Latest Articles (Page 2118)

A flashing IM tab appears on my taskbar. I open it to discover the message: "Seriously, have a play of this." It's a link for Counterclockwise - a Knot in 3D remake. My correspondent is correct. I should play this. I do. It's awesome.

Knot In 3D was Tron lightcycles in 3D, as coded for the ZX Spectrum back in the pixellated mists of time. Counterclockwise remakes the idea with your cycle flying around in a looped 3D space taking on a rival chaser (you can only go so far before coming back on yourself) and your own trail. The space rapidly fills up, and you you have a smartbomb and lasers to clear yourself a path - there's only limited ammo though, so you'll need to do tricks and combos to keep your resources up.

I don't think I need to say more other than to stress that it's really good. Play it.

In this first part of our two-part interview with Team Fortress 2 developers Robin Walker and Charlie Brown, we talk about the pathways from the modding community to working at Valve, the long development of TF2 and the changes it went through, Valve's thoughts on parallel mod Fortress Forever, and how the art design plays such a major role in how we play the game. In Part Two we get into specifics over the nine classes, how it was only by being funny that they were able to finish the game, and, inevitably, talk about Peggle.

TF2 developers Robin Walker and Charlie Brown are an excellent double act. Robin Walker talks, lots. Charlie Brown talks rarely. But despite this disparity, they gel neatly together, finishing each other's sentences (it’s just that Charlie finishes with a word, and Robin with another couple of paragraphs). Both represent an aspect of the ways Valve is different from any other gaming company I know of. Robin Walker, an original member of the Australian Team Fortress development team, still talks about himself as if he were a modder. He seems almost oblivious to his elevated position. Charlie Brown discusses coding in the way a quietly modest father might mention his pride for his son. Both talk about game development in terms of the player’s needs and desires. They still sound like gamers, perhaps in a large part because they, like every developer at Valve is required to, stay in constant communication with the people who play their games. And they seem to be enjoying themselves.

I began by asking Robin Walker how it was that the Team Fortress guys came to be working at Valve back in 1997. They were in demand at the time, their Quake-based mod attracting a lot of attention, with interest from Activision amongst others. But then Valve got in touch.

Since the Team Fortress Beta went live, the collective bodies of Rock, Paper, Shotgun have been running around with cartoon projectile weapons pretty much non-stop. When that "Pretty much" kicks in, we have a break and write about Team Fortress 2, just to mix things up and keep it fresh. The following are the nine short critical examinations (with gags) of the character classes that Jim, Alec and myself conjured up with special Word Science.

If these people find messing around with cranes, and tumbling down hillsides in jelly-tyred juggernauts half as entertaining as I do then Rigs Of Rods should sweep the board at next year's IGF.

The version the judges will be playing was unveiled yesterday. Bigger, better, and beautiful-er than before, it's one of two excellent freeware automotive sims released this month.

It's Feudalism, a Flash-based RPG-strategy hybrid with a little of Dynasty Warriors, a little of Final Fantasy and a lot of pressing the Spacebar.

I'm currently far too hungover to usefully ascertain its actual worth, but it would seem to have the requisite degree of slack-jawed repetition and obsessive-compulsive loot collection for my current, broken state of mind. It also has Ninjas in it, and charmingly awful graphics. Go play, and let us know if it actually is any good.

Here's Raph Koster talking about his proposed wikification of MMO's, Metaplace. The more I look at this stuff, the more I fear for how much random pseudo-gaming material I'm going to have to look at in the next couple of decades. "Jim, can you give us a round up of the best twenty spaces on Metaplace?" Cut to me scrolling through 73,000 incrementally different fantasy parlours. Gah.

What I'm trying to say is: I think this will probably be very big indeed. If Koster's team can get the toolset right, or even half right, this is going to be a very important aspect of how the web will working in a couple of year's time. It might not even be Metaplace the does it successfully, after all, we had There before Second Life swamped the web, and Everquest before World Of Warcraft became the best thing since sliced undead.

Anyway, take a look. It's pretty brief, but the idea is in motion:

I'm trying to work out what's changed.

