Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The true casualty of Battlefield: Bad Company 2 isn’t the hundreds of soldiers who die each round, or even the dozens of vehicles that lie strewn across the battlefield, slowly reduced to scrap and rubble by continued ordnance as they’re used as cover by desperate marines. The true casualty is the scenery. You’re presented with a pristine (or mostly pristine) landscape that is about to become a battlefield. The soldiers are like a horde of locusts, sweeping through for their conflict, leaving the entire place ravaged and skeletal, each building a carcass stripped of all its outer walls, and most its inner, until it’s little more than a few support columns and what remains of a roof. Bad Company 2 is devastation: arbitrary and completely unhindered.

Read the rest of this entry »

So here’s a thing: Werewolves and Vampires are being added to free FPS Battlefield Heroes. It’s some kind of micro-payment event, lasting a month, where you can pay to be able to rise again in the night maps of the game. “Once-dead Nationals can be transformed into blood-sucking vampires and Royals into teeth bearing werewolves.” Okay then. A trailer, below, explains a bit more.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Command & Conquer 4 multiplayer beta test will indeed be open, and it’s happening today. It’s scheduled for 9AM PST, which by my calculations is in about two hours. You’ll want to be keep an eye over here for details.

Oh, and Battlefield: Bad Company 2 multiplayer beta is up too. Grab those keys where you can. We haven’t got any, obviously, because why would we want them? Eh? EH? But our chums over at Fileplay have some, so keep an eye on them too.

So it’s about time we caught up with what’s going on with Battlefield: Bad Company 2, since the multiplayer footage has seemed so solid. DICE have coughed up a single player trailer (below), which is all very spectacular, but kind of predictable in that military-hardware porn with a rock soundtrack that we’re kind of getting over-familiar with now. Anyway, there are a couple of other bits of news that might be of interest. The first is that despite bleating about their dedicated server support when the stuff about Modern Warfare 2’s atrocious online service came to light, those dedicated servers can, apparently, only be rented from DICE’s pre-approved partners. Setting up your own server if you happen to have a host-capable box won’t be an option. So it’s better than the MW2 situation, but it’s still not great. The multiplayer beta for PC begins on the 28th, so we will at least be able to take a look at these approved partners – which are the usual suspects of mass games server hosting – and see how their options hold up.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Sims 3 Create-A-World Tool, which is a tool for creating worlds in The Sims 3, is now available in beta. EA says: “Design Entire Worlds – Players can choose terrain patterns, vegetation and neighborhood accents like water towers and lighthouses, then place lots and roads to create something totally unique.” It actually looks fairly impressive, and appears to be a free download update for the game. There’s also a large PDF walkthrough which shows off some of the features and teaches you how to use the tool. The tool appears at the same as the Hi-Tech pack, which can be used to furnish the houses in your landscapes with contemporary furniture and consumer gadgets.

Electronic Arts might be making a load of noise about reclaiming the FPS crown with the re-pumped Medal Of Honor, but I think they’re also making decent headway in that area with the Bad Company sequel. What we’ve seen so far from the multiplayer sessions has been very exciting, and the latest footage from the game’s “Panama Canal” map looks just as intense – particularly the quad-bike stuff. After that they could throw us a Battlefield 3 bone, and we’d be happy manshooters. Go take a gander at the footage below.
Read the rest of this entry »

Want to know what C&C4 looks like in play? You’ll be wanting no longer, thanks to the rabid newshounds of VG247, who have sniffed out a five-minute video with developer commentary. I’ve posted said video below. It’s all game footage. So go take a look, and then slam your fist on the beer-swollen counter of the internet, registering your drunken demands in the comments section, before toppling backwards off your bar-stool and into the heaps of discarded, useless metaphors littering the floor below.
Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s what Bethesda say: “RAGE will be published by Bethesda Softworks, (a) ZeniMax subsidiary. As a result, Electronic Arts Inc will not be involved in the sales and marketing of RAGE. The ongoing development of RAGE is unaffected by this development.” Thoughts on this below.
Read the rest of this entry »

Spike TV’s Video Game Awards took place last night and EA tool the opportunity to run their trailer for the rebooted Medal Of Honor. I’ve posted it below, courtesy of the all-seeing GameTrailers. It’s all looking very modern.
Read the rest of this entry »

Oh dear, the price restructuring in Electronic Art’s micropayment-funded FPS, Battlefield Heroes, has delivered some unhappiness to the internet. Players who were previously able to enjoy the high-end weapons without using real money to pay for them are now unable to do so, due to the amount of grind involved in earning enough points. Essentially, people weren’t spending enough money and consequently the points cost of game-earned “Valour Point” items – which include weapons which define your effectiveness on the field – has been increased, while the real-money “BattleFunds” are now a bit cheaper.

So was Battlefield Heroes ever going to work? Should players stop whining and cough up for their super-sniper rifles? Can it be rebalanced in a more amenable and profitable way? It’s hard to see for sure, but it’ll be interesting to see whether the game survives this hiccup and lives to profit another day.