Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Or should that be “Taking On Space”? Russian site Igromania has posted a selection of combative Mass Effect 3 screens that show Shepherd taking on all comers using both the front and back of his gun, which is why HE is an intergalactic badass and YOU are a guy sat reading about him, why HE is wearing a full-body suit of power armour and why YOU are wearing trousers. When was the last time you used both ends of an object to complete a task? Remote controls don’t count. Screens after the jump.
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With The Witcher 2 looming like a dark juggernaut of RPG-based distraction, we thought it might be a good time to go back and poke around in the original game. Just what was it that really made it sing? (There may be some mild spoilers ahead.)

Forget about the sex cards, forget about the five hour slog through the Outskirts, ignore the occasionally shoddy writing and voice work, and let’s focus on how The Witcher deals with choice. It’s a piece of game design that demands respect.
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The guys over at VG247 have come up with a bunch of references to the as-yet-unannounced-but-nonetheless-likely third (or fourth, really) instance of the Far Cry series. It seems the game is definitely happening, despite Ubi’s lack of noise on the title. Also it’s worth noting that the key reference made by a developer working on the game says that the game will be a console shooter, but I would be profoundly surprised if it did not receive a Windows variant, too.

So, readers, let’s come up with our perfect Far Cry sequel. Assuming Far Cry 2 was the starting template, what would put in? What would you take out? I’d say: keep the size and scale of the maps from Far Cry 2, but add an inventory, and wandering AI, neutral AI. Actually, just make Stalker in the Dunia engine, in the Jungle, with vehicles. That would be just fine. Hell, that sounds like Boiling Point. But maybe a game like that made by a giant 200-man Ubi studio is what the world has been waiting for.

Update: More videos added below.

This one appeared during our second weekend of yacht-hammocking, and is well worth a watch. It’s one of the first truly impressive Portal 2 trickshot videos I’ve seen, themed around the throwing of cubes. I love that there are people out there who see games completely differently to me. They see paths my mind would never think of. Take a look.

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Because there’s a demo. Spiderweb Software’s Olden Skool CRPG is out now, and you can unlock the full game from the demo, I believe. Spiderweb have been going for quite some time now and, thanks to the pitiless gaze of their founder, Jeff Vogel, have never deviated from their mission. If Avadon tickles your interest them you should totally browse through their other games. There’s a fair few fantasy adventures to be had in there.

Hooray! Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword has been released, and everyone can get a taste of it via the demo. This era-shifting expandalone for the warmongering ancient combat sandbox – which introduces firearms to horses to create crude tanks – is available to buy, too. I’m playing it right now! Well not right now, but it’s alt-tabbed so I can write this. More on that soon.

Trailer belooooow.
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Ah, APB. That most ill-fated of games. What shall become of you? Well, we will soon be able to have a better idea, thanks to being able to get our hands on GamersFirst’s free-to-play reboot of the game. The open beta kicks off on May 18th, and I suspect a fair few people will be popping by to see whether the new owners have managed to deal with the game’s various problems. What’s also fascinating is the openness with which the APB Reloaded blog has been dealing with things like cheating. Take a look at the section on cheating in that last post, for example: “We have ON PURPOSE not kicked hackers for over a week to monitor what they are doing. That clearly will change. One semi-famous aimbot site realized that we had caught a slew of their users over the weekend (though we did so silently), then they stopped their own hack, and then earlier today re-enabled it. Sigh… when will they ever learn.”

And so on.

And I can pluralise DLC like that, because I am in charge of language. Anyway, the Bethesda Blog has a bouquet of details on the forthcoming New Vegas content, and there is three of it: Honest Hearts, Old World Blues, and Lonesome Road. Honest Hearts is due on May 17th and “takes you on an expedition to the unspoiled wilderness of Utah’s Zion National Park”, then Old World Blues, which appears some time in June, enables discovery of “how some of the Mojave’s mutated monsters came to be when you unwittingly become a lab rat in a science experiment gone awry.” Finally there’s Lonesome Road in July. That “brings the courier’s story full circle when you are contacted by the original Courier Six, a man by the name of Ulysses who refused to deliver the Platinum Chip at the start of New Vegas.” I don’t know what that means, but it sounds like something that would happen in a Fallout game.

These DLCs are all going to be $9.99, and full details are here.

If it weren’t for my throat being quite so epically sore, I’d be sighing long and hard enough to power a hovercraft. After all of Volition’s trumpeting about finally treating the PC as an equal, no longer farming out PC versions of their games, and generally trying to sell themselves as the PC gamer’s bestest friend, the same old tiresome nonsense is occurring. Want to play the demo of Red Faction: Armageddon, a month before the full game comes out? Well, get a 360 then. And if the PS3 ever claws its way out of its current embarrassing mess, they’ll release the demo on that, too. But the PC? Um, cough.

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We recently catapulted our correspondent Dan Griliopoulos over the ocean to have a nose at upcoming Roman Empire-themed MMO Gods & Heroes; a preview on that itself is due very soon, but first let’s try something a little different. Dan was kindly granted an extraordinarily high level of access to Austin, Texas developer Heatwave Interactive (staff at which worked on some of the earliest and most legendary MMOs) as they worked on the game during its late stages – their meetings, their design and marketing dilemmas, their thoughts on competition, painful decisions about to delay or not to delay… It’s rare insight into the hard work and heart ache inherent in creating an MMO, games of (in)famously sprawling scale and complexity.

It’s 6am. All through Austin the iridescent grackles are beginning their morning chorus; all through Austin, people are thinking of ways to kill grackles. Community manager Donna Prior is already up, moderating the Gods & Heroes beta forums, but the rest of Heatwave Interactive is still abed, dreaming of Romans, MMOs and the end of crunch time. The studio, in the basement of an isolated tower block is quiet until 8.00am when content designer Todd and lead designer Tim let themselves in. Whoever you ask in Heatwave – from the CEO to the guy who builds the servers right over to the handyman – says that Todd is there when they arrive, when they leave, at weekends…
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Reader and filmmaker Luke Pierson has made a short documentary feature about competitive Starcraft 2, and I’ve posted it below for you to take a look at. The film is a freshman year documentary project for the film school at Columbia College Chicago, and was shot at (presumably the Starcraft 2 club of) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Pierson explains: “I really wanted to create something that would make it easier for competitive starcraft players to explain to their friends and family (gaming and otherwise) what it’s all about.” And he’s not done a bad job.

Any other gamer-filmmakers out there?
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