Latest Articles (Page 2122)

What would the world be like without graphs? Bleak, I dare say. They are like the rainbows of mathematics... So imagine my delight when I discovered a blog dedicated to not simply graphs, but graphs about World Of Warcraft. Look at this beauty, which charts PVP Rank against faction. Cor.

This graph shows that "The Alliance-Horde imbalance (2:1 in our sample) makes it easier for Horde characters to enter PvP BGs. This means that given the same amount of play-time, Horde has less wait time, and thus more practice. This might also encourage forming groups ahead of time (i.e. prefabs) because it doesn't impact wait times, whereas it would in the Alliance case."

But you know what? There's much more.

I've not been paying a great deal of attention to IO Interactive's two-man shooter, Kane & Lynch, but there's every reason to think this might actually be pretty interesting. Hitman: Blood Money ate a load of my spare time this year, so I'm eager to see what IO can manage to come up with next. I'm also keen to see how this new fad for co-op gaming plays out. Five years ago there was barely a dozen co-op shooters in existence, now they're clambering out of every marketing spreadsheet. This has to be a good thing, and the ideas that developers come up with for making players work together are going to change the way we play - subtly perhaps, but we're already seeing the ideas build up. (Pulling buddies to their feet in Gears Of War, for example.)

Thanks, Game Trailers.

And what do you think, readers?

Listen buddy, this is my home. You shouldn’t be in here. Have [CLANG] a [CLANG] little [CLANG] respect [CLANG].

I’m an Engineer. That means I’m not interested in you. I’m interested only in my work. If it so happens that my work is near something that’s important to you, that’s just dandy. Just don’t expect me to go where you ask, and definitely don’t think I’ll come join you on your damn-fool crazy errand to the other side of the tracks. Me, I’m setting up shop right here.

There’s two ways to play the Engineer (well, three, but if you’re running around in the enemy base with your feeble shotgun out, you ain’t doing it right). Semi-offensively, and defensively. The former involves setting up a front line, dodging the slings and arrows of outrageous fortressmen to set up teleporters and turrets that help keep your team pushing forwards.

RPS can confirm that friendly fire will indeed be removed from Team Fortress 2 in the update rolling out in a couple of hours.

Lead developer Robin Walker told us that he did indeed email German forum Gamestar to say that the mode was never meant to be left in.

"We shipped it by mistake, as it wasn't something we wanted to be a part of the game. We haven't built the game around having it in, and it just stops it from working," explains Walker. Breaking both the Spy and the Pyro, the TF2 team decided that friendly fire prevented the game from being any fun to play, and it will soon be gone completely.

[I originally wrote this for the relaunch issue of PC Gamer, when they were introducing their extra-life section. The Long Play features are basically a critical essay, looking at a game a few years on and noting why it still matters. Anyway, this is my look over Black Isle's genuinely seminal RPG. A few years old, every word then remains true now - and I sincerely doubt we'll ever see its like again. Obviously enough, there's some fairly heavy spoilers in here. Re-reading, it reminds me that I should do something bigger than this on the old warhorse. I've got Chris Avellone's e-mail around here, somewhere...]

Ignored by the gaming press upon release, only receiving warmish reviews that stopped well short of open adulation and the victim of one of the most ill-judged marketing campaigns (“A corpse with irresistible sexual charisma”) in history, Planescape Torment is the classic Underdog. Inevitably, it became the (relatively speaking) commercial runt of the Baldur’s Gate litter. In the years since, the coin of its critical worth has accumulated to the point where aficionados regularly cite it as the greatest of the PC RPGs. In fact, it’s rehabilitation has gone too far, with its name being a simple byword for narrative excellence without anyone really feeling the need to say why. There’s more here than dogmatic romantic myth.

Interesting times for fans of what's usually considered Command & Conquer's Godfather III moment. In a minute, I'll politely introduce you to a free game. First though, the bit you probably already know about. C&C: Renegade, the awful-singplayer-but-quite-interesting-actually-multiplayer FPS is, rumour has it, to receive a sequel.

I can well believe that someone at EA has presumably ferreted around in the dustiest dungeons of the spreadsheets and re-floated the idea of a C&C FPS, but an actual sequel to Renegade and its Battlezoney first-person base-building somehow seems unlikely. With Team Fortresss 2 and Quake Wars currently fuelling class-based teamplay fever, and EA already holding tight onto Battlefield's reigns, I'd guess at that being the likely approach.

