4gamerzone

The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky Preview

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 14:57:00 +0000

Xseed's partnership with developer Nihon Falcom is certainly benefitting old-school Japanese role-playing game fans in North America. The publisher recently released the Ys games for the PlayStation Portable and is now working on localizing The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky trilogy that was originally released in Japan in 2004. Anyone comfortable with turn-based battles will feel right at home, but Trails in the Sky makes its own touches to the combat system and customization to make it unique.

Combat is grid-based, but you can't really tell.

The story is set in Liberl Kingdom and revolves around a feisty young girl named Estelle Bright, the daughter of a legendary fighter. Her adopted brother Joshua is always by her side looking out for her as they take on guild quests together. You'll join the Bracer guild early on (an organization dedicated to help the people), which serves as a tutorial for introducing you to the combat mechanics, arts, and craft. As you continue completing jobs from the guild, the story will advance and you'll learn more about the world's politics, as well as the people close to you.

At a glance, the gameplay resembles a fast-paced strategy role-playing game. Enemies appear onscreen, and once you've entered the battlefield, you have the option to maneuver around a 17-by-17 grid area for strategic placement. It's turn based and quick; you don't have to deal with which direction you're facing (or move first and then attack; you just automatically attack if you're within range), but you do have to keep in mind how you want your characters positioned. On top of your standard attacks, you have magical abilities that come in the form of orbal arts. In Trails in the Sky, characters have individual orbments, which are a technology that lets you harness orbal energy points and customize your skills. Slots in your orbment can be filled with different types of quartz, which grants you the ability to cast spells or even boost your stats.

Other than your health and energy points, you need to keep track of another meter in the form of your craft points. These build during battle, and once you reach 100, you can execute an S-craft technique that is similar to a limit break or overdrive attack where you deal extra damage but use up all of your charged craft points. Your party members will learn unique crafts as they level that will require craft points.

There's a lot to take in at first, which is why the game provides you with a Bracer notebook that documents your current missions and can be used as an in-game manual. Estelle may be talented with a staff in battle, but her skills don't exactly extend to the kitchen, given the amount of flack she receives from her father and brother. Throughout your travels, you'll gather recipes that are automatically recorded in a recipe book. From there, you can use items that you've picked up along the way to conjure up some meals to help your party.

Orbments is the way to go.

We didn't get far enough to find out more about the overarching story, but there was enough intrigue and mystery surrounding the main characters to keep our attention. Estelle can be a bit too bubbly at times, but Joshua's levelheadedness strikes a good balance. Visually, Trails in the Sky doesn't stand out much compared to other Japanese RPG remakes that have been put out on the PSP, but its visuals are pleasing nonetheless and the soundtrack is fitting. For those interested in the soundtrack, you can receive it by preordering the limited-edition version of the game at participating retailers. It also comes bundled with other goodies, such as a poster and a Bracer guild replica badge. Look for The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky when it is released on March 29.

Lego Pirates of the Caribbean: The Video Game Preview

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 14:48:00 +0000

With a theme-park ride, a Hollywood blockbuster hit, and building blocks, Pirates of the Caribbean is a franchise that has come a long way since the initial attraction opened in 1967. Disney has a fourth movie coming out in May, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, inspired by the book by Tim Powers. TT Games has been on a roll, tackling huge franchises like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and Harry Potter (we can only hope Lord of the Rings is in the future). It has also transformed these beloved tales into video games that are suitable for anyone to play. Lego Pirates of the Caribbean: The Video Game will cover the content across all four movies and will be familiar to anyone who's been playing the Lego games. However, TT Games' goal is to capture the essence of what makes a particular franchise special, and in the case of Pirates, it's all about buccaneering.

Due to the nature of the movies, the game will have an action-oriented approach with more of an emphasis on platforming than puzzle-solving this time around. Our demo was of the second movie, Dead Man's Chest, where we started off on the island in which Jack was captured by the natives and they were planning to eat him. You may remember the fight scene where Jack winds up in a wheel. In the game, Will is on his way to rescue Jack while rolling around in a makeshift hamster ball. There's a lot of rolling down the side of a mountain, avoiding traps, and figuring out what switches to hit to move forward. While you're busy playing roly-poly, crushing objects and all sorts of vegetation, you can see Jack running in the distance either being chased by the natives or vice versa. Even in the build's pre-alpha state, the view of the hilly island looked great and made us feel like we were on a tropical island with access to all the fun and colorful plastic building tools we needed to proceed.

We skipped ahead to another part of the island where we were able to see what it was like to go underwater. Your health meter turns blue and you have a limited amount of time before you need air, but from what we saw, we're looking forward to exploring the world beneath the waves to see what kind of treasure we'll find. The engine has been reworked since Harry Potter, so the lighting in certain areas really added to the atmosphere. This was particularly noticeable when we moved to the Flying Dutchman portion of the game where the ghost lighting established a spooky tone for the level and was quite different from other Lego areas we've seen. Undead characters can use portals that living characters can't, and if it's possible for Lego pieces to look gross, the pink tentacles wiggling around deck definitely came close.

You can play with more than 70 characters from the movies, including the undead, which come with special powers. Jack has a special ability where he can whip out the compass he acquired in the first movie; white footsteps will then appear and lead him to "what his heart desires." This usually means treasure marked with a bright red X. As mentioned, the focus of the game is more on platforming, primarily because pirates spend most of their time swinging on ropes to commandeer a ship, climbing masts to avoid getting caught, and walking the plank when things don't go their way. TT Games' goal was to have the characters be more dexterous and give them interesting pirate powers to use. Another new feature is that you have access to a crew of up to eight characters. Using the Y button (or triangle on the PlayStation 3), you'll be able to pull up a wheel that lets you easily manage your party. They aren't always onscreen with you, but we're guessing that there will be some commandeering involved at some point where we need some extra hands on deck.

Son, I'm Captain Jack Sparrow. Savvy?

Lego Pirates of the Caribbean: The Video Game will come out on almost every platform, including the Nintendo 3DS. This is the first time where the same game from the console versions can be experienced on a handheld. It's only a single-player experience, but it's the exact same one, with the exception of a few tweaks to make it more portable. For example, the story levels are split into smaller chunks for easy pick-up-and-play options, and the street pass mode allows you to do random battles if you happen to pass by other players with street pass active. You pick a character and select your offensive and defensive order (high, low, medium), and the fights play out like rock-paper-scissors. These battles can be replayed later with animations, and depending on how you do, they will earn you coins, which you can then use to purchase characters that are only available via this mode. The 3D effects also work well, but we were told that eye fatigue was something that TT Games looked into extensively. What it discovered was that your eyes get tired when your characters move around in a 3D plane because you are making your eyes focus and then un-focus. What TT Games did instead was keep the ocular deck fixed on the character, so that what you're looking at will always remain fixed. Other things in the environment will also pop out, such as all the tiny Lego pieces that you collect and certain objects.

Lego Pirates of the Caribbean: The Video Game looks to be another solid entry in the library of Lego games, and we look forward to seeing more. We didn't get to see any funny cutscenes this time around, but we were told that the original score has been licensed, so you'll be able to get into the swashbuckling mood with its invigorating score. We'll be sure to see the game again before it ships sometime this May for the PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo DS, PSP, and 3DS.

Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection Exclusive Preview

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 14:41:00 +0000

It's hard to believe that it has been 20 years since we initially accompanied the dark knight Cecil and the dragoon Kain on their mission to the Village of Mist. The story in Final Fantasy IV explored themes such as love, betrayal, friendship, and devotion, which ultimately set the tone and style of the many Final Fantasy games to come, according to the original game's designer, Takashi Tokita. During the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, we met with Tokita to go over the new features of the collection.

It's not as though Final Fantasy IV hasn't received its share of remakes. The reason behind the bundle was not only to celebrate the anniversary of the game, but also to create something that fans had wanted. The game comes included with Final Fantasy IV: The After Years, the WiiWare game that was released in downloadable installments in 2009. Originally a mobile game in Japan, The After Years continued the story in FFIV, this time with Cecil and Rosa's son, Ceodore, as the main character. From the main menu, you can access the original game, which is remade from the Super Famicom version in Japan, so the difficulty is harder than the eventual US release. Other than a graphical update, additional challenge dungeons have been added to The After Years.

Tokita wanted to continue the story of Final Fantasy IV so that players who finished the DS remake would have more to look forward to. The After Years jumps 17 years after the events of the original, so in the PSP collection, a section of the game called "The Interlude" will bridge the gap between the two games. This is entirely new content that can last anywhere from 10 to 12 hours or more. The Interlude begins in Damcyan, where Edward has rebuilt his castle, and the entire crew is back together to celebrate. We didn't learn much more about what else is going on, other than that during this time of celebration, there seems to be something lingering on people's minds.

The graphics for all three parts of the game are consistent, so there are noticeable graphical upgrades from the original game as well as the WiiWare games. Enemy models have been redesigned, as well as the characters themselves. They aren't drastically different, but they are a step up from the original sprites. The colors also look fantastic on the PSP; everything looks much richer and more vibrant than in previous iterations. For those wondering how the music will sound, the game comes with the original SNES soundtrack, and you also have the option to switch to the enhanced DS version, so you can experience both versions.

The famed Magus sisters.

It hasn't been that long since we've played the version of Final Fantasy IV, but for fans of this classic, it doesn't matter. Reunite with the diverse cast of characters once again in Final Fantasy IV: The Complete Collection when it is released on April 19.

WWE All Stars Q&A - Matches, Cages, and Weapons

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 14:31:00 +0000

If you've been following WWE All Stars, you'll know that the game offers an over-the-top style of wrestling where little things like rules and physics don't carry a lot of weight. Such a game seems like a great opportunity to get creative with the usual selection of match types, so we chatted with senior designer David Friedland to see what fans can expect from All Stars' various game modes.

GameSpot: Let's start with the basics. What are the standard game modes that you knew you had to have in the game--those cornerstones of any wrestling title? How are you trying to make them stand out in All Stars?

David Friedland: When we began development on WWE All Stars, we looked at every major match type in WWE history and prototyped most of them. Ultimately, we went with the match types that best supported our fast-paced, over-the-top and arcade-style gameplay. These include standard 1 vs. 1, Triple Threat, Fatal 4 Way, Tornado Tag, Elimination, Extreme Rules, and Steel Cage. In addition, we added two progression modes: Path of Champions and Fantasy Warfare. These modes are similar to the ladder progressions you find in modern fighting games but with a unique WWE style.

GS: How about the more "out there" match types? Tell us about the other modes in WWE All Stars and what players should expect out of these.

DF: We have taken a number of liberties with the standard WWE match rules in order to better accent our gameplay style. Falls count anywhere. There are no count outs or rope breaks, and the only way to get disqualified is to bash your opponent repeatedly with an object. Standard Tag Team has been replaced by Tornado Tag, where all four competitors are in the ring at the same time. In Steel Cage matches, your ability to escape is tied to the amount of damage you do to your opponent, forcing players to mix it up rather than simply attempting to climb out right from the start. All of these decisions were made to support the pacing of the game and eliminate anything that took away from the depth of the combat system. We also wanted to make certain that all of our match types were playable online.

Fantasy Warfare is a mode that will have huge appeal to WWE fans. These 15 matches pit WWE Legends of yesterday against WWE Superstars of today to determine the best of the best in a number of categories.

Some of the matchups may seem obvious. Who else would compete for Greatest Big Man besides Andre the Giant and Big Show? Other matchups focus more on personality or lifestyle than physical attributes. In the Superior Lifestyle matchup, beer-drinking hell-raiser "Stone Cold" Steve Austin faces off against the straight-edge CM Punk to determine the better role model. Each of these matchups has an accompanying video package highlighting the buildup to the match. WWE really knocked it out of the park with these videos. WWE Legends and WWE Superstars who have never competed against one another now appear to have actual rivalries going.

Path of Champions is a fighting-game-style mode with a series of three 10-match ladder progressions. Each of the three paths has accompanying cinematics voiced by the real-life WWE Superstars. In the WWE Legends path, players face Undertaker with Paul Bearer for the World Heavyweight Championship. In the WWE Superstars path, players compete to face Randy Orton for the WWE Championship. In the Tag Team path, players battle to face D-Generation X, comprised of Triple H and Shawn Michaels, for the WWE Tag Team Championship.

Who's gonna be the one to break the tension with a hug?

GS: Can you talk about the creative process behind coming up with these game modes? How you went from the initial batch of ideas to what ultimately made it into the game?

DF: Ultimately it was about the gameplay. The pacing of WWE All Stars is very different when compared with previous WWE games. Some match types lent themselves well to our style. Four-player matches, for example, are gloriously chaotic affairs with their own special strategies. With Steel Cage matches, the WWE All Stars environment is perfectly suited for huge, high-flying moves. Some matches, with object-oriented victory conditions, did not make the cut, as accomplishing the victory conditions was either too easy at our game's speed or caused too much of a slowdown in the action for our tastes.

Fantasy Warfare was a lot of fun to create. The development team at THQ San Diego has many diehard, lifelong WWE fans who have been watching these WWE Legends and WWE Superstars for many years. Everyone on the team had matchups they wanted to see, and the ideas flowed freely. Once we had the roster finalized, Fantasy Warfare really started coming together. As stated earlier, while some of the matchups were easy to imagine, such as Hulk Hogan vs. John Cena or Andre the Giant vs. Big Show, others required thinking outside the box. In the end, we came up with 15 matchups that really showcase the personalities and abilities of our roster.

