Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 5:23 PM

Category: Role Playing

Pete Hines: I'm not sure we're surprised. I can tell you we're definitely relieved and pleased that so many people are playing it and enjoying it. Certainly we all thought the game was really good, but until it's out there and lots of folks start playing it "for real," you never really know.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 10:54 AM

Category: Role Playing

The architecture is also varied enough from city to city to give a cultural feel without being over-the-top. As for what lies within the Oblivion portals, well - let's just say the atmosphere there fits the world's lore extremely well.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 10:10 PM

Category: Action

Eighteen months ago, Tomb Raider team members at Crystal Dynamics embarked on their own quest to rediscover Lara Croft. During their soul-searching mission, they unearthed past consumer surveys, conducted new research, re-read every game review, listened to lots of passionate pleas and opinions from gamers and re-played through every Tomb Raider product. From this introspection and open-minded search for a fresh perspective, Tomb Raider: Legend was born.

As a result, Eidos is evolving the brand while building on the original values of compelling character and suspense-filled adventure gameplay. Crystal Dynamics has brought together the biggest and most diverse development team in Tomb Raider history and recruited Lara Croft’s original creator Toby Gard as the lead character designer.

Eidos and Crystal Dynamics shaped Lara’s look and movements to be an inherent extension of her skills, motivation and personality. Lara’s character model features natural structure, realistic textures, detailed facial features, reactive eyes and fluid motion, all of which make her part of a living environment.

New character animations and controls allow her to move through stunning environments with grace and precision, while an understanding of the game’s original appeal reinvigorates the fundamental explore-and-solve adventure experience.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 10:44 AM

Category: Role Playing

A few other subtle yet telling details hint at how little the developers thought to work on the game engine. For example, you can stand on a fire with no injury whatsoever; your attacks are incredibly repetitive and swing right over the monster's heads, while still dealing damage. Monsters seem unable to walk around the smallest objects without immense luck, and if they are standing on a moving object, cannot be knocked off.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 8:41 AM

Category: Role Playing

While nobody is going to mistake Tamriel for a real living, breathing world, it is certainly brought to life by the dozens of NPCs who reside in the various towns and settlements. They go about their daily and even monthly routines of eating, sleeping, shopping, socialising and travelling out of town, and indeed many quests play to this fact, whether it involves spying on someone or breaking into their homes in order to ransack them before they get back. With a lockpicking mini-game, shadow-enhanced stealth and physical modelling for world objects, it actually feels like proper house-breaking, too.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 10:11 AM

Category: Role Playing

Oblivion is a staggeringly ambitious game that successfully unites some of the best elements of RPG, adventure and action games and fuses them into a relentlessly immersive and intoxicating whole.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 9:13 AM

Category: Action

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 3:31 PM

Category: Massively Multiplayer

Join us the weekend of March 24th for the FactionsTM Preview Event! This will be your first chance to visit the breathtaking continent of Cantha, the newest world of the Guild Wars saga. During the event, you will get the chance to play roleplaying and player-versus-player characters, and to pursue a variety of gameplay options, including story missions, competitive missions, and a new form of PvP called alliance battles!

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 3:33 PM

Category: Role Playing

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 12:00 AM

Category: Massively Multiplayer

Guild Wars Factions takes place on the Asian-inspired continent of Cantha, where new and existing Guild Wars players join an epic quest to defeat an ancient evil and save a war-torn empire. Roleplaying and competitive player-versus-player gamers alike will be able to join together in guild alliances to take control of territory and determine the fate of Cantha. New scored challenge missions and strategic competitive missions allow players to test their roleplaying prowess and earn the right for their alliance to take control of cities, towns and outposts.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 9:47 AM

Category: Role Playing

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 5:54 PM

Category: First Person

Rat Hunter features traditional, by-the-book gameplay, which does not wander into the realm of tactical shooters. Players will have to overcome different obstacles and solve various puzzles in order to get to the next level. They will also get to shoot monsters, but there is no goal such as "Kill everyone"; the adversaries are just a device to maintain the tension and further the story. The advanced physics engine used in the game allows to create a highly interactive environment.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 1:15 PM

