Aeropause Games » Adam Englebright

Sword of the Stars 2 ‘Engine’ trailer has big spaceships

Adam Englebright — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 21:14:19 +0000

Sword of the Stars 2, an upcoming 4X space game from Paradox and Kerberos set to be released sometime in 2011 has just had a teaser trailer released taking a look at the Mars 2 engine, giving us the opportunity to view some giant spaceships, and really, who doesn’t love giant spaceships. Hit the jump to see this feast for the eyes.

New Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 DLC ‘The Sacrifice’ out October 5th

Adam Englebright — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 19:13:20 +0000

Valve have announced that ‘The Sacrifice’, downloadable content for both Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2 – which functions as a prequel to ‘The Passing’, following the survivors from the first game’s journey South -will be released on October the 5th. The downloads are separate for each game. L4D will “receive the complete Sacrifice campaign with maps playable in Campaign, Versus, and Survival.”, including a “new style finale featuring “Sacrificial Gameplay” where players get to decide who will give their life so the others may live.” L4D2 will get ‘The Sacrifice’ campaign, playable with the original L4D survivors, and the “No Mercy” campaign from the first game, but with the L4D2 gameplay modes, infected, items and weapons. It’ll be 560 Microsoft Points on 360 and free on PC.

Tales of Monkey Island on sale for $4.95

Adam Englebright — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 16:41:53 +0000

Once beloved of many online communities, Talk Like A Pirate Day has faded from prominence in recent years, many having tired of it, or forgotten. Not Telltale Games, however, who, until ‘tomorrow’ (the 20th, in PST) are offering the entire Tales of Monkey Island series for $4.95! That’s all five episodes of their point and click (and drag) adventure game for a rather substantial saving, so I would suggest you go and buy it right now, scurvy landlubbers, yarrgh, grog, parrots etc…

Red Faction: Battlegrounds announced

Adam Englebright — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 17:17:36 +0000

After the discovery a few days ago that THQ has registered the domain redfactionbattlegrounds.com, speculation has abounded as to the nature of the project – but THQ have now revealed that it’ll be a downloadable title on XBLA and PSN. According to the press release,

“Red Faction: Battlegrounds is a fast-paced multiplayer-focused vehicular combat game in which fast-attack vehicles, heavy tanks and combat walkers wreak havoc above ground and beneath the surface of Mars. Staying true to the Red Faction universe, players can demolish anything that stands in their way, from military compounds to enemy vehicles, using advance Martian artillery and explosives.”

Which sounds pretty awesome. It’s being developed by THQ Digital Studios UK, and there’s no release date yet announced.

Review: Singularity (PC)

Adam Englebright — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 20:08:19 +0000

I was pleasantly surprised at how much I liked Singularity – Raven Software’s first original IP in over a decade, which looked good in trailers, but was led out to die by Activision, to the point where I only realised it was out a few days ago, ironically because someone mentioned what a shame it was that it had been marketed so poorly since it was really good, etc. Lucky I did realise, because Singularity is probably the best first-person shooter I’ve played all year. Hit the link for my full review!

You play as Captain Nathaniel Renko, a Special Forces operative, and, after the explanatory intro cinematic about the island you’re on, Katorga-12, site of some rather dodgy Russian experiments, find yourself sitting in a helicopter, with your teammate telling you how easy this is going to be. Big mistake. Some time-pulse goes off, your helicopter crashes, and you find yourself in a derelict settlement. You wander into a building, where another time pulse sends you back to 1955, where you change time, and you spend the rest of the game trying to put it right.

You’ll spend most of the game in 2010, with occasional excursions back to 1955. The story isn’t a masterpiece, but it’s reasonably compelling, and you’ll want to find out what happens to the villainous Doctor Demichev, the helpful Doctor Berisov, and the Alyx Vance-a-like Kathryn. The story is as much about the people as the island itself, where Russians were messing with a mysterious element called E99, which facilitates your time-hopping antics, and powered the Singularity, the explosion of which seems to have been the cause of many of the island’s problems. Large parts the story are told through ghost sequences and carelessly discarded audio recordings (a la Bioshock) , roughly 90% of which end on the death of the person making the recording. Usually along the lines of “We should never have done these experiments… what? What’s that sound? AAAARGH! (messy dismemberment)”

If you’re trying to sell someone on a game, a good move is to compare it to a game they already like. Singularity can be described as ‘like Bioshock, with additional mechanics redolent of the conceptually fantastic but unfortunately awful Timeshift/the critically acclaimed, damn-near-perfect Half-Life 2, and comedy Russian accents’. Well, I say it’s ‘like’ these games, but it’s so close to these games that at some points it crosses over from ‘imitation’ to ‘wholesale copying’. Again, that’s not a bad thing – think of it as a ‘greatest hits’ compilation of the popular band Corridor Shooter.

