Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 3:19 PM

Category: Developer

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 4:47 PM

Category: Action

The remit is destruction and parody: turning the fantasy tropes on their head by making you a villain rather than a hero. But there's no wit here that reaches beyond farts and vomit. The setting is never anything but convenient imitation, and you'll commit more heinous acts letting the trucks crush your amphibian friend in Frogger than you'll manage here.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 2:35 PM

Category: First Person

Set twenty-five years in the future, Hellgate: London introduces a world devastated by a demon invasion and a desolate city scorched by hellfire where mankind has gone underground to survive. Among them are the Templar, an archaic and secret society that foresaw this demonic apocalypse centuries ago.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 11:55 AM

Category: Movies

...if this tangled web does still involve the filmmaker, Raimi has been busy brainstorming about the villains he’d like to get into the next flick. “I would love to see Electro, Vulture, maybe the Sinister Six as a team,” he said.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 2:41 PM

Category: First Person

When we look at the shooter genre we think 'why am I always playing a straight line? Why are the only tools I have guns? And why do I have no choice over which guns I have and when I use them?' What we wanted to do was really take that choice and put it into the game in a way that was expressed in a physical and tangible way.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 11:02 PM

Category: Massively Multiplayer

We wanted to avoid designing any delivery (or “fedex”) quests at all. In fact, we put a sign on the door to the quest design area that said: “Every time you make a fedex quest, Abaddon will feast on puppy eyes.” We want the quests in Eye of the North to present players with new goals, new challenges, and new ways to play the game.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 11:47 AM

Category: Role Playing

The first thing that's obvious about Loki is that it's obviously trying to get back to some old-school roots and, from the moment you see the amount of damage float upwards off of enemies as you hack and slash chunks out of their HP scores, it feels very familiar. So familiar in fact that we didn't even have to puzzle over the controls, they just came naturally to our fingertips.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 10:07 AM

Category: First Person

After your plane crashes into icy uncharted waters, you discover a rusted bathysphere and descend into Rapture, a city hidden beneath the sea. Constructed as an idealistic society for a hand picked group of scientists, artists and industrialists, the idealism is no more. Now the city is littered with corpses, wildly powerful guardians roam the corridors as little girls loot the dead, and genetically mutated citizens ambush you at every turn.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 9:41 AM

Category: Massively Multiplayer

Due to hit store shelves during the 2007 holiday season, Guild Wars: Eye of the North will require at least one of the previous Guild Wars campaigns (Prophecies, Factions, or Nightfall) in order to play. It’s a game that will benefit long-time players of the Guild Wars games, with all of the content targeting existing Guild Wars characters.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 9:33 AM

Category: First Person

The guys at Splash Damage, the development house responsible for the excellent Return to Castle Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory multiplayer game, have put together a fast paced, team-based, and objective focused game that we've been enjoying quite mightily today.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 5:18 PM

Category: Massively Multiplayer

Little is known about the elusive krait, but a few witnesses describe an army of slithering, serpentine warriors that seem able to transform in the middle of battle into numerous - and much more dangerous - forms.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 3:13 PM

Category: Role Playing

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 10:46 AM

Category: Movies

Production company Legendary Pictures will be handling development of an upcoming film based on Blizzard's Diablo series of action RPGs. Indication of the studio's involvement came with the listing of Diablo in the "Coming Soon" section of the official Legendary Pictures site.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 9:02 AM

Category: Action

One boss battle involves a tubby bald monster that looks a bit like the executioner from 300 or the Baron Harkonnen from Dune, but considering that this boss is suspended from the ceiling and literally spills his guts on you to cause damage, there's little chance of getting him confused with those other guys.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 5:35 PM

Category: Role Playing

According to Game Informer, the battle system in Fallout 3 is called the Vault-tec Assisted Targeting System (V.A.T.S.). You'll certainly be able to tackle enemies in real-time using first-person shooting, the article says, but V.A.T.S. lets you pause time and select a target at your leisure.

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

Category: Developer

The suite, sold at retail and through Valve's Steam download service, will consist of the shooter sequel Half-Life 2: Episode Two, the team-based multiplayer game Team Fortress 2, and the action/puzzle game Portal. Valve is handling development of the games on PC and Xbox 360, with EA UK's Chertsey, Surrey office bringing the titles to PlayStation 3.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 1:09 PM

Category: First Person

Players get the options to play on either side of the war, though the demonstration and hands on time we had focused more on the human side of the conflict than the Strogg, and can use five classes to help achieve objectives. We admit having our doubts that five classes would be enough for some of the more advanced players, but a few minutes with the game showed us that the entire attitude of the developers has been to structure the gameplay into different tiers for the experience level of gamers.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 2:25 PM

Category: First Person

The game starts during present-day, out in the not-so-safe streets of Al-Khali. Apparently, every thousands of years an unspeakable evil (that everyone always speaks about anyway) comes around to muck everything up and a group of talented individuals named "Jerichos" must fight it back.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 12:01 PM

