Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Can a man called Alan really be an iconic action hero? Divining rods point to yes after watching this actual-proper-footage demo of Alan Wake on stage at last night’s Microsoft presentation. The light-as-weapon really does look like an interesting system, and the general visuals seem to be an enormously high quality. Hard to really know if it’s going to have the frights we’d expect from a supernatural thriller, but you can bet Alan is regretting marrying a woman with such as spooky voice. Go watch.
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Courtesy of the all-seeing eye of GameTrailers, we have several minutes of Modern Warfare 2 high-quality camera-shot game footage from the E3 presentation. It’s heavy on the spoilers, showing a set-piece on an icy cliff, some combat, and some snow-mobile action. And that looks like all kinds of fun.
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The Left 4 Dead trailer doesn’t pull many punches. Fighter planes, chainsaws, dudes with holes for faces, and a whole lot of prayin’. Yeah. That’s what I call a trailer.
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New game, new locations, new characters, new weapons, new monsters: John has been to Valve and dragged back the news. [Click on images for full size]

Left 4 Dead who now? No one was expecting Valve’s next game to be a sequel to 2008′s awesome co-op zombie shooter, Left 4 Dead. To answer your immediate question: Yes, this is a completely new game, with new characters, in a new location, with new zombies, new weapons, new twists, and an improved Director, in five completely new campaigns set in the Southern United States. This isn’t more maps for the previous game, it’s a brand new game, and it’s due this November. We snuck into Valve HQ ahead of Monday’s announcement and played a full campaign, and at first glance much appears to have evolved.

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In a world exclusive audio interview, Rock, Paper, Shotgun sat down with Valve’s project lead, Chet Faliszek, to discuss the freshly revealed Left 4 Dead 2.

Within is comprehensive coverage of the new game, the new ideas, the new weapons and campaigns and characters and Infected. You’ll find this nowhere else on the internet. It’s still a Rock, Paper, Shotgun podcast, of course, so there’s also plenty of discussion about our mums, swine flu, and Chet’s horror at John’s foul language. Chet talks not only about the new elements to the game, but also gives us some background as to why Valve chose to make a whole new game, rather than expanding upon the original. There’s also information on how this doesn’t mean L4D is forgotten.

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Shock! Classic comedy-adventure Monkey Island is coming back – twice. First up, we’ve got a remake of the original Secret of Monkey Island, complete with new graphics and – ooh, controversial – voicework. Then, Telltale (who handled the recent, divisive Sam & Max comeback series) will work with Lucasarts on five new gamettes, to be known as Tales of Monkey Island. Blimey. Hell just froze over, pigs flew, and the pope did his business in the woods. Details and some footage below.
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The full trailer for Bizarre Creations’ (Project Gotham Racing, Geometry Wars) new racer is up – and it’s real-world cars with fantastical power-ups. I saw Blur a little while back, and asked if there was any in-fiction explanation for these powers. They claimed not, all their attempts to dream one up having proved too ridiculous. I know I’m happy to just take it in my stride: magic cars are magic cars.
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About as obvious a next move as they come for Traveller’s Tales – they’re all chummied up with Warners in the wake of Lego Batman, which surely paved the way for what’s the holy money-grail of Lego licenses: that bally boy wizard. The game’ll cover the lad’s first four years at Hogwarts, and will make EA, who publish the movie-related HP games, very cross indeed. Video and details follow.
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Hot off the E3 grapevine is news that Crytek’s ultro-graphics shooter Crysis is definitely due a sequel. A proper sequel, that is, and not another Warheadesque expandalone: Crysis 2 will even sport a whole new engine. No further details whatsoever, and certainly no whiff of a screenshot, but hopefully all that stuff’s inbound later today. All we do know: it’s now multi-format. Oh, won’t someone please think of the children, etc. Me, I just hope it’s a better game than the underwhelming first two Cryses. Let’s start the guessing now, though – will Crytek stick to their tried and tested tropical setting, or elect to demonstrate the might of their new Cryengine 3 in a whole new locale? Urban would be fun… The press release, such as it is, is after the jump.

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A friend of mine seemed distraught about Mini Ninjas. “Why would you be developing that, when you could be doing another Hitman game?” He’s right, of course, but this does look reasonably entertaining – and I can only assume that Io are developing another Hitman game, as yet unannounced. Anyway, your diminutive assassin in this game isn’t going to require quite so much thought in play, but he can hide inside a pig, which is something 47 hasn’t tried.
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The fragments of dialogue in this gives a way a fair bit of what’s going to happen in the game, so if you’re allergic to spoilers you might want to avoid it. A rather classy little trailer for Mass Effect 2, anyway, and I’m loving the super-detailed science fiction cities. Falling-to-death dude looks remarkably like the zombo-drones from Dark Athena, too. Hmm. More on this soon, as John gets to see it at E3.
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