By RPS on March 24th, 2012 at 12:08 pm.
It’s a weekend, it’s sunny, and that means you should stay indoors playing videogames. Or reading about videogames. Either really, just stay indoors no matter what. Another way you could do that is by entering our competition to win an Alienware M11X R3 gaming laptop, courtesy of the men of war at The Creative Assembly. They’ve just this week released expandalone Total War: Shogun 2 – Fall of the Samurai, which moves the setting 400 years on from the original game and brings semi-modern weaponry as well as America, Britain and France into the fray, and they’d jolly well like to celebrate it by giving one RPS reader one of these 11″ ultraportable gaming notebooks. It comes equipped with an Intel Core i5 brain, 4GB of remembering power and GeForce GT 540M graphicsability. Four runners-up can have a Steam key for a Total War game of their choice.
To enter, we want lovely (or brutal) pictures from you. The Samurai, Shogun and their similarly legendary chums/foes were all about nobility and honour, so it’s your job to provide an authentic screenshot from either Total War: Shogun 2 or Fall of the Samurai in which honourable units are behaving as dishonourably as possible. That’s the overview brief – the execution is up to you. We’ll pick a winner at random, but have a good old giggle/sneer in the process. If you don’t own either game, you can grab a demo of Shogun 2 from Steam for no-pennies.
Ensure your screenshot is less than 200 kilobytes in size (or our poor inbox will weep), and mail it here before 6pm Central European Time on Tuesday 27 March. This is a worldwide competition, by the way. Hooray!
Usual rules apply. Here’s a trailer to put you in the mood for WAR.
24/03/2012 at 12:27 ColOfNature says:
I don’t have either of those games. Maybe a local purveyor of such things could be conned into ronin me a copy for the weekend.
24/03/2012 at 12:32 JB says:
They’re naginata just lend it to you, you’ll have to rent it at least.
24/03/2012 at 15:45 Coccyx says:
I’m not that interested, most of my Shogun games are lost in the first few turns to my enemy – game set and match(lock)
24/03/2012 at 12:34 Navagon says:
There’s a Daimyo on Steam you can try.
24/03/2012 at 12:51 The Hammer says:
Just be wary. I’ve heard of scams in the past that Tokyo Steam account details.
24/03/2012 at 14:32 Navagon says:
I find it difficult to give you a samurai of my opinions on that.
24/03/2012 at 15:18 Fumarole says:
I katana wait to play this.
24/03/2012 at 13:30 awickedone says:
Make sure you bring an obnoxious camera, and while trying to convince the proprietor take photos as he/she gets more and more frustrated, this will ensure he/she even angrier. Until the point you get thrown out, or you convince him/her to give you the game, either way you will have an entry into the competition, just make sure the box of the game is in the pictures of the proprietor.
24/03/2012 at 13:35 Quasar says:
I think the joke went right Hokkaido-ver your head.
24/03/2012 at 14:23 awickedone says:
Maybe… or maybe I didn’t want to continue the joke that two other people have and wanted to create another side track conversation by taking his comment from another viewpoint, but I see that alternate paths get bombed just as hard as Nagasaki.
25/03/2012 at 17:46 yurusei says:
Geisha self a copy, You’re Shogunate love it eventually.
24/03/2012 at 12:32 Navagon says:
Yay! I’ll see what dishonourable shenanigans I can instigate right away!
24/03/2012 at 12:32 jimmm25 says:
They picked a great time to have a competition, just when they release a 5GB patch for the game which means I cant run the game to take a screenshot until it is downloaded!
24/03/2012 at 12:52 brulleks says:
Hang on – the runner up prize is Steam keys of any Total War game, and yet the competition requires the latest Total War game to enter?
24/03/2012 at 12:56 razgon says:
Yeah, I fnd the competition a bit…strange in that regard?
24/03/2012 at 12:59 AmateurScience says:
Deeeeeeeeeemmmmmmmmmmoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo:
http://store.steampowered.com/app/201270/
24/03/2012 at 13:07 Mr.Luke says:
“so it’s your job to provide an authentic screenshot from either Total War: Shogun 2 OR Fall of the Samurai” :P
24/03/2012 at 13:08 Navagon says:
It seems it’s pretty much exclusively for people who haven’t bought Fall of the Samuri yet.
24/03/2012 at 13:39 JB says:
Or people who would like to win one of the other Total War games, of course.
24/03/2012 at 14:35 Navagon says:
Anyone who doesn’t own those, even after the stupidly cheap prices they’ve been sold at, simply isn’t interested in them. Fall is the only one that hasn’t been sold at a cheap as chips price.
24/03/2012 at 14:42 Unaco says:
Or, they missed those super cheap sales. Or, they didn’t know about those games and are interested in them now, since finding out about them. Or, they took a blow to the head in Summer of ’85 and have been in a coma since then, awakening a few months ago to a strange world with these new fangled vidya games. Or they’d be happy to get Napoleon or Medieval 2 if it were for free. Or, they have FotS, and it’s their first TW game, and they’d like to check out what the fuss is about previous games, like Shogun 2. Or… or… or…
There are plenty of reasons why this isn’t just open to people who want FotS.
24/03/2012 at 13:23 AgamemnonV2 says:
I was excited until…
“…so it’s your job to provide an authentic screenshot from either Total War: Shogun 2 or Fall of the Samurai…”
I own every other Creative Assembly game except Shogun 2 because the graphical requirements are ridiculous if I want to play it on anything but “Final Fantasy VII graphics look better than what I’m looking at now” settings.
