2008 Top 10 Teen Electronic Christmas Gifts

E-books officially on the Nintendo DS

2010-07-07T19:29:00.001-07:00

So what's up on the e-book front at Nintendo? E-books on the DS. Imagine, if nothing else, the literacy angle---old-fashioned.

Wii | Alice in Wonderland Impressions

2010-03-04T23:00:00.001-08:00

We fell down the rabbit hole for a first look at Disney's latest adventure, Alice in Wonderland.

Creating a movie-based game is never an easy task, but when that movie is the new Tim Burton adaptation of the well-loved story Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, that job is a serious undertaking. But with the project under the watchful eye of ex-SCEE producer Philip James and with the backing of director Tim Burton, Alice in Wonderland has the potential to be a cut above the usual movie tie-in. We invited James down to our London office for an extended look at the game and heard his thoughts on working on the adaptation.

[ Watch Video ]

Alice in Wonderland is a third-person adventure game that tells the story of Alice: a young girl who falls down a rabbit hole into a wonderful fantasy world populated with strange characters. The game loosely follows the plot of the film, visiting a range of key scenes while also adding new ones. Surprisingly, though, you don't play as Alice. Instead, you take on the role of the inhabitants of Wonderland, who have been tasked with protecting her. Most of the famous characters are playable in the game, including The White Rabbit, The Cheshire Cat, and The Mad Hatter. Each has a unique special ability and attack, which is used to solve puzzles or defeat enemies in battle. The abilities themselves are rather eccentric, but they fit in with the "anything goes" feel of Wonderland. The March Hare, for example, throws cups and saucers at enemies, while the Mad Hatter is able to use the power of perspective to crush enemies between his fingertips.

One of the unique features of the game is the ability to switch among characters at any time and use their combined powers to solve puzzles. We were shown one level set in castle, which required the use of different characters to proceed. We saw the Cheshire Cat come across a set of footpaths, each with a gap in the middle that was too far to jump across. On each side of the gap was a wooden platform on a rope, like a rudimentary set of scales, which had a number of sand bags piled upon it. Highlighting the sand bags with the Wii Remote caused them to change colour, with each colour corresponding to a particular character's ability. In this case, the bags lit up purple, which told us that we could use the March Hare's telekinesis ability to move them off the platform to the other side. This decreased the weight on one platform but added too much to the other. The solution was to switch to the Cheshire Cat and use his invisibility powers to make a larger set of sand bags on the opposite side disappear. This allowed the platform the cat stood on to rise up and give him enough clearance to jump the gap.

All the classic characters make an appearance in the game.

Many of the puzzles play off of the wacky characteristics in Wonderland, allowing you to bend the rules of the real world to come up with some interesting solutions. For example, we saw a variety of objects in the game that were split in half. One way of reassembling them was to drop them into a river. This caused a reflection to be cast on the surface of the water and give the appearance of a whole object, which could be pulled out in its entirety ready to use. The same trick was used with mirrors to rebuild entrances to rooms or open up new areas. The Mad Hatter's perspective ability was also used in a similar way. One puzzle we were shown required the Hatter to cross a large ravine, but the bridge across it had split in two. By aligning the camera just right, it gave the appearance that the bridge was one whole piece, which fixed it and allowed the Hatter to cross. The logic to these solutions makes little sense, but they don't feel out of place with Wonderland's magic doors, shrinking potions, and talking animals.

We were also treated to a demo of the combat in the game and saw several characters duke it out with the card soldiers of Wonderland. Enemies appear at special locations and materialize out of heart-shaped portals, which is similar to how enemies appear in the Zelda games. Attacking is confined to the A button alone, and repeated attacks trigger different moves or combos. You can switch among characters in battle, so you can use the March Hare's cups and saucers attack at long range before moving in with the Mouse's ninjalike attacks to take down enemies at close range. Destroying enemies gains you "impossible ideas," which are used to upgrade your character's abilities. Although your character cannot die, losing all your health strips you of any impossible ideas gained during the battle. Alice is left vulnerable during attacks, and enemies sometimes attempt to drag her away to a portal; if you lose her, it's game over. You're alerted when this happens, so you have to make a mad dash to pull her out again. The art style captures the fantastical nature of Wonderland, but not having seen the film, it's difficult to tell if the developer has its own look or if it was borrowed from the movie's style. The environments look detailed, and lots of lighting effects are used during combat to add to the eye candy. Some of the level designs also look good, with the Mad Hatter's upside-down house being a particular standout. Many of the actors from the film are lending their vocal talents to the game, and we recognised Steven Fry and Barbara Windsor in our demo. Although we didn't get to try it, the game will feature two-player co-op. You will be able to jump in and out of a game at any time, with the action taking place on a single screen rather than being split. Disney told us that there should be over eight hours of gameplay in the final version, and there are collectibles to find throughout.

The Mad Hatter was never one for interior design.

Alice in Wonderland looks like an interesting take on the titular story. Based on what we've seen so far, the puzzle design is clever, and playing as Wonderland's inhabitants seems far more interesting than playing as Alice herself. We're looking forward to getting our hands on the game, which is due for release March 3 on the Wii.

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"Wii | Alice in Wonderland Impressions" was posted by Mark Walton on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 08:56:51 -0800

Wii | Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands First Impression

2010-03-03T23:00:00.001-08:00

We follow the prince on one of his many adventures after Sands of Time in Ubisoft's upcoming adventure game.

The prince has certainly kept himself busy during the seven year gap between the Sands of Time and Warrior Within. Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands on the Wii recounts the story of just one of his many crazy adventures that is different from the events that are being told in the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC version. We met with lead game designer Yanick Piche who walked us through several levels of The Forgotten Sands, as well as showed us some of the prince's new moves, sand powers, and the introduction of cooperative play.

[ Watch Video ]

Ubisoft isn't willing to reveal much about the story because the game begins by throwing you in the midst of a crumbling city, and as you progress through the areas, you'll eventually learn how the prince got there. All we know for now is that he has lost his dagger, and with that, he has lost the ability to rewind time. But the prince has stumbled across a magical artifact, which now grants him special sand powers. A genie will accompany you on your adventure, but unlike Elika who will save you from certain death, the genie hovers around you like Tinkerbell and is most useful when you have a friend playing with you. At any time, a second player can jump in to take over the role of the genie to help you find the right path or highlight important things onscreen you may have missed while performing extensive acrobatic maneuvers.

As you progress through the game, you'll learn three types of sand powers that can be used in combat and to navigate through intricate levels. Instead of looking for the right path to find your way to the next room, this version of The Forgotten Sands is about creating your own path. At first, you'll be limited in terms of what path to take as the game brings you up to speed, but as time goes on, you'll eventually have the freedom to solve the platforming puzzles however you like. The first power you'll receive is the ability to create an anchor (or a ring) that you can put on the surface of any wall to help you scale it or provides a place to latch on and just hang out. In combat, this power will freeze enemies, and you can use it to slow traps, as well as other hazardous moving obstacles. To help you get to higher ground, the second power you'll receive is the ability to form a sand pillar. When enemies run into this pillar, it functions like a trap by bursting and tossing them in the air. The final sand power allows you to create a protective sphere that can suspend you in midair. You can use this to position yourself for another jump in a new direction or save yourself from a potentially disastrous fall. If an enemy runs into you when you're in this shield, it'll freeze him or her temporarily and give you the opportunity to counterattack.

You can only use one sand power at any given time, and there's a quick recharge time in between each use. An example of how to use the powers together was demonstrated when we were faced with a large chasm that had a horizontal pole on one end, making it impossible to reach with just a wall run. We watched as the prince called forth a spiraling sand pillar, wiggled his way to the top, and then created a ring on the wall. After jumping onto the ring, he bounded away from the wall and created a sphere that allowed him to hover in midair. This allowed the prince to turn toward the pole and then pounce safely in the direction of it. Collectibles strewn across the area will give you a hint as to the most ideal way to get across, and energy orbs that fill up a three-orb meter let you restart from the last platform in case you fall; otherwise, you'll be bumped back to the last fountain save point. Because you have the freedom to create your own way, there are plenty of secret areas to find if you decide to wander off the beaten path. So, it's worth it to explore areas that would otherwise be impossible to access without your powers.

Being able to call forth a magic bubble comes in quite handy when you're aiming for hard to reach areas.

When a game is built specifically for the Wii, it generally means that motion control is involved in some form or another. This is definitely the case with The Forgotten Sands. Most of the time, you're using the remote to point and activate plates with your sand power. But in combat, swinging the remote correlates to slashing while using the nunchuk correlates to punching monsters in the face. Foes in groups of up to six will come in waves, with an enemy leader highlighted by a beam of light so that if you take him or her out first, which forces the others to flee. You gain experience as you clear enemies, so it's up to you to determine how much time you want to spend in combat. As you fill up your experience meter, you'll also gain new combat skills like an area tornado attack or a charge attack.

To make the game more accessible, a hint system is in place where you can hit up on the D pad to receive a clue as to where you need to go. When making difficult jumps, a blue line will appear at times to let you know whether that route is even possible to attempt. The developer explained that Ubisoft wanted this to be a social experience and an accessible one. You can coordinate with a friend by passing off your sand abilities to the genie while your friend then helps you freeze traps as you focus on fighting enemies or tricky platforming sections.

Use your sand powers to slow down traps.

Similar to the other next generation Prince of Persia games coming out, this one has a distinct Sands of Time feel and look to it. You'll hear Yuri Lowenthal's familiar voice as he banters with his genie companion while you effortlessly make your way through once splendid-looking castles that are now decorated with overgrown vines or run along the decaying walls in deserted city streets. We look forward to bringing you more of the Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands as we approach its May 18 release date.

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"Wii | Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands First Impression" was posted by Sophia Tong on Wed, 24 Feb 2010 11:01:15 -0800

Xbox 360 | Splinter Cell: Conviction Updated Impressions - The First Twenty Minutes

2010-03-02T23:00:00.001-08:00

Twenty minutes into Sam Fisher's latest adventure and we've already smashed a man's face through a piano. Want to know more?

On the run from the government that trained him and searching for the men who killed his daughter, it's not easy being Sam Fisher. Fortunately, playing as Sam Fisher is not nearly as hard, as we found out during our hands-on time with Splinter Cell: Conviction at Microsoft's X10 event. The first 20 minutes of the game not only offer a slick tutorial of Sam's potent abilities, but they let you flex those muscles in all sorts of creatively deadly ways. Human shields, clever misdirection, and brutal interrogation techniques are all in a day's work for Fisher, and we discovered how Conviction makes these things simple to learn and satisfying to execute.

[ Watch Video ]

Splinter Cell: Conviction starts off with some dramatic cutscene moments. A redheaded woman with a gun to Fisher's head, an interrogation inside a secure facility, and ghostly images of Sam's daughter all flashed by while the cacophony of the event drowned out any expository audio. When the game proper began, we found ourselves in a street-side cafe, populated by a bustling crowd of people. There is a vividness to the characters and the environments that feels like a refreshing break for the shadowy series. When loud noises caused the idle citizenry to panic and run from the scene, the rush of activity and the stillness they left behind was like a sensory palette cleanser, letting you know this isn't the same gloomy Splinter Cell you've played before.

This strong visual impression continued as we made our way into the area where fruit vendors had set up stalls. It soon became clear that the market was our first training ground, and with the help of unobtrusive onscreen prompts, we soon became comfortable with moving in and out of cover. If you pull the left trigger, you'll stick behind cover in a manner similar to Gears of War. Move to the edge of cover and small white indicators will appear on other cover positions, indicating where you will move to if you tap the A button. This simple system is consistent with the game's slick interface. If you've seen coverage of Conviction before, you're probably familiar with the text objectives that appear on the ground, on the sides of buildings, and on other in-game surfaces. The cover indicators are similarly placed. They are visible enough to catch your eye, but not big enough to intrude on the environments.

The overall effect of this style is to draw your attention to the environments. It essentially trains your eye what to look for, so pretty soon you are sliding between cover positions without even noticing the indicators. This same philosophy extends to story exposition and character developments. When Sam is interrogating someone or having a relevant memory, a black and white projection will appear on whatever surface Sam is looking at. These filmstrip-quality videos move with Sam's gaze, allowing you a glimpse into the narrative without yanking you out of the moment. All these elements combine to create an engrossing visual style that impresses straight from the get-go.

Just as we were getting the hang of movement, Sam had a very vivid flashback that took us back in time to his daughter's bedroom. Young Sarah (approximately five years old) is scared of the dark, so Dad sits on her bed and explains how the dark is nothing to be frightened of. Though it was hard to hear the actual conversation because of the noisy event venue, the scene still conveyed a touching sense of fatherly devotion. It also served to demonstrate the visual filters that Conviction uses to indicate how stealthy Sam is being. When the world around you turns black and white, you are hidden from enemy sight. When you are spotted or exposed, the screen is once again flushed with vivid color. A quick jump back to the marketplace showed this in action, but soon it was back to the bedroom. This time, the quiet evening at home turned dangerous, as breaking noises in the other room heralded the arrival of intruders. Sam leaves Sarah in her room and deals with the armed invaders in classic Fisher style. A quick takedown (press B near an enemy) leveled and disarmed the first one, and then the other two were quickly marked for death. Whenever Sam performs a melee takedown, he earns the power to tag (aim and hit the right bumper) and quickly execute (Y button) enemies.

It's a powerful ability and one that is clearly integral to Sam's survival. How many enemies you can shoot in one takedown depends on the gun you are using and how upgraded it is. Splinter Cell: Conviction has a Persistent Elite Creation (PEC) system similar to that found in the Rainbow Six series. This system allows you to upgrade your arsenal in single-player, as well as tweak your guns and outfits in Conviction's cooperative modes. Fisher's single-player loadouts are determined by his progress to an extent, but there is definitely room to increase your gun damage, magazine size, or even the number of targets you can quickly execute.

PEC points are granted for fulfilling a wide variety of in-game challenges. Some are single- or multiplayer specific, but the points are persistent no matter what mode you are in. Many of these reward actions are what you would normally perform in the course of battle, like performing silent takedowns or quick executions. However, there are a lot that encourage you to use Sam's abilities to their fullest extent. During our time with the game, we earned some points for taking an enemy as a human shield and then using his head to bash through a door. We garnered another reward (also door-related) for using our busted rearview-window mirror to check under a door and then busting it in and knocking down an enemy on the other side. We also progressed toward a third reward by popping out of cover and grabbing our enemy's attention. When we dove back into cover, a silhouette remained of our last known position. Flanking and killing an enemy who was investigating our silhouette brought us one notch closer to the "cat and mouse" reward. Finally, we scored some points for shooting a large chandelier and bringing it crashing down on our enemies' heads. Good times.

Splinter Cell: Conviction is dedicated to making it easy to be the deadly Sam Fisher that we all know and love. The slick interface makes maneuvering through the environment feel natural and intuitive. Onscreen prompts and streamlined controls make your formidable array of abilities easily accessible. And a robust rewards system encourages you to make the most of your skills. As if we needed any encouragement to grab our daughter's murderer by the throat and smash his face into a grand piano.

Of course, this is all based on the first 20 minutes of the game. How Fisher's abilities evolve and where his adventure will take him remain a mystery. To read more about Splinter Cell: Conviction, check out our latest hands-on with the cooperative Deniable Ops mode. Splinter Cell: Conviction is looking sharp and is on track for an April 13 release on the Xbox 360 and PC.

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"Xbox 360 | Splinter Cell: Conviction Updated Impressions - The First Twenty Minutes" was posted by Chris Watters on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 19:42:34 -0800

PlayStation 3 | Super Street Fighter IV QA

2010-03-01T23:00:00.001-08:00

Capcom's Seth Killian gives us the latest on Capcom's new entry in its acclaimed fighting series.

Capcom's upcoming Super Street Fighter IV is set to deliver fans of the series a meaty helping of new content to master. The robust offering of new characters, new moves, and new ultra combos should give anyone who mastered last year's Street Fighter IV something to study. Today's new trailer shed some light on the bulk of the game's new cast, which includes a surprising array of familiar faces drawn from Street Fighter history. We checked in with SSFIV's special advisor Seth Killian to talk about the upcoming game, the new characters, and what the deal is with the raccoon.

[ Watch Video ]

See who's been added to the roster!

GameSpot: How did the team go about selecting these extra characters?

Seth Killian: The 10 new SSFIV characters were based on post-SFIV fan feedback, which we then filtered according to which characters we felt would be a good fit for the game in terms of fighting style. I'm happy to say we were able to include almost all of the most popular requests.

GS: How many of the characters added this time out were characters that didn't make the cut for SFIV and how many are driven by the user feedback once all the characters in SFIV were revealed to fans?

SK: Development on Dee Jay and T. Hawk was started during the original SFIV, but the rest of the newcomers were basically all driven by the players' feedback after SFIV was completed.

GS: Super Street Fighter IV is bringing characters together from three separate "worlds" of Street Fighter (SSFII, SFIII, SF Alpha). What has it been like to balance and refine these characters to fit them within the SFIV universe?

SK: The SFII and SF Alpha characters both come from games with fundamentally compatible background systems, so integrating them together with the world of SFIV wasn't too intimidating. I was actually really worried about the SFIII characters, however. That game was built with parrying as the core background system, so in a game like SFIV without parries, would they be too weak? I'm happy to say they are definitely not too weak, and I was actually surprised how naturally the SFIII crew made the transition to Super SFIV.

GS: What can you tell fans of the new characters about how they're going to handle? Will they "feel" like their 2D counterparts like the characters did in SFIV or will there be some tweaks?

SK: There are, of course, a lot of tweaks, but I think any fans of these characters in their SFIII incarnations will pick them up very easily in Super SFIV. Everything you loved about them from SFIII is still there, as well as a bunch of new tricks. They're actually among the most highly developed characters in the entire game; they have really large and flexible move sets to draw from.

[ Watch Video ]

Meet some of the newest additions and see them in action!

GS: What kind of changes will the returning cast be undergoing in SSFIV? Can you give any specific examples?

SK: The philosophy behind the rest of the changes was to "balance up." This means rather than "nerfing" people, the aim was to make everyone stronger, though to varying degrees. Basically we don't want any fans of a certain character to pick up Super SFIV and find that all their favorite stuff doesn't work anymore, so we've actually worked to enrich every single character in terms of moves and overall possibilities. In terms of specific changes, there are a lot, ranging from the subtle, like Ryu's fierce shoryuken going from one hit to two hits, on to the more significant, like Guile's attacks having some increased priority’and even a brand new technique for Sagat. The number one change is, of course, the addition of a second ultra combo for everyone. These will change the dynamic of many fights.

GS: How important was the feedback the team received from the fighting game community on the original Street Fighter IV and what aspects of that feedback have been integrated into SSFIV?

SK: It was critical. Everything from the characters to including the online modes is pretty much a direct response to feedback from fans. Although we weren't able to do every single thing that was requested--from the big stuff like characters and online modes down to even very specific items, like having your character select cursor start on the same character you picked the last time (rather than having to move it each time from a default position)-- we've tried very hard to marry the best ideas from SF fans with our own thinking about how to create a great game. I think it's safe to say this is the most fan-influenced project in Capcom's history’maybe even in all of gaming history, at least as far as fighters are concerned.

GS: In terms of structure, will SSFIV feature the same progression and unlock system to get all the new characters or will they be available from the outset?

SK: We're going to have everyone unlocked right away. I understand the idea behind unlocks to some degree--you want to encourage people to play in different styles and experience more of the game. But I personally do not like them and want to have all my tools right from the start. "Everybody unlocked from the start" is another feature we can credit directly to fan feedback. Their voices really let me drive this point home with the traditionalists on the team.

Adding ninjas is never a bad thing.

GS: Constant iteration seems to be something that goes hand-in-hand with the Street Fighter series--obviously, Super Street Fighter IV is a new product--but has the team ever considered using downloadable content as a delivery method for future iterations of Street Fighter IV before moving onto Street Fighter V?

SK: DLC has been discussed, but frankly, the schedule for Super SFIV was so tight that we haven't been able to think much beyond this project. We did try and create more hooks in the architecture this time around to keep at least the possibility open, though the future for the series remains wide open at this point.

GS: Finally, what's up with the raccoon?

SK: That would be Ibuki's pet tanooki, Don. Do not mess with Don.

GS: Thanks for your time.

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"PlayStation 3 | Super Street Fighter IV Q&A" was posted by Staff on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:30:57 -0800

Xbox 360 | Super Street Fighter IV QA

2010-02-28T23:00:00.001-08:00

Capcom's Seth Killian gives us the latest on Capcom's new entry in its acclaimed fighting series.

[ Watch Video ]

See who's been added to the roster!

GameSpot: How did the team go about selecting these extra characters?

SK: Development on Dee Jay and T. Hawk was started during the original SFIV, but the rest of the newcomers were basically all driven by the players' feedback after SFIV was completed.

GS: What can you tell fans of the new characters about how they're going to handle? Will they "feel" like their 2D counterparts like the characters did in SFIV or will there be some tweaks?

[ Watch Video ]

Meet some of the newest additions and see them in action!

GS: What kind of changes will the returning cast be undergoing in SSFIV? Can you give any specific examples?

SK: The philosophy behind the rest of the changes was to "balance up." This means rather than "nerfing" people, the aim was to make everyone stronger, though to varying degrees. Basically we don't want any fans of a certain character to pick up Super SFIV and find that all their favorite stuff doesn't work anymore, so we've actually worked to enrich every single character in terms of moves and overall possibilities. In terms of specific changes, there are a lot, ranging from the subtle, like Ryu's fierce shoryuken going from one hit to two hits, on to the more significant, like Guile's attacks having some increased priority…and even a brand new technique for Sagat. The number one change is, of course, the addition of a second ultra combo for everyone. These will change the dynamic of many fights.

GS: How important was the feedback the team received from the fighting game community on the original Street Fighter IV and what aspects of that feedback have been integrated into SSFIV?

SK: It was critical. Everything from the characters to including the online modes is pretty much a direct response to feedback from fans. Although we weren't able to do every single thing that was requested--from the big stuff like characters and online modes down to even very specific items, like having your character select cursor start on the same character you picked the last time (rather than having to move it each time from a default position)-- we've tried very hard to marry the best ideas from SF fans with our own thinking about how to create a great game. I think it's safe to say this is the most fan-influenced project in Capcom's history…maybe even in all of gaming history, at least as far as fighters are concerned.

GS: In terms of structure, will SSFIV feature the same progression and unlock system to get all the new characters or will they be available from the outset?

Adding ninjas is never a bad thing.

GS: Finally, what's up with the raccoon?

SK: That would be Ibuki's pet tanooki, Don. Do not mess with Don.

GS: Thanks for your time.

Read and Post Comments | Get the full article at GameSpot

"Xbox 360 | Super Street Fighter IV Q&A" was posted by Staff on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:30:57 -0800

PlayStation 3 | Transformers: War for Cybertron First Look

2010-02-27T23:00:00.001-08:00

We get a look at Activision and High Moon Studios' surprising new Transformers game.

At this point just about everyone knows who the Transformers are. The robots that made children across the world wonder about cars, jets, trains, insects, and dinosaurs got reinserted into pop culture thanks to Michael Bay and his two explosive films that reimagined the mighty bots for the modern day. Unfortunately, more than a few purists were torn by the films because of some unsettling departures from canon, such as a mute Bumblebee, an Optimus Prime with lips, a genital-sporting Devastator, Ebonics-speaking bots, and Shia LaBeouf (although Megan Fox gets a pass) to name just a few. Thankfully the movie's popularity has led Activision and developer High Moon Studios to try their hand at a Transformers game that aims to give fans of the robots in disguise a fun and less unsettling experience rooted in the past. Transformers: War for Cybertron drops you into the Transformers universe as the conflict between the Autobots and Decepticon escalates into the events that led the dueling bots to leave their homeworld of Cybertron to come to Earth. We recently met with Activision and High Moon, who gave us a demo of the game on the Xbox 360, which showed off the Autobots and Decepticon campaigns and showed more promise than we would have expected.

[ Watch Video ]

Check out this exclusive trailer for Transformers: War For Cybertron.

The game's story is split into two narratives that follow the two bot factions as they take shape, with the Decepticon story set before the Autobot story. The Autobot story is set before Optimus Prime assumed the mantle of prime and follows the unassuming Optimus as events unfold and he becomes the greatest leader the Autobots ever had. The Decepticon story follows Megatron, who, unlike Optimus, is well on his way to becoming a robo jerk. The narrative follows Megatron as he sets out to restore Cybertron to what he feels is its former glory, which, not too surprisingly, involves a whole lot of mayhem and destruction. The interesting wrinkle to Megatron's tale is how he gathers together his crew: one of his first recruiting missions has him meeting a promising young bot named Starcream. The Decepticon campaign also shows Megatron clash with Autobot leader Zeta Prime (one guess how that goes).

The demo we were shown highlighted excerpts from the Autobot and Decepticon campaigns. It gave us an idea of what to expect from the third-person action game and made a great first impression. Before we dive into specifics, we'll offer up some general bits of info: the game features a single-player mode, split into two campaigns as we mentioned, as well as an online multiplayer mode that supports competitive and cooperative play. We're especially intrigued by the game's cooperative mode, which supports drop-in, drop-out gameplay for up to two other players so that you can go through the campaign story with two other friends.