GS: One of the big parts of WWE All Stars is the idea of different classes with distinct advantages and disadvantages against one another. Can you talk about how the class system affected the creation of these modes and how their interactions might differ from a standard one-on-one match?

DF: The class abilities definitely have an impact on some of the match modes. Nowhere is this more apparent than with the Acrobats and Big Men. Acrobats have some unique advantages in Steel Cage matches, where they can leap up to the sides of the cage walls and rebound off for high-angle attacks on their opponents that are very hard to defend against. In three- to four-player matches, the range of an Acrobat's turnbuckle moves make them especially dangerous, as opponents are never quite sure who they are going to attack next. Three- to four-player matches are also where the Big Men truly shine. Their ground stomp juggles can often pop multiple opponents into the air at once. Their ability to punch or kick an opponent out of the ring makes them great partners in Tornado Tag, allowing them to easily create distance between the opposing partners so they can double-team a single opponent.

They're not really fighting--they're just testing the structural integrity of this fence.

GS: How much of an influence on the design of these modes was the decade-spanning collection of WWE superstars you have in the game? The sport has changed a lot over the years, so how did you make sure that each type of match would work well with, say, an '80s Superstar and a modern Superstar?

DF: Most of our match types were popular throughout WWE history, and all of the WWE Legends and WWE Superstars in our game have all the tools they need to compete in these match types.

Where our roster really influenced our design was in the Path of Champions and Fantasy Warfare modes. Path of Champions has three separate paths players can select, with each tailored to a different era in WWE history. In the WWE Legends path, players are up against old-school Undertaker--back when he was managed by Paul Bearer. All of the opponents in this path are WWE Legends themselves. The WWE Superstars path has a more modern feel, with players confronting "The Viper," Randy Orton, and other current WWE Superstars. The Tag Team path offers the best of both worlds, with players competing for the right to face D-Generation X, the popular tag team featuring WWE Superstar Triple H and WWE Legend Shawn Michaels. This path features a mix of both WWE Legends and WWE Superstars as opponents.

Fantasy Warfare is all about the roster. With the WWE All Stars roster evenly split between WWE Legends and WWE Superstars, it was a matter of finding the best matchups and best themes and then working with WWE to create pay-per-view-quality video packages to accompany each matchup. Initial reaction to these matchups has been hugely positive, and we can't wait for the gaming public and the WWE Universe to get the chance to play through Fantasy Warfare in its entirety.

GS: Thanks for your time, David!

No More Heroes: Heroes Paradise Hands-On

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 14:22:00 +0000

Notorious Japanese developer Goichi Suda (better known by his pseudonym, Suda-51) has built a reputation around presenting gamers with bizarre characters in crazy settings. His previous work includes Killer7, the upcoming Shadows of the Damned, and the Wii title No More Heroes. Despite getting its birth on Nintendo's family-friendly console, the latter is now making the journey to the PlayStation 3. So what do three years and a new platform bring to the table? We recently had the chance to fire up the old beam katana with No More Heroes: Heroes Paradise on the PlayStation 3 and find out how the transition has fared.

As a brief recap to those unfamiliar with the original Wii version, No More Heroes puts you in the shoes of Travis Touchdown, a guy with a professional wrestling and anime obsession that borders on the unhealthy. His home base is a hotel named No More Heroes in the city of Santa Destroy, California. Keen to turn a quick buck after running out of cash, Travis decides to do a bit of wet work, but in doing so, he becomes involved in a ladder competition for the top spot of the United Assassins Association.

Recharging Travis' lightsword requires some suspect waggling of the Move controller.

So what's new in the PlayStation rerelease? Like the PS3 version of Dead Space: Extraction, No More Heroes: Heroes Paradise doesn't appear to have received much by way of new art. While the game's publisher, Konami, claims it will now run in glorious high definition, from our time with it, the game looks more like a scaled-up Wii version rather than a whole new game.

True to its Wii heritage, Heroes Paradise on the PS3 can be played using Sony's Move and sub-controller motion-sensing peripherals or a standard DualShock 3 pad. As you’d expect, thanks to the similarities between the Wii Remote/nunchuk combo and the Move, anyone familiar with the Wii game will be able to pick it up almost instantly. Movement is handled by the analog stick on the sub-controller, while attacks are performed by tapping the Move button. You can lock on to targets with the L2 button, while pressing and holding the Move button charges up an advanced attack. With the exception of executions, despite supporting Move play, none of the game's attacks are performed by swinging the controller. Depleting an enemy’s health bar rewards you with a flashy finishing flourish started with either a vertical or horizontal swipe. Keep in mind, though, that the game does not support a Move-only control configuration, which means you will need the Move's controller sidekick to play.

If you're not into waving your arms around in front of your television, the game does support the DualShock 3, but in doing so, it will take away from the experience of wielding a sword. It's all pretty standard stuff, with the two analog sticks being used for moving Travis around the world, while the triangle button unleashes attacks. Unfortunately, even if you opt for the simplicity of a game pad, the game forces you to shake the controller to charge your weapon. On more than one occasion, we were attacked before having the chance to successfully charge up, leaving us unarmed in battle.

Players can now replay boss battles and try to improve their scores.

The biggest new feature in the PlayStation version is the inclusion of a new boss battle mode called Score Attack. As the name suggests, it focuses entirely on boss encounters and gives you the chance to replay key fights from the main story with the goal of beating your previous scores. Successfully completing the fight rewards you with a rank report. We're eager to see if the final version of the game includes some form of online leaderboard support. Though we didn't see any, the game will apparently also include a handful of new boss fights.

From our time with it, No More Heroes: Heroes Paradise appears to be a complete although unadventurous repeat performance of the Wii game on Sony's big black box. While the scaled-up graphics and Score Attack mode are nice additions for those who missed the game the first time around, the small smattering of extra goodies in the box makes it a hard sell for anyone looking to pick it up for a second time. Look out for our full review soon, with the game slashing its way onto shelves in April this year.

Spider-Man: Edge of Time First Look Preview

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 14:20:00 +0000

Following the success of last year's Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions, Activision crowned Canadian developer Beenox as the primary developer on future titles featuring the Marvel Comics icon. The first game to be primed for release following the developer's "lead spider developer" status is the recently announced Spider-Man: Edge of Time. While the game isn't a direct sequel to Shattered Dimensions, it shares its predecessors multi-Spidey vibe, albeit with a new twist. Whereas Shattered Dimensions offered an action adventure ensemble, Edge of Time changes the formula by putting a buddy-cop-movie twist on the action and throwing in some time travel for good measure. We recently had the chance to get a proper run through the game by Beenox and Activision reps, which showed off what the game is going to offer.

As we noted earlier, Edge of Time is not a direct sequel to Shattered Dimensions. The game features an original story that revolves around Spider-Man 2099 and Amazing Spider-Man teaming up to stop a chronal catastrophe that threatens their worlds and just about everything in between. The time shenanigans kick off in 2099 when an evil scientist travels back in time to change the timeline to something a little more conducive to the evil scientist lifestyle. Unfortunately, this requires some murder, namely the death of Amazing Spider-Man. While Spider-Man 2099 tries to stop the scientist before he starts, the futuristic wallcrawler just misses him and winds up getting caught in a time bubble that protects him from the timeline changes that happen around him. The good news is that he retains his memories of how things should be and is able to contact Amazing Spider-Man before his death. The bad news is that the two don't get along, which gets the cross-time team off to a rough start. Will the pair find a way to get along and save the day? Probably, but from the look of things, it's not going to be easy.

The story's time travel angle is more than just a narrative device and figures prominently in Edge of Time's gameplay. The core gameplay should be familiar to Spider-fans who've played previous Spider-Man games, especially Shattered Dimensions. The webslingers will have unique abilities that differentiate them from each other. Amazing is the speedy, acrobatic fighter of the pair and incorporates web constructs into his combat moves of punches, kicks, and leaps. For Edge of Time, Beenox has buffed him out with a new evasion move that will let him dodge just about anything when used properly. Well, almost anything, considering he isn't going to be able to dodge his impending death without some help. 2099 is more of a powerhouse, throwing hard-hitting punches and kicks with a wide reach. His moves have been enhanced with a new decoy ability that lets him create a duplicate of himself to throw off enemies.

The time element in the gameplay has you bouncing between the past and the current, slightly busted 2099 future. The action is set in the Alchemax building in both eras, a massive, small-city-sized building that's a cross between a fortress and a science lab. The actions taken by Amazing Spider-Man in the past impact 2099's reality in a variety of ways. In the demo we saw, which showed off the third and fourth levels in the game, this played out in two key ways. The first element was basic and required both Spider-Men to be at the same location in both eras so they could work as a team. The second was a bit more mind warping: When 2099 is forced to fight a massive robot blocking his path, Amazing has a timed sequence where he has to destroy the prototype of the robot in the past. As he takes out various components of the robot in the past, the mech pounding 2099 becomes incapacitated and eventually disappears.

Unfortunately, as most any sci-fi time scholar can tell you, this alters the timeline, meaning one big problem can be replaced by another or by several smaller ones. Time is funny that way. As a result, the gameplay looks like it's going to have quite a few "good news, bad news" moments as one threat is replaced by another. The upside is that there should be a lot of variety to the action. Finally, as before, both heroes will be able to use their spider sense to get insight into their goals and spot enemies, crawl on walls, and, for 2099, enjoy some freefall segments. The other familiar mechanic fans will appreciate is the ability to earn "spider essence" from downed foes that you'll be able to spend to upgrade your existing abilities and moves as well as to unlock new ones. In addition, fans can spend essence on alternate costumes.

The demo gave us a good sense of how the game is going to be structured and highlighted the intriguing time mechanic, especially in relation to interaction between the Spideys. As we mentioned earlier, the two don't get along, and because 2099 is linked to Amazing, there's an awful lot of bickering going on between the two during the action, courtesy of a picture-in-picture-style display that has one of the pair popping up in the lower right-hand corner of the screen from time to time. Besides being used as a griping mechanism, the picture-in-picture display is used to show off important events in the timelines and offer direction. It's a neat twist that looks like it's being put to good use.

The whole affair is being brought together by some key names that fans should recognize from the games and comics. Veteran writer Peter David was tapped for the story and, given his experience with time shenanigans, is well suited to crafting the tale. The voice actors being tapped to bring the webhead to life are also experienced in their business. Josh Keaton, a spider-vet whose work includes voicing the webbed hero in the Spectacular Spider-Man animated series and Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and voicing Ultimate in Shattered Dimensions, is on hand to voice Amazing. Christopher Daniel Barnes, whose spider street cred includes the '90s Spider-Man animated series and Shattered Dimensions, where he voiced Spider-Man Noir, is being tapped for 2099.

Based on this early look, Spider-Man: Edge of Time appears to have an interesting premise that Beenox is making smart use of. We've got the expected questions around which villains are being included, how long the game will be, and what cameos to look for, but it looks like those answers will come later, because no one was talking. We definitely like what we've seen so far. Spider-Man: Edge of Time is slated to ship this fall for the 3DS, DS, PlayStation 3, Wii, and Xbox 360.

MX vs. ATV Alive Hands-On Preview - Bar Banging

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 14:15:00 +0000

Competing in professional motorsports seems like a terrifying venture. Luckily, for those of us who like to keep our bones intact, the MX vs. ATV series has allowed us to sample the excitement from the safety of our television set. Together with Elliot Olson, senior game designer at developer THQ, we hit the track and went hands-on to find out what's new in the latest entry of this off-road racing series.

With Alive, THQ is taking some of the focus off first place. Sure, getting the number one spot is nice--especially when you get to rub your buddy's face in it--but coming in fourth or fifth will net you something as well. That's where the experience points come in. No matter where you race, what you do, or how you place, you'll always be completing challenges and unlocking points. You can then spend these points on new parts for your vehicle, outfits for your character, new tracks to race on, and more.

The outfits are purely cosmetic, but the parts can be used to tweak the performance of your ride. To give yourself even more of an edge in the race, Alive also features a list of rider skills for you to unlock and use with your racer. You can equip up to two skills at a time, which can help you take more hits before wiping out or provide bonuses to the experience points you gain.

Being able to take some extra punishment is important since Alive had us getting a little more physical with the other racers than we've seen in other games. As Olson pointed out, in the previous MX vs. ATV games, you never wanted to touch any of the other racers. If you bumped up against somebody, you were more likely to end up face down in the mud than anything else. Now you have some leeway to bang bars with the other contestants and focus more on the race rather than respecting other people's personal space.

Don't be afraid to rub elbows with the other racers.

Even if you're not knocking your buddies off their bikes, newcomers to the MX vs. ATV series may be nervous about wiping out in their first races. However, with this racing series, Olson noted that the developers have always tried to find a balance between accessibility and authenticity. And while these two categories aren't mutually exclusive, they often cater to two very different groups. Alive doesn't have any flying turtle shells or cartoon banana peels, but the game's handling still seems forgiving enough that even new riders should be able to get the hang of things quickly. And like with the other games in the series, Alive looks like an authentic off-road racer, complete with screaming motorcycles, muddy tracks, and painful-looking wrecks.

We had fun during our brief time on the track. The reflex stick from the previous game is back, and using it while popping the brakes to make a near-90-degree turn while sliding through the mud was exciting. The game was easy to jump into, thanks in part to the jump and cornering assists, and although we came in fifth place, the game made sure our other achievements were at the forefront.

