IT’LL BE PACKED, MAN: Peter Connelly of Microsoft Games Studios, plays his ‘Crackdown 2’ game yesterday in preparation of the sold-out PAX East Convention.

Lots of great media coverage, and feedback for the team.

Check out the IGN review from PAX EAST 10

Set to be released in July, Crackdown 2 boasts a co-op campaign for up to four people, but it’s also packing two competitive multiplayer modes known as Team Deathmatch and Rocket Tag. Because you’ve been playing games for awhile now, I’m sure that “Team Deathmatch” is pretty self-explanatory. That’s good because Team Deathmatch is cool and all, but Rocket Tag is where it’s at.

Rocket Tag is, well, tag with rockets. One person runs into the orb and becomes “it.” The longer that person is it, the more points her or she earns. Everyone else is trying to kill that person so that the orb is up for grabs again. The only gun everyone has is the rocket launcher. Toss in the Crackdown leaping and launch pads everyone knows and loves, and you have one of the most solid recipes for a multiplayer match you’ll find on Xbox Live.

James Cope, Producer for Ruffian Games, explains some of the new “Skills for Kills” rewards, agility strength, driving rewards and more in this X-Play preview of Crackdown 2.

Check the Crackdown 2 ViDoc

Hat tip: AceyBongos

CVG (computerandvideogames) just posted a recent interview with James Cope from Ruffian Games on Crackdown2

Have you had to change much from the first Crackdown to now in terms of co-op? You’ve got four player co-op in the sequel, right?
Yes. We believe quite strongly in co-op gaming and Crackdown was evidence of this – for those people that were having difficulty playing a game, bringing in a mate made it easier.

So with four-player co-op in Crackdown 2 it’s about making the game easier – it’s four powerful beings in this world. And we don’t want to mess around with that.

One of the things we had to change from a competitive point of view is that Crackdown never supported having more than one mission active at once.

We [wanted] four players on four corners of the world on four different missions working towards one goal. That was a big technical transfer but it’s something we had to think very carefully about. We wanted that four different people approaching the game from four different angles. We just don’t like corridor-ing people.

The co-op experience of just having people stand next to each other and be elastic banded together doesn’t fit [with what we wanted to do]. Playing the same game for an ultimate purpose, chatting to each other on Live – that’s the real co-op experience. You can talk about the moment you’re having: “You should have been here!”

hat tip: Sean Noonan

Folks any other cool Crackdown2 videos we should profile…

Crackdown 2 looks set to offer everything fans want from this video game sequel: more guns, more vehicles and more missions.