By now you’ll know everything there currently is to know about Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, having read our wonderful preview. You’ll know that it’s a third-person medieval fantasy action game with a Gears-ish feel, some impressive boobies character assets and a co-op focus. But you’ll probably have a few questions for the developer, InXile Entertainment, questions of the most terrible urgency. Is co-op the future of dungeon crawling? Do Caddick’s tattoos go all the way down? How can you blindfire with a bow and arrow? The people need to know, damn it.

Here’s Matthew Findley, InXile President, with some additional insights. Not just “some”, in fact – best take a toilet break now, because this is one long (and interesting) read. Creative Director Michael “Maxx” Kaufmann and InXile founder and COO Brian Fargo were also briefly available for comment.

VideoGamesDaily: Matthew, Michael, Brian – thanks for the demo today. We like the idea of bringing back the classic dungeon RPG, and we thought the game looked very good in motion. On the other hand, we were a little taken aback by the similarities with Gears of War and Army of Two. Can you talk to us about that?

Matthew Findley: There are two parts to it. One, bringing back the dungeon crawl, for sure – we love it, we grew up with it, for the same reason that I think you’re gravitating towards it. But we have to recognise that today’s gameplay is different than it was 10 years ago, and so their metaphors for what their style of gameplay is are different. It’s more console, it’s action-oriented, et cetera.

We purposefully want to give you something so when you pick up the controller, right away you’re comfortable – you get it, you know how it works, basically, and then we start to take you in another direction. So you say ‘yeah, boom, a cover system, it’s medieval Gears of War’ like you said, but then all of a sudden you get into exploration, puzzles, melee is a very big part, the fact that the characters are not clones of each other, debuffing each other. It really takes it to a much deeper experience.

Because in a lot of those products, you’re just running, running, running – this isn’t that kind of pacing, we have areas like that but there are other areas that are not like that. So we recognised that there’s a different game role today, and we’d like to take you where you’re comfortable.

On a kind of tangent, I use Age of Empires as an example – at first, when you play, you say ‘this is just like Warcraft, it’s exactly the same’. But then you start putting up walls and castles, the game comes into itself. I loved Age of Empires, and by the time I was into it, it was not Warcraft. But in the beginning it felt just like it.

Michael Kaufmann: There are two main things that differentiate us from a co-op point of view. One is we’re the first ones to have this concept of being able to switch which character you’re playing at checkpoints. The reason we’re the first ones to do that, is we’re the first ones to have characters that are actually different from each other.

Each character has specific strengths and weaknesses, and how you play as Caddick is very different to how you play as Ilara. What comes from that is needing to use strategy, because the enemies each have their own strengths and weaknesses that play against your strengths and weaknesses – you end up with this rock-paper-scissors thing, trying to figure out with an enemy what is the right way to roshambo them.

Findley: It’s a very Zelda kind of thing.

Kaufmann: Right. And adding in ‘co-op at a distance’ makes a huge difference: we really disliked the feeling of claustrophobic feeling of the modern co-op game. Most co-op things I have to be standing right next to you to do them. They were cool, but it was just it made us feel we always had to be right there.

All the environments in our game have been designed – and all the skills in our game have been designed – to allow the player to do co-op at a distance, and encourage, reward the player for doing co-op at a distance. You saw the ice spell, being able to regenerate from across the room, and all the environments having multiple levels where you can go upstairs and get cover…

Findley: Using the environment is a true piece of your strategy and tactics, taking the high ground, things like that.

Brian Fargo: I just want to say, we welcome the comparison [with Gears and Army of Two]. We’re not shying away from it at all. A big part of it is the genre. You don’t realise how powerful that is. You could take science fiction and World War II, they’re completely different. A first person shooter in science fiction versus one in World War II is a different experience.

We want to bring that fantasy to this action genre. We want to combine those, and we think that’s going to be really fresh and really strong. So we’re excited about that, and then we have all the unique aspects of the game plus a very robust melee system, which is very different to both those games.

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There’s something Reggie Fils-Amis, Jack Tretton and Aaron Greenburg don’t want you to know about platform-exclusive intellectual properties: there aren’t any. Not really. The notion that a given parcel of design calls is wed to one system till death do them part, that its migration to other systems is not just impossible but literally unthinkable, even blasphemous, is… well, exactly what it sounds like: a phantasm invoked by smack-talking executives and the fanboy massive, and a thorn in the flank of those who prefer the exchange of ideas to head-butting quantity logic.

Timed exclusives exist, true, but time passes. In a capitalist economy, nothing is set in stone. Publishing arrangements certainly aren’t, as Activision is busily demonstrating in its handling of the Call of Duty franchise, and the particularities of hardware are just as temporal, as Sony has recently proven by stapling a soap bubble to the tip of Wii Motion Plus.

Contracts terminate, are contested, or are mined for loopholes. Publishers and programmers alike adapt, shift, working their way around sub-clauses, over and under technical obstacles. Profit motives override all. IPs are modified – constantly – to expand audiences and meet new market conditions. Halo abandons the Mac, becomes an FPS, gets turned into several books, changes development houses, reverts to an RTS. Sonic shares a box with Mario. Final Fantasy “dumps” Nintendo, then Sony, cuddles up to the iPod. Crysis goes console-based. Ubisoft buys Tom Clancy.

Where an IP plays hard-to-get, it will simply be imitated. Lips riffs on Singstar, Project Natal on the EyeToy camera (yes, I’m aware that the latter pair have different capabilities, but they still share a concept). It’s a testament, again, to the sanctity some assign the unreal notion of exclusivity that many such instances of “creative theft” are treated with disproportionate revulsion. Never mind that Saints Row 2 is often funnier and more inventive than Grand Theft Auto IV, or that Dante’s Inferno, for all its flaws, has a combat system as rewarding as that of God of War – these games have committed the original sin of building a little too conspicuously on the achievements of their peers, and deserve nothing less, in the eyes of the faithful, than to be burned in the streets.

Deja vu.

