Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Ah, how I remember artificial life sim Creatures. How I remember being enthusiastically told THIS IS LIFE only to discover something sickeningly cute that I was too lazy and impatient to successfully poke any emergent behaviours from. After a few decades spent lost in endless spin-offs (some of which still dustily lurk on the lower shelves of my local budget supermarket, somehow), the series is due for a full-on reboot. Creatures IV gets a new team, a new publisher and a new-but-old approach.
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Avadon is Jeff Vogel’s latest RPG; a roaring saga of dark politics and glorious face furniture. It’ll give you hours and hours of questing… but will it show you a good time as you slay giant spiders and screw with the fate of nations? Well, let’s see Wot I Think…

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QuakeCon. QUAKECON. QUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAKE-A-CONNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN. Just saying that name makes me laugh: truly, it is the most testosteroney of all gaming conventions. If QuakeCon and BlizzCon were ever to merge, terrible, terrible things would happen. Fortunately, id’s being owned by Bethesda these days means there’s no risk of that happening. QuakeCon ’11 isn’t far off – the doors open August 4. It’s going to be a big one, because that date means it’s a mere month before RAGE finally ships so doubtless there’s going to be a ton of exciting hands-on access for atendees. And could it maybe, maybe, pretty please maybe entail a first glimpse at Doom 4?

One way to find out (actually there’s two, but ‘watching the internet around that time’ scarcely seems like making an effort): pre-register now.
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Futuremark Games Studio, whose last outing was the well-received by largely unplayed Shattered Horizon, have announced that they are making three new MYSTERY games. They tell us: “you can tag this under PC, XBLA and iOS. We will leave it to your readers to guess which platforms apply to each game (there are only 343 possible combinations).”

Hmm! Let’s see whether we can guess from the trailer, which is below. (I think it’s actually pretty obvious.)
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You want to play Space Marine. I want to play Space Marine. We all want to play Space Marine.

But what if you want to do more than play Space Marine? What if you want to pre-order it for trinkets and exclusive crumbs of content? Relic has you covered. They’re even giving away hardware, for goodness sake. Thanks to RPS reader Mondo Mau for sending this in. Details after the jump.
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This is extraordinary – a cartographic depiction of player deaths in Just Cause 2, creating a beauteous terrain map composed only of light-points. Each point represents one of 11 million fatalities caused by impact with terrain or objects. It’s a god’s-eye view of gaming.
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I’m not going to lie, there are some perks to this job. One of them is that if I want to say “Look! Look, everybody! Far Cry 2 is, for the next few hours only, £2.50 on Steam! You should buy it, because it’s really good!” Then nobody can stop me. Not even you, guy who hated Far Cry 2 and is reading this right now. You are powerless.

EDIT: Turns out the deal is for UK and America only, and Europeans are still getting a price of €7.50. Europeans I am so sorry.

I know some people didn’t get along with Far Cry 2, and they cite checkpoints, overly aggressive AI and more besides as reasons that it’s a terrible game. But some people, like me and, apparently, every games developer I follow on Twitter, felt that it was an utterly transporting experience that produced breathtaking gunfights and moments of high drama with incredible regularity. Which group will you fall into? Who knows. But at £2.50, it’s a risk you’d be mad not to take. Buy this game, pop it onto its highest difficulty setting to enhance the realism that game works so hard to simulate and just see whether you have the time of your life.

Mode 7′s turn-based yet lightning-quick combat strategy game Frozen Synapse finally got a proper, big-boy release yesterday. A fair chunk of you will have played it already, as it’s been in a purchasable beta form since the beginning of time or thereabouts, but if you’ve not glanced back at it since the early days, you’re in for a meaty treat. In addition to a host of improvements to the UI and multiplayer, the singleplayer elements have worked out far better, and far more substantial than I’d imagined.
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End Of Nations, the MMORTS from Trion Worlds, is not far away now. Trion are gearing up to explain how adding MMO to RTS equals a game that you might want to play, and they’re spooling up the hypecopter with a video, which you can see below. It talks a little about how progression in the game works, as well as mentioning customisation, persistence, and a bunch of other stuff in the overlap between pacey strategy and ongong MMOness. Also, those helicopters certainly absorb a lot of bullets, I would say.
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Something called the Ikko Ikki Clan Pack has just been released for beautiful grand strategy game Total War: Shogun 2, adding a brand-new faction of warrior monks to the game, as well as new skill trees, a new Ikko-Ikki monk agent, eight new units, a new hero and more for the the price of $5. You can buy it here. I’m actually prepared to call it a fairly generous package, compared with the emaciated Babylon and Polynesia packs for Civilization V. Full feature list after the jump.
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After a brief delay, the much-ballyhooed first major patch for CDP’s rather well-received RPG landed last night, which means now’s the chance to see whether their claims of an up to 30% frame rate improvement are the truest facts or a case of too much optimism. V1.1 also slices all the DRM out of the game, so you can install away on as many PCs as you can lay those grubby wee hands on. The Troll Trouble free DLC is included in the patch, which I’m pretty glad of as the game’s launcher had been resolutely refusing to download it beforehand. Speaking of the launcher resolutely refusing to download things, v1.1 has made a bit of a mess in that respect. Oh, and Steam users? You’re in a for a biiiiiiiiiig download.
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