Rock, Paper, Shotgun

As I sat in 2K’s lobby waiting to play Spec Ops: The Line, a man played The Darkness II on a nearby consolebox. If I were to estimate, I’d say 84% of his time was spent eviscerating people, tearing them limb from limb, punching gaping holes through their most precious parts and lopping off their screaming faces with a twitch of his tentacles. It truly was one of the most gruesome displays I’ve ever been witness to. That man was Shawn Frison, senior designer at Yager Games. In Spec Ops, he has helped create something far more brutal than the comic book killfest of The Darkness.

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When I was a much younger person, I rarely stopped playing Enemy Unknown and Jagged Alliance. If I did put them to one side, it was usually because I was playing Master of Magic instead. There were other games, of course, but in terms of the amount of time devoted to them, those three were probably the dominant forces for at least a few years. UFO and Jagged Alliance are both receiving new versions this year and, lo and behold, Warlock: Master of the Arcane is the best attempt to emulate Master of Magic’s best features as anything I’ve played in the sixteen years since I bought it. It’s more than a clone though, with plenty to say for itself.

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Agent Griliopoulos was dispatched to see the game formerly known as Hitman: Subtitle for us. He returned bathed in blood, dressed as a sailor, and bearing these words. Update: now with brand new screenshots!

Oh, we are skeptical souls at RPS. Though we loved Hitman: Blood Money, we have been somewhat wary of Hitman: Absolution. Partially, because there are mild changes to something we loved (like when the X-Files replaced Mulder with T-1000) and partially because Kane & Lynch left us colder than Captain Oates. The new level we saw yesterday had the chance to allay our fears though, set as it was in a lovely orphanage. What can go wrong in a lovely orphanage?

Jumping back from the lovely orphanage for a second, we were given a quick rundown of the game’s backstory before Agent 47 got to meet all those lovely nuns.
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I am responsible for many of the smaller craters that mark the moon’s surface. It’s true! I’ve been playing Lunar Flight, the modern take on Lunar Lander that I first spotted way back in 2011. Turns out it’s a simulation of me panicking as I hurtle toward the ground, upside down, beginning to rotate wildly in the hope that the motion will somehow cause me to skim off the rocks and bounce to safety. It doesn’t. It’s not an intimidatingly hardcore simulation but it is a lot less arcadey than I expected it to be. The beta, which feels remarkably complete, is available to those who donate $5 or more. More thoughts follow.

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I’ve been playing an early version of Jagged Alliance – Back In Action, the upcoming remake of one of my most beloved games. I keep my copy of Jagged Alliance 2 atop a giant stack of Soldier of Fortune magazines, which stands between an ashtray containing a smouldering over-sized cigar, some satellite surveillance photos of a dictator’s villa, a few scattered dogtags (some with bulletholes through them) and a pile of empty shell casings. I don’t know why I keep a lot of that stuff but I guess it reminds me how much of a man I am. Can Back In Action do the same?

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We sent Agent Smee to have a good long play of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. Below is his detailed report on the colourful open-world fantasy ‘em up where atheism gives you an XP boost.
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I’ve had my hands on a preview build of Amanita Design’s Botanicula, a return to their origins of organic exploration, rather than Machinarium’s more rigid adventure style. And I’m pleased to say it seems to be working so far.

A broad, beaming smile is not a facial expression games frequently paint over my face. Botanicula’s endless inventiveness, delight in intricate throwaway details, and ludicrous levels of joie de vivre, make it impossible not to sit staring at the screen grinning like a loon.

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Him: silent, stoic, patient. “OK.”
Me: jabbering, confused, hectoring. “Go there, what about that, does that look like that?”

A right pair, Jim and I. Entirely inappropriate, surely, to tackle a co-operative puzzle and exploration game together. We did it, though. We conquered At A Distance‘s abstract shape-worlds, and we did it together. And creator Terry Cavanagh (VVVVVV) only had to give us big, fat hints around half a dozen times. Perhaps he was inwardly thinking “these feckless jokers run a website about videogames?”, but outwardly he was patient and understanding, so I’ll presume we weren’t quite the most pathetic pair he saw tackle his brain-teasing wonder.

Right: here’s the main problem with writing about At A Distance. You say how it works, you spoil it. I’m going to take a cowardly middle-ground and obliquely reference key elements without actually shining a direct light on them (and certainly not on how to solve the game), but if you want to go in totally blind to this 30 minute-long co-op indie game that requires two adjacent PCs to play it, stop reading now.
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FrozenByte’s ethereally-lit follow-up to their Lost Vikings-esque puzzle-platformer has been sitting temptingly on my hard drive for several weeks now, but my Skyrim habit has kept me from until today. I was still feeling a little raw after the freneticism of Serious Sam 3 and an unfortunate chilli-burn incident that temporarily cost me the use of my hands, but Trine 2‘s main menu alone is a balm for the soul if ever there was one. I’ve put a little time into the beta version – not enough for some sort of cast-iron verdict, but enough to go ‘d’awwwwwwwwwww’ and offer a few early observations.
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Oh dear. The context in which I find myself writing about Ghost Recon Online is very different to the context in which I played it. It was all sunshine and daisies and shotgun shells then, but now it’s blood and mud and he said she said and everyone knows best and everyone else knows nothing. What I’m not going to do, though, is discuss the controversial comments made about completely different Ghost Recon game and one man’s troubling take on the state of PC gaming, so I’d be grateful if you could keep arguments about Future Soldier to the thread about Future Soldier. I’m talking about Ghost Recon Online, a game specifically made for PC and PC only (at least for now – apparently there’s a WeeeeOooooo version due after Nintendo’s bizarre console/tablet thing launches), and one mercifully sidesteps piracy and DRM arguments due to being an inherently online game with persistent player ranks and whatnot.

Here’s the thing about GRO: it’s a free to play, mulitplayer-only shooter. And it’s pretty good. That doesn’t have to be an oxymoron after all.
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The Spec Ops series has been going since 1998, although came to an abrupt end after eight games and an abandoning of the PC, in 2002. Now, a decade on, it’s back with Spec Ops: The Line. We sent Craig to take a look at an early build of the military shooter to see if it’s a welcome return.

Sand, like bullets, can kill a man. You need sufficient quantities, but it’ll eventually either crush, suffocate, or get in so many sandwiches that the victim grinds his insides away. Given the choice of what I’d rather die of, I’d go with a lead sandwich (bullets) over a sand sandwich (an actual sandwich with sand).

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