Of course, you could explain away a lot of the above with two simple words: “only human”. “Exclusive” thinking, it might be argued, runs deeper than choosing between formats and their line-ups, taps into something natural and fundamental: a wellspring of shared antagonism that fuels everything from playground punch-ups to football riots. Perhaps there’s nothing more mind-blowing at stake here than social identification, positive and negative: we are “us” because they are “them”, they are “them” because we are “us” – whether the individuals in question be Battlefield fans or Asian immigrants. People like to take sides, even when they don’t have to. It’s just part of our binary code.

I find this line of thought depressing and frustrating in equal measure. It reduces the issue to an inevitability, a tragic flaw, and inevitabilities don’t allow much room for discussion. It’s not as if you need look far for alternative mentalities, anyway. Just glance at a few of our interviews.

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Speaking at a preview event for new action-RPG Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, InXile Entertainment President Matthew Findley has told VGD he feels Japanese role-playing developers find it “very hard” to achieve “real characters, real story, real moral dilemmas” in their games.

Asked whether he thought the notion that Western RPGs are more forward-thinking than Japanese RPGs was accurate, Findley replied: “I think it is, I think it is. I mean, no Japanese company could have made Fallout or Mass Effect. There’s just no way that could happen, it’s so culturally nuanced.”

Findley is perhaps especially qualified to comment on the RPG’s choppy fortunes: InXile’s 2004 remake of The Bard’s Tale lampooned many of the genre’s more stagnant aspects.

“Remember we joked in Bard’s Tale, ‘I am the Chosen One’,” he said. “I mean, come on – a 13-year-old boy that’s the Chosen One, that’s going to save the universe. I mean, really – for me that’s just so old and ridiculous.

“So I think it’s fantastic – boom, here comes BioWare, here comes Bethesda, bang bang. Let’s get real subject matter in here, let’s get real moral dilemmas, let’s get that stuff back from the PC.

“What they did was take the Final Fantasy turn-based metaphor, cause they [Square Enix] really made it work – BioWare took the best elements of that, and said ‘OK, now we’re going to do real characters, real story, real moral dilemmas and bang, now we’re back to a real-feeling RPG’. I think that’s very hard for the Japanese to pull off, much as I couldn’t culturally speaking make one for them.

“How many Western products do well in Japan? Not that many. The cultures start to kick in. I’m not putting them off, it’s just a cultural issue.”

Findley also commented that the genre’s traditional audience had aged, and that certain RPG devices were simply no longer appropriate.

“I think the genres are growing up and becoming more sophisticated. The console business isn’t that old, when you get right down to it. In the mid-90s there was no console business, not like these kind of products.

“So I just think that the generation playing the 13-year-old Chosen One – well now they’re 30 years old or whatever, and are they really going to keep playing that kind of game?”

The full interview with Findley and his colleagues Michael “Maxx” Kaufmann and Brian Fargo will be live soon. You can read our preview of Hunted: The Demon’s Forge here.

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‘Gears of Dragon Age’. ‘Army of Two Worlds’. A couple of terms you may see floating around in connection with Hunted: The Demon’s Forge, an original third-person action-RPG unveiled to the public today for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. VideoGamesDaily was on the guestlist for the press reveal last month, and while those off-the-cuff comparisons carry a certain weight, we found there was more to the new game than first met the eye.

Developed by InXile Entertainment, the brains behind 2002’s raucous RPG spoof The Bard’s Tale, and published by needs-no-introduction Bethesda, Hunted aims to ‘bring the classic dungeon crawler back’ in all its brooding, blood-soaked, isolationist glory. Players take charge of either the hulking, bear-chested Caddick or strapping, bare-chested Ilara (did you see what I did there etc), a mercenary duo dispatched to a massacred township in search of crystals by an enigmatic spectre.

The demo opened on an almost Silent-Hill-esque note, lingering over the tattered spectacle of the town itself, with its flapping awnings and gutted households, but when Creative Director Michael “Maxx” Kaufmann seized the controller the afore-hinted parallels took centre-stage – or off-centre-stage, as the game’s camera would have it. While the weapons on offer are thoroughly old skool (bows, blades and magic) Hunted’s basic mechanics are those of a more contemporary breed of action title: lock-to-cover, precision aim and rapid fire.

Never lose your head in a boss fight.

Co-op play (whether online or with the AI) is the key area in which InXile hopes to distinguish itself. Ilara and Caddick are derived from familiar archetypes, he stronger and tougher, she faster and more able at range, but the developer has teased some interesting new threads out of that time-honoured double act.

Magic, for instance, can be used directly on the game’s Orc-like enemies, fireballs arcing through the air like mortar rounds, or to ‘battle-charge’ the other character, temporarily boosting their attributes. Caddick can levitate foes into Ilara’s line of sight for easy headshots; she, in turn, might freeze his adversaries with ice arrows. Each character has three skill trees, and experience points from kills are divided equally between the pair.

Kaufmann drew a line under the idea of ‘co-op at a distance’. Characters can patch each other up wherever they are in an area, tossing healing vials with unfailing precision. This, he explained, will allow players to get the utmost out of some extremely attractive, grandiose Unreal-powered environments, exploring different routes and combat vectors. We’re a little worried that being able to heal at range could encourage players to split off and fight their own battles: those instances of teamwork between Ilara and Caddick we saw might have been engineered for the purposes of the demo. Don’t quote us on that till a hands-on opportunity arrives, though.

Besides the forces of evil, Hunted’s tumbledown underground temples and tunnels feature a promising array of puzzles: one early specimen involved lighting an arrow on fire and shooting it into the eyesocket of a talking stone head to clear the path. Of these conundrums, around 40 per cent will be ‘challenging’ while a privileged 20 per cent are said to be ‘nigh impossible’; most will be optional, but new weapons and equipment await those who take the trouble to solve them. Combat has its puzzle aspect, too: at one stage, Caddick shoulder-barged a weakened pillar to flatten a distant catapult.

We're not sure what's going on here, but the guy on the left's probably none too happy about it.

