Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Still no in-game images yet, but we’ve just learned that Mechwarrior Online will use CryEngine 3. “It is definitely the best choice for us,” said Russ Bullock, president of Piranha Games. “Both the character animation pipeline with the procedurally and physics based animations and the destruction system fit our goals perfectly and allow us to develop a truly unique AAA experience based on the award-winning BattleTech Universe.” Perhaps not too much of a surprise choice, either, given that Crysis mod. I also rather like the description of the “four pillars” of the game: “Mech Warfare, the embodiment of Mech to Mech combat. Role Warfare, the ability for player’s to customize their experience to suit their own style of gameplay. Community Warfare, the ability to let the players take part in epic combat for territorial control. Information Warfare, an element on the battlefield that incorporates information technology to help control the fight.” If they can nail all of those then it could be a fine, fine mech game.

Hullo! I used to write on this site, and then I got very tired. I sleep most the day now. It’s nice. When I’m sleeping, I get my nurse to play podcasts. This is my favourite games podcast in ages. Roguelike Radio is a Roguelike-centric podcast which plays a different one every couple of weeks and does a show about it. In this case, however, they’ve got Edmund McMillen on to talk about Binding of Isaac. And it’s so brilliant, I almost managed to stand up. But my legs failed, and I was left sprawling hopelessly on the floor. I wish I had working legs and a functioning penis, though that’s probably too much information. But honestly, unless my critical faculties are as rusty as my cog-powered cock, this is a genuinely brilliant, wide-ranging interview about McMillen’s latest. Go listen! Meanwhile, I’m going to have a little lie down. Bye!

So, that’s close to a week of Skyrim under our collective belts of minor loafing, which means we’re hitting Skyrim content saturation point. Or we will tomorrow, anyway. Maybe. In the meantime: what have you all been doing in Skyrim? I spotted Alec installed new poll software, which means I can have a go at doing a poll to find out! Yay. Actually, I mean I’d been planning to do a poll anyway, but was too confused by the poll plugin. Anyway… What have you spent the majority of your time doing in Skyrim? Vote below!
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Joystiq‘s crystal ball lit up earlier today with notification of a blog post by Runic bosslord Travis Baldree in which the man from Runic states that “a game of this scope up to the quality and polish level we want to achieve is going to take a little longer,” and also: “We’ve probably had 18 months of full development time on it so far – not excessively long yet, as far as that goes. The amount of time we need to take it the rest of the way is relatively small.” Basically, it’s not going to hit in 2011 as expected.

“Besides, you’re all playing Skyrim right now anyway, aren’t you?” observes the astute Mr Baldree. Why yes, I am. I just saw a giant totally bat a wolf up the side of a mountain! Awesome.

Aka ‘Dragonbotherer’ aka, ‘Biff the magic dragon (in the face)’.

I feel that I achieved an awful lot in the three and half days I had to review Skyrim (as documented here and here, but at the same time there was far more I just didn’t have the time see/fight. Foremost of those was the main plot, with my long and happy experience with earlier Elder Scroll games having me convinced that the best course of action to get an accurate sense of the game was to immediately go off-piste and do my own thing. That is, I maintain, the real reason people take to Elder Scrollses, and particularly why they end up playing them for hundreds of hours, until their wives leave them, their abandoned children miserably grow into psychopathic adults and their pets die of love-starvation.

While it was always my intention to tackle the whole dragonborn thing afterwards, there has been… let’s call it ‘debate’ within the towering obsidian walls of Castle Shotgun about whether I’d done the right thing or not. Well, now I’m a decent way through the campaign, my game-world is littered with sky-lizards and everything that crosses me is getting a good old shouting at: so, is this the one true Skyrim experience?
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“Rockstar – forever counting down to the next trailer”, observes our Adam wryly. Indeed, this does appear to be their current MO – declaring a trailer’s arrival in advance, and hoping to cause internet frenzy during the wait. So, this one, which I believe is our first substantial look at the game in action, will unlock at 5pm UK time. I’ll leave it below for you – feel free to spend the next 15 minutes staring at a black box, or why not go and have a jog or plant a tree in the meantime? This four minutes of narrative video is, by the way, billed as “a first look at the targeting mechanics, movement and animation, enemy intelligence and other technical design innovations going into building an advanced, intense and immersive action-shooter with Max Payne 3.”

Hands up who’s hot for targeting mechanics?
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Good Old Games have certainly built themselves a brand. Over the last few years the Polish project has leapt forward from offering a few provincial classics to a really impressive catalogue of games that made the 90s and early 00s interesting. Clearly they’ve been letting in many more recent games of late, with Fahrenheit appearing last week for example. And they used it to launch their own game, The Witcher 2, earlier this year. But it seems they want to expand even further, going directly into competition with the likes of Steam, Impulse, GamersGate or Origin. Which is always a bold step, but one made much more interesting when you consider their DRM-free requirement.

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I don’t know what kind of Thursday you’re having, but I’m having one that sounds like the sigh an old armchair makes when you sit in it, like exasperation is too much effort, and instead deflating despondency is all that can be enunciated. And then I found this.

Bach makes everything better, as I think we can all agree (no matter what the World Health Organisation keeps telling my clients), so Baroque.me‘s distraction in a website form soothes all ailments. It’s a remarkable little thing in which white circles pluck at ever-changing-in-length strings to produce baroque heavenliness. Why am I mentioning it on a so-called gaming site? Well, you can interact with those white balls, messing with their pathways, to influence the music. And interaction means game, and game means post.

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I don’t know how one would ‘hip’ but I’ve made it into a verb and there’s nothing that can be done about that now. Sideway New York is a platforming game with an urban aesthetic, by which I don’t just mean that it’s set in a city, I mean that it contains hip hop music and graffiti. The characters are two dimensional but the world is not, as seen in the trailer here. I don’t know how well it works because I haven’t played it yet, but you can! There is a demo available on Steam and if you enjoy that, the full version will only set you back £5.94.
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So far today we’ve had news from a better world, investigative journalism and egg-robbing retro action. It’s probably time for an RPGmaker game that combines Gameboy stylings with a FOREBODING JOURNEY INTO THE DARK HEART OF MAN (my caps – my entire phrase in fact). I don’t want to give too much away and you can play through the entire thing in less than an hour, so if you fancy a go at the strangest fetch quest you’ll play today, grab Wither here and meet me below the break afterwards. I’ll be waiting. If you get frustrated at any point, heed this advice: no need to run around clicking on everything, there’s always a clue.

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I worked on a PC hardware magazine for years, and found myself as caught up in the bitter CPU and GPU wars that characterise that industry as much as the next man who cares a little bit too much about expensive circuitry, but even so I’ve never really fancied a multi-card system via NVIDIA SLI or ATI Crossfire. The noise, the expense, the technical potholes…

However, between Rage, Battlefield 3 and Skyrim (particularly the latter, wanting to try out all of the settings tweaks and mods to max it out), for the first time I’m thinking about doing it. I’ve got a GeForce 560 (non-Ti) which more than holds its own, but there are usually a few bells and whistles I need to turn off if I want a solid frame-rate at 1920×1200. The expense of higher-end cards is extreme, but for around £120-50 I could pick up another 560. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. But have you ever dabbled in the dark art of multi-card systems? And was it worth it?
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