Splash Damage’s solid team-manshoot Brink has been out for a million years by now, of course. Except if you live in land of chaotic weather and fine tea known as the UK and like to buy your PC games via Steam, in which case it’s only just come out. Our inquiries into why it’s been missing from Brit-Steam for so long have only ever been met with no comments, but whatever the problem was (a disagreement with Steam ToCs? Something to do with keeping retailers happy? A mountain goat chewed an important cable? We can but speculate.)

Well, now it’s back. Why? We don’t know. Too late to mean much? We don’t know. All we know is that a) it’s back and b) it’s discounted by 25% for the time being, which means the price is an eminently reasonable £22.49 (which is still dearer than retail). Free DLC’s due soon, so maybe now’s a decent time to take its bytes and force them onto your hard drive if you haven’t already.

Brink DLC is coming soon. It is called Agents Of Change>. That’s it up there in the image. The news about it is this: it will be free on Steam for the first two weeks, say Bethesda, and will appear at some point> in July. As previously mentioned, the DLC will include “two all-new environments, five new player abilities, two new outfits, and two new weapon attachments.” (We asked about why it’s not on Steam in the UK, incidentally, and got a “no comment”. It seems to still be missing, so that remains an oddity.)

Anyway, Splash Damage are reportedly still at work on new balancing changes for weapons, and other patch stuff to improve the game. I might knock up an RPS game of this at the weekend, if anyone fancies it. Join the Steam group for clever notifications!

Update: LulzSec have released what they claim to be everything they took from Bethesda, including source code and admin passwords, except for the 200,000 user details which they say they’re leaving out because, “We actually like this company.” (They also claim to have broken into senate.gov, and paste this as proof. That should bring them some dark-glassed attention.)

LulzSec, who have claimed responsibility for many of the gaming hacks of late, have announced they’ve had access to Bethesda/Zenimax’s data for a couple of months, and are planning on releasing details today. They’ve been winding up BethSoft all day, threatening to release details of a number of games, including Brink. However, in their usual way, they are suggesting they’ll go easy on them because “we love Call of Cthulhu.” They rather spuriously suggest this is motivated by a lack of details on Skyrim, but even if they received some, plan “to embarrass you anyway.”

(more…)

I miss demos. I miss them so much. I wouldn’t be here, writing these words, if it weren’t for demos: how else could a sport-fearing, skinny young misery with only the slightest pittance for pocketmoney have found his way into playing video games? Once, my bedroom was littered with floppy discs, each and every one of which had at some point led to me standing outside a game shop, counting pennies with a quivering hand, praying I had enough.

Granted, magazines were the gateway drug back then, when there was no way to watch a trailer or scour Facebook for new screenshots, but later in life the web too seemed an infinite fount of sampled digital delights, and led to any number of purchases of those games that seemed the most absorbing – or simply because the demo ended, apparently expertly, at a point which left me urgently hungry for more. Those days are gone.
(more…)

Bethblog had the details on this late last week, and it looks promising for the PC version of Brink, with fixes to the server browser, the dedicated server, and some minor bugs. The weirdo sound bug on certain maps has been fixed, and also: “Graphical performance has been improved, especially when using Ambient Occlusion. We’ve worked closely with both AMD and NVIDIA, and you should see performance and stability improvements in future driver revisions from both parties.” No exact date yet, but it should be this week. I’ll make sure I schedule games on the servers when it’s all updated so we can take a look at the improvements.

We’ve got a UK server in London and a US server in Chicago. And we’re going to have some evenings manshoot on there. More details below.
(more…)

Playing Brink this weekend made me worry. But not about the usual things. I was worried that there would never be another way to experience the details of its world – no possibility for further exploration of the Ark and its precarious situation. This isn’t something I normally think about when faced with a multiplayer shooter. I certainly had no interest in finding out more about the world of Quake III, or Battlefield 2, because nothing in them really inferred anything outside those isolated battlegrounds. Their conflicts were their world entire. Not so with Brink, and, now that I come to think of it, a few other worlds, too. I begin to wonder whether game fictions might be too readily disposable>.
(more…)

Brink is here, and we’ve been playing it. We’ve even got some servers up. But what do Alec, Jim, and Quintin actually think about it? Let’s find out.

Jim: Brink then, the long-awaited multiplayer shooter from British devs Splash Damage. Everyone had a bit of a play?

Quintin: I have shot so many men.
(more…)

Brink is out now in the US and apparently out in the UK tomorrow. We’ve spent the last couple of days playing it, but you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for our full critical verdict. Nevertheless I thought I’d say a few things tonight, including venting my frustration with a critical bug, and providing you with our server details for US and UK-based Brink servers. Read on for a mixed bag of information!

(more…)