Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Plant people! It’s an abomination, I say. If plants were meant to be people then God would have given them the vital organs to be human, like eyes and shoes. ArenaNet, however, see nothing wrong with creating a leafy mockery of the human form with their “Sylvari”. They’ve gone as far as to blog about it in detail here, and also to detail their visual appearance here. Not an Ent in sight, though, so that’s some small reason to be thankful, I suppose.

Anyway, it’s appalling. They’re almost as heinous as those monstrous anthropomorphous plants in Popcap’s ridiculous Plants Vs Zombies. As if pot plants could ever defeat the undead. You’d need trees and stinging nettles at the bare minimum.

I bet you’d like to spend some time a-puzzlin’ this week, eh? Well perhaps you can, if you enter our shiny Lucid competition. It’s a puzzle game! We’ve got a bunch of Steam codes to give away, and you can win them with a minimum of effort! All you have to do is email us here and tell us what puzzles you. The most puzzled people will win.

Usual rules apply. Closing date is midday, 13th August.

Valve’s in-game TF2 item store is about to become an out-of-game item store. They’re trialling something called Steam Trading, which primarily involves swapping your TF2 unlocks (i.e. those damnable hats, mostly) for other games.

It’s an old-fashioned barter system in new-fangled clothes. What happens is you invite someone on your Steam friends list or who you’re in a group chat with to trade, and can offer up your various TF2 items to the other guy. In return, he or she can offer you other TF2 items – or to gift a game to you. You can’t do this with any old game in your Steam library – only games you’ve purchased from the store as a gift, or received as an Extra Copy.
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Hmm, this is a bit of an odd one, via ShackNews. This Space Marine forum post, which has subsequently been deleted, saw a THQ community manager claiming that the co-op aspect of Space Marine would turn up 30 days or so after release, but as then clearly been redacted. Since then THQ have released a statement saying: “Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine will have co-op and we look forward to announcing more details later this month.”

I guess someone is in trouble for blurting out meticulous PR plans, eh? Tsk.

Gotham City Imposters, which can very loosely be described as Team Fortress 2 populated by armies of crazies pretending to be either Batman or the Joker, is two important things: 1) the first game from NOLF-makers Monolith since the dour FEAR 2, and more importantly their first attempt to do humour and outlandishness rather than po-faced horror since 2003 2) bonkers.

This is why my bat-sense is tingling at news GCI has opened beta sign-ups.
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How about this, then, man-shooting fans? Over two Imperial minutes (count ‘em!) of Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3′s Spec Ops survival mode can be found below, via BluesNews. What is it? Well, I dunno. Let’s say it’s some kind of escalating fight mode, with its own perks and stuff, featuring lots of different opponents: dogs, men, men, men, big armoured men.

Big. Armoured. Men. So big. So armoured. So shootable. Mmm.
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You see what I was going for in that headline, right? Alec likes Transformers, and space stuff? And shooting? Right? Okay, well, anyway, the chaps at DoubleSix games send word that their next game is Strike Suit Zero. It’s a space shooter in which you fly some kind of transforming space battle thingum, which is called a Strike Suit. DoubleSix claim this means “ludicrous firepower and awesome abilities.” Their hyperbole is backed up with a secondary steel fist of space-features: “Strike Suit Zero features a dazzling art style, high-speed zero gravity vehicular combat, branching-mission structure, ship designs from renowned Mechanical Design engineer Junji Okubo (Appleseed: Ex Machina, Steel Battalion) and music from award-winning sound designer Paul Ruskay (Homeworld).”

THEREFORE: SPACE-BIFF! The game is set to arrive in the “first quarter” of 2012. Cinematic teaser trailer below. (Cinematic, in this instance, being a synonym for “pointless”. Shame.)
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The fans, they demanded of Croteam that Serious Sam 3: BFE feature four-player splitscreen play. And so it came to pass. RPS can exclusively reveal that the forthcoming ultro-shooter will allow you to gather around a PC monitor with your chums and FIGHT. Up to three gamepads can be used alongside one mouse and keyboard to have four-player multiplayer and co-op. You can see full-size screens below.

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Hooray! Just when things seemed really gloomy, here’s comes a zombie apocalypse scenario to put things into perspective. Even if your capital city is on fire and your heroic leaders are unable to do anything but share holiday snaps, it’s worth remembering that you aren’t going to be eaten alive by the shambling undead. Ah, that’s a nice feeling.

See: the four-player co-oping in Dead Island that we’ve already seen a bit of already. Consider: that it’s actually not all that like Left 4 Dead. Suppose: that it might actually be fairly entertaining. Wonder: when the zombie games will end.
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As part of what can now only be interpreted as Ubisoft’s ongoing campaign to ensure Driver: San Francisco is the most hated PC game of all time, not only will it include their abhorrent ‘always-on’ DRM (meaning everyone from those without a reliable internet connection to those in the armed forces can’t play it), but there’s also going to be no demo! The consoles get their demo of the game tomorrow, but according to Ubisoft, “There are no current plans for a PC demo.” When we asked why not we were bluntly told, “We have no information on any PC demo planned.”

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I tried to look for a logical reason why typing strange and complicated words at angry Counter-Strike players at a LAN party would possibly calm them down, but then I remembered that Type Hard is based on The Typing of the Dead, a game which posits a world in which zombies can be killed with words. So it’s probably best to just go with this one, and indeed to enjoy the fantasy that online trolls really can be talked into submission by smarter minds. Ah, if only.
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