Category: First Person

Jeff: In general we wanted to find the correct balance between the original UT’s play style and where it evolved to in UT2004. To that end we’ve upped the weapons power slightly, and designed levels that keep the combat range a little tighter. The mobility options introduced in UT2003, like double jump and wall dodging, are still present, but with the increased gravity aren’t as dominating as in the last title.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 2:58 PM

Category: First Person

A new contract animator has joined us to help finish Prey. Eric Weiss has a background in both film and computer game animation, having worked on such movies as Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Godzilla, and most recently, Superman Returns.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 6:39 PM

Category: Role Playing

Finger: Some of the screenshots we've seen for Oblivion show a massive draw distance that goes out way further than Morrowind could handle. Is a draw distance this far going to make it into the final game, and if so, is it only a setting for the most of extreme of PCs? Can the Xbox 360 handle that kind of huge environment?

Pete Hines: The most recent videos you saw were taken last week, so yes, that's in the final version of the game. That's what it looks like. On the Xbox 360 it is a fixed distance, and yes, it can handle it. Again, it looks just like it does on the videos. On the PC it's actually a slider so that it can be pulled in for older or slower cards, or drawn out further on the latest cards. As newer and better cards come out, you'll be able to adjust that even further.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 6:41 PM

Category: Role Playing

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 9:54 PM

Category: Role Playing

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 10:52 AM

Category: Role Playing

I don't believe I've ever said exactly what projects folks will work on. I've certainly never said anything about another Elder Scrolls game or an expansion.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 10:38 AM

Category: Role Playing

Set in a world where orcs and man are at an uneasy peace, a group of dwarven miners have stumbled across a buried tomb, which may contain the fallen orc god, Azriaal. This discovery has raised tensions considerably, as the orcs now see this as a holy crusade to recover their deity, and return to power like they enjoyed centuries earlier. While this chaos is swirling around, players take control of a lone adventurer, the only survivor from what was a once party of four, and must now figure out how they will deal with what is happening.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 9:53 AM

Category: Massively Multiplayer

The geography of Cantha will experience a constantly shifting battle line between two factions, akin to Rise of Nations or PlanetSide. You'll align yourself with either the Kurzicks or the Luxons, neither of whom are necessarily "good" or "evil"; their battle is one of resources, not of domination. The campaign introduces Alliances, which are made up of up to ten player guilds, and this larger group will have its own communication channel and bank storage. The Alliances themselves will vie for control of up to 20 cities across Cantha, and their NPC inhabitants will be aware of who controls their town.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 8:58 AM

Category: Action

Eighteen months ago, Tomb Raider team members at Crystal Dynamics embarked on their own quest to rediscover Lara Croft. During their soul-searching mission, they unearthed past consumer surveys, conducted new research, re-read every game review, listened to lots of passionate pleas and opinions from gamers and re-played through every Tomb Raider product. From this introspection and open-minded search for a fresh perspective, Tomb Raider: Legend was born.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 2:19 PM

Category: Massively Multiplayer

March 10, 2006 (BELLEVUE, WA): ArenaNet® , developer of the award-winning online roleplaying game Guild Wars®, and NCsoft® Corporation, the world's leading developer and publisher of online computer games, announce today the release date of Guild Wars FactionsTM, the hotly anticipated second game release from the critically acclaimed studio. Guild Wars Factions will be available in stores worldwide April 28, 2006.

Guild Wars Factions takes place on the Asian-inspired continent of Cantha, where new and existing Guild Wars players join an epic quest to defeat an ancient evil and save a war-torn empire. Roleplaying and competitive player-versus-player gamers alike will be able to join together in guild alliances to take control of territory and determine the fate of Cantha. New scored challenge missions and strategic competitive missions allow players to test their roleplaying prowess and earn the right for their alliance to take control of cities, towns and outposts. Large-scale alliance battles pit teams from opposing factions against each other in a struggle to conquer new territory and redraw the battle lines across the continent of Cantha. New elite missions allow the most skilled players exclusive access to areas designed to be the ultimate cooperative challenge.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 11:20 PM

Category: Strategy

Star Trek: Legacy places you in the role of the Admiral of a task force of warships, which you control in small and large-scale battles. Test your strategic and tactical skills in real-time combat featuring authentic spaceships, full damage modeling, and spectacular visual effects.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 6:10 PM

