Bowling For Goblinbine
Huh. Why haven't we posted about the upcoming Blood Bowl electric videogame for a while? Oh, that's it - because we hate Skaven. Can't stand the ratmen. We'd never discuss them, and there's no way one of our number would spend his every spare minute painting plastic figurines of them. No way.
Since we last posted about Cyanide's adaptation of Games Workshop's brutal fantasy football tabletop game, the whole gamut of the game's playable races has been revealed. You got yer Orcs, Humans, Dwarfs, Lizardmen, Goblins, Skaven and, as most recently announced, Wood Elves and Chaos. Which rather makes this one of the most faction-full Warhammer-related videogames in ages, excitingly.
While we know all the races - and, as you'll see below, have pretty trailers for most of 'em - what we don't know all that much about is how the game will play, outside of the core concepts. It can be played as either real-time or turn-based, which means there's potential to win a brand new audience as well as charming the purists, and there'll also be a theoretically endless career/league mode, complete with player customisation and kit upgrades. It should, then, be a whole lot more substantial than the Blood Bowl, er, tribute Chaos League, which Cyanide released in 2004. Oddly, they seem to have removed most references to that and its expansion pack from their website...
It's due in the second quarter of this year, so hopefully the floodgates of armoured sporting carnage should open any day now. Here's those trailers, anyway. The first is by far the most interesting, as it features the first snatches of in-game footage - including peeks at both the real-time (lots of running) and turn-based (lots of coloured squares) modes. There's also a fun look at the character customisation stuff, which looks pleasingly elaborate - like Dawn of War's army painter but with more daft hairstyles and spiky things.
Also some race-introducing trailers which feature a lot of grunting and thumping, but nothing so essential as an interface or in-game camera: