Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I uttered “oh come on” at least four times during this footage of the sequel to Avalanches’ gloriously stupid GTA-with-a-parachute sandbox actioner. But they were, I assure you, happy “oh come ons”. Just Cause 2 clearly intends to push plausibility far past breaking point, turning hero Rico into a fully-fledged superhero who can do whatever a spider can, but without the fruity suit and restrictive moral code. Take a gander at his absurd parachute and grappling hook skills below. Grappling a moving plane while in free-fall! He’s some guy, that Rico. Some guy.
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Sam Fisher’s been off the radar for a little while, Ubisoft having given the old lad some time off whilst they made that bloke in the hood from Assassin’s Creed their stealth-man of the hour. Well, the guy who pays Michael Ironside’s rent is coming back this year, in the long-delayed Conviction. In the CGI and in-game footage below, it’s clear this is an earthier, angrier, more brutal Fisher. Maybe he’s so grumpy because he just heard the Left 4 Dead 2 announcement?
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EA have announced that they’ll be publishing Realtime Worlds’ gang-war MMO, All Points Bulletin. Creator Dave Jones is keen to compare the game to GTA or Call Of Duty. “WoW’s great, and it’s attracting huge numbers, but let’s face it there’s probably still more players on GTA and Call of Duty in terms of online,” Jones told Gamasutra. It’s looking pretty slick, and it’s hard to see it not being awesome. (Jones is, after all, a key brain behind the original GTA concept, and a pretty distinguished designer in the subsequent years.) The game is due “early 2010″ – and is PC-only, apparently. Woo!
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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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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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2K Games have released a story-telling trailer for their open-world historical gangster thriller, Mafia II. This is kind of dark, and I could hardly be looking forward to it more. For a reminder of why we’re excited it about this one check out (Czech out? Okay, no) John’s extensive preview. There should be a bit more info about this coming from the show, later this week.
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