Here’s something you might not know: One mouse click burns 0.00142 calories. In action-role-playing PC games like Diablo III, you’ll click that mouse literally thousands of times. And according to developer Blizzard Entertainment’s statistics (assuming one monster death equals one click), all that clicking has led players to burn 4.7 billion calories.

Who needs exercise when you have Diablo III?

Blizzard celebrates the first year of its action-RPG with an infographic [see below] full of all sorts of crazy numbers, like players killing 3.3 trillion monsters or finding over 648 trillion pieces of gold. Diablo III requires a constant Internet connection, which led to a catastrophic launch last year filled with errors, negative user reviews, and memes. In spite of its rocky start, 14.5 million unique players have fought against Diablo’s horde of demons.

For its second year, Blizzard is exposing Diablo III to a new set of players — PlayStation owners. During Sony’s PlayStation 4 event in February, Blizzard revealed that Diablo III will head to both the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 3 with console-specific changes and features. I can’t wait until Blizzard tells us how many calories we’ll shave off from pushing those analog sticks.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Xbox Live is going to the cloud.

At today’s Xbox Reveal event, corporate vice president of Xbox Live Marc Whitten announced that the new Xbox Live service for the upcoming Xbox One console provide access to movies, games, and save files from “anywhere.” He also said that the system will feature a “dedicated DVR” to capture your gameplay and upload that to the cloud as well. However, these were not shown in action, as Whitten only spent a few minutes discussing the online service before moving on to the next part of Microsoft’s presentation.

For more, check out of complete coverage of the Xbox One reveal and our livestream and liveblog.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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I was running out of time and ammo. Mutated wolves, freakish crustaceans, and a flying demon were relentlessly hunting me through the swampland. According to my watch, I only had 15 seconds left of breathable air in the gas mask. I had two choices: either let the wildlife eviscerate me from head to toe or suffocate to death from the surface’s radioactive atmosphere.

Welcome to the harsh world of Metro: Last Light.

Developer 4A Games returns to post-apocalyptic Moscow in this sequel to Metro 2033 (out May 14 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC). The studio based its first-person shooter series on the Metro books written by author Dmitry Glukhovsky. Just a few months ago, the future of Metro: Last Light was uncertain when original publisher THQ closed down due to bankruptcy, but Deep Silver (publisher of the zombie-slaying Dead Island games) picked up the publishing rights for $5.8 million during the THQ auction a few weeks later.

The interruption doesn’t seem to have affected Metro: Last Light in any meaningful way. 4A Games crafted a rich, beautiful world fraught with danger, political conspiracies, and supernatural forces.

What You’ll Like

The unshakeable sense of dread

Twenty years after nuclear missiles scorched the planet (an event stemming from World War III), Moscow is a wasteland. All sorts of monstrosities have risen from the ashes and claimed the Russian city as their turf while other creatures chose to go underground where the remaining survivors try to live a normal life. Death looms at almost every corner.

This is clear when you first step foot on the surface. Between the pockets of intense radiation and the wildlife that slithers, swims, flies, or runs across the landscape, I was always nervous when Last Light took me back above ground. Part of that anxiety comes from a sort of tactile connection that develops during the non-shooting portions of gameplay: the act (and squeaking sound) of wiping your gas mask to remove any blood or goo obscuring your vision, repeatedly charging your electrical equipment by rapidly clicking the mouse, or flicking on your lighter in places where your flashlight just doesn’t work.

As the elite Ranger known as Artyom, you’re not some avatar in a virtual shooting gallery. You’re an active participant, a citizen of the Metro. A survivor. And once you feel like you’re actually a part of the fiction, the threats amplify tenfold. The hostility isn’t limited to the world of the living, either. Remnants of the dead — those who died from the blasts — appear in the form of ghostly apparitions and disembodied voices whispering to you in the darkness. Last Light isn’t a pure survival-horror game, but the creepy elements it uses are enough to make you paranoid.

The people

The tension can feel overwhelming at times, so a series of Metro stations that people have transformed into towns serve as much-needed breaks. They’re more than just trading posts, however. You feel as if real people have lived in these places for years. You learn this from the numerous conversations happening all around you. Some folks are refugees escaping the tyrannical rule of the Nazis or the Communists (at the end of the world, it seems divergent political ideologies are stronger than ever). Others are humble merchants who will gladly take your pristine pre-apocalypse bullets — Metro’s form of currency, which you can also use as ammo — in exchange for their wares. And some are just thieves, looking to scam the next poor bastard who walks their way.

Even your enemies, if unaware of your presence in the shadows, tell fascinating stories. One group I snuck up behind were sharing superstitious tales, like the story of The Tunnel Keeper, a mysterious Pied Piper of the Metro who commands its followers to travel into the dark tunnels. They’re never heard from again.

These conversations are shining beacons of life (or whatever’s left of it) in the otherwise bleak future that Last Light depicts. You can see the weariness on the survivors’ faces. But, somehow, they’ve found a way to go on with their lives after the bombs had dropped. I found this oddly comforting.

Post-apocalyptic beauty

Metro: Last Light looks stunning. If you have the means to, you should definitely play this on a PC. Even my ancient machine, which is slightly above the minimum requirements, was able to run one of the most visually striking games I’ve ever seen. The developers sculpted a gorgeous painting out of the charred and broken buildings, bridges, and streets of post-fallout Moscow. The same is true for the labyrinthine tunnels and city states of the Metro system where gas lamps illuminate the dank walls and filthy homes of its tenants in gritty detail.

It makes me jealous for those who are able to run Last Light at its “optimum” settings, which require, among other things, a $1,000 Nvidia graphics card. If you fall into that camp, pat yourself on the back. You’re in for one hell of a visual treat.

Filed under: Games

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As the masked mercenary known as Deadpool, Wade Wilson mostly looks out for himself. The nobler heroes he sometimes fights alongside with do their best to distance themselves from him as much as possible. And he never shuts up — he’s called the “Merc with the Mouth” for a reason.

He also has two other voices living (and arguing with each other) inside his head. So he’s kind of insane.

That insanity plays a huge part in High Moon Studio’s third-person action game based on Marvel Comic’s vulgar antihero (out June 25 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC). Deadpool’s mind is split into three distinct personalities: regular Deadpool (who you play as), a childish Deadpool dealing with raging hormones, and a veteran soldier who’s a bit more level-headed and strategic. The developer recruited former Deadpool author Daniel Way to write the story and brought along ubiquitous voice actor Nolan North — who sounds like he had a hell of a lot of fun in the role — as Deadpool himself.

After playing and watching small chunks of the (surprisingly fluid) combat-focused gameplay, I noticed that much of the off-the-wall humor works because of Deadpool’s many voices. Here’s a look at how they viewed the most memorable events from the demo.

Source: High Moon Studios

You can extend the combo timer by shooting enemies with the right trigger.

Deadpool

Like in the comics, Deadpool loves to break the fourth wall. He’s well aware that he’s in a video game, so instead of saving the world, he’s trying to make the best game he can. In the first level, Deadpool speaks to the president of High Moon Studios over the phone, who finally agrees to make the game after Deadpool’s bombs go off in the developers’ office. He even calls Nolan North, but he promptly yells, “Well, fuck you, Nolan!” after North proposes an “alternative” take on the character that has him chasing after men rather than women.

His methods to make the game can seem illogical: At one point, I had to rapidly tap a button to inflate a large bounce house at the bottom of a sewer. Since I didn’t know where to go, I kept jumping inside of it — hearing North saying “Boing!” in dozens of ways is kind of entertaining — until Activision producer Chris Owen pointed out that a gate had opened (which you could barely see behind the house). It all made sense 20 minutes later, when, at the end of the level, Deadpool came crashing down from the top of a skyscraper and used the bounce house to cushion his fall.

“[Since Deadpool can't die due to his regenerative healing powers], there are no consequences to [his] actions,” said senior creative director Dave Cravens. “He can do all sorts of things that other characters can’t. So that’s part of what drives him. That and the fact that he’s just absolutely insane. I think when he walks into a room, he’s convinced everybody loves him, unless they’re shooting at him. [But] if they got to know him, they would love him. So Deadpool is all about Deadpool.”

Quotable lines

When the first achievement pops on the screen:
“What’s that? You guys tracking my every move now? But I haven’t even accomplished anything in this game yet!”

Deadpool tries to edit a script sent by High Moon. But he tosses it away and turns to you:
“Hey, player, just go with it. We’re about to change your fucking life. Bring the noise!”

When all three voices try to figure out how much explosives he should use:
“Dude, fuck math. Just use all of it!”

Source: High Moon Studios

Deadpool can slowly take out bad guys with stealth executions.

Juvenile Deadpool

The naïve and childish version of Deadpool sounds like he hasn’t quite hit puberty yet, but that doesn’t stop him from giving in to his more impulsive desires … including, but not limited to, his libido. When he comes across Cable (one of many Marvel characters making a cameo) in the island of Genosha, Deadpool imagines him as a woman wearing a small bikini. The image evaporates as he runs toward him, but he still thinks she’s there. If you choose to, you can make Deadpool squeeze Cable’s nonexistent breasts, which he swiftly counters by punching him in the face.

Quotable lines

While the three voices argue whether Cable’s telling the truth about the “incredibly large breasted” naked woman who wants to meet Deadpool:
“B-B-B-But what if Cable means it this time?”

After you inflate Deadpool’s sex doll in his apartment:
“She always looks so surprised to see us!”

While Deadpool sings a pretty decent rendition of Patsy Cline’s “Crazy”:
“See? He’s like an angel!”

Source: High Moon Studios

One of Deadpool’s “gun-ka” abilities that attacks multiple targets.

Commander Deadpool

This personality speaks in several octaves lower than the other two, and his no-nonsense comments make it clear that at least some part of Deadpool still cares about preserving whatever integrity he has left. But he’s ultimately powerless, since the others don’t listen to him.

He’s also a stark reminder that Deadpool is an efficient killing machine. Due to his regenerative healing, Deadpool can’t die; he just gets knocked out if his health bar reaches zero and scolds the player when it happens. Starting off with his signature katanas — and later with a pair of daggers and large hammers — you’ll use a combination of quick and heavy attacks to brutally dispatch your foes. Guns can extend your combo time: Deadpool automatically locks on to targets and fires at them when you pull the right trigger. A teleportation ability (that you can direct with the analog stick) is useful for dodging incoming attacks.

You earn Deadpool Points with each kill, which are redeemable for new weapons or upgrades. Longer combos will also increase your Momentum meter and give you access to special “gun-ka” techniques. These show off Deadpool’s acrobatic skills as he leaps into the air and eliminates groups of enemies in one fell swoop.

Quotable lines

After Deadpool realizes that Cable lied about the fan girl:
“Don’t worry, we’ll land a real girl someday. This is our game, after all.”

When you first discover the sex doll:
“If this game had a shame meter, it’d be full right now.”

While Deadpool scribbles all over the game script sent by High Moon Studios:
“Ah, crayons. Very classy.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Like movies, games tend to follow certain trends. Action games became more cinematic after the bloody debut of God of War. Cover-based third-person shooters proliferated after the success of Gears of War. And more recently, some indie developers are flocking to the blocky graphics made popular by Minecraft.

