2012 PlayStation 3 exclusive Starhawk is squarely aimed at the "sophisticated" gamer, Sony has said.
In a new interview Sony vowed to make a game for "shooter game players" and promised not to dumb it down.
"We're aiming the story, and the gameplay, toward a bit more of sophisticated gamer," Harvard Bonin, Sony Santa Monica Studios' Senior Producer, told the EU PlayStation blog.
"I've been quoted as saying, 'This isn't your mom's game... it's for gamers,' and I stand behind that. While we are trying to make the fun in the game more accessible, that doesn't mean we're dumbing it down. We're making this for shooter game players. It's not going to be watered down to try and please casual gamers that don't know no-scoping from a hole in their head."
Starhawk, the follow-up to Warhawk, is being developed by LightBox Interactive, the studio set up by Dylan Jobe and other ex-members of Incognito Entertainment, and Sony Santa Monica.
Warhawk launched as a Blu-ray and digitial download. Starhawk, however, will be released as a Blu-ray retail only. Unlike Warhawk, Starhawk features a fully-fledged single-player campaign as well as the multiplayer portion the series is known for.
Players assume the role of Emmett Graves, a Rift miner turned gun for hire altered by Rift Energy, found on the outer reaches of space. The enemy faction is the Outcast, humans turned into monsters following exposure to Rift Energy.
On the subject of protagonist Graves, Bonin compared him to Metal Gear star Solid Snake and Batman. "Snake definitely has his demons and so does Emmett," he said.
"Hes not a fantastical superhero, he's just a guy who got caught up in a bad situation... we like to think he's a bit like John McClane, kind of an 'everyman'.
"Granted, the Rift energy does allow him to be a little stronger and a little faster than the other Rifters. I don't think that a cookie-cutter superhero character is what sophisticated gamers are looking for. While we want to be a popcorn blockbuster type of action game, we also think there's room for smart storytelling. Even Batman is a tortured guy, and you've seen how well that's done."
At the peak of his popularity, Tintin's creator George Remi was in control of an organisation that must have looked a little like a video game company. When writing the Calculus Affair, for example, there were photographers despatched to Switzerland for reference material, as well as background artists, letterers, and Remi himself who would draw the characters. Now Tintin is in the hands of an actual video game company. No wonder he looks so at home in his new surroundings.
Ubisoft's been crafting a Tintin game to accompany the forthcoming film, and, as is often the case with these things, I'd been expecting the worst: a cartoon masterpiece reduced to a limply reconfigured FPS where you run around Marlinspike Hall, stealth-choking Nestor, collecting a trail of floating croissants and taking cover behind 2CVs. (I know Tintin's not French, incidentally, but I couldn't think of any Belgian cars.) Put those fears aside. What Ubisoft's actually done is much more interesting. It's taken Tintin, and turned him into Donkey Kong.
I certainly wasn't expecting that - yet it works surprisingly well. The game's 3D art is set on a 2D plane - if you've got a really expensive TV, by the bye, that art will be in actual pop-out 3D too - and you control Tintin as he jumps around from platform to platform in a series of teetering split-level environments, finishing off baddies and collecting trinkets.
Tintin can fight, but that's not really the way to get the best out of him. Instead, as in the books, you should be trying to out-think your enemies, watching their patrols, dropping down behind them, and then stealth-lamping them, or using elements of the environment to get rid of them in other ways.
On a level set aboard the Karaboudjan - a ship I have been dreaming about exploring since I was six years old - this often amounts to lobbing stuff. Tintin can pick up objects and throw them -you aim with a glowing trajectory line, like Gears of War or Worms - and that means you can bowl your foes over with oil drums or flatten them with crates.
There's a lot of variety to the system, however. Throw a pot over somebody's head he'll go on a clumsy cartoon rampage, possibly punching out some of his own team. In a boss fight against Allan, Captain Haddock's villainous first mate, you'll need to race back and forth across the screen and trick him into accidentally blowing up stacks of fireworks that will work as little homing rockets, before sending him crashing into a wall with banana peels when he starts to give chase. (Bananas may seem to be taking the whole Donkey Kong homage a little far, but in Tintin's defence he was using the trick back in Cigars of the Pharaoh - classic bedtime reading since 1934.)
