Bodycount Review

There was a time when arcade games were one of the most successful genres on consoles. Epitomised by the likes of Daytona USA for the SEGA Saturn and Time Crisis for the original PlayStation, the arcade cabinet to table-top console port effortlessly drew hard-earned cash from wilful gamers' pockets all over again as they set out to discover just how close their home system could get to the industry-leading visuals of a cabinet machine. Limited content and the lack of a half-decent story were of little concern in those days – it was all about recreating the buzz of an arcade emporium in the comfort of your own home with the aid of a much flimsier light gun or racing wheel and minus the compulsive injection of 20 pence pieces. It's hardly shocking, then, that in an era where arcade cabinets near extinction in the UK (they cling on in the seedy backwaters of motorway service stations and seaside piers) and console games like Call of Duty pack tens of hours-worth of blockbusting content onto a single disc, the arcade gaming experience is struggling to compete.

Activision would have you believe that the reason Bizarre Creations' Blur (a game we gave 9/10) was so commercially unsuccessful is because gamers aren't interested in arcade racing games anymore, while classic arcade shooter series like Time Crisis (3 & 4 were released on PS3) have been critically ripped apart this generation. Perhaps the best example of an arcade shooter in recent times was Bizarre Creations' The Club, which met a lukewarm reception from critics in 2008 (again, despite a high score from TVG). You see, we love arcade games here at TVG and we love a good arcade-style combo system, which is exactly the kind of experience Codemasters' Bodycount is aiming for. The whole game is based around a combo multiplier that builds in number as you headshot and frag enemies. With little room for a notable storyline or punctuating set-pieces, this score multiplier effectively becomes the centrepiece to Bodycount's gameplay.

Contrary to our initial impressions during the last preview, it's not the lineage of Bodycount's destructible environments from Criterion's 2006 shooter, Black that form the game's primary focus. Sure, blowing up an explosive canister will take out a few foes nearby, and arcking a grenade into the top floor of a wooden guard tower can bring it to a satisfyingly splintered heap, but it's not the propellant of Bodycount; it's more a supporting member of the cast. Drop a trio of mines at the feet of some enemies on patrol, however, and watch as one gets stepped on and detonated, combusting all nearby fuel cans into a x5 multiplier flurry of kills, and you begin to get a picture of where the appeal ultimately lies. Again, as we pointed out during a recent hands-on, the destruction is actually very formulaic and abundantly predictable, which is arguably as it's supposed to be in an arcade shooter of this type – Battlefield: Bad Company 2, however, it is not.

But while there is an

 

obvious tiering of destructability to the levels – with their red oil drums, fuel cans, and gas canisters – which is semi-excusable in all its arcade trashiness, that doesn't make basic oversights like shoddy AI and lazy level design acceptable just because it's an arcade game. And we're not talking about dull, jack-in-the-box AI that's shoddy just because it's so one dimensional; we're talking about schizophrenic AI that fails to make any consistent sense throughout the entirety of the game. Enemies will land grenades on a 50 pence piece right next to you on every throw, and whole platoons will know your precise location at all times (no matter how much cover you hide behind), constantly showering you with bullets leaving little room for respite. And yet, at other times, they'll fail to notice you standing a few metres in front of them, or they'll get stuck in a feedback loop as they attempt to negotiate a wall by repeatedly walking into it.

But if the AI is glitchy, then the level design is just downright cheap. Most levels resemble a mediocre multiplayer map more than they do a precisely orchestrated single-player layout, while the objectives are as colourful and stimulating as sawdust. Many of the 18 levels are so small, in fact, that the developers often resort to making you retrace your steps and activate a beacon or some such in the same general area that you blew up a command console five minutes earlier. The recycling of assets leads to repetitive colour schemes and environments, and Codies even has the cheek to reuse the same maps on multiple levels. We certainly felt a bit ripped off by all of this by the end of the game – even though the single-player campaign may take towards 10 hours to beat, the actual content on show seems to be more fitting of around half that game time.

Perhaps the score multiplier could appease our frustrations over all of these shortcomings though; perhaps it could resurrect a poor example of a dying genre. Regrettably not. It isn't as if there's anything overtly offensive about the score multiplier, or that it's broken in any way; it's just that it doesn't quite fit together particularly well. It's a bit like Orlando Bloom really: he seems like a nice enough guy and we don't have anything against him, but he just doesn't play the role of a hero convincingly – you get the feeling that he just wants to pop down the street and buy some organic pesto from the deli. Similarly, Bodycount's multiplier should be about freneticism and chained kills but it just hasn't been balanced enough to achieve this. There's no time limit on the multiplier, which encourages an overly methodical approach, and this is then made worse by the fact that any regular gun kill breaks the chain. So, rather than risk an attempt at a headshot, you'll end up darting around the levels dropping copious grenades and mines (which are dispatched plentifully from downed enemies) to keep the multiplier up. At times you'll end up using explosives more than guns, which comes across a bit backward to be honest – the resulting gameplay just doesn't quite ring true. When you compare Bodycount's system to the variation, scope, and balance of Bulletstorm's 'Skillshots', for example, it really does pale in comaprison.

We haven't been able to sample Bodycount's multiplayer on the review code provided, but the details are fairly straight forward: competitive multiplayer comes with deathma

tch and team deatchmatch modes for up to 12 players, while a co-op mode that has you fighting off waves of enemies across an enclosed map in the now standard Horde/co-op Zombies style helps to bolster long-term appeal. A further Bodycount Mode, which grades your scoring performance in each single-player level and sets it against ranked leaderboards, adds a touch of replayability. All in all though, none of this helps to save Bodycount from being one of the poorer FPS titles so far this year. It's not the worst – that achievement goes to Duke Nukem Forever so far – but it's uncomfortably close nonetheless.

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Darksiders II - Interview Feature

If some of Darksiders' gameplay elements felt a little... familiar... at least it can't be denied that it had a visual style all of its own. Joe Madureira (of Marvel Comics fame) crafted a distinctive look for his Zelda/God of War hybrid and it paid off, with the first game in the series shifting over 1.3 million units. With a sequel looming on the horizon, TVG sat down with Daniel Isaac McGuffey, Creative Manager for THQ, to find out more about parallel time-lines, Death, and the Apocalypse.

 

Let's talk about the setting of the game. Why have you chosen to set it at the same time as the first one?

We want people to understand that the Darksiders world is much larger than what they saw in Darksiders I, which all happened on Earth. There's a complete alternate dimension - which we showed a little of today - in the Abyssal Planes, and we want to really explore that, and also set up what's to follow with the four horsemen. We do want to get them all in eventually, but we feel it's really important to showcase each of them one at a time, and show you what makes that character special, show you their motivation, show you their tool-set, how this character moves; traverses; interacts with the world, so the best chance to introduce Death was within that time-frame because of his motivation at the moment, which is to redeem his brother. We didn't want to completely remove War from the story either and just make it completely Death focused because we know people found War endearing and we want to connect the two together, so that's part of the reason why we're doing it in a simultaneous time-frame.

So will you be revisiting some of the events of the first game from another perspective, and meeting up with War as you go through?

Without divulging too much, yeah, there will be some crossover, and you will get a little more insight into what happened in Darksiders I via Darksiders II.

In terms of the new mechanics, what sort of new puzzles can we expect?

We do want to bring back some of the items you had in the first game. You saw the Ghost Hook, which functions a lot like the Abyssal Chain only it has some of Death's sort of signature traversal added to it, so he can get more mileage out of it and use it in different ways. However, he can also use it like War could, so you can use it in combat, pulling enemies towards you, or pulling yourself towards enemies. We wanted to refine the gear experience, so while there were six pieces of gear and a bunch of passive abilities you could get in Darksiders I, this time what I will say is, there will be only three gear items but they will change, evolve and level-up so that they will gain abilities as you go along. We want to keep players from having to go back and forth between menus equipping items; we want you to have the full tool-set available to you at all times once they're all made available to you, and be able to switch between them very fluidly without having to equip and unequip items. So while initially it seems like there will be fewer, they're much more nuanced and robust than what you were able to play with in Darksiders I.

So what are those three gear items? Are we talking equipment or weapons?

Well some of them will function as both, so they will all have a primary function but some of them will have a combat function as well. You saw the Ghost Hook, I don't think we're talking about one of the other ones yet, but there will be a return of the Portal Gun, so the Void Walker will be returning, but it's going to have a lot of different functionality that we didn't see in Darksiders I - it's definitely getting an upgrade.

How extensive will the customisable loot and armour be?

It's super extensive. War had the Trimmer Gauntlet, and Death's Scythe - essentially two different secondary weapons. We want to give the player a chance to get into combat in exactly the way that they feel comfortable with. So if they want to use really light weapons where they can get into combat and do a lot of damage up close, then we want to offer them those; if they want to do really heavy damage with much slower weapons, we want to offer them those. So we have multiple classes of weapons: we have axes, maces, we have melee weapons - which resemble gloves that have claws on them - we have hammers, different pole-arms, broadswords, and those will all have different effects on them. You can expect to see a really vast selection of weapons that will even get different benefits based on the armour that you equip. So there will be sets that you can find - you can find sets of armour that have weapons that correspond and vice-versa.

