Latest Articles (Page 2120)

Steam's new Community feature leapt out of beta yesterday, and is now fully integrated into the system. Which means that we rather thought we should have a Community Group of our very own.

Currently it's completely empty, so join us, whydoncha? Either click on this to get at it via the electronic internet, or plop this into your Steam address bar:

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/rps

...the penguins were hardest hit by global warming and pollution. The ice had melted, the fish were gone.

Then, at the darkest hour, the ancient Penguin Goddess Sedna appeared before the starving masses. Gathering the survivors around her, she uttered these fateful words:

"My penguin children, here me well. Starvation and chaos are upon you. There is room for but one tribe. The others must perish less ye all perish. That is the price of survival."

The Penguns stood in stunned silence. Only one tribe could remain, but which one? How would they decide? As darkness descended, the answer became apparent...

That's right - PENGUIN DEATHMATCH.

Penguins Arena (for the sake of grammar, let's assume this is pronounced, "Penguins: Arena") is the mad conclusion of this worrying tale. From French indie developers, Frogames, it's an extremely cute and daft deathmatch game born of the confused relationship between Quake 3 and that punching with boxing gloves on springs minigame in Monkey Ball.

Sad and good news at once - kind of like a puppy being born then immediately exploding.

Penumbra: Overture, the creepy indie physics-based adventure game spun out of an impressive tech demo, is to get a sequel, one that ties off its story's various loose ends. Trouble is, it was supposed to be a trilogy. Now it's a mere duology, like the Kill Bill films or albums by the UK band behind the best-ever number one single that's probably about something to do with ejaculation but no-one's really entirely sure, Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

After the jump: no more unnecessary pop-culture references, promise.

Fans of large metal things stepping on smaller things will be disappointed to hear that FASA Studios have shut their doors. Reportedly half of the team are being moved into the rest of Microsoft Studios. The other half move to the pub, nursing pints and considering what they plan to do next. We wish them luck with whatever it is. FASA, even in their modern post-MS buyout form of Studios, rather than their older Interactive, made some pretty neat games.

While best known for the Mechwarrior games, their swansong was the future-trivia-answer Shadowrun (the question being: Which was the first game which allowed the PC to play against XBox 360 owners?" Tricky people will phrase the question "console owners" instead, where the answer will shift to Quake 3 on the Dreamcast and you'll lose). I reviewed it for Eurogamer on release and gave it 6/10. It's also one of my favourite multiplayer games of the year so far. There's no contradiction there. As appealing as it often was, the mark reflects the ridiculous price attached to the game. If you see it cheap, and fancy raising a digital glass to the folk of FASA, you won't regret it.

I should have mentioned this yesterday, but CCP's full time economist, Dr. Eyjo "DrEyoG" Gudmundsson, has published Eve Online's first financial report. In it he examines the mineral trade, which is the backbone of all Eve's production and manufacturing stuff. The Doc explains:

This first Econ Dev Blog (EDB) has given a descriptive overview of the major trends for the market of minerals in EVE. Overall trade quantity and volume has increased dramatically over the last 3 years and the price of minerals has fallen considerably due to increased mining efficiency through better tactics and improved technology. The price formation has also improved showing that price difference between regions is becoming minimal in Empire space and reflects only the time value of moving minerals in low sec. However, smaller population and the risk of piracy in zero-zero space results in less efficient markets with low volumes and great fluctuations in prices given an arbitrage trade opportunity for the brave entrepreneur.

Needless to say, money means graphs:

I've been traveling for the last week, and between playing Puzzle Quest, reviewing games which I'm NDA-ed up to the journo gills about, drinking heavily, and and getting crushing existential dread with Alec when walking across a bridge in Vancouver, I picked up some comics. And one of them is relevant to the blog, so I'll write something about it. Yes.

It features this bloke. And since there's two incarnations of it out, it's a bloody PC Game.

It's Halo: Uprising, it's by Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev and it has a review hidden around here, somewhere. See if you can find it.

Being one of those gamers who regularly reacts to games by saying "Wouldn't It be Cool If..." I responded to Grin's last original game, Bandits, by saying "Wouldn't it be cool if there were some more ambitious sci-fi MadMax vehicular action games out there". (My mum would be so proud, okay.) Bandits, you see, wasn't particularly good, but it was good enough for me to want more racing across scorched alien desert and blasting other vehicles into tumbling shreds of wreckage. There was the potent kernel of an idea in there, and a pretty solid mouse/keyboard control method for speeding death-buggies too. And so I dreamed of high-speed action games. Then, all of a sudden there there was Rage, and Borderlands. Now, assuming that Rage is a very long way off, and doesn't quite fit the Bandits template that inspired my gleeful pipe-dreaming (we'll see why in a bit), then that leaves me with one focus of interest: Borderlands.

