Alan Wake devs talk self-publishing and dodgy console ports
2012 looks like it’s going to be the year of the bigger studios self-publishing games on the PC. Rebellion Studios have already told us their plans to omit a publisher for the PC edition of Sniper Elite V2. Now Alan Wake developers Remedy have discussed the intricacies of their self-publishing arrangement for the PC version of the much-vaunted episodic Xbox 360 thriller.
Alan Wake was published on the Xbox 360 by Microsoft, so it seems a little odd that Remedy are publishing it themselves on the PC. We assumed that Microsoft’s vested interest in PC gaming (after all, they make that Windows thing) would put them at the forefront of publishing it, just as they have with Fable 3.
Get your face in Max Payne 3!
It’s a bit like that online dating site where only beautiful people are allowed access, only your chances of sleeping with a supermodel are greatly diminished. Unless they happen to play the game when it’s released in March and take a shine to your in-game noggin.
Max Payne 3′s Gang Wars multiplayer mixes things up
In an age of tacked-on multiplayer modes, Max Payne 3 aims to be different. Developers/publishers Rockstar have added a “Gang Wars” multiplayer mode which adapts to the play style of its players.
According to IGN, Gang Wars will feature the standard capture-the-flag style scenarios, with the twist that new scenarios are created on the fly. For instance, complete a drug-deal-gone-wrong (they always go wrong, don’t they?) mission as the dominant player and you’ll find a bounty on your head in the next mission. Win some territory in one round, and you’ll find yourself defusing bombs on it in the next.
Assassin’s Creed: Revelations day one patch revealed
Ubisoft has released a list of the changes the Assassin’s Creed: Revelations day one patch will bring to the game. As reported by DSOGaming, the patch will improve Nvidia’s 3D vision with added sky rendering, and also fix “problems with running game in offline mode”.
Maybe Ubisoft aren’t all bad. Both Skyrim and Batman: Arkham City have required substantial post-launch patches to get them up and running properly on the PC, and these have taken a few weeks to appear. We won’t know if there are any more issues until we actually play it on December 2, but it seems Ubisoft is at least trying to nip some problems in the bud.
Full changelog after the break.
Saturday Crapshoot: The Unicorn Killer
Every week, Richard Cobbett rolls the dice to bring you an obscure slice of gaming history, from lost gems to weapons grade atrocities. This week, we head out to catch a real criminal!
In the world of PC gaming, the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups. The police who investigate crime and casual gaming companies willing to churn out games about some staggeringly inappropriate things. Like this – a casual game based on a real-world killer, currently serving his time. Fun! His name is Ira Einhorn, and he evaded justice for 25 years after beating his ex-girlfriend Holly Maddux to death and stashing her corpse in his closet to fester. Yes. Really.
This is the story of how he was captured. According to Real Crimes: The Unicorn Killer.
Arkham City’s DirectX 11 support is some kind of joker
Arkham City’s been out on those awful plastic box things for a good month or so now, but us PC gamers have had to put up with a wait. We know that this is because developers Rocksteady are cramming lots of cracking stuff into the game for the PC version. We know that when it’s finally released we’re going to have the most realistic experience you can have short of dressing like a gravity-defying flying rodent and fighting crime on the streets of Ipswich.
But all is not well in Arkham City. It appears that a number of gamers are having problems with all the shiny bells and whistles DirectX 11 brings to the game. For example, Jared Walton of AnandTech has an ultra-powerful gaming PC, but experienced huge frame rate drops until he scaled back the game from DirectX 11 to DirectX 9. It seems to be the experience many other PC gamers are having, too.
Rockstar’s Dan Houser gets nostalgic about Max Payne
Rockstar’s Dan Houser has been shedding a little light on the creative proces behind the gruff, manly second sequel to Max Payne. Speaking to Gamasutra he rightly points out that the rose-tinted glasses often blur out older game’s deficits – a challenge that Rockstar faces with Max Payne’s legions of dedicated fans. “I think the challenge of nostalgia is a more profound one, because one thing about video games is your memory tends to remove the horrendous,” said Houser. “You want to appeal to the fans of the original and bring in a new audience.”
When asked about Max Payne’s hair rotation (bald with beard), Houser commented that the issue was a contentious one. “We saw a lot of people questioning our parentage, and our right to be doing this and, you know, our right to even exist,” said Houser. “There is a lot of love for this property. The fact that there’s a huge rabid fan base is something that is very much in our favor.” It sounds like Rockstar is taking Max Payne seriously, and has a huge amount of respect for the franchise. We’re so excited that the four months until its launch in March 2012 might as well be taking place in bullet time.
Telltale employees genetically engineer Jurassic Park scores
Is Metacritic the new Amazon? Despite only coming out three days ago, Jurassic Park has a host of decent user scores on the review aggregator, which set Gamespot’s fake reviews radar a twitchin’. Gamespot did some cursory Googling and found that the reviewer’s names matched up to those of developers Telltale’s employees.
In a statement to Gamespot, Telltale covered their backs by saying: “It is being communicated internally that anyone who posts in an industry forum will acknowledge that they are a Telltale employee. In this instance, two people who were proud of the game they worked on, posted positively on Metacritic under recognizable online forum and XBLA account names.”
Gemini Rue woos Steam
We were utterly impressed with 16-bit-style point-and-clicker Gemini Rue, which combines a beautifully scummy atmosphere with proper adult sci-fi storytelling. It’s already shown up in the Indie Royale bundle, but it’s also been added to Steam’s growing catalogue of point and click adventure titles. The Steam version adds a couple of new features – cloud saving, and 15 in-game achievements.
