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Now Battling: Battlefield Heroes

Written by Jim Rossignol on June 25, 2009.

After a rather extended beta and much delay, the free cartoon FPS from Electronic Arts/DICE has finally arrived. You can play it here, for no pennies. Impressions below.

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Harry Potter And The Free Demonstration Program

Written by Kieron Gillen on June 25, 2009.

We’re not exactly the biggest fans of Harry Potter here at RPS, because we’re grown-ups so prefer to spend our time on grown up pass-times like videogames, painting Skaven and marching around chanting that we are playing army, asking people to join us until a girl tries to join us, at which point we inform them loudly that no girls are allowed. But EA have released a demo of their latest videogame incarnation of the bespectacled mage. It’s about 600Mb or so, and you can get it here. Scanning its press release, I find the following line: “Players may even get sidetracked by Ron’s romantic entanglements as they journey towards a dramatic climax and discover the identity of the Half-Blood Prince” which makes me think that Ron is going to blow his load messily before discovering who the half-blood prince is. Lucky old Ron, I say. Anyway – trailer beneath the cut. Woo!
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LFG: Mythic and Bioware Merged By EA

Written by Jim Rossignol on June 24, 2009.

Big business announcement day, then. EA will merge Mythic and Bioware to create a new MMO and RPG division. The new division will apparently be headed by BioWare boss Ray Muzyka, while BioWare’s other co-founder, Greg Zeschuk, will become Group Creative Officer. Mark Jacobs, the outspoken boss at Mythic, will apparently be leaving the company, and has made no announcement about future plans.

This internal rejiggery will not affect any of the Bioware games currently in development (Dragon Age, The Old Republic, Mass Effect 2), but it clearly has some broader implications for the future. Not least of which is that someone is getting quite serious about taking on Blizzard in that millions of dollars of MMO subscriptions business. Hmm.

EA: The Sims 3 “The Most Successful PC Launch”

Written by Jim Rossignol on June 10, 2009.

Electronic Arts have announced that the new Sims title has “sold thru more than 1.4 million PC/Mac units within the first week”, and that makes it their most successful PC launch ever. Given that last month’s top selling PC game in the US was The Sims 2 Double Deluxe, it’s a fair bet that The Sims 3 will continue selling in the months and years ahead. And there should be no surprise about that, The Sims 3 is an incredibly well designed and silly soap opera of a game. Seized by my normal Sims-response malevolence, I set up a family of nightmarish redneck freaks, complete with horrifying clown-faced patriach (above), and I was intending to do a couple of posts about their trials, tribulations and inevitable psychiatric collapse over the coming weeks. But the problem is that I can’t get near The Sims 3 when it’s running, probably because I still haven’t built my girlfriend that gaming PC I’ve been promising for the past two years… Hmm.

EA To Publish APB, Trailer

Written by Jim Rossignol on June 2, 2009.

EA have announced that they’ll be publishing Realtime Worlds’ gang-war MMO, All Points Bulletin. Creator Dave Jones is keen to compare the game to GTA or Call Of Duty. “WoW’s great, and it’s attracting huge numbers, but let’s face it there’s probably still more players on GTA and Call of Duty in terms of online,” Jones told Gamasutra. It’s looking pretty slick, and it’s hard to see it not being awesome. (Jones is, after all, a key brain behind the original GTA concept, and a pretty distinguished designer in the subsequent years.) The game is due “early 2010″ – and is PC-only, apparently. Woo!
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E3 09: Mass Effect 2 Trailer

Written by Jim Rossignol on June 1, 2009.

The fragments of dialogue in this gives a way a fair bit of what’s going to happen in the game, so if you’re allergic to spoilers you might want to avoid it. A rather classy little trailer for Mass Effect 2, anyway, and I’m loving the super-detailed science fiction cities. Falling-to-death dude looks remarkably like the zombo-drones from Dark Athena, too. Hmm. More on this soon, as John gets to see it at E3.
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House Of Cards: BattleForge For Free

Written by Jim Rossignol on May 26, 2009.

Someone is going to be livid. Battleforge, EA’s card-trading, deck-based online RTS – which was a full-price game a couple of months ago – is now free to play. (The server is taking a pounding at the moment, and it’s achingly slow.) Anyway you can now get the full game, with two full decks, and full access to all content since release, for nothing. You have to level up in both PvE and PvP before you can enter full trading stakes, but that’s a whole lot of game for free. As an RTS Battleforge is slightly cumbersome, especially in PvE, but I can’t fault the balance or possibilities for deck-construction. Being able to build an army with the cards you’ve meticulously scraped together is surprisingly rewarding. It’s a genuinely interesting experiment, and I hope the move to a free-to-play model brings in a few more people who might get a kick out of that sort of thing.

Filthy Ways To Leave Your Lover: Sims 3 Hands On

Written by Kieron Gillen on May 18, 2009.

I’ve been playing around with Sims 3 code for Eurogamer for a few weeks now. Impressions start like this…

I’m not sure what my highlight so far has been. It may have been having a guy die while making out with me, before immediately proceeding to call up his sister, have a little mourn, flirt, make out, ask out and then dump her, whilst standing over the grave of the brother. Or it may have been discovering the patriarch of the town has a daughter, who I end up going out with, only to dump brutally, before hearing the patriarch has died, chatting up the widow in the gym (I ask her if she’s single – surprise, she is!), and flirting with her enough to go steady. All in front of a crowd, including the upset daughter. Before dumping the widow. Only to later, in my dotage, get back together with the daughter and move into their epic townhouse.

Ah, business is good. Or at least slutty.

And continue ever-onwards. Review before launch. And RPS-members-in-game, obv.

The EA Maths: $1bn Loss, PC Ascendent

Written by Jim Rossignol on May 6, 2009.

The UK’s gaming newsdesk, VG247, has a comprehensive round-up of EA’s recent financials, including that $1.08 billion loss for past financial year. There’s a whole bunch of other information in there, going a long way into clarifying EA’s business practices over the past twelve months. Most relevantly to our deskbox platform, the majority of EA releases last year were on PC. More interesting still was the admission by EA CFO Eric Brown that digital downloads on PC would become the dominant force in gaming. “The PC is becoming the largest gaming platform in the world,” said Brown. “Just not in a packaged-good product.”

Also revealed in the figures was that Spore sold 2 million copies, and that Warhammer Online had 300,000 subs at the end of March.

Battlefield 1943: Trailer, Cheap, Delayed

Written by Jim Rossignol on April 24, 2009.

DICE’s forthcoming “not Heroes” Battlefield game, Battlefield 1943, will be delayed on PC until September, reportedly due to the complications of bringing it to the PC platform. Once it turns up it’ll be a downloadable game available for $15. The game will feature a simplified Battlefield 1942-style system, and revamps three of the original maps, Wake Island, Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima. There’s a trailer for Wake Island beneath the click.
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