Gaming « Beyond the Iron Sky

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Yes, games are art. And thus part of free speech. Deal with it.

Iron Sky: Operation Highjump gets its game on.

November 4th, 2009 by Jarmo Puskala

It’s time for the makers of the Iron Sky game, the Jyväskylä, Finland based IGIOS, to step out of the proverbial closet. They have released the community pages for the game, titled Iron Sky: Operation Highjump on Wreckamovie, Facebook and Twitter.

You might have heard that someone was already making a game based on Iron Sky – that’s us.

We are looking forward to working together with the WreckAMovie community on a game that will mirror the enthusiasm and creativity seen in Star Wreck and Iron Sky -movies. We, the people behind the production, are fans of the movies as well as gamers, and we have no intention of making another half-assed movie-based game that limits itself to retelling the plot of the movie. Rather, we want to tell a story of our own: one that is related to the one told in the movie, but can also stand on it’s own.

The first task is already up, and so are our brand new pages in Twitter and Facebook (links attached). Welcome aboard, based on the quality of shots in we’ve already seen here in WreckAMovie, we believe that the community here can provide us some great insights and help us make an even better game.

- Matti Delahay, IGIOS

Operation Highjump will be a real time 3rd person action adventure game set in the WWII era. A standalone story in the world of Iron Sky, the plot revolves around a secret underground Nazi base in the Antarctic. Rather than plain vanilla technical and graphic splendour, we aim for good playability, immersive plot content, strong dialogue and atmospheric environments. (Yes, that’s what they all say. But we mean it.) Add a nice big cup of strong, black humour, and you’ve got a general idea of what we’re shooting for.

You can read more about the real-world Operation Highjump at Wikipedia. Also known as “The United States Navy Antarctic Developments Program, 1946-47″, it was a massive naval operation where a taskforce consisting of 4,700 men, 13 ships, and several aircraft sailed to the Antarctic. Officially it was supposed to be a training mission, but conspiracy theories suggest it was a full-blown military operation to wipe out the secret Nazi base in the Antarctic.

Posted in Finland, Gaming, Iron Sky, News | 3 Comments »

Assembly Winter 2009

February 20th, 2009 by Jarmo Puskala

Team Energia is packing themselves into my trusty old Passat and soon we’ll be heading to Assembly Winter 2009 at (ex-)Pirkkahalli.

We’ll be handing out the first issue of The Truth Today and well, actually we’ll be playing! So come and beat the Energia house band at Rock Band and win stuff.

That’s about it I guess, now off to the batcave! See you at Assembly. And as long as the wlan at the party place stays up we’ll be Tweeting.

Posted in Energia, Gaming, News, Travels | No Comments »

War Was Never So Much Fun.

February 18th, 2009 by Antti Hukkanen

I was reminiscing about old games the other day. 1993 was a good year for computer games. It saw the release of UFO: Enemy Unknown, Syndicate, and of course, Doom. And then there was the little gem, undeservedly largely forgotten since, Cannon Fodder. Cannon Fodder was a fun, addictive and very challenging action game, and everything about it shows that the designers had fun putting it together. Witness this promotional music video, featuring the design team and a professional version of the game’s intro song.

The video plays upon one of the …funny… little details in the game: when you shoot and kill an enemy soldier, then shoot at him again, and again, he keeps jumping and twitching and yelling in agony, while little red pixels spray around. Now, the controversy that seems to be a prerequisite of any successful game had nothing to do with the pixelated blood and violence (except in Germany, of course), but rather, the use of the corn poppy (a symbol for WWI veterans) in the title art. This is interesting because this was just one year after Wolfenstein 3D came out – the game that introduced gore to computer games. (The id Software team had tried to do the same one year earlier with Dangerous Dave in the Haunted Mansion, but the graphic violence was vetoed by publisher Softdisk.)

That’s how quickly public opinion changes.

PS. Back to the song! In all honesty, I prefer the tracked version, heard on the game intro on the Amiga – it has more bounce. Unfortunately, the intro doesn’t make for very gripping viewing. But do listen to the song here.

Posted in Gaming, General, History, Videos | 4 Comments »

Star Wreck RPG back in stock!

February 13th, 2009 by Antti Hukkanen

As a result of some recent returns from retailers, the Star Wreck Roleplaying Game is again available from the Wreckstore. Undoubtedly the best commercial roleplaying game ever thrown together in two months, it works both as a parody of Star Trek and SF RPGs, as well as – gasp! – an enjoyable comedy RPG in its own right. The printer-friendly (unillustrated) version is available for free on the game’s website, in case you feel the need for further proof of its awesomeness. But it doesn’t do to delay: we’re aware of no other physical copies still lingering anywhere else except maybe eBay, and aren’t considering printing any.

P.S. I talked with a nice fellow at this year’s Tracon event last weekend, and he mentioned that a RPG based on the side-splitting Tolkien parody Bored of the Rings had game mechanics similar to ours. I was not even aware such a game existed (I can’t speak for Mike, but I seem to recall that the Inability system was my idea initially), and could not find any references with a quick online search. If there’s anyone out there who can comment on this, please do!

Posted in Gaming, General, Star Wreck, The Store | 3 Comments »

Epic fail: Gears of War publisher violates customers with a steamroller.

January 30th, 2009 by Jarmo Puskala

Gears of War designer CliffyB demonstrates Epic customer service.

You might have already heard the news about the pc version of Gears of War. However stupidity of this magnitude deserves every bit of bad publicity it can get.

All legally bought copies of PC’s Gears of War stopped working today. This is because a certificate that the copy protection system uses expired. Now those who have bought the game are unable to play it until the publisher releases a patch – however everyone who has illegally downloaded the game can still play, because the DRM system is cracked in the pirated version.

This is just completely unacceptable. People who support DRM want digital products to have the kind of security physical products have, but they obiously aren’t bothered to carry the same responsibilities that sellers of physical goods have.

Imagine you buy a new coffeemaker – for couple of months you happily make your morning coffees and one morning it just refuses to turn on. You take it back to the shop and want a working one. “Well, sorry”, the clerk says “the anti-theft mechanism was accidentlly triggered in all the coffee makers. We can’t replace it, but just take it home and somebody will come and fix it sometime”. Now that wouldn’t happen would it? When you buy something you expect that the seller doesn’t turn it off in a couple of months because it might have been stolen. You would take it back and if all the other coffee makers were broken as well they’d have no option to give you your money back. And I would bet you’d never buy that brand of coffee maker again.

So in pretty much any other field of commerce a seller that screws it’s customers over this bad would suffer huge losses and go out of business. However you can do this with computer software and just expect the people to take it and buy the sequel too.

And some people want DRM to be applied for movies as well. Soon you might be in the situation that if you want to pay for a movie you can’t expect to actually watch it. You get the license to watch it if the DRM system works, if the publisher doesn’t go out of business and if they don’t think there were more than two people in the living room watching it.

The bottom line:This is just is stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, oh it hurts, stupid, stupid, please make the stupid stop, stupid, stupid, stupid. And did I mention this is stupid?

Posted in Gaming, Opinions, Piracy | 3 Comments »