Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Did you like Bulletstorm? Did you enjoy the multiplayer modes? So did I! I can’t imagine anybody’s still playing them, but that’s for Epic and not me to decide. They’ve just released the Gun Sonata DLC pack, offering three new maps for Anarchy, the game’s arena co-op point-scoring mode, and two new maps for Echo, the game’s corridor-shooter point-scoring mode. For this they are charging ten American dollars, which is a number that is a little more than nine dollars, but significantly less than twelve dollars.

I think I need another mug of tea. Press release after the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »

Bulletstorm isn’t actually out until this Friday, but EA recently demanded we send one of our number along to play, complete, and review the finished game. I returned to RPS having finished the single-player game and invested some six hours into the multiplayer, making me perfectly equipped to tell you Wot I Think.
Read the rest of this entry »

Remember this spurt of controversy back in January when we heard that the Bulletstorm demo would be gracing the Xbox Box and Sony Playingstation only? Turns out the PC will be getting a demo after all. Epic vice president Mark Rein has tweeted that the PC demo is in the works, and should be available “shortly after” the game’s release this Friday. Strong!

Just to keep score, we’ve now whipped away concerns that People Can Fly couldn’t be bothered releasing a PC demo for Bulletstorm, that the game causes rape and that it might be crap. All we need now is for a press release to come pinwheeling in through the window that the game’s dropped Games For Windows Live. Ah, a man can dream.

Following the recent wash of ingenious marketing and controversy it’s a little tricky to remember that Bulletstorm is simply an FPS from the Painkiller developers, coming out in less than 2 weeks. Will it be any good? At EA’s invitation I sat down for a lengthy hands-on. That’s the perfect set-up for a dick joke, by the way. My restraint knows no bounds.
Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday Fox News asked the headline question, “Is Bulletstorm the Worst Video Game in the World?” Which is spectacular. It’s a quite remarkable piece of writing, worthy of our own Daily Mail. And why is it the WORST GAME IN THE WORRRRLD? Because they’ve named some of the Skill Shots with sexual innuendos. Which, they absolutely astonishingly claim, causes rape.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Bulletstorm tweeting-thing announced that People Can Fly’s free Call Of Duty parody, Duty Calls, has been download 1.25 million times over the weekend. The brief game, which mocks the “realistic” shooter genre, was an advert for Bulletstorm’s more science fictional approach on the macho manshoot. And, well, it was actually pretty funny. As adverts go, it was one of the more inventive ones we’ve seen. A kind of anti-demo. “Bulletstorm is not this,” being the message. It also, perhaps, goes some small way toward making up for the lack of an actual demo. Well, they say laughter is the best medicine. We’ll see about that.

EDIT: Stand down! People Can Fly’s Creative Director, Adrian Chmielarz, has tweeted saying that Bulletstorm only requires a constant internet connection for installation and online play. This simply looks like an incredibly poor choice of words on EA’s part, since none of the other “digital” versions on the disclosure page list a persistent internet connection as a requirement. Phew. For posterity, I’ve re-posted my original post after the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »

Bulletstorm isn’t getting a PC demo and we are ANGRY, yes, but then they release a trailer with a line like “pucker your butthole!” and all is forgiven. Now Epic have started releasing short videos detailing the various skillshots integral to the game, and they’re calling these skill-related episodes… skillisodes, a word that I can barely type without going and washing my hands. But then you actually watch them, and they’re awesome. Full game’s less than a month away now!
Read the rest of this entry »

I spent some time trying to figure out how to crowbar in my own reference to that bit in The Simpsons where Skinner declares there to be a “diorama-rama”, but it just didn’t work. Anyway, this is the Bulletstorm trailer where they get clever, because it’s a diorama scene that reference’s Halo’s one, and that is like a satire or something. Ah, “pastiche”. Yeah, that’s the stuff. Go watch it, and think about how well Epic know their audience. Pretty well, I reckon.
Read the rest of this entry »

There was a time when a new game from Epic meant saving up the thousand or so pounds it would cost to get a machine that could play it. That sounds so alien now, so ludicrous, that people were upgrading at such vast expenses just to play the latest, greatest PC game. But of course it was an investment in the many dozens of games that would follow, until the next time id released something. But now, thanks to cross-platform publishing, the PC is idling. We’re already so far ahead of the current gen console tech that we can spin our wheels and enjoy our latest games on two-year-old rigs, with the graphics card we bought at the time. Madness. And to prove this point, the Bulletstorm specs look positively pedestrian. They’re below.

Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a new Bulletstorm trailer, in which, Cliffy ‘Don’t Call Me CliffyB’ B describes his hopes, dreams and aspirations.

Good grief.

(Probably NSFW)
Read the rest of this entry »