Command & Conquer: Renegade is an often forgotten part of the C&C series. Whilst we all remember the first Tiberium Wars and Red Alert and their subsequent sequels, Renegade seldom gets mentioned. I must admit I never played it that much even though I quite enjoyed it, but at the time I never had the cash to buy the game. Soon though, you will be able to play it again but in a modern graphics engine in the form of Renegade X.
The Mandate caught my eye a few days ago and media interest has significantly grown around it these last few days, with people like TotalBiscuit and Angry Joe endorsing it. Taking a look myself I too find myself very intrigued at the possibilities of this game. The Mandate is a sandbox RPG in space where you captain a Mandate starship with a full crew that you must recruit, nurture and command properly in performing your duty as Captain of this starship.
When X Rebirth was announced a couple of years ago, I was very excited. I love the X games. They were sometimes a buggy, overly complicated mess but by the time you get to X3: Terran Conflict or Albion Prelude, what you get is quite a polished, complex and involving space simulator where you can build up an entire empire of stations and fleets of ships to defend or expand with. Its even better with some of the awesome mods that the community has created for it. So I was understandably very happy about a new X game rebuilt from the ground up. I pre-ordered it without much thought at the expensive price of £40. Oh my, what a mistake that was.
Continue reading X Rebirth Review – I’m Done With Pre-orders
How often have you had a moment of pure awesome during a game that you wish you could’ve recorded for posterity? It’s not practical to simply constantly record what you’re doing like Fraps because of the big performance drop which can have an adverse effect on gameplay and the massive amount of data that Fraps has to write. You’d soon be out of disk space if you just kept recording everything you did! Enter ShadowPlay. Though it can record manually like Fraps, the key feature of ShadowPlay is hinted at in the title. Released as part of the GeForce Experience software, it’s currently in beta and has some work ahead of it, but so far I’m very impressed with its capabilities.
By now all of you should be aware of the still-unfolding disaster that is EA’s SimCity. And if not, what rock have you been hiding under? Its yet another example of EA screwing their customers, attempting to completely control every aspect of what you do, primarily so they can make as much money from you as possible. It could be this time EA have finally gone too far, but we’ll have to wait and see how this saga will unfold over the next few days. In any case, I feel like this is an excellent opportunity to compare how games should be developed and how you actually should engage with your customer base if you want ensured success and longevity for your product. For this I shall be looking at Bohemia Interactive (BI) and their upcoming title Arma 3.
Ahhh Homeworld, possibly my favourite game of all time next to Half-Life. It was a very unique RTS when it came out and for some reason remains a very unique RTS even today because to my knowledge, no-one has done anything quite like it since. Homeworld first appeared in September 1999 and spawned two more games, Cataclysm and the sequel Homeworld 2. All three were lauded for their design, storytelling, music and overall production. Homeworld 2 was released in 2003 and since then… nothing. Homeworld has essentially been sat on by the various companies that have owned its IP over the past 10 years. Homeworld 3 is something many space/RTS lovers want but has been nothing but a pipe dream and the franchise looked to be long dead and buried. But now there is hope where once there was none as the now bankrupt THQ starts selling off its various IPs including Homeworld…
WARNING!! This review contains plot spoilers!!
You may remember that I covered some news about this game about three months ago. Back then it certainly looked promising, with the devs making bold statements that this would be “space combat reborn”, taking inspiration from classic flight sims like the X-Wing series, Wing Commander, Freelancer and so on. Strike Suit Zero (SSZ) was finally released on January 23rd and I immediately picked it up on Steam. It’s been a long time since I last saw a decent space flight sim and I was eager to jump straight into it. So does the game hold up to the promise of being space combat reborn? In a word… no.
What I think many of us have suspected for some time now has been confirmed. Gabe Newell has confirmed that Valve are working on Source 2. Ambushed by a group of 4chan members on his birthday, they presented Gabe with a physical Mann Co box as his birthday present for which he had to pay the usual fee you need to pay to open the boxes which amused me no end. Gabe being Gabe took it all in good humour and after the celebrations, spent some time answering their questions which gave us some very interesting information.
Blizzard have finally given us a release date for the next chapter of the Starcraft series, Heart of the Swarm, and about time too. So mark your calendars up for March 12th 2013. It’s already been well over two years now since Blizzard first released Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty and quite frankly I’m surprised it’s taken Blizzard this long to release the next chapter. I know there are balance issues to address for the very competitive multiplayer side of things and of course you want to make sure the story is up to the same quality as the last instalment, but really three years between releases? Being the skeptical, cynical sort I can only assume its Blizzards way of milking our wallets as much as possible. Of course I’m not a developer either so what do I know?
These past few weeks have given us a remarkable number of new space sim titles where previously the genre was pretty devoid of anything new or decent (see Strike Suit Zero and Star Citizen for more info). And this trend continues with another blast from the past, the Elite series. I only ever played Frontier Elite II which came out in 1993, but I remember how awesome it was. It was the first space sim I had played which had such an open and free-form sandbox world where you could go and do whatever you wanted. Now one of the original creators of the game, David Braben, has announced a Kickstarter project to attempt to revive this once great series. And whilst I welcome this news with caution, I’m actually rather concerned.