It's a science fiction desert-world FPS with vehicles, randomised missions and ubiquitous co-op. It also features bizarre alien fauna - possibly a bad thing, given Auto Aborto Assault's mutant debacle - and lots of motorised fighting with desperate bandits. What it does do is try to create a thriving world, with lots of unexpected encounters - a little like that other open ended shooter I can't stop talking about: Stalker.

Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts (affectionately referred to as an 'expandalone' by Relic, its developers) has gone gold. I'll let its producer, Shane Neville, express his feelings about this:

I think that means he's happy.

Kieron and I have getting on for 20 years of games journalism experience between us, but neither of us have ever been in the presence of a developer at the moment they finished their game before. This changed last Friday, when we'd both gone out to Seattle and Vancouver to see a splendid bunch of THQ games. (The delay in announcement, incidentally, is simply because there's a brief pause between a developer reckoning their game's finished and their publisher giving the final thumbs-up.)

I'm really, really pleased to have been there for it, as it's one of those unique elements of the games industry guys like me generally never get to experience. It's several months of several human beings' lives drawn to one focused conclusion, with something so tangible to show for all that effort. I'm hugely jealous; it must be an incredible feeling.

Details of the birth after the jump...

We at RPS have but eight eyes between us, no matter what magical powers Kieron claims his rectum has. This means we miss a lot of stuff, and thus are very grateful to readers who tip us off to great stories.

Eventually, we'll get really damned good at throwing them up as soon as they arrive, but for now, here's a quick-fire summary of what's slapped through our pretend letterbox recently. They're sequenced at random by an idiot (that's me), but there's a rough hierarchy from Woo! to Meh to Huh?

The B sends glad tidings of Guitar Hero III - coming to PC. The game itself isn't that exciting because a) we really want Rock Band now, to be honest and b) Frets on Fire got there first, and for free, but that there'll be a custom USB guitar controller means mega-W00tings. I'll be first in the queue to buy one, and will establish whether or not it's possible to play Peggle on it. Due by the end of the year, reportedly. Dunno the GH3 tracklisting as yet, but I will forcibly cuddle as many Activision product managers as it takes to get Fortunate Son by Creedence Clearwater Revival on to it.

(Via Fun-Motion) San Fran indie developers 2D Boy have posted a trailer for their forthcoming World of Goo. Here's my impression of it:

I absolutely haven't got the faintest idea what's going on here, yet I know that it is good. It's one of those occasions when I'd far rather be utterly mistified, than find out the reality of the situation, no matter how excellent it might be. Like watching Spanish soap operas, or The Bloomberg Channel.

(So no, I never played Tower of Goo, which you can get here.) [You really should play it, John, it's brilliant - Rest Of RPS Team.]

I'd like to interrupt this FPS-excitement to focus for a moment on the real-time strategy game, Universe At War. Now I'm well aware that, between C&C3 and Starcraft 2, this is going to have a hard time. But I was lucky enough to play it earlier this year, and I'm actually pretty excited about its mad verve. It's a game that sits half way between Starcraft and Red Alert - it's packed with madcap ideas and over-the-top sci-fi silliness. What I'm trying to say is: there's a good deal of cowbell.

Thanks, Game Trailers, you big game trailering site, you.

Yeah, the engine looks pretty ropey, and that ugliness has put a load of people off right away. Do not be fooled: this could be one of the best asymmetric multiplayer games you'll play in 2007 or any other year. The three races are pleasingly different, and one of them has a cow hoover for sucking up their resource: cattle.

Like every good geek, I have a favourite gaming moment. It's in Aliens Versus Predator, a vintage but oft-forgotten first-person shooter that gets mentioned by my games-hack peers about as often as the Pope says "are you sure this hat makes God happy?"

As if you needed more this evening, Valve have put the Meet The Engineer video on Steam.

Very different from the previous two trailers, but still just as superb, the Engineer takes things at a remarkably casual pace, strumming away on his guitar, gently explaining his nature to you, while his hand-made machinery slaughters any who might come near.

His profile will be with you after this short break.

Valve have just announced that The Orange Box is available to pre-order on Steam. And there are a few good reasons to do so.

