Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Dead Rising 2: Off The Record is out October 11th, revisiting the sequel’s crazed casino-mall through the eyes and lens of the original game’s swaggering photojournalist Frank West. Both the protagonist and the trailer are delightful because they appear to take themselves far too seriously but swiftly degenerate into surreal, nonsensical madcappery. It all looks rather bleak and ill-judged, with the tale of a once great man fallen on hard times. And then the theme tune kicks in and it’s suddenly more Saints Row: The Third than George Romero. Just remember…his name’s Frank.

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Anno 2070 is a vision of what cities will be like when I’m either dead or an incredibly doddery old chap with a cybernetic toupee, and I’ve been pleased by the promise of its glistening underwater cities. Despite the terrible lack of resources facing our fragile globe, I’d quite enjoy retiring to one of those sea-bubbles. But, of course, someone had to go and spoil my future by bringing war into it. This newest trailer for the city-builder sim shows the military of the future, all sleek submarines, whirligig rocket-crafts and submersible death-platforms.

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The seemingly endless drip-feed of character announcements for Batman: Arkham City is starting to get on my wick. Yes, we know there will be supervillains in the game. Can we not just play it now? Please? Also in there, Mr Marketing has slowly told us, are a raft of playable Bat-Chums, including Batman’s diminutive protege Robin, who’s been redesigned as a sort of scrappy thug. Why would anyone want to play as Robin instead of Batman? I mean, Robin. But you can see the speedy wee fellow in action below.
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Alec and myself are busy playing Rage, and rather enjoying it, actually. That said, we had to do quite a bit of tweaking to get the damned thing working ok. We both used the fix detailed here in combination with enabling the GPU transcoding thing, while also updating drivers (particularly important for ATi cards). This seems to address most of the texture pop-in issues, and apparently ups the texture res, too. You’ll ideally need a card with 1.5gb VRAM to get a step up in texture quality, and if you have 3gb or more it’s reportedly possible to go higher still, although this article on the Geforce site said they found no immediate differences. Anyone with enorm-VRAM able to confirm?

Bethesda echo these and other fixes here.

Answering the questions “But why no plans for Red Dead Redemption?” and “Has Rockstar abandoned the PC platform?”, Rockstar had this to say:

“We hope that with the announcement that L.A. Noire is coming to PC this fall, and the knowledge that our next big game Max Payne 3 will have a PC release (plus that we’ve released both Grand Theft Auto IV and the Episodes from Liberty City for PC), we can finally put to rest any misconceptions that we’ve ‘abandoned the PC platform’. We do know that, yes, there is just one title absent from our PC release plans – that game of course being Red Dead Redemption, and of course we’re well aware that some fans have been asking for it. All we can say is that whenever it is viable (technically, developmentally and business-wise) for us to release a game for PC (or any other particular platform) – we will and we usually do; unfortunately, that is just not the case 100% of the time for all platforms. To PC gamers, we hope that between the Grand Theft Auto titles, and the forthcoming L.A. Noire and Max Payne 3, you’ll have plenty of great Rockstar action to enjoy.”

I continue to find it baffling. RDR seems ideally suited to PC, and is a far better game than LA Noire. Oh well.

As keen as I am to poke CCP in their collective eye for being rubbish about Eve things, it’s true that CCP’s CEO Hilmar Pétursson is a decent chap. And it seems particularly okay of the flame-haired Icelander to post an extended apology to Eve players on the game’s site. Dwelling on recent debacles, he says: “Somewhere along the way, I began taking success for granted. As hubris set in, I became less inclined to listen to pleas for caution. Red flags raised by very smart people both at CCP and in the community went unheeded because of my stubborn refusal to allow adversity to gain purchase on our plans. Mistakes, even when they were acknowledged, often went unanalyzed, leaving the door open for them to be repeated. You have spoken, loudly and clearly, with your words and with your actions. And there were definitely moments in recent history when I wish I would have listened more and taken a different path. I was wrong and I admit it.”

He also observes that words mean little next to actions. It’ll be interesting to see just what actions the pioneering MMO studio end up making. There doesn’t seem like any easy way out.

Here’s the trailer for that live-action Dragon Age TV series, starring that woman people on Twitter all have a crush on, and it’s… Well.. It’s. Well. Well, it makes Dragon Age II seem an awful lot more palatable all of a sudden. Bless everyone involved, but the budget’s just not there, is it?

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Hopefully this is happier indie price-experimentation news than the below… What began as really little more than pay what you want for one game – that being Frozen Synapse – has been slowly expanding to be some games, as appears to be Humble Bundle trends. You’ll be very glad to hear that the very, very good Space Chem is the latest addition, joining Trauma which was bundled in earlier this week. And yes, this works retroactively for people who already bought the FZ bundle. So, whatever you have given or are prepared to give, you’ll end up with FZ, SpaceChem and Trauma – and if you beat the average price you also get a package of Frozenbyte games to boot.

All the games are available in PC, cultist PC and hippy PC flavours, by the way.

If you don’t know what Space Chem is, then boo. BOOOOOO. And also read this.

Gamasutra note that Proun developer Joost van Dongen has taken some time to analyse the success (or lack thereof) of his Pay What You Want scheme for the quirky racing game. While he has made a healthy and pleasing $23,000 so far, he estimates that 40% (200k) of the installs of the game were pirate installs, despite the game being freely available from “official” sources.

Actual sales? 4,400 people paid an average of $5.23 for the game. Gamasutra explain what this means: “The prevalence of free players means the game has averaged just 9 cents of revenue per download, Van Dongen said, well below what he thinks a successful game with a traditional sales model would have made.” My thought? It’s well worth $5, go and buy it right now.

When I saw the announcement for Insane 2, which is out a little later this year, something stirred, deep in the lost vaults of my head. Insane. Yes. Why do I know that name? A bit of Googling later and I realise that the original insane (which cleverly anticipated the letter-as-numbers-in-sequels thing by being called 1nsane, which surely means this one should be called In2ane) is one of the first games I ever reviewed in anger – a multiplayer offroad racing game from Codemasters released in 2000. 2000! That’s almost a thousand years ago. Quite why Codies decided to make a sequel to a game that people who played it can barely remember is beyond me, but there it is. Actually, I vaguely suspect it is a rebranded version of a game that has already come out in Russia, but I can’t be sure. There’s a video of the game below. You sure to race about and stuff.

Mmm. I am going to go back to Rage. Where I can also race about and stuff.
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