After our less-than-stellar performance, Olson took us on a tour of one of the game's short tracks. These smaller venues are designed to distill all of the motorsport's carnage and chaos down into a few lethal laps. Right away the figure-eight track he had selected turned into a battleground as his character fought to break past his opponents in front. At the same time, he also had to avoid the racers behind him when the track looped back on itself..

As you race, the tracks will degrade and become even more treacherous in spots.

After that, we decided it was time for a break. To help us relax, we loaded up a massive sand dune in the game's free ride mode and practiced our jumps and midair stunts. If you think you've got what it takes to be the next Tony Hawk on a motorbike, you can enter Freestyle Jam. This mode actives a 60-second timer and tracks how many points you can rack up in that time performing tricks. Afterward, you can hop on the leaderboard and see how you stack up against your friends. Whatever your calling, you can check on MX vs. ATV Alive on May 10 for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Supremacy MMA Hands-On Preview

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 14:05:00 +0000

Developer Kung Fu Factory is taking a stand against the likes of EA's MMA series. Rather than attempting to fully simulate the sport, its upcoming fighter MMA Supremacy is taking cues from classic arcade fighters such as Tekken and Virtua Fighter to make it more accessible and more fun to play. That's not to say characters will be launching fireballs at the opposition and performing impossible flying kicks--far from it. The visceral no-holds-barred fighting style that MMA is famed for will remain, albeit with a number of tweaks that make performing combos, grapples, and dodges natural to anyone that's played an arcade fighter.

Each character's basic moves--kicks, punches, and clinches--are easily performed using three face buttons on the pad. When combined with directional movements or multiple buttons, more powerful attacks are performed, with each character having his own unique set of moves. A color-coded body diagram shows where your opponent has been hit the hardest. Concentrating on those areas ensures quick knockouts, but even if you're on the ropes, you have the option of using your adrenaline bar. Pushing both triggers together activates a slow-motion mode, giving you more time to avoid attacks and unleash specials. The forth face button is reserved for parries. Pushing up and down on the analog stick performs a high or a low block, but when combined with the parry button, if your timing is right, you can deflect your opponent's attack and follow up with one of your own. Though we initially found it difficult to get the timing right, with practice, we were able to perform a flurry of brutal counters.

Though well-timed parries are impressive, we found ourselves having the most fun with clinches. After you've grabbed your opponents, you can wrestle them to the ground and launch a barrage of punches. If you've got a quick opponent, those hits can be blocked and the situation reversed, so you're on the receiving end of attacks. You can also perform a special move, which launches a manic quick-time event where you have to rock the right analog stick from left to right. If you do it faster, you perform the move, but should your opponents do it faster, they are released from your clinch and get the opportunity to launch a counter attack.

Certain characters are better at clinch moves but tend to move slower, while others are better at basic kicks and punches but tend to move faster. This is intended to foster strategic combat, but it also means that you can't create your own character for the fights to remain balanced. There are plenty of characters to choose from, though. Five of them are officially licensed, with each having his own narrative that runs throughout the Supremacy Stories Career mode. Each fighter's story is told via a stylized motion comic. One comic we were shown featured a bulky ex-SAS soldier, who was having a fight with his manager. In what was clearly a take on the cockney gangster antics made famous by the likes of Lock Stock, they exchanged a number of expletive-filled jibes, complete with some rather amusing cockney rhyming slang.

John's new vegan diet had suddenly given him the power of levitation in the ring.

As you progress through Supremacy Stories, your character earns experience points, which you can use to unlock new moves and abilities for your character. Those abilities can be used in online fights and tournaments, though your overall strength remains the same in another bid to ensure fights remain as balanced as possible. As well as Career and online modes, there are local multiplayer tournaments to compete in, a training gym for practicing moves, and a Femmes Fatales mode where female fighters do battle. Whatever mode you're fighting in, you have a number of different arenas in which to fight. These range from massive spectator arenas to smaller rings, inspired by unofficial underground fights. All share a dark and gritty look. The fighters themselves look detailed, and without an official license, there's a lot more in the way of blood and sweat on show during a fight.

Supremacy MMA is due for release on June 7 in the US and June 3 in Europe. Look out for a full review on GameSpot soon.

Bodycount Hands-On Preview

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 14:11:00 +0000

Bodycount has been through a turbulent development process. Originally described as the spiritual successor to EA's first-person military shooter Black, the game has seen its ship date slip numerous times. The situation is further compounded by the public stoush between Codemasters and former creative lead Stuart Black, with the two parting ways citing artistic differences. We recently visited Codemasters' Guildford studio in London to get our hands on the game, shoot some guns, and shoo away info bandits.

Before we picked up the controller to play the game for ourselves, we were given a brief overview of Bodycount. Like its brother from a different mother, Black, Bodycount is all about arming players with a handful of real, hefty weapons to fire to their heart's content. Work has gone into ensuring that the things that go boom are the stars of the show, with beefy shooting and visible impact on the world around you taking centre stage.

I told you NOT to put metal in the microwave!

Africa played host to our demo, and after landing on a rocky mountainside we had our first victim handed to us on a platter. Spawning in, pistol at the ready, an unsuspecting guard slowly ambled away with his back to us. Naturally we wanted to make it one shot, one kill, and in doing so we weren't about to run the risk of shooting from the hip. It was here that we were introduced to Bodycount's unorthodox gun sights. Once you bring up the tip of your weapon, your feet plant. Rather than being able to strafe around spraying bullets at the target in the middle of the screen as you would in other games, moving the left stick with iron sights up causes you to bob and weave like a boxer, ducking and dodging as you avoid incoming bullets. It's an awkward feeling, and all through our demo we felt like something had gone wrong--with the process of aiming fixing us to a spot rather than allowing us to freely return fire and dive for cover as we would in other shooters.

With our kill count at one we followed the path, deviating to the left and going up some stairs and into a shack where we found an optional weapon: the shotgun. Swapping our peashooter pistol for something capable of making basketball-sized holes in walls seemed like a good choice, and we promptly fired a few rounds to test its abilities and make our own exit. It's this environmental destructibility that, as we engaged our first waves of aware enemies, helped us discover how little cover surfaces provide. Wooden room dividers and floors could be torn up wholesale (though not metal surfaces), allowing us to make impromptu speedy escapes, as well as opening up new entry points for attackers.

Accessibility is Bodycount's design mantra, and as a result, ammunition is plentiful. Fans after a shooter experience where each round must be counted, weighed up, and justified before pulling the trigger can stop reading now. There's no scrounging around in the dark, hopefully searching corners of the room for one extra shell before you go headlong into combat. As well as scattering bullets, killing adversaries causes them to drop blue orbs which represent intel that you can spend on new abilities. Of course, the bad guys aren't going to simply let you waltz in and make enough currency to buy the best unlockable items in the game.

Our immediate job was to locate a C4 package and use it on some enemy antiaircraft guns that were keeping our UAV eyes-in-the-sky at bay. Once we had blown the SAM site to smithereens and accrued enough intel massacring the local populace, we were able to call in a rolling airstrike that rained down fiery death from above. Though we had the chance to see only one ability during our play, the menu system was a four-part segmented wheel, suggesting that at least four different abilities will be available in the finished game, one of which featured a stylised shield icon--perhaps a personal protective device?

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Bullets can't hit, when you dodgin' like me.

Three different types of bad guys were stupid enough to get in the way of our lead during our playthrough. Medics hurry to the aide of gunned-down comrades, reviving them and granting them a second wind. Scavengers rush onto the screen from behind cover, looting any stray intel left lying around on the battlefield. Successfully killing scavengers returns all the intel they manage to accumulate and grants you a big info payday. The third and final rival type is the psycho, a heavily armoured Terminator-style tank class that hits hard and is able to take a beating. Grenades prove to be most effective here and can be used like a traditional thrown explosive--by cooking and then throwing before waiting for it to explode--or used in the more fun way, by double-tapping the grenade button on the shoulder button, which causes them to ignite on contact. The latter approach became particularly useful for taking care of foes that were perched on walkways high above and out of gunfire access--carefully lobbed grenades trapped them in the ensuing fireball.

Taking out the psycho and jogging our way triumphantly to the finishing line, we were presented with a fade-to-white screen--a curious twist on the usual black screen--and a foreboding glimpse at rival faction the Target, a robotic force with an unknown past at the core of Bodycount. After showing us the gritty, hilly dirt of Africa, our guide explained that the finished game will take you inside the enemy's ships, a very different locale made largely of glass and providing see-through cover that can be destroyed. Other real-world locations will include the garish neon lights of cities in Asia.

While the game looks quite good, and the guns certainly are the heroes, we walked away from our hands-on session a little concerned about the game's aiming system. We welcome evolution to what has become a largely stagnant yet extremely competitive genre, but it smacked of reinventing the wheel for the sake of doing so. We're hoping the next time we see it the system may be a little more refined. Bodycount still doesn't have a confirmed release date, but we're eager to see how it changes in the run up to its Aussie winter 2011 release window. Stay tuned for more soon.

Lord of the Rings: War in the North Hands-On Preview

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 14:02:00 +0000

The Lord of the Rings story is known the world over for its epic scale and for the bonds between the members of the fellowship. Unless you've been boning up on your LOTR lore, the War in the North saga may not ring as true as the content of the films. This chapter takes place at the same time that Sam and Frodo are desperately trying to hurl jewellery into a volcano, and plays as the backdrop for Snowblind Studios' upcoming game.

We recently got our hands on the three-player cooperative game (the title will support two-player split-screen, two- to three-player LAN, and two to three players online in addition to a single-player mode). We took control of the dwarven tank class during a quest in the Misty Mountains. The demo opened with us flying towards our destination aboard the feathery backs of giant talking birds. We were dropped in a safe spot and given a chance to get to grips with the controls. As you'd expect from a console action role-playing game like this, each character's primary skills--shooting arrows, hurling magic, and swinging a sword--are mapped to the face buttons. More advanced class-specific skills like aggro management and area-of-effect spells are found in submenus by pressing the bumpers and are tied to cooldown timers to stop them from being spammed.

…and this is for courting my sister!

Though the game is still going through the tuning phase of development, currently if you manage to land a string of successful hits once you've reached a predetermined multiplier, you will achieve Hero mode. Hero mode is triggered by tapping the Y button once, and it unleashes a more powerful attack on your target. Against large enemies like ogres and bosses this can be a whirlwind sword attack or a jumping downward blow that deals considerable damage, but when using it against poorly armoured grunts, it's capable of lopping off limbs and heads with gory effects.

We found that the momentum required to engage Hero mode was surprisingly easy to gain when playing to the strength of each character class. This allowed Farin, the dwarf tank, to rush in and scoop up all of the hate, and in doing so kept the Ranger, Eradan, free to sneak in with stealth and backstab and bleed enemies, while the elven ranged fighter, Andriel, fired a volley of arrows from distance.

Recognising and applying the unique traits of each class to the situation is essential to survival and tactics, and by using our bowman as a scout we were able to take down a lookout perched on a hill before he could alert his brothers of our presence, giving us the upper hand when we launched from the valley below with blades glinting in the sunlight. While weapon-wielding soldiers can hit anything on the ground, targets sitting atop raised platforms can't be reached with conventional steel, dividing the group and necessitating the need to pick and choose whom to drop first, and with whom. Melee pounded away on shield-carrying footmen, while our group's marksmen took heads off with sharpened projectiles.

Clearing our way to a campsite complete with a cosy burning fire, we found that racial abilities aren't limited to combat. Inside a nearby cave was a chest filled with unremarkable vendor guff, but by lightly searching the room, our dwarven loot sense began tingling, highlighting a weakened wall that we could destroy to gain access to a secret room. It isn't all about lucre though; rangers can track enemies, finding hidden paths, while elves have an affinity for herbs, picking them along the path and using them to mix up potent consumables.

Did I ever tell you how I got the nickname "Pincushion"?

Inside the secret cave room was a second chest filled with much rarer booty. Rather than draw from a single pool of quest rewards, each character can interact with the chest simultaneously, each pulling out a random selection of items. Not all of them will be upgrades, but the fact that the game doesn't feature any form of soul binding on items means you'll be able (if you wish) to share gear more appropriate with other members of your squad as opposed to flogging them as vendor trash. Though it may change before the game ships, examining each item slot on the character menu brought up a scrollable list of applicable items and their relative performance. Items with green stats will upgrade your character, while items with red info will reduce your effectiveness in combat--not what you want.

While we dug our hands into our virtual knapsacks to check out our new goodies, we also took the opportunity to mess around with our skill tree. Like in any RPG, as you level up you will be gifted points that can be spent on improving existing abilities and unlocking new ones. Each class will have 20 unique aptitudes, and these include duel-wielding a second main hand weapon or switching from a support role to offensive damage dealer by upping your magic.

As we trudged on through the powder we eventually reached a high peak and the drop to a valley below. Flicking torches among a sea of dark bodies accompanied by guttural roars indicated thousands of amassing orcs below ready to get bloody. After taking care of a final small group of trash mobs, we jumped across a gap in the landscape and came face-to-face with a hulking snow troll as winged dragons circled in the sky above. Though the encounter had been toned down for demo purposes, our studio guides explained that the encounter will be a long and hard-fought battle and will reward players with suitable spoils for successful slaying.

