Latest Articles (Page 2119)

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.

Defence is the best form of attack. Is that right? No: attack is the best form of attack, and the engineer's turrets are the best form of defence. So where does that leave the Demoman? Well, he's the midfielder of death. Neither truly an attacking class or a defensive class, he's just lobbing damage into the middle of the map and hoping for the best. Most of the time, of course, he's coming up trumps: how many times has your demise been a grenade in the face?

No other class quite boasts the versatility or the punch of the Demoman. The grenade launcher has two possibilities: pumping out explosive charges, or placing stickybombs, either as fire-and-fergedaboudit mines, or as traps to be detonated later on. As Demoman you're most likely to be an unsung hero – who else is going to be able to turn a corridor into a death-trap at the squeeze of a mouse-button? Who else bounces a grenade round the corner to take out a turret without risking a follicle on your cell-shaded scalp?

MEYYYYDICCCCCC!

Yeah, seriously. I'll get to you. I'm talking.

There's many of reasons why people become a medic in a first-person shooter. They're especially true in TF2.

For me, there's two big ones. I'm sure there's some people who do the healing thing out of pure altruism. Hell, there may even be pacifist players out there, who doesn't believe in ultra-violence even when it's as slapstick as a paint-balloon. There's certainly some who enjoy being that go-getting team player - not true altruism, but the pleasure of being a cog in a well-oiled machine. In the case of Team Fortress 2, someone will be attracted to the clinically-dry persona of the Teutonic Medic, half-way between a Nazi Evil ( not mad) Scientist and the voice in a GPS guidance system. You may even just pick it by accident. But not me. Here's why I play the medic more than anything else...

1) I don't need to shoot straight. 2) I like to win.

Let me explain.

So why do we still know so little about Aion? Is it because the impending Tabula Rasa is currently eating all of NCsoft's focus? Is it because the now-cancelled Auto Assault was a catastrophic failure, so this next MMORPG is getting a rethink? Is it because it still hasn't escaped the conceptual stage?

What we do know hits some of the right notes - a modified Far Cry engine means a certain degree of pretiness (though that's what I thought when I first heard of Aion a year ago, and since then I've feasted my eyes on all number of incredible ocular sweetmeats). And it has flying - not on the back of a poxy animal of some kind, but you, the character, actually flying, with big giant wings on your back. Ooh. I like flying.

There are also bum notes, specifically every single screenshot. MMO developers, if your characters look like this:

While perusing the bazaar of the gaming bizarre over at the eminent GameSetWatch, I happened upon a link to the optimistically named We Can Fix That With Data. To my delight, the site offers an analysis of buffs and nerfs of character classes in World Of Warcraft. And there's a graph:

Actually, there are loads of graphs. Better still, the comments offer some insight into the foggy science I will now call "nerfology". There are thoughts from minds such as that of Brian 'Psychochild' Green, who observes that no graph can do the complexity of nerfological decision-making true justice:

Yeah, the issue with metrics like this is that you always want more information. Class populations would be interesting, to see how popularity of a class affected balance decisions and vice versa. Also, how do the changes affect different builds, or even different talent trees?

Fun Motion spot this enticing looking physics game. A jelly-based physics game in fact, featuring wobbly cars made of jelly:

Vid 1: (quite short)

Longer, more detailed version if only you would click.

We at RPS like the PC because it gives us a big mess of stuff. There's more things to play out there than you can fit into a lifetime, and it's growing, non-stop, like a formidable fungus. We must therefore applaud those people who want us to make even more stuff. Well done you.

Some fun, yesterday. One such gentleman is bearded theorist (and occasional practitioner) of fun, Raph Koster. He's the man who directed the development of Jedi-vending system, Star Wars Galaxies (the first time around), and then wrote a book. Koster has decided that all this virtual world stuff needs to be centralised and exploded at the same time. It doesn't need Second Life, instead it needs a "virtual place" on the web. We don't want a single, all-encompassing world, says Koster, we just need an appropriate, networked toolkit. We needs something like a Blogspot for virtuality.

And so mr Koster's company has announced Metaplace - a net-based virtual world toolkit for making mini virtual worlds. You won't need the equivalent of Second Life or World Of Warcraft clients installed on your machine if this takes off, you'll just need Metaplace. Anyone will be able to make an online world in five minutes, and dropping in and out of different online spaces will be as easy as surfing web pages. It's Internet II: The Revengening taken to its logical extreme.

Koster announced this today, the internet went wild, the Metaplace website stopped working, and we all agreed that it's exciting stuff. Too exciting.