Rock, Paper, Shotgun

PC Gamer report that Telltale have sent an apologetic letter to everybody who pre-ordered Jurassic Park, stating that the game will not be coming out this month as planned and will instead be arriving this Autumn, together with fallen leaves and a creeping loss of daylight. The slightly funereal missive, which contains such grim strings of words as “This has been a hard choice for us,” “We regret any disappointment” and “We will begin issuing the refunds” can be read in full after the jump. Poor Telltale.
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Those of you with allergies had better take your antihistamines, because with action RPG Darkspore coming out tonight experts are warning of epidemics of play fever. You know, because it’s like hay fever but with a game, and the game has “spore” in the title… and I think hay fever might be caused by spores. It’s either caused by spores or ghosts, I’m sure of it.

Never mind. The Darkspore launch trailer’s out now, anyway, with clips of the game interspersed with various pieces of lukewarm-to-warm praise from gaming sites. See it for yourself after the jump.
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Mount & Blade: With Fire & Sword has gone gold. There’s a statement of fact. Another: there’s a trailer of the game’s sieges below. Today I am ALL BUSINESS.

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Men Of War: Assault Squad has had another patch, which fixes up some balancing issues and adds a couple of new vehicles. You can get the patch here if you need to. There’s also some paid-fo downloadable content now available, which is a pack of five new maps for assault zones multiplayer mode. Sigh. I love this game.

3000AD’s upcoming MMOFPS Line Of Defense is big. The latest devblog reveals at that one of the base areas, Nightbridge, which is a base within a ruined city, is: “…nearly 2km x 3km massive.” And the surrounding environment is even more serious: “The entire scene itself – like the other three – is about 64km x 64km. A lot of space to run around in with weapons of mass destruction.”

Mr Smart says he’s worried that players of normal FPS games might end up being a bit overwhelmed by it all: “My single greatest concern at this point is that it is so huge that most gamers used to the “closed in” level based design of fps games, may just get lost in there. Or at best, be intimidated by the size of it all.” More screenshots here.

Ha. Trackmania 2 is going to be glorious. Watch the video.
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Oh, so on Sunday, in the middle of our yacht-based hammocking, my retrospective of Dreamfall went up on Eurogamer. The conflict the game generates in me was interesting to explore, and once again its moving story of faith and Faith won out. For instance, I utter:

“This isn’t a game that’s worried about drawing in the kids. In fact, it’s imbued with a strong tone of melancholy that it absolutely does not let go of throughout. This is a downbeat game, and goodness knows that’s rare. But it’s not so one-dimensional as to be miserable. Within the trauma, the sadness, the directionless confusion of people’s lives, is a message of extraordinary optimism, a resounding cry of hope. Because there’s faith.”

You can read the rest of it here. And I really whole-heartedly recommend reading my interview with creator Ragnar Tørnquist. I think it’s one of the best things wot I’ve done.

This is a bit “some men have paid some money to some other men”, but given the general tendency towards 40K gonkery around these parts it’s worth a nod. THQ have just announced that they’ve arranged to hang onto the rights to Warhammer 40,000 for a few more years yet. This means we’ll see more Only War-based games from THQ (including social and mobile ones; let’s hope the former doesn’t mean TyranidVille) after the upcoming Space Marine and the MMO Dark Millennium have been and gone. Licences for the licence god!
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We’ll have much more to say about the Witcher 2 in a short while – I’ve now also played the preview code Jim got all frothy about and can happily confirm that it’s awesome, so we’ll have a good old chinwag about it soon – but in the meantime allow me to point those pretty little eyes of yours at the latest dev diary video. It demonstrates one of the key differences between the first and second game: the fluidity, variance and satisfying crunch of the combat, as opposed to the rather unusual click-timing of the original (don’t say a bloody word, old magazine readers). Geralt’s a stone-cold killer this time around, a flurry of masterful violence pleasing to both the eyes and that mysterious link betwixt gamer’s hand and gamer’s brain.
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No way, no sir. That’s what was decided soon after Notch posted saying that modders would be required to pay a small fee to register and download the Minecraft source code in order to make mods. The internet disagreed about whether that was going to happen, and so it did not happen.

Other details explain that the mods must not be malicious, or make money, and that Mojang retain the right implement them into Minecraft as they see fit, so as to avoid situations in which the team are forced to copy popular mods, because a mod does something their game does not.

Bethesda’s is a crown with many likely jewels at present – Brink, Rage, Prey 2 and of course Skyrim are all mightily impressive prospects in their own distinctive rights at present. And then there’s Hunted, whose gleam is a little harder to discern right now. A welcome break from the post-apocalypses which dominate Bethesda’s shooter range, in broadest terms it’s Diablo making the beast with two backs with Gears of War. An appealing concept – hackery and slashery up close and personal, with a strong co-op emphasis. My kind of thing, nominally.
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