Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Due to adverse weather conditions and abnormal levels of volcanic activity, we’ve yet to bring you thoughts on the Tales of Monkey Island episodic adventures. Alongside the remake of the original by LucasArts, Telltale are currently producing five chapters of a brand new story for the hapless pirate, written and coded by many original LucasArts developers. The first of these, Launch Of The Screaming Narwhal, has been out for just over a month, and the second part has just appeared. (As Alec reported yesterday, you can now buy them individually in the US at least.) Here’s some thoughts.

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Just a few thoughts on a few hours of Raven’s latest suckling at id’s IP teat… Lest word hasn’t reached you yet – perhaps unsurprisingly if so, given the dearth of pre-release reviews – BJ Blazkowicz’s latest corridor-based Nazi-gibbing adventure seems disappointingly flat. Given id are now a part of the Bethesda/Zenimax machine, it’s highly unlikely Raven will ever get a crack at the game universes they’ve (for better or worse) helped build, making this something of a sad farewell. At the same time, there’s a relief to knowing that some of the most formative names in PC-based man-shooting are no longer left in the hands of an Activision-owned studio who’ve not truly excelled themselves for years. Hopefully this isn’t Wolfenstein’s last gasp, but from what I’ve played so far it’s not going to be its proudest legacy.
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It’s about ten minutes in the game and I’m presented by quite the sight. Hearing footsteps on the stairs, I shout to drag the Lady into the room. “Hey! Look at this”. I continue what I’m doing, before glancing over at her distinctly disapproving face. “You have just killed the Labrador of the seas,” she says coldly, then walk out the room. I can see the future. It is a lonely future. It’s a future which may drive a man to evil. Which is lucky, as I’m the right place.

What’s the problem? I’m just going clubbing.
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So. Stalin Versus Martians has been released. I thought I’d have a quick crack at the full code and bring back some initial thoughts on the Eastern front. Initial and probably final, as I strongly suspected I’d never go back there. Because… well, it was clear it was going to be absolutely terrible.

Or was it?
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Gas-Powered Games’ (with a little help from Stardock) Demigod enjoyed an unexpected early release yesterday, thanks to a silly snafu by Gamestop. Jim’s feverishly working on a full verdict on it to be posted in a few days’ time, but unfortunately it’s been held up by the release version suffering some pretty flaky netcode. It wouldn’t do to judge a game that’s almost entirely multiplayer only on the strength of its offline skirmishes, so while we wait and pray for an ultra-patch, Jim and Alec had a brief chat about their impressions so far… If they both seem a little surly, it’s because their clever brainwave to try and get the damn thing working in LAN mode over Hamachi had also just failed miserably…
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If you look at a British £2 coin, you’ll notice there’s a motif in the design of one of the circles that shows a series of interlocking cogs. When the coin was originally launched, the Royal Mint declared that these cogs represented “the evolution of technology from the Iron Age to the internet”. Another thing you’ll notice if you look carefully is there are nineteen cogs, an odd number, all interlaced, thus any attempt to use this mechanism would lead to its snapping and spraying bits of cog everywhere. (Unless it were on a Möbius strip, supernerds.) This is the sort of thing you’ll become expert on after playing a Cogs for a while.

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Tale of Tales’ The Path comes out a week today. It’s a unique game, almost stretching the use of the word “game” to describe it as such, in which you take one of six Little Red Riding Hoods through the woods, on her journey to Grandmother’s house. However, simply completing this task is the shortest route the the game’s ending – indeed, if anything, finishing the game is really the last thing you want to do.

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