Darksiders 2 release date announced

Darksiders 2 launches on 29th June for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, THQ has announced.

Pre-order from GAME, Gamestation and Gamestop in Ireland and you'll get the Death Rides pack. This includes side-quests in the Maker's Realm and Dead Plains areas. Here, you can earn additional experience and loot. You get to aid an ancient Construct, battle The Bloodless and retrieve Karn's lost treasure. THQ said today the content amounts to around two hours of gameplay.

Pre-order with Amazon.co.uk and you get the Deadly Despair pack. This gives you a speed boost for Despair that acts as a permanent perk.

There's another pre-order bonus pack, called Angel of Death, but this is yet to be tied to a retailer. With this you get a unique set of enhanced armour with an angel inspired design, a pair of upgraded matching scythes, and an exclusive visual trail for your companion crow Dust.

In THQ's release no mention is made of the promised Wii U version, set for launch alongside the console later this year.

Screenshots of the Death Ride and Deadly Despair packs, and a new trailer, are below.

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Assassin's Creed 3 release date announced

Assassin's Creed 3 launches on Tuesday, 30th October 2012, Ubisoft has announced.

Confirmation comes from an on-going investor call. No other details were announced, but Ubisoft boss Yves Guillemot said the development team had been working on the game for three years.

"We will push the title a lot because it's a fantastic product that the team has been working on for three years," he said. "What we have seen is just fabulous."

Ubisoft had teased that 2012 would bring a "major" new game in the Assassin's Creed franchise. Eurogamer was told this game would conclude the story of protagonist Desmond Miles before the series' doomsday date arrives in real life. That doomsday date is 2012, so we were always going to need the concluding instalment - what we now know is AC3 - this year.

PC, PlayStation 3, Wii U and Xbox 360 versions of Assassin's Creed 3 are apparently on the way. Nintendo mentioned an Assassin's Creed Wii U game when the console was unveiled at E3 last summer.

Assassin's Creed 3 is rumoured to be set during the American Revolution.

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PS3 exclusive JRPG Ni No Kuni out in Europe Q1 2013

PlayStation 3 exclusive Japanese role-playing game Ni No Kuni launches in Europe in Q1 2013.

Publisher Namco Bandai is localising the Studio Ghibli and Level-5 collaboration, adding English voices and subtitles in French, Italian, German and Spanish.

The game also includes the original Japanese voiceover, which you'll be able to listen to with English subtitles.

"We have worked very hard on Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch and it has been a great honour to collaborate with Studio Ghibli and [composer] Joe Hisaishi, so it was important for me that players outside Japan also have the best experience of the game we can give them," said Level-5 boss Akihiro Hino.

"To make this possible, we decided to invest the time in localising the game so that as many people as possible across Europe can enjoy the full experience in their own language."

Ni No Kuni has a Western subtitle of Wrath of the White Witch. The name refers to a magical world into which the hero, a 13-year-old boy called Oliver, can travel, using a magical book given to him by a fairy disguised as a doll. The game appears to take place between two realities: the real world, and the land of Ni No Kuni.

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Only Modern Warfare 3 made more money than Skyrim in 2011

No exclusive PS3 or Xbox 360 game sold more copies than Bethesda's formidable open world fantasy romp Skyrim last year.

No, not Gears of War 3 on Xbox 360 (in North America); and no, not Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception on PS3.

On PC, Skyrim outsold all other PC games 3:1 during November, and is Steam's fastest ever selling game.

In terms of money made worldwide, Skyrim was the second most successful game of 2011. Only Modern Warfare 3 will have finished higher, which puts Skyrim ahead of even FIFA 12 and Battlefield 3.

Who said fantasy RPGs were the pursuit of lonely nerds? They're not any more, although for fellow RPG makers this is both a boon and burden.

Bethesda had shipped more than 10 million copies of Skyrim within the game's first month on sale.

With quantities like that, it's no wonder the Creation Kit toolset has been popular on PC. More than 2500 free, user-created mods were made within three days of the Creation Kit launching, and more than 2 million separate mods have been downloaded.

No specific, Bethesda-made DLC has been announced for Skyrim, although we do know it will be released as a timed-exclusive for Xbox 360.

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Warp Review

Warp starts with one simple idea and everything cascades organically from there. The idea is summed up by the title: you can warp. This short-range teleport move allows you to spring Zero, an imprisoned alien, from his captivity in an underwater research base. Bypassing walls and doors, it never demands the same radical change in thinking as a Portal gun, but it tugs at the same thread. Traditional navigation must be abandoned as you learn to read the map in a different way.

Zero is a strange sort of hero, a cross between X-Men's Nightcrawler and a jelly baby, speaking only in Mogwai chirps. Don't be fooled by his adorable appearance, however. As well as warping through walls, he can jump into solid objects - including humans. Once inside, jiggling the left stick makes the object explode. Again, including humans. It makes for a tonally jarring experience; the cute, gelatinous critter who turns people into grisly splats of blood and meat.

As you explore the base, guided by another alien entity via psychic messages, you gain additional powers. The first allows you to create a phantom echo, useful for distracting guards and security turrets, but with limited range. The second allows you to swap places with any object the echo touches. The third lets you launch whatever object you've warped into as a projectile. In true Metroidvania style, the more abilities you gain, the more of the map you can access.

1/8 Some sections offer multiple routes, depending on your skills.

It's all very solid and compelling, but is held back by slightly sticky control, an occasionally awkward camera and prehistoric AI, a combination that proves something of a problem for a game that largely relies on stealth. Guards are dimwitted in the extreme, often tangling each other up as they try to navigate the scenery. They also suffer from sporadic peripheral vision, sometimes spotting you when you think you should be hidden and sometimes not noticing you when you appear to be in plain sight.

Xbox 360: 800 Microsoft Points (?6.80/€9.60/$10)Xbox Live MarketplaceDue to be released on PS3 and PC (Origin) on 13th March

The result is a game where progress comes from luck and persistence as often as genuine moments of inspiration and skill. Apart from a few head-banging moments, usually requiring speedy reactions that the controls struggle to supply, you're always moving forwards but not always feeling like you've earned it.

Depth comes from a small suite of skills that can be purchased by trading in Grubs, lumpy little alien snacks hidden around the map. Grubs can also be earned by completing special Challenge Rooms, punishing time trials that serve as advanced tutorials for Zero's talents. Finding enough Grubs to unlock the really useful abilities is a long-winded affair however, and certain sections are either frustratingly difficult or insultingly easy depending on which upgrades you've chosen, sight unseen.

The ideas at the heart of Warp are sound and, in general, the game is well paced and introduces its evolutions at just the right time. There's a looseness to the execution though, and it keeps the experience from becoming more than the sum of its parts. Warp is a pleasant enough diversion, but with patchwork design that remixes gameplay ideas and stylistic elements from sources as diverse as Splosion Man, Metal Gear Solid and Portal, it never gels into anything particularly memorable.

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Fresh Far Cry 3 screenshots fire in

While this screenshots are very pretty, I think they should be some sort of law that makes developers explicitly state how shots like these were generated in fine print.

To put it bluntly, there is no way in hell a 360 or PS3 made these except maybe at like 5 fps. Kids won't differentiate and will think they will be getting this level of quality when they won't, and they will be disappointed.

It's like in the old days when you saw a game advert that had awesome screen shots in your favorite console based gaming mag. You went to buy it and it looked like shite, because it was actually a direct screen grab from the PC build, or from back when the game was being developed. The console code couldn't match it. Remember Tomb Raider 2? (That had a simultaneous PC/PSone release) - yeah, I remember being disappointed by the graphics purely because of the lying adverts. God help anybody who got the PSone version of Quake 2.

So many games made me sad like that when I was a kid. The mega drive never lied to me like the PSone and the N64 did!

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Mass Effect 3 Demos Analysed

The concluding chapter of the Mass Effect trilogy is remarkable in that it's the first to be released simultaneously on all major HD platforms, with BioWare releasing Xbox 360, PS3 and PC demos earlier this week. Feedback we received from readers suggested that the PS3 build fails to match its Xbox 360 sibling, exhibiting major frame-rate issues - something we decided to put to the test.

Methodology in testing this sort of thing is fairly straightforward. In the absence of actual benchmarking tools for console games, we produce two separate tests to measure performance. In the first, we simply capture the exact same footage from each version. Mass Effect games are packed with engine-driven cut-scenes which gives us plenty of material to choose from: we decided to opt for the opening cinematic as it appears to pose various challenges for both Xbox 360 and PS3 engines.

Like-for-like footage from the demo analysed on both Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 - v-sync in combination with over-budget frame rendering produce some alarming drops in performance.

Video(Playlist,1);

General performance characteristics for Mass Effect 3 appear to be par for the course in comparison to its predecessors. Both versions appear to be operating with a 30FPS cap, and v-sync is engaged. The game is double-buffered, meaning that it is drawing the next frame behind the scenes while the current one is being displayed, with the framebuffer flipped on the screen refresh. The good news is that there's no tearing (well, not on PS3 any way - the 360 is sometimes a bit late with its update, resulting in an unnoticeable tear at the very top of the screen), but the bad news is that if a frame runs over budget, the game stalls until the next refresh.

This manifests in the 360 analysis as a smooth 30FPS frame-rate suddenly dipping for prolonged periods to a more jerky 20FPS. Now, with the PlayStation 3 game what we're seeing is more scenes operating over budget, resulting in longer, more sustained drops to the lower frame-rate. More than that, we also seem to be seeing that the PS3 version sometimes misses the 20FPS refresh, making the stall even more pronounced, resulting in some drops down to 15FPS - not good at all.

So how does this translate into the gameplay? Let's run some more analysis across the run of play from both levels featured in the demo.