That's dim-and-distant stuff if it even happens, but available right now is C&C Red Alert - A Path Beyond, a total conversion of the original Renegade. Somehow, it's standalone and free too - i.e. you don't need Renegade to play it. Its shtick? Why, Renegade but in Red Alert's alterna-history 1950s universe, with Tesla tanks and everything.

While no one here at RPS fully understands the meaning of 'football' we do realise that the beautiful game does hold many of you in its boisterous thrall. We are therefore pleased to announce that the better football game, Pro Evolution Soccer, has a 1.1gb downloadable demonstration of its most recent incarnation, "2008", available for your perusal. This new game reportedly features all the most important elements of a football sessions: kicking, heading, goaling, and advertising.

Does RPS need a football expert? Probably. Now, back to my sniper rifle fantasies...

I don't know about you, but The Sniper seems a little, well, disconnected. I mean I'm there in the fight alright, but I've usually got something on my mind. That thing is usually the other sniper.

While Team Fortress 2 happily throws up the “Nemesis!” tag for those enemies you give you a kicking once too often, it doesn't acknowledge the real battles that are taking place. The most defined of these are the duels between opposing snipers. There's always one, and he'll always be devoted picking you off first. And so the sniper respawns and has one target in mind: the guy on the enemy team. The fight devolves from one where the sniper is an element of supporting, long-range firepower, to one where there's only a single goal: to stop the other sniper being effective. It's a duel like no other in the game.

We're chuffed to declare that RPS will have reviews of Half-Life 2: Episode Two and Portal at the moment the Orange Box goes live on October 10th. Nowhere else on the net will be publishing reviews before this date, so frankly, check us out and our fancy new haircut.

Today was spent in Valve HQ playing the latest chapter in the Half-Life story, and tomorrow morning I'll be leaping through Portals, before interviewing anyone I can nail to a chair. Expect to see interviews here in the next couple of weeks before release.

More details later this week.

I'm interviewing Flagship Studio's Ex-Blizzard-ite Bill Roper tomorrow for a magazine, so have been doing a little research into what sort of things the man's been saying recently. Some interesting stuff out there. Hellgate: London is a game which I've been, while not ignoring, I've been more waiting to actually actively have a chance to play the bally thing than following the hype. So, while this is a couple of weeks old, it's new to me. Newsweek's always excellent N'Gai Croal chatted to Bill Roper in two separate interviews this year, which he serialised in four parts. He's now lumped it together in one mega-interview which annoys me by asking all the sensible questions I'd have gone for, forcing me to actually apply my brain a bit harder than normal. Damn N'Gai Croal.

Anyway, here's Bill on what sort of game Hellgate is. Is it a turn-based strategy game set during the Punic Wars?

"No, it's an MMO. I mean, MMO means "massively multiplayer online." We're gonna be connecting hundreds of thousands to millions of players online. You know, Diablo 2 is an MMO, but in people's heads when they think MMO they think the EverQuest model so that gives them all these parameters of what an MMO is. And then---I don't know if this gets driven by marketing groups or by sales or fans, I don't know--people really seem to need, have that need to be able to strictly define things. Like I know that Raph Koster at one point referred to Guild Wars as a hub-and-instance MMO, trying to narrow down what kind of MMO it was. It's an MMO. You go online and you're playing with, you know, thousands of other people in your community. That's what Hellgate is. It's an MMO. But to me the more quote-unquote "confusing part" is that its both a single-player game and an MMO. I was thinking of it as trying to be kind of like the Swiss Army Knife of games or the Reese's Peanut Butter Cup of games. You've got your single-player MMO or whatever, or it kind of has these different arms that it reaches out to, these different people that want to play it. But we talk about it as being a massively multiplayer online game in the fact that we're gonna be putting a massive amount of people together to play a game."

I join you live from a secret location in the United States, on a secret mission for Rock, Paper, Shotgun that will hopefully become a lot less secret very soon. But I'd get excited now, just to be prepared.

Meanwhile, I bring you news of a more immediate nature. Fearsome-looking news site Pacific Epoch reports on a Chinese MMO that has started freezing the accounts of male players who play as female characters.

The game, King Of The World, (possibly better translated "World Of Legend"?) is going to demand proof of your gender if you want an in-game VJ. According to Pacific Epoch,

Walaber's JelloCar has a beta version out. I had to plug in an Xbox 360 controller to get this working, but once going it's weirdly fun. The rubbery car bounces across equally springy terrain, and can occasionally be inflated to pass particularly difficult obstacles. Everything is drawn in lovely scribbled, papery textures.

