Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It’s been too long since we’ve had a gratuitously silly, astonishingly epic Minecraft video post. So here’s twenty minutes of Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Minecraft. You know what to do.

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I began today posting a spoof video of the SNES’s Mega Man, with a Portal gun. It made me smile. I end today posting a genuine video of a game where two people are remaking the original Super Mario Bros, with a Portal gun: Mari0. It made me smile much bigger. I got hold of an early version. It made me do that weird mix of smiling and frowning that Mario Bros games do, except with the bigger grins for clever portal application. They’re going to get sued into space by about fifteen different companies at once, but fortunately they don’t seem to mind.

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It has been five years since Introversion last entered the Independent Games Festival, with Darwinia, and the studio have just announced that they have entered their latest game into IGF 2012. However, the submitted game is not Subversion, the stylish, procedurally generated urban heist sim that the team have been working on, which is now on indefinite hiatus. Instead, there is to be an entirely new game, of which we know nothing, apart from the fact that it isn’t a sequel to a previous game. Chris Delay was candid as ever in explaining the decision and his words and more of mine are here to enlighten you.

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Cripes – how would you like the complete Grand Theft Auto series for under £9? There are two ways to do this. You can get yourself a balaclava and steal them from a shop, but it’s high-risk, and some would argue morally questionable. Or you could hand over that much money to Gamers Gate, where they’re selling GTA 1, GTA 2, GTA III, GTA: Vice City, GTA: San Andreas, GTA IV, and GTA Episodes From Liberty City, for actually 1p less than that balaclava at £8.74. Bear in mind that GTAs 1 and 2 are already free, but that’s still one heck of a lot of automobile crime without the broken glass and prison sentence. (Thanks to Michael Rose for the tweeted tip.)

Hopefully there’ll be a third expansion for Relic’s largely (but not solely) fantastigood Dawn of War II, and the usual clutch of new factions and units, but in the meantime a lone Tau unit has snuck into the current version of the game. Specifically, into the Last Stand survival co-op mode, wherein you pick a suitably 40Kian hero and attempt to survive as long as you can.

Controlling the suitably battlesuited Tau Commander in Last Stand will require a small payment of additional money – someone should totally invent a word to describe that – but is available in both the full version of DOW2: Retribution (but not just the base game, as far as I can ascertain) and the cheapy Last Standalone spin-off. Due out at the end of October, and in-action in moving pixel-based form below.
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I spend a lot of time playing strategy games, but sometimes it feels like I spend more time learning how to play strategy games. It says something about the complexity of the games and a frightening amount about the lack of complexity of my brain that by the point I’ve figured out how to balance my economy and marshall my troops, I’m often ready to move onto the next thing. Therefore, I can be pleasantly surprised by a strategic offering that only takes minutes to learn and Blue Libra is just such a game. The line-drawing controls and simplicity betray its app store roots, but nonetheless I found something oddly compelling about its single screen systems and brief scenarios. There’s a demo here and more thoughts below.

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On Friday, when I was off having better things to do that pick apart another misleading and harmful series of half-truths and outright nonsense about the horrors of videogaming, Jim put things rather more succinctly. Baroness Von Greenfield continued her sad descent from being respected by anyone, and once more proved that a lot of knowledge combined with absolutely no knowledge at all is a dangerous and embarrassingly biased thing. Rather splendidly, the Telegraph’s Tom Chivers sought the expert opinion of a real expert, one Dr Dean Burnett of Cardiff University, who has written a statement-by-statement riposte to the obfuscated scaremongering Greenback offered. It’s well worth a read, not just because it offers balanced, educated views on the effects of gaming on the brain, but also because it’s a darned good, educational read in its own right.

Wow, games are great. Take for instance A Tale By Alex. The game by new indie team Digital Dreams, it’s a side-scrolling platformer played on three separated levels… simultaneously. Because each is a version of a kid, Alex’s, imagination.

It’s an amazingly cute idea, the two higher strips showing a reimagining of the real-world interior Alex is playing in. Jump over a table at the bottom, and it’s a grassy mound. Run past your pet tortoise and it’s a giant, biting monster that must be attacked. An elastic band flung in your front room is a range weapon for Alex the Knight.

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I barely played the first Prototype, so when it comes to the sequel anything plot-related is a bit hazy. Angry men are killing each other with appendages they should not have, that much is clear, but what about the soldiers caught in the middle of it all? Do they deserve to be torn asunder? Judging by this latest trailer, they sure do, casually shooting defenseless animals and then snickering about it. And if you don’t want trouble, don’t hang around with a bunch of tanks and guns in a place called The Red Zone. Leave the weaponry at home and stick to The Mauve Zone, or even the pedestrianised zone, it’s hard to imagine all this mayhem going on there.

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