Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Sometimes, I think zombies are just a giant metaphor for our pervasive cultural fear of other people. And so, as Dead Island demonstrates, we keep that oh-so-frightening Other at arm’s length by thwacking it upside the head with a boat paddle. Or at least, I know that’s how I deal with my interpersonal problems. However, Dead Island: Riptide (Get it? It stands for “rest in peace… tide”) is adding a fifth playable character, and he likes to resolve his conflicts up-close-and-personal. His name’s John Morgan, and he’s not even the least bit afraid of the one thing scarier than a brain-devouring End of Days: human contact. So he punches people. Dead people, no less. Ewwwww.

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Once upon a time, Techland made everyone cry. Then it made some people cry again when it, er, didn’t make them cry again with Dead Island: The Game Based On The Hit Original Trailer. The final product was still pretty fun (if very rough-around-the-edges), mind you, but its over-the-top blend of Borderlands and zombies didn’t exactly scratch the itch people were expecting it to. Fast forward (and maybe also reverse and slow-mo) to now: Techland’s attempting to court attention again with a new sadvertisement for sequel Dead Island: Riptide. But – in this post-Day-Z-and-Walking-Dead world of ours – does it succeed?

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Ubisoft have revealed that their cowboy ‘em up series will return next year with Call Of Juarez: The Gunslinger. Once again the game is being developed by Techland, and the new game will place you at the controls of frontier bounty hunter whose antagonists are famed gunslingers, such as Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett from VG247, and Jesse James, who is bad. The Joystiqs report that the game will be closer to Bound In Blood in terms of how it will play, although they note that “You can’t bend down and pick up a fallen enemy’s gun until you purchase that skill.”

There’s a – sigh! – live action teaser below.
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Techland have announced that they are currently working on a new game, currently named “Project Hell“. The game is a spin off from Dead Island, as revealed on their recent blog-post about the game, it comes out of “an internal weapon mod” for Dead Island, made by one of their own. It’s a first-person “hack and slash game in a dark fantasy setting”. Techland said that the mod “was a proof that chopping monsters frozen by magic spells using two-handed swords is brutally fun and addictive.” We had always suspected, of course, but now we have proof. Horrible proof. It’s going to be just as dark as their tropical zombie-hurter: “Our main goal is to make a game we can all enjoy playing so don’t expect unicorns and fairies – we prefer breaking through hordes of undead minions only to slaughter their devilish and loathsome masters in a bloody boss-fight.”

No other details on release or owt, but they say a small team is currently working full-time on the game.

Techland’s zombie game Dead Island sold especially well, so it’s hardly surprising that a sequel should have appeared on the RPS long-distance radar so quickly. There’s no information aside from the name and confirmation that it exists, (thanks VG247) but I sense this will please those of you who enjoyed the original tropical island undeath. Full details will appear in the summer, and I’m hoping to see more surfing zombies, perhaps some zombie scuba action?

A few weeks ago, I was accosted by a disarmingly elderly-looking salesman during the after-party of a gaming event. While everyone else clutched refreshing beverages in their keyboard-calloused hands, he brandished a clipboard in much the same way a soldier would handle a firearm. His spiel, which ended up sounding sort of like an elevator pitch for Gamification, was all at once targeted and messy – like a SWAT shotgun that fired heaping gobs of butter. It was the weirdest thing. I walked away – or escaped, really – not quite grasping what he was trying to tell me, but understanding that he wanted people to notice the goddamn hell out of it.

And now, I’m getting an eerily similar feeling from the latest trailer for Ubisoft and Dead Island dev Techland’s Mad Riders because, well, goodness. Lots of things happen in this trailer. Occasionally, they’re even related. First it’s a parody, then it’s a parody of itself, and by the end, I think it might even be parody of that parody. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll cringe. You might even do all three at once. So maybe have an ambulance on speed dial – just in case.

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What… where…. Who? Videowhats? I’ve been away for a week (pleasure not work for once, although the weather did its best to undermine that) without internet teats to suckle upon and I currently have about as much idea of what’s going in the land of videogames as I do about ballroom dancing. While the RPS Hivemind straps me into the Rapid Retraining Device, I’ll leave you with news that Dead Island devs Techland’s next, and entirely who do the voodoo-free, offering will be turning up in a mere nine days’ time. After the dark, divisive concept album that was Dead Island, Mad Riders seems to be Techland’s equivalent of the ninety second punk single. It’s got quadbikes. They are ridden. Madly. Basically, it looks like Mario Kart but with crash helmets and no magic shells.
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Techland are a developer famous to different people for different things. Some know them as the people behind the Call Of Juarez series, others for last year’s very decent Dead Island, and others still as the racing game team who gave us Nail’d. (Oddly though, they don’t seem to know this about themselves, with a website that doesn’t mention the latter two games at all.) It’s in their racing guise that they offer Mad Riders (also not mentioned on their site), an Ubisoft published off-road arcade racer that just about gets a mention on their site.

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It’s a frequent lament that we rarely get to play bad guys in an interesting way. There’s another hope on the horizon, with the rather good Dead Island announcing some new major DLC. Ryder White is a whole new angle on the game’s story, where you play as the titular character – the game’s main baddie. Which is a splendid idea, if it’s done right. It’s a new single-player campaign, where you’ll apparently get to understand White’s motivations for his actions, as well as see him as a loving husband and military man. Techland say it’ll be “several hours” long, and add in a couple more weapons. We’ve some screenshots of it below.

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RPS is probably the most visited website on the internet, knocking Google and YouTube into an embarrassing runner-up position. I don’t have accurate data, but it was.

Meanwhile, we’ve just received an email letting us know that Techland’s Tomasz Gawlikowski says, “Dead Island is probably the best selling new IP in this year”.

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