NEW FALLOUT 3 DLC: THE WASTELAND GETS EVEN WIDER STILL

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5.19.2009

Brandon Boyer

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Continuing, for now, to keep their promise of a game that never ends, Bethesda has just announced two more expansions to Fallout 3‘s Wasteland, with Point Lookout, a “massive new swampland area filled with new quests and content,” due in June, and Mothership Zeta, in which players will “experience an alien abduction first hand and find out if they’re tough enough to survive,” coming in July.

At the same time Bethesda has announced that PlayStation 3 Vault 101-ers will finally be getting their chance to take advantage of the widened Wasteland with the last, first DLC package Operation: Anchorage, coming in late June, followed every 4-6 weeks thereafter by The Pitt and Broken Steel, the most recent pack that finally did away with the end-game and level cap.

And, finally, for those that have been waiting and don’t want to fiddle with the content drip-feed, October will bring the release of a Game of the Year edition of the game that will include all five packs for the same price as the original release.

Fallout 3 [Bethesda]

TEAM FORTRESS TEAM TEACHES HOW TO FACEPLANT WITH GRACE

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5.19.2009

Brandon Boyer

2 Replies

Valve teaches the rest of the industry how best to deal with a PR flub (say, oh, I don’t know, accidentally leaking your own video over the weekend): you own it with class and style by awarding yourself an unlockable achievement, and publicizing your internal HR rampage to hunt down and back stab the person responsible.

Team Fortress 2 [Valve, via Tom]

Today’s other best Fallout 3 development: Japan’s ‘agoministrator‘ re-imagines the game as a 70s TV drama, with perfect pitch freeze-frame introductions of all its major players. The coup de grâce groupshot at 1:27-1:40 is a little bit mindblowing. [thanks much, Super Punch!]

Leaked this weekend: the brilliant culmination to a series of Team Fortress 2 character updates that saw the focus on the Sniper abruptly backstabbed and turned to a focus on the Spy.

These guys need a feature-length, immediately.

Team Fortress [Valve]

So how will Activision, Tony Hawk, and upstart Chicago developer Robomodo reinvent the skating game to take on the heavyweight board-porn of EA’s fantastic Skate franchise? As they’ve been hinting at for at least a year, it’s all in the controls, and so, as above and below: the new board controller.

How does it work? Speculate for now and ask again after its official E3 debut, and watch Spike Jonze/Ty Evans/UNKLE’s ‘Heaven’ video (which you see a few brief seconds of in the trailer) in the meantime to at least appreciate the art of the board while you wait.

Tony Hawk: Ride [Activision, Robomodo]

It’s been a few months since we last heard from Coin App and their Mario Galaxy-cum-arena-shooter Max Blastronaut (you might remember it as the one that promised to give players the ability to ‘ghostride’ its lunar rovers), but the studio’s just written in with this latest trailer.

As you can see, the co-op count’s gone up from two to four, and the combat’s gone far more Smash Bros type chaotic, particular with that gravity gun: check Coin App’s site for more screenshots of the game’s mechs and moon buggies, and see if you can’t sniff out their target platform, which they still haven’t announced, but is strongly hinted at.

Max Blastronaut [Coin App]

In the many months that’ve passed, I still haven’t managed to dig up many gems in Xbox 360’s Community Games section that have instantly hooked me quite as much as Mommy’s Best’s previously previewed Weapon of Choice, and I’ve just become as quickly intrigued by one-man-team Nathan Fouts’ Grapple Buggy, his next game due on the console by the end of the year.

As the name implies, Buggy promises to take all of the fantastically grotesque alien landscapes of Weapon and combine it with both physics enhanced vehicular platforming ala underdog NES game Blaster Master and a Bionic Commando-esque dual-grappling hook, in some dual-punch combo of under-utilized mechanical excellence.

Here’s Fouts’ again-perfectly ludicrous sci-fi pitch:

Take control of the prototype Grapple Buggy piloted by Nova Commander Javeya, and her alien co-pilot Drozo to explore the newly discovered VALD-END 317.

The distant planet seems to house massive amounts of Tetravaldisae, known to its harvesters as ‘Vald’. Used to create fuel for faster-than-light travel, Vald is the single most valuable commodity in the known universe. The New Homeworld Armada and the Drozo Empire have formed a strained alliance to confirm these portentous readings sending the Grapple Buggy and its team into action for the first time.

Can the Drozo Empire be trusted? Has Javeya’s government thrust her into a compromised situation? Will VALD-END thwart both species schemes? Swing into action with Grapple Buggy!

Fouts has set up a site for the game here, and you can follow his progress via the Mommy’s Best devblog here.

Grapple Buggy [Mommy’s Best, devblog, via XNAplay]

Klei Entertainment — creators of original Xbox Live Arcade game Eets and the studio that helped bring Metanet’s N to Live Arcade — calls this footage of their next console game, Shank, “pre-pre-pre-alpha”, but it’s hard to see how much better it can get.

Done up in traditional animation style, it’s already promising some seriously weighty and solid brawler mechanics: check the official Shank blog for more concept, character and storyboard art (and a hat-tip to Wolverine) from the team.

Shank [Klei Entertainment]

ONE SHOT: BRüTAL LEGEND’S ULTRA-VIVID CONCEPT ART HORRORSHOW

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5.9.2009

Brandon Boyer

3 Replies

Not gonna lie: I was big gunning to feature Brütal Legend in an upcoming installment of Concept Album since this GDC session, and was quite disappointed to be beat to the punch by remorseless rapscallions ripping half-blurry mid-res versions of the art from the GDC-stored PowerPoint. Anyway, this one was the most brilliant bit, by the inimitable Scott C., who has his own Action Comic here.