So will you be able to carry all those through into the multiplayer?

Into multiplayer? We're not talking about multiplayer at the moment.

But there's going to be multiplayer?

I don't think we're quite talking about what we're doing yet with the connected elements.

Can you talk about co-op at all?

We do have a few different things planned, but right now it's just not something we're talking about.

So you've mentioned that there will be other characters, other than Death, in the game - we've got War - is there going to be Fury as well, is that right?

Fury and Strife are the other two horsemen, and we're not talking about what their significance is in the game yet.

See I always thoug

ht it was Famine and Pestilence...

Part of Joe Madureira's involvement is that he has a remarkably different take on things. If I were to tell somebody to draw a tree and Joe to draw a tree, what he does is not going to look anything like what anybody else would do, and that's what he brings to the game. He's going to make Death and War look different to what anybody else would've imagined, and likewise, these guys - Joe and some of the other guys at Vigil - didn't think that Pestilence and Famine sounded like cool characters to play as, so Strife and Fury just fit more into the universe.

So obviously the game's going to be on Wii U as well - can you talk at all about the unique features that that version's going to have?

The team's still designing those. Because the hardware's so early and the team's only had a very limited time to work with the hardware, we're still determining what the most beneficial things to provide for the Wii U user-base will be, but it certainly will have most likely different interface capabilities than all of the other SKUs will have.

There's been talk about possibly releasing a comic book and a movie based on the series. Is there any more news on that?

There most certainly will be a comic book, and as we get closer and closer to the launch of Darksiders II you'll be hearing more and more about that. At THQ - I don't know if you know Danny Bilson, or THQ's mantra... it's one of trans-media - supporting games with products that make sense. Whether that be a movie or a comic book, we want to pursue those options as long as Dan... you know, obviously Darksiders is a game of incredible mind-share and quality; the art, the universe, is something the team works very hard on. So, if a movie makes sense, and upholds the vision of Darksiders, and makes sense in the grand scheme of things we'll do it. If it were just a play for publicity or revenue, it's not something that interests us. We're going to do it when it makes sense to do a Darksiders movie, but yeah, if those elements come together then you can expect to see one.

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Darksiders II Preview

Darksiders II is a sequel in space rather than time. You play as Death rather than War, at the same time, in a different place. And who wouldn't like to be Death for a while? Reaping and pillaging is why we play games after all. To sate our repressed barbarous desires; to smash open an other and smear his blood across our naked chest. To have cool scythes.

Death approaches a huge bell atop a barren, craggy outcrop. He takes a moment to admire his jet black locks in the sheen of his scythe before arcing round to slice the bell into two juddering halves. An enormous floating fortress of rock and dread descends into view, as a pair of monstrous skeletal wyrms unfurl ahead of it.

War is a bit slow and lumbering anyway. A bit of a tank; good for soaking up blasts and crushing civilians, but not exactly nimble; not like Death. One minute you might be queuing up for bacon croutons in Lidl, the next - fatal heart attack. That's stealth. And if you were Death (are you?), you'd also be a bit miffed if your brother (War) got banged up on false pretences for a crime that wasn't really his (ending the world early). You might even set out on a quest to clear his name. In fact you will (did/are), in Darksiders II.

Summoning his undead steed, Death leaps down upon the serpent's rocky back, and charges toward the fortress.

Death is considerably more agile than his brother, scurrying up and along walls to reach far off ledges, and swinging across chasms with his whip-like Ghost Hook. In combat, Death fades and counters; he can't block - he doesn't need to - and relies instead on sneaky evasive manoeuvres to outwit his opponents.

Comparisons to God of War (combat) and Zelda (puzzles) were made with the first game, and they will certainly be made with the second. Despite its unique visual style (courtesy of X-Men comic artist, Joe Madureira), Darksiders is a series which perhaps borrows more than it innovates. Vigil are certainly making a much bigger game this time around however, with each of the four realms in the sequel containing as much dungeon content as the whole of Darksiders I. A central town (such as the fortress Death is currently charging towards) acts as a hub in each realm, populated with a range of NPCs offering side-quests and the promise of rare loot.

Bursting into the throne room, Death demands an audience with The Lord of Bones.

"My lord is busy tending his realm," cackles his skeletal aide.

"You must bring back the head of his champion to earn his counsel."

"I shall embark upon... the fetch quest," sighs a dejected Death, before trudging to the Champion's Arena and glaring at a statue with a few missing horns.

"O  frabjous day! a fetch quest within a fetch quest. Guess I'd better go get those missing horns to summon this bloke, that's how it normally goes after all. Ho hum. Off to this conveniently placed dungeon over here I suppose."

 

The dungeon we we

re shown featured a few simple puzzles (e.g. rotate laser emitting statue to hit receptor across room) and a fair amount of good old-fashioned scrapping. Death wields his dual scythes with aplomb, occasionally fusing them into a single weapon when ending a combo to deal more damage. Brief flashes of his full 'Reaper' form occur during combat, and a range of magical 'Wrath' abilities allow Death to cause damage from a distance, like summoning a flock of eyeball-pecking crows. In addition to his scythes, Death will have access to a huge range of weapons throughout the adventure - including axes, spears, broadswords, and gloves with spiky bits on. Loot pick-ups (with the exception of quest items) are randomised, with foes dropping various unique stat-boosting pieces of armour. Darksiders II will also feature a full skill tree, allowing you to customise Death to your preferred play-style as you level-up. It won't be possible to max-out the skill tree in every direction, so you'll need to tailor your armour-bonuses, skills, and weapons to create a synergistic combination - choosing defense boosting armour and skills if you favour a slower hammer weapon for example.

As the final horn slotted into place, the arena floor began to tremble. A trail snaked its way through the dust towards the reaper. But it was no match for Death. He tore the skull-worm out of the ground before it could strike, felling it with a single sweep of his scythe.

In addition to the array of weapons and armour available, Death will gain access to three pieces of equipment during the adventure. Although the first game had six such items, each piece of gear in Darksiders II is said to have multiple functions and a far wider range of uses. Death's Ghost Hook allows him to latch onto high points and swing through the air, but also functions as a hook-shot, reeling in enemies or pulling him rapidly towards gargantuan foes. The Void Walker, which generates portals, will also be making a return, albeit with significantly revamped functionality.

The silence was all too brief. Before Death stood the champion, a mighty Golem formed of rock and bone. The beast roared with rage and, ripping out its own head and spine, lashed out - obliterating the gallows Death had been standing on moments ago. Death answered with a flail of his own, latching onto the beast's detached cranium with his Ghost Hook, and sent the Golem crashing into the ground.

Vigil is remaining extremely tight-lipped about any potential multiplayer modes, but have hinted that Death might cross paths with the other Horsemen of the Apocalypse on his travels. Although the ending to Darksiders I suggested the possibility of co-op in a sequel, comments from the developers seem to suggest that this might be something they're saving for a later title in the series - and given that Darksiders II runs parallel to the first game, its ending isn't all that relevant anyway. There's still much work to be done at this early stage - adding the promised in-town npcs, and building many of the side-quests and bosses - but the distinctive Marvel-esque aesthetic is already confidently established,

with chunky, colourful character models striding through the game's intricately sculpted, monumental environments. Hopefully Vigil will be able to come up with some distinctive gameplay to compliment Darksiders' distinctive visuals by the time it ships.

"So I'll just finish off this fetch quest then shall I..?"

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Dead Island - Hands On Preview

 

It was never going to be representative of the teaser trailer, was it? Anybody who really thought the video short (which premiered across the web in February and subsequently won its creators, Axis Animation, a Cannes Lions Award) was going to resemble Techland's actual game code should have had their head examined. Simon Pegg may have liked the teaser, it may have been the top trending topic on Twitter for a day, and game commentators predictably made a fuss about the film's infanticide imagery, but ultimately it was just an impressive CGI short that did what it was supposed to do: drum-up interest in the game. Dead Island, the game, is about a zombie infestation across a luxury holiday resort in the tropics and here is where its similarity to the teaser trailer ends.

Sitting down to actually go hands-on with the game, it feels like many of Techland's previous projects: it's very rough around the edges and the gameplay mechanics are a little, well, odd. For a start, whoever came up with the idea of basing such a huge portion of Dead Island's combat around melee weapons is either mildly crazy or a borderline genius (perhaps both). First-person games that rely on melee combat aren't usually attempted by developers and there's a very good reason why: it's usually rubbish. Melee is great as a supporting act (Master Chief's rifle butt, for example) but not as the star player simply because the perspective doesn't lend itself to slog-fests and close quarter engagements. First-person means that it's more difficult to check what's coming up behind you, while melee combat can't easily be varied into combos and it's also more difficult to judge the reach of an axe or hammer when you're swiping it haphazardly in front of your eyes (third-person, it would seem, is better at aiding depth perception).