The Autobot segment of the demo focused on an early part of the story that set the action up. You will be able to choose one bot to actively control and two others to join your party of three. The segment we saw focused on Optimus, Ratchet, and Bumblebee--all meeting for the first time. One key thing to note about the game, which is a very cool bit, is that the bots have been reimagined in their native Iacon forms, well before they began mimicking cars. High Moon worked closely with Hasbro to settle on a look that is close to the iconic Transformers look but is unique. The result is a very smart, futuristic look for the vehicles that everyone transforms into. The sequence followed the trio as they set out to escort Bumblebee to deliver bad news on the state of the leading bodies of the Autobots. Basically, things are pretty bleak: Zeta Prime has been taken out, and the high council has disappeared. All the three bots can do is head out and try to marshal their forces to deal with the Decepticon threat and help where they can. In the demo, the trio had to reactivate several turrets to help fend off an assault from Megatron's crew.

Optimus Prime with no lips.

The race to get to the turrets showed off the stunning metropolis of Iacon, which, despite being under siege, looked fantastic. The journey to the turrets showed off the very cool art direction in the game, which is big on small details, such as showing how the Autobots physically plug into terminals, or even turrets, in order to interact with them. More importantly, the sequence showed off how fluidly the bots switch from vehicle form to robot form, as well as the game's combat mechanics. Basically you'll be able to transform at any time by clicking in the left analog stick, which frees you up to use the robots' other abilities in combat. War for Cybertron plays around with the standard Transformers action formula by mixing up each robot's abilities. Besides the expected melee combat and transforming, you'll be able to use two types of special attacks. One is dependent on resources, namely orbs that you'll collect off of defeated enemies, and the other has a cooldown period you just need to wait out. From what we saw, the resource-dependent attacks are basically different weapons you can pick up (the bots can carry two at a given time and swap them out whenever they find something new). The cooldown attacks were an interesting mix of active and passive abilities. For example, Optimus has a war cry that essentially serves as a damage increase to those near him, while Ratchet has a ray he can use to heal himself or others. The system looks suitably spectacular when you're watching the game, so we're anxious to see how it will play and how you'll combo all the different abilities. The Autobot portion of our demo ended with the massive turrets being reactivated and a Decepticon warship being taken out. The subsequent story cinematic showed off Jetfire, whose history is being tweaked some for the game in order to better fit the story. From what we could see, it's nothing too drastic, just a slightly more logical setup for his joining the Autobots.

The Decepticon sequence showed off Starcream, Thundercracker, and Skywarp in a mission that showed off how jet gameplay will work in the game. The High Moon reps noted that the strafing, hovering, and boosting mechanics were inspired by old-school gem Crimson Skies. The flight action looked sharp and was a smart showcase for the game's variety. The level featured a mix of open spaces that were conducive to proper flying and more cramped areas that required a bot change or hovering and sniping (both of which seemed to be easy to transition to). We were also able to check out the jet barrel roll special ability, which looks exactly like you'd expect. The sequence also showed off an underground area on Cybertron. The second Decepticon bit we saw showcased a boss fight that pit Megatron, Soundwave, and Breakdown against Omega Supreme. As intimidating as the massive Autobot min city looked, the trio was able to take it out in a lengthy multipart boss fight.

Overall the game looked pretty fantastic thanks to its unique art direction. The reimagined transformers look great and shine because of a host of little touches. Whether it's the hovercars the Autobots turn into, the way the turrets and consoles they interface with change to match their color, or the new look for energon cubes, Cybertron looks to be brimming with activity. Besides the impressive detail and effects, the game's performance is impressive. The hectic action, explosions, and transformations look stellar and zip along at a brisk pace regardless of the onscreen mayhem. The audio was pretty much you'd expect for the special effects and musical score. As far as voice goes, Peter Cullen, geek national treasure of the highest order, is back to bring Optimus to life. Sadly, Cullen is the only classic cast member we recognized, so anyone hoping for some old-school Megatron action is out of luck.

Here's our chance to see the Transformers duke it out on their home turf.

While some of this may sound too good to be true, the game is looking like it just might be the real deal. High Moon's approach is benefiting from no movie to tie in with and a respectable dose of geek love. The results we've seen so far seem to be paying off in the most promising Transformers game we've played in years. We're anxious to get our hands on it, especially the online multiplayer, to see if it plays as good as it looks. Look for more on Transformers: War for Cybertron in the weeks to come. The game is scheduled to ship on the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 later this year, with Wii and DS versions of the game, from Next Level and Vicarious Visions, respectively, hitting at the same time.

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"PlayStation 3 | Transformers: War for Cybertron First Look" was posted by Ricardo Torres on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:26:24 -0800

Xbox 360 | Transformers: War for Cybertron First Look

2010-02-26T23:00:00.001-08:00

We get a look at Activision and High Moon Studios' surprising new Transformers game.

[ Watch Video ]

Check out this exclusive trailer for Transformers: War For Cybertron.

Optimus Prime with no lips.

Here's our chance to see the Transformers duke it out on their home turf.

Read and Post Comments | Get the full article at GameSpot

"Xbox 360 | Transformers: War for Cybertron First Look" was posted by Ricardo Torres on Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:26:24 -0800

Wii | Metroid: Other M Hands-On

2010-02-25T23:00:00.001-08:00

Samus has a case of the baby blues in this sequel to Super Metroid.

Metroid: Other M--codeveloped by Nintendo and Team Ninja (of Ninja Gaiden fame)--is best described as a culmination of all the Metroid games that came before it. It interweaves plot points and gameplay mechanics from those games into a sequel that takes place after events of Super Metroid, but despite bringing all of these familiar characteristics together, Other M feels anything but familiar. The game forges its own identity that rests somewhere between Super Metroid and the Metroid Prime series, with the end results amounting to something that most fans will probably find surprising. A warning: This write-up includes some minor story set-up spoilers.

[ Watch Video ]

Nate Bihldorff talks about Metroid Other M at the Nintendo World Summit.

Our demo begins with a brief CG cinematic where the camera pans to the depths of space to find a person--bounty hunter Samus Aran--curled in the fetal position (like the scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey). After uttering the question, "Why am I still alive?" Samus awakens to find herself in the ending sequence of Super Metroid. An appropriately disgusting and angry Mother Brain stomps around as the baby Metroid (that originally appeared in Metroid II) holds Samus above ground within its maw. Just seconds before Mother Brain releases a devastating beam of energy from her massive eyeball, the baby Metroid drops Samus and takes the brunt of the blast. Its gooey remains drip down onto Samus as she readies her arm cannon and says, "It's time to go." Mother Brain is defeated.

In the following scene, Samus (shown in her Zero Suit form) awakens in a quarantine room and later remarks that she constantly dreams about her confrontation with Mother Brain, as well as the fate of the baby Metroid. In fact, a large part of developing and growing Samus as a character for Metroid: Other M seemingly stems from the loss of the baby Metroid to the extent that it's a focal point of her remaining monologue in the introduction--a suggestion of her growing motherly instincts, perhaps?

As the scene ends, Samus transforms back into her Varia suit and the tutorial begins. In it, we learn about some of her basic movements and abilities--most of which are controlled by holding the Wii Remote sideways so the layout resembles the NES controller setup. The action in Metroid: Other M takes place in 3D space from a third-person perspective, so Samus can move around much as she did in Metroid Prime by using the D pad. You can fire her arm cannon using the button 1 (button 2 performs jumps) and hold it down to perform a stronger, charged shot. By throwing a few enemies at us, the tutorial revealed that there's seemingly no manual way to target enemies, so where you shoot is a combination of where you're facing and which enemy has priority over another for the auto-aiming system. Samus also has some evasive skills--by pressing left or right on the D pad just before a projectile hits, she quickly leaps to the left or right. Lastly, changing into the morph ball is as simple as pressing A on the Wii Remote, and like previous games, Samus can plant regular or superbombs while in this state. Also of note, you can recharge missiles by simply holding the Wii Remote vertically and simultaneously holding down the B button (a similar functions works for recharging health when it gets dangerously low, but it doesn't appear to refill all of your health).

The tutorial also included a section explaining Samus's search mode, which should be immediately familiar to fans of Metroid Prime. By pointing the Wii Remote at the screen, the camera automatically transitions to a first-person, in-the-visor mode that lets you look around by holding the B button. Not only can you use this mode to investigate your surroundings, but you can also use it to lock onto and combat enemies either by using Samus's default arm cannon attack or her missiles. It's worth pointing out that when you search a room and happen to come across a special item (such as an energy tank or missile capacity upgrades), it will be marked on the map shown at the top-right portion of the screen.

With the tutorial over, we got another cutscene where a quarantine officer tells Samus to head to a meeting where news that Mother Brain has been defeated and Planet Zebes has been completely destroyed is met with a round of cheering from others in the room. Time passes and we fast forward to a scene with Samus sitting inside her ship when she suddenly receives what she refers to as a, "baby's cry," which is an SOS coming from a distant part of the galaxy. She eventually reaches the source of the SOS and what appears to be a derelict space station called the Bottle Ship, where the main portion of our gameplay session took place.

Upon arrival, we're told to take a look around using Samus's search mode--a quick inspection of the area reveals that a Galactic Federation Army ship is also docked. We take a few minutes to run and jump around (to test out the controls a little more when the camera's in a side-scrolling perspective) before going through the first door on the ship. Inside, Samus encounters the Galactic Federation group that arrived at the station earlier as it tried to get through a seemingly impenetrable door. As luck would have it, a member of this crew is none other than Adam Malkovich--Samus's former commanding officer in the Galactic Federation Army (and later, the AI construct from Metroid Fusion) before she took up the reigns of a freelance bounty hunter. Samus briefly references tension that exists between the two of them because of her previous career choices, but it's something that will more than likely expand further as the game progresses.

After helping the team get through the door via a missile from Samus's weapon, the team moves forward and Samus is left behind to make her way to the control room on her own. Along the way, we encounter some of the familiar, weaker enemies of Metroid's past, such as zoomers and skree. We take out these enemies using Samus's regular attack and continue to explore before coming upon an empty bathroom area. Normally, such a room wouldn't be a big deal, but it is in this case because we get a glimpse of a new perspective that places that camera closely behind Samus (similar to the camera perspective found in the Resident Evil 4 and 5) and forces her to walk at a slower pace. Whether this camera perspective has any kind of significance over just accommodating the tight space remains to be seen, but it was quite a surprise when we came upon it for the first time.

We continue to go from room to room, putting Samus's acrobatic abilities to good use as she wall jumps and clings to ledges before pulling herself up to make her way to the control room where she meets up with the rest of the Galactic Federation crew, as well as the first boss encounter. This giant, purple monster flings its tentacles about, making it difficult to find enough time to jump into the first-person mode and take shots at its eye using missiles. When we do get a solid shot in, the Galactic Federation soldiers manage to freeze parts of its limbs, which you then have to target and fire upon with missiles in first person. After doing this a few times, the creature is defeated. Adam takes up a position in the main portion of the control room where he tells the rest of his crew to infiltrate other parts of the ship and asks Samus to restore power to the system management area. This requires a bit of backtracking to an earlier part of the level (where we get some more time to snoop around for extra items, some of which can only be accessed via the morph ball), but it only takes a few minutes before we find the designated area, clear out the enemies that were preventing power from reaching other parts of the ship, and head back to the control room where the demo ends.

At this point, Metroid: Other M seems to succeed in creating a new type of Metroid experience, but it's really hard to explain just how different it feels until you get your hands on it. The mixture of old Metroid and Metroid Prime elements seems like it's not an amazing fit initially, but as time goes on, changing from third to first person feels more natural. We'll have more on Metroid: Other M before its release on June 27.

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"Wii | Metroid: Other M Hands-On" was posted by Giancarlo Varanini on Wed, 24 Feb 2010 21:04:29 -0800

PlayStation 3 | Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands First Impression

2010-02-24T23:00:00.001-08:00

The prince from the Sands of Time trilogy is back, and we find out what he was up to before his adventures in Warrior Within.

Even though Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands will be released roughly around the same time as the Jerry Bruckheimer Hollywood blockbuster, there is no relation to the movie at all, so don't expect a Jake Gyllenhaal-look alike or voice actor. The story does take place in the Sands of Time universe, though, during the seven-year gap between the Sands of Time and Warrior Within. The Forgotten Sands will focus on just one of the prince's many wild adventures and explains his drastic transformation from the once naive, cheerful young man in Sands of Time to the jaded, brooding character seen in Warrior Within.

Use your sleek moves to fend off dozens of enemies at a time.

The game starts off with an impressive, sweeping view of a city that is under attack as we see scores of sword-wielding men fighting along the battlements and fortress grounds. This besieged kingdom belongs to the prince's older brother, whom the prince has decided to visit, but it seems that he has come at a bad time--or perhaps just at the right time. With the ongoing chaotic battle unfolding in the background, we quickly made our way down along the stone steps, leapt gracefully from one crumbling ledge to the next, and deftly darted along walls to join the fight. The prince's acrobatic movements looked very familiar as he shimmied carefully across narrow ledges and somersaulted effortlessly from one pole to the next. The flow of combat was just as smooth, but one of the big changes will have you facing larger groups of enemies, ranging from a small group of three to a big group of 50. You won't be able to block anymore, so evasive maneuvers involve rolling and being quick on your feet. You'll still be able to perform some stylish finishing moves, like vaulting over enemies to stab them in the back, and you also have the ability to kick opponents down to stun them, then finish them with a quick jab. When facing a decent-sized group, you can crowd surf and hop on the heads of your enemies, then dance out of the way. This particular section of the demo was incredibly cinematic as the camera panned across the vast terrain to give you a sense of scale, and while we were fighting our way through the crowds, we could see the battle raging on in the background.

Next, we explored the sewers beneath the palace, which actually looked quite nice and sanitary with cascading waterfalls pouring out of several openings. The prince already had a solid skill set when it came to wielding his sword, but now, he can gain the ability to control the elements of nature. One of the first powers that he'll acquire is the ability to freeze water. Using the left trigger at any time, all the water in the area will freeze for as long as you hold the button. In this particular area, it will grant you access to wall run on ice to get to another platform. A yellow energy bar under your health bar depletes as you hold the left trigger, so you can't freeze water indefinitely, but it regenerates quickly as soon as you let go. Sometimes you'll be faced with some trickier platforming situations where you'll need to time your powers to get to where you need to go. As our prince made his way above ground and into the luxurious, cavernous palace, we saw water used to create some elaborate platforming puzzles. Timed water spouts along the palace interior were conveniently placed so that when we timed it correctly, we could show off our trapeze artist skills by flinging the prince from one frozen pole to the next. This was the only magical skill that we got to see, but we were told that you can also control the other elements like earth, air, and fire.

The prince will once again be able to rewind time as he did in the trilogy, so you can always go back a few seconds if you missed a tough jump or took too much damage. It costs energy orbs to do so, but your meter can be replenished by collecting more orbs from enemies or breakable items nearby. These orbs can also be used to execute more powerful and advanced skills. Another added feature is the ability to customize and upgrade the prince's combat skills from the experience that you gain while fighting. For example, your shield ability unleashes a burst of energy, which knocks surrounding opponents to the ground. But when it gets upgraded to a tornado, you can call forth a swirling wind that can easily round up and decimate anyone that gets too close. Another advanced move that we got to see was a dash skill that lets the prince dart from one side of a room into the next. This allowed him to plow through any unfortunate individual that happened to get in the way and provided a convenient alternative cross-wide chasm when there were no walls on which to scurry.

Control the elements and use them to your advantage.

Our demo wrapped up with a miniboss fight in a section of an underground ruined city, where we saw the prince fight against a decent-sized horde of skeletal warriors. The story behind these wraiths is that the prince's brother decided to raise a magical army of sand warriors to defend his kingdom from intruders at the beginning of the game, but this could only be accomplished at a huge cost. All the citizens have now turned into sand statues, and it looks like the undead don't intend to leave anytime soon. The miniboss we faced was a large charger that wasted no time trying to run us over. Fortunately, it wasn't very bright, so by carefully positioning the prince, you can lure the miniboss to trample the swarm of warriors in the way, which will save you the trouble of having to dispose of them yourself.

The Forgotten Sands looks and feels like a next-generation Sands of Time. It is full of rich and colorful art direction, as well as clever level designs. The prince represented a cross between the character models of the prince in Sands of Time and Warrior Within. He looks more mature than in the first game and maintains that mysterious air about him, but he looks less menacing than he did in the second game. The voice actor for the prince in Sands of Time, Yuri Lowenthal, returns so it'll feel very much like you're continuing the adventure immediately after the events of the first game. We were shown an incredibly beautiful area--which you'll come across multiple times in the game to meet a woman named Razia--that was reminiscent of the Fountain of Time seen in the first game. As we approached the empty gazebo bathed in moonlight, it was hard not to be taken with the soft silver glow of the moon that covered the artfully crafted landscape.

We're quite eager to see more of Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, which is set to be released on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC sometime in May. The Wii and DS versions will be entirely different games built specifically for their respective platforms. We'll update you with more information as soon as it becomes available.

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"PlayStation 3 | Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands First Impression" was posted by Sophia Tong on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:00:54 -0800

PC | Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening Hands-On - First Details, Combat, and Dragons

2010-02-23T23:00:00.001-08:00

We get our hands on this expansion for Dragon Age: Origins.

Some days, you just can't get rid of a monster invasion. In Dragon Age: Origins, your character tried to do just that by joining the Grey Wardens, an ancient society dedicated to hunting down the monstrous darkspawn, a race of murderous subterranean creatures with a mysterious resemblance to the uruk-hai of the Lord of the Rings motion pictures. And hunt the darkspawn you did, eventually confronting the hordes and ending their invasion, known as the Blight. Or, so you thought.

[ Watch Video ]

Watch Awakening in motion in this video preview.

In Awakening, the first expansion for Dragon Age, you'll play as the leader of the Grey Wardens in pursuit of a new enemy, a mysterious darkspawn general who can think, talk, and raise armies of new darkspawn, who appear to be breeding underground. Interestingly, you can import your character directly from Dragon Age and be the hero that game made you--the uniter of the scattered Wardens and enemy of the Blight. Or, you can start a new game with an entirely new character, a Grey Warden emissary from a neighboring country that was once at war with Ferelden, in which case you'll be met with suspicion and distrust even as you try to save the land.

Welcome back to Ferelden. Hot enough for ya?

BioWare suggests that Awakening isn't about one new whiz-bang feature that totally changes the gameplay, but rather it's about offering more of what fans seem to care about most--a deep story with memorable characters and real consequences for the choices you make. The expansion is being developed by the same team of writers, designers, and artists who created the original game, but it will offer plenty of new stuff to play with, including six new characters to join your party, new elite character classes, tons of new high-level skills, an expanded level cap up to level 35, and more than 500 new items, including new, higher tiers of weapons and armor for your adventuring party.

We recently had an opportunity to play through two different areas of the game and get a peek at what's in store. The first area put us in the boots of a warrior Warden hero allied with two of the expansion's new characters, both spirit healer mages: Velanna, a sharp-tongued elf, and Anders, a human wizard with a smart mouth not unlike that of Origins' Alastair. Our party began its journey into the ruins of a captured city, which had been fully assimilated by a new brood of darkspawn to the extent that even the walls and floors were covered with pulsating pink flesh.

After hacking our way through several alpha genlocks and hurlocks, we managed to rescue Sigurd, a bitter dwarf burglar who had been part of a previous war party sent to curtail the darkspawn threat. Apparently, her comrades were overwhelmed and she fled. As the only survivor, she was captured and was in the process of being dragged away--as she suggested, perhaps as part of a sinister plot to seize women to breed more darkspawn--when we cut down her captors. Despite her earlier act of cowardice, she was eager to join our party and seek revenge. We were given the chance to change our party by adding her, but we declined in favor of using both mages to blast our foes to bits, and we descended further into the city. A dying dwarf warned us about the "children," one of the expansion's new types of enemy--slimy creatures that spawn from darkspawn brood mothers--though sadly we weren't able to tangle with them, since we had another engagement with the Queen of the Blackmarsh.

A classic case of darkspawn infestation, plus the place costs a fortune each winter with all this shoddy insulation.

The queen, as it turns out, doesn't hold a court. She's an ancient spectral dragon who can be summoned only by reassembling the fragments of a shattered dragon's skull in the midst of a dank, forbidding swamp blocked off by a tear in the Fade--a barrier created by the netherworld from which all magic originates. Once we clicked on the skull to reassemble it, the tear disappeared and we were free to enter the Queen's court, a small, flat clearing paved with a circular panel of stones. The queen herself swooped down on our party of a warrior and two spirit healers, along with Sigurd. Like with the dragon battles of Origins (and other previous BioWare games), special preparation and strategy will clearly be needed to conquer the queen.

Among other things, the queen can knock back one or more of your party with a sweep of her wings and take one of your comrades out of play by clutching her victim with her talons before tossing her victim aside. Interestingly, when she takes enough damage (whether that be from repeated backstabs, whatever feeble melee attacks you can deliver from the front, or all those magic spells she keeps resisting), she'll change forms to a giant sizzling orb of spirit energy locked into the center of the stone circle, while a group of electrified wisps spawn at the edges of the circle and drift inward toward the queen, presumably to recharge her energy. We managed to have our party chop down most of these wisp creatures, but the last one met with the queen in orb form. The orb then faded away and the queen made her triumphant reentrance from the sky, just in time to utterly crush our exhausted party, though to be fair, this was the first time we'd ever fought that battle, and we're assured by the BioWare team that this sort of thing happens to Dragon Age players all the time and doesn't make us any less of a video game player.

Awakening is on its way out the door in March. You'll be back to fighting life-or-death battles in no time.

In any case, it's clear that Awakening will have a great deal to offer for Dragon Age fans. The expansion will be available in March both as a retail in-box product and as downloadable content.

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"PC | Dragon Age: Origins - Awakening Hands-On - First Details, Combat, and Dragons" was posted by Andrew Park on Thu, 18 Feb 2010 09:29:47 -0800

Xbox 360 | Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands First Impression

2010-02-22T23:00:00.001-08:00

The prince from the Sands of Time trilogy is back, and we find out what he was up to before his adventures in Warrior Within.

Use your sleek moves to fend off dozens of enemies at a time.

Control the elements and use them to your advantage.

The Forgotten Sands looks and feels like a next-generation Sands of Time. It is full of rich and colorful art direction, as well as clever level designs. The prince represented a cross between the character models of the prince in Sands of Time and Warrior Within. He looks more mature than in the first game and maintains that mysterious air about him, but he looks less menacing than he did in the second game. The voice actor for the prince in Sands of Time, Yuri Lowenthal, returns so it'll feel very much like you're continuing the adventure immediately after the events of the first game. We were shown an incredibly beautiful area--which you'll come across multiple times in the game to meet a Djinn who gives you your newfound powers named Razia--that was reminiscent of the Fountain of Time seen in the first game. As we approached the empty gazebo bathed in moonlight, it was hard not to be taken with the soft silver glow of the moon that covered the artfully crafted landscape.

Read and Post Comments | Get the full article at GameSpot

"Xbox 360 | Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands First Impression" was posted by Sophia Tong on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:00:54 -0800

Xbox 360 | Dead Rising 2 Hands-On

2010-02-21T23:00:00.001-08:00

We create our own weapons in this zombie-slaying sequel.

Nothing bleeds quite like a de-armed zombie. Capcom showed off the latest build of its zombie-murder simulator at Microsoft's X10 event today, and Dead Rising 2 is shaping up to be a hilariously gruesome depiction of one man's fight against a horde of stumbling brain eaters. The battle for survival has moved from the quiet suburban mall from the first game into the bright and glamorous Fortune City (the ironically named casino town based on Las Vegas), but the core slicing-and-dicing gameplay has made the transition intact. The streets overflowed with hordes of zombies, hundreds of weapons, and the copious bodily fluids that spilled forth when one was unceremoniously stabbed. We got a chance to test out some of the extreme violence first hand, and it seems to offer a lovely vacation for those who just cannot stand the thought of ambling zombies.

[ Watch Video ]

The story hardly matters when you're busy chopping undead monsters into tiny pieces, but there is one very important aspect of protagonist Chuck Greene's personality that separates Dead Rising 2 from its predecessor. Chuck appreciates art just as much as the previous game's star, Frank West, but he doesn't express himself through photography. Instead, you craft weapons of unbridled destruction that allow you to show off your creative side in decidedly deadly ways. As you can imagine, this has a significant impact on the combat. Previously, you might have found a shiny chainsaw on the ground and used it to slice up some zombies in an up-close-and-personal fashion, but now, you can use your skills to combine weapons to make that chainsaw even more worthwhile. If you strap a couple onto either end of a kayak paddle, you not only extend your reach significantly, but you can also spin and swing it with such flair that large groups of zombies tumble to the ground in a blink of an eye. Killing zombies is always fun, but it feels even more special when you put such care into crafting the perfect weapon to dispose of them.

