Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Alternative title: “Demo-nic Possession”. Cos, you know, occult and stuff. Oh, nevermind. Wolfenstein, the recent manshoot from Raven, has a demo. I know, how about that! We certainly have had a bumper crop of game demonstrations of late. This particular demo is apparently a mere 685mb big, which seems quite economical in these engorged times. It also means that the game is no good, because small = bad, as we all know. Should you choose to install it, you’ll find yourself in a strange alternate world where the Nazis didn’t win the war, because someone shot at them, to death. Get it here, and I am sure there will be more mirrors along soon. Like this one.

Just a few thoughts on a few hours of Raven’s latest suckling at id’s IP teat… Lest word hasn’t reached you yet – perhaps unsurprisingly if so, given the dearth of pre-release reviews – BJ Blazkowicz’s latest corridor-based Nazi-gibbing adventure seems disappointingly flat. Given id are now a part of the Bethesda/Zenimax machine, it’s highly unlikely Raven will ever get a crack at the game universes they’ve (for better or worse) helped build, making this something of a sad farewell. At the same time, there’s a relief to knowing that some of the most formative names in PC-based man-shooting are no longer left in the hands of an Activision-owned studio who’ve not truly excelled themselves for years. Hopefully this isn’t Wolfenstein’s last gasp, but from what I’ve played so far it’s not going to be its proudest legacy.
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Raven’s reworking of the old lone Wolf will soon be upon us, August 18 for North American and August 21 for Europe. I’ve post the two most recent game-footage trailers below, in which we seen BJ using his supernatural vision and a flamethrower to clear the decks of a Zeppelin. I’m wondering whether that bit of the game ends in an explosion. It’s a fair bet, eh? More on this, no doubt, when we take a look later in the month of August. There’s a bunch more information over on the official Wolfenstein site, obviously.
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This is a fun teaser for Wolfenstein. A “motion comic”, it’s a faux-gritty tale of tracking down Hitler and his chain guns, my favourite moment having to be the swastika-shaped prison. Good, inappropriate times. There’s also a couple of trailers from a week or two back that we haven’t posted so far, tucked neatly below.

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Just out is this moving-picture displaying the introductory sequence to Raven’s upcoming Wolfenstein do-over. It’s a curious project, for once putting the mystical overtones of the Wolfenstein series front’n'centre, as opposed to the usual late-game burst of fantasy weirdness. This cinematic, though, aptly demonstrates its two conflicting elements – Nazi-shooting and crazy gothic magic, the latter this time to be wielded by you as well as your exaggerated foes. No in-game footage, and thus no enormous sense of how this sequel/remake (semake? Requel?) will play. But I guarantee you this: it will feature the shooting of pixel-based German men.
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Well, that’s what the trailer should have been titled. Actually it’s more about the goofy occult horror angle of the reworked shooter, showing off the reality-hopping “veil” effects and the green-emitting monsters that Nazi scientists have created to destroy Freedom, jazz and apple pie. There are also impossibly large guns. That’s right: it’s Wolfenstein, it’s coming this summer, and it’s a first-person shooter videogame. We like those.

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Oh, I wish it really were called that. I miss the days when game names were ritually suffixed with ‘3D’. I might start doing it anyway. “Next week, we’ll be posting about Fallout 3 3D, Spore 3D, Warhammer Online 3D and Peggle…”

There doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of buzz around Raven’s upcoming occultist-Nazi shooter just yet, at least not compared to id’s own Rage 3D, but maybe I’m just not looking in the right places. Here’s what was shown at Quakecon, anyway. It’s possibly a little more subtle than the E3 footage – but it’s nevertheless certainly not subtle. I think/hope it’s pushing for deliberately silly, and it could be a lot of Serious Sam-y fun if so.
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(Apologies if all this E3 stuff is bugging you – normal service will resume on Monday, but we wanted to make sure we aggregated all the big PC talking points).

First footage of the new Wolfenstein game, handled by perennial id lackeys Raven – who have much to prove after Quake 4. Though they are also, for the first time since 2000’s Soldier of Fortune, making their own game, the mysterious Singularity. No info on that yet, but we do get this:

Big on the mysticism, clearly – and apparently hero BJ Blaskowitz will have psychic powers of his own. Hnn. Not seeing anything to suggest Raven are straying off their well-beaten dark’n’shooty track, but there’s talk of open world stuff, I hear.

Well, hello. I’ve just gone six days without the internet. Cursed steam-age parents. Remind me to never, ever leave my house again.

Clearly, I’ve a lot of news to catch up on, once I’ve finished staring in fascinated horror at some of the angry reader comments on the Eurogamer Top 50 Games of 2007 feature, which all four of us RPSites contributed to enthusiastically. My prediction: by 2009, Halo and Mario fans will have reached such numbers and ferocity that they’ll have formed their own nation, constantly at war with the rest of the Earth.

One story that has caught my haggard post-Christmas eye is another suggestion that Cryptic’s Marvel Universe Online MMO is dead, as originally rumoured back in November.
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