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http://www.1up.com/features/starbreeze-secret-history I found this to be a pretty entertaining read about the history of Starbreeze, there's some very open and unguarded insights into the studio. To sum up the points pertinent to Syndicate - 1. It's definitely a shooter, an evolution of what Starbreeze is known for. 2. Starbreeze has had massive employee turnover in the last couple years, and the majority of their studio leads have left and formed MachineGames, a studio that will be working with id Tech 5 as part of the Zenimax family of companies. 3. Syndicate is being built on Starbreeze's internal engine, the one that was already looking pretty crusty by the time The Darkness had come out. (The article also notes that the main software engineer behind the tech has also left the company, so they're "fucked, basically".) 4. EA has been meddling with the game, sending over embedded producers and rebooting development constantly. A troubled development cycle certainly doesn't mean they can't deliver a quality product in the end, but maaan...

I'm not saying that they are, only that the control is reminiscent of survival horror games.

*Watches trailer* The hand gestures the main character keeps make seem to be a squad command thing. The crazy space polygons are cool. ... Anyways. I think the game looks cool, it's not like some dubious awful studio is making it. My stance on this game is - If it wasn't called X-com, i would have no problem with it, and would be tremendously stoked about what they're making. In fact, I am still very interested in the game regardless, i'm not going to ignore a potentially great game because i disagree with the title. It's just that calling it X-com carries with it baggage and certain expectations. Still, here's what i choose to hope for - By this game being successful, X-com is en vogue again, and that opens the door for the "real" X-com sequel we all want. (Which would hopefully still be set in this rebooted mythology, because while X-com was many things, it was not a story. The new setting looks much, much more interesting.)

Heh, I've actually read about the lead designer stating how in SCV he wants to heavily downplay the sexualized and fetishized elements of the series.

Resident Evil. You know, standing in one place and slowly rotating, that whole control convention. Basically every survival horror game prior to RE and up to and including RE4 was doing it. Crusader reminds me of that style of control, except Crusader gives you a ton of evasive maneuvers on top of it.

They weren't that bad. Sure it was some RE-style tank controls, but that game presented you with a lot of options for how to move more effectively within that framework. The hardest part was just getting comfortable with all those different evasive commands, particularly the strafing roll, which is what really makes the game very playable.

A CG trailer for Prey 2 just showed up, and looks... Like a CG trailer, but it's more indicative of what that game will be than live action footage of people on a plane, at least. (It might be cool, is the takeaway.) Also first footage of Soul Calibur V. It looks very, very fast, relative to the past games. Pretty exciting.

Watching the Konami presser right now... It's uh... It's kind of a train wreck, nothing really interesting is coming out of this. Am totally on board for HD updates of the ZoE games though, i never did get to play ZoE2.

Having played TES games growing up, i was never especially impressed by feats of environmental scope. (Daggerfall sets the bar pretty high.) I mean, but creating an arbitrarily massive environment would be the easy part, populating that massive environment with meaningful content is the hard part. I've always felt Bethesda is pretty peerless when it comes to that.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/06/02/watched-like-a-hawk-hawken-dev-diary/ This looks pretty fantastic. The customization options sound like they'll be pretty sparse, which i find disappointing. The RPG-points thing he was talking about sounds like what Section 8 does, just having a set number of points to build up specialized attributes. The core game mechanics look pretty great though, i see a lot of things that remind me of MechWarrior and Armored Core.

It's extra annoying because the amount of time between having access to the full map and ending up locked into the end-game phase is fairly short, and the point of no return isn't super, super clear. The game dumps you back into a post-game free-roam after the credits have rolled, but... egh.

I actually expect that Microsoft will be the last to launch new hardware. The 360 probably has the strongest position right now, especially with the Kinect selling something like ten million units, and their famously high software attach rates. Compare with the terrible woes Sony is having with the PS3, and the Wii starting to flat-line for Nintendo. (I mean, make no mistake, the Wii has the hardware lead, but Nintendo has been selling them to an audience that doesn't buy games. I think you're going to see Nintendo try and swing back to the hardcore audiences hard with this E3 and the purported "Project Cafe".) What i expect out of the big three is - Microsoft - Staying the course, and lots and lots of motion control. Sony - NGP will be revealed as the PSVita, probably a huge push for it, and then those guys just really getting down and licking boot over the PSN fiasco. Wii - Project Cafe and Project Cafe tech demos, a play for the hardcore audiences, and a big push for the 3DS. (I think the 3DS is going to see a price cut before the year is out.)