"So is this unpolished, early code? In the most cases, playable samplers are entirely representative of the final product, but BioWare does have some form in releasing unfinished demo code on PS3 in particular."

Moving into analysis of the demo's gameplay on both levels, we see the same capped 30FPS with v-sync engaged, but there are still plenty of dips in performance which are amplified on PS3.

Video(Playlist,1);

It's pretty much the same story: frame-rate dips on both platforms (fairly consistent with Mass Effect 2, on 360 at least), but it's clearly the PlayStation 3 demo that is operating at a lower level of performance. It's something of a shame because in most other respects, the demo suggests that there's not very much to tell these two versions apart otherwise: both utilise a stunning new lighting system, and appear to feature FXAA anti-aliasing, which really suits the artwork.

However, the issues on PS3 do extend beyond the frame-rate; there's just a general sense that the code is somewhat unfinished. On scene changes, sometimes characters or textures noticeably pop-in - something we don't see on Xbox 360. And there's the odd bug too - check out this shot comparison and look at the background. All appears to be well on the Microsoft platform, but something bizarre is happening on PS3 - a shader bug or texture compression issue, perhaps.

Character and texture pop-in on the PS3 version suggests we're looking at unfinished code, and there's a general sense that the demo didn't enjoy the same level of QA as its 360 equivalent, as this shot demonstrates. Hopefully the PS3 version will be improved for its full release.

So is this unpolished, early code? Can we expect changes in the final game? In the vast majority of cases, playable samplers are entirely representative of the final product, but BioWare does have form in releasing unfinished code for its demos, on PS3 in particular. The Mass Effect 2 PS3 demo ran with v-sync disabled, improving overall frame-rate at the expense of image consistency - this was adjusted in the final version of the game. Similarly, the PS3 version of the Dragon Age 2 demo also saw some changes in its transition to final code.

Perhaps lending further credence to this theory is that the content we're seeing here isn't new: the introduction mission has been used in plenty of press material, while the second mission will be familiar to those who witnessed the Kinect voice command demonstration at Microsoft's E3 press conference. So hopefully we will see improvements to the final game - and of course, we'll be running a full Face-Off as soon as we can.

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Remedy discusses Alan Wake 2

Remedy Entertainment has discussed the heavily-rumoured Alan Wake 2, suggesting, if it happens, it won't take as long as the first game to create and won't launch on a PlayStation console.

Is there a team at Remedy working on Alan Wake 2, or at the very least thinking about it?

"Thinking about it?" head of franchise development Oskari Hakkinen told Eurogamer when we asked him that very question.

"When we made Max Payne, we never knew it was going to be a success. We were just young people in a basement creating a video game that became massive. We were shocked by people tapping us on the back at E3 and saying, 'You've done something amazing. Do you realise what you've done?' Everyone's like, 'No. What have we done?' It's like, 'You've created this amazing game.'

"On Max Payne 1 Sam [Lake, creative director] killed off all the characters. So it was a problem starting Max Payne 2 because we never knew we were going to make a sequel. We never thought about it. Sam never wrote the story like that. He wrote one game. The only reason why Mona Sax survived when the lift door closed is because one of the partners we were working with on the graphic novel, she was like, 'Don't kill Mona!' So we changed it so you didn't explicitly see she died. Fortunately, that's why Mona played such a big role in Max Payne 2.

"For Alan Wake, we planned a little bit more ahead. So with the story Sam had already created the fiction from the get-go to be something larger than just one game. He created it with a whole franchise and a whole universe in mind. Even Night Springs was something he had already thought about - a fiction within a fiction. So it came quite naturally for him to know the fit for [Xbox Live Arcade game Alan Wake's American Nightmare].

"It's a lot more thought out than Max Payne ever was, but at the same time we've got nothing to announce."

While Alan Wake 2 remains unannounced, an Xbox World report from last year suggested the game was being made for the next Xbox, which is rumoured to be set for an E3 2012 announcement.

While Hakkinen refused to confirm or deny this report when we put it to him, he did say that if Remedy makes Alan Wake 2 it won't take as long to create as Alan Wake.

"Development wise, five years is developing an engine, the tech, the tools, all of the things you need to do to do a story, a character, other NPC characters and so forth," he explained.

"Once those things are done it's a lot easier. We're seeing it already with American Nightmare, which was only eight months of development, and we completely changed the setting. It's in Arizona now. It's not in the Pacific Northwest.

"So without recycling much of anything we did it in eight months, because a lot of the things were already locked down. It's a lot easier when you've got a team that knows what they're doing and it's about a franchise they know.

"The answer is, if we were to do a sequel to Alan Wake, it certainly is a much quicker and easier development cycle than the original Alan Wake, because the engine is created for the game. The overall fiction and the universe is already created.

"Concerning next-gen, I really can't speak to it because it's just a fuzzy thought in everybody's head right now. We don't know [what's coming]. They're keeping it very tight. Maybe it's just not the right time to talk about it."

Alan Wake launched as an Xbox 360 exclusive in 2010. It launches on PC this week nearly two years later. Alan Wake's American Nightmare is an Xbox Live Arcade exclusive game.

So far, Alan Wake has yet to grace a PlayStation platform, and it sounds like it will continue to skip Sony consoles in the future - despite Remedy owning the Alan Wake IP.

"I know you're never going to see Alan Wake or Alan Wake's American Nightmare on PlayStation," Hakkinen said. "Those are Xbox exclusives.

"The franchise is really close to our hearts. It's something we developed for a long time. You'll be seeing more of Alan Wake in the future."

But will Alan Wake 2 be multi-platform?

"With all honesty, there are absolutely no plans for that at the moment," Hakkinen replied. "I'm not going to say never, but at the same time I'll say there are no plans. There are no conversations and no plans going on for multi-platform."

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Mass Effect 3 DLC bundled with Razer peripherals

Not content with bundling Mass Effect 3 DLC with toys and books, developer BioWare has announced you'll also be able to pick up extra content for its forthcoming space RPG with a range of Razer peripherals.

Razer's new Mass Effect 3 line includes the following items:

Razer Imperator gaming mouse ($79.99)Razer Vespula dual-sided gaming mouse mat ($34.99)Razer BlackWidow Ultimate gaming keyboard ($139.99)Razer Onza Tournament Edition Xbox 360 controller ($59.99)Razer Chimaera Xbox 360 gaming headset ($209.99)iPhone 4/4S protection case ($34.99)N7 messenger bag ($79.99)

Pre-order any of the above and you'll pick up some in-game multiplayer content for the impending sequel, detailed on Razer's site as follows:

"The Razer Mass Effect 3 Collector's Edition peripherals and gear come with a redeemable code to unlock bonus item packs for Mass Effect 3 multiplayer, including the deadly Collector Assault Rifle to give you a leg up on the Reaper invasion. If you have already unlocked the Collector Assault Rifle, this code will strengthen the weapon further."

Mass Effect 3 is due on shelves for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 from 9th March.

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Final Fantasy creator's next project is a surfing iPhone game

Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi will abandon home consoles for his next project, an iPhone game centred on his hobby of surfing.

The legendary developer told Eurogamer at a BAFTA event in London last night he now had three iOS projects in the works, but remained tight-lipped on the details.

The trio of titles will be "small projects" and "platform" games, following his work on expansive Wii role-player The Last Story.

"The first one is a surfing game," Sakaguchi added.

"He's not joking," his translator confirmed.

Sakaguchi mentioned how he often dreamt up ideas for games "while taking a shower or waiting for a wave while surfing".

But why develop on iOS? Sakaguchi claimed it was because he was "an Apple fan" and remarked how the smartphone market was "increasing rapidly". Whether traditional console gaming would ever be overtaken by mobile devices "remains to be seen", however.

"Images outputted by PCs or consoles will always be of higher quality," Sakaguchi reasoned, "so they will never disappear off the face of the Earth."

The developer was speaking at an event to mark the UK launch of The Last Story, the latest game from his Mistwalker studio, which also created Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey.

Before that, Sakaguchi masterminded the Final Fantasy series from its creation until his departure from Square around the time of Final Fantasy X.

Sakaguchi admitted he has now grown tired of people asking him about the Final Fantasy series. "I had six interviews this morning and afternoon and there were so many questions about Final Fantasy," he said. "I am really tired of it!"

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Final Fantasy 13-2 Sazh DLC release date, price details

A fresh episode of Final Fantasy 13-2 story arrives on 28th February for Xbox 360 players and a day later on PlayStation 3, Square Enix has announced.

Sazh: Heads or Tails lets players control afro-sporting Sazh in a new quest that runs parallel to the main Final Fantasy 13-2 tale.

Bucket, spade and enemy crabs not included.

The extra slice of story costs 400 Microsoft Points on Xbox 360 or ?2.99/€3.59 on PlayStation 3.

Fancy some extra card games as well? Well, snap! The DLC pack also adds "Chronobind" and "Serendipity Poker" to the Serendipity casino.

Before that, Square Enix will pump out another two new costumes for heroes Noel and Serah. Next week Noel receives the 'Spacetime Guardian' outfit, while Serah strips off for a new 'Beachwear' look.

The wardrobe-enhancing items go on sale 21st February for Xbox 360 players for 240 Microsoft Points, and a day later on PS3 for ?1.59/€1.99.

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Sonic 4 Episode 2 screenshots leak from Xbox Marketplace

Sonic 4 Episode 2 screenshots leaked from Xbox Marketplace last night.

They were quickly taken down, but not before eagle-eyed gamers copied them for your viewing pleasure.

Alongside the screenshots was a plot description that confirmed new details on the inbound downloadable platformer.

