More from E3!

I’ve been embedding from GameSpot for most of my game videos, but I like how easy it is to give people access to GameTrailers high definition videos, so I’ll use those today. If you want to watch a video in high definition, it should be shown as an option before the movie plays.
So, E3! Lots of interesting games coming out, though most of them have already been announced. There will be another Final Fantasy. Big surprise there! There were updates abound for many games, though I wonder what is going on with Alan Wake, I haven’t seen any new information since 2006.

Otherwise, get your butts off the couch and in front of your monitors, it’s time for an hour of game trailers!

Tom Clancy’s End War, here is a trailer from last year’s Ubisoft Days. This is the first RTS that will incorporate a full voice command system. If it works out well, the voice command system could add lots of fun to the gameplay, especially considering this game will come out on consoles, where controllers generally fail in the RTS genre.

Fallout 3, finally we can return to the romantic Fallout Universe! This has been a long time in waiting, and luckily it has been picked up by Bethesda (Morrowind, Oblivion), so we can be fairly sure this game will rock.

Fable 2, I really loved the first one, as well as every other game Peter Molyneux has ever worked on. Notice the canine companion theme in this game as well. Both Fable 2 and Fallout 3 have a serious focus on working with animals.

Dead Space, a good old fashioned “Deep Space” survival story. Don’t watch this trailer if you are easily creeped out.

Mirror’s Edge, a new acrobatic take on the FPS genre. Throw in a little bit of excessive government oversight, and you’ve got soemthing that reminds me of Ghost in the Shell.

Now go get some sunlight, there will be many sequestered months ahead.

Mercenaries 2

E3 2008 starts next week, this is a preview of one of the games that will undoubtedly be showcased.
Mercenaries was a great sandbox-style third person shooter released a few years back. It set your character (one of three possible choices) in the middle of a North Korean/UN/Chinese/South Korean conflict, playing each side in pursuit of money and reputation. I greatly enjoyed Mercenaries, which in my opinion offered more open ended fun than the GTA series (though I haven’t tried GTA4 yet).

Mercenaries 2 will be showcased at E3 2008, offering up the same three lovable, money grubbing warmongers, this time scorching earth in South America.

(the video may take awhile to load, my apologies, try refreshing the page if it wont load any video)

On Games and Women

Men and WomenUntil recently, gaming was primarily a male pastime. Females entering the realm of controllers, attribute modifiers, BFGs, and circle strafing have created a confused and disoriented male gamer. But fear not, one of my favorite gaming journalists has written an excellent paper detailing exactly how us devoted male gamers will make it out of this predicament alive. I recommend you all read it. For the sake of Cortanna, Kerrigan, Jade, Lara, and Jaina, read it. Read the article here.

Confirmed: Diablo 3

Diablo 3 IconAlright, I’ve spent the last hour or so pouring over the new Diablo 3 trailers/gameplay/interviews and I admit I am impressed! For once, I won’t be embedding game videos into the blog, I’ll be providing links instead. The Diablo 3 gameplay and trailer really require that widescreen feel the current iteration of this blog cannot provide. That said, check out the annoucement trailer (make it full screen using the button to the right of the menu button in the GameSpot video player, can be done with the other videos too).

Here is a good 20 minute live gameplay video (introduces barbarian and witchdoctor classes).

And of course an interview with a Blizzard employee.

So what’s so great about Diablo 3? I was drawn in for 2 reasons. First, Blizzard actually added a color palette this round. After playing games like Warcraft and Starcraft, playing Diablo 2 felt like replacing life with black and white. D3 has so much more color than the previous games, in addition to a very tasteful art design that will allow this game to look great on anyone’s machine. Second, Blizzard added physics. Physics is not a hallmark feature in RPGs, but it has been implemented in such a way as to look good AND provide additional gameplay. When you are watching the trailer, pay attention to when objects in the world blow up into chucks of wood and stone and imagine if it all fell on the floor in a boring heap instead (like it did in D2).

Happy Saturday!

Diablo 3 “Announced!”

Quoted from MaximumPC.com, Jeff, eat your heart out:
diablo 3

“Here we go! The community site Diabloii.net is reporting that Blizzard will be announcing the third game in its epic Diablo series at this week’s Worldwide Invitational in Paris.  That’s right.  Diablo III is on its way!

“With this week’s speculation over the Blizzard teasers, more and more reports in the media, and numerous tips coming direct us at IncGamers from reliable inside industry sources in the past 24 hours, we now have confirmation from inside sources to say that Diablo 3 WILL be announced on Saturday at WWI Paris 2008.”

