Battlefield 3 has finally figured out that the key to making a successful television ad is not to pick a theme song whose essential lyrics must be bleeped, and just put it all in the hands of filmmaker Freddie Wong.
Using Back to Karkand’s forklift and “online battle tactics that many of you should know and love,” Wong, with Sam and Niko from Corridor Digital, with this 60-second spot in just 10 days. It will begin airing soon. Freddie’s excited, and he’s also excited that he got to use real explosions and a tank. And we’re excited for him.
Is Formula 1 still popular, then? I thought it would have gone out of fashion now it’s been followed up with
Formula 2 and Formula 3. But then people still play Battlefield 1942 even though Battlefield 3?s out. You hopeless nostalgics!
The sport of driving long, fast cars around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around and around remains well-liked enough to keep spawning videogames, the most recent of which is Codemaster’s F1 Online. It’s free to play, it’s, uh, online, and it now has a closed beta and the first trailer for you to videowatch.
You can throw your helmet in the ring for that here. Being closed, you’re not guaranteed a slot, but an open beta will follow. Here’s a trailer from last month, which suggests this browser-based affair is a wee bit different from the traditional, more sim-like F1 games. Looks like Micro Machines meets Foot-to-ball Manager to me.
A new trailer has been released to celebrate the launch of I, Zombie from Awesome Games Studio.
The title is now available on Xbox Live Indie Games for 80 Microsoft points. I, Zombie is a tower defence style game that places you in the shoes of the attackers. Command your infested comrades, fight your way to freedom and embark on a quest for world domination.
Zombies have often been lambs to the slaughter in video games, but with a player in command they should survive longer. The game requires a mixture of stealth, cunning and strategic timing as you attempt to overcome armed defences with a horde of zombies at your command. Every armed guard has the potential to be used as a weapon: simply attack them and convert them to do your bidding.
Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City takes the series in a completely new direction and offers a style of gameplay yet to be seen from the franchise.
Operation Raccoon City takes the series in a completely new direction and offers a style of gameplay yet to be seen from the franchise. Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City provides you with a true third-person team-based shooter experience.
The story is set in September 1998, and the action centers on the ill-fated Raccoon City and the horrific consequences of the deadly T-virus outbreak. Umbrella Corporation must cover this up and thus orders an elite team into Raccoon City to destroy all evidence of the outbreak and eliminate any survivors. However, the US government has quarantined the city and dispatched its own team of elite soldiers to determine the source of the mysterious outbreak.
You will take on the role of an Umbrella Security Service soldier, competing alone or with up to four players co-op in a battle against all the competing forces at play in Raccoon City./p>
What that headline means, of course, is that the anticipated Mesmer is the latest (and I believe final) class reveal for Guild Wars 2. The character’s skills focus on the making and breaking of illusions, making them a tricksy and cerebral class with some of the more esoteric magical effects at their disposal. ArenaNet have released five (count ‘em!) videos of the Mesmer in action, and you can watch them all below. Try watching all give simultaneously and see if your brain is different afterwards. (And gosh, isn’t GW2 just the prettiest thing?!)
Anomaly: Warzone Earth is an extraordinary mixture of action and strategy in a reversed tower defense formula.
The game tasks you with saving a near-future Earth from an alien onslaught. The invaders have captured world’s major cities, building huge turrets that destroy everything in their path. It’s up to you to lead an armor squad through the streets of cities like Baghdad and Tokyo, planning the route and strategically choosing which units to deploy in order to crush the opposition. Take control of the Commander, whose special abilities and quick thinking will be vital in supporting the squad in its mission, as you engage in fast-paced, tactical battle across story campaign and two heart-pounding Squad Assault Modes.
Right, this will get tongues a-wagging. C&C Tiberium Alliances is the next reboot of the Nod vs GDI universe, and as we discovered earlier it’s a browser-based “epic strategy MMO” using the dark magicks of HTML5. Here’s what it’s going to look like. In short, like C&C classic in some ways and yet… not. Really not.
Attack waves? That suggests no direct unit control to me, and the video suggests lines of troops auto-marching. That will be, um, divisive, I expect. As will the new, apparently FarmVille-esque harvesting system. Fire is very much being played with here.
Still, much remains to be seen, and the sheer scale of the war for Earth seems pretty beefy. Hopefully tomorrow’s beta will see fuller word reach our anxious, shell-like ears.
Fruit Ninja Kinect is a sweet little trifle that won’t leave you satisfied.
Sometimes, you just want a game to distract you for a few minutes. Cleaving hundreds of fresh, juicy fruits is a fun way to kill a bit of time, and this has made Fruit Ninja a popular mobile game. You can slice up some oranges, hack some pineapples, and slash some strawberries on the bus, and as soon as you get where you’re going, you can put the game aside, having had a short, complete little experience that you can then immediately forget in order to focus on other things.
With Fruit Ninja Kinect, the fruit-slicing action migrates from your mobile device to your television, and although its implementation of the Kinect is very good, this is still, at heart, the same game you can play on your phone for a buck. At 10 dollars, the sweetness of this enjoyable minigame turns a bit sour, and the same play-and-forget quality that serves as a virtue during a morning commute becomes a bit of a liability in the living room. Fruit Ninja is a fun little distraction–nothing less and nothing more.
The VGAs coughed up a new trailer for Hitman: Absolution, which is crammed with sneaking, stealthery and silence. Except for all the parts with windows exploding in slow motion and The Bald One murdering almost every single person in his path, which just happens to take him through a hospital ward. Those parts are quite noisy. There’s also a crying nun. She is crying because of the constant gunfire and images of men being shot through the abdomen at point blank range. Do you want to see such things? They are below.
The Original Assassin, eh? I’m guessing it’s not John Wilkes Booth they’re trying to knock off his perch with that particular phrase.
It’s a strange oversight that the music sounds, to my ears, like blood-pumping stuff rather than the sort of morose finger-picking that a blood-soaked kill-video demands. How else would I know that the man-shooting is terribly sad and worthy? Somebody should remedy that. Just remember to mute the Hitman side of things. And then share any infinitely better examples that you concoct.
