Rock, Paper, Shotgun

To release a demo. Well, we weren’t, but it’s a nice surprise to wander in to discover that Treyarch have released a just-shy of 700Mb demo of their new Call of Duty 4-engine Quantum of Solace electronicshootygame. You can get it from here, via what we call a hyperlink. Having not actually played the demo, I can only go on the press notes – of which, only the fact it includes the voice of Dame Judy Dench sticks out (An Official RPS Inappropriate Lust Object, for the record (Are you Sure? -Ed)). Frankly, I’m not likely to actually download it to play either – I share Alec’s initial luke-to-cold response to what I’ve seen. Has anyone played it? Should I overcome my prejudices? Should the Lion lay down with the lamb? TELL ME.

This latest trailer for the videogame of the new bond movie, Quantum of Solace, looks at how the game is a reworking of the rather solid tech we saw in Call Of Duty 4. Of course that doesn’t mean that this game will be anything like as intense or interesting, not least because it’s making my nose tingle in that way that movie licenses generally do. Or maybe that’s just a nasal flashback to Nightfire. Eugh.

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Preview wot I wrote about the upcoming Bond game is up over on Eurogamer. It’s not, suffice to say, one of those ‘lalalalalala everything is shiny wooo’ previews:

It might end up feeling like Bond skins taped over a hasty Any-FPS skeleton. While we’ve only seen two levels so far, the bizarre presence in those of exploding fuel tanks (”mousetraps”, according to Treyarch) inside a posh hotel lobby suggests this an action game that very much plays by the rules.

While I’m actually fairly gentle to it, I’ll add the qualifier I did over there – there’s still a few months of work left to go on the game, so it could yet be more Goldfinger than Die Another Day. Oh – beware of the Angry Internet Man in the piece’s comments thread, loudly crying foul at the partially pessimistic tone. Whadda ya think – are not entirely positive previews of upcoming games welcome journo-honesty, or miserabilist, unprofessional presumption?