And yet somehow, much like with Techland's last title, Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood, the game still manages to be enjoyable despite this lack of refinement. It's the minor touches, such as the ability to combine various weapons and objects to form new instruments of zombie slaughter, which make the combat interesting. A sticky bomb and a knife, when combined together, make a knife that explodes once it's been stuck in a zombie (particularly useful when thrown), while razors and a baseball bat combine to form, well, you get the point. The sheer range of the melee weapons is equally impressive: knuckle dusters, morning stars, meat cleavers, machetes, and axes to name but a few of the many, and they're all upgradeable to new levels of zombie dicing strength when you've accrued some money to spend.

Regular refurbishment of each weapon adds an element of survival to the mix. Unless you spend a bit of dosh fixing that mace before you go out on a mission, it's liable to cease functioning once you've crushed the skulls of a handful of zombies with it. And then there's the option for ranged combat with these melee weapons too: once a horde of zombies becomes too much to handle, you'll often resort to throwing everything you've got at them until the last thing you've got left is a med-pack, which you'll probably lob at them for good measure anyway. The lock-on system works well for this and Techland has made sure that there's a price to pay for lobbing weapons at zombies by removing the item from your inventory once you've done so. The only way to get it back is to return to the zombie corpse you've impaled and dislodge it from the bloody torso, which ensures that you can only use the throwing option sparingly if you want to

have any hope of survival.

That's not to say that guns don't play a role in the game at all. One playable character from the range of four specialises in ranged weapons and firearms, for example, and we did find the odd AK-47 dotted around the game world during our hands on session. It sort of makes sense, I suppose: how many assault rifles would you find on a luxury holiday resort anyway? On the other hand, presumably maces wouldn't be that commonplace either but that's hardly the point. The tendency towards melee combat, at least in three of the four character classes, does distance Dead Island from the likes of Left 4 Dead. It gives the zombie gaming genre a fresh feel, which is something that Techland has always done quite well in the FPS genre with Call of Juarez despite the many deficiencies elsewhere. And the open world setting, one of Dead Island's key selling points, also makes for an original experience.

Yes, there are problems with that open world: running through the procedurally generated packs of zombies without confrontation is pretty straightforward. Many of the necromancers will follow you for quite some distance despite your best attempts to lose them, but then again a lot of them seem fairly unperturbed by your presence as you sprint through the shady alleyways between each villa. During a straightforward FedEx quest, like the one we did during our hands-on, this 'run away!' tactic is perhaps a little more successful than it should be, but then it's a balanced alternate tactic to some extent as well. Techland has implemented a stamina bar so that you can only run so far and are more liable to damage from attacks when the bar is drained, so there are disadvantages to the flight rather than fight approach. Additionally, if you use the tactic too excessively then eventually you'll be left with more zombies on your tail than you know what to do with. All in all, the game seems to work out a solution to these problems fairly solidly and isn't unbalanced even if it is a little wobbly. One thing we did notice is that a lot of the game environment we played through was cordoned off by concrete walls with Biohazard signs, so it'll be interesting to see just how 'open' the island of Banoi is in practice. Nonetheless, the game world we played in offered plenty of opportunities for exploration through missions and side-quests that were approachable in the usual non-linear fashion.

Those varied classes that we mentioned earlier do help to add elements of strategy and variation too, as do the range of zombies. Xian Mei plays the assassin class and can be used to sneak past zombies without them noticing, which is perfect for flanking while characters like Logan (the all-rounder) and Sam B (the tank) bulldoze through an onslaught of the undead. Meanwhile, the aforementioned firearms specialist, Purna can use ranged attacks to lighten the load. From zombies on fire to zombies emitting noxious gases, and charging zombie mini-bosses restrained by straightjackets, the variation in enemies then manages to put the various playable character classes to good use.

Technically speaking, Techland is getting a lot of the core elements right with Dead Island: there's an original premise with gameplay that's both well varied and balanced (just about), so if the Polish studio can focus on shoring up some of the game's production values and overall sheen, then it could even have mini-blockbuster potential when it launches in September.

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Deus Ex: Human Revolution - DLC Screens & Details News

 

Following the official announcement last weekend, Square Enix Europe has now served up a couple of extra story details on Deus Ex: Human Revolution's 'The Missing Link' DLC while dropping the first batch of screens for the content (shown at the bottom of this article).

The details are a little spoilerific, so if you're yet to finish the game's story then avert your eyes now... 'The Missing Link' takes place towards the end of the main plot, where Adam Jensen goes 'radio silent' with Sarif Industries and boards a freighter ship.

During the main campaign, gamers are shown a cut-scene where Jensen climbs into a stasis chamber of sorts and then the next scene you see shows him exiting the ship three days later and entering a complex where the ship docks.

'The Missing Link' tells the story of what happened on that freighter ship, where Jensen is tortured by Belltower agents and robbed of his augmentations. As a result, gamers effectively have to build a new set of augmentations from scratch. New story elements, characters, and environments are promised – the DLC is scheduled to arrive some time next month.

"We are very excited for Deus Ex: Human Revolution fans to be able to further develop Adam’s journey in the game with The Missing Link DLC," said David Anfossi, Producer of Deus Ex: Human Revolution at Eidos-Montreal. "Gamers will be able to experience a vulnerable side of Adam like never before, which gives the overall game a whole new dimension. The Missing Link propels players into compelling gameplay, beginning with Adam being temporarily stripped of his use of augmentations, new, visually stunning environments and the continuation of Deus Ex: Human Revolution's conspiracy rich story.”

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Driver San Francisco - Final Look Preview

 

Some games are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them. If Driver: San Francisco is going to aspire to any of these categories, it'll be the middle one. The title certainly won't be born great, such is the disappointment of former instalments in the series - for the same reason, it seems unlikely that anybody is going to be thrusting greatness upon it. This leaves achieving greatness as Ubisoft Reflections (formerly Reflections Interactive) strives to reinstate the Driver name after a series of poor design choices in the three major instalments following its 1998 debut. And as far as we can see having sat down for a sizeable hands-on with Driver San Francisco's multiplayer and opening single-player act, Ubi Reflections has been working very hard to produce a game of formidable polish.

Take, for example, how far the code has come since we first saw it this time last year. At the centre of the gameplay is a 'shift' dynamic that allows you to teleport freely between any car in the game's open world (we'll explain why later). In our first hands-on with the multiplayer this time last year, the bird's eye view of the city that you used for shifting was featureless and colourless. Buildings and roads were uniformly grey, almost as if the game was in a proof-of-concept stage at the very start of development. In the current build though, this bird's eye view is fully rendered with all the textures and colours that you'd see from the default driver's perspective. The developers were taking on a hefty task with the innovative 'shift' dynamic - smoothly rendering a full open-world with no noticeable drops in frame-rate or pop-up is a daunting prospect at the best of times - so it's great to see that they've been refining and optimising the process so successfully over the last twelve months.

For those of you who haven't been keeping up with the development of DSF though, here's a quick recap: it's billed as a return to the classic gameplay of the original Driver, where the focus was squarely on driving - gone are the GTA-style on-foot sections and gunplay of subsequent sequels. The hook, though, is this 'shift' dynamic. Ubisoft Reflections makes sense of it by placing Tanner, who returns as protagonist, in a coma after a coming together with his long-time adversary, Jericho. Within that coma, Tanner learns that he can shift into any car across the city of San Francisco and embody the driver at that vehicle's wheel. Across the game's main story, Tanner uses this ability (unawares he's in a coma) to infiltrate Jericho's gang and embody his various henchman as they complete jobs for their ringleader. With these details alone, DSF is already the most story-focused pure driving experience in any game of recent times, but it's the variation that Ubisoft Reflections appears to be managing through all of this that's particularly striking.

 

During a couple of hours with t

 

he single-player, we experienced everything from car chases (as both cop and criminal) to illegal point-to-point street races, one mission where we embodied a journalist trying to capture footage of reckless driving, and another where we had to rescue a kidnapped woman in the boot of a car (the key was to take out the kidnapper's car with oncoming collisions by shifting to cars just in front of him). The gameplay hook of shifting really has allowed Ubi Reflections a wide range of tools to flesh out a discernible plot and the studio clearly hasn't shied away from the challenge. Each vehicle you shift into with either a side or story mission attached to it has discernible characters on-board with plentiful lines of dialogue and even minor back-stories to flesh out. There's the driving instructor who bullies the confidence out of his teenage student until Tanner embodies the young boy and scares the living daylights out of the instructor with some crazy driving antics, or the street racer who's trying to win some cash to send his younger brother to college. The scope and breadth of what's going on here is as fresh and invigorating as it is technically impressive.

Of course, no Driver game comes without its focus on American muscle car-style handling, and what better location to frame that than the series' original setting, San Francisco, where Steve McQueen's antics in a Ford Mustang have made the film Bullitt so enduring over the decades. True to the game's heritage, handling is weighty through the corners with a focus on handbrake turns and rung-out drifts. The steep hills of San Francisco make for plenty of ludicrously airborne moments as you chase down the game's various objectives, all of which is then latched onto a Burnout-style currency system. Driving into oncoming traffic, time spent jumping, and drifting all add to the amount of money available for buying new cars and parts, while 'boost' and 'ram' gameplay perks that emerge as the game goes on do manage to keep the driving experience fresh.

