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I didn't really get on with Age of Empires III - pettily, I was turned off by its fonts - so wasn't paying huge attention to the second add-on pack. Then three things happened which changed my mind.

Firstly, they released a demo of it. I'm always interested in free stuff. Secondly, Tom Chick got excited about it. When it comes to anything to do with the RTS, I'll trust Chick a long way - especially because he wasn't exactly enamored with the first. Thirdly - and this really shows how off my radar it was - it's actually being primarily developed by Big Huge Games rather than Ensemble. Who, according to Tom, have been doing some really neat things. Including hotkeys, but Tom always gets excited by hotkeys. If a key's not hot, he's not into it.

612 Mb of Real time strategy ahoy!

Kongregate combine the awesomeness of free games with the hellish nightmare of talking to strangers on the internet. Fortunately, you can ignore the chat windows and concentrate on the games. Or indeed ask for help if you get stuck.

I draw your attention toward Manifold - a deceptively simple-looking Flash game, involving guiding your little guy from one side of a small screen to the other. Haven't I sold it yet? Joel Esler's cunning puzzler makes it more interesting with the inclusion of a Gravitational Manifold Anomaly Device. "Don’t get mad, get GMAD!" Using WASD for movement, you can click and draw on the screen to throw your GMAD at any surface, whereupon it will create a little gravity-defying bubble, propelling you in the direction in which you drew. Using this, you need to thinkum to work out a route past whatever obstacles are in your path.

It's immediately interesting, and very quickly tricky. But quick and intuitive, and created with a minimalist skill. And free. Oh yes indeed, free.

I've killed a lot of men recently. A lot of men. And frankly, I needed a break. Running a crosshair-burned-into-the-retina eye over what was either already installed on my PC or within easy reach, my options were fairly limited. Guns, swords, magic death powers, psychic fists...Peggle? No. No more Peggle. That's the easy way out.

What's the opposite of violence? Art, perhaps. That's when I realised precisely what the cure to my bloodthirsty blues was. I haven't played Guitar Hero for quite some time. Music will sooth my serial killer's soul. (Bear with me, this will become PC-relevant after the jump).

[Flashpoint has the dual appeal of being simultaneously one of the most realistic takes on the Soldier game the medium has ever seen and the only one where you can engage in the sport of Tractor hunting in an attack chopper. I've interviewed Marek and his brother a few times over the years, and they're one of the more gloriously eccentric and constantly enthusiastic developers I've met. Last time I was over there, talking about Armed Assault we had a lengthy discussion about how they were programming Butterflies. They develop incredibly militaristic games and they obsess over butterflies. It's hard not to love them.]

Before Bohemia released their classic Soldier-Sim, I had a chance to chat to director Marek Spanel about his life growing up as a games devotee in the Czech Republic. He described sneaking their first computer into the country after a trip to Switzerland. And then, realising there was no way to load or save data, jury-rigging cables to perform the task with their tape recorders. And then learning to program games so, finally, they could achieve their objective of playing a game.

I think I found the polar opposite of Quake Wars: it's the trailer for Nexon's Mariokart-inspired PC racer, KartRider.

Game Trailers, we salute you.

This game has been rather popular in South Korea over the last couple of years, where Nexon have it installed on pretty much every gaming Cafe PC. Nexon makes its money from micropayments for kart upgrades, so you can log in and play for free whenever you want. The same model is being distributed over the net here, and, like Maple Story, will have US and European releases.

Here's a new video with Splash Damage's Paul Wedgwood and Id Software's Kevin Cloud talking about teamplay in Enemy Territory. Yeah, it's a mere marketing-speak exercise, but the video itself gives some idea of the things you get up to in ETQW. The acrobatics with the Strogg buggy, for example, as well as some of the more impressive objectives such as the mining laser.

Thanks, Game Trailers. Thanks.

If only it looked this good on my PC. I think it might be upgrade-o-clock.

