Rock, Paper, Shotgun

…which is a videogame news headline if ever I wrote one. It’s also perfectly descriptive of what I am about to talk about, which is the footage posted below. It shows both the editor for Lexaloffle‘s voxel-powered arena-shooter, used for editing things, as well as the sword, which is used for swording stuff. I’ve posted the previous more general action trailer, too, so you can recall the correct category of awesome for this upcoming piece of cleverness.

The game should be out later this year.
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As previously mentioned, Steamlands looks pretty perfect. So it’s excellent news that it is now available to play on Nitrome. The game puts you in charge of a giant steam-tank which must be customised to overcome the various enemies you face. In this way, your enemies are crushed. If only all things in life were so.

It seems that British retailer Game has realised that there are No Oceans on the internet, and has consequently broken the planned Friday release date of the PC version of Portal 2. The company told Eurogamer that the move was a “market reaction” to the availability of the online version of the game.

Perhaps they’d like to join our campaign for worldwide release dates? How about it, Game?

I’ve had brief encounters with Splash Damage’s upcoming athletic shooter Brink a few times now, and by this point I’m simply very keen to be able to sit down and play it at my leisure, building my character under my own steam, tackling its challenges with an RPS collective. Fortunately it’s now just a handful of weeks away, but even so there’s a few things left to chat about.

On my most recent entanglement with it – while I was also seeing the likes of Skyrim, Prey 2 and Rage – I had a chance to poke my big, stupid nose into two aspects I’d not seen before. Number one! The training missions, which double up as tutorial for the more esoteric aspects of the game and a gear-unlocking, high score-chasing sub-game in their own right. Number two! Being a fat guy.
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Last week I played tower defense FPS Sanctum and posted some impressions. Since then I’ve played a bit more. And some more. And a little more still. I may even have missed a meal somewhere along the line. If you’re a fan of tower defense, having fun or missing meals, you should probably buy this game.
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The Settlers 7 is to be getting a new patch, which will add a co-op version of the game. Which is a pretty fantastic thing to find thrown in there for free. It’s also part of the fourth DLC pack called Settlers 7: The Two Kings (do you see what they did there), which adds in the new mode as well as some new maps to go with it. But to be clear: the co-op goes to everyone who updates with the patch, regardless of the DLC. More details thisaway.

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Magicka is to get two new challenge maps, “Caverns” and “Marshlands”, each featuring a swarm of monsters that a player must take on with magic violence. You can check out the details of the maps in question in a video, below. However, one map will be free, and one will cost $1.99. Which will be which? Well that’s being decided in a poll just here. Looks like Caverns is the firm favourite, but maybe it’ll turn around for poor old Marshlands.

“These maps will be released on April 26th, one of which will be offered without requiring so much as a single potato,” say Paradox, cheekily.
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Fans of the X series? Awake from your comas – the series is back with the freshly announced X: Rebirth. There’s four images, too. And a trailer!

I know there are mixed opinions of the space shopping X games (no skateboarding jokes, please), but really no one is in any position to disagree with their having named the first game’s expansion pack, “X-Tension”. Really, let’s all stop and just clap at our monitors for a moment.

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Nice Technology’s free-to-play island-based MMORTS, Picaroon, is a something a bit different. It’s s seafaring RTS, which in itself is a bit unusual, but it’s also an MMO with an endgame. As I understand it, the game last two weeks at which time all players in the game face “the unique end-game… a huge battle where the skies go darker, the roulette wheels spin and giant, mammoth ships appear out of nowhere alongside submarines launching ancient nuclear tipped missiles…” Gosh.

Could be worth a look, anyway. It’s otherwise as you might expect, with “decks” of additional abilities purchasable to make your game a bit easier, should you wish. Needless to say, there’s a trailer below.
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We have seen some astonishing claims for completion times of Portal 2. When I criticised a number of the recurring nonsensical complaints against the game yesterday, one of the aspects I highlighted was that the game simply couldn’t be finished in four hours. But we’ve since received so many comments, tweets and emails from people claiming to have finished between 4 and 5 hours that we became a little suspicious. Having spent yesterday morning replaying the game, knowing all the solutions, I was certainly nowhere near finished in four hours. And the rest of us on RPS have found it’s taking at least seven hours. And then we started hearing about some even more incredible finishing times for Portal 2, based on Steam’s in-built timer. We’ve some news for you: the timer doesn’t work.

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Well, this is rather unexpected. Then again, I’m very easily surprised: I also described the discovery of fresh bread in the cupboard this morning as rather unexpected. This really is unusual, though – Relic are to carve The Last Stand, a high-speed survival RPG mode, out of their Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II and sell it as a standalone game for $10. It’s out today, and it’s to be called The Last Standalone, which is agreeably stupid.
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