RPS Feature Listen or be unmade
Welcome to the freshly relaunched RPS podcast, the Electronic Wireless Show! You might think this is episode 31, but actually it’s episode 1 again. We’re rebooting it, even though we just did that last year. We’ve started by making it more accessible. Instead of three of us chatting about videogames between snippets of jaunty music, there’s just a sad man saying “Sonic the Hedgehog” over and over. We’re confident you’ll like it. Read the rest of this entry »
Rejoice FPS fans, for Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus is now down to just £20 / $25 to celebrate the day of sales, deals and discounts that is Black Friday. Whether your preferred digital merchant is Amazon US, Steam, Green Man Gaming, Games Planet or Fanatical (other digital game retailers are available), now is definitely the time to buy if you haven’t got the game already.
Also mourn, FPS fans, since such sweeping discounts so close after release most likely means none of these games have been selling well. Read the rest of this entry »
RPS Feature Goddamn Moon Nazis
Fail Forward is a series of videos all about the bits of games which don’t quite work and why. In this episode, Marsh Davies discusses Wolfenstein: The New Order [official site], its robot dogs and limpid eyes.
Wolfenstein [official site] ranks as one of the best and biggest surprises of last year, stretching beyond its source material to offer a romp through wonderfully designed levels, non-linear stealth, and even a plot that strayed into unfamiliar territory like “heart-warming” and “actually funny.” More, then, is what we wanted and what Bethesda intend to supply with The Old Blood, a smaller standalone prequel coming in May. PAX East hosted the first public play session and it was all streamed on Twitch. Check it out below.
Bethesda have just announced a Wolfenstein: The New Order stand-alone prequel, which is wonderful news. Going by the subtitle The Old Blood, it’s set in 1946 as the Nazis are on the brink of winning World War II. Good ol’ Blazkowicz sets out on a tw-part mission, first of all breaking into the titular castle and then heading to Wulfburg to prevent the exhumation of terrible artefacts. The gloriously pulpy trailer is below.
The last time I tried to play the original Wolfenstein 3D was a few years back, on a netbook. It seemed like a good idea at the time. About half an hour later my contorted, shrivelled fingers revolted, crawled out of their sockets and attempted to end me.
They failed, of course, because fingers detached from hands cannot exert significant pressure. So it is that today I am able to play Super Wolfenstein HD, a free game created by Broforce devs Free Lives for the Indies vs. Pewdiepie jam. You may already have encountered Where Is My Hammer: Destroy Everything from the same jam. Super Wolfenstein HD is loosely similar in concept, except everything is Nazis. So much Nazis.
BJ Blazkowicz is probably regretting his choice of transport. When he clicked on The Trainline’s website and booked his tickets, instead of grabbing a seat in the “Moving HQ of the Aryan Race”, he should have selected “Quiet Coach”. That way the worst that would have happened is the that someone might be playing music on tinny earbuds DESPITE THE CONDITIONS OF THE COACH BEING CLEARLY DISPLAYED. He chose poorly, and this footage of Wolfenstein: The New Order shows the peril of accidentally sharing space with an Aryan matriarch and her pet ED209.
RPS Feature Old Wolf, New Tricks
Update: This article has been updated to reflect the following factual corrections: your co-pilot is called Fergus, not Rufus; the cover system is still present in the game; a painting on the wall was of Deathshed, not the Fuhrer.
“In my dream, I smell the barbecue.
I hear children.
A dog.
I think I see someone.
Someone I love.
These things are not for me.
I move by roaring engines.
Among warriors.
We come from the night.”
Gawp. Yawp. Goggle. B.J. Blazkowicz does beat poetry. This can’t be Wolfenstein? But it is.
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RPS Feature Slight Return
Huh, the spellcheck on here knows the word ‘Wolfenstein’. Good job, dictionary attendants. Anyway, the reason I’ve had cause to use that peculiar faux-Teutonic title today is that I played an early press build of the latest game in the series, Wolfenstein: The New Order, at Gamescom.
It was a strange experience, not least because it seemed so desperate to remind me that Nazis are evil. Have we forgotten that already?
Word on the grapevine (Twitter) has it that there’ll be some big, noisy game announcement at 2pm, but at the time of writing I have no idea what it would be because no-one tells me anything. Probably because RPS has insulted pretty much everyone by now, but oh well. In the aim of providing vaguely timely news, I have pre-written the below post ready to have relevant keywords inserted and/or removed once I find out what the game in question is. Let’s see how well I do! Edit – nailed it.
[GAME NAME]WOLFENSTEIN: THE NEW ORDER is a REMAKE/SEQUEL/REBOOT/RIVAL/ OF
HOMAGE/TO [OLD GAME NAME] WOLFENSTEIN 3D, developed by [COMPANY NAME] MACHINE GAMES and to be published by [COMPANY NAME] BETHESDA.
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It’s been interesting to watch Disney’s Wreck-It Ralph get showered with acclaim for being “the best videogame movie ever.” I say that because, well, “best videogame movie ever” doesn’t really mean anything. Heck, most announced films based heavily around games have yet to even reach a point where they could safely be called “existent” – let alone “good.” World of Warcraft, Mass Effect, Deus Ex, and, er, Asteroids are all buried somewhere in Hollywood’s screeching bowels, but will they ever see the light of day? Who knows. And now Wolfenstein‘s rejoining that venerable roster – with the co-writer of Pulp Fiction (the one who wasn’t Quentin Tarantino) attached, no less. I vote for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as Mecha Hitler.