Specifically, they’re adding guns and explosions to the basic block-building gameplay. On the PC, at least three first-person multiplayer shooters use this same premise: Jagex’s Ace of Spades (out now for $9.99), Infernum Productions’s Brick-Force (free-to-play as either a download or in your browser), and Exato Game Studios’s Guncraft (releasing this spring for $15). You can carve and shape the battlefield in hundreds of ways in each game, making it hard to tell what the differences are just from looking at videos or screenshots. So we decided to see for ourselves what each one has to offer.

Crafting

Ace of Spades

Ace of Spades uses a class-based system: The choices are the Miner, Commando, Marksman, or Rocketeer. Though each one comes with their own arsenal, all of them can build and destroy levels using guns and melee weapons like spades and pickaxes (the only mode you can’t build anything in is in “classic” capture-the-flag matches). The Miner can get through more blocks — his spade can take out whole walls at a time – than the others, who can only dismantle one or two blocks per hit.

Besides building with individual blocks, you can use premade structures called prefabs to improve your defenses or to lay down a new path, such as small platforms, towers, and staircases. However, nearly five months after its launch on Steam, Ace of Spades still doesn’t have the tools to let players create their own maps.

Brick-Force

Brick-Force has an elegant setup for community-made maps – Infernum highlights a new one every week on its website, and the most popular maps are in regular rotation on the servers. Level building is fairly straightforward: You plop down into a barren landscape and choose different brick types from a menu. You can use specialized abilities and items, like lighting bricks on fire or placing gun turrets, but you can only put down a small number of them. You can also join or create specific “build rooms” so others can come in and help you build a new map.

Guncraft

Guncraft also emphasizes player-made maps. You’ll often find matches based on custom maps rather than those created by the developers. One neat feature in the map editor is that you can generate random terrain like a river, a desert, or frozen tundra. You can even design your own custom prefabs.

What may become the most impressive part of Guncraft is the actual gun crafting, a feature that’s not out yet (it’s coming after launch). By using a similar grid-like interface from the map editor, you can customize the look of your weapon before you bring it online. You’ll have points that you can pour into different stats — vehicle damage, player damage, bullets per shot, and such — but Exato is still working the kinks out, as gun crafting might lead to some seriously overpowered weapons if the studio isn’t careful.

Notable multiplayer modes

All three of these shooters have the usual selection of multiplayer matches we’ve seen and played countless times before (team deathmatch, capture the flag, and so on), so here’s a look at the modes that stand out for each game:

Ace of Spades

Despite how overused the undead are in FPS games, Ace of Spade’s Zombie Survival mode isn’t half bad. You only have a minute or two to find a place to hide or defend yourself before someone in the map is randomly picked as the first zombie. The zombies must kill all the survivors before the timer is up.

Once turned into a zombie, you have a few options. Zombies can tear through blocks almost as effectively as the Miner, and they can build their own prefabs. On your minimap, you can also see the heartbeats of the leftover human players, indicating the general area in which they’re hiding. The mode plays out like a frantic game of tagging as you try to build yourself an escape route or dig underground and hope the zombies don’t find you.

Brick-Force

Brick-Force’s Build ‘n Destroy mode boils down the genre into its essential ingredients. Teams go through two distinct phases during a match: the first to build, and the second to fight each other and destroy (the host can customize how long each phase lasts), with a semi-transparent wall separating both sides during the building time. After a match ends, the process repeats, but this time you can improve your existing fortifications from the last round. It’s just a shame that not too many people actually play this — you might find a room or two among a sea of team deathmatches when searching the servers.

Guncraft

If you want to take a break from shooting other block people in the face, the best way to spend that time is in Lava Survival. Players must race to the top of a map — or build a new way to get there — before a rising pool of lava consumes them (the speed it rises varies from map to map). But instead of killing other people with your guns, you can freeze them for a few seconds, which is a death sentence if the lava is nearby. The optional hookshot weapon (similar to a grappling hook) is your best friend here, as you can use it to quickly move away from the lava … or accidentally fall into it if you miss your next shot.

Cool weapons and tools

Ace of Spades

Two guns immediately stand out when you play Ace of Spades: the Drill Cannon and the Snowblower. The former is the exclusive property of the Miner, and he can use it to disintegrate massive rows of blocks in an instant as the drill plows through terrain with ease. It’s not much of an offensive weapon, but it’s fun for making underground tunnels or for weakening your opponent’s base.

The Snowblower, meanwhile, is a handy build tool as well as a deadly weapon. It rapidly fires blocks of ice, making it useful for plugging up holes in your base or building new walls. Any player that gets caught in its path will die within a few shots.

Brick-Force

Brick-Force’s in-game store has a lot of odd accessories and silly costumes for you to put on. Want to dress up like Batman with a cowl and a cape? You can do that. You can also buy or rent (using either in-game currency earned from playing or real world money) a jetpack, new materials to build (such as anti-gravity nodes), new guns (you start out with a submachine gun and a pistol), and new melee weapons (including pitchforks and frying pans). While the weapons all have different stats and functions, buying them is more or less an aesthetic choice.

Guncraft

The real stars of Guncraft’s combat are the vehicles. Taking a page from Electronic Arts’ Battlefield series, players can take control of helicopters, massive gunships, tanks, and even Star Wars-like hover bikes. Some maps already come with a few vehicles, but others become accessible only when you gain a certain amount of kills (borrowing Call of Duty’s killstreak bonuses). They don’t always work — helicopters and tanks can sometimes get stuck inside a building or in the ground– but it’s a minor trade-off for the chaos that ensues as blocks and gunfire fly across the screen.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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For the followers of Epsilonism, the Earth is only 157 years old. They believe dinosaurs are a lie that people fall for because they are weak. And if you have a birthmark, you might be a descendant of Kraff, the famous “Emperor of the 4th Paradigm.”

The only things the religious cult asks for in return is an open mind and your wallet.

The clear-cut parody of the Church of Scientology is just another jab at pop culture in the upcoming Grand Theft Auto V. The open-world crime game doesn’t come out until Sept. 7, so developer Rockstar Games has a few more months to drip feed cryptic teases, such as this PSA from the fictional Epsilon Program. The video displays the various goals and belief systems against a background of seaside cliffs, a lighthouse, and a small island, which look like possible locations for GTAV. The portrait of a new character dressed in a ceremonial robe is also shown.

Check out the three-minute teaser below:

This isn’t the first time that the Epsilon Program has been in a GTA title — you could’ve found out about it in missions or idle chatter from pedestrians and radio stations. Back in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, you can run into Epsilon believers who love to shout “Kifflom!” — the name of a deity Epsilonists worship that’s also used as a greeting — or hear an interview with its leader, Cris Formage, on West Coast Talk Radio. In Grand Theft Auto IV, you can hear another person talking about Kifflom on Public Liberty Radio. And if you place an order for GTAV on Rockstar’s Warehouse site, you can get a Kifflom shirt for free.

On its website, the developer invites readers to visit “one of [the Epsilon Program's] enlightenment centers.” Directions to those centers, and possibly more GTAV news, will arrive in a week.

(Thanks to Zak Islam for the tip.)

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The 3DS is having a great year. Between hardcore strategy role-playing games and the return of beloved franchises, Nintendo has been cookin’ up a diverse library for its 3D-enabled handheld.

During yesterday’s Nintendo Direct video announcement, it revealed a ton of information on upcoming 3DS games for the spring and summer — and just a few hours later, it was ready to show some of them off during a press event in San Francisco. While we played everything there, we’ve narrowed down the list to the four games you should pay attention to, breaking down just how similar or different they are from other entries in their respective series.

As an extra bonus, we wrangled up a few Nintendo representatives to tell us some little known facts behind each game.

Harness the power of the ‘stache

Title: Mario & Luigi: Dream Team
Release date: August 11

Synopsis

The newest role-playing adventure for the world’s most famous plumbers (which is different from that other Mario RPG series) has the Mario brothers running back and forth between dreams and reality to save Princess Peach. It’s like Inception except with less music by Edith Piaf and more vaguely Italian-sounding dialogue.

What’s old or new about it?

Besides earning experience points and levels, Dream Team is totally different from earlier games in the series. Mario crosses into the dream world whenever Luigi volunteers to sleep on magical pillows. This is where he teams up with the magnanimous Dreamy Luigi (they’re Luigi’s dreams, after all), a much more powerful version of his brother. Dreamy Luigi can merge with sparkling auras called Luiginary Works, where he becomes a giant, disembodied face that can help Mario around the 2D platforming levels.

The first Luiginary Work uses Luigi’s thick mustache as a stretchy tree branch — you pull his real mustache with the stylus on the bottom screen and let go once Mario is on it — that propels Mario to greater heights. Luigi’s second power brings objects in the background to the foreground with a powerful sneeze; you trigger it by rubbing his nose with the stylus.

Did you know?

“The game’s writing in English is handled by Nate Bihldorff, from the Nintendo of America localization team,” said a Nintendo representative. “Nate has been the lead writer for every game in the series to date.”

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Unless you’re a heartless monster, the sight of cute pets who need our tender love and care is simply irresistible in video games. For proof, just look back at the 1990s, where the Tamagotchi craze began (and quickly died) alongside the Pokémon and Digimon games.

Developer ZeptoLab tapped into this innate desire when it released the first Cut the Rope for mobile phones and tablets in 2010. The goal was simple: feed the weird green monster (called Om Nom) some candy by solving physics-based puzzles. Almost three years and 300 million downloads later — and after a successful sequel with Cut the Rope: Experiments, a Chinese New Year-related update called Cut the Rope: Lantern Box, a comic book, lucrative merchandising deals, and the launch of an animated web series — ZeptoLab is ready to unveil its newest Cut the Rope game.

Cut the Rope: Time Travel (out today for iOS and Android devices and reviewed on an iPhone 4S) isn’t a radical departure from its predecessors, but it’s just as addicting. The biggest change is that you now have two Om Noms to feed in each level: the one from the present and an ancestor from its family’s past, like a warrior from the Middle Ages or an artist from the Renaissance. Future updates to Time Travel will include new levels as well as the second season of the animated Om Nom Stories (the first episode comes out May 4), which you can watch from within the game.

In other words, Cut the Rope: Time Travel continues ZeptoLab’s quest of transforming Om Nom into not just a popular video game monster, but also as a widely recognizable cartoon character.

What you’ll like

The adorable Om Nom

How can you not love Om Nom’s face? ZeptoLab has done a great job of turning a green blob with stubby legs and huge eyes into a lovable character that you just want to squish to pieces — it’s like the long lost cousin of Gizmo and Stitch. From the cartoon, we know that Om Nom has a bit of a personality, too: It’s rambunctious and has a child-like sense of wonder (which led it to stumble into a mysterious time machine in the first place). Om Nom oozes the kind of charm that both adults and children can appreciate.

Just the right level of difficulty

While the first 90 levels (which I completed in about two hours) steadily adds new challenges, it never feels too overwhelming. Familiar obstacles and tools like ropes, rockets, and bouncing platforms are still here, as well as new ones like portals and the ability to stop time (see the gallery below for a full list). Trying to figure out which object to activate first is a lot like applying the order of operations to a math problem: If you accidentally set off something or mess up in just one area, you’ll probably have to restart the level.

Like in the first two Cut the Rope games, however, I never felt truly stumped. Just when I’m thinking about using Om Nom’s telepathic powers (it has a finite amount of uses) to cheat by pushing candies to its mouth, I find a way to pass the level. It isn’t always the most elegant solution, nor do I always earn a perfect three-star rating, but it’s still rewarding to solve Time Travel’s complex visual equations.

