DC Universe Online New Theatrical Trailer

Here is the Fractured Future trailer for DC Universe Online.

Batman Arkham City New Screens

Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
Developer: Rocksteady Studios
Genre: Fantasy Action Adventure
Release Date: Q4 2011(more)
ESRB: TEEN

Crysis 2 Story Trailer

Have a look at what the CryEngine 3 can create! 3 years after the mission on the island which took place in the first Crysis we find out what happened after these 3 interesting years. Just hope they will say what exactly happened with earth after the island mission when the game will be out. So check out the trailer!

Elder Scrolls V - Skyrim Official Screenshots

Here are the official Skyrim screenshots from Bethesda Softworks.

Dragon Age 2 Hands-On from Gamespot

However invested you were in the Warden hero of Dragon Age: Origins, it was hard to shake the feeling you were a mute telepath with a chatty entourage. Picking dialogue options as the silent protagonist and getting a vocal response felt distinctly old school. It was by no means a deal breaker, but the difference in the fully voiced Dragon Age II is striking--the branching conversations on which the story turns are more natural and immersive, as we found with Marian Hawke, the well-spoken (English, apparently) mage heroine of our demo.



The visuals, with more distinctive design and fewer rough edges, are another change with immediate impact. Other differences, such as the glossier presentation and punchier combat, will be fully felt after hours of play--and there will be plenty of hours. Where the first game sprawled across the kingdom of Ferelden, the sequel spreads through time, spanning years. Much has been said about the framed narrative: the story is told in flashback, as the recollections of Hawke's dwarf comrade Varric. This gives the plot a start and an end point, with room for the fiction to manoeuvre in between.


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We played the Xbox 360 version of the game through a section of the main quest line about 20 hours in and joined our level 10 Hawke in the Deep Roads, Ferelden's network of abandoned dwarven tunnels. In Hawke’s party was Aveline, a knight-like human warrior, Isabela, a pirate-like human rogue, and Varric, also a rogue, packing a huge crossbow. The character models are refined over those of the previous game, with finer facial details and better-looking costumes--or less absurd headgear, at any rate. Animations are less stiff, too, with more nifty flourishes in combat and more natural posing outside of it.

Hawke and her crew, part of an expedition led by Varric's brother Bartrand, had come to a forgotten city, where they had stumbled on a magical artefact--"an idol of pure lyrium". Soon after we joined the game, Bartrand pilfered the idol and fled, leaving Hawke trapped underground with a host of unfriendly natives: a dragon flanked by little dragonlings, magical rock golems ("profanes"), and screeching demonic shades. Cue a lot of fighting in Dragon Age II's lightly rejigged combat system.

Though it's more obvious when you play as a melee class character than a mage, there's a new immediacy to combat, which feels more like fighting and less like queuing a command. You hit a face button and deliver a blow, cooldowns notwithstanding, with the punchiness underlined by more dynamic animations. The pause-and-play system is still in place, if that's more your bag, letting you freeze combat and flit between characters, issuing commands before restarting the action. Our Hawke had been levelled as a spellcaster focused on lightning-type magic, with a chain lightning spell and tempest--a stormy, wide-ranging, area-of-effect spell--among her attacks. These looked nice and sparky; we didn't notice any of the slowdown that sometimes troubled the biggest, flashiest spells in the original Dragon Age.

A glance at Hawke's ability screen revealed a slicker, friendlier-looking menu, with spells clustered together into small talent trees laid out on a single page. These trees are grouped by school of magic (elemental, primal, and the like) or specialisation (spirit healer, blood mage), with the latter needing a specialisation point to unlock--granted at levels seven and 14, said the menu. The menu screens are more polished and less utilitarian generally, except for the tactics screen in which you can program party member behaviour (if property X is less than Y, attack A with spell B), which is still on the uninviting side.


There will be blood (all over your face).
After cutting a swathe through the forgotten city, we met a rock wraith abomination (a demonically possessed rock creature), triggering the meatiest conversation in our demo. It played out in radial dialogue menus, Mass Effect 2-style, with a dialogue option's intent denoted by an emblem on the wheel: an olive branch for a peaceful line, a hammer for an aggressive one, and so on. Not all tones of dialogue option were available at each juncture, but others came with, for example, a heart, a star, or a Greek comedy mask. Coupled with more cinematic framing and the voiced Hawke, conversations are much closer to Mass Effect 2's gold standard, though characters are still extravagantly spattered with blood on occasion. We struck a deal with the creature that demanded we find an ancient crypt and destroy its guardian in return for an escape route from the underground city.