It's painfully tricky at the moment, but you can see how some really good levels would make this weird wonder play quite beautifully - as a chap notes in Walaber's comments, a checkpoint system for the levels would be useful. I look forward to the finished article.

Not too long ago, a selection of Britain's best games writers and I gathered in someone's front room to eat pizza-pie, play a lot of Peggle and come up with an informed if quasi-arbitrary list of the best 100 PC titles of all time. There were several games whose sole voice of nomination in the room was my own nasal insistence, all of which I'll be shouting about on RPS over time.

UFO: Enemy Unknown (the first X-COM game) was one, and reminding folk of it saw it argued into the top ten, pleasingly.

Aliens Versus Predator was another, but no chorus joined me on that. If I'd have known then quite how well-loved it still is, I would have Phillybustered it far higher.

My third, and least supported, cause celebre was... Aha. You'll have to click below to find out, won't you? Well, clearly the tags below reveal exactly what it is, but pretend you're suprised, eh?

Princely esoteric games news site GameSetWatch informs us that Plasmaworm, the world's premier psychedelic snake clone, is now available for free. Get it here.

Plasmaworm has the distinction of being only the second game in living memory (the first being De Blob) to make me feel a bit sick. I really am getting queasy in my old age. Perhaps it's all the blogging.

Readers of increasing age will remember - possibly fondly - the Kick Off games. Top down hyper-speed football which everyone played until Sensible released Sensible Soccer (Except for some people who didn't and carried on claiming it's the superior game). Its creator Dino Dini has recently been involved in a little internet-fisticuffs over the state of his Wikipedia page, which basically included a revert-war and a fascinating discussion thread. Having had enough of it, Mr Dini decides that the only possible way for him to express his disgust with Wikipedia is in the medium of song.

No, really.

One of the few pieces of PC-related news to emerge from the Tokyo Game Show comes in the form of the extremely slick trailer for cartoon shooter, Paperman. It's an arena-based multiplayer shooter, where the flat characters will be able to take advantage of their flat-physics in combat - such as being able to turn side-on to avoid incoming bullets.

The game is being developed by a Korean studio, Cykan Games, who are in turn part of the technology company, Gravity. They're affiliated folks who developed one of the better Korean MMOs, the charming Ragnarok Online. They're also developing Ragnarok 2, which has, rather mysteriously, been in and out of beta since December 2006.

Thanks, Game Trailers, you are best.

Cartoon Network's Adult Swim is certainly responsible for some of the finest cartooning entertainment about, but were you aware they also make some of the most entertainingly offensive Flash games on the internet? You are now!

What about Five Minutes To Kill (Yourself)? "Stick it to the man, by sticking it to yourself." You are in an office, driven insane by meetings, and have all of five minutes to mutilate yourself to death, using only office equipment. Perhaps viciously staple yourself in the face? Or mash your head in the photocopier? Maybe best of all, wear a paper shredder as a hat?

Read on for less wholesome goodness

This feature on the origins of the Enemy Territory: Quake Wars team, Splash Damage, was originally published in February this year by the world's cleverest games development website, Gamasutra. The piece is based around an interview with Splash Damage owner and founder, Paul Wedgwood. I've updated it slightly, to reflect the fact that we're now rather close to the release of the game. That meeting with Wedgwood went on to provide material for my book about gaming, which I'll pimp to death on here once it's approaching publication. Anyway, read on for the story of the little mod team that ended up making one of the games of 2007. If you want to make it big in games, this is a pretty good way to go about it.

This interview was an odd kind of reunion. I had been acquainted with Paul Wedgwood for many years, long before we met in person. Back when I was an obsessed Quake player he was one of the people organising the communities, writing columns, administrating games, and commentating for an Internet TV show for which my Quake clan played numerous exhibition matches.

Now that his life has taken quite a different path - into the highest echelons of game development - you might expect him to have left his fan community roots behind, but quite the opposite it true. It is the first-person gaming community, and its focused, implacable gamers, that have made Wedgwood and his company what they are today. These guys are fans, and utterly in love with living a geek dream. You can tell this because of Wedgwood's enormous collection of sci-fi miniatures in the boardroom... But there's much more than that to this particular group's development credentials.