Cut the Rope: Time Travel screenshots

What you won’t like 

Pesky ads asking you for money

Nothing takes you out of the experience like an ad that constantly reminds you that you can refill Om Nom’s superpowers with real money. You’re given a few to start off with, but the message pops up if you’re repeatedly failing a level. I suppose the prices aren’t too insane (from 20 uses for $1.99 up to 1,000 uses for $19.99), especially since the game costs about a buck or three depending on the platform, but it’s just another stark reminder that mobile games are not afraid to put their business models front and center.

Conclusion

Cut the Rope: Time Travel is the type of time-wasting game that mobile devices excel at. Most of the levels takes seconds or minutes to solve and it’s easily double that amount for dedicated players going for the coveted three-star rating in every level. Having two mouths to feed doesn’t change the formula all that much, but when combined with the funny time traveling premise and the upcoming cartoon, ZeptoLab gives you more than a few good reasons to come back to Om Nom again.

Score: 80/100

Cut the Rope: Time Travel is out now for iOS ($0.99 for iPhone and iPod touch, $2.99 for iPad) and Android devices ($0.99 on Google Play). The publisher provided GamesBeat with the iOS version for the purpose of this review.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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SAN FRANCISCO — Colwn was losing momentum. The European team tied round after round with Curse Gaming, the last surviving Americans in the tournament. But now its loss seemed imminent as Curse’s Casey “Buds” McIlwaine began to eliminate them with surgical precision. First, he took out one Colwn member from an impressive 32.5 meters away, then another at 11.7. The last fell in a tense 1-on-1 battle when Buds shot him from above.

The defending world champions of the first-person shooter ShootMania Storm had fallen. Curse would go on to lose to Fnatic’s dominant performance in the finals, but it didn’t matter. This was by far the most exciting match of the weekend.

“There’s so much pressure,” said Colwn member Alessandro “Stermy” Avallone 24 hours before his defeat. “You have many eyes on you. You have the lights. You’re playing on a big stage. You’re not playing from your room.”

Source: Shootmaniac.net

Alessandro “Stermy” Avallone

Avallone, only 25 years old, is a veteran of the e-sports (and media) circuit. You could tell: He was very well-spoken and composed and knew exactly what to say. He ditched what may have been a promising career in professional soccer — “I did tryouts for quite famous teams when I was younger,” he told me — when he began entering video game competitions in the early 2000s in his home country of Italy. His list of achievements since playing full-time is nothing short of impressive.

Colwn had recently added a new person to its roster, the 17-year-old Dylan “Akm” Bignet, the younger brother to the third Colwn teammate, Michael “Winz” Bignet. While the team doesn’t have a clear leadership structure, Avallone stressed the importance of showing Akm how to compose himself while up on stage.

“For a young player like him, we try to teach him not only the way to act when you have to play, but we try to make sure that he knows how to have the right mindset when going to live tournaments because there’s [a big] difference than playing online,” said Avallone.

The trio was just one of 16 teams competing in last weekend’s ShootMania launch tournament held in conjunction with the now disbanded IGN Pro League (IPL). On the line was $100,000, but no matter where teams ended up on the ladder, each one walked away with at least some kind of monetary prize.

Here comes a new challenger

With so much money and sponsorships involved, it’s easy to forget that some of the pro players, known more by their online IDs than their real names, are still kids — they can’t even drink yet. Many walked around the comedy club-turned-e-sports-arena clutching pillows, backpacks, and duffel bags either waiting for their next match or — for those already eliminated — hanging out to watch the rest of the bracket unfold. At least one of them had his entire family (mom, sister, and sister’s boyfriend) cheering him on from the dimly lit sidelines.

Fans, journalists, IPL staff members, and other onlookers crowded toward the back, where a well-stocked open bar was serving drinks. The main stage, lit up like a Christmas tree with bright monitors and light fixtures, overlooked rows of PCs where anyone could sit down and play ShootMania for fun. They were almost always full.

Placed right near the foot of the stage, where the pros competed, were the commentators (also known as “shoutcasters”). For someone like me who was unfamiliar with the game, they did a good job of setting up the scene and describing the players’ various stratagems and motivations. And a giant projector screen displayed all the professional matches, which was clearly viewable from almost all angles in the venue.

Source: Ubisoft

Danny “TestyRabbit” Gillies (left) at the PAX East tournament

This was the kind of experience that Danny “TestyRabbit” Gillies was looking for. Unlike Avallone, this was the first time Gillies — and his underdog team, Ride the Lightning — competed at a professional level. Ride the Lightning qualified as the sixteenth team because of its victory during a special competition held at last month’s Penny Arcade Expo in Boston. Though excited about coming to San Francisco, it ended up woefully unprepared: Ride the Lightning lost both of its matches on the first day.

“A week before PAX, we played about six to eight hours a day,” said Gillies. “But toward the end of the week, our performance kind of like went down a lot because we were just kind of tired of playing. I had a lot of work to do for these last two weeks for school, so I wasn’t able to play that much. So we didn’t play as much as we would’ve liked to.”

No one in Ride the Lightning competes full-time: Gillies is in college, and his two teammates, Jacob “Vee” Calderon and Ryan “Odin” Therrien, both have other jobs. Without sponsorships to help pay their way to tournaments across the country, Gillies seemed unsure of Ride the Lightning’s future as a professional team.

“We got lucky — if Ubisoft wasn’t paying for our trip here, we wouldn’t have come,” he said. “But lucky enough, they did. … I guess [we'll keep competing] until we run out of money. [Laughs]”

Top image credit: Ubisoft

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Haunted Hollow’s origin story isn’t as grotesque as those behind the mummies, goblins, and zombies it proudly depicts. The turn-based free-to-play strategy game is from the minds of lead designers David McDonough and Will Miller. It’s coming to iOS devices later this spring. But it would take a few years — and some fortuitous timing — before their idea became a reality.

Both men got their start in the industry at Firaxis Games (McDonough as a producer and Miller as a gameplay programmer), a studio known for such hardcore strategy franchises like Civilization and the more recent XCOM: Enemy Unknown. At different points in their careers, they left Firaxis to work at the now defunct Big Huge Games as system designers on Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. They barely missed the ax: A few weeks before Big Huge shut down last year due to the (very public) financial collapse of its parent company, 38 Studios, Firaxis asked them to return to work on a new mobile game.

Lucky for them, they agreed.

The original premise, which McDonough and Miller came up with while eating lunch one day, had players running a hotel for monsters, the kind of creatures made famous through pop culture like vampires and werewolves. Gradually, it became more complicated. The hotel full of monsters became a haunted house full of monsters. The player was now a “mad scientist” or “insane count” who’d send their deadly minions to scare the people living in a nearby town.

Soon, they realized the game needed a more clearly defined opponent, so they plunked down a second haunted house that another person (or the A.I.) could control. The blueprint they ended up drawing from this brainstorm featured two “ridiculous” houses casting shadows on opposite sides of a small valley — Haunted Hollow was born.

Source: Firaxis Games

Haunted Hollow designers Will Miller (left) and David McDonough.

Taking a family friendly approach

While Haunted Hollow maintains the type of gameplay depth that Firaxis is known for, it’s still quite different from anything else the company has done before, especially with an art style that wouldn’t look out of place on The Disney Channel.

“Civ, of course, is a dead serious game, and XCOM is also like that, especially what the art guys at Firaxis did with it when they rebooted it — they really made it like a sci-fi movie and it feels very tense,” explained McDonough. “But in Firaxis’ back catalog, there are a lot more lighter games: from Sim Golf to Pirates to Railroads. … And when Firaxis asked us to make a mobile game, that’s the direction we thought. We really love mobile games for their sort of whimsical nature, their casual, universal appeal, and for the way this platform lends itself to a sort of board game sensibility, which seemed perfect for a cross-demographic style of game.”

Instead of going for a bloody or spooky take on classic monsters, the developers headed the opposite way. They made them cute so that Haunted Hollow wouldn’t seem scary to kids, but they also made sure that they looked appealing enough for adults to appreciate.

“We got the children of the developers — the lead programmer and lead artists — their sons were sort of the test group for how scary things were,” said McDonough. “We definitely wanted it to be a family game that you can play with your kids, and that they can have [as much fun with it as you are].”

Source: 2K Games

Combing the same type of rooms results in a larger version. It’s better to build up into the sky to make the most use of your space.

Scaring the townsfolk is tougher than it sounds. To assemble a powerful army of monsters, you have to carefully think about the construction of your haunted mansion. You receive a new room to plop down on your house with each turn, and the type of room you use will determine the type of monster that’ll join you: The vampire’s room is full of stained glass windows, the mummy’s has a golden sarcophagus, and so on. If you place the same rooms next to each other, you’ll create a bigger version of that room and spawn a monster with better stats and attacks.

Haunted Hallow categorizes the creatures in three different roles: Those who can only scare people in their houses (giving you Fear points to buy monsters and power-ups for each match), those who only attack (killing rival monsters slows the other player down), and those who can do a little of both. You’ll have to use all three types to take over the town and stop your opponent — either a local player sitting near you as you pass your iPhone or iPad back and forth, someone online via Apple’s Game Center, or against the A.I. — from doing the same (they can bring your possessed houses under their control by scaring them again).

A third faction, an angry mob brandishing pitchforks and torches, makes the territorial conquest a little more complicated. They descend from a central church when the town’s meter (increasing with each home you control) reaches a certain point, and they’ll attack any monster near them as well as burn down houses that you or your opponent took over. Only higher level creatures can defeat them.

Image credit: Firaxis Games

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With his slick armor, explosive weapons, and cocky attitude, Iron Man tends to get all the attention when he’s fighting alongside his superpowered friends (like in The Avengers). That’s why I wasn’t surprised when, even in just Lego brick form, the billionaire playboy still managed to hog the spotlight in the latest Marvel game.

Scheduled for a fall release on almost every current system — Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Nintendo Wii U, PC, PlayStation Vita, Nintendo 3DS, and even the DS — Lego Marvel Super Heroes brings together Iron Man, Deadpool, Black Widow, and over 100 other Marvel characters in a huge adventure designed by developer TT Games. You’ll use the superheroes’ different abilities to try to stop Loki and the rest of his villainous cohorts from collecting the mysterious Cosmic Bricks.

TT Games showed a 20-minute demo (one I couldn’t play) of Lego Marvel Super Heroes during last week’s Game Developers Conference in San Francisco (a meeting that was literally next door to the new DC Comics game I also saw that day). Producer Phillip Ring played as Iron Man, the Hulk, and Spider-Man as they ventured into the Lego Marvel version of Grand Central Station in New York City.

Seeing the Hulk smash things into dozens of Lego pieces and a blocky Iron Man flying through the air as he obliterates enemies with his energy blasts invoked the kind of charm and childish delight that’s only possible with the Lego games. It seemed like an ideal digital playground for players to pit their favorite superheroes and supervillains against each other.

Source: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

Abomination is one of the Hulk’s many nemeses.

