I have no complaints when developers add a couple of snowmen, a Father Christmas costume or a giant rolling snowball to their games at this time of year, but it’s rare for a seasonal update to impress as much as the level added in Polynomial’s latest update. I’ll admit, I’ve only ever played the demo of the “musical space shooter” but you’d have to be a fool to argue that its dancing fractals aren’t a wonderful sight to behold. Are you a fool? I hope not, because then you might not be overjoyed by the abstract made merry in the video below. Perhaps try the demo (Windows, Linux, Mac)? The full game is currently on sale for £1.49 over on Steam.
You remember Happy Wheels? Free flash game, dangerously fun/funny. Well, this being Christmas and all, its creator Jim Bonacci added a Christmas theme to it. Where you control Santa and some Elves. Then kill them, repeatedly and without mercy.
Just head to Happy Wheels’ site, pick a level and at the character select screen, choose Santa.
Battlefield 3 has finally figured out that the key to making a successful television ad is not to pick a theme song whose essential lyrics must be bleeped, and just put it all in the hands of filmmaker Freddie Wong.
Using Back to Karkand’s forklift and “online battle tactics that many of you should know and love,” Wong, with Sam and Niko from Corridor Digital, with this 60-second spot in just 10 days. It will begin airing soon. Freddie’s excited, and he’s also excited that he got to use real explosions and a tank. And we’re excited for him.
Is Formula 1 still popular, then? I thought it would have gone out of fashion now it’s been followed up with
Formula 2 and Formula 3. But then people still play Battlefield 1942 even though Battlefield 3?s out. You hopeless nostalgics!
The sport of driving long, fast cars around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around remains well-liked enough to keep spawning videogames, the most recent of which is Codemaster’s F1 Online. It’s free to play, it’s, uh, online, and it now has a closed beta and the first trailer for you to videowatch.
You can throw your helmet in the ring for that here. Being closed, you’re not guaranteed a slot, but an open beta will follow. Here’s a trailer from last month, which suggests this browser-based affair is a wee bit different from the traditional, more sim-like F1 games. Looks like Micro Machines meets Foot-to-ball Manager to me.
What that headline means, of course, is that the anticipated Mesmer is the latest (and I believe final) class reveal for Guild Wars 2. The character’s skills focus on the making and breaking of illusions, making them a tricksy and cerebral class with some of the more esoteric magical effects at their disposal. ArenaNet have released five (count ‘em!) videos of the Mesmer in action, and you can watch them all below. Try watching all give simultaneously and see if your brain is different afterwards. (And gosh, isn’t GW2 just the prettiest thing?!)
Right, this will get tongues a-wagging. C&C Tiberium Alliances is the next reboot of the Nod vs GDI universe, and as we discovered earlier it’s a browser-based “epic strategy MMO” using the dark magicks of HTML5. Here’s what it’s going to look like. In short, like C&C classic in some ways and yet… not. Really not.
Attack waves? That suggests no direct unit control to me, and the video suggests lines of troops auto-marching. That will be, um, divisive, I expect. As will the new, apparently FarmVille-esque harvesting system. Fire is very much being played with here.
Still, much remains to be seen, and the sheer scale of the war for Earth seems pretty beefy. Hopefully tomorrow’s beta will see fuller word reach our anxious, shell-like ears.
The VGAs coughed up a new trailer for Hitman: Absolution, which is crammed with sneaking, stealthery and silence. Except for all the parts with windows exploding in slow motion and The Bald One murdering almost every single person in his path, which just happens to take him through a hospital ward. Those parts are quite noisy. There’s also a crying nun. She is crying because of the constant gunfire and images of men being shot through the abdomen at point blank range. Do you want to see such things? They are below.
The Original Assassin, eh? I’m guessing it’s not John Wilkes Booth they’re trying to knock off his perch with that particular phrase.
It’s a strange oversight that the music sounds, to my ears, like blood-pumping stuff rather than the sort of morose finger-picking that a blood-soaked kill-video demands. How else would I know that the man-shooting is terribly sad and worthy? Somebody should remedy that. Just remember to mute the Hitman side of things. And then share any infinitely better examples that you concoct.
