Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Here’s a new video for the sequel to the infamous Boiling Point. The video’s in Russian, but still does an excellent job of demonstrating the a) ambition and b) madness of Deep Shadows’ open-world FPS. Why does he shoot that fisherman? Why does that man on the roof explode? Why does he keep slicing people in the back of the neck rather than the front? White Gold will, I suspect, turn out to be comedy anecdote-central.
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I suspect I may have missed this one if RPG watch hadn’t noticed C&VG had republished my PC Gamer preview of White Gold online. White Gold is basically, Boiling Point 2. You’ll remember Boiling Point for being a bit buggy on release. Now, looking at the comments thread, they hit an interesting point. That I went on about Boiling Point having a load of bugs. Blimey.
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I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, because it just tickles me pink. If you were paying attention to PC gaming in 2005 then you’ll probably remember Deep Shadows’ spectacularly open-ended FPS, Boiling Point. It remains one of my favourite games of all time, partly because it was an astonishingly ambitious game of the kind I can’t seem to get enough of, and partly because it it was an accidental surrealist masterpiece of outlandish bugs and terrible production. Few games were as weirdly broken as Boiling Point, and there were plenty of commentators who came away with wry smiles and unhappy brains as a result.
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While you may not realise it from reading this blog, there are other PC shooters other than Bioshock we give a damn about. No, really.

Firstly, Eurogamer head off to Germany to actually speak at length to the Crytek guys about their forthcoming Crysis, including getting hands on with the multiplayer section (Deathmatch sounds much as you’d expect, but the Power Struggle seems an interesting cross between a territory-control and base-capture game). Also, predictably, the multiplayer doesn’t look as impressive as the single player graphically. Bally Electric Internet not keeping speed with our DX10 explosions.

While Crysis is the one everyone will be excited about post-Bioshock, I’m personally keeping an eye on White Gold, which PC gamer have lobbed up a short preview of online. You may not be aware of it. It’s basically the sequel to Boiling Point, the most critically divisive game of last year. You may remember that Games TM gave it 9 and Edge gave it 2. Meanwhile, me, being a smart-arse, came close to literally giving it both. Enormously ambitious and enormously bugged in about equal measures, the real question with White Gold is whether developers Deep Shadow will somehow manage to keep it under control.

When I had it demoed to me, they stressed they’d learned a lot and all that but… well, White Gold isn’t their only game. They’re also working on Precursors, which is basically Boiling Point… in space. While White Gold is a natural step on from Boiling Point – including Giant Spiders, which will gain extra points from me – Precursors lobs a load of influences from things like Freelancer in there too – space missions, flying between planets, whatever.

So rather than, after Boiling Point, concentrating their efforts… they make TWO ambitious games. Sharing a lot of technology, admitedly, but still. You salute them and fear for them in about equal measures.