Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Regarding the strange derpage today, where Deep Silver seem to have somehow released the dev version of Dead Island to US Steam users, we’ve had a statement back. It’s succinct:

“the final version will be out during the day”

Which would seem to be both a tacit acknowledgement that something that wasn’t the final version was released, and also the good news that the error should be fixed before bedtime. So that’s good. Our review of Dead Island will appear just as soon as I’ve finished writing it.

Relic’s orkshoot came out today for people who happen to live in North America, but a mysterious and intractably evil force is preventing exactly the same collection of ones and zeroes from unlocking on PCs in other parts of the world. We’re not expecting Space Marine review code ourselves until a bit later this week – instead of being allowed access to the version already live across the pond – and, mysteriously and worryingly, no American reviews have been posted yet. Hmm.
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The Adventure Update of 1.8 is not far from our Minecraft clients. Soon, internet, soon. Personally I’ve been holding off playing any Minecraft until it had a bunch of new content, and so this update will be the point at which I return for a fresh look around. Some details on what to expect can be found below, along with that trailer.
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Oh my word, I need a nap after this. I feel like an octogenarian who’s just been played a Lil’ Wayne record. It’s so noisy, so fast, so violent. COD multiplayer has become increasingly excessive over the years, and Modern Warfare 3′s looks as though it’s thrown in everything it can think of – it looks so very far away from simply sniping dudes in one-storey buildings. I can’t keep up with all that! I’d need to mod DX3′s invisibility aug into it, just so I can hide in the corner, terrified and weeping.
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Gosh, here’s a whoopsie. Dead Island is out now on Steam for the Americanish, except the version they’ve received probably isn’t the one Deep Silver were hoping they’d get. It seems the dev build of the game has been put out there, rather than the official version. Complaints about a bad port, mysterious goings on, and no-clipping all seem to come down to the fact that this is the bug-testing, cheat-enabled, not-for-release version of the game. Code that people are digging up seems to reveal that this might even have far too much of the 360 version left in it. Crikey, that’s a big oops. (I should note that the PC review build I’m playing certainly is optimised for PC.) A day one patch is intended to fix an impressive thirty-seven issues. Perhaps one of them will be the release of the internal debug of the game to US customers? We’ve contacted Deep Silver to see what’s really going on.

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Here’s a huge news story that we somehow didn’t manage to post yet, because we’re big, silly poo-poo heads. Also, I was distracted by being stung on the eyelid by a wasp, which is something I can recommend to precisely nobody. While I was busy bellowing in horror, the Deus Ex Human Revolution DLC teased by last week’s rather inelegant ARG finally came to light. As suspected, it’s called The Missing Link, and as speculated it concerns the rather odd scene late in the main game where Adam goes on a secret journey to an unknown location. (And if you think that amounts to a spoiler for a game that’s all about mysteries, I honestly despair.)

If you haven’t gotten that far in the game, don’t read on – because more fulsome details are below. If you can’t read the rest but are itching for safe DX reading – well, how about browsing RPS cunningly rejiggered to look like one of DXHR’s in-game electro-newspapers? Top work, Nir Yomotov. Truly, his vision is augmented.
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A new trailer for the wonderful The Dream Machine has appeared, which rather nonchalantly includes lots of new footage from the forthcoming chapter 3. Which looks… intriguing. The Dream Machine is one of the best written and most interesting adventure games in years, built entirely out of clay and cardboard, and glacially released in chapters. However, the new footage also contains the surprise at the end that the game will be appearing on Steam toward the end of this year.

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How many trailers manage to accurately convey a design philosophy while also being pretty damn funny? I’ve done some swift calculations on my abaci and mathomancy tells me that the correct answer is this one for Serious Sam 3: BFE. Despite pouring scorn on so many modern gaming conventions, the whole thing is so gleeful that it doesn’t seem spiteful, just completely and incurably insane.

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