Blizzard’s Vice President of Design, Rob Pardo, already teased that a new game announcement was on the way in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz this morning.  He’d know–the Blizzard frontman is delivering the keynote address at this year’s big gathering.

Of course, had you a dollar every time a news site swore that Diablo 3 was coming, you could have already hired the producers for Diablo IV and World of Diablo.  Blizzard’s ongoing series of teasing splash images has a few days left before the big reveal.  If this is just another Starcraft 2 race, expect to see a number of demon-killing enthusiast gamers eating hats–the taste certainly wouldn’t be new.”

Space Siege

If you liked Knights of the Old Republic, Dungeon Siege, Battlestar Galactica,  or System Shock then I’ve got a game for you! Gas Powered Games (Dungeon Siege, Supreme Commander) is working on a very interesting science fiction RPG coming out later this year called Space Siege.
Back story: Humanity is running from a formidable alien threat on a massive colony ship which has come under attack by said aliens. *gasp* The entire game allegedly takes place on this ship. The key feature of this RPG is how you decide to defeat your opponents. Your character is a talented mechanic who can augment his own body using looted technology OR he can use said technology to upgrade his loving robot companion instead. There are several game endings possible, based on how much humanity you have left over at the end of the game.

I’ve got two videos for you, the first is a classy trailer and the second is mostly gameplay.

Far Cry 2

I liked the original Far Cry! Released in 2004 by German developer Crytek Studios, nobody had any idea what to expect. Far Cry offered some of the most amazing tropical visuals to ever grace my monitor. It also happened to be pretty darn fun running/swimming/driving/asploding my way around tropical islands and camps of evil mercenaries and science experiments gone wrong.

Far Cry

FAR CRY

Crysis, released last year by Crytek, was supposed to be the Far Cry’s successor, and while it did raise the graphical bar into the stratosphere, gameplay wasn’t spectacularly innovated over Far Cry’s. Crysis is one of those games that will be around forever, considering even the mighty GTX280 can just barely run it at an acceptable framerate while at high resolutions.

CRYSIS

Strangely enough, none of them share ANY storyline whatsoever. Far Cry 2 is being developed by Ubisoft, not Crytek. Far Cry 2 isn’t even using the same graphical engine! Also, unlike to the first two, Far Cry 2 should be completely open-world, a feature usually relegated to RPGs and Grand Theft Auto.

FAR CRY 2

Remote Gaming

A new service from a website called SteamMyGame.com has me impressed! Using their system, you can stream games from one computer in your house (say, your mega-awesome gaming desktop) to any other platform in your house (say, your 5 year old laptop, a tablet, or an Eee PC).
The service starts the game on your desktop or other powerful computer and streams the video over to your underpowered laptop/ultramobile pc/console. You get to play the game with all of the settings maxxed out at very high framerates on a system that normally wouldn’t even start the game. The streaming service takes the input from your mobile system (keyboard and mouse) and streams it back to the desktop (or other powerful computer). Right now this seems like it is restricted to local networks only, because the data throughput required to do this is more than most internet connections can handle. For a 720p connection (1280 x 720 resolution) you need to be transfering between 1 megabyte and 8 megabytes per second to maintain a healthy framerate.

Either way, until integrated graphics catch up on mobile systems, this provides an interesting alternative for those with powerful desktops and underpowered laptops. If internet connections ramp up, we might start seeing “Remote Gaming Services” where a powerful server runs the game at very high settings and streams it to any computer anywhere with any hardware for a fee.

Here is someone demonstrating the technology:

Spore Creature Creator

static.squarespaceSpore is coming sometime in September, but EA/MAXIS have released the creature creator inside the game ahead of schedule for us to goof around with. There is a free version and also a paid version ($9.99). The free version has about 1/4 of the available pieces to add to your creature, but otherwise it is the same thing.

In Spore, you will take a creature from single celled organism all the way to galaxy spanning civilization over the course of many generations and many different sub-games.

Here is a link to the Spore site.

Download the free version of the Creature Creator here.

Week of 6/15/08

We’ve got three events upcoming!
On the 17th:

Firefox 3 will be released. Everyone go out and get it on launch day, we are trying to set a world record for most downloads in a single day.

firefox

The Spore Creature Creator will be released, more on this Tuesday.

Spore

On the 18th:

Nvidia releases their next line of GPUs! It seems only a few months back the 9000 series hit the shelves, now the GTX 200 line is already at our doorstep. AMD will be releasing their 4000 series early next week in retaliation.

spy_vs_spy