Accordingly, we found the crypt--a flinty cavern with glowing red veins--and faced off with its guardian: another huge rock wraith, this one with a powerful rock fist and the ability to summon profanes. This boss-like fight and the absence of a healer character had us micromanaging the party members, not least to keep them out of the way of the rock wraith's periodic rolling knockdown attack. Here, the rhythm of combat started to feel familiar, as we flipped between characters to keep everyone healthy and in the right spot, a la Dragon Age: Origins. It remains to be seen, then, how radically overhauled the combat feels in the long run--but certainly in its visuals, presentation, and dialogue system, Dragon Age II is looking to be a more confident, polished adventure than its predecessor.

Dungeon Siege III

With input from the original developer, Gas Powered Games, Obsidian Entertainment is developing the next incarnation of the Dungeon Siege franchise.

Ridge Racer Unbounded Debut Trailer

Video Games | Ridge Racer Unbounded | Ignite 11: Debut Trailer

Xbox 360 | PlayStation 3 | Nintendo Wii | PC Games

Deus-EX Human Revolution Hands On

There's a moment very early on in Deus Ex: Human Revolution that leaves you feeling a little guilty about what's going to happen to protagonist Adam Jensen. He's knee-deep in a conversation with a female colleague--clearly one whom he has some sort of history with--and in an effort to brush aside the political turmoil bubbling up within the office, Jensen insists he doesn't keep enemies; he likes everyone. But as the player, you have the benefit of foresight. You've seen the trailers that reveal Jensen's fate, knowing that he'll soon be transformed into a fully weaponized tool of surgical violence with more biomechanical augmentations than you can count. But looking at this Jensen, the one you see in the first 30 minutes of the game, you can't help but anticipate something terrible on the horizon. [Spoiler Alert: This preview details a small number of story elements from the first hour of the game.]

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So go the early moments of Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the highly anticipated sequel to an all-time classic. We're introduced to a troubled world and characters that aren't spared any shelter from its chaos. Jensen is an especially intriguing figure because of the way he's pulled into the heart of the conflict through no choice of his own. To set the stage, Human Revolution takes place in a stylized and not entirely optimistic vision of the year 2027. It's a world where powerful corporations are pioneering biomechanical science at a breakneck pace, producing a fractured population of those eager to upgrade themselves and those deeply disturbed by this technology's effect on humanity. Through the ambient chatter of news reports and whispered uncertainties among side characters, the game establishes an atmosphere of tension and unease early on in the story. To recycle Eidos Montreal's catchy slogan, "It's not the end of the world… but you can see it from here."

Likewise, you don't have to wait long to see what triggers Jensen's metamorphosis. The game begins with our protagonist walking through the hallways and laboratories of Sarif Industries, an augmentations company where Jensen, an ex-SWAT officer, provides private security. Glancing around the research and development labs, you get a good idea of what sort of technology this company is working on when you catch sight of fleeting but thoroughly creepy visuals--a sea of dismembered limbs and people being rebuilt with mechanical attachments. (Though, oddly enough, the most unsettling visual we saw was a guy just running along on a treadmill right next to a pair of robot legs lacking an upper torso matching his pace.) Imagery like this certainly helps to understand the motivations behind the reluctant Jensen we see early on, a guy who's unsure of these augmentations as a way to develop his role within the company. After all, who's all that eager wants to run home and eat steak when you work at the slaughterhouse all day?

Meet Sarif, your boss. Clearly he's a man who indulges in his own product.
We should mention, though, that this is a very pretty slaughterhouse. If you've seen the various screenshots and trailers for Human Revolution, you know that Eidos Montreal is aiming for a very specific look; namely, a gilded cyberpunk landscape rendered in various shades of gold and black. The aesthetic that the CGI trailers established carries over to the game astoundingly well. Even doing something as simple as walking through office hallways, the sense of atmosphere is terrific. The game's art director, Jonathan Jacques-Belletete, calls this a "visual texture" designed to let you know right away which game you're playing. It's hard to say Eidos Montreal hasn't succeeded there. While the facial detail is a little underwhelming during cutscenes that really focus on character faces--at least on the Xbox 360 version we played--the overall art style more than makes up for it.

