So back at E3 2012, a couple of weeks ago, I was delighted to get the chance to sit down with an industry veteran, Christian Allen, who’s now becoming responsible for bringing the hardcore tactical shooter back to the market, where more casual shooters have left a large subsection of the gamer audience clamouring for more depth, more realism and better tactical gameplay. Project Takedown reached its Kickstarter funding goal back at the beginning of April, and the team at Serellan is now getting stuck into the development, working to reintroduce the genre, eschewing certain elements of modern FPS design that have begun to compromise the shooter experience, in favour of a more old-school approach.
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DayZ Preview – Interview With Dean ‘Rocket’ Hall (E3 2012)
DayZ, Dean “Rocket” Hall’s zombie survival mod for Bohemia Interactive’s Arma II, has exploded over the face of the internet’s games community. This is not just ‘some zombie game’ to add to the pile of industry’s most ubiquitous theme – it’s what everyone, from the word go, has been asking for from a zombie game: open-world realistic survival.
Still in alpha, as its creator is eager to stress, DayZ is drawing an inordinate amount of gamers into its harsh world simply by providing a large open island filled with villages and towns, Chernarus, a selection of scavenge-able weapons, medical supplies and food, scattered throughout the empty buildings and 30-50 other players, who may or may not be willing to try to survive alongside each other. With 1:1 time, food, drink and blood meters along with the occasional need for realistic first aid treatment and full-on unrestricted PvP, DayZ’s vision of the zombie apocalypse is bleak and satisfyingly simple in its realism.
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Arma 3 Preview (E3 2012)
Bohemia Interactive released Arma 2 three years ago, and thanks to its expansive open world and realistic design, space for player creativity and extensive mod support, it’s still going strong if sales and the activity of the community are anything to go by; which they are. BI’s approach to its sequel, I’m assured by Jay Crowe, Creative Director, is that of building upon that solid base, developing new innovations and features that can latch onto their powerful in-house Real Virtuality engine.
While Arma 2 excelled in its vast landscapes and incredibly realistic ballistics, it lacked a little in some of the finer details. Arma 3 has gone to lengths to fix that. NPC animations have been updated to look more natural and to take the surrounding terrain into account, the whole world is more colourful and more detailed and the inventory has been revamped (it was really needed) with a tab system that looks infinitely more usable.
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E3 2012: Games & Press Events Review (LA Gaming Conference)
It’s here. Electronic Entertainment Expo 2012, better known as E3, has kicked off in Los Angeles and just like last year’s E3, it’s the games industry’s annual D-Day. The announcements have already started rolling in, even though the show floor has yet open. Zath is in attendance once more and will be giving you daily summaries of all the news of the day as well as in-depth game previews and interviews over the next 3 or 4 days. We’ll begin with a summary of the various press conferences of the day.
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Journey Review (PS3)
Thatgamecompany is back with their third game, Journey, which sees the player travel across a strange and beautiful land to their ultimate destination, with other real players accompanying them along the way. While the gameplay and visuals are unique, the ethos and atmosphere behind Journey harks back to the wonderful worlds of both flOw and Flower. And much like its predecessors, exposition is a visual experience, left for the player to interpret.
The player is given control of a small, robed and hooded figure who can run, jump and slide and that’s about it. Beautiful in its simplicity, the game naturally introduces its salient features and mechanics through player discovery. Anyone seeking a complex platforming system and an arsenal of special moves may be disappointed because that is the very antithesis of Journey.
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Assassin’s Creed: Revelations Review (Xbox 360, PS3, PC)
Our old friend Ezio Auditore is back for one final romp, and this yearly dose of conspiratorial frolics since Assassin’s Creed 2 is getting somewhat perplexing. Surely such a hasty turnaround should result in shoddy and rushed sequels? But I think it’s safe to say last year’s Brotherhood proved us all wrong, with a healthy measure of new content and logical improvements. The question is, as we close Ezio’s chapter of the story, has Ubisoft’s army of international studios pulled it off once again?
