due a going over. Perhaps one of the Jim-clones can be woken from their cryogenic stasis to do it while I go off to GDC. Then again, they never did come out of the cloning process quite right…
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Because Doctor Who is a thing that exists, and because there is an internet with games on it, there is going to be a free-to-play Doctor Who MMO. The BBC’s commercial arm (which is about to be lopped off in sacrifice to the mad god Cameron), BBC Worldwide, has announced that further to their pretty poor third-person action-adventure game things, there will be a massively multiplayer game based on the license. To be developed by indie team Three Rings (Puzzle Pirates), it’s called Doctor Who: Worlds In Time, and is due out some time later this year.

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The friend of mine who got into Mortal Online used to try and sell me on it with the strangest stories. “There’s this one naked player who stands on a bridge all day and night and when players try to cross it he beats the crap out of them with a stick,” or “It’s so cool! At night you can’t see anything without a light.” And so on, and on. If you, like me, never ended up giving this hardcore sandbox MMORPG a shot, now is the time to try. Blues has word that developers Starvault have just started offering free 14 day trials, with no credit card required, and you’ve got to love an online game which has “Long-term wounds” and “Cooking” as the two most prominent items on its upcoming features list. Vids & info after the jump.
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