Back in Team Fortress Classic, I was all over the spy. Hell, I played under the name KING SPY! such was my delusions of grandeur - and, being such a mediocre spy, they really were delusions. But now, I only really don the Balaclava of Backstabbing when the game dictates our team needs one - an area too packed with turrets to be penetrated with anything short of a medic/heavy-ubercharge-combo, a stalemate in a narrow area with all the teams facing a single point, whatever. I do the job with surgical precision and then get the hell out.

Why don't I love the Spy anymore? What's changed?

After some serious head-scratching, I worked it out

God, Battlefield 2142 takes a really long time to install. It takes an even longer time to patch (a good 20-odd minutes for the most recent one), which makes me shout "so exactly what is it that's so special about you?" at my supposedly super-fruity quad-core CPU. This rather complicated my plan to take a quick look at First Strike, an interesting and just-released Star Wars mod for DICE's most recent teamshooter. Awful name, of course, but: spaceships!

My, what a lot of colons. Wouldn't it be nice to see a game mix up its punctuation a little, a throw in a semi-colon even an interrobang? I digress. PC Gamer have lobbed my review of the first real Guild Wars add-on pack online. In it, I say things like...

Even a couple of years after launch, Guild Wars remains unique in the pantheon of online RPGs. No monthly fees. No perpetual level grind. No integrated PvP. No races. No open communal adventure areas. No jump button.

And then go on to mock my own usual rants about Guild Wars, which I've done far too many times and won't bore you with for now. Go read.

The plot of Techland's recently announced Dead Island promises a fun time: a tropical tourist resort turns into a zombie apocalypse. You, as a tourist on the package holiday to hell, must put things right and bash the horrors. It's cocktails and crowbars on the beach as you battle with decomposing partygoers. Yum.

Techland promise open-ended first-person survival shootiness in a large island environment. Using the environment to drop things on zombies, and to find clubs to beat them with looks like it'll be the order of the day. Your overall objective is to find your lost wife, who was presumably out shopping for a nice beach towel before the arrival of the undead. So it's a sort of Stalker-comes-to-Hawaii. (Could the twist be that you are your own wife?)

I'm betting research was fun for this game: "Yes, we all have to go to a tropical paradise island for... authenticity." Techland are also boasting "a liquid, gas and electricity physics simulation system, which allows you to create your own unique ways of eliminating enemies", which is a claim I'm sure I've heard somewhere before...

We've been having a bit of a chat about the scout's character. Well, more precisely his apparent lack of it. Unlike the other grizzled, weird, or exuberant Team Fortress classes, this is a character with a distinctly indistinct mannerism. He's just some skinny guy. There are no towering personality traits to latch onto, no cuddly cartoon charisma to grab hold off. In fact, he's not loveable in any way: he's an nasty little thug.

Think about it: while even backstabbing bastard Spy has a certain panache, the scout is a dude in a cap and T-shirt who sounds a little too smarmy and self-satisfied.

And really, what does he have? His gimmick is nothing more than his pace. He can run faster than the others – he can get across the map in half the time of his larger chums. But that's it. Nothing doing.

This is why I love the scout best.

[This time we're going retro, and UK-retro at that. On our blighted isle, Cannon Fodder was one of the more iconic games in a generation of software with one of the greatest theme tunes of all time. For the making of the sequel, I talk to Stuart Campbell, the designer. Stuart is better known for his games writing, where he remains the most controversial journalist the UK has ever produced. That is, a lot of people hate him, which is always a sign you're doing something right. If you like this, Stuart has gone into enormous detail on each level of the game over at his site. CF2 is also available on The Underdogs.]

Cannon Fodder had everything. A pixel-perfect blend of action and strategy with a small squad of men versus intricately designed levels. The greatest game theme tune of all time in the form of the lazy skank of “War’s Never Been So Much Fun”. A splash of controversy over its use of the military poppy, with national outcry from the tabloids over its insult at the old boys. Ironic, when you consider that Cannon Fodder was one of the most anti-military wargames of all time. How do you follow all that?

Let's all practise our alphabet.

Except in a really confusing way.

Super Letter Game is a Flashy little number that requires you to find all the letters of the alphabet hidden inside a sea of Zs (which only sounds good if you pronounce it the sensible American way). It's not easy though. The letters swim and spin in the direction in which you move your cursor. So move toward a letter and it will dash away. It's all about carefully moving in the opposite direction, and then pouncing at the right moment. And missing those evil Zs. It's the work of Laurie Cape, a Leeds-based web designer, with a strange mind.

