What Shogun II can learn from the original Shogun: Total War
What Shogun II can learn from the original Shogun: Total War
At 9.40 this morning, one of my geisha entered the quarters of rebel general Homma Katsunaga. By 9.43 Katsunaga was hanging from a rafter by a lute string, and I was one mouse-click away from ruling all sixty provinces of Sengoku-era Japan. A fun festive season of Samurai slaughter was drawing to a close, leaving me one satisfied, surprised and slightly fearful gamer.
Fearful? After a couple of happy weeks with the TBS/RTS hybrid that catapulted Creative Assembly into the big time, the idea of a sequel seems both splendid and scary. There’s no question that Total War: Shogun 2 will be prettier than its progenitor, and offer far more extensive multiplay options. What remains to be seen is whether ten years of Total War feature-creep will end-up enhancing Shogun’s single-player side or suffocating it.
Richard Cobbett discovers that some games are so bad, even changing absolutely everything for the sequel can’t help. Yes, it’s Les Manley 2. And it’s even worse than the first one… Note: if you’re in an office or public place with a zero-tolerance approach to pixellated semi-naked ladies, you’re probably best emailing a link to yourself and reading this at home. In private.
As we saw last time, Les Manley in Search for THE KING was a truly terrible adventure that didn’t understand the importance of story, personality, comedy, or puzzles that could be solved without psychic powers or a hint book. Nevertheless, it did well enough to get a sequel barely a year later… or at least, developer Accolade had high enough hopes for it doing well to green-light one. Of course, this left it with something of a serious problem. Normally, a sequel is the game that takes the good bits of the original and makes the most of them. Since Search for THE KING had no good bits, Lost in LA was in trouble. Its solution? Grab a camera, hire some bikini girls, and hope like hell that sexism would sell.
What could possibly go wrong?
PC gamers have won the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam battle for Hastings
PC gamers have won the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam battle for Hastings
What’s the best word for this? “Pwned?” “Obliterated,” perhaps. Let’s just go with “destroyed”. PC gamers have destroyed the console based opposition to take first place and unlock the hidden fifth map in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam. The map was won by amassing 69 million team actions. As a result PC gamers can now enjoy the lush jungles of Operation Hastings while console gamers languish far behind in their dark, grey, Operation Hastings-less world.
Studio Director of Sports Interactive, the studio behind the stellar Football Manager series, has been awarded an OBE by the Queen in the latest round of honours awards. In full, O.B.E. stands for Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, and is one of a series of chivalric awards created by George V, the highest of which makes you a knight of the British Empire. Suffice to say, not too many game developers have made the esteemed honours lists.
Constant net connection no longer required for Ubisoft games
Constant net connection no longer required for Ubisoft games
It looks like DRM checks on games such as Assassin’s Creed 2 and Splinter Cell: Conviction have been changed for the better. The controversial DRM system was launched earlier this year with Settlers 7, and required players to be permanently connected to the internet in order to play. Now the games will no longer pause instantly if a connection is lost, but will still require an internet connection to validate the install every time the game is booted up.
Can you dig it? Yes you can. Twelve months of getting square eyes with Minecraft.
When we each made up our personal list of favourite games this year, Minecraft was on nearly all of them. It’s a first-person fantasy game made of cubes. There are cubes of grassy soil stacked in contours to form mountains, smooth cliff faces that you can dig square tunnels into with your voxellated pickaxe, and cubic trees sprouting cubic leaves. Your head is a cube. The sun is a cube. In all probability, the world of Minecraft is a cube. You should also mentally cube the length of time you expect to spend in it, because it’s so stimulating and relaxing, so hypnotically compulsive, that you’ll never escape its grip.
There are few things more satisfying than a massive chain reaction ending in an explosion. A creation by Minecraft player called Daniel looks to have taken the crown of best Rube Goldberg machine away from the one hidden in Fallout 3. This construction is the size of a small town and harnesses the forces of gravity, water, lava and chickens to create an epic chain reaction that culminates in the death of a twenty foot tall Creeper. You’ll find the video below.
