Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Mercy, this E3 is turning out to be a generous one. Next up we’ve finally got some in-game footage of alien bounty hunting sim Prey 2. It turns out that the excellent CG trailer we saw last week was actually hugely faithful to the game proper, and not at all the flight of fancy it could have been.

The following footage also solves the mystery of why this radically different sequel even bears the Prey name. Because it explores both sides of the predatory/prey relationship, of course! Oh, game developers. Never change.
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Edit- The trailer is no more. For now, anyway. Sorta-explanation below.

We’re still agonisingly denied a look at Hitman 5, aka Hitman: Absolution, aka Hitman: Subtitle in as-it-plays action, but at least we’ve got some raaaawk-soundtracked, stylised pre-rendered kill sequences and scene-setting to stare at. It also features a sort-of naked lady, but you can’t really see anything, but if you’re reading this in a place where an image of a sort-of naked lady but of whom you can’t really see anything would cause you trouble, like a nunnery or on a projector in a primary school classroom, you probably shouldn’t carry on.
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Easy to forget, isn’t it? With BF3 increasingly pitched as the military shooter to beat this year (though only an apocalypse event could prevent MW3 from outselling it, I fear), some of us have perhaps lost sight of BF3′s true purpose: epic-scale online manshooting. Here’s the first official taste of it, lending a sense of just how the FrostBite 2 engine scales itself to massed, non-scripted battles. Also, as a free bonus to you, my favourite reader, there’s another video showing off the various capabilities of said engine.
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In case you missed it – as part of my oh-so-insightful and not at all chaotic liveblog of the heavily staged, saccharine pantomime that was yesterday’s Microsoft pre-E3 conference – here’s a fair-sized chunk of proper in-game footage of the latest Tomb Raider reboot. We’ve only seen screenshots and pre-rendered stuff so far, right? Well, here’s how nu-Lara plays.

Warning: shirt.
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This? Right here? This is how it should be done. A whole ten days (and eight hours) ahead of Dungeon Siege 3′s release, Square Enix and Obsidian have put out a demo on the game’s Steam page. BOOM! That was the sound of assorted expectations being blown out of the water.

It’s especially handy seeing as it’s only in playing DS3 that you learn just how much they’ve changed the Dungeon Siege formula into something slower, with a greater emphasis on decisions, action and co-op play, and less of an emphasis on loot, donkeys and scenery. The demo contains “a small taste of Dungeon Siege III’s single-player and 2-person local co-op modes
(co-op requires two controllers)”, but I’ll be able to get more specific in about 1.5 gigabytes’ time.

A body of Far Cry 3 details and footage has come bubbling to the surface of E3 like a bullet-riddled corpse in a greasy river. Since I was encouraging you lot to buy Far Cry 2 not two weeks ago, you’d think I’d be pumped as hard and tight as a tire about Far Cry 3. But I’m not, really. Come take a look for yourself. It looks great, but it doesn’t look like it has the same will to break new ground.
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There were so many RPS news posts yesterday! What was going on in my absence? This is like coming into work as a mechanic and finding repaired cars not just in the car park, but on the roof, in the basement, balanced on top of lamp posts.

To business. I have lots of great headlines that might benefit this ICE-cool new trailer for Assassin’s Creed: Revelations (“Some More Mr. Knife Guy”, “Cool Runnings”), but I can’t use any of them because the game’s title is too long. That’s going to be a theme today, isn’t it? Ah well.
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As mentioned yesterday, the goodly folk behind the wonderful Desktop Dungeons have opened up a free-to-all demo of their planned ‘full’ version of the ingenious puzzle RPG.

You can play it in your browser, via Unity, right now, but it only lasts for the duration of E3 – i.e. until the end of Thursday. Hurryhurryhurry.

Heretics! Blood Letters! Chaos Space Marines! And Orks. Always with the Orks. (The Orks need their own game, really: they get such a bad rap, treated as idiots and fodder). Here’s the Chaos-centric E3 trailer for Space Marine, a game I am very much looking forward too, albeit with the concern that the lone hero thingy might not entirely sit well my own vision of Space Marineyness. Still, I love the 40K universe as much as any poorly-shaven man of my generation, so the opportunity to get all first-person on it makes me tremble like a tiny rabbit.
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Only a shortie for Ken & chums’ latest, but it’s pretty confident proof that we’re not in Rapture anymore, Andrew. Rocket-spewing zeppelins, anti-gravity powers, gruesome splatting via sky-crates and, at the end, a hint of how large the environments may be. Also, it really plays up the fact that this is a buddy game – but not exactly a buddy comedy. Read the rest of this entry »

Kingdoms Of Amalur: The Reckoning hasn’t been seen all that often, and if it’s not something you’ve heard of you should probably expect to. 38 Studios, a team headed up by former baseball bloke Curt Schilling, took an enormous loan from Rhode Island to move their offices over there, which means Amalur’s kingdom is a cash-rich one. As demonstrated by the below…
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