In a year when great FPS aren't exactly as rare as ammunition in a survival horror game, Clive Barker's Jericho has kind of slipped through the cracks. Now with its 1.06Gb 1 level demo released, it's time for it to get a little more attention. Barker's been involved in games before, of course, most notably Clive Barker's Undying (Which always sounded like a warning more than a game title to me - i.e. "Do not fight Clive Barker - your blows with slide from his skin like gentle rain!") as well acting as gaming's brave knight riding forth against the the dragonish Ebert. Jericho is at once Very Clive Barker and also Very Videogame. That means you have things like this looming out of your screen at you. Growls!

The oddest thing about Jericho is what it reminds me of.

Daikatana. That's not necessarily a bad thing.

While chatting with Team Fortress 2 developer Robin Walker, he let us know, "We're going to do a Pyro tweak in the next couple of days."

Specifics of the changes weren't clear, but when we put it to him that people felt he was comparatively underpowered, Walker diplomatically replied,

"The Pyro doesn’t get lag compensation with the flamethrower in the same way which other characters do for their weaponry, which I think has a really subtle effect on perception, and it gets worse as your net connection gets worse. It’s one of the vagaries of multiplayer. Sometimes you think that what’s going on might not be what's going on. But this is why we gather lots of data."

You'll have to excuse me if you've seen this one before, but the consistently excellent Indygamer just happened to link me in the direction of Bear Go Home. It's a peculiar creature, and has washed up on our link-logging shores thanks to the Dare To Be Digital competition, which pits student game designers in a fight to the death game design competition.

Anyway, the titular bear has to head home, and you'll get him there via pulling at bits of his anatomy with the mouse-pointer - pulling his tail and letting go to make him move faster, pulling him up by the scalp to jump, stretching his jaw to catch fruit, that sort of thing.

It all looks super cute, especially with the wrapping-paper-illustration visuals. Terrifyingly, however, the background music is some kind of looped playground chant, as sung by little girls. I can only imagine them as the little girls from The Shining. It couldn't be more sinister if it tried.

Well, lookie what's gone up on Eurogamer just this minute - it's my review of Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, the standalone expansion for what was anyone with a brain's RTS of 2006. Or, arguably, ever.

I could easily have done a Gillen'n'Boiling Point and given this multiple scores. One for Joe Ooh-I-Like-Tanks-Public, one for established RTS fans and one for people who really, really dig Company of Heroes. It was a tough decision, but I think I hit the right compromise.

Oh, and here's a quote in case it helps you summon the extra reserves of energy you need to click through to the review.

Oh, praise the Lord of Gaming - someone, finally, agrees with me about Peggle.

Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, developer of the wonderful Trilby adventure games, and now Mr Famous for his ludicrously good Zero Punctuation Flash reviews on The Escapist, entirely concurs with me that a) Peggle is fun and distracting, but not incredible, and b) Bookworm Adventures is better! Mr Yahtzee - marry me. Here it is:

When the team clearly needs a medic and no-one else is doing so, I play a medic. When the team clearly needs to an Engineer - and, despite the current wave of wrench-monkeys filling servers, it does happen - I'll play an Engineer. When the team clearly needs a Spy and no-one is, I play a Spy.

But when I get to pick, I pick The Soldier.

The Soldier is Team Fortress showing its cultural roots. Always remember that it was a Quake mod and, far more than anything else, the Soldier is the character who has still got one foot in that prehistory. It's all in his primary weapon - the rocket-launcher. Doom's most iconic weapon was the shotgun. Quake's, due to the addition of the true vertical axis and the emergence of a certain skill we'll be getting to in a minute, was the Rocket-launcher. The Rocket-Launcher, fundamentally, hasn't changed much from Quake 1. Yes, it shoots slower. Yes, you have less ammo. But the abilities it feeds off are right there. You're still playing to its strengths, and it's still working.

And we got it from Sierra and they got it from whoever they got the hat from. THIS HAT.