The game has online and offline co-op with Sonic and chum Tails battling through multiple stages in gameplay designed to echo Sonic 2.

The plot description in full:

"The Sonic 4 Saga continues as Sonic reunites with Tails for all new collaborative play! Following the events of Episode I, Metal Sonic has returned to form a formidable alliance with Dr. Eggman! To face this new threat, Sonic will have to call upon an old friend to help him save the day! Joined by Tails, utilise ingenious combination moves and race across four brand new Zones, in order to put an end to their evil plans! Play alone, or with a friend locally (and online), in an evolution of Sonic 2?s collaborative gameplay! Unleash Sonic and Tails' devastating joint attacks and combination moves to fight the united force of Metal Sonic and Dr. Eggman. Episode II features an all new game engine, bringing you updated physics and an original graphical style as you race through four unique Zones and a new Special Stage."

Sega last month published a teaser trailer for the game, due out at some point this year. (Going by this latest leak, sooner rather than later.)

It launches on PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Arcade, iOS, Windows Phone and Android. An enhanced version for Android devices with Tegra 3 is in the works. Unlike Episode 1, however, Episode 2 will not release for the Wii.

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Witcher dev's two 2014/2015 "AAA+" games are simultaneous PC, next-gen console releases

The next two major titles from Polish developer CD Projekt Red, scheduled for 2014/15, will be simultaneous multi-platform releases for PC and next-generation consoles, detective Eurogamer has discovered.

"We are definitely starting for new consoles," managing director Adam Badowski told us, when asked whether the pair of known-about "AAA+" games will be for this generation or the next.

"The market is ready for something new," heralded head of marketing Michal Platkow-Gilewski, "for something faster, more powerful."

Badowski added: "I can tell you we are and we were focusing on powerful gaming rigs. We're going to do something amazing, so we need extra processors.

"It will be multi-platform game, so the multi-release at the same time. But if you are talking about leading platform, we will use most powerful, just because it can give us the freedom of creation.

"And it's cool to develop something special, new - better than others on the market. It's our goal."

When does CD Projekt Red begin making an engine for the next generation of machines?

"We've already started," Badowski revealed.

"We prepared a backlog for the new features quite a long time ago."

"Oh hey, I'm photo-real next-gen Geralt! Mmm."

"You probably know that we've decided to develop our new engine that is called Red Engine, so we've prepared a long-term plan for that engine. So we are yes, yes we are developing some features just for the new..."

Platkow-Gilewski interjected: "We are anticipating what the new generations of consoles may be."

"The market is ready for something new, for something faster, more powerful."

Michal Platkow-Gilewski, head of marketing, CD Projekt Red

"Not only consoles," Badowski butted in.

"What the platforms will be," Platkow-Gilewski answered. "And what will happen in the PC market, because you know we have to create something better than we could achieve today. We have to see a little bit the future, like other developers I guess."

The specs CD Projekt Red are working towards for these next-generation consoles are "quite powerful but nothing extraordinary", shared Badowski. But this is "our - I hope - lucky guess", he added, inferring that CD Projekt Red does not have next-gen dev kits. Platkow-Gilewski confirmed that what will be in next-gen consoles, "we don't know this, today".

CD Projekt Red talked about two major new games in November. These were described at a conference as "AAA+" games, and are scheduled for 2014/2015. A "AAA+" game is "something huge and it's multi-platform", explained Platkow-Gilewski.

One of these is new IP.

CD Projekt is putting together a new team to make this game. The Witcher team won't be involved. "The second team is just a few guys right now," shared Badowski, "because we decided not to split the original Witcher team in two parts, but to hire new staff, and we've just started."

"The second project is during the early pre-production stage, so we don't need the huge team for that."

What will this new IP be? "We are staying in RPG," Badowski said.

"Hey, we're in the snow!"

"The whole scenario is quite simple: we're going to create almost exactly the same kind of team, and our policy is to create RPG games for mature audiences. But of course the second title will be different than the first one. We need to change universe and gameplay mechanics, but the game will be based on a deep scenario as [are] The Witcher games."

"Our approach stays the same," Platkow-Gilewski reinforced, "we just want to refresh a little bit our minds and do something different."

This new IP is "not at all" to do with FPS They, which acquired studio Metropolis Software was working on up until January 2010.

"[The new IP] will be a mature RPG and story-driven game. I cannot say in what universe - maybe high fantasy, maybe not."

Adam Badowski, managing director, CD Projekt Red

Will this new IP be a science-fiction game?

"I cannot say right now," deflected Badowski. "It will be a mature RPG and story-driven game. I cannot say in what universe - maybe high fantasy, maybe not."

What's the other AAA+ game being made by The Witcher team, then?

It has to be The Witcher 3 - please can you put us out of our misery and confirm it, we asked?

"Frankly speaking, not yet," Platkow-Gilewski replied. "Give us some time; I'm sure we will announce it pretty fast in the following months, but we want to do everything in the proper order. And right now we are focused on polishing and bringing the Enhanced Edition to Xbox 360 and PC."

"Especially as on Xbox 360 we don't have the first instalment of The Witcher. So we want to slowly enter the market, educate our gamers/customers - we don't want to [talk] too much about our future projects for now."

"There are rumours that The Witcher is a saga..." Badowski teased, and confirmed that both of the "AAA+" projects "are in pre-production stage". We weren't allowed to know which would be released first, in 2014.

CD Projekt Red revealed three other games at the November conference: two "A" games for 2012, and one "AA" game for 2013.

"It makes me laugh when I see blurry last-gen pictures of myself."

We'll know "pretty soon" about the first "A" game, which will be released Q1 2012. It's definitely not a mobile game - CDPR isn't going there - but we may have prodded a sensitive spot when we asked if it was anything to do with The Witcher 1.

"You are unpacking the gift, you know," Platkow-Gilewski told us. "Really soon we will inform the community about our surprise. It will come pretty soon, in the following two months."

Whether the second "A" game will be similar we will have to wait and see. That's coming later this year.

What exactly is an "A" game?

"Give us some time; I'm sure we will announce [The Witcher 3] pretty fast in the following months, but we want to do everything in the proper order. And right now we are focused on polishing and bringing the Enhanced Edition to Xbox 360 and PC."

Michal Platkow-Gilewski

"The definition of product A is that this is a good quality game for a single platform which doesn't involve enormous effort on our side," Platkow-Gilewski explained. "This is our internal definition. After the first surprise, maybe we'll reveal some information about the second surprise for this year."

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings - Enhanced Edition on Xbox 360 and PC is classified as "AAA". No plus. This is "something big, or huge, but for a single platform", Platkow-Gilewski clarified.

What, then, is the "AA" game due in 2013? It's unlikely to be a PS3 edition, given the Xbox 360's "AAA" status - not to mention that CDPR hasn't made a decision yet about whether to convert the game to Sony's machine.

"AA" titles are "big games with good scores" of 85 per cent or higher on Metacritic, we were told. "They have some selling potential, but they don't require more than two years of our work," said Platkow-Gilewski.

(Note that while the Xbox 360 version of The Witcher 2 took one year, that period was converting an already made game, not creating one from scratch - which is presumably what Platkow-Gilewski means.)

This "AA" game sounds like an expansion pack for The Witcher 2. Is it?

"Let's release the game first and we will see," answered Platkow-Gilewski gingerly.

"The thing is, we have to measure our capabilities, and we have big plans for the future."

"Believe us," he urged, "we want to do as much as possible."

The Enhanced Edition of the Witcher 2 on Xbox 360.

Video(Playlist,1);

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Saturday Soapbox: Why Everyone Is Amazing

These are angry times. The interconnected world is plaiting the lunatic fringes into a sort of consistently annoying haircut (a skinhead, in this case), Argentina is hacked off because the United Kingdom has sent a piddly little nuclear destroyer to paddle around the Falklands, nobody seems to have any money but do enjoy that 1.5 per cent pay rise that doesn't come close to inflation, and - perhaps most importantly - the fine art of dubstep is being sullied by its unwelcome proliferation across supermarket aisles and game trailers.

It was in this spirit of apocalypse that Marsh Davies took to our weekly nutter-shouting-in-a-park Soapbox slot to argue that developers have the right to stay silent about their future plans. In the process, he annoyed an awful lot of you who didn't realise that his tone wasn't entirely serious, despite labelling the Facebook Like button an example of "ego-frotting evil". Oops!

But, in the midst of the debate, one of Marsh's central points went unnoticed: that there are some very healthy, legitimate reasons for gamers to feel entitled. Many games are evolving into a collaborative experience created by programmers and players, and while this can occasionally cause problems for both parties, we don't do enough to celebrate a gaming culture that is increasingly creative and participatory. As others have rightly argued, there is another way to look at the evidence of 12,000 people playing Half-Life 2 together in solidarity: "This is the generation where more people are more supportive of more things and they're more supportive in the most wonderful of ways."

"As others have rightly argued, there is another way to look at the evidence of 12,000 people playing Half-Life 2 together in solidarity: 'This is the generation where more people are more supportive of more things and they're more supportive in the most wonderful of ways.'"

1/20 So this is it. The mental world.

(Oh, and if it makes anyone feel better, even Valve isn't usually this secretive and obtuse in the face of pronounced public opposition to something it's doing, so I'm taking its silence as confirmation that we'll see a Half-Life 3 announcement this year. Tell me I'm wrong, Gabe!)

12,000 people playing a seven-year-old game together on the same day in the forlorn hope it would draw the attention of their idols is one of a range of really good news stories about the games industry that probably doesn't always penetrate past the doom and gloom of stories like THQ sacking loads of staff or Sony closing a game studio weeks before its last release even hits the shelves.