Though we didn't have a chance to see them in action, since there's no Middle-earth monorail, once you've travelled to a location you can use teleporters scattered throughout levels to return to a central quest hub.
Judging from our time with Lord of the Rings: War in the North, its easy-to-pick-up combat system and group-focused gameplay should make for fun when you and a few buddies live out your own fellowship adventures online or on the couch. Get ready to don your cloak and dice up your fair share of monsters when it's released on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC in 2011.

Alice: Madness Returns Exclusive Preview

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 13:57:00 +0000

It wasn't too long ago that we paid a visit to Wonderland and spent some time getting to know some of the twisted creatures that reside in that fantastical world. Creative director American McGee and executive producer RJ Berg once again team up in this sequel to the cult classic American McGee's Alice, which is being developed by McGee's studio Spicy Horse in Shanghai and published by EA. During the week of the Game Developers Conference we jumped ahead and took a tour of a later level, Queensland. For more information, you can read our preview here. EA recently came by our office to show us a new level, this time from Chapter 1, where we can see the beginnings of Alice's dark descent into madness.

The Hatter's domain is one of the first areas you'll visit after the tutorial stage. Here, judging by the color palette and decor, there's a distinct steam punk vibe to the area that has been carefully crafted in Alice's troubled mind. And that's where Wonderland exists, in the mind of the young girl who lost her family 10 years ago. The game's story follows Alice between Victorian London and Wonderland as she tries to piece together lost memories and dig deeper into her repressed ones. As you explore Wonderland, you can pick up two types of memories: the smaller audio snippets are suppressed voices from her past, and when you come across a larger memory, Alice will have an epiphany regarding the events from that devastating night.

In the beginning you won't have access to all the weapons. However, we were able to mess around with Alice's full repertoire to see how it works in combat. For the most part, we preferred using Alice's vorpal blade, which deals quick melee strikes. But each enemy type has a weakness, so it's almost impossible to get through by just mashing one button. The long-range weapons, such as the fast-firing pepper grinder and the explosive teapot cannon, are great for getting enemies out of the way before you get too close. The auto-lock-on feature is helpful, but there is a free aim mode as well if you prefer to maneuver on your own.

The first enemies we faced were the Mad Caps. These gremlin-like creatures were relatively easy to dispose of, except some came armed with a shield that would deflect our repeated blows. By watching how they move, however, you'll soon learn that they'll come at you fully with their fork, and if you dodge out of the way, it'll leave them wide open to your attacks. Another enemy type included flying creatures known as bolterflies (basically bolts with wings), which spawn from a nest repeatedly and do nothing but get in your way. Taking out the hive will clear them for good, but you have to watch for these things and think carefully about how to proceed.

On top of being able to wield a variety of deadly kitchenware, Alice can dodge quickly and jump multiple times, leaving a flurry of pretty blue butterflies in her wake. Once she comes across the shrink flower, she can shrink on command and explore areas for collectibles and other goodies. The insane children have left clues on the walls, so it pays to look around to see what has been scrawled. Like the drawings, certain platforms are visible only in this shrunken state. You'll find that enemies will leave behind teeth, which is the currency in the game that will let you upgrade your weapons--up to four times each. It's worth taking the extra time to explore, since there are "drink me" bottles to collect that will unlock concept art and additional bios in the main menu, giving you more character backstory.

Real world themes will make their way into the twisted Wonderland.

As you progress through this murder mystery, you'll venture through beautifully painted worlds, each with its own unique style and art direction. Alice's outfit and hobbyhorse change as you go, to match with the overall aesthetic. Even the enemies themselves match the surroundings, and as twisted as they are, the detail and creativity behind them is worth noting. There are four difficulty settings in the game, and while we played the game on normal, it provided a decent challenge, especially when we spent a good amount of time figuring out which weapon to use against what enemy. It's much more tactical than a straight-up button masher because if you treat it as such, you won't get very far. The platforming portions aren't too tough once you get used to how Alice jumps and glides around. To really get an idea of how the game plays and looks, be sure to watch the video preview embedded above.

Alice: Madness Returns looks to make quite a comeback with its stunning visuals and varied gameplay. We are eager to spend more time in Wonderland and uncover all of its secrets when it is released on June 14 for the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3.

The Fancy Pants Adventures

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 13:42:00 +0000

We took a look at a new game mode from EA's latest downloadable offering, which plays like a crazed mash-up of Mario Bros, Little Big Planet, and Super Smash Bros.

If this is the first time you've heard of Fancy Pants Adventures, you could be excused for thinking it's a tie-in for an upcoming animated TV show or movie. However, if you have any interest in the Flash gaming scene, you'll know that it's actually a novel and addictive browser-based Flash game. Creator Brad Borne is working with EA to bring the game to the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade on April 19 and 20 respectively, at $9.99 and 800 Microsoft points. We got a chance to go hands-on with the game and speak to Borne at a recent EA showcase event

In TFPA, you and up to three other friends play as stick men, with, as the name suggests, each character sporting large trousers. You can customise your character using accessories unlocked by playing through the game, which also helps you to differentiate characters from each other. You see, Fancy Pants Adventures is a very fast-moving platformer, where the emphasis is on moving through the level to collect swirls before everyone else. That's not all--you can beat other characters to relieve them of their swirls, slide-kick them to get past, or jump on their heads to get to hard-to-reach places.

There are many modes in the game, all of which can be played by up to four players both locally and online. We got to play with three other people at the event and had a lot of fun trying to collect the most swirls while taking advantage of people in the process. Borne promises the game will satisfy players who want to have fun with friends and those who prefer to compete for high scores on the leaderboards. Borne has been in the process of pulling in levels from the Flash version of the game and working with a small Spanish team that has been getting them running on console.

There will also be more competitive game modes such as King of the Hill, which we played for the first time at the EA event. In King of the Hill, each character has to jump up walls to reach the top of the level, where they find a device that spews out swirls. Each player has to try to maintain dominance of the hill by knocking other players back down, allowing them to exclusively collect the swirls for points. In our game, players were charging their weapons (which included items such as forks and even a baguette) and unleashing them on their enemies. Others were bouncing off walls, getting a run up and then slide-kicking them into oblivion.

Running upside down--just one of the special abilities offered by wearing outlandish trousers.

While The Fancy Pants Adventures is currently set for release only on consoles, the possibility of a PC version is being looked into as well. If you've enjoyed the likes of New Super Mario Bros. and Little Big Planet, then it's definitely worth keeping an eye on. Watch out for the game on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 in a couple of weeks' time.

Warp Preview

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 13:54:00 +0000

Stealth action title Warp pits teleporting alien Zero against scientists and security guards in an underwater laboratory. "Portal meets Metal Gear" is a description bandied about at the game's Montreal-based developer Trapdoor, referring to its science-fiction flavour and puzzle emphasis on one hand, and its top-down, stealth-based play on the other.

Frag out!

The lab complex from which Zero must escape, a network of gleaming white chambers filled with science stuff, could certainly be a seabed outpost for Aperture Science. It's here that Zero finds him(her? it?)self imprisoned in a glass-walled cell, monitored by lab-coated, clipboard-toting technicians. They must not have known about the little alien's ability to "warp"--that is, teleport short distances through space or space-containing walls.

One warp later and he's loose in the lab, free to exercise his explosive second power, "frag." With this, Zero can warp into people or Zero-sized objects and kerplode them from the inside. You waggle the left stick to jostle the hapless host or suitable vessel--waggle enough, and you'll blow them up, producing usefully destructive blasts in the case of explosive barrels, and bloody messes in the case of human victims.

Don't feel bad about the latter. Soon enough you'll spot an alien specimen like Zero dead on some kind of science table. Scientists, eh? And then there are the armed guards, who deserve less sympathy still. These guys have laser-scoped guns and force-field shields, through which Zero cannot warp, making them dangerous enemies. Combat is not an option for the alien critter, so he needs to work towards escape by traversing the lab's rooms with warp-enabled stealth, hopping through walls that aren't protected by force fields, chaining warps from object to object, human to human, object to human, and so on.

Can we talk about this?

Rooms are set up as puzzles with multiple solutions. In one of the simplest, Zero has to destroy a force-field generator by fragging a nearby barrel. In another, this one defended by guards, he can warp in through a wall behind them to get around their shields. In another room, with a couple of scientists and a couple of patrolling guards, Zero can attract the humans' attention by warping into a nearby barrel and giving it a wiggle--but not blowing it up until they all gather around to see. Alternatively, he can nip from the barrel into a guard, another guard, and then away. Humans are left dazed for a short while after being inhabited, giving Zero a few moments to make a dash out of cover.

We're told to expect further abilities later on in the game, promising more complex puzzles as it progresses. But with two of Zero's abilities to work with, Warp already has a neat setup for top-down action puzzling. Nice touches take the visuals beyond ordinary--at one point, while we pan our bird's-eye view across the subaquatic lab, a whale glides through the surrounding water--and the aesthetic blend of cute and clinical, edged with gruesome, is appealing.

Warp is being prepped for release "soon" across Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network, and PC by studio Trapdoor in association with the EA Partners program.

Infamous 2 Preview

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Sat, 23 Apr 2011 13:37:00 +0000

Establishing a new brand is always risky business, but if your product weathers the storm and comes out the other side, then you gain the opportunity to forge ahead without the constraints of your original concept. This became Infamous developer Sucker Punch's mantra when it began work on the follow-up to its 2009 open-world game. To do this, it recognised it needed to grow both the characters and the world that they inhabit with physically larger monsters, better visual effects, and, for the first time, user-generated content.
The studio admitted during its presentation that it hopes it is building the next "game of the year." Unfortunately though, since there's no specific checklist to follow to raise a good game to the level of greatness, they're building the game they want to play. In doing so, the team is taking everything people loved about the original and then jamming its finger into the power socket and cranking up the juice.

Our demo was split into three parts: a boss encounter with the Behemoth, a game of hide the shards with Zeke, and a small taste of some of the content you'll be able to create with the user-generated content tools. With a couple of obvious exceptions during key story moments, Infamous was largely a game played at the grunt level. As an origin story, it followed Cole as he came to grips with his new and, at times, frightening powers. This included lashing out at something bigger and meaner than himself, but for the most part players took on groups of similarly armoured and skilled soldiers. Infamous 2 marks a turning point and sees Cole ditch the long sleeves of his courier jacket to show off tattooed arms. With this newfound confidence comes the chance to tackle new and even larger enemies.

The demo began with Cole arriving at the scene of a downed helicopter in the middle of the city. Searching inside, he muttered aloud that he was searching for an old man, though it remains unclear whether he's referring to new antagonist Bertrand--the leader of a local anti-deviant militia group--or Alden from the original game. Regardless, there seemed to be a venomous edge to Cole's speech, suggesting that perhaps this was less a rescue mission and more an operation to get even.

The end of the cutscene threw us straight into the world, and we stood facing a wide street lined by stout buildings draped in red party lighting. As we followed the star marker on our minimap towards suspicious-looking smoke plumes, a thunderous roar echoed through the cement gauntlet. A few more steps forward, the head of a giant bipedal reared its head and came into view. Even packing superpowers, it didn't seem like a good idea to kick it in the shin, and we turned to run for our life. The ambling beast was foolish enough to give us a glimpse at its numerous weak spots, revealing two pinkish glowing points on its chest before shuttering its ribcage to protect the goods. As we backed up it bellowed again, spitting phlegmy globs and giving us a chance to shoot it in the tongue. The dance continued through the streets--it lumbered ever closer while we did our best to return fire as we avoided the exploding cars around us.

Enemy militia put aside their differences for a moment, joining forces under a common enemy and rushing to fire at the creature by our side. The support was short-lived though, as the group was swatted away like flies at a barbeque by mutated humanoids (not unlike Dead Space necromorphs) that also joined the fray.

While melee attacks were functional in Infamous, they've become a more crucial element in the sequel, with Cole using a cattle prod to clobber anything and everything that comes within swinging range. Basic attacks can be combined with fancier execution moves, which are performed by tapping the triangle button when you've built up enough in your meter. These finishers are bone-crunching thumps, some in slow motion and most ending with the release of an electrical discharge that stuns nearby foes. Putting the stragglers to sleep with our justice stick, we turned our attention back to the monster destroying the city, shooting at exposed parts of its body as it muscled through buildings that impeded its path.

Where previously changes in colour from blue to red were your best indication of whether your attacks were doing damage, boss fights will now include health bars. A final volley of electricity from our fingertips smote the beast, but faded to white before we could bask in the glory of our kill.

While the first part of our demo put us in control of good karmic powers, providing fast, accurate bolts, the second arena was all about bad Cole. Dropping in, we jumped on the radio with old pal Zeke, who sent us searching for blast shards in a warehouse. Our only vague hint on their location was that they were being stored inside a box stamped with the militia's insignia. Anything wooden became fair game as we unleashed our dark side, and once we had found the specific crate and cracked a safe by zapping it, we then had the task of finding more just like them in other warehouses in the area. Of course, rather than let us simply waltz in and take their goodies, bad guys showed up to stop us. We were merciless as we tore them limb from limb, lobbing clustered energy grenades at anything moving and in the process removing the protective sheet metal covering the walls that had protected us from incoming gunfire.

Our mission ended with us dealing a final, killing blow to a large elemental ice creature who was brought around to our way of thinking by destroying its limbs one at a time. Stepping over the body to a waiting safe, we opened it to find not only blast shards, but also Bertrand's briefcase. What could be inside? The secret to Cole's past? An amazing tofu dessert recipe? We're going to have to wait and see.

