Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I think about 50% of the gaming development community is either ex-Looking Glass or ex-People Can Fly. This lot, The Astronauts, are the latter, and these Polish Bulletstorm vets have just announced The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter.

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This headline feels like it’s dropped in from from 2007. Back then Epic put a pile of money under a giant washing basket. Then Mark Rein waited with a length of string tied to a stick and hoped for a developer to wander underneath. Painkiller devs People Can Fly did, enticed by the money and banquet that Rein had seeded his trap with. But when the trap came tumbling down, PCF left a leg sticking out, so all Epic got was a bit of the company. As of today, Epic Games have trapped that missing leg and now fully own the Bulletstorm developers. They’ve bought the final chunk of the company from founder, Adrian Chmielarz.
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Today I come to you with a heavy heart and a higher-than-average tolerance for dick jokes. Bulletstorm – perhaps the manliest manshoot of them all, depending on how you measure these things – is officially dead. Apparently, People Can Fly’s cartoonishly profane murder symphony didn’t fly with Epic brass, so now Grayson Hunt is getting mad skillshots on angels. Somewhere, a giant remote-controlled dinosaur is shedding a single tear. Made of lasers. So then, what happened? Well, in what’s almost assuredly a first for a game company – nay, the whole of humankind – Epic’s Mike Capps partly blamed PC piracy.

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

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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.
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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!
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