As a special New Year’s Eve present, STALKER developers CDC have decided to release the full Software Development Kit for the X-ray 1.6 engine, the force behind the most recent STALKER game, Call of Pripyat. This is the first time fans have had access to fully featured mod tools for the latest STALKER game, and the new tools will give players the power to create whole single player and multiplayer missions. Check out the official STALKER site to get your hands on the new tools.
15 things we want to see in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
15 things we want to see in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
I love Oblivion, but not because it was perfect. That and the previous Elder Scrolls game Morrowind were great because they tried more than they could do flawlessly – that’s what made them so liberating compared to a lot of other RPGs. Now that we know Skyrim is coming, though, it’s time to take a harder look at what the Elder Scrolls games could be doing better. This is what we want from The Elder Scrolls V.
Wings of Prey – PC Gamer UK’s Simulation Of The Year
Wings of Prey – PC Gamer UK’s Simulation Of The Year
With its breathtaking terrain and heart-stopping battles, this air combat sim is flying high. We waggle our wingtips at Wings Of Prey.
A much-loved PC combat flight sim is ported to consoles and gets utterly trashed in the process. PC favourite IL2 was converted to console-focused Wings of Prey. The script was written the second the game was announced, but rather splendidly, Gaijin (the port-ers) failed to read it. Rather than hammering flat all of IL-2’s subtleties, the Russian team preserved them, producing a game that’s stronger than its prototype in several areas. Even better, they flew their new title back to PC simmers.
PC gamers are winning the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam platform war
PC gamers are winning the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam platform war
When DICE launched the Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Vietnam expansion they also pulled the trigger on a race to unlock a hidden fifth map. The challenge was for players on each platform to perform 69 million team actions. DICE have thrown up the tally so far, and PC gamers have performed more team actions than the Xbox 360 and PS3 combined.
Maximum kersplode: Five ridiculous Crysis explosions
Maximum kersplode: Five ridiculous Crysis explosions
Crysis may be a few years old, but it’s still one of the most graphically powerful games you can play. Normally that power is used to render huge islands, armies of panicky Korean soldiers and invading alien forces, but what if you took all of that power, and used it to create the biggest explosions you possibly could? Five brave gamers have done just that. Below you’ll find videos of some of the biggest bangs in gaming. One man drops a fleet of helicopters out of the sky, another belly-flops onto a huge tower of exploding fuel trucks, and another man spawns a pile of 3,000 barrels and causes an explosion so ridiculous that he can’t look directly into it for more than two seconds without it crashing his PC. You’ll find videos of the five most insane Crysis explosions embedded below.
Free Super Meat Boy update to add level editor and online sharing portal
Free Super Meat Boy update to add level editor and online sharing portal
Super Meat Boy is set to receive a huge free update in the middle of January, adding editing tools that will let players create and share their own levels. A new area called Super Meat World will also be added, acting as a hub to which Team Meat can add further leves in future, and even offer up areas for guest developers to step in and create their own challenges. Read on for details.
When I first started playing Minecraft a few months ago, I played with a rule: if I die, I have to delete the entire world. Now I’m trying to get to hell and back. The diary starts here, and over Christmas new entries will go up weekly on Wednesdays.
Neptune’s Pride – PC Gamer UK’s Webgame Of The Year
Neptune’s Pride – PC Gamer UK’s Webgame Of The Year
Five weeks of plotting, bluffing and double-crossing with Neptune’s Pride, the most duplicitous strategy game of the year.
The icon next to his name turned grey, signalling that he’d just signed out of MSN Messenger. That meant he was away from his computer. It was time. I opened up the other window, selected my fleets and sent them all towards his worlds. By the time he came home that night to see what I’d done, it would be too late. And by the next morning, I’d have won the entire match. All hail the space slug! Doom to the space squid! That’ll teach them to make an alliance with me.
Neptune’s Pride isn’t real-time strategy, it’s long-time strategy. Each day, you login, upgrade some of your planets, direct your fleets around the galaxy, and then… you wait. A long time. Moving that one fleet between those two planets? That’s going to take four hours. Between the next two planets? Another ten. To reach the enemy planet you’ve ultimately sent it to attack? About 22 hours total.
What Shogun II can learn from the original Shogun: Total War 