Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Here at RPS, we love the Chinese. Steam buns? Alright by us! The Great Wall? Heck of a wall, that. Mr. Miyagi? What a guy. But what if you hated the Chinese? Well, then I guess you’d get a kick out of the latest Operation Flashpoint: Red River trailer, which awaits you below and introduces the Chinese army as enemies. I want to go on the record as saying that while RPS will shoot the Chinese in Red River, we won’t enjoy it. Nuh-uh. Not one bit. Thanks to Bigdownload for the video.
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Battlefield Play4Free is unacceptable. The title, I mean. It looks like it should be some ramshackle shop that briefly appears on the road that runs behind the high street. The one with offers in the window written in pen, and a guy behind the counter with a recent prison tattoo on his knuckles. “Yeah, I can yet ya Battlefield. Nah, sorry, I only take cash.”

However, that’s what those shifty-looking sorts at EA and DICE have chosen for the second free-to-play incarnation of Battlefield, following on from the slightly disappointing (but highly populated) Heroes. All serious this time. There’s a new trailer for it – a proper one, not some shaky cam footage – below.

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Orion: Prelude seems to be getting a fair bit of press. Why is that? Well, it’s because the game features Tribes-like jetpacks, Halo-like jeeps and, uh, Cretaceous-era-like dinosaur, Tyrannosaurus. (In fact their recent email to us the devs finished the subject line with (DINOSAURS!) just to be clear, or maybe because they still can’t quite believe it. These chaps from Spiral were showing all this stuff at GDC, AND I DIDN’T GET TO SEE IT FOR SOME REASON, but anyway they released a trailer of it all going on, which you can see below. So it’s all fine, I suppose.

They should also release some screenshots. Video below.
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If there’s one thing I’m forever hungry for, it’s hi-gloss tower defence games. If there’s one thing I seem to find surprisingly little of on PC, it’s hi-gloss tower defence games. Toy Soldiers was an XBLA hit (selling 500,000 copies) last year, and apparently rightly so – it’s a remix of the oft-repeated formula, with the very notable tweaks of direct unit control, megasplodes and a World War 1 setting. Howitzers, tanks, biplanes – these are yours to assume command of as you attempt to keep the dastardly Foreigns from your door. As is a joyously growing trend of late (see Cthulhu saves the world) it’s now on its way to PC.

64 seconds that will (probably) make you want to play it are below.
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In case you were wondering how to identify a slow news day in the world of PC gaming, it’s when you find me posting about a strategy game demo. Armoured And Dangerous is such a thing. It’s a game. It’s a strategy game. I don’t want to understand it. There’s a video of it below. It looks a bit dodge. But it’s super-cheap, and it does have tanks in it.

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Some congratulations are in order! Indie developer Croteam’s Serious Sam series is, in a strictly metaphorical sense, pregnant, and about to give birth to three independently developed spin-off games. Croteam and Serious Sam publisher Devolver Digital today announced that they’ve given several smaller indie devs (including phenomenal Dutch pairing Vlambeer of Super Crate Box fame) the opportunity to make a game based on Serious Sam, and they’ll be released in the run up to Serious Sam 3: BFE. What have you got in store? WELL! Come take a look.
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Atari’s lightweight Ghostbusters game Sanctum of Slime arrives this month on March 23rd, which is eight days after Shogun 2, five days after both Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood and Homefront and two days before Crysis 2 and The Sims Medieval. So many games! So close together! And lest we forget, games, like breasts, are best when they are pressed close together. If you told me this time last year that I’d be enjoying this many games so close together, I don’t know what I would have done. I’d probably have hit you.

Anyway, perpetual news machine Blues News notes that Sanctum of Slime has a new multiplayer trailer out, and I’ve trapped it in the Ecto-Containment Unit after the jump.
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Okay, so crafting possibly isn’t the most exciting thing about the spectacular upcoming MMO, Guild Wars 2, but it certainly is a thing about it, and ArenaNet have chosen to reveal it today. There will be crafting, and there will be eight disciplines: Weaponsmith (making melee weapons), Huntsman (crafting bows and pistol, as well as torches and warhorns), Artificer (for the fashioning of magical weapons such as staves and scepters), Armorsmith (for heavy armour), Leatherworker (for medium armour), Tailor (for light armour), Jewelcrafter (for rings and necklaces), Cook (for buff-inducing foods). Most of these professions will also be able to upgrade existing items. Characters can choose two of these disciplines at any one time, and these can be changed back and forth, retaining skill level’s acquired, for a cost.

More information, and a quick chat with game designer Andrew McLeod, lie below.
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A dozen IM windows light up the Rossignol Research Crater with the same link. This link. It’s a game called Antimatiere, hosted on Kongregate. It’s a 3D puzzler that’s all about the world becoming 2D. There’s been some kind of accident and people and their things have become two-dimensional, and are now pasted on the walls, floors, and ceilings. Your task – as a person of three-dimenions – is to swap these entrapped objects about and try to figure out what happened. You should probably play this one.

There are two different stories here, really. The first is Intel’s presentation at GDC last week, in which Intel’s Matt Ployar (the new PCGA president) stood up to talk about the growth in PC game sales. In addition to what we’ve already heard about growth in the last year, he predicted that the PC would be a bigger market than “all the consoles combined” by 2012. This is partly due to massive growth in Asia, and a shrinking of sales in North America, where people can’t quite afford their $60 PS3 games anymore.

The second story is from this interview with EA’s Frank Gibeau (via GI) who says that PC downloads are “awesome”. Continuing with that line of thought he explained: “The margins are much better and we don’t have any rules in terms of first party approvals. From our perspective, it’s an extremely healthy platform. It’s totally conceivable it will become our biggest platform.”

So that’s the news about bigness.

Hello! Welcome to another week of Mod News. It’s probably no secret by now that I like my STALKER un-modded: there’s something weirdly beautiful about the ever-so-slightly-broken nature of those games. Except for Clear Sky, but let’s pretend that didn’t happen. So this mod, this Call of Pripyat total conversion, is catching my eye for doing something other than the standard bugfixes, graphical updates and general rebalancing that mods of GSC’s strange series tend to go for. Read on for information on that, and on other tremendous happenings in mods over the past seven days.
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