Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It’s been almost a year since we heard about Bunch Of Heroes. It’s a top-down cooperative zombie shooter, and it’s coming out on the 21st Sept via Steam and Gamers Gate. There’s also a new trailer to celebrate this, which you can see below.

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After the rumours spilled out, EA and Starbreeze’s well known secret is finally official. Syndicate (the official site isn’t yet working, but should be there) has been announced, and yes, it’s an FPS. And yes, it offers four-player co-op. And it’s only called “Syndicate” so far. Surprisingly, it’s due out early next year. They’re describing it as a “revival”. Because when you think Syndicate, you think “a unique and brutal sci-fi first-person shooter experience”. Right?

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The Discworld novels are quite the divider. Everyone I know seems to love them, from my dad to my about-to-be-wife, while I’m pretty indifferent. But I do remember really enjoying Discworld Noir back in their 90s. Going back to it, I was surprised not only by how well written it is, but also how little game there actually is within all the writing. I consolidated those thoughts on Eurogamer, including bits like:

“The witch novels – that’s safer territory. Gone is the “this is a bit like that”, replaced with instead just fun storytelling and embellished fairytale. There he has me. And there’s more common ground – we can all agree that the first two Discworld games were bloody awful.”

You can read the whole piece here.

Syndicate will reportedly be a 4-player co-op FPS, developed by Starbreeze. This thread on NeoGAF has some images and info which are apparently leaked from the Swedish edition of Game Reactor which is out next week. This what we know: “Chip Enhanced Gameplay: Slow down time, see through walls, and breach your enemy and everything digital in the world with Dart vision – A neural DART6 chip implant that allows you to interface directly with the Dataverse,” “4-Player Online Co-op: Assemble your Syndicate for global domination. A 4-player, online co-op experience like no other, with chip enhanced gameplay and 9 missions re-imagined from the original Syndicate,” “Visceral FPS Experience: Utilize an upgradable arsenal of futuristic weapons, armor and gear to annihilate your enemies and harvest their chip technology for personal advancement and sinister corporate greed,” “Sci-Fi Fiction: Immerse yourself in the world of Syndicate 2069, with a world-class sci-fi story experience, written by bestselling author Richard Morgan.”

Men will get shot from a first-person perspective. Yep.

Sunday is for sitting somewhere in the Somerset countryside, reading a giant book of philosophy. If that’s gets boring there’s always a tenuous data signal out here for reading the many philosophies of the internet. Here’s a few of those.

• So, thanks to commenter Kad, I am leading with a podcast this week. It’s an “Irrational Interviews” piece, which sounds like it should consist in entirely random and unpleasant questioning, but is actually Ken Levine vs the doctors of Bioware. “We were having lunch one day after having made some medical education software,” recalls Ray, “then we realized what we’re really passionate about is video games. Why don’t we just make some video games? Take everything we own, and everything we make as doctors on weekends, to fund the company. …That was the extent of the conversation.” And so on.

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Time to engage your value-subroutines, make sure your fiscal-cortex is online, and it’s probably best if you have your payment method of choice to hand too. It’s the bargain bucket: Your handy receptacle for collecting the best download deals in every weekend. If your thirst for cheap games isn’t satiated by this bountiful selection, why not take a visit to SavyGamer.co.uk for more of the same. Here’s the deals: Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of people are asking us to find out why Space Marine – and its demo – have disappeared from Steam in the UK, despite being a Steamworks game. I.e. it is not for sale on the download service that it requires in order to run. Whaaaaaaat. We’ve tried to get to the bottom of this, but all we can get is a No Comment – we’ll update with more if we can get it. I have my theories, but it would imprudent to share them without evidence. Sorry about that: what a ridiculous and frustrating situation. Especially as the UK has already had to wait several days longer for the game than everyone else, thanks to conniving dunderheads in the retail industry.

In the meantime, if you acquire the PC version of the game from anywhere else, rest assured you can still activate and play it on Steam despite it being invisible on the store. This includes Direct2Drive and Gamersgate for £35 each, but retailer ShopTo.net is selling the Steam activation code directly for an eminently reasonable £23. Given the net result wherever you buy the game is that you have to activate it on Steam, it seems sensible to pick the cheapest route you can find. Anyone spotted a better deal?