Rock, Paper, Shotgun

There’s high drama in the spacey world of Eve Online this week. Well, there’s always high drama in the spacey world of Eve Online, but this one’s proving especially clamour-inducing. It hinges on the fact that CCP have just introduced a third virtual currency to the game. In addition to standard ISK and the exchangeable gametime credit known as PLEX (perhaps not technically a second currency, but it is traded between players in-game for ISK as well as being bought out-of-game with real-world currency), there’s now something called Aurum. This is spent on customisation and vanity items for the long-promised player Avatars, which were introduced as part of today’s free expansion pack Incarna. You can sell PLEX for Aurum: that’s complication one. Bear with me here.

The vanity items appear to have been comically overpriced. If you’re buying PLEX directly from CCP and you convert it to enough to buy an in-game shirt, you’ll have paid the equivalent of $25. In other words, as much or more than you’d pay for a real-life shirt.
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The next bit of Fallout: New Vegas DLC, which will be called Old World Blues, will be available on July 19th. That’s the first image of it up there. What we know at present is that the plot is based on your being a “lab rat” in one of the experiments that produced many of the mutants that inhabit the game, and you will be able to either fight your kidnappers, or join with them to take on a “larger threat”. It will also raise the level cap and give you some other options, such as talking to robot appliances.

Bethesda have also sent word that a significant update for the game will appear before this DLC, providing “improvements to performance and stability in major areas”.

Major areas. I don’t know that that means, but it sounded significant enough for me to want to emphasize it in a military briefing sort of way.

The Paradox/Arrowhead partnership continues to produce some of the best promotional material in gaming. The live action trailer for the new PvP expansion for Magicka is a delight, and you can watch it below.

This new PvP expansion is free, but there are also $.99 map packs, as Paradox explain. There’s “Vulcanus Arena, a sci-fi themed map that doubles as a PvP map and a challenge map,” and “the chilling Frozen Lake map as well as a “stop staring at me, you’re freaking me out” Watch Tower map.” All of which adds up to some solid cheap extras to our favourite comedy mage game. Carry on, Paradox/Arrowhead.
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Here’s one that slipped by. Cobalt is a sidescrolling shooter with an agile robot at the helm, dodging enemies and wandering around being altogether very shooty. It looks like Metal Slug meets Machinarium meets every bullet-time game ever. Cobalt can slow down time, climb on walls, boost and hop around athletically from the word go, but weaponry is limited at the start of the game. But by the looks of things you’ll eventually unlock quite a bit and turn into some kind of deathmachine. It’s still being developed and may not see release for another year but dinnae be afeared, a trailer is down there to show off some of the single player action and the games music. Meanwhile, the second trailer is a drunken multiplayer bout between two of the developers at Oxeye. Thanks to Gaming Irresponsibly for bringing it back into the internet’s dark embrace.

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The upcoming third BioShock game intends to fix an oft-made criticism of the Rapture-set original games, according to Timothy Gerritsen, Director of Development at Irrational Games.

The Executive Producer on Bioshock Infinite admitted to RPS in an interview published today that, in the first Bioshock, “we failed in giving you a sense of that city underwater.”
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Orcs are having a hard time these days. Persecuted everywhere they go and thrown into games and films as the epitome of evil. They just can’t catch a break – they are the poor victims of a McCarthyesque witch hunt. Also, they must die. Robot Entertainment says so. Dan Gril went and had a look at Orcs Must Die earlier this year and found it to be good, if lacking a little complexity. It looks like Robo-Ents is addressing that problem and adding a lot of traps, which you can combine in any number of ways to hopefully create merry carnage. Trailers after the jump. So go on. Jump around.

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Whenever another MMO announces that it’s changing to a free to play subscription model, the sound of rapid intakes of breath can be heard throughout corridors of Castle Shotgun like some panicked zephyr. We just can’t believe it. There’s an alternate reality out there where all MMORPGs are free to play and it’s trying to break into ours.

Hot on the heels of the City of Heroes announcement, we’ve heard that child-friendly MMO Lego Universe is doing something similar, but a bit stingier. Where City of Heroes is letting anybody play for free up to level 50, this August Lego Universe will allow anybody to go romping through the game’s first two adventures zones for as long as they like.
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Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad – first it had a name, then it had some screenshots, then it had some videos and now it has a release date. And so the cosmic ballet continues. Tripwire’s next commercial take on the masterfully dour World War 2 mod-gone-pro has been in the offing for a good few years, but now? Now it’s only months away. To war, gentlemen. Well, nearly.
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