Rock, Paper, Shotgun

When the human race finally leaves the Earth to live as gaseous nano-clouds amid the stars, our supermarket trolleys will reveal their hidden sentience and rebuild themselves as a race of gladiatorial destructo-borgs. This, you understand, is not the back story to Metal Drift. It should be. I certainly experience metal drift with most of the trolleys I end up wrestling round Asda as we collect ready-to-decay food for our weekly engorgement. One day, when I am in charge of the back story of all futuristic combat games, things will be okay. In the meantime you’ll have to make do with the meagre efforts of the developers, who explain their Metal Drift thus: “a vehicular sport combat game set in a distant future.” That doesn’t explain my motivation, but okay, we do expect vehicular war in the future. In fact, we can expect it right now, because the demo is on Steam.

One thing which ensures we’ll post your game is if you have an awesome name. In fact, even if for a second we think you have an awesome name. So when Brian Ramage mailed us, I got all excited thinking he was called BRIAN RAMPAGE. But he’s not. Momentary sad-face, turning smiling when you realise he’s here to tell about a soon-to-be-released-game-on-Steam. It’s a multiplayer-hover-craft sports game called Metal Drift, and it’s the first fruit of indie Black Jacket Studios, who certainly have the multiplayer lineage being Tribes 2 vets. I had a quick go at the preview-code now, and it seems to walk that line between Battlezone and Speedball 2. Which is a good line to walk. More when we’ve played more, I suspect, but until then there’s info on their site, and beneath the cut you’ll find some footage of the game in action.
Read the rest of this entry »