Miscellaneous Ramblings

A whole lot of not much has been happening over the past few weeks here (as usual), so I thought I'd mention a few things that have been going on in the outside world that have affected me in some way. Well actually that's a bit of a lie because I did have an operation on Wednesday, but it was just to remove an ingrown toenail and has proven to be nothing but an embuggerance, preventing me from going airsofting and generally making upright movement uncomfortable.

On the gaming side of things there's been an event comparable to Duke Nukem Forever's recent media release, and that is that the NeoTokyo mod team have recently released a new video showcasing some of DJ Bourgeoisie's enviable level design (the talented bastard). There's also word that they're planning a huge media update soon, with new screens and trailers, so if you're a massive NT freak (please tell me I'm not alone) this will no doubt be welcome news and should be making your undergarments moist right around now. There's also a few samples of the completed soundtrack on composer Ed Harrison's MySpace page which should send tingles of ambient-styled delight down your spine.

In the industry there's been lots of hubbub over EA's recent bid to buy Take-Two (and with it Rockstar Games), and I'm happy to report that so far, even though EA have taken it straight to the stockholders, T2 aren't budging. This has been labeled as the first 'hostile' takeover in the history of the games industry, and hopefully it will be the last. I would also like to mention that although psychotic crackpot 'lawyer' (and I use the word loosely) Jack Thompson offered EA his full cooperation and well-wishing, they essentially told him to go and sodomise a tree because of his 'colourful' history. He has also been sanctioned by the Florida Supreme Court in an event in gaming history on par with the parting of the red sea in the Bible. Hopefully old Jack will one day realise his God-given task of freeing the world of games is in actual fact filling a gap that some milk he forgot to buy at the store fifteen years ago left and he will promptly resume his normal life. In the mean time, the best we can do is try to keep him off the streets at night and all do our part to try and comfort his embarassed wife whose sexual satisfaction has been fulfilled only because of generous gamers - poor woman.
Get well soon Jack.

Finally, although this may not even ring a tiny little dinnerbell for 99.7% of you, Itlit Software, as I have been recently informed, has been purchased by a larger corporate entity (£5 says it's EA) to boost funding for their flagship RelentENGINE title Relent: The Fallen. Similar to Crytek in their fascination with a single word, but in that only. Yes, the RelentENGINE showed signs of being a fair competitor to Crytek's frame-per-minute graphical throne, and indeed even the Unreal Engine's stranglehold on the console gaming and mod communities, but at a playable framerate and with some colours other than pale grey, respectively. It not only promised this, but has also made claims to provide 'massive destroyable city environments' along with many other impressive features (full specs here).
So why, you ask, am I talking about it in the past tense? Well, following Itlit's purchase by the as yet unknown (can anybody clarify?) company, all previous non-profit projects, agreements and policies have been bombed, along with any hope I had of securing a copy of the engine for myself. Why, you ask? You do ask a lot of bloody questions. Thing is, I have been drawing up plans and calculating feasibilities to create a game of my own, free to download. I won't say any more than that as it may still happen one day and I don't want some sneaky bastard stealing my plans, but the RelentENGINE was the only hope I had of ever getting it rolling. I wanted a next-gen engine, capable of various degrees of shader rape, typical physics stuff, typical AI stuff and large, detailed city environments without loss of framerate. The RelentENGINE's specs hit my needs and kept going until they hit the horizon, and, even though I haven't actually seen any screens or videos, it seemed perfect and I just had really good feeling about it. I was half-way through the paperwork of a Confidential Disclosure Agreement (am I allowed to disclose that?) before I was informed of the takeover and new policies, and my teenage hopes of bitch whipping a team of trained monkeys into helping me make my perfect game were cruelly dashed.
It's not over yet, as I may be able to get my hands on the engine yet. In the mean time, however, I shall despair.
I bid you good day.

2008: Year of the game?

Being honest, 2007 was a huge disappointment for me. Games like Assassin's Creed, Super Mario Galaxy, Bioshock, Mass Effect and Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare paled in comparison to everything that came before them, and you'd have to shove the pointy end of a loaded rifle into my rectum and threatened to pull the trigger before I actually played any of them. On the positive side there was Crackdown. And that's it. One great game worth playing, for a whole 365 days, 8 760 hours or 31 556 926 seconds of prime release time. But what about Crysis, I hear you cry (pun intended)? You could launch Crysis and its entire development team into the sun and you'd have to send my testicles along with them before I started caring. But that's a rant for another time.

So I was casually flicking through the latest issue of PSM3 yesterday when I discovered an 18 page extravaganza featuring 157 new games. Think about that for a second. 157 games on PS3 alone means there must be something good in there, right? Right. I noticed a few gems I'd either forgotten about or didn't know about to begin with. For example, The Getaway 3, Two Days to Vegas (new media released recently on Steel Monkeys' official site) and The Outsider (Splinter Cell: Conviction without Sam Fisher).
I'm going to go off on a limb here and spew out every good game I can think of that's coming in 2008, in no real order.
Grand Theft Auto IV, Mercenaries 2, Mirror's Edge, the Half-Life 2 modification NeoTokyo (pigs flying etc), Mafia II, Eight Days, Midnight Club Los Angles, Alan Wake, Red Faction 3, Rage, MGS4, Gran Turismo 5, Haze, Killzone 2, The Club, Frontlines: Fuel of War, Far Cry 2, Battlefield Bad Company, Fallout 3 and Rainbow Six Vegas 2.
And those are just the ones I'm interested in.

There is a little voice in my head screaming at me for writing this because the majority of them are sequels and soulless mush, the likes of which are slowly draining away all originality and creativity from the gaming industry, along with my will to live, but the sheer number of appealing titles has already bound and gagged the little bastard and beaten him until he can't move. I probably won't end up buying more than one or two of these, but it's always good to have choice, and a repeat of last year would have seen me hanging myself in a mental asylum for cases of unusually extreme boredom.

I'm almost a month late, but I'll say it anyway: bring on 2008!