Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The men of Bigpoint send word that their Diablo-like MMO based on the Drakensang games (ish) has entered the open phase of its beta activities. I had a moderate amount of fun with it when I played in the closed beta – you can read my account here – and reports are that it’s developed a fair bit since then. You can sign up for it here. There’s also a lovely trailer to tie up this post with a bow, below.
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Germanic RPG Drakensang – which we last spoke about just here – has a prequel, River Of Time, but it’s not available in the UK, so I can’t (easily) play it. That makes me sad. Why would I want to play it? Well, because plenty of people are beginning to point out that it’s a pretty, full-blown, and mechanistically interesting RPG that has released at just $20. Sure, it might sit well into the hard betrodden realm of fantasy RPG standards, but I fear no dwarf-quest – why wouldn’t I want to take a look?

So anyway, I suppose I will throw this one out to the comments? Is River Of Time any good, Internet? I believe Americans and Europeans can get it on Steam? Is anyone playing it?

German developers Radon Labs have turned their attention from RPGs to turn-based Battle Isle type strategy, with their new game Future Wars. Assuming your weekend isn’t already crammed full of pre-ordained game action then you might want to check out the first five levels of the game, here. It’s a mere 325mb of demo.

None of us have had time to play this yet, but I wanted to post it up here for y’all to download and possibly discuss. The 500mb demo of the German RPG is here. I was stumped by the language barrier of playing the German demo a few weeks back, but I can nevertheless confirm that the game is very pretty, and very fantasy. Still, it does seem to be extremely well made, so it might just be worth a look. And it has reminded me to take a look at their previous game, which I have on my shelf here, the completely mad Project Nomads.

Kieron says he might look at the Drakensang in more detail later, but he quite often forgets what he’s doing and

In my enfeebled state this morning I set the Drakensang demo downloading. I’d been looking up developers Radon Labs, and the reason for that was my uncovering their 2002 game Project Nomads in a great heap of rubbish in my office. Nomads was a stark-raving mad quasi-strategic action game, in which you traveled about on a flying island, and I’ll write a retro piece about it next week. Anyway, I wanted to see what those imaginative developers were doing now – having been surprised they still existed at all. It seems they’ve learned their lesson, because they’re developing the generic fantasy of Drakensang. There’s a demo! What I somehow failed to realise until I came to install it, was that the demo was in German. Undaunted, I set out on a quest. Impressions follow.

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