Alternative title: “Demo-nic Possession”. Cos, you know, occult and stuff. Oh, nevermind. Wolfenstein, the recent manshoot from Raven, has a demo. I know, how about that! We certainly have had a bumper crop of game demonstrations of late. This particular demo is apparently a mere 685mb big, which seems quite economical in these engorged times. It also means that the game is no good, because small = bad, as we all know. Should you choose to install it, you’ll find yourself in a strange alternate world where the Nazis didn’t win the war, because someone shot at them, to death. Get it here, and I am sure there will be more mirrors along soon. Like this one.
Just a few thoughts on a few hours of Raven’s latest suckling at id’s IP teat… Lest word hasn’t reached you yet – perhaps unsurprisingly if so, given the dearth of pre-release reviews – BJ Blazkowicz’s latest corridor-based Nazi-gibbing adventure seems disappointingly flat. Given id are now a part of the Bethesda/Zenimax machine, it’s highly unlikely Raven will ever get a crack at the game universes they’ve (for better or worse) helped build, making this something of a sad farewell. At the same time, there’s a relief to knowing that some of the most formative names in PC-based man-shooting are no longer left in the hands of an Activision-owned studio who’ve not truly excelled themselves for years. Hopefully this isn’t Wolfenstein’s last gasp, but from what I’ve played so far it’s not going to be its proudest legacy.
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Raven’s reworking of the old lone Wolf will soon be upon us, August 18 for North American and August 21 for Europe. I’ve post the two most recent game-footage trailers below, in which we seen BJ using his supernatural vision and a flamethrower to clear the decks of a Zeppelin. I’m wondering whether that bit of the game ends in an explosion. It’s a fair bet, eh? More on this, no doubt, when we take a look later in the month of August. There’s a bunch more information over on the official Wolfenstein site, obviously.
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This is a fun teaser for Wolfenstein. A “motion comic”, it’s a faux-gritty tale of tracking down Hitler and his chain guns, my favourite moment having to be the swastika-shaped prison. Good, inappropriate times. There’s also a couple of trailers from a week or two back that we haven’t posted so far, tucked neatly below.
Just out is this moving-picture displaying the introductory sequence to Raven’s upcoming Wolfenstein do-over. It’s a curious project, for once putting the mystical overtones of the Wolfenstein series front’n’centre, as opposed to the usual late-game burst of fantasy weirdness. This cinematic, though, aptly demonstrates its two conflicting elements – Nazi-shooting and crazy gothic magic, the latter this time to be wielded by you as well as your exaggerated foes. No in-game footage, and thus no enormous sense of how this sequel/remake (semake? Requel?) will play. But I guarantee you this: it will feature the shooting of pixel-based German men.
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Well, that’s what the trailer should have been titled. Actually it’s more about the goofy occult horror angle of the reworked shooter, showing off the reality-hopping “veil” effects and the green-emitting monsters that Nazi scientists have created to destroy Freedom, jazz and apple pie. There are also impossibly large guns. That’s right: it’s Wolfenstein, it’s coming this summer, and it’s a first-person shooter videogame. We like those.
Oh, I wish it really were called that. I miss the days when game names were ritually suffixed with ‘3D’. I might start doing it anyway. “Next week, we’ll be posting about Fallout 3 3D, Spore 3D, Warhammer Online 3D and Peggle…”
There doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of buzz around Raven’s upcoming occultist-Nazi shooter just yet, at least not compared to id’s own Rage 3D, but maybe I’m just not looking in the right places. Here’s what was shown at Quakecon, anyway. It’s possibly a little more subtle than the E3 footage – but it’s nevertheless certainly not subtle. I think/hope it’s pushing for deliberately silly, and it could be a lot of Serious Sam-y fun if so.
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(Apologies if all this E3 stuff is bugging you – normal service will resume on Monday, but we wanted to make sure we aggregated all the big PC talking points).
First footage of the new Wolfenstein game, handled by perennial id lackeys Raven – who have much to prove after Quake 4. Though they are also, for the first time since 2000’s Soldier of Fortune, making their own game, the mysterious Singularity. No info on that yet, but we do get this:
Big on the mysticism, clearly – and apparently hero BJ Blaskowitz will have psychic powers of his own. Hnn. Not seeing anything to suggest Raven are straying off their well-beaten dark’n’shooty track, but there’s talk of open world stuff, I hear.
Well, hello. I’ve just gone six days without the internet. Cursed steam-age parents. Remind me to never, ever leave my house again.
Clearly, I’ve a lot of news to catch up on, once I’ve finished staring in fascinated horror at some of the angry reader comments on the Eurogamer Top 50 Games of 2007 feature, which all four of us RPSites contributed to enthusiastically. My prediction: by 2009, Halo and Mario fans will have reached such numbers and ferocity that they’ll have formed their own nation, constantly at war with the rest of the Earth.
One story that has caught my haggard post-Christmas eye is another suggestion that Cryptic’s Marvel Universe Online MMO is dead, as originally rumoured back in November.
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