Rock, Paper, Shotgun

With Warhammer moving ever more into the world of videogames, this just about inches into our remit. Or, at least, an excuse for an amusingly geeky comments thread. On Wednesday, Games Workshop’s Warhammer celebrated its 25 years of painting little guys at the weekend. The Miniature Wargames Union made a two-part documentary about the development of the game, which will make certain gamers sigh nostalgically about the Nippon and Norse Army lists in Ravening Hordes.

Second part beneath the cut.
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I’m off to interview Paul Barnett, Creative Director at Mythic for Warhammer Online in That There London tomorrow. As part of my research, I’m watching his presentation from the LIFT conference site (Which has a mass of videos to watch. I’ll probably move on to the oft-brilliant Robin Hunicke next). Now, if you’ve been following Warhammer, you’ll probably have seen Paul speak before. But that’s Paul in selling-the-game mode. Here, we have his high-speed delivery applied to a much more serious topic. There’s lots of Barnettisms (”We’ll be playing games on cans of soup!”), but these are bigger issues than how Dark Elves are a bit like Lord Byron. But, yes, we get a massively extended metaphor about how videogames really shouldn’t be like Las Vegas…

The most recent Dawn of War expansion now has a gameplay trailer, feature lots of gory, shooty action from those pernicious Dark Eldar. It’s the briefest of orchestrally-soundtracked showpieces, but I have to admit it’s already got me eyeing the Dawn Of War discs on my shelf, sitting as they are (in some odd twist of accidental organisation) between Star Wars Empire At War and Company Of Heroes. And no, my games aren’t cataloged by degrees of genre, they’re cataloged between shelf, desk, floor and occasionally, bin.

Anyway:

Thanks, Game Trailers! Thanks.

Are y’all still excited about Dawn Of War, or is it time to move on? And would a 40k MMO have been a whole lot more interesting than Warhammer Fantasy? (Clue: it would.)