First of all, there's the rather big announcement that pre-ordering will secure you access to the Team Fortress 2 beta test, which (also just announced) opens on the 17th. A pretty huge incentive there, with this being the most exciting looking multiplayer in forever and ever. A chance to see those pretties a month early in enticing indeed.

For those a bit annoyed at having to buy Half-Life 2 and Episode 1 again when ordering the set, the pricing should quickly put that to rest. To get the whole box (HL2, Ep 1, Ep 2, TF2 and Portal - phew) will cost you a pre-order price of $45 (£22 (£25 with tax)). To buy the three new games individually will cost you $80 (£40). So, um, the whole lot then, maybe? Even better, Valve have said that those still miffed can "gift" their duplicates to friends. Which is nice.

But perhaps there is one more piece of news that will have people pre-ordering in their mad droves. Coming up on page two!

This is so great it deserves its own post.

Click for bigness.

An attractive new action-adventure has appeared on the RPS radar, flaunting its pixels quite outrageously. It's called Edge Of Twilight and it's set in a fantasy steam-punk universe in which a battle between two cultures rages. (Lucky it wasn't set in one of those fantasy steam-punk universes where everyone sits about eating biscuits and talking about corduroy.)

Here's a picture:

Like all games in 2007, it looks extremely pretty. It might even be fun to play - the main character's abilities change depending on the day-night cycle - but we should perhaps keep in mind that the developers previously made Hot Dog King. Yum!

One of the PC's finest features is its ability to allow small, eccentric development teams to create great games without constraints. The spirit of the bedroom programmers of the '80s is just about living on PCs across the world. One such home-grown PC team are the British IGF winners, Introversion, who have been something of an inspiration in their attitude towards game development: the kinds of games they have decided to develop appeal to something basic about gaming. It's not a Retro appeal, so much as timeless. Uplink, Darwinia and DefCon each have their own encapsulated, deliberately self-contained idea, and each sits just outside the commercial comfort zones. These titles do what indie games do best: surprise, entertain, and challenge.

So how does Introversion's central programmer, the superbly-named Chris Delay, feel about independent game development in 2007? “Alive and well! PCs are still the best place to play genuinely indie games made by very small teams. It's worth keeping up with events like the IGF - a lot of teams that do well show up later as serious game developers. I think people's interest in indie gaming has been slowly rising and this is definitely a good thing.”

Introversion came away from the IGF as stars, but are now somewhat distancing themselves from their indie roots, with increased commercial success thanks to their exposure on Valve's Steam sales platform: “We're big fans,” says Delay. “Of course we'd say that, since all three of our games are now available to buy on Steam. But it's such a convenient system. I recently reached the end of my patience with Vista and wiped the hard disk, and installed XP from scratch. After installing Steam I had easy access to the latest versions of every game I'd bought over the system. From a company point of view Valve offer a direct link to a huge number of customers who might otherwise never have heard of our games. Certainly with Darwinia, Steam was kind of a saviour for us and sold Darwinia in quantities we'd never seen before. With Defcon (and all of our future games, we hope) we released the game on Steam and on our website and in the high street simultaneously. We've found that players like the choice – some people want the convenience of Steam, some people want it direct from the creators and not tied to any system, and some people like to walk into town to buy.”

And some of us just want to get rid of the towers of CDs and DVD boxes that currently dominate our tiny box-room offices...

Read on for thoughts on Multiwinia, Subversion, and the future of Introversion.

My continuing unhealthy interest in GSC Gameworld's apocalyptic FPS from earlier this year reaches a climax over at PC Gamer UK's website, with a three part feature originally published in the magazine. Read the three parts here, here, and here. Or, conveniently, read the first part and then follow the links built into those very pages. Clever, eh?

The feature covers the inspiration of the game and links to The Zone, both in the real world of Chernobyl, and in fiction. I say things like this:

Many people have returned to the zone to live, including some of the former residents who are resigned to the damage the radiation will cause to their health, some criminal elements who use the 'off-grid' nature of the place to hide, and some refugees from wars in nearby Soviet republics.

It's the night of the New Game Download. The Crysis multiplayer beta, oddly described as "Friends and family", is accessible to anyone with a Founders' Club FilePlanet account. Which anyone can get by paying IGN's insanely awful download service $10 they don't need or deserve.

Spaces on this beta are limited, with more due later as it's rolled out to the more general public. So get in there quick if you think early access to Crysis is worth £5 of your penny jar collective.

