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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

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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X-COM: The Re-Imagining

The reports of an X-COM remake have finally been confirmed by 2K Games, with a bit of a twist. XCOM, a “re-imagining” of the classic MicroProse series, is an FPS under development not at Irrational Games – as the unrelenting rumour went – but at 2K Marin, the studio behind BioShock 2. XCOM is the re-imagining of the classic tale of humanity’s struggle against an unknown enemy that puts players directly into the shoes of an FBI agent tasked with identifying and eliminating the growing threa
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When Are Bad Ideas Good Ideas? Goats vs Nazis and Dropsy

Kickstarter, bless ‘em, have made possible many projects that would have been much, much harder for indie developers to initiate only a few measly years ago. We’ve seen plenty of really interesting projects receive funding via the platform, including Kentucky Route Zero, Octodad 2, Star Command and Blade Symphony. Goats vs Nazis, then, is the latest game project to kickstart their development with the platform. I don’t even know where to start – or end, for that matter. Certainly, Goats vs Naz
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What Was Icarus? BioShock Infinite

The over-speculated and hotly anticipated Irrational Games project that was to be revealed today? BioShock Infinite. The announcement of the latest game in the BioShock franchise, slated to launch on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC in 2012, seems to belong to the category of ?expect the expected:” As we all turned to the unexpected (Freedom Force, SWAT, X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter, Kingdom Hearts or Yar?s Revenge), I don?t think many of us really did see the new BioShock game coming – not one
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What is Icarus?

The past week has seen some irrational behaviour on a strange teaser site, whatisicarus.com. Initially there was nothing to see but a smoky background and a single grey spot, not much of a tease. But sharp visitors noticed that the white spot changed position every day, making a slow but deliberate migration around the page. It was a few days before the overall shape was discerned: a figure 8 or vertically-oriented infinity symbol, and the spots looked instead like holes cut out in the black, re
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Welcome To Earth

The Mass Effect series is on its way to becoming an epic trilogy, perhaps the most cohesive trilogy in games if it achieves what it set out to do. BioWare first introduced the sci fi saga in 2007, with a promise of a story that would span three games, each a self-contained episode of a much larger overarching tale. Moreover, they promised a personalized experience that recognized the player’s decisions along the way and shaped the world and events around those decisions, right up to the conclusi
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Warframe Starter Guide for Plains of Eidolon

Warframe is huge right now – and for good reason – after their latest big update, Plains of Eidolon, has come out. It is indeed a fantastic update to a fantastic game. If you are thinking about jumping in, here are 12 important things about Warframe you absolutely need to know before starting out. 1. Warframe is really, truly free Warframe is free to play. Really! Make no mistake: If you want, you’ll never have to pay a single dime. It is common for the games press to make the mistake of thi
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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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Versioning Guybrush Threepwood

LucasArts have been curiously posting old concept art revisions on a Facebook page dedicated to the forthcoming Monkey Island 2: Special Edition. Four scrapped versions of your favourite leading man, Guybrush Threepwood, have appeared so far: My question is, which of these discarded Guybrushes would have been your favourite? View PollFor a completely different type of comparison, you can check out our earlier post that juxtaposes old and new cover artwork from the game. </img> </im
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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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Transformers: War for Cybertron Rolls Out June

It’s been a while since we last had a look at Transformers: War for Cybertron, and since then there has been some good media released that gives us a good look at the gameplay. G4TV has a developer walkthrough narrated by Matt Tieger from High Moon Studios, demonstrating the game with Optimus not-yet-Prime. As the earlier previews suggested, the game really does take a lot from the Gears of War series, and plays like a tight third person shooter. There is more to the basic formula with the addi
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Top Five Left 4 Dead 1/2 Custom Campaigns

In August 2010, Chet Faliszek announced Valve would begin to rotate biweekly custom-made campaigns on the official servers of Left 4 Dead 2: Every two weeks we are going to feature a new community campaign on our servers. We will feature one campaign at a time to make it is easier to find games. We?ll be keeping it featured for two weeks so people can familiarize themselves with the maps for competitive play. Though we wholeheartedly agreed with Valve on their choice to start their campaign
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There Is Something In The Sky

E3 2011 is in just over a week, which is just enough time for me to catch us up on some games that I am very much looking forward to. We’re just about halfway through the year and there have been some great titles already, but some of my most anticipated releases are yet to come. We’ll start with one that has recently had a fresh round of press coverage ahead of its E3 showing. The last time we looked at Irrational Games’ BioShock Infinite, Martyn walked us through the newly unveiled teaser tra
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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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The Whispered World Week

Note: This is Day 1 of “The Whispered World Week” at The Slowdown. Check back for more tomorrow! Cover Art This week, after a brief stretch of inactivity, The Slowdown prepares to turn its knobs to full blast with five days solely dedicated to the German-made, apocalyptic fantasy point and click adventure, The Whispered World! I consider this week, from the 19th to the 23rd, just as much a return to my gaming roots – the adventure game genre – as it is a gesture towards the game’s only true
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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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The Secret History of the Whispered World

Note: This is Day 2 of “The Whispered World Week” at The Slowdown. Check back for more tomorrow! Nothing is permanent in this wicked world – not even our troubles. –Charlie Chaplin Sometimes pictures are worth a thousand words. Other times, a video is worth these thousand words; once in a while, though, there comes a time when neither pictures, videos nor a thousand words can accurately portray a story. One such story, in more than one way, is that of The Whispered World, an apocalyptic f
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The Samaritan Paradox Review

<p><b>The Samaritan Paradox</b>, a relatively new commercial AGS adventure game by <a href="http://faravidinteractive.wordpress.com/">Faravid Interactive</a>âs Peter Ljunkvist, published by <a href="http://www.screen7.co.uk/">Screen 7</a>, is a story about a story. A refreshingly Swedish one, too. The gameâs protagonist, Ord Salomon – âordâ is Swedish for âwordâ – is a shut-in PhD student of literature, rotting away at a failing thesis, with worried frie
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The Samaritan Paradox Review

The Samaritan Paradox, a relatively new commercial AGS adventure game by Faravid Interactive’s Peter Ljunkvist, published by Screen 7, is a story about a story. A refreshingly Swedish one, too. The game’s protagonist, Ord Salomon – ‘ord’ is Swedish for ‘word’ – is a shut-in PhD student of literature, rotting away at a failing thesis, with worried friends, until he chances upon the daughter of a prominent dead Swedish author. Salomon, a hobbyist cryptographer obsessive-compulsive about signs,
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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 Not-So Silver Lining

Lost at the Sea Fan games based on more or less commercially viable licenses have always faced the unenviable task of navigating the stormy, abbreviated seas of C&D and DMCA all the while keeping a low enough profile to avoid the aforementioned corporate shallows, at the same time maintaining a public enough face to attract necessary fan interest. Some projects, like Indiana Jones & The Fountain of Youth and AGDInteractive’s remakes have surprisingly managed to stay afloat; others,
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