Historic matchups

One point Ring kept stressing during the demo was the importance placed on representing the legendary rivalries in the Marvel universe, both to satiate comic book fans and simply to serve as “cool boss encounters” for those unaware of the characters’ history. The first example was the Hulk versus Abomination, who are both larger than the traditional Lego “minifig” size. That difference was clearly apparent in the way they fought each other: They lifted cars and traded powerful punches in a button-mashing minigame that left the Hulk victorious.

Lurking inside Grand Central was Sandman, whose ability to shape sand into anything he wishes turned the train station into his own Manhattan desert, preventing the player from reaching him at the end of the building. Tall sand walls and dozens of Sandman’s minions littered the screen as Ring switched between Iron Man and the Hulk to fight them off. This is where it looked like Iron Man had the advantage — he can fly around thanks to his armor’s jets, avoiding enemies on the ground while blasting them with his signature unibeam.

Source: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

Sandman has taken over the train station (loosely based on the real Grand Central Station in NYC).

However, even though Iron Man can fly, he can’t just skip straight to Sandman; you have to bring your whole gang of heroes with you. And that requires a bit of teamwork. Ring had to build a water cannon, but neither Iron Man or the Hulk can use it. So he transformed the Hulk into his scientist alter-ego, Bruce Banner — his huge green limbs amusingly pop like a bubble back into their human form — so he could shoot the cannon. Once the wall solidified with the mixture of sand and water, he turned back to the Hulk again so he could smash through it.

Ring then skipped a few scenes later to bring us outside of the station as Spider-Man joined the fray. The wall-crawler can swing through levels by using his web shooters and can also use his spider-sense in certain areas (shown with shiny red and blue particles onscreen) to find and activate items. By this point, Sandman had become a building-sized version of himself with an impressive amount of Lego blocks swirling up and down his body.

Source: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment

Sandman swells into a building-sized version of himself at the end of the level.

Ring had to leverage the different abilities of Spider-Man and the Hulk (with Iron Man still flying around) to finally defeat him. He used Spider-Man to create a web rope so that Bruce Banner could climb to the top of a platform, smash something there as the Hulk, and turn back into Banner to use another water cannon. Sandman crumbled after he shot him with two more cannons scattered in the level.

The mission ended with a cutscene of S.H.I.E.L.D’s Nick Fury (voiced by a Samuel L. Jackson soundalike) and Agent Coulson (bizarrely marrying the Marvel films with the universe of the comics) talking to the heroes about the Cosmic Bricks. They cracked funny one-liners that stayed true to each of their personalities, like Spider-Man complaining about having too much homework to do or Iron Man asking Fury if the next mission will cut into his “jacuzzi time.”

Ring concluded the presentation by saying that you’ll visit more than just New York (including an open-world portion of Manhattan), such as Thor’s otherworldly home and locations familiar to X-Men fans. Each area features a different mix of characters — the one following Sandman’s has Wolverine and Captain America teaming up — because TT Games wanted to cover as many Marvel characters as it could in the storyline.

“We wanted to make sure that … every time we bring someone in, it feels like they’re adding something to the gameplay,” said Ring. “Something to the experience that you didn’t have previously.”

Lego Marvel Super Heroes screenshots

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The Ouya and the GameStick are like the Deep Impact and Armageddon of Android-based microconsoles. They’re so similar that it might be hard to parse the differences between the two, let alone in an increasingly crowded alternative console market that relies on digital downloads (as opposed to buying games on a disc).

Ouya releases June 4 for $99 and GameStick ships in late April or early May for $79. Both were present at the annual Game Developers Conference last week in San Francisco, where we spent a little time with the miniature devices and their games. But we all know that consoles are more than just their specifications, so here’s what you can expect when you plug in the Ouya and GameStick to your television.

Hover over the gallery below to see the comparison:

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Unless you’re playing competitive multiplayer games at a professional level, you don’t have much incentive to get better. Positive kill/death ratios and a high-ranking might snag you a fancy new logo for your gamertag or maybe a shiny weapon skin that not too many other players have, but that’s usually it.

MekTek Studios takes it one step further. It wants to transform the best players into e-sports stars.

The developer has ambitious plans for Heavy Gear Assault, a first-person multiplayer-only mech simulator coming to PCs in 2014. It will be the first title in the Heavy Gear universe (which started life as a table top role-playing game nearly 20 years ago) in over a decade. MekTek is bringing back the franchise in style: It’s using Unreal Engine 4, the newest iteration of Epic Games’s tool for next-generation development.

The first teaser trailer (embedded below) is all in-game footage, and I’m told this is what the final product will look like when it releases later next year.

Are you not entertained?

Heavy Gear Assault has its sights set on the exploding e-sports scene. Gameplay revolves around a gladiatorial arena where giant robots and their pilots fight each other for fame and money. You can obliterate the opposing mech’s limbs and weapons using your own guns or get up close with swords and hammers. All of this carnage takes place on a battlefield with destructible terrain.

MekTek had an early demo to show during the Game Developers Conference, depicting just the arena and basic combat skills. Since it’s a simulation, controlling a mech requires a bit more dexterity than the usual first-person shooter: The mouse controls the direction your torso is facing and WASD keys handle the legs. Mechs accelerate like cars, so the longer you hold down the keys, the faster you’ll move. When I fired my rifle at the player next to me, his armor gradually twisted and darkened from taking too much damage.

The edges of the arena contained sections for audience members. When the game is live, these avatars will represent real players watching a match. But they aren’t passive observers; they have the power to influence a fight. If they don’t like what the participants are doing or if they’re just bored, they can activate environmental hazards in the arena by voting. If enough people vote, the fighters will have another obstacle to deal with as they lunge for each other’s throats.

The audience can also grade their performance, which will affect the fighters’ reputations. It wasn’t clear what happens if a player has a bad reputation, but Mektek hopes this system will encourage good sportsmanship — by weeding out jerks and cheaters — in the community.

If you have an entrepreneurial spirit, you can even sponsor mech pilots with your in-game money (earned from winning matches) and follow their exploits throughout different tournaments, leagues, and seasons. Alternatively, you can place bounties on players’ heads so you don’t have to do the dirty work yourself.

The features sounded really exciting, but at this early stage in the development process, it’s difficult to tell if they’ll actually pan out.

Source: MekTek Studios

Concept art for the arena.

MekTek is adopting the popular free-to-play model for Heavy Gear Assault. You can either play the base game for free or sign up for a premium subscription, similar to free-to-play massively multiplayer online role-playing games (such as Star Wars: The Old Republic).

Premium subscribers (for a rate not yet finalized) will have more benefits in the long run: discounted prices for cosmetic improvements like new pieces of armor and invitations to exclusive tournaments and events are just a few rewards the developers have planned.

Currently, MekTek and Heavy Gear Assault publisher Stompy Bot Productions are running a pledging campaign on its website to help fund the game with a simultaneous crowdfunding initiative launching on Kickstarter in two weeks. The goal is to raise $900,000 (so far they have $100,000). If all goes well, a beta version will come out some time in the first quarter of 2014.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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SAN FRANCISCO — Comic book fans love to argue about which superheroes would win in a fight. Would Batman really beat Superman? Could the Flash take on the Green Lantern? But what if these heroes fought against themselves: Would Batman Prime (with the regular cowl and tights) win against the vampire-like Nightmare Batman? Or would Gaslight Batman’s steampunk gadgets school them both?

These are the sorts of questions Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment may answer with Infinite Crisis, a free-to-play multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) for the PC featuring the well-known heroes and villains from DC Comics. It follows the basic MOBA formula: Two teams fight for control over specific points on a map, players level up by capturing those points or killing the opposing team, and then they upgrade their skills and buy items to maximize the potential of their characters.

Handling development duties is Turbine, a studio best known for its massively multiplayer online games like The Lord of the Rings Online. With Infinite Crisis (set for release later this fall), Turbine is going up against established MOBA giants such as Riot Games’ League of Legends and Valve’s Dota 2. Even though Warner Bros. just announced it Monday, Infinite Crisis was ready to see, with an early version available to the press at the annual Game Developers Conference.

It may not set the MOBA world on fire, but my time with Infinite Crisis was enough to see that — just like the DC-centric fighter Injustice: Gods Among Us — superhero-on-superhero battles never get old, no matter what the genre.

“All of our work has been about players getting online, playing together in groups, and having a good time together,” said executive producer Jeffrey Steefel. “ And MOBAs felt like the natural next step for us.”

Taking inspiration from the comics

While the plot is loosely based on the Infinite Crisis comic book series that DC released a few years ago, Turbine wants to tell its own story and focus, in Steefel’s words, “on the characters and the [different] worlds they come from.” The premise involves a mysterious cataclysm that pulls in all sorts of parallel universes (hence the different versions of the superheroes and supervillains) to the Earth we know and love. As a protector, you must assemble a team to fight against other teams in order to restore order across all the worlds.

Source: Turbine

Zatanna (left) takes on Captain Marvel.

Infinite Crisis will start off with six different variants of each character, with Turbine planning to release more (including versions of heroes that aren’t in the comics) as time goes on. These aren’t just character skins, however. Each will have their own sets of powers, skills, and backstories: That means Gaslight Batman handles very differently from Nightmare Batman.

For those who closely follow DC Comics lore, Turbine also made sure to incorporate some character-specific touches to their attacks and abilities. I only got to play two characters during my short time with Infinite Crisis, but the best example I saw was when I was controlling Captain Marvel. His ultimate attack (ultimates unlock for all characters once they hit level 6) actually reverts him to his human alter ego Billy Batson, a young teenaged boy, who then runs up to the nearest enemy and yells his trademark battle cry of “Shazam!” This summons a large thunderbolt that hurts anyone within a small radius as Billy transforms back into Captain Marvel.

Other ultimate attacks also lean on creating the sort of spectacle you’d expect when superheroes fight each other. The Green Lantern (the Hal Jordan version) creates a large plane using the powers of his ring and smashes it on top of his enemies, while the Flash uses his incredible speed to repeatedly punch you.

Source: Turbine

The Flash’s ultimate attack: The fastest puncher in the DC Universe.

Familiar MOBA gameplay with a twist

I’m not the most seasoned MOBA player — I play a little League of Legends every once in awhile — but I was able to easily slip into Infinite Crisis without too many adjustments. Capture points are still here in the form of large electronic pads, as are your team’s “minions” or nonplayable allies — here they’re robots — that mainly serve to deter the enemy from venturing too far into your territory by themselves.

The matches I played took place on a circular map known as Gotham Heights. In order to win, you have to reduce the opposing team’s health bar to zero, which starts decreasing once your team captures three or more pads. On the one hand, you can join your teammates to hunt down and kill isolated players, but this leaves you with fewer eyes watching your captured points. If you spread out, you’re more likely to defend or capture new places, but you’re also more vulnerable, especially if the other team decides to gang up on you.

One major way Infinite Crisis tries to distinguish itself from other MOBAs is by pitting players against the map as well as the other team. This happens during sequences Turbine calls “catastrophic events,” where a large meteor heads toward the map whenever a team’s health bar dips below a set number. Small beacons determine where the meteor will land, and if you don’t deactivate the one near your team’s spawn, the meteor will crash and damage everyone, as well as alter some geographical features of the map itself. If both sides shut off the beacons in time, the meteor will just hit a “neutral” spot where no one gets hurt.

Source: Turbine

Nightmare Batman

Some abilities called “stolen powers” also let you interact with the levels. When I was playing as Doomsday, I had the Super Strength power already equipped, so I could lift heavy objects like cars and toss them at other players for extra damage.

