Like Armored Core and Armored Core 2, you are given a trial mission to see if you are talented enough to join the mercenary group dubbed Global Cortex. New features within Armored Core 3 include consorts (additional allies that can be obtained to assist you in a mission), detachable weapons (thereby lessening your total weight and increasing speed), and a new Core classification; Exceed Orbit (EO) which sacrifices the power of Overboost and allows you to deploy a built-in, autonomous weapon on your Core.

GAMEPLAY HINTS

Get any enemy

Buy a chaingun, then stand in one place and fire. You should kill the enemy very quickly.

Equip the fastest leg part (petal) and the machine gun with 1000 ammunition. In the battle arena, strafe around your opponents until they run out of ammunition. This takes time, but it works. You can also equip the best generator you can. Do not worry about AP, as they will not hit you that often.

To defeat literally anyone in the Arena (even Exile), equip the following parts and go to the reservoir. Immediately turn left and go as quickly as possible to the platforms sticking out of the reservoir wall. Try to use over-boost as much as possible. First, boost up to the lowest one, second from right, and from there boost to the next one, to the right. Once you land on that platform, turn on your extensions and blast away. If you are fighting Ace, he might land on your platform and shoot you or stand there and recharge his energy. He will probably fly up again and go out of bounds by flying too high. The recommended parts are as follows.
Seth Kursel.

….

full here

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.

10) Fully deformable environments

Physics isn’t new to multiplayer games, but it’s generally limited to certain obvious objects: boxes, exploding cars, bright red barrels that scream: “Shoot me and I’ll totally explode, bitch!” Impotent explosions and casually tumbling debris isn’t enough to satiate our urge for destruction - we want to smash the walls from their foundations.

We’re sure there are complex reasons why this kind of interactivity is difficult in a multiplayer setting, but we’re far too lazy to worry about “variable arrays” and all that - we simply want to absolutely destroy everything in a level, leaving only the smoldering bodies of our downed opponents behind at the end of each match. Some developers have come close, but we’re still not quite feeling it. Perhaps upcoming Fracture’s terrain deformation will give us our fix.

Above: Half-Life 2’s gravity gun is great, but we’d rather be ripping load-bearing walls out of buildings than tossing caution signs around

9) 180-degree turn

Incredibly physically fit super-soldiers apparently move about like elderly women carrying walkers (the kind with tennis balls jammed onto the ends). To turn around, they’ve got to make tiny baby steps around central pivots.

Even if we up the sensitivity on our mice or analog sticks so that the gentlest twitches send us into over-enthusiastic pirouettes, it doesn’t make sense. Lost Planet rectified this with a quick turn button - that’s all we’re asking for.
Source: gamesradar.com

Like Diablo, Hellgate: London is multiplayer and contains unique items. Except now it’s a first person shooter, takes place in a near future London instead of a dungeon, and has much higher system requirements. It also has unique dungeon areas, and a plethora of extra customization options for your weapons and a form of crafting that lets you augment items.

Most of this is done well, and none of it is in anyway bad. Unfortunately that’s not all there is, Hellgate: London does feel a bit MMORPG like, when the game itself is not an MMORPG. For instance, you receive missions to travel to an area that is a number of levels away. (Imagine moving from area to area and each area has a different theme with different monsters. And you have to go through 3 or 4 of them to reach your end mission. ) Each level contains a number of critters that you fight. Usually in batches of 30 or 40 that are mostly the same. You move slowly from one end to another while holding down the attack button until they die, loot, heal, and repeat. If this sounds like most MMORPG titles you’ve played, you’ll feel right at home here. And just like those titles it’s all a bit dull. Combat involves shooting or swinging a sword in close combat. You do this by holding down either mouse button until the creature is dead. You then move on to the next creature while also holding down a key to retrieve all the items that were dropped by the dead creature. You progress in this way until you face a tougher creature, and then you might only change up your tactics by using some health stims or casting a spell.

And this lack of interesting game play is one of Hellgate’s main sticking points. I believe the majority of the audience that loved to play Diablo have moved on to titles like World of Warcraft that do most of the things Diablo did and more. The years have caused gaming to evolve, and Hellgate: London feels as though it should have come out 5 years ago, or it should have elevated the game play elements to give us something new. That’s not what we have here. Instead, Hellgate feels like it wants to be Diablo’s older brother, but forgot how to be fun along the way.

I want you to know, I’m going on like this because I wanted to like Hellgate: London. I was willing to overlook some of the bugs (Like you can’t progress because the way out is blocked off because the random level generator sometimes doesn’t leave you with an exit) like the ones where the system just crashes out to the desktop, and the patches aren’t even given a proper version number. (As of this review, they are on patch 0.6) Even through all this, I wanted to walk away with a satisfying Diablo like experience. It just didn’t happen though, and I felt as though even with more patches to address the bug issues, nothing can save Hellgate’s boring and repetitious game play.