(Plus a friend hat, non-pictured)

You may remember last week we ran a competition to win this World in Conflict-o-garment. All your had to do was to reveal to us a secret which was confided to you. The most amusing, heart-breaking and generally "Oh, God, You soooooo shouldn't have told us that. They'd kill you if they found out, and in an entirely unmetaphorical way" secret would win. As would the second best, as we had two hats. We were quite overwhelmed by the response. Overwhelmed by how many of you would sell out your friends for a cheap old hat, which is probably polluted by my head-germs. You're bad people.

If you're as bearded as I am - and few, at the moment, are more bearded than I am - you probably had an Ultima Online account at some time or another. Good news - since their general renovations to the world, they've invited us all back for two weeks of play. Time for an RPS: Woop, methinks. Woop!

Basically, if you've ever had an UO account at any time, your account is reactivated. Pop on. See old friends and get ganked by them or something. Hell, you don't even need to dig out the old discs, as they'll let you download the client. Go here for more details.

Clearly, the most important thing about this news is that Alec will be able to carry on his The Worst Ninja series without having to pay any money and/or whine at EA PRs until they give him a press account.

[Quinns is RPS' roving reporter. Sometimes he roves closer to home. That is, the local department store. And then he starts thinking. Then he mails us frenetically. And we post it, as it keeps him away from us with his youthful vigour and knives.]

I think games may be screwing us up more than we think. Hear me out here.

So I was out buying a breadknife recently, and I was standing there in front of this big ol' wall of knives. And there were all kinds of them, from the department store's own classy brand, to sci-fi looking ones with ugly transparant handles, to the top-of-the-range how-the-Hell-can-a-piece-of-metal-cost-that-much Global Knives.

Now I don't usually buy domestic stuff like this. I'm your regular "Hey, if I eat these instant noodles straight from the kettle I can save myself from doing washing up!" class of bachelor, so I'll admit to not knowing the standard procedure for picking out a breadknife. But what ended up going through my head was this:

"I should by the best breadknife available. It'll minimise the time I have to spend cooking, and it'll save me from wasting money on an inferior knife should I decide I want to upgrade it at a later point."

Recognise that particular school of thought? IT'S FROM THE SIMS.

The fine folks at PCG have added my recent review of Stranglehold to their online cauldron. Using your eyes, you can read it after clicking on the text below.

Here's cool: slow motion diving through the air, pistol in each hand, taking out all 15 baddies in the room. There's no denying this. Now do it sliding down a bannister, riding belly-first on a trolley, or gliding along the back of a museum dinosaur.

No one can call into question the inherent coolness of John Woo's gun-toting action style - although perhaps they might want to ponder on the overall quality of his later films (cough-Broken Arrow-cough). Stranglehold is a sequel of sorts to his 1992 Hong Kong film, Hard Boiled, with Woo there to direct the cutscenes to match his familiar policy of action before story, and to ensure the game has a suitable body count.

Okay, so Soulstorm, a new Dawn of War expansion has been officially announced.. It's got Dark Eldar and a ooh-still-a-mystery race in it, and there's no point in asking me what the latter is because I honestly don't know. Honestly. Stop staring at me like that. Alright, alright, it's Ewoks. Now go away.

Actually, a lot of guessers reckon it'll be Tyranids, the most notable ommission amongst the Warhammer 40,000 RTS' ranks, but developer Relic have claimed in the past that they'd never do the big space-lizard-monster-insect-horror-things because the old game's engine isn't quite up to how they'd like to do them. Minds change though, so I'm not personally going to definitely believe that old statement just yet.

I can think of some people who are surely praying for it to be a different faction though, and that's the chaps behind the DoW Tyranid mod. More on which follows should you be so kind as to click on the red words below.

What would the world be like without graphs? Bleak, I dare say. They are like the rainbows of mathematics... So imagine my delight when I discovered a blog dedicated to not simply graphs, but graphs about World Of Warcraft. Look at this beauty, which charts PVP Rank against faction. Cor.

This graph shows that "The Alliance-Horde imbalance (2:1 in our sample) makes it easier for Horde characters to enter PvP BGs. This means that given the same amount of play-time, Horde has less wait time, and thus more practice. This might also encourage forming groups ahead of time (i.e. prefabs) because it doesn't impact wait times, whereas it would in the Alliance case."

