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The Slowdown

A blog by vrap in General

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About this blog

A blog for those who spend more time thinking about gaming than gaming

Entries in this blog

No Man Is a Dead Island

…but maybe a zombie is! A singular and unique, expertly designed trailer was all it took to light a fire under the video gaming community, bringing a slow and deliberate simmer to an absolute, absolute boil. This trailer, with its decidedly nihilistic take on the zombie mode, exhibited in reverse and to a haunting piano-based soundtrack, has been called the best trailer of the year (in February!) on several sites already, for instance, by LA Times? 24 Frames, The Escapist, Unreality, and Ain?t I
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XCOM Gameplay Trailer is Intense

There’s not much new to report on XCOM, the “re-imagining” of the PC classic which we’ve covered here before. But last year at E3, 2K Games finally released a brief trailer showing in-game footage for us to pick apart, and I thought I’d bring us up to speed. Click through to see the video embedded below. <p style="text-align: center;"> Since the last time we saw the game, the screenshots are sporting much deeper colours and sharper edges. The game is still looking quite rough in the
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ReVVVVVView

Terry Cavanagh‘s seminal platformer VVVVVV dropped last January, and I gave a brief heads-up noting its brutal difficulty and audacious $15 pricetag. Since then the game has hopped onto the Steam bandwagon and has had its price slashed to a much more reasonable two-thirds less, which makes it an irresistible indie option for platformer fans. And as I mentioned in my recent summary of 2010, VVVVVV turned out to be one of my favourites of the year. You play as space Captain Viridian whose crew is
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Interview with Epic Games? Jay Wilbur

Since its inception in 2008, the Dubai World Game Expo has been the annual showcase for game developers in the Middle East. In the last few years many western studios have taken an interest and have come to sponsor or give panels, including CryTech, Blizzard Entertainment, Electronic Arts, and Epic Games. Epic had a large presence at DWGE 2010, showcasing their latest development tool, the Unreal Development Kit. Their booth featured a workshop with tutorials on the basics of the UDK, and repre
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2010: The Year in Review

I?ve not been as active on the Slowdown as I?ve liked lately, something I hope to rectify this year. As it happens, I was actually playing games! Which left me with less time to write about them. 2010 was a very busy gaming year for me; the sheer number of quality titles was staggering, and I?ll try and give a brief mention to some of my personal favourites. While I did enjoy a handful of the huge AAA releases in 2010, I would have to say that I?ve gotten stuck in deep into the indie scene, pla
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Steam Treasure Chest

Over the past two weeks, we were able to highlight three fantastic budget-sized and -priced titles available in the massive Steam holiday sale. With one final day left of the sale, there’s still hopefully just enough time to recap these reviews and perhaps help you make that final decision to grab – or pass – a title or two! Below, you’ll find one-paragraph snippets from and links to our reviews: Shatter “Originally released on the PSN, Shatter is on the surface a high-definition rendition of
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Steam Treasures: Dark Void Zero

No beating about the bush: First and foremost, Other Ocean?s downloadable minigame Dark Void Zero brings your inner AVGN to the fore, the game being above all a meticulous, studious replication (compared to a revision or a reimagination) of the features that often make older games so highly resistant to enjoyment, in turn rendering the game an easy target for naggish nitpicking. Before its release, the PC and DSiWare title created a minor stir in the games press with its cleverly orchestrated m
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Steam Treasures: The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom

Published under the 2K Play budget moniker and developed by the aptly named the Odd Gentlemen, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom is a story of the titular gentleman thief getting suckered into a paradox of time, place and the self. His strange-sounding shenanigans are dressed in lavish Victorian-style steampunk and early filmic elements, coated with a glaze of Edward Gorey – rated “E” for “Comic Mischief” by the ESRB – and finally capped by the swinging sounds of a boisterous backing band –
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Laggard La-Mulana Loved

