Reviewing Green Day: Rock Band almost seems silly. People kept asking me how the game was and all I could think to say was "It's Green Day: Rock Band." That is literally the best description and review of this title. If all of those words together appeal to you, this is your game. If any of those words make you yawn or grimace, then you can stop reading now.
I don't need to explain how a plastic peripheral music game works, right? Songs occur, and you play them on fake instruments. Sometimes you sing if you've had a couple beers.
What is worth noting is that Green Day: Rock Band is more akin to The Beatles: Rock Band than it is to Rock Band 2. This is a game about the alt-punk trio's career, a loosely chronological journey through their best known songs. It's set in three venues over about 15 years, and lets you play as Billie Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tre Cool. The presentation is very similar to the Beatles version, as is the career mode. You earn photos and videos of the band as rewards for doing well on the songs
That's it, videogames; I've officially had it with audio logs. They were a cute diversion a few years back, but now it seems like every post-BioShock game environment is strewn with more recording equipment than a Guitar Center. Aside from the latest Batman -- excused for being set in an insane asylum -- I've never been able to comprehend why anyone would capture the intimate details of their day-to-day lives on tape, only to leave said recordings out in the open for any caped crusader or genetically-enhanced super-soldier that might be passing through. Then again, I guess I still don't really understand the point of Twitter, either.
Anyway, Raven Software's newest first-person shooter, Singularity, absolutely overflows with that sort of atmospheric junk. And that's just one of the many, many ways Raven's game gives off a serious BioShock vibe. For starters, Singularity opens with a helicopter crash over the Pacific Ocean -- BioShock, a plane crash in the Atlantic. Both games drop their silent protagonists into strange and perilous ruined cities where mysterious, flesh-mutating substances have been unearthed. They also both allow you to collect and trade the aforementioned gene-altering materials to customize and upgrade your abilities. I could go on for days, honestly, but all that's really missing here are guys in retro-looking diving suits, a soundtrack loaded with Bing Crosby songs, and the ability to unleash swarms of bees from your hands.
I've never been as consistently interrupted while playing a game at the office as I was while playing through High Moon's Transformers: War for Cybertron. I would put on headphones and play for ten or fifteen minutes, and I would suddenly feel a tingle in that weird lizard-brain proximity sense we've all got that says "someone is in my personal space bubble." I'd turn around and see another IGN editor standing behind my shoulder, staring at me with pleading eyes, and I always knew what they were going to ask before they asked it: "is it good?" It's the look of someone afraid of getting their hopes up.
Which is why I was happy to report to those asking that Transformers: War for Cybertron is actually very good. Fantastic, even. High Moon has taken a fun, fast, third person shooter foundation, crafted a well thought out transformation mechanic on top of it, and designed combat situations around that. The end result is a shooter that has an identity all its own, and leverages its license to make something very cool for fans and newcomers alike.
This year's international tournament takes place in South Africa, and EA Sports is keen to produce a tie-in product that both reflects worldwide diversity and attracts the casual observer.Of course, there are some challenges that come with developing 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa – the first one concerning incremental improvements.
Over the last few years, EA Sports' football series has become one of the finest console simulations ever. But how do you build on the base gameplay mechanic of kicking a ball around a pitch?
Despite FIFA 10 being quite the definitive title, 2010 FIFA World Cup shows that there's still plenty you can add. For the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions there are over 100 improvements, both in the gameplay engine and in the presentation.
You might assume that Red Dead Redemption's multiplayer borrows heavily from GTAIV. Well, except for the fast cars and automatic weaponry, anyway -- hopefully, history class taught you enough about turn-of-the-century America that you're not expecting to find any Apache helicopters in Redemption's 1908 setting. But while Rockstar's upcoming Western has obviously learned a lot from GTA, the multiplayer is a more original, gunplay-and-cover focused mode in Redemption. And during a recent press multiplayer event here in San Francisco, I got to play through the various multiplayer modes to find out just what makes this game different.
Alan Wake is a psychological action thriller, a unique new take in the world of gaming. The game is set in an idyllic all-American small town and its surroundings in the state of Washington. Alan Wake, the game's protagonist, is a bestselling horror writer, who writes a novel about his darkest nightmares. In the game, those nightmares come true. As with Remedy's previous games, story and atmosphere are fundamental elements. The game features a massive, open world for the players to explore. The game design is mission based with the player as the driving force behing the action, and as with their previous games, Remedy again focuses completely on delivering the best possible single player experience. The use of light is a significant gameplay element. Remedy has developed proprietary new technology to support the gameplay of the title and to push the high definition visuals to the next level. [Remedy]
The Sims franchise has made its way to home consoles several times, but The Sims 3 is the closest it's come to matching the PC version yet. With a fully featured Create a Character, the inclusion of life cycles and Lifetime Wishes, and the ability to be constantly online with the Sims store, EA's doing everything they can to make Sims 3 for consoles the experience fans expect.
