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Sci-fi MMO Tabula Rasa will go live on the 19th of October, and the 16th for pre-order people. (What an interesting way to spread the server load). Like John, I was unable to figure out quite what the Tabula Rasa Beta NDA would actually allow us to say, but I'll have a crack at summing it up here (in a legal way) for those of you who might be interested.

[Quintin Smith is Rock, Paper, Shotgun's roving reporter. He's famously easy to talk into fun stuff. Once I talked him into hitting on girls at a hyper-elitist indie-rock festival in the style of Oblivion's conversation sequences, heavily cribbing from Consolevania's review of Bethesda's game. And he got worryingly far. He's easy to talk into fun stuff because he believes in fun stuff. Hence he's the ideal man to send to investigate the enormous house of gaming fun that is Birmingham's Omega Sektor. Or so it says here, anyway. Take it away, Mr Smith...]

And now for a bit of investigative journalism. Come with me as I take you on a journey through the world of the truth. Be warned, for the path we’ll walk is paved with jagged, cutting interviews and broken hearts. If at any point you find yourself overwhelmed with emotion, I think it was Machiavelli who once said that ‘you can cry, ain’t no shame in it.’ But you should always remember that I never cried during the making of this piece. Not once. Because I am a grizzled journalist.

Let’s begin.

Here in the UK there’s been some chatter about the recently opened Omega Sektor in Birmingham, or to use it’s full, nauseating name, Omega Sektor: The Play Place. The Omega Sektor in Birmingham is planned to be the first of many and is advertised as a kind of gamer’s Mecca. The website offers hundreds of super-advanced PCs as well as games consoles, sponsorship from major game publishers, special events and tournaments, ‘guest appearances’, a chillout lounge, a VIP room, and above all- acceptance.

Everything I read about Omega Sektor made it seem an electronic milk and honey wonderland, where young and old gamers of all walks of life can come together and hold hands before blowing each other’s virtual kneecaps off. To quote from the site, “When gran challenges the twins to a game, you know you’re having a good day out.” But it all sounded bogus to me. I’m pretty sure when gran challenges anybody to anything all you know is that it’s time to help look for her medication.

All this chatter made me curious and the whole project clearly had massive financial backing, so I decided to travel up to Birmingham in the name of providing a thorough report on Omega Sektor for Rock Paper Shotgun. I also decided to pack a lunch and make a day of it, but then I remembered how horrible it is when companies try and make gaming cool and I got hit by a wave of apathy that led to my packed lunch being a bagel and a bottle of Famous Grouse.

This is probably the oddest free thing to emerge from EA for the last few months: Tiberium Earth, which turns Google Earth into a kind of Tiberium-based fan mod. You get to imagine what it might be like if Earth really was infested with the crystalline super-resource from the games... Albeit using Google Sketchup, so not exactly click 'n spray.

Seeing this lying on the desk in the PC Gamer office was something of a surprise. They've only gone and brought back oddball games-and-girls US magazine PC Accelerator! Who'd have thunk it.

Well, not back-back. One issue back, presumably to either test the waters for some manner of relaunch or to because there was a load of interesting ad stuff outside of PC Gamer, or some other reason. Who cares? All that matters is that one of the most casually sexist videogame magazines the world has ever seen is back for another crack.

I'm quite glad to see it.

Here's a rather excellent thing you probably didn't see yet.

The unfortunately named Bloxorz is loads of fun. Clearly it should have been called "Blockotron" or "Slabflip 2000", but I guess it's too late for that now. The idea is to get your block slotted into the hole (and in the game!) without tumbling to your death. I know how you hate Flash games, but believe me when I say you'll like this one: there's something slightly misleading about its perfect geometry, and the odd pulsating noise in the background makes me uneasy... Also I'm not sure what's going on with the orange squares, so it might be best to read the instructions instead of shouting "yeah, yeah" and throwing your arms in the air, like I did.

Okay. Am I the only person to find this advert for Timeshift rather peculiar?

Casual games? Forget that silly old name - we've found a new one!

