If you’re a fan of the webhead wall crawler and don’t mind that the latest film looks like it could be abit of a washout, you’re probably already super psyked about the upcoming video game tie-in. If not, you likely will be after watching this trailer.
Gearbox Software teams with Valve for Steam achievements, DLC, auto-updating, matchmaking, and Steam Cloud support for new shooter. Borderlands 2 will benefit from Valve’s Steamworks features, publisher 2K Games announced today.
If Sniper Elite V2?s Killcam of the Week is a thing now, then I’m all for it. Simple, effective delivery of bullets to the brain over distance has always been my favourite thing in games, even better when we get to join the bullet on their journey, to share the excitement of their life’s ambition of making a skull’s acquaintance. Rebellion’s WW2 sniper sim puts you in the pants of a an OSS agent, hunting his targets through the Battle of Berlin. Historically inaccurate video, below.
I hope the X-Ray effect isn’t just an affectation for the videos, but everything we’ve seen of it shows the innards of the targets leering for the camera in similar garish fashion.
Would you like to play Borderlands 2? You can do it on September 18 this year, on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. (September 21 for international audiences, Gearbox tells us, meaning those of you not in North America.)
You can even play it in splitscreen. Four-player co-op, too. With more guns and skills than ever, it looks like.
I was rather close to falling down a deep, dark Counter-Strike hole just after the Counter-Strike:Global Offensive launched in November, but a broken PC released me from a frightening future of constant de_dust2 battles and crying about how unfair it is. I’d actually forgotten I had it until Valve and Hidden Path updated it this week, switching from a stress test to a big-assed closed beta, with over 80 tweaks. The big changes are the addition of three reworked classic maps, de_inferno, de_train, and de_nuke, and new guns, the Nova shotgun, the Bizon and the MP7 SMGs. But there’s more.
Any changes made to Counter-Strike brings more eyes, more opinions, than any other game I can think of, and Valve are using this as a real beta, not a marketing exercise. Aside from adding extra content, they’ve already altered the recoil twice: first according to CS pro Salvatore “Volcano” Garozzo’s tip that the recoil was too much and too difficult to control, and then shortly after when it was clear their tweak wasn’t nearly enough to help out player. CS: GO is an actual work-in-progress.
Waveform is an interesting experiment in minimal game design: you stretch and compress a wave passing through space, manipulating it to fit the patterns it encounters. It’s on the relaxing end of the spectrum, with only one control and chill-out music. Despite a troubled inception, failing to reach a modest Kickstarter goal of $8000 funding, it’s managed to wiggle into Steam’s servers, oscillating to fit the wavelength of Gabe Newell’s heart. Fancy seeing what it’ll look like? Video here.
It’s got some (oscillo)scope, and it’ll come with a wave editor as DLC, although there’s no word if that’s free or paid for.
Obviously it would be handy of the launch trailer told is when the game is due, but this does nothing of the sort. You’ll just have to ping a rubber band between your fingers, or get a long length of rope and flick it, watching the flick move along, while you wait for it to land sometime in March.
Somewhere along the line, cooperative MMO bullet hell shooter Realm of the Mad God became a real thing. I was looking the other way when it happened, perhaps getting a haircut that required my head to be pointing in exactly the opposite direction, otherwise I’d have noticed and not had to rewrite this opening paragraph where I’d previously claimed it was being released now. So, yeah: Wild Shadow‘s magnificently silly bullet-hell based MMO is now out on Steam, rather than just being released for the first time. Alec has written so many words on the game that I’ll refer anyone looking for actual details to those. Or if you prefer video, I have that below via another cynical Brit. It’s good, it’s free, it’s frighteningly compulsive and the Steam version ties into the web-version, so you can continue progress from one to the other.
So, like, WTF is Realm of the Mad God? Total Biscuit will save me.
Speed your way along every course while fine-tuning your technical driving skills.
The intuitive control system and the exciting tracks provide endless fun for every member of the family. Be fast, be furious and be one step ahead of your competitors by finding shortcuts, repairing your car in the pit lane, dominating your opponents from the top-down view and more!
Counter-Strike co-creator Mihn Le left Valve a few years ago to work on his own interpretation of the CS formula, but he took something with him: he runs on Valve Time, that temporal twisting that people experience in the presence of all those Steam servers. For years and years I’ve been hearing about his free-to-play Terrorist vs Swat team game Tactical Intervention, and it finally looks like it’s breaking loose in 2012. The American launch of the game will be in Spring 2012, with closed beta testing in March. There’s even a new teaser trailer, showing rappelling!
I have a fair bit of interest: Valve’s treatment of CS has been very conservative, which is unsurprising given it’s their biggest game, and any changes are met with a terrifying amount of focus. But Tactical Intervention has rappelling, attack dogs and highway chases, and the sneaky beta footage looks entertainingly shonky. The hostage animation there cracked me up. When it arrives in Europe, I’ll be up for a few games.
Over five minutes of footage that is already being hurredly removed from YouTube. Probably because it shows that the latest iteration of Far Cry is less about firearms, more about fetch quests. You misison, should you chose to accept it, is to go and collect some fungus for a crazy old man. Oh, and while you’re doing it, you will be trippin’ balls.
BEST. FETCH QUEST. EVER.