From what we've seen of the multiplayer, shifting lends itself as well to the gameplay here as it does in the story missions. Two modes were on offer during our hands-on, one of which was a variant of tag and the other your basic cops and robbers experience. In the tag mode, one player has a trophy and all other players have to steal it off them - the person who holds the trophy longest wins. Shifting has obvious advantages here as you scurry to shift into a vehicle as close as possible to the trophy holder and take them by surprise. The cops and robbers mode, on the other hand, pits numerous cop players against a single robber and, once again, using shifts strategically as a group of cops will soon have the target car pinned into a corner. Ubisoft Reflections has promised 19 multiplayer modes in total (11 online,

the rest split-screen) which is a pretty tantalising prospect, although it'll be interesting to see how many of these turn out to be variants on a theme.

As the arcade driving game genre misfires on current-gen consoles, it's refreshing to have Driver San Francisco come in and fill that void with all kinds of refreshing ideas across its gameplay and storyline. There are genuinely shades of Burnout's previous-gen brilliance here.

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Dual-Thumbpad Add-On For 3DS Spotted [UPDATE] News

True to rumours that emerged around a couple of weeks ago, Nintendo has a new attachment in the offing for its 3DS that will add a second analogue thumbpad to the handheld's existing design.

The news comes from leaked scans of Japanese gaming mag Famitsu (thanks, Kotaku), which clearly show how the add-on attaches itself as a cradle to Nintendo's current 3DS model. As well as a second thumpad, the attachment will also introduce a trigger button to the right shoulder of the 3DS control suite.

Andriasang broke the news originally, reporting that the first game to utilise this underslung peripheral will be Monster Hunter 3G (a 3DS version of the Wii's Monster Hunter 3).

Nintendo's stock rose last month when investors learnt of a pre-TGS announcement that's set to take place on September 13th, so presumably that's when the company plans to drop all of this news.

More as we get it but, in the meantime, check out this neat list on Kotaku of the attachments that Nintendo's released for its various consoles over the years.

Update: Nintendo has now officially confirmed the 3DS attachment, telling Kotaku, "We can confirm that Nintendo plans to release the Circle Pad attachment, but Nintendo's regional subsidiaries will make further announcements about its availability at a later date."

You can bet good money that this "later date" will be next Tuesday, September 13th...

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EA Announces Syndicate Reboot News

Project RedLime has finally gone public: EA's deal with Chronicles of Riddick developer, Starbreeze Studios, that was set to reboot a classic EA franchise has culminated in the official announcement of Syndicate for an early 2012 launch on Xbox 360, PS3, and PC.

Positioned as a reinvention of the mid-90s strategy game from Peter Molyneux's Bullfrog studio, this 21st century reboot will swap the isometric perspective of the original for the ubiquitously popular first-person shooter genre.

Syndicate tells the story of Miles Kilo, a prototype agent for mega-corporation Eurocorp. The game's 2069 setting depicts a dystopian corporatocracy where other companies such as Cayman Global and Ascari vie for control of the American marketplace alongside Eurocorp.

There's a whiff of Deus Ex about all this, as EA explains that everything in Synidcate's world is digitally connected (people included). It seems guns and frag grenades aren't the limits of players' weapons either, as DART 6 bio-chip technology will apparently open up bullet-time powers and upgradeable hacking capabilities (referred to in the press release as “chip breach gameplay”).

Precisely where EA and Starbreeze is going with Syndicate remains purposefully vague at this stage, although this wouldn't be the first classic, isometric strategy game to be re-imagined as an FPS in recent times – 2K Games' XCOM reboot is also due for release early next year.

“We are excited to finally reveal what we’ve been working on the past couple years,” says Mikael Nermark, CEO of Starbreeze Studios. "It's been a great experience working with EA, and an amazing opportunity for us to use our expertise in the first person shooter and action genres to bring back, and reignite, the signature action/espionage gameplay of Syndicate.”

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El Shaddai - Hands On Preview

There are a few things the Japanese love in their games; stylish but lanky heroes, brilliantly white school girl panties, and one long and near incomprehensible story line. These are things you should unashamedly come to expect when you pool together a dream team of Japanese talent, write a check and leave them to create the type of game they’ve always wanted to make. And yes, it’s absolutely mental.

But we’re not talking Bayonetta levels of insanity here, and forget the knickers; El Shaddai is something completely different. It could be interpreted as a strange journey into a Japanese developers’ psyche or – and most likely - a middle finger to the now domineering Western games market. No hulky space marines, guns and brown with bloom to be seen here. It’s a mix of psychedelic platforming and third-person action with a storyline you’ll need to take notes on.
As we mentioned, the Japanese love a confusing story and it's one hell of a tale to tell. Inspired by the Book of Enoch, the plot sees seven angels sent to earth to live with humans. The angels end up falling in love with humanity and, rather than taking a passive role and watching over them as God had intended, they end up introducing angelic technology into humanity.

The humans end up worshipping the angels, rather than God, and end up creating a new species called Nephilim, who for some reason look like walking custard monsters. God’s not a fan of the Nephilim and asks Enoch, God’s scribe, to remove both the Nephilim and the angels who had failed him.

Eventually, as Enoch, you’ll end up in the Tower of Babel on Earth. The tower was built by humans in celebration of the angels and El Shaddai takes place on the many levels of the tower. It’s all very unclear at the beginning, and it almost tries its best to confuse you further when you lose the first fight. Instead of a gamer over, it rewinds right back to the start where an altered version of the opening begins to play. On top of that, it offers alternative endings depending on how you play. While it doesn’t immediately penalise you for dying, allowing you to jump straight back into the action, certain deaths can affect the eventual ending and whether it’s good or bad depends on your overall skill during the whole game rather than specific choices.

El Shaddai offers an environment that constantly changes perspectives and play styles. One minute you’ll be rushing forward and tackling the occasional battle, the next you’ll face challenging jumps in a cutesy side-scrolling platformer or even end up driving a motorbike in a nostalgic homage to Final Fantasy VII’s escape sequence in Midgar. These changes offer a good range of what the engine can do but the overall simplicity of the sections we played felt a little underwhelming. It’s perhaps a case of too much variety in a short amount of time, something we’re hoping the main course should rectify.  

Stripped completely bare of any HUD, El Shaddai is a game you can play or watch with equal measures of enjoyment. It’s another entry for the games as art debate and one that takes its art very seriously. So much so, that the development lead is non

e other than artist Sawaki Takeyasu, famed for his work on Okami and Devil May Cry. It’s the first time he’s ever had control over a games story or gameplay mechanics but one we should be paying attention to.

Perhaps having an artist so involved in the game as a whole might explain the overall simplicity El Shaddai radiates. Unlike Devil May Cry, which offers a decent array of weaponry to play with, El Shaddai has only three. The weapons offer more than rock-paper-scissors styled advantages in battles but also affect platforming abilities. The Arch, a sacrosanct blade used to slice foes up also allows Enoch to glide after jumps. The Gale, a ranged weapon that also grants the ability to dash, and lastly, the Veil, which acts as both a shield and close proximity damage dealer. These weapons are gained during battles where you’re forced to steal and purify them from the many enemies you meet in the game or by picking them up in certain sections of each level. Weapons can dull and you’ll have to purify the weapon should it become infected from repeated use.

While each weapon offers a specific tactic to winning fights, they are also instrumental in passing some of the more difficult side-scrolling platform sections that require the special abilities each weapon offers. There were points during our demo that were impossible to progress through with the weapon we had equipped. Luckily there is usually an essential weapon drop near these sections but we can imagine that won’t always be the case.

Battles are reminiscent of Prince of Persia, where you have a small area to circle around as enemies approach you, as well as the handy instant revive option should you lose a fight. As expected, you can jump, dodge and attack but most of the time you’ll mash the buttons until something awesome happens. While no specific combos are displayed in menus, you can time your button pressing right and perform combos. It’s a system of self-discovery rather than trying to teach you an array of moves over the over, but one that could often leave a deeper understanding of combat to the comfortable repetition of a few basic moves.

It’s the visual style that sets El Shaddai apart from the rest though. Changing from soft cell-shaded 3D environments, harsh dark futuristic highways to 2D cartoon-like side scrollers, the art constantly evolves during your journey. In-engine and hand drawn cut-scenes mash together, and unlike the cut-scenes of Mirror’s Edge, which felt removed from the world, El Shaddai’s mix of traditional and modern art styles blend seamlessly.

It not only offers sheer joy for your visual taste buds but also offers a new dynamic to platforming. Perspectives can be mixed and what appears to be a hole is in fact a platform. We died twice during the demo by falling off what appeared to be a straight bridge but was in fact a long

hole on the road - it makes basic platforming feel fresh and exciting.

This is exactly what El Shaddai appears to be, a fresh injection of platforming goodness and a creative tour de force that set it apart from the ubiquitous gun battles and space marines of contemporary Western titles. El Shaddai is already out in Japan with a European release set for this September.

