It is a time of unexpected occurrences! For one, we’ve written more about Call of Duty this week than we normally do in an entire year. That might be a slight exaggeration, but we tend to provide more coverage of actual gill-endowed, often delicious cod than we do COD. Recently, however, there’s been a fair deal of – gasp – rather interesting news about Activision’s endlessly annualized behemoth. And the latest tidbit? Apparently Infinity Ward’s actually putting a lot of extra work into Call of Duty: Ghosts‘ PC version. WHAT UNIVERSE IS THIS.

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Professor Veronica Marbles, chair of the Serious Person’s Classical History Forum, would almost certainly be outraged by the contents of the video below. It’s almost four minutes of naval combat in Total War: Rome II, you see, and it’s so preposterously crunchy> and wonderfully dramatic that it can’t possibly reflect the reality of wooden ships at war. At one point a pack of smaller ships surround a larger vessel, punching holes out of its hull, like particularly angry jackals swarming across an elephant. Boarding operations resemble terrifying alien invasions, furious creatures pouring from deck to deck with no regard for life or limb. One ship simply chooses to disintegrate> on impact. Surely, Professor Marbles, this was not the way of it? “THE RIGGING IS IMPERFECTLY PORTRAYED”

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When I saw that Dishonored was going to have additional DLC missions I was worried that it might wander off the beautiful path that the original game created. It was all too possible that any additions might seem like bad fan fiction for the original, quite neatly encapsulated, game. Corvo’s story was so complete that would be very odd to see “further adventures of”, or anything of that ilk. Arkane, of course, chose wisely in this regard. They chose Daud, the troubled master assassin defeated by Corvo in the original game. And Daud, I am beginning to feel, makes for a better experience than Corvo ever could.

The Brigmore Witches, then, is very much worth playing.> (more…)

The Tropico 5 announcement teaser, below, is a re-enactment of a splendid scene from Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. Much like a devilishly handsome sewage worker or agonisingly attractive abbattoir attendant, Chaplin was quite the looker when stripped of the greasy remnants of his trade. Dapper. And he could have been a scruffy hearthrob singer-songwriter too, given the right knitwear and a battered old guitar. Perhaps the same is true of El Presidente, Tropico’s dictator. Trim the beard, swap the uniform for something svelte and scrub away the decades of corruption, and let’s see what we have…OH! If you can still your beating heart, there are details about the game below.

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Hmmm. Well, OK then. So remember how Microsoft is closing down its increasingly irrelevant PC games marketplace once and for all? I would hope so. We just posted about it, like, an hour ago. (Apologies to the rather sizable goldfish portion of our audience; that comment was insensitive.) Well, you’d think that plus a very overt focus on Xbox One would imply total abandonment of our hotrod tech hive art house sector of the gaming industry. But in a legitimately shocking twist, you’d be wrong. Microsoft just hired former Steam director of business development Jason Holtman for one reason and one reason only: “to make Windows a great platform for gaming.”

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Entirely understandably, the bulk of the deservedly rapturous reception to Gone Home has focused on its unseen narrator Sam, a teenage girl who gradually and powerfully documents her timeless emotional and social trials. While it was certainly the dénouement of Sam’s tale that prompted open tears from me and that will, I sincerely hope, see this game reach a wide audience of human beings, there are (at least) three other stories in this short game, taking more of a background role and enjoying no narrator, or indeed any kind of explicit call for attention.

I found a little extra personal resonance in a particular one of these, and it’s that which prompts me to interrupt my sabbatical from work and post about it now. Be warned that here be both spoilers and navel-gazing.> (more…)

UPDATE: Helps if you set the trailer live, eh John?

Seemingly exclusive to Rock, Paper, Shotgun, there’s a new trailer of Might & Magic X: Legacy game footage below. The classic series returns after an eleven year hiatus, and the first act of it will be available to early-buyers on Monday. Yes, Monday! Blimey, that snuck up from nowhere.

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Devolver Digital was kind enough to provide us with ample preview code for Hard Reset developer Flying Wild Hog’s upcoming revival of Shadow Warrior.>

That may have been a mistake.>

I decided to attempt some form of Let’s Play/Blather All Over/Preview thing, and well, I’m new to this. Very, very new. The end result is a mixture of description and discovery that hopefully gets the job done, but with “ums” and “uhs” a-plenty. Also, when I die, just go ahead and carve the phrase “So anyway…” into my tombstone. It’s become abundantly clear that it’s what I wish to be remembered by. Shadow Warrior really is coming along nicely, though. It’s easily the bloodest game to ever bleed blood, and the sword-fu is like fast food chili: chunky, satisfying, and made up primarily of disembodied limbs. I doubt it’ll take home any Game Of The Year awards when the dust settles, but it’s big, loud, and dumb enough (in a sort of smart way) that you should probably take notice. My enthusiasm doesn’t come across as well in the video as I’d have liked, but I did have a fun – though certainly not perfect – time with the couple hours I played. View 30-or-so scattered minutes of it below. (P.S. If you hate my voice, well, it’s actually impossible for you to hate it as much as I do. So!)>

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Thief is a slippery game. When it finally revealed itself, the results were impressive, although I found cause for concern in the City’s lack of character and the potentially staged nature of several encounters. Then there was news of disturbances during development, not altogether surprising considering the length of the job and the size of the team. It was when Nathan played the game and reported back that hope sputtered like the torches in Bafford’s mansion. Today, I’m as surprised as could be that a trailer, with no in-game footage, has restored some confidence and interest. The depiction of class warfare is far from subtle, but there are images reminiscent of the earlier games’ cutscenes, and the City looks recognisably magnificent. Also, release may not be as far off as I’d suspected.

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Games For Windows Live – Microsoft’s heinous piece of burdenware that dragged down even the best of games – hasn’t been much of A Thing for a while, but some vestiges remain. Like the human appendix and pretty much every part of a platypus, however, they don’t really serve a purpose anymore. So the Games For Windows marketplace, which you may remember from such hits as that time they halfheartedly turned it into a Steam clone and that other time it got vomited back into existence by an Xbox? Come next week, it’s history.

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