Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Cleopatra does what ‘any mother would do’ in the latest trailer for Total Rome: Two War – builds the impossible, sleeps with the enemy, brings ruin on her people, suckles a wolf (metaphorically), feeds the beast (metaphor again), and kills her sister (not a metaphor). There’s no mention of a dalliance with an asp but presumably that particular part of the tale is still to be told. I’d feel rotten if my mum reckoned she’d brought about the end of a dynasty, the fall of a people and the murder of a family member on my behalf, but maybe it’s a bit like the time she dropped a birthday cake and reckoned it was my fault because I was being ‘giddy and distracting’. Unlikely. I was a solemn and dignified six-year old, and preferred Camus to cake.

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Total War: Rome II has a release date. Facts, straight at the front. That’s what I’m all about: business. Focused on the matter at hand, not allowing myself to wander off and start writing about bees or nostrils, like some airheaded buffoon. Too many gaming sites these days seem to think that they, the author – in my case John Walker, aged 35, living in Bath, son of Meg and Hugh, about 5’11″, blue/green eyes, first class degree in Youth & Community Work And Applied Theology, married, no children, one cat – are the more important aspect of the story rather than the news itself, the precious pieces of information for which the reader has come to the website, not wanting it to be obfuscated amongst trivial nonsense about the writer’s breakfast (I didn’t even have any breakfast today, so couldn’t tell you if I wanted to) or what colour socks they’re wearing. (Black.)

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You’ve been told plenty about Total War: Rome II, but you haven’t seen all that much of it. Not in living colour, full motion, high-resolution video with digital sound and smellovision. How the heady scent of historical battle fills my nostrils! It’s just like my office is filled with sweaty Roman loincloths. But then again, when isn’t it?

These narrated 11 minutes of man-stabbing cover the same scenario our Jim reported on from GDC – which is to say the battle of Teutoburg forest, in which a bunch of German chaps rather unexpectedly gave three Roman legions what for.
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IN A WORLD where game publishers are all in competition over very silly, largely pointless things for no real apparent reason…

[Scene: the world]

Sega: “Push the button.”

Creative Assembly: “This is madness. We can’t do it. If we take this step, there’s no turning back. Not just for us, but for the world.”

[Scene: still the world]

Epic: “Did you see the readout coming from Sega? They’re just mad enough to do it.”

Crytek: “But why? This is going to change everything. We’ll have to fire back with something even bigger. Somehow. Otherwise, the Graphics Wars will be lost.”

Epic: “It’s a goddamn arms race from here on out. Best buckle up, kid.”

[Scene: that first portion of the world again]

Sega: “PUSH THE BUTTON. PUSH IT NOW. FOR ROOOOOOOOOOOME.”

[Scene: space]

An astronaut, gazing down at Earth: “Sweet mother of god.”

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If you dig deep in any random farmer’s field or carpark in Britain, you’ll eventually find a Total War: Rome 2 trailer. They’re impressive too – shiny, dramatic and packed to the brim with tiny men of war. While I’m convinced that, at times, the game will be as attractive and grand as the videos suggest, I’m also aware that a great deal of the footage contains heavily edited historical battles rather than the kind of backwater skirmishes I usually find myself panning across from a distant vantage point that is actually tactically useful. The latest video shows the battle of the Teutoburg Forest, in which Germanic tribes ambushed Romans and total warred them to death.

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Total Two: War Rome is going to be enormous, like the Roman Empire itself, although hopefully it won’t suffer from sprawling overstretch and collapse, in conflict with itself. Forty units, combining naval and land forces, can take place in the battles, and the developer diary below concentrates on the siege of Carthage, because it’s a big city having rocks lobbed at it. Creative Assembly discuss the historical context for the battle and introduce the tactical map, to help with orientation during the large scale struggles. The next diary takes us to the forests of Germania and Gaul. It’s all impressive stuff so far, although I can’t wait to see more of the game’s strategic side.

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Go on, try to guess. Creative Assembly have announced the first playable faction for the forthcoming Total War: Rome II, and we know who it is! Okay, I’ll give you some hints about who you’ll be able to play in Rome II. They liked long straight roads. They conquered enormous stretches of the globe. They were very keen on murdering each other to usurp power, and were master strategists in battle. Can you guess who’s in Rome II? Can you?!?

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How far will you go for Rome? That’s the question asked by the new trailer for Totalest War XII: Rome II. Will you go so far as to launch the heads of statues at people as if you were the deity of ten-pin bowling? That the kind of thing Rome seems to demand. I think the word Creative Assembly would like people to use when discussing all this Carthiginian conflict is ‘epic’. I’m going to go with ‘quite big’. It looks like quite a big war, with potential to be total.

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Here’s what I know about Total War: Rome 2. It’s this strategy game, where you play as… the Romans? And they’re really angry about something – I bet Caecilius cheated on Metella again, in the horto. So rather than just a regular war, that they have all the time, this time it’s a TOTAL WAR. But for the second time, because the last one didn’t quite take. The game features Romans, horses, and probably statistics. And armies! You can see four new screenshots of such matters below.

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