The demo devoted most of its time to the nuts and bolts of ranged combat: melee remains something of a mystery, though it looks satisfyingly visceral, with blood splashing all over character models and shields disintegrating in the fray. There were also hints of still grander scenarios further along the line, monstrous humanoid outlines glimpsed briefly in the far distance.

InXile has a solid pedigree when it comes to fantasy fiction, and its mastery of the long-running Unreal Engine should be evident from the screenshots. Assuming the new game’s slightly past-their-sell-by-date combat principles are appropriately explored, the hunt for a decent Diablo substitute could be over.

Hunted: The Demon’s Forge is coming to PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Release dates have yet to be announced. Our rather lengthy interview with the developers will be live soon.

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Splinter Cell: Conviction has the mother of all tutorials. Or rather, father. Scuttling from over-turned table to over-turned table in a Maltese marketplace, following the ear-mic directions of old comrade Anna Grimsdóttír, the lately out-of-retirement Sam Fisher reacquaints himself with some basic stealth dynamics by way of flashbacks to his infant daughter’s bedside.

Darkness, the grizzled assassin explains to sleep-deprived Sarah, has its uses. Not wishing to give his offspring night terrors for life, he doesn’t go into much detail, but veteran Splinters will be well attuned to the violent current beneath these paternal reassurances. That undercurrent soon bubbles to the surface, as you road-test the new ‘Mark and Execute’ mechanic mid-flashback on three unfortunate housebreakers, queuing up headshots with right bumper and loosing the rounds in a split-second with Y.

This smooth interweaving of exposition and interaction is typical of the new game, with pre-rendered plot points and objective data mapped, home cinema style, onto flat surfaces as you approach them in real-time, tactics reminiscent of Heavy Rain’s object or limb-tethered button prompts.

If you can smell a psychological dimension to Ubisoft’s stylised approach, you should trust your nose: in the three levels we encounter at the press event – marketplace, mansion house and military airfield – Fisher’s surroundings are occasionally crowded by painful remembrances, monochrome snapshots of tombstones, the whisper of ambulance sirens. Later on, a villain harangues us from the security of a projected image and there’s a moment, just a moment, in which we confuse this nebulous threat with another figure from Sam’s past.

Sarah’s affection, it transpires, was one of the few things keeping the man’s murderous leanings in check in the wake of Splinter Cell: Double Agent (“What did you do, daddy?” she asks, appearing at the bedroom door, and he sheepishly hides the gun at his side). Deprived of that affection by a road accident in which Third Echelon, his old employer, may have a hand, he’s become an utterly ruthless rogue cannon, operating in the pitch-black regions beyond even the secret agent’s muddy code of conduct.

Our Xbox 360 demo build sported noticeable tearing and frame rate dips. This aside, Conviction looks decent.

The new interrogation sequences, of which we get to sample two, are obviously symptomatic of this departure. Scripting is again cleverly intermingled with brutally hands-on play as we throw a jabbering skinhead around a toilet, mashing his head through the slats of a cubicle and cracking it against the sink, the game restraining us at intervals for just long enough to let another plot morsel dribble from our victim’s bloodied lips.

Also symptomatic, perhaps, of Sam’s righteous savagery is the game’s relative action heaviness, playing down the careful monitoring of view cones and light levels that characterised earlier Splinter Cells in favour of adaptation on the fly. Cover points, handholds and goons within reach of a fatal headlock are picked out by HUD elements for maximum convenience, and our hero is a lot quicker than his advancing years should allow, whether he’s shuffling palm over palm along a ledge or scaling a wall pipe.

Fans of the previous games will doubtless be crying havoc at all this, and it’s hard to know how to soothe their fears. Splinter Cell has become something different, a flashpoint-dotted escapade across moody but easy-to-read sandbox environments, asking less of the player’s capacity to analyse an area but counter-balancing this with greater pace and more sophisticated presentation.

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Remember when Ubisoft’s Patrick Redding told you that Splinter Cell: Conviction would last 12-16 hours? Well, he was lying. Or rather, he was only referring to the single player campaign and co-op modes.

Factor in Deniable Ops, the competitive multiplayer mode, and according to Creative Director Maxime Beland the figure is twice or thrice Redding’s estimate.

“Deniable Ops is going to last people like 20-25 hours, easily – there’s a lot of modes and maps,” Beland revealed in a recent interview. “Then we’ve got co-op, story – easily 30-35 hours of gameplay. So we should be selling the game for 200 bucks!” Trying to get one over Activision in the pricing stakes, eh, Maxime?

Apparently creating multiplayer modes for Conviction is a doddle, on account of its highly flexible AI.

“Because we’ve built our AI in a systemic way, our AI is all reactive to the ingredients you throw at it, it’s not scripted at all – because we’ve built that, it was very easy for us to create some multiplayer modes that took advantage of our AI,” Beland explained.

“You take a map that’s working, you throw in enemies, and they’re going to be fine – they’re going to be talking, shooting, taking cover, hunting for Sam. Everything works. Once the AI is debugged for story, it works in all those modes. It required very little work on the AI side to get us all those modes.”

Conviction has five two player modes for six maps, all of them featuring large groups of AI goons. Not quite a pant-ripping breadth of options then, but enough to be going on with.

“And just like we did in [Rainbow Six: Vegas], we had a lot of different modes, and what’s cool is they’re playable in co-op, they’re playable in single player, and it’s just extra value for the player,” Beland went on. “And it’s not that hard to do. So it’s fun to do it, a pleasure to do it! To give even more gameplay for the same amount of money.”

We like the sound of that better than the 200 buck bit. How about a level editor while you’re at it?

Conviction hits PC and Xbox 360 in April. Read our hands-on here, and don’t forget to check out the full interview.

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The story of Splinter Cell: Conviction, so far? It goes something like this: ‘Now you see Sam, now you don’t, now you see him – crikey, he’s got a beard, what gives, Ubisoft? And why’s there so much daylight? Oh, now he’s gone again. Oh, there he is. Yay, he’s had a shave. Gosh, he just smashed that man’s face into a toilet.’ Sort of like Jack Bauer doing a pantomime, then.