The game’s ‘unique’ selling point is the Time Manipulation Device, or TMD, which you get about an hour or so into the game. Like the Plasmids in Bioshock, it’s something utilised by your left hand which supplements your guns in combat, often with much more amusing results. It has several different functions – reversing or accelerating the passage of time for certain objects (or enemies, for that matter), ‘impulse’, which knocks back enemies (kills them if they’re weak enough), ‘deadlock’, which creates a bubble of slowed time (of which more in a moment) and the gravity gun feature. It’s got a different name, but to be honest, it does exactly the same thing. Even down to glowing blue and going supercharged at the end.

Of these, by far my favourite is the deadlock. You can throw down a bubble around a squad of Russian soldiers, wildly spray machine-gun fire toward them, shrink the bubble with a wave of the TMD and blammo! they all fall down dead. Efficient and awesome. And consistent – peculiarly, some of the other powers have different effects on different enemies. Aging one type of enemy causes them to slow down, but using the same power on a different enemy causes them to explode.

The difficulty curve is odd as well – a well-balanced beginning gives way to an incredibly punishing, ammo-starved second act. At one point, I had to make my way through a sewer full of mutants. Ostensibly, you’re meant to sneak past them, but after the first four or five tries, this proved to be impossible, and I had to zap the enemies with my glove, then run back to the beginning of the level, wait for my glove to recharge, and repeat with the next enemy. There are ten enemies. Then, in the final third, you’re practically tripping over ammo and health packs.

The game is very linear, with practically no back-tracking. This could be a problem, but ultimately works out in the game’s favour, as it ensures less tiresome repetition – you’re always moving on, there’s a feeling of constant progress, and you do lots of different and interesting things in different environment (similar, but distinct enough). One minute you’ll be fighting mutants in a tunnel, the next fighting soldiers as an enormous ship ages around you, the next fighting a giant monster on top of a railway bridge. The progress is mirrored in your abilities and equipment. There are bits of ‘E99 tech’ which can be used at stations dotted throughout the levels to update your TMD, and rarer weapon upgrade cases, with which you can improve your chosen firearms.

The weapons, such as they are, are pretty good. There’s the standard pistol, shotgun, assault rifle, but also some more esoteric weapons with interesting functions. The sniper rifle which can slow time allowing you to better line up shots; the grenade launcher which allows you to fire grenades and control them by rolling them around until you get them where you want them; and best of all, the Seeker, which allows you to control the (exploding) bullets you fire – a gun so awesome you can’t keep it with you as a permanent part of your arsenal, and can only pick it up in particularly heated combat zones. The combat in this game is one of the high points – nearly always entertaining, and if you get bored, you can always throw a tank of liquid nitrogen at them, which causes them to freeze, then shatter them.

They attempt to put in some puzzles, although nine times out of ten, the puzzle is ‘push old, broken, crumpled crate under nearly-open gate, de-age to lift open’. The repetition can get a little irritating, although at least you’re not likely to get stuck. The main irritation the game offers are monsters called Phase Ticks, essentially little suicide bugs, which swarm up to you and explode, sometimes ten or more at a time. It’s cheap, it’s unnecessary, and it’s unbelievably frustrating.

Thankfully, there are other, more interesting enemies for you to fight. Beyond the usual Russian soldiers (and their subset, ‘Russian soldiers with better armour and miniguns/rocket launchers’), there are Reverts, freakish mutants reminiscent of Fallout 3, Zeks, half-human trogs who can phase shift and teleport, and the rather large Radions, who can shoot laser beams from their mouths. No kidding. In addition to fighting them in the single-player, there’s a (fairly limited, if I’m honest) multiplayer mode, which is primarily a mildly diverting (though not-at-all balanced) soldiers-vs-monsters mode. It’s underdeveloped, lacks long-term appeal and has clearly been appended late in development, which is a shame, as it clearly has potential, and Phase Ticks are much more fun to play than to fight.

The games’ problems are few (other than those I haven’t already mentioned). It looks pretty good for the most part, but in places textures were either not loading or atrocious (I’m not sure which is worse). The game gets too easy near the end, with you absurdly outclassing every enemy you come across, and the finale is an anticlimax, with a ‘choice’ to be made, which, in all honestly feels a bit rushed, which is a shame, because it does rather detract from what is, in most other respects, an excellent, if unoriginal, game. Should you buy it? Yes you should! Singularity gets 4.5 Aeropausonauts out of 5.

