Update: Hasbro have now clarified their previous comments, claiming they were made "in error":
“To clarify, comments that suggest Transformers games have been lost were made in error. We apologize to Activision and regret any confusion; they’ve been great partners, and we look forward to future opportunities to work together.”
Original story: Transformers owners Hasbro have said they would like to see older video games based on the beloved toy franchise to make a return - except those games are lost somewhere on a hard drive inside Activision.
]]>Oh, how it pains me to say this. If you felt you could have waited an eternity to get around to playing Fall of Cybertron, War For Cybertron or Devastation, that trypticon of broadly well-received, Activision-published Transformers third-person shooters, I've got bad news.
Here's a hint: they've been removed from Steam, plus all other digital marketplaces - as have subsequent and worse sequels. This is bad comedy.
]]>We don’t do scores on RPS, but sometimes we mourn for the inability to deploy a 7/10. The ur-score, the most double-edged of critical swords, the good but not great, the better than it deserves to be, the guilty pleasure, the bungled aspiration, the knows exactly what it is, the straight down the line. One score that can mean so much.
There is one particular type of 7/10 game that heralds joy, not disappointment: the solid, maybe ever so slightly wonky action game with no interest in being anything more than a solid action game.
]]>Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.
Most Transformers games are awful, which isn't enormously surprising given we're talking about annual shooty-bang ties-in for bottomlessly stupid movies based on a toyline from the 1980s. But said toyline did inspire some excellent comics - including the current More Than Meets The Eye - so it's not a given that retro-geek nostalgia about giant shapeshifting robots has to be appalling. Until this year's cel-shaded brawler Devastation, Fall of Cybertron was about as good as got it (at least on PC - the old PS2 Transformers: Armada is extremely ambitious), in part because it embraced lore and classic characters in a way that earlier games hadn't, but mostly because it managed a sense of scale. This last is particularly suprising given that FOC was not set on Earth and did not feature any tiny squishy humans to contrast against the Cybertronians' immense scale.
]]>Sometimes in this absurd job I catch myself in the mirror, notice what I'm doing and have to tell myself to stop. I did that around three hours into Rise of the Dark Spark. I've played a great many games that are a great deal worse than this mostly recycled new Transformers game from Activision, but the reason this one had me sneering at myself is due to knowing that I played it only because I felt I should.
]]>Three or four years ago, I would have fallen to my knees and begged for a Transformers MMO. Today I would not, which is partly because I feel totally burned out on MMOs and partly because my knees increasingly make this unpleasant clicking noise if I bend them too abruptly. But you can be damned sure I'll at least have a big old fiddle with the character creator in Jagex's upcoming Transformers Universe even if the long-haul of levelling and whatnot is too galling.
Get a look at the first proper in-game footage below. Spoilers: robots.
]]>Hmm, this looks like old news, since the DLC has been out for a bit, but since we are the PC's premier site for Transformers news, I feel duty-bound to post it: below is a trailer for Fall Of Cybertron's Dinobot DLC. As you might expect, it allows you to play the lizardly Transformers in multiplayer. It also contains retro Optimus Prime, insecticons (I think? - I originally mistyped that as "invectobots", which would a different type of transformer entirely) and some other robo-stuff.
For a transformative opinion on the game's multiplayer, you can read Alec's verdict here. He also held forth on the single player.
]]>Last week I told you all about Transformers: Fall of Cybertron's barrage of fanservice that is its singleplayer mode, and now here are some thoughts on its team-based multiplayer.
No posturing Megatron-Optimus stand-offs or piloting of walking cities here: multiplayer is a completely different game, as is so often the case for shooters. While the campaign involves running and blasting easily-dispatched drones as an improbably self-regarding soundtrack booms and familiar faces jabber gags and exposition, FoC's multiplayer is actually about transforming.
]]>Third-person shooter Transformers: Fall of Cybertron was released yesterday in North America, but due to a last-minute bait and switch is still a couple of days off in the UK. I've cannoned my way through the singleplayer campaign, which I can tell you about below. A multiplayer report will follow, by the way - at the moment, the staggered release date and attendant timezone issues are styming me from being able to get any games in, but that will change very soon.
]]>I suspect Peter Cullen could tell me he'd just murdered my mother, eaten my cat in a sandwich and set fire to my feet and I'd feel impossibly comforted, just so long as he did it in his Optimus Prime voice. It's that and many more giant robot-based, entirely unbreakable associations with childhood joy and wonder which means I'm excited to a slightly alarming degree about the sequel to a distinctly average action game. Launch trailer below, and, perhaps more usefully, some details on how to make the previous game, War For Cybertron, a whole lot less bland.
]]>The eternal six-year-old in me is quite excited about Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, even though I am well aware I should have moved on to grown-up's things by now. Well, someone make me a videogame about a cheese and wine party or paying the electricity bill and I guess I'll play that too. First though, I wish to heed the call of the last of the Primes. Well, more specifically I want to play as Soundwave and Shockwave, but I suppose I can endure being the namby-pamby Autobots too. FOC has had a strange path to PC, having been initially denied to this platform after the devs admitted they didn't have time to do it well (which was presumably the case for the perfunctory War For Cyberton PC port), before an additional studio, the venerable but little-known Mercenary Technology, was drafted in to make a dedicated PC edition of the robo-biff sequel. Concrete details on just what PC-specific improvements/features it'll have are out, and it gives me hope that it might light our darkest hour.
]]>The latest trailer for Transformers: Fall Of Cybertron is the one most likely to set giddy hearts racing, for it shows both dinobots and the enormous Metroplex in action, fighting and punching. There's an inspirational voice-over from Optimus Prime, too, which is something everyone needs to listen to when they're eating their wheaty breakfast. No illusions about this game being a big dumb firework display, but sometimes exploding robots of updated nostalgia is enough.
The game arrives in August.
]]>Transformers: Fall of Cybertron is coming out on PC after all, which means I now have free rein to get all over-excited about it - even if I am worried by all the grey corridors of its predecessor and the terrible choice of music in the below trailer. But, sound and pre-renderness aside, gosh! What a lot of fan service is in here. It's got all my favourites - Shockwave, Bruticus, the Dinobots, Metroplex.... All that's missing is my beloved psychopath Galvatron, my old, poorly-painted miniature model kit of which you can see above. Of course, they'll need to kill off Megatron to get him in, but as technically FoC is a prequel to the familiar Transformers crashed-on-Earth-and-started-fighting-again tale I guess that can't happen. Boo! They could go down the nu-comics route of making Galvy an entirely different character, but that's just stupid. STUPID!
ANYWAY. Trailer! Exciting robots! Awful music! An Autobot the size of a city! Also on PC! Please have wide-open areas like this video suggests!
]]>So I haven't actually played Transformers: War For Cybertron, but Alec liked "the bit where the robot punched the other robot." If there is a more ringing endorsement - aside from, hypothetically, "it let me punch, kick, crush, blast, boil, mash, blend, throw the sun at, and gravely insult Shia Labeouf" - I've yet to hear it. For the longest time, however, its upcoming sequel was confined to the robo-space-planet of Consoletropolistopiatron, because developer High Moon Studios felt it wasn't capable of delivering an up-to-par port. Fair enough - given that War's port was a bit shoddy. Still though, nothing isn't generally better than something. So now, High Moon's passing the baton that turns into a fully featured kitchen off to the aptly named Mercenary Technology.
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