Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The internet moved at especially frightening speed this evening, with a tale that 007 Blood Stone/Blur/The Club/Geometry Wars/Project Gotham developer Bizarre Creations was allegedly to lose staff or even close its doors slamming from 0mph Twitter rumour to 100mph damning Activision statement within 90 minutes.

Online chatter’s divided into roughly two camps. 1) Owners Activision are greedy so-and-sos who have no right and far too much to money to do this 2) Bizarre have been churning out duds in recent years and this is only logical.
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James Bond: Blood Stone seems to have rather sneaked up on us. Perhaps it’s going to shoot us with a silenced pistol. It’s out in only two days, and to commemorate this, there’s a launch trailer. It can be watched, with either or both eyes, below.

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What is going to happen to Bond? With the films on hiatus it seems all we really have to look forward to from the smooth agent is a Daniel Craig facsimile doing his “the Bourne Movies were quite good” routine in a tux. It’s a shame. It’s not that Blood Stone looks particularly bad, as you can see from the trailer below, it’s just that, well, I was watching Roger Moore and Christopher Walken ham about in A View To A Kill last night, and I couldn’t help feeling that Bond might be wandering too far from what made it great. Without humour, we are getting just another action movie, and without the classic billionaire-genius villains, well, what’s the point in deploying Britain’s greatest espionage asset? It wasn’t like this in my day. I remember when all this was green fields. These steamships are ruining everything.

In-game footage aplenty, below.
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So, while the Bond movie languishes in limbo, Activision have confirmed that the other new Bond game is called James Bond 007: Blood Stone. It’s being developed by Bizarre Creations, and will feature fancy cover-based shooting, hand-to-hand fisticuffs, chatting to sexy ladies, automotive racing sequences, and the voices of Daniel Craig, Joss Stone, and Judi Dench. There’s a reveal video up, which I’ve posted below. No release date yet.
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Hmm, Bizarre Creations do rather seem hyped-up about their new racer, Blur, which features a kind of real world street-racing system with science-fictional power-ups. In this trailer they explain some of effects, such as a “shunt” energy ram (aka red turtle shell?), a nitro, and an EMP blast. All these allow players to have more influence on the outcome of the race than mere driving skills would allow. Anyway, go take a look.
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You know I’d forgotten about Blur, actually, and I’d skipped a lot of the initial bout of excitement over the game. Seems it is still Windows-bound, however, with a rough “end of 2009″ release date, and so we’re eventually going to get a taste of Bizarre Creations “power-up, power-up, power-up” philosophy for their hyperbolic new racing game. They’ve stuck some of their developer types in front of a camera to talk about it, and mixed that with some in-game footage, all funkily edited up, of course. It’s looking rather… colourful.
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The full trailer for Bizarre Creations’ (Project Gotham Racing, Geometry Wars) new racer is up – and it’s real-world cars with fantastical power-ups. I saw Blur a little while back, and asked if there was any in-fiction explanation for these powers. They claimed not, all their attempts to dream one up having proved too ridiculous. I know I’m happy to just take it in my stride: magic cars are magic cars.
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We’ve been trying to work out a way to do something a little more like reviews on RPS for a while, without actually doing anything as boring as that. We’ve come up with this: The RPS Verdict. The idea is simple. We take a recently released game that most of us have played and just have a little chat about it. Those who haven’t played it act like an interested party, asking whatever questions come to mind. Then, at the end, we pose a single question to the panel: Would you buy it? Also, add jokes to season, as is our wont, and lob up here.

We thought we’d start this new tradition with the recently-released shooter, The Club.

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Martin Lee drops us a line to tell us that the demo for Bizarre Creations the shooter is out, and is “many Peggles” in size. In fact, as a blogging professional, I can reveal it’s actually 124 Peggles in size. In fact, it’s so big that the RPS-towers bandwidth pipe visibly vented its bowels when we even considered downloading the thing. Poor thing.

If you don’t know what makes this Shooter-as-redesigned-as-racing-game interesting, Jim talked a little about the Club earlier this week. Hurrah for Jim!

The much-hyped shooter by racing game masters Bizarre Creations is out on Friday. It’s a gun game with a difference: the action is a little closer to fighting games or racing games than your traditional kill ‘em up. The Club is where the hi-score table is what matters, and your ability to get flick headshots dominates everything else. It’s a little closer to the arcade cabinet rail shooter than your traditional third-person shooter, and it throws a bunch of different characters and challenges at you, like a fighting game, rather than any kind of story or campaign. These short gunfight are about getting a continuous stream of headshots, flick-shots, and combat-roll-to-headshots to pump up your score multiplier. The more consistently you kill, the higher you’ll rank on the score tables of The Club.

Past the jump: a developer video and the RPS opinion on The Club.
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