Month: May 2009

Thief 4 Finally Announced

Nabeel Burney Leave a comment

At long last, Eidos Montreal has finally announced Thief 4. Initially the announcement was made by Community Manager René Valen on the TTLG forums, but eventually the official site made space for the new game.

index

The main site for the game has no information whatsoever past a logo, and links to the official forum and twitter. The game is apparently in very early stages, hardly into production.

In the world of gaming, there are mainly three phases – the concept, pre-production, and production – and right now we’ve reached our goals with the conceptual base, the story.

Stéphane D’Astous

It would be asking too much to expect that we will see anything more about the game for a long time, and indeed the game will not be shown at E3. For now all the fans have is the logo (which is tentative, Rene assures us) and sure enough the community has exhausted that avenue of anxiety.

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Merchants of Brooklyn: Drug Wars

Martyn Zachary Leave a comment

The crazy cavemen over at Paleo Entertainment recently braved outside their developmental caverns, revealing a kooky plan for a new multiplayer game mode, Drug Wars, to be given out free to owners of Merchants of Brooklyn. Though the game was erroneously reported to be a stand-alone game on some other websites, as it stands, Drug Wars looks to be no more than an additional component to MOB. Here’s what the team had to say about it:

“Find the drugs, stash the drugs, defend the drugs, kill everyone and take their drugs! YOU MUST HAVE DRUGS!”

Based on the little promotional material revealed so far, Drug Wars seems to be taking some more advantage of CryTek’s more-than-boisterous CryENGINE 2, apparently sporting both drivable vehicles and larger levels, and is currently being prepared for a public release announcement at this year’s E3 gaming expo.

…In other, far less interesting news, I’m still yet to restart MOB from scratch due to the patches corrupting my save games…

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Arkane’s The Crossing On Hold

Martyn Zachary Leave a comment

Arkane Software’s The Crossing is now on hold. Arkane’s Raphale Colantonio tells Joystiq, “We ran into an unexpected financial challenge some months ago and we had to put The Crossing on hold”. 1)http://www.joystiq.com/2009/05/15/valve-and-arkanes-the-crossing-on-hold/ They speculate that Arkane’s crumbling partnership with EA is the reason for this indefinite delay.

According to Colantonio, Arkane is now working on two other projects – an FPS RPG and an iPhone game – instead. Since Ubisoft owns the rights to the Might & Magic franchise, we’re in shallow waters with speculation as to what “FPS RPG” means at this juncture.

In any case, only another forthcoming Source game from Arkane will save me from a broken heart.

References   [ + ]

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Downfall

Martyn Zachary 2 Comments

Remigiusz Michalski’s new 2D horror adventure game, Downfall, is the latest AGS-based indie project to make it gloriously over to the retail market. The game, designed to attract those craving “…for an intellectual adventure that puts complex storyline and immersive dialogues before the polygon count”, and features “scenes of violence and gore, sexual content and strong language and it is suitable only for persons of 18 years and over”.

From the Harvester Games website:

“Quiet Haven Hotel was supposed to be just a one night shelter for Joe and Lucy Davis. But things soon start to go wrong. Lucy’s panic attacks get worse and soon she disappears. And in the morning hotel changes too. Nothing is what it seems anymore. Joe is left alone, trying to understand what is happening, trapped between reality and the nightmare.”

While the game is obviously another testament to Chris Jones’ fantastic adventure game platform, it’s also a delightful example of perseverance: Back in 2007, Downfall was a mere batch of relatively clumsy, gorey screenshots posted over at the AGS forums. In fact, an early demo version(!) is still available for download in case you’re the kind of person to obsess over a game’s entire production curve. Here is a comparison, of the “old” and “new” Downfall, to really drive home the amount of improvement that’s gone into the project:

At this juncture, the game looks fierce, and sports an interesting, aesthetically cohesive look and feel. The game will be sold, for the modest price tag of $9.99, at Direct2Drive.

Update:

A demo has been released for the game and is currently available on FilePlanet.

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Ghost Pirates of Vooju Island

Martyn Zachary Leave a comment

Over at the Autumn Moon blog, Bill Tiller spilled the beans on an all-new game series called the Ghost Pirates of Vooju. The game, seemingly designed to take advantage of the current piracy boom – Tiller freely admits that a pirate-themed game “would be less risky than some of the other unusual ideas we had proposed, and would be easier to market” – is interestingly slated for release before the already publicized sequel to A Vampyre Story that we just reported on a mere few weeks ago. The estimated release date for Ghost Pirates is early 2010, while A Bat’s Tale will follow some six months later.

As far as the game’s register, ‘The Biller’ (as we affectionally call him here at The Slowdown) elaborates that he wishes to see the game enter a slightly more dramatic space not unlike “…Full Throttle or the movie The Incredibles.”

What do you make of this? Personally, I’m nothing but delighted that Tiller – who practically has the rights to computer gaming piracy anyway, having almost singlehandedly crafted the look to the beautiful Curse of Monkey Island – and indeed, in another post, Tiller outlines how he also feels “…people really liked the art I did on Curse of Monkey Island and wanted to see some more of it.”

Styles make fights, so why not games? Adventure-Treff have some hot scans and The Pumpkin Post have posted a lowdown of the game’s characters – that’s about it for now.

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