Rock, Paper, Shotgun

*INEVITABLE COMPARISON TO PORTAL*

Now that’s out of the way, let’s all drool over Kim Swift’s upcoming Quantum Conundrum, which looks like what a computer game would look like if Pixar made computer games. That’s just a fact rather than a wild, hastily decided upon and ill-conceived opinion based on eight minutes of footage shown at CES 2012 and narrated by Kim. Now that I mention it, I did just watch just such a video and decided that anyone who didn’t have a massive grin on their face for at least half of it was probably a pod person. Now, smile. I expect to see the rictus grin of a terrified corpse when I observe you all through my periscope momentarily.

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Square Enix’s Scarygirl, formerly a PSP game, has just been confirmed for a Euro/UK release, and it’s definitely happening on PC. It’s an action platformer, and it’s based on the graphic novel by Nathan Jurevicius. Coming out on Xbox Live Arcade on the 18th Jan worldwide, a PC version will follow “shortly after”, whatever that might mean. You can see a trailer for it below.

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The VGAs coughed up a new trailer for Hitman: Absolution, which is crammed with sneaking, stealthery and silence. Except for all the parts with windows exploding in slow motion and The Bald One murdering almost every single person in his path, which just happens to take him through a hospital ward. Those parts are quite noisy. There’s also a crying nun. She is crying because of the constant gunfire and images of men being shot through the abdomen at point blank range. Do you want to see such things? They are below.

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When I witnessed a playthrough of Hitman: Absolution I expressed my concern that there was more murder than assassination and that the level shown looked rather linear. I was fully aware that what was on display may not be representative of the actual hits in the game, showing barcoded-billiard-bonce on the run rather than in his more usual mode of calmly calculated cash-for-cadaver commerce. Here then is another view of the same level, with commentary from game director Tore Blystad and gameplay director Christian Elverdam, as a counterpoint to some of my queries and doubts.

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Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Hitman and (spit) Final Fantasy publisher Square Enix has been experimenting with a brand new, proprietary graphics engine, which it calls Luminous. Given Develop notes this is DirectX 11 tech, it seems more than likely it’s coming to future PC games – so let’s take a look at the thing below. The idea is it’s that much closer to photo-realism, at least in terms of environments – while I’d rather spend my games in a crazy, impossible, fantastical environment than a faithfully-recreated multistorey carpark, there’s no denying that this tech looks mighty impressive.
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Deus Ex: HR came saddled with a selection of preorder incentives, a phrase that tastes like a little bit of sick in my mouth. The upshot is that if you didn’t buy the game from a grid coordinate during the correct lunar sequence, you may be missing little bits of content. No longer. Now, everything can be yours, provided you’re willing to reach into your digital wallet once more. There are two packs available, neither of which I have any experience with so don’t expect an informed opinion. Personally, I haven’t found the game to be lacking any of the things that are listed below. Have you?
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Squeenix ultraboss Yoichi Wada has spoken about the ongoing woes of troubled MMO, Final Fantasy XIV, saying “The Final Fantasy brand has been greatly damaged,” when asked about the game. VG247 reports that the Square man, speaking at a press conference in Japan, said that they company planned to “continue with our reform work, which basically amounts to fully redoing the game, and hope to revive the FFXIV that should have been released.”

The XIVth Final Fantasy game, which was launched in September last year, has been so beleaguered that its intended subscription model has never actually come online, with trial accounts being extended indefinitely. The PC version of the game sold 630,000, with the PS3 version, which was intended to appear in March of this year, returning for further development at a heavily reshuffled internal dev team.