There's actually a lot of good going on. The Humble Bundles raise millions for charity and support creative people who want to exist outside the traditional games industry structure; Tim Schafer gets to make a new adventure game (on a golden yacht at this rate); and while the UK Top 40 may make for grim reading now and then (especially if you get sent the private copyrighted sales data that goes with it), there is great prosperity among those who strive to innovate outside it. Did you know that Riot Games, the maker of League of Legends, is absolutely swimming in money? I didn't until recently. Good news though!

There are a few people sucking teeth, of course. THQ isn't doing very well - we all appreciated core games boss Danny Bilson's noble goal of empowering creative people to make the best-possible games, but the quality hasn't been there frequently enough to pay the bills - and even safe-sounding giants like Square Enix posted big losses in FY 2011. Meanwhile, Ubisoft seems to have lost some of the creative zeal that made every one of its mid-2000s games into an exciting, unknown quantity, resorting to annual iteration and spamming console launches, posting losses in the process.

Meanwhile, former Microsoft "XNA" man Chris Satchell's bold vision of an Xbox Live Marketplace dominated by a peer-reviewed community of high-quality indie developers has been thoroughly kicked to the kerb - as the company tries to get its ducks in order around a future entertainment vision that sees operating systems converging on smartphone, desktop, tablet and games console, and shoving high-margin premium video streams and downloadable content down your broadband pipe instead.

"The goldrush around the iTunes App Store will slow down and shake out quite a few losers, but this is nothing to fear. The best will survive."

1/10 This game's quite good. Someone should have said something.

But that's OK too, because people adapt. Change is healthy. As Tim Schafer himself told our friends at Hookshot Inc this week, "The indie community is now moving elsewhere. We're figuring out how to fund and distribute games ourselves, and we're getting more control over them. Those systems, as great as they are, they're still closed. You have to jump through a lot of hoops, even for important stuff like patching and supporting your game... I mean, it costs $40,000 to put up a patch - we can't afford that! Open systems like Steam, that allow us to set our own prices, that's where it's at, and doing it completely alone like Minecraft. That's where people are going." The goldrush around the iTunes App Store will slow down and shake out quite a few losers, but this is nothing to fear. The best will survive.

'The best will survive.' A few years ago you could have called me a hopeless optimist for saying that, but these days I think I'm right. Social media is replacing the search engine as a smart gamer's primary means of discovering good content, and social media is much better for sharing on the internet than search engines because it innately favours quality. People mostly share things that excite or fascinate them, partly because they want their friends and acquaintances to be excited and fascinated too, but mostly because they want to bask in the reflected glory of being the guy or girl who found that amazing new thing on the internet.

This sort of thing is going to make everything better, not just gaming, and it certainly makes a lot more sense than hoping Microsoft will stick a massive ad for your indie game on the Xbox dashboard when it can charge someone 40 grand for use of that space instead. Now you can just make what you do high quality instead, and - by notifying the best curators - you'll get the word out. It even works for websites. Removed from that nonsense and enshrined in the goodwill of Notch's half a million Twitter followers, I wouldn't be surprised if Tim Schafer's adventure game is a massive hit. As long as it's good, people will now have the means to notice.

Still these are angry times. It's hard not to find something in the news to cast a long shadow over your cornflakes every morning. Yet still gamers do amazing things to support amazing game developers, and around them the apparatus of a socially connected world seems hard-wired to start rewarding that sense of mutual support and optimism on a much grander scale. The good will out. The best will win.

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FIFA Street release date announced

Showboating footie sim FIFA Street leaves the dressing room on 13th March for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, EA has announced.

The publisher also seized the moment to unveil the game's new Street Network feature, that lets you record clips of yourself showing off and then share them with friend in-game.

It also allows you to keep track of friends' progress through the game, and will broadcast regular community clips, such as goal of the week.

"Street soccer is all about the one-on-one battle, when you pull off a trick to roast your opponent," commented producer Sid Misra.

"The Street Network brings that real-world swagger into the game by enabling players to capture video of those moments and share them with everyone in their street network to see, and providing friends with a way to compare each other throughout the game."

It's the first outing for the franchise since the underwhelming FIFA Street 3 stumbled onto shelves back in 2008.

View the original article here

Insomniac confirms it won't make more Resistance games

Insomniac has confirmed it will not make any more Resistance games.

Insomniac boss Ted Price told VG247, "We won't be making any more Resistances."

Price's comments confirm the suggestion that Insomniac - now working on Overstrike for EA and smaller games for its new Insomniac Click division - was done with the PlayStation exclusive shooter series following comments from creative director Marcus Smith in August last year.

"I loved the Spyro the Dragon series when [Insomniac] did that. I didn't work there at the time, and I was bummed when they didn't work on the fourth game, but ultimately, I think it was healthy for them to move on. I think that's what we're seeing here," Smith said at the time.

"We've done Resistance 3 and we're really into it and proud of it, but we're not currently slated to do a Resistance 4. So it would be hard to say it's any kind of lynchpin within Insomniac. I think we're thriving and branching out in a lot of different directions."

He added: ""We've got a lot of different places for the universe to go, so I could certainly see the series going to another developer. I'm sure Sony would want to find a high calibre developer to do a good offering. I don't think they'd hand the franchise over to somebody who is going to screw it up."

"We recognise we have a very loyal fanbase among Sony players, and we love them," Price told Eurogamer at E3 2011 in June.

"We're definitely dedicated to them. However, we've always wanted to reach out to an even broader audience. The Xbox 360 audience has been a viable, vibrant audience for a long time. This was just a chance to do that."

Insomniac has been a PlayStation-exclusive developer for 15 years. Overstrike, due out on Xbox 360 as well as PlayStation 3, is its first multiplatform game.

Nihilistic is creating a Resistance Vita game. Sony Bend made Resistance Retribution on PSP. Which studio will Sony task with creating Resistance 4, should it decide to do so?

Resistance 3 sold 180,000 units during its first month on sale in the US, according to NPD.

That was a significant drop-off compared to Resistance 2's 385,000 first month total back in November 2008. Resistance 2 went on to sell around three million copies worldwide.

Resistance 3, which picked up a healthy 8/10 from Eurogamer on release, debuted at number four in the UK charts in September, behind Dead Island and Warhammer 40K: Space Marine. It entered the US monthly chart at number seven, behind Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Dead Island and Gears of War 3.

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SoulCalibur 5 DLC revealed

PlayStation Vita Review

The ultimate hardcore gamer's handheld?

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HomeReviewsNewsVideosEGTV ShowDigital FoundryGameDBRelease DatesEG ExpoForumGaikaiNewsXbox 360PlayStation 3SoulCalibur 5 DLC revealed ByWesley Yin-PoolePublished27 January, 2012

Bikinis! Wings! Face paint!

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Namco Bandai has announced the downloadable content for upcoming fighting game SoulCalibur 5.

Three packs of DLC are scheduled to launch in February, each priced €1.99 or 160 MS points in Europe.

They are:

Pack 1: Launch Day February 3rdNine exotic customisation items including bikinis, wings and face paints.Original music from Soul Blade and SoulCalibur (tracks also available individually for €0.99 or 80MS points).Pack 2: Valentine's Day February 14thNine fearsome customisation items including breast plate, kimono and animal heads.Original music from SoulCalibur 2 and 3 (tracks also available individually for €0.99 or 80MS points).Pack 3: February 28thNine exclusive customisation items including mask, face paint, camouflage and skull.Original music from SoulCalibur 4 and Soulcalibur: Broken Destiny (tracks also available individually for €0.99 or 80MS points).

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Kingdoms of Amalur Preview: Action Speaks Louder

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. It's an instantly forgettable title. And it's not just meaningless and profoundly generic, it's saddled (like Dragon Age: Origins before it) with the exhausting suggestion that this isn't the birth of an exciting fantasy universe so much as the launch of a new franchising opportunity.

Having spent 15 hours or so in the company of a near-finished preview build of 38 Studios' brisk role-player - out next week - I can confirm that it deserves much better than this limp nomenclature. And yet, it's true that the title fits it like a glove.

'Kingdoms of Amalur': the game's universe is exactly the derivative mishmash of worn high fantasy tropes that you expect after reading those three words. It's been rubber-stamped by some big-name creatives (fantasy author RA Salvatore and comic and toy king Todd MacFarlane), and I suppose it's possible that "every building, tree and creature has a clear and defined history within this immersive world," as the literature claims. But this land of elves (sorry, Fae), dwarves and men initially offers nothing to distinguish itself beyond a similarity to Blizzard's Warcraft that's not so much striking as actionable. (I could swear that I met the Night Elf druid from the original WOW trailer. She even had the same clothes on.)

'Reckoning': if this subtitle makes you think of a violent console action game saturated with acrobatic combos, murder gauges and gory slow-motion execution moves, you're right again. In game design terms, Amalur's principal departure from the BioWare and Bethesda games that loom so large over it is a punchy, brawling combat style, ideally suited for a game pad.

1/10 It's like the Cataclysm never happened; for refugees from old Azeroth, Amalur will be a home from home.

But before you tar it with the dumbed-down brush, consider that Amalur never pretended to be a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate - or anything else, for that matter. It's got all the branching conversations and skill trees you could want, but this taut and immediate action (along with its colourful artwork) sets it apart from its American RPG peers: games that, for all their qualities, can be dour and mechanically clumsy. Amalur, by contrast, is bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and slick as you like.

Amalur's development at Big Huge Games - which was owned by THQ for a spell before being incorporated into 38 Studios, an ambitious company owned by MMO enthusiast and former baseball star Curt Schilling - has been led by Ian Frazier (Titan Quest) and Ken Rolston, an Elder Scrolls veteran who was lead designer of both Morrowind and Oblivion. It's not exactly a pretender to Skyrim's throne, however.

