Here’s a roundup of some of the games I managed to get some extensive hands-on time with at the recent Eurogamer Expo in London. As well as highlighting what was looking good, I’ve pointed out a few that you should definitely beware of before you splash the cash. The Contender category consists of a few games that you might usually overlook due to past form or generic looks, but have a read; you might just change your mind.
Continue reading Eurogamer Expo: The Good, The Bad & The Contenders
After attending a recent developer session at a games expo event, I was invited to a behind closed doors interview session with Nolan North, the talented voice actor behind Nathan Drake of the Uncharted series. During the interview he spoke about how he became a voice actor and about his roles in other games such as the Penguin in Batman: Arkham City and as Desmond in Assassin’s Creed.
Click through to watch the extensive video interview.
Continue reading The Voice of Uncharted: A Nolan North Interview (Video)
Regretting not finishing Final Fantasy XIII? Well that probably depends on whether you managed to forgive the linearity and heavily automated combat to push on and finish, or on how adept you are at finding HD cutscene compilations on torrent sites to enjoy what was a cracking story along with some generation-leading CGI.
Either way you better get cracking because there’s every chance that you’ll want to return to Cocoon and Gran Pulse next year with this sequel. Don’t worry about your FFX-2 flashbacks; no Dresspheres have been sighted, yet.
If you thought the PSP wasn’t capable of hosting spectacular action games then you’d be very wrong, as Chains of Olympus and Ghost of Sparta are a fine pair of beasts. But let’s face it, Kratos was always way too angry to settle being stuck in your pocket.
While the first God of War collection and the Sly or Prince of Persia HD trilogies were upgrades of already good-looking PS2 games, this has taken more of an effort coming from the PSP. Sporting the best visuals the handheld ever saw, these games are now re-born with their potential fully realised in HD.
The Games Workshop space faring Warhammer 40k universe has been begging for a proper action game for years. Having provided so much inspiration for video games it’s about time it had one.
Relic Entertainment have served 40k well already with their Dawn of War strategy games on the PC, but now they face a different challenge with an assault on the crowded action shooter genre. This is no Gears of War clone though; you’re playing as a Space Marine, the toughest soldiers out there. These seven-foot tall genetically engineered killing machines don’t need a cover-system; they’re all about fighting through the pain.
PS3 gamers eager to get online and show off their Space Marine skills after charging through the single-player game may find a nasty little bug is stopping them connecting to any matches.
When logging into the multiplayer options many players are getting this message: “Your NAT is not set to “Open”. This may prevent you from joining or hosting some game sessions.”
With Insomniac Games moving onto a multi-format future with Overstrike, this could well be the final Resistance title on the PS3. It was PS3 gamer’s first FPS love, but since then it has always been overshadowed by the technical powerhouse of Killzone. So how will the series bow out?
You now play as Joe Capelli, (R2 SPOILER!) the man forced to kill Nathan Hale as the Chimera virus finally overcame the former hero. Despite Capelli’s hand being forced, he was given a dishonourable discharge from the army. Four years later, the Chimera are still slowly strangling the remains of the human race from the earth and we find Capelli living with a small group of survivors and his wife and child.
The first game was a surprise hit from the Vigil Games team. Despite being an original creation, the world felt so lived in and like it had a deep past with plenty of scope for further stories, making for a world we’re eager to dive back into.
For the sequel, you play as a different Horseman of the apocalypse, Death. Rather than joining your bother War, immediately after the events of the first game, which would have been a great starting point given the tantalising conclusion, your adventure will run alongside that of your brother’s. This parallel story may throw up the odd familiar face, but we’re told to expect plenty of new locations, which is definitely better than going through all the old ones with everyone telling you that you’ve just missed your brother.
After a brief panic of thinking I’d spent a full year queuing for games at Gamescom I stirred myself awake to remember an early Olympics title would of course be released the Christmas before the event itself. Especially after the previous games on the Wii sold by the tonne. It’s still heart breaking to see Sonic standing next to archrival Mario with no signs of murderous intentions though.