It all works very well, by the looks of it: the levels are smartly laid out and filled with little secrets to uncover, there's an enviably tactile sense of cartoon violence to every punch and every bullet, and the detailing shows that real attention has been paid to the source material.
Enemies flatten themselves against banisters in a spindly Thompson Twin-esque tangles of limbs, the punching animation is right out of the books - one arm back at a right angle, the fist of the other one pointed straight up - and the way that Allan's body shakes as he fires his machine-gun is so perfect you can almost see the "rat-a-tat-a-tat" emblazoned across the screen in neat little writing.
Even better, Tintin actually looks pretty good. In the forthcoming movie, from what I can tell, he is a grubby and dead-eyed homunculus. He's horror in a sweater, and he wears his skin like someone who has just put it on in a basement, perhaps as a prelude to a night spent licking tombstones and sneezing on the bible. In Ubisoft's game, however, you get to focus on the entire figure rather than just the face, and the whole thing works a little more convincingly.
The developer's promising a campaign of over ten hours, with plenty of different locations and familiar faces along the way. On top of that, there's also a co-op campaign that is, brilliantly, set within one of Captain Haddock's dreams. It uses the same mechanics as the main game - you're still exploring complex 2D environments, beating one screen at a time, and making it to the exit - but there are a couple of smart differences.
The first is that the environment is now filled with surreal touches - ship railings that lead past floating fireplaces, doors that hang in the air like something out of Magritte - and the second is that you can team up with Haddock himself.
Both characters have their own special skills: Tintin has a grappling hook, and Haddock has super strength - the super strength, I like to think, of alcoholism - and as these skills converge, the levels become far trickier to navigate. There are traps within traps, puzzles that have to be untangled from both ends, and the obligatory moments where you're transformed into Snowy and get to sniff out treasure. Good old Snowy, eh?
Little vignettes like this, along with the levels' stylish forced perspectives and quick animations, suggest that Tintin might ultimately be more suited to a game than a film anyway - even if the film in question is directed by Steven Spielberg and co-written by Joe Cornish. Ubisoft may not have gotten the font right, then - and I'm genuinely ashamed that that should irritate me as much as it does - but it's handling a lot of far more important elements with real style. This is shaping up to be that rarest of tie-ins: the one that truly shows an understanding and appreciation of its subject matter.
UPDATE: European distributor Lace Mamba has told Eurogamer a boxed version of Red Orchestra 2 will hit UK shops on Friday 16th September.
ORIGINAL STORY: PC exclusive Red Orchestra 2 has been delayed, Tripwire Interactive has announced.
Its 30th August launch has been pushed back two weeks to 13th September.
"While we understand the fans are clamouring to get their hands on the game, we felt we needed the extra two weeks to get it right and add the extra polish the game (and the players) deserve," Tripwire said in a statement.
PC tactical FPS sequel Red Orchestra 2: Heroes of Stalingrad costs US gamers $39.99 via Steam and other digital download stores. Prices for other territories will be "set to appropriate pricing for those territories". Nice.
The follow-up to acclaimed 2006 effort Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45 adds a cover system, collision detection and a new stat tracking system.
Spooky Game Boy title Avenging Spirit headlines this week's Nintendo eShop update.
Originally released in 1992, the black and white classic sees the title's main character shot to death at the start of the game.
Players must then play as his ghost, able to inhabit other characters and creatures to avenge your untimely end and, naturally, save your girlfriend.
It's a portable version of the full-colour arcade 1991 original, which was ported to iOS earlier this year. It's out on the App store for $1.99 (£1.21). The 3DS version costs a little more - 3 (about £2.60).