The game unfolds in a more structured, less naturalistic or open-ended manner than an Elder Scrolls; its very large open world is made up of quite neatly defined and thematically discrete play fields, connected by disguised corridors. Game flow is clearly more important than total freedom to Big Huge Games, and the same is true of its approach to storytelling.

There's certainly a wealth of narrative detail and background lore here, and quests are framed in a familiar style, with conversation options and talking-head exposition. But fans of BioWare's intricate interactive fictions (regular and observant readers will know I don't really count myself among them) might be disappointed. Meaningful choices or forks in the tale are rare (making a lot of the dialogue redundant, it has to be said), and progress through the game is defined less by story than it is by exploration.

Your main quest and a choice of faction quests lead you from one location to the next, with a starburst of optional side-quests around each hub. Recovering WOW addicts like yours truly will find themselves soothed by the structure of this particular offline methadone. (It also bears comparison to Wii gem Xenoblade Chronicles.) Quick travel and a very detailed map keep things manageable, but while this certainly feels more like a video game than an untamed wilderness, it's not without a sense of scale and adventure - and, pleasingly, there are plenty of secrets to find.

Most of these secrets yield loot. Kingdoms of Amalur is a joyously loot-happy game - not quite a Diablo but close - and rightly unconcerned about showering a solo role-player in treasures. Chances are you'll be wearing something with a purple name and more stat boosts and status effects than you know what to do with in your first half-dozen hours, and you'll have superseded it just as quickly.

"We MUST make a profit to become what we want to become."

And Mass Effect 3-themed extras.

"I'm not going to pretend that Skyrim doesn't exist."

I haven't delved deep enough to judge Amalur's story yet; suffice to say that your character is a resurrected warrior with no memory (like most RPGs, Amalur assumes you want all your points invested in Amnesia from the get-go) who attracts the attention of a band of seers called the Fateweavers as well as an antagonistic, warlike tribe of Fae. In this world, everyone - especially the story-obsessed Fae, who constantly re-enact their fabled songs - believes their fate to be written in advance. So your ability to decide your own fate (and others') is both alarming and precious.

It's a cute conceit for a medieval fantasy game, although it's hard to tell if the rather functional writing will have the grace to handle it when the going gets tough and the choices start to matter. It's also tied, with varying degrees of success, to your character development and the mechanics of combat.

Among Amalur's best achievements are some thoroughly addictive and rewarding crafting options; non-boring crafting isn't easy to do.

Video(Playlist,1);

Character development, like so much in this game, is a pleasant balance of freedom and definition. There are three simple 'Destiny' archetypes (mage, rogue and warrior) but at each level-up you're free to invest points as you desire across these three skill trees. You can specialise one path or create your own hybrid quite easily, and at certain points you'll be rewarded with bonuses appropriate to your particular combination of Destinies. If you get bored, it's possible to pay a Fateweaver to unlock your Destiny, and reinvest all your points in a completely different build.

Active skills take the form of new weapon-attack combos or special skills that can be attributed to one of four trigger-plus-button slots. Combined with the basic controls - shield block, dodge and primary and secondary weapon attacks - you get a simple, responsive, flexible and fun combat system. Enemies are pretty easy to down with combos, but when they hit, they hit hard - and with no recharging health, you'd better have some potions at the ready.

The most inelegant graft from console beat-'em-ups is the Reckoning meter, which charges with the bonus Fate you earn in combat (you get more Fate for more varied and effective use of your abilities). Fill this and you can enter a 'bullet time'-style frenzy, aiming to reduce as many enemies as possible to minimum health before the meter drains. Then you can "unravel their Fates" by executing them all in a single blood-spattered climax. It works, and it's useful in busy fights (Amalur likes to throw large, mixed enemy groupings at you). But it feels like an egregious inclusion in what is otherwise a sensitive and seamless mix of stat-crunching and free-flowing action combat.

With Skyrim's long shadow extending well into the early part of this year - and with only muted support from publisher EA, which is more invested in BioWare's work - Kingdoms of Amalur might prove a hard sell to sated fantasy enthusiasts. That title and the game's rather forced, generic personality don't help.

But initial impressions are of a game that's very nicely put together and hard to put down, with a refreshingly direct approach to putting pulse-raising action into a trad role-playing epic. Check our review next week to find out if the promise is fulfilled.

View the original article here

The Simpsons Arcade, Far Cry 2 headline PS Plus update

PlayStation Plus subscribers can pick up the impending re-release of 1991 coin-op classic The Simpsons Arcade free of charge for a limited time this month.

Konami's cartoon tie-in is available at no charge from 1st February to the end of the month.

It's a bumper few weeks for PS Plus members, with Far Cry 2 and Final Fantasy V among the other freebies up for grabs. There's also substantial savings to be had on Rayman Origins, Sonic Adventure and House of the Dead 3.

Here's the full list of offers, as seen on the PlayStation Blog:

From 1st February:

The Simpsons Arcade - 100 per cent off (you save ?7.99/€9.99)Final Fantasy V (PSone Classic) - 100 per cent off (you save ?7.99/€9.99)Hungry Giraffe (minis) - 100 per cent off (you save ?2.49/€2.99)Farm Frenzy (minis) - 100 per cent off (you save ?2.49/€2.99)Sonic Adventure - 50 per cent off (you save ?3.15/€4.00)Sonic Adventure DX Upgrade - 100 per cent off (you save ?3.19/€3.99)Rayman: Origins - 50 per cent off until 08/02/12 (you save ?24.00/€30.00)

Second chance offer:

Sega Megadrive Classics: Sonic the Hedgehog - 100 per cent off; Sonic the Hedgehog 2 - 100 per cent off; Golden Axe - 100 per cent off; Streets of Rage 2 - 100 per cent off; Altered Beast - 100 per cent off; Comix Zone - 100 per cent off (you save ?24.00/€30.00)Jellybeans Dynamic Theme - 100 per cent off (you save ?1.59/€1.99)Skulls Dynamic Theme - 100 per cent off (you save ?1.59/€1.99)Rayman: Origins Globox Toe-Grab Avatar - 100 per cent off (you save ?1.20/€1.50)Rayman: Origins Darktoon Avatar - 100 per cent off (you save ?1.20/€1.50)Rayman: Origins Baby Dragon Avatar - 100 per cent off (you save ?1.20/€1.50)

Still to come later this month:

Far Cry 2 - 100 per cent off from 14th to 22nd February (you save ?15.99/€19.99)Vandal Hearts: Flames of Judgment - 75 per cent off (you save ?7.50/€9.75)House of the Dead 3 (Move) - 30 per cent off for two weeks (you save ?1.45/€1.79)Splinter Cell, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory - 50 per cent off for one week (you save ?12.00/€15.00)

View the original article here

Mass Effect 3 DLC included with new art book

Another day, another report of obscurely packaged Mass Effect 3 DLC.

Following news earlier this week that EA is giving away exclusive DLC with Mass Effect action figures, today we learn it's also handing out in-game content to anyone who shells out for a forthcoming hardback art book.

According to a Dark Horse blog post, all those who pre-order The Art of Mass Effect Universe (priced at $26.91) through Barnes & Noble before 20th February will receive a download code for "character boosters" and a new weapon called the Collector Assault Rifle.

For reasons unexplained, the retailer notes that the voucher will only work for PC and Xbox 360 versions of the impending BioWare action RPG sequel.

We're seeking word on whether gamers outside of the US will be able to access the content.

View the original article here

Jak and Daxter Trilogy release date announced

Forthcoming PlayStation 3 HD revamp The Jak and Daxter Trilogy arrives in European stores on 22nd February - the same day as the Vita.

The pack includes touched-up versions of Naughty Dog's PS2 platformers Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, Jak 2 and Jak 3.

You can expect 720p HD visuals, stereoscopic 3D support and over 100 Trophies to track down, some of which were unveiled on the PlayStation Blog earlier today:

Pedal to the Metal: Destroy Metal Kor at Nest - Gold Purple Pain: Navigate the Purple Precursor Rings - Bronze The Super Orberator: Collect 2000 Precursor Orbs - Gold Testosterone: Pass the Tests of Manhood - Silver Just the Artifacts Ma'am: Find three Artifacts in Mountain Temple - Bronze What's That Smell?: Escort Men Through Sewers - Bronze The Beast Beater: Destroy Metal Head Beasts - Bronze Gate Crasher Masher: Defend Spargus' Front Gate - Bronze Pedal to the Metal: Destroy Metal Kor at Nest - Gold

The pack will sport a relatively budget €39.99 price tag.

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Darksiders prequel novel announced

The Darksiders series is to get a scene-setting novel tie-in, THQ has announced.

Written by fantasy veteran Ari Marmell and published by Random House's Del Rey imprint, Darksiders: The Abomination Vault is set thousands of years before the events of the first game in the franchise.

The book follows twin Horsemen Death and War as they attempt to scupper a mysterious plot to resurrect powerful ancient weapons and trigger a devastating conflict.

It's due on shelves in May this year, a month before Darksiders 2 is expected to launch.

For a closer look at the Vigil Games-developed sequel to the well-received 2010 Zelda riff, head on over to Eurogamer's Darksiders 2 preview.

View the original article here

Why Tomb Raider won't release on Wii U

Crystal Dynamics has explained why PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 game Tomb Raider will not release on Wii U.

Global brand director Karl Stewart said development on the hotly-anticipated reboot began long before the announcement of the Wii U - and it wouldn't be right to simply port the game to Nintendo's tablet-fuelled Wii successor.

"When we started developing the game we made a conscious decision that it was all about building the game for a platform and making sure the game was specific to that platform," Stewart told the Crystal Habit Podcast (via the Eidos forum.