Still trying to find something that will make the horrendous amount of money you spent on Vista and a DirectX 10 graphics card worthwhile? Can't help, sorry. At least not until Crysis.

However, the 250Mb of downloadabliness here may very briefly make you feel ever so slightly better about yourself and your loose-clasped whore of a wallet. It's a DX10 rolling demo/benchmark of Dubya Dubya Two naval sim PT Boats: Knights of the Sea and, actually, it's really quite pretty. Good water, good boats. Job done. Close your eyes when the straight-outta-PS1 sailors appear though, or you'll start cryring again. While it's not the heartbreaking beauty of, say, a UT 2003 landscape, I still had one of those increasingly frequent "hang on - games can actually look like this now?" moments of mild future-shock.

About the game itself? Don't know much I'm afraid, as in practice this is the kind of thing that often gives me the creeping fear, ashamed of the inadequacies of my own patience and ability to think tactically. It claims to be heavy on the action though, and also lets you jump between first person cannons-a-go-go and a third person strategic view that lets you scoot multiple boats off to where you want them.

Having finally got my computer working after some memory went kiizzzzzzpip! I needed some soothing. Hence, as humans have done through the ages, I turn to the power of art. Nullpointer forwards some links to Jim, who gives them to me. So I found myself reading the developers of Braid talking about landmarks in games, where they link to this:

And a smile starts to cut through the scowl.

Well look here then. Shiny and new.

To celebrate our forty-fifth year of being online, we thought a redesign was in order. Gone is the mad explosion of cartoony boxes, and in is super-smartness like a new suit. No ties though please, we're smart-casual.

So, take a moment to get used to the new surroundings. Yes, we know, we all fear change. But clutch hold of the person near you, and soon enough you'll never believe it was any different.

[This time we turn our attention to the development of the third Thief game. It's worth noting this is the first making of where the person I interviewed wasn't the effective Project Lead. This leads to a very different interview. I'm speaking to Jordan Thomas, who's got a way with a quote. I've interviewed Jordan a few times before: here's him on the Cradle and here's him on lighting in Bioshock. EDIT: When I was putting the article online, I somehow snipped a whole paragraph and a half when formatting it. It was the bit after the word "Academic", and actually one of the key sections of the whole interview. Excuse? Er... I was deeply hungover. Will that do?]

When Looking Glass shattered, your correspondent, along with the vast majority of Thief’s sizable, fanatic fanbase, got more than a little despondent. Was there any hope for a continuation of the greatest stealth game the world had ever seen? Well, yes, there was, as otherwise we wouldn’t be doing a post-mortem of Thief III and instead continuing to weep hot tears into our foaming mead. The game arrived in the hands of Ion Storm Austin, fresh from their success in making the original Deus Ex. With a new team, mixing veterans of Looking Glass and new staff, they faced the challenge of matching their forefathers.

Oh yes they will. Susan Promislo from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), has gotten in touch and given us a chance to write about something positively videogamey that doesn't involve shooting pretend men in the face. Something that could, in fact, help both humanity and the perception of videogames. Find out what it's all about after the jump.

Earlier in the week I was interviewing Epic's Cliff Bleszinski about Gears Of War on PC. It was a bit of shame really, because what I wanted to ask him about was Unreal Tournament III. I mean Gears looks fun - and I'll be talking about that in depth in a forthcoming PC Gamer, paper fans - but the true heavyweight for the PC is going to be Unreal Tournament III. Alongside Enemy Territory and Team Fortress, this game is going to arrive at the traffic lights of gaming like a spacecraft pulling up next to a Jeep and an ice cream van. UT3's new assault levels promise some outlandish possibilities for co-op gaming (the long-ago PC Gamer LAN's finest hour was playing UT2004 assault vs high skill-level bots). UT3 will have with airbourne assaults, skyscraper sized vehicles, and unnatural environments aplenty. The maps themselves promise to simply outdo anything we've ever seen. I mean go back and look at UT2004 - those maps are astonishing enough. UT3 is a year on from Gears Of War... It's like we'll never need another game engine. Just look at it:

It actually looks like that.

Anyway, here's Epic bossman Mike Capps talking about Unreal Tournament III. The most interesting thing that he mentions is that damage will be increased across all weapons. That's a fairly big deal, dragging it back to the land of one-rocket kills - arguably a major boon for skilled teamplay. Sorry, I'm being all FPS obsessive again...

During this drought of online multiplayer games, we were grateful for a tip-off from reader Aleksander Kiin, linking us to Teewars.

