Rock, Paper, Shotgun

In today’s game news from another universe: Modern Warfare’s sensitive depiction of the banality of combat has prompted the Pulitzer committee to add a video games category. Half-Life 3′s midnight launch also brought with it Steam 2. And APB, the most populated and well-received action-MMO of its generation, spawning a cultural revolution and raising gaming to the highest artform, has a sister game in production: the action multiplayer shooter known as APB Vendetta.
Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a strange sight, seeing APB back on Steam, a year after it went away. Of course this is the new version, brought back to life by K2 Networks, reinvented as a free-to-play game. Which as of today can now be played-for-free via Steam. So, you gonna?

And here’s a sweet thing – the image above is captured from the new version of the game’s opening video. Is it sweet? Or is it slightly creepy? I can’t decide. Cheers Craig.

Oh, this spate of live action trailers the world is currently suffering from will surely end soon? Beyond giving the message, “we don’t think our in-game graphics are impressive”, I’m not sure what else they’re supposed to convey. But fortunately, this latest for APB Reloaded does occasionally switch to in-game footage. Which, of course, ends up looking (slightly) unfairly lame having just been watching its real-world equivalent shot on high-def film.

Read the rest of this entry »

APB Reloaded‘s delayed open beta is set to go live at 1400hrs UK time. It’s going to be interesting to see what changes GamersFirst have made in their efforts to reboot the dead MMOFPS as a free-to-play title, and they’re keen to stress they’re very much regarding this as a beta, despite the game having launched once before. Interestingly, the company has taken on Dave Jones (GTA mastermind, and the mind behind APB in the first place) as an advisor to the project. Make of that what you will.

Ah, APB. That most ill-fated of games. What shall become of you? Well, we will soon be able to have a better idea, thanks to being able to get our hands on GamersFirst’s free-to-play reboot of the game. The open beta kicks off on May 18th, and I suspect a fair few people will be popping by to see whether the new owners have managed to deal with the game’s various problems. What’s also fascinating is the openness with which the APB Reloaded blog has been dealing with things like cheating. Take a look at the section on cheating in that last post, for example: “We have ON PURPOSE not kicked hackers for over a week to monitor what they are doing. That clearly will change. One semi-famous aimbot site realized that we had caught a slew of their users over the weekend (though we did so silently), then they stopped their own hack, and then earlier today re-enabled it. Sigh… when will they ever learn.”

And so on.

We’ve got some codes if you want to get into the final days of the APB closed beta. But there’s a limited number of them! So it’s going to be a race to see who can email in to here with a good reason as to why you should get a code. Don’t change the subject line. I’ll update when they’re all gone.

If you want to keep up with the progress of the free-to-play APB remake, then you could do no worse than to keep your eye on this blog. Go! Go! GoooOOOoooo!

So APB Reloaded is now going into its second week of beta, and the APB Reloaded blog has a full breakdown of what took place during the first week. If only all beta-tests were so transparently documented! The team have also released a trailer for the game, which is currently undergoing lots of tweaking for both balance and performance. The trailer shows a car-chase, and it looks like the APB we knew and were indifferent toward. Nevertheless I am still fascinated to see whether this free-to-play company is going to get the game right after its multi-million dollar catastrophe. The closed beta sign ups are done, but there’s a newsletter here if you want to keep an eye out for further developments.
Read the rest of this entry »

And now, some guns! GamersFirst have released the first few screenshots of APB Reloaded, their upcoming free-to-play reboot of Realtime Worlds’ cops’n'robber MMOG. There are four of these shots, all showing a man enjoying a day out with his gun. The screenshots accompany a long blog post from designer Zak Littwin (previously the QA Lead at Realtime Worlds) detailing just some of the changes coming in the game. Not convinced? You might be after you read the quotes I’ve pulled from the post below.
Read the rest of this entry »

The APB: Reloaded blog has come up with some details about how to join the closed beta. Sign up and create a GamersFirst account is the first step, but later there’s information and DxDiag and things. They’re just warning you that it’s going to get involved, or something. Apparently 20,000 people have already registered, which sounds like a decent number, but I wonder how many of you lot will? How many of you want to go back? How many of you feel excited that this game is relaunching? I have some hopes that GamersFirst will be able to fix some elements of what made APB wonky, but it’s tough to know if they can really make the big changes that would bring the game into the state it should have been at launch.

That said, if it’s eventually going to be free to play, we’ll all end up having another look, won’t we?