I've been working in PC Gamer's office for the last couple of days, and with half an hour free at the end of the day, Tim told me to hammer out a blog post for them based around the game of World in Conflict we played at Lunch. Which Tim won. Frustratingly.

I'm not sure what I was trying to do with that title.

Exciting news for every reader! Browsing Ragnar Tørnquist's blog, I spied in the comments links to something I'd never thought might exist:

Valve's Orange Box will be released on 12th October (and apparently the 10th in the US) and it gives us a number of reasons to be cheerful. It's a bundle of games – and that's something we don't often see these days, especially when all three games are brand new. We can look forward to Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal all at once: which one will you play first? You can barely imagine another developer being able to do this: to deliver three different games, each with its own palette of potent ideas, for release on the same day. Valve are beginning to scare me.

After the clickhop: some rambling thoughts on the Valve box of goodies. (Because I am a thought-rambler.)

RPS-roving reporter Quinns has been crying over this, so I have to share. It's the first footage for THEY (Whose name doesn't appear to actually have capital letters in any of the press we can find, but seems to demand it), being developed by Metropolis Software who you may know from the incredibly lovely, no really, honest, Aurora Rising.

Here's the trailer. To avoid spoiling it for you, the (er) critique is beneath the cut.

Thanks, Game Trailers.

I don't speak French, so that joke probably doesn't work, but I thought it worth a try.

So instead of finishing off the work I was supposed to do this afternoon I spent an hour attempt to make any kind of headway in Gridblaster. For some reason Gridblaster breaks the videogame-processing parts of my tiny brain. It seems no more complicated than your average retro-shooter, but for some reason there's just too much going on for me to cope with.

We understand that some of our readers are fond of a sport called Foot-to-Ball, played by young men with fashionable haircuts and uncomplicated wives. Part of its underground popularity has been fueled by the long-running rendition of the sport in videogamingvision by a small, independent company know as Electronic Arts.

Disclaimer: Only "Americans" can get free stuff.

When my lottery numbers finally come-up and I start assembling the dev team for Total Transport Simulator (a combo plane/train/automobile/ship sim) Pierre-Michel Ricordel is going to be the first person I call.

Until you read this anyway.

We already wrote about the annoucement of this sequel to the never-hit-it-big GTA-like. Now we offer almost as few words about the first trailer for it.

It's the 12th birthday of Command & Conquer today - which means you only have to wait another four years until you can sleep with your copy of the first game (according to UK law, in case you're a shocked US reader. Although I'm not rightly sure if any country actually has laws about physical intimacy with plastic discs).

S.T.A.L.K.E.R. is now available on Steam. It was one of the most interesting and atmospheric PC games of this year, and you really should play it - if just to have an opinion on it. It's up there for just $30, so give it up to the Ukrainians. Needless to say, I'll be talking more about Stalker later in the year.

[Another of my Making Of's from the vault. I was pleased that I got a chance to do this too - it's much easier to get a developer to talk about their previous game when it's one in a series which they've making a sequel to. It just ties into the whole PR cycle. Trying to get an interview just about something outside of that is a little trickier, and Eric Flannum was enormously gracious with his time. This is a slightly expanded version from PC Format's original, with some extra material. I replayed it last year actually, and lobbed my piece on Sacrifice's merits over on my blog a while back. If you like this, you may like that too.]

Sacrifice is one of the most distant landmarks in the PC gaming atlas, in an area marked “Here Be Dragons”. While spectacular, few people went there, and those who did came back reciting fantastical tales of strange vistas, genre-blending RTS/Action mechanics and a frankly wicked sense of humour. To game historians looking back from the far future, it’s going to prove as mystifying as Stonehenge is to archaeologists. How on earth did they build this?

Well, like everything, it started with an idea. “The inspiration was originally from our lead programmer, Martin Brownlow,” Eric Flannum, now at Arenanet tells, us, “He got the opportunity to start a team at Shiny, and basically able to make any game he wanted to. He’d also had the idea for the Sacrifice terrain engine”. The game he wanted was, essentially, a radical update of ancient Julian-Gollop spectrum classic Chaos, but in 3D.