You combine these vicious tools behind enticing red doors that are sprinkled liberally throughout the strip, which means you will have to step momentarily away from the bloodshed if you want to spice up the combat a bit. Flexing your creative muscle in the privacy of these sterile rooms is probably a good thing, and it gives players a chance to meticulously duct tape tools together without the fear of a zombie chomping on their heads. If you are feeling adventurous, you can attempt to combine the various tools you find around the environment together to form your own personalized superweapon, but there are also helpful hint cards that spell out the perfect recipe for mass destruction. You earn these hint cards either by leveling up, finding them hidden somewhere in the environment, or reading informative posters that line the walls and various kiosks. At this time, developers at Blue Castle are working on a system to reward players for finding these cards, but this is not yet reflected in the game. In the future, you may earn special attacks or extra experience points for finding the hint cards before you create a weapon on your own, though.

The combination weapons make an already violent game that much more gooey and red. The chainsaw oar is just the beginning of the extreme necrocide. We attached a few standard construction nails onto a baseball bat and proceeded to pound razor sharp spikes into the heads of the unsuspecting undead. Nails can also be attached to propane canisters, and, if you have a standard firearm and a strong stomach, you can cause the barrel to explode, singeing the monsters closest to the blast while impaling those farther way with deadly shrapnel made of metal. We discovered by reading a helpful poster in the middle of a casino that you can make a smoking flamethrower by putting gasoline in an ordinary squirt gun. And if you think punching zombies with a plain boxing glove sounds less than thrilling, you can strap your trusty knife onto the front and create a weapon that would certainly be banned from most officially sanctioned boxing events. It's a robust system that continually surprises and entertains with the vast array of ridiculous weapons you can create.

The basic structure remains intact from the first Dead Rising game. There is still a time limit urging you through the mall, which keeps the pace moving so you don't get so caught up in killing zombies that your actions lose all meaning. Major story events, as well as optional side missions, count down in real time on the in-game clock, which means you will have to make careful decisions on how you want to spend your time in this terrifying town. Like in the first game, if you miss an important story sequence, you will not be able to progress further into the game, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. You can spend your free time hunting down hint cards, leveling up, or just enjoying the scenic view and then restart the adventure with all your unlockables intact. The save system is getting an overhaul as well, though specifics have not yet been revealed. Expect more than one save slot, though, which should give players a way to backtrack if they find themselves continually showing up late for unskippable appointments.

Although the biggest addition to combat is the ability to combine weapons, there have been changes made to the core gameplay as well. The most notable is how guns have been implemented. In the first Dead Rising, aiming your gun required you to stand motionless on the ground, which made you an enticing target for the swarming undead. But Dead Rising 2 allows you to move and shoot at the same time; thus, this time-tested concept makes firearms much more viable weapons in the sequel. Because of this added freedom, there will be a greater variety of guns to play around with, giving less creative players a chance to quickly dispose of their prey without the need to spend time in the construction room.

In Dead Rising 2, murdering zombies isn't the only vice in which you can partake. Fortune City is home to oodles of casinos, and you can unleash your gambling monster on slot machines with their hypnotic display of flashing lights. Money is actually important in Dead Rising 2, despite the majority of the population being made up of brain-dead brain eaters. You earn money by gambling or just slamming a stool against a slot machine or ATM until money spills out, and you take your hard-earned winnings to pawn brokers who are all too willing to exploit your needs for a quick buck. On sale are such life-saving items as hint books for powerful combination weapons, unique weapons that can only be found in a pawn store, and magazines that give Chuck added abilities. These magazines replace the books from the first Dead Rising but serve the same purpose, though we can only cross our fingers that the downgrade from legitimate literature doesn't portend a dumbing down of the entire game.

[ Watch Video ]

Dead Rising 2 is shaping up to follow in the footsteps of the first game quite nicely. There are lots of little touches that really make this game stand out from the zombie-slaying crowd. A fire extinguisher can be used to freeze then shatter your many foes, and consuming too much alcohol not only makes Chuck puke in glorious high definition, but the zombies will actually slip in your sick if they wander into the middle of the puddle. We look forward to seeing what other surprises Dead Rising 2 holds in the future.

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"Xbox 360 | Dead Rising 2 Hands-On" was posted by Tom Mc Shea on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 17:44:04 -0800

Xbox 360 | Supreme Commander 2 Updated Hands-On - Multiplayer and Skirmish

2010-02-20T23:00:00.001-08:00

We get our hands dirty in multiplayer in this epic strategy sequel.

The original Supreme Commander expanded on the large-scale strategy of the real-time strategy classic Total Annihilation, and Supreme Commander 2 will further streamline the experience to focus on key strategic decisions and the gigantic killer robots that result from those decisions. The game offers three standard multiplayer modes: assassination, which requires you to destroy your opponents' ACU (supreme commander) unit to win; supremacy, which requires you to wipe your opponents' ACU, base, and armies off the face of the earth; and infinite war, a sandbox-like mode with no specific victory conditions that's primarily intended for experimenting with various tech trees. We've had a chance to try these modes and skirmish matches against computer-controlled artificial intelligence opponents and have much to report.

[ Watch Video ]

Get the details on Supreme Commander 2's multiplayer in this interview.

The sequel will offer 21 multiplayer maps, including revamped versions of popular maps from the first game such as Seton's Clutch and Finn's Revenge, and there will be only two primary differences between multiplayer on the PC and on the Xbox 360: the PC version will support up to eight players, while the Xbox 360 version will support up to four. Also, the PC version will play online via Steam, while the console version will obvious run on Xbox Live, with support for friends lists, ladders, and stat tracking. Otherwise, multiplayer matches in both versions of the game will be very close to each other--they'll both start fast and ramp up even faster. Both versions let you choose various map conditions, such as fog of war on or off, varying game speeds, and fixed or random spawn positions. You can also easily assign teams to set up a team game, and/or slot in AI opponents to turn your match into a co-op session against computer opponents--though at higher difficulty levels, AI opponents are alarmingly efficient and frighteningly aggressive.

Supreme Commander 2 is all about smart decisions and the giant killer robots that follow from them.

In most multiplayer matches, you'll start near two mass nodes with two engineer units and an ACU supreme commander unit (which, like engineers, can construct buildings). Mass is, of course, one of the game's primary resources, along with energy (which you generate by constructing generator buildings). While your first order of business is to build mass extractors on your two nearest nodes as quickly as possible, the rest is up to your first big strategic choice.

As we've mentioned previously, Supreme Commander 2 offers five different research tracks, three of which are tied directly to military development (land, air, and sea). Research points automatically trickle into your coffers at a slow pace, though you can construct research centers to accrue them at a slightly faster rate. Now, while you can construct basic barracks-type structures for churn out units for each of these terrain types, you'll only unlock higher-level units along each tree by investing research points in various improvements in each track. Only by scrambling up through the land military track, for instance, will the Cybran Nation be able to eventually commission the Megalith II minor experimental walker or the major experimental Cybranasaurus. It's these choices you must make early and often that will get you a leg up on your opponent, though it's also crucial that you get a sense of your opponent's choices and progress with aggressive reconnaissance.

Traditional real-time strategy recon is usually a function of how well you can micromanage your cheap scout unit (or cheap peon unit) into the fog of war and sniff out your enemies' bases before your sacrificial scout gets splattered into paste. Fortunately, Supreme Commander 2's research trees allow for recon as well. In addition to sounding stations which your builder units can construct from the "advanced" buildings tab (including radar and aquatic sonar stations), pretty much all research tracks contain at least one radar upgrade that will increase the range of all tracking stations, as well as at least one vision upgrade which will increase your sight range.

Battleships are a very powerful ally, but they're best used when backed up with sonar intel.

Interestingly, some higher-level units have additional radar- and vision-based bonuses, like the UEF air track, which includes an unlockable bomb camera that will extend the field of vision around any of your bomber units. Key intel (especially if you happen to sight an opponent's deadly high-level experimental unit lumbering your way) will also help you adjust your next research picks to perhaps be more suitable to the situation at hand. All tracks have defensive additions, such as personal energy shields, that can be unlocked for your land, air, and sea units, as well as for your structures and ACU.

Beyond recon, Supreme Commander 2's multiplayer games seem to be real-time arms races with intermittent skirmishing and landgrabs. In order to keep your war factories humming and your armies constantly growing, you need to snag as many mass deposits as possible (though if you're a skillful enough micromanager, you can actually send your engineers out after your fallen allies and foes to scavenge leftover mass from their husks). Fortunately, building point defense is extremely easy (turrets can be quickly and cheaply dropped in and around your holdings) and from there, it's a hop, skip, and a jump up through the structure research tree to heavier emplacements, like the Noah Unit Cannon (a powerful experimental unit that is at once artillery, troop transport, and barracks that generates powerful ground units, then fires them like long-range artillery shells to dump them right into enemy territory) and good, old fashioned nuclear warheads. As a matter of fact, even though Supreme Commander 2's marquee attractions are the huge, lumbering offensive experimentals, playing a defensive "turtle" style seems like a very viable way to go in multiplayer, assuming you can dig in and control enough mass nodes to keep your forces going.

It's actually viable to turtle up in Supreme Commander 2. Just make sure you can back it up with some nukes.

From what we've seen, Supreme Commander 2 has a great deal going for it as both a single-player game with a hefty campaign and as a multiplayer and skirmish game with a lot of different ways to play. The game is scheduled for release in March on both the PC and the Xbox 360.

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"Xbox 360 | Supreme Commander 2 Updated Hands-On - Multiplayer and Skirmish" was posted by Andrew Park on Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:26:00 -0800

PC | Supreme Commander 2 Updated Hands-On - Multiplayer and Skirmish

2010-02-19T23:00:00.001-08:00

We get our hands dirty in multiplayer in this epic strategy sequel.

[ Watch Video ]

Get the details on Supreme Commander 2's multiplayer in this interview.

The sequel will offer 21 multiplayer maps, including revamped versions of popular maps from the first game, such as Seton's Clutch and Finn's Revenge. And there will be only two primary differences between multiplayer on the PC and on the Xbox 360: The PC version will support up to eight players, while the Xbox 360 version will support up to four. Also, the PC version will play online via Steam, while the console version will obviously run on Xbox Live, with support for friends lists, ladders, and stat tracking. Otherwise, multiplayer matches in both versions of the game will be very close to each other--they'll both start fast and ramp up even faster. Both versions let you choose various map conditions, such as fog of war on or off, varying game speeds, and fixed or random spawn positions. You can also easily assign teams to set up a team game and/or slot in AI opponents to turn your match into a co-op session against computer opponents. Though at higher difficulty levels, AI opponents are alarmingly efficient and frighteningly aggressive.

Supreme Commander 2 is all about smart decisions and the giant killer robots that follow from them.

As we've mentioned previously, Supreme Commander 2 offers five different research tracks, three of which are tied directly to military development (land, air, and sea). Research points automatically trickle into your coffers at a slow pace, though you can construct research centers to accrue them at a slightly faster rate. Now, while you can construct basic barracks-type structures for churn-out units for each of these terrain types, you'll only unlock higher level units along each tree by investing research points in various improvements in each track. Only by scrambling up through the land military track, for instance, will the Cybran Nation be able to eventually commission the Megalith II minor experimental walker or the major experimental Cybranasaurus. It's these choices you must make early and often that will get you a leg up on your opponent, though it's also crucial that you get a sense of your opponent's choices and progress with aggressive reconnaissance.

Traditional real-time strategy recon is usually a function of how well you can micromanage your cheap scout unit (or cheap peon unit) into the fog of war and sniff out your enemies' bases before your sacrificial scout gets splattered into paste. Fortunately, Supreme Commander 2's research trees allow for recon as well. In addition to sounding stations, which your builder units can construct from the "advanced" buildings tab (including radar and aquatic sonar stations), pretty much all research tracks contain at least one radar upgrade that will increase the range of all tracking stations, as well as at least one vision upgrade that will increase your sight range.

Battleships are a very powerful ally, but they're best used when backed up with sonar intel.

Interestingly, some higher level units have additional radar- and vision-based bonuses, like the UEF air track, which includes an unlockable bomb camera that will extend the field of vision around any of your bomber units. Key intel (especially if you happen to sight an opponent's deadly high-level experimental unit lumbering your way) will also help you adjust your next research picks to perhaps be more suitable to the situation at hand. All tracks have defensive additions, such as personal energy shields, that can be unlocked for your land, air, and sea units, as well as for your structures and ACU.

Beyond recon, Supreme Commander 2's multiplayer games seem to be real-time arms races with intermittent skirmishing and land grabs. In order to keep your war factories humming and your armies constantly growing, you need to snag as many mass deposits as possible (though if you're a skillful enough micromanager, you can actually send your engineers out after your fallen allies and foes to scavenge leftover mass from their husks). Fortunately, building point defense is extremely easy (turrets can be quickly and cheaply dropped in and around your holdings) and from there, it's a hop, skip, and a jump up through the structure research tree to heavier emplacements. These include the Noah Unit Cannon (a powerful experimental unit that is at once artillery, troop transport, and barracks that generates powerful ground units, then fires them like long-range artillery shells to dump them right into enemy territory) and good, old-fashioned nuclear warheads. As a matter of fact, even though Supreme Commander 2's marquee attractions are the huge, lumbering offensive experimentals, playing a defensive "turtle" style seems like a very viable way to go in multiplayer. That is, if you can dig in and control enough mass nodes to keep your forces going.

It's actually viable to turtle up in Supreme Commander 2. Just make sure you can back it up with some nukes.

Read and Post Comments | Get the full article at GameSpot

"PC | Supreme Commander 2 Updated Hands-On - Multiplayer and Skirmish" was posted by Andrew Park on Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:26:00 -0800

Xbox 360 | Alan Wake Hands-On

2010-02-18T23:00:00.001-08:00

We finally get a chance to explore the inside of Alan Wake's mind in this creepy and intriguing thriller.

Last week, we brought you our impressions of developer Remedy's excellent Alan Wake showing at Microsoft's X10 event. Not only did we see a demo of this psychological thriller in action, but we also got our hands on a completely different level, making this the first time we were able to play Alan Wake. We knew it was beautiful to look at and the story intrigues us the more we glimpse of it, so we're happy that the gameplay makes as good of a first impression as the game's presentation values. The controls were solid and the combat felt slick during our play time, which gives us great hope for this long-in-development story-driven experience. Luckily, that development time is almost over, for Remedy has announced that Alan Wake is coming to North America on May 18 and to Europe on May 21.

In the section we played, a visually slick cutscene and narration fills us in on the premise. Alan quotes horror writer Stephen King, which seems appropriate given the prolific author's obvious influence on the story. As the camera pans across a dark lake, Alan tells us how he has driven to visit a lighthouse, for reasons he can't explain--yet this drive is incredibly urgent. As he drives through the dead of night, he hits a pedestrian. Shocked, he gets out of his car to discover that the man he struck is dead. Dazed, Alan wonders what will happen next--and the body vanishes, as if it were never there. Obviously, Alan is even more shocked than before, though there isn't much time to dwell, for the scene--and the voice-over--then shifts tone.

The following scene offers us a quick rundown of what has been happening in Alan's life to lead him to where he is now. If you've read previous coverage, you probably know that Alan is a famous author, looking for peace and inspiration in the quiet hamlet of Bright Falls. The scene fills us in on even more information: His wife, Alice, is missing; he woke up behind the wheel of a crashed car to discover a week had gone by, the time all but lost; and most importantly, his imagination is coming to life before his eyes. Alan's idea for his upcoming novel is happening as he watches, and he even finds manuscript pages from this book on his travels--a book he has yet to write. In the demo, we discovered several such pages, but they are more than just a narrative device: they also provide clues of what you might next encounter. For example, one page talked about a flock of black birds that descend upon you almost like smoke. And as we saw in last week's demo, you do indeed encounter such a freaky phenomenon.

The demo began after Alan wakes from his stupor. As Alan, you see a gas station in the distance, across a deep ravine and the river that flows through it, and Alan surmises he'll probably find a telephone there, or someone who can help. We started off down the path and through the forest, but as you can imagine, this was not a stress-free trek. We glimpsed a shadowy figure on the path, who appeared and disappeared, spouting gibberish that didn't make a whole lot of sense. However, we did catch his name as he rambled: Carl Stuckey. As we mentioned in our prior preview, Carl is the man Alan was to meet in order to receive keys to a lakeside cabin. When he went to the diner to meet Carl, a mysterious figure emerged from the shadows and told Alan that Carl was indisposed. In this case, it seems "indisposed" is a major understatement.

Eventually we saw lights ahead at a logging camp, where a cabin rested amid a maze of stacked logs. However, Carl continued to flit across our path, and it became quickly clear that we'd need to defend ourselves. Eventually we made our way to a shed and found a telephone inside. We tried to make a call out and reached the sheriff's office, only for the call to give way to some far more insidious cries and scowls. A phone was not the only device to be found in the small cabin, however, and we picked up a flashlight and a pistol, knowing they'd come in handy. As soon as we did, however, we met with the realization that something wasn't right. Indeed, Carl was trying to push the shed into the ravine with some industrial equipment. We jumped out just in the nick of time, and the makeshift cabin plummeted into the river.

Thankfully, the pistol and flashlight came in more than handy, and it wasn't long before we were filling Carl's cronies with lead. The "human" enemies you fight in Alan Wake are called the Taken (the ones we saw dual-wielded axes and weren't afraid to throw one), and as you might know already, they are sensitive to light. To weaken their defenses and slow them down, you shine a bright beam of light on them by holding the left trigger, and you shoot your weapon by pulling the right trigger. Focusing light on a Taken also functions as a sort of lock-on, honing in on the enemy closest to the beam and making it easy to take shots at him. Your flashlight doesn't have unlimited energy, though. Each time you focus light on an enemy, you lose battery life, and you need to replenish flashlight batteries in the same way you replenish ammo. Tapping Y replaces your battery, while tapping X reloads your ammo. When you are running low on either, a prompt will appear on the screen to let you know.

Alan controls smoothly, which might be a relief if you've played a typically sluggish survival horror game before. When you turn, the flashlight's beam leads the way, so while Alan isn't the most fleet-footed guy, he can certainly pivot the beam around as quickly as he needs to. Nevertheless, this is no third-person shooter. Alan still moved more authentically than you would see in a shooter, ambling along when sprinting and landing with a thud if falling from too high above. The path was fairly narrow, but we moved along easily and were able to fight off baddies without getting hung up in the environment or having trouble getting about and honing in on the Taken. We used both a pistol and a shotgun in our travels, and both felt solid and had just the right amount of heft. The shotgun in particular felt powerful and weighty.

The rest of the gameplay followed somewhat traditional lines for a creepy adventure. In order to get to an upper path, we needed to use a logging crane, but there was no power available, so we had to search for a generator. While we did so, we discovered one of Alan Wake's more interesting facets. Ammo stashes are hidden around the various areas, placed there by an enigmatic helper who scrawls arrows and cryptic messages on the sides of buildings. You can see these hints only when you pass the beam of your flashlight over them, so you'll need to keep your eyes open if you want to have enough ammo and batteries to get by. Once we found a few stashes, we could confidently move forward, making our way to the upper path before we had to make way for the journalist next in line to take a look.

Alan Wake looks impressive. The way shafts of light cut through the darkness or softly waft through doorways sometimes sets an ominous tone and other times seems inviting, urging you to escape the darkness. The forest is littered with authentic touches, like junked cars, axes stuck in rotting stumps, and makeshift log bridges. Alan's narrative will keep you constant company, so thankfully the voice acting seems solid and unforced. The ramblings of the Taken cut through the silence of the forest, while the shotgun in particular makes an impression with its dominant boom. If you're a sucker for slick production values, this is a game you'll need to keep an eye on.

Luckily, you won't have long to wait. May 18 is just around the corner, and Alan Wake may be just the story-driven adventure you've been craving. Only time will tell, of course, but for now things are looking good for the game, though we're not so certain about Alan himself or his missing wife. We can't wait to find out more about the evil forces directing this drama, and we'll share more news as it becomes available.

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"Xbox 360 | Alan Wake Hands-On" was posted by Kevin VanOrd on Thu, 18 Feb 2010 08:38:58 -0800

PlayStation 3 | Skate 3 Updated Hands-On

2010-02-16T23:00:00.001-08:00

With a new co-op Career mode, we try to squeeze our entire team into one magazine cover shot.

EA hit the ground running with its Skate franchise, which from day one offered a uniquely analog-stick-driven control scheme and a refreshing, true-to-the-sport approach to skateboarding. Now on its third installment in four calendar years, the development team at EA Black Box is looking to keep the series fresh when the next game arrives this May. The team's approach is twofold: introduce a brand new city to work your skateboarding magic in and shift the focus of Career mode to the social aspect of the sport.

[ Watch Video ]

The city, this time around, is a fictional metropolis called Port Carverton. It replaces San Vanelona, which had been the setting of the first two games in the series. Like San Van, Port Carverton is designed as a skater's Mecca that draws inspiration from famous skate spots from all over the world then drops them into one great big hodgepodge of benches, ledges, and impossibly inviting urban architecture. The team's cheeky approach to using real-world locations has resulted in areas like Second and Navy, a waterfront pier skate spot with a suspiciously similar look to San Francisco's Third and Army, or the Aletown neighborhood that will invoke a distinct sense of deja vu for anyone who's been to Vancouver's Yaletown.

But unlike the San Vanelona of Skate 2, which was a city overrun by the anti-skateboarding Mongo Corporation, Port Carverton is a city that feels like it wants to reach out and give you a big ol' hug. Gone are the capped handrails that you had to recruit a friend to pry off, as are the guards that came out of nowhere to knock you off your board whenever you found a particularly shiny marble ledge in the center of the financial district. Instead, Port Carverton is described by Black Box senior producer Jason DeLong as a genuine skater's paradise; a place where security guards will go out of their way to point you toward cool spots and the sun never seems to stop shining.

A new Career mode will act as your tour guide through Port Carverton. As a continuation of the previous two games, Skate 3 has you more or less at the pinnacle of your career, and now it's time to do what seemingly all famous skaters do: start your own board company. Selling boards and building your brand is the main thrust of the Career mode, with each career challenge offering a reward in the form of board sales. It feels similar to an experience points system that will trigger new milestones at increasing intervals, which unlock more challenges, gear, and new spots to skate throughout the city.

Getting your whole team into a shot during photo challenges is a lot of fun.

Because a board company isn't complete without sponsored riders, you'll need to go out and recruit some folks to join your team. The cool part about this is that it opens up the possibility to play the entire Career mode cooperatively with friends over Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network. We got a chance to play a number of co-op challenges and walked away impressed by the different experience that pulling off a challenge with a friend can deliver.

The photo challenges were easily our favorites. With these, you and your teammates all need to perform a trick on (or over) a specific object before a timer runs out, such as launching over a huge gap or grinding a specific ledge. With more than one player, you now have the opportunity to coordinate your skating so that you all wind up in each other's shots. So you might have one guy grinding a bench while the other airs over him, or both of skaters might launch over a gap in tandem--that sort of thing. You can, then, take that sweet photo and tweak it with a number of postproduction options (brightness, contrast, depth of field, and the like) before seeing it turn into an in-game magazine cover that you might later find plastered all over the city as a flier or even a billboard.

All the other usual suspects return in the Career mode challenges, including downhill races, high-score competitions, and video challenges. We asked DeLong about one of the criticisms of the last game that had to with the way later challenges in the Career mode got very specific about what sort of trick you had to do and what you had to do it on (anyone who remembers doing a handplant on a basketball backboard will know what we mean), which often turned into a roadblock in your career progression. For Skate 3, DeLong says they've focused more on creating tiered pools of challenges that let you pick and choose which specific challenge you want to complete in order to unlock the next pool. Another criticism--pedestrians getting in your way during critical moments--has been remedied with a button that now lets you raise up your arms like the boogeyman and scare people away instantly. Supposedly, the volume of physics-enabled litter has been scaled back as well, so at least now there's not quite as much tripping on stray soda cans just as you are about to ollie onto a handrail.

Our time with Skate 3 also revealed a few other notable additions. Besides three difficulty levels, which is a first for the series, you can now take part in an extended tutorial system. This system is called Skate School with Coach Frank, and the coach is a thoroughly goofy character voiced by actor, as well as former pro skateboarder, Jason Lee. You can also now place an invisible photographer at any point in the game, letting you snap photos quickly and easily at any location without having to pull up the video editor to place a tripod camera then scroll to where you want in the video timeline to pull out a still shot. You'll see the customized character of anyone you're friends with on PSN or Live cruising through your city as an AI skater, even if you're just free skating around town. And in a nice little touch, if you appear in a friend's video that becomes a smash hit on the skate.reel content sharing system, you'll gain royalties in the form of boards sold in the Career mode.

Port Carverton is a much more inviting city than the San Van of Skate 2.

It's hard to get a good idea of how well the whole online component will work in Skate 3 from the relatively limited time we spent with it, but overall, we liked what we saw. The new city should infuse some fresh air into the series for those who were disappointed by the reuse of San Van in Skate 2, and there are definitely some features that should make the game more accommodating to new players. We're looking forward to spending more time with the Career mode to see what sort of trouble we can get into online, so be sure to check out our upcoming coverage leading up to Skate 3's May release.

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"PlayStation 3 | Skate 3 Updated Hands-On" was posted by Shaun McInnis on Fri, 12 Feb 2010 14:55:57 -0800

PlayStation 3 | Skate 3 Updated Hands-On

2010-02-15T23:00:00.001-08:00

With a new co-op Career mode, we try to squeeze our entire team into one magazine cover shot.