The third and final section of our demo was a look at user-generated content and how it will be integrated into the game. Taking a page out of fellow PlayStation-exclusive title Little Big Planet 2, Infamous 2 will include a robust creation tool for building and sharing original missions. UGC levels will appear automatically in the game for players and act like normal side quests, marked on the minimap with a green icon. Accepting one plopped us on a rooftop, asking us to collect a giant coin and showing its influences, populating the sky above with orderly rows of the same enemies that had chased us when we fought the Behemoth. Our job was to shoot them down as they scrolled back and forth, dropping a line every so often. Floating bonus asteroids could be destroyed to slow their speed temporarily, making it much easier when used alongside Cole's rapid-fire energy shots. Successfully completing the mission rewarded us with a score (and can grant experience points) but didn't appear to offer much by way of comparing our score against other players. Nevertheless, it was an interesting diversion from the usual building climbing and wrestling with hobos.

Regardless of the type of content we took on in our session, one thing was abundantly clear: Cole has come to terms with his special skills on both ends of the moral compass. Running felt faster, hovering was much more effective when leaping from one rooftop to another, and weapons were exact and deadly. Through Cole, Infamous 2 unabashedly revels in its newfound power, and we're eager to play more and continue the story. Keep an eye out for more as the title approaches its June 7 North American release date on the PlayStation 3.

Street Fighter X Tekken Preview

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 13:31:00 +0000

One of the biggest surprises at Capcom's recent Captivate press event was a fully playable demo of Street Fighter X Tekken, the upcoming fighter mash-up that combines the Street Fighter franchise with Namco's Tekken series. Originally announced late last year at San Diego Comic-Con, the game has been kept under wraps, leading many to believe development on it was proceeding slowly. However, producer Yoshinori Ono surprised attendees with a meaty first look at the upcoming game, which included actual hands-on time. While the work-in-progress version we played was far from finished, there were plenty of hints as to where the incredibly promising final combat system is heading.

Ono's presentation kicked off with a look at the game's trailer and a very top-level overview of combat mechanics. He explained that the upcoming game will feature a broad roster of fighters and a new game system that will offer content that both Street Fighter and Tekken fans will appreciate. The game's core controls will revolve around the standard six-button Street Fighter configuration of three punches and kicks. Ono noted that many of Tekken's combos will work if you choose to use only four of the six attack buttons, but longer combos will be possible if you use all the buttons. The other central mechanic to the system is switching between fighters, which will be accomplished by hitting the medium punch and kick buttons.
Once the overview was done, Ono showed off a new trailer that highlighted the characters in the playable demo. Chun-Li, Ryu, Ken, Guile, and Abel from Street Fighter were showcased alongside Nina, Kazuya, Marduk, King, and Bob from Tekken. Following the trailer, Ono made it clear that there would be more announcements surrounding the game's roster coming at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo in June, San Diego Comic-Con in July, and GamesCom in August.

After laying out the basics and teasing some of the content in the game, Ono encouraged attendees to try out the demo and see what could be discovered in the work-in-progress version of the game. We were surprised to find a host of elements hiding in plain sight in the playable demo that made some radical changes to the Street Fighter system. First and foremost is the tag mechanic, which follows Tekken tag-style swapping that requires you to manage your fighters, especially when they're low on health. If you don't swap in a brawler with full health before your fighter is dealt a death blow, you'll lose the match, because the game doesn't automatically toss in your remaining fighter a la Marvel vs. Capcom 3 (MVC3). Next were throws, performed by pressing the light punch and kick buttons. These came in two varieties: basic standing throws and tossing your opponent right or left by holding a direction on the controls.

Another unique entry to each fighter's moves is an MVC3-style launcher move performed by pressing fierce punch and kick, which seems to be a perfect setup for combos. Each fighter also possessed a super meter that was broken into three segments that could be used to perform EX versions of any of their special moves. If you charged it to full you could perform a super move. While this was all good stuff to see, our most interesting discovery had to be the unique charge moves every fighter had (except Abel, who was missing it in the demo we played). The sure-to-be-controversial charge moves appear to let you charge up one move on each fighter and unleash a powered-up attack. What's interesting is that there appear to be three levels of charging players can do that include a regular special move, an EX version of the move, and a full-on super combo. What's interesting is that the moves don't appear to lower your super bar, making it theoretically possible to chain or perform some crazy combos. We also noticed it was possible to swap in a partner while in the middle of performing a combo and have your partner join in on the pummeling.

In terms of specifics on the characters, most of the Capcom characters have been left intact from previous incarnations. Ryu has a new dash move, and Chun-Li has unfortunately had her lightning leg neutered to a half-circle controller motion and button press. Still, once you practice with the new mechanics, the charging definitely mixes things up. On the Tekken side, Nina, Kazuya, Marduk, King, and Bob were on hand to try out. The characters looked great and handled surprisingly well.

Battles were interesting as the Tekken side of the roster offered a selection of fighters that mostly appeared to have a disadvantage from a speed standpoint. We have to wonder if the selection of playable fighters was done to prove a point, because none of them, especially the slow-moving ones, had much trouble with projectiles once we got their moves down. Each of the fighters handled well and piqued our interest for what the game is going to offer.

The visuals in the game are a cross between the cartoony look of the recent Street Fighter revival and the more photo-realistic approach used in the Tekken series. The result is a cleaner overall look to the character models that skews toward finished comic book art. The three stages we played looked great and, in the case of two of them, showcased some familiar touches from one of the franchises. The first was a standard training area that was a basic white room. The second was a ruined street scene that had the battle taking place in front of a battered Capcom Plaza building with a large mech collapsed in the background and more moving around a freeway overpass in the distance. The third was something out of Jurassic Park, with the first round of the battle kicking off on a walkway above a Tyrannosaurus pen holding two of the large critters chained to posts. For the second round, the fighters hopped off the walkway and onto the ground, which let us get a glimpse of Alex, everyone's favorite boxing-glove-wearing raptor, watching from the foliage.

Based on what we played, Street Fighter X Tekken is a fun, smart blend of the two franchises. The fighting system's meshing of elements from each series is shaping up shockingly well considering the disparity between the two. While we're not totally sold on some of the tweaks we've seen so far (Chun Li, why?), we have to say there's a lot to be excited about in the upcoming game.

Dragon's Dogma Hands-On Preview

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Fri, 22 Apr 2011 13:25:00 +0000

We're not just referring to the title when we say that Dragon's Dogma is an interesting beast. This upcoming Capcom game is an original IP from a publisher that's well known for squeezing the most it can out of its established franchises, which is certainly novel in and of itself. But perhaps more interesting is the combination of setting and genre. Despite the fact that this is an open-world fantasy game in the vein of the Elder Scrolls series, it's not a role-playing game; rather, it's a frenetic sword-and-sorcery action game. Thus, leveling up and rolling invisible dice take a back seat to using quick reflexes and clobbering the ever-loving snot out of anything unfortunate enough to get caught in your way.

Allow us to clarify. We're talking about a game where you can set a goblin on fire, pick him up, and throw him into a group of his goblin buddies like a living Molotov cocktail. It's also a game where you can jump onto a griffin soaring majestically in the air and then stab it in the head so many times that it falls back down to earth in a sad heap of feathers and twisted limbs. It's almost if the minds behind Devil May Cry made a game heavily inspired by Lord of the Rings. And when we say "almost" we mean "exactly" because Dragon's Dogma director Hideaki Itsuno and producer Hiroyuki Koboyashi also held those same respective titles on Devil May Cry 4. You don't have to dig deep to find that high-action influence here.

Other Capcom influences are on display as well. The boss battle we played had echoes of both Monster Hunter and Lost Planet 2 with its setup of four ragtag adventurers going at it against a single massive boss. In this case, it was the aforementioned soaring griffin that came after a little warm-up against some goblins. The game has three player classes: mage, fighter, and strider. We played as the latter, which is a nimble fellow skilled in archery and dual-wielded short swords. Lacking any glowing orange weak spots, the griffin boss fight was an open-ended affair where we could use any number of strategies. Ours was quite straightforward: Pester it with arrows (which can be charged for extra power) until it gets angry enough to come down and swipe at us. That's when we exploited one of the game's cooler features, which was the ability to grab onto any part of the boss's body and climb atop it. Even though it soon took off from the ground and began flying through the air, we cautiously climbed across its back until we were perched on its head. Then, we unsheathed our short sword and went to town on its face.

That griffin is going down.

It was actually one of our teammates who shouted that friendly bit of advice on where to plant our blade once we began to climb onto the griffin. These AI-controlled teammates are called pawns, and you're able to run around the gameworld recruiting the ones who you believe will have the best combat skills and knowledge of monster weaknesses. Capcom wasn't quite ready to spill the beans on whether you can swap out these pawns for human players using online co-op, but it would frankly seem like a missed opportunity, given that this game is already laying the groundwork with some very interesting teamwork mechanics. You've got the usual options, like reviving a fallen ally or using the mage class to buff a teammate's abilities. But you've also got stuff like being able to hold back a goblin's arms and let your teammate wail on him like a schoolyard bully, as well as the ability to give your teammate a boost into the air so that he or she can grab onto the griffin hovering just out of reach. Certainly the strategy of knowing which pawns to bring into your party could be compelling in its own right, but there's something about the game's four-player structure and potential for combat teamwork that just screams co-op.

Of course, combat isn't the entirety of this game because it does offer an open-world setting where you'll be spending plenty of time simply getting to know the landscape. But, first, we should mention that it is a very pretty landscape. Dragon's Dogma is running on the same engine as Lost Planet 2, which was certainly one of the more visually impressive games of the past year. While the camera was a bit problematic during the frenetic boss fight we played, the game itself is already rather pleasing to the eyes. So what sort of sights will you be seeing as you explore? Well, besides the verdant pasture where that poor griffin was slain, Capcom also showed us what some of the day-to-day city life looks like. There are several cities in the game, and the one we saw was one of the largest, complete with separate neighborhoods for the upper, middle, and lower classes. It's in these types of places that you can interact with non-player characters, recruit pawns, and try to avoid the seedier elements that show themselves during the wee hours of the game's day-night cycle.

Just how open is this open world going to be?

The big question we have about the open-world aspect of Dragon's Dogma has to do with just how much incentive there will be to go exploring off the beaten path. After all, open-world games that lack hidden surprises and the proverbial buried treasure outside of the main story missions tend to only have one real difference from linear games: extending the amount of traveling you do between story events. We know Dragon's Dogma is more action game than RPG, but does that mean it won't have a robust loot system where you're rewarded for venturing off into the woods in search of some great hidden weapon or coin to trade in for something you really want? That's probably wishful thinking. Perhaps more realistic is the option to learn additional details about the main story by going off in search of small villages outside of the larger cities. We suppose time will tell.

These are the sort of questions we're left with about Dragon's Dogma. What we've seen of the game has us cautiously optimistic, but there are a great many questions left to be answered to see if the game is going to live up to the potential it's showing in these early stages. We'll see if Capcom's new open-world fantasy action game can deliver when it's released on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 next year.

Dead Rising 2: Off the Record First Look Preview

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 13:22:00 +0000

Maybe you prefer the quiet artistry of a good photograph to the adrenaline rush of riding a dirt bike. Maybe garish yellow leather jackets just aren't your thing, and you simply couldn't care less about the concerns of a single father trying to raise a child amidst a zombie apocalypse. Well, those are weirdly specific preferences you have, but, hey, have no fear! It turns out Capcom cares about your type--the type who clearly prefers Dead Rising star Frank West to Dead Rising 2's Chuck Greene. See, according to Capcom Vancouver executive producer Jason Leigh, there was so much fan feedback from Frank West diehards that the developer decided to do something slightly wacky with the upcoming Dead Rising 2 director's cut: swap out heroes.

Enter Dead Rising 2: Off the Record. You can think of this director's cut version of last year's zombie slayer as an alternate-reality exercise in "What if?" Instead of playing as Chuck Greene throughout the course of the game's adventure, you play as Frank West, the photojournalist star of the original Dead Rising. It's largely the same game, retrofitted with a few story and gameplay differences that mostly arise out of the change in protagonists. In terms of story, it turns out Frank's star burned a little too bright after the big scoop he broke in the original Dead Rising. Now, Frank's a has-been former celebrity trying to get his career back on the upswing. So what does he do? Reality television, of course.

Capcom showed us the first 10 or so minutes of Dead Rising 2: Off the Record, suggesting that this is not merely a palette swap. Frank West begins Dead Rising 2 on the zombie-killing television show Terror Is Reality, only his adventures at the start of the game go a bit differently from Chuck's. Wearing form-fitting wrestling tights that reveal just how pudgy Frank has become, he begins taking out zombies in a mock wrestling ring with chairs, suplexes, and whatever other weapons he can use. (Including sweet, sweet fire.) Even though Frank survives the bout, he gets thoroughly mocked by the host for his sad state of weight gain, hair loss, and fading celebrity--a Pyrrhic victory of sorts.

Frank instantly regrets his decision to appear on Terror Is Reality and suddenly wants to get the hell out of there. He leaves the dressing room and stumbles upon the host TK in a clandestine meeting, which serves as a tutorial for reintroducing you to the photography mechanics of the original Dead Rising. At any time, you can take photos of various objects for PP (experience points, essentially) that are all divided into categories like horror, brutality, and humor. In this case, it's getting the scoop on this shady business deal as a little retribution for being so thoroughly mocked on television.

