Rock, Paper, Shotgun

There’s a Bus Driver 30-minute limited demo out. SCS explain why Bus Driver is so exciting: “In Bus Driver, your job is to transport passengers around an attractive and realistic city. You must drive to a timetable on a planned route, whilst obeying traffic rules, and taking care not to upset or injure your passengers. This makes Bus Driver unlike any other driving game – the experience of driving a bus is very different from blazing through a racing circuit as in most driving games.”

You can imagine how excited I am by the implications of this. It’s not pretty. You can download the demo here.

Riding high on the wave of fan contentment generated by news that upcoming MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic will absurdly cost between £45 and £130 (depending on which increasingly bonus-fatted version you want), EA/Bioware have dropped some more major news. Hopefully, this one isn’t quite so distressing.

Eurogamer brings word from EA of the closest we’ve had yet to a release date – “the second half of 2011.”
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The chaps from Gamespot have been in the first to get Arkham City Penguin reveal, but you can see it right here, below, thanks to the magic of sharing. To be honest, I like my Penguin in a top hat, but what do I know, eh? No matter, this is more than made up for by the fact that the trailer looks VERY EXCITING, with Batman punching dudes and, possibly, getting punched himself. Batman is just a man, and Arkham City is just a game, but what a game it looks to be.
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“Open, but directed,” says Tim Willits in this latest look at Rage, referring to the way the player will have scope to explore the wasteland, while being directed down particular paths to complete individual missions. That seems to be generally how folks like their open world, too. Some scope for poking about and exploring, but generally a storyline to follow, too. In fact, the more we see of Rage, the more this seems like Id really know what they are doing.

This latest bit of footage also previews the multiplayer vehicular combat, which looks pretty solid (although personally I’ve never found a vehicular combat game that I’ve stuck with for any length of time, no matter how amusing it initially might be.)
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Australia’s tortuous and wobbly journey towards sensible classification of games has take a positive step this week with state and federal governments agreeing “in principle” to an R18+ rating for games. It’s a rating that has long seemed necessary for the country, and a recent meeting of attorneys general – at which only New South Wales abstained from the vote, with everyone else saying yes – looks like it is now, finally, going to be possible. That’s not to say that Australia is going to shy away from censorship, however, as ABC News reports: “Under the proposed guidelines, games containing high-level violence will be restricted to adults, while games containing extreme violence will continue to be refused classification and banned from sale altogether.”

It’ll be interesting to see whether this move dampens the ferocious pro-censorship noise coming out of Australia’s governmental types. Any antipodeans care to comment?

The forthcoming Driver game (subtitled “San Francisco”, but could probably do with being called “Coma Wars”), has an excellently weird videogame premise: the protagonist is in a coma and, as a consequence of his horrible unconsciousness, can psychically take over any driver in the city. Yes, it’s a game about the psychic danger of people in comas. A warning, some might say. Ubisoft are aware that this is super-bonkers, and have put out a new video to explain how the feature works. You can watch it at your leisure, below.
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We’re not always enormous fans of live action trailers at RPS. Unless the game is somehow going to be live action, it seems a touch irrelevant. And then I stop and think, actually, how is that any different from a CGI trailer? Then I realise it isn’t, and I say sorry to everyone. However, there’s really no justification for snarling at Square Enix for releasing such a trailer for Deus Ex: Human Revolution. They’ve released so many in-game trailers for the game that I swear we must have seen it from beginning to end now. Also, this latest is a canny response to their previous live-action faux adverts for Sarif Industries. And this one’s a touch bleak.

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A few years ago, games were mocked for ‘only’ being ten hours long. Now, increasingly developers aren’t simply coming in under that on a regular basis, but potentially aiming even shorter – as seen in this Develop 2011 session written up by Gamespot the other day. Some are arguing the audience doesn’t have the patience to last for ten hours with a game.

So how long should games actually be? How much do you insist on getting for your money?

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Hurrah! A new trailer for the exceptionally bonkers-sounding Gotham City Imposters – a game in which everyone is either pretending to be Batman or the Joker. That is a Good Concept. This one’s a CG trailer, and therefore not much use to anyone, but it sure is fun to watch. Hey, that’s a use! And it contains lots and lots of bleeped swearing. But what’s this? It turns out that we’re such bloated idiots that we missed a game footage trailer last month. So that’s below too.

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Have you heard of Born To Fire? No you haven’t, because it has only just been announced in English. Ahead of GamesCom, where NHN Corp (who sound like an evil empire from the future) and Funtree (who sound like a company that should exist in Toyland) will be debuting the Korean online shooter, comes the CG trailer below. I’m going to venture the thought that its attitude toward women is not exactly top notch.

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Ladies, gentlemen, be seated, for today is a solemn and joyful occasion: the adding of a new entry to the Patch Notes Hall of Fame, right next to the special Boiling Point Memorial Annex (as so memorably earned with notes like “the snake wasn’t able to bite you while you were crawling” and “fixed: size of the moon”). The Witcher 2, lay your goodness upon us:

Option to fist fight woman praying at a statue in Vergen has been deactivated.

And breathe… and relax. That’s not the only addition though, with others including a smoothing over of the difficulty curve, the inventory getting a new ‘Junk’ option to make it clear what you can get rid of, innkeepers looking after your stuff while you’re out questing, the protective power of Quen being dialed down, and map markers actually going in the right place. Most excitingly of all, there’s a brand new quest! I think we all know what that means. Yes! It’s Diary Time!

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