We should all face another fact, that piracy greatly helped Diablo succeed. Gamers would copy the game and distribute it to friends to allow them to all play together. While no one has any idea what the ratio of bought vs stolen copies were, anyone can guess that the majority of owners probably copied it from a friend or downloaded it from a warez source. This lack of copy protection allowed first adopters to share the game with friends who weren’t likely to drop $50 for it. This community aspect probably helped the game succeed, but now Hellgate London and other games are locked down in such a way to make it impossible to successfully play online and freely copy it. That’s not to say the developers should have opened up the game for rampant piracy, but one can look at this as one more reason for Diablo’s success vs why Hellgate doesn’t work. I really think Hellgate could have used a more open license where one could buy the game and share it with two friends. This would create the community aspect that the game needs. Hellgate: London and Diablo style games are more fun among friends than anonymous strangers (Like regular MMORPG titles). But trying to convince your friends to buy a lackluster single player game like Hellgate is not going to go over well. And that leaves you with playing among strangers and kids. It just doesn’t feel the same and simply doesn’t work out as being a fun gaming experience.

There are a number of things about Hellgate: London that work. It has a competent inventory and customization system. It has good graphics and an interesting world behind it. But the fact that the game remains dull, and there are rampant bugs makes it a title that is best left until the next version is released. Maybe when they release an expansion pack or significant patch that cleans up the game’s weak points and includes some other play mechanic besides simply fighting, moving, fighting, moving, fighting, moving, etc that would be the time to buy this game. For now, considering all the other great titles that have come out this year, I suggest spending your money elsewhere. In my opinion, Hellgate: London was released too early.

Source: videogamenews.com

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.

Though it’s tough to boil down a game as huge as Burnout Paradise, the way we see it there are three overall ways to enjoy your time in Paradise City. Step one is simply getting used to the huge expanses that make up the open-world environment; the entirety of which is open to you from the get-go in Paradise. The city is massive, and you’ll likely spend your first hour in the game just trying to get your bearings or marveling at the sites. With enough time, you’ll get to know the city pretty well, learn the shortcuts you need to get you from one spot to the next, and even uncover some secret spots that don’t show up on the game’s minimap.

Once you’ve got some miles under your tires, you can move on to the second step of enjoying Paradise: the challenges. Every intersection in the game has a challenge associated with it, and you can choose to enter a challenge simply by stopping at an intersection and burning the tires (by pressing the LT and RT triggers simultaneously). Different challenge types are indicated by colored dots on the minimap, so you always know what kind of challenge you’re near. The challenges themselves are pretty standard Burnout fare. You have your race challenges that take you from one end of Paradise City to the next, and your stunt events where you execute as many huge jumps, drift turns, and barrel rolls as you can to string together to score huge point combos.

There are also marked-man events, where you must get from one point to another without being taken down by psychotic drivers looking to do your car much harm, as well as road-rage challenges, where you flip the script and try to take down as many cars as you can in a given amount of time. Finally there are make-specific challenges, which you can enter only in the prescribed car. To switch cars, you head to the closest junkyard (the Paradise equivalent to the garage) and change your current ride for any car you’ve collected on the way. You collect cars either by upgrading your license, or taking them down during the occasional street encounters with these special collectible rides.

Different cars in Burnout Paradise have different attributes. There are your souped-up, tricked-out speedsters, which are obvious choices for the race events, as well as bulkier rides whose strength will keep your challenge hopes alive even when the pressure gets intense. Choosing the right car for the right event becomes more important as the game progresses. For example, you don’t want to enter a marked-man event with a slim, speedy sports car like the Rossolini LM Classis, as it will most likely get eaten alive.

As you travel through Paradise City, you’ll encounter stations along the way that can provide some timely help in a crunch. Perhaps the most valuable are the repair shops; drive through one and your car will be instantly repaired and ready to continue on its way. Gas stations come in handy, too; zip through one and your boost meter will fill up to its maximum as you exit. Finally, there are the paint shops; yeah, they don’t really help you for challenges, but they’re an easy way to quickly (and randomly) change the color of your ride. All of these stations appear on your minimap after you’ve discovered them for the first time. It’s good to know where all of them are, so exploration in the early goings is a must.

Winning challenges in Burnout Paradise is how you upgrade your Paradise City driver’s license and thus get access to better vehicles. However, it isn’t just about the intersection challenges; every road in Paradise City is a challenge unto itself in this game. By pressing up on the directional pad, you can enter one of four road-rules challenges: two race (offline and online) and two crash events (offline and online). Road-rules races challenge your timed run from the very beginning of the street to the very end, whereas crash events will test your high score in “showtime” mode, which is essentially one extended car accident.

