Artless Gamer

After a long time of rumors, hinted at, teased and talked about for months. Now it is finally official. EA has announced Dead Space 2. All platforms will benefit from this long awaited title and as such Xbox 360, PS3 and PC gamers alike will be able to enjoy this second installment of this much loved title.

Not much else can be said about this new release. We don’t have an exact release date yet and the game hasn’t been rated by the ESRB or PEGI, either. Executive Producer of Dead Space 2, Steve Papoutsis, promises plot twists that will surprise gamers and has had this to say about the new release:

Hero Isaac Clarke returns for another heart-pounding adventure, taking the fight to the Necromorphs in this thrilling action-horror experience. New tools to gruesomely slice and dismember the Necromorphs complement Isaac’s signature Plasma Cutter, empowering him as he meets new characters, explores epic Zero-G environments, and fights against a relentless necromorph onslaught. Survival isn’t the only thing on Isaac’s mind in Dead Space 2 – this time, he calls the shots.

Further information about the game can be found by clicking here.

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At first I had my doubts that anything big would leave EA’s gigantic publishing factory any time soon. Recent announcements of massive lay-offs have painted a dark picture of the company’s financial situation and with 1500 employees less, the company seems to be significantly weakened. The company justified this by calling it a move to “narrow the product portfolio to provide greater focus on titles with higher margin opportunities”. Why not just call it saving money?

Despite the disheartening news, it seems like EA are still planning to go ahead with some rather high profile titles. DICE’s senior lighting artist Oscar Carlén, included the title Mirror’s Edge 2 in his list of games for his 2009-Present portfolio.

As soon as the news about this spread, however, he removed the entry.

When EA published the first title for Mirror’s Edge I played both the demo and the full version. While the game concept was fresh and exciting, the full release version was very underwhelming in terms of actual game play delivery. The first title was plagued with many issues, including an exaggerated camera motion feature that made a lot of gamers “motion sick”. Aside from the motion sickness, the game didn’t really blow me away. It was short, didn’t expand and ended up being a bland experience that tasted more of an early experiment for a concept to be worked on in the future.

Players can now hope that the second installment of the game will be a more fleshed out and gripping experience than the first one.

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The early months of 2010 are currently looking to be very exciting. Aside from the PC launch of the game in Q1 of 2010, the first two DLCs will be released by Ubisoft in both January and February.

Each of the new content units will require 1GB of HDD space and that looks to us like quite a large expansion to the game. After being sorely disappointed by short-lived and low-impact DLC in Fable 2, Assassin’s Creed II promises to be worth every penny spent on it.

The January DLC will be titled Battle of Forli, and the February DLC release will run under the title Bonfire of the Vanities. Exact release dates or DLC pricing have not been announced, yet. I am guessing, however, that the price point will be somewhere around 1600 MS Points, considering the size of each DLC.

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DirectX 11, or correctly named Direct3D 11, was first revealed by Microsoft at Gamefest 08 in Seattle. It comes with GPGPU support and a whole other range of snazzy tech features that will make PC gaming even more expensive than ever before. First and foremost, however, it is supposed to help deliver a whole new generation of visually stunning computer entertainment. We can only imagine the panicking waves of kids running into stores looking for a better graphics card, more ram and … well, if you’re already at it, how about a new motherboad, new CPU and … oh forget it. Just fork over all your money and take this whole new PC.

Perhaps I exaggerate, but looking at this amazingly pretty video, I can’t help but think that my current machine, which isn’t much older than a year, won’t be able to handle this kind of stuff.

Still, those are absolutely stunning graphics. I can’t add much more to this, I suppose. Though, I am somewhat torn between video and music – which one of the two is more enchanting? Does anyone know who composed the music?

If you’d like to view this video in its intended wide format, just view it again directly on YouTube. Enjoy over and over again.

Update: Should have looked in the credits of the video for the musician. The score to the demo is by Mike Kondratyev. Nice.

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Halo Legends

For those of you that didn’t know yet, Microsoft in cooperation with the rest of the Halo gang and globally renowned artists, are making an animated series based on the Halo Saga, Halo: Legends. The first episode was aired today.

Well, today is Saturday and the first episode “The Babysitter” was launched today over the Halo Waypoint on Xbox Live. I am enthralled. Unfortunately, I don’t have any screen shots but if you are a Halo fan then you most likely have an Xbox 360. Assuming that you have a Gold account, just download Halo Waypoint and watch the episode while it’s still available.

Here a quote from Wikipedia:

Microsoft announced at Comic-Con 2009 that it was overseeing production of a series of seven short anime films, together called Halo Legends. Financed by 343 Industries, the animation was created by five Japanese production houses: Bones, Casio Entertainment, Production I.G., Studio 4°C, and Toei Animation. Shinji Aramaki, creator and director of Appleseed and Appleseed Ex Machina, serves as the project’s creative director. Warner Bros. will distribute Legends on DVD and Blu-ray in early 2010,^[70] Six of the stories are officially part of the Halo canon, with the seventh, made by Toei, is intended to be a parody of the universe.

I wonder which direction this series will take once it starts to depart from the known and accepted canon of the Halo saga. Let’s just hope that they stick to it for long enough. After all, Bungie is still working on Halo: Reach.

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