Last month VGD slipped on some PVC pants, screwed three Magilites to its forehead and skulked down to south London to interview Maxime Beland, Creative Director on Sam Fisher’s much-delayed, grim-faced return to the world of gaming. Set your jaw and read on.

VideoGamesDaily: Conviction has had quite a troubled development period. We hear earlier builds were scrapped because it was felt the game was becoming too similar to Assassin’s Creed. Is that a worry now? What did you change, in particular?

Maxime Beland: It was actually never a worry, that it was too much like Assassin’s Creed. The stress and the reason why we changed was because it didn’t feel like a Splinter Cell game anymore. So many things had changed – there were no gadgets, there were no lights and shadows, there were no athletic moves – a lot of the core values that Splinter Cell depends on.

And that’s what we changed, we brought them back. We were delivering them in a different way, it’s faster, it’s more dynamic – as you’ve seen, it’s still stealth but it’s a new type of stealth. I’m happy because I think we’ve succeeded in delivering stealth that is going to reach more people. It’s going to ring true with a lot more people, because it’s more permissive.

VGD: Some of our forum members have expressed concerns that the changes are still too drastic. If nothing else, Sam himself looks very different – the three-scope visor no longer graces the box art. What would you say to reassure fans of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, for instance, that this is still recognisably the same sort of experience?

Beland: I think it’s interesting what you say, because I think everybody has a different perception of who Sam is. I think to me the three dots are probably one of the best icons of the game industry – it’s so powerful, it’s such a powerful image, we know they’re very iconic for the franchise, and that’s why they’re back, that’s why Sam gets his goggles back in the game. Our main menu has the three dots.

So to me, that is still Splinter Cell. What is also Splinter Cell is Sam Fisher himself. But to me, a black wetsuit is not Sam Fisher. It’s one of the tools he uses when the situation asks for that. But in Conviction, because it’s much more of an urban environment, because there are moments with crowds, because Sam is not dropped off a chopper into a Siberian base, he is dressed in a way that fits the crowd, that fits the context for Conviction.

So we didn’t change Sam because we didn’t like the wet suit, I love the wet suit, he looks great in a wet suit – for me Sam is dressed for the party he’s going to. And for the next Splinter Cell, the context will define his uniform.

VGD: Will the crowd play more of a part later in the game? Or will it be more a question of secluded interior areas and patrolling guards?

Beland: There’s a lot of variety. A big point for me in Conviction was trying to give a lot of variety for the player. So we’ve got all kinds of maps. We’ve got maps that are more open, outside, with crowds, where you get to do some exotic gameplay in there in the crowd, and we’ve got moments like you saw where the crowd is a bit more window dressing – they’re there, but if combat starts they’re just going to run away and that’s going to be it. We’ve got maps that are completely isolated from civilians, more classic Splinter Cell if you want. So I think we’ve got a good variety of those.

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The creative force behind Grasshopper’s eclectic output, Goichi Suda enjoys a huge reputation outside of Japan and the reasons are many – not least the fact that he appears to be a thoroughly amiable chap.

Unlike the Kojimas or Miyamotos of the development community, Suda’s work isn’t the most widely played or the most commercially successful. Even the most ardent follower would have to admit that the likes of Michigan: Report from Hell or Flower, Sun and Rain can be deeply esoteric and often lacking in polish. Yet despite such variation in acclaim, Suda’s games all share one commonality – they all leave an indelible impression on the player. From Killer7, to Contact, to No More Heroes, each shows that streak of individuality – that unwillingness to conform, that wry wit, that radical design. His output is the very definition of cult.

In a nod to the less adventurous, No More Heroes 2 can be controlled with either the remote and nunchuck or just the classic controller.

What better place then than London, the home of punk, to sit down and discuss design philosophy, retro gaming and cranberry chocolate sundaes? “Punx Not Dead” reads the title of No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle – a fairly self-evident axiom given what we know about Suda’s style, but what does it mean to the man himself? “I’m happy to be back in London because the soul of punk is in London, but like we have no samurai in Japan, it’s hard to see a punk in London,” says Suda disappointedly. Grasshopper’s motto is as much about what it seeks to avoid as it is as a statement of defiance. “Punk to me means to create something that has never been done – always something new. That kind of spirit I want to be in the game and in the studio and never to be dead”. 

Of course the satisfaction of executing the original game's gestures is lost if you opt for the classic controller, but you will expend less energy.

Many modern games have appropriated the stylised pixel art of the 8-bit era – the original NMH flirted with 8-bit aesthetic for the interface and much of the sound design, but NMH 2 drags us right back into the 1980s with the inclusion of an extensive medley of 8-bit tiles. Simultaneously addressing the original game’s most criticised aspect and building a more cohesive 8-bit homage, NMH2’s side jobs are resolutely retro while somehow never stooping to the level of clone. 

Obviously holding the 8-bit era in a great deal of reverence, I ask Suda what his favourite 8-bit game is and his response is characteristically unexpected. “The Star Wars vector scan arcade game” he says enthusiastically imitating the sound of an X-wing. Inarguably the product of the 8-bit era, Atari’s 1983 classic is the last game I could’ve anticipated being Suda’s number one, hailing from the country that bought us Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Donkey Kong, but then his interest in Western culture has always been distinct. 

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At the heart of any consideration of God of War 3 lies the hoariest of debates, a dispute as gnarled and fissured as a Titan’s fingernail, as intense as the flames of Tartarus, yet as monotonous as the River Styx. If you’ve played the demo, you probably have an inkling already. I’m talking about our old friend “innovation versus refinement”. Giant conceptual leaps versus deft baby steps. New stuff versus not so new stuff.

The third God of War is as far to the right-hand side of the equation as you can get. It looks big, talks big, wears big, meaty shoulder guards a-drip with gore and shaders, stalks cavernous, creatively lit environments murdering enormous, billion-polygon enemies, but its technical and cinematic accomplishments are essentially sleight of hand. And the conjuring trick is getting old.

