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A small mod team have been working on a recreation of the original Metal Gear it seems. Cautiously at first because they didn’t wish to tread on the toes of original developers and owners Konami, lest they get into trouble with the company. However, Konami have heard of the project and have now given the team the go-ahead.
The mod team named Outer Haven are making their recreation in a version of Valve’s Alien Source engine and although they’ve started their work, they haven’t really made a lot of progress thus far as they’d been waiting for Konami’s go-ahead. Konami have now let the team ‘fill their boots’ and make their recreation on the condition that it isn’t used commercially (i.e. “you cannot use our copyrighted material to promote a product you are selling or making any profit from ”). As long as Outer Haven stick to that, they are free to proceed.
As they reach out to the wider Internet community to look for more team members to help bring their project to fruition, it’ll be interesting to see just how faithful a recreation they will make.
The last week seems to have brought a lot of game developers out of their trance as far as the question of what will happen to the multiplayer servers of many games after Gamespy is shut down on the 31st of the month. Quite a few games have already had solutions either announced or already put into place. The latest are Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War and Dawn of War II.
Relic have swooped in at the last moment seemingly (although the process actually started last week) to save the original Dawn of War from Gamespy and while Dawn of War II is not supported by Gamespy (rather the Games for Windows system) they’ve decided to set it up with the same new system. In short it means that these games, noted for being progressive games in the RTS genre, will continue to offer multiplayer games after the end of May. And that means all seven titles as well.
Dawn of War’s multiplayer has already been updated to work through Steam instead via a patch offered on May 22nd, but Dawn of War 2’s new system is still a work in progress. Relic say that they expect it to be buggy for a little while, but they couldn’t fathom leaving the players without any sort of multiplayer system for a length of time so release it mostly-finished so they can patch the bugs while still offering players the chance to connect and compete.
The people behind the Natural Selection games are due to move onto their next game, Subnautica. This would usually be a bit of a problem, as there’s still a sizeable community of players for NS2 right now and having the game’s developers working on their new game would mean infrequent updates to the older game. However, Unknown Worlds have come up with a solution.
Thanking the community for their dedication, passion and for keeping the game alive years after release, it was announced today that development of NS2 would carry on through their efforts. “We are happy to announce that Unknown Worlds Entertainment has approved a team of experienced and passionate community members to help carry on the development of NS2 into a potential patch 266 (and hopefully, beyond!).” Which essentially means that the IP has been put in the hands of the players.
The new team has been called “Squad 5” and will be a small team led by two community members called Wasabi and Obraxis. They won’t be paid for their efforts to keep the game alive, but anyone in the community who contributes in a notible way, be it through a bugfix or adding something the game that enhances the core gameplay will get a special Squad 5 badge on their profile to show their involvement. The team is also promising to be transparent with the updates, promising to be seen around talking about changes on podcasts and streams as well as being involved in-game too.
Placing a game’s IP into the hands of the community is a fairly bold move, but it could easily turn out to be a good one as far as updates for the game go. Provided the community can keep itself working together, NS2 could yet have many more years in it.
Growing Pains is a small indie platformer game by Smudged Cat Games with unique game mechanics that is already available on Xbox 360 through the indie channel and is soon to be released on Steam.
In the game you play a small orange creature called the ‘Vessel’ that resembles nothing more than a living ball of orange spiky fur with an eye. The little thing’s very active though, able to jump twice its height (or more if you time the jump upon landing correctly), ‘run’ along the ground at a decent speed and even wall jump which is how you find yourself moving on through the levels most of the time. Oh, and as time ticks by the Vessel is ever so slowly growing, causing levels to become a race against time to complete your task before you get too large to move onto the next section of the level.
The game contains 9 levels, each with 3 difficulty levels. The aim of the levels is the same each time: make your way through the levels without getting stuck or killed by one of the traps as fast as possible, collecting the rainbow-coloured ‘glowsticks’ to open up the ‘gates’ blocking your path at the end of each small room of the level. As noted above, you can run, jump, cling against walls to slow your descent, wall-jump up the wall you’re clinging to and get a higher leap upon landing (although you need to time it just right) to make your way around the rooms and avoid the traps. You can also temporarily stop your growth by holding down a key (default is the ‘o’ key) using up a power gauge shown at the top of the screen or accelerate your growth to allow you to be able to make the height you need to jump (default is the ‘p’ key).
