Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’d heard decent things about EA’s Facebook-based Dragon Age side-project, Legends. I am scarcely free from cyncism about Facebook gaming in its current form – so uncomfortably dependent on building compulsive play then charging to continue immediately -but I by no means believe it won’t improve. I am always willing to look and see where it’s going.

A big license and the promise of deeper mechanics sounded like it might be taking the genre/platform somewhere newer. In a way, it does – but it’s also a large and frightening backwards step for roleplaying games.
Read the rest of this entry »

If there was one thing I took away from GDC this year, it was that the “mid-level” publishers are having a good time. Digital distribution seems to be favouring them, and companies such as Paradox are working hard to diversify and deliver unusual games. Paradox’s line up for this year includes a bunch of interesting titles, such as Crusader Kings II, Sword Of The Stars II, and Mount & Blade: Fire & Sword, and they’ve already produced a big management title, with Cities In Motion, and this year’s surprise action RPG hit, with Magicka. Clearly, it was time to catch up with Paradox’s CEO, Fredrik Wester. You can read our conversation below.
Read the rest of this entry »

DICE: getting very good at making people on the internet go “ooooh.” Case in point, Battlefield 3 – of which we’ve seen very little, but everytime we do it hammers home a sure sense that this is far more than your average man-shoot. Here’s another decent chunk of in-game skulking and firefighting, ably demonstrating both the splodeyfects and the rather impressive barks/ conversation system the game seems to employ.
Read the rest of this entry »

So it turns out Ubisoft’s Rocksmith will be (1) coming to PC, (2) the first music game named after me personally and my remarkable reputation as a devil-may-care rock god, and (3) The first music game to work with real-life guitars. My feelings on this could be summarised succinctly, but I’ll spare you, just because I don’t think anybody wants to read the sentence “YES!” quite that many times. Details and first few trailers after the jump. Thanks to reader Lars “Teddible” Westergren for sending this in.
Read the rest of this entry »

This isn’t like other Ultima Underworld II retrospectives. This is Dan Griliopoulos’ account of Ultima Underworld II as a “memory palace“, a mental construct which Wikipedia describes as a “mnemonic technique that relies on memorised spatial relationships to establish, order and recollect memorial content.” That’s the starting point. Let’s find out what he’s up to in there.

Let me start in the middle; I own a palace.
Read the rest of this entry »

Ubisoft, you do like making mistakes. The publisher’s strange habit of incorporating piracy into their products seems to have reared once more. Remember back in 2008 when they thought it would be a good idea to officially patch Rainbow Six Vegas 2 with an illegal NO-CD crack? Today Eurogamer brings us news that those copyright infringing scamps may have been at it again. This time it looks like they’ve included a torrented version of their own soundtrack in the Digital Deluxe Edition of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood on PC.

Read the rest of this entry »

This week in Mod News, a couple of interesting projects are on their way to being released. There’s also a bunch of Dragon Age II mods already, along with a nice resource for anyone wanting to try their hand at making such things. Could there even be more? Why yes, there could! Click on to read it all.
Read the rest of this entry »

Yikes! This is the most impressive Unity-powered project I’ve seen to date. BeGone is a butter-smooth, not-at-all-ugly multiplayer FPS you can play right out of your browser. Click on the link, pick a server, wait some seconds and you’re off, engaging in hot manshoots with up to 11 other players. You hear that? That’s the sound of the past crunching under the heavy boot of Tomorrow. Go play, or watch some footage after the jump. News courtesy of the ever-independent Indiegames blog.
Read the rest of this entry »

Oddly, I have never once thought to question what faces really provide the voices for the Dawn of War games’ assortment of space bastards. Did I think there was really an ork behind a microphone somewhere? Did I truly believe there was a man who naturally spoke like Patrick Stewart x1000? Of course not, but a testament to good voice acting is when you don’t think “oh, that’s just a guy pretending to be an Eldar.” In the below video, Relic show just who’s providing the snarls, hisses and achingly earnest exposition in DOW2: Retribution. While some performances are better than others (that sure is a lot of North Americans doing British accents), for the most part it’s enormously impressive. Particularly, you can’t fault either the gusto or the very visible effects upon the faces of those who make the noise of war. For instance, the lady above – take a guess who she plays?

Read the rest of this entry »

The first Prey 2 trailer has dribbled onto the internet, like a splodge of molten entertainment. You’ll find it contained after the jump, but be forewarned- it’s an entirely live action affair, containing actual humans actually reacting to imaginary stuff. Thanks to RPS reader Gabe “Fear Factory” McGrath for sending this in.

EDIT: Oh, snap! This isn’t useless at all. It corroborates what Kotaku was saying about you playing not a Native American, but a Federal Marshal, and if that’s true- well, in the same post Kotaku say Prey 2 will be an open-world game with you playing a bounty hunter on an alien planet. This game just got very interesting. More details after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have no idea what to make of this, other than happiness. With confusion. Someone has taken Heywood Banks‘ song Toast, clearly performed live on an American radio programme, and animated it in TF2, and stuck it on Break.com. It’s a year old, millions of people have already watched it. It’s old. Thing is, it’s funny. Thus: post.

Read the rest of this entry »