Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I know you. I’ve seen you around here before, right? You’re that person who wants to see a FEAR 3* multiplayer trailer for the Soul King mode. I knew I recognised you! Come on in.

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There’s a feeling that’s difficult to shake when playing Paradox Shift. It’s that sense that you can’t wait to see how it will be implemented in Portal 3. Time travel surely comes next, right? The student indie project from the University of Southern California and the Laguna College of Art & Design has been mentioned in the same breath as Narbacular Drop and Tag: The Power of Paint elsewhere, and it’s tempting to agree. So I’ve had a play of a bit of it. And while it doesn’t have a feature quite so novel as portals, it’s certainly a far more engaging implementation of first-person time manipulation than previous attempts from mainstream gaming. The concept – moving between two time zones, tagging objects and transferring them between the two, in order to solve puzzles – is very intriguing. The delivery is already looking impressive. There’s some thoughts below.

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Depending on how much fibreglass you ate as a child you may or may not remember that the last two weeks saw Valve encouraging people to use Team Fortress 2′s new editing suite to submit videos in a whopping twenty different categories. The deadline for this competition is long gone but the fun is just beginning, as now anyone with a Steam account can start judging those videos via this very link.
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VG247 are reporting that the countdown timer at Carmageddon.com has nothing to do with former publishers Square-Enix (Eidos), and that it is possibly an independent project.

A source familiar with the matter said that Square Enix has nothing to do with the next in the Carmageddon series. All rights to the action IP have been negotiated away from Square, owner of original publisher Eidos. The Carmegeddon website is not owned by Square Enix, contrary to reports over the weekend.

Mysterious! I guess we’ll know more when the timer expires on June 1st. I wonder if it has anything to do with the previously reported open-source version.

What are you doing tonight?

We here at RPS are card-carrying fans of Plain Sight, the beautiful, acrobatic, low-gravity robot dueling game. So last week when the developers got in touch about organising an RPS Plain Sight night to give a boost to the game’s ailing playerbase, I was all to eager to shout “Yes!”, though it was more like “Yepht,” because at the time I was eating spaghetti. Whether you do or don’t own Plain Sight, if you want to have some fun and/or do a good deed and/or literally run rings around a sucker or two, tonight is for you. Details after the jump.
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APB Reloaded‘s delayed open beta is set to go live at 1400hrs UK time. It’s going to be interesting to see what changes GamersFirst have made in their efforts to reboot the dead MMOFPS as a free-to-play title, and they’re keen to stress they’re very much regarding this as a beta, despite the game having launched once before. Interestingly, the company has taken on Dave Jones (GTA mastermind, and the mind behind APB in the first place) as an advisor to the project. Make of that what you will.

Turn to page 20 of Flight Simulator X’s pathetic excuse for a printed manual and you’ll see a credits list of around 160 names. To my knowledge only one of those names belongs to a wargame design visionary. Quite what Peter Turcan contributed to the final FS isn’t made clear (‘User Experience’ covers a lot of territory). To understand what he contributed to computer wargaming, you need look no further than 21-year-old watershed Waterloo. Read the rest of this entry »

There are three reasons to like this extremely long video of Dead Island. The first is that it showcases what’s starting to look like quite the fast-paced action RPG, full of numbers going up and luxurious vistas. Beautiful. The second reason is that there’s a bit where the protagonist throws a baseball bat at a propane canister and it explodes instantly. Amazing. The third is that it mentions Dead Island will support four player co-op throughout the whole story. Strong!

…then again, I’m sure lots of you will take these points as reasons to dislike it. In a case of some serious false advertising, if you were expecting something bleak and horrific, you certainly won’t be finding it here after all.
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I played a lot of Action Half-Life back in the day- it’s a mod which adds leaps, rolls, kung-fu and so on to Half-Life multiplayer, as well as a small collection of colourful weapons, each of which is (in theory) the equal of any of the others. It also boasted some of gaming’s most legendary map secrets. You can read my love letter to AHL here, or read my account of an expedition into one of those secrets here.

It therefore fills me with a delicate, Monday morning joy to announce that Action Half-Life 2 version 2 has been released. If you own Half-Life 2 you can get the installer here, a Linux server binary here and read some details as to what’s new and watch a trailer after the jump.
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You will remember that time-travelling RTS Achron made me a bit giddy last year, largely because it was one of the cleverest pieces of game design I have ever seen. Hopefully you’ll also have thought “whatever happened to that”, because now we have the answer: there’s a video and a detailed update from project lead Chris Hazard – including the phrase “I have briefed senior officials at the Pentagon” – below.
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Bethblog had the details on this late last week, and it looks promising for the PC version of Brink, with fixes to the server browser, the dedicated server, and some minor bugs. The weirdo sound bug on certain maps has been fixed, and also: “Graphical performance has been improved, especially when using Ambient Occlusion. We’ve worked closely with both AMD and NVIDIA, and you should see performance and stability improvements in future driver revisions from both parties.” No exact date yet, but it should be this week. I’ll make sure I schedule games on the servers when it’s all updated so we can take a look at the improvements.