[ Watch Video ]

Getting your whole team into a shot during photo challenges is a lot of fun.

Port Carverton is a much more inviting city than the San Van of Skate 2.

Read and Post Comments | Get the full article at GameSpot

"PlayStation 3 | Skate 3 Updated Hands-On" was posted by Shaun McInnis on Fri, 12 Feb 2010 14:55:57 -0800

PC | Elemental: War of Magic Updated QA - Progress Report and Improvements Over GalCiv

2010-02-14T23:00:00.001-08:00

Stardock frontman Brad Wardell gives us an update on this ambitious fantasy strategy game.

In the beginning, there was nothing. And for a long time, nothing happened until some guys made Master of Magic, a cult-classic strategy game that let you conquer a fantasy world with sword-swinging armies and magic spells. Master of Magic was succeeded by a great many other fantasy games that all put their own spin on the formula, but these successors eventually faded away. Now, developer Stardock is looking to recapture the magic of large-scale fantasy-themed strategy with Elemental: War of Magic, a game that builds on the success that the studio attained with its acclaimed Galactic Civilizations series. Stardock's Brad Wardell explains.

In Elemental: War of Magic, there be dragons.

GameSpot: Give us a brief update on the game's status. What parts of the game are currently being worked on?

Brad Wardell: We're nearing the end of the first beta of the game. Our focus has been to work through the game mechanics to make sure what seems fun on paper will translate to fun in-game. Specifically, we have been working on the battle system, quests, and the player's dynasty. The dynasty system has proven to be far more interesting than we had realized. In Elemental, the player exists in the game as a specific unit (the sovereign). The sovereign can have children who appear in the game as champions with various powers. These units can be married off to other kingdoms to secure alliances and gain other political advantage. In turn, they can have children. We have a genetic algorithm for producing the children, which has had some interesting visual results. In one game, I married my beautiful daughter to a trog monster. I will require many months of therapy to recover after seeing their child.

GS: Even though Elemental is a brand-new intellectual property, it's coming from the same team that created Galactic Civilizations and that has worked on strategy games for years. What are some of the most important lessons the team is taking from its previous gameplay, design, and balancing experiences and applying to Elemental?

BW: There's a lot of lessons we've learned from Galactic Civilizations that we're bringing into Elemental. Probably the single biggest lesson has been the importance of giving the game a "soul." Each of the 12 factions needs to feel different. The gameworld should feel rich and full of epic history. We are focusing on making sure that while it is a strategy game with great depth, it also makes players feel like they're part of an epic tale that is different each time they play.

GS: We've also seen that Elemental has an extremely far zoom mode that incorporates the early beta "cloth map" view--definitely not a feature we've seen in the studio's previous games. What are some of the most important technological lessons and tech tricks the team has learned and perfected to bring into Elemental?

BW: In Galactic Civilizations II, players could zoom out to see the whole galaxy. In Elemental, we've taken strategic zoom to the next level where the game can truly be played completely in the cloth-map view. This is important to us because it lets us have our cake and eat it too--the game can be played on a netbook but also will have stunning, state-of-the-art graphics on the latest hardware.

So…Rain of Fire sound good to everyone else?

GS: One of the most impressive and enjoyable aspects of Stardock's established GalCiv series is its smart and challenging artificial intelligence for computer-controlled opponents. How will Elemental's AI opponents compare? In what specific ways will they be even better than those of GalCiv II?

BW: Probably the biggest difference in our strategy on computer AI is that we're going to expose our AI algorithms to players via Python. In Galactic Civilizations, I wrote the AI myself, and as good as it was, there was always the limitation of "it could only be as good as I was." In Elemental, I'm writing the computer AI again, but this time, when it's done, players will be able to modify it as well.

GS: More recently, Stardock has encountered challenges in netcode for more multiplayer-heavy games. What lessons has the team taken from its recent experiences to apply to Elemental's multiplayer?

BW: The big difference is that for Elemental, Stardock is writing the netcode. In Demigod, we were the publisher and licensed a third-party network library to help developer Gas Powered Games handle its peer-to-peer system. While we were able to throw our own developers at the problem to resolve the issues for Demigod, it's not something we want to ever go through again. So on Elemental, [the netcode is] 100 percent our own. Moreover, Elemental is client/server based rather than peer-to-peer. So all the computing takes place on a server rather than on individual machines. This means one player can't really affect the game experience of everyone else.

Obviously, Elemental is focusing on its single-player experience. But much of our network investment is focusing on enhancing that single-player experience by letting users share and incorporate [user-created content] within the game. For multiplayer, the client/server setup lets us optionally manage players' saved multiplayer games so that they can go back and continue later on without worrying where their saved game is.

GS: Can you give us an update on the powerful editing tools we've previously discussed? What are some of the new developments that have been added? How big will players be able to make their maps? How many interconnected quests and triggers can be tied together? Just how long of an epic campaign do you think ambitious hobbyists will end up making?

BW: During our last visit, we had the integrated map editor, item editor, and city designer for players to enhance the game experience. Since then, we've been developing a conversation editor that can be used in-game for players to enrich the interaction between characters in the game and help users expand the in-game story as they see fit. We are also hoping to fit in a quest editor so that players can create new quests.

GS: Finally, is there anything else you'd like to add about Elemental: War of Magic?

In addition to conquering the world, you can pursue quests. With any luck, the in-game editor will let you make your own quests, too.

BW: Probably one of the most fun parts of developing the game has been the open beta program. Even though the game isn't scheduled for release until the end of summer, we've had an ongoing beta for several months in which we've had enough time to play the game and find things we did, and didn't, like about our initial designs. For instance, we redesigned the technology tree to be a lot more fun, and our economic system has been refined heavily based on player feedback. It's just one of those things where the game will have had lots of real-world strategy game players playing the game long before it's generally available. It's been a lot of fun so far.

GS: Thanks, Brad.

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"PC | Elemental: War of Magic Updated Q&A - Progress Report and Improvements Over GalCiv" was posted by Staff on Wed, 10 Feb 2010 13:51:59 -0800

Xbox 360 | Final Fantasy XIII Hands-On

2010-02-13T23:00:00.001-08:00

We were lucky enough to spend some time with the English version of Square Enix's latest role-playing epic.

If you're currently living in Japan, chances are you're already grinding your way though Final Fantasy XIII from Square Enix. Unfortunately, the rest of us have been left waiting for the English-language version, which is due for release on March 9. To ease our collective pain, Square Enix invited us to go hands-on with the final build of the English version on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 at a special event in London.

[ Watch Video ]

The event kicked off with a screening of the full intro movie to the game, which showcased the high-quality cinematics and introduced the main characters. The movie began with the camera panning through a deep valley covered in lush vegetation. Three birdlike creatures then flew through the valley, up into the sky, to reveal a vast airborne city, filled with futuristic-looking buildings and vehicles. The screen faded to black and cut to a close-up of the barrel of a gun, which was being held by the main female character, Lightning. The detail in the animation was astonishing, and we could pick out every pink hair on her head. The movie then cut to an underground chamber, the city of Cocoon, where the early stages of the game take place. A huge flying vehicle powered by glowing blue engines swooped across the screen, revealing another female character, Vanille, dressed in a hooded cloak. We were treated to a beautiful scene showing the main characters of the game riding atop a dragonlike creature in a cloudy sky. Next the movie cut between several scenes, showing the various summons in the game. We were able to pick out Shiva and Odin's attacks, before the video cut into an action montage, which ended with Vanille gazing into a valley, complete with giant creatures lumbering across the screen.

While watching Final Fantasy cinematics is always a treat, thankfully the preview event also allowed us to play various sections of the game, the first of which took place in the underground city of Cocoon. Taking control of Lightning, we explored the city, traipsing down narrow walkways. This section of the game was relatively linear. As we ventured down a walkway, every few minutes we would encounter a save point, a floating orb (which is a futuristic reimagining of the simple treasure chest), or a group of enemies. Unlike in Final Fantasy XII, the enemy encounters took place on a separate battle screen, which resembled the surrounding environment. There are no random battles in the game, and enemies can clearly be seen onscreen before you encounter them. However, the walkways in Cocoon were too small for us to squeeze past enemies, and we inevitably ended up fighting everyone that got in our way.

Fortunately, battles are lots of fun, thanks in part to the new battle system. It doesn't rewrite the rule book on turn-based combat but instead offers a faster version of the active time bar system from previous Final Fantasy games. The ATB is now split into segments. Each segment corresponds to an action, and the number of segments indicates how many actions you can chain together. Some actions, such as a simple attack, may use only one segment of the bar, while larger attacks may require two or more segments. Because we were playing with Lightning at a relatively low level, her ATB contained only two segments, so we could chain just two attacks together. As characters level up, they gain more segments in their ATB, allowing them to put together more devastating combos. Attacks in the command menu are split into two sections: manual and auto battle. Manual allows you to pick different attacks to queue up in your ATB timeline, while auto battle selects the most appropriate commands and automatically fills the ATB. We found the auto battle option useful during the early stages of the game, where enemies are relatively weak, and we can see this feature coming into its own when grinding character levels later in the game. We also found the ability to stagger our opponents useful. Staggering is activated by attacking enemies repeatedly, which increases an orange bar above their head. The bar is constantly decreasing, and only sustained attacks are enough to push it to the top and stagger an enemy. Once staggered, enemies took double damage from our attacks, while their attacking power decreased.

[ Watch Video ]

Continuing through Cocoon, we took control of Snow and Vanille. The game alternates between the characters, who are all on a different path through the city. Each of the characters specializes in a different weapon. Lightning uses a gun sword called Blade Edge, Vanille uses a bizarre fishing rod weapon, and Snow simply attacks with his fists. New weapons are available to buy throughout the game, though we were told that the best way to enhance a character's attack power is to upgrade his or her existing weapons. Different types of organic and mechanical items can be bought at shops, which are accessible via the many save points in the game. Not only are the items cheaper than new weapons, but they allow you to concentrate on increasing specific weapon attributes, such as attack power. Another way to power up your characters is with the crystarium system. Crystarium is accessible at any time from the main menu and lets you upgrade a character's attributes, such as magic ability, or increase a character's accessory slots . The system is similar to Final Fantasy X's sphere grid in that increasing one attribute opens up more areas to upgrade. Upgrades cost a certain number of crystarium points, but more points are awarded after each battle.

Square Enix also showed us a number of other locations from the game. We skipped ahead to a section from chapter six, titled Chain of Events. The chapter took place in a town called Palumpolum, where we took control of Vanille. This section showed us some of the stealthier elements of the game. We had to use a drainage pipe to sneak into a complex surrounded by guards. We were able to avoid battles by hiding behind boxes when enemies approached, before making a mad dash to the pipe. We could then sneak under guards, and proceed into the complex. Another chapter we saw was Nautilus City of Dreams, a theme park filled with bustling crowds and circus shows. A battle between Snow and a number of guards was taking place just outside the city, which was shown on the TV screens inside Nautilus. Finally, we skipped forward to chapter 11, to the world of Pulse. This area was much larger than earlier parts of the game and was made up of large grass-covered valleys, populated with giant dinosaur-like creatures. Getting around was made easier by a minimap to the right of the screen, showing our current position, along with any side quests that were available. Side quests are accessed via floating panels dotted across the landscape, and we were shown one that required us to hunt down a specific enemy on the map. The reward for doing so was a bunch of valuable items and access to more side quests.

The new active time bar battle system mixes turn-based combat with fast action gameplay.

After getting over the initial shock of playing a Final Fantasy game on the Xbox 360, we found it was difficult to tell the two versions apart. Both look spectacular, with the game's engine creating stunning vistas. As we walked around the environments, we could pick out all the details on our characters' clothes and see their hair floating around in the wind. Battles looked fantastic, with vibrant lighting effects filling the screen during summons. We were constantly reminded that the summons were fully rendered in real time, as it was often difficult to tell whether it was the game engine at work or a full-motion video sequence. Also of note is the lip-syncing during cutscenes. Character animations have been reworked for the English voice acting, so speech lines up perfectly. However, we noticed at this stage that the movies on the Xbox 360 suffered from more compression than on the PlayStation 3, while the Xbox 360 had an overall crisper image quality in the main game.

We're very eager to get our hands on the finished product, which is due for release on the PS3 and Xbox 360 on March 9. Stay tuned to GameSpot for a full review soon.

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"Xbox 360 | Final Fantasy XIII Hands-On" was posted by Mark Walton on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 13:35:45 -0800

PlayStation 3 | Final Fantasy XIII Hands-On

2010-02-12T23:00:00.001-08:00

We were lucky enough to spend some time with the English version of Square Enix's latest role-playing epic.

Don't mess with these guys.

Summoning Shiva produces some of the flashiest visual effects we've seen in an RPG.

The new active time bar battle system mixes turn-based combat with fast action gameplay.

We're very eager to get our hands on the finished product, which is due for release on the PS3 and Xbox 360 on March 9. Stay tuned to GameSpot for a full review soon.

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"PlayStation 3 | Final Fantasy XIII Hands-On" was posted by Mark Walton on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 13:35:45 -0800

Xbox 360 | Fable III First Look

2010-02-11T23:00:00.001-08:00

We meet with Peter Molyneux and get our first look at Fable III.

Earlier today, while attending Microsoft's X10 event in San Francisco, we had an opportunity to meet with Peter Molyneux and spend between 20 and 30 minutes checking out Fable III. As we watched the game being played, Molyneux pointed out a number of key new features. While there are clearly still a lot of things that aren't being talked about yet, we came away from the presentation feeling like Molyneux's claims that this is going to represent a huge step forward over Fable II are well founded.

[ Watch Video ]

The first portion of the demo took place in a city where Molyneux's character was walking around looking for his young daughter and showing off some already-impressive visuals in the process. As he strolled across a bridge, he spotted the daughter playing with some of her young friends and being watched intently by another member of the family: the dog. As he approached the group, the daughter's friends ran away, and--perhaps as a result--the young girl became quite upset. How does a father comfort and cheer up his daughter in a situation like this one? Well, in Fable II, you might have resorted to dancing in front of her. Relentlessly. But in Fable III, emotes like that one are being replaced by touch and mapped to a single, context-sensitive trigger button.

Using said button, he bent down to pick up his daughter and proceeded to play with her--tossing her up and down until her sobbing gave way to girlish giggles. Then, using the same button, he gently reached for her hand and walked her down the street with the dog following dutifully behind. Molyneux appeared to contemplate popping into a pub at one point, but his daughter was quick to point out that he really shouldn't do that with her in tow. Next, we were shown how the touch command will work with a very different character who, on this occasion, was a beggar asking for money. Appearing sympathetic to the man's plight, Molyneux took his hand and started walking him through the town--perhaps to buy him a hearty meal or some new clothes. The beggar was clearly familiar with the way that Molyneux plays these games, though, (or perhaps just with the layout of the town) because not a minute into the walk, he started protesting and doing everything he could to resist being pulled along. Molyneux's plan, as it turned out, was to sell the beggar to a factory--whether the beggar was going to be put to work there or turned into an affordable meat product wasn't clear, but he was clearly opposed to the idea either way. Other uses for touch, we're told, will include guiding children to schools or orphanages, picking up someone who's injured to rescue him or her, and greeting people with gestures that are appropriate for your relationship with them. A handshake used the first time you meet someone might be replaced with a hug as you become better acquainted with them, for example.

And why exactly should you want to spend your time getting to know people and being nice to them? Well, because you'll need their help if you're to stand any chance of overthrowing the evil king. Followers will be an important consideration in Fable III, both prior to when you become king and during your reign on the throne. And, there will be a number of ways to gain their loyalty. One of the more interesting examples we were given, for example, involved wooing a powerful woman who had plenty of her own followers to make them your own. Other characters will be more easily pleased and might simply be impressed by your prowess in combat.

Based on what little combat we saw in Fable III today, it seems that it'll play out in much the same way as it did in Fable II, with buttons devoted to magic use, projectile weapons, and melee weapons. Molyneux hinted that there will be some improvements, but what he was most excited to talk about was the way that weapons will work. Molyneux's hope is that no two weapons in Fable III will be the same because--like your character--they'll morph based on your actions. The most obvious way that weapons will transform is that they'll grow bigger and more powerful the more you use them, but there's much more to it than that. The visual style of your weapon will change quite radically according to how it was used. So to give you the examples that we got to see for ourselves today, the head of a large axe that has presumably been used to kill a lot of skeletons or beasts appears to be made of bones, while a sword that has been used to commit evil acts, such as killing innocents, will forever appear to be covered in blood. And if you're still not excited, perhaps hearing that you'll be able to trade your unique (or at the very least, uniquely named) weapons with other players online might do the trick.

As you progress through the story, there will apparently be a number of occasions where you're encouraged to give up your unique weapons--perhaps for financial gain or some other temptation. Molyneux's hope, though, it seems, is that you'll feel so attached to your weapons--which you'll ultimately be able to store in your own armory--that you'll be reluctant to give them up. And perhaps you should be reluctant because while they will grow more powerful as you progress through the game, it's not yet clear if the same will be true of your character. All we know for sure is that experience points are a thing of the past, along with your health bar and anything else that resembles a heads-up display.

[ Watch Video ]

You know what else will be a thing of the past? Having to play co-op as some generic character that is of absolutely no interest to you. That's right, in Fable III, you'll be able to play co-operatively with a friend, and both of you will get to use your own characters, work on improving your own weapons, and even bring along your own dogs. Molyneux also pointed out that you'll be able to use the touch command with each other, but we chose not to pursue that potential line of questioning. This was partly because the character that we were seeing on the screen didn't really look like one we'd ever want to touch.

This character, which we watched battling against generic bad guys inside an impressively detailed cavern of some sort, was far and away the most evil looking that we've seen in a Fable game. Glowing red markings on his dark skin were somewhat reminiscent of those on Illidan from World of Warcraft or Devil Jin from the Tekken series. And that idea was reinforced when, during combat, he appeared to sprout horns and wings. Said appendages didn't appear to be parts of the character's physical form but rather translucent visual motifs that served no obvious purpose other than to look really cool. For characters at the opposite end of the good-and-evil scale, these demonic visuals will be replaced with angelic ones. This was evidenced by a video clip we saw showing a character that appeared to have large white feathered wings.

Before our time with Molyneux and Fable III came to an end, we were told that becoming king in the game will unlock at least two major new gameplay elements that--for the moment--aren't being shown. We were given a brief outline of what one of them will be, though, and the gist is essentially that with great power comes great responsibility. As king, you'll have access to a huge treasury, and having spent time on the streets gaining and getting to know your followers previously, you'll find yourself having to make difficult decisions when it comes to putting all of that gold to work. You might not want your people to starve, for example, but what if the money that's needed to feed them is also needed to assemble an army so that you can defend them? Unlike some of the choices in previous games from developer Lionhead Studios, these are unlikely to be black and white. You'll still be able to wander around your kingdom after ascending to the throne, and mechanics like combat and touching will still be a big part of the game. We were told that if you're confronted by someone badmouthing you in the street, for example, you could take him by the hand and choose to either throw him to the ground or, if you have something you're feeling guilty about or would just like kept quiet, lead him to your treasury and offer him a bribe to keep quiet.

During the brief question-and-answer session that followed the demo, Molyneux mentioned the existence of a second continent named Arora. And, on the subject of Natal support, he stated that Fable III is being designed for the regular Xbox 360 controller first and foremost, but that some Natal surprises are coming. We look forward to bringing you more information on Fable III, Natal, and player characters being able to "touch" each other cooperatively as soon as it becomes available.

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"Xbox 360 | Fable III First Look" was posted by Justin Calvert on Thu, 11 Feb 2010 15:38:58 -0800

Xbox 360 | Just Cause 2 Updated Hands-On

2010-02-09T23:00:00.001-08:00

We once again abuse the practical applications of a grapple hook, but this time we discover a ninja's greatest weakness along the way.

"I hate ninjas." Those words may reek of heresy if you've been raised on shuriken-related entertainment, but put yourself in the shoes of Just Cause 2 protagonist Rico Rodriguez--the very man who utters them--for a quick moment. After waging a one-man battle against heavily armed military forces, he's managed to complete a dangerous sabotage mission by the skin of his teeth. Exploding fuel tanks, rocket launchers, snipers--he's somehow survived it all. But right when the coast looks clear and just as Rico is about to secure the mission’yep, ninjas show up.

[ Watch Video ]

DEMO: Square Enix associate producer George Wright guides us through Just Cause 2.

That's how one of the delightfully absurd story cinematics went in our most recent hands-on demo of this open-world action game. It's heartening to see that the storytelling is every bit as eccentric as the gameplay because what we've seen so far suggests a sandbox game designed for the type of players who'd rather go off and create their own mayhem than stick to a rigidly designed story mission. It's over-the-top action where hijacking vehicles often takes a backseat to BASE jumping from mountains or slingshotting into the air with a parachute and grapple hook.

This latest demo was among the most improbable yet. We started on a lush, tropical beach; hopped into an attack helicopter; and flew all the way up to a military base perched atop snowy mountain cliffs. Our task was simple: Destroy four vent stations, rescue a person of interest, and try like hell not to die. Just Cause 2 affords you the usual armory of submachine guns, grenades, and jeeps (which, if you drive like us, can certainly be considered weapons). But the real fun of this game lies in the creative combinations of weapons and tools. For example: You might launch yourself into the air with a grapple hook, open your parachute to begin floating effortlessly, and use your rocket launcher to unleash chaos without leaving the friendly skies. You can get even more creative and use your grapple hook to attach a vehicle to a helicopter then fling it into enemy strongholds like the most expensive wrecking ball ever.

Use a moving car as cover with "stunt position" controls.

On this particular mission, we elected to run into the vent stations and attach several satchel charges to the targeted equipment. Then, we detonated the vent stations--and all the enemies guarding them--from a safe distance. When the charges ran out, we stole an enemy tank and began blasting everything in our way that looked the least bit threatening. (And also trees. We might have destroyed some trees, too.) Eventually we succeeded in sabotaging all the vents, at which point it looked like Rico was on his way to a nice pat on the back. Naturally, that's when the ninjas showed up.

Clearly, what we've got here is a game that doesn't take itself too seriously. When you can send a human being into low orbit by grappling him to a gas tank and shooting holes in it (the tank, not the man), there's an obvious sense of levity to the game. The story and the denizens of this fictional South Pacific island nation seem to match that tone as well. Like, for example, the aforementioned ninjas. Out of nowhere, they simply show up and act as a sort of collective boss battle standing between you and your ultimate goal of rescuing a person of interest. It's a tough battle because of their ability to throw smoke bombs and teleport the second you start shooting them. But after some trial and error, we found a ninja's one weakness: rockets to the head.

A moment later, we almost had our VIP. But as luck turned out, what seemed a foregone victory turned into a high-speed vehicle chase across a frozen lake. While in a vehicle, Just Case 2 allows you to jump straight onto the roof to either start shooting at a nearby vehicle or grapple straight onto it. We did just that, zipping from our jeep to another, holding onto the outside of said speeding car, and shooting the ninjas occupying it when they stuck their heads out to fend us off. It was a pretty thrilling chase scene that ended with us finally, at long last, completing our goal.

Just Cause 2 is a game where things go boom. A lot.

With so many opportunities for chaos and a storyline that wears its ridiculousness on its sleeve, Just Cause 2 looks like an intriguing entry in the sandbox action genre. If there's one thing that remains to be seen, it's how exciting the game will be outside these set piece battles because the several-hundred square-mile setting means there will be a lot of traveling between missions. Look forward to more information on that as we get closer to the game's March release.

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"Xbox 360 | Just Cause 2 Updated Hands-On" was posted by Shaun McInnis on Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:06:42 -0800

Xbox 360 | Metro 2033 Updated Hands-On

2010-02-08T23:00:00.001-08:00

The shooter based on the Russian sci-fi novel is due soon and we've got a hands-on look at the game.

Developers have been making video games out of movies for years, but recently, that trend has morphed a bit; they're now making video game adaptations of books. Perhaps the best-known case is EA's upcoming adventure game Dante's Inferno, based on the 700-year-old poem of the same name, but it isn't the only one. THQ's upcoming Metro 2033, being developed by 4A Games and due for release in March, also finds its roots in literature--namely a science fiction book of the same name by Russian author Dmitry Glukhovsky. THQ representatives recently stopped by the GameSpot offices to give us another look at the game just ahead of its release.

[ Watch Video ]

Check out our video preview of Metro 2033.

The Metro 2033 novel has proven to be one of the fastest-selling books in Russian history, with its mixture of science fiction, action, and a mystic undercurrent, and the game takes all of those elements into account. In the game, you play as Artyom, one of thousands of Russian citizens who have been living in the Moscow subway system for decades after a nuclear apocalypse. The subway system, which was designed not just to protect the citizenry from nuclear fallout but also to act as a makeshift shelter for an extended period, has become Artyom's home, and each of the stations in the subway system has been transformed into a miniature city all its own.

