Just announced at Microsoft’s E3 conference as an Xbox 360 console exclusive, Left 4 Dead 2, a new chapter of the game that takes the struggle against the horde to the southern bayou, and will focus more strongly on melee weapons — chainsaws, axes, frying pans, and baseball bats — on top of its updated arsenal of guns.

The game, due to launch on Xbox 360 and PC on November 17th, will also include new boss zombies, new survivors (seen above), and “more co-operative campaigns, more Versus campaigns, and maps for Survival mode available at launch.”

1.) Microsoft unveiled the 3D motion sensing and facial/voice recognizing “controller” project named Natal.

Microsoft promised the moon in its demo video for their Project Natal, carrying the tagline that it would “make ‘you’ the controller” and that, as the controller is the current “barrier separating game players from everyone else,” with Natal, “the only experience you need is life experience.”

As above, Microsoft demoed racing games, fighting games, and simple sports games using full body spatial recognition that let you hold up virtual steering wheels, duck, weave and deliver punches, and kick goals using nothing more than their physical actions.

But the company also took that a step further, promising full facial recognition — demonstrated by walking in front of your TV and having the Xbox 360 instantly log you in to your personal account — and object scanning, like holding up your own skateboard and having it instantly placed in a game. Microsoft added that the system could function just as well in a multiplayer environment.

For real world use, apart from a ringing endorsement by none less than Steven Spielberg, Microsoft called up Fable producer Peter Molyneux to demonstrate Lionhead’s project Milo — a virtual friend that they promised could carry on fluid conversations with full voice and emotion recognition, and demoed sleight of hand tricks like drawing on a piece of paper, holding it up to the Natal sensor, and having Milo “receive” that same paper in the virtual world, with additional recognition of what you’d drawn. (more…)

E309: LUCASARTS ANNOUNCES NEW WII, PC MONKEY ISLAND, XBOX LIVE REMAKE

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6.1.2009

Brandon Boyer

8 Replies

And so E3 coverage officially begins: first up, LucasArts has announced the revival of its classic adventure series Monkey Island with Tales of Monkey Island, a new five-part monthly episodic series for WiiWare and PC by the Telltale Games, the same studio of LucasArts vets behind both the Sam & Max revival and the Strongbad series games.

Following that, LucasArts will unveil The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, an internally developed remake of the original game that will add “updated high definition graphics, a re-mastered musical score, and full voiceover”, exclusive to PC and Xbox Live Arcade.

The Tales series is due to launch in “a few short weeks,” with the Special Edition due “later in the summer.”

Monkey Island [LucasArts]

The latest look at Double Fine’s PS3/Xbox 360 open world metal slasher Brütal Legend introduces the star power the studio’s tapped with its four Rock Gods: Judas Priest’s Rob Halford, Motorhead’s Lemmy Kilmister, Lita Ford, and, of course, Black Sabbath’s Ozzy Osbourne.

Brütal Legend [EA/Double Fine]

Dredged up from the unknown depths at French gaming site JeuxVideo: the first video of TT Games and Harmonix’s fantastically unlikely crossover Lego Rock Band. While it doesn’t show off any gameplay, per se, since we’ve been playing Rock Band for the past two years, it shouldn’t take too many guesses there as to what to expect.

What it does hint at is some of the environmental destruction detailed several weeks back, as well as the game’s “fantasy locations” (ie. big yes to Lego pirate/castle stages), and, at the tail end, TT Games’ propensity for slapstick bricks.

PARTY MONSTER: ROCKSTAR ANNOUNCE NEW GTA IV EPISODE, BALLAD OF GAY TONY

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5.26.2009

Brandon Boyer

2 Replies

I’m reporting this one straight down the middle: Rockstar have sent word that the second Xbox 360 exclusive episode will shift Liberty City’s perspective from bikers (as with the original Lost and the Damned episode) to balladeers, with the “fall” release of The Ballad of Gay Tony.

Rockstar say this episode will see players take the role of “Luis Lopez, part-time hoodlum and full-time assistant to legendary nightclub impresario Tony Prince (aka ‘Gay Tony’),” taking on a “struggle with the competing loyalties of family and friends, and with the uncertainty about who is real and who is fake in a world in which everyone has a price.”

As a side note, for the the ragtag handful of people that don’t already own the original Grand Theft Auto, both episodes will be combined on a retail disc at release called Episodes from Liberty City, which won’t require the original game to complete.

