Official comms from the surface of ManiaPlanet indicate that ShootMania has received a new update containing the ‘Arrow’ weapon. After re-tuning our vox equipment and asking for a repeat of the message, we can confirm that ShootMania is not infact jumping on the archery band-wagon, but offering the Arrow gun indroduced in the Combo add-on for use in all game modes.
I didn’t expect to love Shootmania Storm quite as much as I do. But, after playing the beta fairly extensively, I have news. This game is good. And as it’s freely available in open beta right now, you should at least try it.
I say ‘comes to’; really I mean ‘goes to’, out there in the desert. But while IPL may be far away from our UK bunker, the jarred heart of PCGamesN is marked ‘eSports’, and beats ever faster whenever one of us mentions the Sin City shindig.
Is it in its guns? Oh no that's just bullets. Is it in its maps? Oh no that's just vaguely neo-Aztec architecture, I think. (Shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot) oh if you wanna know what makes the latest ShootMania update so nice, it's in its grappling hooks. Yes, the second phase of Nadeo's eSports shooter has proper grappling hooks, and I've got Cher stuck in my head.Our Spotlight units plug content our journalists have made, that our advertisers want to promote. Sometimes the promotion is paid for, but the content they go to is always independent with no client oversight or approval.
The IGN Pro League just announced that it will play host to a ShootMania Storm tournament at its IPL 5 event in Las Vegas at the end of November, where six teams of three will compete over a $100,000 prize pool.
I once delved into Hammer with all the well meaning innocence of the canary in the coal mine and came out more than a little ruffled. As powerful a map building tool as Valve's own level editor is, it's more than a little counter intuitive for most users. That's why I let out a sigh of relief when I saw the below video for Shootmania Storm's map editor: a drag-and-drop, what-you-see-is-what-you-get sandbox funbag. It makes sense. It looks simple. It even looks a little fun. Check it. Check it right out.
ShootMania Storm, Nadeo’s community driven eSports FPS with buildable levels and all sorts of tournament features, is going to be (mostly) Free to Play, Ubisoft has announced. Essentially you get a stripped down version of the game if you don’t pay, but a whole raft of features if you do. Which sounds pretty Free to Play to me.
I'm already playingShootMania, Nadeo's surprising adjunct to their TrackMania series, and they've just announced that if you want to get involved you can sign up at their site. Weirdly for a 'Closed Beta', everyone that signs up is guaranteed a spot: the beta sign-up period is open until July 2nd.
Mania is right. In the few hours I've been fiddling with the ShootMania: Storm alpha, the surprising lurch into the FPS genre by driving game developers Nadeo, I've developed a kind of need. It makes me angry, as all twitch games do, but instead of rage-quitting, I wait the brief moment it takes to respawn and get back to the fight. It turns out it's lots of fun.
Whether they be drenched in wubwubs, besotted with Inception-esque brawngs, edited together by an ADHD lab-chimp or just grossly misrepresentative of the final product, everybody loves a good old-fashioned videogame trailer. I've gone ahead and pulled together the biggest PC game trailers of E3 and laid them all side by side, to save you wandering all over the internet and potentially getting hurt. Some of them are brilliant.
Ubisoft's E3 presentation was the most interesting of a truly terrible bunch, rescuing E3 for me. But while everyone is talking about the incredible Watch Dogs, I squeed a bit over Shootmania, even though the presentation didn't show the game off in the best light. What was missing?
