Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Amy is a game with zombies in it, but don’t leave just yet. I know we’re oversaturated with them, but that doesn’t mean we should be jaded about every upcoming game that involves the shambling nonliving. It’s still possible to use them in interesting ways and, for me at least, even just shooting them in the head isn’t boring quite yet. Amy’s doing something very different though. Set in an infected city of the near-future, it’s a game about survival and companionship. It would be easy to describe what I’ve seen so far as urban Ico with zombies, so that’s what I’m going to do. There’s new footage below, with developer narration to describe how infection will destroy you and how it can be staved off. It’s not the most whizzbang stuff but it’s certainly piqued my interest.

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Ubisoft’s devs are keen to talk up the hardcore and “high-quality” credentials of their forthcoming free-to-play offering Ghost Recon Online in their new dev diary, which you can see below. They talk a bit about how it emerged from “hardcore” PC games, and argue that the most important aspect of bringing it to PC is making it feel responsive enough. It is apparently a third-person shooter that “plays a lot like a first-person shooter”. Hm! There’s a lot of game footage in there, and lots of commentary from the devs. Take a look.
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Let’s start off today with something free that could eat up a massive chunk of your Friday, in bite-size portions. You may remember Pixeljam’s Dino Run, it entertained John many a moon ago, back in the days when death by meteors actually seemed more likely than death by economic collapse. Detailing the last days of the dinosaurs in documentary-style pixel graphics, it’s a hectic race for survival, as meteors slam into the ground seeking to obliterate all life. The special edition allows you to customise your dinosaur (hats, dinosaurs in hats) and includes a couple of new modes, one of which allows multiplayer racing (several dinosaurs in hats). As part of the pack, which is only free today and tomorrow, you’ll also receive Space Rubbish and the spiffy soundtrack albums to both.

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Emergency! Emergency! A demonstration version of Foot-To-Ball Manager 2012 has inserted itself into one the tubes of the internet, and needs you to remove it then safely store it upon your own personal computer. If you are bold and daring enough to attempt to resolve this crisis, I beseech you to point your browser device here forthwith and then take any steps necessary to download approximately two gigabytes of English-made data. Then we will all be safe. And you can play half a season putting the feet of one or all of England, Australia, Scotland, France, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Italy, Norway, Denmark and Sweden onto a ball.

God speed. You are our only hope.

When people decide to give their games massive names, do they not realise how difficult it is for me to make puns about them? There’s no way I can fit Kings Bounty: Warriors Of The North and any kind of wordplay onto a single line, it simply cannot be done. I should be consulted in naming committees. Henceforth, I’m going to refer to this next in the commendably daft RPG-strategy series as King’s Bounty: Northlands, or KB: Nordic Edition. That’s what it seems to be anyway, with a new hero called Olaf who is the son of the “Northling King”. I’m guessing it’s another expansion-type thing rather than a full sequel, but there will be all new locations, units and skills, as well as valkyrie companions who are described as “gorgeous”. Perhaps that’s one of them in the screenshot above. Gorgeous, is she? You decide. It’s out Spring 2012.

For a while there I thought I was living the month backwards, but actually Mojang have released a third iteration of the 1.9 pre-release of Minecraft, which you can get HERE, should you care to. It contains an enchantment table, baby animals that grow up into big animals, and some other crafting-related rubbish. Meanwhile I have been playing Minecraft again! I should probably write about it in a continuation of the late Quinns’ Mine The Gap, only I would call it Mined The Gap, which seems like the correct variant spelling for that particular series pun name.

Anyway, having played it for a while, I think that Minecraft needs bees. And I also think that NPCs should occasionally capture you and make you be Nic Cage in The Wicker Man, the Best Bits of which you can see below in a YouTube video I have posted because a) it is irrelevant to this news article, and b) I will never get tired of pretending it’s the actual trailer for the film. Hooray!
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It’s not quite clear what IGN’s source is for this, but according to them the Dungeons & Dragons online-RPG Neverwinter, which Cryptic said originally was “an old-school tactical Western RPG”, but online, is apparently an now MMO more “closer to a game like Nexon’s Vindictus”. So a free-to-play one where action dominates. Quite how this contrasts against what Cryptic’s Jack Emmert told us previously is detailed in part through the link (and mainly consists of learning the lessons of Star Trek and Champions going free), but it doesn’t actually seem like that a big a change to me.

Nevertheless, word is that the game has been delayed to the end of 2012 to make the necessary changes. It would seem that these changes might have come about thanks to Cryptic’s acquisition by expanding F2P giant Perfect World, who also bagged Runic, and are planning to make a Torchlight MMO at some point.

The autumnal quasi-summer has abandoned me and more than ever I am in need of indoor entertainment, preferably without spending a single penny as I’ve squandered all my money on garish Bermuda shorts. Enter Nous, a free game which claims to be a computer program seeking its purpose and identity. In order to learn it offers to teach the player, a quid pro quo in which both discover something about themselves. I should stress, that’s what the program does, not the game itself. It’s a top-down shoot ‘em up with a weirdly compelling narrative and there isn’t a fourth wall in sight.

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I was just watching this League of Legends champion spotlight (below) over at PCG and couldn’t help feeling a bit weird. On the one hand I’m deeply embedded in enough in the general jargon and conceits of gaming to basically know that the guy narrating the Xerath reveal is going on about, but on the other I am aware that I definitely don’t understand the significance of this six minute overview within the context of the game and its other heroes. When alien archaeologists are digging up our fossilised internet from a cold, dead Earth in a billion years time, I wonder whether they will bother to try and decode all the games we played. It’d only take one slip up of inference on Extra-Terrestrial Time Team to imagine that were a culture that did little other than hover over icons to compare the specifications of our virtual equipment and/or skill loadout against another. Hell, maybe that’s precisely what we’ll end up being, if League Of Legends gets any more popular.
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