Not that I'm bitter or anything, after having a friend on the inside who'd got me onto this "Friends and family only" beta, receiving an email that told me it was secret, shhhh, and not to tell, and then finding that the hoi poloi are downloading it willy nilly. Dreadful people littering my private beta access, leaving their cigarette butts everywhere I shouldn't wonder. Grumble.

The Enemy Territory: Quake Wars demo can be downloaded from here, or a little faster here. It is around 740mb big. ATI users need to download and install this, in order to avoid frustration.

The demo does not include this lovely map.

The demo includes the map from the beta test, Valley, which, while being fairly representative of the action from the game as a whole, is not the finest map the game has to offer. I can say this with some certainty because I've played Splash Damage at the entire game, including a run through each of the four campaigns. My PC Gamer review will contain my thoughts on that experience in a week or two. I'll link to it when it comes online. Meanwhile, for information on a more exciting map, take a look at this spoiler-packed preview. I'm calling "spoilers" on this one because I honestly can't think of another multiplayer FPS where the maps could be spoiled by being talked about beforehand - ETQW's maps are huge and surprising.

Pyschonauts developers, Double Fine, have released a new range of free, web-based minigames to play. And by "range", I of course mean, "one of them". But as the site says under its grand banner, "When there's only one candidate, there's only one choice!"

The game is Epic Saga, a beat-em-up that quite literally matches the glory of Rise of the Robots. Looking an awful lot like the wonderful Videlectrix old-skool game spoofs by the Homestar Runner people, it's hardcore retro something something. (Is this the "delirious rambling" GSW were on about?)

You probably haven't read secret friend of Rock Paper Shotgun Oliver Clare's review of Serious Game Global Conflict: Palestine so I'm going to link to it, as I think it's worth thinking about. In fact, I already did by the time I said I was going to. And I'm doing it again. There's no stopping me.

I haven't had a chance to play it yet, as much as a journo-em-up appeals to me (I quite like the idea of being completely out of my depth and trying to interview Hamas about how to get past the end of level three in Rainbow Islands). It's the sort of thing I wish there was more of. There's a demo here, for interested parties.

If shooting albatrosses brings bad luck I'm in for a really lousy autumn.

This past week, in the gaps between work, blackberry picking, and bouncing about in the Rigs of Rods Tatra, I've been catching-up with a wonderful old friend - Red Baron 3D.

Thanks to Sierra's German wing, this evergreen Great War dogfight sim, justly famed for its immersive dynamic campaign and marvellous MP, is now totally free. Well, strictly speaking it's Red Baron II that's free. You'll need to apply the official superpatch to upgrade to RB3D. You'll also want a Glide wrapper, a WinXP sound fix, and a tolerance of Deutsch (the patch doesn't remove all traces of the Baron's native tongue). It's a bit of a dance, but follow the following step-by-step guide and you should be happily ambushing albatrosses inside half an hour.

[This was published by game development portal Gamasutra last year, but I thought it might be interest to you lot, too. Jenkins is a clever bloke, and has some interesting things to say about games as a medium.]

As one of the foremost academic commentators on contemporary media Henry Jenkins has made a major impact on discussions surrounding games and their place in our culture. His ideas suggest that by examining how people appropriate and recombine different media we learn much about the nature of those media forms within contemporary society. This, as well as much of Jenkins other work, focuses on the nature of interactivity, and that often means video games. He is an MIT professor, a contributor and speaker at media conferences, and an influential author. His latest book, Convergence Culture, articulates Jenkins' most recent theories of how individuals interact with modern media.

Jim: What games do you regular play yourself? Are there any games you recommend to other people? (Do these games coincide?)

Henry Jenkins: As a gamer, my preferences tend to run towards casual and puzzle games (especially classics such as Tetris, Snood, and Super Collapse), simulation games (anything by Will Wright), and the classic sidescrollers (Shigeru Miyamoto's games were my first love). The more I get sucked into the world of games research, ironically enough, the less time I get to play games. These days, I am most likely to end up playing Guitar Hero, which is a favorite in the graduate student lounge here. I'm not particularly good at it, which means that students often want to play against me. Getting your head handed to you by one of your students is payback for all of the demands I make on them in the classroom.

Jim: I first encountered your work with the 'Eight Myths Debunked' piece. Do you think any of those myths are likely to be dispelled any time soon?

HJ: Those of us who care about games are going to be confronting these particular myths for some time to come. Each myth is very deeply rooted in our culture and has become almost the established wisdom among those people who are not themselves gamers and have very little exposure to the medium. They are the things you think you know when you know nothing else about games and that makes them especially hard to combat. Keep in mind as well that there are all kinds of groups and individuals who have a vested interest in spreading fear and ignorance. They play upon these misconceptions and regularly reinforce them through their comments in the press.

