At GamesCom 2010 Bliz­zard revealed how crafters will be able to cre­ate their own gear. In Dia­blo II, you had the assis­tance of the mys­ti­cal Horadric Cube to cre­ate new items. In Dia­blo III, Bliz­zard intro­duced the Arti­san, a new char­ac­ter who does the work for you. You just need to enlist an arti­san and pro­vide some mate­ri­als and he sets out to cre­ate your new gear.

To add an Arti­san to your ret­inue you have to help him out – usu­ally by doing a quest for him. After you gained his trust he will fol­low you on your trav­els. They will set up show in the near­est town and you will be able to inter­act with him there. There are three types of Arti­sans that will be avail­able to your hero: black­smith, mys­tic, and jeweller.

• You can sell and repair items at the black­smith, as well as have him cre­ate weapons and armor for you. He can also add sock­ets to any weapon or armor.
• The mys­tic cre­ates mag­i­cal imple­ments like scrolls, potions, runes and charms, and enchants items.
• The jew­eller is an inter­est­ing fel­low: He cre­ates gems for you and allows you to com­bine gems to cre­ate one of higher qual­ity. This Arti­san can also remove gems from items.

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A few days ago, the E3 trailer for Deus Ex: Human Rev­o­lu­tion made it into the web. The third install­ment actu­ally is a pre­quel to the orig­i­nal Deus Ex pub­lished in the year 2000. In March the first trailer was shown to the pub­lic. The E3 trailer expands on the for­mer and drops a few hints of the pos­si­ble plot. Before I start ram­bling, do your­self a favor and enjoy the trailer:

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I bought Prince of Per­sia: The For­got­ten Sands dur­ing my stay in Lon­don over the extended week­end. Today, I had noth­ing to do so I put it in the PS3 and had a go at it. After roughly seven hours I was done. The real play­time is about one hour less and six hours of game­play aren’t all that good for a game like this. The pre­de­ces­sors took me longer. Any­way, let’s see if I can sum­ma­rize my expe­ri­ence a lit­tle better.

I won’t tell you any­thing about the plot. Let’s just say that the sto­ry­line is weak and you surely won’t be absorbed by the nar­ra­tive. The acro­bat­ics and plat­form­ing is up to the Prince of Per­sia stan­dard set by The Sands of Time. The first two hours are pretty easy going but it get’s more chal­leng­ing later on. The prince unlocks new pow­ers like freez­ing water or mak­ing por­tions of ruins seem like they did before they were destroyed. You have to com­bine these pow­ers to get through the later lev­els and this is def­i­nitely more chal­leng­ing than the begin­ning areas. Thanks to the abil­ity to rewind time you improve the odds to beat tricky plat­form­ing areas.

Com­bat is more bor­ing because it mostly con­sists of but­ton smash­ing. The first ene­mies are easy, the later ones are a bit tougher and some­times quite big. With the pow­ers the prince unlocks with his expe­ri­ence points everything’s easy, though. Using these pow­ers requires the same resources as does rewind­ing time so you may  have to be care­ful, depend­ing on your play­ing style. Dur­ing nor­mal game­play you can’t max­i­mize your pow­ers so you should play the game’s chal­lenge modes.

The visu­als of the game aren’t impres­sive at all. The game had poten­tial, though. Some­times, TFS looks really fan­tas­tic which is unfor­tu­nately negated when you arrive at dull look­ing areas. Some areas even look a bit unfin­ished. Seems like the devel­op­ers had a lot of pres­sure fin­ish­ing the game in time which results in this unre­fined game.

Funny side­note: You can unlock addi­tional stuff via Uplay and the devel­op­ers added an Ezio cos­tume (Ezio is the lead char­ac­ter in Assassin’s Creed II).

So, what’s my con­clu­sion? The game is nei­ther bad nor awe­some, but good. It has a solid base but there’s quite a bit of untapped poten­tial hid­den deep within. That makes it bet­ter than the 2008 Prince of Per­sia but that’s it. It’s got good voice act­ing and some inter­est­ing plat­form­ing but com­bat is a dull affair. If I had to rate the game, I’d give it 6 out of 10 points.

Finally, we get to see more than just a few screen­shots.  As Eidos Mon­treal boss Stephanie D’Astous tweeted a few days ago a ‘sur­prise’ has come this way. Nat­u­rally, the sur­prise is noth­ing more than a trailer albeit a nice one. I already burn to have a copy of the game in my hands. The first install­ment was spec­tac­u­lar, the sec­ond one I found not that well made. Any­way, have a look for yourself:

This morn­ing I went to Gametrailers.com expect­ing noth­ing out of the ordi­nary, like I always do Today, how­ever, my sharp eagly eyes spot­ted a God of War 3 review. This review con­tains minor spoil­ers but you shouldn’t worry if you’ve already played its pre­de­ces­sors. The review does the game credit: You’ll see some stun­ning in-​​game graph­ics and parts of a few cutscenes. Well, I can’t wait for the game any way, espe­cially since the sex mini-​​game has been unearthed, but I want to play this game right now. Just look at it. That’s frig­ging awe­some, people.

Appar­ently, God of War 3 once again fea­tures a sex minigame. Every God of War title, even the PSP ver­sion, has included an optional, hid­den sec­tion where Kratos can please top­less maid­ens. In the third install­ment of the very suc­cess­ful fran­chise game direc­tor Stig Asmussen didn’t want to include the minigame at first. This time around, they decided to inte­grate the sex minigame into the story where it serves more of a pur­pose than in pre­vi­ous titles. In the con­clu­sion to the tril­ogy Kratos beds the god­dess of love – Aphrodite – her­self. He couldn’t pos­si­bly do bet­ter in fur­ther games, could he?