Latest Articles (Page 2116)

Wednesday (to be renamed "Orangeboxday") is approaching with a crazed inevitability, and we're all out of control. So here's something to make it worse, whetting your appetite while wetting your pants. Another exclusive screenshot of Episode Two.

Click pic for embiggenment.

Don't forget that at 8:01am UK time, and 12:01am Pacific time Wednesday, as The Orange Box begins unlocking on your Steam account, Rock, Paper, Shotgun's verdicts of both Episode Two and Portal go live. You'll want something to do while Steam awakens and the final blob of downloading completes, so what better than our (completely spoiler-free) detailed opinion on both games.

The PC Demo's been online for months, which was leading me to wonder what on earth was delaying the full version. Thankfully, it's all sorted out, and will be out on the 22nd in the US. This is a good thing.

Puzzle Quest joins Peggle and Bookworm Adventures, becoming the third part of the holy Puzzle Trinity this year. Peggle (available to download here, weighing in at 14.3 MB or the size of 1 Peggle) is the one which has innovated in terms of mechanisms - mashing Pachinko into an inversed Puzzle Bobble. Bookworm Adventures and Puzzle Quest innovate in terms of structure. In Puzzle Quest's case, it takes a simple RPG/Quest game and where they'd normally have battles, inserts games of Zoo Keeper. Shockingly, it works brilliantly. And, to add to the absurdity, the whole thing is set place in the none-more-PC-ier Warlords universe.

MSOIDS is a version of Asteroids with garish hand-scribbled art. Apparently made in four hours by messing about in MS paint and adding the results to a simple vector thinger, it makes an exceptionally tricky, eye-wincing version of the game. The madly scribbled explosions make it a special kind of bastard to get a hi-score at, but hey, you can press spacebar for new colour schemes.

Far more interesting, and developed in a mere seventy two hours by the same folk, is the nightmarish and crude puzzle FPS Mondo Medicals. The levels are "impossible" in that Escher way, and are a challenge to get past without becoming disorientated. Backtracking and going against intuition is key to defeating these spatial puzzles. (Why don't more games have spatial puzzles. And why aren't there more pure-puzzle FPS games? Eternal questions.) There's also an alarming pixellated horror theme, with a TV-faced man yelling about cancer, and some screaming maw thing motionless in a room. It's... unique.

Readers who've been visiting RPS since the halcyon days of ooh, August may recall my irregular misadventures in Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn. For the story so far, a sad tale of lost shoes, bullying healers and being rubbish at hiding, clicky here and scroll down. The concept, if you can't be bothered to read the last two posts, is this: I'd never played Ultima Online before this year, and rather foolishly believed it would be something like the MMOs I am familiar with. It really isn't. Despite its recent ooh-shiny remake, UO doesn't make much effort to explain its workings to new players, which, when you're as stupid as I am, results in a great deal of confusion, terror and hilarity. My quest - to achieve something like progress based only on the information given to me by the game itself.

Disconsolate about my continued failure to kill anything that isn't cute'n'fluffy, I turn to more creative pursuits. I need a hobby, preferably one that doesn't involve fighting impossibly tough zombies. But what sort of profession would be suitable for an off-duty ninja? Tailoring? Nah. Knitting somehow doesn't scream 'silent assassin.' Tanning? I'm a vegetarian - wouldn't be on, really. Aha - lumberjacking and carpentry. It's as honest a trade as they come, and there's something fairly macho about chopping down trees, so this is evidently a perfect method of restoring my battered man-pride.

I report for duty to New Haven's chief carpenter guy, who asks I get hold of 60 logs for him. The fact he can't get 'em himself has me concerned that he's perhaps not the master of woodcraft he's claiming to be, but hell, anyone's an expert compared to me. More importantly, a tree probably can't punch me in the face. This should be a challenge even I'm capable of. Famous last log-based words.

I notice that PC Gamer have lobbed the interview I did with David Doak of Free Radical online. Free Radical are best known for their console games of course, both in their previous life at Rare with Goldeneye, and with Timesplitters as solo entities. The interview came about when they were talking about co-developing for PC. In it, we talk about the differences between FPS on consoles and PCs and the differing attitudes of PC and console gamers. And he says things like...