Also in the eStore this week, touch-screen fishing challenges from Go Series Fishing Resort, and some card games.
eShop update - 11/08/11
Avenging Spirit (3DS Virtual Console) - 3
Go Series Fishing Resort (DSiWare) - 2, 200 DSi Points
If you want to install upcoming shooter Rage on your Xbox 360 you'll need to make some serious room about 22GBs.
id Software programming legend John Carmack revealed the gargantuan install size during his QuakeCon keynote (reported by GamingBolt)
"On the 360 we don't have a partial install option," he said. "It's all or nothing, which is kind of unfortunate. It means you have to install 21/22GB of stuff which takes a long time but if you've got it and you play it on the 360 that's the way to go."
Why is it the way to go? Because not installing the game means latency.
"Once you get everything from memory that works pretty good, but if you're coming straight from the hard drive then the first time you walk into everything from the DVD or from the Blu-ray even worse in terms of total latency time you listen to that Blu-ray churning around as it's pulling everything in," Carmack continued.
Tom played the first couple of hours of Rage last week and returned enthused. "The Sisyphean grind of Doom 3 has been replaced by a post-apocalyptic, quasi-openworld crust, and within that the immediacy of control, flying body parts and dense, corkscrewing level design corridors galore have been embellished with smart combat modifiers and, of course, some of the fastest, most detailed graphics you've ever seen, flooding out of your preferred buffer at 60 frames per second," he wrote in Eurogamer's Rage preview.
High-speed arcade puzzle game Cubixx HD launches on the PlayStation Network on 17th August, developer Laughing Jackal has announced.
It costs £6.29 in the UK. PlayStation Plus subscribers get a 20 per cent discount during its first week on sale.
Cubixx HD is from the developer behind the recently released chain reaction PlayStation Mini OMG-Z, and the original Cubixx, released as a Mini two years ago. It is the UK studio's first PS3 game.
It's a Qix-style game that sees you move around the faces of a cube to cut out areas - eventually all the faces - and release the energy trapped inside.
The art style rekindles memories of cult eighties film Tron.
Laughing Jackal is working on a PlayStation Minis conversion of the Fighting Fantasy series of Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks.
One of the more insane conversations I've had recently was with someone who was predicting the "brutal" crash of the mobile gaming industry in about two years.
At the time I was having one of those deliberately non-argumentative nights where I just let people spout whatever nonsense they like at me, on the assumption that if I just smile and nod, we'll quickly move onto another subject.
In my more combative (on deadline) mood, I'd probably be keen to explore whether that's even possible. Are we in some sort of crazy bubble of novelty right now? Are people going to reach saturation point and just stop buying apps en masse?
I'd like to think that the relentlessly tempting pricing model and the ever-increasing capabilities of newer handsets will keep that at bay. Also, as more of the 'big boys' join the mobile scene, the better the quality of the games will be, and the more attractive these titles will become to the current set of unbelievers.
Personally, the only direction I can see the graph going in terms of mobile gaming sales is up. Sure, people will drop out through App Fatigue now and then, but you can bet they'll be back the minute something truly ground-breaking shows up...
I'm not sure how many hot dinners I've had in my life, but at this stage it must be neck-and-neck with the number of quirky racing games vying for your attention on the App Store.
PowPow Games must realise this, and to combat the inevitable heckling has made sure that Dream Track Racing's courses are barmier than a hot barm cake.
At first glance, you might equate its penchant for stunts and flips with a kind of DIY Trials, but fortunately there's rather more to it. Once you get into the meat of the game, you're sent on a dizzying whirl of loop-the-loop, where judicious use of tilt control is every bit as crucial to your course time as raw acceleration.
New tracks come and go in seconds as you blitz your way around attractive patchwork environments, but the quest for gold medals makes it the kind of game that you become unexpectedly intimate with.
As that relationship grows and as new, more elaborate constructions unlock, it becomes obvious why Apple was keen to flag Dream Track Racing up as its iPhone Game of the Week.
It's hardly lacking in content either, despite the impulse price, with 60 levels as well as Wi-Fi multiplayer, a track editor for the creatively minded and a soothing massage thrown in free of charge when you're done. Actually, I can't be sure about the last point, but I'm sure PowPow would oblige if you asked them nicely.
8/10
Zombie Gunship
iPhone - £0.69. In-app purchases from £0.69 for 10,000 coins to £34.99 for 1.5 million coins.
