Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Bargain King Lewie Procter alerts me to new that the new owners of Half-Life mod-gone-pro The Ship are offering a Christmas present to existing owners of the comedy assassination game. And yes, they do openly admit it’s also “a transparent attempt at some shameless marketing”, which makes it an even easier pill to swallow. Basically, if you’ve bought (or decide to buy) The Ship at any point between its release in 2006 and the end of the current Steam Winter sale, you’ll be gifted two bonus copies of the game to give to anyone of your choosing. If they then activate it, they too get a free bonus key to giftify to someone else. It’s like a chain letter, but with activation keys for an agreeable multiplayer videogame about silently murdering toffs on a 1920s cruise liner.
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RPS is probably the most visited website on the internet, knocking Google and YouTube into an embarrassing runner-up position. I don’t have accurate data, but it was.

Meanwhile, we’ve just received an email letting us know that Techland’s Tomasz Gawlikowski says, “Dead Island is probably the best selling new IP in this year”.

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Because it’s a download. I mean I guess maybe that is still physical in some sense. It is a configuration of atoms on hard-drives… This is a rubbish line of thinking. Look over there, a free thing! It’s out and free, says Battlefieldblog. It’s new guns, as trailered below. So are you Battlefield 3 purchasers still playing Battlefield 3? Or has the lustre worn off?
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Yes, it’s one of those things where they add stuff to a game for free! We used to call them patches, but now we call them free DLC, at least when they have content and not just fixes in. A subtle distinction, don’t you think? Anyway, Dungeon Defenders, the excellent FPS tower defence, is getting one of them. Actually I read wrong, it has got one, RIGHT NOW. It includes four new skins for the Apprentice, Monk, Squire and Huntress, new “holiday-themed weapons” and a “mission where you must deliver Christmas presents to random locations and defend them, ending in an epic boss fight with the evil Mega Snowman!”

Woo! Ludicrously colorful trailer featuring said snowman below.
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So that one might live, another must die. And so it was that Star Wars Galaxies went the way of Mark Hamill’s leading man status last week, having been ushered out of existence by the dark forces of licensing in order to make way for The Old Republic. We’ve already posted news of the closure, but it’s well worth having a look at the below player videos of its final moments. As well as all the epic space battle stuff, the death of an online world makes for a strange, and sad affair, where the evident outpouring of emotion is so often hampered massively by the constraints of the game. Yet for all that the stiff animations and looped emotes somehow make these farewells all the more poignant.

Also: watch Luke Skywalker get murdered by Ron Burgundy.
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We at RPS know what it’s like to be too popular. Unable to walk from our Limousines to the exclusive clubs and restaurants we frequent without being assaulted by mobs of screaming, frantic fans, we completely understand the challenge it offers. And BioWare/EA are discovering the same with Star Wars: The Old Republic. The queues: they are long.

Which is a bit of a shame in your first week. With queues for servers sometimes stretching to over two hours, it is a bit offputting. And BioWare are warning it’s not going to get better soon.

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Well goodness crikey, Skyrim seems to have snuck out a micro-patch. Running the game tonight an odd thing was happening – important texts from bodies were automagically opening when I looted, rather than waiting for me to pick them up and dig them out of the inventory. A change! I cried at the screen, and checked the version number. It’s now 1.3.10.0, and it seems there’s a bigger reason for the update: the game now supports 4GB of RAM.

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If you can’t or won’t afford The Old Republic but are grumpily hanging around comments threads wishing you too were off on online adventures, it’s worth remembering that exactly 312,129 MMOs have now gone free to play. No lightsabers, but also no queues. One of the more recent of these is Everquest II, the at-the-time ambitious fantasy world that’s probably slightly annoyed that its precusor still co-exists alongside it. Below is a narrated video tour of some of the new stuff in the free to play to play update, the Age of Discovery expansion, the new class Beastlords, a dungeon designer tool and a major overhaul of key city Freeport. This is actually my first peek at the game in quite some time – it’s really quite pretty, in a slightly austere way.
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There’s been another MMO launch today, sort of. The ‘open preview’ of Doctor Who: Worlds In Time can now be played over here. With The Old Republic now available, it would be fun if this was turned into a clash between widely loved sci-fi franchises but that is not to be. The two games are as different as two games can be, unless one were hopscotch and the other were the clash of Empires that was The Great Game of the nineteenth century. Doctor Who: WIT, you see, appears to be in the same mould as Three Rings’ previous title Puzzle Pirates. There’s a Doctor to dish out missions, themed puzzles and a bunch of familiar worlds to investigate. Could be fun. Sign up here, watch trailer below.

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