Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Remember how we laughed and cried over arcade physics racer Trials 2? Okay, well we did. And lots of people loved it, and lo it was some kind of hit. Well, Red Lynx haven’t been sitting on their hands staring at the ceiling since they made it, no sir, they’ve been making another silly side-on zooming and jumping game, called Monster Trucks Nitro. (Secretly been around for a while, we just weren’t paying attention. Shh!) There’s a demo through that link, but the download is slow. Fortunately you can also get it on Steam too. Hooray!

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Previous RPS-love-item Trials 2 has just had another free update gone live. This time there’s three new sets of voice-overs from Brandon DiCamillo, Art Webb and Rake Yohn, multi-language support (So Jim can get his Witcher-esque thrills by playing it in Polish), team-chats, improved graphics (Triple-widescreen mode!) and – most importantly – 14 new downloadable tracks. It’s enough to make you say “Hurrah for Red Lynx!”. In fact, we will.

Hurrah for Red Lynx!

So, I’m bouncing E-mails with Red “Trials 2″ Lynx. They’re asking if I’ve judged the Trials 2 compo yet - and I reply I haven’t, but will be sorting it out this week when I do the Champions one. And I ask ‘em what they’ve been up to, and they say they’ve just finished a new phone-game for the N-Gage, which can be played for free via browser against anyone you fancy. Oh – and Pocketgamer dug it.

So I figured I better go to the site and have a crack. And lo! – it’s some satirical-videogame collision between Advance Wars DS, Worms and ancient Tetris-as-Stronghold game Rampart.
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We’ve talked about Trials 2 a lot, we know. So we figured that it was about time we actually shut up and listened a little, and see what Red Lynx, the creators of Trials 2 had to say. A tag team of Creative Director Antti Ilvessuo and CEO Tero Virtala worked hard to answer our questions, speaking in a singular voice we will call RED LYNX. As a gestalt entity, it deserves capitals. We talk about their appearance on Steam, the concept of difficulty, downloadable game and have a competition to give away some Trials 2 goodies. Well, flags. But they count as goodies to the likes of us. Interview and compo… go!
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This is proving to be a splendid day for things that RPS like. Following on from the news that there is something beyond Beyond Good And Evil, news reaches us that the gloriously hyper-difficult Red Lynx Trials 2: Second Edition is now available on Steam for ten dollars. In fact, there’s a dollar off if you order now. Since we’ve ranted about it previously on multiple occasions, you can assume our strong recommendations of giving it a shot remain in place. Rejoice! Rejoice!

That said, the one group who may pausing mid-rejoice to wonder if it’s all good are those who already bought the game for twenty-dollars direct from the team. Hmm. At least there’s a new patch including new levels and – waitforit – bone-breaking sound effects to distract them from that. Full details of the patch here.

Old comrade Oskar Skog mentions that his Swedish bunch of readers have done an pile-on interview with RedLynx about recent RPS-celebration subject Trials 2. It’s answering a bunch of questions from their readers, and – in the spirit of international goodwill – it’s written in English, not Swedish. To reciprocate next month RPS will have Swedish Posting Week, where we’ll have a shot of doing likewise. No, really. Some of the answers are fun. For example: Why Finnish games involve hurting.

Finland was still a bit over 100 years ago one of the poorest countries in Europe. Before that, even poorer. And when the country was underdeveloped, and poor, and climate is cold as you know, life most likely was far from easy. You had to face risk, danger, things we would nowadays see as very dark sides of life – maybe that started to develop a base for very sarcastic humor. It is easier to handle the negative things, if you can see some humor in them?”

I dunno what our excuse is.