Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It’s official – I can no longer tell the difference between fan film trailers and Hollywood trailers. The extraordinary snippet of film below is a teaser for a soon-to-be-released fan movie of Left 4 Dead. But I challenge you to spot the joins here. I mean, unless they’ve a person stood on someone else’s shoulders, holding a third man upside down by his trouser legs, it seems like they have a crane. Are you still a fan film if you’ve got a crane? Surely you’re just a film at that point? In other words: wow.

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Actually, if I am honest, it’s quite a boring award, what with it being Best Project 2012 at games industry networking event, Game Connection, which was taking place in Paris this week. But that’s not to say it’s not worthwhile – indeed, it nudged me into posting two lovely trailers for the action platformer, Tink, which you can see below. The absurdly-named developers Mimimi say of the game: “Tink is a 3D action adventure game set in Tinkerworld, where everything can be built from basic materials as long as the idea behind it is strong enough. Cities, forests, mountains and seas are crafted from nothing more than color, paper and glue.” Which sounds a lot like how we made RPS! Anyway, the game looks exquisitely lovely, and might actually be the most colourful game ever made. Seems like that’s deliberate.

Tink is apparently destined for Steam sometime next year, if Mimimi can raise the money they need. I suspect they will.
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Terry Cavanagh’s extraordinary first-person co-op puzzle game, At A Distance, is now available to download for free. You’ll need two networked PCs side by side to play it with a friend or helpful acquaintance. I played it with an Alec, as you can read here. We found it to be something quite special, demanding both considered co-operation, spatial thinking, lateral thinking, inside-out thinking, and boiled thinking, fresh from the pot. It’s remarkably atmospheric, too, and goes a long to way towards showing how minimal first-person visuals can be, while still telling you everything you need to know.

Side-scrolling procedurally-generated post-apocalyptic magical adventure thing A Valley Without Wind has entered a multiplayer testing phase, which is available to pre-ordering types. Arcen say: “For those interested in opting into co-operative play in the same server/world with up to a few dozen other players (perhaps even more), head over to the AVWW multiplayer wiki and check out the FAQ section along with other related notes, specs, and such.” There’s a big old post from Chris Park (as is his style) explaining more over here.

If you’re one of the lucky ones able to access your Origin account, and you’ve pre-ordered The Old Republic, you’ll be pleased to learn you’re going to get access to it a week early. Which is in five days! Five days! Coo lummee – it feels like this game’s been in development for over a thousand years. I’ve certainly been to a thousand preview events. And it’s any pre-order that gets you early access, not just one of the fancy special editions. You also get 30 days of “free” play (I love the idea that it’s free, after you’ve just spent £30 on the game), before the tithing begins at £9 a month (with discounts for buying in lumps).

“NEW: INSTANT ADVENTURE! Just add a handful of players and taste piping hot fantasy action, just like momma used to make.” Something like that. Well, actually Trion Worlds don’t really explain it like that, as you can see in their dev diary, below. They do, however, explain that the new Action On Demand stuff will allow you to drop in and drop out seamlessly, without causing your group any issues in their progress: “The new “Instant Adventure” button teleports players to Stillmoor or Shimmersand where challenges scaled to party size await. One minute you could be purging a nest of cultists with a small group … the next you’re fighting alongside dozens of players in a massive raid against the Blood Storm’s mightiest forces.” Sounds like there’s some clever maths involved! (Don’t forget to read Dan’s huge interview with the Rift team.)

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From this astonishingly boring website, it seems there is to be a GTR3. Which is a dull way of announcing good news. More details are hard to come by at this point, as SimBin – currently the only name attached – are maintaining “radio silence” on their forum. So we have just this obscure and tiresome site that seems to be loading something for two minutes, and then doesn’t. And nothing more. The developer of the first two GTRs, Blimey! Games, no longer exists. And the company that replaced it, Slightly Mad Studios, is working on Project CARS for 2013, after offering Shift 2 this year. So will this be developed internally at SimBin, without Ian Bell? We’ve no idea, because they’re being so peculiarly opaque.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of Gotham City Imposters, the upcoming Team Fortress but with Batmens and Multi-Jokers shooter, but I am very glad to see Monolith embracing the peculiar once again, after too many years of cheerless FEAR games. And here’s a neat way of promoting it too: a stylised, scrappy, wordless animated short showing off assorted ways for Team Bat to off Team Joker and vice-versa.
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Skyrim has received a rather hurried patch 1.3. How do I know this? Because my game of Skyrim just crashed to desktop for no given reason, and on trying to restart it, Steam’s patcher kicked in. Maybe it will fix random crashes to desktop?! It does offer “General stability improvements”, who coincidentally was a man I served under in the army in the 1940s. So have they addressed any of the litany of issues on everyone’s lists? Well, if the books not sitting correctly on the bookshelves was one of yours, then you’re a winner! If not, well, then maybe not so much.

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