Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I feel like having your eyes located inside your mouth – just behind a jagged row of teeth that probably uses live sharks as dental floss – would pigeon hole you a bit from a career standpoint. Such is the plight of Natural Selection 2‘s Skulk aliens, and yet, they seem to do rather well for themselves within their small area of chompy expertise – at least, if Natural Selection 2′s latest trailer is any indication. This time around, the asymmetrical puny, mechanically assisted humans vs horrifying aliens (some of whom are colossal elephant monsters) action takes place on a new map called Docking, which should be available to closed beta players any time now. It’s a positively gorgeous mix of red-hued industrialism, green alien goop, and, er, some form of shooting range/basketball court, but the shooty, bitey, bleedy goodness is the real star here. Check out the madness after the break.

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Some days you click on a trailer and realise the developers have mapped out your life for the two months following their game’s release. Assuming Team Fortress 3 isn’t squeezed out in Summer of this year, I’ll be jetpacking around on Natural Selection 2, Unknown Worlds’ Aliens-inspired FPS/RTS multiplayer game. Here’s why.
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Dynamic infestation is not pictured in this picture, which pictures aliens being fought by soldiermen. But it is pictured in a new video diary from the Natural Selection 2 beta developement thing. Excitingly, I have used 21st century internet technology to make it visible in the extended version of this blog post. Unknown Worlds’ Charlie Cleveland told us: “As you may remember, we got a ton of attention awhile back when we released a video of our first dynamic infestation prototype. We’ve since written our own engine (switched away from Source) but we now have a basic, playable, version of dynamic infestation, in-game and ready to test.” And that’s what is in the video.
And here it is >>

Unknown Worlds superfan channel Natural Selection 2 HD has been charting the progress of the FPS/RTS hybrid with meticulous detail over the past few months, and most recently the man behind it made a trip to the California-based studio to meet the team and find out some more about the team and the game. I’ve posted the “meet the team” video below, for your viewing pleasure.

Natural Selection 2‘s pre-orders have apparently doine a huge amount to get the game to the “next stage” and the ongoing beta is yielding significant results for the team. We hope to have own interview with Unknown Worlds, as well as a hands-on with the game, pretty soon.
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Ooh, we’ve got the first official game footage trailer from the Natural Selection 2 beta! The hybrid RTS-FPS multiplayer sequel is in pre-order-based beta at the moment, where it is being tweaked and honed and squeezed into shape by the testers and developers alike. For those of us who haven’t dared dip in, however, it’s not been clear quite how this thing plays. Unknown Worlds have addressed that with a brand-spanking new video, which you can check out below. It shows the RTS mode, as well as lashings of combat. There’s also perspectives from both alien and marine side, giving you an idea of how the game should play out.

And it looks good.
Coming out of the goddamn walls >>

Hybrid FPS strategy game Natural Selection 2 – which is threatening to be dangerously good – has begun a closed beta. Accessed via Steam, this stage of the beta will be available to the first 10,000 people who preorder. You can do that here, should you be so inclined. I’ve posted the most recent trailer, which features the teleporting “Fade” alien class, below.

Unknown Worlds, if you are reading, you need to make a decent gameplay footage trailer that explains the concept of the game. Thanks!
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Unknown Worlds appear to be creeping towards the final stages of the epic development of their RTS-FPS multiplayer hybrid sequel, Natural Selection 2. The $20 pre-order is going to give folks access to an alpha test from the 26th of this month. Apparently 12,000 people have already pre-ordered, so you should have no shortage of people to “test” things with. Pre-ordering also unlocks the SDK, tools, and fancy armour (pictured). This one has been so long in the making that, at times, I thought it was never going to happen. It is happening, and it’s looking like an extremely interesting example of a what a seven-man independent team can achieve when they really want to make the game in question. (Old) teaser, trailer plus more recent footage, below.
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Crikey! At last. Following their winning of the best upcoming indie game in the ModDb award, they’ve uploaded some better quality footage than what was used in the award reel. It’s still pre-alpha, they stress, and they wouldn’t normally release this into the community in this state, but they’re in a celebratory, sharing mood. Frankly, it looks fine to me.
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Goo did it. Radiohead did it. Even educated independent PC videogames do it. This time, it’s Petri Purho’s Crayon Physics deluxe – yours for however much you care to pay for it. 10p or 10 pentasquilliongillion Venusian sex-dollars, whatever you feel it deserves/are comfortable with. It’s a strategy that worked out pretty well for 2D Boy when they did the same thing with World of Goo last year, despite the vast majority of folk offering insultingly but inevitably low tithes. Be interesting to see if it plays out as profitably for Sir Purho; while his game certainly isn’t the out and out triumph that Goo was, it’s a fun and inventive science’n'creation puzzler that’s certainly worth a punt in this mega-deal. Which lasts only until January 15th, so hurry.

In other Super Indie Game Deal news, if you preorder both Natural Selection 2 and Overgrowth at once, you get ‘em both for pretty much the price of one. More on that in tomorrow’s Bargain Bucket, and videos of all three games I’ve whiffled about here are below the cut.
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None of your artificial ones here. Though, that said, these are the fruits of NS2′s budding modders’ experimentation rather than straight-from-the-source stuff – but they’re a useful demonstration of what Unknown Worlds’ still-mysterious new engine may be capable of. They rather evoke Doom 3, but obviously a lot more amped up and mega-detailed. I found the dark, ominous metal corridors oddly beautiful in a way – though once tediously onmipresent, this kind of environment isn’t something we see that much of these days, and do remind me that there’s a reason we’ve always thrilled to the Aliens look.
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Seven years ago to this very day, uber-Half-Life mod Natural Selection was released. Man! Aliens! Man vs aliens, in a real-time-strategy-in-an-FPS-perspective kinda way! In that time, it’s become something of a landmark in terms of just how far you can stray from the source technology (pun not necessarily intended), just how successful a group of a have-a-go home designers can be, and quite how much prescribed concepts of first-person-shootage can be pushed. Developers Unknown Worlds Entertainment are gearing up for the insanely-anticipated release of the standalone sequel (of which the first and second super-shiny images of this post come from – click to embiggen), whose birth depends hugely on how much pre-order interest they can drum up. In other words, if you’re excited about NS2, you should totally pre-order it. It’s going to be a fine and splendid day in PC land when it finally walks our way.

Right now though, given it’s NS1′s anniversary day, we poked Unknown Worlds’ Game Director Charlie Cleveland into providing a little insight into how this milestone mod came to be…
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