Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Time is a meaningless construct. A philosophically confusing frame that demeans our very existence when we acknowledge it. Destroy your clocks and watches, they are prisons, trapping you in a mental cells! Stop being tools of the elite chronologistia, and allow yourself to be free. Let’s not consider the seconds ticking off, falling like dandruff on the shoulder of life; the minutes that build up and up and up until the dam breaks and we all get covered in sticky time juice; the hours that segment our day but lazily repeat, not even having the common decency to go up to 24; the days that.. ooh, today’s Wednesday! That means Call Of Juarez: Gunslinger is out! Hooray for time and dates. And hooray for acknowledging Call Of Juarez: Juarez’s launch with a new trailer on that very day! There’s 4 minutes of footage, which covers everything that has been said about the game and finally demonstrates the unreliable narrator with guns schtick. It is below.
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Wanted: one co-op partner for Splinter Cell: Blacklist. Must enjoy crashing through doors simultaneously, long walks in the dark, and pretending that one of the character’s is still voiced by Michael Ironside. Preference given to someone that can quote Chaos Theory’s Sam/guard chats and those who would rather muck about with the AI over actually following the mission text. To be in with a chance, watch the video below and apply in the comments.
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It’s like something out of a storybook. Guy meets gigantic, monolithic game publisher. Guy helps create publisher’s flagship franchise. Guy leaves to pursue something new and different. Guy’s company is bought by said gigantic, monolithic publisher due to hilariously unfortunate circumstances. Guy reluctantly returns to company. Guy gets fired a couple months later. AND FINALLY: Guy’s project is “suspended for an undisclosed period of time.” And some unrelated people somewhere else all lived happily ever after.

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I say “conspicuously” because the latest Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag trailer contains all other pirate things. Boats, poofy beards, vast seas, tropical settings, gruff voices chattering, cannons, SHAAAAAAAAAAAARK, dead men floating, black flags, a different SHAAAAAAAAARK, and magnificent hats. No sea shanties, though. That is the crying-est of shames. Oh, hm. No shoulder parrots either. And hey, where are all the eyepatches and peg legs? Jeez, this doesn’t look like a realistic pirate game at all. So much for historical accuracy, game series about cyber memory men who survive physics-defying leaps into hay bales and murder pretty much everyone who died between the years 1189 and right now. What a sham.

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Hey, everyone! What’s free and now available to everyone with an internet connection? Hang on, my phone’s ringing… What? She’s crying! You’re right, I should stop and think before posting open-ended questions to a popular website. No, I guess I didn’t think it through. Look, Dad, there’s no smoke withou – okay! Jeez. Tell her I’m sorry. Hey, everyone! What game’s now free and now available to everyone with an internet connection? Everyone answering Anno Online, I appreciate your ability to see past a “your mother” joke. You’ve made a retirement age lady very happy.
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UPDATE: New video of just gameplay, without someone wittering over the top of it.

IGN, as it happens. And you can see footage of some GTA-type wandering about in Watch Dogs below. The handsome corporate gaming site was the first to get to grips with Ubisoft’s action-hacking game about the timeless love affair between phones, surveillance, guns and explosions in urban areas, and it looks quite good. Like the tennis.
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I am grumpy. In the world away from my desk and monitors, people have been meeting and playing Splinter Cell: Blacklist and I wasn’t invited. They were probably worried that having someone there who has completed every Splinter Cell, bar that rubbish one set in the prison, would mess up their plans. I might be disrupting their electrical flow of PR by dropping truth EMPs. Like pointing out that Ubisoft don’t understand what “Ghosting” means. They don’t want my truth making their screens all squiggly. The thing is, Ubisoft/The MAN, the video below of the Spies vs Mercs mode might have just won me over.
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Eventually, Assassin’s Creed creator Patrice Desilets will make another game. He’ll just have to make some excruciating blood sacrifice on an arcane altar in some Mayan ruins first, because he is clearly cursed. First he left Ubisoft to chase his new vision, then eventual partner THQ drowned in a sea of unsold uDraws, and now – only a few months after being brought back into the Ubisoft fold – he’s flying solo once again. This time, however, he claims the departure wasn’t voluntary at all. Well, unless you define “being unceremoniously booted out the front door by security guards” as voluntary, anyway.

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I am still surprised when games have their own songs. I view music like magic, but not in the Kieron way. I think you shouldn’t be able to sit down and just come up with up a song based on a subject. That seems like it shouldn’t work. It should be, hmm, involuntary? And if someone sits down and just thinks up a song, then it shouldn’t be catchy or good. And then this bloody Gunslinger trailer comes along, with a song about Silas Greaves and his shooty ways, and is kind of catchy and good. It is confusing, and will lodge in your head like a bullet.
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Oh gosh, delivering bad news is always so difficult. I never know how to soften the blow. Good news first? No, no, that never works. Oh, I know: everything that’s ever mattered to you will be gone one day and also Might and Magic Heroes VI has been nigh-unplayable for more than 24 hours. Phew, much better. The rather disturbingly lengthy period of downtime (especially given that the base game’s been out for ages) seems to have kicked off around the recent release of the turn-based strategy’s new Shades of Darkness expansion. Players have been reporting mountains of issues ever since.

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