"Given that we've been working on the game quite a while before Wii U was announced I think it would not be right to try and port it across. If we started building a game for the Wii U we would build it very differently and we would build it with unique functionality."

The game will, however, launch on Mac. Eidos is in discussions with a company to bring it to the platform, but Stewart was unable to guarantee it will launch alongside the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 versions' confirmed global simultaneous release - expected this year.

View the original article here

Legit Battlefield 3 gamers banned via PunkBuster exploit

Update: EA has responded to Eurogamer with a statement that has already been aired on the Battlelog forum.

In summary: this is only happening to a "small subset" of PC gamers, and not on console.

EA is on the case and is "confident" of having a "permanent solution" for you "shortly".

Until then, you're advised to avoid servers running PunkBuster.

Here's the full statement:

"We are aware that some Battlefield 3 players are experiencing connection issues with PunkBuster enabled servers," EA's statement read.

"This problem is limited to a small subset of players on PC and will not impact players on PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360.

"We are actively looking into the specifics of this issue and we are confident that we will have a permanent solution in place shortly.

"In the meantime, if your connectivity has been affected, we recommend that in the interim you join servers that are not running PunkBuster. There is a filter setting for this in the multiplayer server browser.

"Thank you for your patience."

Original story: To prove how flawed Battlefield 3 anti-cheat and monitoring systems are, hackers have used a PunkBuster exploit to ban more than 150 law-abiding players.

Cheat and hack forum ArtificialAiming instigated the bans and provided proof of their coup in a post (via Battlefield 3 blog)

ArtificialAiming's argument is with GGC and PBBans. These are third-party services that run on Battlefield 3 servers and provide a host of anti-cheat tools - live ban lists among them. GGC and PBBans were working together, but broke off their partnership in October.

"We are bringing back the unerring of PunkBuster back for a third season," read the post on the ArtificialAiming forum. "We have selected GGC-stream as the target since they have the most streaming BF3 servers and makes it very easy to add fake bans.

"In 2011 we hit them with a mass ban-wave, and now we are banning real players from Battlelog while GGC-stream is totally unaware. We have framed 150-plus BF3 players alone."

GGC-stream apparently denied the appeal of players who were framed by saying the bans were "legit".

ArtificialAiming even created a host of fake nicknames on the banned accounts to signpost the problem. Examples of these are "No_one_is_safe", "You_will_never_find_all_the_fake_bans", "BF3_fake_ban_#111", "GGC_is_not_safe", "Many_more_fake_bans_are_coming" and "This_is_a_fake_ban". And that was just for one banned BF3 account.

ArtificialAiming claims to have banned eSports League admins as well - although these bans were "quickly removed" by GGC.

"Thx to the GGC-stream team for the lulz," the post concluded.

EA and DICE are yet to comment on the issue.

View the original article here

Mass Effect 3 cover-camping a no-no on Hardcore, Insanity

Apparently I'll need to do more when playing Mass Effect 3 on Hardcore or Insanity difficulties than cower behind cover and pop up every so often to fling a biotic ability or loose a round of ammo, safe in the knowledge that my Krogan ally-plus-one have taken care of everything else.

"On Normal you'll be able to power your way or shoot your way through the game. But when you try Hardcore or Insanity you're not going to be able to do that any more," lead designer Preston Watamaniuk warned OXM (via VG247).

"You really will have to think about each combat; who the enemies are, what kind of resistance you're presented with, and then strategise to take them down. I'm hoping that it'll feel like you made a mistake and the game called you on it, rather than, 'I thought I was playing well, and then I died.'

He was a good Shepard. Just saying.

"We've tried to make it so that it just feels like if you're working the problem - using all your squad, all your powers, picking the right guns - you're going to get through that combat.

"It's not going to be, 'I sat in cover and popped out five or six times to use powers and stuff.'"

What's more, the Insanity difficulty will be harder than in previous games.

Peer pressure, explained Watamaniuk: "I had a lead designer for another game write to say, 'Make Insanity harder!' And I was like, 'OK!' This was a really well-known and respected guy, so I was like, 'OK, I'll do my best.'"

I hope it wasn't Shigeru Miyamoto - he's supposed to be busy making Nintendo's next big hit! I wonder if it was Dark Souls' director Hidetaka Miyazaki, or Skyrim's game director Todd Howard?

"It's not going to be, 'I sat in cover and popped out five or six times to use powers and stuff.'"

Preston Watamaniuk, lead designer, Mass Effect 3

Watamaniuk went on: "You'll notice that if you play on Insanity, that sort of general rule of thumb is even harsher. You'd better be doing everything well, or you'll die."

As we've waffled-on about before, baddies in Mass Effect 3 come in more shapes and sizes - and with more tricks up their sleeves - than in they did in Mass Effect 2 or Mass Effect 1. Some of them even carry shields that block bullets! So you'll need to get up off your bottom and flank them if you're serious about saving Earth. And no it's not unfair, because you'll get more goodies with which to tackle them.

"There's all the cover mobility, there's increased mobility in and out of cover, like being able to Storm out of cover, roll into cover, roll out of cover - a lot more agility around that," explained Watamaniuk.

"We have more involved powers, power combos, mods and the mods interact with the powers. Being able to take a Claymore shotgun and put a Shredder mod that allows you to penetrate through enemies, and then you put Cryo ammo on top of that, and all of a sudden you can pull the trigger once and blow four husks away."

A Mass Effect 3 demo will be released on Valentine's Day - Tuesday, 14th February.

The classes you can pick from when playing Mass Effect 3's co-op multiplayer mode.

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View the original article here

Rebellion: gamers are ready for WWII revival

Though widely considered tired and played-out, the World War II sub-genre is ripe for a comeback, so says Alien vs Predator developer Rebellion.

While discussing its forthcoming Sniper Elite V2 project with GamerZines, senior producer Steve Hart argued that the more contemporary settings favoured by the likes of Battlefield 3, Black Ops and Modern Warfare 3 are themselves becoming increasingly stale.

"I think the market is ready for World War II," he said.

"You've seen the extra press the likes of Red Orchestra 2 have gotten because all of a sudden WWII is a breath of fresh air whereas modern conflicts perhaps aren't."

Hart went on to offer his opinion on why FPS developers had recently chosen to abandon the time period in favour of modern conflicts.

"I wouldn't say developers moved on, instead they gave it the respect it needed and said 'Right, we've done that to death, let's go look at something else.'

"It just so happens that our timing for a World War II game is better than others out there, and gamers are ready for that now. Even better for us is that we're coming out before perhaps another Call of Duty set during World War II, as I'm sure we'll be seeing another one of those at some point."

The sequel to the solid 2005 shooter is due out later this year.

Rebellion isn't the only studio hoping gamers can stomach a return to WWII. Black creator Stuart Black is currently developing Enemy Front at City Interactive, also planned for a 2012 release.

View the original article here

Yoshinori Ono outlines vision for next-gen Street Fighter

Capcom's Street Fighter maestro Yoshinori Ono has outlined his vision of fighting games on the next generation of consoles.

Future fighting games, he told Eurogamer, will let gamers customise their characters to a greater degree than we've seen in the past - indeed Street Fighter x Tekken's controversial gem system is a sign of things to come.

"For future titles I want to keep having this concept of, my character is different than your character," he said.

"In fighting games, the only difference between me and you is how good I am. But what I want to do with fighting games from now on is add in that element of customisation, where I can have a Ryu that's different than your Ryu, so we can compete on a different level than just our execution."

SFxT's gem system is designed to allow players to customise characters - but these characters are pre-made and, beyond colour and costume changes, remain fixed.

Ono suggested future fighting games may allow fans to create their own gems, "But really the ultimate goal would be to have the players themselves create their own characters to some degree," he revealed. "We call it user created content, or user created design."

"So in that case it would be like, the Ryu that Yoshinori Ono made is the best, or the Ryu that other guy made sucks. If we could have that interaction between the fans: I've created this great character so why don't you come try it, or that guy's character he made isn't so good. Why isn't it that good? If we can get that back and forth between the community and create more dialogue and interaction within the game, that would be the best case scenario."

The next generation of consoles, Ono admitted, puts "a lot of pressure" on Capcom to create something new in the fighting game genre. But next-gen fighting games will, ultimately, be directed by fan feedback.

"Really it comes down to the ideas and information we have now and the requests of the fans," Ono said. "Maybe it wouldn't even have to wait until the next generation of consoles. It could be something we could do now.

"But we need to get as much information as we can from the fans: what kind of things do they want to see in fighting games? What are they responding to? What don't they like? That's why I like to go around different countries and see what the community is saying about the games.

"The other thing we need is time. Obviously it takes a long time to make a game. If it's something we could do with this current generation we could do it. But if it takes longer… yeah, we could think of something really great to do on next generation of consoles."

The next-gen, the next Xbox and, presumably, PlayStation 4, promise to deliver vastly improved graphics than the current gen. While Ono is perfectly happy with the power of PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, he did hint at the visual improvements the shift to next-gen will enable for future Street Fighter games.

"Just for the basics of fighting games, and what we've done until now, the current generation of hardware is more than enough to do what we want to do," he said. "You can see with Resident Evil 6, we've got amazing graphics in that game. We've got stylized art in Street Fighter x Tekken.

"But I'm a person that puts a lot of focus and attention to the details of the visuals. Fighting games are great to be spectated. The players enjoy it, but people watching can also enjoy them. With the next generation of hardware we can make things better for the spectator in that sense."

He added: "So maybe the guy's clothes could get ripped off during the fight. Chun-Li would be like, 'Oh no!' There are a lot of things we could do with the graphics to make it look better. But in terms of the basics, we already have a lot of the power we need."