By pressing the left and right buttons simultaneously, you can enter showtime mode at any point, even during a challenge. Your goal is to destroy as many cars as you can before your boost meter runs out. You can press A to leap your heap of wreckage into the air, and hitting big-score objects such as buses will give you a multiplier to your score (and more boost to continue the mayhem). At the end of race or showtime events, you can save your results for offline events, or upload them in online events, to compare your handywork against others. Each street in the game has its own lap time record and showtime score to beat, which essentially turns every inch of asphalt in Paradise into its own mini-game.

The seamless uploading of times and scores for races and showtime events is really just a prelude to the third and potentially most rewarding method for playing Burnout Paradise: online multiplayer. Here, up to eight players can compete and cooperate in a variety of challenges. All online access is controlled with the directional pad. You can first invite friends to your multiplayer session by choosing them from a list. Once your pals are in the same session as you, you’ve got a lot of options. First of all, you can create races from scratch, choosing the start and end points, as well as setting any checkpoints you wish players to drive through along the way. You can also create multiple-race events, with each succeeding event taking a completely different route than the one prior.

Where things really get interesting online are the online challenges, which feature both competitive and cooperative play that opens up the world of Paradise in exciting new directions. There are 50 challenges to take part in online, and the kinds of challenges available depend on the number of people online with you. Though there is some overlap, the list of challenges available to four people online is slightly different than the list available to five or six, and so on. These challenges run from the relatively mundane, such as crashing into one another or meeting at a particular spot on the map, to the considerably more interesting, such as power-parking challenges (which judge you at your skill in parallel parking your car at top speed).

The cooperative challenges are some of the best. One two-player challenge requires you both to barrel roll off ramps at the same time, which takes some delicate timing and communication between the two players. One eight-player challenge requires seven drivers on the steps at Ocean View, while the eighth player jumps over them. If you have an Xbox Live vision camera or PlayStation Eye handy, you can take photos of yourself for use on your license, or for bragging rights when you take down one of your buddies. All of your collected pics will be stored in a menu known as “the lineup” that you can refer back to later, if only to see the smiling (or otherwise) faces of your defeated foes.

We’ve spent a good deal of time with Burnout Paradise so far, and it’s hard not to be impressed with the amount of content that is being stuffed into this game. All that’s left to do is continue to refine the elements of the game that are currently in place; most notably the artificial intelligence, which seems as if it could use a good dose of aggression to give the road-rage and marked-man events a bit more oomph to them. Nevertheless, it seems that, long after you’ve tired of the single-player challenges in Paradise City, you’ll want to experience the multiplayer challenge events to see what kind of trouble you and your friends can stir up.
Source: gamespot.com

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.

Frankly, I think it’s a pretty crappy stunt to pull on the people following this game. We’d already been lied to once before when the infamous “demo” footage for Killzone 2 a few years back turned out to be CGI, and now they’re admitting to altering screenshots to make them look better. Touching up pictures may work for supermodels and pornstars, but when games are judged on how they actually look, this kind of underhanded behavior is not cool and not something any consumer should condone.

It’s worrying how obsessed with the graphics Guerilla and Sony seem to be with Killzone games, to the point of lying about them. Might explain why the first one had such disappointing gameplay. Stop trying to wave your graphics-peen around and actually concentrate on making a good game, please.
Source: gametab.com

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.

Horrible news for a very talented individual, but maybe it’s the curse of third party Nintendo titles kicking in. The Wii has clearly found its niche in the toy/family territory by now and obscure, heavily adult and unestablished IPs like this are bound to have a hard time getting recognized among Nintendo’s first party games. While the Wii could have been a breeding ground for quirky games such as No More Heroes, I don’t feel they have much of a home there anymore.

With any luck, No More Heroes at least sells enough copies somewhere. I’d hate to see Suda’s creativity stifled because people just want the same old stuff in their games.

Source: gametab.com

These downloadable games include three action titles, two musical titles, a racing title and a shooter, suiting every gamer’s tastes. If you own a PSP, you’ll be able to access the new content with the aid of a Wi-Fi connection or through your PC connected via USB. Keep in mind that the new titles will be shorter than the usual UMD games, but we’ve seen blockbusters ranking high in game reviews, although they only took up 200MB of storage space.

US gamers might get a surprise for Christmas, as the PC compatible version of the PSN will become active this winter. Care to guess what those 7 titles are? I’m hoping for Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep demo, or a brand new Ridge Racer, although I won’t be surprised to see NFS ProStreet surfacing on the PSP this winter. Sony’s finally doing something to catch up with the Xbox Live and the Wii’s similar service, but as long as there’s no daily update and the lag’s omnipresent, the PSN will still be number 2… or even 3.

Seems that producers have abandoned the PS3 for now, as more and more PSP titles are getting ready to surface, confirming the success of the Slim version. Where would Sony be right now without its treasured portable gaming device? Let’s just hope that the profit made through the Slim/Lite PSP sales makes up for the losses caused by the gigantic PlayStation 3.

Source: softpedia.com