Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The next SWTOR update is all about customization, allowing radical visual overhauls for any and all characters. Nice move, space developers, but what won’t get me playing your game is the inclusion of cat-people. As we all know, the inclusion of cat people in any franchise (we’ll omit Thundercats for now) is an admission of creative bankruptcy. Yes, even in Elder Scrolls games. It’s just not okay. If you are looking around for that other race, the crazy alterative to elves or stormtroopers, and the best you can come up with is a man that looks like a cat, well… no. Anyway, that’s what this next update brings. Not player Jawas, or anything like that. Hell, even Star Wars Galaxies had playable Ithorians.

Grumble. Videos below.
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Our chums over at Indiegames spotted an interesting-looking freeware game out there in the open wild country of the internet. It’s called Fragment and has seen the light of day thanks to a busy team of Vancouver Film School students. It’s a stealth sort of thing where you can assimilate your enemies, deploy clones to distract them, and so forth. There’s a video of it running below, or you can just grab it here.
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Remember a while back I posted Six Things I’d like to see in Planetside 2? Well, one of them just got ticked off the list. The two-man Harasser buggy is happening, soon. Except it’s three-man, now. It’s Happiness Day at Rossignol Towers. See it in action below.
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Goscurry is kind of weird. It’s merciless – ruthless, even, sometimes – but bizarrely relaxing. Think Audiosurf, only it pretends to hate you in an attempt to mask an un-abiding desire to tell you all its secrets. And of course, it expresses those nuanced feelings through the medium of deliciously smooth beats. Oh, and also the tops of buildings. I am not explaining this well. Basically, you pilot a ship down a track so thin that it inspires this sick sense of dread in the pit of your stomach, but it’s all automatic and you only make turns (using the arrow keys) at right angles. In addition, gaps, barriers, and different barriers pop up, forcing you to rapidly jump, dodge, and shift direction – also via the arrow keys. If you fail (and you will, a lot), the game just randomly generates a new track. And while the action doesn’t sync up one-to-one with the music, the act of playing is exceedingly rhythmic. It just feels really, really, really good. If you need more convincing, there’s a trailer after the break, but oh jeez play this now. It is happiness in a tiny rocketship.

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Lumber Island is clearly the name of a strategic resource management game about constructing a timber export company, so imagine my surprise when I loaded it up, having decided to flex my management muscles, and found myself in a sinking rowboat, viewing a darkening world from a first-person perspective. I’ve been duped, I thought, there’s no way I can begin my ascent to the top of the lumber industry without access to 57 pie charts and an isometric map. A few minutes later, a lumberjack with a curtain of flesh where his face should be was pursuing me through a forest, his axe ready to chop me in twain. MY BLOOD IS THE RESOURCE THAT HE CRAVES. Lumber Island is a free horror game and you can play the first chapter now.

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I haven’t been back, or even been inclined to go back, to Guild Wars 2 since its initial release, though that probably says at least as much about me and my grasshopper mind as it does about it. I know a bunch of people are playing it, but I don’t know how I can usefully address them about what’s going on with the game, at least not without becoming something of a fraud. A free, tongue-in-cheek retro platformer based on GW2 though? That I can tell you about, and I don’t need to say even a single thing about high-level content to do it.

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Listen, we’re all angry about something. Right now I’m angry that my cat knocked over a wooden minimalist gorilla statuette I keep on my bedside table, which bashed me on the head and woke me up at 3am, leaving me feeling terrible all day. (I still love my cat, though. She can’t help being a moron). Maybe you’re angry about something more important, or less important – the important thing is that it made you angry. Put it to one side, just for a bit. Sit down, sit down, breathe the air slowly, calmly, gently through those stressed nostrils of yours, and spend awhile with 40 Seeds, a charming, ambient browswer game about wind, life, propagation and nothing.

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By way of example, a recent specimen from the dark blue segment:

Soldier. There is some job for you. You will receive further orders from your commander Kate. But you must to know – this will be not so easy. You’ll need to deliver some secret weapon, save wounded soldiers and all this must be done as fast as possible. So get your Ural Truck and go. THERE IS SOME JOB FOR YOU.
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I’m hoping that Firefall‘s co-op PvE focus will prove to be the antidote to my months spend exploding dudes in the purely-PvP Planetside 2. I checked out Firefall’s closed beta some months back, and very much liked what I saw, and I also met some of the team last summer and was impressed by Scott “Tribes” Youngblood’s take on it all. I think this game could well be a Rather Big Deal indeed.

Come July 9th, you’ll be able to decide for yourself. That’s when the open beta will commence. I’ve jammed the latest gameplay trailer below, because that’s what I do.
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