Category: Role Playing

Two Worlds combines the extremely dynamic and sophisticated combat system with the meaning and freedom of exploration exceeding the accomplishments of other games of the genre. A top quality Role Playing experience - the ultimate goal of the Two Worlds project is to deliver a superior Role Playing Game to the PC and Xbox 360 market where players have a real chance to shape the game world with their actions - to an extent that has yet to seen in other productions. This premise will be supported with a strong, non-linear storyline, mind blowing graphics, and stunning combat sequences. To attract the mass audience, the complexity of the game will be achieved mainly through a variety of meaningful choices while the User Interface will be simplified.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 8:37 AM

Category: Role Playing

As far as the best aspect, I think what I like best is that even know, in the final stages of finishing the game, I can sit at lunch with guys on the team and we'll be talking about the game and everyone is still talking about something different they did that nobody else had seen or done. It really gives you an appreciation for the scale and scope of the game.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 3:04 PM

Category: Role Playing

This time around, though, the quests seem more varied and reasonable than in Morrowind, which often boiled down to either "kill this person" or "find this item." A perfect example of the improvement is one quest where I was asked to keep tabs on where a person was going. I had to be at a certain location at a certain time, and just watch where the NPC went in her day. And with the Radiant AI allowing NPCs to go about their days in different ways, randomly talking to other characters on various topics, the quest isn't exactly scripted the way most of Morrowind's were. Of course, there are still quests where you have to kill a person or fetch an item, but it's refreshing to know that those aren't my only option.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 8:58 AM

Category: Action

The newest villain in the Tomb Raider franchise has finally been revealed and man is she... mystical! Amanda Evert is an old friend of Lara Croft who was thought to be killed while excavating a tomb while back in graduate school. Little did she know that she would come back from the dead, and let’s just say that the friendship isn’t what it used to be...

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 9:22 AM

Category: Role Playing

Secondly, you tend to laugh... a lot. One minute you’re rocking out to some music on your headphones and building one of the most famous locations in all of the (ancient) world with your bare hands, then all of a sudden someone says something funny and it’s bedlam.

Instead of having to reach a certain character level to unlock the next tier of skills, you have some control over the pace at which you unlock your masteries. At each character level, you earn three skill points, which you can either place in a mastery to advance it and unlock additional skills, or increase the power of the skills that you've already unlocked. This adds another level of strategic thinking to character development, because there is an ideal balance somewhere between dumping all your points into Tier 1 skills or, conversely, dumping all your points in a mastery to unlock the Tier 6 skills as soon as possible.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 8:35 PM

Category: Role Playing

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 10:47 PM

Category: Gone Gold

Rockville, MD - March 2, 2006 - Bethesda Softworks® and 2K Games, a publishing label of Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. (NASDAQ: TTWO), today announced that the highly-anticipated role-playing game, The Elder Scrolls® IV: Oblivion™ has gone to gold master and will be available in stores in North America and Europe during the week of March 20. Oblivion will be available for Xbox 360™ video game and entertainment system from Microsoft and PC in both regular and collector's editions.

"Our most ambitious project ever is finally done," said Todd Howard, executive producer of Oblivion. "We're excited to get the game into everyone's hands and let them experience it for themselves. We hope they enjoy it. I think it's our best game yet."

Oblivion is an epic, open-ended single-player RPG for the next generation providing gamers with one of the most life-like gaming experiences to date. The powerful combination of unprecedented graphics and freeform gameplay allows gamers to unravel the main quest or explore the vast world at their own pace. Oblivion is the fourth chapter in the award-winning Elder Scrolls series that includes Morrowind® (2002 RPG of the year - Computer Gaming World), Daggerfall™ (1996 RPG of the year -- PC Gamer), and Arena (1994 RPG of the year - Computer Player).

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 3:55 PM

Category: Movies

After a brutal war in the evil land of Stygia, Conan crosses harsh desert and trackless jungle with VALERIA, a blonde, sexy and very dangerous buccaneer. Together, they stumble across XUCHOTL, a fabulous lost city rising from the burning sands -- where no city should ever exist. Even more ominous is the creature guarding the city's black walls: a huge, monstrous dragon resurrected from ancient bones.