Brain Assassin

This march promises to be quite event­ful. I’ve just pre-​​ordered Bat­tle­field: Bad Com­pany II and God of War III from Amazon.co.uk. Best of all, Ama­zon is kind enough to pro­vide an in-​​game early AK-​​47 weapon unlock code for BC2. Accord­ing to a pre­view over at Ars Tech­nica you can beat the single-​​player game of BC2 in about eight hours or so. That’s O.K. because mul­ti­player ist the meat of the game. Appar­ently, you’ll also get a day-​​one map pack in the form of a one-​​time-​​use code included with the game. Just enter the code and you get two addi­tional maps. If you buy the game used, you’ll have to unlock the con­tent for US$ 15. Here’s a pre­view of things to come:

God of War III on the other hand is all about the single-​​player expe­ri­ence. Ama­zon bun­dles the game with a code to unlock a For­got­ten War­rior char­ac­ter skin, if you pre-​​order with them. GoW III ups the ante in terms of size by offer­ing areas up to fours times larger than those found in its pre­de­ces­sor. The pro­gram­mers and design­ers have included new instru­ments of death and ruth­less tech­niques for Kratos to learn. The third install­ment will con­clude the tril­ogy but there already are plans to cre­ate more games with Kratos. Here’s a trailer for your view­ing pleasure:

Dante’s Inferno, which has been shipped to cus­tomers already, is a game very sim­i­lar to the God of War fran­chise. It has already received mixed reviews, cit­ing “repet­i­tive and/​or deriv­a­tive game­play”. Nev­er­the­less, it has been con­cluded that this is a game that fans of action shouldn’t miss. As of yet I’m still unde­cided whether to buy the Dante’s Inferno or not. I think I’ll stay with Kratos though. Today, I saw the story trailer for NIER. While it cer­tainly isn’t to my taste there surely are a few sim­i­lar­i­ties to God of War. Actu­ally, the offi­cial press release says that this is a unique Action-​​RPG fea­tur­ing twist­ing sto­ry­lines cou­pled with deep char­ac­ter devel­op­ment. NIER is being pub­lished by Square Enix and will be avail­able in North Amer­ica on April 27th, 2010. We Euro­peans will have NIER in stores almost a week ear­lier on April 23rd, 2010. Enjoy the story trailer:

Last week I was on sick leave and I spent quite a few hours play­ing the lat­est install­ment of the Call of Duty fran­chise: Mod­ern War­fare 2. It’s the first title of the fran­chise that I own and inter­est­ingly enough, I bought it for the PlaySta­tion 3 rather than for the PC. Any­way, I love the sin­gle player mode even if it is annoy­ingly short. An expe­ri­enced player will defeat the game in only a few hours. Apart from the length, CoD: MW2 really does fine.

It’s the multi-​​player mode that tends to suck from time to time. The devel­op­ers – the guys from Infin­ity Ward – imple­mented a fea­ture called host migra­tion. This fea­tures pre­vents the game from end­ing if a match host leaves the game early. Instead, a host migra­tion delay allows a new host to be selected and the game to con­tinue on. Out of 50 times it worked three times for me. To be hon­est, it worked more often but in these instances the game became unplayable because of the sud­den lags and stut­ter­ing. All these count­less times when I saw

In addi­tion, the game has some seri­ous bal­anc­ing issues. Every time I’m on a team with two or three other peo­ple and we’re play­ing against a team con­sist­ing of eight play­ers, I’d like to stran­gle the devel­op­ers respon­si­ble for this screw-​​up. There’s no fun in that, espe­cially if you’d pre­fer Mouse and Key­board to a Gamepad any­way. So, you’re not the best player, you’re low-​​level, and your team mates are roughly your equal and you’re play­ing against eight high-​​level char­ac­ters who have access to bet­ter weapons and perks. That sucks.

Last but not least, have you ever seen the “Game lobby closed” error mes­sage? No? You’re one of the luck­i­est guys to ever play this game. The sys­tem looks for other player, waits for more peo­ple, joins another lobby, spends more time wait­ing, pre­tends to launch the game – and then it screws you over by dis­play­ing a notice with the infor­ma­tive text “Game lobby closed”. There are times where I def­i­nitely spend more time wait­ing for a game to be set up rather than play­ing it.

