Category Archives: Impressions

A Darkness sequel? That Starbreeze won’t touch it with a ten foot demon tentacle? Sounds bad: it won’t stop DI making a game capable of breaking free from the shadow of its predecessor, though.

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My first experience with the 3DS was in July, back at Nintendo’s UK showcase at the top of a very tall building on the Thames. It was a landmark moment; I’ve not felt like I did when I turned up that 3D slider for the first time since my introduction to the original iPhone touchscreen. It’s a moment where technology feels like magic.

The second time I laid hands on a 3DS, circumstances were rather less favourable. As Street Fighter legend Yoshinori Ono so elegantly put it, I was in a giant, cold shed in the middle of nowhere. Like everyone else, I’d been up since stupid o’clock in the morning and had been forced to sit through a press conference in which nothing was announced for fifty minutes. I had to fight with about 1,300 other people in order to get hands-on time with anything. But seeing one of my favourite games beautifully remade in 3D honestly made it worth the pain.

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Thinking about it for a second, tennis games have a weird tendency to be at the forefront of revolution in the videogames industry. The first proper commercial videogame was a tennis game. Virtua Tennis was a Dreamcast poster child. Tennis games were some of the first to really embrace online. And many of the first motion control game were tennis games – Wii MotionPlus launched with two of them.

According to 2K Czech President Stephane Dupas, Top Spin 4 marks the point at which motion control has become sophisticated enough to satisfy the series’ simulation needs – on Sony’s hardware, anyway. We spent some time with Dupas and the game in London recently – read our impressions below.

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Modern military FPS games, viewed ungenerously, are basically a sequence of orders cloaked in comfortingly abstract jargon, removing any illusion that you’re shooting at actual people. Go here, put C4 on that, shoot that dude, defend this building, oskar mike tango down eliminate contact GET ON THE MACHINEGUN RAMIREZ . As a cog in the war machine, you barely even know whether you’re fighting for the good guys. Who cares, anyway, so long as there are objective markers?

Homefront is a bit different. In its opening sequence, you are handcuffed to a schoolbus and forced to watch an invading Korean army round people up in front of houses and shoot them in front of their small, screaming children, splattering the insides of their heads against the window. Well, there’s your motivation.

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Today is the day the majority of reviews for both James Bond titles from Activision go live, and we’ve rounded-up what we can find for you on Blood Stone and GoldenEye below.

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Lord of the Rings Online has been free-to-play since September 10 in the US, but players in Europe have not been as lucky, as the launch of the new model was delayed. Thankfully, the wait is finally over, as Codemasters revealed today the revamp will go live next Tuesday, November 2.

This isn’t the first time a Turbine game has hit a snag in Europe, as the free-to-play model for Dungeon & Dragons Online was also delayed in the region, but finally went free-to-play earlier this year when Turbine took over the servers on the continent.

Thankfully, all issues getting the contractual matters sorted are finalized, and in order to get European players acquainted with some of the changes and additions, we’ve been playing the game and taking a few notes since it launched in the US, and hopefully our summarization will get you excited for some free-to-play goodness.

Not only are there new quests and a lovely new area to explore, but the Harvestmath Festival is also going on at the moment, and while always fun, there’s a new bit of madness to take part in this year: Bilbo’s infamous basement.

In summary, Bilbo was one sick little man.

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So. Diablo III looked hot before Friday’s opening ceremony at Blizzcon. By the end of the weekend, it would be looking “hawt”.

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Ubisoft recently put a load of games journalists up in Rome to see the first few hours of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. We didn’t get invited. But we did get to play the game in London just afterwards. Read on for hands-on impressions from the first few hours of the game.

Warning: may contain minor spoilers about the opening. But trust me, it’s better than watching me try to talk about the game without actually talking about the game for a thousand words.

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Even when the Internet was aflame with comments from people who’d played it at PAX, even when I was invited to come and see it for a hands-on in London, even when I was actually entering the room full of demo pods showing the title screen, I didn’t really believe that Duke Nukem Forever existed. But it does, and I’ve played it, and talked to Randy Pitchford and Gearbox’s VP Steve Gibson about the extraordinary story behind it.

Want to know what it’s like?

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Hothead games has released a small trailer, showing of the quirkiness of Swarm.

We were given a demonstration of the game at PAX, and it looks rather fun, and if you checked out the developer walkthrough of the game we posted last week, you’ll get to see exactly what we saw during the hourly demonstration.

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The first Dead Space was one scary game. Very scary. In fact it was so scary, we left some lights on in the house the first couple of nights after playing it.

If you were of the same mindset, Dead Space 2 will be no different for you. In fact, after getting some hands-on time during PAX last weekend, we can almost safely say it might even give you full blown nightmares. And that, my friends, is a good thing.

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We were given the opportunity to play as the female Hawke in Dragon Age 2 at PAX this weekend – it was announced just before the show that you could choose sex for the RPG’s lead – and got a good look at the sequel’s graphical overhaul to-boot.

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DeathSpank, not content to rest on his laurels, is back later this month in Thongs of Virtue, where he must collect six pairs of thongs.

Hopefully, they went through the wash beforehand.

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Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood was impossible to miss at PAX Prime last weekend, what with it’s massive display and flashy booth.

We weren’t only intrigued by the booth’s spare-no-expense decor, though; we were also curious as to how Brotherhood’s multiplayer was looking.

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Portal 2 was shown to the public for the first time at PAX Prime last weekend, and while no one got hands-on time, Valve’s Josh Weier was there to show us a bit of the puzzler’s co-op portion.

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It’s rumour no more. Motorstorm Apocalypse is out in the open. It’s coming next year and sounds properly awesome. We were in London to check out the game.

We also chatted to game director Matt Southern about the game. Get our interview here.

[Word by Adam Hartley]

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Treyarch studio head Mark Lamia has said that the team was pleased with being able to do something new with Call of Duty: Black Ops.

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Update: Someone’s picked out the play footage in the background of the PS Blog interview and blown it up. Check it here.

Original: Guerrilla Games’ senior producer Steven Ter Heide has had a chat with the US PS Blog on all things “jetpacks, fan requests, new Helghast foes”, and everything else Killzone 3 related.

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Reviews for Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands are going live, and we have a few of them rounded-up for you below the break.

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With the Halo: Reach multiplayer beta going live on May 3, you’re probably wondering what it’s like to actually play. We sent Adam Hartley to get some hands-on time with code at a Microsoft event in London.

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