No joke: World of Planes flight sim MMO is real
They all laughed back on April 4, when PC Gamer posted a story on World of Planes, an exciting massively multiplayer WWII flight sim from Wings of Prey developer Gaijin Entertainment…which Gaijin revealed on their forums to be a joke. Yeah yeah, we fell for it. Very funny.
Well, who’s laughing now?
That’s right: Gaijin checked in today to say that World of Planes [update: not to be confused with Wargaming.net's just-announced World of Warplanes] is not, in fact, an April Fools joke, but a real game about planes and the wonderful world they fly in.
We’ve learned a valuable lesson from this: all April Fools joke game announcements are real, no matter how much developers may claim otherwise.
Modern Warfare 3 screenshots non-leaked
Entirely on purpose, Activision PR has released a set of three new screens from this year’s inevitable record-shattering-yet-divisive blockbuster military first-person shooter. If yesterday’s trailer and the leak from last week left any doubt in your mind that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 would involve men with guns in a variety of locations, some of them damp, let these shots put your fears to rest.
Download Portal 2: Songs to Test By (volume 1) for free
Move over Lady Gaga, here comes LaDY GLaDOS. While the latest Jonathan Coulton single will still cost you, Valve has posted 22 tracks – totaling more than an hour – of Portal 2′s electro-trippy ambient soundtrack for free download, complete with album art and Android/iOS-formatted ringtones. Even if you’re not a Portal fan, this is worth grabbing for tracks like Science is Fun and the hauntingly catchy Turret Wife Serenade.
Bonus: the fact that this is labeled “Volume 1″ implies more free tunes will be coming sooner or later!
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning gameplay video released
The upcoming action RPG from 38 Studios (and the team formerly known as Big Huge Games) made an appearance at this year’s GDC and PAX East, and now the developer-guided tour has been posted online. The video focuses mostly on fighting, which is best described as a flashy union of Fable and Mortal Kombat. The UI is very console-oriented in this video, but we’re told that the PC version will be getting special treatment and attention. 38 Studios founder (and former Boston Red Sox pitcher star) Curt Schilling is a die-hard PC gamer, and only a fool would give the boss a sloppy version.
Id Software’s John Carmack picks a side in the Nvidia/AMD GPU war
We sat down with legendary John Carmack and picked his brain on a few of our favorite topics. Along the way, we asked him which graphics card–AMD or Nvidia–he would buy right that second and why. His answer might surprise you.
Second Fallout: New Vegas DLC coming May 17
Obsidian is busy as a beehive these days, both prepping Dungeon Siege III for a June launch and putting the final touches on Honest Hearts, the second DLC batch for Fallout: New Vegas. Honest Hearts will send players off the Mojave map and into the wilderness of Utah’s Zion National Park to defend a caravan from tribal raiders. Like the first DLC, Dead Money, the story will pick up the story of a mentioned-but-not-seen character from the main game, The Burned Man.
I wasn’t super-wild about Dead Money – though it was a great story, the repetitive level design and obnoxious beeping explosive collar took a chunk of the fun out of it. But the first Fallout 3 DLC, Operation Anchorage, was pretty weak too, and then we got the much better Broken Steel, The Pitt, and Point Lookout (let’s not talk about Mothership Zeta), so I’m still very much looking forward to exploring Honest Hearts next week. Click Read and Comment to see the latest batch of screenshots.
Download the Mount and Blade: With Fire and Sword soundtrack free
Free tunes! Another game soundtrack has been released for download, this time for the standalone Mount & Blade expansion With Fire and Sword, which features music by Jesse Hopkins and Pyotr Salnikov. (The download also includes Hopkins’ Mount & Blade: Warband soundtrack.) You can snag it here. With track names such as “Peaceful Travels” and “Eastern Soul,” it’s a little more low-key than, say, Bulletstorm‘s all-action-all-the-time tone, and it might make some decent background music for that MMO whose looping soundtrack you’re bored silly of.
Mount & Blade: With Fire and Sword comes out May 3.
Darkspore review
Why won’t Maxis let me play with its best toy? The awesome, Play-Doh-like Creature Creator that powered the wacky player-made monsters of Spore is a shadow of its former self in Darkspore, a loosely-affiliated hack-and-slash action RPG spin-off of Will Wright’s evolution game.
