A while back it was revealed that we will not only be treated to the FPS take on the old X-COM franchise, but that there is also a "proper" new game in the works, which is going to take us back to the base building and turn based combat goodness of the original games.
Today the developers, Firaxis, has posted this video look of the game, giving us the first chance of actually seeing it in action:
I'm personally really excited after watching this video!
Some people may disagree with the somewhat cartoony art direction that the game seems to be sporting, but I don't mind it at all, and I think that the new "glamour" cam that they were showing off looked awesome and will help add to the immersion of combat.
I'm definitely much more interested in XCOM: Enemy Uknown now and looking forward to playing it later this year (no firm release date is available yet, though).
Mass Effect 3 is launching next week and, in an attempt to drive us into a Krogan-like state of Mass Effect fueled frenzy, BioWare has just put up the launch trailer for the game.
Oh yes, I'm ready for another ride with the good Commander!
The Syndicate trailers are coming in hard and fast as we close in on the February 21 release date of this FPS that is a festival of gun violence and pulling the brain chips out of other people's head.
This one sheds even more light on the co-op mode of Syndicate and also goes into further details about the "breach apps", which will let you disarm enemies, heal friends and other handy stuff (maybe jailbreak an Iphone?)
I like the "Dart overlay" feature, even if it does feel like it's been ripped straight from Batman's "detective mode".
The ability to be able to customize your character as you gain levels seems potentially interesting as well.
As a gamer that has long since given up on the ninja reflexes required to be fighting for top spots in FPS battles, I'd be interested in tailoring my character to be able to support my more competent fighting allies from behind the lines.
I've never been much of a fighting games fan, but for some reason I've always quite enjoyed the Soul Calibur games ever since I played the original on my Dreamcast console way back in the day.
The Soul Calibur games are something of a "black sheep" in the fighting games genre, as far as I understand it. It's generally viewed as being a bit too simplistic and not terribly well balanced, but it's easy for non-fighting games people to pick up and the fights look great, so that's probably why I'm partial to it.
Also the chance to play a dual sword wielding pirate with a demon blade is pretty nifty.
Soul Calibur V is the latest entry in the series and is coming out today in the US, while us eurotrash peeps will have to wait a few days more.
I saw this quick look of the game over on my favorite video game website, Giant Bomb, so check it out if you're in the market for a casual friendly and great looking fighting game:
"Orc Attack" is a game in the vein of Castle Crashers, which lets up to 4 players take the role of a band of gassy Orcs and beat their way through over 20 levels of human bashing goodness. I've had a talk with Igor Rodinski from "Casual Brothers", developers of this upcoming beat- and fart-em-up Orc Attack, which is looking to satisfy all your filthy human killing needs.
Here's a gameplay demo showing the game in action:
Now on to the interview.
Q: Firstly I’d like to ask you to give us a short introduction to Orc Attack. What’s the essence of the game?
A: The essence is, above all, fun, both alone or even better, with your friends.
The story has its fair share of protest against the destruction of the environment. The Orcs use to live wild and free in their homeland, until the humans arrive with their evil machines to exploit the natural resources to the exhaustion, bringing pollution to the land, water and air, and making the Orcs fell terribly sick, suffering severe gastric disorders that will result in extreme flatulence.
Q: The beat-em-up genre has had somewhat of a revival in recent years, especially after the release of Castle Crashers. Can you tell us a little about what your inspiration for Orc Attack has been and how Orc Attack stands out from other beat-em-ups?
A: We can’t deny we love Castle Crashers and that we found some inspiration in it. In fact, we were pretending to catch the spirit of 2D beat’em up classics, bringing them to 3D, something that no one done before, and we think we succeeded thanks to our innovative camera, for Orc Attack stands out from others beat-em ups firstly for been in 3D and for its innovative camera, focusing the action with all four players always on screen sharing the same view.
Secondly, the mass combat allow up to 50 enemies on screen, so the battles looks really spectacular. Of course, there is the difference that in this game you play Orcs against evil human, and, naturally, the use of gases, as farts and burps, to fight the enemies producing explosions and other deadly effects, is also a stand up.
BioWare released this short video Friday to let us in on what we can look forward to in SWTOR:
No huge surprises really and not much in terms of concrete information.
I guess the few new bits of data that we can take away is that guild banks will be the first new guild feature that we'll see and that this "Rise of the Rhakghoul" storyline is going to take place across two content patches.
