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.
Shootmania Storm is out today. I think it’s a fantastic game; a competitive twitch shooter set in an overloaded neon castle. It’s unusually player-friendly in these modern times: it’s got a fully fledged and easy to use level editor, it doesn’t shove microtransactions down your throat, and it has a rare degree of connectivity, allowing you to compete in leagues and league tables against competitors across the world.
But it’s also unusually precise, a game designed with a fine scalpel. There are no needless mechanics in Shootmania Storm; there’s no fat or waste. There’s no crouch button. Weapons auto-swap when you run over them. There are only a handful of weapons. There’s no experience points or prestiging. It’s a beautiful, brilliant design.
In a multiplayer zeitgeist warface-painted for so long in the muddy colours of military facade, Shootmania has been a harder sell that it might have been. In Nadeo’s new opus, there are no tangos to down, no ironsights to raise, and no smoke grenades to lob. But spend a minute or so in the company of its launch trailer, and you’ll believe you don’t need any of that bumph.
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.
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Nadeo’s ManiaPlanet titles are on the verge of a Steam release, the good people at Steam Apps Database have discovered. Standing stage right before the curtain's hitched up are minimalist multiplayer FPS number Shootmania Storm and the free to play component of racing sequel Trackmania 2, Stadium.
Awesome news everyone, Nadeo have launched the open beta for their excellent-looking Shootmania Storm. Right this very moment, this moment that you are wasting reading a sentence constructed of multiple sub clauses, sub clauses which you could argue add needless complexity to what should otherwise be an extremely simple and direct sentence, you could be better spending your time downloading and playing Shootmania.
IGN, owners of annual pro-gaming tournament IPL and biggest games site in the world, have been acquired by publisher Ziff Davis.
Ubisoft has announced that Nadeo's pre-gamer oriented shooter, Shootmania release date has slipped to April.
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.
One day I will write an entire feature solely in dubstep. It'll just go WUB WUB BRRRR zzzz wupwupwup or something. Which is pretty much how I sound when I talk anyway. Click through to see another ShootMania trailer showing off some of the new features and a variety of rather snappy moves.
John “TotalBiscuit" Bain is one of gaming’s premier video personalities and an increasingly prolific caster and eSports commentator. He was at IPL5 to cast StarCraft 2 and a bit of Shootmania, but also to support the brand-new eSports team he recently started with his wife Genna “Intricacy" Bain: Axiom eSports. 
Getting off the flight to Las Vegas from Boston, the man in my row starts talking to an older woman. They are both regulars in Vegas, and they reminisced about hotels and casinos while the rows ahead slowly emptied. There’s one they both liked but (and here the woman sighs wistfully), “It’s moved farther down The Strip since the old days. I haven’t been back in years."
IPL5's happening in Vegas, and it's all Starcraft 2 this, League of Legends that and Pina Colada the other. You know what it's like. But there's also Nadeo's nifty FPS, built from the ground up for eSport play. While the game isn't released until January 23rd next year, IPL marks its very first tournament - with a prize pot of $100,000.
This weekend saw the 2012 E-Sports World Cup draw to a dramatic close, with tournament finals taking place across Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, Trackmania Canyon, Trackmania Nations, Shootmania Storm and Starcraft 2. Winners spilled out of the ESWC arena like Coca-Cola from a Mentos-infused bottle, spraying sticky world champions all over the ceiling. But who are these freshly crowned wundermenschen? Let's take a look at them.
TrackMania developers Nadeo will be putting all their weight behind ShootMania and hope that their forthcoming build-your-own-battlefield shooter will bring FPS games back to prominence in esports. Speaking to designer Florent Castelnerac about his hopes for the game, and the audience of 12 million TrackMania 2 players that Nadeo can already lay claim to, I asked why the developer didn't try to push TrackMania itself more as an esport. There is a "loneliness when you practice" racing games, he said.
Welcome to this week’s round-up of PCGamesN’s biggest news and best stories of the last seven days. We've got Spitfires in Burma, dogfights in space, and a slew of important patches for some of our favorite games.
French developers Nadeo reckon they have around twelve million people playing TrackMania now, and who am I to disagree with them? They may well pull a few more into the mix with the forthcoming TrackMania 2: Stadium and the previously announced TrackMania 2: Valley, both of which Nadeo have now said are due "early next year," though no firm date is set. Click through to see videos of cars. Lots of cars. All the cars.
Shootmania: Storm developers Nadeo want to bring the first-person shooter back to esports, not just by giving gamers something that will awaken long dead memories of the classic deathmatch of old, but also by putting tools in their hands that will allow them to create the sort of games that they want to play. Shootmania is more than just a return to the time-honoured, Quake-style deathmatch that was all about leaping and laser guns, it’s also a level editor and modding tool, backed up by an infrastructure developed to support sharing, tournament play and streaming. Nadeo firmly believe that if you build it, they will come.
In the world David Ting envisions, kids don’t just play soccer and basketball on their school playground, or talk about last night’s hockey game at lunch. They talk about last night’s StarCraft match, and describe their favorite strategies for Call of Duty or Street Fighter. They’re not nerds or geeks or any other label you care to slap on them, they’re just kids who love sports.
