Realpolitiks is the practice of pragmatic diplomacy based on circumstance. Real politics is arguing with your mum’s friend Derek on Facebook about unisex bathrooms. And Realpolitiks [official site] is a strategy game set in the contemporary world with all its international crises and dilemmas. The first two have been around for a while, but the last one just came out today.
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The trailer for Realpolitiks [official site] is spectacular, in the way that someone stepping on a rake and then falling into a pond is a spectacle. The game itself looks like one of those maps and graphs things that I love, with its focus on politics in the modern world, but the trailer doesn’t spend a lot of time with the game. Sure, you’ll see a map around the 30 second mark, but that’s assuming your eyes haven’t already popped out of your skull. “When World Collapses,” sez the trailer, “REAL MEN MAKE REAL POLITICS”. The man in the video rubberstamps a document with blood.
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IL-2 Sturmovik blew me away at Gamescom last year. With only a couple of weeks until I fly out to Cologne again, I’m enthusiastic about the prospect of another unexpected champion of gaming emerging from a cloudbank and peppering me with excitement. A year has passed since I took to the skies and development has continued at a steady rate. New planes are appearing and the modelling of existing ones is improving, but it’s the dynamic campaign I’m most excited to see. Glorious great maps. Two new videos below.
The IL-2 Sturmovik series is one of those rare sims which stretched beyond its nerdy remit to attract an audience of people who’d never normally clamber into a virtual cockpit. Now developers 1C Game Studios are teaming with the Russian Military Historical Society to produce ILya Muromets, a new flight sim set during World War 1. It’s set during the Eastern Front air war and named after the first airliner, and one of the first large bombers in aerial warfare. There’s the first set of screenshots below.
RPS Feature Beastie Toys
Each Monday, Chris Livingston visits an early access game and reports back with stories about whatever he finds inside. This week, monster-based monster strategy (again!) with (even more!) monsters King’s Bounty: The Dark Side.
Last week I moaned about not being able to get monsters to work together to destroy humankind. I should have just waited for this week, when King’s Bounty: The Dark Side (or just Dark Side, depending on what you’re reading) gave me the monster team-up of my dreams. Zombies, demons, vampires, orcs, goblins, imps, three-headed dogs, skeletal archers, necromancers, and even dragons, all in the mix, and more importantly all working together for monsterkind.
Resist cynicism or die. Hope. Dream. Think. Act. Be vulnerable. Open yourself to risk or you’ll never truly learn, love, or live. That hip new band may very well drop a cracking second album, I can make that Cronenbergian game controller I’ve been dreaming of, my mum shall stop hinting that I’m going to die alone in a ditch, and King’s Bounty will get an actual proper sequel rather than simply more glorified expansions.
Oh. Well. Maybe the next one after this. The next in the series will be King’s Bounty: Dark Side this summer, publishers 1C have announced. Yes, it looks like another expandalone sort of dealy rather than a game building upon King’s Bounty in bold new ways.
RPS Feature Directly Controlled
Men Of War: Assault Squad 2, or MOWASTWO for short, is now available to those who buy into the ongoing beta. Full release is scheduled for the 20th of March. Needless to say, Jim dove in, headfirst.
I’ll admit that I’m a bit in love with the Men Of War games. It clouds my judgement. The series is flawed, even occasionally lame, but always so beautiful to my eye. Many games have attempted to sell us the idea of War, and even more the idea of Men, but it is only in Men Of War that these two ideas fused together, like desperate lovers, to produce a simulationist battlefield mutant that looks at us with terrible eyes and says: “Aim is in the reach zone!”
I’m sorry, it’s been a while since I wrote anything. All my metaphors seem to have become sticky from neglect.