Category: Action

In keeping with the literary theme of our source material, all aspects of the game--including the weapons system--derive from the building blocks of fairy tales and the books containing them. The Words as Weapons concept is elegantly simple--our main character can pluck action verbs like "BURN" from the game environment, carry them around, and hurl them at enemies and obstacles. Word weapon effects are full of variety yet are visually self-evident, an aspect which I think makes the concept ideal for episodic games.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 12:01 PM

Category: Role Playing

Your mount is controlled just as your unmounted character would be, except that it turns differently. Therefore, you do have to learn how each type of mount moves and compensate for that. While on a mount, if you attack with a melee weapon, you’ll automatically strike at the nearest enemy. In this way, mounted combat becomes less about aiming your shots and more about timing.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 12:59 PM

Category: Action

Your character, the Overlord, has been awoken by a small pack of goblin-like minions who have pledged their utmost loyalty to you. It is explained that the previous Overlord had constructed a massive tower of evil but was defeated by a band of heroes. As the new up and coming Overlord, it is your job to regain your strength, restore the tower to its former glory, and ultimately cement your place as the true ruler of all.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 8:10 PM

Category: Movies

"I get asked the question so often, I thought it best to make an announcement," Connery, 76, said in a statement posted Thursday on Lucasfilm's "Indiana Jones" Web site. "I thought long and hard about it, and if anything could have pulled me out of retirement it would have been an 'Indiana Jones' film."

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 11:38 AM

Category: First Person

Rather than standing still, mindlessly waiting to get shot, enemies will quickly scamper out of sight, turning you paranoid as you continually watch over your shoulder to see if anything's coming up from behind.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 4:07 PM

Category: Role Playing

We integrated the notion of replay value from the outset, so most levels are randomly generated. We felt that randomly generated levels were preferable to a level editor, for example. We are more in the Diablo mold than Titan Quest. You soon get bored with playing a game in unchanging decors. Moreover, a player always has the possibility when restarting a game to continue on his road or to start again, keeping his hero's current level and inventory.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 6:53 PM

Category: Role Playing

The first dungeon-based game to realistically depict underground life, Dungeon Hero promises all the danger, intrigue and daily routine of an actual subterranean community. Combining HD graphics with incredibly detailed environments completely immerses players in their newfound surroundings, complete with goblin cheese merchants, jailed troll miners and helpful imps just looking for peace.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 6:06 PM

Category: Action

Redwood City, CA (June 6, 2007) – Corks are flying across the continent as Eidos and Crystal Dynamics toast the release of Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Anniversary, which ships to North American retailers today.

Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Anniversary is a celebration of Lara's original adventure in an entirely new Crystal Dynamics game. In 1996 the original Tomb Raider video game launched and introduced the world to Lara Croft, one of the entertainment industry's most successful and prolific cross-over properties.

"The anniversary edition is a fan-inspired celebration bridging Lara Croft's groundbreaking past with a revived passion for new adventures and technical advancements," said Bill Gardner, president and CEO of Eidos Inc. "Lara Croft is at the doorway of a new decade, and we've made sure she's ready to face exciting new challenges in the world of entertainment."

Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Anniversary takes advantage of more than 10 years of technical advances to faithfully recreate the sense of isolation, suspense and surprise of the original title, but with greatly expanded environments, enhanced puzzles, updated weapons and the smooth, athletic character movements introduced in Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Legend in 2006.

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

Category: Science

Radiocarbon dating of chicken bones at the site on the Arauco Peninsula in south central Chile indicated a range of A.D. 1321 to 1407, well before the Spanish arrival in the Americas.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 2:03 PM

Category: First Person

First and foremost, GRAW 2 on the PC is a first-person shooter, whereas the console versions are played from third-person perspective. The PC also lets the player have significantly more control over mission options, tactics, and how you choose to play the game, while the console versions tend to throw you into the action as fast as possible and not bog down the player with options.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 1:48 PM

Category: First Person

Visually, Shadowrun looks great in some areas and painfully unfinished in others. The environments and textures look good, and the spell effects and other particle-oriented elements look great. But then there are dumb omissions, like the way that they didn't bother to include any kind of climbing animation--so when characters go up ladders, they do so locked in their standing position with no movement whatsoever.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 5:15 PM

Category: Massively Multiplayer

One of the biggest challenges our art department faced was to make each dungeon feel unique, while at the same time capturing the sense of an enclosed, sometimes claustrophobic, environment. Unlike the wide-open plains of Elona, groups will have less room to maneuver around obstacles. Enemies travel in high concentrations, so there will be little time to think or relax while pressing onward to the next objective.

Posted by Darren 'Doom Dude' Finch at 6:11 PM

Category: Action

Quite often, this freedom to just get on and figure out what to do means that some of the game's 14 levels can take an age to suss out. But while this can often lead to relentless leap of faith annoyance, the solution is almost always right under your nose, and it's hugely satisfying once you get through a section that's been holding you up. After a while, you might learn to stop blaming the game for your own failings, and start paying more attention to the clues all around you.