Tag Archives: Pandemic

A promo trailer showing off the preorder bonus for The Sabotuer has popped up over on D’toid.

It’s a Nazi dagger, and you can only get it through GameStop.

Here’s the info:

“Reserve your copy of The Saboteur today and make your enemies die at the blade of their own steel with an exclusive Nazi knife, stolen from your enemies. This in-game weapon gives you the ultimate revenge with a silent and swift execution maneuver. ”

It’s out on the PS3, PC and 360 on December 4 in Europe and December 8 in the US.

EA’s sent out three new shots of The Saboteur for us to look at.

It’s looks good. Different for the WWII genre anyways, innit.

They’re after the jump. It’s out on the PS3, PC and 360 on December 4 in Europe and December 8 in the US.

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Tom French, lead designer of The Saboteur, has posted a developer diary over on the US PS Blog, explaining the origins of the game’s hero Sean Delvin, how and why he was based on 1930′s British/French grand prix champion William Grover-Williams, and how this is not your typical WWII game.

“We wanted to make our hero the action hero we all wish we could be in our hearts,” wrote French. “To further ourselves from the typical WWII story we set out to make Sean’s story personally motivated rather than political.

“We felt strongly that it was extremely important to let the player to step into the shoes of Sean Devlin and become The Saboteur right along side of him.

“You’ll get to play the origin story of The Saboteur, race in vintage race cars across the streets of Paris, scale the Eiffel tower, shoot your way through hordes of Nazis, sabotage their operations with explosives, chase through burning zeppelins, derail trains and that’s just a few examples of the big action moments.”

Sounds great to us. Hit the link for the rest.

New screens for The Saboteur have popped up over on the official website.

Should you be unsure which ones are new, USA Today has them in order for you here.

Also, if you preorder your copy of the game through EA, GameStop, or GameCrazy, you will get an exclusive Nazi knife, stolen from your enemies.

Game’s out December 4 and 8 for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 in the UK and US, respectively.

There’s a trailer after the break for Pandemic’s The Saboteur.

Game’s out December 4 and 8 for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 in the UK and US, respectively.

We honestly can’t wait. It looks bad ass.

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The now defunct Australian house for Pandemic Studios has released a video of the Wii game it was working on and we have it posted after the break.

Called either The Next Big Thing or No Limits Racing, the video contains pseudo-celebrities, and the ability to put your Mii in-game as a character.

Regarding the footage from the Brisbane-based studio, EA commented: “On any given day, there are a lot of great game ideas under consideration at EA … not all of them go all the way to market.”

Rumors back in January stated that the devs were also at work on a Dark Knight game for PS3 and Xbox 360 before the studio was shuttered.

Thanks, Joystiq.

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There’s a video of a canned Pandemic Wii racer thing after the break called Next Big Thing.

Looks OK. Clearly wasn’t. Thanks, Kotaku.

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Pandemic does not want you to think of The Saboteur as just another World War II game, because it doesn’t either.

It’s just the setting, more or less.

“We don’t even really think of our game as a WWII game, it’s the backdrop to our game which gives us arguably the best real world bad guys of all time,” lead designer Thomas French told D’toid. “Our game is big, over the top, and filled with lots of high action.

“Mechanically we’re so different from those games too and the ‘kitchen sink’ of tools we have for the player make for something that’s even different in just the sandbox genre as well. It’s also got a different world than people are used to seeing in this time period, full of grit, personal stories, and real characters.

“We wanted to use some historical events but not be too tied to dates so it wouldn’t keep us from telling the story and putting that in the foreground. Being a sandbox game where the player and can play parts of the story at their leisure we didn’t want to have to have events happen at particular dates that would limit the player’s freedom.”

Game’s out this year for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.

More on Pandemic’s The Saboteur today, with a new movie being released in celebration of E3 next week.

It has drunk Nazis, which is always a plus, and a blurred out backside in a bar scene. Minus a point for the blurred ass, EA.

It’s out “autumn/winter 2009″ according to the end of the trailer. PC, PS3 and 360.

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Some new footage of Pandemic’s The Saboteur’s popped up on GTTV, showing off the Will to Fight system of the landscape changing from black and white to colour as you progress through the game.

The WWII title’s set in Paris, with the streets dropping monotone as you fight back against the Nazi occupation.

The video’s interspersed with an interview with dev lead Tom French. Take a look. There’s no date on it as yet.

EA’s put out a bunch of screens and art for The Saboteur, containing both new and old stuff.

There’s some nice bits of art there, but we’re pretty sure the screens are old.

The Pandemic actioner was shown in London earlier this week.

Get them after the break.

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Pandemic’s The Saboteur isn’t coming out any time soon. Just in case you thought it might be.

“There’s still definitely a lot of work to do,” dev boss Tom French told VG247 in London this week.

“We’re not even alpha yet. There’s little quirks and kinks, but we still have plenty of time to work that kind of crap out.”

