Games Cheats and Reviews

This time next year, we will have the choice between playing in a galaxy far far away, or exploring space, the final frontier. And as fun as Star Trek Online is right now (yes, even with the bugs), most sci-fi MMO fans are aware of the powerhouse that is Star Wars: The Old Republic. After all, BioWare’s making the game, it’s Star Wars, and did we mention that BioWare is making it? As rocky as Star Trek Online’s start has been, it looks to contain one facet that won’t be in The Old Republic: having your own starship. Though, that looks like it’ll be STO’s only real draw (besides the license) once The Old Republic ships early next year. Even in its in-development state, TOR is sporting quite a few features that STO will have to play catch-up to between now and TOR’s release. BioWare is working on adding a whole new method of storytelling in an MMO (via NPC interactions, branching dialogue trees, a morality system, etc.), and is looking to reclaim the crown of “franchise sci-fi MMO” from the final frontier, thanks in no small part to the already-well done features below.

Story Driven Experience

When playing a story mission in Star Trek Online, it’s all text delivered through a little dialog box. More times than not, it’s usually an alien race harassing a Federation colony, and you need to step in and blast them out of the stars. From the little that we’ve seen of The Old Republic so far, this much is certain: you will have many different story arcs available to your character available out of the box on day one. Recently we saw some of this in action as we got a taste of the Trooper’s story arc, and what it was like to be a part of Havoc Squad (a mercenary group, essentially). The mission assignment itself was simple: infiltrate a base on Ord Mantell and obtain a secret weapon known as the ZR-57. Though, during this mission, we interacted with other members of our squad, talked with the locals to pick up side-missions along the way, and even decided the fate on some of the guards in the base — all with spoken dialog for every character (even ours). Adding that level of immersion in an MMO is huge; it felt like we were playing Knights of the Old Republic all over again (that’s a good thing).

At a discussion panel at the Game Career Guide seminar during the last day of GDC 2010, developers who worked on Flower, The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, and Portal discussed how they got their college student games noticed enough for publishers to give them jobs and put their games out commercially.

Portal

After seeing screenshots or video of the Xbox Live Arcade version of Perfect Dark, you may not have been blown away. Coming just weeks after the release of the gorgeous Battlefield: Bad Company 2, not to mention the myriad of other great-looking FPS games that have been released in recent years, it’s easy to be underwhelmed. You might even think that it hasn’t been updated much from the N64 version — but if that’s what you’ve been thinking, you clearly haven’t taken a look at N64 game in a while.

The video above shows some footage of the opening cinematic and part of the first level in both the N64 and XBLA versions of Perfect Dark. It doesn’t take long to see that Rare has clearly polished up the graphics quite a bit since the game’s release back in 2000, although it looks like the AI still leaves something to be desired. You’d think the guards would have more of a reaction when they see a woman waltzing around with a gun in her hand.

Perfect Dark releases on the Xbox Live Marketplace next Wednesday, March 17, for 800 Microsoft Points ($10).

Following this year’s Game Developers Choice Awards ceremony, we were able to grab Valve’s Gabe Newell for a brief chat about Portal 2, wherein he mentioned that he thinks it is the best game Valve has ever created. Here’s the transcript of our interview:

1UP: Was Portal 2 from the beginning always going to be a full price game?

Gabe Newell: “One of the nice things about The Orange Box was it allowed us to try out a couple of different things, and Portal really seemed to resonate. We got the signals that we wanted — this is what people liked; this is what people didn’t like. And to us, it was like, ‘OK now we know how to take this big,’ so that’s what we’re going to do with Portal 2.”

Many of us here in the office got our first hands-on with the new PlayStation Move today and its (somewhat necessary) add-on, the Sub Controller. There were a number of tech demos on display at the event (look for our video recap for more impressions), whereas the only “real” game on display working with the new Move was the recently announced SOCOM 4. And while I personally won’t be hanging up my DualShock3 and trading it in for a Move after my first impressions with the product, it’s still an impressive display on what can be done with this new device: decent motion control for a hardcore game.

The PlayStation Move controllers themselves are very similar to the current set-up of the Wii Remote and its Nunchuk: The right-hand controller controls your head/gun/firing while the left-hand controller handles your movement with an analog stick. Each controller has a trigger as well; the left-hand’s trigger operates as a “go-into-cover” function, while the right-hand’s trigger fires your selected weapon (for the sake of the demo we were only able to use a machine gun). There is even an “action” button in the middle of the Move that, when pressed, would have you look down the sight line of the rifle — making the motion sensitivity increase.