Okay, this is intriguing. Gamespot have done a large interview with Ken Levine of The-artists-previously-known-as-Irrational about Bioshock. In it, he's getting grilled about a number of issues to do with the whole what the game means thing. One of them gets an interesting response - regarding the fact the game, after all this complexity, the endings are a harsh Manichean dichotomy (i.e. You're either Jesus or Mr UltraBastard of Shitsville). He admits that it was never his intention, and the request came from "somebody up the food chain from me". Later, he elaborates...

"One of the reasons I was opposed to multiple endings is I never want to do things that have multiple digital outcomes, versus analog outcomes. I want to do it like the weapons system in the combat in BioShock. There are a million different things you can do in every combat; you can play it a million different ways. Looking into the future for the franchise, that's something I want to [figure out], that by the time you get to the ending of that choice path, you have a sense of your impact on the world through lots of little permutations rather than like a giant ending piece, if you follow my meaning.

And I think we did a reasonably good job with [the endings], but there are just two of them. And this is not a game about A and B. This is a game about one through 1 million, and all those permutations of choice. And as I think about the future of the franchise, that's where I want to take that."

The RPS guide to staging your very own Sputnik Commemorative Event.

You will need:

- Five minutes of preparation time. - One copy of freeware space flight simulator Orbiter. - One copy of the equally free Project R-7 add-on. - Appropriate sounds (I recommend Bach, Glass, or this). - Vodka (optional).

Got all that? OK, now...

Valve have just announced that The Orange Box is to have one more disc inside. A single, written by the excellent geek-turned-geek-singer, Jonathan Coulton, and members of the Valve writing staff, is to accompany the five games already bulging its cardboardy edges. (Presumably those ordering through Steam will be given a download).

Maddeningly (for both you and me), I know what the song is, and I will be murdered if I say. And I also know that I thought only yesterday, "Valve really ought to release that song as a single." So clearly my thoughts control Valve's actions. Know this: it's incredibly good.

I'm just off to think about Valve giving me a well-paid job on their writing staff now.

I can't honestly recommend Eve Online.

I play it, and it's remains one of the most fulfilling, frustrating, exciting and excruciating gaming experiences I've had. Eve is a game that has expanded the list of interesting stuff in the world, and it has created an utterly unique and beautiful game in the process. But I can't recommend it.

I can recommend Peggle to anyone, but Eve, well, I'd say that you should consider yourself warned. There's nothing else like it, in the same way that's there's nothing else like the crushing gravity of an exquisite neutron star. This is a cruel, beautiful singularity in MMO space. It's the one online game that is actually a 'virtual world' in any sense, and I feel as if every single player has left a mark on it in some way. Just like real life, we all have something to add, no matter how inconceivably microscopic that contribution might be.

It really is The Long Game. Commit to Eve and there's a chance you'll begin to get wrapped up in something temporal and psychological - something you'll struggle to articulate to outsiders. I've been writing about Eve for nearly five years, and I still don't believe I'm quite getting the message across. It's a big spaceship MMO, and there's lots of things to do... What lies beyond the jump includes some general information about what there is to do in Eve, discussions of some issues that will only matter to the players, and plenty of food for thought from one of Eve's most senior developers, Nathan 'Oveur' Richardsson.

It's always fun when a story generates another story. Regular readers will recall the Planescape retrospective I posted recently. The ever-lovely Slashdot picked up on it, and one of their commentators pointed everyone in the direction of the game's actual Vision Statement over at RPGWatch, from when it was called "Last Rites" rather than "Planescape: Torment" and they weretrying to persuade management to greenlight the project.

Since I hadn't read it, it's likely that a lot of you haven't either. It's interesting to see what was planned that didn't happen. And it's interesting because it's incredibly fucking interesting. It's one of the best videogame documents I've ever seen in my life. It's smart, driven, obsessed and actually really funny. For example, it has diagrams that look like this.

Clearly, you should read the whole thing. If you haven't played the game, don't go past page 25. It's relatively spoiler free until then, before immediately revealing the biggest secrets in the game. And I'll quote some random non-spoiler examples beneath the cut.