Eventually, you make it up to the office of the head honcho who has called you in for a meeting. But before you can get down to business, an alarm sounds and you're sent rushing back down to the labs to see what has gone wrong. What follows is your first taste of combat, as armed mercenaries have overtaken the labs and left a trail of burning offices and bloodied scientists in their wake. All you have is a simple assault rifle and a knack for using cover to avoid gunfire. Nevertheless, we were pleased to discover that even when you strip the combat of all its biomechanical bells and augmented whistles, there's a solid foundation underneath it all. The guns carry a heavy impact and the fluid cover system manages to avoid feeling jarring as you switch from first person while running around to third person while you hunker down behind an object.

Carrying on the Deus Ex legacy, you can also pick up objects and throw them at enemies, but in our limited experience, we didn't find much practical application for flinging empty cardboard boxes at armed mercenaries. We imagine that particular ability will come into use later in the game when you begin to really explore and dig apart environments--this opening level was a strictly run-and-gun affair apparently designed to get our feet wet.

The game's opening prologue is more Call of Duty than Deus Ex, but that changes once you get your augmentations.
Whatever success you feel after this quick-and-simple introduction to the game's combat soon comes to a sudden and violent halt. It's here that Jensen runs into a mysterious augmented figure that turns his one-man security operation on its ear. We won't go into details, but suffice it to say Jensen is left for dead and the doctors tasked with rescuing him elect to go the full-on biomechanical recovery route. The opening credits sequence that follows paints a grim picture of the transformation Jensen goes through, and in keeping with the game's uniformly stylish aesthetic, it's a thoroughly awesome montage with an art design that can't really be overstated. This despite the fact that you're essentially watching a man on the verge of death being outfitted with robot arms--and not exactly by his own choice.

At this point, we were about a half-hour into a three-hour demo of Human Revolution's opening moments. We'll have another preview coming your way in a few weeks that details how combat works once you settle into your augmentations, so be sure to check back for it.

Two Worlds II PC Review

If you played the original Two Worlds, you might not be surprised to learn that its sequel does not represent the role-playing genre at its most refined. What may surprise you, however, is that Two Worlds II's clumsy features don't greatly diminish the impact of its big, busy world. Here is an expansive third-person role-playing game brimming with fearsome monsters to slay, colorful spells to cast, varied quests to perform, and murky swamps to explore. The game lacks the fine points that adorn the greatest role-playing adventures--distinctive characters, a compelling narrative, and memorable plot reveals. But this is an entertaining journey nonetheless, due in no small part to intriguing but accessible systems that let you create your own magic spells, concoct potions, and upgrade your favorite weapons and armor. If you've been looking to lose yourself in a fantastical kingdom, and don't mind some clumsy combat and some nagging interface issues, Two Worlds II is a fine way to escape the rigors of the real world.

Like its precursor, Two Worlds II takes place in the land of Antaloor, where (once again) your sister is in trouble and where (once again) the evil wizard Gandohar is up to no good. It's a suitable framework, but the game fails to build on its foundations. Through a series of good-looking flashback sequences, you eventually learn more about Gandohar, but the personal touch is conspicuously absent. The game devotes little time to giving your sister a personality, making her a simple MacGuffin to help put the story in motion, but nothing more. Nor do you meet many memorable characters. While much of the voice acting isn't bad, some of it is lifeless (your own character), ridiculous (a drunken local), or stiff (a student in need). The tomes you collect contain some fascinating tales and tidbits, but much of the dialogue sounds forced and unnatural--like something an author would write, but not something an actual person would say.

That isn't to say that Two Worlds II's quests won't draw you in. Sometimes, it's the bits of humor that keep you interested. A one-armed man threatens you, but as it turns out, it's a two-handed weapon he hangs on his wall. The dialogue's little jests may put a grin on your face, but you might actually guffaw if you explore this abode later and discover that the treasure chests within all contain two-handed bludgeons. An encounter with a black knight recalls a memorable scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, while a character involved with the quest is a Sean Connery soundalike (a clear reference to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade). If the humor doesn't inspire you, perhaps the chance to drive the outcome of the quest will. In multiple cases, you choose how to proceed. This kind of decision-making isn't unique to Two Worlds II, and you won't see the exciting flexibility you may in a game like Fallout: New Vegas or Dragon Age: Origins. Nevertheless, quests involving the element of choice stand out in Two Worlds II because there is not always a clear "bad" or "good" path. A witch accused of crimes against nature; a professor accused by a supposedly innocent student: these characters may or may not be who they appear to be, and choosing to follow one path may result in unforeseen and occasionally heartbreaking circumstances.