Despite appearances, it's nothing like Worms, so no need to worry there. It is in fact a super-cutesy 2D shmup, with four standard weapons, one very cool bonus samurai sword, and a grappling-hook-chain-thing on the right mouse button for making those awkward leaps.

Once the chain is mastered moving around the maps is lots of fun, making it all the more satisfying when a rocket lands smack-bang in your opponent's chirpy face. And then you realise you can fire the chain at other players. It's free, and there are a people playing on the servers even first thing in the morning. Certainly worth checking out.

Continuing our class-by-class ranting about Team Fortress 2. See here, here and here for the story so far.

Important update: this article was written in the earliest days of the TF2 beta, before The Pyro was patched to become more effective, and is subjective account of how it felt to play him then, not a review of the class. Please bear this in mind before you shout at me that I'm wrong and stupid.

I’m so lonely. No-one hangs around with the Pyro. Is it the gasmask, the fact they can’t see my face or understand what I’m saying creeping them out just a little? Really, that mask isn’t even necessary, making it a vaguely perverted affectation. Or is it the rodent-like hunched pose and thin-legged scurry, making me too ridiculous a sight to be taken seriously? All the other classes have a certain superheroic nobility to them; the Pyro’s just a little laughable to look at.

Click to continue, or you shall surely burn. Burrrrnnn!

Midway's Harvey "Deus Ex" Smith has a bit to say about the development of environments and "gameplay ecologies" for his new shooter, Blacksite:

I suspect Blacksite might actually be worth getting moderately excited about. Smith is at the controls, and there's both Gears Of War jump in/out co-op, Stranglehold's destructible environments, and some Brothers In Arms squad-control stuff. Area 51 might have been a bit arse, but this looks like it might have some value. Blacksite 2, says Smith, will be even more interesting.

Bristol-based peripheral boffins Saitek have announced that they've launched the latest in their range of moulded-plastic control devices. Now we don't usually cover hardware here on RPS, but Saitek have a special place in hearts - not least because we once had a drink with one of their designers, who told us wild tales of all their weird prototypes that lay in their basements, rejected and dust-laden. Oh how we lamented the lack loss of those unloved experiments. Some made it through however, such as the optimistically-named CYBORG CONTROLLER.

So I finally get Team Fortress 2.

(By "get", I of course mean, "did best at".)

Clearly lots of people had left by this point.

Let me be straight with you. While the FPS is right up there as a favourite genre, and while I play every single player FPS I can get my hands on, I've never really had any time for multiplayer. Clearly for reviewing purposes I'll play them, but for leisure? No interest. I'm not interested in being either beholden to anyone else, nor being let down by anyone else, and most of all, I'm not interested in sharing my hard work with anyone else. I'm a bastard that way.

With MMOs I find it's different. Playing City of Heroes alone can be a rather lonely experience. Team up, with a good balance of powers, and it's really rewarding. But it's a game about constant progression, moving forward as a result of your efforts. That sense of narrative progression, for a reason I can't quite pin down, excuses the game. This doesn't change the fact, however, that I'd still far rather be able to play it on my own, and just get on with it my way.

The change of heart will follow.

TF2 hasn't been the only thing eating into my social life this week. Prompted by a game designer friend, I've found myself signing up for the broswer-based strategy game Travian (or Travian if you're in the US) on the x3 server. I'm enjoying myself. I like it enough to have analysed it enough to realise why - eventually - I'll stop playing it. But, for now, it's a kick which is working its way into my daily routine.

It borrows heavily from every kind of Settlers it can find (Both Blue Byte and Catan varieties), and - in the words of my designer friend - is a little too good to be a (mostly - there are extra payment options for bonuses) free webgame. Now in its third version, the idea is, you start as a village, and grow by building shit. You can trade between other villages, gain troops, go to war and build alliances - the whole basic wargame thing. Despite the cartoon finish, it's surprisingly deep - you don't just build (say) an academy to train troops in a village, but you can then upgrade it to level 20. Since similar decisions need to be made about all your constructions, what you decide to do next becomes of paramount importance. I'll be writing more about my game another time, and my fledgling alliance's scrambling to avoid being crushed by Bigger Boys, in the future, but for now I suggest you could do far worse than play it. Just be sure to use the three-days new-player grace to build your economy as quickly as you can.

Yes, this is a shameless attempt to recruit friendly tribes.