Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Earlier this week, I saw Brink, a game whose substance no-one had hitherto seemed terribly clear about. Pray allow me to try to correct this…

You can tell this is a Splash Damage game because it’s about two teams of players fighting an eternal, bloody war against each other in objective-based maps. It’s not nominally an Enemy Territory game (as have been SD’s two titles to date, Wolfenstein: ET and Quake Wars), but for all the Kent-based developers’ claims that Brink is something of a new beginning, it’s very much a natural extension of what they’ve done previously.

You can’t tell this is a Splash Damage game because, well, everything.
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The problem with the leaked Game Informer cover a few weeks back, and the reason a whole bunch of folk, myself included, reacted to it with knee-jerk negativity, was that it appeared to tell a complete story. You’re back in Rapture, and the Big Daddies are now ladies. Oh God, must it really be so obvious?

As it turns out, that’s only a fraction of the story. It’s barely even the story at all, in fact – in the name of attention-grabbing marketing, that single, strangely self-contained image discarded all the more interesting questions around Bioshock 2. Even now, having yesterday seen the game in action and discovering nothing’s anywhere near as simple as it had seemed, I’ve a very clear sense there are a great many more questions yet to be posed – let alone that I’ll discover their answers any time soon. Which, really, is why Bioshock 2 is so exciting to the breed of gamer who we like to think reads this site.
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RPS is very pleased to have been one of the first websites in the world to see Mafia II running. We took a trip to 2K Czech, in their Czech Republic headquarters, and saw how the game is coming together. So far, so good. They were allowed to continue with our blessing. Below are detailed impressions of the game at this stage in development, along with five brand new screenshots (click on them for the full versions).

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I had a look at Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising the other day, and then happened upon the notion of writing down what I saw and publishing it on an international gaming website. And so it came to be that Eurogamer has a couple of thousand words of details as well as interviewy gobbets with lead AI man, Clive Lindop. It goes,

“First and foremost, the scale of the game needs to be expressed. Dragon Rising presents a 135 square mile island, with an engine offering a draw distance of up to 35km. This isn’t an exaggeration – we’ve seen it with our own eyes as a Cobra helicopter rises above the hills to reveal the extraordinary vista. The new engine is designed to allow a great deal of stuff on screen at any one time, which is essential for one of the game’s most distinctive features: shooting people from miles away.”

And carries on over here.

Back in the dim and distant past, anyone who was anyone and had a (for the time) pornographic amount of RAM was playing Planetside – the MMOFPS that was surely surely the bright future of PC gaming. Actual FPS, not vague cursor aiming and damage based on your stats – it was about reflex and precision, and military tactics.

Four years later, we’re not playing it any more. Well, some of you probably are, but we Men of RPS at least lament for a dream lost.
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A preview of Warhammer Online has appeared on Edge’s website, Next-Gen.biz. But being Edge, it’s literally impossible to know who wrote it. It will forever remain a mystery, not even to be solved by futuristic robot races with special Knowledge Tablets.

It begins,

Clearly, this is tentative ground. Warhammer is an enormous license, and proves itself regularly in the strategy market. But it also has a lot in common with Blizzard’s behemoth. Orcs, dwarves, dragons and wizards – we know it very well. But will familiarity breed contempt, or an enormous pre-cooked audience? Clearly, the desire is to be just similar enough so everyone’s comfortable, before it begins to subvert you with what Mythic calls Realm Vs Realm.

And carries on here.

Dear me, a few days ago the fine-feathered folks at PC Gamer put my preview of Age Of Conan on their website and I didn’t notice. That’s being remedied RIGHT NOW.

Be tantalised by this excerpt, and read the rest here:

Six months ago, Conan looked to be in a spot of bother. The beta began, and the players let out a unified “Erk”. The problem? The combat. In trying to move away from the standard MMO fare, Conan’s esoteric approach to online fighting left many players bemused. Now, only about four months from the delayed release date, it’s that element of the game that’s seen the most work.

The good news is that it’s still different enough from every other MMO to be interesting. The better news is that it’s very easy to play. Perhaps even too easy. Every enemy in the Robert E Howard-inspired game has three points where they can be attacked: left, right and above.

It’s battle of the new Battles today. Eidos have revealed details about the new Battlestations game, Battlestations: Pacific.

Details and screenshots below.

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