Wrestling move or hug gone horribly, horribly wrong?

Naturally, your photography session doesn't last long before the zombie outbreak that kicked off the original Dead Rising 2 also occurs. This is where the game begins to more closely resemble Chuck's adventure, though with a few changes here and there. A number of winks and nods litter the hallways, like a poster of Chuck with his face covered up and a disused Game Boy-like device lying on the ground that looks an awful lot like Katie's. Frank's also got a couple of new abilities for dealing with zombies, like one silly move where he grabs a zombie and poses next to it while taking its picture--the result being a terrifying shot not unlike your average MySpace photo.

There are a number of differences apart from the way the story unfolds. "This is still the world of Fortune City, but we've made sure to go in and freshen it up," said executive producer Jason Leigh. You'll find new weapons, outfits, psychopaths, and other various knickknacks spread throughout this fictional Nevada resort. And continuing the tweaks made to the save system, there will now be checkpoints that autosave whenever you enter a new area, complete a story event, or defeat a psychopath. Beyond that, there's also been some tuning to the effectiveness of various weapons and psychopath difficulty levels. Leigh didn't get into specifics on what's been altered, only saying that a lot of dials are being turned.

Yes, the camera is back. With surprisingly little zombie blood on it!

So that leaves us with the big question: How much is Dead Rising 2: Off the Record going to cost? Sadly, that wasn't revealed. Capcom did state that the game would be "appropriately priced," but it failed to go into anything more concrete than that. It will be a shame if Capcom winds up charging full price for a director's cut of a game that came out last year, even with some pretty inspired changes made to the core of the game. In any event, we're talking about the successor to the game that won GameSpot's Funniest Game of 2010, so we're obviously eager to see more of the hijinks that Capcom Vancouver has in store here. Stay tuned.

Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City Preview

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 13:20:00 +0000

While co-op is nothing new to any Resident Evil fan who took part in Chris and Sheva's Great African Safari of 2009, the recently announced Operation Raccoon City represents what might just be the boldest leap the series has made into the world of online teamwork. It's a third-person shooter with a story campaign that will see teams of four players make their way through the titular Raccoon City zombie outbreak that provided the setting for Resident Evil 2 way back when. In an odd reversal from that particular game, you'll actually be assuming the role of Umbrella Corporation's special security troops--each relying on one another's class-specific abilities--in a hunt for Leon Kennedy.

Operation Raccoon City is being developed by Slant Six, a studio whose history thus far consists entirely of SOCOM games. That background is evident the moment you pick up a controller because Operation Raccoon City feels much more like a traditional third-person shooter than any recent Resident Evil game. There's a cover system, you can actually fire while running, and the whole thing moves at a much faster clip than what you've come to expect from anything bearing the Resident Evil name. The new and the old have a way of intersecting in some interesting ways, like when you peer down your gun's iron sights only to pull back and notice a lot more zombies surrounding you than before.

However, don't mistake this for some bog-standard military shooter. There have been some pretty huge changes made to the standard Resident Evil formula, but it's still a Resident Evil game. In fact, in a lot of ways, it's a game that harks back to earlier titles in the history of the series--back before this newfangled daylight business became all the rage. What we saw of the co-op campaign showed zombies doing their shambling thing in dimly lit city streets and shadowy alleyways, with no shortage of dark corners housing who-knows-what. It is clear that Capcom and Slant Six want to return to the horror roots of the series and use that as a contrast to the more fast-paced shooter action.

Hello, Mr. Hunter!

Said shooter action can be played in a variety of styles, depending on which character you choose. In the co-op campaign, you'll be joining up with Umbrella Corporation's black ops/tier one/really-good-at-shooting-guns security squad. There are four characters to choose from, each with what Capcom says will be distinct skills and personality. Their names, in order of ascending awesomeness, are: Vector, Spectre, Bertha, and Beltway. Vector's the stealth expert; Spectre is the surveillance guy who can use infrared goggles to sniff out special enemies; Bertha is the medic; and Beltway is the heavy who excels in demolitions work. Capcom insists that the campaign is designed in such a way that everyone will need to rely on one another, though we didn't get to see much of those class-specific skills in action during the brief campaign demo.

We did see a lot of shooting, though. It seems the streets of Raccoon City have seen a noticeable uptick in zombie infestation since the events of Resident Evil 2. There are swarms of normal zombies that aren't an especially huge threat until you begin to take damage. That's when they can smell danger and begin to charge after you in full force. Aside from them, there are some more uncommon special zombies that roam around, including some pulled directly from early Resident Evil, such as the hunter. And, naturally, when you do find yourself feeling a little worse for the wear after all this zombie fighting, you'll still find random green herbs scattered around the darkened alleys. The city may be overrun by zombies and perpetual darkness, but it's still a fine place to grow medicinal herbs.

"Daddy, why is Psycho Mantis hugging that angry police man?"

In addition to the story-based co-op campaign in which you play as the bad guys in a hunt for Leon Kennedy, you'll be able to slaughter dozens of shambling zombies in a competitive mode. In this scenario, it's once again the four class-based Umbrella Corp. employees against four similarly talented US military spec ops soldiers. As in most zombie outbreaks, the military has been sent into quarantine the area, but it has found quite a bit of opposition from Umbrella Corporation, so now it has no choice but to team deathmatch one another in a battle of supremacy. What's interesting about the competitive mode is that there are still plenty of zombies roaming around that couldn't care less whether you're on one team or the other. It's a points-based contest in which you get one point for a zombie kill, 10 points for killing an enemy teammate, and so on, based on good deeds you do for the team and special zombie types killed.

So all of this is more or less what you can expect from Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City. The elephant in the middle of the room is certainly this game's resemblance to Left 4 Dead--another zombie apocalypse series with four-player co-op. Anyone who has played the Left 4 Dead series knows what a high bar was set for any game trying to imitate it. But whereas Left 4 Dead built a lot of its success on varied makeshift weaponry and a profoundly awesome sense of humor, Capcom seems to be banking on the class system and the more serious atmosphere that distinguishes this game from the competition. We'll see how it all turns out when we get closer to the game's release later this year.

SSX First Look Preview

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 13:15:00 +0000

When EA first revealed SSX: Deadly Descents, fans of the series were left scratching their heads wondering where their beloved snowboarding series had gone. For a franchise that is known for bright-colored outfits, vibrant characters, and, of course, the impossible tricks, it seemed as though EA was going for a more "serious" approach. If you haven't been following the developer diaries that we've been posting here, you should be happy to know that not only did EA drop the subtitle "Deadly Descents" but the developers are also working on relaunching the franchise by sticking to what it does best--crazy tricks and high-speed racing. Creative director Todd Batty gave a presentation at a recent EA Sports event in San Francisco to not only go over what SSX is known for, but to also go into detail about the new Survival mode, which is what we saw in the initial announcement trailer.

The Deadly Descents trailer that was released at the end of last year only represented one-third of SSX's gameplay. In the presentation, Batty introduced the three pillars of gameplay and described them as "Race It," "Trick It," and "Survive It." He then went on to give a high-level overview of what the team was aiming for in the new game. We didn't get to see any actual gameplay outside of a test bed (because they just got out of preproduction a month ago), so it looks like our first real look at the game is going to come at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in June. The next part of the presentation briefly went over the fact that racing is one of the foundations of the game and the series, as well as the new game's online multiplayer and "social elements." More details on what that entails will have to wait, but Batty did go into some detail about the new physics. For the developer diary on the new physics, you can see that here.

SSX was never about realism, and even though the graphics are taking a more realistic approach--thanks to the advancement in technology--the gameplay will not. Like previous games, the physics will be overly exaggerated, so you'll once again be able to soar off of snow-covered cliffs without any worries, do as many flips as it takes to make you sick, and still manage to land board first. Batty talked about how the previous SSX games kept you confined with artificial boundaries as you made your way down the cold mountain, and he emphasized that fact with a few video clips from SSX3. No matter how much you pushed against a side wall on the track or how much momentum you gained, you'd be dragged back onto the main strip. In the new SSX, as long as you have the momentum, you can launch yourself into the air in any direction and traverse any part of the mountain--no boundaries. The developers put together some clips using the same terrain from SSX3 to demonstrate this, so you can see the snowboarder gather speed and basically do a full loop from the right side of a half pipe and land on the left. This is supposed to work off any surface regardless of the geometry; as long as you have the speed, you have the freedom to go where your board takes you. On the mountain, this lets you vault yourself onto other ledges and areas that you would otherwise miss if you kept to the ground. Not only that, but you'll also be able to get some big air from virtually anywhere as long as you've got the speed (and a big drop) to do the most death-defying tricks. We're incredibly curious to see the amount of freedom that this will allow and can't wait to see how it plays out.

Elise is no stranger to the mountains.

The darker, grittier scenes from the initial trailer and screenshots represented what would be the Survival mode where the goal is make your way safely down a treacherous mountain while battling the elements. Batty emphasized that it's not about dodging bullets or wielding any kind of weapons. The goal here is to mimic what's going on in the real world of boardercross, where extreme sports enthusiasts risk their necks traversing some of the most dangerous peaks in the world. The danger here, however, is Mother Nature, which can include and is not limited to snowstorms, avalanches, fog, and rock slides. The only thing that is being tracked as you blaze down the icy slopes is your speed and elevation. You'll have access to a wing suit (think of flying squirrels), an ice axe, and potentially other gear. Batty described it as, "Think of what Borderlands did for guns; we're going to try to do the same thing with gear." As seen in the trailer, the helicopter acted as our guide and our ticket to access other unexplored portions of the mountain. In the presentation, we saw how a snowboarder could leap off of a conveniently placed ramp and cling onto the rails of a hovering helicopter. Fear of heights is not an option.

The locations are going to be based on real-world mountains, and Batty mentioned that the goal is to create an extreme experience for players, taking them to vistas that they would likely never see. You can enjoy a sunset at the top of Mount Everest or hang out along the jagged peaks of Mont Blanc. To create this experience, EA Canada downloaded all of NASA's data of the topography of the planet, so the foundations of all the mountain ranges are drawn from real terrain. To make things interesting and more viable in the SSX world, however, layers have been added and runs have been molded. So you'll be able to do more tricks and find alternative paths.

Batty also talked about how the initial SSX had eight levels and SSX3 only had the illusion of an open mountain when it really wasn't open. He wants this game to be big, so he initially proposed 300 levels, thinking that the number always ends up shrinking throughout the development cycle anyway. Even so, 300 is a lofty number. What it has is 18 major mountain ranges that include 70 open mountains with multiple drop points in each. There's supposed to be somewhere between 200 and 300 drop points so that you'll get a different experience, depending on where you start. The fact that you can now virtually go anywhere will make each run unique.

"Darn, did I just chip my board?"

The final point that Batty touched on was the characters, and only Elise has been confirmed so far. The rest is up to the fans. A Facebook page has been set up to get fans to vote for characters they want to see return. We're assuming the major players will be back, like Mac and Zoe, and new faces will be added to the roster. Even though the characters and the environments have a new look, it seems like the developers are sticking to the familiar arcade-y gameplay we all know and love. We'll be getting more updates in the near future, so stay tuned for more details. SSX is currently scheduled to be released on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in January 2012.

Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One Hands-On Preview

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 13:11:00 +0000

It's not often that we ask you to forget what you know about a game, but it will certainly make things easier to get your head around Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One. This third-person four-player cooperative game picks up after Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time and pairs four unlikely cohorts in Dr. Nefarious, Captain Qwark, and the namesake duo.

Not this television show again!

The setup has Ratchet, Clank, and Qwark on the way to a dubious-sounding award ceremony. Our suspicions were confirmed when Qwark took the makeshift podium and walked into Dr. Nefarious' latest plan. As the good doctor reanimates a giant monster, the four (including Nefarious) are snatched up and made part of an intergalactic animal collection, forcing them to put aside their differences and team up.

Our hands-on demo consisted of the N.E.S.T. Cliffs level and gave us a chance to take Clank through his paces. Each character has its own unique ability, and in our case we were able to toss out a bomb that would temporarily slow down time. The level consisted of basic platforming using sea creatures as bounce pads, knocking electrified ocean life off piers, smashing boxes, and fighting a giant fish boss.

While ordinarily our four central characters may not necessarily hang out and have space beers on weekends, developer Insomniac Games has been crafty in the way it straddles the line between cooperative and competitive gameplay. Each player has kills and bolts tracked independently, so you'll want to break away from the pack to smash crates and hoard loot before the rest of the team can catch up. This isn't a game for lone wolves though, and it works best when everyone is communicating and working towards the same goal. An example of this was when all of the players selected the same weapon (using the right analog stick to scroll through a hovering radial menu) and damage bonuses were rewarded--hitting harder and consuming fewer rounds of ammunition. It's a great idea to encourage cohesive play, but we did find that the menus obscured the playfield more than necessary when four people were doing it at once.

Camera control is handled automatically and takes all the need for panning movement out of your hands. It's a smart choice and works two ways. First, it stops each player from attempting to wrest control away from everyone else to see what it is they want (instead of what the group needs to be focusing on shooting), and second, it lets the game designers create locked cinematic angles for platforming sections. All four players in our demo spent some time missing from the game after losing track of their own character or misjudging gaps, winding up dead or sinking after falling off a ledge. We did get to grips with it eventually.