Playing this game, in an age of morally faceted space opera and physics-driven sandbox ingenuity, is a little like making conversation with the school bully right at that point in time when bulk and muscle cease to predominate in the politics of the playground. The chunky bastard still has a certain handshake-crushing charisma, and that pubescent growth spurt has added several cubic feet to his BMI, but his day has come and gone. He just doesn’t know it yet. Besides, there’s a hot chick in the year above.

Auxillary tools include the fire bow, of some service when progress is blocked by flammable undergrowth. Or flammable people.

There are some benefits to keeping the brute company though. For one, you get to play more or less the exact same thoughtfully paced, gratifyingly pissed-off hack and slasher your great grand-daddy once fed into his wheezy old PlayStation 2, right down to the challenges and battle arena that spawn post-story-completion. Which means you’ll once again be picking bones with the gods in the form of the eternally-at-boiling-point Kratos, failing to spare the whip on battalion after battalion of anomalous mythical no-good-niks, square-buttoning them until they detonate under the pressure of bottled-up experience points, right-stick somersalting through gaps in the throng to buy your weapons some cool-off time – time enough, perhaps, to let rip with one of your slower but vastly, vastly more satisfying overarm triangle blows, rebounding particle and bad guy alike skyward, allowing them a brief mid-air respite before star-hopping into their midst to continue the punishment.

Larger and less easily broken opposition rears its head (or heads) with clockwork punctuality, and evasion accordingly becomes more of a priority till at last, by dint of much hit-and-running, the Minotaur or Cyclops or whatever collapses beneath the weight of a huge, spinning circle icon. You rush in jabbing the button, and Kratos promptly launches into the sort of scripted micro-Armageddon that might otherwise be achieved by stuffing a cruise missile full of beef and firing it into a paintball factory. Further jabbing is required. You oblige, Kratos bellows a lot, tendons snap, arteries gush, the orchestra thunders to a halt and your health and magic bars sop up the remainder of the victim’s lifeforce.

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Shrouded in mystery for over half a decade, Remedy’s psychological thriller wears its influences on its sleeve – the troubled writer seeking inspiration in a mountainside retreat, the unexplained threat of a mysterious foggy presence wrapped up in tight episodic content, the use of a flashlight to exploit your enemy’s weakness.

If public response to James Cameron’s Avatar has taught us anything, it’s that people love a nice digestible analogy. Alan Wake is The Shining meets Lost in Luigi’s Mansion. Of course I do Remedy’s work a great disservice. It’s fair to say that survival horror games have waned in popularity over the last few years – clear evidence that the well had run dry or at least been clogged with the putrid remains of J-horror rejects, Romero zombie wannabies and Jacob’s Ladder-lifted twitching monstrosities.

In taking their lead from the psychological horror masters – Alfred Hitchcock, Stephen King and David Lynch – Remedy have created a world that is familiar enough to elicit feelings of discomfort and fear while exploring them in a medium than rarely looks beyond viscera for its thrills and scares.

Could these cryptic sreen shots could be from a cut-scene or does Alan get to go off-road?

We recently had the opportunity to speak to Remedy’s Head of Franchise Development, Oskari “Ozz” Häkkinen to learn more as Alan Wake emerges from a long slumber. “Alan Wake’s been in development for about five years which is a long time obviously, but we’re a small studio of about fifty people. It’s been a labour of love,” says Ozz, casually revealing that one of Microsoft key exclusive triple A blockbuster titles has been in the hands of a mere 50 people. XBLA games have 50 person development staff. Handheld titles even. It’s a testament to the exceptional ambition and build quality of the game that it’s so surprising to learn how few people were involved in realizing such a product.

Alan Wake doesn't look like your average hero - just a regular guy in an extraordinary situation. At least that's what how he's explaining those goofy genetics to his children.

A portion of that protracted development time can be attributed to building a proprietary engine: “We looked out for gaming engines that could play with this light and dark mechanic that we needed and we realised quite soon that there wasn’t anything out there that could do it”, says Ozz. The resistance to fall back on restrictive and expensive middleware has proved to be a wise, if time consuming, choice. Alan Wake is an extraordinary-looking game, rich with dense foliage, dramatic lighting and genuinely perceptible depth of field.

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Lengthy CGI cutscenes? A broody, brooding protagonist? Surly space marine ex-boyfriends? This certainly isn’t your father’s Metroid. Not that any of this should be a surprise from a developer like Team Ninja, the somewhat unlikely current custodians of Samus Aran. Yet an hour or so with Other M suggests the franchise is in safe and capable hands.

It starts with a CGI action replay of Super Metroid’s denouement – Samus defeating a quite frightening re-imagined Mother Brain thanks to the intervention of a larval Metroid. As she opens her eyes and sees the friendly face of a quarantine officer, it becomes clear her vision was a dream, our heroine reliving her harrowing experience. Curiously, she seems more than a little perturbed at the demise of the Metroid she refers to as ‘the baby’. Aside from owing a debt to her improbable saviour, it seems there’s a deeper connection between Samus and the Metroid, the repetition of the word ‘baby’ in her inner monologue likely to become more significant as the game progresses. It’s certainly clear that Other M’s obvious anagram isn’t accidental.

Power Rangers meets Blue Man Group.

After a lingering shot of Aran’s curves in her skintight Zero Suit – classic Team Ninja – she steps into that familiar armour to test out her powers. In a sterile grey chamber, the player is introduced to the new Samus Aran. Those expecting either a return to the series’ 2D roots or a kind of Metroid Gaiden in the style of the developer’s most famous work may be surprised at just how Other M works. With the remote held sideways, players guide Samus around 3D environments with the d-pad. Digital movement in three dimensions? It sounds like madness, but this unusual idea works, partly thanks to the responsiveness of the controls. Holographic enemies are sent in for Samus to blast, with a helpful auto-aim ensuring that shots fired roughly in the right direction will hit their target, while dodges are executed with a jab of the d-pad just before enemies or their projectiles hit.

