Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It is tradition within the walls of Castle Shotgun to frown upon CGI trailers with a big bushel of frowns, but the trailer for Risen 2: Dark Waters has a number of frown-dissolving elements. 1) Pirates. 2) It’s quite pretty. 3) Voodoo. 4) Firearms. 5) It means we’re getting another Risen game, and it features pirates, firearms, and voodoo. All these things are backed up by the announcement from Deep Silver and Piranha Bytes, who say that the game will take place across a number of distinct islands, as your character seeks to persuade pirates to help him battle sea-monsters. The game will also apparently feature “dirty-tricks” in combat, which is either in keeping with the pirate theme, or worrying scatalogical. Either way, I’m on board.

Trailer below decks, etc. (Sigh.)
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Also on the comeback trail this week is Piranha Byte’s RPG Risen. Piranha were the chaps behind the Gothic series, but having lost the license in a disagreement with former publishers JoWood went off to make a spiritual sequel instead. While JoWood’s Gothic 4 was about as much fun as eating mildly poisonous cardboard shoes, Risen was 50% a genuinely brilliant game (and 50% a slightly tedious one) – here’s my series of diaries on it, in which you can see my early surliness quickly become excitement. Risen 2 sounds like they’re determined to fully go for it, rather than lurk in an awkward middleground between past successes and future ambition. Pirates! Guns!
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It’s been quite a while since a trailer made me say, “Wow.” And indeed since one made me gasp, “Oh my God.” This CGI teaser for Dead Island – a zombie game originally announced in 2007 – is both stunning and horrendous. Bleak like your puppy dying of tiredness is bleak. The game itself sounds absolutely fascinating. An open-ended sandbox zombie survival game, first-person but with an emphasis on melee combat, where you must try to survive for as long as possible on an infested New Guinea island. We have little more to go on, other than the knowledge that Deep Silver are publishing, and that the people behind it are capable of a trailer as brilliantly morose as the one below.

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Can it really be almost a decade since the original Emergency game? If you think about it, a tactical management game based around manipulating the emergency services – putting out fires, taking people to hospital, rescuing the stricken – is the kind of thing that not only makes sense as a game, but would largely act as a positive image for games as a whole. Well, if it was any good. You can judge whether this modernised making of Emergency 2012 is any good by checking out the demo.

Emergency 2012 is out now. Game footage below.
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Also at Gamescom was… actually, I’m having trouble writing this. Part of me thinks it’s a good idea not to cover this at all, because of one of the most egregiously awful titles I’ve seen in my fifteen or so years of gamesjournodom. The other part of me really likes the bit where you’re flying through the air on your ATV and flipping between the enormous rotating blades of a wind-turbine. Fuckity yeah, etc. I’m posting about – hnnngh – Nail’d, as I have a terrible weakness for the awesome. It’s out before the end of the year, you can find more details on its site, look at new, oddly grainy shots over at Worthplaying and see the trailer below…
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The last Nail’d in the coffin? Nope, I’ve got pun-blindness on Techland’s “ATV Racing Game” – that means quad bikes and motorcycles – and I feel like a bit of an old duffer even posting about it. Where’s my truck simulator? Anyway, it’s called nail’d, all lower case, which is just silly, but okay. It’s out in the last quarter of the year, and “through its insane bursts of speed, “nail’d” will catapult you from one adrenalin boost to the next.” The same is true of my driving in a quite normal car.

I dunno, these youth racing games. It’s not cricket. And besides, weren’t Techland supposed to be making zombie action affair Dead Island? Whatever happened to that? I see the site has been replaced with a mysterious “under reconstruction” notice. Interesting.

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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