A tether system is in play that lets you throw out a safety line and grab hold of a player ahead by pressing the triangle button. It's not a guaranteed get-out-of-jail card, and while we used it a few times to try to correct a bad jump, it can quickly spell your downfall if the person in front is in the same boat. There is a low penalty for death here, though, and while it will have an impact on the scoreboard, you'll simply rejoin the game when the rest of the group gets close to the next spawn point.

An unlikely foursome working together if ever we saw one.

Should you fall in combat after taking too much damage, a helpful fellow player need only make his way over to your incapacitated state and hold the circle button long enough to revive you. It does take a few seconds, but since the rest of the group offered some covering fire, we weren't often interrupted playing saviour.
Our demo was built with variety in mind, forcing us to navigate jumping between moving-sea-creatures-turned-platforms, knocking electrified fish off piers and into the water below, smashing boxes, and confronting a giant fish boss where we all needed to hit a bait release device within a small timing window to keep our target occupied as we hit it with everything we had.

While we enjoyed the play, we do have some concerns about the game's camera. It always did a great job of framing the action happening onscreen, but it also tended to obscure some environmental traps that need to be traversed, making jumping difficult. Combat is fun and frenetic, though you'll want to keep a firm eye on your character rather than looking at what the group is doing if you want to stay alive. As you'd expect, the game is playable solo, but it also supports a mixture of drop-in, drop-out local and online support. We're hoping for another look at the game in June at this year's Electronic Entertainment Expo. Stay tuned for more on this upcoming collaborative brawler heading to the PlayStation 3 in the later part of 2011.

Asura's Wrath Updated Preview: Live Demo of Space Tossing and Finger Punching

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 13:17:00 +0000

The last time we checked in on the six-armed antihero Asura, star of the upcoming Asura’s Wrath, he was clearly in a foul mood. The game’s reveal trailer, first shown off at Capcom’s press event in Tokyo last year, was big on pummeling, harpooning, teeth-gnashing, and yelling, as well as a large finger from outer space. At Capcom’s recent press event, the publisher shed some light on just what Asura is, courtesy of a new trailer and an over-the-top demo of the game that left us hungry for more on the promising title.

Capcom producer Kazuhiro Tsuchiya and Hiroshi Matsuyama from Cyberconnect 2 are developing the title in conjunction with Capcom. The two kicked off their presentation with some background on the title character. The game’s story revolves around Asura, a demigod who’s kicked out of the demigod club by his peers and cast down to Earth. While we’re still not clear on the specifics of how this all goes down, the end result has Asura on Earth, and he’s seething (like we reckon anyone voted off of Survivor would be). To add insult to injury, his daughter has been kidnapped and used to power up his former peers. It also appears that just about anyone Asura encounters is hell-bent on murdering him, so it’s not a great day for him. Tsuchiya didn’t offer much more on the story beyond emphasizing that it blends science fiction with mythology and will make use of a broad canvas to tell its unique story of action and drama.

Following a brief introduction, Tsuchiya moved on to the latest trailer that picked up where the last one left off, with Asura running and jumping around, kicking butt and taking names regardless of a foe's general size. Besides stomping foes who were about his height, the little hate-dynamo-that-could took on a massive Godzilla-sized enemy, even going so far as to run up his arm and clock him in the face. The trailer wrapped with another nod to the dramatic "finger from space" scene in the last trailer and showed more of the aftermath.

Once the trailer finished up, Tsuchiya and company dove into showing off what the game looks like in motion via a short gameplay clip and an actual live demo. The clip showed a mix of more conventional third-person action gameplay that highlighted the game’s mix of science fiction and mythology more clearly. Tech-looking airships and troop pods were on display, along with assorted enemies. Asura stomped his enemies with his bare hands and used whatever was lying around. We also caught that besides beating foes with his bare hands, air jumps, and grabs, Asura was also able to use ranged gunfirelike shots from one of his arms to shoot enemies from a distance. Following the clip, which Tsuchiya noted was to give those in attendance an idea of the range of action being implemented into the game, we were treated to a live demo. It focused on fighting the large enemy seen in the trailer, which showcased the game’s impressive sense of scale. The demo focused on the fight we saw between Asura and the massive foe that towered over him, offering us a chance to see how the action will shift to different perspectives. The other bonus was the dialogue--mostly coming from Asura’s foe named Wyzen--during gameplay and cutscenes. The techno demigod clearly knew Asura and spent most of the demo time talking smack and generally taunting him. While pointing out Asura’s fall from his demigod state, Wyzen’s hot topic was Asura’s kidnapped daughter who it seems was used to power Wyzen and possibly more of his buddies. An interesting plot point that came up had Wyzen noting that Asura’s daughter was suffering for his sins.

Wyzen also called Asura a traitor, which set our hero off on a rage-fueled pummeling session. During this battle Asura sprouted an extra four arms, which was handy when a nearby battleship fired missiles at him as he chased Wyzen. Apparently Asura’s additional arms are capable of party tricks, like catching incoming missiles and flinging them at their point of origin. An interesting detail we picked up during the sequence was the dynamic camera movement and input prompts that came up as the action played out. It’s hard to tell how much control a player will have during these sequences, but they appeared to be more than just glorified quick-time events. At one point during the chase, Asura was prompted to trigger "burst mode," which changed the action to a more dynamic sequence where he caught Wyzen and then gave him a toss (yes, we understand Wyzen is a lot bigger than Asura, but that’s just how it went). Wyzen shifted in the air to angle his fall at the angry hero, which called up a more typical QTE button sequence that had Asura not only gut-punching him but also tossing Wyzen through banks of clouds and out into space.

Unfortunately, tossing a demigod out into space won’t finish him off. As Wyzen finally stopped zipping through the air, he fired off some more smack talk and engaged a mantra reactor that powered him up to an absurd degree. The influx of power supercharged the beefy god to such a degree that he expanded to a size much bigger than the Earth itself. In fact, he got so big that the Earth looked to be on par with the size of one of his moobs, which was more than a little unsettling to see. Once Wyzen was full size, he got off a few more cracks at Asura and noted that Wyzen is one of the seven deities who are supposed to protect Earth and mortals. However, Wyzen also noted that Asura is the destructor who doesn’t belong and should die.

Following the ballsy statement, Wyzen busted out his finger of doom and sent it down to the atmosphere at Asura, presumably to help him die. As the massive finger came barreling down at him, Asura braced himself and prepped his six arms for the incoming digit and actually brought the thing to a standstill. But, given that it was a celestial finger from space, all Asura could do was briefly hold it before five of his six arms shattered. After a flashback and another QTE, the antihero used his one good arm to throw a mighty punch at the incoming finger that sent a shockwave up through the finger that was so big it shattered Wyzen who went up in a Death-Star-at-the-end-of-original-Star-Wars conflagration. The demo closed with Asura lying in a heap of his body parts and burnt earth, with his one good arm broken off but still clenched in a fist and pointing upward. The camera angle changed and it appeared that the narrator that was heard in the trailers might be someone watching everything go down. Once the live demo ended, Tsuchiya noted that this battle was actually one of the early boss fights in the game, Asura’s Wrath would be playable at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, and the team is anxious to see how people react to the game’s unique gameplay.

Before the session ended, the team fielded questions that yielded a few more bits of info on the upcoming game. The scripted battle sequences we were shown will be balanced with the more traditional third-person action at the start of the demo. The team’s focus is to ensure that players will have something interesting to do at all times--even during what appeared to be scripted cinematics. The boss fight with Wyzen was one of several spaced out through the game and was actually one of the more low-key battles as things get bigger and crazier later in the game. When asked about the mechanic for building energy seen during the demo sequence (which amounted to button prompts), Tsuchiya explained that there will be different mechanics to charge up Asura. Once you’ve built a charge, you’ll be able to trigger the burst mode sequences that led into greater attacks that made use of cinematics. Finally, in terms of gameplay pacing, Tsuchiya noted that the game will feature a variety of gameplay experiences that ebb and flow to move the action along.

After seeing the presentation, we have to say Asura’s Wrath makes a flashy impression that left us wanting more. We’re curious about the story as, to date, Asura’s been a man of few words (and those have usually been “ARGH” and “RARRGH”), so it’s hard to figure out just what’s going on with him. In addition, we have to say that Asura may well be the angriest hero we’ve seen since Kratos from God of War, although we’d have to say Asura is currently coming across as a front-runner in the Rage Olympics. Kratos would at least stop and glower for a conversation or two in the GOW games, but Asura is more about sign language--painful, brutal sign language.

The visuals in the game are a stunning blend of smart tech and unique art direction that make a head-turning impression. The demo we saw featured a maniacal camera that zoomed and twisted between gameplay and cinematics, which featured a gargantuan scale. Wyzen’s exponential growth during the course of the demo and the fluid pacing of the action was an impressive testament to the tech skills Cyberconnect 2 has honed on the most recent Ultimate Ninja Storm Naruto games but taken to a massive scale.

We’re hoping Capcom and Cyberconnect 2 can deliver on their goal of making the experience a unique blend of action and drama because it certainly looks like an over-the-top blast. Asura’s Wrath is slated to ship next year for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Look for more on the game in the months to come and from this year’s E3 in June.

Inversion Updated Hands-On Preview - The Highs and Lows of Gravity

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 12:57:00 +0000

In most games, gravity is not your friend. How many times have you attempted a jump that looked easy, only to come up short and fall to your doom? You can blame gravity for that; it's a constant nuisance that keeps us from flying off into space, but not much else. Developer Saber Interactive (creator of TimeShift) has finally had enough and is looking to put gravity to work for us in its upcoming third-person shooter, Inversion. In it, you take on the role of Davis Russel, a husband, father, and cop destined to save the world from an alien aggressor. We recently got to see this game in action and get our hands on all of its gravity-bending mayhem.

While the gravlink may be powerful, nothing beats the satisfaction of a boot to the head.

At the heart of Inversion lies the gravlink device, a machine with the power to bend the forces of gravity to your will. Our demonstration began with a hands-off portion where the main character, Russel, and his partner, Leo Delgado, had already commandeered a few of these alien machines for themselves. We were then introduced to the basics of ducking into, out of, and firing from cover. Anyone familiar with today's numerous cover-based shooters should find themselves right at home here.

The game started getting interesting when Russel fired up the gravlink and put it through its paces. The device has two settings, depending on whether you want high or low gravity. Using the low-gravity setting, our character launched what looked like a gravity grenade at an enemy behind cover. The resulting blast sent the cowering foe into the air to float alongside some rocks and other debris. He could still fire his weapon, but it didn't do him much good when our character used the device's other feature to call over a rocklike a magnet and then launch it back at the enemy's face.

After fighting his way though numerous bombed-out buildings, our character emerged atop a ruined highway that was crawling with enemies. The firefight started out as you'd expect, and then the singularity event hit. Everyone--friend and foe alike--was lifted into the air as the gravity began to shift from one place to another. Our character exchanged a few midair volleys of fire with enemies before being dropped back to the ground, which was now the side of a building. Now, he was fighting horizontally, ducking behind neon signs and skipping over broken windows.

The shockwave attack is costly, but it can easily blow away enemies who get too close.

Once the rest of the initial forces had been mopped up, reinforcements arrived. However, they were outside of the singularity event and had to fire diagonally upward to reach our character. It was a bizarre sight to look across at what was once the floor and watch the fight play out. And, as if that doesn't boggle the mind enough, we were then told that in later sections, the gravity gets so messed up that enemies might be fighting at you from any and all directions. Thus, the very idea of up and down is completely lost.

Once the highway fight concluded, the developers skipped ahead for us to go hands-on with another part of the game. This area put us right in the enemy's backyard, which was less of a yard and more of a massive, underground cavern. To help even the odds, we were given access to the gravlink's high-gravity setting. With this new ability, we could stop enemies in their tracks and leave them paralyzed under their own weight. We also had access to the shockwave, a burst attack that used up a great deal of the gravlink's power to devastating effect.

In the first of two firefights we played through, we discovered that some enemies came equipped with a shield that protected them from our gunfire. To quickly dispatch these nuisances, we had to switch back to low gravity and pop them into the air. From here, had a few fiendish options: toss our enemy's body into a pit of magma, smash him with a rock, or execute him with a gruesome melee finisher. Naturally, we went with the latter. On the other hand, high gravity was great for locking down stronger, deadlier targets. This gave us time to take out all the lesser enemies before giving them our full attention. The second battle took place right around the corner near what appeared to be a mining station. Because the station was made of flimsy wood, we got our first real chance to see the game's physics, powered by Havok's Destruction engine, in action. Once the bullets and boulders started flying, sections of the station began collapse and crushed those foolish enough to stand beneath them. Then, swarms of nimble enemies armed with knives and pipes came out of nowhere and rushed our position. However, with one blast of high gravity, they instantly stopped their screeching and dropped to their knees under their own weight. With grim satisfaction, we strolled past the kneeling foes and dispatched them one at a time with blasts from our shotgun.

You're not the only one with a gravlink, and if you're not careful, you'll find yourself soaring through the air.

Toward the end of our demo, we caught a glimpse of a zero-gravity area. With the game's constant switching of gravitational forces, we couldn't help but be reminded of Mario Galaxy--albeit a much more violent version. And while the game is set to support both local and online cooperative play, Saber Interactive was tight lipped on any other multiplayer modes. Inversion has some genuinely clever ideas that turn first-person shooters upside-down. But the game still has a ways to go before reaching its release date of February 7, 2012, on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Resistance 3

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 13:07:00 +0000

We've only seen Resistance 3 a handful of times, but at each turn, we've been shown distinctly different aspects of the game. We've experienced new enemy type the brawler, hidden from a hulking Chimera goliath under a bridge after a tense boat trip with an old friend, and this time, we got a feel for the mood developer Insomniac Games hopes to create by putting us in the shoes of the everyman.

