Rock, Paper, Shotgun

And we <3 Team Meat right back. Over the weekend, they've been chatting to the cool cats over at IndieGames.com, and Ed dropped this hefty knowledge bomb:

We’re never going to make a game that couldn’t also be on PC. That’s a stupid thing for most indies to do. PC is crucial

No surprises there, considering that the Steam sales of SMB outnumber the Xbox sales by 2:1.

Don’t just take my out-of-context quote for it though, listen to the interview yourself here. There’s talk about how Tommy’s ex really didn’t like him wearing pyjama pants outside, Ed discusses the development of The Binding of Isaac, and they dish out a bit of advice to indie devs hoping to get a Steam distribution deal.

Rumours emerged this weekend that all isn’t happy-times at Crytek. The Crysis developer has been accused of mistreating staff, and sacking employees unlawfully, the accusations appearing on a Tumblr blog. But these are accusations Crytek’s co-founder Avni Yerli has rushed to deny, speaking to Develop. Amid suggestions that six-month crunch periods leave employees not knowing if they will still have a job, Yerli insists that Crytek respects and values staff.

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Scaleform? Dolby Digital? AMD? I didn’t ask for this. Neither did you, probably, so if you fancy a way of disabling all those annoying unskipable splash screens, here it is. Word on the street is that the member of staff at Eidos Montreal responsible for them fully intended to make the splash screens skippable, but as they entered the meeting room to discuss it, a prerendered cutscene took over and forced them to make the splash screens unskippable. What a shame. Read the rest of this entry »

They Sunday Papers! Here they are again, this is what Sundays are for. I’ve been detonating dynamite in the murky depths of the internet and collecting what floats to the surface. Let’s take a look at my sack full of stunned links.

• Well I don’t usually put video links as the lead article on the SP, but GDC have posted Thomas Grip’s Evoking Emotions and Achieving Success By Breaking All The Rules, a talk about the making of Amnesia. Everyone who is even vaguely interested in how games are made, and why they are made in the way that they are made, should watch this. (Oh and you should buy Amnesia, if you haven’t already.)

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VG247 have spotted that fourteen minutes of Borderlands 2 wobblecam footage has leaked. It’s not great quality, but it shows quite a lot of the game in action. You can watch it below.
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Rab is away this week, so no Cardboard Children. I barely know anything about boardgames, so I won’t bother to try and fill you in, and instead I will turn to the previous fill-in guy and ask if he’ll talk about boardgames for us. Oh, he will! That’s great. Perhaps he’ll provide us with a video to post in the empty space below? Good! Okay then.
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It’s Saturday, that can only mean one thing. Ok, I guess it means several things: Lie ins, spending the afternoon in the pub, rubbish sports on the telly. But it also means cheap games, and here they all are, waiting for you to gobble them up. If you’re still greedy for more delicious discounted gaming, you can find a feast of cheap games catalogued daily over at SavyGamer.co.uk. Here’s this week’s deals: Read the rest of this entry »

If there is something I’d really like to be simulated, it would be a giant digging machine that could bore through to the deepest parts of the Earth and then shoot upward, bursting out of the ground and eating the entire Eiffel tower in its spinning jaws. One day that will be simulated. But not today. Today we wait for Take On Helicopters, a simulation of one of the helicopters that will no doubt buzz around the giant Earth drill-ship like flies, perhaps bravely allowing the heroes of the movie to leap onto the armoured drill deck and fight their way inside, before finally duelling the evil and insane drill-ship controller on the bridge, as a nuclear bomb’s timer ticks down to zero. Amazing stuff.

The Take On Helicopters trailer, which features impossibly handsome helicopters, some knees, and more dials than I know how to look at (but zero colossal rock-boring mole-craft) is below.
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Stronghold 3 isn’t that far away now and I’m as excited as a peasant with a new pitchfork. Much has been said of the fancy physics and the way they’ll affect traps and breaches, and much more has been said about diseased badgers. To remind us that it’s not all pestilent wildlife and siege warfare though, Firefly have lifted their portcullis to let a new trailer slip into the world. It concentrates on the economic side of the game. That means maintaining the castle and the village around it. It also means listening to the demands, hopes and fears of your people, which, like a British weekend, mainly revolve around ale, wolves and the ever-present possibility of being placed in the stocks.

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There’s a lot to be gleaned from the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 Multiplayer World Premiere Trailer, though after typing out the cumbersome title I’m loathe to write anything else due to intense fingercramp. I’ll say this for it though: it manages to make combat look exciting, dramatic and bloody horrible, sometimes simultaneously. There’s lots of shooting, which I expected, lots of killing, which I also expected, but also large, spinning fuchsia dogtags, which I certainly didn’t expect. Admittedly, it is mostly man-shooting though. There’s evidence of all kinds of new as yet unexplained details, from strike packages to proficiency. What does it all mean? I’m going to say that men will use packages to strike other men in their proficiencies. Or some other combination of those words. You heard it hear first. Discuss and dissect below. Oh, and do look out for the particularly unpleasant Claymore-alike, the Bouncing Betty. Ouch.

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