Crap Shoot: MST3K Presents: Detective
Richard Cobbett gets snarky with a bit of police brutality that mocks itself so you don’t have to. Grab your respawning gun and wooden wood and get ready to fight some crime the text adventure way.
What many people don’t understand is that those of us who savour bad movies, games, books and other forms of media really aren’t doing it to be nasty. It can be a mean-spirited hobby, but if you hang out with a group for a good riffing session, you’ll quickly find that the point is to have fun with the badness rather than necessarily get all smug and superior. The undisputed kings of riffing, and the ones who got more people into it than anyone else, were the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew. If you’re in the US, chances are you don’t need me to tell you who they are or what they’re doing now.
In the UK though, we never got to see MST3K properly, making it firmly one for the alpha-geeks. If you want to check out the show, look for Mitchell, Space Mutiny, Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, and of course, Manos: The Hands of Fate, which took over from Plan 9 From Outer Space as the worst movie ever made as soon as it got the MST3K treatment. The show’s definitely worth checking out, and not just because it was the inspiration for today’s game – an interactive riffing session that turns one of the worst text adventures this side of The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy into one of the funniest.
Killing Floor expands with free maps and a new gun
Arena-based co-op zombie shooter Killing Floor was updated last night, with four new maps and a Mac 10 machine pistol with incendiary ammo. The game’s update philosophy is that the gamey stuff, like weapons and maps, are free to all players. Only new character models, which are a purely aesthetic improvement, cost real money.
Lord of the Rings Online doubles revenue in one month – by going free
At the GDC Online conference – which is not online, it’s in Texas – LoTRO developers Turbine revealed that making the game free has doubled the amount of money they make from it. The game now generates its cash from microtransactions, and optional subscriptions that provide a monthly income of Turbine Points to spend on in-game stuff. It means less money from the average player, but their number of players has exploded by over 400%.
PC Gamer US Podcast 243 – Gametosterone
That sound you heard was December 7 being circled on 12 million calendars at once. The PC Gamer crew, joined by Chris Perry of MMOReporter.com, ponders the release date of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.
Then we reconsider OnLive as a non-subscription service, and take a better informed look at the TF2 Polycount update. Chris jumps into Left 4 Dead’s new DLC, Evan recounts his Medal of Honor beta experience, and our jaws hit the floor when we hear how much 3D Realms spent not making Duke Nukem Forever.
Supreme Commander 2 patch reinvents its economy
Supreme Commander 2 was just updated to reverse a long-standing but unpopular decision about the way you pay for your units and buildings. The sequel, unlike the original, wouldn’t let you queue construction of anything you couldn’t afford at the time you ordered it. Now, seven months after release, Gas Powered have gone back to the Supreme Commander 1 system: you don’t pay for anything until it starts building.
The Ball gets commercial publish date
The Ball, an Unreal Tournament 3 mod that came second place in this year’s Make Something Unreal competition, is being published by former winners Tripwire Interactive. It’s a first person puzzler where you have a giant… ball. Shut up, it looks great.
World of Warcraft has 12 million active subscribers
And I’ll bet most of them are the alliance on our bloody server. Ahem. Just received word from Blizzard that they’ve reached 12 million subscribers. These are people who have active game time or who played in an hourly internet game room thing in the last thirty days. The number doesn’t include expired or cancelled subscriptions.
Channel 4 to close digital investment arm
Channel 4, one of the UK’s publicly funded TV broadcasters, is shutting down its digital investment division, 4iP.
New Chief executive David Abraham has decided to scrap the investment division, which had an initial budget of £20 million. 4iP reportedly has around £6 million remaining in it’s investment fund, and, before it sinks into the molten lava that courses beneath all UK office blocks, has pledged to spend that on “digital format innovation.” Turning TV shows into games, then.
Channel 4′s Education division, responsible for games like Privates and The Curfew, is not affected by the change.
[via Develop]
Correction: This story originally indicated that 4ip was responsible for partly funding Channel 4′s educational games initiative. This was incorrect, and the story has been changed to reflect that.
Buy Left 4 Dead 2, get a hat and skillet in TF2
If you’ve ever bought Left 4 Dead 2, or if you buy it before 4pm Pacific Standard Time today (that’s 11pm, UK folks), you’ll get Ellis’s hat and a skillet in TF2. Look, a picture of the soldier threatening three tiny, quadriplegic Michelin Men that he’s keeping in one!
AI War developer’s two upcoming games
Arcen games, whose financial troubles have been splashed across our frontpage of late, have announced two new games. Hopefully, if they can release them before they shrivel up and moths explode out of their pockets, they’ll be so awesome that everyone will buy them and it’ll all be great. There are two: a zombie trap-laying roguelike thing, and a tower defence game.
Let me say that again: a tower defence game from the makers of AI war.
Global Agenda COO warns against “chasing WoW”
Successful shooty-guns MMO Global Agenda was a success because it was designed from the ground up to appeal to people too busy with family to maintain a World of Warcraft commitment.
How to edit your skin in Minecraft
Are you jealous of all those players running around Minecraft in their spiffy duds? Are you tired of your boring, default skin? Do you long to be unique and appreciated for your good looks? Well, for absolutely no cost to you–other than a bit of your time–you can change your appearance and finally be confident that wherever you go, people will gasp in awe at your grandeur (in Minecraft).
The Sacrifice comic concludes, DLC out
The Sacrifice, Left 4 Dead’s thrilling comic, has concluded. It tells the story of how brave Bill went to the final respawn closet in the sky, as was revealed in The Passing, the Left 4 Dead 1 DLC released earlier this year. In a similar vein, The Sacrifice DLC has just shipped for free for both L4D 1 and 2, and lets you play through the fighty bit leading up to the climax of the comic. And the best part? Everything Left 4 Dead related has suddenly become ridiculously cheap.
Shogun 2: Total War’s comedy ninja assassin
In this new clip of Shogun 2: Total War, Creative Assembly’s community manager Kieron Brigden talks through a demo of the Ninja unit and his oddly bumbling but ultimately successful assassination attempt on an enemy general. I was tempted to take a video of this video of a video and talk over Kieron talking over the video in the video, but I thought it’d only encourage the internet and it might all get out of control. I’ve embedded the original below:
Call of Duty: Black Ops will have 3D for most devices
Update: Oh wait, I’ve read this wrong. They’ve actually just added support for most stereoscopic 3D devices across all platforms, including the PC. You can use your expensive 3D goggles with CoD:BlOps even if they’re relatively new. Sorry for the confusion – the original post is below.
Treyarch have announced that Call of Duty: Black Ops will have full 3D support! Rather than displaying a different sprite for every possible orientation of a character, they’ve fully modelled the enemies, weapons, and environments by rendering what they call “polly gonnes.”