Some of these issues are cyclical: they get battled back, there is a lull, and then some new activist emerges to exploit the ignorance and try once again to push through laws or score legal victories off of many of these issues. You don't hear much these days from David Grossman; Jack Thompson is the current poster child for this perspective, but I have the feeling that he will soon fade from view, and someone else will rise up to take his place. Each has depended upon a slightly different inflection of these myths and so we will see these things get reconfigured once again. Long term, some of these myths will be harder to sustain as more and more of the kids who grew up playing Super Mario Brothers step into adult roles as first time parents, starting teachers, members of the work force, staffers for government agencies, and journalists.

Much, much more after the hop. I mean loads.

Following on from Jim's review, Eurogamer have published my piece on Total War Kingdoms. Which mainly exists as a glorified referral post to my previous first-impressions piece which almost warped into a full review. To avoid repeating myself, I wander into increasingly esoteric terrain. For example...

This is kind of one of the problems running through Total War games. You don't really get to change history. Sure, you can make - as I did - the Apache run rampant over the continent, but fundamentally the Apache don't change by their experiences significantly. What would Apache civilisation be like when they'd got hold of the Gold of the Incas, for example? Pretty much identical. One of the standard problems that the harder-core Total War fans have is with the quasi-fantastical units - the flaming pigs in Rome, for example - but when you severely changed history, you need that imagination to cover the holes and populate that alternate history.

I'm surprised I ended up marking this as low as I did - I thought it was a shoe-in for the top end of the marks, but when returning to review it, elements grated more. That I concentrated on the weakest of the campaigns (The Americas). A couple of extra notes though...

I'm in Canada, looking at pixels flashing excitedly on screens. More on those another time - more importantly, here's what the developers in question decorate their work-space.

The lobby of Gas Powered Games: a big, gleaming sword and a custom-made remote control car that can reverse at 50mph or something. Also, four different types of nut on tap.

The lobby of Relic entertainment: a giant statue of a Space Marine commander. And a full-scale tank poking through the wall. A tank. Also, a PS3 running Mortal Kombat II (which, in retrospect, really is a terrible game).

Real-world grown-up critic Steven Poole (who probably even has his own room and big boy pants and everything) has put up his columns which he wrote for grown-up big-boy pants games magazine, Edge. Poole's probably best known for his book from the same period, Trigger Happy. Which looked like this in its first edition, which is most attractive.

(More on Poole and why you should be excited to read his columns beneath the cut, methinks.)

We at RPS enjoy Touring Cars best of all the track-based motorised racing, because they look like they're having the most fun. What a shame then that the Race 07 Demo runs appallingly badly on this PC (Dual Core, 7800GT). Of course, this being the nebulous world of PC gaming, it might run entirely fine on your identically specced PC, so if you like a bit of serious fast car frippery then you might want to have a go. The demo can be downloaded from here, or grabbed via Steam. In fact it installs itself on Steam where-ever you get it from, so that might just be the best option.

A BMW at about 10fps.

This might have been my least interesting post so far. I'm sorry. I'll do better next week.

Not really safe for work: A Second Life Herald reporter looks into how to procure cute baby unicorns/nightmares:

After much digging and several dead leads, I came upon Marcelle DeCuir, famed originator of this cult by way of Snapzilla. "I was hanging out with Polyester (Partridge) one day and she had the baby [unicorn], so I asked her where she got it. She pointed me towards Sensual Stoneworks, and I was shamelessly raped by a unicorn. I don't mind".

You get hold of baby unicorns by having your avatar bummed by an adult unicorn, or flame-hoofed horsey. I'd add more detail, but I'm not sure it would be appropriate. Other non-consensual fantasy couplings lie beyond the link.

So I was just telling a cynical chum to buy Peggle, or be damned, and he asked if viewing the ad-funded version browser version counted against his descent to hell. Of course, being the RPS daily dunce, I had no idea there was one, or that it was a free as (advert-ridden) sunshine. It isn't as good as the full retail version, by virtue of being trapped in a browser, but you can now get to Peggle without having to part with seven British pounds , or fifteen Yanqui dollars. See the "Also Available Online" bit at the bottom of that page for the link. You need to install a browser plugin, then all the Peggle is your oyster, or something.

Peggle, in case you've been entombed in a rock for past year, is the best puzzle thing since sliced Tetris.