Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Today I come to you with a heavy heart and a higher-than-average tolerance for dick jokes. Bulletstorm – perhaps the manliest manshoot of them all, depending on how you measure these things – is officially dead. Apparently, People Can Fly’s cartoonishly profane murder symphony didn’t fly with Epic brass, so now Grayson Hunt is getting mad skillshots on angels. Somewhere, a giant remote-controlled dinosaur is shedding a single tear. Made of lasers. So then, what happened? Well, in what’s almost assuredly a first for a game company – nay, the whole of humankind – Epic’s Mike Capps partly blamed PC piracy.

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This kind of thing just scares the hell out of me. While Bulletstorm isn’t exactly the kind of game I’m going to put on a pedestal and hail as the one true future of electronic entertainment, it was a new franchise, a rare shooter that didn’t take itself deathly seriously, a good-looker and a game that at least attempted a few bonus ideas. It did a lot of things right, and it was clearly having a great time in the process. Yet it didn’t turn a profit for devs People Can Fly and Epic.
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Did you like Bulletstorm? Did you enjoy the multiplayer modes? So did I! I can’t imagine anybody’s still playing them, but that’s for Epic and not me to decide. They’ve just released the Gun Sonata DLC pack, offering three new maps for Anarchy, the game’s arena co-op point-scoring mode, and two new maps for Echo, the game’s corridor-shooter point-scoring mode. For this they are charging ten American dollars, which is a number that is a little more than nine dollars, but significantly less than twelve dollars.

I think I need another mug of tea. Press release after the jump.
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I am as outraged as a man who hasn’t yet felt the effects of his morning tea can be. Which is to say I look the same but I’m typing marginally harder.

I spotted over at PC Gamer that Epic have released the Bulletstorm soundtrack for free. Kind of them, no? You can download it here. Except I’ve just discovered the hard way (clicking through every track in sequence) that it features everything except the Disco Inferno cover that plays when you get to the club, which is to say they left out the one track everyone remembers. Epic have dropped the ball right onto our collective face. If you haven’t played Bulletstorm, you can watch the part I’m talking about below.
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Better late than never? Bulletstorm has finally released its PC demo, which is perhaps a tad late to make up for the bad blood over its previous cancellation, but presumably still within plenty of time to convince the doubters to take a look. Quintin loved it when he reviewed it, and Kieron, Quintin and I had a good old chat about it here. You can download the demo RIGHT NOW from Steam or apparently on GFWL, but I got fed up of their ghastly website when trying to find it.

With John literally ten minutes from the end of the game, Kieron having completed it, and Quintin having reviewed it, it was decided that a gathering of the Verdict for Bulletstorm should be called. The mighty trumpet sounded, and we gathered around the Rock, Paper, Shotgun Reflecting Pool, whereupon we sang our tales of dick-fuelled murdering. Read on.

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Okay, so I was wrong. I admit it. Everything Dr Carole Lieberman said was absolutely true. The proof is below.

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I’m very pleased to say we’ve heard back from the last of the experts we contacted after the Fox News Debacle. We’ve now spoken to Jerry Weichman, Ph.D who was quoted by John Brandon as warning that games such as Bulletstorm could do serious damage to children, as an example of an expert who was “worried that video game violence may be reaching a fever pitch.” And while Weichman explains that he was not misquoted, he certainly has far more moderate views on videogames than someone reading the article may have believed. When calculating the rather odd maths that led to Brandon’s “nearly universally” angry experts, we counted Weichman amongst the two who were actually against the game. This was incorrect, as our interview with the clinical psychologist reveals, in which he explains, “there is nothing wrong with the game being produced and sold to the users it is intended for.” And we also learn that Dr Weichman is rather partial to a game of Call Of Duty.

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Bulletstorm isn’t actually out until this Friday, but EA recently demanded we send one of our number along to play, complete, and review the finished game. I returned to RPS having finished the single-player game and invested some six hours into the multiplayer, making me perfectly equipped to tell you Wot I Think.
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There’s always a twist. If you followed the Fox News Debacle, you’ll have seen the tale that began with an article on Rupert Murdoch’s esteemed news source that asked whether Bulletstorm was “the worst video game in the world”, and argued that playing it could cause people to rape. We took a closer look at the claims made, found that at least one of those interviewed had been deliberately misrepresented and another ignored, and demonstrated that the author of the article did not complete even basic fact checking before publishing (for instance, being willing to let readers believe that reported rapes are on the increase). Then the “expert” who triggered it all, Dr. Carole Lieberman, got in touch to finally provide her evidence for the “thousands” of articles that proved sexual violence in games causes sexual violence in real life. Nothing she sent had anything to do with the subject, and it became clear that she had either not read the papers she was linking to, or wasn’t able to understand them.

Now the original author of the Fox News article, John Brandon, has filed a new Bulletstorm story on FoxNews.com, in which he once again makes extraordinarily inaccurate statements that he cannot evidence, and decides to insinuate that Rock, Paper, Shotgun has not told you the truth. Oddly enough, we have.

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Remember this spurt of controversy back in January when we heard that the Bulletstorm demo would be gracing the Xbox Box and Sony Playingstation only? Turns out the PC will be getting a demo after all. Epic vice president Mark Rein has tweeted that the PC demo is in the works, and should be available “shortly after” the game’s release this Friday. Strong!

Just to keep score, we’ve now whipped away concerns that People Can Fly couldn’t be bothered releasing a PC demo for Bulletstorm, that the game causes rape and that it might be crap. All we need now is for a press release to come pinwheeling in through the window that the game’s dropped Games For Windows Live. Ah, a man can dream.