Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Sundays are for wondering if you will ever sleep again, while cradling a steaming cup of hot drugs. Perhaps, in those grey autumn hours before the sun has managed to struggle out of its own slumberings, you will start going through the week’s writings about games. It’s been a good week for that, at least.

• Chris Dahlen’s piece on imaginary games journalist Rachael Webster is quite the thing: “This was the one big hiccup in the project: nowhere on the site did we advertise that Rachael wasn’t a live girl. Alternate reality games are a special illusion that only works if the audience discovers the trick. The worlds they build aren’t stuck in a television screen, or cheap and obvious like the backdrops at a miniature golf course. They’re pervasive, delivering their fiction straight to your everyday world—to your email, your phone, even to spaces in the real world. They’re fiction without borders, and they can make the player feel as if, to use the most common expression, they’ve “fallen down the rabbit hole.””

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Blue noticed that Radical have put out a trailer detailing their approach for New York in Prototype 2. The so-called “NYZ” will be far more detailed this time, with the city divided into three zones, allowing them to increase the visual fidelity and density of detail in the city. There’s loads from the devs and a bunch of game footage in the video, which I have posted below. It’s looking more and more promising.

(Echoes of a BLDGBLOG article wot I wrote.)
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I hope you’re all after some cheap games for your computer boxes, because that’s exactly what I’ve got. Here’s your weekly record of the best value gaming offers from across the world of PC gaming, it can only be the RPS Bargain Bucket. There’s tonnes of variety in this week’s selection, I reckon must be something for everyone here, but if you don’t spy anything that grabs your attention, you can always head over to SavyGamer.co.uk for a constantly updated digest of gaming deals across all platforms. Read on for this week’s selection. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s on nights like this one, when sleep is denied me, that I miss Eve Online most of all. I would have spent it hunting, leading fleets, and indulging in the stuff that makes the game so special. It’s funny, because I realise that those who have never played Eve’s PvP game will never know what I am missing out on, now, let alone what they have missed out on, always. For all the writing I’ve done on the subject, I’ve never been able to capture quite what it all means in terms of a cerebral, tactical, persistent challenge. There is nothing quite like it. That singular nature means that videos like the one below – a forty-minute tale of sophisticated, high-level combat through Eve’s wormhole space – are possible. You should watch this video, even if you do not believe you will ever play Eve, because it captures the drama, the control, and the mathematics that are integral to the PvP game.

And it makes me acutely aware of what I am missing out on. The guys making this video are hardcore PvPers, even by my standards, and it’s impossible not to admire their dedication. Perhaps I was found lacking. Thanks, Roburky.
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It’s all been dragoning and mining and dildo-waving and warfaring this week, so let us not forget that there are many other places videogames can visit. Arvoch Alliance, follow up to the Evochron games, purports to be “the definitive 3D space combat game.” I do like a bit of space combat, although all the talk of Newtonian physics and an incredibly elaborate targeting system has me immediately worried I may be fluffy for this one. Find out for yourself though: a svelte 250MB demo is out now, as is the full game. But what does it look like, a man perhaps once bellowed in mild confusion at his cold, unresponsive monitor? It looks like this, silly.
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And there’s a trailer showing off Strike At Karkand, to celebrate that fact, below. Needless to say, the trailer shows off a lot of walls getting blasted into bits, a lot of guns getting reloaded, and a lot of shouting. I love shouting. That’s the best bit. Back To Karkand, just in case you’ve been asleep for the past couple of months, is the DLC for Battlefield 3 that brings back four famed Battlefield maps for the new game. They are: Strike at Karkand, Wake Island, Gulf of Oman and Sharqi Peninsula. It’s free if you pre-ordered, and $15 to everyone else. The DLC also introduces a bunch of new achievements, weapons, vehicles and so forth, and the Battlefield blog is slowly detailing them all for our anticipatory pleasure.
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Frankly I find posting about – and thus somewhat contributing to the sensationalism – this almost as unsavoury as the news story itself, but I suppose it’s the sort of thing I guess we should all be aware of, if only to shake our heads, tut loudly and make doomy prophecies about the world going to hell in a handbasket.

There didn’t appear to be anything in the way of pre-release reviews for Telltale’s Jurassic Park game (I should note that they kindly set across code for RPS today, however), but somehow there were a couple of very, very positive user reviews on Metacritic. Stuff like “a mix between Heavy Rain and LA Noire”, “lovingly-crafted” and “if Steven Spielberg decided to direct Heavy Rain” and other eyebrowing-raisingly effusive endorsements in this vein. Which rather suggests they played a different game entirely to the one I did. Doing a little digging, Gamespot identified that the posters of these gushy comments did, in fact, work for Telltale.
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Do you enjoy conversation between passionate individuals? If so, the recent Irrational Interview featuring Ken Levine and Guillermo Del Toro is a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend an hour of your day. The Mexican author/director is working on a horror game and the first part of this audio was posted on Halloween so I expected a focus on spooky happenings but the conversation is much more wide-ranging. There is some discussion of monsters but mostly it’s two men discussing the joy of the creative process, as well as the frustrations that can arise in the film and game industries.

Del Toro is frank as ever, at one point describing working on projects with no personal interest as like trying to “fuck without a boner”. He does swear a lot. Ken slowly warms to the idea of this navvy-like behavior and by the end they’re both at it. Two parts. Downloads here and here.

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A trailer for Crusader Kings II would inevitably consist of closeups of maps and loud, pompous music, so even though I’m hugely excited about the game I wouldn’t bother posting it. Or it would be the first in a series of live action comedy sketches themed around the seven deadly sins, in which case I’d be more than content to share it with the world. I’m happy that a game so head-scratchingly intense that I’ve gone through six scalps playing the beta is able to let its hair down. And, yes, I’m talking about the game as if it is a sentient being. What of it? Let’s just watch.

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