The setting of Metro 2033 is vital to the game's narrative. When you start the game, exploring the opening areas of your home station, you gain an understanding of the underground way of life--most of the citizens have never been to the surface, and fewer still even remember the days before the nuclear blast decimated the planet. And while Artyom's home station is a safe haven, danger isn't too far away. Traveling between stations requires you to make your way through the subway tunnels, which house all sorts of trouble--from mutated monsters that attack without provocation, to renegade bandits. Certain stations are home to trouble as well--for example, there's a raging conflict between the remnants of the Communist Party and those ubiquitous (at least in video game terms) Nazis.

Then there are the Dark Ones, mysterious creatures who psychically attack their victims. The regular populace isn't able to fight the Dark Ones. Most folks simply black out when they appear, which makes their threat that much more terrifying. As Artyom, you are somehow immune to the effects of the Dark Ones, which naturally makes you the ideal person to find out what they're all about.

Much of the early action in Metro 2033 is straight-up shooter action--in one early scene you're traveling between stations on a simple pushcart and are attacked by mutants. A bit later, you'll be accompanying a rogue-ish character known as Bourbon, who has promised to reward you with his AK-47 in payment for your assistance. And while that notorious Russian automatic weapon might not sound like the greatest of rewards, in Metro 2033, the weapons you carry (and the bullets you fire) define who you are. That's because most of the weaponry and ammunition you acquire underground are hand-fashioned and, as a result, not as accurate or as powerful as topside weapons. Topside weapons, produced by machines before the apocalypse (like Bourbon's AK-47), are more powerful and significantly more valuable. In fact, topside ammunition is used as currency underground--you can use it to buy new equipment or save it to use as traditional ammo when additional stopping power is needed.

During THQ's visit, and in our subsequent play of the game, we got a good feel for the world of Metro 2033, which seems to be rich with details inspired by the book. For example, in an early scene set in a bar, Artyom and his friends toast one another with three shots of vodka--a number insisted upon by the Ukraine-based 4A development studio. Producers told us that while the book's narrative forms the game's heart, there were changes that needed to be made in order to make the game a compelling experience to play. For example, in an early version of the game, the player didn't get to fire a weapon until about 45 minutes into the game. By contrast, in the build we played, you're dropped into the action much more quickly, with a gunplay-intensive prologue and other action sequences spread in between the exposition.

Nuclear fallout above ground, enemies everywhere underground--life isn't easy in Metro 2033.

While the focus on Metro 2033's gameplay seems to be on shooting, there is some variety--in certain areas you can use stealth to get past enemies. Artyom's wristwatch comes in handy here because it has a sensor that will show you how exposed you are in the shadows. In certain sections, such as when you're topside in certain levels, you'll need to wear a gas mask to protect yourself--your watch also has a timer that will tell you how long your gas mask's filter will last. Incidentally, if you are attacked by enemies while wearing a gas mask, there's always the danger that the mask will crack, rendering it useless. But with plenty of dead bodies around, especially topside, you'll usually be able to scavenge new equipment when you need it.

From a gameplay standpoint, the shooting sequences can be lackluster at times and the enemy animations aren't always as smooth as they should be. That said, Metro 2033's rich setting and mysterious narrative look to be its greatest strengths as you explore the huge underground setting and learn more about Artyom's connection with the Dark Ones. There's plenty of story to tell--the original Metro 2033 novel has been translated into English and will be released next month, and the author released the sequel, Metro 2034, last year. Could we see a video game sequel as well? That will depend on the success of the first game, which is due for release on March 16.

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"Xbox 360 | Metro 2033 Updated Hands-On" was posted by Brian Ekberg on Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:16:43 -0800

PSP | ModNation Racers PSP First Look

2010-02-06T23:00:00.001-08:00

We get an exclusive hands-on with Sony's impressive portable version of the upcoming PlayStation 3 kart racer.

ModNation Racers is the upcoming kart racer for the PlayStation 3 being developed by United Front Games that is set to carry on the "play, create, share" movement introduced in Little Big Planet. The game was first shown off at last year's Electronic Entertainment Expo and offered a fresh addition to Sony's growing PS3 software library. While we've had a few updated looks at the game in the months since its debut, it looks like Sony has been keeping a secret that we discovered on a recent visit to SCEA's San Diego development studio: a PSP version of the game. While it may sound like crazy talk to hear that the ModNation Racers experience is being converted to the PlayStation Portable, we're pleased to say that it's happening and is going well. We had the chance to get a look at an early work-in-progress version of the game and were shocked by how well it's coming together.

[ Watch Video ]

If you haven't been following ModNation Racers, the unique kart racer features standard single- and multiplayer racing modes with a robust and easy-to-use content creator. If this sounds a lot like the model set by Little Big Planet, that's because it really is the spiritual successor to Media Molecule's groundbreaking game. One of the key differences in the experience--aside from the difference in genre--is an even more accessible, and surprisingly robust, content creation tool that's basically a triple threat. The game's three creation "studios" let you create unique mods (drivers), karts, and tracks using thousands of props and a free-form road-layout tool for a staggering number of combinations. While this whole package makes sense on the PlayStation 3 given its processing power, a successful and faithful portable conversion clearly poses a pretty hefty challenge.

Sony tapped its San Diego development studio to take on the task of creating a unique ModNation experience on the PSP that was faithful to the PS3 game. To pull off the ambitious task, the team reached out to two studios: United Front Games, which was pretty well versed in the ModNation world, and Studio Liverpool, Sony's UK development house responsible for the awesome Wipeout games on the PSP. United Front Games offered guidance and assistance around the assets used for the game to ensure that the art style remained faithful to the overall aesthetics of the PS3 version. Studio Liverpool made a unique contribution to the project in the form of the game engine the team developed for the Wipeout games on the PSP.

The result of this work is a full-featured re-creation of the PS3 game on the PSP that comes packing nearly all the content from the console game, sharp visuals, and an impressive sense of speed. The game retains the urban vinyl look of its console cousin while sporting a stylized look that fits the action. There are some trade-offs to detail given the PSP's horsepower and display resolution, but Sony San Diego's work to tweak the Wipeout engine for its needs is paying off nicely. The game looks supersharp and retains its quirky personality.

[ Watch Video ]

On the content side, ModNation Racers PSP features a single-payer story mode that has you working your way through a series of levels facing off against bosses. In addition, the game features three content creation studios that let you customize your driver and kart as well as create entire tracks from scratch. While this may sound daunting, each of the studios features an easy-to-use interface that makes it a breeze to make use of the hundreds of different items to create something. Many of the items in each editor feature some level of additional customization, such as color or detailing, that you can use to fine-tune your items to your liking. The game stays true to the interface of the PS3 game's content creation modes and should be accessible for just about anyone to play around with. The track editor is especially impressive given the scale that you work in.

As far as the multiplayer goes, there are a few options to choose from. The multiplayer experience lets you mix it up in ad hoc or infrastructure matches for up to six players. You'll find all the different match types from the PS3 game on hand in addition to a brand-new mode for the PSP. Besides the traditional multiplayer options, ModNation Racers will let you upload your custom content as well as download the work of other players.

But while this all sounds well and good, cool graphics and content creation tools don't mean much if the game sitting at the heart of everything isn't good. We got some hands-on time with two tracks in the game and are pleased to report that the racing mechanics are sound and the controls are responsive, which makes for a fun kart experience. Your goal, as in the PS3 game, is to outrace your opponents on winding tracks filled with hazards, weapons, jumps, and shortcuts. An interesting new wrinkle to this solid set of mechanics is a new stomp move added to the PSP game that lets you smack around an opponent even if you don't have a weapon on hand. One of the big keys to the game's success here is the frame rate, which is fast and smooth even in its unfinished state. The game's audio wasn't quite as polished up as the visuals were, so we didn't get a proper sense of what to expect, but we reckon it should be pretty close to what we've heard in the PS3 game.

So after going through ModNation Racers PSP, our big question was around how or if the game was going to sync up with the PS3 game. The team was pretty tight-lipped on any cross-platform communication or functionality, although it noted that its goal, as well as that of United Front Games, was to make the best possible game experience on each of the platforms. We're curious to see just what, if anything, ends up going on between the two platforms, but we have to say that the PSP game stands up pretty well all on its own.

Based on what we saw and played, ModNation Racers is shaping up to be one of the most promising PSP games we've seen this year. The game's smart and faithful conversion of the PS3 game is an impressive feat matched only by its smooth frame rate. Those hungry for some kart racing or content creating on their PSPs will do well to keep an eye out for the game. ModNation Racers is slated to ship later this year for the PSP in tandem with the PlayStation 3 game. Look for more on both in the coming months.

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"PSP | ModNation Racers PSP First Look" was posted by Ricardo Torres on Fri, 05 Feb 2010 06:18:29 -0800

PC | The Settlers 7: Paths to a Kingdom Hands-On - First Look and Economic Buildup

2010-02-05T23:00:00.001-08:00

We get our first look at, and our hands on, the next game in the Settlers strategy series.

Developer Blue Byte has worked on The Settlers for quite some time, but the next game in the series, The Settlers 7: Paths to a Kingdom, will make big changes. The game is being developed with a brand-new 3D engine that allows for highly detailed close-ups on its colorful new landscapes, its long horizons, and its stylized characters and buildings, which recall the exaggerated fairy tale art of the motion picture Shrek and the colorful characters of Team Fortress 2. More importantly, it's being enhanced with a number of new changes and additions that will make the gameplay at once deeper, more varied, and potentially more appealing to a wider audience, thanks to the input of consultant Bruce Shelley, a cofounder of the dearly departed Ensemble Studios--creator of the Age of Empires series. We watched a brief demonstration of the game's features, then tried it out for ourselves.

The Settlers 7 will offer enhanced economic and military strategy with a colorful and attractive new graphics engine.

If you're a longtime Settlers fan, you may recall that the previous game in the series had a streamlined economy system which some players found to be a bit on the shallow side. The new game's economy has been retuned to not only return Settlers 7's economic game to the depth of its predecessors, but also to tie it in more closely to either military operations, or the game's new strategic track, research. Research takes place at religious structures, where studious monks (powered by such crucial economic resources as books and beer) can develop game-winning techs while your opponents are busy building their economies or their armies. However, military victory has been enhanced with the ability to give your armies direct move and attack orders, and should you care to, you can definitely opt to tilt your economy in favor of the gold and food required to commission an army quick.

Like with other games in the series, The Settlers 7 takes place on the planet we know as Earth, and focuses its early action in Europe approximately during the Age of Sail, where pikemen and musketeers march side by side into battle and where trade routes to India and Africa are potentially huge moneymakers. However, the story of the single-player campaign starts in the fictitious country of Tandria with the princess Zoe, who has been commissioned by her father, the king, to ride off into an unruly colony and take her place as monarch. The campaign will offer the usual requisite tutorial mission to open and lead into a comprehensive story-based set of missions, though the game will also include standalone skirmish maps and a statistic-heavy competitive multiplayer with extensive leaderboards to track anything from which players are the most successful in deathmatch to which players have baked the most bread.

More importantly, the game will have in-depth customization tools to create both your own custom castle (with a variety of options to customize towers, pennants, balconies, and other features), and an extremely powerful custom map editor which will let you tweak available resources, number of players, and victory conditions with a single click. For instance, a certain map might default to requiring players control a handful of key territories, and unflagging all key territories but one will automatically turn it into a king-of-the-hill match. And as soon as you've tweaked the map to your liking, you can start a skirmish or multiplayer map with a single click--no need to save the map or do anything else.

We then skipped ahead to a hands-on session with a single-player skirmish map set to standard victory conditions. Winning a basic game of Settlers 7 will be about securing key victory conditions--there will be 20 in all, which include military, economic, and research trees as well as accruing the most resources as possible. Once you secure enough victory points (in a basic game, you need to lock down six of them), a timer will begin to count down, and the player in the lead will win unless another player can seize away some victory conditions (by accruing more resources or tech), or eliminating that player with a military victory.

With enough beer and books, these jolly monks are bound to develop a guaranteed victory by way of research.

In our case, we decided to shoot for an economic victory by aggressively building up a strong infrastructure. The key to a good economy is quickly seizing as many resource-producing nodes on the map as possible, construct resource collection and processing buildings (and storehouses) nearby, connected smartly by well-maintained roads that can ferry your goods to your processing plants to produce advanced goods, such as higher-grade food and clothing. Finding these key resource nodes is easy, since they're marked in the world by floating icons, and since the game has a real-time strategic zoom feature vaguely reminiscent of the camera in Supreme Commander.

Placing key structures is simply a matter of opening up a build menu, then placing them in a smart location. Most basic buildings themselves are miniature hubs onto which you can build up to three add-ons--for instance, farms can be developed with grain fields or piggeries. However, many of these add-ons have co-dependencies with each other, different types of resources, and with other structures--grain fields need wells (which produce unlimited water), while piggeries need grain and water. While the series' classic base resources of iron ore, gold, stone, and coal are still the foundation of the economy, more-advanced structures and techs require different combinations of basic and advanced resources, such as forged tools to support workshops that upgrade your transportation infrastructure, or books printed on paper used to support the research of monks.

Smart use of small-scale and large-scale strategy will win you the day in The Settlers 7.

Even as an economy-based player, you'll still need to dip your toe into other areas of the game, particularly military development. This is because, like in previous games of the series, nearby territories on the map surrounding your initial holdings will be guarded by armies of neutral forces (or forces controlled by opposing players), and in order to get at these new territories and their precious, precious resources, you'll need to send troops into that territory to cut down the opposition, then occupy it to convert it to your side. The whole process is considerably more interesting than it sounds, and seems to require a good mix of micromanagement skills and strategic oversight, making sure each of your farms, workshops, and forges is working at peak capacity, while also keeping an eye on the bigger picture of how close to victory conditions you or your enemies are, and which key resources you either lack or have in surplus.

The Settlers 7 seems like it will offer deep economic strategy and lots of solid improvements to a series that has already carved out a legion of loyal fans over the years. It's scheduled to ship in March.

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"PC | The Settlers 7: Paths to a Kingdom Hands-On - First Look and Economic Buildup" was posted by Andrew Park on Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:22:41 -0800

PC | METRO 2033 Updated Hands-On

2010-02-03T23:00:00.001-08:00

The shooter based on the Russian sci-fi novel is due soon and we've got a hands-on look at the game.

[ Watch Video ]

Check out our video preview of Metro 2033.

Much of the early action in Metro 2033 is straight-up shooter action--in one early scene you're traveling between stations on a simple pushcart and are attacked by mutants. A bit later, you'll be accompanying a rogue-ish character known as Bourbon, who has promised to reward you with his AK-47 in payment for your assistance. And while that notoriously inaccurate Russian automatic weapon might not sound like the greatest of rewards, in Metro 2033, the weapons you carry (and the bullets you fire) define who you are. That's because most of the weaponry and ammunition you acquire underground are hand-fashioned and, as a result, not as accurate or as powerful as topside weapons. Topside weapons, produced by machines before the apocalypse (like Bourbon's AK-47), are more powerful and significantly more valuable. In fact, topside ammunition is used as currency underground--you can use it to buy new equipment or save it to use as traditional ammo when additional stopping power is needed.

Nuclear fallout above ground, enemies everywhere underground--life isn't easy in Metro 2033.

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"PC | METRO 2033 Updated Hands-On" was posted by Brian Ekberg on Wed, 03 Feb 2010 13:16:43 -0800

PC | Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4 First Impressions

2010-02-02T23:00:00.001-08:00

Wingardium leviosa comes in handy as we zap everything that isn't glued together in Traveller's Tales latest Lego game.

Thanks to the success of giving some of the most beloved franchises in pop culture a Lego makeover, it was only a matter of time before Traveller's Tales set its sights on rebuilding the magical world of Harry Potter using the colorful Danish bricks. Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4 tells the story of the famous boy wizard in its signature cheeky fast-paced Lego style. It follows the first four movies, which include The Sorcerer's Stone, The Chamber of Secrets, The Prisoner of Azkaban, and The Goblet of Fire. This isn't the first time that the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry has been re-created in video game form, but there's a certain charm to seeing your favorite wizards, witches, and muggles transformed into blocky, yellow-headed characters.

Daniel Radcliffe finally makes the minifig career transition.

Our first look at Lego Harry Potter began with a cutscene on Privet drive, where we saw the young Harry Potter dropped off by Dumbledore. The story was told through exaggerated motions and expressions by the characters, as well as minimal sounds, but as always, it was incredibly effective in terms of getting the key points of the story across, especially if you're already familiar with the material. We watched as Harry received his letter of invitation to attend Hogwarts, and before we knew it, we were in the Leaky Cauldron with Hagrid, destroying everything that wasn't part of the background.

Similar to previous Lego games, you can play with a friend (and online if you're playing on the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3) and use the abilities of a specific character to solve puzzles, as well as collect bonus items. What's new in Lego Harry Potter is that Harry and his spellcasting friends will gain new abilities as you progress through the game. At first, Harry can't do much except zap with his wand and wave at people who pass by him. But after attending his classes at Hogwarts, he'll build up an impressive repertoire of spells and abilities, which can also be upgraded. There will be 140 playable characters, each with his or her own distinct personality and abilities, so there's plenty of unlocking to do if you have the patience to explore by leaving no brick unturned. Hagrid has been given some spellcasting abilities to help Harry out initially, so between the two, we watched as Hagrid used his leviosa spell to put together objects in order for Harry to snag some hard-to-reach items. Because Harry was much lighter, he could bounce off of makeshift trampolines, whereas Hagrid would just crush the object. However, both characters were able to hop around the cobblestone streets on a green lawn chair as though it were a pogo stick. Because the Harry Potter universe is filled with mystery and surprises, it's fun to keep an eye out for peculiar items because you never know what they'll do.

There are plenty of secrets to discover in the world of Harry Potter by being thorough. Not only do you find your way to the next area, but if you find the four crest pieces in each area, you'll also get a gold brick, which will then give you access to bonus material. Moving from one area to the next doesn't involve jumping around in a hub menu; instead, the story events (six events in each story) will unfold when they're supposed to, which provides a seamless transition from one level to the next. You have the freedom to revisit older areas, like classrooms to practice spells, but once you're ready for the story event, the game is set up so that you will be guided to the next level.

"Izzat you 'Arry?!"

Harry will share similar traits with his friends Hermione and Ron because they're learning the same stuff in school, but they will still be unique. For example, Ron has his pet rat Scabbers while Hermione has her cat Crookshanks, and we assume these pets will help them in some form or another. Hermione's superior knowledge will grant her access to areas that aren't available to the other two boys, and she'll have the time turner. Harry, on the other hand, will eventually learn parseltongue and the Patronus charm. While there is no quidditch match to play in Lego Harry Potter, you can still hop on any broomstick to ride it, and it's hilarious to see the differences among the three students as they try to get a handle on broom riding. Eventually, when you unlock some of the other characters like a member of House Slytherin, you'll get access to the Slytherin common room. As in the previous games, unlocking more playable characters will allow you to return to previous areas and access things that were impossible to get the first time around.

The build we saw was still in its early stages, but we were impressed with the background and the details of the environments. Other than the obvious Lego bricks and pieces that can be taken apart then slapped back together, the settings were quite realistic. They provided an interesting contrast to the Lego pieces and gave us that authentic vibe from the movies. From the animated portraits in the halls of Hogwarts to the clothing-eating drawer in the Gryffindor common room, the humor and goofiness that the Lego games are known for is all here. The music has been borrowed from the movies as well, so the trademark tunes and themes will easily invoke memories from the films.

What mystery awaits our intrepid trio of interchangeable-parts heroes?

We're excited to see more of Lego Harry Potter and for the chance to explore the long corridors of Hogwarts or take a walk in the Forbidden Forest. Other areas that we took a brief look at included Gringotts Bank and the Weasleys home. Both were re-created as faithfully as possible with some extra fun stuff thrown in, like riding a tractor on the Weasleys lawn and using your magic to get garden gnomes to ride a motorbike. There's no limit to the kind of whimsical things that can happen in this rich magical world, and it looks like Traveller's Tales is taking full advantage of it. We didn't get a chance to see it, but we're told a level editor similar to the one in Lego Indiana Jones 2 will also be included. We'll update you with more information on Lego Harry Potter as soon as it becomes available. The game is currently set to be released in May on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, PlayStation Portable, and the PC.

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"PC | Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4 First Impressions" was posted by Sophia Tong on Mon, 01 Feb 2010 08:56:20 -0800

PC | Supreme Commander 2 Updated Hands-On - Single-Player, Early Strategies, Unit Mix

2010-02-01T23:00:00.001-08:00

We try out some single-player gameplay, as well as cover the campaign and some of the powerful units in this epic strategy sequel.

Supreme Commander 2 will be bigger, faster, and filled with even more giant death robots than the previous game. The sequel will--like the original Supreme Commander (and its inspiration, Total Annihilation)--still focus on higher level strategy and smart planning along specific research lines to improve and expand your armies. But it will also have a streamlined resource model to get you into the action faster, as well as intricate branching research trees that will let you build up an army of many different kinds of killer robots to wipe your opponents off the face of the planet by land, sea, or air. We have new details to discuss about the game's single-player campaign, early game strategies, and powerful military units to share. Please be advised that this article may contain spoilers.

[ Watch Video ]

Learn about the story details in Supreme Commander 2's campaign in this exclusive interview.

As we've mentioned previously, Supreme Commander 2's campaign will, like the original game, consist of 18 "operations," (essentially, missions, though each will take place on an enormous map that will expand in size as the action continues), divided into six operations per faction. The first six operations will tell the tale of Commander Dominic "Migraine" Maddox, an officer in the UEF faction--the faction that has assumed control of the intergalactic coalition between it and the game's two other factions. Maddox is an accomplished military man whose father fought through the Infinite War of the previous game. But he was able to put aside his differences when he met his bride to be, a young woman belonging to the Illuminate faction. Just before Supreme Commander 2 begins, Maddox becomes a father, and his wife Annika cares for their son on a faction-neutral planet while struggling to keep her identity and religion a secret. By the time the game begins, Maddox himself has become a world-weary veteran looking for a way to retire from the military to live out a peaceful life with his new family.

The subsequent campaign operations are devoted to the Illuminate and Cybran protagonists of Supreme Commander 2. In the Illuminate campaign, you'll play as Commander Thalia Kael who is a member of a powerful Illuminate splinter faction known as the Royal Guardians and who actually attended military training at the same academy as Maddox. Her motivation is to restore the original Aeon faction (which had been led by the lost princess Rhianne Burke) to power following the bloody war with the Seraphim alien race. Thalia's mission is to secretly aid the Royal Guardians in seizing power back from the Illuminate with the guidance of her older brother Jaran. Thalia's brother is a former military officer retired due to chronic illness who now relays orders and strategic advice to his sister remotely.

The final set of operations tells the story of Commander Ivan Brackman, the "son" of Dr. Gustav Brackman--the latter of which is the leader of the Cybran faction and no more than a superintelligent, preserved brain in a jar. Ivan is the first of a new breed of Cybran--perfect hybrids of human tissue and cybernetic technology. And by virtue of his more-human physiology, he's been known to exhibit more independent thought than the average Cybran. Having expressed interest in military operations at an early age, he was sent to the same academy that Maddox and Thalia attended. But he took a different path after graduation and was recruited by Dr. Brackman himself to join his father's personal defense force.

While the story of the game's campaign is much more intimate and tied to human relationships than that of the original game, the sequel's basic gameplay will test your ability to be a calculating field general with the vision to commit to a long-term strategic plan, as well as the guts to press that big red button to initiate nuclear war if necessary. We had a chance to try out some skirmish maps against computer-controlled opponents with the game's three factions and found a much faster startup into a much more heated series of battles than in the original game.

This Cybranasaurus Rex is one of the game's most powerful experimental units. You don't want your opponents to bring one of these to your door.

In Supreme Commander 2's skirmish and multiplayer maps, you'll find yourself starting off with a single ACU unit and two engineers not that far off from some mass nodes. Your best bet is to build up some mass extractors as soon as possible, but beyond that, you're ready to make your first big strategic decision--which type of military installation to build. You can choose to build a land, air, or naval installation (though the Illuminate don't have a full naval track because their units hover over the ground and can cross water) to produce a few basic units that function on that particular terrain type.

On the PC, this takes place by way of a conventional mouse-and-keyboard interface that has been heavily streamlined to not dominate onscreen real estate. On the Xbox 360, the control scheme has been modified to work with the sticks and buttons, replacing the standard mouse cursor with a "stretch cursor" that will let you select any nearby unit with a quick button press rather than having to hunt for that unit and precisely click on it. (The console version of the game also lets you paintbrush any units in the vicinity to group-select them.) Though the console version has simple, one-button shortcuts for move and attack orders, Supreme Commander 2 uses a radial menu system to issue more complex orders, such as building structures in specific areas or queuing up specific units to build at an installation. While it took us a bit of time to get used to the interface, we quickly figured out the radial menu system and button shortcuts. Thus, we were able to pretty much do the same things we had done on the PC version.

On either platform, once you've built your first mass collectors and energy generators to get a basic economy going, as well as your first military installation to get your army going, you're ready to start climbing the technology tree. This means you're ready to start your quest to eventually unlock and bring out the big guns. But rather than upgrade an expensive town hall structure to unlock an additional "tier" of units, you can unlock advanced armies by way of research.

