Multiplayer shooters have advanced stupendously since the likes of Doom and Quake. Contextual actions, unlockable weapons, team and objective based combat, physics, sprawling maps, class systems and a slew of other complexities have been crammed into modern frag-fests.

Nevertheless, there are still a few features and concepts we’d like to see perfected before the inevitable next step involving wires poking out of our brain stems. Potentialities like Call of Duty 5, Halo 4, Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 and Half-Life 3 will undoubtedly offer things we’ve never even thought of, but here are a few humble suggestions that we have considered. Easier said than done, right? Probably. (more…)

Hellgate London is notable because it’s from the same folks who brought us Diablo. Diablo was a Mexican holiday game where you would try and bowl pumpkins down a bowling alley while trying to knock over bottles of Tequila. No it wasn’t. Actually Diablo was a top-down-perspective dungeon crawl that was very popular. Why was it so popular? I’m not sure anyone sent out a survey to find out, but if I were to guess it would be that the game had low system requirements, online multiplayer, and unique items. The later being attractive to players since their characters could be fairly well customized and interesting. Somehow this combination made the game a huge success. I’m sure everyone has their own reasons why they liked the game as well, but I just wanted to hit on those basics to give you an understanding of why Hellgate: London doesn’t work like Diablo did so many years ago.
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Where cars crash, smash, and explode: It’s our idea of Paradise in this latest look at Criterion’s ultra-fast racer.

The world of Burnout is about to open up. With Criterion Games’ upcoming Burnout Paradise, the high-speed, crash-’em-up style of Burnout play you’ve come to expect from the series is expanding to include go-anywhere, open-world gameplay, as well as online play that will keep you and your friends zipping through the highways and byways of Paradise City long after the game is released in January. Hot on the heels of last week’s look at the Paradise demo, we’ve been spending some time with the full game for a sneak peek at what to expect once it crashes into store shelves.
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If you thought that Killzone 2 had been looking too good to be true, then it’s quite possible you were correct in your assumption. Developer Guerilla has admitted that the last batch of screenshots had been “touched up” to make them look better than they actually were. Bad form, you dirty boys. Bad, bad form.

Guerilla’s Seb Downie made the confession on the official PS3 forums, trying to justify the misleading promotional material by saying the enhancements were only small:

They are only the tiniest bit touched up. Short answer is yes. Long answer is that there was a little bit of colour-correction done and some minor polish, but nothing major. Still very close to reality and it looks better in motion in my opinion.
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Censored blood or not, I’m still a big fan of Grasshopper’s Suda51, the eccentric creator of Killer 7 and the new Wii game, No More Heroes. Sadly, it seems not even his native Japan appreciates his abstract work as No More Heroes kicked off to a disasterous launch in the man’s home turf.

Suda and executive producer Yasuhiro Wada were on hand to sign copies of the game and give out the promotional toilet paper we’d all heard about, but after twenty minutes, not a single person had bought the game. Ouch! It’s rumoured that a Famitsu reporter, there to cover the washout, eventually went ahead and bought a copy himself.
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