Japanese indie developers Nigoro have released by far the most endearing press release of 2010 (just compare theirs to Square-Enix’s latest). On their blog, the team announced their Nicalis-published Nintendo WiiWare title, La-Mulana, will not make its scheduled 2010 released date after all thanks to Nintendo?s highly stringent requirements and testing policies. Their unique, Engrish-flavoured announcement goes on to state that We did a lot of thinking. As a result, we come to the conclusio
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Steam Holiday Sale 2010

For the past few months, Steam has operated in permanent discount mode – and this year’s “Holiday Sale” isn’t exactly a change of pace. In fact, its daily discounts are progressively more preposterous still! May cooler heads prevail, and do absolutely remember not to purchase any non-daily deals until the very last day of the sale. SavyGamer have a flat list of each deal on their website, if you fancy that sort of thing. Other current sales events you might want to check out: Humble Bundle
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Steam Treasures: Shatter

The Great Steam Treasure Hunt, a large-scale metagaming event organized by Valve this holiday season, has had Steam users complete objectives every two days in order to win games from the Steam store catalogue. Tasks have ranged from using various community features to completing specific in-game achievements in discounted games. That moaning sound in the background? That’s just the good ladies and gentlemen from Impulse, GamersGate and Direct2Drive sighing audibly – the Treasure Hunt has been
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The Humblebee Flies Again

The de facto pay-what-you-want package deal is back! Colour us surprised, as last May?s Humble Indie Bundle seemed so much like a one-off. But here it is, a fresh assortment of indie titles: Braid, Cortex Command, Machinarium, Osmos, and Revenge of the Titans, each of them cross-platform and sans DRM. Exactly like last year, buyers can choose how to best split their payment between the five games and two charities, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Child?s Play; in addition, there now exis
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The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings

?has, with the most recent batch of screenshots from the game, confirmed what CD Projekt RED senior producer Tomasz Gop boldly stated in a March 2010 developer preview, that The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings would be ?the best-looking RPG you?ve ever seen.? Above, the detailed greens of the grasses contrast against the charred, smouldering red hues of a battlefield partially shrouded by smoke, together with the dynamic silhouettes and tense poses struck by soldiers and burned-down tree trunks s
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2K Loves Me, Loves Me Not, Loves Me!

Ever since the BioShock 2 launch, 2K Games have been giving PC players high blood pressure and ulcers thanks to a laundry list of problems with the game, ranging from its Games for Windows Live integration and DirectX issues to the infamous ?Rapture Metro? map pack, giving much credence to the view that the game was effectively left to rot on the platform. To add insult to injury, this sentiment was already firmly established before the publisher?s wishy-washy approach to ?The Protector Trials?
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Bionic Commando Recharmed

The new Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 characters that Capcom has been posting on their official Facebook page are adorable and really wacky: The game itself will probably play just like the first one – not everyone’s cuppa tea and whatnot – but hey, this time around, it sports a roster full of cute chicks with big teeth along with a series of funny slash fugly dudes! Really, just seeing characters with natural smiles is a change of pace, and heck, I think I even see some overbite to go with the big
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The Road More Traveled: 5TH Cell?s Hybrid

Cowabunga! Washington-based Scribblenauts devs 5TH Cell probably could not have done a more complete 180 degrees in licensing Valve?s Source engine for their latest game, Hybrid. The just-announced game is unfortunately going to be released on the wrong platform ? that is, as an XBLA exclusive, at least for the time being: 5TH Cell is proud to announce Hybrid, a revolutionary new video game available in 2011 exclusively for Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA). Hybrid is a pioneering third person shoote
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The New Vegas Fallout

Major video game launches are a huge deal these days, and sprawling, feature-rich open-world titles like Obsidian Entertainment?s Fallout: New Vegas come very close to being MMO-like in their courting with danger. As soon as the early reviews begun pouring in, New Vegas indeed turned out to be just as bug-riddled as Fallout 2 originally was back in 1998: At least the player above got in-game, though – while personally installing Fallout 3, I was met with a faulty DVD, an “Error: -5006 : 0x800
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The Source of a Bloody Good Time