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F1 2011 - Hands On Preview

 

This year's Formula 1 season has been a paradox so far; it's been as unpredictable as it's been predictable. On the one hand there have been more overtaking manoeuvres in the sport than we've seen for decades, a comeback from last place to first in 30 laps (Jenson Button in Canada), and tyres that perish more quickly than fairy dust in a vat of sulphuric acid. On the other hand, one driver has won six of the first nine races and pretty much secured the Driver's Championship already, barring a monumental reversal of fortunes. That driver's name is Sebastian Vettel.

Exhibiting the same kind of skill for 'race management' that his countryman, Michael Schumacher mastered during his heyday, Vettel has effectively made the lead for races uncharacteristically dull given all the madness going on behind him. And it's the FIA's implementation of new regulations such as the Drag Reduction System (DRS), re-introduction of the Kinectic Energy Recovery System (KERS), and Pirelli's infamously precarious tyre compounds that have created this madness, long may it continue. Given the impressive attention to detail in Codemasters Birmingham's attempt at the sport last year, it'll come as no big surprise to hear that DRS, KERS, and the Pirelli tyres have all been lovingly recreated in F1 2011. Readers who paid attention at E3 this year will probably know this already, and are also probably aware of the other headlining new features on Codemasters' crib-sheet:

A new Co-op Championship mode.Split-screen multiplayer.16 player online multiplayer and full 24-car grids with AI drivers making up the difference.

The marketing focus is clearly on multiplayer this year. It's all part of the 'Go Compete' tagline that Codies has added to last year's 'Be The Driver, Live The Life' mantra. But this is all just swanky new bodywork really - the kind of stuff that you can put on the back of a game's box to sell it but will not necessarily result in core gameplay improvements from one year to the next. For that you've got to get a good look at what's going on under the hood - has the handling improved? What's the driver AI like now? Have they been significantly reworked from last year and, more importantly, does this result in sizeable improvements to the experience?

These questions were foremost in our mind as we sat down to an extensive hands-on session just prior to last weekend's British Grand Prix. Rigs with full steering wheel and peddle arrays glazed the demo hall, as did one of Team Lotus' F1 cars from last year - Lewis Hamilton's brother, Nicolas (an accomplished racing gamer himself and competitor in this year's Renault Clio Cup, which supports the British Touring Car Championship) was also present at the event. We went toe-to-toe with LAN multiplayer, split-screen, and single-player experiences and can say whole-heartedly that F1 2011 is exhibiting the kind of steps forward over a one-year dev cycle that you'd expect from EA's gigantic FIFA team.

Driver AI is the first thing

 

 

that struck us. It's noticeably quicker through corners, more aggressive with overtaking opportunities, and more likely to take a defensive driving line into corners when you're right on its tail. The AI was already impressive last year but, as we outlined in our review, it still suffered from some age-old racing game shortcomings (particularly the problem of getting bogged down in single-file through slow hairpins, allowing you to leapfrog multiple positions). These problems have now been consistently ironed out and effectively relegated to the sidelines. It's abundantly clear that Codies Birmingham has been working particularly hard on the AI's corner quickness, and this is the real difference maker.

It'll add so much to the career mode that the dev team introduced last year, where the goal in your first season was merely to finish in the points rather than win races. Now, with a recognisable concertina effect between you and your opponents as you enter and exit corners, the game has really nailed the sensation of painstakingly chasing down the car in front of you. It's this kind of thing that makes a fight for 10th place in a slower car just as exciting as going for the win in a McLaren, so it looks very much like the core improvements to AI will have a recognisable trickle-down effect through the modes this year.

Handling has also had a lot of attention lavished on it. Despite some gamers' detractions from last year's handling system, in our opinion it was still a solid representation of the sport. In F1 2011, it's once again a system that subscribes to the Codemasters code of being as widely playable as it is realistic, but there's also a more natural feel to it this year. Senior Producer, Paul Jeal has been quick to point out how there's more tangible understeer and oversteer this year and we're inclined to agree. The balance of the car through corners is more noticeable so the rear-end won't violently snap away from you with minimal warning quite so much. We also noticed a lot more understeer into corners, particularly in low-speed turns with an adverse camber where the car is likely to lose a lot of its front-end downforce. Hopefully Codemasters can now take advantage of this in the mechanics of car setups so that there's more inclination to fiddle around in the garage this year.

But the improvements don't end here. Producers, Paul Jeal and Stephen Hood showed some comparative trackside shots of F1 2010 and 2011 at the press event, and there were significant differences. Looking down on Spa Francorchamps' Eau Rouge corner from the top of the hill, screenshots of F1 2010 showed a relatively bare hillside with a uniform grass texture. In F1 2011, on the other hand, the same shot revealed all kinds of flora. If we knew anything about botany then we'd be reporting back to you with tales of azaleas and hyacinths - as it is, we're just going to say there were lots of pretty flowers and shrubs. And the split-screen multiplayer that we mentioned earlier was silky smooth in our play-test, while also managing to retain an impressive amount of graphical detail from a full-screen, single-player view.

It's all representative of a game that really is coming along in leaps and bounds over 12 months of development time. Codemasters' budget can hardly be comparable to the sort of money EA spends on improving FIFA year-over-year, but the kind of leaps forward in design and content are comparable between each series. If you loved last year's F1 game, this will be one to buy again this year. If you didn't play F1 2010, then you're in for a sumptuous treat when F1 2011 releases this September 23rd.

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FIFA 12 - Career Mode Preview

It's fair to say that we were a little underwhelmed by the Career mode in FIFA 11. EA's new feature combined the previously separate Manager and Be-A-Pro modes from FIFA 10, but effectively lost a lot of the details and nuances of each mode in the translation. In-depth stats from the Manager mode fell by the wayside, as did international call-ups from the Be-A-Pro mode; Backroom Staff were ripped out, as was the Player Form feature that debuted in FIFA 10. FIFA 11's career mode appeared to make two modes half as good, and then combine them together into a single offering. Not only did you feel like there was less content on offer, but that content felt shallower and less football-savvy too (who actually starts their career as an inexperienced, 18 year-old player manager of Man Utd anyway?).

At the very least though, EA Canada won't simply be re-boxing the same Career mode from FIFA 11 with all the relevant updates this year. There's clearly been a concerted effort to turn the mode into something resembling a more cohesive managerial experience this time around. "With the second year of Career mode, what we really wanted to get to was a more authentic way of being a manager in particular," FIFA's Producer, David Rutter told us. "It's been really focused on the manager experience this year, to try and experience some of the things that happen to real managers in the real-world based around real-world situations."

After a short stint of hands-on time with the mode, there's certainly some substance behind these claims. One significant addition comes in the form of Youth Scouts, which first have to be hired from a pool of hopefuls and can then be set to the task of recruiting decent young players for your side. "Send a scout away and they'll come back with some recommendations but they're vague," explains Rutter. "Send them again and they'll come back with a greater sense of accuracy but, the more times you do that, the more chance there is of another club stepping in and taking them."

Player Interactions are another step forward this year, where members of your team will express their disappointment at not getting enough games, a lack of achievement at the club, or a wage dispute. This all forms part of a new Player Morale system, although you'll receive similar interactions from players who've received injuries as well. During our play-through, a slightly dismayed Raul Meireles informed us that he'd received a knock during a previous game but hoped to be fit for the next match. It was little more than a text box that popped-up in the menu screen, but it's a neat little addition nonetheless so long as it doesn't get arduously repetitive.

Another area that's been highlighted for improvement is the transfer system. In addition to a new transfer deadline day that offers multiple advances in one day (allowing multiple rounds of negotiations to take place) rather than the previous system that treated deadline day like any other, EA has also promised a more believable system for transfer/contract negotiations with other players/clubs. "They're sometimes high-balling, sometimes low-balling. Sometimes they'll high-ball then low-ball; sometimes they'll low-ball then high-ball to try and interact with you in a slightly unpredictable but realistic way," said Rutter.

Our experience with this side of the mode was limited once again, but even the examples it did throw up were a little dubious. Teams such as Inter Milan, Chelsea, and Olympic Marseille all offered bids for Jamie Carragher, two of which showed examples of low-balling with Chelsea offering £3.5 million and Inter Milan offering £5.5 million against a £6.5 million valuation for the player. The new system does appear to throw up more realistic negotiations then, but the question you've really got to ask yourself is why two of Europe's biggest sides would be interested in spending big money on a 33 year-old central defender whose best years are long behind him.

The caveat at this point, of course, is that the build demoed to us by EA was a work in progress and not representative of the final game - many improvements are left to be made. But it's worth remembering that these kinds of shortcomings frequently sold FIFA 11's Career mode short and broke any sense of suspended disbelief that the game successfully built up elsewhere. One of our gripes with FIFA 11's mode was how CPU teams tended to loan out their experienced first-team regulars, and these sorts of shortcomings were still painfully apparent during our hands-on. When we booted up a game as a player manager in the FIFA 12 build, our board of directors suggested that we loan out a young hopeful for more match experience when that young hopeful just happened to be our Virtual Pro. Unfortunately there was no option to respond to their suggestion with the remark, 'Are you drunk or stupid?'.