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GameStop closes Northern Ireland stores

GameStop shops in Northern Ireland have closed, as the company continues transferring all UK business online to the GameStop website.

Pictures of closed GameStation stores in Northern Ireland were taken at the weekend (and posted on TheGamingLiberty). Apparently staff were told on Sunday.

"We are transferring all of our UK business online to www.gamestop.co.uk," read a post by GameStop UK on Facebook. "We will honour all outstanding deposits and gift cards on www.gamestop.co.uk please contact - help@gamestop.co.uk for further assistance. Have a lovely day!"

Stores in the Republic of Ireland are "not affected at this time", GameStop regional boss Michael Finucane explained to MCV.

"The recent store closures in Northern Ireland are part of our plan, announced six months ago, to exit the UK market from a brick and mortar perspective.

"We started this process last year closing our Birmingham, Stockport and Belfast locations.

"Our go-forward plan," he added, "is to serve the UK market with enhanced digital and online offerings."

Finucane said the GameStop website business had experience "tremendous sales growth".

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NeverDead Review

"Yeah, so I heard that in NeverDead, you can rip your own head off and use it to roll through ventilation shafts. I heard you can attach your head to your severed limbs and just wobble around on the floor kneecapping demons with your twin pistols. I heard you can pluck your right arm off and then throw it, still clutching an Uzi, into the mouth of a giant boss, so that he'll swallow it and you can then shoot him from the inside and the outside at the same time."

Princess, you heard right. You can do all of that stuff in NeverDead, because NeverDead is kind of amazing. And it's lucky that NeverDead is kind of amazing, because - quite a lot of the time, at least - NeverDead also isn't actually very good.

Konami's latest is the fruit of a weird collaboration between Metal Gear Acid director and long-time MGS stalwart Shinta Nojiri and Rebellion, a venerable studio based right here in plucky old England. Together, they've come up with a game about Bryce Boltzmann, a grouchy Tom Waits-alike who wanders the streets of New York hunting demons with a sexy lady named Arcadia.

Bryce is cursed with immortality - which, you'd think, must be about as terrible as being cursed with really nice ankles. But while he can't be killed, he can still be chopped into pieces. Whenever this happens, he'll then trundle about, using his scattered body parts with creativity and violent flair until a brisk combat roll sticks him back together again, or a meter fills up and he can generate an entirely new body from scratch.

1/16 Fire and electrical propagation allow you to give your attacks an extra kick - if you've equipped the right perk.

Your enjoyment of all this hinges on how amusing you find a man saying, "I need a hand! Literally!" once every five minutes as he hops around a sewer level with his hair on fire. Don't get me wrong: NeverDead has an enviably bizarre direct-to-video personality, and its opening half-hour is loaded with more WTF moments than you can normally hope to expect from an action game in 2012. It thrills me that a game with this premise exists, and the whole thing feels earnest in its nuttiness rather than crazy for the sake of it. It's a genuine meeting of East and West.

The price Konami has had to pay for this delightfully unusual concept, however, is a lingering sense of cheapness. It's clearly a risky proposition, and I'm not certain it's been backed with enough investment to pull it off properly. The environments are barren, the sound is glitchy during cut-scenes and the camera is awkward to shunt around. Worst of all, NeverDead gets repetitive really quickly.

The combat can probably take most of the blame for this. With little in the way of set-pieces or palate-cleansers, NeverDead's first few hours tend to dump you into a series of muddled interiors before barring the exits after you move through each doorway, trapping you in rooms filled with monsters. In order to proceed, you have to take out a selection of demon spawn points while they burp a tasting menu of otherworldly horrors into your face. Once they're destroyed, the exits open up again, you advance, and the whole thing repeats itself.

Occasionally there's a very simple puzzle to tackle in between bursts of violence, but it doesn't save you from the relentless application of an uninspiring formula - and NeverDead's moment-to-moment demon slaughtering isn't quite entertaining enough to cope with such a bare-bones approach to design.

1/13 Buying upgrades is relatively easy, but you only have a limited number of slots to place them in. Most tend to be rather uninspiring, though.

Bryce can attack enemies with dual-wielded guns, but most of his arsenal is pretty characterless, conveying no sense of power or kickback whenever you pull the trigger. He can also slice baddies up with a sword, which you wield with quick flicks of the right stick. This control scheme is actually fairly entertaining, but lunges and strikes tend to be imprecise and the hit-responses you're getting from your victims are stilted and unreliable, meaning you don't always know whether your blows are connecting properly.

Enemies, meanwhile, may be wonderfully strange in their designs - there's everything from pig-like foot-soldiers through to spindly giraffe-things with blades for heads and some vulture-ish harpies who have laser sights attached to their faces - but they're all pretty tedious to hack away at. What's more, they're flung at you so ceaselessly (and often in such close quarters) that you never have time to ponder how you might like to approach the next encounter, let alone think about planning anything fancy with your disembodied arms and legs. For the first few hours, in other words, NeverDead is too busy juggling unconvincing shooting and slashing that it forgets to focus on the one thing that could have made it truly brilliant.

Weightless guns and clunky swordplay - and the annoying pause as you switch between them - are also joined by destructible environments, with the game's designers sending you through a series of locations that are ripe for smashing to pieces. On occasion, all this destruction can be thrilling, and Rebellion's attempt to orchestrate an organic feeling of anarchy certainly seems like a good match for a game in which you're essentially a teetering Jenga-tower of limbs and internal organs.

Sadly, instead of exhilarating chaos, you're all too often left with brute clumsiness - saddled with environments that fall to pieces a little too unpredictably and a camera that struggles to keep up with the action when the interiors start to grow in complexity. There's an upgrade shop that allows you to spend XP on various perks and, tellingly, one of its better offerings is an automatic bullet-time mode that kicks in whenever you're in trouble. It's sold to you as a power-up, but it feels like a workaround for the game's innate awkwardness.

1/21 The plot, hinging on a grumpy pop princess, is pleasantly weird.

Stick with it, though, and you'll find that NeverDead steadily improves with time. The second half of the adventure sees the environments opening out - even if it does start to look like a pound shop version of Crysis 2 - and with it, you begin to get battlefields that give you a little more room to enjoy your limbless abilities. There's a great skill - unlocked a touch too late - that lets you rip your arms and legs off and then detonate them like mines, while new weapons such as the shotgun and a grenade launcher eventually bring a much-needed sense of force to Bryce's more traditional arsenal.

(It's also worth noting that Arcadia's not half as bad to have around as many other games' AI sidekicks are. She's quick to prioritise targets and - on normal difficulty, at least - has little trouble taking care of herself. She rarely feels like a burden and can often act like a genuine ally. And she never makes you give her a boost over a low wall.)

Even when the going is good, though, fundamental problems remain. Rebellion doesn't really know how to deal with your immortality, so it throws in creatures that roll around on the floor and will chase after your head if it's not attached to your body. They'll then swallow it whole and, if you fail a QTE, you're faced with an abrupt Game Over screen and an option to return to the last checkpoint. It's not a million miles away from a traditional fail state, I guess, but it feels cheap.

Bosses, meanwhile, often have health bars that recharge themselves in bursts, presumably so you can't just beat them by bloody-minded attrition. It's a system that grinds against itself fairly seriously, though, meaning that the game's penultimate fight in particular can turn into a prolonged stalemate as you both race around a tiny arena, hacking away at each other and recharging, and then hacking away again, with little progress to show for your troubles.

Bosses often come with great visual designs, but towards the end of the game, the mechanical annoyances start to pile up.

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Despite second-rate combat and a repetitive campaign, however, there's still something fiercely likeable about NeverDead. The charm of the game's limb-shattering premise shines through all the cost-cutting and the fact that Rebellion hasn't been able to mix up the pacing or zero in on the crucial mechanics.

You can see that charm in the weird downtime sequences back at Arcadia's apartment, during which Bryce can take off his head and scrub it in the shower or dump it into the washing machine. You can see it in the moments where combat suddenly clicks, and you fling your arm at a rampaging boss, blow it up, hop away and then accidentally send your skull sailing across the room in the aftershock, slotting it neatly through a basketball hoop. You can see it in Arcadia and Bryce's luminously crap quipping, and even in some of the multiplayer missions. (Most of these are primitive twists on Horde or Oddball, granted, but one or two of them chain control points into a mini-marathon and then send you racing against your opponents to get to the finishing line. Brilliant fun.)

Ultimately, NeverDead feels like gaming's equivalent of Buckaroo Banzai, or Phantom of the Paradise, or any one of those weird B-movies you used to find lurking in the midnight spaces of an old video store and which you often loved for their unlikely concepts or their wilful obscurity more than their actual quality. NeverDead hasn't been given room to get the most out of its strange ideas, but it's still plucky, warm-hearted and genuinely idiosyncratic. How often can you say that about a shooter these days?

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First Final Fantasy 13-2 DLC announced

The first batch of Final Fantasy 13-2 DLC launches on Xbox Live on 7th February and PlayStation Network the day after, publisher Square Enix has announced.

It's a Coliseum Battle titled Lightning & Amodar. These regular add-ons will pit the player against enemies from previous entries in the series, allowing you to recruit them into your party once they've been defeated. A price has not yet been confirmed.

Square also announced plans to release additional story episodes for some of the game's key characters, though wouldn't offer additional detail on exactly what to expect.

One of the game's endings offers up a 'To be continued...' tease. Is Square planning a downloadable epilogue? Or is Final Fantasy 13-3 on the way?

The game, which launches on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 this week, won an 8/10 from Eurogamer.

"Hurling money at a development team that has been labouring without firm creative leadership for close to a decade now has led to a game that is, in many ways, as disjointed as its world, as rambling as its lead character," read Simon Parkin's Final Fantasy 13-2 review.