I had a lot of trouble with that at first, but after playing three of these games, i find it doesn't really happen to me anymore. The biggest hurdle to overcome was realizing that i didn't need to sprint all the time. You can still run plenty fast outside of the free-running sprint, and you won't have the contextual free-running making you do random things you didn't want do. Sprint only when you want to free-run, when you know where you want to free-run, and it all kind of clicks into place. As a random aside, I have to say, i'm fairly impressed that these games have become as popular as they are, because they don't strike me as very accessible games. (In fact, i've watched people struggle with them.) I mean, they're great, absolutely great games, but they're also convoluted as shit. Step back and think about all the layers of contextual control going on there, it's a little bit insane. Combine that with the weird nested, serialized narrative, and i don't really understand how these games have done as well as they have. The power of marketing, i guess? The marketing for the games has been very good. Or the promise of being a sick medieval assassin is just that powerful. Or both. Probably both. It's easy to forget how completely strange and risky that first game seemed.

I've been seeing trailers for this thing all over the place, it looks like fantastic fun. I had no idea it was being funded by a kickstarter.

I see what you did there.

It's bound to happen with a series that has been so popular and prolific, but i can't imagine playing these games out of order, with how weird and nested the mythology for the series is becoming. Of course, if you don't care about the story, that's not an issue. Personally though, i've been pretty into it, and it's an interesting experiment if nothing else, to see such heavily serialized story-telling in what has become such an enormous franchise. It's kind of the Lost of video games.

ANYWAYS. Hey everybody, check out this fancy new Serious Sam 3 trailer. http://ca.kotaku.com/5807492/serious-sam-3-bfes-promises-eye+ripping-fun-no-cover-all-man I think it looks promising.

Classy, being so judgmental like that.

I'm sure it depends entirely on how well it does. I mean, Sin and Punishment 2 exists because of the interest the virtual console re-release of the original generated. (Also, S&P2 is so, soo good. If you have access to a Wii, you should play it.) Treasure has shown they're no longer adverse to sequels, which... I don't know, i'm not sure i'm happy about that. The reason Treasure is so well regarded is because they're willing to spin old-school designs off in crazy directions, but a lot of what they've done in recent years is ports and sequels. I'm extremely happy to be getting a version of Radiant Silvergun that i don't have to jump through hoops to play, but... there was also the Ikaruga port, this Guardian Heroes port, Missile Fury was the third (arguably fourth) Bangai-O game, and then Sin and Punishment 2. I think Treasure runs the risk of digging themselves into a rut.

http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2011/05/treasure_inspired_by_castle_cr.php I found this all fairly interesting.

Minerva's Den is out on the PC now, hey? I played it on the 360, quite liked it. More than that, actually. I think it was probably one of the most substantial and interesting DLC add-ons for any game on the 360. Well worth playing, you guys. Good to see that it's finally been made available for the PC version.

I haven't played Far Cry 2 in a long while, so maybe i'm misremembering some of the details... I don't normally have a problem with respawning enemies, and it wasn't the exact problem i had with Far Cry 2 either. The problem i had with Far Cry 2 is how instantly aware and instantly hostile everybody is. It seems a little at odds with how believable and immersive that game wants to be, when just trying to get from point A to B results in jeeps flying at you out of the road side brush, enemies just chaotically throwing their lives away to ruin your day. A solution, i think, would have been for them to somehow curb the uncanny supernatural awareness that the AI had regarding its surroundings, its ability to not only spot you through dense jungle but then also instantly recognize you as an enemy. It's like you were running around with a reflective jacket and a kick me sign on your back. To be fair, this is a problem that seems to exist with most shooters touting stealth gameplay without explicitly being stealth games. (Including the Crytek games Far Cry 2 owes so much to.)

I really like what i saw. It seems like they're giving you a lot of interesting options to play with, and while none of it looks especially involved, it's probably the right level of depth for this game.

I don't think those retailer-specific pack-in DLCs are currently available for purchase, but eventually they all will be. I have no idea what pricing will be like though. I'd imagine it'd be like five bucks a case? Something like that, probably.

I found that all to be the most interesting stuff in the video, i guess you have to be a fan of mech games, heh.