Rock, Paper, Shotgun

REVELATORY NEWS. Did you know that PlanetSide 2 – free-to-play titan and king among first-person Jimshoots – had a prequel? That’s right: the two in the title isn’t just for show like everybody clearly assumed it was. There is another. It’s still about refreshingly colorful spacewars and shootouts with more moving pieces than an upturned ant hill, but the graphics are worse and wobbly netcode is a mightier enemy than any mecha tank. Also, it still costs money for some reason. SOE’s not crazy, though. It sees the writing on the wall. Soon, PS1′s subscription fee will be extinct just like all the others, and it’ll join the F2P era.

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There are nearly as many Team Fortress 2 hats as there are snarky jokes about Team Fortress 2 hats. I see more hats in a day of browsing the Valvier parts of the Internet than I do in a year of going outside. But let’s face it: ours is a hatted man’s world, and so long as there are heads to be ogled and summarily shot, people will clamor for more carnivals of craftsmanship to cover them. You can probably see where I’m going with this. There’s a new Team Fortress 2 update, and it’s entirely player-created. Also, it’s mostly hats. These, however, are robot hats, and – as the wisest of all Benders taught us – that makes them exponentially more interesting. There’s also a video, comic, and all sorts of other post-update revelry. The break is not a robot, but it will do is best to emulate the experience.

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If past me – Nathan the Younger, EverQuest fiend extraordinaire – knew that I/we would eventually be complaining about having access to too many free MMOs, he’d probably shake his head in shame and see if there was still time to have a traumatic experience that’d turn him into a dystopic totalitarian dictator. But here I am – kind, vaguely humble, and only prone to conquering the most formidable of grilled cheese sandwiches – and now Rift’s shedding its subscription in favor of something a bit more comfortable. Truth be told, I kind of assumed it had already flipped the switch. Hm. Well, anyway, explanatory “don’t worry guys seriously no buying power never mind that everyone always says this” trailer after the break.

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Command & Conquer‘s march into free-to-play territory has been fraught with confusion. Will it have single-player? Won’t it? Is it even technically Command & Conquer Generals 2 anymore? I guess not, seeing as EA’s taken to shaving off that grizzled, battle-tested moniker in favor of the simple, sprightly Command & Conquer. And that, it would seem, wasn’t some careless “why not?” decision made on a whim. “We need to kind of wash the stain of C&C 4 away,” said lead designer Samuel Bass. The goal? To go back to the series’ roots. By, er, using Generals as a blueprint. I guess Victory’s reasoning kind of makes sense in video form. See the whole thing after the break.

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You’re probably thinking, “Action? Hah. The closest card games have ever gotten to action was the grisly paper cut massacre of 1912.” But actually, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft keeps quite a brisk, effects-packed pace. Ice and fire sing down from on high (or at least slightly above the coffee table), and monster slabs snap, crackle, and pop en route to shattering to the winds. Turns, meanwhile, go by in a flash – at least, when players who know what they’re doing are trading heated strategic blows. See for yourself via a full Shaman vs Mage match after the break.

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Ridge Racer, arcadey automotive classic and proof that dumb Internet jokes will outlive us all, is still alive and kicking, even in a racing landscape where cars have finally learned to fly. Last year’s hyper-destructive Ridge Racer: Unbounded was a messy good time, and former FlatOut developer Bugbear is once again behind the wheel for Ridge Racer: Driftopia. Two things, however, distinguish this one from the rest of the powersliding pack: 1) it’s free-to-play and 2) whiirrrrrr rubber screeeeeech driiiiiiiiiiift thoooom [sound of a tire wobbling around on pavement before falling over]. There is, in other words, a focus on drifting. But goodness, this otherwise looks like a low-rent Burnout, and I am physically incapable of complaining about that. Here, watch me try. Whoops, now I’m bleeding everywhere. While I mop all of this up, might I suggest a metal-mangling scream of a trailer after the break?

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Woohoo, it’s Wushu! Excellent, I have fulfilled my dumb joke quota in the first line. Now then, come reverently kneel in the dojos of intrigue. Age of Wushu, you see, might look like a typical MMO with high-flying wuxian trappings, but – at least, on paper – it actually sounds far more daring than that. Case in point: kidnapping. When you log off, your character stays in the world as an NPC. Said NPC can actually be kidnapped by other players, which I imagine will either prove cinder-block-choppingly infuriating or absolutely hilarious. Wushu also makes bold claims about being sandbox-y, pointing to systems for bounties, crime and imprisonment, random emergent PVP, a level-free advancement system, and more. Be warned, however: it also sounds dauntingly complicated, and F2P doesn’t help matters. See what I mean – first in the form of a gentle, open-palmed video and then with harsh, skull-wobbling words – after the break.

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Oh, TimeGate. Still-unconfirmed (or denied) rumblings have linked you to a rather sizable portion of Aliens: Colonial Marines’ acid-puking awfulness, so there’s your legacy for now. I’d be remiss, however, if I didn’t point out that the recently reviled studio’s proven reliably inoffensive in the past, producing middle-of-the-road manshoots like Section 8 and a few FEAR expansions. So it’s with a slightly less mountainous mound of trepidation than expected that I bring you word of Minimum, TimeGate’s new free-to-play shooter/slasher/watch two Greek-mythology-inspired titans go all Rock ‘Em, Sock ‘Em Robots on each other-er. Promisingly, its inspirations seem to run the gamut from Quake’s speed to Unreal’s arcadiness to Minecraft’s adaptability, but obviously, snapping all those puzzle pieces into a coherent whole is another matter entirely. I must say, though, the achy, breaky, blocky trailer after the break has me sort of intrigued.

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League of Legends is notorious for a lot of things: a steep yet rewarding learning curve, a sometimes less-than-cuddly community, making all the money and stealing all your friends and leaving you painfully alone/playing Heroes of Newerth, etc. And then, of course, there’s that other thing people don’t talk about nearly enough: shamelessly exposed, highly impractical female character designs. Yes, it’s fantasy. Yes, it’s fiction. It doesn’t matter; this stuff alienates people, and that’s a fact. But while calling out people who see women exclusively as chainmail bikini stands is important, there’s an equally key flipside to the coin: encouragement. So good on Riot for beginning to take baby steps in the right direction with Sejuani. Her gigantic boar, however, continues to parade about trouser-less, a picture of frolicking filth.

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