Of course, there's more to Two Worlds II than its narrative. There's a whole world to explore, made up of rolling green hills, decrepit universities, and dank dungeons filled with rattling skeletons and hulking beasts. The visuals aren't best in class, but they aspire to more than simple "generic fantasyland." The savannah of the early hours sticks closely to brown, dusty trails and grassy meadows, but moving through the chapters unveils more interesting vistas. The Asian-inspired design that kicks off chapter two (of four) revels in attractive red trimmings and intricately adorned bookcases. Nearby, gnarled branches and grim darkness lend an air of mystery to a society of outsiders. You still set foot in some boring caverns and bland (if sunny) fields, but progressing through the story exposes more visual delights. Loading times are generally breezy, so you won't have to wait too long when entering houses or caves. It's when the game forces you to get up close and personal that it bares its visual quirks. Characters gesticulate stiffly and exhibit little personality as they converse. Many animations, such as those when mounting or dismounting your horse, are jittery or off in some other way. But Two Worlds II is a huge improvement over its rough-looking predecessor and is attractive on its own terms.

When facing your menacing adversaries, you aren't stuck with just blades, or a bow, or magic spells: you can choose any of these, and easily switch between up to three equipment sets with the press of a button. Regardless of your weapon of choice, combat is appealing, if a bit ragged at times. If you wield a blade, crunchy sound effects give battles some oomph, as do melee moves that knock back nearby enemies. On the other hand, inconsistent collision detection means you don't always get that delightful sense of impact you might hope for when plunging an axe into an ostrich. Casting a spell results in windy noises (summon a giant spider) and swirling visual effects (heal yourself)--though the auto-targeting has the camera occasionally whipping around in uncomfortable ways. If you enjoy ranged weapons and magic, you might find bows and spells better left to certain occasions, since it's often difficult to put space between you and that swarm of bees descending on you.

That's especially true in Two Worlds II's tight, dark dungeons, where many of the game's most obvious flaws come to light. Narrow caverns are often populated with monsters too large for them. Maneuvering into an effective position can be tricky in these cases, especially when the uncooperative camera makes it impossible to figure out exactly what's going on. The need to manually unsheathe your weapon--and the delay when switching between weapon sets--can also complicate these sticky moments. Fortunately, some slippery combat situations can be exploited to your advantage. Monsters and humanoids alike suffer from pathfinding and AI difficulties. A beast might get stuck running against a rock, allowing you to pelt it with arrows until it falls over dead. Or if you put enough distance between you and your target, it might not even react at all when your arrow finds its mark. You can see that some thought was given to how certain creatures behave. For example, big cats run toward you to attack and then scamper away at a quick clip to escape your blows. But when the same cat runs halfway up a crevasse and gets stuck, or slides across a rock formation at angles that defy gravity, the immersion is broken.

You do more than fight, of course: you loot and level, and Two Worlds II handles both of these aspects superbly. There's a lot of stuff to collect, and while you inevitably discover a lot of items and weapons you won't use, you find enough helpful treasures to make it worth opening every armoire and investigating every nook. It helps that the lock-picking minigame, which involves matching your rotating lock pick in a series of notches, is enjoyable and, when you're picking master-level locks, quite challenging. Your spoils might include skill books, which unlock new skill trees. (These might be new spell categories, such as necromancy, or new attacks, like ice arrows.) You also loot items used in Two Worlds II's fascinating and complex spellcrafting system, in which you create your own spells from raw materials; you can even name spells yourself. It's entertaining to mix and match various spell cards and modifiers to see what spell you will devise. Perhaps it will fire ice missiles, or improve your health regeneration for a time. In any case, you can bestow powers upon your mage as you see fit, from a number of different schools of magic--air, earth, and so on.


There are other diversions as well--some integral to the experience, some optional. You create your own potions out of the foliage you gather and the entrails you scavenge from defeated foes. As with spells, experimenting with potion ingredients is enjoyable, in part because there are so many morsels to mess with. You can also break down accumulated equipment into its raw materials and use those materials to upgrade your favored armor and weapons. In both cases, you perform these activities directly in the inventory menus--you don't need to visit a blacksmith, or find a campfire or potion set. Considering the huge numbers of materials you collect, this is a great convenience when compared to other recent RPGs, such as Risen. Unfortunately, your inventory gets clogged with all sorts of miscellaneous doodads and can be a hassle to sift through. Perhaps you are looking for potions to improve your shock resistance, but because so many potions look exactly alike, you might have to hover the mouse over each identical item until you find what you need. Additional sorting options would have been infinitely helpful. Fortunately, Two Worlds II offers conveniences that streamline other parts of the experience in welcome ways. For instance, it's easy to traverse long distances using the numerous teleporters scattered about, and you even possess your own teleportation device. There are no restrictions placed on this kind of travel, so once you discover a teleporter, you can zip to it at almost any time.