Infinite Crisis isn’t finished yet (that’s why you don’t see any screenshots of the user interface, as much of that is still being finalized) but as far as MOBAs go, it seems like a solid addition. Given the worldwide recognition of DC Comics’ stable of heroes and villains, it should have no trouble finding a dedicated community to support it.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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SAN FRANCISCO — Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima has revealed that The Phantom Pain, first teased at last year’s Spike Video Game Awards, is actually Metal Gear Solid V. Take a look at one of the trailers below:

“Snake” — it wasn’t specified if this was the Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid 4 or Naked Snake/Big Boss from the prequels — is alive and somewhat well after waking up from a nine-year coma. He’s lost basic movement of his legs after an unknown accident, explaining why he was crawling in previous teasers for The Phantom Pain. In a gameplay demonstration running on a PC, Snake uses his arms to move around a burning hospital as a masked man escorts him out of the building.

From there, Kojima said Snake will be able to walk about in an “open world.” He previously teased an open world Metal Gear in another project called Metal Gear Ground Zeroes, but that was actually  just another code name for MGS5.

In another trailer, a man was carrying Snake out of the hospital — a man who looks eerily similar to the infamous Metal Gear villain, Revolver Ocelot. The Ocelot lookalike and Snake mounted a horse and rode away through a burning forest, where Snake started firing a gun at their pursuers.

A supernatural figure is chasing Snake and his bandaged friend in this iPhone snapshot from the presentation. GamesBeat/Giancarlo Valdes

While the talk started out with a bang with the MGS5 reveal, the main point of the presentation was to demonstrate the sheer power of the studio’s new Fox Engine. Kojima Productions employees spoke about how the engine can render realistic characters and objects. They showed a real-time demo that had Snake walking around an exquisitely detailed conference room modeled after a real place at their headquarters in Tokyo, zooming on various guns and weapons that hung up on a wall.

Kojima Productions also talked about the new U.S. branch that it’s building in Los Angeles, which sports a red version of its striking fox logo. The mission is to become “the top studio in the world.”

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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SAN FRANCISCO – My opponent inched closer to the TV as the scoreboard updated to 2-2. He immediately grabbed the white ball, but I unleashed a devastating uppercut that knocked it out of his hands. Ten seconds later, we started a new match, our fifth one in just as many minutes. We transformed from curious observers and complete strangers into heated rivals.

Not bad for a PlayStation 3 game that looks like it time-traveled from the 1980s.

Independent developers were the stars of the show at last night’s PlayStation Indie Arcade event during the 2013 Game Developers Conference, where Sony demoed more than two dozen upcoming games for both the PS3 and the PlayStation Vita. Together, they made up an eclectic library that spanned many different genres, but a few had a common thread: local head-to-head multiplayer.

While they may lack the triple-A production values of other competitive experiences — like Street Fighter IV or Madden football — they’re no less exhilarating, especially if you’re the type of gamer who likes to rub your victories in your friends’ faces.

Source: Die Gute Fabrik

Hokra: The green team and the purple team are chasing after the “ball” (the little black box) after one of them loses control.

Sportsfriends

Coming out sometime this fall for the PS3, Sportsfriends is actually a compilation of four different games (which the developers successfully crowdfunded using Kickstarter late last year). Sadly, I wasn’t able to play Johann Sebastian Joust — a sort of tagging game that uses PlayStation Move motion controllers timed to music — but here’s a breakdown of the other three (playable with regular controllers):

Hokra

Hokra is kind of like a minimalistic take on soccer, but instead of controlling detailed avatars of real-life players, you’re in charge of brightly colored squares with numbers attached to them. You have to hold and protect the black square in one of your team’s designated goal posts (at the corners of the screen) for as long as you can before the other team rushes in and steals the “ball” by bumping into you.

It’s a game with a simple interface, but that just makes it easy for anyone to pick up and play. You can play against someone 1-on-1, but Hokra is at its best with three other people playing with you. It does not use Move.

BaraBariBall

A weird cross between basketball and dodgeball, BaraBariBall [top] pits one or two-man teams to fight for control over a large white ball. Whoever can launch the ball and sink it into their team’s color-coded goal (a body of water) on the other side of the map scores a point.

As simple as that sounds, it’s actually a little complicated: Others can knock the ball out of your hands with punches and kicks, and you can run out of jumps if you’re not careful (jumping takes up one of the orbs floating around your character, which regenerates when you’re standing on the ground).

Being economical with your movements and playing to your character’s strengths makes BaraBariBall surprisingly deep. Your fortunes can quickly turn around (for good or bad) at the last-second, and each match progressively felt more intense and exciting as we grew used to the controls.

Super Pole Riders

Developer Bennet Foddy takes a second stab at the underserved pole-vaulting genre with Super Pole Riders, a sequel to his physics-based (and browser-only) game. You have to pass a suspended ball to your goal while carrying a large pole. The best way to win is by kicking the ball, but that gets a little tricky since you have to launch yourself off the ground by using the pole, which — as anyone who has played Foddy’s hilarious running game QWOP will know — isn’t an easy feat.

Sometimes I’d completely miss the ball or flip all the way around and kick my opponent instead (it takes a few seconds to respawn). You have to take the physics into consideration, otherwise you’ll just flop around uselessly … but like QWOP before it, that’s half the fun.

Divekick

Without crazy combo moves or complex blocking schemes, Divekick (out this summer as a digital download on the PlayStation Store) may seem like a barebones fighting game. But the creative folks at Iron Galaxy Studios somehow make it feel fierce and dynamic with just two buttons: one to jump and another to kick. Since the kick is your only offensive move, it only takes a single hit to kill someone. Most of the time you’re just trying to lure your opponent close enough to hit them.

Your character is always moving forward, but you can control that distance with character-specific powers (indicated by the sneaker or foot shown below you) that you fill up by kicking. Some can run backward, others can slow their descent after jumping, and another — amusingly named Kung Pao — can summon portals to set traps. It’s a nuanced system that, while ridiculous on the surface, requires the same sort of strategizing and mind games that the bigger franchises are known for.

On the Vita version, two people can play on the same screen with the D-pad and the face buttons, but the best way to play might just be on the PS3. While you can use the regular DualShock controllers, the developers also brought a pair of hefty-looking Divekick “fighting sticks” to the PlayStation event that just had two hand-sized glowing buttons. Instead of the frantic tapping on the Vita, you’re smashing the large buttons as fast as you can.

It’s a little silly — and perhaps somewhat overkill — but the feel and sound (from the constant clicking) of these special controllers perfectly matches the fast-paced combat. However, whether you can buy one for yourself is still up in the air: Iron Galaxy is trying to figure out if it’ll actually sell them.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Robert Kirkman has a twisted mind. Somewhere in the dark recesses of his psyche lurked tales of hacking off limbs, gouging of eyes with spoons, and pinning down male genitalia with nails. And this doesn’t even have anything to do with what the zombies do. He just has to let all that shit out. That’s the only explanation I can think of for The Walking Dead, the writer’s ongoing black-and-white comic book story that has expanded its reach to television and video games.

The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct (out now for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, and PC) isn’t your typical first-person zombie-shootin’ game since you can’t mow down the undead with a generous supply of bullets. It takes place in the early days of the zombie apocalypse from AMC’s version of The Walking Dead — the popular TV series based on the comic — and puts you in the role of Daryl Dixon, the show’s crossbow-firing antihero.

In keeping with the fiction’s rules, gunshots and explosions attract way more zombies (via sight and sound) than those they actually kill, so it’s best to stick with melee weapons and close encounters to ensure Daryl’s safety as he fights through Georgia in search of his older brother, Merle. Developer Terminal Reality wisely emphasizes a survival aspect that zombie-focused games usually ignore, but it’s not enough to elevate Survival Instinct (as played on a PS3) from being more than just a mediocre experience.

What you’ll like

Struggling to survive

Unlike the undead shooting gallery seen in Left 4 Dead or Call of Duty: Black Ops II’s outlandish zombie mode, Survival Instinct has a distinctive gameplay loop of exploration, scavenging, and hunting down walkers (The Walking Dead’s parlance for zombies). It all comes together really well in the first few hours — you need to look for gas cans so you have enough fuel to travel from town to town; you explore that area for food, munitions, and possible survivors to bring with you; and when you’re done there, you drive over to the next place and repeat the process.

Zombies aren’t just cannon fodder since it only takes a handful of them to kill you. The best strategy is to break them up into smaller groups or isolate them individually, and then sneak behind and smash or stab their heads with weapons like a baseball bat or a machete. It’s impossible to account for every single corpse roaming around, so I always felt nervous when exploring an infested town. But it’s all the more thrilling when you do manage to outsmart them by picking them off or when you successfully hide from a huge herd that’s coming after you.

The road is fraught with danger as well. The chances of your car breaking down or finding a pit stop to search for supplies depends on which of the three routes you take. Driving down the back roads use up a lot of fuel, but you’ll pull over more often for supply runs. Regular streets take up a little less gas and gives you a medium chance to find new areas. And highways need the least amount of fuel, but you’ll also have a high probability that your car will stall.

The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct screenshots

Grounding this risk/rewards system in some sense of realism makes your experience unpredictable. I thought I was doing well when I had a surplus of food and guns … but the next area I traveled through (and the herd of zombies I met) nearly drained me of all of my resources.

It’s a solid system that would’ve worked well with better level designs and mission objectives. But repetition began to set in halfway through my 8.5 hour playthrough thanks to a bunch of problems, which more development time could have fixed.

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Luchadores are criminally absent from video game culture. You can have your clunky knights, your space marines, and your assassins — real heroes wear decorative masks and fight in spandex. Fortunately, developer DrinkBox Studios was thinking the same thing.

Releasing this spring exclusively for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita (no final pricing yet), Guacamelee! — an absurdly awesome name — is the unexpected child that pops out nine months after a 2D brawler and a platformer lock eyes and make sweet, sweet love in the back of an Impala. In reality, DrinkBox spent two years creating its fantastical take on the Day of the Dead, a Mexican holiday where people celebrate the lives of their deceased friends and family. But for the humble agave farmer Juan, this day isn’t filled with candies or parades.

An army of skeletons has attacked his town, and their leader — the evil Carlos Calaca — kidnapped El Presidente’s daughter. Juan takes it upon himself to save her, transforming into a luchadore; if you’re playing next to a friend in the drop-in/drop-out cooperative multiplayer mode (only available in the PS3 version), Juan’s wrestling partner Tostada joins him in the fray.

If the premise sounds familiar to a certain plumber’s quest to save a princess, that’s because it’s intentional: Guacamelee! is fully aware of the shoulders it stands on. You’ll find playful references and jokes that explicitly point to Super Mario — as well as the Metroid games, given the similarities both series’ share with their sprawling, interconnected worlds — during Juan and Tostada’s kooky adventure.

Somehow, Guacamelee! feels refreshingly original in spite of the games it liberally borrows from. I was only able to play a 15 minute demo (and shown another 10 minute sequence controlled by the developers), but the challenging fights and exploration left me wanting more.

Building on the player’s skills

Combat comes in four basic categories: punching, stamina-draining special attacks (measured by the number of yellow squares next to your health), throwing, and dodging. For the first minute or so of playing co-op with DrinkBox co-founder Graham Smith, it felt like a by-the-numbers fighting system that I’ve seen in many beat-em-up games before. But Guacamelee! quickly peels back its layers of depth once you get into your first battle.

