Most FPS games in the history of FPS games fall into one main category. You guessed it, the FPS category. Say ‘First Person Shooter’ to somebody and they will likely picture the same thing, regardless of what game it is; running around, jumping around, crawling around, and well, walking around, shooting endless enemies with a range of same-old, same-old weapons. Bulletstorm, however, brought a whole new set of ideas to the existing FPS template, and boy did it do it bloody well.
Epic have revealed what their new Unreal engine will be capable of. Many games have used the Unreal engine as their backbone (Bioshock, Batman Arkham Asylum, Bulletstorm to name a few recent ones) so its hard to contain the excited yelps when you see a video like this. New lighting effects, ‘bokeh’ depth of field, and lots of other phrases for “snazzier graphics” mean the next generation should be suitably prettified.
There’s a new Call of Juarez game coming out, and its going in a very different direction. Scrapping the wild west setting for a modern one is a bold move – don’t we have enough modern shooters these days? Call of Juarez’s Wild West felt like a breath of fresh air in a genre saturated with modern shooters. Still, if this trailer is anything to go by, they’re at least trying to keep the themes of lawmen vs outlaws, and I’m certainly interested enough to keep my eye on it. It’s due out in Summer 2011. See the trailer below.
This amusing indie game snuck past our radars last month, but a new trailer for a Vietnam expansion?/sequel? grabbed our attention quite easily. It looks like a cross between Castle Crashers and Diablo, with an emphasis on casting all manner of crazy spells and mowing down mobs of enemies. We have since both bought it on Steam and will be trying the co-op mode sometime soon, but in the meantime, check out the two highly entertaining trailers below.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking ‘Why does that little Minecraft man look so sad?‘. That little Minecraft man is Matt’s, and I have to take this moment to congratulate Matt on his achievement earlier this week, the achievement of managing to accidentally wipe an entire (new) world of things that a bunch of people worked pretty hard on. How the hell did he do that, you ask? Well, in the attempt to update our server so we could enjoy the wonders of the latest updates from version 1.3 (including a new lighting engine and BEDS), he inadvertently reset the server, losing the entire world and setting us back in a brand new world to start again. Now, thankfully, all I had built was a pretty shit skyscraper, and all the spawns were completely buggered (10 creepers per day attacking my structures), but there was also a lot of other hard work done by other members of the server. So yes, Matt, you should feel terrible.
Steam had a crazy Command & Conquer sale this weekend which – though it didn’t have every C&C title ever in it – had great handful of the newer stuff for only £3.75 each. Included was Red Alert 3, the third (do ya think?) installment of the outstanding Red Alert spin-off universe from the original C&C game And let me tell you, if you haven’t played it in the years since it was released, then you are in for a treat, just as I was. This wasn’t exactly meant to be a review, because I haven’t even finished the game yet, but after putting around 8 hours into it already and still not being the slightest bit bored, I’m quite happy for this to be considered a huge amount of raving and cheering about something you most definitely should play (in effect, a review… but not).
Screenshot from the new Serious Sam game, which will feature swarms of these fellas.
Guest Article : Steven Harbor
The current generation of video games is stricken with a curse. To my memory, neither the previous generation nor any of the generations before it had this problem. This problem was introduced way back in 2006 when Nintendo finally announced its new gaming system, the Nintendo Wii. Nintendo touted their new “innovative” motion controls. These motion controls would supposedly usher in a new era of “innovative” games. Nintendo, after decades of repeatedly remaking their key franchises with marginal improvements and updated graphics, suddenly became the harbinger of innovative gaming. Ever since then, Microsoft, Sony, and every developer in the world have been trying desperately to jump on what I would say is an imaginary bandwagon. It’s a bandwagon of innovation that does not actually exist. The Wii obviously did not usher in an innovative era of gaming. There isn’t a single game on my girlfriend’s Wii collection (which is quite large) that I can say uses the Wii remote in any meaningful way. Nintendo blinded everyone with a hail storm of marketing and hype over its product, acting as if it was the second coming of Jesus, but what motion controlled game came out last year that you just absolutely loved? That’s what I thought. You were holding the controller sideways and using the 1 and 2 buttons as A and B buttons on all those games. Now that’s a real era of innovation right there. “Oh, but there was that one thing where you have to shake the controller up and down to—“ shut up before I smack you in the face.
Eurogamer have an interesting article chronicling the story of Axel Gembe, the German hacker responsible for breaking into Valve’s network and releasing the source code for the then-unfinished Half Life 2 back in 2003. This is the first time we’re able to hear the story from his point of view, and it outlines the entire event pretty well. Check it out over at Eurogamer.net. The story of Half Life 2’s development is pretty much a legend among PC gamers and its weird hearing this story so many years down the line. Who remembers that early screenshot? Ah, good memories…
Telltale have been busily making fun point and click adventure games for a while now, with mostly good results. I didn’t play any of the new Sam and Max games, admittedly, but I tried the Strong Bad and Monkey Island episodes, and they seemed alright. Just nothing spectacular. Then recently, they’ve been trying some new game ideas such as Late Night At the Inventory, a simple but entertaining poker game. They also made the surprise jump to a more mainstream popular franchise in Back to the Future (the second episode of which is out today, in fact). Still, none of these have piped my interest as much as the prospect of a JURASSIC PARK GAME! YEEEAH!
We haven’t mentioned id’s Rage around here yet, and with a new trailer out today which shows off some of the gameplay, nows as good a time as any to fix that. I’m pretty excited about the prospect of Rage – the makers of Doom and Quake know what makes a good FPS, and since this is the first new IP of theirs in over a decade I reckon that excitement is more than justified.
