Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The best part of Flare Path’s day? Probably dawn. That’s the time he goes out and checks all his Simulation & Wargame News traps. This morning in the treadle cage by the old pig-sties he found 400 words on a rather promising FSX add-on. The snares in the plantation were empty, but saucer-eyed and struggling in the one in the Chalk Lane culvert was the prettiest little HistWar: Les Grognards snippet you ever saw. Even without the Over Flanders Fields communiqué almost bitten in half by the 7” gin under the Cottonworth bridge, it would have been a good bag. Read the rest of this entry »

After playing XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Adam sat down with associate producer Pete Murray and asked him about some of the changes that have been made, as well as seeking clarification on a number of issues. Discussion of the chryssalids’ new look attracts the wrath of an unseen assailant, queries about base invasions lead to talk of balance and punishment, and an unhealthy interest is shown in the various ways that a soldier can bleed to death.

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When we asked Richard to take a look at Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, he started sniffling and claiming to have gone down with the T-Virus. Can this action-packed retelling of the series’ early years be the cure to what ails him, or just one more headache?

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As I’ve progressed further into The Secret World‘s beta, and have cleared most of New England’s enormous territory and swathes of quests, I’m hitting that more difficult place to write about in an MMO preview. That’s partly because you obviously don’t want to know what’s going to happen 30 hours into your game, and I’d be an idiot to say. And it’s partly because being a beta I’m increasingly hitting buggy territory and slightly unfinished missions, and it’s pretty bad form to write about that since it’ll likely be gone by release. (And if it’s not, it’ll certainly get written about then.) I mean, it’s hard not to want to tell you about the time I died so hard all my clothes and my hair fell off, and I spent the next hour streaking around in a tiny pair of pants, baldy-headed with my boobs out for all to see. But that’s unlikely to be a feature in the finished game. So of course everything I’m writing about here is subject to change.

So instead, I’ve thought of the big three things I think The Secret World is really getting right, and then put together a list three things I worry it could get wrong.

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My previous posts on Day Z have largely been about driving home the kind of situations it generates, but I want to step away from that to look a bit more close at the systems it uses, and why it creates such powerful responses in the people who play it.
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Really, there are only two things you need to know about Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion mastermind Ron Gilbert‘s The Cave: 1) It takes place inside a talking cave. 2) The cave is mysterious. And a bit sultry. “Welcome,” the Cave said as the demo began. “Don’t let my sultry and mysterious voice startle you.” Meanwhile, when asked about the titular magic rock formation’s overall role in the game’s proceedings, Gilbert chimed in: “He’s kinda mysterious. Sultry, too,”

OK, maybe there’s a bit more to it than that. Here are the basics: there are seven characters, each of whom has ventured to a time-and-space-transcending cave to “learn something about themselves and who they might become.” So yeah, Mr Cave (whose last name is hopefully not “Johnson” – that could get confusing) gets top billing, but this is a game first and foremost about those seven – with backgrounds ranging from Medieval knight to time-traveler. So you pick any three, descend into the depths of their respective madnesses (and, you know, a cave), and leap between them to advance through an interconnected Metroidvania-style world. Appearances, however, can be deceiving, so here’s the bit that should have you jumping for nostalgic joy: “It is an adventure game,” said Gilbert, quickly pocketing an entire bucket in-game. “You want to pick up everything you can.”

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RPS was recently in desperate need of somebody who knew a thing or two about Formula One, so they could cover Codemasters’ new browser-based management sim, F1 Online. And since my very favourite palindrome is ‘racecar’, they immediately thought of me. Here’s how I got on.
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Yesterday I shared my brief experiences with XCOM’s tactical mode, telling the tale of terrified men and women sent to their untimely deaths as I gleefully discovered that any confidence I had was misplaced. They sure did die a lot. I didn’t die with them though because I’m the commander, sitting in my base and commanding. The scariest thing I have to do in person is deal with the financials and the sinister Council who administer them, that and the occasional moral dilemma.

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Eerie Canal‘s Dreadline grabbed our attention last week. An RPG/RTS hybrid, from a five-person indie team made of former Irrational/Harmonix developers. That’s rather appealing. Even more so when you learn the game is about playing as a group of monsters who travel through time, killing humans during famous disasters. Wanting to find out more, and how they came to be working together, I spoke to three of the number, Bryn Bennett, Aaron DeMuth and Arthur Inasi, as well as prising out of them a couple of completely exclusive screenshots. Note that both are pre-alpha, and the UI is obviously temporary.

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According to The Elder Scrolls Online game director Matt Firor, the series’ online spin won’t be quite as social as expected. At least, not completely. “We have a whole part of the game that’s 100% solo, and that’s the main story,” he explains to an invisible interviewer in this Game Informer video. “Everything you do is solo and the world reacts to you that way.”

Isn’t it about time we just admitted this isn’t actually a good thing?

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Embarrassed kids are amusing. A parent or authority figure co-opts a line or two of their lingo, and they act like it’s the cataclysmic end of everything they hold dear as foretold in The Prophecy. It is, to them, a corruption – a barely recognizable remnant of something they once loved that’s been chewed up, spat out, and then obliterated by a fortuitously timed meteor. It’s interesting, then, to watch fully (or at least, mostly) grown adults react the same way any time social games come up.

And yet, while the parent/grandparent parallel still applies, there is some reason behind social gaming’s reprehensible reputation. The overwhelming majority of the titles that gum up Facebook’s works bombard users with requests and notifications while waging a rapidly escalating war on their wallets. Worse, calling them “social” is a major stretch, seeing as friends in Zynga’s “ville” games or even Funcom’s The Secret War are less people and more currency. It’s almost enough to make you wonder if all those “incredible gaming possibilities” Facebook proponents tout are even real. That in mind, I spoke with Brenda Brathwaite and John Romero – whose company Loot Drop just launched Ghost Recon: Commander - about how the modern age has shaped social games and whether or not they’re having a negative effect on the people who play them.

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