TF2 Engineer Update Fully Revealed

Adam Englebright — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 10:28:21 +0000

So, I posted the other day that Valve are updating TF2, and the Engineer class in particular. Well, it’s all come out now. The Team Fortress site is now showing that the update is complete, and ready for download. What’s in it? Here’s a brief rundown. 35 new Engineer achievements have been added, as have four new maps: Coldfront, Upward, Hightower, and Thunder Mountain; and four new weapons, The Frontier Justice (a shotgun), The Wrangler (a pistol), The Southern Hospitality (a wrench), and The Gunslinger (a glove replacing the wrench). Oh, and a mini-turret. For an in-depth look at it, I would recommend the TF2 Wiki who go into far more detail than may be comfortable on the subject. The Engineer Update is out now, so head on over to Steam and get downloading!

Team Fortress 2 ‘Engineer’ update announced

Adam Englebright — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 21:30:41 +0000

After rumours, wild speculation, and this rather interesting comic book, Valve have officially announced the Engineer update, which is “the largest single-class update ever” for TF2. It will include “new maps, items, achievements, and more”, according to Valve. If you visit the site, there’s also a “Wrench Log” – every time an Engineer crafts something between now and Thursday, they have a chance of getting the Golden Wrench. Every 25 Golden Wrenches awarded, something more will be revealed about the update. At the moment we have ‘Frontier Justice’ – a new shotgun, the promise of new maps and a load of cryptic drawings about Australia and Abraham Lincon. Hmm. Still, wrench count currently sits at 48! What are you waiting for? Get playing!

Interstellar Marines: Running Man released

Adam Englebright — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 20:09:54 +0000

Interstellar Marines is fascinating to me; once you get past the super-generic name you find a game, nay, a trilogy, being developed with the Unity engine, allowing it to be run on browsers, but attempting “AAA production quality”, from indie dev Zero Point Software. The games is an “AAA first person shooter experienced in a realistic and unpredictable future where first contact with another sentient species is slowly becoming reality’, which ” balances the military realism and cooperative action from tactical shooters with the character development and narrative depth of Role Playing Games.” They’re releasing ‘slices’ of gameplay – little playable sections which show off their progress. The third slice(the first two being The Vault and Bullseye) is Running Man, in which you’re wandering the halls of a training facility dispatching training robots. You’ll need to download the Unity player to play, or you can hit the jump to watch the trailer.

Video Games | Interstellar Marines | Exclusive Running Man Release Trailer HD

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Wire.vg is something you should be interested in.

Adam Englebright — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 13:37:07 +0000

New, useful and interesting sites aren’t as commonplace as you might think, but I’ve found one in the form of Wire.vg, for those of you looking to be kept abreast of all the stuff that’s going on in the world of videogames. It’s a little cumbersome to describe, but John, the founder (and also EIC of Nukezilla) explained it thusly

Wire.vg is a new way for you to get your gaming news. We understand you want the source rather than the copy, and we understand you want the best not the fastest. This is why Wire.vg has no user-submitted content (there are loads of very successful sites you should go to for this). Instead Wire.vg gets all its news from the best sites on the net and then lets you, the reader, vote on which posts are good.

For more words about this, hit the jump.

So (and I’ve been trying to go out of my way to defy the comparison) it’s a cross between Reddit and Google Reader. But better. Curated content (that is to say, not the sort of pigswill that the average Digg or N4G user will smear all over the screen) and user voting (meaning that unlike a vanilla RSS reader, you can see the sort of stories people have liked). There are filters for time – 1 hour, 24, 48 and a week pertaining to the ‘top rated’ and ‘most read’ stories.

It also pulls in a wide variety of feeds (not Aeropause yet, but I’ll be asking!) so you get a diverse breadth of opinion on the subjects. Probably my favourite thing about it is that it’s still developing – new features being added all the time. For example, one issue it currently has is that (what with all the feeds it’s pulling in) there are a lot of news stories telling you exactly the same thing. John said

I’m planning a way to group the same news stories together, then getting it to show you the best currently available post on that specific piece of news. Eventually the site will automatically not just find the hottest news, but find you the best write-up of it.

Which, as I’m sure you’ll agree, is awesome. I’ve got five beta codes to give away to the first five commenters (if they could leave their email address, that would be grand). By the way, you can still use the service if you’ve not got a beta code, but new features are beta-first. Wire is a fantastic new way to get gaming news, and one which I’m sure we’ll see a lot more of in the future.

Review: Doctor Who: The Adventure Games: City of the Daleks.

