Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The first trailer’s arrived for Anno 2070, the futuristic reimagining of the city-building strategy series which previously covered the years of 1701, 1602, 1503 and 1404, making 2070 an excellently mad choice. The below footage is pretty exciting- it seems we’ll have the choice of making either a sustainable city that operates in harmony with its environment (with what looks like Apple doing the architecture), or a dark, Blade Runner-looking city that extinguishes all natural resources. Take a look.
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Anomalies are so named because they go nom nom nom and eat everything that investigates them. It’s true! Something else that’s true is that tower-defence-but-in-reverse game Anomaly: Warzone Earth now has a demo out, and you can get it here. Jim got on well with Anomaly, calling it a “novel idea, well-presented… well-executed”, and even comparing it to Defense Grid. I’ve spawned some footage of the game itself after the jump.
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I am as outraged as a man who hasn’t yet felt the effects of his morning tea can be. Which is to say I look the same but I’m typing marginally harder.

I spotted over at PC Gamer that Epic have released the Bulletstorm soundtrack for free. Kind of them, no? You can download it here. Except I’ve just discovered the hard way (clicking through every track in sequence) that it features everything except the Disco Inferno cover that plays when you get to the club, which is to say they left out the one track everyone remembers. Epic have dropped the ball right onto our collective face. If you haven’t played Bulletstorm, you can watch the part I’m talking about below.
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Hello! So, when I pottered off to Lionhead to take a peek at the upcoming PC version of Fable III, I also had a chat with lead designer Josh Atkins. Read on for how the studio feels about PC gaming and PC gamers, the choices, changes and improvements they made for the PC version of Fable III, how youngsters react to difficult moral decisions in games, and the thorny issue of Games For Windows Live…
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It’s quite fancy. (Click for full size.)

Will probably post some thoughts on it tomorrow.

It is tradition within the walls of Castle Shotgun to frown upon CGI trailers with a big bushel of frowns, but the trailer for Risen 2: Dark Waters has a number of frown-dissolving elements. 1) Pirates. 2) It’s quite pretty. 3) Voodoo. 4) Firearms. 5) It means we’re getting another Risen game, and it features pirates, firearms, and voodoo. All these things are backed up by the announcement from Deep Silver and Piranha Bytes, who say that the game will take place across a number of distinct islands, as your character seeks to persuade pirates to help him battle sea-monsters. The game will also apparently feature “dirty-tricks” in combat, which is either in keeping with the pirate theme, or worrying scatalogical. Either way, I’m on board.

Trailer below decks, etc. (Sigh.)
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By the sounds of things, fantasy MMORPG Rift is the most competent game to try and encroach on World of Warcraft’s turf in quite some time. Our man Dan Gril was certainly impressed, and the view from the top of Mount Metacritic is impressive enough. The latest trailer, showcasing the Rogue class and the game’s create-your-own-class mechanics in general can be seen after the jump. You know, in case you were thinking about going rogue. Ha! Ah. Ahh.
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It’s ok: there is a cursor on the menu screen. The PC isn’t being treated like the ugly stepson who’s only allowed a bowl of water and a rotten banana for dinner this time. Fable III’s conversion to personal computer may be a few months late, but that’s not because someone fell asleep and forgot to press the ‘Insta-Port!’ button. Lionhead have done this properly.
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Baseball season started a couple of weeks back (Phillies are 7-3 up, thanks for asking) which has grabbed the attention of all the nations in the World Series. Fortunately I’m in one of them – a place called “The United American States” – where they show the sport on all walls and areas of sky. And so the baseball games are appearing too, including Baseball Mogul 2012 – a management sim that boasts it offers you far more detail than most. Don’t believe them? Then try the demo.

In other news, the word “mogul” is fun to say. Mogul mogul mogul.

Portal 2, which appears next Tuesday (how did that sneak up on us so fast?!), continues sneaking its way into other games. I imagine using portals. There must have been a more imaginative way of my phrasing that. Almost every member of the Potato Sack has gained content relating to the cryptic influence of GlaDOS, including Killing Floor, The Ball, RUSH, Super Meat Boy, Toki Tori and even Amnesia: The Dark Descent, which has got some new, free and somewhat cryptic DLC.
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Quietly one of the most popular games on the net, RuneScape is not exactly short of players. It has, for the longest time, however, been short of a way to provide those players with the same kind of community-building infrastructure as other popular online games. The latest update fixes that, and it’s proving popular, as Jagex report: “In just 24 hours more than 250,000 RuneScape players have formed clans, including over 370 clans containing 50 members or more. The update gives RuneScape clans a real presence in the game and included a host of new features including individual clan camps, chat channels, clan customisations, clan websites and new in-game content; Rated Clan Wars.”

RuneScape is free to play, and has been out for a very long time indeed.