One of the most surprising video game announcements in recent memory ? honest! ? is Bloody Good Time, a new eight-player multiplayer game “regrouping ambitious teen actors ready to kill for fame? from Scottish The Ship developers Outerlight, who have suddenly made their return to the gaming headlines. Bloody Good Time, launching today on the 29th of October and available on XBLA and from Steam, has the ignoble distinction of only being the second Source title to be published by Ubisoft, the firs
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Vindictus: MMO, Hack and Slash or Dungeon Crawler?

Korean MMO maker Nexon?s forthcoming English-language conversion of Mabinogi Heroes, re-titled Vindictus, is launching today in North America and Canada. What makes this launch particularly notable in our minds here at The Slowdown is Nexon?s curveball partnership with Valve Software: Instead of going for the common go-to engine in Epic?s UE3 (which is used, for instance, in DC Universe Online, Mortal Online and Huxley), the game instead runs on an adapted version of the Source engine. Bear wi
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UDK Hat Trick: The Ball, The Haunted and Sanctum

Ever since Epic Games announced the Unreal Development Kit in November 2009, with UE3?s market penetration, a $99 starting price and comparably modest licensing terms (0% royalty on $5,000 and 25% above $5,000), the big step for aspiring mod teams to take in moving over to the commercial side of video game development has considerably shrunk. In fact, there are already three promising Unreal Tournament 3 mods that have not only made the jump over to the UDK but also gone commercial, and curio
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The Journey Down Interview with Theodor Waern

In this interview with main Skygoblin Theodor Waern, who is fresh off releasing the very first chapter of his four-part adventure game series, The Journey Down, we discuss the game?s unique look and feel, Waern?s inspiration for the game and find out more about the role Adventure Game Studio played in the game?s development. We also got around talking about the importance of polish, what makes a puzzle a good puzzle, and Waern’s workflow. In addition to this interview, we have also simultaneou
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The Journey Down ? Chapter 1: Over the Edge Review

Under the moniker of Skygoblin, Theodor Waern, with music provided by Simon D?souza, has written, painted and animated a standout freeware indie adventure that is perhaps most easily described as an amalgamation of three LucasArts classics from the past: Monkey Island, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango. Even if the game does recall the meta-level humour and carnivalesque of the first, the animations and the magnificent meld of 2D/3D of the second, and the stylish ambiance and setting of the third,
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Boiling Point 2 and Precursors in English

Intent stare, intent marketing A few months back, we lamented the fate of Russian developer Deep Shadows? two latest projects, Xenus II (“Boiling Point 2,” or White Gold: War in Paradise, as it would have been called here) and Precursors, two very unique games that unfortunately remained both untranslated and unpublished in the English-speaking world. Thanks to Badmofo?s comment on the original post, however, it came to our attention that fan-made English translations for both games are finall
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New Left 4 Dead DLC: The Sacrifice

This Friday?s Portal 2 GTTV episode also had a brief but promised Left 4 Dead segment to it. Valve?s Chet Faliszek talked with Geoff Keighley to announce the details of the new Left 4 Dead 1 and 2 DLC, called ?The Sacrifice,? to be released free on the PC and on the Macintosh, too. Unlike the previous Left 4 Dead 1 DLC, “Crash Course”, which did so in name only, the forthcoming downloadable content is all about Valve bridging existing gaps in the games’ storyline: ?The Sacrifice? will reveal to
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Open Outcast

Open Outcast is a to-be free total conversion of Crysis Wars, planned as a successor to Appeal?s original 1999 release Outcast, a game that remains in many ways the artistic pinnacle of voxel-based graphics. While Novalogic?s series – Comanche and Delta Force – were always the best-known trumpeters of the technology, and though voxels have been utilized in a far lesser role in various strategy games and even in the level editor of Crysis, it was Outcast that made the world of volumetric pixels a
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