Rock, Paper, Shotgun

According to IGN, DC Universe Online is dropping subscription charges next month. The article quotes SOE executive producer Lorin Jameson as saying, “this was our preferred business model from day one”. Well, it’s taken seven months to implement that day one plan but it’s finally here. It does make sense. While SOE are claiming that a drop in subscriptions is not behind this move, anyone who has visited Gotham City lately can tell you it’s a bit of a ghost town. Is this enough to entice anyone in, or back in? Full details below.

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Right, so here’s the first step in answering the mystery of Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s boss battles – they were outsourced. Meaning, a lack of continuity during the development process, one has to assume. That’s not a condemnation of the work done by G.R.I.P., the company responsible for the bosses, who will have their own story to tell. As I said in my review of the game, the real story of how they happened will likely come out in a few years time, once enough people have moved on to be willing to explain. So why such a feature was outsourced, why there wasn’t a coherence between them and the rest of the game, and why they weren’t just ditched when it became clear they didn’t fit in, are questions that will perhaps one day be answered. But not yet. But as a magazine noticed, there’s a behind-the-scenes video with GRIP’s president discussing the battles that quietly appeared last month. So yes, this information was always out there. You can see it below.

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Here’s some words you don’t see on RPS every day: Mario, Link, Megaman…Pikachu. Yet there they all are. The reason is Super Smash Land, a free, downloadable demake of Smash Brothers, the game were Nintendo characters pummel the crap out of one another. There is no love in that family. Dan Fornace, the creator, has previous with this sort of thing. He once half-made a Smash Brothers alike using Lord of the Rings characters. This project is different though; it’s Smash Brothers as made for the original Gameboy. Except on your PC. Take a look.

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There are a great many online free-to-play games that we ignore every day. If we did not, the site would be only covering such games, no one would read it, and we’d all be broken, sobbing messes. But I am not a strong enough man to skip past something called Pony Vs. Pony. Not when there’s a song, too.

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So, it’s bloody Talk Like An Idiot Day. Oh, internet, you’re good at some things, but you’re not at others.

And worse, Talk Like A Pirate Day has now become so horribly commercialised. Remember when it was all just that annoying friend thinking they were being amusingly wacky? Perhaps wearing a novelty eye-patch and shouting “ARRRRRRHHH” until someone punched them? Those original values are lost amongst a bunch of publishers and developers thinking it canny to release pirate-themed news today. So it is that Tales Of Monkey Island is on sale, and Pirates Of New Horizons promotes itself with a video. And there will probably be others too. More details below. (NO NOT “BELOW” LIKE ON A PIRATE SHIP.)

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White Wolf are holding their Grand Masquerade at the moment, which makes me wish I was in New Orleans. That said, just mentioning New Orleans makes me want to be there so we won’t give White Wolf too much credit. If you’re not aware of them, they’re the company behind Vampire: The Masquerade and other related role playing games. Not the computer versions, mind, but the actual pen and paper, sit around and speak words to each other versions. The Grand Masquerade is their fan get-together and details about CCP’s upcoming World of Darkness MMORPG have been dripping out of it. Dripping like blood, you see?

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This week marks the Eurogamer Expo at Earl’s Court in London, an event at which there will be many delightful videogames to see and play – including a raft of top-notch indie titles. Some members of RPS will be in attendance at the show on the Friday at least, but on Saturday we must all flock to Bath as a last ditch attempt to rescue the lady John has tricked into marrying him that day. However, we will also be lurking in an alehouse in the vicinity of the Expo on Friday night, where we will be in the proximity of copious amounts of alcohol/soft drinks and, hopefully, you.

Wanna come along?

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Time for another one of our in theory regular but in practice highly irregular comparisons of the last week’s top ten best-selling PC games on Steam, and at UK retail. Obviously there are all manner of ways in which these are not fair or entirely meaningful comparisons, not least in that Steam’s metrics can tend towards the cryptic, that Steam’s includes pre-orders but UK retail (via Chart-Track) doesn’t and that it’s laughably hard to find many PC games on British high streets these days, but it’s always fun/horrifying to get a flavour for the stark differences between what people are buying digitally and what plastic boxes their attention is caught by.
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The Writers’ Guild of Great Britain – a rather different entity to the US Writers’ Guild – last week announced its nominees for assorted mediums’ most lauded writers. Included are the obscure likes of ‘television’, ‘theatre’, ‘books’ and ‘radio’, but fortunately Best Videogame keeps things relevant to our little corner of the internet. This is a prize given only to UK writers, so who do we think got a nod? Some clever people, that’s who.

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There will inevitably be an English language version of this video available four seconds after I post this, but I feel compelled to make everyone watch it right now. It’s a short BioShock: Infinite trailer from TGS and I find it hugely exciting. There’s some nattering at the beginning, in Japanese, but once that’s done with it’s all action in the universal language of “my word, this is rather thrilling”. It does show some sequences that those wanting to go in completely fresh may not want spoiling, although it’s enemy types rather than plot. Then again, for all I know, the dialogue at the beginning may give away a huge plot twist. It’s unlikely though, isn’t it? Still, if Japanese is something you understand, certainly don’t go telling the rest of us if Elizabeth reveals she’s a sledge.

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