Regardless of all of these additions for FIFA 12 though, perhaps our main concern is that so much of what made the previous Manager and Be-A-Pro modes so good still won't be coming to the Career mode in FIFA 12. "I know that international management in particular is one of the biggest questions that we get asked - it's not in this year," Rutter confirmed. "Ultimately it boils down to simple prioritisation issues - bang for buck, what do we think

 

matters most? Sometimes we put things in that benefit the game in a way that isn't immediately obvious to people; they might not see what the cool stuff was."

"Last year it was the underlying competition engine. Most people don't care about that kind of stuff but for us it was a really big accomplishment and we didn't make a big song and dance about it because we knew nobody would be interested in the technology that we're using to pump the tournaments round..." Rutter said.

"...In the meantime people are saying, 'Where is this? Where is that? I wanted my this, I wanted my that,' and everyone has every right to want exactly what they want, it's just sometimes we can't do it and we can't do it because it's not quite at the top of the priority list, or it's just that the amount of time and effort that would go into doing it would take away something far more important. Some people missed some things, some people loved over stuff. Ultimately we're trying to just make the best game we can."

We have no doubt that EA Canada is making the best game it can, or that this year's Career mode will be better than last year's. For us, it's looking like it still won't offer the depth that the previous Be-A-Pro and Manager modes had separately in FIFA 10, but at the very least it's building towards a more immersive managerial experience. The folks at Sports Interactive don't have anything to worry about quite yet though.

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GoldenEye 007: Reloaded - Interview Feature

While Eurocom's Goldeneye Wii-make was never in danger of threatening the classic status of the N64 original, it nonetheless proved to be a robust study of Rare's seminal shooter, re-cast in modern FPS conventions. With an HD port now confirmed for Xbox 360 and PS3, TVG spoke to Activision Producer, James Steer, to find out more about Bond, Stealth, and Goldeneye 007: Reloaded.

Why the decision to bring it over to the HD consoles?

When we were originally thinking about making a Goldeneye game it felt right to make that game for the Wii platform because of the N64 heritage, but when we were developing the game and we started showing it to the press, retailers, and then eventually to the public, it became clear that that wasn't enough, and that people wanted to be able to play the game on PlayStation 3 and  Xbox 360. The problem is that we needed to update the engine for that, and we wanted to be able to deliver 60 frames a second gameplay, 16-player online multiplayer, and photo-realistic graphics. We had the game team at Eurocom concentrate on making sure the Wii game was the best game they could

 

possibly make, while all

 

 

the technology team were able to develop an engine for us to deliver, so when the game team were finished making the Wii version they could roll off. Hence this year we'll see the release of the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions.

So when you were designing the original, the engine was designed with a port in mind straight away?

No it was totally separate. Eurocom work with a separate technology team, because that's the best way - those guys can go make the best tech possible - the gameplay guys are just concentrating on the game. So they can then go and push the graphics engine as far as they can, and the team can just make the best game. Then they come to merge at some point, but while they were making the Wii version we didn't really want to disturb them... so we were like, 'You make sure this game is the best, while the other team worries about the engine.'

What's changed for the port? Are there any new single-player levels in the campaign?

No. The storyline is the same as the story we had updated for the Wii - so we had Bruce Feirstein take the original movie and update it for 2010 to make it relevant. So rather than being about the Cold War it's more about the banking crisis so people recognise it. Because we're introducing Daniel Craig's Bond to the story, we needed to update the story as well. In terms of the actual levels you'll play through in the single-player campaign, they are the same. Obviously every level's been massively updated: new geometry, new textures, new animations, new effects, audio, and a completely new AI system - so the way that they'll play will be completely different to the Wii version. And obviously we've added the MI6 Ops which is an entirely new gameplay feature that wasn't on the Wii, so that's kind of adding over ten hours worth of gameplay - very different style, from Assault to Elimination, to Stealth, to Wave Defense - something for every type of player. For people that like to be defensive, they can challenge themselves by playing those missions and trying to post a really high score, whereas someone who likes to run and gun can go and play Elimination. Multiplayer has also been completely updated to support 16 players: new modes, new maps, new characters, new weapons. We really haven't left any of it alone; it's been completely updated.

So even new animations? Did you get Daniel Craig's body double back in the Mo-Cap studio?

Yeah, we have some more footage of that and we've updated all the animations in the game. Eurocom have their own motion capture studio on-site, so it's really handy for them because they can just get actors in, get them to perform the animations, and they have their pipeline that gets them into the game really quickly, so it's very handy really.

I see - so you brought him back and recorded new ones for the updated version as well?

Yeah.

So in terms of the MI6 Operations mode, where are the levels from - are they sort of sections of the single-player?

 

They're a combination of some of the single-player levels, some of the multiplayer levels, and some new; whichever worked well in the game. The level designers go and look at the levels and think 'Actually, that would make a nice kind of arena for say, Wave Defense'. So it's a combination. Some maps have been updated because they've needed to be made larger because they now hold 16 players, so there'll be some maps that people with the Wii game will recognise, some that will be updated entirely, and some that are completely new.

And there are four modes - are they going to be available on every map?

No. There are specific maps for specific challenges.

So each one has maybe one mode per map?

Yeah, well, there are ten different challenge missions within the MI6 Ops feature. Each one has a leaderboard attached to it so you can be the best at playing say, 'Memorial Defense', or maybe 'Jungle Elimination'.

But then there wouldn't be say a Jungle Assault, or a Jungle Stealth for example?

No, we've picked the environments and the maps specifically for that style.

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GoldenEye 007: Reloaded Preview

Eurocom's Goldeneye 007 really stood out (for a Wii shooter). It had a solid single-player campaign (for a Wii shooter), compelling multiplayer action (for a Wii shooter), and top-drawer graphics (for a Wii shooter). Crucially, there was a sense that Eurocom had genuine respect for the N64 classic: they understood the importance of stealth in the single player level design, and knew that four-player split-screen was a multiplayer must-have. Naturally, it was never going to eclipse the lustre of its Rareware forbear, but (for a Wii Shooter) it was very good indeed.

It even fared far better (critically at least), than Activision's other high profile Bond game, Blood Stone. In fact, the failure of Blood Stone, and relative success of Goldeneye 007, proved if nothing else that releasing a Bond game without a strong license tie-in is a risky proposition, particularly if the gameplay isn't exceptionally solid.

And so we come to Goldeneye 007: Reloaded, a PS360 remake of Eurocom's 'Wii-imagining' of the N64 classic, remastered in 60fps HD. But can a game that was 'good for a Wii shooter' possibly hope to survive in the brutally competitive HD FPS market? And with Blood Stone apparently crashing the Bond market last year, does anyone even really want to play as 007 anymore, anyway?

Eurocom's entire single-player campaign has survived the port intact and without alteration - to the extent that, despite assurances from the team that all assets have been rebuilt for the HD remake ("from the ground up"), it's hard to initially discern much disparity with the Wii version. This is likely more a testament to the confident cinematic direction of the Wii original than an indication of any critical deficiency in the new HD textures and geometry, however. Camera sweeps and level layouts have been faithfully preserved, and the port seems to capture the essence of Eurocom's work - this is, after all, a remake rather than another 're-imagining'. A cursory play-through of the snowy Severnaya level reveals that the visceral melee take-downs of the Wii original are still intact, with the choice of carnage or subtle stealth largely left to player preference (on lower difficulty levels at least).

Nods to the N64 original abound; the camera still pans round into Bond's head at the start of each level, the sniper rifle is still in that first tower of the Dam section, and 007 even rolls off a few asides which reference dialogue from the original game and movie.

"Just like old times," he whispers to 006 as the pair silently subdue a pair of guards at the start of the Dam map (a line originally from the end of Facility in the N64 original - but we won't nitpick when a developer is tapping on the fourth wall).

It's not just like old times, of course. Pierce Brosnan is replaced by Daniel Craig, and Eurocom's Goldeneye has entirely new, Wii-made levels - with Bond writer Bruce Feirstein updating the story to focus on the banking crisis rather than Cold War fallout. Feirstein wasn't the only Bond talent to be drawn to the game; 007 composer Dave Arnold and Craig stunt double Ben Cooke were drafted in to supply music and motion-capture footage as well (for Goldeneye: Reloaded, Eurocom has apparently summoned Cooke back to their on-site motion-capture facility to record additional animations specifically for the port). Naturally Eurocom's gameplay reflects the advances in FPS mechanics that have occurred over the last decade, with grenade indicators, instant-kill melee attacks, regenerating health, and even the ability to aim and move concurrently all making it through to the port.

New to Goldeneye 007: Reloaded are a set of single-player challenges based on reworked sections of the campaign and multiplayer maps (with a few entirely new ones thrown in too). There are ten challenges in total, ranging from Assault and Elimination missions to more exotic Stealth and Wave Defense maps (which charge you with sneaking undetected through a level, or defending an array of computer terminals from waves of AI opponents). An editor is also planned to facilitate custom mission creation, with players selecting from a range of maps, victory conditions and A.I. to set their own challenges. Activision claims that these modes will add an additional 10 hours of play to the single-player experience.