Scraping up the last of the long-weekend news, the trailer for Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty 4 followup, Modern Warfare 2. A game so flagrantly big-budget, realistically modeled, and combat-driven may seem an odd fit for the usual Offworld fare, but I’ll let you in on a secret: Call of Duty 4 was one of the smartest games I played continually throughout 2008, and my vote for (no joke) MMO of the year.

Granted, its single player game didn’t quite ring with emotional impact for me as it seemed to do for most (I’d already experienced a more lo-fi version of its desperate, crawling climax a year before in undersung PS2 gem Raw Danger), but the rank-rising, challenge-based and XP driven multiplayer game was the first online shooters since the earliest days of Half Life that would hook me so completely, a crown only stolen by Left 4 Dead.

What we don’t get above, unfortunately, is any further details on how that half of the game will have evolved, but it’s what I’m anticipating more than any other aspect.

Modern Warfare 2 [Infinity Ward]

WEEKEND WATCHING: OUR TOP NETFLIX INSTANT-WATCHING PICKS

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5.23.2009

Brandon Boyer

12 Replies

It’s been a few months since we last gave each other recommendations for Netflix on 360 weekend watching, and with things popping up and down on the service weekly, I think it’s high time for an update, particularly for this extended three-day blowout.

Here’s my quick rundown of the top things that shouldn’t be missed:

Let the Right One In: Tomas Alfredson’s take on John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel of the (basically) same name skyrocketed itself to one of my top movies of 2008 (landing it square next to Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York) for making a vampire horror movie that isn’t a vampire horror movie (despite what its stateside trailer may tell you), one that I watched four times in the first two months after its release.

It’s a coming of age story, it’s a story of isolation (on everyone’s part) and of broken, dependent relationships, that ends on a note of indistinguishably mixed hope and resolute sadness when you carry the story forward in your mind. It’s also gawpingly gorgeous, and everyone’s got good hair and wicked style. Do not miss this.

Party Down: With the first season coming to a close Friday night, you now have no excuse to not sit down and watch what I’m going to call right now as the first, best new American comedy series since.. maybe Curb Your Enthusiasm? It’s not just the cast, though that helps, a lineup which includes former State member Ken Marino, Adam Scott (who you remember as the guy who saved it with his solo in the best part of Step Brothers), Freaks and Geeks/Adventureland’s Martin Starr, and Lizzy Caplan (aka My Hollywood Girlfriend; you know her from Cloverfield and as The Only Real Reason To Watch True Blood).

The premise: each episode is a separate LA occasion worked by the titular catering service Party Down, staffed by former/fallen/would-be actors, which sounds like a perfect setup for easy hijinks, and often is, but is always very smartly tempered with an undercurrent of life-reflection — taking the easy, low road after being knocked down. Actual pathos, the kind that the American Office has been managing to scrape together each week since that brutally, Who’s-Afraid-Of-Virgina-Woolf-ishly dark Dinner Party episode. But, also, it’s very, very funny.

Those are my two top, but there’s also, of course, the first season of Graham Linehan’s IT Crowd (which I have intended to talk more about on Offworld for months, let’s do that soon), Søren Larsen’s documentary Lynch, which won’t sell you on David Lynch if you’re already a skeptic, but is an essential peek behind the transcendental curtain if you’re a fanatic, and the Short Films from his box set also recently reared their head on the service, too.

Also from around the network, BBG’s Joel has recommended this documentary on unsung music producer legend Tom Dowd and guest blogger Tiff Chow has had nothing but good things to say about CJ7, the Chinese ‘E.T.’ reimagining from Shaolin Soccer/Kung Fu Hustle director Stephen Chow.

Anyone else dug up any diamonds or have anything to recommend? Let us all know via the comments!

In the first of what promises to be a viral series leading up to Brütal Legend‘s October release, LucasArts vet and Double Fine head Tim Schafer continues to prove his acting mettle by making this appearance alongside Jack Black and Steve Agee, a performance so tour de force that it makes Black puke.

Brütal Legend [EA/Double Fine]

ONE SHOT: THE DYNAMIC TENSION OF TEAM FORTRESS 2’S SNIPER UPDATE

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5.20.2009

Brandon Boyer

6 Replies

Valve channel vintage Charles Atlas for the latest in the continuing struggle between the Sniper and the Spy leading up to TF2‘s latest update. See the official page for an explanation of what’s going on here, though it does honest to god boil down to new jar-of-pee weaponry, ala the team’s April Fool’s gag [via Valve].