"The biggest challenge for us, specifically for PC stuff, is what the hardcore PC gamer expects from a shooter is quite different from what console gamers expect. There's a bit of PC snobbery there, I think [Laughs]. From a game design point of view, I've always found it's funny dealing constantly with questions about analogue controllers versus mouse and keyboards. It's a very thorny topic."

Go read. I suspect there may be some venting in the comments thread too.

Adrian Hon, ex-Perplex City, recently dropped me a line to tell me about the things he's been up to since leaving Mind Candy. And one of them is an interesting opportunity for the more would-be-designers (i.e. the too many) in the RPS audience. Basically, Cancer Research are running a competition to design an Alternate Reality Game which will be used to raise awareness and funds for the charity. The best idea will recieve £1300 to develop the game, while being mentored along the way. What are they looking for? To quote from Let's Change the Game's website

Remember that one book you read when you were young that completely changed your life? That's what we want this game to be for everyone who plays it - an experience they will never forget. An experience that makes them see the effect cancer has on us all, and how we can help fight against it together.

In other words, a interesting opportunity to make a serious game with a purpose. The winning entry will be chosen by a panel of industry sorts, and the winner will have access to Cancer Research's full resources (stores, ads, mailouts to 20 million people...). As Adrian put it, "It's a great chance for aspiring designers to gain experience on a really significant game, and it's an experiment to see if games and ARGs can effect real change." First round 500 word entries need to be in by November 16th and all the details you'll need can be found on the website.

A demo you may have missed - Escape From Paradise City, so far the only game this year to mash up John Carpenter movies and Guns'n'Roses. For that, it must be at least be admired.

Its comedy gangster tone means folk may presume it to be oh-god-not-another-GTA-clone, but actually (as players of its forerunner Gangland will know) it's got more in common with Syndicate and the tragically compromised Republic: The Revolution. Won't say any more because I'm reviewing it elsewhere, but do take a look at the demo.

Don't forget, there's only four days left to get your entries in for the Valve Compo. You could win the excellent Half-Life 2: Raising The Bar hardback book, signed by Valve's head honcho, Gabe Newell.

All it takes is sending us some urban decay photography you've taken, showing us the post-apocalyptic wastegrounds in your area. The two best entries will be picked by us, and will win the books. Email your pics here, keeping them under 200k. Or upload them and send us the link.

More details can be found here.

Ok, this is the stupidest thing you'll play this year. And I bet all of Kieron's money that you play it through at least seven times.

Which-Way Adventure is a Flash-drawn choose-your-own-adventure where the choice between jumping down a manhole or crawling through a fence can be the difference between becoming trapped in 1908 as a shoe cobbler's apprentice, or seeing a lady acrobat with her top off before being eaten by a Manticore. Perhaps you'll destroy capitalism, or maybe you'll become a hobo, riding the trains, before being eaten by a Manticore. There's a fairly strong chance you'll be eaten by a Manticore.

It's ages old, so snooty netsnobs will sneer, but I, like you, hadn't seen it before. And our lives are more enriched.

Inspired by the highly enjoyable Minerva, I spent a few hours this afternoon playing through Half-Life 2 mods. I was a little disappointed with the limited farming action in TractorSource, but nevertheless pleased that the ongoing intimate relationship between games and tractors continues apace. I look forward to the completed mowing add-on.

Far more satisfying was the single player Half-Life 2 mod Riot Act, which is set in Nova Prospekt at the time of Alyx and Gordon's original hell-raising. You play as an escaped prisoner fighting his way to freedom, and fight alongside other prisoners and so forth. There's a bit of shaky pacing and some annoyingly narrow corridors in there, but mostly the design is up to a professional standard. The scene setting visual effects as you fade in and out of consciousness in the opening moments are jolly impressive. Riot Act also boasts the third prettiest mod website I have ever seen. These chaps will soon be in gainful gaming employment, I'd wager. (If they aren't already.)

