Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Being the oldest RPS contributor has certain advantages. You can attend preview events in un-ironic cardigans, you can admit to finding 90% of manshoots deadly dull, and best of all, you get to sit in the RPS rocking chair and regale the young’uns with tales of wargaming glory. That’s what Heavily Engaged is all about. Over the next month or so, I’ll be giving a selection of the worthiest military strategy games on my shelves, the AAR treatment. Expect lashings of martial drama, tactical blunders aplenty (it’s a while since I last played some of these), and maybe even a little dash of post-result historical analysis. Read the rest of this entry »

Alpha Centauri has a special place in my heart. It’s a sort of spin-off from the Civilisation series (but don’t tell the lawyers), released way back in 1999. It’s not available to buy digitally (EDIT: Now available on GOG.com), but it had a Complete Edition reissue on the Sold Out range, available on Amazon US/UK. It’s essentially Civ in space.

Or is it?
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Eggs! Symbols of God’s divine plan for lunch. But there’s a serious side to Easter, which is the story of how Jesus was basically pretty badass after all. For the first 120-minutes of the movie it looked like he was just being contrary and messing with people, but no, he was actually some kind of immortal dimension-travelling superbeing with a message about how life would be okay if people just stopped being dicks all the time. Right on, Mr Christ. Shame no-one paid attention to that, even after the supernatural rising from the grave stuff. Ah well. Perhaps we can find some other message that will be of use. Let’s try these scriptures from the miraculous desert of the internet!

• A rant close to my heart has appeared over on Brainy Gamer. It’s Mr Abbott – because he’s Mr to you – talking about abstract visuals in a world of high-poly manshoots: “Today, games like S:S&S EP, Osmos, the Bit.Trip series, and pretty much anything designed by Mark Essen (aka, Messhof) represent designs that embed their “primitive” visual styles into the core experience of playing them. In other words, they look that way because any other art style would diminish them.” Go abstract, I say, and the world will be your vague splodge that might be interpreted as an oyster. I often wonder whether mainstream games can afford to explore being a little more abstract, and I think all signs point to yes. Consequently the future of art styles in games is one the moist exciting frontiers in all of culture. I think. (I’ll leave that typo in, for posterity.)

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Hello! This is not Cardboard Children and I am not Rab Florence. Our Rab is a man much in demand. As well as being a worthy addition to anybody’s Twitter feed, he works in television, which I gather is a bit like being Frodo in Lord of the Rings except instead of the One Ring that you’re questing to destroy it’s your free time.

This week, I thought it might be a good idea to talk about a board game that I bought on his recommendation. It’s called Cosmic Encounter, and it’s a tiny, tidy, intergalactic catfight in a box that anybody can play. It’s also my favourite game in my collection.
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Welcome to you weekly dose of download discounts, cheap games scoured from all of the internet, and brought to you in convenient list form. This week’s all about the hot preorders, and the thorny topic of region pricing bollocks rears it’s ugly head again. If you want to know when all the games are cheap all of the time, get yourself over SavyGamer.co.uk, and read on for this week’s Bargain Bucket. Read the rest of this entry »

Oh for Heaven’s sakes – Battlefield 3′s not even out yet, and already we’re previewing Battlefield 1942. There are 1938 more Battlefields to come first! Oh, wait. Yes, that’s right. The start of the series. Got it. So: Brendan Caldwell takes us back to where DICE’s war began, and reminisces about being a disgusting coward.

There was a time in first-person-shooter history, believe it or not, when World War II was not The Boring War. Oh, admit it. We all remember it well. “Dubya-dubya-two?” we asked excitedly. “Can’t get enough of it! Gimme some. I said give it to me. I want it.” Then the fatigue set in. Pineapple grenades lost their novelty. German uniforms didn’t give us a rude-on anymore. So we discarded World War II, like a soggy Metro full of old nibs.

Oh, but remember the good times. The French hedgerows, the crumbling grey bunkers. The beaches. The endless, endless beaches. Nothing like a trail of unsaved Private Ryans to soak up the salt, the sea and the atmosphere of intense brutality. Catching some rays by the seaside there, Private? Ah! You cannot be. For it is overcast. Also, you are dead.
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Aaargh! I love tower defence games and I quite like Two Worlds 2 (even though they wouldn’t send me review code), but I have both Portal 2 to finish and Witcher 2 preview code on my PC. No time! Nooooo tiiiiiime! Maybe you have time. Tell me you do. If you do, you should try the bizarre Two Worlds 2 spin-off game Castle Defense, for which you slip into the shoes of TW2 arch-nasty Gandohar as he smacks down rebellion. The game’s not out until May 17, but there’s a demo now.

Amazingly, they haven’t called it Twoer Defense, but that’s because they’re not as clever as me. Try it here.

I would make a gag about a game concerning resurrection being entirely relevant today, but someone religious will probably come and shout at me if I do. So I won’t. Superflat Games’ Soul Brother is another one of those delightfully crazy webgame gems which regularly pitch up on Adult Swim’s site, and is perhaps best described as a 16-bit platform game about strategic suicide.
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UPDATE: Use this link to sign up to the beta, and there’s an RPS group already in there, I believe.

For the past few months I’ve been playing around with an unreleased gaming application called Evolve. It’s an interesting piece of software, rather like Steam without the digital distribution, and with a whole load of other functionality that is otherwise spread across different applications such as Hamachi, Raptor, and so on. Evolve is an attempt to merge all of that stuff into a single system that will encompass both LAN-bridging systems to play older games, and social networking systems to make it easier for people to play in larger groups. It’s a website, a social network for gamers, and an overlay with stuff like an in-game browser. It has even more exciting features planned, too, as this interview reveals.

Impressed by what I’d seen, I decided to talk to founders Michael Amundson and Soren Dreijer and find out a bit more about where the Evolve project – which is about to launch publicly – is going.
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Thanks to everyone who sent this in, tweeted and MSNed me about this. I’d also like to thank you guys for stopping short of throwing rocks through my window.

So, Ice-Pick Lodge, the legendarily high-minded Russian developer behind Pathologic and The Void have just released Cargo, a game I’ve been looking forward to for almost a year. More so ever since I read Tom Jubert’s account of his business trip to visit Ice-Pick’s offices (which is a two bedroom apartment in a Moscow high rise) and I fell that much more in love with the guys. If you haven’t read it yet, do so immediately.

Anyway, Cargo – The Quest for Gravity (previously “Cargo!”), which you can see above and buy here, is a game about… it’s… the… OK, it’s probably best if you just read my account of my first hour of play. It’s after the jump.
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So, Microsoft and Lionhead’s PC version of Fable III is to simultaneously release on both Games For Windows Live and Valve’s Steam. Jim perhaps did not entirely acknowledge the importance of this news in his post ysterday. The importance being “HOLY GOD-DARNED CAMEL SPIT, MICROSOFT ARE SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY.”
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