A video game featuring zombies you say? What are the chances? But wait! This time you're in the gunner seat of a heavily armed AC-130 ground attack aircraft, and we all know that death from above makes it all OK again.
Cynicism aside, Limbic's stylish shift in approach makes a substantial difference, and any indifference is swiftly swept away as you attempt to cut a swathe through the undead hordes from the air.
Similar to the one-off aerial attack levels you might have seen in Call Of Duty and Ghost Recon, the idea is to stop the zombies from breaching the bunker.
Allow so much as one shambling ghoul into the safe haven and you're kicked off the job. But the money you earn for all your kills and rescues can be put towards upgrading your arsenal - something you'll quickly realise is essential if you're going to save humanity from the zombie apocalypse.
With faster reload speed, a better damage spread and faster bullets, you can start to kill more efficiently, and therefore sweep around the map quicker with every passing turn. But with more powerful weapons comes a greater risk of inadvertently wiping out a fleeing human with splash damage - and if three innocents get killed, there's another excuse for the commander to kick you off the job.
But it gets worse for you the longer you survive, with giant lumbering beasts joining the throng, and huge crowds of undead to dispatch from all angles. Keeping your head above water for more than a few minutes at a time is always a tall order, but with its constant drip-feed of rewards to haul you back, it's the kind of game you can lose hours to without even noticing.
It's enough to melt your stony heart. Gamer meets gamer. Gamers fall in love, decide to break out on their own and form their own development studio to make little game babies together.
And so here we have Fenix Fire's 'first born', a rather ebullient side-scrolling platformer that wants - more than anything - to put some sunshine back in your day.
Poor awkward teen robot boy Roboto finds himself on a quest to find his lost love, who has inconsiderately blasted off to another galaxy. Cue jump-filled kleptomania!
It's not terrifically original, sadly, but rather like Cordy (now available for free on iOS, people!), Roboto still catches the eye through its class and high-gloss execution.
Key to its effervescent charm is the quality level design combined with simple yet flexible controls, and a smooth learning curve to ensure players develop a deft mastery of the twitchy hover-jump mechanics. It also helps if you're a decent shot, too, with increasingly irksome sentries to neutralise en route.
By the time Roboto starts facing off against chunky boss monsters, this simple, unpretentious yomp starts to show its teeth a little and adds challenge to its cute cartoon sheen. Roboto could have strayed from the well-worn formula a little more than it does, but as a quick platforming snack between meals, this does just fine.
It's long been established that hair are your aerials. They pick up signals from the cosmos and transmit them directly into the brain. And yet people like Sally spend their entire waking lives perpetrating follicular vandalism and get paid for it.
Stranger still, government agents like Gamehouse create electronic simulations of this act, where willing participants wander in off the street to have their hair washed, coloured, cut and blow dried. The even have their eyebrows plucked. The indignity.
The better you perform this curious multitasking exercise, the more customers you get. And the busier it gets, the more plates you have to keep spinning, lest your client base storms out in disgust.
Keep on top of things, though, and you'll have more filthy lucre to spend on new washing units, magazine subscriptions, coffee makers and, eventually, assistants. Next stop: world domination and celebrity dandruff.
Sure enough, you'll build your chain into a world famous enterprise and get to snip the stars and ply them with magazines and coffee until your eyes bleed.
If Diner Dash, Cake Mania and their ilk are your grubby little gaming secrets, then I won't hold it against you. Sally's Salon might well be as vacuous as deep space, but since when did that ever stop something being strangely enjoyable?
Somewhere within the heart of the sprawling Gameloft organisation is a menacing cliché-generating machine. Every hit gaming genre in existence is fed, byte by byte, into its gaping maw by concerned-looking lab techs.
No-one has any real control over the machine - we'll call it MAL - because it became sentient a few months ago and began periodically uttering delirious one-liners. In rare moments of clarity, new mobile games are spontaneously delivered to the nervous, white-coated operatives.
The latest of these focuses on agents of a secret organisation who protect society from the invisible threats of the 21st Century. The best agents. The smartest technology. The most generic Splinter Cell-meets Syphon Filter stealth-shooter clone you've ever laid eyes on? That'll be the one.