You don’t mess with Civilization. If you aren’t a Civ fanatic already, then you should know that Civilization is a veritable cornerstone of PC gaming; it’s a franchise that defines the turn-based strategic experience, that exemplifies the “intricate systems interacting with each other to produce addictive gameplay” motif, that invented the “just one more turn” phrase within PC gamers’ minds, and is often named the best game in PC history. Civilization titles are rare — the “okay, this is pretty much the best one, there’s no way to do but down after this” game that is Civilization IV came out way back in 2005.

So it’s no small feat for Firaxis to be making Civilization V. Fact is, with a series this storied and iconic, the developers can’t simply get away with making it look prettier and making the number bigger. They have to make a game that makes the five year wait worth it, especially after its near-perfect predecessor. So what will Civ V do? From a recent, 20-minute demonstration, here are four major changes that V is making to justify its existence.

As they’ve established previously, Blizzard isn’t anti-console and plans on making another console game — eventually. World of Warcraft might seem like the natural choice for what game to bring to consoles, given its incredible success, and as producer J. Allen Brack told G4tv, it’s certainly something that Blizzard thinks about often.

Asked why MMOs haven’t made much of an impact on consoles, Brack explained, “I think there’s a lot of reasons. There’s not one thing. One is, it takes a long time to develop an MMO. The lifecycle of consoles being what they are, you have to really time when your console’s going to come out, what its projected lifecycle is going to be with when your game is going to be, which is challenging.”

Brack went on to outline the technical challenges of bringing World of Warcraft to consoles, which include the game’s current 15GB size and the issue of releasing patches on a platform that’s controlled by Microsoft, Sony, or Nintendo. He added, “[A]nd then specifically in the case of WoW, WoW was designed to be a keyboard game and its control scheme and its camera controls and the number of abilities that you have and the spells and how things work are very keyboard-centric. The idea of translating that to a gamepad is a very, very challenging proposition.”

Portal 2’s existence was only just recently confirmed a few days ago, but details out of Game Informer’s cover story continue to make their way online. Now the entire cover story itself has evidently been scanned, and VG247 pulled a few of the major details.

Portal 2 will, reportedly, take place hundreds of years after the first Portal (pictured), resulting in the Aperture Science labs looking like “a jungle.” Despite this significant time shift, Portal 2 will still somehow once again star Chell, the first game’s protagonist, as the playable character in the single-player game. GlaDOS returns as well, with the (Portal 1 spoiler warning) personality cores you seemingly destroyed at the end of the first game having taken over different areas of the lab.

Meanwhile, as previously revealed, the co-op campaign will be a stand-alone story…that apparently stars two bi-pedal robots. Gameplay-wise, physics will play a bigger role in the puzzles, with one example being using a portal to suck air from a vent in one area into another. There will also be “reflection cubes” that’ll be used for laser-redirection puzzles. Game Informer’s cover story also confirms that Portal 2 will indeed be a full-fledged game, with Valve comparatively calling Portal 1 a “test bed.”

The Electronic Software Ratings Board has issued a Teen rating for Lips: I (Heart) the 80s, and inadvertently also announced Lips: I (Heart) the 80s in the process.

This will be the fourth installment of iNiS’s karaoke party game for the Xbox 360, following the original Lips (pictured), Lips: Number One Hits, and Lips: Party Classics. The ESRB rating (picked up on by IGN, via Joystiq) explains what the title makes rather obvious: “This is a karaoke music game in which players sing along with music videos of various styles and genres from the 1980s.” The description also reveals at least two songs that will be included by quoting lyrics from them: The Police’s “Roxanne” and Rick James’ “Super Freak.”

If the game is already rated, that likely means Microsoft will make Lips: I (Heart) the 80s official pretty soon — perhaps with an announcement at GDC next week.

Sony has officially announced its “secret sequel,” and as it turns out, it’s a proper follow-up to the beloved SOCOM series: SOCOM 4. The game is being developed by Zipper Interactive, and it’s due out this fall. Many assumed MAG was the developer’s next step in military action, but apparently they plan to keep the two running concurrently. The blog promises to continue to support MAG after SOCOM 4 launches.

The plot revolves around a military coup in a South Asian country. Players take control of a five-man squad to stop him in the single-player campaign. IGN reports that the 12-hour mission features motion-captured characters in the directorial style of Uncharted 2. All weapons and supplies will be either given at the start of the game, or found inside the missions, to replicate the feeling of searching for supplies in a combat scenario. Of course, multiplayer is back as well, promising 32-person multiplayer with new Special Forces units. Other than that, details are sparse, but we’re sure to see more in the coming months.