But you know what? There's much more.

I've not been paying a great deal of attention to IO Interactive's two-man shooter, Kane & Lynch, but there's every reason to think this might actually be pretty interesting. Hitman: Blood Money ate a load of my spare time this year, so I'm eager to see what IO can manage to come up with next. I'm also keen to see how this new fad for co-op gaming plays out. Five years ago there was barely a dozen co-op shooters in existence, now they're clambering out of every marketing spreadsheet. This has to be a good thing, and the ideas that developers come up with for making players work together are going to change the way we play - subtly perhaps, but we're already seeing the ideas build up. (Pulling buddies to their feet in Gears Of War, for example.)

Thanks, Game Trailers.

And what do you think, readers?

Listen buddy, this is my home. You shouldn’t be in here. Have [CLANG] a [CLANG] little [CLANG] respect [CLANG].

I’m an Engineer. That means I’m not interested in you. I’m interested only in my work. If it so happens that my work is near something that’s important to you, that’s just dandy. Just don’t expect me to go where you ask, and definitely don’t think I’ll come join you on your damn-fool crazy errand to the other side of the tracks. Me, I’m setting up shop right here.

There’s two ways to play the Engineer (well, three, but if you’re running around in the enemy base with your feeble shotgun out, you ain’t doing it right). Semi-offensively, and defensively. The former involves setting up a front line, dodging the slings and arrows of outrageous fortressmen to set up teleporters and turrets that help keep your team pushing forwards.

RPS can confirm that friendly fire will indeed be removed from Team Fortress 2 in the update rolling out in a couple of hours.

Lead developer Robin Walker told us that he did indeed email German forum Gamestar to say that the mode was never meant to be left in.

"We shipped it by mistake, as it wasn't something we wanted to be a part of the game. We haven't built the game around having it in, and it just stops it from working," explains Walker. Breaking both the Spy and the Pyro, the TF2 team decided that friendly fire prevented the game from being any fun to play, and it will soon be gone completely.

[I originally wrote this for the relaunch issue of PC Gamer, when they were introducing their extra-life section. The Long Play features are basically a critical essay, looking at a game a few years on and noting why it still matters. Anyway, this is my look over Black Isle's genuinely seminal RPG. A few years old, every word then remains true now - and I sincerely doubt we'll ever see its like again. Obviously enough, there's some fairly heavy spoilers in here. Re-reading, it reminds me that I should do something bigger than this on the old warhorse. I've got Chris Avellone's e-mail around here, somewhere...]

Ignored by the gaming press upon release, only receiving warmish reviews that stopped well short of open adulation and the victim of one of the most ill-judged marketing campaigns (“A corpse with irresistible sexual charisma”) in history, Planescape Torment is the classic Underdog. Inevitably, it became the (relatively speaking) commercial runt of the Baldur’s Gate litter. In the years since, the coin of its critical worth has accumulated to the point where aficionados regularly cite it as the greatest of the PC RPGs. In fact, it’s rehabilitation has gone too far, with its name being a simple byword for narrative excellence without anyone really feeling the need to say why. There’s more here than dogmatic romantic myth.

Interesting times for fans of what's usually considered Command & Conquer's Godfather III moment. In a minute, I'll politely introduce you to a free game. First though, the bit you probably already know about. C&C: Renegade, the awful-singplayer-but-quite-interesting-actually-multiplayer FPS is, rumour has it, to receive a sequel.

I can well believe that someone at EA has presumably ferreted around in the dustiest dungeons of the spreadsheets and re-floated the idea of a C&C FPS, but an actual sequel to Renegade and its Battlezoney first-person base-building somehow seems unlikely. With Team Fortresss 2 and Quake Wars currently fuelling class-based teamplay fever, and EA already holding tight onto Battlefield's reigns, I'd guess at that being the likely approach.

That's dim-and-distant stuff if it even happens, but available right now is C&C Red Alert - A Path Beyond, a total conversion of the original Renegade. Somehow, it's standalone and free too - i.e. you don't need Renegade to play it. Its shtick? Why, Renegade but in Red Alert's alterna-history 1950s universe, with Tesla tanks and everything.