Even more Brutal Legend DLC to melt faces with

Metalheads who picked up Doublefine's Brutal Legend on Rocktober 13th have more DLC to look forward to after the previous "Tears of the Hextadon" map pack.

Coming on December 17th, the next installment of downloadable extras includes a lot more than just maps or a guitar. Titled "Hammer of Infinite Fate", the goods within will provide not only aesthetic qualities to the Druid Plow and Eddie Riggs, but the in-game GPS, "Oculus of the Lost", will guide you to all the collectibles that you may have missed or are tearing your hair out trying to find.

Here's exactly what to expect in the Hammer of Infinite Fate DLC pack:

• Three different oufits for Eddie Riggs so that he may travel in style: Mountain Man (which comes with a beard), Black Metal and Zaulia Threads. This also includes seven new patches to rock.
• Four new paint jobs as well as four more upgrades for the Deuce aka the Druid Plow: Oculus of the Lost; the Eye of Sorrow, a weapon that harnesses the power of the Sea of Black Tears and launches black projectiles of doom at enemies; The Disgorger; and the Coiling Maw. No descriptions for the last two but judging by the names alone they would definitely shine better with the gore filter ON.
• Nine new achievements/trophies become available with correlate with the other DLC
• Six new heads for Mount Rockmore, one of which is Tim Schafer himself. The others are stated as being the busts of Rima, Razputin, Dadbat, Hunter, and Kage the Kannonier.
• And not to ignore the already expanded multiplayer, you can also expect four more maps to rock out and summon those burning zepplins on. Look forward to the Altar of Blood, Coiled Remains, Crucible of the Titans and The Amplified Cliffs maps.

December 17th for the PS3 ($4.99) and Xbox 360 (480 MSP), be there or be left in the dust. Of the Deuce, that is.

Brutal Legend: An action-adventure game

Okay, I'm going to come out and say this right now: Brutal Legend is not a Real-Time Strategy game. I repeat, Brutal Legend IS NOT AN RTS.

There are a lot of people confused right now about where BL stands genre-wise and it's really easy to explain and it's perfectly easy to see that it's an action-adventure. But because there are RTS-like elements in the game, and because the whole of the gameplay stemmed from the multiplayer, people are automatically tagging it as an RTS. It's really not, and here's why.

Real-Time Strategy games are exactly what they sound like. You're playing a game as a commander of an army or resistance and you have to use- here's the key word- strategy and planning to set up defenses and prepare for your initial attack on your enemy in order to win the battle. You can't just run out into the field and start attacking- okay, you can, but it may not be a good idea, especially since in most RTS games you would be leaving one part of your operation vulnerable as your army runs to wherever you tell them to. You can't afford to do that or the enemy will exploit that vulnerability in order to win. Whether you're playing against AI or another person it's the same.

Many people would have you believe that the majority of the BL gameplay is RTS based. These people are wrong. In fact, they are so wrong that they are the main cause of everyone crinkling their brows at BL and going, "Well if it's an RTS then I'm not playing it," causing them to miss out on a truly fun game for all the wrong reasons. I am not denying that there are parts of the game that involve RTS-like portions, but what I am saying is that it is not the entire game

Brutal Legend Demothon and more Brutal Legend

The Brutal Legend Demothon was yesterday and it was a blast to watch. This livestream'd inside-look into the makings of Tim Schafer's latest pet project gave a lot of insight and a lot of laughs.

The premise of it was that an ancient god, Ormagoden, contacted Tim via instant message and told him that if there weren't 666 million downloads of the demo (which became available to XBL Gold members on the 24th of September, and all users on October 1st) then everyone in the world would get swineflu.

Here's the video that they just happened to have of the instance:






So in an attempt to avoid world-wide swineflu Tim enacted the official Brutal Legend Demothon, an event that would involve live streaming video from Doublefine Studios, Tim's company which also put out Psychonauts (one of my favourite games which deserves its own post), and time with some of the people behind the making of this metal-tastic game.

If you missed it, sucks for you. But if you were there right as 12pm hit then you and many, many others were anxiously waiting as we saw a Brutal Legend sticker and some random shadows in the background.

Apparently they were having some technical difficulties and didn't get the show started until about 12:30, but that's okay! We fans of metal, as well as video games, were patient as they got their shit together.