Stargate Worlds - A Gated Community

Written by John Walker on August 28, 2008 at 10:56 am.

The best bit about the Stargate movie (no, seriously, there is a best bit) is when all the soldiers are running around the pillars under some Egyptianesque building. Every time they get to a pillar they press their backs against it and “cha-chunk” their big rifles. Next pillar, “cha-chunk”. Pillar after that, “cha-chunk”. The amount of live ammunition lying all over the floor in that room must have been a hazard. And that is definitely the best bit in that film. Apart from trying to guess if that baddy is a boy or a girl. Fortunately this is unlikely to have an influence on the MMO Stargate Worlds, for which there is a trailer below.

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Battlefield Heroes Footage, Limited Beta

Written by Jim Rossignol on August 28, 2008 at 8:40 am.

The main Battlefield Heroes site has started running contests for a limited number of beta keys. They gave away 400 last night, and there’s more to come. The rumour in the mill is that a large scale beta should be turning up very soon indeed. After the jump we have several minutes of Heroes footage, which starts off fairly slowly - try to imagine it ramped up with eight aside - and then goes fairly triumphant as it shows off the ludicrous air-combat. We get a good glimpse of the pace of the fighting, the layout of one of the maps, the vehicle use, and even some of the character customisations.
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Wright On Sporn: “Some of it’s really good”

Written by Alec Meer on August 28, 2008 at 12:19 am.

The Associated Press has managed to squeeze a comment on Spornography out of Will Wright:

“When you give players creative control, you have to expect they’re going to do the unexpected. Some of it’s really good for what they were shooting for. It’s amazingly explicit, especially when those creations are animated. We just have to make sure those people aren’t messing up the experience for others.”

Which, while not approval as such, certainly isn’t damning the monstrous penis-beasts and sodomy monsters the internet seems so fond of. Good on ‘im. Unfortunately they don’t ask whether he’s made any Sporn himself, which means we’re duty bound to speculate wildy that he has, and that it was unimaginably disgusting.
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Two Worlds 2 Is Too Pretty

Written by Alec Meer on August 27, 2008 at 10:00 pm.

Ah, Two Worlds - the comically-translated RPG that malicious types (like me) could describe as the poor man’s Oblivion. Or perhaps the drunken madman’s Oblivion. It was utter nonsense in so many ways, but hard to dislike - it had a certain just-getting-on-with-it factor that its peers lacked, and offered no small amount of unintentional belly laughs. Also, you could improve your weapons by bolting weapons of the same type onto ‘em, which was a fun way around the usual loot fixation.

A sequel’s on its way, and the first screenshots of it are out. RPS’ initial reaction was to cry bullshot, but a chum who saw it in action at Leipzig assures us that these are the genyooine article. More pics’n'words beneath the cut.
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Spore: It’s Made Of People

Written by RPS on August 27, 2008 at 7:25 pm.

[Brandon Boyer, the author of this piece, is one of Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s international agents. In 2006 he visited Spore developers Maxis at their studio on behalf of Edge magazine. The following article is an updated version of the feature that was published in that magazine last year. In it Mr Boyer talks to Wright and his team, and gets the heart of how this game came to be. Read on to discover how Spore was made of people.]

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Full Throttle Remembered

Written by John Walker on August 27, 2008 at 1:43 pm.

I would like to publically declare my love for Full Throttle. Something very strange happened with history and opinion on that game - it was well received by critics, it was completely fantastic, it was Tim Schafer’s most mature writing (three years before Grim Fandango). And then somehow it became the black sheep of LucasArts’ output, condemned by false memories of being too short, and having awful arcade sequences throughout. Which just isn’t true! Certainly it was a shorter adventure compared to others in their catalogue, but it was such an astonishingly fine one. And the arcade bits? Pieces of piss, apart from one crappy section with the demo derby. Get over it! Restore Full Throttle to its rightful glory! And then check out this excellent piece from Adventure Classic Gaming, discussing the fate of the two aborted sequels with former LucasArts artist, Bill Tiller.

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Todd Hollenshead: PC Makers Like Piracy. Secretly.

Written by Kieron Gillen on August 27, 2008 at 12:02 pm.

Browsing Quarter-to-three, I discover that Tom “Tom Bramwell” Bramwell’s interview with John Carmack and Todd Hollenshead has caused a little internet drama, picked up by 1UP. To paraphrase, Hollenshead argued that PC manufacturers secretly like that there’s piracy on the PCs, as it’s something which makes people buy PCs. After all, unlike console manufacturers, they don’t make any more profit if people actually buy games or not.

Which left Jim and I a little bewildered on a couple of points.
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Far Cry Series To Remain In Africa?

Written by Jim Rossignol on August 27, 2008 at 10:56 am.

UK-based blogchums Videogaming247 were clever enough to remember to go to Leipzig (unlike us) and consequently they’ve come back with special Far Cry information. Ubisoft Montreal are, apparently, already in the initial stages of the third Far Cry game. Here’s the interesting bit:

“There are still things we want to do with the African setting, and I think it’s safe to say we’ll continue to explore it. That said, we might find something new and compelling about the Antarctic setting that wants us to make the next game there, but honestly, we’re still at the preliminary stages.”