Gamasutra reveals that NCSoft have announced the formation of a new studio, Carbine games who are - as are NCSoft's wont - developing an undisclosed massively-multiplayer game. It's formed around a mass of World of Warcraft veterans (er... we mean Ex Blizzard Alumni, not just people who've hit the level cap) and Tim Cain, ex-Troika of Vampire: Bloodlines infamy. What are they up to? Well, a nose around their site reveals a few clues. Firstly, they're not strictly speaking new, having been existent since 2006. Secondly, there's the download section, which includes some arty desktops and some music. The latter, entitled "The Awakening" doesn't give any real clues - being generic rousing gaming-orchestral music, which would fit into anything from Halo to Guild Wars. Then after about a minute and a half it goes into a hard-as-hell beat, which strikes me as a strange change of direction, until I realise that it's finished and we've skipped onto the next track on Itunes, Jay-Z's 99 Problems. And, for the record, I'd be first in line to play a Rap/Fantasy MMO. Though, admittedly, possibly last in line too. The actual concept art, well... looks fantasy. No visible Elves, but still fantasy, perhaps with a touch of a 40s-pulp-sci-fi vibe too.

Speculation in comments thread - Go!

I didn't really get on with Age of Empires III - pettily, I was turned off by its fonts - so wasn't paying huge attention to the second add-on pack. Then three things happened which changed my mind.

Firstly, they released a demo of it. I'm always interested in free stuff. Secondly, Tom Chick got excited about it. When it comes to anything to do with the RTS, I'll trust Chick a long way - especially because he wasn't exactly enamored with the first. Thirdly - and this really shows how off my radar it was - it's actually being primarily developed by Big Huge Games rather than Ensemble. Who, according to Tom, have been doing some really neat things. Including hotkeys, but Tom always gets excited by hotkeys. If a key's not hot, he's not into it.

612 Mb of Real time strategy ahoy!

Kongregate combine the awesomeness of free games with the hellish nightmare of talking to strangers on the internet. Fortunately, you can ignore the chat windows and concentrate on the games. Or indeed ask for help if you get stuck.

I draw your attention toward Manifold - a deceptively simple-looking Flash game, involving guiding your little guy from one side of a small screen to the other. Haven't I sold it yet? Joel Esler's cunning puzzler makes it more interesting with the inclusion of a Gravitational Manifold Anomaly Device. "Don’t get mad, get GMAD!" Using WASD for movement, you can click and draw on the screen to throw your GMAD at any surface, whereupon it will create a little gravity-defying bubble, propelling you in the direction in which you drew. Using this, you need to thinkum to work out a route past whatever obstacles are in your path.

It's immediately interesting, and very quickly tricky. But quick and intuitive, and created with a minimalist skill. And free. Oh yes indeed, free.

I've killed a lot of men recently. A lot of men. And frankly, I needed a break. Running a crosshair-burned-into-the-retina eye over what was either already installed on my PC or within easy reach, my options were fairly limited. Guns, swords, magic death powers, psychic fists...Peggle? No. No more Peggle. That's the easy way out.

What's the opposite of violence? Art, perhaps. That's when I realised precisely what the cure to my bloodthirsty blues was. I haven't played Guitar Hero for quite some time. Music will sooth my serial killer's soul. (Bear with me, this will become PC-relevant after the jump).

[Flashpoint has the dual appeal of being simultaneously one of the most realistic takes on the Soldier game the medium has ever seen and the only one where you can engage in the sport of Tractor hunting in an attack chopper. I've interviewed Marek and his brother a few times over the years, and they're one of the more gloriously eccentric and constantly enthusiastic developers I've met. Last time I was over there, talking about Armed Assault we had a lengthy discussion about how they were programming Butterflies. They develop incredibly militaristic games and they obsess over butterflies. It's hard not to love them.]

Before Bohemia released their classic Soldier-Sim, I had a chance to chat to director Marek Spanel about his life growing up as a games devotee in the Czech Republic. He described sneaking their first computer into the country after a trip to Switzerland. And then, realising there was no way to load or save data, jury-rigging cables to perform the task with their tape recorders. And then learning to program games so, finally, they could achieve their objective of playing a game.

I think I found the polar opposite of Quake Wars: it's the trailer for Nexon's Mariokart-inspired PC racer, KartRider.

Game Trailers, we salute you.

This game has been rather popular in South Korea over the last couple of years, where Nexon have it installed on pretty much every gaming Cafe PC. Nexon makes its money from micropayments for kart upgrades, so you can log in and play for free whenever you want. The same model is being distributed over the net here, and, like Maple Story, will have US and European releases.