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If you were paying close attention to the internet last night, you might have noticed an explosion of silence, a colossal wave of nothingness that swept from one corner of the globe to the other. The epicentre of that great non-event was Sony’s announcement of SOCOM 4, an “all-new SOCOM coded from the ground up for PlayStation 3” in which you lead “an elite, five-man squad” armed with the “latest weaponry” into combat with an “army of rebel fighters” in the midst of “inhospitable jungles, crumbling city streets and urban ruins”. We think we’ve seen this movie before. The black dude dies, right?

We don’t have a particular problem with SOCOM in itself – the Americans quite like it, apparently, and we enjoyed the PSP versions – but we do have a problem with SOCOM when it’s the “surprise Sony sequel” lurking behind several days’ worth of PR cock-teasing. SOCOM, let’s be clear, is far from surprising. Perhaps Zipper Interactive’s new game will take the franchise to unimagined heights, but for the moment at least you’ll forgive us not getting all hot and bothered at the idea of exploding jeeps, glued-down haircuts and people yelling “GOLD TEAM” into earmikes. Bad Company 2’s out today, chaps. This gutsy militaristic shizzle is ten-a-penny.

This iteration's major new feature? Women with guns. Lara Croft says hi.

You know what isn’t ten-a-penny? Space dogfighting games. Non-combat-centric, third-person action-adventures. Old school Zelda killers. Sony’s back catalogue is stuffed with landmark IPs, elderly gems craving another lease of life on PS3. Here are a few of the names the publisher could and should have mentioned yesterday evening. (Bear in mind that we’re operating in the realm of wishful thinking here, and thus far, far away from any tedious commercial realities.)

Just another sleepy little village caught up in Save-The-World shenanigans.

Alundra

Long before the now defunct Clover Studios rattled Link’s cage with the wonderful Okami, Matrix Software was kicking the yelping little twerp into touch with the sumptuous, plainly derivative but masterful Alundra. Beneath its large, crisp sprites and layered backdrops dwells a surprisingly mature storyline – players step into the boots of a Releaser, entering people’s nightmares to cure them of demonically inflicted psychological maladies – and some cracking, level-wide puzzles (think teleportation pads and movable blocks, lanterns and ice pits). You can get it on PSN these days. No excuses. The sequel’s funnier, but more of a trial and error experience.

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Ubisoft’s Red Steel 2 lacks a certain something. What is it now? Oh yes. Fear. Self-doubt. The insecurity you’d expect from the successor to an underwhelming launch title, the confidence issues that ought to attend on flying the flag (once again) for grown-up, growly, hardcore-leaning action gaming on the Wii.

You could write a book (or at least a couple of paragraphs) on the things Red Steel 2 isn’t afraid of. Crates, for starters. This game doesn’t care that you’ve bisected, blasted and high-kicked enough cuboid storage units to fill that warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark. It doesn’t care that you were precision-popping oil barrels to incinerate nearby enemies from your third birthday onwards. Both cliches are here in abundance. Red Steel 2 never tires of them, nor of the twinkling coins and juicy MGS-ish ammo packs they invariably contain.

It’s not afraid of formulaic level structure, either. It doesn’t mind in the slightest that its sand-papery steampunk environs readily boil down to a handful of hubs and square-cut combat arenas, held together by frayed lengths of Cheesy String plot and passably screened loading transitions. It’s not afraid of telling you to go rescue women with unnecessary cleavage (or for that matter men with unnecessary cleavage), or of talking head cutscenes, or of nuke-X-number-of-Y side quests. It’s not even afraid of QTEs, though it possibly should be.

Jackal gunslingers have low health, but are a nuisance nonetheless.

Red Steel 2 doesn’t have the time to be afraid, see. It’s too busy being the finest, most intelligently assembled example of Wiimote combat the console has to offer. And in return, it asks that you not be afraid. Afraid of Nintendo, that is. Afraid of what the Kyoto giant has wrought of the gaming ecosystem. Afraid of a future that includes three major motion sensitive gaming devices and a healthy population of SD screens.

It wants you to keep your cool during play, too. Moving between our God of War 3 review build and Ubisoft’s “Red Western” has been painfully enlightening. In the former, after all, you can lay down frenzied, earth-shattering hundred-hit combos without any marked increase in heart rate. Try the same trick in Red Steel 2 and they’ll be picking bits of shoulder tendon out of the sofa cushions for years to come.

The game inspires a more considered, thoughtful approach not only by way of such familiar tactical quandaries as ninjas who can knock bullets aside, or hammer-wielding juggernauts with impenetrable frontal armor, but because actually, literally waving a blade at somebody in a damaging fashion is hard. Even when you’re a cowboy-samurai crossbreed with a highly intimidating neckscarf, and even given the developer’s decision to split proceedings between rigorous 1:1 control and scripted, accelerometer-triggered actions.

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Few companies can claim such domination of the Xbox driving landscape. In pole position at the birth of Xbox Live and responsible for one of the few games to demonstrate the power of the 360 at launch, Bizarre Creations are synonymous with being there first and doing things right.

Having ended their close relationship with Microsoft Game Studios following 2007s meticulously comprehensive Project Gotham Racing 4, their subsequent acquisition by publishing giant Activision has given the Liverpool-based studio some well-earned reflection time as they prepare to take their dominance multi-format.

The barge attack can be used at close range to blast surrounding cars or if well timed can even defend against attacks.

Ged Talbot, co-Lead Designer on Blur, explains: “After PGR we had a very open map. Activision basically said ‘What do you want to make?’ so we pitched them a few ideas and the action power-up racer seemed to float to the top”. Action here is the operative word – during our time with Bizarre Creations it became clear that they weren’t billing Blur as a racing game, but as an action game.

When broken down to simple video game mathematics, Blur takes everything Bizarre have learned about the grounded arcade racers over the last decade and adds a touch of violent abstract futurism, not unlike the Wipeout series created by Bizarre’s Merseyside neighbours at Sony. Throw in a bewildering set of modification options and some inventive approaches to online networking and you have an intriguing package that has more in common with a multiplayer-focused action title than simply a race for first place.

4-player split screen work amazingly well and the frame rate doesn't suffer one bit.