Our hands-on session with some of our German cousins was in the form of a multiplayer party with laughs and smiles hiding the pride of wanting to win at all costs. Wiimotes at the ready then.
Continue reading Mario & Sonic at the London 2012 Olympic Games (Hands-on Preview)
Now I’m not saying looks are everything, but after slumming it through the grey roughness of the original Metro 2033 game, it’s amazing to see the difference in Metro: Last Light. This game looks gorgeous. Yes, it still has a bit of a grey fetish, but like Killzone, it’s made pretty work of some of the colour palettes old-timers. And the game’s still only at pre-alpha code level, so it could get even better.
Those of you that played through the original game will find that the story of Last Light follows on from the (SPOLIER) ‘bad’ ending where you did launch the missiles to destroy the Dark Ones. So it would seem that your initial fight will be against human enemies, we’re sure there’ll be a few mutants along the way too. We’ve already seen those winged gargoyle-like arseholes (they pissed me off a lot last time) flying about in one of the trailers. Towards the end of the presentation, we also saw some large troll/gorilla-like creatures that featured some astonishingly slick animation and textured rocky skin that almost distracts from them trying to rip Artyom’s face off.
One of the biggest challenges facing the PS Vita handheld is its ability to work with first-person shooters. The addition of a second analogue stick -and they are proper sticks now instead of nubs- is an important leap forwards from the original PSP and from our hand-on experience it’s a challenge the device and developers are already relishing.
Nihilistic are bringing the Resistance series to the handheld market for the first time in FPS form, after the third-person adventures of Retribution. The improvements are instantly noticeable, making the console’s 2012 arrival seem very far away for everyone outside of Japan.
Continue reading Resistance: Burning Skies (Vita Hands-on Preview)
If anyone could make another great game for the PlayStation Move, it would be the team behind its best game so far. Rather than knock out Sports Champions 2, Zindagi Games have opted for a fun action title. You might recognise parts of the game from the early tech demos for the PlayStation Move back at E3 2009. It’s good to see that demo become a full game, we’re just surprised it took this long.
Medieval Moves is a first-person action adventure game with movement around the game world taking place automatically and the action kicking off between stops. This leaves your hands free to concentrate on using your weapons and other cool gadgets to get through the medieval settings against an army of skeleton warriors and other ghoulish foes.
Continue reading Medieval Moves: Deadmund’s Quest (Hands-On Preview)
After years of asking, we finally have our PlayStation phone, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play. The Xperia Play comes with a 16GB memory card, which we soon populated with a few games for a quick review and a look at a few of the phone’s features.
With an aim to improve sales, the price of the device has recently been slashed by almost a half to around £299 for those wishing to purchase the handset on its own. So let’s take a look from a gamer’s perspective at how the device holds up.
Just looking at the Suda 51 name and Juliet Starling’s outfit, you know this is going to be another bat-shit crazy game from the Japanese auteur and Grasshopper Manufacture. What I didn’t expect to see at the developer walkthrough with Producer Scott Warr at Warner Bros Interactive’s Gamescom HQ was some of the most engaging action of the week.
You are high-school cheerleader Juliet Starling who forgoes further extra-curricular activities in favour of a spot of vampire zombie slaying and it looks like they’ve chosen her 18th birthday (cutting it close, Suda-san) to come and find her at school. We’re not asking why zombies are there; let’s face it, if no film in history can give us a decent explanation, why should we expect any more from Suda 51’s pigtails-and-chainsaw vision? Juliet attends San Romero High, an on-the-nose reference reference to the classic zombie director, who still manages to get his dues despite his last few films being absolute shite.
If you don’t have a Nintendo Wii, then you may have ignored their Goldeneye remake. Hell, you might have a Wii, but the prospect of taking it out of the box to mangle your childhood memories with bastardised controls just doesn’t seem like a good idea. Well now the N64 classic, a game that many regard as the best movie tie-in ever and one of the finest multiplayer games in existence, is getting the HD treatment it deserves. Fuck knows why emotional potato man Daniel Craig is in it though.
