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.
Get ready to strap in, go back in time and take stick in the most pivotal battles in the history of air combat.
Birds of Steel puts you right in the crosshairs of WWII’s most intense skirmishes. This original IP blends next gen supremacy and the fine details of aerial combat into a historical recreation fit for flight sim fans and history buffs alike. Use your skills to pilot the top planes from all combatants in WWII to recreate history or to change the outcomes of the most prolific battles in history. Online and offline elements add an entire new element to the game which will ensure Birds of Steel remains a fresh combat experience long after you’ve played for the first time.
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.
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.
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.
Have you ever played a third-person shooter and thought, “Well, this is all well and good, but why isn’t it underwater?!” before screaming and throwing your property out the window? Put down that hatstand, because there’s a demo for Deep Black: Reloaded. And it features jet packs and harpoons.
This is, I should stress, from Biart, the same people who brought us Depth Hunter. The “Reloaded” comes from its being a version of a 360/PS3 digital game, but, um, the console’s Deep Black hasn’t been released yet. My brain hurts. It’s a near-future sci-fi, that promises a story involving espionage and bio-terror, and a smattering of world supremacy.
Far Cry 3 is the upcoming sequel to the 2008 video game Far Cry 2. It is currently in development and is due to be released in 2012.
Far Cry 3 takes place on a tropical island found somewhere at the intersection of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. However, Patrick Redding, a Ubisoft story designer, mentioned that an Antarctic setting is a possibility for future games. The main goal of the game is to escape from the islands (as there will be more than one, mentioned by Dan Hay) and their crazed inhabitants.
The Call of Duty franchise has covered almost every corner of the globe, from snow-capped mountains to the streets of suburban America. But it’s never strayed too far outside of its military roots. What if there were a Call of Duty game that put you into the shoes of a different type of enforcer—namely, a law enforcer?
The video above proports to be “leaked internal footage” of an upcoming downloadable game called Call of Duty: Police Warfare. It’s a fake. But it’s a very convincing one, convincing enough that you wouldn’t be a foolish fool if you were fooled by it.
