Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Lots of people wrote about this, but Vertelemming was the most appropriately obscure, so gets namechecked. He said “You are returning. The stream in the Cleft is returning. The cavern is returning. Uru is returning.” And so it is. It’s a free server, so you can just go play and donate if you wish. “We’ve opened all the Ages, and added most of the goodies in MO:UL. We’re referring to it as MO:ULagain—feel free to explore and enjoy,” as they say. And here’s three videos made in tribute to the game when it closed. Lost of footage of – er – stuff. Also, things.
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It’s Monday morning. As such, we should gracefully ease into the working, gaming week with a webgame. Too many to name people mailed us this over the weekend. It’s a one-button web-game based on a cheery Rick Dangerous/Spelunky theme. One Button Bob manages shows that, if you limit the context smartly, you can actually create a lot of the “traditional” gaming problems on a single button. It’s also a bit of a giggle. Go play.

Demos are great. Like when you go to the supermarket and they have those plates of demos at the cheese counter. You can download a small chunk of cheddar, and if you like it there’s this unlock code you type in to access the full wedge of cheese. Or at car showrooms, where you’re allowed to have a go in the car for free, see how realistic the driving is, find out if it’s one of the ones that lets you drive through barriers and run over spectators. Another place you can find demos is with videogames. Like, for instance, this one for Aliens Vs. Predator. It’s only available via Steam, and is 1.3 of your gigabytes. And here’s some video-isual watch-o-footage…
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There’s two things which RPS love. One: Tanks. Two: Demos. As such, the release of the Theatre of War 2: Kursk 1943 demo is a prompt for celebrations in the RPS shack and/or a post. You can download the whole getting on-for-700Mb demo thing here. Kursk was the largest tank battle of all time – at least, until Jim gets his Elite-with-robots game idea made by someone. Lots more details on its own site, or you can watch a teaser trailer below.
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Do you like smashing stuff? I do. Glasses, plates, Fabergé eggs, jars containing the souls of lost children. So games about smashing stuff make me very happy. Red Faction: Guerilla being the most recent highlight. And now thanks to the kindly stranger (I’ve forgotten who it was, sorry) who tipped me off to Rubble Trouble, I’m having a gleeful smashing afternoon.

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Hurrah! Robokill’s back. The original game had both Walker and I write a little around, and now there’s a sequel. In short – it’s a Smash TV/Robotron versus Diablo cross, with you upgrading your little mechanical fellow while working your way through a maze of rooms. While there levels and monsters are all new – and the monsters seem much smarter – almost everything we said in the original pieces holds true. As in, the pits are annoying (though there’s less of them) but it’s really good fun, the rumble of your multiple-guns builds up and it’s well worth playing, especially if you haven’t touched it before. Video follows.
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One Mr Bock writes, a little sad there’s no external discussion of Estiah other than a thread on the Penny Arcade. I feel the same about the Neptune’s Pride Beta, so decided to have a quick nose and… yeah, it immediately has a couple of mechanics that look quite interesting. It’s a limited-actions-per-day thing, but there’s a neat Guild Wars-esque twist in terms of how combat operates. Worth a look, if you fancy that kind of thing. And a few thoughts about both this, and this kind of thing below…
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A rifle amongst the oily rags, Toblerone wrappers and bat skulls that litter the floor of the RPS engine room reveals we’ve never posted about open source Civilization clone FreeCiv before. By turn, that means we’ve never written about its newish browser-based offshot FreeCiv.net either. This is exactly the kind of site that should be telling you it’s possible to play one of the most important names in PC gaming history in your browser, for free. Unfortunately, we’ve been washing our hair since December 13th, so we didn’t. Now we all look like Jennifer Aniston circa 1995 (Jim looks especially glamorous), we have time to tell you.
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I started the week by playing the experimental gameplay game that Jake Elliot sent us – Beluah & The Hundred Birds. The current theme is 100 things – Jake’s is a dream-like platformer, which externalises the inevitable collectibles to tiny birds which follow you around. While the main platform levels are a little uninteresting – I suspect an attempt to work a frustration/euphoria sort of dynamic between the flying and platforming bits, but while it does works like that, it doesn’t quite work well enough to justify it – I kept playing due to some lovely crystalline music and the simple joy of building this flock behind me. It’s like Syndicate, without miniguns. It also put me in the mind to listen to Grandaddy’s The Crystal Lake…
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Wrestling games are a somewhat console proposition. Back in the day, any teen-orientated games mag would just lob the latest wrestling game on the cover, knowing it always sells. However, not all wrestling games are bashers. Grey Dog’s Software’s is a highly PC Wrestling game, in that it’s about numbers. No terrain, but you can’t have everything. Yes, it’s the latest version of the wrestling management game, complete with a demo. The big change seems to be the addition of narratives to the matches, so you can set up storylines and similar. So John would like it. I had a quick crack now, and didn’t really get very far, progress curtailed by a slightly clumsy interface and not knowing anything about wrestling. Anyone played the older ones and have anything to share?