Perhaps Silent Ops should come fitted with a free memory wipe, because if you'd never played any sneaky shooter over the past 13 years, you could be fooled into thinking that it wasn't bad. Like most Gameloft titles, it looks like it was made in 2001, the twin stick controls are entirely unsuitable for prolonged touchscreen play, and the narrative appears to have been phoned in by bored chimpanzees.
It's also hilariously easy, with an auto-aiming system apparently designed to remove the last traces of whatever gameplay was left. You might be prompted to engage in some swipe-y QTEs, melee battles and sniper interludes, but for the most part you're trudging through the most turgid, unstealthy, third-person shooting crud anyone's dared inflict on the populace since the PSone.
The sooner Gameloft stops wasting its considerable resources making console-lite games and starts figuring out how to make the most out of mobile platforms, the better. Like 9mm, Silent Ops is gaming at its most clueless and uninspired.
New Borderlands 2 details have emerged from US magazine Game Informer (via Gematsu).
The 2012 FPS, like Borderlands, supports four-player co-op, but this time the protagonists from the first game are NPCs.
So, four new characters are available to play as. The first is Salvador, the Gunzerker, a stocky bloke who can dual-wield any weapon in the game. There he is below.
Eridium is the new game's currency, and is used to improve weapon and vehicle statistics. The first game's three-branch skill tree returns.
Dynamic story missions aim to improve storytelling. The narrative is shaped around your approach to an objective, the magazine says.
NPCs are improved. They will converse with the player character in a more interactive manner. Enemy AI is greatly improved.
As previously mentioned there are all new weapons, but all of the guns in the first game have been scrapped. Vehicles are more varied. One shown is called the Bandit Technical.
Oh, and of course, amusing/annoying robot Claptrap is back.
Battlefield 3 should keep you going for a while - the upcoming shooter has years' worth of unlocks, developer DICE has claimed.
It's the "deepest" shooter in the developer's history, and has ten times the number of unlocks than Battlefield: Bad Company 2 had.
These are spread over weapons, weapons attachments, gadgets and a "huge" unlock tree for vehicles.
"There should always be something left to achieve in Battlefield 3," persistence designers Valerian Noghin and Fredrik Thylander said on the Battlefield blog.
There are also medals, ribbons and service stars, which display your skill, commitment and teamplay prowess, to gather.
"You will be rewarded handsomely in Battlefield 3 for exemplary skill, such as capturing X amount of bases in one round," the designers said.
"Excellent teamplayers who keep the teams vehicles in mint condition and revive fallen comrades will not go unnoticed either. These type of skill-driven rewards are typically handed out in the form of ribbons, and good players can often get more than one ribbon in a single round."
The Battlefield blog details the way the upgrades and unlocks work in the sure to be a hit shooter, and reveals the Service Stars feature, designed to challenge the hardcore.
"The ultimate bragging right would be for a player to be awarded the rank of Colonel with 100 Service Stars attached, and to have 100 stars in all weapons, kits, and vehicles. Getting there will be a massive task consider that a challenge! :)"
A few years back, when DICE was sitting down and putting together its plans for domination of the first-person shooter genre - plans that may well come to fruition later this year - it peered into the future and asked: what's the one feature that all first-person shooter games will have?
The answer, it was surmised, was destructibility. Walls would come tumbling down, cover would crumble and bullets would tear into the scenery with realistic conviction. Both Bad Company games took that challenge on, but disappointingly, very few others followed this path.
With the Red Faction series now officially marked down in history as a noble failure, it's just Bodycount that's left to probe that particular vision of the future - and it does so with gusto. Things fall apart in this game, and they do so with style. Playing through one of its levels is like being given the keys to the sweet shop then wreaking havoc with a heavy mallet.
The destruction here is satisfyingly granular; wood splinters, metal buckles and concrete flecks away with pleasing authenticity. Its influence on the second-by-second play is unsurprisingly profound: cover shreds and walls give dissolve with ease. There's none of the persistent chipping away that Bad Company requires. Bodycount's destructibility is comically exaggerated, and a single grenade or a couple of shotgun shells is often all it takes to open up a new route.
