Rock, Paper, Shotgun

There are some new pictures of what Deus Ex: Human Revolution looks like. Some are good. Some are some of the worst screenshots ever taken. Want to look at them? Follow our handy 15 step guide:

1) Click on pictures

2) Develop eyes

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The Hivemind have told you I’m helping out this week. The truth is I’ve been kidnapped by Quinns in a hot air balloon. I don’t want to write about the Personal Computer games. I am being forced. Send help. They make me play games with lots of religious imagery, which my enfeebled mind finds impossible to resist. Games like Rosslyn: The Templar Mystery, which is essentially a first-person point and click, with a very holy escape-the-room vibe. The whole game is set in Rosslyn Chapel – wot was in that Da Vinci Code – where you have to leaf through your grandfather’s old diary to find the clues to solve 51 puzzles hidden in the statues, stonework and tombs. I like it quite a little. But then I would say that. Quinns is pointing a rusty bayonet at me.

No, he isn’t. Read more of my genuinely held impressions after the jump.

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Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad, the sequel to jaw-droppingly bleak 2006 multiplayer FPS Red Orchestra (which you can read me screaming about here), is absolutely the PC exclusive on the horizon that I’m most excited about. Just look here at the features list. They’re taking a rich, rare little game and turning it into a beast. A beast! With bullets for teeth!

Anyway, Blue’s News have spotted a thread on the “Bash and Slash” forums (ew) and another thread on the PBBans forum where people are reporting on the game’s cheating countermeasures and impressive array of server options (including a server tool to allow hosts to modify everything from weapons to scoring elements). It’s all to be found after the jump.
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It’s not professional to criticise my colleagues in public, but sometimes a line has to be drawn. It was my day off on Friday, and I entrusted Rock, Paper, Shotgun entirely to the others. And yet no one – NO ONE – bothered to report news of a 30 minute demo for Trucks & Trailers. I can only apologise. And sob. Fortunately I’m here now.

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While there are rumours flying around about Valve’s DOTA 2 project being the first in-house game to embrace the free-to-play model recently made possible on Steam, there seems to be (scant) evidence that another title could be beat it to the accolade: Team Fortress 2.

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And thus continued the saga of sadness known as poor Project Zomboid.  Over the weekend, developer The Indie Stone removed the game from their website after they discovered that pirates had developed a version that can update itself. This means trouble. Here are some words that they said in a blog post:

“These ‘auto updating’ versions of the game could screw us completely. We have a cloud based distribution model, where the files are copied all over the world and are served to players on request, which means we are charged money for people downloading the game.”

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I was cheering excitedly about beautiful indie shmup Jamestown last week, and the title’s tagline of “Mars is waiting! Bring your friends!” must be the finest piece of video game marketing of the last ten years.

But a philosopher once said that a video speaks a thousand words, so here’s games commenter Total Biscuit talking you through the game in an even more agitable manner than usual. I’m serious- if you watch up to him reaching the first boss you will hear the actual sound of a man having a nervous breakdown.
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Valve is already getting its head stuck into the F2P trough, so it was probably only a matter of time before they went from merely supporting F2P games to adopting the business model themselves. Their Head of Marketing Things To People Who Might Want To Buy Them Doug Lombardi was asked by French website Barre de Vie if Valve was working on their own F2P title. To which he promptly said, “Oui.”
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You couldn’t ask for a nicer story to start the week with. Following a somewhat underwhelming showing of Battlefield 3 on chat show Late Night with Jimmy Fallon last week, the Battlefield community was roused from its sleepy state of contentment. “THAT LOOKS NOWHERE NEAR AS GOOD AS BEFORE,” they bellowed, probably.

That’s because it was running on a PS3. The unofficial Battlefield 3 blog has amassed some info on the matter, including tweets from Dice developers stating that the PC version of Battlefield 3 will not only run at a higher resolution than the console version, it’ll have double the framerate and more besides.
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Sundays are for quietly sitting down at your PC, putting on some music, and drinking a cup of tea. Perhaps, as you sit there, you might consider some of the week’s events. Do they really matter to you? Are they really significant in the scheme of things? Maybe not, but The Sunday Papers is here to say that taking an interesting in random ephemera is sacred, and will always be so. Let’s see what we’ve got this week.

• Gosh, I know the reaction to E3 this year was largely “why were there no surprises?” But Keith Stuart takes it a few steps further to ask whether it might actually signal the end of gaming as we know it: “The apathy shown by some of the big players toward the exhibition hints at its demise, but that will be a death knell not just for a ludicrously noisy show, but for a whole way of thinking about games – as epic, landmark events. Some see the dripfeed of marketing information naturally transmogrifying into the dripfeed of content.” It’s an interesting point, but I think the rise of DLC is actually a more significant marker for that. No game will be complete, everything becomes about what comes next. Troubling indeed.

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