Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Hmm, I’ve seen this sequence of game events somewhere before: shipwrecked up on a beach, where you find some similar washed up loot, then fight something with a stick, and meet a sexy lady. Egad! It seems that the opening sequence of Risen, the new fantasy RPG from former Gothic developers Pirhana Bytes (the new Gothic is being developed by Spellbound, and more on that another time) has happened before. Isn’t it… well isn’t it the start of Age Of Conan? And possibly another RPG I only faintly recall? Perhaps these games took their cue from the same issue of Fantasy Happenings Journal (For Fantasy Professionals), where ideas for fantasy adventures are free. Free to use. And reuse. And… there’s a three part developer walkthrough, and despite my de-Risen of the subject matter (oh, I’m that good) it’s worth taking a look. Whee!
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While the kneejerk reaction to this is obviously one of mild incredulity, I can see why Egosoft have chosen to release this “benchmarking” version of X3 as a demo. It must be remarkably frustrating for people who build wide-open, sandbox titles and then find they can’t adequately promote or explain their game with a demo version. Perhaps there’s no way to chop out a chunk of the universe for people to play, and there are obvious problems with putting out a time-limited version of a full game. I guess this keeps the download size down too. If you want to see how your machine renders Terran Conflict’s pretty-pretty spacemobiles then you can get it here.

FX’s Sons Of Anarchy is currently doing a fine job of making biker culture seem interesting all over again, exploring the disintegration of ’60s biker ‘values’ in a post-millennial America. Meanwhile, a new game from Deep Silver is going back to those 60s roots, creating an action game based on those hazy James Dean days. Ride To Hell looks likely to be a GTA-in-the-West-Coast-Biker-Scene, which is no bad thing. There’s not a lot on show here – men riding bikes. But the music is great. While it reaches the more obvious Steppenwolf territory in the second half, the bluesy steel guitar for the first half is a thing of joy. A thousand points to the first person who can tell me what it’s from.

The video’s bumped below the jump, because GV have chosen to stick a 30 second advert on the front of the gaming advert. Boo.

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