The modification you can do to your characters at the loot-equipping screen (which is essentially a crippled version of the Creature Creator) is limited to G.I. Joe-like functionality that only allows manipulation of accessories on 25 playable “hero” monsters that someone else already enjoyed the fun of creating. Being locked out of its creative power baffles me. Let’s pretend that we don’t know what we’re missing, though, and critique Darkspore’s colorful hack-and-slash gameplay for what it is: mildly entertaining with a lot of good ideas, most of which go awry.
Telltale’s Jurassic Park: The Game delayed
We were expecting the first episode of the Jurassic Park adventure game to drop into our laps any day now, but instead we’ve received a press release announcing that the game is being delayed until further notice. The note from Telltale CEO Dan Connors indicates the game will change somewhat from the quicktime-event heavy affair it was when we first saw it a while back, throwing around terms like “moving in new directions” and promising that the revised game will have mechanics and storytelling “beyond anything you’ve seen from us before.”
If you’d already pre-ordered the game, Connors promises a full refund within the next few days plus a free Telltale game of your choice. Not a bad way to smooth things over, all things considered.
Read on for the full text of Connors’ apologetic letter.
Stand-alone version of DoW2: Retribution’s Last Stand coming tomorrow
This is pretty cool: tomorrow, Relic plans to release a stand-alone version of the Last Stand co-op survival mode of Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II – Retribution as a $10 download from Steam.
Last Stand, which was initially added to Dawn of War II in a patch shortly after release, has proven to be a big hit. It makes a lot of sense to release it as its own game, since it’s essentially a completely different animal from its RTS/action-RPG campaign and multiplayer modes, and appeals to a different crowd. A $10 price lowers the barrier to entry considerably (versus the $30 price for Retribution) for people who want to check it out.
“We saw this as a unique opportunity to introduce new players to the Dawn of War franchise as well as expanding the player base for the already popular Last Stand mode,” says DoW2 Producer Jeff Lydell.
Anybody out there gonna pick this up?
Download the Bulletstorm soundtrack for free
No matter what you think of Bulletstorm’s over-the-top gameplay and crude humor, you’ve gotta love free stuff. Epic is out to win the hearts and minds of cheapskates by offering up the shooter’s original soundtrack (composed by Michal Cielecki and Krzysztof Wierzynkiewicz) free of charge. Click here to snag a total of 56 minutes of overly dramatic background music, spread across 24 tracks with names like “My Cyborg Components” and “Too Many To Kill Them All.” Can’t turn that down!
Magicka: Vietnam now available on Steam
Paradox has unleashed its lighthearted parody DLC upon the world. Magicka’s element-conjuring wizards are, for some reason that really doesn’t matter, now battling enemies in Vietnam with assault rifles and napalm. It’s incredibly preposterous, and therefore awesome. You can grab the insanity on Steam for $5.
Who’s tried it, and what do you think? Is it so crazy that it works, or too soon? View the launch trailer after the jump.
Valve releases Portal 2 Long Fall Boots video
Portal 2 must be getting close: Valve has released another video, this one showcasing some impressive acrobatics from normally unseen player character Chell and calling for investment in Aperture Science’s Long Fall Boots, which negate all fall damage. Check it out after the jump.
Torchlight II teases new monsters
Ever fought a Yakotaur? No? Well you’re gonna. Runic Games has put up a page with a teaser concept painting of the half yak, half yeti beast along with five others you’ll casually bump into while exploring the depths of Torchlight II’s dungeons. The other five (manticore, witch, gargoyle, spectral dragon and Dwarven automata) are a little more conventional, but still cool lookin’. Runic is promising to unveil more every other week leading up to E3, so this page is worth bookmarking. Read on to see’em all here.
Red Faction: Armageddon trailer encounters Martians
Volition’s upcoming blow-up-everything shooter has a new trailer out showcasing the plot, which introduces bug-like aliens to the previously all human-on-human violence sci-fi universe. Sadly, it doesn’t show off the part of the game I’m most looking forward to: the magnet gun, which spectacularly rips apart the environment by attaching super-powered magnets to any two points and collapsing them together. Anyway, click through to watch the trailer, and circle May 31 on your calendar to signify RFA’s release date.
