Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I know! More people who were dead and now walk again! They are a fun time. Headup Games’ tactical zombie game, Trapped Dead, came out last week. I’ve been having a bit of play of it, and wrote some words about that experience, below.
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Keldyn Interactive send word that a single-level demo of their zombie-slaying action game Dead Meets Lead, is now available. You can get the demo, called The Challenge, just here. I’ve also posted the most recently trailer below, so that you can elucidate the game concept by sitting still and staring. Hooray!
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So, first the developers of turn-based tactics game Fray post a heartwarming video of their day spent with some expensive motion capture technology, and now they put out a dark live-action teaser trailer featuring a spot of parkour which, once again, I’m inclined to post. You’ll find it below. Kieron could only approve of this developer’s use and abuse of the gaming press.
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This week has been an unusually quiet one within the mod community, with very few developers churning out any hot and spicy news. However, one story has dominated the headlines, not just in the mod community, and not even just within the gaming press. What is it? If you’ve been vaguely tuned into this interesting tale, you’ll probably already have guessed. Either way, read on for all the deets.
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This is quite the thing. PC Gamer has caught sight of a photo posted by Team Fortress 2 community member Political Gamer on his recent visit to Valve’s offices, which he writes about on the Steam forums here. Most of the images in the thread are idle photography, but one of them- which you’ll see in full after the jump- is a wall of sci-fi looking concept art showing space-ships and whole load of headshots of people who might best be described as “incorrect”. My unstoppable speculation follows…
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Angry Birds is a catapult game that has proven quite successful on mobile telephones. In other news, Elvis Presley sold some records, chocolate tastes quite good and Star Wars offered positive licensing opportunities.

The PC version of Rovio’s bland but compulsive one-button physics puzzler perhaps hasn’t proved quite so much a phenonemon, but that’s probably got something to do with being far more expensive than the eyeTelephone and (free) Android versions. For a limited period, this imbalance is addressed – you can grab the game for free.
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If you were to restart your Steam account, you’d notice that your copy of Left 4 Dead 2 would start updating. This is to add in the beta for a new campaign, Cold Stream. It has a few bugs, but that’s why God gave us betas. Wow, that’s such a succinct news story I need to add another.

If you were to restart your Steam account, you’d notice that it would have updated to change its voice chat technology. As anyone who’s ever used Steam Voice will know, it wasn’t exactly as good as it could have been. It’s now been replaced with SILK, an audio codec developed by the Skype peeps, with what I like to call a “dynamic bit rate protocol”, meaning it can vary its bandwidth up to 30kbps (twice as much as Steam Voice would use.) Valve adds that the voice chat connectivity and reliability has also been improved, which is mighty fine news as we were increasingly finding ourselves opting for using non-Steam chat when playing together. Isn’t that all smashing?

The good news about Relic’s upcoming Warhammer 40,000 manshoot keeps on getting gooder. First, THQ reversed their decision to not release it on PC. Then Quinns came away from an early preview with a much bigger spring in his step than we expected. Now we hear that it won’t, as had previously been hinted, be merely a matter of bashing/stabbing/boltering Orks until they’re all dead. The Space Marines’ gnarly arch-nemeseseseses Chaos will be showing up too. Nicely-rendered blood for the blood god!
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Aperture Science’s documentary video game, Portal 2, is with us on the 19th April. In the interim the applied sciences company is releasing a series of videos advertising investment opportunities. The first of these is below. Valve’s president Gabe Newell says of these new opportunities,

“Portal 2 is the best documentary-style investment opportunity game we’ve ever contributed to and we’re confident that savvy investors will immediately see the value in these product demonstration videos.”

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Crysis 2 comes out today! And Lego Star Wars III! Hooray! Except of course, only if you drawl your vowels. These two big games are out in America only today. Crysis 2 reaches Australia on Thursday, and the finally completes its journey to Europe by Friday. Lego Star Wars III: The Clone Wars is taking a three day journey to Europe to reach us by Friday, before then walking to Australia to eventually be released eight days after its US launch. We’ve had enough.

No Oceans is RPS’s campaign to have the UK release day for games changed to Tuesday, to come into line with North America. Which will be a lot of work. It means convincing retail to change their delivery days, and reschedule their systems. But we think it’s worth it, both for them and for customers. Here’s why.

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Okay, it’s time to stop. I’ve found the best game ever. And I’ve not even played it yet. The fine Mr Cameron IMs me saying, “Euro Truck Simulator, eat your heart out,” and he’s right. In fact, everything else, eat your heart out. Tricky Truck is a game about driving a giant, heavy lorry across tracks that look like they were built by a Trackmania fan who only had concrete. Oh! It’s from Gravitysensation, the guys who did Sumotori Dreams! Right, I’m going to play it – see if my enthusiasm is correctly placed, or if I was right to be a bit worried by a website that looks like it’s been run through that Geocities filter. (And before anyone says, I know full well that Kieron posted about this last August, but no one took any notice, including me, so I’m highlighting it all over again. And we’ll keep posting it until you care. It’s only your time you’re wasting.)

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