If Far Cry 2 ends up being good I rather hope this third game has a brief iteration time, rather than being another four-year project.

Spore Civilisation Trailer

Written by Jim Rossignol on August 27, 2008 at 8:40 am.

Via the big K, this latest Spore trailer sees producer Kip Katsarelis and designer Soren Johnson talking about the civilisation stage of Spore, particularly what they themselves enjoy about that planetary-struggle mechanisms of Maxis’ forthcoming evolve ‘em up. Lovely stuff.
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Crysis Wars: 13-Day Aged Prime-Cut Trailer

Written by Kieron Gillen on August 26, 2008 at 11:29 pm.

This is a little old, but we somehow didn’t post it when it hit the web a week ago and since I’ve been deep in Crysis: Warhead today for a magazine, it seemed appropriate. It’s a video showing Crysis Warhead’s included re-imagining of the Crysis multiplayer. In short: more short. Intense. More thoughts on FPS-multiplayer and completely random Mass Effect stuff beneath the cut.
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Games Not To Show Your Mother

Written by Alec Meer on August 26, 2008 at 10:12 pm.

I’ve just spent a little time at Komix Games, home of Austrian developer/artist Florian Himsl. He’s a very naughty boy. I thought I’d posted about impregnate ‘em up Coil before, but I can’t find it in our archives after all. One of several games Himsl made in collaboration with Gish creator Edmund McMillen, it’s the more subtle edge of their work. Beautiful but bewildering, it’s a sort of biological puzzle-art game that takes pride in not offering much in the way of help or hints. Llike their other efforts, it employs a soundtrack that’s the right mix of pretty and disturbing, neatly preventing this from being simply offensive.
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GOA Confirms Open Beta, Definitely Lowers Prices

Written by John Walker on August 26, 2008 at 1:37 pm.

Edit: As confirmed by GOA in the comments below, the prices for Warhammer ARE lowering in the UK as we printed last week, and their statements contradicting this and poo-pooing our reporting seem to have been somewhat erroneous. The lesson: RPS is always right, and handsome.

After astonishing amounts of confusion, GOA has finally made what appears to be the definitive statement regarding Open Beta access for those who pre-order Warhammer Online from the EA Store, and Direct2Drive.

It seems their plan was to not announce which of their partners would be offering customers OB access until the day the game becomes officially available for pre-order sale - this Thursday. However, EA and D2D, who it turns out will be amongst those partners, put the information up early. GOA then responded to this by, er, denying it. Now they have said they intended Open Beta to be available via certain pre-order outlets all along.

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Morality Tales - BioWare Versus The Issues

Written by John Walker on August 26, 2008 at 11:03 am.

I’ve been playing lots of Mass Effect recently, because as a leading games critic it’s essential I stay ahead of the curve and keep my finger on the pulse. A mere nine months after buying it on 360 and then never playing it, and then blagging a PC version only three months after its second release, I’m on the case.

It would probably be controversial to say that BioWare’s three most recent RPGs, Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire, and Mass Effect, are all exactly the same game in a different setting. Because Mass Effect’s setting is quite similar to KotOR’s. But what’s rather fortunate is that they change the combat style in each, so there’s always something unique to complain about on a forum. What’s also important to note is that they’re all three flipping ace, and I love them. They just… they just tend to do this one really silly thing.

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Star Trek Online: Explore ‘Em Up

Written by Jim Rossignol on August 26, 2008 at 9:52 am.

VG247 point out this fan Q&A in which Cryptic studios executive producer Craig “Zinc” Zinkievich affirmed that players in Star Trek Online would be expected to explore space, and not just grind missions for Starfleet.

“So we don’t view exploration as a ‘break’ from other gameplay – it’s integral. Expect to be encouraged to boldly go! And as an incentive to explore space, discovering new civilizations is one of the major ways to open up new resources and equipment and make new alien recruits available to you, your fleet and your faction.”

That sounds pretty positive to me - although I wonder how quickly gamers will explore up the galaxy if it’s pre-made. (”We can’t land here, it’s a level 36 planet!”)

Left 4 Dead Trailer And Delay

Written by Jim Rossignol on August 26, 2008 at 8:08 am.

Having spent the weekend co-op gaming at a mini journo-LAN this weekend, I’ve got the taste for fighting alongside my chums. Left 4 Dead, which I’ve played a couple of times now, has had a similar effect each time I’ve experienced it, and the reason is that it’s a game which insists that you help each other. Finding games in which working with your friends is essential to victory is actually rather tricky - any number of co-op games are actually just you playing a single player game in which your friends happen to be. In Left 4 Dead you don’t just happen to be shooting the same targets, you’re pulling each other up from where you’ve fallen, rescuing injured members from where they are trapped in rubble or locked rooms, or blasting zombie swarms away from a stricken comrade. It’s thrilling, because you can really mess up and get someone else killed. The Leipzig trailer appears after the jump.
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