Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Posts Tagged ‘Dead Island’

Byte vs Brick: Week Ending Oct 1

By Alec Meer on October 3rd, 2011.

Hello, nurse. You *are* a nurse, aren't you?

And again! A not entirely industry-representative yet unquestionably fascinating/depressing look at what comprised the top ten PC game sales for Steam compared to UK retail over the last week. Will The Sims’ dominance of retail continue unabated? (Obviously). Will there be any surprise returns to the Steam top ten? (Yeah, actually). Read on to find out the answers to both these questions and more, as long as those questions concern the chart-placing of contemporary PC games. If you want to find out the answer to what the Queen had for breakfast this morning or where Muammar Gaddafi is hiding, I really cannot recommend reading the rest of this post.
Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , .

38 Comments »

Who Do Voodoo? Dead Island Movie Looms

By Alec Meer on September 27th, 2011.

George Clooney's playing fourth from the left
The internet is littered with the rotting corpse-stories of ‘game x optioned for movie’, so many of such headlines failing to come true, Hollywood executives’ frothing plans simply ending up mired in cinematic red tape for years to come or Uwe Boll somehow getting his hands on the license. Perhaps Dead Island is destined for a similar fate, today bringing news that Lionsgate plan to bring its foul-mouthed tale of holidayers versus zombies to the silver screen – but the hullabaloo over that trailer might sharply increase the odds of something actually happening.
Read the rest of this entry »

, , .

55 Comments »

Byte vs Brick: Week Ending Sep 17

By Alec Meer on September 19th, 2011.

I will happily reuse this picture until the end of time

Time for another one of our in theory regular but in practice highly irregular comparisons of the last week’s top ten best-selling PC games on Steam, and at UK retail. Obviously there are all manner of ways in which these are not fair or entirely meaningful comparisons, not least in that Steam’s metrics can tend towards the cryptic, that Steam’s includes pre-orders but UK retail (via Chart-Track) doesn’t and that it’s laughably hard to find many PC games on British high streets these days, but it’s always fun/horrifying to get a flavour for the stark differences between what people are buying digitally and what plastic boxes their attention is caught by.
Read the rest of this entry »

, , , .

25 Comments »

ARGHipelago?: Dead Island DLC

By Adam Smith on September 9th, 2011.

More of a bloodpool really
Dead Island released today in the EU while our American cousins have been slaycationing for a few days already. Later this month, there will be more, deader bits of island in the form of the rather unhygienic Bloodbath Arena DLC. The game first showed its rotten face at E3 in 2006 and its prolonged development cycle didn’t manage to iron out all the wrinkles, though John was suitably impressed by what he played. Now that the game may finally have stumbled through the hurdles of its difficult release, maybe the DLC will have a smoother ride. Or I might be back next week to tell you it’s been delayed until 2017. Details below.

Read the rest of this entry »

, , .

16 Comments »

Impressions: 15 Hours With Dead Island

By John Walker on September 7th, 2011.

Welcome to Dead Island. I'll be your holiday rep.

Dead Island was released (in some manner) in the US yesterday, and arrives in the UK, once it’s painstakingly paddled across the massive oceans of the internet, on Friday. I’ve been playing it for a long, long time, and yet still haven’t got anywhere near its ending. And as such, even though I’m about to tell you Wot I Think, in the interests of probity will offer you my Impressions.

Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , , .

143 Comments »

Dead Island PROPER Released Later Today

By John Walker on September 6th, 2011.

Herp derp.

Regarding the strange derpage today, where Deep Silver seem to have somehow released the dev version of Dead Island to US Steam users, we’ve had a statement back. It’s succinct:

“the final version will be out during the day”

Which would seem to be both a tacit acknowledgement that something that wasn’t the final version was released, and also the good news that the error should be fixed before bedtime. So that’s good. Our review of Dead Island will appear just as soon as I’ve finished writing it.

