Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Another Valve-inspired short film to enjoy this morning. Many years ago, John showed off part one of the Purchase Brothers guerrilla-style Half-Life homage, and now they’ve only gone and released part two. It uses the same blend of live action and game footage to fine effect. They spent $250 making this. To put that into context, Michael Bay spent 742 billion dollars on each of the Transformers films. This contains marginally less robots hitting one another but otherwise it’s far superior. Remember to watch in HD.

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I’ve not had a chance to get on the Spocean beta yet, but I wanted to get the UDK-powered project up here because it looks fantastic, and could hardly be more RPSy if it tried. It’s a game of team-based galleon-crewing warfare. Built in UDK, the game is – according to creators Woodley Games – a “woodpunk” simulation of “Napoleonic-era naval warfare from a first person perspective.” And it looks rather beautiful with it s gentle caricatures of ship-to-ship conflict. “Teams start on two separate ships, fire cannon shot at each other, and then try to board when they have the advantage,” explains the FAQ. “THEN they murder each other.”

You can get it here. (Thanks, PixelProspector!)

Sat here in my nightmare fortress, watching all my friends tweeting about the soft horrors of modernity, I came to think about the times when I have had to give up on a game because I was too obsessed with it. There have only been a couple of examples of this, but I know I am not alone. RPS chum Craig, for example, recently forced himself to give up his true first-person passion, TF2, so that he could make the most of his holidays. My deletion of my Eve client (moved from one HD to another across five or six years) was a monumental moment that precipitated in a colossal outpouring of elegiac grief, which pretty much constituted my final word on the game. I knew that if I didn’t end it, the relationship would drag on forever as I “just popped in to see what’s going on”, and then come out again four months later having founded a new alliance and led 100-man fleets into inebriated death at 4-am Reyjavik time. I had to delete her.

So I ask, readers, have you ever had to delete what you love?

We haven’t written anything on time-bending RTS Achron for while, which is probably because our enemies travelled back to the past and eradicated our earlier posts. Let me just travel to the future and ascertain whether we go on to write any further posts about it.

…

We do! Not that anyone on the planet ever gets to read them, because of… no, I vowed I wouldn’t talk about that. So while I go dig a fallout shelter in the garden, I’ll leave you guys to enjoy your final week of existence with the Achron launch trailer.
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Foot-to-ball is coming home. Or at least it will be as soon as you click this direct download link for the PES 2012 demo. As always, perfect to play while lounging on the couch in front of the tellybox. Unless your tellybox is linked to an Xbox 360 in which case, come back to the PC. The 360 demo has been delayed due to those pesky unforeseen circumstances that crop up from time to time! This is the first demo to be released for the game and is based on preview code and it allows you to play ten minute matches with Manchester United, AC Milan, Porto, Napoli, Santos and C.A. Panarol. It’ll be followed by an updated demo mid-September.

Update: This astonishing story on Ars reveals that GameStop – the US’s largest games retailer – is having staff remove the vouchers because it competes with their own online service, Impulse.

Apparently people still sometimes buy games in shops! Imagine that. And if you do that with the US retail version of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, according to VG247 you’ll get a code to play the game via OnLive. That’s the service that lets you stream the game via your internets, so it’ll play on any machine with a decent connection. It’s an interesting inclusion. And makes me wonder – have you tried OnLive, or any similar service yet? What have your experiences been?

Some new shots of Dishonored have appeared. Now that I’ve finished Deus Ex, and thus can no longer anticipate it, I’ve officially decided that Dishonored is going to replace it. Officially. It just looks like it’s going to be everything I want from a PC game. So if it’s not, Arkane are going to find a disproportionate amount of poo in their sock drawers. Meanwhile, five new screenshots have been released. Of which two are good, one is okay, and two are so terrible that if I’d had the cheek to submit them to any editor for a magazine I’d have been hanged in public.

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As spotted by the canny denizens of the Escapist forum, there is a quite extraordinary clause in the EULA of EA’s new game service, Origin. One that may well make you think twice about letting the software on your PC. Under the title of “Consent to Collection and Use of Data”, the clause states that by installing Origin you are giving EA permission to “collect, use, store and transmit technical and related information that identifies your computer, operating system, Application usage (including but not limited to successful installation and/or removal), software, software usage and peripheral hardware.”

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Hacking, slashing and indeed crawling through dungeons should get boring, shouldn’t it? Even when they’re randomly generated, aren’t they all the same? Dank, grimy, dim and claustrophobic. Rubbish places. If I came across one at the bottom of my street I’d complain to the council. But when Cardinal Quest invites me to go slay an evil minotaur I’m more than ready to trudge down, level by level, seeing what I can discover. Spruced up, streamlined Roguelikes are becoming more popular and this is a fine example.
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