Assassin’s Creed: Revelations is the first game to tie all three existing protagonists together, exploring both the twilight years of ancestors Ezio and Altair (the 12th-century Syrian assassin), and fleshing out present-day Desmond’s troubled past. Now here’s where I have to blurb the “previously on Assassin’s Creed..”, but to tell you the truth, it isn’t exactly straightforward. Not that the esotericism is necessarily detrimental to the franchise, but it does make it a tad impenetrable to newcomers.
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Deus Ex: Human Revolution Review (PC/Xbox 360/PS3)
Deus Ex: Human Revolution has a hefty weight on its shoulders: the expectations and apprehensions of thousands of fans of the original Deus Ex released in 2000, a highly acclaimed RPG whose levels of complexity in both gameplay and narrative are a force to be reckoned with. But in another respect, it’s almost a new franchise that needs to win over a new generation that doesn’t necessarily remember PC games of a bygone era. Either way, half-baked isn’t going to cut it. Fortunately, the game has spent at least four years in development, showing Eidos is committed to giving the franchise a prequel it deserves.
Story
You play as Adam Jensen, a former cop who works as a security specialist for a bio-mechanical augmentation company known as Sarif Industries in 2027. These augmentations are the powerfully divisive preoccupation of the age, raising tensions in society and exposing the disparity between the have’s and have-not’s. The corporations bill them as the next stage of human evolution and a chance to better ourselves, while anti-augment groups are concerned over both philosophical issues, such as playing god, and inequity problems.
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E3 2011: Games & Press Events Review (Los Angeles Gaming Conference)
The Electronic Entertainment Expo (otherwise known as E3) is a strange and fantastical beast of a convention. Large companies forgo their everyday suits and shareholder meetings to install fully-fledged stylised buildings within the Los Angeles convention centre’s great halls, complete with multiple floors, ventilation, windows, backrooms and theatres.
These strange architectures are then rammed with PR trying to sell games they understand little of, developers nervous and agitated at the prospect of doing hundreds of almost identical interviews and ‘booth babes’ clueless as to what’s going on at all. And thus, as in previous years’ of E3, a literal gaming city is erected for the sole purpose of hype; most of it we see, some of it, such as the altogether more business-like buyer meetings and VIP rooms, we don’t.
Well E3 is well and truly here, and on the day before the show floor opens up to a hungry press, two of the console companies along with EA and Ubisoft held press conferences to demonstrate their latest and (hopefully) greatest, and of course, to brag about games/consoles sold.
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Bulletstorm Review (PS3, Xbox 360, PC)
In the school playground of shooters, Bulletstorm is the sailor tongued big kid whose motivation for the next wedgie lies more in the prospect of beating his personal record, than in any angsty hatred. People Can Fly’s new shooter is brazen and unabashedly brutal, but does the sci-fi butcher-fest successfully make its retaliation to the ubiquitous Call of Duty and its wannabes, and more importantly, is it the romp one hopes it to be?
Bulletstorm follows the exploits of space pirate Grayson Hunt and the, well, storm of bullets that ensues when a bid for a revenge against his former general lands him and his friend Ishi, in a giant, vicious-alien-filled, torn and ruined resort on a strange planet.
Transformers: War For Cybertron Review (Xbox 360)
The Transformers universe is a rich host of lore and metallic ass-kicking that in recent years has been subjected to a few sub par games which failed to capture the feel and fluidity of Transformers combat, not to mention mimicking Michael Bay’s widely disrespected Transformers movie offerings. But High Moon Studios has been working closely with Hasbro on creating Transformers: War for Cybertron, a game set to explore how the war between the Decepticons and Autobots actually unfolded on their home planet, before they were forced to pay the human race a visit.
Settling upon this point in the timeline was a great choice, allowing them to expand on the lore, as service to hardcore fans and shape gameplay in order to permit an exciting experience. The campaign is split up into ten parts, 5 for the dastardly Decepticons and 5 for the Autobots, loosely intertwining with each other, though some more direct confrontations with the characters you play in the respective campaigns could have made for an interesting dynamic. Nevertheless you get a good choice of any of three famous characters per mission often including Megatron or Optimus Prime each with their own abilities, which are unfortunately not unique.
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