Besides jumping away, dodging (where Juan and Tostada rolls to the side with the push of the right analog stick) is your best defensive move since you can pass through weaker enemy attacks without getting harmed. And throwing is great for crowd control: Once your foes are on the brink of death, you can grab and toss them against other enemies in any direction.

Your special moves, which you gradually unlock by playing through the story, can also help you with some of the tricky platforming areas. If you pull off an uppercut while jumping in the air, you’re essentially performing a double-jump to get to hard-to-reach areas. After you get a real double-jump maneuver, the uppercut turns it into a triple jump. Others, like the headbutt, are more direct: It can break any of the giant yellow rocks that block off passageways.

This also holds true for your supernatural powers. With the tap of a button, you’ll transform into a rooster that can fit in narrow corridors. And by traveling through fixed portals, Guacamelee! switches from depicting the world of the living to the world of the dead (and vice-versa). Later on, you can trigger this on your own. In the dead world, certain blocked paths in the living world magically become available and previously transparent platforms will solidify. Some types of enemies only exist in the dead world, and while they can still hurt you no matter which world you’re in, you can’t kill them until you make the switch.

Keeping these various strategies into account is especially important in later parts of the game. Smith jumped a few hours ahead to show me the kind of quick-thinking and multitasking you’ll have to do. In one memorable battle, he fought off two dead-world-only creatures, a handful of skeletons with shields that he had to smash with the right color-coded attack, and plants that shot damaging spikes from the ground. Combined with some skillful platforming levels, he said that this part of the game took him “three hours to practice” before he could pass it.

It seemed somewhat intimidating to watch. But designer Chris McQuinn assured me that “most people will get to Gram’s skill level, if not get better than Gram,” by this point in the game.

Guacamelee! screenshots

Drawing from Mexican culture

Guacamelee! is only the third game created by the Toronto-based studio, but it’s quite a departure from its previous pulpy science fiction world of Tales from Space: About a Blob and Tales from Space: Mutant Blobs Attack. One of DrinkBox’s animators (who is from Mexico) pitched the idea of the story, characters, and levels to the rest of the team. The result is a gorgeous pastiche that draws from different sources of Mexican culture.

“From About a Blob to Mutant Blobs, Guacamelee! is like the next iteration of [our tools],” said Smith. “The engine that we’re using is our proprietary engine, and it’s getting better and better. I think it’s kind of coming through in the games.”

The sharp, angular aesthetic of the characters — I told Smith it kind of reminds me of Disney’s animated films, and he said others have mentioned that it looks like Samurai Jack — meshes well with Guacamelee’s bright colors and patterns. It almost seems like you’re playing inside of a pop-up book.

Source: DrinkBox Studios

Carlos Calaca

Many of the enemies represent DrinkBox’s interpretation of popular monsters and demons from Mexican folklore. The blood-sucking chupacabras look like miniature dinosaurs with wings, and small Mayan statues come to life as the fierce Luchas. During our co-op demo, we ran into a female villain whom the developers conjured up from old stories of a seductress who would lure men into a field at night and kill them.

“It’s nice to take what their story is and then turn them into what we think we want them to be,” said McQuinn.

If you’re interested in trying out the same demo I played, DrinkBox will show it to attendees at next week’s Penny Arcade Expo in Boston.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Update: The contest is now over. Thanks for playing!

A physics-based puzzler and the return of an intrepid squid are the subjects of today’s prizes. For the last day of our contest, we have one game for the Nintendo Wii U and one title for the Nintendo 3DS:

• Puddle (Wii U, pictured above)
• Ikachan (3DS)

Entering is simple:

• Hop on Twitter and follow @GamesBeat, so we can notify you via direct message if you won.
• Tweet this message to help spread the word (changing the name of the game to the one you want from the list above):

Dear @GamesBeat, I want Puddle! http://wp.me/p1re2-2FuH #gamesbeatgiveaways

• You can submit one entry per game, but anything more will disqualify you.
• We’ll message the winners (chosen at random) shortly after midnight Pacific each day.
• You can only win once in this contest.

Good luck!

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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UPDATE: The contest is now over. Thanks for playing!

Spend your weekend blasting computer viruses or stealing cash from random people in today’s round of prizes. For Saturday, March 9, we’re giving away:

• Retrovirus (for Steam)
• Dollar Dash (Xbox Live Arcade)

To enter, here’s what you have to do:

• Hop on Twitter and follow @GamesBeat, so we can notify you via direct message if you won.
• Tweet this message to help spread the word (changing the name of the game to the one you want from the list above):

Dear @GamesBeat, I want Retrovirus! http://wp.me/p1re2-2FpU #gamesbeatgiveaways

• You can submit one entry per game, but anything more will disqualify you.
• We’ll message the winners (chosen at random) shortly after midnight Pacific each day.
• You can only win once in this contest.

Good luck! And remember: If you don’t win anything today, check back tomorrow to see what the last two games will be.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Update: Friday’s contest is now over. 

Whether you feel like you just need to shoot something after the end of a tough work week or relax with a game that may or may not make you smarter, we’ve got you covered.

For Friday, March 8, we’ve dug up two Nintendo eShop games for your 3DS:

• Gunman Clive (pictured above)
• Brain Age: Concentration Training

And here’s how to enter:

• Hop on Twitter and follow @GamesBeat, so we can notify you via direct message if you won.
• Tweet this message to help spread the word (changing the name of the game to the one you want from the list above):

Dear @GamesBeat, I want Gunman Clive! http://wp.me/p1re2-2Fjv #gamesbeatgiveaways

• You can submit one entry per game, but anything more will disqualify you.
• We’ll message the winners (chosen at random) shortly after midnight Pacific each day.
• You can only win once in this contest.

Good luck! And remember: If you don’t win anything today, check back throughout the weekend to see what our last four prizes will be.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

[Apologies for the review being a little late. Due to some technical problems, Giancarlo had trouble connecting to Sony's prerelease online sessions for God of War: Ascension's multiplayer modes. We didn't want to publish the review until Giancarlo was able to spend more time with multiplayer, which he did earlier today. Of course, keep in mind that the issues he experienced is in no way indicative of what the servers will be like when the games comes out. We also know that other reviewers fared better than Giancarlo did. So your experience may vary. -- Ed.]

Every inch of Kratos pulsates with power. He can cut down his foes effortlessly with his twin Blades of Chaos. He can tear off the wings of a harpy using just his bare hands. But when Ascension begins, you won’t find the former Spartan general celebrating a moment of victory — you’ll see him chained up like an animal, tortured by his captors. He looks defeated. His body is weak.

Sony Santa Monica has emphasized the humanization of Kratos in God of War: Ascension (out Tuesday exclusively for the PlayStation 3). In previous God of War games, Kratos was a revenge-spewing machine, racing across the ancient Greek world at 1,000 miles per hour until he satiated his blood lust. And he’s not all that different in this prequel — chronologically the first game in the series — as he still obliterates an army of mythological creatures in brutal and violent ways.

But to the developers’ credit, we do see a side of Kratos that’s never been shown before. He’s self-reflective, haunted by visions of a past he doesn’t understand, and he’s also (dare I say it) vulnerable. So vulnerable, in fact, that he doesn’t even engage in any tongue-in-cheek sex minigames, which has been in every other God of War so far.

That alone should tell you that Ascension is a slightly different beast from the rest of its ilk. It preserves the hack-n-slash spectacle from the games before it, but it also adds cinematic tweaks that make you forget that what you’re seeing is running on a nearly 7-year-old console.

What you’ll like

Awe-inspiring levels and boss fights

God of War’s most distinguishing characteristic has always been its sense of scale, with Kratos fighting legendary monsters who can seem as large as entire cities. Ascension wastes no time in getting to the good stuff: Within the first hour, I was fighting the hundred-arm Hecatonchires, a menacing giant whose body served as the foundation for a prison. This is the domain of Ascension’s three main villains, the Furies (sisters who act as judge, jury, and executioner for anyone who betrays a blood-oath to the gods).

While I fought a bunch of smaller enemies on a constantly moving platform, the Hecatonchires kept trying to swallow us with his disgusting maw filled with sharp fangs and spider-like legs — Kratos and company looked like mere ants in comparison. Despite the word’s overuse, “awesome” is the only description I can think of that aptly fits the sensation of seeing these set pieces in motion.

It doesn’t hurt that Ascension has a near-flawless visual presentation. Aside from odd quirks (like pixelated birds flying next to an otherwise beautiful backdrop of the ocean), God of War: Ascension is one of the best looking PS3 games I’ve ever seen. It particularly works well with the over-the-top violence. I almost had to turn away from the TV after seeing the gruesome animations play out many times: brains popping out of elephant men’s skulls after Kratos cuts them wide open, the way that two bloody halves of what was once a gorgon just hang in the air after he executes it, and how the cyclops desperately clings to life even as its entrails spill out of its stomach.

With the PS3 nearing the end of its console cycle, my mind kept wandering back to the PlayStation 2 release of God of War 2, which came out in 2007 (only a few months after the PS3 launch). It was the last major triple-A release for the then-6-year-old hardware, and in terms of visual fidelity, it was the best the PS2 would ever get. I believe the same could be said for God of War: Ascension.

Even if you don’t have any interest in playing it, I highly recommend hunting down someone who does and watch them play Ascension on a huge TV. Seeing videos of it online on a computer screen does not do it justice.

Cinematic combat

The graphics aren’t the only reason the violence can seem so real and disgusting. It’s also because of how Ascension stylishly frames the action with its virtual cameras — they zoom in close when Kratos is about to deliver a finishing blow and pans out when he’s fighting screen-filling creatures like the Hecatonchires. It’s one smooth transition after another, and they rarely obscure your vision or get stuck at weird angles. Some cuts from one camera to the next can seem disorienting, especially during Ascension’s less-than-stellar platforming segments. But for the most part, you can trust it.

They even make the choreographed button-prompt kills — which have become less intrusive now that they show up on the sides of your screen and not in the middle of it — appear exciting again. But if you’re not a fan of that, the developers also made sure to leave room for some creativity: When you grapple against certain weakened monsters, the fight switches to an Infinity Blade-style 1-on-1 scenario, with the camera sitting just a little behind Kratos’ shoulders. You can dodge left or right to avoid attacks and use your light and heavy moves to finish the job.

It’s an intimate approach to combat that makes you feel like you’re right next to Kratos as the blood and guts fly from his helpless opponents. Make sure you eat something before you start playing.

Skill-based multiplayer

Multiplayer is a fun mix of traditional modes and God of War’s combo-driven fighting system. Though you don’t play as Kratos, the nameless warrior you’ll end up customizing has similar moves and powers, the details of which vary depending on the god you align yourself with (Ares, Zeus, Hades, or Poseidon).

You can’t just mash buttons and hope to win. You need to pay attention when your opponents are open for grabs, when it’s the right time to use your quick attacks over your heavy attacks, and how long it takes for your special moves to cool down. The result is kind of like a skill-based version of rock-paper-scissors. Once you figure out how it works, it feels satisfying to put someone up against the proverbial ropes as you take him out with one devastating combo after another.

