Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Last week’s instalment of Captain Smith saw my bookish, ambitious mercenary captain having some actual success. Would it last, or would the game once again cast me into the gutter like a cigarette butt? No prizes for guessing that one.
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So, that major new PC game Ubisoft were on about the other week? It’s not Assassin’s Creed Online. It’s not World of Rayman. It’s not Multiple Splinter Cells. It’s not Silent HunterVille. It’s Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Online, it’s a third-person tactical shooter, it will be free to play, and it will be PC-only. Is Mr Clancy OK with that? I bet he doesn’t like giving stuff away for free.

Find out more and watch the first video of GRO, as I’ve decided everyone will probably start calling it, below.
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The Indie Stone, creators of upcoming apocalypse RPG Project Zomboid, have been barred from selling Project Zomboid by Google Checkout. This seems egregiously unfair, but part of the big G’s reason for this smackdown is that they’re asking money for something that doesn’t yet exist. Indie Stone, for whom this is now the second time they’ve been denied a big pile of money which they claim to desperately need to fund Zomboid’s development, have devised a possible way around this.

Now, they’re asking you to buy games that do exist – which will be accompanied by a ‘free’ copy of Zomboid once it is available. Proceeds from this trio of games will fund Zomboid’s development, presuming that cash doesn’t also get locked away from them. What are these games? Ah, that’s the thing…
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Stardock are running a video developer diary series detailing various aspects of the Elemental expansion, Fallen Enchantress. I’ve posted the first couple of these below, thanks to BluesNews. It’s looking good, and lead designer Derek Paxton has told Gamespot that UI changes will make this game far easier to get to grips with than its troubled parent game. This time around it also has a team better suited to getting an unbugged game out the door on time: “There are dedicated producers, designers, and a formalized production pipeline that we have borrowed from the enterprise software world. The design is focused, fixed (with some flexibility as we iterate and improve), and communicated to the team. Time is set aside for iteration (after we are feature complete) rather than still implementing critical features until release day.”

So that sounds good. The game looks like an improvement on the original, too.
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Yes, you’re asleep. Yes, this is a dream. There can’t be any other explanation for this: the game that shouldn’t be, couldn’t be, is. After over a decade in development, multiple project reboots, all the crazy promises in the world, the closure of its original developer, a shock resurrection at the hands of the Borderlands/Brothers In Arms devs and another, final delay for luck, Duke Nukem Forever is finished. Yes indeed, Gearbox Software have announced that the infamous shooter has gone gold today. It’s actually gone gold. It’s coming to a PC near you next month.

Or at least it would be, were this not a dream. (It’s not a dream). (Or is it?) (It isn’t). (Or is it?)

Arcen Games, they most famous for AI War, are still working extremely hard on their next project, exploration-led adventure, A Valley Without Wind. Oh, I’m so desperate for a great exploration game. Will this be the one? Please let this be the one. There’s a bunch of new details, and a new trailer, below.

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The 2K way of late appears to be announcing impossibly ambitious and exciting-sounding games then going deathly silent for months (with the notable exception of Duke Nukem Forever, which has been very, very noisy since its comeback announcement). So it’s grand to see BioShock: Infinite start its promotional gears turning again, ahead of what will hopefully be a grand old infosplosion at E3. Following a revamp of the game’s website, we’ve got four new screenshots to stare at and make desperate, fannish guesses about. Hope you don’t like horses, because I’m about to show you a picture of a dead one.
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Version 1.6 of Minecraft will land in your javabox later this week, and it looks like Notch is planning on some pretty meaty tweaks. Tall grass! Craftable maps! Spreading mushrooms! Oh, and fire is made less firey.
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Kieron and Quintin‘s excitement about Mode 7′s Frozen Synapse has been somewhat infectious, which means it’s safe to say there’s rather a lot of people looking forward to the imminent release of the fast-paced simultaneous turn-based action strategy-em-up. It’s so soon! This Thursday! And it’s found itself a publisher in Matrix Games. There’s some new pictures, one of them moving, below.

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‘Tis a strange thing, to be posting a trailer for a game which came out four years ago, and died in the interim. Much-maligned MMO Hellgate: London is due for a free to play relaunch as simply ‘Hellgate’ later this year, at the hands of Korean rights-holders Hanbitsoft. It’s apparently attempting to shrug off its embarrassing legacy and reposition itself as Serious Business, as the below 12 bloomin’ minutes of pre-rendered, scene-setting hyper-earnestness reveal…
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Morning! And yes, there’s this game, too. Trailer below.
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