This chapter of Resistance 3 marked our reintroduction to Dr. Malikov as we inched our way closer to meeting him at the railway bridge. Set in Pennsylvania's Mount Pleasant, this nighttime mission removed a lot of the bravado that came with playing Nathan Hale, the supersoldier, and put us in the skin of a weakened, scared human on the brink of extinction.

The demo began with us trudging through bushland, and it wasn't long before our buddies the Chimera dropped in a handful of new foes. These new sniper hybrids pack hefty rifles and have the ability to cloak themselves, becoming invisible on the move, which gave us a huge advantage when they were still. When stationary, the laser sights on their weapons draw long red paths that are easy to follow back to their bodies. As a result, our guide would spot one and follow it back to its source and apply a liberal sprinkling of bullets. A new Chimera weapon, the Dead Eye, works like the L23 Fareye from Resistance 2 but packs a nasty alternate fire, and we didn't need to get hands-on to see its impact on targets after its requisite few seconds of charge.

Auger fans will be pleased to hear that it, as well as many of the weapons in Resistance 3, have received a new look with updated and more Chimera-y scopes. While we still struggle with what seems like the unbeatable weapon--one that can shoot through anything, as well as throw up a protective shield--we'll take any advantage we can get against the invaders.

Moving into a nearby mine to avoid the watchful eye-in-the-sky dropships circling with their spotlights, we ran into another new challenge in Resistance 3: shield drones. These little robotic nuisances lurk behind Chimera soldiers and protect them with an impenetrable force field. Seeing that indeed our rounds were ineffective, our only option was to take one of the other paths ahead of us, sprinting to flank them and taking out the drone from behind before finishing off its occupant.

We were most surprised by the return of the weapon wheel, a radial menu accessed through the triangle button that details each of the boomsticks in your current arsenal. It's a throwback to the first game, but we were told they have been brought back into the mix to give players more flexibility and choice with their preferred style of play rather than forcing you to hunt out the appropriate tool for the job. We got a look at about seven or eight weapons, including mainstays like the shotgun and the HE .44 Magnum, as well as the bullseye and carbine in our previous demo. But we've been told to expect plenty of new additions alongside the familiar faces. Each will feature two upgrade paths: one for primary fire and one to boost its secondary function.

Because Capelli fills Hale's shoes with frail, human feet, health is no longer regenerative. Players will need to seek out health kits rather than duck behind cover and wait it out. Insomniac hopes this will bring the game a much-needed sense of urgency around forging forward rather than picking off targets at range.
Though our demo teased only a few new weapon types and the things we can use them on, our lasting memory was that of the change of pace. The move to return health packs to the game and Capelli's need to hide from searchlights rather than come out guns blazing all points toward a slower, more calculated type of gameplay. We've been impressed with what we've seen so far with Resistance 3, and we're hopeful it will elevate the series beyond simple run-and-gun action. Humanity has stumbled, but Capelli is giving us one final chance at redemption. Can we win our own war? Stay tuned for more ahead of Resistance 3's September 6 North American release exclusively on the PlayStation 3.

F.E.A.R. Updated Hands-On Preview - Multiplayer Roundup

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Some horror stories cultivate a creeping terror that slips beneath your skin and gnaws at your brain. Others like to slap you across the face with one huge scare--one moment everything seems fine, but the next, you're leaping out of your seat and knocking over something expensive. Both have their merits, but the F.E.A.R. series has always relied on the latter. We recently attended a multiplayer event here in spooky San Francisco to match wits with Alma, the villain of the F.E.A.R. games, and her supernatural hordes in the game's four multiplayer modes.

Because we have already covered F***ing Run, the fast-paced mode that pits man against wall (or more to be more specific, The Wall), we decided to start with Soul King. In this mode, you take on the role of a specter that can possess numerous living weapons--cultists, armored troopers, wraiths--that populate the map. Your goal is to rack up souls by killing everything in sight; the player with the most souls when the timer runs out is the soul king. Naturally, you lose a few souls when killed, which the other players may collect and add to their scores.

During our session, we chose to think of ourselves as less of a soul king and more of a soul assassin. As the end of each match drew near, the other three competitors got nervous and stopped collecting souls in favor of hunting the current king (who is outlined in white for all to see). We took this opportunity to sneak behind the king as he was being chipped away by the other players, and when the time was right, we shot him in the back. We then snatched up all his lost souls and became the new soul king just as the timer hit zero.

After we finished with Soul King, we moved on to Contractions. In this mode, Alma has a bad case of being pregnant. But instead of doing what any normal person would do--starting her own reality TV show--she terrorizes you with hordes of monsters instead. Contractions is highly reminiscent of the numerous horde modes found in other games. Barricaded within our safe house, we had to either survive numerous waves of increasingly difficult enemies or be trampled underfoot.

F.3.A.R.'s Contractions mode is already pretty tough…but it gets worse.

To better our odds of survival, we had two jobs in Contractions: collect weapons and rebuild barricades. The weapons were stored in crates hidden around the map, which had to be hauled back to the safe house before we could use the destructive goodies within them. Rebuilding the barricades covering the windows of the safe house reinforced the fact that--in a supernatural apocalypse--being able to nail boards into walls is a life-or-death skill.

When a contraction hit, it was time to stop what we were doing and take cover in the safe house. While it was tempting at first to battle the enemy hordes along the balcony that surrounded the safe house, by the second or third wave, we had retreated (or limped) back inside. Though the interior of the safe house wasn't very big, it was divided up into several rooms and littered with windows. It was crucial for our team to coordinate with each other so that we all knew which room was getting hit and how to divide up our forces.

Ultimately, we ended up getting divided into little bits by our foes, so we decided to move onto the final mode of the evening: Soul Survivor. In this mode, at the start of each match, one member of our team was chosen to play the role of the corrupted. Just like in Soul King, the corrupted can fly around and possess enemies to use as weapons. Your goal is to overwhelm the other three players and convert them, one at a time, to your side. The non-corrupted players just have to survive.

At first, the survivors had the definite advantage. They would huddle up and easily dispatch everything thrown at them. However, as the fight dragged on, they would invariably run out of ammunition and be forced to move out to scavenge for more. As the corrupted, that was our time to strike. If one fell behind, we would quickly descend upon him and beat him into submission. While his teammates fought to get to their fallen comrade, we would quickly convert him, making it a two-on-two match.

Will you be the soul survivor? Signs point to no.

F.3.A.R.'s suite of multiplayer modes is shaping up to offer a refreshing break from the usual Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, and Capture the Flag modes you may have come to expect from other games. Each brought a different flavor of anxiety to the mix and kept us on edge throughout. You can check out all of F.3.A.R.'s multiplayer modes for yourself this May on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3.

Twisted Metal Hands-On Preview

noreply@blogger.com (kucha lana) — Mon, 18 Apr 2011 12:56:00 +0000

Twisted Metal is Sony's longest running PlayStation franchise and spans more than 15 years, appearing on four different platforms. This year, the series makes the jump onto the PlayStation 3 for the first time. We were at an event to finally put the controller in our hands and take three of the game's multiplayer modes for a spin.
For anyone unfamiliar with the series, Twisted Metal is vehicular-based combat that puts warped caricatures behind the wheel as part of a carnage tournament, though director David Jaffe likens it more to Street Fighter and other finely tuned cat-and-mouse games than simply strapping machine guns to cars. Our presentation included looks at old faces and some new ones, such as the introduction of Juggernaut, a huge truck featuring both cab and trailer, as well as the first airborne ride in helicopter, Talon.

Juggernaut's entrance marks a proud moment for Jaffe because he wanted to include a complete truck from the very beginning but never quite made the hurdle until now. The unit acts like a combination of Optimus Prime and the Spy Hunter vehicle, capable of ramming through smaller cars with ease, as well as able to play safe haven to other friendly players by dropping its rear ramp and driving inside. It does have its trade-offs, though. While inside, players will have their choice of one of two heavy mounted guns on the roof to use as turrets. The larger of the two has a limited amount of aiming mobility, needing the shooter to communicate with the driver to let him know he needs to steer the truck in certain directions to hit targets. Likewise, if a player using Juggernaut is kind enough to play host to others, the truck's defenses are lowered significantly while the ramp is down and drivers are entering and exiting. This allows the opposing team a window where Juggernaut takes two or three times more damage.

Axel "the human Oreo" makes a return in Twisted Metal, reprising his role as the guy wedged between two giant wheels with guns at the ready. His unique ability gives him the chance to scrunch together and makes him potent as a melee damage dealer, rolling over rival cars like a monster truck and crushing the inhabitants.
Talon is Twisted Metal's first attempt at a flying vehicle. While we didn't have a chance to try it out ourselves, it seems to add some interesting new dynamics to gameplay. Its abilities include a giant magnet fitted to a chain dangling from the underside of the cockpit that can lift other cars, both friendly and foe, off the ground. Adversaries will want to be dropped from a great height to kill them instantly, while cooperative uses in modes like Nuke allow you to quickly evacuate a teammate carrying the human flag and capture points from the air or take control of an advantageous raised platform.

Environmental destruction is a hallmark of the brand, and it manifests itself in different ways. Our multiplayer demo kicked off with an innocuous-looking suburban setting that was quickly destroyed with the mayhem of more than a dozen people shooting up the place in Team Deathmatch. This relatively flat and open space was made all the more simple by our option to simply plough through houses, making holes where we wanted them. We opted for Meat Wagon, a retro ambulance with mounted guns and a special ability that fires patients strapped to metal stretchers and holds bombs toward other unsuspecting drivers. It's equal parts sight gag and function, and by using the alternate fire mode, you can manually maneuver your munitions into opponents to gain a damage bonus.

Black Rock Stadium played host to our second match and offered us a look at Team Last Man Standing mode, which focused on making lives count. Each team begins the game with a set number of respawns; once one of the teams has depleted its rival's pool and wiped it out, it is game over. Loosely based on a previous Twisted Metal track, Black Rock Stadium is a huge multistory open playground. Features include a lava pit that damages but doesn't destroy your vehicle on contact; giant wrecking balls that swing like pendulums across roadways; a falling spike room with scattered safe spots (you'll need to learn the pattern to avoid being crushed); electrified zones that drain away your health if you stay inside them; and our favorite part, dynamic walls. The latter means that the level layout changes frequently, stopping players camping power-ups, and it's exciting trying to avoid floors that become walls as you run from another player. Because of its larger size and its ramps, line of sight played a much larger role in this arena, making it tougher to land hits with guided weapons than on flat, open-plan locales like suburbia.

We went with Reaper, the motorcycle-riding, chainsaw-wielding clown for Black Rock Stadium. His steering response and acceleration made him zippy and responsive enough to get out of most jams. Pulling back on the left analog stick pops a wheelie, dragging your blade against the ground to power it up and deal more damage when thrown. It's unguided, but we were assured that's more than countered in its ability to slice through car doors and into skulls.

Harbour City was our third and final map, and it gave us a look at Nuke, a multiplayer mode we heard about at last year's Electronic Entertainment Expo. Essentially, it's Twisted Metal's version of Capture the Flag but (surprise) with a quirk. Rather than grab a flag, your job is to capture and hold human hostages, return them to your team's mobile or stationary missile launcher site, and survive long enough to sacrifice them. Doing so kicks them into a manually guided rocket that is then aimed at the opposing team's giant doll or clown statue. Modeled on America's favorite pastime, baseball, teams will alternate between offensive and defensive rounds for three innings. The team with the greatest number of hits wins.

The layout of Harbour City is a busy commercial grid, filled with oil refineries, tanks, and a huge underground canal that runs the length of the map and has ramps back up to street level. Up to three capture targets can be set by the host. Though we only had two in play, it became a frantic fight as our team rushed the targets and scooped them up while the rest of the group attempted to provide cover. Kills earn slightly fewer points than rocket launches, so you may not always be the first one to the abduction scene, but you can stay competitive on the scoreboard by taking out those chasing your leaders. Vehicle speed and strength directly correlates with the time it takes you to sacrifice your victim back at base. While fast, light roadsters can speed along, their relatively weaker shells make them sitting ducks as the try to capture the flag. It's also worth noting that because some of Twisted Metal's cast have ground-to-air and air-to-air weapons, once a nuke is up in the air, it doesn't mean it is game over. These can be shot down while in flight, securing the base and forcing a reset.

While the team isn't yet talking about it, we did spy a glimpse of what appeared to be a leveling system tied to multiplayer progression, though at this stage, it remains unclear what gaining rank will unlock.
We walked away from our first play happy with the way things are coming together. Each character has its own distinct feel to drive, from slow and heavy but bursting with power to lighter and more agile rides. Steering feels great and is nice and loose like an arcade racer, but it can quickly tighten up with a well-timed hand brake tap to take a corner at speed. Most importantly, no single vehicle felt like it was the "I win!" option, and with rumors of a potential beta in the works before release, things will only continue to be balanced. There is no shortage of online multiplayer games available for PlayStation 3 owners, but if developer Eat Sleep Play can build and foster clan play, we can see these turf wars raging late into the night. The game is targeted for an October 2011 global release date. Keep it locked to GameSpot for more info.