Playing the game I must admit it has elements I like. The concept of completing a task before you grow too large is a good one, and the controls are responsive and smooth. Provided you time it all right it’s possible to leap between two walls close together to climb up a tall vertical part of the map like some sort of limbless athlete, laughing at the spiked ball obstacles in your way. The sounds too are wonderful and the music charming. The game lacks a multiplayer but it does contain scoreboards (one for each difficulty per level, making a grand total of 27 over all) which you can try to get onto the top of and giving the player an excuse to keep trying levels to perfect their jumps and glowstick collection techniques.
However, there are some things that threw me off about the game. One of them is the visuals, with the Vessel being very nicely detailed but other elements such as the glowsticks and the spiked balls being much less so which caused a bit of a weird disconnect for me I’m afraid. This game is also by its nature very hard to get right without a lot of practice and after a handful of failed attempts it did feel a bit hard to want to keep going and complete the level, never mind aim for the leaderboards. The default positioning of the ‘stop growing’ and ‘grow more’ keys also made me feel a bit irritated as the ‘move’ keys are set to ‘a’ and ‘d’ and jump is space, and this sets the growing commands on the opposite side of the keyboard to the other controls which is a bit of a pain when you need to keep them held down while you’re moving about. Fortunately like most games, the controls are rebindable so you can move them if you wish and so this downside is only a niggle at best because of it.
Overall as a game Growing Pains is a decent game, if not quite the best I’ve ever played. The music is good, the visuals are alright and the concept simple but well-executed. I will say this though. If not already available Smudged Cat needs to make and sell plushie versions of the Vessel. I’d buy one, with black button eyes. 😀
Growing Pains is released on Steam tomorrow, May 28th.
Today I decided to take a look at the game T.E.C. 3001. While this game has been on Xbox Live Indie Games for quite a few years, it recently came out on Steam. T.E.C. 3001 is an endless runner game where you play a robot that needs to collect leftover energy for humanity.
There are a few ways to play this game. There is both Singleplayer and Multiplayer modes. Unfortunately Multiplayer is only Local. So there is no playing with friends unless they are in the same room as you. Anyway, in Singleplayer, you can either do the Campaign Mode or the Endless Mode. The Campaign Mode consists of 41 levels which vary between 3 different race types: Speed Run, Drag Race, and Free Run.
The first mode, Speed Run, is a mode where you are set to 3 lanes on a track and you dodge obstacles by just movie left or right. You can also can jump and slide under obstacles as well.
The second mode, Drag Race, has you stuck to the middle of the track, you can’t move left or right. You need to reach the end within a certain time. To do this you need to activate boosts as you run over them. Each time you hit it right you get an extra boost. If you activate it too early or too late you get slowed down. You are also required to jump or slide under obstacles as you run as well.
The third mode, Free Run, is probably the harder of the modes. This mode gives you free movement anywhere on the track. These levels usually have multiple paths you can go, a lot of times making you jump from one path too another to get around obstacles.
You will have to manage your speed on some rounds for if you are going too fast or too slow it can mean the death of you. For example if you are going too fast around a sharp bend you are most likely to go flying off the edge. If you end up being too slow at a certain jump you may not make it to the next platform.
Another way to play the game in Singleplayer is the Endless Mode. This is basically a Free Run mode where you try to last as long as you can. As you go, you end up getting faster and faster till almost everything is just a blur around you.
As I mentioned earlier there is also a Local Multiplayer mode where you can play split screen vs a friend. You can race on all three of the modes in game: Free Run, Drag Race, and Speed Run.
T.E.C 3001 is a good game to hop on and off if you are craving some high octane fun. This game can get frustrating at times when you can seem to beat a level. Some levels, especially the Free Run ones, can be really challenging at times, but when you finally beat them you can’t help but feel a sense of accomplishment. You would most likely find yourself going back to older levels to try to get better scores.
The gameplay, the music, and the general look of T.E.C 3001 make this an awesome game to have in your collection if you are looking for a challenging, high energy game. Also it is pretty cheap ;).
You can buy it on Steam, as well as on the Xbox 360 though the Xbox Live Store.