And it’s not just about killing other players. The maps usually have their own objectives to distract you from improving your kill-death ratio. In the Forum of Hercules, the famous demigod will spawn monsters that attack everyone and you can earn extra “favors,” or points, for defeating them. In the city of Troy, you can help fend off the Greek invasion by manning a large catapult. And in a level ripped straight out of the film 300, you can kick people down into a deep well for the ultimate humiliation.

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Update: Thursday’s contest is now over.

If it weren’t for our delicate bones, I think everyone would be willing to give motorcycle stunts a try. Who doesn’t want to jump across a row of flaming school buses while spinning around high up in the air? But until scientists can get their act together and give us the Iron Man body armor we deserve, the virtual version will just have to do.

For Thursday, March 7, we’re giving away two codes for Urban Trial Freestyle:

• One for the PlayStation 3
• One for the PlayStation Vita

And here’s how to enter:

• Hop on Twitter and follow @GamesBeat, so we can notify you via direct message if you won.
• Tweet this message to help spread the word (changing the name of the system to either VITA or PSN, whichever you want):

Dear @GamesBeat, I want Urban Trial Freestyle for VITA! http://wp.me/p1re2-2F79 #gamesbeatgiveaways

• You can submit one entry per game, but anything more will disqualify you.
• We’ll message the winners (chosen at random) shortly after midnight Pacific each day.
• You can only win once in this contest.

Good luck! And remember: If you don’t win anything today, check back tomorrow to see what our next two prizes will be.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Warning: I talk about some of the events from Dead Space 3′s ending. 

Isaac Clarke continues to have the worst luck of anyone else in the universe. Visceral Game’s Dead Space 3 brought him to hell and back as he tried to get rid of the deadly Necromorph creatures for good. But as you can see with this new piece of downloadable content (DLC), it’s clear he failed.

Dead Space 3 Awakened (out on March 12 for Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, and Origin.com) extends the third-person action-horror experience with new chapters that occur immediately after Dead Space 3′s ending. You can find out what happened to Isaac and his partner John Carver either by yourself or with a friend in cooperative multiplayer. Your guns and items will carry over from any Dead Space 3 save files you may have.

The small sliver of Awakened I played felt like a standalone horror story, complete with unstable characters, a supernatural threat, and all the gruesome gore you can take. It’s as if Visceral took the horror elements of what initially made the franchise so great (and which was noticeably absent from the latest game) and packed it in all at once into Awakened.

But first, I’ll give you the bad news.

Recycling old areas

I’m concerned with how much Awakened recycles levels from Dead Space 3. I didn’t expect this DLC to suddenly explode with entirely new content, but I also didn’t expect to see the Terra Nova. That ship served as the primary setting for the first act of Dead Space 3, and after exploring every part of it, I wasn’t happy to find myself back there again.

Though Awakened will also feature brand new areas for Isaac and Carver to yell at each other over, the portion I played (a little over 20 minutes worth) was all about their return to the Terra Nova. But it isn’t in the same shape you left it. The remnants of Jacob Danik’s men — religious extremists from the cult of Unitology who were chasing you in the main game — have taken it over and turned the broken vessel into a sort of church … a church where they cut off body parts to serve a being they call the Voice.

As I walked around the familiar layout of the ship, I noticed that the new church appeared to have hired a rather eclectic interior designer with a love for the macabre — I found dozens of lit candles and severed hands at nearly every dark corner. I saw ominous messages scrawled in blood on the walls. And dead Necromorph corpses (pictured below) were strung up in a Christ-like fashion, as if to serve as a make-shift altar.

Was it creepy? Sure. But I couldn’t get over the fact that I was still blasting Necromorphs in the Terra Nova.

A return to form?

One of the highlights of Dead Space 3 was John Carver’s story, which you can only see if you play co-op with someone else. Carver’s mind slowly unraveled during the campaign as he experienced hallucinations about his dead family. Eventually, this led him to see objects in a level — toys, family portraits, birthday gifts — that Isaac (and the other player) couldn’t.

In terms of the fiction, Carver was suffering from dementia because of mysterious alien-made obelisks known as Markers. Isaac also suffered from this dementia in the first two games, but he became immune to it at the end of Dead Space 2.

The ending of Dead Space 3 changes that. The events there have somehow reset Isaac’s mental stability, and now both he and Carver suffer from dementia (and thus see different things). In the chapter I played, Isaac kept having visions of someone chasing him — a mutilated figure brandishing a cleaver (pictured up top). This mysterious person couldn’t take any damage, but he could hurt you and bring along a few Necromorph friends to attack you as well.

At certain points during the mission, he’d show up some distance away from me, just at the corner of my eye, and quickly disappeared when I tried to focus on him. It was also easy to mistake him for his followers, who wore bags over their heads and had sharp, metal contraptions in places where their forearms and hands should have been. Visceral Games wasn’t kidding when it said Awakened will have “the most disturbing content” it has ever put in a Dead Space title.

Sometimes, these poor saps — you’ll hear their rhythmic chants about sacrificing their eyes, ears, and minds — are just an innocuous part of your visions; but in a few areas, they actually fight you. It was difficult to tell whether the battle was really happening, or if Isaac was having another mental breakdown.

Either way, the demo was enough for me to see that the Necromorph situation had only become worse, and not better, after Dead Space 3. After what the characters went through in that game, this narrative twist might seem like a cop-out. But if this means Awakened can successfully bring back the scares again, I don’t mind it one bit.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Update: Wednesday’s contest is now over. Keep an eye out for tomorrow’s post!

Let’s face it — your Steam library could use some more cavernous puzzles and crafty ninjas. It’s now day three of our weeklong giveaway contest, where we put two codes up for grabs each day (provided you correctly follow the instructions below).

For Wednesday, March 6, we have two distinct PC games for you to download on Valve’s digital distribution service:

• The Cave
• Super House of Dead Ninjas

Entering is simple:

• Hop on Twitter and follow @GamesBeat, so we can notify you via direct message if you won.
• Tweet this message to help spread the word (changing the name of the game to the one you want from the list):

Dear @GamesBeat, I want The Cave! http://wp.me/p1re2-2ETO #gamesbeatgiveaways

• You can submit one entry per game, but anything more will disqualify you.
• We’ll message the winners (chosen at random) shortly after midnight Pacific each day.
• You can only win once in this contest.

Good luck! And remember: If you don’t win anything today, check back tomorrow to see what our next two prizes will be.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Update: Tuesday’s contest is now over! Keep an eye out for a new post soon.

If you’re into tough squids and hate color-coded cliques, today is your lucky day. As we posted yesterday, we’re giving away games all week long. Each day, we’ll put two download codes up for grabs (provided you correctly follow the instructions below).

For Tuesday, March 5, we have two quirky titles for you to download on your Nintendo 3DS:

• Ikachan
• Tokyo Crash Mobs

And to enter, here’s what you have to do:

• Hop on Twitter and follow @GamesBeat, so we can notify you via direct message if you won.
• Tweet this message to help spread the word (changing the name of the game to the one you want from the list):

Dear @GamesBeat, I want Ikachan! http://wp.me/p1re2-2ELc #gamesbeatgiveaways

• You can submit one entry per game, but anything more will disqualify you.
• We’ll message the winners (chosen at random) shortly after midnight Pacific each day.
• You can only win once in this contest.

Good luck! And remember, if you don’t win anything today, check back tomorrow to see what our next two prizes will be.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

UPDATE: Monday’s contest is now over. 

Once again, we have too many games just sitting around unused in our inboxes. And we want you to give them a good home. So starting today, we’re kicking off a full week of giveaways — we have a total of 14 download codes to give out. Each day, we’ll put up a post with two of them up for grabs (provided you correctly follow the instructions below).

For Monday, March 4, we’ve got two games for the PlayStation 3 that you can redeem on the PlayStation Store. They are:

• Capcom Arcade Cabinet pack 1 (featuring Black Tiger, Avengers, and 1943: The Battle of Midway)
• Disgaea 2: Cursed Memories

To enter, here’s what you have to do:

• Hop on Twitter and follow @GamesBeat, so we can notify you via direct message if you won.
• Tweet this message to help spread the word (changing the name of the game to the one you want):

Dear @GamesBeat, I want Disgaea 2! http://wp.me/p1re2-2Etj #gamesbeatgiveaways

• You can submit one entry per game, but anything more will disqualify you.
• We’ll message the winners (chosen at random) shortly after midnight Pacific each day.
• You can only win once in this contest.

Good luck! And remember, if you don’t win anything today, check back tomorrow to see what our next two prizes will be.

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

At face value, the heroes of Gears of War aren’t all that likable. No one can relate to soldiers with Hulk-like muscles, bloody chainsaws, and a penchant for catchy one-liners like “Shit, yeah!” Some circles of the Internet (including former Gears designer Cliff Bleszinski) have affectionately pegged this exaggerated masculinity as being too “dude-bro.”

The problem, I think, isn’t with the excessive violence and humor on their own, but in the way they clash against the third-person-shooter franchise’s narrative tone. Developer Epic Games attempted to add some empathy and drama — such as the search for a character’s missing wife in Gears of War 2 — over the course of the last three games, all to varying levels of success.

I brought this up during my interview with Gears of War: Judgment writers Rob Auten and Tom Bissell last week in San Francisco, where we all found ourselves taking in an unusually warm afternoon as we stood on the third-floor landing of an outdoor staircase. It was a nice change of pace from the noisy room in the floor below us, which was full of journalists and Epic Games employees curb-stomping the crap out of each other in Judgment’s multiplayer modes.

“I think Gears’ reputation for that is not entirely earned,” said Bissell. “Because the fact is, when you have four characters killing stuff in a combat scenario, certain ‘dude-bro’ emotional insinuations are inevitable. What are they supposed to do? The kiln of combat forges these relationships.”

Bissell is an award-winning and prolific writer whose work encompasses a wide range of topics. He has written books about the Vietnam War, his experience as a member of the Peace Corps in Uzbekistan, and even video games.

“If anything, [Gears] is not afraid to acknowledge that more openly,” said Rob Auten, Bissell’s writing partner-in-crime. “I think the ‘dude-bro’ [image] is sort of a double-edged sword: People slag Gears for being sort of emo, and they slag it for being dude-bro. It’s like, ‘Look guys, you can’t have both!”

Auten is no stranger to working with video games, either. He’s been “in or around” the industry for the last 10 years in different jobs, including being an animator and a writer.

From our short chat, it was clear that Auten and Bissell (along with Epic Games and developer People Can Fly) were out to craft a decidedly different Gears tale that would remain true to the series’ roots while injecting some much-needed nuance and personality.

Making Kilo Squad more dynamic

The main characters of the first three Gears of War games were Delta Squad members Marcus Fenix, Augustus “Cole Train” Cole, Damon Baird, and Dominic Santiago. Since Judgment is a prequel to the trilogy, we have a different group in the form of Kilo Squad. Included in its ranks are younger versions of Baird and Cole, as well as new faces Sofia Hendrik and Garron Paduk.

“I think our goal was to make the characters a little bit more … jagged,” said Bissell. “Marcus and Dom love each other — they bicker a little bit — but they’re fundamentally old friends. Our characters are not old friends: They barely know each other. Baird and Cole have known each other for a month. Sophia and Paduk hate each other. Sofia doesn’t like Baird. Paduk hates everyone.”

