Rock, Paper, Shotgun

A thousand welcomes to Rock, Paper, Shotgun Version 3.345263ish!

Thanks the size of Zeus’ biceps go out to James Willock for its construction. We hope you like it. We do. We understand that you may not, however, because change is terrifying.

So, comments are disabled on this post for the time being, as frankly our focus at the moment is checking it all works properly, not arguing about grey versus red. Please, check it out. See that everything works properly. If it doesn’t – and I mean actually not working or something important having been lost in translation, not moon-on-a-stick requests – please drop me a line here and I’ll chat to t’others about getting it sorted.

You may notice there’s an empty space above our header at some times; we’ll have that fixeroonied soon.

Spy out. Oh wait, wrong gaming publication.

Well look here then. Shiny and new.

To celebrate our forty-fifth year of being online, we thought a redesign was in order. Gone is the mad explosion of cartoony boxes, and in is super-smartness like a new suit. No ties though please, we’re smart-casual.

So, take a moment to get used to the new surroundings. Yes, we know, we all fear change. But clutch hold of the person near you, and soon enough you’ll never believe it was any different.

Don’t forget, there’s still time to enter our epic Win A Hat Compo, where you could be the proud owner of a furry World In Conflict Cossack hat. We’ve had some remarkable secrets sent in already, some we’re convinced break Official Secret Acts in several countries, but still want to hear yours. So get over to the compo page and start divulging.

Thanks the size of a spaceship to James Willock for his ridiculous amount of hard work getting the site looking not only spick, but also span. Everyone immediately hire him to design your site, but insist on paying double. And in the meantime, stare in wonder at our pretty.

Earlier in the week I was interviewing Epic’s Cliff Bleszinski about Gears Of War on PC. It was a bit of shame really, because what I wanted to ask him about was Unreal Tournament III. I mean Gears looks fun – and I’ll be talking about that in depth in a forthcoming PC Gamer, paper fans – but the true heavyweight for the PC is going to be Unreal Tournament III. Alongside Enemy Territory and Team Fortress, this game is going to arrive at the traffic lights of gaming like a spacecraft pulling up next to a Jeep and an ice cream van. UT3’s new assault levels promise some outlandish possibilities for co-op gaming (the long-ago PC Gamer LAN’s finest hour was playing UT2004 assault vs high skill-level bots). UT3 will have with airbourne assaults, skyscraper sized vehicles, and unnatural environments aplenty. The maps themselves promise to simply outdo anything we’ve ever seen. I mean go back and look at UT2004 – those maps are astonishing enough. UT3 is a year on from Gears Of War… It’s like we’ll never need another game engine. Just look at it:

It actually looks like that.

Anyway, here’s Epic bossman Mike Capps talking about Unreal Tournament III. The most interesting thing that he mentions is that damage will be increased across all weapons. That’s a fairly big deal, dragging it back to the land of one-rocket kills – arguably a major boon for skilled teamplay. Sorry, I’m being all FPS obsessive again…

Also: does anyone else think Gears Of War should have been a game about battlefield engineering?