Here's a new video with Splash Damage's Paul Wedgwood and Id Software's Kevin Cloud talking about teamplay in Enemy Territory. Yeah, it's a mere marketing-speak exercise, but the video itself gives some idea of the things you get up to in ETQW. The acrobatics with the Strogg buggy, for example, as well as some of the more impressive objectives such as the mining laser.

Thanks, Game Trailers. Thanks.

If only it looked this good on my PC. I think it might be upgrade-o-clock.

Okay, this is intriguing. Gamespot have done a large interview with Ken Levine of The-artists-previously-known-as-Irrational about Bioshock. In it, he's getting grilled about a number of issues to do with the whole what the game means thing. One of them gets an interesting response - regarding the fact the game, after all this complexity, the endings are a harsh Manichean dichotomy (i.e. You're either Jesus or Mr UltraBastard of Shitsville). He admits that it was never his intention, and the request came from "somebody up the food chain from me". Later, he elaborates...

"One of the reasons I was opposed to multiple endings is I never want to do things that have multiple digital outcomes, versus analog outcomes. I want to do it like the weapons system in the combat in BioShock. There are a million different things you can do in every combat; you can play it a million different ways. Looking into the future for the franchise, that's something I want to [figure out], that by the time you get to the ending of that choice path, you have a sense of your impact on the world through lots of little permutations rather than like a giant ending piece, if you follow my meaning.

And I think we did a reasonably good job with [the endings], but there are just two of them. And this is not a game about A and B. This is a game about one through 1 million, and all those permutations of choice. And as I think about the future of the franchise, that's where I want to take that."

The RPS guide to staging your very own Sputnik Commemorative Event.

You will need:

- Five minutes of preparation time. - One copy of freeware space flight simulator Orbiter. - One copy of the equally free Project R-7 add-on. - Appropriate sounds (I recommend Bach, Glass, or this). - Vodka (optional).

Got all that? OK, now...

Valve have just announced that The Orange Box is to have one more disc inside. A single, written by the excellent geek-turned-geek-singer, Jonathan Coulton, and members of the Valve writing staff, is to accompany the five games already bulging its cardboardy edges. (Presumably those ordering through Steam will be given a download).

Maddeningly (for both you and me), I know what the song is, and I will be murdered if I say. And I also know that I thought only yesterday, "Valve really ought to release that song as a single." So clearly my thoughts control Valve's actions. Know this: it's incredibly good.

I'm just off to think about Valve giving me a well-paid job on their writing staff now.

I can't honestly recommend Eve Online.

I play it, and it's remains one of the most fulfilling, frustrating, exciting and excruciating gaming experiences I've had. Eve is a game that has expanded the list of interesting stuff in the world, and it has created an utterly unique and beautiful game in the process. But I can't recommend it.

I can recommend Peggle to anyone, but Eve, well, I'd say that you should consider yourself warned. There's nothing else like it, in the same way that's there's nothing else like the crushing gravity of an exquisite neutron star. This is a cruel, beautiful singularity in MMO space. It's the one online game that is actually a 'virtual world' in any sense, and I feel as if every single player has left a mark on it in some way. Just like real life, we all have something to add, no matter how inconceivably microscopic that contribution might be.

It really is The Long Game. Commit to Eve and there's a chance you'll begin to get wrapped up in something temporal and psychological - something you'll struggle to articulate to outsiders. I've been writing about Eve for nearly five years, and I still don't believe I'm quite getting the message across. It's a big spaceship MMO, and there's lots of things to do... What lies beyond the jump includes some general information about what there is to do in Eve, discussions of some issues that will only matter to the players, and plenty of food for thought from one of Eve's most senior developers, Nathan 'Oveur' Richardsson.

It's always fun when a story generates another story. Regular readers will recall the Planescape retrospective I posted recently. The ever-lovely Slashdot picked up on it, and one of their commentators pointed everyone in the direction of the game's actual Vision Statement over at RPGWatch, from when it was called "Last Rites" rather than "Planescape: Torment" and they weretrying to persuade management to greenlight the project.

Since I hadn't read it, it's likely that a lot of you haven't either. It's interesting to see what was planned that didn't happen. And it's interesting because it's incredibly fucking interesting. It's one of the best videogame documents I've ever seen in my life. It's smart, driven, obsessed and actually really funny. For example, it has diagrams that look like this.