Oh, and also UI customization which I'm sure a lot of people will be very happy about.
Personally I would have liked some more information about the legacy system aside from "we'll do stuff with it!".
This Syndicate trailer was posted just before Christmas, but it got lost among the piles of merriment and X-mas spirit, so I just saw it yesterday and thought I'd share it with you guys.
The video feeds us some more details about how the co-op gameplay of Syndicate will function, including a brief look at the four different agents that you will be taking the role as.
It's interesting that you'll be playing as four distinct agents and while I'm sure it'll add some flavor to the multiplayer experience, I feel that it does detract a little bit from the dystopian and drab vibe that is associated with the Syndicate universe.
In any case, it looks like we'll get to have fun kicking people in the balls and shooting them with large guns in the co-op multiplayer so there is always that, I suppose!
I wanted to share a pretty neat video that I saw over on Gamespot the other day. It's a cool little piece that goes through 2011 and the games that came out over the months.
I've already dumped more hours into Star Wars: The Old Republic than probably any other game that I've played in 2011. I'm really enjoying the game so far, even if it can't quite match the addictive qualities of WoW (can anything really be expected to recapture that feeling again, though?).
Anyway, I thought I'd share with you my first experience of the PvP battleground system in Old Republic. So I give to you this video of me noobing around the Alderaan PvP battleground and trying to violently burn my republic enemies into a crisp, through the use of Force lightning.
I hope you'll excuse the slightly too loud sound effect volume in the video. I had some technical issues with the recording, but I hope you can still manage to hear most of my commentary.
If I do go for the Inquisitor like I plan, then I will head down the road of the sorcerer, which focuses on all the lightning based ways of causing terminal discomfort in your enemies.
I mentioned in my last Skyrim Journal post that I have been playing through the civil war quest line. After deciding that Ulfric Stormcloak was an Elf hating racist bastard I joined up with the Imperials and set about maiming and murdering Stormcloak soldiers where ever I found them.
I followed the quest line and I quickly discovered that there is a pattern to the way that the civil war quest line works. You'll be sent out to an Imperial camp where you'll be given a couple of missions, such as blackmailing a local person of power into helping the Imperial cause or freeing some captured soldiers.
Standing back and performing the role of human artillery is quite fun during a fort assault
After these quests you'll finish up the area by assaulting a fort filled by enemy soldiers. This ends up as fairly large battles where you'll be supported by 5-10 allied soldiers and your goal is to simply murder every fool that is crazy enough to not run away when you start throwing fireballs in their general direction (turns out most of the Stormcloaks are crazy fools).
If you're not already familiar with Zero Punctuation then now is a good time to jump on board and check out his extremely funny game reviews.
He's just had a go at reviewing Skyrim and the results are, as usual, really funny. You can check it out in the video below
While this is not the most informative review of Skyrim that you can find (but really, do you need a review of Skyrim? Just buy it already!), it more than makes up for its lack of finer journalistic qualities with its buckets of humor.
I really recommend checking out more of Zero Punctuation's stuff.
With Light Speed Gaming having been up and running for a couple of months now, you will hopefully already have gotten some idea what this site is all about.
However, I thought it might be a good idea to make a little more personal bit on what this place is and what you can expect to find here. So, inspired by Problogger's advice on "talking head videos", I decided to make a talking head video of my own! (Because you should always follow any advice that you see on the internet. It's just common sense)
Skyrim is mostly a pretty serious and proper place. Sure there'll be the occasional drunkard that makes a slightly salty remark, but for a brutal medieval society they sure don't swear a lot.
So that's why good fun can be had by putting in completely unneeded censorship bleeps at certain key parts of the dialogue, with hilarious results.
I'm currently eking the last drops of Force fueled fun from the Star Wars: The Old Republic beta weekend. I've managed to get a Bounty Hunter up to level 17 and gotten myself a starship. This has allowed me to try out the very controversial "space missions" for myself and see what they're all about.
In this video I take you through a space mission in my Bounty Hunter ship.
As you will have gathered from the video, unless you were watching it with the sound turned off or have the attention span of a goldfish, I am not really very keen on the space missions in SWTOR. I don't understand the design decision to put in on rails shooting missions in a game that is all about immersing you in a believable world filled with player choice.