It's time to get judgmental. The 13th Annual IF Competition is underway, and awaiting your vote.

The internet is so much older than you'd think. For 13 years the newsgroup rec.arts.int-fiction has been voting on Interactive Fiction games, to decide upon the best that year. And yes, sure, games may now have something called "graphics", but it's a passing fad. Get over it.

There's a lot of responsibility here. There's a huge 29 entrants, and to make any sensible vote, you'll surely have to play all of them. And no, you're not allowed to vote based on their names, because otherwise Slap That Fish and Lord Bellwater's Secret would walk it.

It's been everywhere already, but may as well mention it here so folk have somewhere else to express their outrage/joy/paranoia/confusion. Yes, Unreal Tournament 3 system specs! Will the beefy quad-core CPU and GeForce 8800 in my PC be worth the investment at last?

Minimum System Requirements Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista 2.0+ GHZ Single Core Processor 512 Mbytes of System RAM NVIDIA 6200+ or ATI Radeon 9600+ Video Card

Recommended System Requirements 2.4+ GHZ Dual Core Processor 1 GBytes of System RAM NVIDIA 7800GTX+ or ATI x1300+ Video Card

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Funcom's troubled Conan MMO is its proposed 50-aside sieges. These massed assaults are one end of its multi-tiered PvP (at the other end of which lies drunken bar brawling, where the more you drink, the more damage you can do) but we've not yet seen much in the way of details about how they'll work.

This recent trailer shows a tiny, mocked up glimpse of what we should expect. The fact that camera cuts away from showing the actual wall breaches or any such significant siege action does not seem to bode well, but I'm still interested in how the overall resource-control and larger land-grabbing game will work. After all, system sieges in Eve Online are the most tedious thing imaginable, and yet the struggle for control over territory remains one of the game's driving forces.

Anyway, thanks Gametrailers!

Some of you may be hoping I'm going to run out of rubbishy song-title references if we do many more Hellgate stories. Sadly, I could do this all year.

Anyway - let's get on with those Beta impressions I promised you yesterday, eh?

Slightly embarassingly, we've realised we neglected to include a 'Contact' page in our recent redesign. This is because we are very, very stupid. Anyway, now we do, in the shape of an almost entirely rewritten About page, complete with exciting bonus puns and self-indulgent mini-autobiographies.

I bring this up only because it also mentions the games each of us would take to a desert island, as that is of course the sole circumstance under which a person could name their favourite things. I'd hate to think that our readers might miss out on an opportunity to sneer at us for our ridiculous choices, simply because they thought that page was the same as always. Please, sneer away.

Rush to your Steam account - Half-Life 2: Episode Two is ready for pre-loading.

As is now traditional, here's a never-before-seen screenshot of the game to celebrate.

Click for enlargement.

Welcome back to Rock, Paper, Shotgun's exclusive interview with Team Fortress 2 developers, Robin Walker and Charlie Brown. (Here's Part One if you missed it.) This time we get down to the finer details of the classes on offer, and talk about their evolution, as well as discussing Valve's other great obsession, PopCap's Peggle. But first we talked about the remarkable part humour had to play in TF2's development.

RPS: I want to ask about the role of humour in the game. You watch the promo movies, and they’re really hilarious, but you think: how can those possibly carry over into a multiplayer game where there’s people playing everyone? And yet somehow it has.

Robin Walker: It actually came about the other way.

Where once I set to any new World of Warcraft information, such as this fresh bag of facts about the new Death Knight class, with the hopeless hunger of a hardcore Star Wars fan hearing there's to be a novel about the secret origin of Moff Tarkin or something, now I only pick up stuff about patch content and the like in passing. I react in the same way I would to hearing about an old crush who I eventually learned wasn't terribly interesting. Got a new haircut, has she? Yeah, I suppose she would make quite a good primary school teacher. A belly-button piercing? Really? With her stomach?