The successful combination of exotic real-world surroundings and desirable sports cars is once again at the heart of the experience, offering upwards of 30 locations and over 50 vehicles each with their own distinct handling and endurance levels, but it’s the introduction of weapons that changes the entire dynamic. Appearing across the tracks as unmistakable orbs of light, Blur’s eight power-ups present a number of offensive or defensive options. Shunt, barge, bolt and mine provide self-explanatory aggressive options, while shock, nitro, shield, and repair help out the less antagonistic player. Expert knowledge of their application grants players secondary functions such as nitro’s cunningly deceptive air brake, or skilfully firing a bolt backwards to deal with incoming fire.

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It’s hard to imagine any game featuring a gigantic bowl of water suspended in space as having “conservative” level design, but that’s exactly what Shigeru Miyamoto thought of the original Super Mario Galaxy. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then, that its follow-up – lest we forget, the first 3D Mario game to appear on the same console as its predecessor – frequently enters the realms of the utterly impossible.

The handful of levels made available to journalists at Nintendo’s European media summit felt at once warmly familiar, yet thrillingly new. Mario Galaxy 2 might not be “more than just a sequel”, as Nintendo would have it, but it expands on ideas touched upon in the original in deliciously inventive new ways.

It’s also more difficult: Nintendo firmly signalling its intention to satisfy a fanbase that has felt increasingly betrayed by the company’s recent casual-focused output. If the generous handful of levels showcased here is any indication, some players are going to be screaming for New Super Mario Bros. Wii’s Super Guide feature. Gone are the invisible checkpoints of the original, replaced by flags Mario must touch if he wants to return there from a later failure. Enemies are quicker – Goombas aggressively waddling towards Mario like angry geese, and deadly flowers spiralling swiftly around a circular structure. Space is tighter, with hordes of marauding Wigglers patrolling the fast-moving platforms of one stage, yet levels are more expansive. Flip Swap Galaxy asks players to rewire their brains, with spin-jumps flipping the platforms underneath Mario’s feet. As if that wasn’t enough, players also have to contend with a tight time limit: four minutes to collect 100 coins. Harder, faster, stronger…

Beats flying Easyjet.

Better? It’s a little too early to tell, but Nintendo has certainly picked some good stuff to show off. Sky Station Galaxy revisits the piranha plant boss battle from the original, but PeeWee Piranha requires a bit more effort to beat than his predecessor. Instead of whacking his tail, Mario must first crack the shell on his posterior, before spin-attacking his exposed backside. It’s tougher than it sounds, with PeeWee moving and jumping around more quickly than expected. This time, three hits merely make him angrier, with a sixth whack eventually releasing the power star.

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Ubisoft’s future, it tells us, is in media ‘convergence’, in migrating top-selling game franchises to non-gaming platforms. The publisher has made determined inroads on home film and cinema in the past couple of years, opening a dedicated CGI studio in Canada and sinking its fingers deep into James Cameron’s wondrous, 3D-flavoured, Avatar-shaped pie (with mixed results, admittedly).

Small wonder, then, that Splinter Cell: Conviction’s Creative Director Maxime Beland is very receptive to the idea of a Splinter Cell movie.

“I’m very hungry for a Splinter Cell movie,” Beland told us at a recent preview gig. “I think Sam Fisher is a great character, I would love to see him right next to Jason Bourne and right next to James Bond, because I think he fits there. So I would love for a Splinter Cell movie to be made.

“Can Ubisoft make a movie? Can Ubisoft make it 3D, like a real footage and 3D movie Splinter Cell? I think so. I would almost say it’s just a matter of time before we end up doing that.”

Of course, the limelight-hogging Assassin’s Creed series is likely to get the silver screen treatment first. Ubisoft put together a sequence of short, highly glossy internet films to accompany the second game’s appearance. “I think Assassin’s Creed right now is such a great franchise for Ubisoft that it makes sense that we make movies out of that also. But I don’t see why we wouldn’t do it for Splinter Cell.”

When asked who he’d cast as Sam Fisher, Beland was uncertain. “It’s probably the biggest question. The biggest questions are probably ‘who is going to play Sam Fisher?’ and ‘do you keep Michael Ironside for Sam’s voice?’

“There is a big decision there, because Michael Ironside is Sam Fisher.” Only balder and not as easy on the eyes, right?

Watch out for the full interview with Beland and our hands-on report later this month. Conviction gets here in April for PC and 360, and it’s looking super-fabulous in a gravelly, smash-your-head-against-the-toilet-door kind of way.

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It has been said that if you laid all the ninjas and dynasties slayed in the extensive back-catalogue of hack and slash super-studio Tecmo-Koei head to toe, they would loop the world all the way from Neo Tokyo to the Great Wall several hundred times over.

At least it has now.  In such capable hands you might expect the introduction of a new IP that marries the slicing and dicing of a K-T game with the real-time character management of Pikmin or Overlord to be an exciting prospect.

Your undead army can be used to destroy threats, clog up traps and quite regularly to form bridges atop one another

Set in an undisclosed European Kingdom, Undead Knights tells the tale of a cuckolded king maneuvered into killing his own daughter and husband-to-be along with a loyal knight, though rather than settling for an after-life of providing sustenance for worms, Sylvia and brothers Romulus and Remus accept the gift of a rebirth from a shadowy death-like figure who also grants them the power to create armies of the undead to control with a touch. The three return to exact revenge on the king, the wicked queen and anybody else who may have been involved along the way.

In terms of maintaining a consistent art direction, Undead Knights is something of a mish-mash. Imagine the gothic mischief of Castlevania mixed with a very angsty foul-mouthed teen and you’re half way there. The world is constructed of predictably typical defense garrisons and uninspired castle interiors, with very little to distinguish one area from the next.

In its defence, Undead Knights does manage to display quite a number of enemies and even more of your undead on screen at one time with little in the way of slowdown, and commanding your denizens to kill results in a pleasing display of butchery, though the entire design is lacking any kind of individual stamp of direction and screams generic video game zombie fodder.