The Illuminate Darkenoid is a huge flying saucer that will rain destruction on any enemies beneath it and crush everything else if it's shot down.

Research has five different tracks in Supreme Commander 2: land, air, naval (except for the Illuminate), ACU, and structure. Research accumulates automatically over time in a ticking meter that gets higher and higher during a match (you can also build research structures that speed up how quickly you gain research points). And with enough points, you can start spending it on any upgrade within the five tracks you can afford. Researchable items generally fall into three categories: unlocks (new units), upgrades (brand new abilities added to existing units), and boosts (miscellaneous bonuses, such as additional toughness or sight range). Exactly which of these alternatives will make the most sense to you will depend on the overall strategic decisions you make going into the game, as well as any intelligence you can glean about your opponent's development thought reconnaissance, which is another crucial component of the game.

The three primary military tracks (land, air, and naval) all seem to provide well-rounded, self-contained upgrades and unit unlocks. The Illuminate air track, for instance, unlocks gunships, transports, and fighter-bombers, as well as personal shield upgrades to ensure your air force can take it while dishing it out. The UEF land track includes rugged but sporty armor like the rock-head tank and demolisher artillery, as well as cumulative training upgrades that will make all land units in this military-minded faction tougher on the battlefield.

Though we spent only a limited time sitting down to play the game, we found ourselves quickly able to tech up to midlevel units in a matter of minutes and start raiding runs on our skirmish opponent's resource expansions. But we caught ourselves looking back and forth between our research counter and the next experimental unit upgrade on more than one occasion. Experimental units are embedded in each research tree and can be built after you've researched at least one and then constructed an experimental unit facility. These powerful additions to your army include minor experimental units (which are generally very powerful and a true threat when massed), such as gigantic unit transports for all three factions.

However, the glistening rewards waiting at the top of each research track are the major experimental units. These include such monstrosities as the Cybranasaurus Rex, the ultimate in Cybran land melee; the King Kriptor mech, a giant UEF robot made entirely out of enormous cannons; and the Illuminate Darkenoid, a humongous flying saucer that not only rains blazing death down on any land targets below it but whose enormous mass also crushes any unfortunate troops beneath it when it's shot down and comes crashing down to terra firma. Each of these major experimental units seems extremely satisfying to use, and once you see your enemy bring them into play, you know the battle has truly been joined. Even more interestingly, Supreme Commander 2 will give you the option to launch a partially constructed experimental unit in a "half-baked" state by pushing it out of the gate before it's 100 percent completed. A half-baked experimental unit will obviously be faster to mobilize, but it has a chance of mechanical failure based on how far along its construction was; a 70 percent complete unit has a 30 percent chance of failure, for instance. This new feature will let you roll the dice to make a desperate last stand against an enemy who's attacked you before you were fully prepared. Though in larger battles, we can see half-baked experimentals taking on an offense role as players who have more mass than time rush out a couple of experimentals to make an aggressive late-game push.

Even though each of the three primary military tracks offers extensive (and largely self-contained) upgrades, in matches against tougher opponents (such as the hard-difficulty artificial intelligence, which is an immaculately resource-efficient terror as of this writing), you may need to tech all the way up to the top of one research tree to deal your enemy a mortal blow. And in some cases, you may need to tech beyond that. That's where the remaining ACU and structure research trees also offer valuable support abilities. With research, the ACU unit becomes a much more valuable and flexible unit on the battlefield, which can not only flee from battle by ejecting an escape pod, enter "overcharge" mode to rain down heavy offensive fire, or "hunker" down into a defensive posture that greatly increases its armor--but it can also gain additional armor and damage upgrades that let it go toe-to-toe with major experimentals to actually win. In the meantime, structural research offers enhancements that speed your production and cut down on your mass and energy spending. This makes your overall operation more efficient and better able to churn out a continuous stream of units. Structure upgrades aren't as exciting as teching up to an enormous killer robot, but their value will become a lot more apparent to your opponent when you use a streamlined, upgraded production economy to keep pumping out enormous killer robots.

The UEF King Kriptor has guns for hands, arms, and a head. It's just one of the game's 27 terrifying experimental units.

Judging from our time with the game, the sequel seems like it'll offer a strategy experience that's both fast paced and varied. While having fast fingers may help you squeeze out some better resources, it really seems like you're more likely to win the day with well-scouted recon to gauge your opponent's strategies and progress--balanced out against careful choices on your own research and army development. This is going to be a game where smart decision-making will lead to crushing your enemies on the battlefield with nuclear warheads and giant death machines. Supreme Commander will be released this March for the PC and Xbox 360--stay tuned to GameSpot for more updates.

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"PC | Supreme Commander 2 Updated Hands-On - Single-Player, Early Strategies, Unit Mix" was posted by Andrew Park on Fri, 29 Jan 2010 19:54:07 -0800

PC | The Secret World Updated QA - Exclusive First Footage and The Town of Kingsmouth

2010-01-31T23:00:00.001-08:00

Game director Ragnar Tørnquist reveals the first in-game footage of The Secret World and discusses the first location to be revealed--the sleepy New England town of Kingsmouth.

Norwegian studio Funcom is working on its next massively multiplayer game, The Secret World, which will let you explore an alternate version of the modern world where old wives' tales and occult superstition have become reality, and dark forces are attacking the world. Your role in the game will be to join one of three secret societies and do battle with the encroaching evil all over the world--even in New England. The first location to be revealed in the game is Kingsmouth, and GameSpot is pleased to reveal new details on the location along with the very first in-game footage of The Secret World. Game director Ragnar Tørnquist gives us a guided tour.

[ Watch Video ]

Watch the first footage of The Secret World revealed with the town of Kingsmouth.

GameSpot: It's great to see the first actual gameplay footage of The Secret World. Set up the video for us--what are we going to see in the video? What's the location?

Ragnar Tørnquist: I think the video--or 'found footage'--speaks for itself, but Kingsmouth is a sleepy small town in Maine, on the Atlantic coast of the United States. It's the kind of place where the population doubles during the summer, and off-season it's very quiet and slow. I think the town's official website gives you a good idea of what sort of town it isøbefore the incident. Something bad is about to happen. Something very, very bad. The video hints at this happening, but the full revelation won't come until we launch the game. There's a major incident, and there are few survivors--and players will be dropped right into the middle of all this. One important theme in The Secret World is that of heroism, and we're going to put players in a situation where being a hero is very difficult: where it's about containing and gathering information, and preventing the darkness from spreading, rather than saving a few lives.

GS: What is the significance of Kingsmouth? How will this seemingly quiet little town exemplify what The Secret World is about?

RT: It's the perfect example of what's happening all over the game world: Dark days are coming. And no one in the know wants widespread panic, so part of what the players have to do is contain this darkness--prevent the truth from being broadcast beyond the borders of the secret world. Part of this is, of course, kicking zombie butt. But part of it is also following your secret society's storyline, exploring the island, digging into the lore, speaking with characters--finding out what's happened, how to stop it, and how that ties into similar events across the world. It's the starting point, but New England isn't the occult ground zero. It's just the beginning of a long descent into total darkness.

GS: We understand that the town will have its own population and even its own local government, presided over by certain key characters in the game. Who are the most important characters we'll meet in Kingsmouth? Why are they important?

RT: Some of those characters have already been revealed--in subtle ways--but the question is: who will survive? And how? And why? For what purpose? This is something we're going to reveal more of as we move forward; we want players to get to know these characters before they start playing the game, so that they'll already have a relationship with them. That way, it'll hurt even more when weø Ahem.

Of course, there won't be just locals on Solomon Island. In fact, players will encounter several characters that have arrived on the island for various--and nefarious--reasons, including a seemingly innocuous group of hippies, some guys in black vans, and even the U.S. military. All of these characters will be fully voiced, of course.

And there might even be some non-human mission givers. I'm just sayin'.

GS: America's New England region is a rich source of old wives' tales and occultism. The area was home to the Salem witch trials. It's the birthplace and home of horror author H.P. Lovecraft. How will such influences tie into the gameplay of this area? Can you give us some specific examples?

RT: Obviously, Kingsmouth--and Solomon Island--draws inspiration from a lot of different sources, including Lovecraft, Stephen King and Edgar Allen Poe. Not just in terms of references--you'll find plenty of those in the unlikeliest of places--but also thematically. And this applies to our entire story, not just the bits that take place in New England. That's really where it began, before we settled on any specific locations, with those sources and influences, and it was only natural that we paid proper tribute to our inspiration by creating an adventure region that wears its influences on its sleeves. These themes and backstories permeate the game, but New England is where we bring it home.

Specific examples are hard to list without spoiling things, but players will face horrors that have risen from the depths of the sea. They will unravel an ancient curse that's haunted this island for a very long time. And they will encounter characters that harbor the darkest of secretsø The story of Kingsmouth will be revealed through both the story missions and tons of side missions that expand on the lore--and everything, every single mission, every character, is tied to this storyline. Nothing's left to chance. Everything is significant.

I think the players who spend the time to dig deep--too deep, perhaps--into the lore will really see how far these influences go, and how we've also made them our own. We're much more than wink-wink, nudge-nudge references to Arkham and Dunwich: for us, it's about the look and feel, the themes, the background, the depth and scope of the game universe.

Kingsmouth, Maine. Population: ??

GS: Given that no players will start their lives in New England (we understand that the three main character hubs will be Seoul, South Korea; London, England; and New York City), how will players be introduced to locales such as Kingsmouth? Will they be given missions to travel to different cities to solve a mystery or two there, for instance?

RT: Players will have the freedom to explore our game world--but yes, they'll also have missions that lead them from the first baby steps in their hub city, through to the 'end'--which, of course, will be just the beginning. And that includes sending them on assignments to various locations. It's all tied to the three secret societies: players will have to learn the ropes, prove their worth, and follow instructions. If they don'tøwell, they can choose to do that, too, but it might be a little harder to get ahead. It's all about freedom, though. If you want the story, it's there, fully voiced and crammed with cinematics. If you don't? Just go out, have fun, and kick demon butt.

GS: About how big will Kingsmouth be in virtual meters or miles? How big will the average town or quest hub area be in The Secret World?

RT: Big. I mean, Kingsmouth may not be a huge town, but it's a sizeable community, and that's just the beginning. Players will be able to explore all of Solomon Island--every single centimeter of it--and the town of Kingsmouth constitutes, at most, one tenth of the playable area in New England. For explorers like myself, this is the perfect playground, and there's such a diversity of locations and points of interest across the island, it's going to keep players occupied for a long timeøand that's just one of the many locations in the game.

GS: We know that players can join one of three different secret societies with very different philosophies about how to carry themselves and how to win the war against the dark forces laying siege to the world. How will characters from these different factions have differing experiences in a place like Kingsmouth? Will the Illuminati have some kind of homefield advantage, being from nearby New York? How will the townsfolk of Kingsmouth (and other locales in the game) treat characters from each group differently?

RT: Most civilians will know little to nothing about the secret societies and the secret world; just like most of us, we're oblivious to the truth. Of course, now that things have happened--dark things, scary things, wet and slithering things--the surviving civilians are wising up to the fact that, yes Virginia, monsters are real and they are here to eat us. While the secret societies will be evenly balanced, Kingsmouth--Solomon Island--is indeed closely tied to one of them, and that's going to be meaningful. The other secret societies won't be left out: they have historical links to other locations in the game. And since Kingsmouth is early on in the progression, it's not going to favor one secret society in front of another.

GS: What sort of adventures will be found in Kingsmouth? Will it be more of a battleground area for fighting monsters, more of an adventuring area for solving puzzles and collecting clues, or an even split between the two? Are the game's various hub areas being designed around having a different mix of action and adventure/investigative gameplay?

RT: Yes, yes and yes.

Or more accurately: it's going to be what you make of it.

Of course, there's going to plenty of action, plenty of monsters to slay--starting with zombies and ending up with, well, very scary things--but yeah, some missions are much more about exploration, adventuring, puzzle solving. There's one in particular that I really like called The Kingsmouth Code, which requires players to really pay attention to subtle signs to uncover a subterranean secret--and while monsters do pop up, that's not the meat of the mission. It's about investigating the town to unravel its mysteries. And it feels really fresh and fun and unique.

Every location in the game will have a balance of gameplay, to ensure that we cater to the different playing styles, while keeping focus on what players are tasked to do: to fight the rising darkness in the name of their faction.

This dark and ominous town will be just the beginning in this ambitious massively multiplayer game.

GS: Finally, is there anything else you'd like to add about this new area, or about the game in general?

RT: I think I've said enough. If I reveal any more secrets, my life might be in mortal danger. They are watching.

GS: Aha. Welløall right, then.

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"PC | The Secret World Updated Q&A - Exclusive First Footage and The Town of Kingsmouth" was posted by Staff on Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:09:15 -0800

Xbox 360 | Supreme Commander 2 Updated Hands-On - Single-Player, Early Strategies, Unit Mix

2010-01-30T23:00:00.001-08:00

We try out some single-player gameplay and cover the campaign and some of the powerful units in this epic strategy sequel.

Supreme Commander 2 will be bigger, faster, and filled with even more giant death robots than the previous game. The sequel will, like the original Supreme Commander (and its inspiration, Total Annihilation) still focus on higher-level strategy and smart planning along specific research lines to improve and expand your armies, but it will also have a streamlined resource model to get you into the action faster, as well as intricate branching research trees that will let you build up an army of many different kinds of killer robot to wipe your opponents off the face of the planet by land, sea, or air. We have new details to discuss about the game's single-player campaign, early game strategies, and powerful military units to share. Please be advised that this article may contain spoilers.

[ Watch Video ]

Learn about the story details in Supreme Commander 2's campaign in this exclusive interview.

As we've mentioned previously, Supreme Commander 2's campaign will, like the original game, consist of 18 "operations," (essentially, missions, though each will take place on an enormous map that will expand in size as the action continues), divided into six operations per faction. The first six operations will tell the tale of Commander Dominic "Migraine" Maddox, an officer in the UEF faction--the faction that has assumed control of the intergalactic Coalition between it and the game's two other factions. Maddox is an accomplished military man whose father fought through the Infinite War of the previous game, but was able to put aside his differences when he met his bride to be, a young woman belonging to the Illuminate faction. Just before Supreme Commander 2 begins, Maddox becomes a father, and his wife Annika cares for their son on a faction-neutral planet while struggling to keep her identity and religion a secret. By the time the game begins, Maddox himself has become a world-weary veteran looking for a way to retire from the military to live out a peaceful life with his new family.

The subsequent campaign operations are devoted to the Illuminate and Cybran protagonists of Supreme Commander 2. In the Illuminate campaign, you'll play as Commander Thalia Kael, a member of a powerful Illuminate splinter faction known as the Royal Guardians, who actually attended military training at the same academy as Maddox. Her motivation is to restore the original Aeon faction (which had been led by the lost princess Rhianne Burke) to power following the bloody war with the Seraphim alien race. Thalia's mission is to secretly aid the Royal Guardians in seizing power back from the Illuminate with the guidance of her older brother Jaran--a former military officer retired due to chronic illness who now relays orders and strategic advice to his sister remotely.

The final set of operations tells the story of Commander Ivan Brackman, the "son" of Dr. Gustav Brackman--the latter of which is the leader of the Cybran faction and no more than a superintelligent, preserved brain in a jar. Ivan is the first of a new breed of Cybran--perfect hybrids of human tissue and cybernetic technology, and by virtue of his more-human physiology, he's been known to exhibit more independent thought than the average Cybran. Having expressed interest in military operations at an early age, he was sent to the same academy that Maddox and Thalia attended, but took a different path after graduation, being recruited by Dr. Brackman himself to join his father's personal defense force.

While the story of the game's campaign is much more-intimate and tied to human relationships than that of the original game, the sequel's basic gameplay will test your ability to be a calculating field general with the vision to commit to a long-term strategic plan and the guts to press that big red button to initiate nuclear war if need be. We had a chance to try out some skirmish maps against computer-controlled opponents with the game's three factions and found a much faster startup into a much more-heated series of battles than in the original game.

This Cybranasaurus Rex is one of the game's most powerful experimental units. You don't want your opponents to bring one of these to your door.

In Supreme Commander 2's skirmish and multiplayer maps, you'll find yourself starting off with a single ACU unit and two engineers, usually not that far off from some mass nodes. Your best bet is to build up some mass extractors as soon as possible, but beyond that, you're ready to make your first big strategic decision--which type of military installation to build. You can choose to build a land, air, or naval installation (though the Illuminate don't have a full naval track, since their units hover over the ground and can cross water) to produce only a few basic units that function on that particular terrain type.

On the PC, this takes place by way of a conventional mouse-and-keyboard interface that has been heavily streamlined to not dominate onscreen real estate. On the Xbox 360, the control scheme has been modified to work with the sticks and buttons, replacing the standard mouse cursor with a "stretch cursor" that will let you select any nearby unit with a quick button press, rather than having to hunt for that unit and precisely click on it. (The console version of the game also lets you paintbrush any units in the vicinity to group-select them.) Though the console version has simple, one-button shortcuts for move and attack orders, Supreme Commander 2 uses a radial menu system to issue more-complex orders, such as building structures in specific areas, or queuing up specific units to build at an installation. While it took us a bit of time to get used to the interface, we quickly figured out the radial menu system and button shortcuts and were able to pretty much the same things we had done on the PC version.

On either platform, once you've built your first mass collectors and energy generators to get a basic economy going, and your first military installation to get your army going, you're ready to start climbing the technology tree--and your quest to eventually unlock and bring out the big guns. But rather than upgrading an expensive town hall structure to unlock an additional "tier" of units, you can unlock advanced armies by way of research.

The Illuminate Darkenoid is a huge flying saucer that will rain destruction on any enemies beneath it, and crush everything else if it's shot down.

Research has five different tracks in Supreme Commander 2: land, air, naval (except for the Illuminate), ACU, and structure. Research accumulates automatically over time in a ticking meter that gets higher and higher during a match (you can also build research structures that speeds up how quickly you gain research points), and with enough points, you can start spending it on any upgrade within the five tracks you can afford. Researchable items generally fall into three categories: unlocks (new units), upgrades (brand-new abilities added to existing units), and boosts (miscellaneous bonuses such as additional toughness or sight range). Exactly which of these alternatives will make the most sense to you will depend on the overall strategic decisions you make going into the game, as well as any intelligence you can glean about your opponents' development thought reconnaissance, another crucial component of the game.

The three primary military tracks (land, air, and naval) all seem to provide well-rounded, self-contained upgrades and unit unlocks--the Illuminate air track, for instance, unlocks gunships, transports, and fighter-bombers, as well as personal shield upgrades to ensure your air force can take it while dishing it out, while the UEF land track includes rugged but sporty armor like the rock head tank and demolisher artillery, as well as cumulative training upgrades that will make all land units in this military-minded faction tougher and tougher on the battlefield.

Though we spent only a limited time sitting down to play the game, we found ourselves quickly able to tech up to midlevel units in a matter of minutes to start raiding runs on our skirmish opponents' resource expansions--but caught ourselves looking back and forth between our research counter and the next experimental unit upgrade on more than one occasion. Experimental units are embedded in each research tree and can be built after you've researched at least one, then constructed an experimental unit facility. These powerful additions to your army include minor experimental units (which are generally very powerful in and of themselves and a true threat when massed), such as gigantic unit transports for all three factions.

However, the glistening rewards waiting at the top of each research track are the major experimental, which includes such monstrosities as the Cybranasaurus Rex, the ultimate in Cybran land melee; the King Kriptor mech, a giant UEF robot made entirely out of enormous cannons; and the Illuminate Darkenoid, a humongous flying saucer that not only rains blazing death down on any land targets below it, but whose enormous mass also crushes any unfortunate troops beneath it when it's shot down and comes crashing down to terra firma. Each of these major experimental units seems extremely satisfying to use and once you see your enemy bring them into play, you know the battle has truly been joined. Even more interestingly, Supreme Commander 2 will give you the option to launch a partially constructed experimental unit in a "half-baked" state by pushing it out of the gate before it's 100% completed. A half-baked experimental unit will obviously be faster to mobilize, but has a chance of mechanical failure based on how far along its construction was; a 70% complete unit has a 30% chance of failure, for instance. This new feature will let you roll the dice to make a desperate last stand against an enemy who's attacked you before you were fully prepared; though in larger battles, we can see half-baked experimentals taking on an offense role as players who have more mass than time rush out a couple of experimentals to make an aggressive late-game push.

Even though each of the three primary military tracks offers extensive (and largely self-contained) upgrades, in matches against tougher opponents (such as the hard-difficulty artificial intelligence, which is an immaculately resource-efficient terror as of this writing), you may need to tech all the way up to the top of one research tree to deal your enemy a mortal blow. And in some cases, you may need to tech beyond that. That's where the remaining ACU and structure research trees also offer valuable support abilities. With research, the ACU unit becomes a much more valuable and flexible unit on the battlefield, which can not only flee from battle by ejecting an escape pod, enter "overcharge" mode to rain down heavy offensive fire, or "hunker" down into a defensive posture that greatly increases its armor--but it can also gain additional armor and damage upgrades that let it go toe-to-toe with major experimentals and actually win. In the meantime, structural research offers enhancements that speed your production and cut down on your mass and energy spending, which make your overall operation more efficient and better able to churn out a continuous stream of units. Structure upgrades aren't as exciting as teching up to an enormous killer robot, but their value will become a lot more apparent to your opponent when you use a streamlined, upgraded production economy to keep pumping out enormous killer robots.

The UEF King Kriptor has guns for hands, arms, and a head. It's just one of the game's 27 terrifying experimental units.

Judging from our time with the game, the sequel seems like it'll offer a strategy experience that's both fast-paced and varied. While having fast fingers may help you squeeze out some better resources, it really seems like you're more likely to win the day with well-scouted recon to gauge your opponents' strategies and progress--balanced out against careful choices on your own research and army development. This is going to be a game where smart decision-making will lead to crushing your enemies on the battlefield with nuclear warheads and giant death machines. Supreme Commander will be released this March for the PC and Xbox 360--stay tuned to GameSpot for more updates.

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"Xbox 360 | Supreme Commander 2 Updated Hands-On - Single-Player, Early Strategies, Unit Mix" was posted by Andrew Park on Fri, 29 Jan 2010 19:54:07 -0800

PC | SBK X Hands-On

2010-01-29T23:00:00.001-08:00

The latest entry in the SBK series pushes a new engine, new visual effects, and new game modes. We met with the game's producer to find out more.

Italian developer Milestone has been working on racing games since 1996, and judging by its latest two-wheeled racer, SBK X, it's clear that that every one of those 14 years of experience has been poured into it. The studio has built the game around an entirely new in-house game engine, which it calls X Engine. This engine provides brand new lighting, effects, and damage modeling. The game has also been given a brand new Arcade mode, hefty expansions to the Career mode, and online play that doubles the player count from last year's game. We got to see all of these features in action recently when the developer invited us to see the game.

[ Watch Video ]

Producer Irvin Zonca talks us through the new features in SBK X.

Producer Irvin Zonca first took us through a demonstration of the X Engine, showing us examples of its capabilities. On the cosmetic side, the stands are now filled with real 3D crowds, and there are better environment details on items, such as trees. There's also much more marshal activity, as they wave flags after a crash and at the end of the race. Zonca is most proud of the positive gameplay effects the new engine has had, though, such as the tire marks that wear on the track after a few laps, which not only indicate when to brake, but the residue also provides you with more grip on the road.

The defining characteristic of the SBK series is that it caters to both the arcade and simulation audience through a series of options you can tweak. These include crash damage, driving assists, and opponent AI. SBK X is no different, but it now also offers a brand new distinct Arcade mode. "We thought about Sega games like Outrun and more recent titles, such as Need for Speed," says Zonca about designing this mode. While this doesn't mean you'll have a beautiful woman alongside you or cops chasing you, what the Arcade mode does feature is accessible handling, fast pacing, and an emphasis on fun, which is certainly unique in the world of motorcycle racing games. Thanks to this, Zonca hopes that pretty much anyone can pick up the game--even people who've never played a two-wheeled racer before.

Thankfully, SBK X still offers the in-depth, long-term challenge that simulation fans will want. The expanded Career mode allows you to create own rider, customise the rider's face, height, date of birth, and riding position. Then, the latter can be tweaked as you progress. You go on to compete against more than 80 opponents on 14 tracks, starting by using 600cc displacement bikes and working your way up to the 1000cc category. Eventually, you'll get to race superbikes, but to get there, you have to play as part of a team, which includes allowing teammates to win if it's strategically necessary. And if you decide to turn on the simulation settings, you'll also have to take part in qualifying and testing. Then, there's the brand new office--a full 3D environment complete with "a beautiful assistant," according to Zonca, where you'll take on business considerations and design custom outfits.

Online is also an important consideration for SBK X, and the team at Milestone was aware that its online mode last year wasn't up to scratch. "The old mode was based on a host-server connection," explains Zonca. "This year, we've used a peer-to-peer system that's allowed us to double the player count to 16 and also eradicate lag." The new online features sound impressive, although this is one area where we'll have to wait for the full game to find out how it copes.

