Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Picking itself up and dusting itself off from a rude, if mild, hacking, Battlefield Heroes reveals its intentions to make summer a little snazzier for its players with new stuff. NEW STUFF! God, I hate old stuff. It’s so rubbish. Heroes’ new stuff includes pirate and wizard outfits for you to prance about in as you kill World War Analogy enemies in EA’s artfully cartoon environments, but also superhero outfits which grant you special superhero powers. There’s even a pair of trailers out to show off the kit in action, and you can check those out below!

Yeah, yeah, I can see you peeking. A few thoughts on this and attending F2P stuff below.
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Are you going to the beach this summer? The weather looks like it’ll hold up, though personally I’ve always enjoyed a walk in the rain along a stormy beach front, as long as I don’t have to deal with scuba diving wolf men battling with lizard spike beasts.

The forthcoming Guild Wars 2 made a splash with the reveal of some interesting looking underwater areas covered in this previous developer walkthrough, and now two rather stylish trailers would like your attention as well. Are you going to take the plunge? Let’s dive in.

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What do you get if you squeeze Don’t Take It Personally Babe, It Just Ain’t Your Story and Lesbian Spider Queens From Mars together? A hurried visit to the Scorpion Psychiatrists of Saturn, of course. You may find its intro oddly familiar:

I am the in-house psychiatrist of Saturn’s best private school. Some students find me creepy. They should! I’m a scorpion! Actually, we’re pretty common on Saturn. But hey, whatever. Besides, a scorpion is needed for a school with this much drama! I’ll solve their emotional problems using my stinging advice beam! But I need to keep my distance lest I get involved myself!

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You know the worst thing about racing? All that turning. Left, right, left, more left – who needs it? Best not to worry about those finer details and stick to what’s in front of you. This new Speedhunters DLC pack for SHIFT 2 should help with all that bother, adding the ability to go very fast in a straight line. Six tracks covering the Quarter Mile and Standing Mile disciplines, with fourteen new specialised cars, are landing June 30th alongside the Legends DLC, which features five tracks with the more traditional curvy parts and a dozen new cars of its own.

Both have been out for a couple of months in console land but us PC types will be getting them for free, via Origin. The excitable trailer’s eyeing the horizon after the jump.
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Yesterday, US politicians attempting to have grown-up videogames be made exempt from Constitutional law regarding freedom of speech and be treated on a par with hardcore porn lost their six-year battle. The industry was hugely relieved, but inevitably the losers are not going gentle into that good night, with Californian senator Leland Yee, author of the defeated bill, posting a rebuttal of the Supreme Court’s verdict. He’s continuing to toe the line that games are turning our children into psychopaths:

“Unfortunately, the majority of the Supreme Court once again put the interests of corporate America before the interests of our children. As a result of their decision, Wal-Mart and the video game industry will continue to make billions of dollars at the expense of our kids’ mental health and the safety of our community. It is simply wrong that the video game industry can be allowed to put their profit margins over the rights of parents and the well-being of children.”
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Now I thought we had already posted about Tribes: Ascend being free-to-play. Perhaps it was simply in one of my prophetic game-news dreams, because I can’t find it. BUT ANYWAY, it is going to be free-to-play, and to celebrate that Hi-Rez have revealed the game in action. You can check it out below. It certainly looks like a new Tribes game to me, which is promising! Looking forward to playing this. I will be the dude at 0:26. (Although the wider picture makes Firefall look a lot more interesting.)

Tribes: Ascend is apparently out later this year at some point.
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Woo, fancy! It’s here.

When using the new “Ultra” spec, DX9 platforms will benefit from real-time local reflections and contact shadows. The owners of DX11 platforms, in addition, will be able to enjoy hardware tessellation (requires the installation of the “DX11 Ultra Upgrade”), parallax occlusion mapping and several improvements for shadows, water, particles, depth of field and motion blur.

Phwoar, eh readers? (You probably want to download the hi-res textures patch on the same page, too.)

Eve Online’s player base is currently ANGRY. The above image is of a riot that took place this Friday in Jita, one of the virtual universe’s biggest trading hubs, and this thread on the official forums is keeping track of all the subscriptions that have been cancelled in protest- some 4,500 so far.

Why all the rage? In short, CCP are dragging the game in a direction the players are deeply uncomfortable with. I know all this because I’ve just finished reading Eurogamer’s sterling coverage of what they’re calling the “crisis”, and you should too. You can read it here, or get yourself a taste after the jump.
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