Saturday Crapshoot: Fascination
Every week, Richard Cobbett rolls the dice to bring you an obscure slice of gaming history, from lost gems to weapons grade atrocities. This week, put on your special adventuring bra for a game that tries to put the T&A into Point and Click, before realising that ‘Click’ doesn’t have an ‘a’ in it.
“Somewhere between Paris and Miami… when ecstasy and angst mingle in a frenzied embrace…” whispers the intro, and already I’m feeling lost – especially knowing that our heroine, Doralice, is a pilot. Is that something she mentions along with the turbulence? It’d be awful if you were on the toilet when you hit that bit of the transatlantic flight, and probably very messy for the cabin crew later.
Welcome to Fascination, one of the most confusing erotic thrillers ever.
Editorial: How to save adventure games
This feature originally ran in PC Gamer UK issue 225.
Adventure games suck. Sorry, but it’s true. This isn’t a lunk-headed action fan telling you this, nor a snotty RPG fan who wants to solve every problem with a sword. No. This is coming to you from a guy who considers beating every Sierra and LucasArts game ever made to be an amateur claim. If it exists, I’ve likely played it, or at least know of it. Broken Sword? Zork? The Last Express? Kingdom O’Magic? Les Manley? I’ve finished great adventures and rubbish adventures, and make no mistake, adventures are my favourite genre of all time. They’re what got me into gaming, the genre I’m most nostalgic about, and one still bursting with incredible untapped potential even today. Even so, today, they suck.
And that’s something that can change. That’s why I get cross. Adventure games deserve to be great once again. The catch is, they have to earn it, and almost none of them are even trying.
Saturday Crapshoot: 9:05
Every week, Richard Cobbett rolls the dice to bring you an obscure slice of gaming history, from lost gems to weapons grade atrocities. This week, get ready to READ ARTICLE. (Uh. Like normal.)
Interactive fiction. Text adventures. In the days before graphics, or at least graphics that didn’t make you want to poke your eyes out with a spork, they were what transported us into worlds of endless imagination, and even convinced a hitherto sane world that The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy game was anything other than appalling. As technology moved on, they became more and more of a niche genre – but never stopped evolving or being developed. Today, with powerful creation tools like Inform 7 and advanced world simulations on their side, modern interactive fiction is still capable of incredibly fun, very original concepts. Want to see a quick example? Yes? Well, that’s lucky!
Here’s a quick taste of something only a game without graphics can hope to offer.
Saturday Crapshoot: Animal
Every week, Richard Cobbett rolls the dice to bring you an obscure slice of gaming history, from lost gems to weapons grade atrocities. This week, SIT BACK AND PREPARE FOR MARKETING.
For thousands of years, humanity has strived to conquer the world, to raise itself above the other animals, and to set foot in an endless galaxy of wonder and amazement and sexy green people of any gender – for these are modern, enlightened times! Sadly, unless you’re a billionaire who wants to see if he really can see his house from space, it appears we can now but sit back and take solace in the fact that, while conquering space seems to have been put on hold, our mighty technology did successfully manage to bring us a point and click adventure based on a salami mascot.
Swings and roundabouts, eh? Meet the Peperami Animal.
Saturday Crapshoot: Zork: Grand Inquisitor
Every week, Richard Cobbett rolls the dice to bring you an obscure slice of gaming history, from lost gems to weapons grade atrocities. This week, prepare to enter a world of adventure where life is cheap, only cheaters prosper, and a few familiar faces are looking forward to saying hello.
When I say that I hate the Myst series, I’m not being entirely fair. Oh, they are dreadful, don’t get me wrong – the most fun I ever had with them was imagining that their backstories were a lie, and really the inhabitants of these pretty-but-boring worlds died out because some idiot locked their only toilet with a stupid puzzle that required them to demonstrate knowledge of local celestial movements before they got to take a bowel one. If you put me on a desert island with a computer and the entire series, I would snap one of the discs in half and use it to slice my own wrists open. Probably Riven.
Really though, what I hate about them is what they did to adventures – convince people that no, we didn’t want characters or plotting (and please, spare me the links to a wiki about the intricate backstory of the Stoneship Age) or puzzles with an actual reason to get in our way. Now, if you could render a vaguely pretty world and put some unmarked levers and dials on it, your job was done. In the entire history of Myst-type games, I can list maybe five I genuinely consider worth having given a chance.
So when I now say that Zork: Grand Inquisitor was a wonderful surprise, I really mean it.
FREE STUFF ALERT! Our friends at Good Old Games have given us 10 copies of Zork: Grand Inquisitor to give away. Check out the competition details at the end of this post.
Saturday Crapshoot: Maniac Mansion (TV)
Every week, Richard Cobbett rolls the dice to bring you an obscure slice of gaming history, from lost gems to weapons grade atrocities. This week, it’s the TV show even many adventurers thought was only a joke – the Lucasarts classic that went from the smallest screen to… a slightly bigger one.
One of the many puzzles in Day of the Tentacle, the 1993 sequel to the 1987 adventure Maniac Mansion, is fixing a broken down time machine by getting enough money to replace the diamond at its core. The hero, geeky teenager Bernard, blinks at this, asking the mansion’s owner, crotchety mad scientist Dr. Fred Edison, why he needs to bother. The guy owns a mansion. Isn’t he already rich enough to just order one? Sadly, it turns out not. Not only is Dr. Fred broke, he’s never even seen a penny from a big TV show that was made about his family, due to him forgetting to return the contract.
Fixing that problem with time-travel makes for a fun comedy puzzle, but when I first solved it, I figured that was all it was. Like most non-Canadians/Americans, I had no idea that the TV show he was talking about actually existed. But did we miss out, or escape? Let’s finally find out…