If Walker's easily prone to tears, my own emotional foible is being governed by extreme worry. Paranoia, even. This may be evident by the occasional panic in this feature I wrote a while back for PC Gamer UK, which has just been lobbed online.

Okay, there's obviously a lot still being said about in the gaming space about Bioshock. Being a crazed obsessive, I'm still reading most of it. But, if you have to read one thing after completing Bioshock, this is the one. It's Chris Remo's extensive interview with Ken Levine, which goes through all the elements of the game and is pretty damn good. And let's have a non-spoilery aggressive quote, eh?

I have to admit that the MMOs we can expect in the next year don't really excite me. The one that I hold a candle for is the mystic-barbarian romp Age Of Conan, which was beautiful-if-awkward when I played it earlier in the year. The developers at Funcom are keen to create a combat system which doesn't just have you press a button and wait for the turn-based hitting to occur. Their solution is the 'combat rose' which allows you to pick your melee swings for both attack and defence, via a small mouse and key graphical interface. It didn't really seem to work when I played it - one swing was much the same as another - and I understand that, after the closed beta, this was one of the systems that the team are reconsidering. The game has, it seems, been delayed until next year. Perhaps the beta did its job.

But there's more to this beast than a weird control system, as I'll report after the jump.

This is a piece that was previously published in The Escapist. It's a favourite of mine. Not only because I got to further seal my fate as gaming's crying fool, but also because it offered me an opportunity to interview the fantastic (Uncle) Charles Cecil about one of my favourite gaming moments.

Confessions of a Crybaby

I am a crybaby. And I don’t care what you think. Well, that’s simply not true, is it? If I didn’t care what you think, I wouldn’t be setting out to write a piece, on a widely read website, explaining why the crybaby gets the best deal. I deeply care what you think. In fact, if you don’t like me, I may… sniffle… come on, let’s get on with it.

I think anyone who might take the stance that games cannot make you cry is either a sociopath, has never played Angel of Darkness and tried to walk in a straight line, or simply a big, lying coward. Begone, cowards! Today is the day of the ludicrously emotional – we shall triumph and probably get all weepy as we accept our victory.

Let me put things in context. I can’t watch a Muppet movie without crying (please, no jokes about Muppet’s Treasure Island – I’ve deliberately never watched it). Not just in the amazingly sad bits where only evil monsters made of angry stone wouldn’t shed 14 buckets of salt water, but pretty much all the way through. There’s just something about them, something about the love behind them, the passion that fuelled (past tense, thanks to their vile murder via the Disney purchase – more crying here) their very existence. The purpose of this aside? To hyper-stress what a sap I am. The sappiest of the sappy. It’s established. We can progress.

After the hurdle: Interview with Charles Cecil.

This is probably the SHMUP! equivalent of Oasis and Blur releasing a single in the same week, but Hikware - of Warning Forever fame - have put out their latest enormo-blaster, Cyclops, while we were still recovering from ABA game's latest blast. And it looks like this...

Continuing my abortive attempts to understand Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn, the remake of the venerable MMORPG.

Today I killed a llama. No-one seemed to mind. I also killed a goat and a horse, but a frog beat the hell out of me. The fact it was called 'Bogling' rather than 'Frog' is, in retrospect, a reasonable clue. Later, when it got dark, I killed a cougar that I was convinced was trying to steal babies from cots or something. I've yet to see any other cougars, so now I'm a bit worried I've killed the only big cat in New Haven. I'm not supposed to be killing endangered species - I'm supposed to be a ninja, noblest of all the warriors. Except I'm a ninja that still can't hide.

Full-on ninja-versus-llama action: the stuff they couldn't show in cinemas!

After the jump: the murderous healer and the great shoe drought.

A fun piece of nonsense I wrote for PC Gamer in the current issue's Extra Life has gone online today. It's a guide to cosplaying Lara in Tomb Raider: Anniversary. In the game, I mean. I'll leave Kieron to write a guide to cosplaying as her in real life.