Rock, Paper, Shotgun

RPS tipster du jour Alex Bakke has sent us this link to a countdown timer- the latest discovery following some two weeks of hard work from the participants of Valve’s alternate reality game. After a paragraph of Glados’s trademark sandpaper wit, it closes “The time is near, humans. But it is not here yet. Tomorrow you will be given the final test. Then it will be entirely in your hands when I am freed.”

This possibly means that Portal 2 is coming out today. Why? Click through, dear reader.
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Yep, no headgear this time, just other stuff. There’s a smaller Badlands map for King of the Hill, there are tweaks and optimisations to visuals and hidden clevers like memory usage. More importantly, perhaps, there’s some basic stuff to help out newbies, including new basic training and a coaching system that will matchmake coaches with people who need to learn to play a bit better. That’s nice. The full details are here.

Since Puzzle Quest surprised everyone by making the combination of match-3 puzzling with an RPG really very good, people have been trying the same with every other imaginable format. Often to less success, lacking the humour and effort that went into PQ. However, no one’s made a Slitherlink-based RPG yet, and for that I will never forgive the world. What is now getting added to the list is, er, fruit machines. That’s the premise for Battleslots, that’s launched five days early today.

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As Quintin mentioned was about to happen last week, Global Agenda is now free to play. Which it sort of was before. But now it’s all free to play, even if you didn’t buy the box. What they’ve done here, right, is called it, okay, “Free Agent”. See, because it’s a game that’s ostensibly about spies (except it really isn’t) and it’s free, see? Geddit?! No, me neither.

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GUNS! Kicks to the face! A knife fight! Jetpacks! Robots! …Robots having a knife fight! Some elderly dude doing a voice-over about how “The hunter does not question his purpose”! VTOL aircraft! Robots! Energy cannons! A guy hanging by his fingertips! Esplosions! Ground vehicles being delivered from orbit! A gun larger than my flat! It’s all after the jump. When’s this coming out again? May 4th? OK.
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And he says hi by completely STABBING YOU IN THE NECK. The First Templar is due in May, and as previously noted, it sits well within the current trend for sword action that appears to be taking place in gaming. Roland is one of The First Templar’s playable characters, and he likes a bit of melee violence, as you can see from his very own trailer, which is below. As I understand it he’s just playable in the prologue, before the lady is unlocked, which suggests he might turn out to be the villain or something. Hmm! He does seem a bit fire and brimstone, eh?
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I have no idea whether The Next Big Thing will be the next big thing for adventure games, because I haven’t had time to play the demo of the game. You might have time, eh? You might even have the inclination. If that’s the case you’ll be pleased to hear that Pendulo Studios’ new game features lots of Hollywood-based hilarity, and the demo kicks that off as “Liz stubmles (sic) upon some suspicious activity. She witnesses the famous Hollywood monster actor Big Albert breaking into the office of his boss, Fitz Randolph, who also happens to be the biggest horror movie producer in the biz.” Gosh!

Yeah.

That impenetrable castle of good taste that is the Indiegames Blog has posted footage of a game called Steamlands, the current project of indie dev nitrome. Steamlands is a Captain Forever style action game wherein you’re expected to build your vehicle as you go, but with the tower defence twist that the turrets on it are semi-automated. RPS has never done stickers for games, like “MUST BUY” or “ONE TO WATCH”, but if we did then I would waste no time in slapping one on this game that read “FULL GORGEOUS”. Plenty of footage awaits after the jump.
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My inside man over at french strategy gaming site Cyberstratège has sent us a link to some alpha footage of the 3D remake of Jagged Alliance 2, previously known as Jagged Alliance: Reloaded and now calling itself Jagged Alliance: Back In Action. You can watch the previously turn-based men with guns do their slightly more real-time thing here and check out the game’s official site here. Thanks, inside man! But you must consider coming outside one of these days. You’ll get a vitamin D deficiency.

What follows are impressions of The Witcher 2 based on the limited preview code that Namco and CD Projekt recently released to the press. It’s the prologue and first chapter of the full game, and as such makes up a healthy chunk of play time. People are saying about ten hours, but I think I spent longer than that with it. I’ll avoid specific narrative spoilers, but I won’t be avoiding game-mechanic spoilers. What that means is that I’ll be talking about how the game works, but not that much about what actually happens. This is not a game where you want to know about the surprises.

So let’s take a look at everything else.
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Treyarch’s community manager Josh Olin has let slip that their PC team are aiming – as previously promised – to release mod tools for the blockbusting man shooter in May. It’ll be interesting to see how busy the mod community for this becomes. I can see multiplayer maps being a fairly popular target, but general tweaky gameplay type mods? What would the motivation be? Anyone enough of Black Ops player to see where obvious modding routes might lie?