Rock, Paper, Shotgun

As revealed by an accidental nose at Steam’s folder structure. Could be anyone’s fault really, but giggles are go nonetheless.

[When I was at NYCC, I found some time to have a quick crack at a load of games on the floor. Quick cracks. I'm going to write up the ones that stick in the memory.]

If anyone on the development team is hanging around the Ubisoft booth, you’re glad that they’re not actually standing beside me and watching. It’s about 10 minutes before the doors of the con close, and the early-twenty-something guy on the controls have spent at least the last ten minutes circling aimlessly in the sky. Really trying has long since drained away. He’s destroyed two of the three drones which he’s been charged with shooting in, but the third is proving elusive. Occasionally a missile collides with him. Occasionally he dodges one. He seems to take down the last one down by some semi-random method, puts down the controls at the end of this abstract training sequence before the mission proper and steps away into the thinning crowd, cursing about the bloody camera.
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This week we got to ask a few questions of Thomas Simon, the lead designer on HAWX. Mr Simon already has a bit of Tom Clancy background in his career, having previously worked on the Splinter Cell series. This time, however, there aren’t going to be any silent takedowns: HAWX (”High Altitude Warfare Experimental Squadron”) is an air combat game that encompasses all the noisy, destructive things that modern aircraft get up to. It’s looking moderately spectacular, and certainly seems like a fresh, non-simulatory take in a world where modern air combat games don’t exactly dominate the gaming headlines. Interestingly, it also ties in with the other Tom Clancy games, as Simon explained.
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Hell, any day can be round-up day. Rather than Kieron’s regular Sunday collection of notable word-sciences though, instead this is a one-off, rather more hotchpotch grab-bag of happy happenstances that have caught my eye today, as I fight the urge to pretend this has any relevancy whatsoever to Space Week.

First up, we’ve got the announcement of Tom Clancy’s HAWX, which totally sounds like a group of male strippers, but is actually an aerial combat thingum set in the GRAW universe. Which, for all the oppressively heavy branding, is actually kinda appealing – we don’t get too many dogfighters these days, so it’s nice to see a new big-money attempt at making one for a broad audience.
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