But single-player action is only one half of any successful Goldeneye game. The port team are completely rebuilding the multiplayer portion of Reloaded to accommodate 16-player online matches (up from the Wii version's 8), with re-jigged maps, additional characters and a brand new selection of 'spy-based modes'.

"We just wanted to do some things that are not straight up deathmatch or team deathmatch," Activision Producer, James Steer, told us.

"We're using the fact that we are a 007 game to try and do some things that are maybe slightly different to what you might expect of a first-person shooter." Exactly what those things are is currently a mystery, but the prospect of spy-based multiplayer Bondage is an intriguing one. 4-player offline split-screen has been confirmed, and survives the transition to the HD consoles.

With only a few months until Reloaded's autumn release window, it's clear that substantial polishing remains to be done. Load times, draw-in and the occasional incongruous animation still need addressing, and the stick response on the Xbox 360 build we played felt curiously sluggish. However, such anomalies aren't unusual for pre-Alpha code, and the team are confident that all issues will be resolved in time for launch. No word yet on whether Reloaded will support motion controls ("stay tuned", hinted Steer), but given that the Wii version was built around the option it's not entirely inconceivable.

With upscaled visuals, revamped multiplayer, and improved online support, Goldeneye 007: Reloaded could prove to be the definitive version of Eurocom's likeable Bond FPS. The game will be up against stiff competition in the latter half of the year, and it remains to be seen whether the promised 'spy-based' multiplayer modes and new single-player challenges will prove to be substantive additions to the core offering. Nevertheless, if Activision invest enough in the remake, it might just turn out to be the second best Bond game of all time - not bad for a Wii shooter.

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Heroes of Ruin - Hands-on Preview

“All the character of a corned beef sandwich, with none of the taste.”

“More interesting than an accountancy lecture. Barely.”

And these are some of the nicer comments I've had about my writing. People just don't seem to appreciate generic twaddle. It's as though basic competency isn't enough, as though people expect something original or interesting as well. Something moving or beautiful. Something approaching art. Of course, it's hard to produce art when your subject matter is so consistently unoriginal, when publishers insist that 'design by marketing committee'

 

is a reasonable substitute for artistic vision. It's not surprising that the bearded and obtuse dismiss games as a serious medium when so many titles are so clean-cut and obvious.

Heroes of Ruin seems clean-cut and obvious, at least superficially. The result of a “merging of ideas” between Square-Enix and developer n-Space, you can't help but suspect it's been dreamt up to scratch a marketing itch rather than a creative one. The art style was designed to have “a broad range of appeal” and largely determined by “focus groups” according to Squeenix producer George Wright, and despite being a multiplayer hack-n-slash dungeon-crawler with randomly generated levels and loot, the official line is that it's an Action-Adventure, rather than an Action-RPG.

“I think we’ve got a lot more mainstream appeal than just another RPG would or just another action game would have.” n-Space Producer Tim Schwalk has previously bragged (thanks, Siliconera).

“If I had a copy of this, and I really wanted to play with magic, I could choose an appropriate character. But my buddy who always plays Call of Duty and Madden, he can jump in as a Gunslinger. He’s got bombs and guns, and he’s going to ‘get it,’ you know?”     

You might not expect a great deal from the story of such a game. Let's see:

“War raged for over a hundred years until strong, powerful Lords emerged from the fighting to bring a fragile peace to the land. This peace is threatened when one of the Lords, Ataraxis, ruler of the city of Nexus, is taken ill by a deadly curse. A call is sent out, promising rewards beyond measure for anyone who finds a cure.” (From the game's official website.)

Still, once you scratch the surface, there are a few interesting (if not strictly original) ideas running through Heroes of Ruin. Additional players can drop-in and out at any time; you can choose to let strangers jump in at random, Demon's Souls-style, or simply limit the privilege to selected friends. The difficulty rebalances at each checkpoint to reflect the average level of your current team, and enemies gain new abilities as the difficulty increases, rather than simply getting stronger. Loners can elect to play solo if they prefer (which presumably, they would), but risk losing certain multiplayer-related bonuses. The game's randomised loot is also handled intelligently; walking over dropped armour displays its stats compared with your current equipment, and a simple tap of the d-pad can either equip it or sell it off straight away. Take that, fiddly RPG menus. Cleverly, all the loot you've sold is transmitted via Streetpass so that anyone can potentially buy your old +10 Pants of Destruction.

Playing as the 'Vindicator' (a paladdin-archetype) reveals a competent if familiar battle system: sword combos can be strung together with a magic-draining (but powerful) dash attack, R blocks, and a quick tap sends you rolling away from danger. Enemies in the demo didn't display any ground-breaking attack patterns or AI, but they're serviceable cannon-fodder, and the Tibur (Shark-men) stand-out against some other fairly drab fantasy staples. Four character classes will be available in the final game, including a mage-like Alchitect, a  melee-focused Savage, and a Gunslinger that attacks from afar with bullets and bombs. According to Community Manager Kevin Eva, each character has “their own reasons” for embarking on the quest, some of which, he hinted, might not be entirely above board.

We encountered two mini-bosses during our brief play-through: a skeletal pirate captain with the power to make players (literally) run away in fear, and a conch-wielding Tibur that summoned two horrifying sea mutants, all dark and mangled with extraneous, pincer-like limbs. The final boss, an amiable-looking pink leviathan, could only be summoned once certain key items had been wrenched from the cold, dead hands (fins?) of the mini-bosses – a sensible fail-safe given the randomly-generated layout of the levels. After hacking at his tentacles for a bit, and dodging some hot, salty spume, our pink friend soon came to a sticky end, marking the end of the demo.

Heroes of Ruin still has several months of development time left. Many of the place-holder NPCs are yet to have their dialogue implemented, and various improvements await the interface and AI (that Tibur mini-boss just glitched nervously from side to side as we hacked him to death). The team is certainly exploiting all 3DS connectivity features to the full, and plans for downloadable daily challenges promise to extend the game's appeal post-release. Although we didn't experience anything particularly original or compelling during our play-through, there's no doubt that n-Space has implemented a number of zeitgeisty features, and the current dearth of original 3DS titles means they're potentially well-placed to find some fans for the game. Nevertheless, questions remain about the originality of the setting, mechanics and design choices on display, and it's unclear whether Heroes of Ruin will prove inventive enough to be of real interest to fans of the genre.

There's a sense that, despite the clever connectivity options, n-Space might be playing it a little too safe with the rest of the design; there's little evidence of nuance in the combat, and developer comments suggest that puzzles will be perfunctory at best. Balancing such a dynamic difficulty system is going to prove a real challenge, and currently the only real penalty for dying is an annoying trek back to your team-mates caused by some inconsistent check-pointing. Hopefully n-Space will implement some mechanism for players to manually tweak the difficulty, as it seems unlikely that any purely automated system could offer a consistently tense and challenging experience given the varied team-configurations that can arise.

n-Space may still have time to address these issues if they're willing to take some creative gambles (Bastion, as a recent example, managed to integrate difficulty choices within a compelling risk/reward framework extremely successfully) but unfortunately, it's precisely a lack of creative-risk taking that currently poses the biggest threat to the project. By playing it safe, n-Space may be missing an opportunity here, and if there's one thing worse than failure, it's mediocrity.

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Lollipop Chainsaw Coming To The West In 2012 News

 

Warner Bros. Interactive has announced that it will be bringing Lollipop Chainsaw (the next game from Suda51's Grasshopper Manufacture studio) to the West next year on Xbox 360 and PS3.

The game was announced in Japan last month via Famitsu, although details of a Western launch and publishing partner had remained unclear until now.

In what's shaping up to be a typically bonkers Suda51 affair, Lollipop Chainsaw sees high-school cheerleader, Juliet Starling take on a horde of the undead armed with a chainsaw.

Gore is being toned down with a more saccharine-sweet aesthetic where pink love hearts replace fountains of zombie blood from the raging chainsaw of a butter-wouldn't-melt protagonist.

It's an interesting change in direction for the studio that brought us Shadows of the Damned in June, which scored 7/10 in our review and debuted at No.31 in its first week on the UK charts before dropping out of the top 40 altogether.

As with Shadows, famed Silent Hill composer, Akira Yamaoka will handle the musical score on Lollipop Chainsaw, while Hollywood director and writer, James Gunn (Tromeo and Juliet, Dawn of the Dead) has been drafted in to handle the script.

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Max Payne 3 To Surface Next March News

 

It was originally announced at the tail-end of 2009 before descending into a media blackout, suffering numerous delays, and subsequently being removed from Take-Two Interactive's financial reports (prompting some press outlets to raise concerns that it'd been canned), but now Rockstar's Max Payne 3 has been placed back on the release schedules for a March 2012 launch.

A new press release has effectively re-announced the game, doling out some new screens and story details while it's at it. True to the initial promotion that emerged on the game a couple of years back, this sequel depicts an older, more unkempt Max Payne who's fallen into disrepute somewhat following the events of the last game and is now a private security guard for a rich family in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

When a gang starts to target the family, Max is forced to re-engage in his classic tricks of bullet-time aided shoot-outs (yes, there will be bullet-time) as he struggles to clear his name and save the family under his protection.