How nice of them to offer a laptop I could actually play Shogun 2 on. : \
24/03/2012 at 13:31 awickedone says:
Maybe a picture of the horrible graphics will get you a pity win, you never know…
24/03/2012 at 13:27 Syra says:
The lols of a giveaway for a game which requires you to have the game.
Also known as marketing trick.
24/03/2012 at 13:41 Unaco says:
The lols of someone who didn’t read the article… Prizes are the Netbook/Laptop systems, and runners up get Steam keys to any Total War game they desire. And you can enter with screens from Shogun 2 or Fall of the Samurai. And there’s a Demo for each on Steam.
24/03/2012 at 13:37 Dana says:
Yo dawg, I heard you like Fall of the Samurai, so we made a contest where you can win Fall of the Samurai, so you can Fall of Samurai while you Fall of Samurai.
24/03/2012 at 14:06 chunkynut says:
So … none of the people here with problems with the competition have any friends they would like to gift them to?
And I can’t imagine that a demo screenshot would be a problem.
24/03/2012 at 14:23 wodin says:
Sadly don’t own any of the games needed. Though I’ve never won anything in my life. I doubt it would change even if I did have the games and tried for it.
24/03/2012 at 14:33 Navagon says:
“Sadly don’t own any of the games needed.”
DemoDemoDemoDemoDemoDemoSteam
24/03/2012 at 14:48 MistyMike says:
The Last Samurai was in 2003. Isn’t 2012 a little late to ape that idea?
24/03/2012 at 15:08 JB says:
ook*
(*translated from ape – “No”)
24/03/2012 at 15:20 MistyMike says:
Ook ooka oo oo oouk ba-ooka!
(translation: “No, really. The gatling-gun-vs-samurai scene was purely symbolic. Here the devs try to read it literally and make it into a tactical conundrum. That’s very not-apelike.”)
25/03/2012 at 00:27 Andrew Dunn says:
It’s hardly as if The Last Samurai was high art that should never be tainted by portraying a similar situation in a game.
Anyway, they might be pushing the OLD VERSUS new angle pretty hard in the marketing but having played a full campaign of Fall of the Samurai now and modernising the hell out of my infrastructure and army, I’d say that 90% of my battles were against similarly modernised troops. The only time I had a Gatling gun massacre of traditionalists fighting in a 16th century fashion was a late-game samurai rebellion in my province, and it’s not really a ‘tactical conundrum’. Gatling guns are only available very late in the day, they’re expensive to train and maintain, and they’re extremely potent whether against samurai or rifle-armed line infantry. They’re the game-changer that they should be regardless of whether they’re used on traditionalists or modernisers.
That said, I’ve now started a game as a faction specifically geared to being traditionalists and it’s a much harder thing. Someone has to take those first volleys so I’m finding that I need spear levies as rifle fodder to soak up the damage so my better troops can close in. Even traditionalists find themselves having to modernise somewhat to compete, though – there’s a balancing act to be had.
25/03/2012 at 06:57 nearly says:
The Last Samurai came 23 years after Kagemusha. Do you mean it’s too late to use thematically similar materials, or not long enough?
26/03/2012 at 00:46 Cinnamon says:
But Kagemusha was genuinely good, not a piece of over hyped trash that comes with a sell by date.
26/03/2012 at 01:12 nearly says:
Over hyped? Over hyped?! It had Tom Cruise in it! Those two things do not go together.
24/03/2012 at 15:47 Coccyx says:
Is there a limit on the number of entries per person? I’m having a hard time choosing.
24/03/2012 at 15:52 Jim9137 says:
No! :D
24/03/2012 at 17:30 SkittleDiddler says:
Smallest size screenshot I could get was 600Kb, so I had to shrink the one I sent in for the contest and as a result it’s been emasculated. I hope the people looking at it don’t make too much fun of me.
24/03/2012 at 18:28 linzhanag says:
http://t.cn/zO6SMbH
24/03/2012 at 20:40 ezekiel2517 says:
I don’t want to download the whole 20gb of Shogun 2 again. Shame.
24/03/2012 at 22:23 Erik Aurum says:
Oh look, a chance to win a good laptop in which I can play recent games that will otherwise melt my outdated PC.
Let’s see what’s required to enter this competition…
Oh
24/03/2012 at 23:13 acenck says:
What a great oppurtunity to get back into PC gaming, I thought, seeing as my PC died a while back. Oh, I need a PC to enter – but like I said, that poor bastard’s dead.
Oh well. I wish the best to the winner.
25/03/2012 at 02:09 Bitrayahl says:
Given the current state of my PC, this screenshot will look like its from a gameboy.
“We’ll pick a winner at random…”
Oh, then I have a shot!
25/03/2012 at 17:40 linzhanah says:
http://ppt.cc/9iT1
26/03/2012 at 11:39 nihor says:
How many screenies can we send? Just one?
27/03/2012 at 07:39 RUN msdos.exe -DMC says:
I’d just like to mention the irony of sending in a screenshot to win a beefy rig but needing a decently specc’d rig to win it. Integrated laptop GPUs with shared memory. Yay!
28/03/2012 at 22:37 fionny says:
Any word on a winner?
01/04/2012 at 01:15 Coccyx says:
Any word? ANY WORD AT ALL?