Thankfully, we did get a chance to try out the single-player game in both Arcade and Simulation modes. The Arcade mode was as easy to jump into as Zonca promised, with forgiving handling, intermediate opponent AI, and a racing line to tell you when to accelerate or brake. In fact, it was pretty much impossible to crash the bike no matter how much we tried. That's not to say there's no challenge--you still have to position your rider down on the bike to make him go faster on the straights, and cornering on two wheels is still tricky, but it seems like a great way to get people into the game.

The brand new X Engine endows SBK X with better graphics, including 3D crowds, more environmental detail, and better lighting.

The Simulation mode is a considerable step up, though, and straight after the Arcade experience, we had to completely change our approach. Sharp corners need to be taken extremely slowly, small nudges against other bikes will send you both crashing out, and overall maneuverability is greatly reduced. Milestone has worked with Ducati to engineer all of the telemetry data, and while we've never taken one of these bikes at 100mph before, the game certainly feels authentic. And if you're an SBK simulation veteran, you'll be pleased to know that Zonca's team has implemented a new physics system to eradicate last year's problems with braking around corners.

"We know we have a big competitor," says Zonca, addressing Capcom's Moto GP 09/10, which launches in March 2010. We'll see how SBK X fares when it hits the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC in May. And if you're itching to find out more about the game, check out our video interview above.

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"PC | SBK X Hands-On" was posted by Guy Cocker on Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:42:45 -0800

PlayStation 3 | Red Dead Redemption Hands-On

2010-01-28T23:00:00.001-08:00

We downed a tequila in preparation for our first hands-on with Red Dead Redemption.

With the recent furore over alleged working conditions at Rockstar San Diego, questions could obviously be asked about Red Dead Redemption's development. Thankfully, our recent visit to Rockstar's London office revealed that the game was looking not only very polished at this stage, but every bit as promising as we'd seen before. We watched as Rockstar walked us through a mission in Mexico, and then we were let loose on a couple of missions in North America.

Red Dead Redemption takes place in the early 1900s, and you take control of John Marston, a reformed criminal now living happily on a farm with his family. Marston is faced with an ultimatum when the Bureau, a forerunner to what will become the FBI, forces him to track down his former gang members. They take his family as insurance, and while reluctant, Marston takes the journey across New Austin and West Elizabeth in North America and across Nuevo Paraiso in Mexico to hunt down his former partners in crime.

[ Watch Video ]

Check out the latest trailer for Red Dead Redemption.

Rockstar introduced us to the game via a short demo, which took place on the Mexican side of the border. It was quite far into the main game according to our representatives, and Marston was helping the Mexican army take back a fort from some insurgents. The rebels had the advantage as they were on higher ground, but our Rockstar rep was able to take most of them out with the rifle. The combat is cover-based and not entirely dissimilar to Grand Theft Auto IV's--no surprise, given that the two games are powered using the same engine.

Red Dead does have plenty of its own refinements, though. For instance, the health system is regenerative, so all you need to do is take cover when you're beginning to approach death. The weapons are also authentic to the period, with Marston able to carry up to six different sidearms from a selection of shotguns, sawn-offs, sniper rifles, and pistols. The signature move is dead eye, where you can slow down time and take precise shots at multiple assailants. You can unleash dead eye at any time, but you need to kill enemies in order to fill up your bar.

As our Rockstar man fought his way up the hill towards the fort, he encountered a number of opportunities to show us the close-up kills. Using a pistol, you can make Marston shoot someone point-blank in the chest; and with a rifle, he'll point it upwards at the enemy's head and blow his brains out. It was a fairly tough battle overall, and it looked as though the Rockstar representative was close to death a couple of times, but he made it up the hill intact to recapture the fort. A cutscene ended the section with Marston meeting an obnoxious mid-ranking general called DeSanta. The general had his men murder the remaining rebels before boasting to Marston of his success.

Thankfully, when we got to play, we were introduced to a much gentler section from earlier in the game. We got a chance to familiarise ourselves with the controls, which on-foot are very similar to those in GTAIV. However, there's a huge emphasis on using horses in this game, and you need to learn how to ride a stallion, tie him up when you stop off at places, and whistle for him when he gets lost. Once we were acquainted with our steed, we picked up a mission to kill Bill Williamson and the Walton gang, enlisting the help of Sheriff Johnson to do so. We escorted the lawman on horseback, and the game features a one-button follow technique to allow you to maintain pace with another rider.

The gang battle was a much simpler affair than the Mexican encounter and clearly acted as a tutorial for the combat in the game. It was fairly simple to take out the majority of enemies using shoot and cover, but when it came to Williamson, we were instructed to injure him or kill him outright. Killing him will win you the mission and earn you a reward, but injuring him and tying him to the back of your horse will earn you more cash. There are many ways that you can approach each mission, and all your activity feeds into the fame and honour system. Your actions will make you more famous in the gameworld, but your moral approach to each situation will affect non-player character responses. If you're evil, then you'll probably earn more money, but the law will be less forgiving towards you, while do-gooders will see the police turning a blind eye to the occasional infraction but will earn less money overall.

Just as GTAIV captured the buzz of a real-life city, Red Dead Redemption looks to have captured the Wild West. While there are large expanses of desert, they're filled with an incredible amount of activity, from civilians in carriages getting held up, to wild animals roaming around looking for food. Of course, this being a Rockstar open-world game, you can interact with everything. For instance, you can save the civilians to earn a reward, or you can kill them and steal their property. You can also kill the animals and skin them for goods to sell in town, and these towns also look to be highly interactive. You can spend money in the stores, upgrade your weapons, or wipe out the entire population to turn it into a ghost town, only to see it slowly repopulate over time.

Our hands-on also allowed us some free time to play around in the world, seeing how it reacted to our actions. We sat down at one of the campsites, which act as your save points in the game, and talked to the other people there. We helped a farmer who was being terrorised by a gang, but arrived too late to save his daughter. In the resulting scene, the man cowered over the young girl, so we ran outside to leave him to his mourning. Thankfully, more entertainment was provided by shooting the vultures that began circling over the dead bodies outside.

Whose cart is that? It's mine, dagnabbit.

The final mission we played was certainly the most entertaining. We met a drunk called Irish who helped us steal a Gatling gun. The gun was stored securely in a nearby mine, and once we fought through a large number of enemies, we found it was conveniently stored in a mine cart. So we grabbed hold of the mine cart and rode it back out aboveground, all while popping out of cover to pick off the remaining enemies. Once we'd gone through an Indiana Jones-style chase, we made it out with the item and took it to a getaway wagon to use on a later mission.

Red Dead Redemption is looking very promising, and our taste of the single-player game has left us itching to discover what Rockstar has planned for the multiplayer. Rockstar promises that all will be revealed before release, and with only a couple of months left before it lands on April 27 (April 30 in Europe), we don't have too long to wait. For more on the game, be sure to check out our video preview, and check back soon for more on the game.

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"PlayStation 3 | Red Dead Redemption Hands-On" was posted by Guy Cocker on Thu, 28 Jan 2010 10:04:16 -0800

PC | Split/Second Updated Hands-On

2010-01-27T23:00:00.001-08:00

A few laps of this high-adrenaline racer is all it takes to put a smile on our face; check out our latest look at Black Rock Studio's upcoming project.

"Split/Second is a racing game, but you're racing through an adventure game." So says Jason Green, ambassador for Black Rock Studio, the developer of the upcoming action-packed racing game for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. Black Rock is no stranger to racing games--it has previously been behind the earlier incarnations of the MotoGP series and, in 2008, put out the off-road ATV racer Pure. Split/Second, with its emphasis on raw speed amid increasingly turbulent and explosive backdrops, blends the studio's racing expertise with its love for Hollywood blockbusters and big-time special effects. The result is a game that's full of surprises.

[ Watch Video ]

Black Rock Studio's Jason Green talks about Split/Second.

During our demo of the game earlier today, we saw a revamped shipyard level (last seen at the 2009 Electronic Entertainment Expo) and got a look at the downtown level and a mode in the game known as Nemesis. Both the shipyard and downtown level feature massive circuits to race on, but like all of the game's tracks we've seen so far, these are "circuits" only in the strictest sense in the word. Yes, you'll be crossing the start/finish line three times in Split/Second, but every successive lap will be a different experience thanks to the destructive power plays at your disposal.

By pulling off advanced driving techniques like drifting, drafting, and jumping, you'll gradually fill up your power meter. There are three stages to the power meter. The two lower stages will set off small power plays with a press of the A button--these small explosions might take out a car or two ahead of you. If you fill up your power meter to the maximum, you can set off super power plays (by pressing the B button on the Xbox 360 controller). These are where the money is--and the wholesale destruction that ensues didn't fail to bring a big goofy smile to our faces each time we saw it.

For example, in the downtown level, a super power play brings down a huge stretch of elevated freeway; as you barrel down the road with the calamity happening right beside you, you'll eventually reach a derailed train lying in a flaming wreck at the head of the disaster, and you'll need to quickly swerve onto a previously closed section of track to avoid it. These super power plays essentially redraw sections of the maps in Split/Second, becoming on-the-fly shortcut creators with the added bonus of tons of smoke, fire, and associated chaos. What's more, super power plays aren't just "one-and-done." In the shipyard level, there's a massive cargo liner that starts off elevated above the road--one super power play later and it's a collapsed wreck that you're driving through on the next lap. If you enact another super power play, the ship collapses even further, resulting in a different path through the rest of the course. In all, the goal seems to be creating enough power play moments to keep even the relatively short three-lap races interesting and varied each time you play them through.

Split/Second's three car classes will have some bearing on your strategy for tackling races: supercars are fast and light but prone to getting out of control easily, especially if you're close to the shock wave of a massive power play. At the opposite end of the spectrum are the race trucks; big, heavy, and slow (well, relatively speaking), trucks are more stable in explosions, but you'll pay for that stability with a lack of acceleration. Muscle cars find the balance between speed and stability and seem like they might be a good choice for players in the early goings of the game.

We saw one other mode, known as Nemesis, which is essentially a survival mode. As you drive through a viaduct straight out of Terminator 2, your goal is to stay alive as long as possible, passing as many vehicles as you can while random big rigs drop explosive barrels in front of you. Blue barrels take time off the clock, and red barrels destroy you completely. In addition, there are random enemy cars that will further impede your progress.

Chaos is the norm in the upcoming Split/Second.

Unlike in most racing games, where your focus is on either your car or the road directly ahead of you, in Split/Second, you find your eye roaming all over the screen looking for what huge object will explode next. The game's developers understand this phenomenon and therefore have removed as much of the HUD as possible--in fact, the only information you need is displayed directly under your car's bumper: lap number, power meter level, and your position in the race. All of the extraneous stuff--like the speedometer (after all, who cares exactly how fast you're going when a massive cargo liner is exploding in front of you?)--has been removed to make way for the good stuff.

Split/Second continues to impress us--we're already convinced the game is going to be a lot of fun both offline and online. What we're hoping to see in the coming months is the game's visuals and gameplay coalescing into a unified whole. The build we saw today had occasional frame rate issues--which is understandable considering the absolute onscreen cacophony--and Jason Green said the team is currently in the process of optimizing all of the game's visual features to run at a solid 30 frames per second. Split/Second is certainly an ambitious left turn for Black Rock and publisher Disney, and we look forward to seeing where the game ends up when it's released in May.

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"PC | Split/Second Updated Hands-On" was posted by Brian Ekberg on Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:12:28 -0800

PlayStation 3 | MAG Final Hands-on and QA

2010-01-26T23:00:00.001-08:00

We got a final chance to play MAG's Domination mode before the game's impending release, as well as chat to Zipper about its ambitious multiplayer shooter.

When Zipper Interactive's SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs debuted back in 2003, it became one of the first PlayStation 2 games to feature online gameplay. Seven years and several sequels later, the studio's latest project, MAG (Massive Action Game), is hoping to impress shooter fans once again by supporting up to a staggering 256 players per match. When we got a chance to play MAG's closed beta, it was limited to 128 players per map, but this time around, we got a chance to participate in full-scale 256-player bloodbaths as part of a UK event organised by Sony Europe for media, bloggers, and community members. The logistical scale of the event was impressive; however, the real boon was being able to see how the game would handle the stress of 256 simultaneous players.

[ Watch Video ]

Check out the setup for MAG's 256-player event in London.

If you're new to MAG, here's what you need to know: It's a multiplayer-only shooter exclusive to the PlayStation 3 and set in the near future where three private military contractors are fighting each other. MAG has three distinct teams to choose from: the gung-ho, US-based Valor; the high-tech, European-themed Raven; and the guerrilla-like Eastern Bloc SVER (Seryi Volk Executive Response). There are five match types, including two training modes, a control-the-point mode called Sabotage, a capture-the-vehicle (flag) mode called Acquisition, and a Domination mode where teams take it in turn to attack or defend an oil refinery. Each team has one map per match type with 15 maps in total. We got the chance to play two 30-minute domination matches as part of a 128-player UK team facing the best that Zipper's US studio had to offer.

With so many people, it's easy to feel overwhelmed with the number of enemies and objectives on each map. To combat this, each team is divided into eight-person squads with an assigned leader. Based on your experience and progress, you might be able to command a squad yourself. According to lead programmer Nate Klee, MAG's overarching goal is teamwork. "To encourage people to work together as a team in these large maps, where you get a huge number of people together, and in order to actually make sense out of that, it really [is important] to try to work as a team." Players that "try to work together with their team in the right location and follow their objectives" are rewarded. If you follow the instructions of your squad leader, such as destroying an enemy fortification, you earn double the experience points. You can, however, decide to be a lone ranger instead, and Klee said the game won't penalise players if they just want to run around shooting people. But the conditions weren't optimum because the noise generated from 128 monitors and players was enough to drown out any orders coming through, despite every player having his or her own headset. This meant we went for the strategy of killing as many enemies as possible. While MAG features some large maps, the action tended to flow toward the centre, with firefights occurring in bottlenecks. Our favourite weapon was the Apex 100 machine gun, which was ideal for mowing down enemies that continued to appear in these crossroads and helped us rack up a healthy amount of XP in the process.

Depending on your preferences, you might prefer to equip your soldier with a sniper or assault rifle, as well as pistols, missile launchers, grenades, health packs, or a welding device used to repair infiltration points. There are no preset classes to choose from, so you can decide how to configure your characters. "The way it works is that you gain experience," explained Klee. "From that experience, you level up and get points that you can spend in our barracks where you can choose different weapons and equipment that you can build into your loadouts and decide how you want to configure your character's weapons, attachments, armour, and various equipment. So you can build your own character based on your play style or build several characters. And, situationally, if you find that within the map you need to change [characters], you can do that."

We did encounter some lag during our games, with enemies jumping from point to point frequently. When we spoke to Zipper, we were told it was the result of specific issues from that venue. Given that the game hinges on a successful connection, fans will be pleased to know that Zipper has put a lot of effort into stress testing the game's online infrastructure. "We've been trying to do it since the beginning…we built the network tech first," Klee explained. "We've been working on testing this for a long time now, but as you continue to scale up, there are always more and more issues. We tried to have a long beta process to help our launch go smoothly." With the game due this week, we won't have to wait long to see how the final version holds up on retail PS3 units with typically home Internet speeds. And we're hoping that, with Zipper's long history of online support, MAG will be as lag-free as possible.

With enemies able to respawn from various points even in the air, you need to check your six at all times.

If you're a fan of SOCOM, then MAG is likely to appeal to you, with the controls, visuals, gameplay, and overall presentation all seemingly cut from the same cloth as its predecessor. Zipper is also hoping to win over new fans with the launch of MAG. "We're hoping it's actually more mass market [than SOCOM]…that it's a game that will appeal to the general shooter population," said Klee. "We wanted to leverage what we learned from the previous games, but it's a different game, and it's ambitious in the scale and persistence." With MAG due out this week in both North America and Europe, we won't have to wait long to see if it lives up to its high aspirations.

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"PlayStation 3 | MAG Final Hands-on and Q&A" was posted by Luke Anderson on Tue, 26 Jan 2010 02:13:58 -0800

PlayStation 3 | Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Updated Hands-On

2010-01-25T23:00:00.001-08:00

We flew into the heart of Battlefield--developer Dice's Swedish studio--to check out the final build of Bad Company 2.

At Gamescom 2009, executive producer Karl Magnus Troedsson proudly announced that Battlefield: Bad Company 2 would "deliver the best online multiplayer experience ever." With just over a month to the game's release, we had a chance to put this claim to the test, as we travelled out to Dice's Stockholm headquarters to see both the multiplayer and single-player in action.

As players of the multiplayer beta will know, Bad Company 2 doesn't change the formula too much when it comes to multiplayer mechanics. What it does offer is more of everything; game modes, customisation options, and destructibility have all been ramped up over the previous game. One such game mode is Squad Rush, a four-vs-four scramble where one team tries to capture a couple of M-com stations, while the other team aims to protect them. It may take only a couple of seconds for each point to be captured, but the defending team can neutralise the point just as quickly, making for some incredibly frantic matches in the games we played.

[ Watch Video ]

We speak to producer Patrick Bach about Bad Company 2.

The first Bad Company was well known for its destructibility, and thanks to an upgraded version of Dice's in-house Frostbite tech, the second game implements something that EA calls "Destruction 2.0." It was fascinating to see it in action--in one squad rush battle, we were able to protect the M-com station by hiding in the wooden hut that housed it. However, once the opposing team took to vehicles, including tanks and a helicopter, they were able to topple the entire fragile structure, leaving the capture point much more open to attack.

There's plenty to like about Bad Company 2's multiplayer, which offers a tactical, cerebral approach to gameplay. "We've made hundreds of changes after feedback from the beta," said producer Patrick Bach. One of these changes is the new hardcore mode, which turns off the HUD, makes weapons more lethal, and turns on friendly fire. Not that the default settings make the game easy; the health system isn't regenerative, so you have to depend on medics to lay out medpacks, which can also be picked up by the enemy. The progression system also lets you get more perks the more time you spend with each of the four classes, such as improved rifles for the sniper class. Thankfully, the humour of the original game also remains--kill yourself, and the onscreen message is just "Epic Fail.

Our visit to Stockholm also marked the first time that anyone outside of EA and Dice had played the single-player game. The story follows on "some time after" the first game, according to Bach, with the two world superpowers US and Russia battling it out. You take up the role of Preston Marlowe once again, whose Bad Company is called in when Russia starts moving into South America, where the plot to unleash a superweapon is exposed.

The first level we played took place fairly early on in the game, with Bad Company following a prisoner who is captured out in the jungle. It's your job to liberate the man, which of course you do by blowing up the entire village he's being held in. The action is punctuated by lots of little set pieces--choreographed action where you can blow entire huts apart, sending men on fire tumbling out. Thankfully, your allies also seem to boast better AI this time around, taking care of themselves in battle without any intervention and even popping out and stabbing people if they have the opportunity.

Bad Company 2 builds upon the success of the original with more game modes and class customisation.

The end of the level saw another big set piece--as the prisoner is dragged away by his captor, time slows down so you can pop a round in the guard's head using your pistol. The man turns out to be an American government official with the inside track on the Russian weapon plot, which leads you on to the second level that we played--a snowy mountain pass. You jump into a helicopter and bring the pain from the mounted turret, which is impressive not only because of the epic draw distance, but also because of the destructability of Dice's meticulously crafted world. With the enemies dispatched, we ran through houses in the remote mountain village, taking in a nice demonstration of the game's destructibility. It was then on to another epic battle with a tank, using the rocket launchers we acquired from enemies dispatched using a sniper rifle.

Bad Company 2 is shaping up well, and if you're into shooters, it should definitely be on your radar when it's released in March. If you're looking to play the game on the PC, be sure to check back on the site later in the week for our exclusive hands-on with what promises to be the definitive version of the game. In the meantime, check out our interviews with the development team above for even more info on the game.

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"PlayStation 3 | Battlefield: Bad Company 2 Updated Hands-On " was posted by Guy Cocker on Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:50:27 -0800

PlayStation 3 | Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 Updated Hands-On

2010-01-24T23:00:00.000-08:00

We got to play the first act of this epic superhero adventure and chatted to the developers about the impressive fusion attacks.

Following the success of Ultimate Alliance and X-Men Legends, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 is based on Marvel's Civil War. The crossover event sees superheroes taking sides for and against the Superhuman Registration Act, which would reveal the secret identities of all Marvel's heroes. Developer Vicarious Visions paid a visit to London recently, and we got a chance to play through the first act of the game.

[ Watch Video ]

Ultimate Alliance 2 kicks off in Doomstadt, Latveria, which is home to the nefarious Doctor Doom. At first, your four-character squad is limited to Captain America, Spider-Man, Iron Man, and Wolverine, but after the first few missions, you can swap these out for other unlocked members of the 24-character roster. Under the direction of Nick Fury, you're tasked with storming Castle Doom where the Latverian prime minister, Lucia von Bardas, is hiding.

The mission takes place at night in the streets of Doomstadt as you make your way to Castle Doom. After battling our way through shock troopers, we encountered our first miniboss, Electro. He used energy-based attacks to deal out damage and recharged his health through a nearby capacitor. Thankfully, the game's destructible physics meant that these could be destroyed. While regular attacks slowly chipped away at his health, it was best to use the awesome fusion attacks to sap his strength. Fusions are gained by defeating enemies or picking up items and combining the power of two heroes for an impressive special move. One cool fusion reflected Iron Man's repulsor rays off of Wolvie's claws, which will result in significant damage for anyone unfortunate enough to be caught in the beam.

After dealing with Electro, we watched a flashback cutscene where Nick Fury reveals that a group of supervillians including Electro, Diamondback, The Tinkerer, and von Bardas, are conspiring against the US. Fury, unable to convince the president to authorise a preemptive strike, organises his own group of heroes to get the job done. This particular act actually occurs before the Civil War as part of the Secret War story arc. "We definitely put our own spin on the storyline," says executive producer Jennifer Oneal. "I don't want to reveal too much, but I can say that in order to make the game fun, we needed flexibility. Your roster is not completely locked to one side or the other. There are certain key characters that are pivotal to the storyline. For example, not all of the mutants are anti-registration. We just couldn't do that because that wouldn't be fun for those who love playing as Wolverine but also love playing as Iron Man."

One of our favourite things about Ultimate Alliance 2 was experimenting with all of the fusion combinations. With 24 heroes that can combine attacks with another hero for a unique fusion move, there's a staggering amount of variation, which includes targeted, guided, and clearing attacks. "Fusions are your ultimate power," explains Oneal. "If you have a big room full of a lot of minions, you want to obliterate them all with one room-clearing fusion. If you have a long hallway that has a bunch of minions, maybe you want something guided, like a tornado or a clothesline that you want to sweep through and clear that area [with]. And if you're playing against minibosses or bosses, you're going to want to use your targeted fusions."

Next up, we encountered another miniboss battle with Wizard and Scorcher. We used a combination of regular attacks and fusion attacks to take care of the duo and its henchmen. One cool clearing fusion attack was Spidey flinging Wolverine around on the end of a web like a mace. Once the battle was over, the team split into two groups; one under Fury's leadership and the other under ours. Here's where the roster opened up for the first time, and we had access to a dozen or so Marvel heroes. We opted for some fresh blood in Ice Man, The Thing, Daredevil, and Luke Cage and jumped back into the action, which moved into Castle Doom's grounds.

Ultimate Alliance has a roster of 24 classic Marvel heroes.

Combining different characters opened up some great new fusions. We tried a targeted one where Cage pulled a chunk of rock from the ground, Iceman froze it with a blast, and Cage then threw it at an enemy for a devastating result. According to Oneal, targeted fusions are "kind of like a one-hit blow" that is ideal for bosses. "You don't want to waste it on a room full of minions because you're only going to hit one guy, but the hit that you do have is very powerful," she said. The mission finished off with an epic battle against The Tinkerer and some of his creations, including prototype cyborg soldiers and a massive walker called the Tinker Tank.

Unfortunately, that's where our time with Ultimate Alliance 2 drew to a close. Thankfully, the game is due out toward the end of September, so we won't have to wait long to get more time with the game's epic roster of heroes. For more on Ultimate Alliance 2, check out our previous content, including interviews with Marvel legend Stan Lee.

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"PlayStation 3 | Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 Updated Hands-On" was posted by Luke Anderson on Fri, 04 Sep 2009 10:10:11 -0700

PlayStation 3 | Super Street Fighter IV Update - Deejay, Juri, and T.Hawk Hands-on

2010-01-23T23:00:00.001-08:00

We kick butt with the new additions to the Street Fighter roster in Capcom's upcoming entry in the series.

We got our first peek of Super Street Fighter IV a few weeks ago in Japan but didn't have a chance to get our hands on an arcade stick and bust some heads with the new characters. Since then, we've been harassing Capcom for some hands-on time and our wish was finally granted this week. Capcom reps stopped by our offices with a demo version of the game that--while bare bones in terms of modes and the full roster--let us try out some of the new roster additions.

[ Watch Video ]

T.Hawk is just as big and burly as ever.

The version of the game we tried featured several returning characters: Ryu, Guile, and Chun Li. There was also newcomer Juri, as well as returning favorites T.Hawk and Dee Jay. The new returning characters have all gotten the funky 3D-watercolor makeover the rest of the cast received in Street Fighter IV and fit in well. While there were no new stages in our demo, the returning stages in the demo had a number of tweaks to them that included changes to static background elements, the addition of more animation or tweaked detail, and some lighting changes.