Clearly, you should read the whole thing. If you haven't played the game, don't go past page 25. It's relatively spoiler free until then, before immediately revealing the biggest secrets in the game. And I'll quote some random non-spoiler examples beneath the cut.

It's time to get judgmental. The 13th Annual IF Competition is underway, and awaiting your vote.

The internet is so much older than you'd think. For 13 years the newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction has been voting on Interactive Fiction games, to decide upon the best that year. And yes, sure, games may now have something called "graphics", but it's a passing fad. Get over it.

There's a lot of responsibility here. There's a huge 29 entrants, and to make any sensible vote, you'll surely have to play all of them. And no, you're not allowed to vote based on their names, because otherwise Slap That Fish and Lord Bellwater's Secret would walk it.

It's been everywhere already, but may as well mention it here so folk have somewhere else to express their outrage/joy/paranoia/confusion. Yes, Unreal Tournament 3 system specs! Will the beefy quad-core CPU and GeForce 8800 in my PC be worth the investment at last?

Minimum System Requirements Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista 2.0+ GHZ Single Core Processor 512 Mbytes of System RAM NVIDIA 6200+ or ATI Radeon 9600+ Video Card

Recommended System Requirements 2.4+ GHZ Dual Core Processor 1 GBytes of System RAM NVIDIA 7800GTX+ or ATI x1300+ Video Card

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Funcom's troubled Conan MMO is its proposed 50-aside sieges. These massed assaults are one end of its multi-tiered PvP (at the other end of which lies drunken bar brawling, where the more you drink, the more damage you can do) but we've not yet seen much in the way of details about how they'll work.

This recent trailer shows a tiny, mocked up glimpse of what we should expect. The fact that camera cuts away from showing the actual wall breaches or any such significant siege action does not seem to bode well, but I'm still interested in how the overall resource-control and larger land-grabbing game will work. After all, system sieges in Eve Online are the most tedious thing imaginable, and yet the struggle for control over territory remains one of the game's driving forces.

Anyway, thanks Gametrailers!

Some of you may be hoping I'm going to run out of rubbishy song-title references if we do many more Hellgate stories. Sadly, I could do this all year.

Anyway - let's get on with those Beta impressions I promised you yesterday, eh?

Slightly embarassingly, we've realised we neglected to include a 'Contact' page in our recent redesign. This is because we are very, very stupid. Anyway, now we do, in the shape of an almost entirely rewritten About page, complete with exciting bonus puns and self-indulgent mini-autobiographies.

I bring this up only because it also mentions the games each of us would take to a desert island, as that is of course the sole circumstance under which a person could name their favourite things. I'd hate to think that our readers might miss out on an opportunity to sneer at us for our ridiculous choices, simply because they thought that page was the same as always. Please, sneer away.

Rush to your Steam account - Half-Life 2: Episode Two is ready for pre-loading.

As is now traditional, here's a never-before-seen screenshot of the game to celebrate.

Click for enlargement.

Welcome back to Rock, Paper, Shotgun's exclusive interview with Team Fortress 2 developers, Robin Walker and Charlie Brown. (Here's Part One if you missed it.) This time we get down to the finer details of the classes on offer, and talk about their evolution, as well as discussing Valve's other great obsession, PopCap's Peggle. But first we talked about the remarkable part humour had to play in TF2's development.

RPS: I want to ask about the role of humour in the game. You watch the promo movies, and they’re really hilarious, but you think: how can those possibly carry over into a multiplayer game where there’s people playing everyone? And yet somehow it has.

Robin Walker: It actually came about the other way.

Where once I set to any new World of Warcraft information, such as this fresh bag of facts about the new Death Knight class, with the hopeless hunger of a hardcore Star Wars fan hearing there's to be a novel about the secret origin of Moff Tarkin or something, now I only pick up stuff about patch content and the like in passing. I react in the same way I would to hearing about an old crush who I eventually learned wasn't terribly interesting. Got a new haircut, has she? Yeah, I suppose she would make quite a good primary school teacher. A belly-button piercing? Really? With her stomach?

I am so over WoW, and have been for around half a year now. In retrospect, I blame the Burning Crusade.