Rockstar makes mention of Max Payne 3 as a "cross-studio" collaboration in this latest announcement, and TVG can confirm that Rockstar London has been brought on-board the project alongside the Rockstar Toronto studio that was initially commissioned to work on the game. As it did with GTA IV and Red Dead Redemption, Rockstar will also be making use of Natural Motion's expertise with its Euphoria engine for Max Payne 3.

Despite the long periods of doubt over Max Payne 3's future throughout the last couple of years, a cover article in EDGE earlier this year and a trickle of screens left in its wake confirmed that there was still life in the first Max Payne game to be developed outside of Remedy Entertainment.

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NeXtBox Graphics To Rival James Cameron's Avatar News

 

Despite the fact that it's yet to confirm whether it's developing the GPU for the next Xbox, graphics chip manufacturer, AMD has pointed towards the kind of visual detail we can expect from Microsoft's unannounced next-gen console.

According to an OXM US article (via Examiner), AMD says that the NeXtBox will be able to deliver visual detail on a par with the CGI in James Cameron's Avatar, which is certainly a lofty benchmark to aim for but the headline grabbing claims don't end there.

AMD went on to say that the AI and physics capabilities of NeXtBox hardware will be able to give every pedestrian in games like GTA and Saints Row an individual character, mentality, and pool of animations.

Although AMD isn't confirmed as the graphics chip supplier for Microsoft's next-gen console, it does provide the chip-sets for the Xbox 360 so a continued deal is likely. Whether or not that deal has been done already is the real question.

With claims like those above, AMD might simply be performing a Peacock-like display to Microsoft in the hope that the existing deal will be renewed for the NeXtBox. On the other hand, that deal may already be done and AMD might simply be so excited that it wants to shout from the rooftops.

Whatever the case, it's quite a gauntlet that AMD has laid down here and if next-gen visuals don't reach that level of fidelity then we all know who to address our angry e-mails to.

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Nintendo's Tokyo 3DS Event Wrap-up News

Nintendo gave detractors to its 3DS handheld some food for thought at its scheduled pre-TGS press event today, revealing a strong line-up of games for next year's slate as well as a healthy dose of juicy hardware announcements.

First-up, some news on the 3DS thumbpad attachment that was leaked last week: Nintendo announced that it will be coming to Japan in December for the modest price of 1500 yen (that's just over £12 in the UK) – the add-on will be powered by a single AAA battery.

There's no word on a Western release date for the thumbpad add-on at the moment, although Nintendo did confirm a bunch of games that will be compatible with the device. We already knew that Monster Hunter Tri-G would be a focus for the attachment's launch, but it's now clear that incoming titles Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater 3D and Resident Evil: Revelations will support it.

Having sampled those last two games with the current 3DS console, it's abundantly clear that both are in dire need of a second analogue pad (particularly MGS: Snake Eater 3D, which utilises the old trick of placing aim controls on the face buttons). Ace Combat 3D: Cross Rumble, Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop, and Dynasty Warriors VS will also be compatible with the attachment.

In other hardware news, Nintendo has scheduled a November update for the 3DS that will bring 3D video capture to the console for the first time (the handheld is currently limited to 3D photo capture). A new metallic red 3DS will also launch in Europe on September 30th to celebrate one million sales of the console in the territory (Japan will get a pink 3DS in October).

European release dates for Super Mario 3D Land and Mario Kart 7 have been shared – they'll drop on November 18th and December 2nd respectively. Nintendo also confirmed that Kid Icarus: Uprising and Luigi's Mansion 2 will miss 2011 and are now due to land next year.

New Paper Mario and Animal Crossing instalments for 3DS will arrive in 2012 too, as will a new Mario Tennis game that Nintendo announced at today's event. On the third-party side of things, Nintendo was able to announce that Monster Hunter 4 from Capcom is coming to the 3DS. This is a huge deal in Japan where the phenomenally successful series has traditionally found its handheld home on the PSP.

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No Smarties? Only Video Games Have The Answer - Opinion Feature

 

Jon Roberts has spent two years teaching children with special needs and educational problems in Warwick, England. During that time he's also developed music education workshops for the Armonico Consort, a music company from the same area. He is currently finishing a master's degree in Genetic Counselling at Cardiff University, alongside which he has taught at Lindamood-Bell learning process, a centre that helps children with language, comprehension and maths by developing their understanding of visual and pictorial imagery. In the remaining time he has aside from all this, Jon writes articles about video games for TVG like this one...

Yesterday morning, a small news story appeared that unsurprisingly got lost amongst all the song and dance over News of the World phone hacking, Rupert Murdoch's subsequently unsuccessful bid to take over BskyB, and the attempts to stop him from creating a giant death star that will orbit the world and cause everyone’s face to melt so we will all look like him and Harry Redknapp, presumably. Underneath the story about Murdoch, phones, and newspapers was a report which showed that, in UK schools, poorer students are falling further behind their more wealthy peers in the education process. According to the BBC, a Sutton Trust study found pupils eligible for free meals in schools below national standards were a third less likely to reach GCSE targets than better-off students elsewhere. This follows on from a study in May of this year, conducted by the Confederation of British Industry, which raised concerns over the standard of the basic skills that pupils were leaving school with. Specifically, the organisation's annual education and skills survey also suggested that many employers (44%) have had to invest in remedial training for school and college leavers.

The trust is launching an Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) targeting this group of children, using £125m of government money and income from other sources. The Sutton Trust says it will aim to focus support on "innovative projects and on scaling-up projects which are cost effective and have the potential to be replicated in other schools."

I put forward the idea that some of this dosh could be spent on developing video games to help those from poorer backgrounds who are falling behind. If we want to turn kids from dummies into smarties then video games could have the answer. Let me explain why:

Contrary to the idea that video games are merely violent bloodfests aimed at adolescent piss weasels, there is good evidence to show that they can be used effectively in education, and this is an idea that is becoming more mainstream. In a recent speech to the Royal Society, the Minister for Education, Michael Gove encouraged educators to experiment with using video games to help teach maths and science. This seems like a sensible idea given video games’ rich history of being used in new and imaginative ways.
Take, for example, a study published by the American Medical Association in 2007 which found that video game skill correlates with Laparoscopic surgical skills, concluding that “Video games may be a practical teaching tool to help train surgeons.” Going back to 1996, research printed in the Perceptual & Motor Skills journal suggested that reaction times could be improved in children through computer game use. And as far back as 1986 a study in the same journal showed that spatial visualisation test scores can be improved by video game playing.

Video games are often cited as causes for reduction in concentration levels in children, leaving their attention spans shorter than a hermit’s address book. However, while there is evidence that certain video games can correlate with reduced attention spans, there’s also plentiful evidence to suggest that the opposite is true. For example, Alan Pope of the NASA Langley Research Centre used video games with a ‘Biofeedback’ process (originally used to improve the attention span of astronauts) to reduce the impulsiveness and hyperactivity of children with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). Video games have also been used in health care settings. ‘Packy and Marlon’ were characters created for the SNES to help children and adolescents with their diabetes treatments. They were so successful that two new characters have been created: ‘Bronkie the Brachiosaurus’ (for asthma self-management) and Rex Ronan for smoking prevention. Presumably Penisy Pete will soon follow for those with erectile dysfunction. Go to clickhealth.org if you want to know more, although prepare to be disappointed if you expect to find Mr. Pete.

For me, the evidence that strongly supports the idea that video games can be used to help struggling students from poorer backgrounds is that they are great motivators. Take, for example, Kandie Demarest’s account of her autistic 7 year-old son (found at lessontutor.com/kd3.html). Demarest testifies that, although her son had serious deficiencies in language and understanding, and social and emotional difficulties, video game playing was one activity where he was able to excel. This was ego-boosting for him and also had a self calming effect. Anecdotally my experience of teaching challenging children is that if you find something they are good at you can use it as a hook with which to hang other positive beliefs about themselves.  I used sports and music, and I see no reason why video games should not be the same.  

Other than providing an arena where young people can have successes, and therefore a sense of achievement crucial to all successful learning, video games have that great motivating factor: they are often good, honest fun. An article in the British Journal of Clinical Psychology points out, “Curiosity, fun and the nature of the challenge appear to add to a game’s education potential.” The value of the joy found in video games – which is so often forgotten – has been demonstrated in the arena of medical rehabilitation. In one case study a video game was used to improve arm control in a 13 year-old boy with Erb’s palsy.  The authors concluded that the game format capitalized on the child’s motivation to succeed and focused attention away from potential discomfort. Pamela Kato writes a good article outlining different ways video games can be used in health care settings - they are divisive and imaginative, ranging from anxiety reduction to helping with chemotherapy symptoms, and physiotherapy. All the applications rest on the assumption that video games can be real, genuine fun and that people want to play them. Fun, educational and confidence boosting. Sounds like they’re worth at least of some that £125 million to me.

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