, , , , .

46 Comments »

Ultra-Oops: Dead Island Dev Build Released?

By John Walker on September 6th, 2011.

A scene at Techland's HQ this morning.

Gosh, here’s a whoopsie. Dead Island is out now on Steam for the Americanish, except the version they’ve received probably isn’t the one Deep Silver were hoping they’d get. It seems the dev build of the game has been put out there, rather than the official version. Complaints about a bad port, mysterious goings on, and no-clipping all seem to come down to the fact that this is the bug-testing, cheat-enabled, not-for-release version of the game. Code that people are digging up seems to reveal that this might even have far too much of the 360 version left in it. Crikey, that’s a big oops. (I should note that the PC review build I’m playing certainly is optimised for PC.) A day one patch is intended to fix an impressive thirty-seven issues. Perhaps one of them will be the release of the internal debug of the game to US customers? We’ve contacted Deep Silver to see what’s really going on.

Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , .

88 Comments »

Dead Island Receiving Day One Bandages

By John Walker on September 5th, 2011.

Come on in, the water's lovely.

Dead Island is out tomorrow in the American States, but not until Friday for the Eurochaps. I’m playing it right now! (We’ll have a WIT up in the middle of the week, to confuse everyone in all territories.) I’m also not encountering quite as many bugs as others have spotted in some of the reviews that have appeared today. But that’s not stopping the appearance of a day one patch, due out tomorrow along with the game, that will fix an impressive thirty-seven issues. You can read them for your own amusement below.

Read the rest of this entry »

, , .

48 Comments »

Resorting To Violence: Dead Island Trailer

By Adam Smith on August 31st, 2011.

Life's a beach. Aha! Sorry, that wasn't very clever. I saw it on a t-shirt or something.
Just when you thought it was safe to get back out of the water, Dead Island is ready to gobble up your brains. Out September 6th in North America and on the 9th everywhere else, the game already boasts one of the most talked about trailers of the year. This latest one still has evocative (and strangely triumphant) music in the background but the foreground looks a lot more like an actual game. Along with the emphasis on co-op we’ve seen from previous marketing material, there’s some enemy variety on show and an urban-type environment alongside the beaches and resorts. Enjoy. We’ll have words about our experiences with the game next week, which unfortunately makes them too late to be featured on the side of a boat or plane wreck. Boo. If the trailer doesn’t contain enough zombies for you, check out this Marvel digital comic prequel to the game. That’s got some zombies in it too.

Read the rest of this entry »

, , , .

77 Comments »

Cheer Up! Here’s A Dead Island Trailer

By Jim Rossignol on August 9th, 2011.


Hooray! Just when things seemed really gloomy, here’s comes a zombie apocalypse scenario to put things into perspective. Even if your capital city is on fire and your heroic leaders are unable to do anything but share holiday snaps, it’s worth remembering that you aren’t going to be eaten alive by the shambling undead. Ah, that’s a nice feeling.

See: the four-player co-oping in Dead Island that we’ve already seen a bit of already. Consider: that it’s actually not all that like Left 4 Dead. Suppose: that it might actually be fairly entertaining. Wonder: when the zombie games will end.
Read the rest of this entry »

, , .

64 Comments »

Hands On: Dead Island

By John Walker on June 23rd, 2011.

Here, have this axe. It's a present!

Oftentimes with games, what you want is to gain knowledge from scratch. There’s a title, a genre, and what we need is to build information upon that. With Dead Island it often feels like things are working in the opposite direction, thanks to that trailer. Everyone invented their own version of the game, and the reality can often feel like the result of chipping away at this impossible ideal. So let’s scrap all that, forget the trailer since it has no real bearing on the game you play, and start getting interested from the ground up.

Read the rest of this entry »

, , , , , .

64 Comments »

Respond to our gibber

Read our finest words

Hello Games Announces Joe Danger For PC

Search for clues

Browse the archive