Beyond the game's visuals, the meat of our demo focused on the gameplay. Our first test was with Juri who played pretty much like we expected--fast but not a powerhouse. The various special moves we saw demoed in Japan were easy to pull off and not too hard to chain together. She's a flashy character who can dole out a decent amount of damage if she's played aggressively and can keep an opponent off balance. However, the party ends quickly if she starts taking hits. The lithe fighter has a pretty glassy jaw, which makes it maddening to try to go toe-to-toe with the heavier hitters in the game, such as Guile and T.Hawk. Her super and ultra moves help even the odds but currently require some very specific setup to do the max amount of damage. On the other end of the spectrum is T.Hawk who felt pretty familiar. The burly Native American isn't very fast but hits like a truck. Hawk's modest array of special moves, air charges, and throws should be familiar to fans of the series.

From the look of things in the demo we played, Hawk's classic moves all seem to be back and performed with the same controller motions. It's interesting to note that it seems easier to pull off his storm hammer grab. His supers and ultras were all nicely flashy, as well as capable of doing a respectable amount of damage. So far, T.Hawk feels like he's made a good transition to the SFIV system. He still has the same strengths and weakness in balance that he always did, with the current notable exception of the easier storm hammer. Finally, Dee Jay seems to be in the same boat as T.Hawk, with a familiar feel, as well as the same pluses and minuses. We tried his classic moves, dread kicks, projectiles, and hyperfist, which all came off without a hitch. The sweatpants-wearing kickboxer's supers and ultras were the most forgiving of the three new characters we tried, although they didn't do as much as we would have liked. We tried each character's taunts, which were decent (Juri), bland (T.Hawk), and goofy (Dee Jay). The demo version we tried only had one taunt for each character, but the final game is set to include more.

Come on. You know you missed those pants. MAXIMUM!

While we weren't able to check it out ourselves, we got briefed on some of the new content we weren't seeing, such as the car and barrel bonus stages, which will stay faithful to those seen in the various Street Fighter II games. We're probably most excited about the various multiplayer options set to be included SSFIV, team and endless battles, as well as the replay channel and upcoming Tournament mode, which will be a free piece of downloadable content due to hit after launch. The new multiplayer modes aren't a perfect substitute for a proper arcade experience with mobs of people and machines, but it's likely the best we're going to get given the state of arcades in the US, so we'll take what we can get.

Super Street Fighter IV is still looking and sounding like a promising evolution of Street Fighter IV. As we said in our last look at the game, we're just hoping the price is right. The amount of content--both obvious and subtle--being put into the game is meaty, but its appeal is directly tied to its price. Super Street Fighter IV is slated to ship in the spring of 2010. Look for more on the game in the coming months.

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"PlayStation 3 | Super Street Fighter IV Update - Deejay, Juri, and T.Hawk Hands-On" was posted by Ricardo Torres on Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:14:56 -0800

DS | Again Hands-On

2010-01-22T23:00:00.001-08:00

Using our abilities to see the past and present at the same time, we try to solve the mystery behind the Eye of Providence.

Again is an interactive crime novel, similar to Hotel Dusk and Trace Memory, which were also created by developer Cing. You play as FBI agent Jonathan Weaver, also known as J, who is trying to discover the identity of a serial killer known as Providence, who consistently leaves behind the "Eye of Providence" cut out from a dollar bill next to the victims. Like in other adventure games that are heavy on the reading, you'll spend a majority of your time tapping through lines of text and moving from one location to another to question witnesses, gather evidence, and, in this particular case, see into the past. We had an opportunity to play a preview build of the game and were easily engrossed by the unsolved mysteries surrounding the murder cases.

Special agents Kate and J.

J and his new partner, Kate, have been assigned to investigate a recent murder, which has striking similarities to a series of murders that happened 19 years ago in the town of Clockford. What's even more bizarre is that a letter that was supposedly written by the killer has been sent addressed to J, reminding him of the events that happened almost two decades ago. After receiving the letter, J decides to check out the crime scene of the first murder that took place: room 315 at Hotel Miranda. On the floor of the dingy hotel room, he finds a bloody wrench and the Eye of Providence. As he picks up the cutout, J stumbles around and his vision splits, giving him a view of the hotel room in the past as well as the hotel room in the present. Because of his unique gift, which seems to be activated by the Eye of Providence, J is able to slowly piece together the events of the past by making the two rooms match one another. So he and Kate decide to reopen the investigation of the Providence murders 19 years ago in hopes of finding the killer before he or she strikes again.

From what we've played so far, trying to replicate the original crime scene is the most interactive part of the game. When you walk onto the scene, broken fragments will appear on the left screen, indicating how many pieces of the puzzle you'll have to put together. You'll be holding the DS sideways so that when you're in this vision mode, you'll see the present room on the right screen and the room from 19 years ago on the left. By investigating peculiar areas, you can learn more about the details of the crime. Using the stylus, you can tap to examine objects, and if you hold the stylus down, it's like focusing all your energy on a significant piece of evidence to see into the past. There's a penalty if you hold the stylus down on the wrong thing, so you have to choose carefully. A bar at the top of the screen indicates how many tries you have, and it is game over if you deplete it. Once you've uncovered all the pieces of the puzzle, you have to tap the events or visions in order, and the truth will be revealed.

When you're in vision mode, it's like playing a game of finding the differences between two pictures, except you have the freedom to move around in a 3D environment with the D pad and the stylus. The game does a good job of pointing you in the right direction so you're not randomly going to the list of locations that are available to try to move the story forward. There isn't much of a challenge in terms of deciding what to do next, because it's usually spelled out, but the focus seems to be on the story and watching it unfold like an episode of your favorite crime drama.

Match up the past and present to find the truth.

Photos of the characters and backgrounds are used to set up this interactive crime novel, and it can be somewhat amusing to see the repeated gestures that the characters use when they're conversing with one another. They show up like cardboard cutouts, and each has a fixed expression depending on the dialogue. It's an interesting look, and it's different from the usual animated graphics, but it can come across as a cheesy cop show.

One nice feature is that you can save frequently and go back and look at the dialogue's history in case you skipped over the conversation. It's a slower-paced game for those who are looking for story-driven games without too many mechanics to worry about. Even though there are a lot of details and evidence to go over, you can easily start up where you left off and jump right back into the mystery without missing a beat, because the game will bring you up to speed. It really is like reading a mystery book, except that you can make a few decisions for the characters and pretend that you have some input toward the outcome. Crime sleuths take note that Again will be released sometime in March.

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"DS | Again Hands-On" was posted by Sophia Tong on Fri, 15 Jan 2010 21:02:37 -0800

Wii | Shiren the Wanderer Hands-On

2010-01-21T23:00:00.001-08:00

As the silent and steadfast Shiren, we attempt to unravel the mystery behind the Karakuri Mansion.

Shiren the Wanderer on the Wii is not nearly as difficult as Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer for the DS, which was released a couple of years ago. If you're hesitant about this game solely based on the title, there's no need. For newcomers to the genre, there is an easy setting if you're not looking to be punished at every turn. Shiren the Wanderer is a new adventure that blends real-time exploration with combat, but it's still turn based so you can access menus and debate your next move. After a few hours, as well as minimal deaths, the game started to grow on us with its simple but nonetheless charming visuals and pleasant soundtrack.

Dungeon crawling with big bad bosses waiting for you at the end.

The silent samurai Shiren is accompanied by his loud-mouthed ferret Koppa, whose quips make up for the lack of dialogue coming from his master. Shiren's uncle and teacher, Sensei, has come across a bizarre stone key that is said to unlock the legendary Karakuri Mansion. The more they learn about the mysterious mansion, the stranger the story gets because suddenly there are guardians, a sleeping princess, and a story where Shiren finds that he may be some kind of "chosen one." We started off in the small village of Otsutsuki to gather some information, and after getting into a brief scuffle with the local thugs, our adventure was finally ready to start.

Dungeons are randomly generated and can be revisited. This gives you a reason to explore, level off wacky-looking monsters, and pick up helpful items. Traps are also hidden around the floors, which can be revealed if you wave your weapon over them or activate them by walking past. Once you enter a dungeon or a new area, you can't back out of the previous floor; the only way out is with a scroll or the exit once you've reached it. If you do happen to die at some point, you'll be bumped back to the last save point, which is usually just outside of the dungeon. On the normal difficulty setting, you'll lose all the items you possess, whereas if you're playing on easy, you won't lose anything other than your progress. There are places in villages--or random tea houses on a mountain--to store your items, as well as your money, in case you do die unexpectedly. Your inventory has a limited amount of space, so it doesn't hurt to drop off items too. A quick save option is available in case you do need to take a break, and you can save at any time on the world map.

Other than hoarding and selling items, you can fuse things together by using a melding jar to strengthen the abilities of a particular item. Another way to boost you gear is to use a dragon orb. In dungeons, you will come across dragon orbs where if you offer an item to the orb, that item will become stronger. You'll need barrier scrolls for this to work, and as long as multiple turns have passed without any interruptions from enemies, then you should be able to upgrade the item.

The game supports the Classic Controller, as well as the Wii Remote (horizontally or vertically) and with or without a nunchuk. You and up to two AI party members are free to roam within a dungeon until you can find the exit. Battles look like they're in real time, but once you approach enemies, you take turns hitting them with your sword or using an alternate attack with a bow. Each step, attack, or use of an item counts as one turn. Most of the time, we just kept hitting the A button to attack with our weapon, and everything worked out just fine. Battles are also about positioning yourself because you can attack diagonally as well, and you'll waste a turn if you attack in the wrong direction. Your companions fight automatically unless you want to go into Full Control mode. There are settings to adjust where you can direct them to use specific items or fight a certain way.

Shiren, Sensei and the ferret Koppa.

One thing to keep in mind is to stay stocked with rice balls because you have a hunger meter that depletes as you venture further into a dungeon. When you're starving, your hit points will start to decrease with every step you take. Your Hps will recover as you take turns fighting, but your fullness will go down. From the dungeons that we explored, each floor seemed to be a reasonable size, and with a map that automatically fills as you progress, it helps you keep track of where you're going, as well as highlights the location of goodies. The only time we actually died in our travels was when we came across a shopkeeper in a dungeon and walked off with a shield without paying for it. One club to the face sent us back to our last checkpoint.

It's unfortunate that you can't play Shiren the Wanderer with two other players, but the game is definitely accessible to a wide range of players. Those who are seasoned dungeon crawlers can find a challenge with the extra quests and the 1,000-floor dungeon that is included. Each time you complete a dungeon, your performance is tallied, so the game keeps track of what you've accomplished. Visually, the game looks a bit dated at times, but there's a certain charm to the painted countryside when you're on the world map, and you'll feel right at home when exploring the quaint villages of feudal Japan. Once in awhile, there will be a cutscene that helps move the story along, but it's actually more interesting to see what the feisty ferret has to say. The music doesn't necessarily stand out, but it can be quite catchy and fun to listen to as you grind your way through the floors.

The quest to unlock the mansion of Karakuri begins when Shiren the Wanderer is released on February 9.

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"Wii | Shiren the Wanderer Hands-On" was posted by Sophia Tong on Thu, 21 Jan 2010 10:38:31 -0800

Xbox 360 | Lost Planet 2 Update - Akrid X Boss Battle

2010-01-20T23:00:00.001-08:00

It's time to have a look at the latest building-size boss from Capcom's upcoming co-op shooter.

Lost Planet 2 is a big game. More specifically, it's a game with big bosses. We've witnessed that firsthand with our last few looks at this four-player sequel to Capcom's hit 2007 shooter. First there was the giant salamander boss back from the 2009 Electronic Entertainment Expo, a massive enemy that you could actually crawl inside of provided you had the courage to grapple-hook inside his mouth and even more courage to make the journey back out at the other end. Then at the Tokyo Game Show 2009, we got a chance to take on a sand worm boss that had us displaying the full force of our teamwork to rig up a giant cannon to shoot this beast down. Now we've seen a new boss here at CES 2010, dubbed Akrid X. Like the others, he's a building-size enemy that can be felled only if you and your three teammates operate at peak efficiency.

[ Watch Video ]

The fight takes place in an urban city environment that feels like a distinct departure from the green jungles and sandy wastelands we've seen in previous Lost Planet 2 stages. Throughout the game you're playing as different pirate factions all trying to survive the Akrid invasion. In this episode, you're playing as the NEVEC, a group you may recall as an enemy from the original Lost Planet. The Lost Planet storyline is surprisingly dense, but if you're a fan of the original game, you'll find yourself rewarded with a few bits of fan service in the form of references to characters from the original game. Remember Ivan Solotov? It turns out there are some clones of him serving in the NEVEC ranks.

As for the Akrid X boss, he's a tough beast to describe. Imagine a demon, a crab, and a dragon, and then combine them all into one towering demon-crab-dragon, and you've got a good idea of what this guy looks like. He's got a few devastating attacks that are capable of killing you in a single heartbeat. First is his ability to leap up to the roofs of the giant buildings flanking the small little courtyard where the battle takes place. He can leap back down below and knock everyone in the immediate vicinity down with a devastating shock wave. Get too close, and you'll be pancaked instantly. He also has the ability to breathe fire, which he does quite often.

Though Akrid X is every bit a hulking colossus, he's got his weaknesses just like every other boss you'll face. Those who played the original Lost Planet will recognize the presence of glowing orange spots on the boss--these are the weak zones where your weapons do significantly more damage than shooting anywhere else on his body. Helping you are a number of vital suits (that is, mini-mech suits) scattered throughout the world that you can either ride around in or strip of their huge guns. There are also battle suits, which are temporary suits of armor that drastically boost your defenses without taking away any of your agility.

These battle suits were the key to our success against Akrid X. Our winning strategy went like this: Run like a madman to the nearest battle suit, throw it on, and then run like a madman to the nearest grenade launcher gun. Once we found one, we'd then briskly walk (hey, we've only got so much stamina) to the bridge cutting through the middle of the level and hide out below to shield ourselves from the boss's death-from-above stomp. From here we'd hang out and fire rockets at his glowing orange limbs. Since he's so tall, he had a tough time seeing us under the bridge, and there were generally teammates scurrying about in vital suits to draw his attention from us.

Though this was our preferred strategy, there were certainly other options for destroying Akrid X. One of the more intriguing weapons from this area is a huge drill--roughly the size of your character--that you can pick up and use against old demon-crab-dragon. The trick, though, is that you'll need to use your grapple hook to get up on top of Akrid X. He's a quick and nimble beast, so it's not very easy to do--but do it right and you'll be able to take your huge drill and bore holes into his weak spots like a futuristic space pirate version of Wander from Shadow of the Colossus.

After an unsuccessful first attempt, we managed to fell this boss on our second go. It was intensely satisfying to see him hit the ground with a giant thud and then disappear into globs of thermal energy. It's a satisfaction you can share with up to three teammates thanks to Lost Planet 2's inclusion of four-player co-op. We're big fans of the teamwork elements that are required for success against these huge bosses, and it's something that makes for an altogether different experience from the original game despite the fact that you're essentially doing the same thing (pointing your gun at the bright orange bits on an enemy and firing). At any rate, we're eager to see more of Lost Planet 2. In the meantime, you can expect it to hit store shelves May 4.

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"Xbox 360 | Lost Planet 2 Update - Akrid X Boss Battle" was posted by Shaun McInnis on Fri, 08 Jan 2010 10:03:34 -0800

PC | Supreme Commander 2 Exclusive Impressions - Early Campaign, High-End Units, Gameplay

2010-01-19T23:00:00.001-08:00

Take an exclusive look at the early campaign, gameplay, and some of the powerful experimental units of this epic strategy sequel.

Prior to 1997's Total Annihilation, no one had ever tried to put a real-time strategy on a truly large scale--the game implemented a radar system so that reconnaissance could play a larger role on the game's large battlefields. Some years later, the game's designer, Chris Taylor, headed off to the rain-drenched Pacific Northwest to found Gas Powered Games and design 2007's Supreme Commander, an epic successor to Total Annihilation that featured enhanced versions of Taylor's original ideas of large-scale strategy and radar scouting along with impressive new technology that let you zoom your view all the way out. You could even zoom far enough to turn the heated battles among the game's three futuristic factions into colored blips on an all-encompassing strategic map.

[ Watch Video ]

Gas Powered Games' Chris Taylor explains what to expect from Supreme Commander 2.

Now, the studio is hard at work finishing Supreme Commander 2, a sequel that will attempt to improve on every aspect of the previous game by offering streamlined gameplay and research, a very thin and clean interface, faster-paced matches with action that heats up more quickly, and a brand-new single-player campaign with a much more-intimate story.

You'll command squadrons of gunships and enormous walking mech units in Supreme Commander 2. And that's only the beginning.

Taking our first look at the sequel in some time, we found it hard not to zero in on the powerful technology under the hood. According to Taylor, most of Supreme Commander 2's tech has been overhauled--if not simply torn apart and rewritten from scratch. You can expect plenty of new graphical bells and whistles in the form of a new rendering engine, new water shaders (a surprisingly important addition to a strategy game where naval battles are a very real and important part of the experience), and a new lighting system that casts multiple shadows in real time (units can be shadowed by nearby mountains, as well as by nearby larger units while simultaneously casting shadows themselves). The sequel's water, in particular, looks outstanding, because it not only reflects and refracts light as it should, but it also breaks up in a realistic gush of foam particles any time a submarine emerges from the depths or a ship gets sunk. In shallow enough water, you'll even be able to make out the wreckage of a sunken ship (and harvest its mass as a resource if you've got some spare engineer units lying around).

In addition, the studio has created "flowfield pathfinding" based on theories explored in a recent research paper from the University of Washington. This is an entirely new kind of unit pathfinding, which--as we saw from a demonstration--will let units easily negotiate bumpy terrain, cluttered battlefields, and even ranks of opposing troops headed right for them. We watched several demonstrations that showed two massive battalions of infantry troops ordered to march right through each other, which they did without so much as missing a step, much less breaking formation. Yet surprisingly, both the improved pathfinding and the shiny new graphics are being optimized for lower-end computers because the game was planned for development on both the PC and the Xbox 360 from the start. Because the team found that it had to be more aggressive about optimizing for the console version of the game, the PC version benefited by having streamlined graphics loading that should run, according to Taylor, just fine on a five-year-old machine. (The studio is currently stress-testing the game on machines that go as low as a 2.8GHz processor with a single gigabyte of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 6800 graphics card.)

Units in Supreme Commander 2 will automatically form up into logical marching orders whenever they're near each other--a new functionality that will go hand-in-hand with another of the sequel's useful new features: "strategic mode." As mentioned, the previous game let you zoom way, way, way out from the action to essentially turn the battlefield into an abstract map with units represented by tiny markers that could be given orders to group up and traverse this or that sector of the map as part of your offensive. And, if you had a dual-monitor setup, you could keep the zoomed-out map open on one monitor while running a zoomed-in view on the second one.

You can still use a dual-monitor setup in the sequel, but strategic mode will also tune out all battlefield sound effects and replace them with radar monitor bleeps and beeps to make it look and feel like an actual commander's view. In addition, nearby clusters of friendly units will automatically be labeled as numbered groups on your strategic map and can be given move and attack orders with a few mouse clicks. Taylor quickly pointed out that you can still create the usual real-time strategy control groups by group-selecting your forces and pressing the CTRL key plus a number key to assign them to a group. But the creative director also explained that he hopes strategic mode's automatic group assignment feature will mean that most players won't even need to use control groups, in the same way that strategic mode's fully zoomed-out view makes a minimap obsolete (though there will be a minimap in the game, too, for those who can't live without them).

Aside from the impressive technology that powers the game, Supreme Commander 2 will also offer an extensive single-player campaign, which--like in the original game--will offer a total of 18 operations. "Operations" is the term used for Supreme Commander's single-player missions, but calling them "missions" seems to sell them short because they take place on huge maps that expand in size over the course of each operation as you uncover various enemy plots in other sectors or are tasked to push forward and explore or conquer new hot spots.

The sequel's huge operational maps will set the stage for huge battles.

However, even the campaign is being modified to provide a more consistent experience. Yes, the 18 operations are divided into six missions per each of the game's three factions-- the UEF, Cybran Nation, and the Illuminate--but they'll take place along a single, linear story path rather than branch off into three different endings. In addition, when your field of view does expand in any given operation, it'll push forward in ways that make logical sense with your updated mission objectives rather than simply expand in all directions as it did in the previous game. This was occasionally confusing to new players who weren't even aware of different sectors that left them exposed to attacks.

Supreme Commander 2's campaigns story will be much more personal in nature. Yes, the game will still take place in the same universe after the events of the Forged Alliance expansion pack for the original game--Gas Powered Games has a full-on "bible" that includes page after page of story and setting details to keep everything consistent. However, this time around, Supreme Commander 2's conflict will be less about a war of ideologies among the imperialistic UEF, the freedom-loving Cybran Nation, and the alien-influenced Illuminate and more about human relationships between key characters.

The Illuminate forces may seem aloof and mysterious, but once a fight breaks out, they don't mess around.

The Illuminate campaign, for instance, will tell the tale of a brother and sister embroiled in a rebellious war to subvert the new Illuminate faction and restore the Aeon faction of the previous game to power. The Cybran Nation's story will be about the interplay between Ivan--one of the newest models of Cybran cyborg--and his "father" and creator, Dr. Brackman (who is himself a brain in a jar that has remained awake and sentient for centuries). The UEF campaign will tell the story of commander Dom "Migraine" Maddox, a human military officer and pilot of the ACU mech who is fighting to defend UEF holdings a long, long way from home and from his wife and young son. Gas Powered Games hopes these very intimate stories, which will focus on the tensions, rivalries, and bonds that result from these very human relationships (aside from that whole brain-in-a-jar thing), will be even more engaging for players who want deep stories and interesting characters with their real-time strategy.

For the rest of us, there will be plenty of explosions, huge battles, and high-level strategy to engage us. Like in the original game, you'll start out with an ACU mech, which is essentially the Supreme Commander unit, and a few engineer units. You'll be tasked to develop a wartime and research economy by seizing nearby mass deposits on the map and constructing mass extractors. Though, you'll also want to construct energy generators to produce the game's second resource: energy. While your first few steps in just about any match seem to be quickly getting an economy going, the game balloons out to higher-level strategy almost immediately because after you get your economy going, you'll be clear to create one of three basic military structures to churn out either land units, air units, or naval units (which are not available on maps with no oceans). At the same time, you'll also be accruing research points automatically (and may gain them faster if you construct research centers).

Research points can be spent on developing a variety of different improvements for your land, air, or sea forces, as well as for your structures and your ACU unit. These improvements all appear in a technology-tree-like in-game interface that lets you pull up the branching research tree in-game and spend your points on various improvements. Research improvements include bonuses to your existing units, like weapon upgrades or personal energy shields, and unlocking newer units to be constructed at one of the three types of military structures. There are also various economic bonuses that may help you gather and store more mass and energy quickly, as well as powerful enhancements for your ACU unit that can be defensive. These include an escape pod enhancement that launches the head of the ACU (while the body collapses), letting your Supreme Commander make a hasty retreat or, instead, power up your ACU to make it strong enough to actually go toe-to-toe with the highest end experimental units in the game...and win.

Speaking of experimentals, Supreme Commander 2 will have 27 of them, including "minor experimentals" like the AC-1000 (a futuristic imagining of the modern-day AC-130 gunship) on up to heavy-duty "major experimentals," like the King Kriptor mech. This is a gigantic humanoid robot that dwarfs the average ACU and is basically made entirely of huge guns (no, that's not an exaggeration). There's also a huge variety of experimental units, including land, sea, and air vehicles that act either as heavy-duty attackers or as humongous troop transports, as well as defensive stationary emplacements. For example, there is the Illuminate space temple, which is effectively a two-way teleporter once you've built a secondary beacon, though your enemies can use it too. Then, there's the UEF Noah-Unit Cannon, which is a long-range artillery emplacement, a unit-generating structure, and a unit transporter all in one (this massive cannon pounds the target area with gigantic shells that contain units of yours that it builds).

Given the great variety of major and minor experimentals in the game and their wide range of uses, it's clear that they'll come in handy for just about any style of player, including defensive "turtle" players who prefer to hide out at their base long enough to drop a nuclear warhead on their opponents. Oh yes, nukes are back, and they're more devastating and look more spectacular than ever. They also leave an ominous gray mushroom cloud that just hangs there, shifting ever so slightly in the wind.

This March, you get to decide who lives and who gets nuked.

Supreme Commander 2 is clearly intended to be everything the original game was and much more, as well as better all around. The sequel will offer more depth, more research, more devastating experimental units to obliterate your enemies with, and powerful and great-looking new technology that'll make each gigantic battle look spectacular while letting you seamlessly zoom out to a wide strategic view without a single frame rate hitch. This is an impressive-looking sequel from an ambitious development studio, and strategy fans should definitely keep an eye out for this game. Supreme Commander 2 is scheduled to launch in March on both the PC and the Xbox 360.

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"PC | Supreme Commander 2 Exclusive Impressions - Early Campaign, High-End Units, Gameplay" was posted by Andrew Park on Mon, 18 Jan 2010 11:27:37 -0800