Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Legend of Zelda Minecraft! GameInformer gameinforms us that Minecraft modders Gary520 and Spirale have been working on a Zelda mod that is as close to a proper game as anything yet made in Notch’s blocky world. The trailer after the jump promises familiar locations, eight dungeons, over 10 hours of play and 20 weapons. There’s even a shield for batting away baddies.

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Indie Game: The Movie has been in the making for a good while now and all the bits we’ve seen so far have been fairly interesting. The filmmakers are into the final stretch of post-production now and to rally the hounds of publicity they’ve released an official trailer, which I should warn you contains footage of some intense-looking young men in thick-rimmed glasses.

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Arcen send word that their procedurally-generated adventure game, A Valley Without Wind, is taking a new direction, as you can see in the video I’ve posted below. Rather than being top-down, it’s now a side-scroller. Developer Chris Park explained that the changed had been discussed for some time, and really came about after seeing previews of the game in a top-down perspective, and the reactions people had to that. He also argues that the side-scrolling perspective fits perfectly with the game’s exploration and survival, as well as the evolving combat mechanics. The Arcen boss says: “The result of this side view switch is something that looks incredibly better, that’s orders of magnitude faster for us to create, and that’s more fun to play. It also helps give a much stronger sense of place: partly it’s seeing the sky when you’re outside, but it’s also the varied terrain height, long falls, poison water, and so on.”

It’s a major change, and it seems like an odd one to me. It might not have been the prettiest game in the world, but the perspective was certainly distinctive. This is… less so.
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Good morning, world. Speaking of Team Fortress 2, how about some actual Team Fortress news? It’s a fine day for the first details on the “most ambitious update in the history of Team Fortress 2″. The first part is a free weekend (starting now, for some reason), and an initial Mafia themed update, complete with a new Payload map. But what else? Valve say:

We don’t want to ruin it, but we’ll give you four clues to get you guessing:

1.) It IS a “Meet the” short.
2.) It involves ONE of the two remaining classes.
3.) It’s NOT the Pyro.
4.) It’s the MEDIC.

So it’s anyone’s guess. More news on this as it happens. I guess I’d better get the RPS TF2 server online, eh? Right, let’s do that.

Whether or not there’s any weight whatsoever to the theory that Team Fortress 2 might turn free to play, it appears someone else got there first. You might find Final Combat to be just a little bit familiar. Just a little. Or a lot. Yes, an awful lot.

This video? This is quite the video.
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Tropico! We can all get behind a spot of sun-drenched dictatordom, right? Not to mention a timely reminder, in this ‘social’ age of limited moves per day and microtransactions, of city-building unbound. After a brief delay, Tropico 4 is due in just two months, and appears to push ruling an island wannabe-paradise to extremes both good (rollercoasters, giant spires with eternal flames at the top) and bad (apocalypse-level natural disasters)…
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I was just about to get my daily ten-minute stroll in Castle Shotgun’s sewage pit – my only respite – when Master Quinns told me to post about this announcement. King Arthur: Fallen Champions follows on from Paradox Interactive’s King Arthur (which Jim was fond of) but takes place before King Arthur II (which has dragons). Here are some pretty words about this and some Irish ones, which are not pretty.
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President Obama wants fathers to encourage their children to “turn off the video games and pick up a book.” Books are good, but games are also good. So we want presidents to play more games. (As well as reading books and ending poverty and promoting equality and stopping terrorism and that sort of thing, obviously).

Good afternoon,

I grew up without a President around. I was lucky enough to be raised by a wonderful 90Mhz Gateway who, like so many heroic computers, never allowed my President’s absence to be an excuse for me to slack off or not always do my best at Quake. But I often wonder what it would have been like if my President had a greater presence in my gaming life.

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While those who don’t read history are, allegedly, doomed to repeat it, they can at least sleep easy knowing they’ll never find themselves on wargame forums grumbling about infantry AI, ballistics modelling, and uniform accuracy. There have been occasions during my long career as a bedroom battle orchestrator, when I’ve wondered whether I wouldn’t have been a much happier player had I steered well clear of history books, documentaries and message-boards. Read the rest of this entry »