As someone whose pirate knowledge is derived from The Muppets: Treasure Island and The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! there’s an awful lot more sticking swords all the way through people and shooting people in the face in the latests Assassin’s Creed 4 trailer than I was expecting.
I can’t help but admit that it all looks rather thrilling, though.
Combining mechanically tight platforming with a rich bizarre art style (one level would see you flying mosquitoes through an oven, the next would have you swinging on ropes through an insect jungle) Rayman: Origins was an excellent game.
The latest trailer for its sequel does much to assuage worries that the designers may have calmed down in the interim.
Time was being a pirate meant you could be the definition of sartorial cool from the ears up in exchange for the odd buckled swash. No longer. These days you’ll be lucky to have a weevil in your ship’s biscuit for company while you wait for Rainbow Six to roll in and shoot you in the head.
One thing’s for certain: the golden age of pirating is over. At least until Assassin’s Creed IV goes gold, that is. Corroborating evidence below decks.
Considering almost every other action in Watch Dogs will be some form of hacking Ubisoft are wanting to make sure it seems as realistic as possible. To that end they’ve consulted cyber security company Kaspersky Lab, double and triple-checking that everything in the game is close to reality.
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The latest footage of open-world hack’em’up Watch Dogs reveals how the game will be broken down into districts, each with a cyber security facility designed to prevent you from gaining access to its residents phones and laptops. Acting much like the pirate encampments and radio masts in Far Cry 3, capturing these facilities will open up a region to be exploited.
The video also shows a car chase and a stolen robot sex droid. So, if that floats your boat, read on.
If spies and mercs could just sit down together over a pizza and a few beers I’m sure they could work out their differences. Yet, Ubisoft, being the blood sport-loving developer that they are, have kept them separate and their blood up just so the two archetypes can fight it out in Splinter Cell’s Spies vs Merc multiplayer mode.
Those cruel bastards.
Watch the two go at it in the below trailer.
Far Cry 3’s homage to the 80s (homage means to pack something out with even more neon, right?) has launched. To mark the momentous release of Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon, Ubisoft have posted this new trailer.
NSFPWVATSON (Not Suitable For People Who Vomit At The Sight Of Neon).
Ubisoft's moody open city hacker Watch Dogs has a release date now. It had a release date yesterday too, technically speaking, but now it has a release date that Ubisoft are willing to tell us, which is significant. Watch Dogs will release on November 22. That's a release date shared by both the console version and the PC version, you'll be relieved to hear. There's a trailer!
When Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag pre-orders were announced, one of the harder sells among its trove of trinkets was The Watch - a dedicated fan service that we didn’t know the first thing about. Well, now we do: it’s a hub for pirate-pertinent information and discussion designed to bypass us, Joe Blog.
“Hello! And welcome to, er, the video that, is you’re watching right now, and - I’m Dean Evans, the creative director for Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon.”
Speaking to Eurogamer, Ubisoft’s Jade Raymond explained why she thinks Splinter Cell’s not risen to the popularity of their other franchises, such as Assassin’s Creed: “despite all of the changes that have happened over the years, it's still one of the more complex and difficult games to play".
With that in mind, Raymond goes on to explain how the developer hopes to broaden its appeal.
The latest trailer for Ubisoft’s Mighty Quest for Epic Loot is a delightfully colourful exploration of creating vicious traps with which to slaughter your enemy: anonymous internet player.
It shows how the game is evenly split between delving into castles online in an ARPG mode and developing your own trap and minion-filled castle in a Dungeon Keeper-inspired god game mode.
Capturing the spirit of the Old West in a first-person shooter is no easy thing, but Call of Juarez: Gunslinger has managed it. It’s not just about creating the look of the place - the dirt and the dust of frontier towns, the tired wooden buildings, the parched wilderness - it’s also about the personality. This is a game of corrupt lawmen, quickdraw duels and some very tall tales. Gunslinger made of grit, grime and gunfights. It feels like an Old West shooter should.
Ubisoft’s latest Far Cry 3: Blood dragon video shows the game’s creative director, Dean Evans, sit down with Terminator actor Michael Biehn, voice of Sergeant Rex Power Colt, to talk about the actor’s passion for the project.
Dean Evans: “What do you think of games? Do you play games?”
Michael Biehn: “No. I don’t, er, I’m here for a pay cheque. Nothing else. I reckon that’s about it.
Dean Evans: “Well you weren’t the first choice anyway but we couldn’t get Kevin Bacon.
If you’ve read the premise for Blood Dragon, it’s likely your brain initiated automatic HAHAHAH protocol long before you reached the bit about a “rogue cyborg army”. If not, and if one of your remaining questions about the game before its May 1 release is, “Precisely how does a cyborg army go rogue?”, you’re in luck.
Of all the nice people invited to a dank Parisian dungeon (half converted, weirdly, into a nightclub by the addition of some velvet drapes, a strobe light and decks) to play The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot, I was the only person to find some actual epic loot. It was a rare and unique crossbow, Bowgart's Crossbow, and it fell out of a witch when I shot her in the face with my regular crossbow. There was a 0.3% chance of me finding loot of this calibre, the excited developer informed me, which made me feel very lucky indeed. Later I’d see a dog with two rats riding on its back. It was a good day.
The thing about enemies of the state, right, is that they like to disguise their identities by altering the pitch of their voices. That’s sort of their prerogative. But I can’t help but feel that their consistent leanings towards the bassier end of the scale - the choice of Sauron and unambiguous evil - only contributes to their unerring ability to attract men like Sam Fisher. Perhaps if they went higher, aimed for shrill or irritating, they’d live a little longer?
Speaking of abilities, Splinter Cell: Blacklist’s new ‘Abilities’ trailer features a pitch-bent voiceover from a likely villain. I wonder which way they’ll go?
Shootmania Storm is out today. I think it’s a fantastic game; a competitive twitch shooter set in an overloaded neon castle. It’s unusually player-friendly in these modern times: it’s got a fully fledged and easy to use level editor, it doesn’t shove microtransactions down your throat, and it has a rare degree of connectivity, allowing you to compete in leagues and league tables against competitors across the world.
But it’s also unusually precise, a game designed with a fine scalpel. There are no needless mechanics in Shootmania Storm; there’s no fat or waste. There’s no crouch button. Weapons auto-swap when you run over them. There are only a handful of weapons. There’s no experience points or prestiging. It’s a beautiful, brilliant design.
Blood Dragon is a standalone Far Cry 3 total conversion available to download on May 1st. It’s an explosive parody of 80s sci-fi action movies and videogames, a neon-infused send up of the likes of Terminator 2 and Bionic Commando that also pokes fun at modern FPS tropes. It features a silly, laboured tutorial, an overly macho cyborg protagonist, an overbearing AI sidekick and a blacklit island terrorised by giant lizards who shoot lasers from their eyes. It’s stupid, but a very enjoyable sort of stupid.
In a multiplayer zeitgeist warface-painted for so long in the muddy colours of military facade, Shootmania has been a harder sell that it might have been. In Nadeo’s new opus, there are no tangos to down, no ironsights to raise, and no smoke grenades to lob. But spend a minute or so in the company of its launch trailer, and you’ll believe you don’t need any of that bumph.
