Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I’ve just passed the mid-point of E3, and by this point, no matter how hard I try, it’s all starting to blend together. It’s at this point that you might start to hallucinate that everything you’ve seen was actually all just the same game – a music title set in a decaying city that featured instrument peripherals with hundreds of buttons.

Thankfully I’ve kept it together a little more than that. Though perhaps not enough! Because when I was showed Alpha Protocol, Obsidian Entertainment new action RPG set in the world of espionage, I was positive I was just being shown Mass Effect. Positive!
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Does anyone under 50 even read Tom Clancy books anyway?

So, “your voice is the ultimate weapon.” I’ll be honest – while I’ve no doubt all that Ubi money can make something that (unlike the horrible Will of Steel) works, I’m finding it hard to believe that Tom Clancy’s voice controls will be anywhere near as slick and forgiving as the below Tom Clancy’s trailer for this Ubi-RTS suggests. However, Tom Clancy’s walkthrough beneath the cut has me genuinely anticipating Tom Clancy’s Endwar.

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My hands can now write ‘E3: The Trailers’ before my brain sends a signal for them to do so. This scares me. I’m going to have to write something really long and self-indulgent next week to compensate for all these blinkin’ videos.

Singularity: the other new game from Raven, and the first time in a near-decade they’re not hooking an FPS onto someone else’s license. But it is, unsurprisingly, an FPS. The trailer (already mentioned in Jim’s post, but figured it was well worth highlighting separately) isn’t giving much away, though if I were to make a knee-jerk judgement – which I do about everything, especially people and types of cheese – I’d say something like ‘FEAR at sea.’ I’m probably waaaaay off, as reportedly it’s got something to do with time-travel. Timeshift at sea, then.

As there’s doubtless a legion of Nazi-jaded folk queuing up to loudly lament COD’s return to WW2, now seems an opportune moment to observe that hey, some of you seem really angry this week. Is it pre-release tension about all these games? Are you okay? Do you need a hug? A biscuit, maybe? Please be happier. Please.

COD: World At War, then. A taste of co-op here, and what I’m now informed is in fact an old trailer beneath the cut. Unfortunately neither spend much time on the survival horror element Treyarch claim is central to the Pacific campaign, but that may be because E3 is so terribly focused on bombast. Hence, ‘splodes!

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I know exactly why you’re reading this post. And it’s exactly the same reason I clicked on the video. You’re in for a terrible disappointment, I’m afraid.

But once that’s done you might become semi-excited anew, this time at the prospect of a semi-casual hex-based strategy game about pirates. It’s an XBLA jobbie that’s coming to PC, and while it’s trying a bit too hard in the sound and vision departments, I reckon it could be kinda fun in practice. I do have a soft-spot for leftfield, lo-fi strategy. It’s possibly too silly and definitely pushing the Looney Tunes sound effects a bit too hard, but I can imagine myself spending a happy ten minutes bombing merry hell out of Kieron or someone of an evening. AND IN THE GAME.

I am unwise. Instead of being attentively merged with my desk during one of the busiest times of year for us gaming news types, I instead found myself deep in some far off wilderness. It’s nice up there. And I needed a couple of hours not spent looking at a glowing screen or sleeping.

Now however I have returned to the bleeping folds of technopolis, and I am mesmerised in some kind of info-tunnel of game news. Can this really be healthy? All the games news at once? Are you sure? Well then, I suppose we’d better try to spend a few moments digesting what we’ve seen.
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When I made my appointment to go and see Atari the only PC game they’d announced they were going to show was Deer Hunter Tournament. I thought I’d go along anyway as it might be kind of interesting – I’ve never played a Deer Hunter game, but I’ve heard they kind of have a naturiffic ambience, if you forget all that huntin’ and killin’ – but I didn’t actually end up looking at the title.

That’s because of Tomasz Gop. Tomasz works for CD Project Red and was Assistant Producer of The Witcher, and was on hand to show The Witcher: Enhanced Edition.
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Siege battles in Mythic’s upcoming MMO Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning -

Crikey, what a pile-on. These climatic PvP tussles will be quite the thing to witness.

There is of course an elephant in the room, and I’m not going to be the one to mention it. Play nice when it inevitably comes up in comments though, gentlemen – you can’t fight in here, this is the WAR thread.

(Apologies if all this E3 stuff is bugging you – normal service will resume on Monday, but we wanted to make sure we aggregated all the big PC talking points).

First footage of the new Wolfenstein game, handled by perennial id lackeys Raven – who have much to prove after Quake 4. Though they are also, for the first time since 2000′s Soldier of Fortune, making their own game, the mysterious Singularity. No info on that yet, but we do get this:

Big on the mysticism, clearly – and apparently hero BJ Blaskowitz will have psychic powers of his own. Hnn. Not seeing anything to suggest Raven are straying off their well-beaten dark’n'shooty track, but there’s talk of open world stuff, I hear.

And I am very tired. I’m also enticed by this cutscene from a new Ubisoft game. About, hey, a post-apocalyptic world! There’s certainly a theme to E3 2008…

No clue about the game itself – but it’s a neat cinematic. It’s gotten me interested, certainly. Doubly so if it’s a game in which you avoid combat, as implied by the water bottle trap-setting scene. Intriguing. And hopefully not another Alone In The Dark.

She swims! She swims some more! She shoots sharks! And swims! I’ve yet to play the last two Tomb Raiders, so don’t know if the old shtick about drowning Lara still rings true, but she seems more aqualunged to my eye:

This video keeps getting pulled down from wherever it’s hosted – this is now the fourth version I’ve put up here. It must be because there’s a single frame of hardcore sex hidden in it or something. Otherwise it’d just be a publisher squealing “no, don’t look at our game that we want you to buy!”, and how could that ever happen?
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