Jumping right into character creation, you'd have little idea that you weren't playing the PC version. While some of the interface has been tuned to work with a controller, you still have all the options for customization, as well as seamless integration of both items from the online store as well as community creations. If you like the shirt you're looking at, but hate the color, you can easily look and see what the community (the community that will hopefully be there, at least) has made as far as color and patterns go. Persistent online is a huge component for Sims 3 on 360/PS3 in general. (I only saw the 360 version at this point.) When you drop your newly created Sim into the world, you can build them a house to live in and, just like the Create a Character, purchase items from the store from within the game if you're not satisfied with what the game offers by default.
During an investor conference at E3 last week, publisher THQ revealed it plans to ship Devil's Third, a recently announced action title from Valhalla Studios, in early 2012.
Devil's Third was first unveiled days prior to the show. Famed Ninja Gaiden designer Tomonobu Itagaki is helming the project at his newly-formed studio based in Tokyo, Japan.
The publisher also unveiled UFC Trainer, a new fitness title that includes all the licensed UFC fighters and trainers from the league. That game is scheduled to ship in early January, 2011 for the Wii, Microsoft Kinect, and PlayStation Move
I wish I'd had the Toy Story 3 game when I was a kid. Back then I hardly had any good cooperative games to play with my siblings, and playing games with my parents usually amounted to me taking it easy on them so they wouldn't quit.
But what makes Toy Story 3 even more special than its great cooperative play is that it actually makes good use of its license. Movie tie-ins have a reputation for being awful, but developer Avalanche Software has found a good way to use the Toy Story name without just creating another rehash of the movie's plot. Instead TS3 has both a decent, story-driven game that touches upon some highlights from the film, as well as an inventive open world game called Toy Box mode
This year's E3 was clogged with big hardware announcements from each of The Big Three (Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony) along with the usual deluge of hands-on time with tomorrow's biggest games. Thankfully that didn't stop some of the smaller game developers of the world from impressing us with their virtual creations. For me, John Daly's ProStroke Golf represented one of my first hands-on demos with PlayStation Move, so the title from Gusto Games had a lot of pressure on its little shoulders. Thankfully I enjoyed my short time spent on the driving range with both Sony's controller and John Daly's new game (though it's sadly devoid of nudity, cigarettes and drinking).
The E3 demo was admittedly limited, but it was perfectly designed to give players an idea of how the PlayStation Move will behave once it launches in the United States on September 19. As I stepped up to the mini tee box that was constructed for E3 purposes, I was told that I had to first calibrate the Move by aligning the club with a spot on the ground and tapping the trigger button the back. That essentially gave the Move a central point on the ground that it could use as a virtual ball. The size of that "ball" is changeable through the difficulty settings of the game, but for my demo it was tuned to be nice and big so as to not create frustration caused by consecutive whiffs
You've heard it all before; this will be the year where Pro Evolution Soccer steals the break on FIFA, when it makes up for the ground lost since it stuttered on to the current generation and when it can finally reclaim the glory lost since its PlayStation 2 heyday. This year Pro Evolution Soccer will be back - it's a mantra that's become wearier as the promise is broken year on year.
Not that Konami's Tokyo team have been producing bad games – last year's Pro Evolution Soccer 2010 was a great effort that managed to stay faithful to the formula laid out some nine years ago, and in many ways it perfected it. The result was a game of football that, while not as exacting or authentic as FIFA, was exciting and, most importantly, a world of fun. But the formula itself is creaking all too loudly; so what better time for a reboot?
Assassin's Creed 2 is a much better game than its predecessor. For one thing, it's actually a complete game, possessing a beginning, a middle, and an end, where the original Creed had a very interesting beginning and a satisfying end connected by 20 hours of interminable grey tedium. And while this sequel may not feel quite as fresh as the first game's handful of exceptional moments did, it serves up a more consistently enjoyable experience from start to finish.
AC2 isn't without its flaws, but it benefits from a completely reworked structure that keeps the pace snappy and makes those minor issues fairly painless. Without a doubt, the most important improvement here is the way Ubisoft Montreal revamped the core mission design. The first Creed offered a sharply limited palette of objectives: Scout the area, undertake a set of investigative assignments, kill a guy, repeat. ACII offers more varied primary tasks, largely relegating the previous game's toilsome errands to the sidelines. You may have a friendly chat with Leonardo da Vinci one minute and kill a politician at a gala event the next, while events like races and extracurricular assassinations are almost entirely left to the player's discretion. One could conceivably play the game strictly for the story missions, which would result in a lean, cinematic, eight-hour adventure.
The arrival of Nintendo's 3DS could be sooner than we hoped as Reggie Fils-Aime revealed that the company are looking to release the handheld in all major territories by March next year.
Quite easily the star of last week's E3, the 3DS wowed with its no-glasses 3D display and strong support from Nintendo and third-party publishers – leaving many wondering when they could get their hands on the device and how much cash they'd have to part with to do so.
"The reason we haven't announced a launch date or pricing is that, first, we wanted to get reaction here...