I am so over WoW, and have been for around half a year now. In retrospect, I blame the Burning Crusade.

While Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw is currently rolling around in fame with his superb Zero Punctuation Flash reviews on The Escapist, there's an even better reason to know his name: his AGS adventure games. And best of these are the Trilby games - a series of stories spanning hundreds of years, following the recurring evil ghost of a murdered son, from his initial death all the way to a futuristic cult's base. So it's with glee that I discover the first of these, 5 Days A Stranger, is being remade in something called "3D".

While it's not Yahtzee's project, he's involved behind the scenes. And that'll do. It's still early days, but the project appears to be running with some enthusiasm. They're using the Source engine, which is rapidly becoming the engine of choice for indie adventure development, and will certainly give it a more modern look than the original's gloriously retro stylings. There's a dev blog and forum on the new site, and a recruitment page, so hey, get involved.

Enemy Territory: Quake Wars went on sale in Europe on Friday and on Monday and the US. Clearly RPS has been a little distracted with Team Fortress 2, but there's every reason why we, and you lot too, should be playing ETQW. It's ludicrously good.

Fortunately, should you (like me) be intent on remaining posted at your keyboard 24/7, you'll be able to download the beast on October 5th in Europe and October 9th in the US: Steam is taking pre-orders for ETQW now. Why does it come out in Europe first? I have no idea.

In some ways it's a shame that ETQW's demo level was that particular map. It's one of the more underwhelming designs that Splash Damage have come up with. Just in terms of the palette used, it's rather middle-ground and didn't really sell the game. The mission itself might have been representative of the game mechanics (and therefore good for beta testing) but part of ETQW's appeal is the sheer beauty of its wartorn terrains, and some of the other maps simply have far more intense objectives built into them. The island (pictured) and the beach assault are particularly solid, while the Slipgate map... well, I'm going to post in detail on a couple of my favourites next week.

As the number of Beta Impressions of Hellgate spread across the net, deductive game-watchers will realise the embargo has lifted for us Journo sorts. Well, mostly. We can only use five grabs from the first part of the game or we'll be crushed by enormous fists. So, whilst other sites are doing useful things like telling you about the game, we're going to deal with a much more pressing question.

Is this really anything at all like London, or is Johnny Foreigner doing another Mary bleeding Poppins on us?

You may have noticed we've been frothing uncontrollably about Valve games for the last couple of weeks (actually, we're in complete control of our froth, thank you very much. What's that? Yes, I know there's drool on my chin. I just like the look, alright?). You may also have noticed that there's one component of The Orange Box that we haven't yet talked about much (we shall soon, don't worry). For a lot of people, Half-Life 2: Episode 2 is the vanguard of Valve's latest box of delights. To help them cope with the sweating and shivering and crying caused by having to wait another eight agonising days yet for more singleplayer Half-Life action, I can confidently prescribe Minerva: Metastasis.

If you're already familiar with it, then all you need to know is that the third (well, third and fourth, sorta) part's out, it's comfortably the best yet, and you should go play it right away. If you've never heard of it, then pray follow me into my word parlour.

You may be aware that as well as releasing splendid (if a little - er - twitchy) Soldier Sims, Bohemia interactive turn their Armed Assault (i.e. Flashpoint minus the intellectual property rights) into military simulators. VBS2 is actually developed by Bohemia Australia. Among their clients are the Dutch army, who recently arranged a game between five professionally trained soldiers and five gamers. Jerry Hopper was there.

The gamers would do whatever gamers would do. The Army would work according to official doctrine. Since the soldiers in question weren't actually familiar with VBS2, the results were perhaps a trifle predictable, but that's hardly the point.

RPS would challenge the SAS to a game of TF2 to decide who's the hardest three-letter-acronym group on the surface of the planet, but we're far too scared they'll slide a blade across our throats in our sleep or something.

If you've explored Team Fortress 2, you'll have listened to the developer commentaries explaining their thoughts on the game design and so forth. But you'll have noticed that missing is their thoughts on how RPS's Alec Meer plays the game.