The upcoming "Guns of Icarus Online" is something as unique as an online co-op steampunk airship game. Taking the role as a crew member on board massive airships that travel over the remains of a war ravaged land, you will get a chance to do your part in aiding the destroyed world with rebuilding itself and flourishing once more.
Players can choose between different classes and you'll need to work together to manage all the complexities of airship combat. Some players may need to focus on repairing the ship while others are manning the weapons or steering the airship.
This just released gameplay footage gives us an early look at the gameplay of Guns of Icarus Online
Gatling guns and flamethrowers? Don't mind if I do!
Steampunk seems to be getting quite popular nowadays, with City of Steam also bringing us an online steampunk experience. That's a nice breath of fresh air and a setting that I don't think we've seen too many games use, so I'm quite interested in seeing how Guns of Icarus Online pans out.
I recently posted an article about the process of my class selection for The Old Republic. After much deliberation and pulling of hair (mostly my own), I finally settled on the statically charged Sith Inquisitor.
With the NDA on the TOR beta test going down just this last weekend, we now find ourselves with more info than we know what to do with.
I thought that it would be interesting to plunge a straw into this bucket of condensed TOR info and try to suck up as much as I could find that deals with the Sith Inquisitor. After a diligent extraction process, I present the results to you here.
This Sith Inquisitor class trailer should give you a good idea of what you are in for
The Basics
The Sith Inquisitor is the "caster class" for the Empire. Able to hurl lightning at his enemies, he is a class that lets you live out all your Palpatine fantasies, sans the melted face part. Inquisitors are the scheming puppet masters of the Empire. They are the keepers of the powerful secrets of the Dark Side. Where the Sith Warriors are blunt instruments that excel in subjugation by brute force and maximum destruction, the Inquisitors rely on more precise and subtle means of influence.
Of course, should that fail, they are more than capable of resorting to burning the flesh off your bones with crackling blue force lightning. You have to keep an open mind and stay flexible, after all. And if you really want to get up and personal, naturally the Sith Inquisitor is also quite capable with a lightsaber, for all your slicing and dicing needs.
Advanced classes
Upon reaching level 10, you will have a choice between two different advanced classes. For the Sith Inquisitor you have the choice of becoming a Sorcerer or an Assassin (no white outfit or wrist blades, sadly).
It's been a week since Skyrim launched. Way too much stuff has being going on for me to play it anywhere near as much as I would like, but I have gotten in around 10 hours with the game by now. Of course, 10 hours of Skyrim is really just scraping the very outer layer of the near bottomless content pit that Skyrim offers.
It's kind of crazy, when you think about something like the Modern Warfare 3 campaign, which offers around 6-7 hours of gaming to complete. Skyrim is a juggernaut of a game that promises to munch down all my free time with some with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.
My first week with Skyrim has really just been about getting my bearings in this overwhelming world. I've done a little bit of the main story line, but I was quickly distracted by a deluge of side quests that saw me finding dead bodies and listening to the tales of old crones.
The initial city of Whiterun can keep you occupied for hours. There's just so much to do!
When playing these big RPG games I normally tend to focus on just the main quest line and supplement a little with side quests. It's not that I hate doing side quests, but I really enjoy following a story, and most often I'll get sucked into the main storyline of a game and find myself blasting through it and missing a lot of content. But with Skyrim I feel more compelled to do other things than just the main quest. Perhaps it is because Skyrim feels so much like a real world, and you can't help exploring a lot and wanting to peak just around the next corner in case there is something cool there.
We've barely had time to dip our toes into the deep oceans of Skyrim, but Q4 2011 marches on and keeps pummeling us with blockbuster games that demand our attention.
Next title to be served up on the bulging gaming buffet table is Assassin's Creed Revelations, which ones again puts you in the (now rather well worn) shoes of Ezio Auditore and Altair Ibn-La'Ahad.
Reviews are up of this wrist bladed stab-em up and we're looking at another strong game, but perhaps not quite up there with the best contenders for 2011.
It looks like Ubisoft has given us another great Assassin's Creed game that builds on all the successful elements of the past games, but the new additions are not all that meaningful. Worse, a few of the new additions seem to be unpleasant experiences that actually detract from the enjoyment of the game.
So if you are already buried in fantastic games that you want to play (Skyrim, Batman and multiplayer Battlefield 3 says "Oh hi there!"), then perhaps you can postpone your trip to the Animus machine until the new year.
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