Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Today’s most beautiful website ever is also full of playable games from our distant, dusty youth. Specifically, scanned, digitised, lovingly recreated and fully playable browser-based versions of those electronic LCD handhelds older gentleman such as myself pined for back in the 1980s. I seem to remember Tiger Electronics made the ones my erstwhile schoolmates so brazenly wielded, but the Pica Pic site seems to specialise in delectably strange Russian and Eastern European versions. I definitely owned Merry Cook at some point, but I’m sure it had a different name and played a tinny Beethoven tune throughout.

Beautiful to behold, timelessly aggravating to play. Take a look now, before some miserable bastard gets their copyright broom out and spoils it for everyone. Via @byronicman.

Do Space Marines go on dates? “You have the most gorgeous geneseed.” “If I said you have a beautiful flamer, would you let me burn the heretic with it?” “In the grim darkness of the 41st millennium there is only war, and your eyes.”

Anyway! Relic’s upcoming orkshooter Space Marine has finally been granted something like a release date. It’s been on the horizon for about 40,000 years already, but now all of a sudden it’s turning up in August. This August, that is. So just five months until the Ultramarine’s Captain Titus sticks his Power Fist into the maw of various non-human scum (which were earlier this week confirmed to include the forces of Chaos). 2011 sure is a busy year for expensive-looking video games.

Space Marine trailer (albeit an old one) below to aid with your remembrance.
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Wandering the streets of San Francisco the other week I happened to stumble on a hotel where Kalypso Media were showing off The First Templar. Lucky for me, I thought, because I’d actually been meaning to find out a bit about the game. Turns out it’s a ferocious co-op melee game, with elements of Tomb Raider. As Kalypso themselves admitted, they aren’t really taking on the Assassin’s Creeds of this world in terms of visuals or feature set, but the game nevertheless has some appealling elements: customisation of your character’s combat skills, some co-op puzzles (which you solve by swapping between the characters in single-player) and some large scale brawls across medieval environs. The game is looking suitably violent, and I think it could do well if it comes out at a lower price point. It’s coming out on May 10th, and I’ve posted the trailer which accompanies that announcement below.
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We’ve got some codes if you want to get into the final days of the APB closed beta. But there’s a limited number of them! So it’s going to be a race to see who can email in to here with a good reason as to why you should get a code. Don’t change the subject line. I’ll update when they’re all gone.

If you want to keep up with the progress of the free-to-play APB remake, then you could do no worse than to keep your eye on this blog. Go! Go! GoooOOOoooo!

There are now more gaming-related fundraising schemes for victims of the natural disaster in Japan than it’s possible to enumerate. Hopefully all have been of some use, even the ones that seemed to involve more than a little self-promotion en route.

Now it’s Valve’s turn to stretch some fanbase muscle: via the quiet microtransaction giant that is Team Fortress 2, they’ve weaved a limited edition set of hats and noise makers, all proceeds from which will go to the Red Cross’ disaster relief efforts in the suffering nation.
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I’m never quite sure how to take news that a PC version of a game is being worked on by an external studio. Volition recently named the practice as the reason for their dodgy PC ports, and have promised they will be doing all their PC development in house in future. But others use it as a means to ensure the PC version receives the extra attention it requires. Except, well, not by them. Tonight Shack News are reporting that Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s PC code is being worked on by Dutch external studio, Nixxes. But Eidos are very keen to emphasise that this is a shared development, rather than just outsourcing the whole thing.

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I’ve been playing a lot of RTS games of late. Men Of War: Assault Squad, obviously, but also Dawn Of War 2: Retribution and Shogun 2. It’s a lot of RTS. In fact, I’m rather rediscovering my love for ordering tiny people to their doom. What I am currently interested in and intrigued by, though, is the games that RPS reader play on a regular basis. Are you guys playing Starcraft 2 nightly? Or weekendly? Is anyone lamented the end of Company Of Heroes Online?

What I want is comments: tell me what strategy games you are play, and how often you play them. Do you play multiplayer? Or lonesome-player? Also, I really want to know if you play as part of a team or clan. Expose your habits!

In some ways it’s a bit silly to wait over three months after your game’s come out to release a demo. In other ways, it’s quite effective. Legendary PC gaming site Rock, Paper, Shotgun mentions your game again, bringing its trillions of readers to your site. Then you become rich, build a rocket, and retire on the Sun. It’s the way of things. And so it is that Iceberg have released a demo for Little Green Men’s Starpoint Gemini, their space strategy roleplay them up from December last year. Jim took a look at it in January, and found it a tad slow, but certainly interesting. But maybe Jim was lying? You can now see for yourself by getting hold of the 755MB demo from here, or maybe here. I’ve put a video of it below, because I know you’re a visual thinker.

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‘Bittersweet’ covers this news, I suppose. Arcania: Gothic 4 was a picturesque but depressingly stupid RPG, and one I couldn’t bear to finish despite a lingering hope that at some point it would suddenly open up and improve. None of this was the fault of series creators Piranha Bytes, who lost the rights in a spat with publisher JoWood, but fortunately went off to make the far more interesting Risen instead.

Nonetheless, Arcania was deemed successful enough to warrant a standalone expansion, Fall of Setarrif, which promised 10 more hours of monster-bothering and a bit more variety. It sounded quite literally “okay.” We shall never know for sure – Setariff has indeed fallen. And in a really weird way.
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Another day, another fun-looking project on the IndieGames Blog. Where do they find all these games? In much the same way as Streets of Rage characters could kick bins to reveal cooked chickens, so I imagine the staff of the IndieGames blog punching the internet only for innovative platformers to come tumbling out.

No Time To Explain is one such platformer based around (1) time travel, (2) propelling yourself around with a high-powered futuregun, and (1) time travel. Do you see what I did there? You can check out the design blog here, play the original flash game here and watch an awesome trailer below.
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Arkane’s 2002 dungeonering game Arx Fatalis passed me by at the time – arriving, perhaps, in an age where I felt positively spoilt for choice in terms of RPGs. In this new age of endless manshoots and a contemporary legion of platformers, I have no such surfeit. The time is right, then, to look backwards.

This is an occasional diary series, to be updated as and when I dip in and out of the game. I should warn you now that it’s more than possible this won’t run until the game finishes. Consider it selected extracts rather than the full, unabridged story.

I awake, as I have so often awoken, in a jail cell. For a change, though, I’m naked. Well, I’m wearing a belt over my nipples and some furry pants, but I’d get at least as many funny looks as I would if I were naked.
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