Rock, Paper, Shotgun

EA CEO John Riccitiello recently met with Notch with (reportedly) a view to acquiring the Minecraft creating company, according to an interview with Develop. “EA came to see us,” says Notch. “I think they had plans, but picked up the vibe. Nothing’s been said since – it’s all very high politics,”

Notch has stated that EA made no direct offer, but that acquisitiveness makes sense, given Mr R’s history. But Mojang is basically not for sale, and frankly why would it be? Minecraft recently hit three million copies sold and Notch is richer than the rest of indie game dev put together. I think there’s a point where you can stop worrying about money, and Mr P has hit it: “I play their games, and they make great games, but we are too far from each other,” said Notch of EA. “They can make their games, and I’ll buy them. We’ll make ours, and they can buy them. Not the property – that’s ours. But they can play it like everyone else.”

Attention, fans of games made by a studio that used to be called Zombie Cow but is now called Size Five Games. The makers of Ben There, Dan That and Time Gentlemen, Please have released their first ever game Gibbage, a shooty platformer with a particularly neat two player mode, for free. But only for the duration of this weekend. What that means is that you should go here, now. No, not later. Now. Time’s a-wasting. The extra words below will still be here when you get back, don’t you worry.
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MTV have spoken to Blizzard’s VP of Online Technologies, Robert Bridenbecker, about the internet’s passionate response to the online-only requirement for Diablo III. He said: “I’m actually kind of surprised in terms of there even being a question in today’s age around online play and the requirement around that.” He went on to explain that anti-piracy concerns did not factor into the decision: “”Internally I don’t think [DRM] ever actually came up when we talked about how we want connections to operate. Things that came up were always around the feature-set, the sanctity of the actual game systems like your characters. You’re guaranteeing that there are no hacks, no dupes. All of these things were points of discussion, but the whole copy protection, piracy thing, that’s not really entering into why we want to do it.”

You read the full comments by Bridenbecker here.

If the Steam page is to be believed then SuperGiant’s esoteric dungeon-crawler is set to arrive on 16th of August (SuperGiant just confirmed this to us over email.) I am honestly expecting this to be one of the games of the year: it’s a beautiful blend of compelling, click hack ‘n’ slash action with artful indie sensibility. What the screens and talk of whacking monsters doesn’t quite get across is how exquisitely the world is delivered as it drops into place ahead of you, a process that is oddly dreamlike, especially when framed against the hard-boiled, wise-cracking voiceover. Anyway, I am sure we’ll ramble about this extensively when it arrives on our Windows boxes.

Alleges Minecraft-maker Notch on Twitter: “Just got a letter from Bethesda’s lawyers. They claim “Scrolls” infringes on their trademark and everyone will confuse it with Skyrim.”

No way/what/how/why/whatwhatwhat? What? Hopefully this is just crossed wires, an overzealous lawyer acting alone, a weird joke or othewise not actually happening. We’ve asked Bethesda for a statement. Let’s wait for more information before we decide we know what’s going on: if it is as it appears, good grief. If it isn’t, phew. More as we have it, anyway.

Update more on the matter from Notch, plus a photograph of the legal notice (in Swedish, but I’ll take Notch’s word for it that it’s what he says it is). Seems to be real, then. Sadface. WORLD, YOU ARE SO VERY CRUEL.

If you’re looking to take your mind off impending global catastrophe this weekend you could do worse than checking out the v1.0 release of Oblivion mod Dibella’s Watch. It’s a new “continent” for Oblivion, which includes “a major city, castles, towns, villages, farms, monasteries and all the good stuff that makes up a Medieval landscape.” It’s a pretty huge Oblivion mod put together by a single person, and, while not as ludicrously as full-featured as total conversions like the almighty Nehrim (yes, I am still meaning to come back to that one day), it’s a really impressive piece of work, and worth a look if you just want a new landscape and some fresh quests for Oblivion itself.

Charming free-to-play MMO Spiral Knights has added a new PvP mode, and it’s all a bit Bomberman, as you can see from the footage below. Three Rings explain: “Blast Network is now available, with more events on the way soon. Blast Network is a highly explosive event that pits Knights against each other and equips them with instant-charging bombs. The object of the game is to blow the competition to smithereens! Blast Network has no equipment requisites at all – simply join and get blasting whenever you like.”

And we all love Bomberman (yes, even you), so this sounds like profit to me.
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When The Transformers toyline was first released back in 1984, it didn’t waste any time: toys, comic, cartoon, branded stationery, the works. Boom: world domination almost overnight. It’s all so different for Jagex’s MMO Transformers Universe. Over the best part of the year, we’ve had a slow drip-feed of text-based annnouncement, mysterious concept art, a pre-rendered teaser and now a slightly longer pre-rendered teaser showing off character/art design and transformination style, which you can see below. Nothing in-game yet, however.

By my calculations, this trend means we will see a screenshot of the game itself by 2014. That’s approximately 900 days away, which by my maths would give you time to watch this 1m13s-long trailer some 1,065,205 times first. Better get to it, hadn’t you?
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Mr Carmack was up on stage at QuakeCon last night, and he was talking Rage and PC. Getting the PC version up to speed has, apparently, been one of the sticking points for Rage’s development, which has taken a few years now. Interestingly, release might not be the end of the that particular line of development, either, because Carmack has revealed that he’s already started a new project, and the “research engines” that this new project produces could be added to the PC version of Rage down the line. Quite what this means isn’t clear, but apparently he has a “firm” plan to release this update to PC, as well as a high-quality texture patch. It’s fascinating to see Carmack getting excited about the PC again, a platform whose power he called “crazy”. Increasingly, I suspect, the words out of the mouths of Carmack and other tech gurus are going to be about the untapped potential of the PC, particularly as the archaic specs of 360 and PS3 begin to frustrate those developers who are still interesting in pushing their technology. There’s a bit more detail on Mr C’s talk here.

I’ve also posted a big old Rage trailer below.
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LATEST: Servers still broken, no idea why, working to fix.

It looks like Brink is having a free weekend!, so you might as well grab it and see what the fuss (or lack thereof) is about. I’ve put the RPS servers online, you can search for them in-game by searching for “Rock”. There’s a US server in Chicago and a UK one on London. I’ll post some events on the Steam group to get this rolling.