Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The second Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II expansion, Retribution, launched yesterday. Or today. Or tomorrow. Or never. Or whenever. All at once. Depends on where you are and where you download from, basically. This hasn’t enjoyed the pan-continental release date it should have done, despite being so inherently online a title. With a bit of luck, you can purchase Relic’s sci-fi RTS/RPG mash-up from the likes of Steam and Direct2Drive right now, and if you can’t you should have access on the 4th, online and at retail. Should you, though? Well, that’s where the following words come in. Consider me your Dreadnought of truthiness.
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Oh I don’t understand videogames any more. I feel like such an old man, harking back to the days when the game would come out, and then eight months later there’d be an add-on. Now I’m not sure if I’m only getting a fraction of the intended game when I open the box, what with pre-order bonuses, special editions with extra quests, and most of all, DLC. DLC is a great idea! More content, and downloadable because we’ve got this new thing called the internet. Great plan! But why am I posting a trailer for Dragon Age II‘s DLC below, over a week before the game has come out?

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Mount & Blade expandalone With Fire and Sword hits this summer, adding explosives, a new economic model and heightened political intrigue to the quasi-realistic indie action RPG. Below you’ll find a couple of new trailers entitled Ambience and Action, and the RPS supercomputer informs me that they’re both precisely as awesome as one another, right down to the molecular level. Remarkable!
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It seems like only yesterday that I was posting a long video of Hunted: The Demon’s Forge. Quite possibly because I was. But that video was old, and this is new! And as we all know, new is best. You hear that, grandad? Besides, while both videos show sexy protagonists E’lara and Caddoc slapping around whole bestiaries of monsters, this one’s demon-strably more polished and marginally less all-over-the-place. But still quite all-over-the-place. You’ll see.
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I wasn’t sure whether to post about the discontinuation of Microsoft’s SideWinder peripherals. Then Kieron emailed with the above headline, and there clearly wasn’t any choice. VR-Zone reports that the Beast Of Redmond are ditching the line of mice and keyboards for a second time, after previously cancelling the line in 2003. A 2007 relaunch failed to catch fire, with only a handful of products ever appearing. And now they are to be put to rest. I suppose Microsoft are learning that you can’t lay a patch by computer design.

If you know Rock, Paper, Shotgun, then you’ll know about my love for strategy games. If I can’t find a bit of time for playing a strategy game in day, I quite lose my mind. Whether it’s a campaign in Men Of Battles, a quick squirmish in Company Of Men In Conflict, or some multiplayer co-op at lunchtime in Total Men: War Of Men At War, I have to get my fix. And today that’s going to be the Strategic Command World War I: The Great War 1914-1918 Demo. Catchy name, crazy game.

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Big Download note that the patch that makes significant balance changes to Civ V (as well as adding a range of bugfixes and a new building, the Aquaduct) has landed just in time for the Polynesia pack hitting this Thursday, and dutiful Steam might just have updated your game already. You can read the full patch notes here.

Guess what I’ve got waiting for you beneath the jump. That’s right! It’s a twenty five minute video review of the new patch by an Eastern European man. Enjoy!
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It’s maybe a little strange, but it always surprises me to see a mod sequel in development. The nature of modding – generally amateur-level, non-profit stuff – means you don’t have to worry about franchising or suchlike, and can let your new ideas run riot as soon as you have them. Nevertheless, we do occasionally see a follow-up to something released before – and this week, one of them has released a whole load of new media. Read on to find out what I’m talking about – and, more importantly, whether or not it’s any good.
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So! You’ve read our Jim’s sparkling words regarding the GDC Battlefield 3 presentation. Would you like to watch some of the in-game footage that he did, using your eyes? You would?! OK!
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I was there for the reveal event. Read on below to find out what happened.
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It’s an RPS ultra-news. There’s a new game from Minecraft creators Mojang, and we can tell you what it’s called: Scrolls. We can tell you what it is: it’s a collectable card game-meets-board game. And more than that, we can tell you a great deal about it. I travelled to Mojang’s headquarters in Stockholm to meet Markus “Notch” Persson and the team behind this new project, including Jacob Porser and Carl Manneh, and below you can read our exclusive coverage. We learn how Mojang’s open development philosophy will apply to Scrolls, quite how strikingly different the project is from Minecraft, how it plays, and some of the more ambitious plans they have in place if it proves to be a success. And we all attempt to avoid attack from Markus and his dangerous collection of Nerf guns.

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