Unreal Engine 3 on Steam and Sonic gets physics

WHAT BETTER WAY to waste away a weekend than with gaming news, from the large to the small, upcoming to free now. We bring you Sonic and Havok, lots of Steam and open betas from Techland.

Lets start out with the bouncy blue hedgehog from Sega, Sonic. The original Genesis versions were a blast because of the unbridled speed and, well, bounciness. They were games rather than psuedo epic cutscenes with choose your own adventure gameplay to string them together. They were simply fun.

They were also quite simple, with much of the physical interactions of the first physics sim, Pong. The news that Sega just licensed Havok for the physics in the upcoming Sonic game is enough to make me drool. Lets just say Sonic plus physics is potentially a match made in heaven. If Sega does right here, and I think they will jealously protect their franchise, count me in.

That brings us to Techland, a company you have probably never heard of. They make a western shooter called Call of Juarez, kind of like Doom meets Deliverance judging by the trailers on the site. If you want to play out some of that multiplayer Deliveranc style fun and hijinks, there is a free beta of the multiplayer maps here.

That brings us to the big one of the day, Steam. I have been ranting about how Steam is about to take over the world for a while now, and this just proves the point in a little more details. They signed up Activision, Naked Sky, Monte Christo and Majesco to the master plan.

Roboblitz is the production version of Robohordes, and as far as I know is the first Unreal Engine 3 (no Core, that is an Intel thing) game to be released. In any case, it is a lot of fun, go buy three copies.

One game that is much more fun is Double Fine/Majesco's Psychonauts. This game has been universally ignored, but is a #(*$&# blast. If you take my advice and buy more than one copy of Roboblitz, you should get at least 12 copies of Psychonauts. Trust me, you won't be disappointed.

That brings us to Monte Cristo and their game City Life, basically a Sim City-esque game. I have no clue how good it is, but there haven't been many stinkers on Steam so far.

Speaking of which, there are a host of other smaller games from other rinky dink companies that recently made their steam debut. Call of Duty, CoD United Offensive, CoD 2 and GunT are all there from some outfit called Activision. I think they made a dragster game for the 2600 back in the day too.

Basically, Valve is on a roll with Steam. These latest games are a huge coup for the company, and only make the momentum harder to slow. It will be very interesting to see who comes next. µ