I played about an hour of Judgment’s campaign, and in that time, seeing just how different Kilo Squad was in comparison to the trilogy’s Delta Squad surprised me. They’re still efficient killing machines when it comes to fighting off the invasion of the monstrous Locusts, but their disagreements and snide comments to one another gave the impression that they’re far from being a cohesive military unit.

“And to me, [that kind of interaction] automatically creates an interesting dynamic between these four squadmates,” Bissell continued. “And so right away, when I realized these are going to be our characters, I thought, ‘Well, this is gonna be really good. This is gonna create a kind of dynamic that I don’t think has really existed in the Gears [universe] … But I think the relationships between the four people in Judgment is a little bit subtler than it is in the other games.”

“We talked to some real military people a couple of times through the process,” said Auten. “There were some people who came by Epic, and they would tell us stories of, ‘We had this one guy in our fire team and we didn’t like him very much, so we all kind of decided we weren’t going to talk to him for a year’ [Laughs]. These kind of reactions — characters, people who work closely [together] — conflict does come up in intensive situations, and we just kind of want to enable that to happen. That’s drama, right?”

Paduk’s biggest fans

Garron Paduk seemed like an interesting, if volatile, choice as a member of Kilo Squad. He fought on the wrong side of the fence during Gears’ Pendulum Wars (kind of like the universe’s version of World War II) and joined the Coalition of Ordered Governments (COG) because he thought it was better to serve his former enemy than stay in jail. He definitely fights with a chip on his shoulder, much to the dismay of the other Kilo members.

Source: Microsoft

Garron Paduk

And the writers absolutely adore him.

“We’re probably Paduk’s biggest fans,” said Auten. “There have been points in the game where people have come up to us and were like, ‘Paduk is kind of a downer.’ For us, [the answer] was never ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ We’re like, ‘Look, let’s try this. Let’s take Paduk as we know and have ambivalent feelings about him in the Judgment part of the game, and let’s throw him umpteen years into the future and imagine who he would’ve become [Editor's note: Paduk also appears in Aftermath, a campaign that takes place in the same timeline as Gears of War 3. You unlock it after earning enough stars in Judgment's story mode].

“He’s taken his own direction. He’s not a Stranded. He’s not a soldier. He respects soldiers but doesn’t want to be part of the military unit…. And he’s traipsing around basically the last big battle he ever fought and the place that has a lot of emotional resonance for him [as he leads] this kind of rag-tag group of stragglers. All of a sudden, all of the Paduk-ness of Paduk really came rushing back into the character, and everybody was like, ‘Okay, Paduk’s pretty good.’”

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I’m tired of fighting Locusts. The subterranean monstrosities have been terrorizing the poor inhabitants of Sera for an entire console generation (almost 20 years in the planet’s fictional timeline) ever since the first Gears of War debuted in 2006. When developers Epic Games and People Can Fly announced last year that they were making a fourth blood-splattering entry in the Xbox 360-exclusive franchise, the only response I could muster was, “Why?”

That “why” turned into a more positive “hmm” after playing a few hours of Gears of War: Judgment (out March 19 for the Xbox 360) at a preview event held last week in San Francisco. This third-person shooter plays a lot like the other Gears: You still slam into cover, you still use rifles equipped with chainsaws, and you still blow up enemies into a potpourri of severed body parts.

It’s a formula that has worked well for Epic in the past, and Judgment doesn’t stray too far from it. I’m still not sure if this prequel can shake off some of that fatigue, but I found that the parts that were new did manage to reinvigorate (if only temporarily) my enthusiasm for mowing down Locusts.

Optional ‘declassify’ rules

Judgment’s campaign begins with a tribunal. Familiar Coalition of Ordered Governments (COG) soldiers Damon Baird and Augustus “Cole Train” Cole are under arrest (along with new faces Sophia Hendrik and Garron Paduk) for disobeying orders. The narrative bounces from one flashback to another as each member of Kilo Squad gives his personal account of the events that led up to their alleged crimes.

But that isn’t the whole story. People Can Fly separated each level into four or five digestible chunks, short sections of gameplay that you can finish in a few minutes. Each of these has a large Crimson Omen (a red cog with a skull that also serves as the series’ recognizable logo) plastered on a wall, and when you examine it, you’re given the option to play with the new declassification system. If you accept, not only will the combat become more challenging but you’ll also hear different lines of dialogue that describe what really happened during these missions — details that were normally hidden away from the public eye.

The challenges vary. While playing a newly revealed level called “Onyx Point,” I saw several different examples of the declassification missions in action. One had me run through a series of bunkers in under four minutes, and if I failed that, an off-shore missile attack would kill me. Another forced me to fight with just a heavy shield and a Lancer rifle. The next challenge introduced a strong gust of wind that made it hard to move and shoot. And one of the last sets in this stage limited my visibility by shutting off the lights and temporarily slowing down my health regeneration.

The declassify rules felt like the most refreshing gameplay change to the franchise. I never knew what I was getting into when I switched them on. I not only had to worry about the Locusts but also focus on fighting them with these seemingly random restrictions in place. It made the combat feel tense and exciting, and for a while there, I almost forgot I was facing the same Locusts from the first three games.

Closing the loop

During the event, Epic also revealed Judgment’s Aftermath mode for the first time. It’s a story campaign set in the same timeline as Gears of War 3. You’re still with Baird and Cole, who reunite with Paduk after they split from fellow Delta Squad member Marcus Fenix to go on a separate mission. Think of it as like an epilogue to Judgment’s tale.

I spent around 20 minutes playing Aftermath, where I fought a large group of zombie-like creatures called Formers in the city of Halvo Bay. Except for the new control tweaks — Y to swap between your weapons and LB to toss or aim a grenade — this mode doesn’t have any of the new features from Judgment. According to Epic Games producer Alan Van Slyke, Aftermath is for fans who loved Gears of War 3 and “wanted more of it.”

The most exciting prospect about Aftermath for me, however, was getting the chance to see how Paduk has changed in the decades since his last meeting with Baird and Cole. Paduk fought on the losing side of the Pendulum Wars (Sera’s version of World of War II) and only joined Kilo Squad because it was better than wasting away in a COG prison. I could only gather small hints of his backstory — he clearly carries a chip on his shoulder and doesn’t care too much about his squadmates — but that was enough to make me think that he’s the most interesting addition to the Gears fiction in years.

Multiplayer: OverRun and Survival

Gears of War 2 from 2008 remains as one of my most memorable gaming experiences of this generation. At the time, I was in college and living with four roommates; we had two Xbox 360s and two copies of Gears of War 2 between us. Together, we played the hell out of Horde mode (where you try to survive against waves of increasingly challenging Locusts) for weeks on end, often staying up till 4 or 5 a.m.

For one reason or another, we couldn’t capture that same feeling of camaraderie and teamwork in Gears of War 3. But I have a feeling that Judgment’s Survival and OverRun multiplayer modes may rekindle that. In Survival, you and your five-man team — made up of classes such as Soldier, Engineer, Scout, and Medic — defend key points throughout a map (with barriers, turret guns, and traps) from waves of A.I.-controlled Locusts.

OverRun works the same way except this time, you’re up against real people — both teams take turns playing as Locusts and COGs. It was exhilarating to demolish my enemies with an all-powerful swing from the gargantuan Mauler, leaving room for my allies to swarm the COG’s defenses and destroy their generator. My team had way more losses than victories that day, but when we did win, it felt good.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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Being tossed into the middle of Fuse is like diving head-first into the deep end of the pool when you don’t know how to swim. It’s basically a third-person cover-shooter, but it’s easy to get lost in all the wild details of alien technology, character-specific abilities, and the government conspiracy story that wraps it all together.

Out some time later this year for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, Fuse is quite a departure from the inventive platforming and first-person shooter titles that developer Insomniac Games is known for (with franchises such as Ratchet & Clank and Resistance for the PS3). It’s also the first multiplatform game for the studio, with Electronic Arts handling publishing duties.

Though you can play alone, Fuse encourages you to play with others (up to three) in its cooperative-focused story campaign and multiplayer modes.

“[Fuse] is not a shooter that has co-op; it’s a co-op shooter,” said Insomniac brand development director Ryan Schneider to GamesBeat. “Our designers are adamant that they think this is the best four-player co-op game on the market.”

Before you can figure out why Insomniac thinks it’s the best, however, you’ll have to overcome a somewhat steep learning curve since it’s so different from typical shooters like Gears of War or Uncharted. Those games lay out a clear path of destruction for you, and their combat rarely deviates from the duck-and-cover mantra. But you can’t just blast your way through Fuse: Insomniac designed it in a way that forces you to think creatively about the characters’ roles and how you can combine their different weapons and strategies to ensure victory.

It’s a lot to take in, but I found that it all started to make sense after the first 10 or 20 minutes of playing.

Taking a leap of faith

I played an early version of Fuse (Schneider warned that it was 2-months-old) on an Xbox 360, and for the first few minutes, I had no idea what I was doing. I had a feeling that my partner, another journalist playing next to me, was in the same boat.

We were on a mission that took place about halfway through the story mode, where Fuse’sheroes from the covert Overstrike 9 agency — Dalton, Naya, Jacob, and Izzy — infiltrate a heavily guarded enemy compound in the middle of a jungle. Muscle memory from playing other third-person shooters clicked right away as I ran for cover and started blind-firing. But Fuse is about balancing the different abilities of your squadmates, and that’s where things became confusing.

To be fair, Schneider said Fuse has a tutorial to ease you in before it introduces you to the alien-powered weapons that all the characters wield. But in the heat of battle, it was hard to pinpoint who exactly had the invisibility cloak (Naya), the energy-based Mag Shield (Dalton), the crossbow that fired liquid mercury arrows (Jacob), or the grenade that can heal folks from long-range (Izzy).

After some trial-and-error and asking Schneider a ton of questions, my partner and I took out everyone in the area. This is when I learned about the importance of Fuse’s Leap: As long as you have at least one teammate still standing (and not already controlled by another player), you can switch to that character at any time. So you can use Dalton to throw up a shield that’ll absorb gun fire, “leap” to Izzy and use her Shattergun to crystallize enemies while under the shield’s protection, and then jump to Naya to sneak behind the battlefield to get rid of the survivors.

Once I realized that Fuse requires a bit more lateral thinking than other cover shooters, I started to think Insomniac may have something special here.

Four-player madness

Leaping is fun, but Fuse appeared to shine best when you have enough people to control all four members of Overstrike 9. Two other players joined us in the room for Echelon, a cooperative multiplayer mode where you have to complete a set of randomized objectives: One minute, you might have to defend a weapon cache against a wave of enemies, and the next you’ll face a soldier piloting a powerful missile-shooting robot.

Communication is key, especially as your allies start dropping one-by-one (you revive them with a button press before a timer runs out). And support roles like Dalton’s can make or break your team.

“Dalton’s the floor general if you’re a basketball fan,” said Schneider. “I’ve been comparing him to being like [Los Angeles Lakers point guard] Steve Nash of the group, where he just kind of has to sacrifice himself for the good of the team and just really be a stud support guy. … Otherwise you’re really gonna look like the Lakers — just totally disjointed.”

Due to a crushing difficulty and some game-related bugs, we weren’t able to survive Echelon all the way through. But the small glimpses of brilliance — shouting to one another for help and then rallying back with perfectly executed teamwork — makes me hopeful for Insomniac’s complicated but exhilarating take on the genre.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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