"In those fragments excellence, confusion, beauty, strangeness, wonder and loss may all be found."

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Brink developer Splash Damage hires Enslaved lead gameplay programmer

Brink developer Splash Damage has hired one of the key creators of Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.

The London-based independent developer has hired Marc Fascia, Ninja Theory's lead gameplay programmer, as technical director overseeing all engineering teams.

Fascia will set the overall direction for Splash Damage's programming teams and will support new director of production Griff Jenkins, the former senior development director of FIFA, as the studio grows "to additional gaming platforms".

"We're hugely impressed by Marc's combination of insane technical ability and project management skills," said Splash Damage boss Paul Wedgwood.

"In particular its Marc's obsession with fun gameplay and his personable nature that makes him the perfect person to lead our army of awesome programmers."

Fascia added: "I'm really happy to be trusted with this incredible responsibility at Splash Damage.

"We're working on some great things, and managing such a big and talented programming team, across multiple varied and challenging projects, is a wonderful opportunity. I love multiplayer and Splash Damage suits my passion perfectly."

Splash Damage is currently working on a number of unannounced projects. Earlier this month Wedgwood said 2012 would be "the most significant year in our history".

"We'll be revealing new titles - both on platforms we've previously visited (including the PC and the world's leading consoles), as well as exploring spaces completely new to us," he said.

"Finally, we've got some special things planned to take full advantage of the changes our industry is experiencing. This is a hugely exciting time for everyone here at the studio and we can't wait to tell you about all the cool things we've got in store for you this year."

Splash Damage is rumoured to be making a Marvel game for Disney, although Wedgwood tried to distance the studio from such talk late last year.

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SoulCalibur 5 Review

Even without the perplexing addition of Stars Wars characters, the last SoulCalibur felt like a game that had run out of creative steam. All the swashbuckling pirates and disgruntled golems played much the same as they had on the Dreamcast, and although Project Soul added the Soul Crush system to make blocking more risky - as well as a customisation mode that let you adjust appearance and attributes - it was akin to owning the same sports car for 10 years straight. It still had the capacity to excite, but familiarity had dulled some of that early intensity.

It seemed that SoulCalibur would join the same ranks as Killer Instinct and The Last Blade: fighting game series that once went toe-to-toe with the best of the best, but were destined to fade away. This tragedy, however, has not come to pass. Although Namco took a misguided step with the epically bad SoulCalibur: Legends, the weapon-wielding warriors have returned in SoulCalibur 5 - And this time, the performance upgrades offer much more mileage.

Set 17 years after the last game, this chapter of the Stage of History is populated by 27 characters, including familiar faces like the dauntingly breasted Ivy and the whimsically sadistic Tira - neither of whom has aged a day - in addition to three descendant characters who inherit the b?-staff, ninja garb and Chinese sword of Kilik, Taki and Xianghua. Although the prot?g?s conduct themselves in a strikingly similar fashion to their forbearers, they each pack enough new tricks to give veteran players something fresh to experiment with.

Completing Story mode will unlock Alpha Patroklos and Pyrrha Omega, who fight in similar styles to Setsuka and Sophitia.

The less familiar side of the roster is made up of a handful of new characters - including the hidden dagger antics of Ezio from Assassin's Creed - as well as six unlockable fighters that range from Mokujin plagiarists like Edge Master and the new mask-wearing Kilik to the throne-abusing Algol from SoulCalibur 4. While having three random-style characters may seem like a bit of a cop-out when compared to the progressive headcount of Super Street Fighter 4, the five genuinely new additions offer a solid increase in terms of match-up diversity.

Patroklos and Pyrrha - respectively the son and daughter of Sophitia - are introduced in a new Story mode that sees them facing off against the likes of Voldo and Maxi while learning about the history of the warring swords. The 20 chapters it spans put an emphasis on narrative rather than collecting weapons or meeting special fight conditions, which is shame given the series' Edge Master Mode heritage. But even though you'll beat the angelic boss in little over three hours, it's an enjoyable if linear journey that benefits from the less cumbersome approach to storytelling of this mode's guest developer, CyberConnect2 (known for the Naruto games and the forthcoming Asura's Wrath).

Solo players looking for a bit more substance, meanwhile, will find solace in Quick Battle and Legendary Souls. The first is similar to Tekken's Dojo mode in the way it mimics an online lobby by offering one-on-one showdowns with custom-made characters. Each AI opponent is tiered from an effortlessly easy E5 to a savagely challenging A1, and by besting them in turn, you can collect 240 different titles that include Farting Baron, Solid Man and Door Knocker is Back. There's even a Mishima Style Master title for beating the Devil Jin antics of Katsuhiro Harada.

Newcomers Z.W.E.I. and Viola use their respective wolf-summoning and crystal-ball-levitating skills to fight at different ranges.

But in terms of SoulCalibur 5's steepest challenge, beating the producer in his own game comes a close second to the punishing gauntlet of Legendary Souls. It's essentially a boss rush that pits you against some of the series' strongest characters - including Cervantes with Soul Edge and Siegfried with Soul Calibur - while turning the difficulty up to 11. Even the most minor lapse here will put you through the combo blender, and although it's a shade more manageable than the equivalent SNK paddling, hardcore players should take considerable satisfaction in passing this test.

For those who'd rather get creative with pants and pauldrons, the expanded Creation mode offers a level of character customisation that puts every other fighting game to shame. There's such a diverse range of commonplace and less obvious creation items - all of which can be personalised with a wide variety of colours, patterns and stickers - that the options now go way beyond making Mitsurugi look like Afro Samurai. And although the additional DLC gear may be a tad contentious, it does offer better value and functionality than Capcom's costume packs.

That said, SoulCalibur is a fighting game first and foremost, and as engaging as the new modes and customisation options undoubtedly are, they all take a back seat to the changes made to the game's fighting system. On a mechanical level, SoulCalibur 5 is a methodical fine-tuning of a well-established formula.

Naysayers will complain that it's losing its identity by trying to be more like Street Fighter, but in truth, SoulCalibur 5's new super gauge compliments the game's trademark eight-way run system by giving players a more defined structure in terms of advanced techniques. Guard Impacts now cost meter to perform, and have been streamlined into one "catch-all" input so that even new players can punish a predictable strike with relative ease. Meanwhile, the new Just Guard offers a more demanding parry for experienced players who want to take their game to the next level.

Bayonetta character designer Mari Shinazaki was brought on board to design the alternative outfits for Leixia, Tira and Ivy.

This style of progressive flexibility has also been applied to the offensive mechanics. Beginners can use basic launchers to send their opponent skyward before comboing into the new Critical Edge supers - with a prime example being Leixia's spinning-top slashes. Then, once they've got the basics down and can start exploring the hidden depths of their chosen character, the new Brave Edges offer a versatile combo extension system. It's even possible for Astaroth to follow up his Critical Edge throw with a Brave Edge launcher that can combo into a midair grab - all for just over 50 per cent damage.

These are the kind of skills you'll need to put into action when climbing up the rankings on PSN or Xbox Live. The usual mix of Ranked and Player Matches sit alongside a new Soul Link system that lets you keep track of up to three rivals, as well as a new Global Colosseo mode.

This free DLC is a community-building tool that's similar to the player rooms in Mortal Kombat. You pick a major capital like London, Paris or New York and then enter a 50-player lobby that lets you browse through Player Cards while participating in Random Matches and Ranked Tournaments that will be held at set times each month.

In terms of the all-important netcode, we were able to enjoy stable games against UK-based opponents with improved lag-reduction compared to SoulCalibur 4. And that's a sweeping statement that can be applied to the game as a whole.

We're 90 per cent sure that Kilik's successor, Xiba, shouts 'foooooooooood!' when bested in battle.

My lasting impression of SoulCalibur 5, though, came from a 'first to 50 wins' set that I played with a fellow reviewer over the course of a long evening. During this time, we experimented with roughly half the roster and although our initial games would've looked like an amateur showcase from SoulCalibur 4, it wasn't long before we were using the new mechanics to Quickstep out of the way of horizontal haymakers, punish whiffs on reaction with Critical Edges, Just Guard telegraphed unblockables, and stage epic comebacks with Brave Edge ball-breakers.

To be fair, these matches weren't quite as thrilling as the first time I played the original SoulCalibur. But in terms of those round-to-round mind-games where you have to adapt your strategies and mix-ups to find an increasingly elusive opening against a similarly skilled opponent, I can honestly say that this was the most intense game of SoulCalibur I have ever played.

SoulCalibur has always excelled at offering an accessible style of combat with a level of single-player content that other fighting games have only recently begun to match. These qualities haven't changed - and now, after what seemed like an uncertain return, the historical fighter is staging its best performance since that fateful Christmas of 1999. High five!

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Resident Evil 6 is Capcom's biggest ever production

Resident Evil 6 is the largest production Capcom has ever undertaken, according to the game's executive producer.

Speaking in a new video introduction to last week's announcement trailer, as posted on the Capcom Unity blog, Hiroyuki Kobayashi revealed that more than 600 people are involved in development, including 150 at Capcom HQ in Japan.

Up until now, that title had gone to forthcoming fantasy adventure Dragon's Dogma, which, when it was announced last year, apparently boasted the publisher's largest ever development team.

Producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi added that the forthcoming Resi sequel "not only has a larger world and deeper experience than you have played before but we are excited to say it is a blend of action and survival horror - something we like to call 'dramatic horror'."

Director Eiichiro Sasaki insisted that the game's story is "intricately designed" and has "intense drama, realism and surprising plot twists."

You'll get to see for yourself when the game launches in November for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

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