By Alec Meer on October 18th, 2011.
The internet has been full of happy things to say about Braindead lately, and having just played it, I can see why it caused so many whoops and coos. This free micro-download is a retro-esque indie platformer, but wait, come back! This is not yet more tiresome retromancy of the kind that regularly floods indiedom, but instead a smart, one-button inversion of the genre. Rather than control the character, you control his world.
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A Jimquisition
By Alec Meer on October 18th, 2011.
I recently played three hours of Skyrim, and decided in my madness that the best way to document this was with three random anecdotes. Of course, if you weren’t interested in hypocritical vegetarianism, obsessively playing with the zombie spell or trying to pull off stealth crafting, those might not have given you the overall flavour of the game you’re after. So, let Jim be your proxy interrogator about the wider nature and feel of the fifth Elder Scrolls – y’know, combat, openness, voice acting, exploration, all that jazz…
Jim: I suppose my initial question has to be: how good an open world do you think it is going to be? Open worlds are very much my favourite thing in games, but good ones are SO rare! What’s the feeling here?
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By Jim Rossignol on October 18th, 2011.
The nebulous “November” date for Batman on PC has been confirmed for the UK as the 18th, and VG247 note that Amazon has the US one date (predictably) for the 15th. The PC version is going to support 3D, DX11, and a bunch of the other in-vogue technologies, making it one of this years most graphical games, or something.
Reception of the Batman on the console boxes has been uniforming rapturous, so it’s probably worth the wait for a definitive PC version. Or not. Depending on the tightness of your Bat-fetish. Alec pointed out that the last trailer was here, but expect a heaving torrent of game footage soon, as the game hits other, lesser machines on Friday.
By Jim Rossignol on October 18th, 2011.
A couple of days ago a friend asked me “what ever happened to that TERA game? It looked pretty.” It certainly did look pretty, and I can see why he lost track of it, because I had too. It wasn’t actually the prettiness that they were touting way back when we first looked at it in February last year, but more the “action combat”. There’s a bit of that illustrated in the second trailer, below, but I’m still not enormously convinced it’s a world away from other MMOs, and this blighter is going to be up against Guild Wars 2, which I don’t envy for it.
Anyway, it is still coming out, in Spring 2012.
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By Jim Rossignol on October 18th, 2011.
Saints Row The Third – a game that has been distilled from the boiled nightmares of Daily Mail readers – fears nothing in its ambition to mock and satirise the whole of existence. The massive moving targets of the monolithic military shooters that are currently trundling toward us on the hype-train are easy pickings for the Volition crew, as you can see below. Saints Row’s Shock And Awesome trailer is just another reason why this might be worth getting. (Calling in air-strikes while wearing a top hat made it for me.) Stupid. Clever stupid.
When? November 15th for North America, November 18th for the Europe.
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By Jim Rossignol on October 18th, 2011.
I love Cortex Command. It’s one of my favourite indies ever. The current build of this brain-defending, bunker-building, robot-deploying, side-scrolling tactical digging and shooting game means that it has a tonne of interesting scenarios you can set up and play, but currently the campaign (which I’d jumped into to take a look at) is a bit completely broken. Cortex Command has been out in “work in progress” beta form for about 47 years, but there’s been a bit of progress of late, and so I’m hoping we’ll see that campaign built upon soon. Nevertheless, for those of you who’ve not played this yet – and you really should have done by now – there’s a free (and sadly harshly limited) demo on the site.
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Part 3 of 3-part wibbling
By Alec Meer on October 18th, 2011.
Last week, I played three hours of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, at my leisure and free to go and do whatever I could. I’m telling a series of anecdotes based on what I saw and did; here’s the first, here is the second and below is the cowardly third.
Despite the outer limit of my creative achievements in real life being hammering a bit of rotting wood I found in the street over a drafty gap at the top of my bedroom window, for some reason I simply cannot resist going heavy on the crafting option in most any RPG I play. The idea that there is some item or items I could have (and for free!) but don’t is intolerable to me. So, while others invited to this play session dedicated their levelling-up to becoming as buff as possible then racing off in search of a dragon or two to stab, I was sticking my hand up and saying “excuse me, how do I make leather?”
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By Alec Meer on October 18th, 2011.
We’ve recently been asked a few times why we haven’t posted anything about comedy RPG Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon. The answer is simple: that game is humanity’s last defence against a dark conspiracy of unimaginable corruption and malevolence, RPS is at the heart of which. Our excuse that we’re just four men against forty-eight thousand billion PC games and so can’t possibly cover everything is just that: an excuse. Were we to break our unholy covenant and post about Rampant Games’ excitable indie turn-based roleplayer Frayed Knights, our plan to consume the miserable souls of every teenager in Basingstoke could never come to pass.
Curses! Now I shall never know supreme power.
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By Alec Meer on October 18th, 2011.
This is one for the young people, perhaps – as part of another trailer for the upcoming Syndicate enshooterising, we get a potted history of Bullfrog’s original game. “A cyberpunk wonderland,” apparently. Then it segues into a pic’n'mix of previous and new Syndishoot footage, and I guess we’re supposed to think “gosh, the reticule-based adventures of MILES KILO sure are highly thematically similar to an isometric tactical game.” Still, it’s nice to see the original Syndicate (“quite a unique experience”, claims robo-lady in the video) given a proper nod – never thought we’d see that as part of a bombastic, noisy trailer like this.
By Jim Rossignol on October 18th, 2011.
Notch tweets: “We won the interim injunction! We can keep using the name “Scrolls”. ZeniMax/Bethesda can still appeal the ruling, but I’m very happy.”
Of course this is only the first step, and we expect Bethesda will certainly take the process to its conclusion at a full trial.
By Jim Rossignol on October 18th, 2011.
After insisting there’s room for more than one military shooter in the market, DICE’s Patrick Bach told IndustryGamers than be believes shooters are becoming a “service”: “I also believe that our free social platform Battlelog will make a huge difference in how people perceive where the game starts and ends. Games, especially FPS titles with their deep persistence and team play are no longer just hard-coded discs. They are transforming into a service.” People sure do love statistics and stuff, it’s true. But does that really make it a service?
He also argued that “authenticity” was more important than realism (contrasting the game with the Armas, I suppose): “We are not trying to create a simulator. But the feeling that what happens in the game is plausible and looks real and authentic is important to us.”