It's an open-ended and freeform shooter, then, because its core mechanic dictates that. There can be no corridors to funnel the player through when the chief selling point allows you to bust through those narrow walls. It does frequently direct the player, however, and a look at three of its single-player levels shows an appetite for introducing choke points and smaller arenas in which the action intensifies.
That's where cover comes in, and for once, it's good to have a cover-based game that has spared a little thought for the mechanic. Holding the left trigger attaches the player to an object, and from there it's possible to peer over or around it with the left stick while using the right stick to aim. An elegant solution, and one that quickly becomes instinctive; within minutes, you're ducking and weaving through the gunfire with the speed and wit of a pro boxer.
You're a fighter with an envious arsenal too, and true to the game's spiritual forebear Black, the guns are lusted over with disturbing fervour. Rendered in exacting detail and taking up a pleasingly large section of your view, they're quite rightly the focus of the game.
These fictional designs, seemingly plucked from a six-year-old's daydreams rather than the pages of a military manual, are gloriously overstated; the Kriss SMG has a high-pitched and violent rasp that can bring walls down; the Super90 shotgun's a hearty boom stick that sends the enemy pirouetting across the map; and the standard assault rifle gives off a mean crackle.
Whether the AI puts up a fight worthy of Bodycount's mean arsenal remains to be seen. Its open-ended gunplay can show the enemy up as smart but functional; they'll know where the fight is and won't get snagged on the scenery (or what's left of it), an achievement in itself, but they don't behave in a way that elevates them from being mere cannon fodder.
Elsewhere, they are bullet sponges. The Psycho, a boss character covered in tribal paint who occasionally appears to switch up the pace, is slow to go down. The environment isn't, though, and when he's on the scene, the destruction is elevated to giddy levels.
There's another worry for Bodycount. Earlier this year it was seen as part of an arcade shooter revival that, with the poor performance of Bulletstorm and Brink's failure to live up to its developer's ambitions, has faltered before Codemasters' game has even been pressed. It's a concern, and Bodycount has much in common with the two.
With Brink it shares an exquisitely designed world that's equal parts comic book and sci-fi parable. The three levels shown off in Bodycount take in an African slum defined by steel containers and shanty huts that are quick to shred (not too far removed from Brink's centrepiece, Container City.)
A peek into the headquarters of The Target - Bodycount's sinister and mysterious villains - offers a sharp tonal shift. The colourful chaos is replaced by bold techno lines delivered in stark black, white and red, and it's here that the Target - complete with their preposterous Lady Gaga-inspired headwear - stalk. There's still shredding to be done, thankfully, with panes of glass shattering and black metal twisting back to reveal sparking electronics.
The third level offers a third flavour, gloomier yet still shot through with vibrancy. A fishing village in China is attacked under cover of rain-soaked night. It's the darkest part of the game's spectrum of colours, we're told, though it's still frequently lit by bright neon that, of course, explodes in a shower of sparks when shot.
It's not just the scenery that expires in bursts of colour either. When downed, enemy soldiers shower you with coloured orbs that tinkle delightfully when picked up. Dubbed Intel, this is Bodycount's in-game currency, used to top up a meter located at the bottom of the screen. When full, it can be exchanged for one of several power-ups: explosive ammo is as described, tearing even bigger holes in Bodycount's world, while adrenaline renders you temporarily invincible.
Intel's available in various flavours too: blue orbs are awarded for standard kills, while yellow ones are handed out for one of the game's skillshots, be that landing a bullet between someone's eyes or killing someone with the scenery. The third, a green orb, is the reward for chaining these skillshots together.
It's not hard to make comparisons to Bulletstorm here, and while the skillshots aren't as inventive or broad as in People Can Fly's game, the spirit's the same.It's an arcade shooter with its priorities firmly in place, a game in which the gun reigns supreme and everything falls before it.
Bodycount is a dynamic shooter that's striving to be unique. Here's hoping that it gets the success it deserves, because it's certainly something to be thankful for.