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In a frantic battle to the checkered flag, Sonic and friends speed around tracks all taken from universes of Sonic and SEGA. Each character has a specific All-Star move that allows a quick way for competitors to get back into the race! Power ups and weapons can also be collected around the tracks and used against the opposition to ensure they don’t become a threat to that number one position. Battle it out in single or multiplayer mode, allowing up to four friends to race in frantic split-screen action, or up to eight players online in the ultimate racing showdown.

All the classic SEGA characters are in there, with plenty of surprises

Party racing fun – Battle it out in single player, challenge your friends in 4 player split-screen or compete in 8 player online action! Game modes include Grand Prix, Arcade and Time Attack.

All your favorite racers - Choose from 20 different characters from the Sonic & SEGA universe including Sonic, Tails, AiAi and Amigo.

High Velocity Vehicles – Every character drives their own unique vehicle including sports cars, bikes, monster trucks, planes and even a giant banana to perform special maneuvers!

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Race here to find out more!

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A not very long time ago in a conference chamber not very far away we had the opportunity to chat with Jake Neri, Producer with LucasArts on Star Wars: The Old Republic, the hotly anticipated BioWare-developed PC MMO. Here are the results. For maximum impact, print the article onto cellophane and move it slowly past eye-level whilst staring at a map of the constellations.

VGD: You have an incredible amount of spoken dialogue in this game, and in three languages to boot! Can you talk me through how you’ve pulled that off?

Jake Neri: Well we’re still in the middle of developing that. It’s a tremendous effort, we have a huge team collaborating on that both at LucasArts and at BioWare studios in Austin and Edmonton are working on that project. It is a massive undertaking, but the pay-off for the player is really huge, and I think that was something that we decided early on – when we wanted to go to full-voice, we wanted to make sure we could do that in all the key languages, to reach as many as people as possible. We’re trying to create a world phenomenon with the game, we don’t think we can do that unless you can hear it in the language which you speak.

Looks like an Inquisitor player to us.

VGD: Do you think this game will convert many Star Wars fans to MMO fans?

Neri: I think so, yeah, I definitely think so. That’s one of our goals. We understand the Star Wars audience pretty deeply, we’re very fortunate to be very much in touch with those fans. At LucasArts it’s a big part of what we’re doing, trying to understand those fans, because they’re are passionate and they’re all out there. We also know from working on things like Galaxies we have no problem with attracting people to the genre just based on the fact that it is Star Wars. So we feel like a lot of the things we’re doing – the story, trying to make you feel like a hero early on, trying to make sure that the combat is cinematic and action-packed – we think those things will bring in new players and we’re hoping they are. At the same time, there are hardcore MMO players that are going to want to play this as well, so we’re making sure that the game fulfils their expectations as well.

VGD: MMOs don’t tend to blow people’s minds with their production values. Do you think gamers in this genre really care for that kind of thing, and are you trying to raise the bar?

Neri: It’s one of the huge technical hurdles in the MMO biz. We can’t always control the scene like you can in a single player game, we have certain limitations with physics, right, we can’t do as much physics at any one time. Because in one scene you might have 250 people on-screen, and you can’t control the environment as well as you can in single player. Now that being said, as far as inside the genre goes, we’re certainly trying to push the boundaries of what you can and can’t do. Combat is a perfect example – very cinematic, very heroic, all over the map, lots of flips and acrobatics, lots of choreography in our swordplay, the ability to block blaster bolts, use force powers…

VGD: Old Republic takes place 3000 years before the original film trilogy, but after the events of the Knights of the Old Republic games. What state is the universe in at present?

Neri: It’s an interesting time. The Sith are there, and they’re ready to do some serious damage… The Sith are different in our world than they are anywhere else. We’ve heard a lot of questions about will we answer what happens in KOTOR 1 and 2. We don’t have a ton of detail on that, we know fans want to understand that, so perhaps we’ll address that at some point.

Somebody's just burned his own fringe off.

VGD: BioWare must be pretty clued-up on the Star Wars franchise by now, having developed KOTOR. How would you characterise your relationship with them?

Neri: They’re very familiar, and I would say that we have a really excellent relationship with them. It’s very collaborative, very free, we trust them quite a bit. They know Star Wars very well. And they have contributed quite heavily to it, in all honesty, so they’re a key trusted partner for sure.

VGD: I’m sure there’s always been a sizeable percentage of Star Wars fans at BioWare.

Neri: Absolutely. They’ve done a great job. KOTOR 1 was an amazing game that they were responsible for, along with the folks at LucasArts. Again, they’re a good partner.

VGD: Thanks for talking to us, Jake.

The game’s slated for a Spring 2011 release.

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Platform warz time. Chatting to VGD at a preview event last week, Red Steel 2’s Creative Director Jason VandenBerghe expressed his belief that the game would function swimmingly on Sony’s motion control wand, but is less suited to Microsoft’s more advanced Project Natal tech. Or at least, to what he knows of it.

“I think it could work fantastically with the Sony wand,” he said, when asked whether the stabby-shooty action fest had a future beyond the Wii, but went on: “With this kind of game you need a thumbstick, that’s the only real constraint. For walking around at least, I haven’t seen a solution.

“Microsoft may come forward and show me something I haven’t seen before, which makes me understand how you can play a first-person action game like this that requires this intense finesse and accuracy in your motion, and not have a controller in your hand of some kind.

“But I think we need to have a thumbstick. I think this is probably a more natural fit for the Sony side of things right now, but I don’t think Microsoft is showing all of its cards right now either.

“And that’s not an insider release – I don’t know. I just don’t buy it. There’s more coming, there has to be more. And you know what, I would love to play these games.”

Specifically, VandenBerghe wouldn’t mind getting his hands on an on-rails slasher.

“I would also, for the record, love to play an on-rails first-person swordfighting game with Natal. Love to! House of the Dead with a sword? Sounds fantastic to me.”

Wonder what he’d make of a hands-free Killer Instinct?

Red Steel 2 is out in March. Peruse the full interview with Jason here.

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