Goldeneye: Reloaded isn’t an entirely faithful HD reworking, it’s more of a ‘reimagining’, which if you remember Tim Burton describing his remake of Planet of the Apes the same way a few years ago, isn’t always a great thing. In fairness though the game scored well on the Wii and it’s bound to be better than the last Bond title we saw on the HD consoles, Blood Stone.
2011 can just end already. First, it was Bioshock Infinite making the wait pure agony, now I can add Joe Danger: The Movie to my most wanted list. Hello Games are well on their way to creating another classic. Seeing as I gave the first game 9/10, I was damn keen to play the sequel at Gamescom 2011. And I did. Every time I passed the stand. By the time I officially met up with Sean Murray and Grant Duncan of Hello Games I thought I had it all worked out. Then they showed me some of the tougher but doubly awesome levels. Now I really hate 2011.
Before I carry on with the platitudes, I’ll quickly re-cap the first game for newcomers: a mainly 2D motorcycle stunt platformer that encouraged linking tricks while getting to the finish line as fast as possible. Gold stars could be won for each event by collecting all the icons, landing on all landing pads and comboing 100% of the level. The controls were simple as you could jump high and perform multiple flips in the air and land doing endos and wheelies to chain stunts; you could even adjust your trajectory in mid-air forwards and backwards.
From Avalanche Studios, the minds behind the Just Cause series, we have the new twin-stick vehicle shooter, Renegade Ops. A downloadable title, that’s less than a month away and looks like one of the hottest downloadable titles at Gamescom 2011.
The twin-stick shooter controls for these armoured vehicles are comfortingly familiar -left for driving, right for aiming and shooting- and allow you to enjoy the simplistic gameplay immediately. An extra boost of speed and braking is handled with the face buttons. A secondary weapon is assigned to R1, while L1 initiates a special ability like EMP strikes to stun enemies, extra armour, helicopter backup or a flare to mark a target for an airstrike, with their use limited while they recharge over time.
Since Saints Row 2 surprised us all by being a hell of a lot better than the original and for many, a more enjoyable game than GTAIV, we’ve been waiting to see how the next game would handle the pressure. Well, just remember it was a bit bonkers before and it’s not prepared to put its pants back on quite yet.
With just one hour to play the new game, we couldn’t believe how quickly it went. The first part of the demo is a bank heist with your Saints Row buddies, and all of you are disguised in oversized Johnny Gat heads, including Gat himself. It would appear that the Saints might have chosen the wrong bank to knock over though. As soon as they let their guards downs, all the bank tellers pull out some serious military grade hardware and open fire.
A Sony console just wouldn’t be right without a WipEout game and the new PlayStation Vita handheld is more than capable of doing the series justice for its tenth title. In our developer session at Gamescom 2011, we were lucky enough to enjoy a presentation from Sony’s Studio Liverpool team and then get a play for ourselves.
Set just 37 years from now, at the “dawn of the sport,” four years before the original PS1 game set in 2052. It’s the first season of the sport, just after anti-gravity was invented. At this rate, it’s highly doubtful we’ll see technology leap forwards as much in the next 37 years, seeing as we’ll all be forced to plod along in hybrids at misery MPH. That’s why we’ll always love games like this as do Studio Liverpool who are keen to emphasise the importance of the time setting of the game compared to the other games in the series:
When the developers first announced there wouldn’t be a cover system for this third-person-shooter it raised a few eyebrows. Now that I’ve seen the suicidal nature of a swarming orc hoard eager to test the might of a Space Marine’s weaponry, it seems it was a great decision.
So forget about turn-based choices, real time strategy and dice rolling, this is the full-on action title we’ve been waiting for. Strategy fans have enjoyed the Dawn of War games, but action fans always intrigued by the rich sci-fi lineage of the series can now look forward to the first decent Warhammer game since Fire Warrior.
Continue reading Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine (Hands-On Preview)
The No Sleep Gamer 