I seri­ously hope they fix these issues very soon. Nonethe­less, I have to applaud them for their update strat­egy. They have a very small foot­print of only a few megabytes and they down­load quite fast. Keep up the good work and fix these issues!

Looks like Ubisoft has announced a new sequel to the Prince of Per­sia fran­chise. Prince of Per­sia: The For­got­ten Sands will con­tinue the Sands of Time tril­ogy. No words yet on how they will return to the Sands of Time sto­ry­line. Accord­ing to the press release, the game will fea­ture “many of the fan-​​favorite ele­ments of the orig­i­nal series as well as new game­play inno­va­tions”. The game’s debut trailer will pre­miere on Spike TV’s Video Game Awards 2009 on Sat­ur­day, Decem­ber 12th, 2009 at 8 p. m. EST.

The For­got­ten Sands is sched­uled for release on “con­soles and hand­helds” in May 2010. This date nicely coin­cides with the film Prince of Per­sia: The Sands of Time which will hit the movie the­aters on May 28th, 2010. I won­der whether The For­got­ten Sands will be some kind of tie-​​in to the movie? It could also sim­ply con­tinue with the prince we know – effec­tively cre­at­ing a tetral­ogy – or mark the begin­nings of a new tril­ogy. I guess we’ll have to wait until Saturday.

Well, Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is on its way to glory. I’ve never played more than a demo of the first install­ment, Drake’s For­tune, but I cer­tainly loved what I saw. It’s time to get the full ver­sion of Drake’s For­tune and get started before buy­ing part two. Both games fea­ture a gor­geous visual design but each is com­pletely self-​​contained. You do get a lit­tle bit out of a few lines or reveals if you’ve played the first game, though.

Any­way, Among Thieves really looks good and the voice act­ing is said to be excel­lent. Com­bine this with funny writ­ing and a well rounded selec­tion of weapons, con­sid­er­ing that actions scenes can play out in many dif­fer­ent ways, it looks like we have a real win­ner here. Of course, that’s just my opin­ion but the game is really doing well on Meta­critic: a score of 97 out of 100 based on 53 reviews is astounding!

The game also fea­tures a com­pet­i­tive and co-​​operative mul­ti­player mode and … wait a minute – I’m already sold! The sec­ond install­ment  will be launched today in the US. In Aus­tralia and Japan Among Thieves will be released on Octo­ber 15th. We peo­ple in the EU will get it last on Octo­ber 16th. The game is rated T or 16+ and will set you back 60 bucks.

Do you want to know more? Visit the offi­cial site or read a review with­out spoilers.

As you might know, I’m a big fan of the God of War fran­chise and I am eagerly await­ing the third install­ment of the game. The release date is still set to be announced some time in the future. Any­way, God of War 3 obvi­ously con­tin­ues where the sec­ond install­ment ended: Kratos is look­ing for revenge. There­fore, he’s “rain­ing car­nage and destruc­tion upon the Gods who’ve betrayed him and the entire Ancient Greek world”. GoW still is a PS3 exclu­sive, so don’t get your hopes up if you don’t own a PS3.

At Spike’s Video Game Awards a brand new trailer made an appear­ance. I’ve embed­ded the short flick for your view­ing con­ve­nience. Of course, there’s also a HD ver­sion available.

There’s another treat for you. A week ago The VG Tilt released some infor­ma­tion about God of War 3. Just in case you’re not pre­pared to read the whole arti­cle, here’s the lowdown:

• Graph­ics will set a new stan­dard (bet­ter than Gears of War 2 and Uncharted)
• The game will be 1080p and 60 FPS
• Looks like Kratos won’t be the only playable character
• Game­play is essen­tially the same but it’s tweaked (e. g. bet­ter camera)
• There will be an online mode (“Glad­i­a­tor Mode” and co-​​op)
• The source is a 100 % sure that there will be a playable demo on PSN

That’s all for now. If I hear some­thing new, I’ll let you know.