Rock, Paper, Shotgun

UDK-powered twin-stick shooter Waves is now available for purchase. I played it at the Eurogamer Expo and had a grand old time even though I clearly need plenty of practice to even scrape the bottom of any kind of leaderboards. There are a variety of game modes, one of which you can try in the demo, and the colourful chaos is somehow balanced while unpredictable. It’s also quite spectacular to behold. Buy DRM-free direct from the developer for £5.94, or from Gamersgate with a current discount of 15% to £5.91. Will be on Steam by 6PM GMT but buying direct supplies a Steam code anyhow so that would seem the ideal option.

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It’s interesting to see how much one man can do with an engine like UDK. Rob Hale has taken a while to get his twin-stick shooter Waves into a shape that he’s happy with, but the end of the road is close now, and I think it’s actually one of the more interesting UDK projects out there. You can see it in action below. It’ll also be making an appearance at the Eurogamer Expo later this month. The game should be out later this year.
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Holy shit! So, when I first posted about multiplayer indie title Depth back in October I found the concept of divers vs. sharks exciting, but I wasn’t expecting all that much from the game itself. It’s difficult, bringing an entirely new concept to life like that. But RPS stalwart Phill Cameron just pointed me towards the new GDC game footage, and this game looks incredible.

Enough talk! Hold you breath, plunge into the frigid waters below and take a look for yourself.
*sploosh* >>

A new version of UDK has turned up, and Epic have produced a demo movie (below) to show off some of the features that the engine now boasts. Worth watching for the pretties, at least.
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As everyone clever knows, 2003′s Tron 2.0 was an imperfect shooter stuffed to the neon gills with thoughtful design – both thematically and visually. As current shooters hunt for ever-more shades of brown, it is only proper to hang our heads and think of where we might be today had Tron 2.0 taken off.

We’ll never know. But we can at least play free Unreal 3-based hacking/shooting game Sp.A.I.
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This is a lovely, simple, violent, artistic idea, fairly well executed. White is a thing of horrible cuteness made by students at students at ENJIM, a French design school. Essentially, it’s an FPS set on a blank canvas. Patrolling this canvas are various little bug dudes who waddle about, getting into staring contests with each other and warbling to vague tunes. You are a shooter chap armed with a series of weapons, including a gravity gun for moving the little blighters around. Each weapon has a different effect on the bugs, which bleed their colour on to the canvas when maimed. A shotgun turns them into a splat, a machinegun will send them running, while bleeding out a trail of their colour, and the grenade thing just splatters them everywhere… You get the idea. As you kill, you draw. Hit Esc and you can see what you have drawn with the paint-gore of your victims. I suppose I should have drawn the RPS logo, but I will leave that to someone with more time, and less sense.

Oh, and my 360 pad messed with the keyboard controls. Stupid thing. Trailer below. (It’s free to play, too.)
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In another part of my life I write these rules. One of the rules – in fact, the one that inspired them all – goes as follows:

“If you think of an excellent punning name for a shop or business, you must quit your job there and then, and begin that enterprise immediately.”

It was inspired by finding this sign, which can only have been a result of someone knowing the rule to be true. The thing is, I’m not sure this rule applies to videogames.

Golf War is a good pun, but a horrible idea for a game.

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I guess John was a bit down on Medal of Honuur. Nevermind! Here’s a first personly experience RPS can get behind.

Under development by a bagful of ex-modders and level designers, Depth is an asymmetrical multiplayer game that recreates the timeless struggle twixst man and shark. One team controls speargun-equipped divers, and has to recover a priceless artifact and take it back to their ship. The other team controls sharks, and must eat them. The shark players also can’t see very well, but can detect motion, and can smell blood from miles away. Ooh, and there’ll be classes, too. Big shark, perhaps? Skinny shark. Fast shark! Hungry hungry shark. But enough of my wild conjecture. A trailer released back in August is after the jump.
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The Gears of War mod team who were trying to make a Terminator shooter have switched their efforts over to UDK, and the results are pretty fancy. You can check out their video, below, or actually go and play the thing by grabbing it from their Moddb page. I’ve not had a chance to look at it yet (Alien Swarm to play) but you won’t need UDK installed to make it work, so why am I mentioning it? A mystery. Also there are some fiddles in the install instructions, so pay attention.
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Time for a relaxing, beautiful UDK-video of hundreds of blocks swirling magnificently to the music? I think so. I love how this stuff looks, and what it hints towards. Also, I’m reminded of a presentation at World of Love, where Eskil Steenberg is showing his automated texture-jigsaw explosion thing, where the model just comes apart into a flat shape for easy texturing. It was such a striking visual, I thought that there has to be a way of using that in game – either stuff exploding out of walls from that flat state, to bloody transformers. Anyway – video!
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There are days when RPS decide that they can no longer resist posting videos of someone making a 3D engine make a load of barrels fall/explode/be eaten. This is one of those days. 25,000 Barrels, piled up, then falling, in UDK. Go!
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