Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The guys at Tripwire have sent word that they’re going to be doing another Killing Floor novelty map event, like they did for last Christmas, only this time it’s a “Summer Sideshow”. What that means is they’ve poured their mapping talents into creating a grotesque freakshow, complete with ‘orrible circus variants of Killing Floor’s hideous mutants, and new unlockables and achievements. You can check them out in the trailer below. More details on the site.

It’ll be arriving on Steam, and the event will from June 30th to July 22nd. (Also I recall Killing Floor being a popular option for an RPS server. Any +1s to that?)
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Tripwire’s lo-fi mining game, Dwarfs!?, has arrived on Steam. It has a demo, and harkens backs to games like Diggers and other 2D tunnelers. It might not look like much from that screenshot there, but it seems to escalate pretty spectacularly, and also to have its heart in the right place. It manges to reference both Dwarf Fortress and Lemmings in a single promotional blurb. If it really is the arcade version of Dwarf Fortress then I suspect the internet is beginning to eat itself, but that’s probably inevitable anyway. Eventually we’ll just end up with some much reciprocity that the internet will turn inside out and vanish in a puff of meme.

Also, I don’t trust anyone who says they don’t like digging. Or mining. We all like it. Or else. Trailer below.
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Last night I got an exclusive sneak preview of the Christmas update to Killing Floor, in which the familiar range of nightmarish mutants are replaced with an even more disturbing group of gingerbread men, murderous elves, fiery snowmen, and super-powered death Santas. It’s an impressive piece of work, and also a little strange, and comes with free stuff for TF2 players. More on these things, to the slightly off-key tune of Jingle Bells, below. (Also, a seasonal trailer.)
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Tripwire has released the third free content pack for their co-op multiplayer zombie-shoot, Killing Floor, as well as a new 99p character pack, which is currently available at half price. 49p! That’s a bag of crisps. The Incendiary pack brings a new weapon and four new maps, as well as upgrades for the Firebug perk. Bonanza! A video of some professional-sounding people completing the West London level of killing floor awaits your judgement beneath.
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If this morning’s interview caught your interest, then you’ll probably want to watch this. It’s an in-engine FMV sequence, rather than being actual game footage, but you get the idea. Tanks, men with rifles, machine-guns, hats. Lots of grimness. Yeah, there’s really quite a lot to look forward to at the minute, isn’t there?
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To anyone who swore and panicked their way through the original Red Orchestra modification back in 2004, or its commercial release, Red Orchestra: Ostfront, back in 2006, the upcoming sequel Red Orchestra: Heroes of Stalingrad should represent a big deal.

To anyone with no idea what Red Orchestra is, let me help out: It’s a multiplayer FPS, set on the Eastern front of World War 2, which captures above all else the grayness and desperation of those nightmare battlefields. Red Orchestra is a game of wincing at suppressive fire, of bayonet attacks, and of struggling to figure out whether that figure is a German or a Russian because muddy gray and muddy brown often look the same in dim lighting.

The sequel’s looking to expand on everything that made the original game great, including its horrific tank combat. Here, we present an exclusive interview with Tripwire President John Gibson, in which he talks freely on the as-of-yesterday unrevealed vehicle combat coming in the sequel.
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Delirium Wartner pointed the Beta of the Tripwire-signed indie game Dwarfs at me, and I’ve had a quick crack at breaking open the soil and quite like it. While the title will bring Dwarf Fortress to mind, it’s much more like Diggers (and, of course, the recent Delve Deeper). While there’s multiple modes, the key one is the arcade one which generates a random underground and charges you to explore it without being over-ran with goblins, released water or unleashed lava. My main reservation is that the direction arrows you create influence both the incredibly weak diggers (who you’ll want to keep away from combat) and the handy warriors (who you’ll want to guide towards it), but it’s agreeably chaotic, gold-chasing. You can get the beta from here. I suspect Delirium got the link from Indie Games, so let’s link to them and show this video…
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Damnable over-long game names. YOU DENY US OUR PUNS, YOU BABBLING SWINE. Grr. Anyway (I lose track of how many posts I’ve written whose second sentences begin with ‘anyway’. Anyway.) at the 1C event during which I cooed at Men of War: Vietnam the other week, I was also privy to a few more details on 2011′s long-awaited sequel to mod-gone-pricetaggy FPS Red Orchestra. The series began life as a multiplayer title, but this one, sometimes referred to as RO2, will feature a solo mode.

While the game itself wasn’t playable at the event, and the only video footage was a slideshow of screenshots, I do have in my possession a clutch of new screens and facts. To see them, you must dance widdershins around Ludlow Cathedral at 4am on the first night of the summer solstice. The ancient legends do tell of another way to access them, but you could never hope to work it out.
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Tripwire Interactive have announced an expansion – called Rising Storm – to the sequel to their rather well-received World War II shooter, Red Orchestra, the sequel being Heroes Of Stalingrad, see. That’s not out yet. The pictures of mangrove swamps should give you a clue about the setting – the Pacific Theatre during those fateful years when Japan decided to try and conquer the world by force, rather than by designing consumer electronics. But wait, there’s actually something really interesting about all this! Behold:

Rising Storm will be created in a first-of-its-kind collaboration between a mod team and a professional game development studio. The Rising Storm team will be made up of the best developers from the Red Orchestra modding community and the mod community at large.

We are now inviting applications for a place on the development team from experienced modders.

Modders-gone-kinda-pro Tripwire Interactive have just released a chunk of free DLC for their popular co-op zombie shooter, Killling Floor. Do you like stuff? Well, it’s got a bunch of stuff in it. More importantly, it’s a pleasing sign of ongoing and generous support for a game that seemed pretty barebones to mine eye upon release. Also, there’s currently a free weekend going on for it, so it’s your chance to take a gander without spending any of your Earthman pennies. Details below. And a question!
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Tripwire Interactive, the good chaps behind the Red Orchestra series, offered up their brand new, standalone multiplayer shooter Killing Floor last week. Well, I say brand new, but it’s an embiggening of an old UT2004 mod. A storm of hype exploded around this co-op survival horror shooter in the run up to release, so now’s the time to judge if it deserved such loving treatment. Indie zombie face-splatting? Sounds about ideal. Or does it? Impressions below…
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