Adam Englebright — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 11:08:03 +0000

I wanted to enjoy this. I really did. This was the combination of two of my very favourite things: Doctor Who and videogames. It should have been like a cheese and bacon toastie. Alas, the cheese turned out to be a bit mouldy, and the bacon a bit rancid. And the bread’s a bit dry as well. Still, we should go in bearing in mind the fact that this is a free game from the BBC (provided you live in the UK, that is – stinkin’ forrins not welcome), so adjust expectations accordingly. Now that I’ve thrown my cards onto the table hard enough to dent it, hit the jump to read my full review of the overtitled Doctor Who: The Adventure Games: City of the Daleks.

We begin in the TARDIS, as the Doctor and Amy are heading for 1963 (because that’s when the first series of Doctor Who… oh you knew that? Bit too obvious, was it? Never mind…) to meet the Beatles, but instead they end up in Trafalgar Square post-Dalek invasion. Clearly the Daleks have changed time, and it’s up to you to put things right! You see a woman running for a manhole cover and a Dalek shouts something about exterminating ‘the last human alive’! With than in mind, you’re handed the reins.

The idea seems to be that it’s a blend of stealth and point-and-click adventure, with some very annoying minigames thrown in for good measure. The stealth thing’s good enough – you’ve got to sneak around, keeping out of the Daleks’ very MGS-like cone of vision. If you do get spotted… well, there are various levels of ‘spotted’. There’s green ‘not at all’; yellow ‘caught a glimpse’; and red ‘you’re going to die now’. The stealth elements are reasonably competent (this does seem to have been designed with kids in mind), and while they’re not Splinter Cell-good, I wouldn’t expect them to be, and they are at least functional.

The next major element is the point-and-click puzzles. Well, I call them puzzles -usually the puzzle is ‘use sonic screwdriver on thing’. The puzzling parts are facilitated primarily by the stealth – in the second act, you’re on the Dalek home planet of Skaro and you need to get some bits and bobs to build something. Other than the Doctor’s alarmingly precise knowledge of the layout of his arch-enemy’s rebuilt home base (which he’s never before visited) you don’t have much to go on, so mostly you’ll be finding the parts through process of elimination (invisible walls keep you within certain areas).

Once you get the parts (or whatever) you have to put them together by a minigame which, as I may have already mentioned, is needlessly annoying (and it can be very, very annoying). So, it’s like that game where you’ve got to move the metal thingy around the shape without touching the sides, or you get buzzed. Except you’ve got to do it with three things. And if you fail one, the other three fail. There’s a simple ‘connect the dots’ puzzle as well, but the maze puzzle – don’t misunderstand me, it’s not complicated, but it is rather difficult to do without wanting to kick the screen in.

Presentation? Well, the character models are all right – not top-notch fantastic, but they do the job just fine – the characters are recognisable, the Daleks (while in their new Power Ranger incarnation) are done quite nicely. Environments are similarly quite good. The best part (as has been pointed out elsewhere) visually is looking out of the windows in Act 2 at the cityscape of Kalaan, which looks really beautiful. The sound is probably the best part of the game, with both leads lending their voices, and Nick Briggs doing the voices of the Daleks. There’s also plenty of bombastic Murray Gold score, which is jolly good as well.

But what of the story? Well, the story for this … thing was written by Phil Ford. He co-wrote The Waters Of Mars with Russell T. ‘The End of Time’ Davies. Now, I – well, I hated The Waters of Mars, with it’s stupid robot, poorly used monsters, fires on the surface of Mars, Doctor behaving like a moron, magic water, bad writing, that asinine biography thing, and the stupid bloody robot. Thankfully, it’s less torturous here – it doesn’t make a great deal of sense, feeling rather like an incomplete story idea – but perhaps I’m holding it to the standard I would expect an episode to meet. It does the job it needs to with minimum fuss, and there are some things I have a feeling we might see again (although I feel obliged to point out for the record that I’m fairly sure it should have been called the ‘Eye of Harmony’, not the ‘Eye of Time’, but maybe this is something RTD changed and forgot to tell us).

Well then. Plenty of damning with faint praise. It was at least functional, and the story… well, it was better than The End of Time (although I think that’s setting the bar too low). I thought that the point-and-click elements were underused, and that the slightly dodgy stealth mechanic was overused, and the mini-puzzle mechanic shouldn’t have existed in the first place. Nevertheless, this is a game both for free and for children (as far as I can ascertain), and things can only improve. I hope. (Note: if you like Doctor Who… well you’ve played this already, but it is worth playing if only because, well, you’re playing as The Doctor! Were I not a Doctor Who fan, I would have been less amused, but as a Doctor Who fan, I enjoyed it more despite myself)

Doctor Who: The Adventure Games: City of the Daleks gets 2.5 Aeropauseonauts out of 5.