Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Look at them! So lovely. Fluttering their big eyes in my direction. I would kiss them all. Failing that, I will blast the sparking guts out of robots on them. Same thing, really. Hawken‘s latest map is called Facility, which seems like a very pretty name for a really outstandingly handsome death-arena. Sigh. Such beauty. Harvesting floating rock minerals like a Greek god. Mmm.

This latest update also includes a bunch of minor changes, which can only add to Hawken’s eligibility on the dating circuit.
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It’s cold outside. Holiday vacation hasn’t started yet. The world might end soon. These are all equally pressing issues, but fortunately, I think I’ve got a solution that wraps them up in a nice, holiday-friendly bow: giant robots. Think about it: they’re naturally warm, have no concept of “work,” and will probably be the reason our race of overly argumentative organ pods goes extinct anyway. Win-win-win. Also, Hawken just went into open beta. It’s really great, so it’ll probably help you feel better about the sorry state of your life and stuff. But mainly those other things.

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Hello, you. The Hawken beta gets into full swing today, and I think you might want a key, because it’s looking rather good. Fortunately for us, Meteor have provided an RPS “superkey” with ten thousand uses. That means the first ten thousand of you to enter it into the Hawken site will get your eager paws on the controls of a robot today. Get going!

The key, instructions, and a trailer, are below.
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“Do we have keys for that?”
“Dunno.”

Games journalism IN ACTION. This was our response to news that much anticipated F2PFPSMechMMO Hawken is to squeeze in a second round of closed beta in a mere three days time, ahead of an open beta in mid-December. We’d, uh, better try and get ourselves on that. TO THE SENDING AN EMAIL CAVE!
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With the Hawken closed beta kicking off this weekend, Adhesive have put out a couple of videos explaining the basics of their jet-packin’ robo-combat for beginners, which I suppose will be all of us. They show some tips about the garage, where robots are armed, tweaked, and deployed to the battlfield. Then there’s some explanation of how to not to die too horribly once you’re out there. All that means plenty of game footage, as you’d expect.

We’ll be giving away keys for a later round of the beta really soon, so keep an eye out for that.
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Jump-jets and chainguns are going to be tested to their limit between October 26th-29th as Hawken throws itself into the oily maelstrom of closed beta testing. The sign-up thingum is here. At some point thereafter there will be an open beta, I believe, before the game of robot-combat becomes a fully-fledged free-to-play affair. If you need reasons to be excited about all this then I’d recommend having a read of Adam’s Hands On experience with the game, and watching this game footage.

Entirely unrelated Daft Punk track posted below.
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Hawken is one of those things I get visibly excited about when I describe it to people. I flail and gesture wildly such that no glass of water or small, desk-adorning cactus within a 100 meter radius is safe. Somewhat coincidentally, that’s almost exactly what happens when I teleport my brain into Palmer Luckey’s mad virtual reality fantasy realm with Oculus Rift – only, you know, for entirely different yet equally devastating reasons. So I suppose it only makes sense that the two literal home-wreckers would end up walking down the aisle hand-in-hand.

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Ah yes, escalation. One game gets a live-action trailer, then all the games get live-action trailers. And now, Hawken‘s taking things to new heights with its very own live-action series – a series being headed up by Warner Bros, no less. And it stars Edi Gathegi, who’s played major roles on everything from House to X-Men: First Class. It’s set to kick off in 2013, but the first trailer – which, if it were really staying true to the logic of these things, would only come in the form of a paperback novel – is now available for your viewing… pleasure?

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As it stands, Hawken is the story of a few robots shooting a few other robots. Perhaps there’s subtext and pentameter and denouements underneath it all, but right now, this is far from the Black Swan of artfully destructive mecha-ballets – let alone the Nutcracker. A recent live-action trailer, however, suggested that – for probably the first time in history – there’s more than meets the eye to robots. And, if the folks at Adhesive Games have it their way, there’ll be even more where that came from.

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