This year? Recent mag articles had pegged it for a 2009 ship. Doesn’t sound like it.

“We haven’t said an exact date yet,” said French. “We are getting closer, and we are getting closer to locking down that date. We want to make sure we hit the right window. We don’t want to get lost, and hopefully we’ll find the right window and the right place in time to get this game out.

“It’s a pretty ambitious project and there’s a lot of content there to explore and we’re really proud of it. We just want to make it come out at the right time and give it the level of polish we want to deliver it at too.”

French admitted that Pandemic’s April 2007 announcement of the game – a sprawling open world action story set in wartime Paris – was too early considering what had been accomplished at that point.

“We definitely started talking about it a bit too soon,” French said.

“We only had a small section of the world even built at that point. We had all these big ideas and aspirations, and it was time to prove it, really. We just went quiet.

“Then the EA acquisition happened, and that gave us a little bit more time to keep massaging and refining the game… All the core concepts are still there – the climbing, the fighting, the shooting, the sneaking mechanics, the racing, the story, the character – but it’s gotten so much better than it did back then. It was more like a tech demo at that point.”

French assured us, however, that the project was ramping up.

“The team has grown,” he said. “We inherit people from Mercenaries and other games, so we’ve definitely got a lot more people working on the project, helping refine all those little details that we’ve been talking about but nobody had time to touch.”

Get screens and more info from the game’s official site.

There’s some early video of Pandemic’s Saboteur after the break, courtesy of supperannuation.

It’s not the best quality, but you get the idea. The game appears to be Indiana Jones in game form, with ledge-leaping, pulling Germans from moving trucks and TPS Nazi action. The jumping staff car may be a bridge too far, but who are we to judge?

Quick, before it gets yanked.

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Pandemic’s launched an official site tag for Saboteur, confirming the long-awaited action game for a 2009 release, according to this Joystiq story.

It’s PS3 and 360, and set in WWII Paris.

There’s info through there on a “Will to Fight” mechanic. The developer reckons the city and action change and react to you as “you free it from Nazi oppression and restore hope and grandeur to” the French capital.

Tres bon. Hit this for new screens.

Lord of the Rings: Conquest demo’s been downloaded more than 1 million times from Xbox Live and PSN, EA’s announced.

The taster apparently debuted as the top demo on Live, ending a nine-week run from World at War.

The Pandemic-developed game released earlier this month.

A very reliable “insider source” has told videogaming247 that Star Wars Battlefront 3 is heading back to Pandemic’s studios in Los Angeles, California.

Pandemic Studios and LucasArts developed the first Battlefront back 2004, with the sequel coming out just a year later.

However, inside of 12 months of Battlefront II’s release, Free Radical Design announced that it would be making a third title in the series. The project was dropped late last year amid FRDs financial difficulties.

Yesterday, alpha footage leaked onto the net that another one our VG247′s contacts told us that footage was indeed real.

We have contacted EA, who owns Pandemic Studios, but as of yet have not been able to reach the publisher for comment.

VG247 is told that this is pretty nailed on, so expect an announcement sooner rather than later.

By Mike Bowden

EA has announced that Pandemic’s freedom fighter shooter, Saboteur, has been pushed back to fiscal 2010, which translates to anywhere from April 1, 2009 to March 31, 2010.

No reason was given as to why the game was pushed back.

Thanks, Gamespot.

By Mike Bowden

EA’s just confirmed that Pandemic’s Lord of the Rings: Conquest will ship on January 13 in the US and everywhere else on January 9.

“Players will finally be able to fight through Middle-earth along the frontlines of good or evil,” said Pendemic boss Josh Resnick. “And what The Lord of the Rings fan hasn’t fantasized about joining Sauron’s army to slay Hobbits?”

Absolutely none, obviously.

Full thing through the link.

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GI is reporting that software giants Valve, EA and Pandemic are set to take part in The Montreal International Game Summit, (MIGS), on November 18-19 at the Palais des congrès de Montréal.

Valve’s Jason Mitchell will be talking about visual arts and EA’s Steve Schnur will be talking serious business.

More details through the link.

By Mike Bowden

When the tagline said “World in Flames,” we didn’t… Never mind. IGN’s given the PS2 version of Mercenaries 2 3.9/10, which for IGN is pretty, pretty bad. Snip:

The original Mercenaries came out three-and-a-half years ago. But instead of giving us a game with more than three years worth of updates, Pi Studios has actually taken three steps backwards. Mercs 2 looks worse, plays worse and is just plain worse than the groundbreaking original. Why this watered-down version was even published is a mystery. Were this game fun, with the missions structured in a way that made them enjoyable, then there’d at least be a reason to rent. But there’s nothing here to recommend. Mercenaries 2 on PS2 is a bad game. ‘Nuff said.

More through the link. Don’t say we didn’t warn you, though. Video review after the break.

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