Other activities are there if you fancy them, but aren't necessarily integral parts of the experience. You can purchase a home, for example, though it's too bad you can't gussy it up with furniture or knickknacks a la Fable III. If you enjoy a bit of gambling, you can participate in a couple of dice-rolling minigames. One good way to fill your coffers is to join locals in a bit of music-making. You can purchase and play a number of different instruments (violin, flute, harp, and more), and buy sheet music for several tunes. This isn't always as easy as it sounds; depending on your instrument of choice, you might have to pound on three or four keys at once in quick succession. These tavern tunes aren't so rip-roaring as to have you seeking out a musician when you discover a new village, but this melodious distraction helps Two Worlds II feel more like a virtual world, rather than a vast collection of quest-givers and shopkeepers.

Even after the dark final chapter comes to a close, you can still return to Antaloor to continue your questing.
Like its predecessor, Two Worlds II doesn't scream for a multiplayer component, yet there it is, buried inside an unintuitive and vast selection of lobbies. Nevertheless, if you form a group with up to seven others and tackle the cooperative missions, you're bound to have fun. This mode has a Phantasy Star Online vibe, getting you and other players together to simply go out and kill some monsters as you progress from one quest to the next. Your online character (or characters; you can create several) is different from your offline one, so this is another chance to level up, earn loot, and play with systems you may not have messed with too much in the campaign. It's also a chance to have fun with archery and spellcasting, which are far more viable when you are supporting teammates than when you play the lone hero. You might also battle other players in online competitive play, but it is unfortunately an unbalanced mess and lets players with leveled-up superwarriors compete against unsuspecting newcomers. The resulting sequence of horrible, frustrating deaths is absolutely not fun. Even if you compete against players around the same level as you, whether or not you have any fun depends almost entirely on the class you select. For example, you might find your spellcaster getting cut to shreds with a single hit before your homing missiles can even find their mark. With so many combat classes all but pointless, Two Worlds II's online competition is a curiosity, but nothing more.

It's unlikely that you look to an expansive role-playing game like this seeking the thrill of online rivalry, however, and Two Worlds II delivers where it counts most. The spellcrafting, potion-making, and equipment upgrade systems offer plenty of depth, yet aren't so convoluted as to make their workings a mystery. Great quests and hidden caches of treasure make this an inviting world to explore, and the ease of travel ensures that exploration is never a frustration. Great writing and characterizations could have taken Two Worlds II to the next level, but even without them, there is enough combat and mission variety to keep you busy and happy for dozens of hours. If you long for a bit of old-world flavor, you'd do best to overlook the ragged edges and let Antaloor work its magic on you.

Dragon Age: Legends Facebook Game

This is the trailer for the Facebook version of Dragon Age.

Video Games | Dragon Age: Legends | Debut Trailer

Xbox 360 | PlayStation 3 | Nintendo Wii | PC Games

Rage Trailer

Rage is a first-person shooter and driving video game in development by id Software. It will use the company's new id Tech 5 engine. The game was announced on August 2, 2007 at QuakeCon. On the same day, a trailer for the game was released by Gametrailers.com.

Information available so far indicates that the game takes place in a post-apocalyptic world similar to that of movies such as The Road Warrior. In an interview with GameSpot, designer Tim Willits revealed that the game is set in the near future following a comet collision with the earth. Influences on the driving and racing gameplay include games such as MotorStorm and Burnout, according to another Willits interview by Shacknews. Players will be able to upgrade their cars with money won from races.

Reports indicate that id is developing Rage with a T-for-Teen rating in mind, and that the Xbox 360, PC, and Mac versions will ship on 2 discs, while the PS3 version will ship on one Blu-ray Disc.

John Carmack told Slashdot in 2007 that there is a Linux port under development, even if it's not yet ready for testing. However, as with earlier games from the company, the Linux version will be offered as a separate download which requires the Windows disk's maps and game data to run.

On July 14, 2008, id announced its decision to partner with Electronic Arts for publication of Rage. Regarding the status of the Linux port after this announcement, John Carmack said "It isn't a launch platform for us, but an executable may still show up.

Shift 2: Unleashed Interview

Check out the damage and lighting interview for Need for Speed Shift 2: Unleashed.

Video Games | SHIFT 2: Unleashed | Lighting & Damage Interview

Xbox 360 | PlayStation 3 | Nintendo Wii | PC Games