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.

Dia­blo 3 Has Been Unveiled

Finally, Dia­blo III has been unveiled on June 28, 2008 at the 2008 Bliz­zard Enter­tain­ment World­wide Invi­ta­tional in Paris, France. Dia­blo III, D3 in short, is an action role play­ing game sim­i­lar to its pre­de­ces­sor, Dia­blo II. D3 will have a focus on coop­er­a­tive play over Battle.Net. There will also be a sin­gle player com­po­nent, but its main focus def­i­nitely is on team play. The game fea­tures a pro­pri­etary 3D engine that will incor­po­rate Havok physics. As a result, there will be par­tially destruc­tive envi­ron­ments which will be of use to the player. Accord­ing to some news over at IGN Dia­blo 3 won’t require DirectX 10, though, so it should be able to run on a lot of sys­tems. As always, Bliz­zard is plan­ning a simul­ta­ne­ous release on both Win­dows and Mac OS X platforms.

The devel­op­ers want to keep the focus on action and expand the role play­ing ele­ments while stay­ing true to the orig­i­nal con­cept. There will be a focus on mak­ing D3 replayable and because of ran­dom adven­tures and class-specific quests that should prove no prob­lem at all. With­out a doubt, we will see large scale com­bat and scores of ene­mies on screen which is one of the key points of the dia­blo fran­chise. Addi­tion­ally, they made the game eas­ier by imple­ment­ing a hot­bar. Eas­ier con­trols allow to quickly swap through skills which directly trans­lates to a more fast-paced expe­ri­ence. Bliz­zard also redid the health sys­tem. It tried to elim­i­nate down­times in com­bat and it came up with health globes. These appear ran­domly after a mon­ster is slewn. In coop­er­a­tive play all play­ers ben­e­fit from the restora­tive effects of this globe.

The inven­tory is still being worked on but it will be sim­i­lar to WoW. No grid inven­tory will be used this time and they haven’t set­tled upon a final inven­tory size. There will be new and return­ing classes. Up to now, only the Bar­bar­ian and the Witch Doc­tor have been unveiled. In Dia­blo III you can select the gen­der of your char­ac­ter, though. There should be five classes ini­tially, but they’re not really quite sure about that yet, I sup­pose. Sto­ry­wise, D3 will play 20 years after the events that took place in Dia­blo II and some evil is stir­ring again in Tris­tram. Deckard Cain has already been announced as a return­ing NPC.

Nei­ther the sys­tem require­ments nor the launch date have been announced as of yet. Be sure to check out the offi­cial site now and then to get the lat­est info.

The Ubi­days 08 are over and Ubisoft has clar­i­fied a few things about the next install­ment in its very suc­cess­ful Prince of Per­sia fran­chise. First of all, the new Prince of Per­sia will fea­ture a prince, not the prince we all came to know dur­ing the Sands of Time tril­ogy. That means, of course, that the new prince will be totally sep­a­rate from the SoT tril­ogy. In addi­tion, he gets a new look and a new female com­pan­ion, Elika. Well, let’s start at the beginning.

The game is set in an ancient fan­tasy Per­sia, where our hero will get caught up in the bat­tle between the God of Light, Ormazd, ver­sus his twin brother Ahri­man, the God of Dark­ness. Obvi­ously, the Prince arrives just in time to wit­ness the destruc­tion of the leg­endary Tree of Life. This act threat­ens to plunge the entire world into eter­nal dark­ness and so our hero will find him­self in a world of light and dark where he has to fight to stop the rise of Ahri­man. Thus, he will sort of become Ormazd’s champion.

Read more…

I’ve dis­cov­ered this game quite a while ago but I had only recently time to take a closer look at it. Mirror’s Edge is an upcom­ing first-person action-adventure video game that has quite a dis­tinc­tive style. Very obvi­ously, it is a parkour-inspired game which con­cen­trates on move­ment. The focus is on the per­son and on find­ing the best route through the envi­ron­ment. The player will slip into the role of Faith who strug­gles to free her sis­ter from a cor­rupt gov­ern­ment. As a run­ner she is trans­port­ing mes­sages for the under­world which is why she has to be fast and smart and try to not get caught by the gov­ern­ment forces.

Accord­ing to the avail­able footage, Faith will move through the city on rooftops and sky­walks. She will jump and slide and even run along walls like the famous Prince of Per­sia. The player will expe­ri­ence the whole thing from a first-person per­spec­tive which should make things inter­est­ing. Appar­ently, there will be no HUD, which will only add to the immer­sive game­play, I guess. Well, it’s time to take a look at the first ever game­play footage over at GameTrailers.com. The few fight scenes are quite rem­i­nis­cent of Matt Damon act­ing as Jason Bourne: short and efficient.

The game is cur­rently in devel­op­ment at Dig­i­tal Illu­sions CE. It uti­lizes the Unreal Engine 3 and is set for release in 2008 on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. It looks very promis­ing and appeal­ing to me.