Finally that gap has been plugged. Today, to accompany our Team Fortress 2 interview Part One and Part Two, and our Valve Compo, is a bonus treat in the form of a modern "internet video". Herein you'll get some properly useful tips from the game's developers.

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Lookee here. We've got a couple of hardback copies of Valve's book, Half-Life 2: Raising The Bar, signed by Valve top-dog Gabe Newell. Would you like one?

In order to receive one of these rather weighty tomes, we want to see your own local City 17. Let us explain...

Everyone lives near at least one building, or one patch of ground, that looks like the haunted remains of an apocalyptic attack. We want a photograph of the most derelict, wartorn, or ravaged-by-age locale near you. The two best, as judged by our highly trained eyes, will receive a signed book.

A quick note - Portal's ready for pre-loading on your Steam account.

To celebrate, here's a brand new exclusive screenshot of it. Click for bigness.

I was bouncing mails with Moonpod, arranging an interview about what they've been up to and specifically their latest game, when I realised that a lot of people may not even be aware of Mr Robot. Let's sort THAT out.

When I reviewed Mr Robot for PCG back in February, I described it as "Head Over Heels meets Final Fantasy with the plot of System Shock. But cute." before going on to say it was "the most enjoyable independent game I've played since Defcon". Which now, seven months on, still sounds about right. It's an isometric adventure game mashed with an Eastern Style RPG, basically, and feels a lot like a modern version of those character-lead, quietly perfect games which I cut my teeth on circa the Spectrum in the UK. I like it a lot and when you play the demo, you will too.

Just, for God's sake, don't use the mouse-controls. I mean it.

Knights of the Old Republic tends to be the only recent Star Wars game that anyone mentions with affection (yeah, I’m aware of a certain fanbase for Battlefront, but that doesn’t stop it from being absolute garbage). This is a shame. I give you Republic Commando, the lost Star Wars game.

Being bound in as it is with the boo-yucky prequel movies, RepCom is easily dismissed as just another easy cash-in. In fact, it’s the best Star Wars FPS since Jedi Knight 1 (I'd happily argue ever, in fact), and for all the sneering LucasArts is prone to from I Remember When All This Were Monkey Islands types these days, it’s strong proof that guys who really get games still work there.

This is mostly because it’s not really very much to do with Star Wars. It’s about four soldiers, not whiny farmboys with destinies or 20-something pretties moping woodenly at each other. It just so happens that those soldiers look a bit like Stormtroopers (pre-Palpatine makeover) and there are some Wookies in it. Republic Commando is free to do what it wants, and what it wants is to be a very accessible squad-based shooter. It's even cheerfully sniffy about Star Wars, your character glancing disdainfully at a lightsaber at one point and muttering "An elegant weapon for a more civilized time, eh? Well, guess what? Times have changed." Cue big gun action. Yeah.

Times change. They have to, as otherwise watchmakers go out of business. Sega have moved from beloved purveyor of bright skies, hedgehogs and underperforming consoles to beloved purveyor of bright skies, hedgehogs and heavyweight PC games. And the world's a better place for it, or at least for us, which is all that counts. Go self-interest!

Anyway, over the last few days they've released a couple of PC demos which showcase the dual sides of the publishers. First, we have the Sega Rally Revo demo, weighing in at 553.98Mbs (or 37.332 copies of Peggle), which features Rallying prominently. Secondly, we have two (count 'em!) demos of the Artist Previously Known as Championship Manager, Football Manager. The Strawberry edition is 523.47MBs in size, whilst the Vanilla edition is a more bandwidth friendly 103.19MB (That's 36.932 and 7.2793 recurring copies of Peggle respectively). The larger edition includes more footbally stuff to play, though xenophobes will be pleased to hear the Vanilla comes with the English and Scottish leagues. We'll report further if Sports Interactive decide to release a Chocolate edition, as we'll be sure to try and assemble some kind of home-brew neapolitan edition from all three.