Half Life 2 has been labelled as “the best game ever” by some critics and it’s near perfect scores in every review it has received would suggest they aren’t lying. Episodic content in the form of two chapters, Episode I and Episode II have been released to continue the story after Half Life 2 and add more for fans to enjoy. Well a third chapter titled “Chapter III” has been in development for some time, and Valve might be dropping the big bomb shell of it’s release at E3 2010.

The above poster is what some believe to be the “Announcement Pamphlet” for what is more than likely Half Life 2: Episode Three. This being said, it hasn’t been confirmed. It’s likely though, as an operator of a PS3/Xbox 360 Fansite contacted Valve about the event at E3 and he was told the content wouldn’t be relevant to his “content”. This basically means it’s got nothing to do with Xbox 360 or PS3. Could Valve be releasing Episode III shortly or could it even be Half Life 3?

~Bryce Wilson

[Via Ripten]

Split/Second: Velocity is a racing title from developer Black Rock Studio whom you might know about if you bought “Pure” another racing title. The game is set on a fictional reality TV show in which the participants race for money, glory and all the women that would surely accompany flying around roads in absurdly fast cars with large structures exploding everywhere!

While racing around the circuits, well you couldn’t really call them that. While racing, you fill up a power play meter which I would like to that seen in titles like Burnout but it’s not the “boost bag” we’re all used too. By filling up this meter you’re able to greatly alter the racetrack and as a result, your chances of making amazing comeback victories. The AI will also trigger these abilities making for some frantic game play.

In order to fill the meter you have to perform death defying moves such as drafting extremely close to other vehicles, going off jumps and doing the good old cliché drift around a corner. It’s all stuff we’ve seen before but definitely worth the reward. These triggers are various and come in numerous forms. It’s not the triggers that are innovative though, it’s the way you activate them with your meter. Instead of going for the general copy/paste mode of “Fill meter up, get reward” Split/Second takes a more Street Fighter IV approach of allowing you to fill it up and harvest a huge reward, or use tiny portions and gain smaller amounts.

The severity of these events and the destruction caused by them is dependent on how full the meter is. The first, and most mediocre events can be triggered when the bar is a third of the way full whilst the most devastating rewards of death are only usable when you’ve banked your meter to full. When you’re going at breakneck speeds around the track, various objects are highlighted a blue colour for your basic power plays, a red highlight for your middle level power plays and a from what I remember the third level had no colour. These events need to be timed perfectly to slow down and decimate your opponents as much as possible.

The system is very similar to the one implanted into the Xbox title; “Need for Speed: Most Wanted” where you were able to destroy pursuing police cruisers by driving through appropriately marked environmental set pieces and revel in the destruction and burnt corpses littering your path of domination and destruction. The results vary from simple things like explosions to outright ludicrous events that incorporate a huge plane skimming the road and taking out your opponents left, right and centre. My personal favourite is making a boat slide of its holdings in a dry dock.

Something that kind of peeved me about Split/Second was the car interaction with the environments. When a car hits a solid object at an insane speed, or even 120 kilometres per hour, it won’t just bounce off with increased speed and drive off. Of course, instant wrecks in an arcade racer like this would be counterproductive, but there needs to be some sort of advanced physics here. It’s also the same with drifting, there was nearly no skill or control required to just floor it around the corner, brake then accelerate when I was done. Snaking (Google it) was nearly possible on most straights.

The graphical presentation of Split/Second: Velocity is pretty much comparable to the sheer beauty of The Mona Lisa. The destruction is stylised and beautiful giving your eyes something to always be feasting upon. It’s interesting to note, that as game and graphics technology alike has grown the explosions seem to be getting more and more amazing. Just Cause 2 featured some of the best I have seen but Split/Second is really close to taking that crown. However with this title it seems positives always come with negatives.

There’s only really two versions of cars in this game; brand new out of the box and the complete opposite: completely destroyed and useless. This proves a problem, as your cars visual damage is the only representation you really have of how close you are to burning out and blowing up. I don’t know if that’s due to the engine, or just laziness on the behalf of the developer.

This extends to the cars in general. There’s really only two types. Sleek, beautiful and fast, then it’s counterpart in the form of slow, ugly square looking cars. They (Black Rock) should have taken a leaf from the book of Burnout in that sense that there was so much variety in the vehicles you could use. It added an extra element of fun and kept you coming back to the game time after time.

Sound wise the game is pretty much what you’d expect from a modern Triple A title. Nothing really stood out to me, and I can’t recall anything worth making an extra mention of. It was nice however to have the cars have individual sounding engines that didn’t automatically rev out after the first few seconds of a depressed trigger or accelerator.

The achievements for the game are pretty bland and average. Nearly all of them just revolve around basic game play elements i.e.; triggering power plays and winning races. It would’ve been nice to see a more fleshed out list for this title on Xbox 360, but it’s easy to overlook it.

In terms of replayability and bang for your buck, Split/Second: Velocity does deliver. There’s all up 72 “Events” or levels based around the premise of this game being a reality TV show so the content is delivered into episodes. There’s numerous game modes, my favourite being “Survival” where you race along the sprint track, and various trucks drop barrels in your path trying to stop you reaching your goal. The game is an easy pick up and play title with friends in its offline 2-player split-screen mode and you’re able to play with your online friends in 8-player online.

All in all Split/Second: Velocity is a fun game. It relies too heavily on it’s one concept; explosions and racing. A more fleshed out title would’ve been great. The game seems to deliver a lot of excitement at first, but then wears its own gearbox down as it expands all its ideas within the first few hours. If you had great memories of blue shells decimating you in Mario Kart, wait until someone drops a building on you.

Pros

• Fresh new game idea
• Some crazy set pieces
• Fun gameplay with friends

Cons

• Relies too much on it’s one premise, not multiple
• Stupid car physics/handling
• Not enough vehicles

Xin Gaming Score: 7.8/10

Note: This was reviewed primarily as an Xbox 360 title. PC Users, I played this with a AMD Athlon x4, 4GB DDR2, ASUS M2A74-AM-SE and a HIS 5750 and I found with all settings maxed out the game actually didn’t work properly. I don’t mean the hardware couldn’t cope, it easily did, it just seemed like the game didn’t want to work.

This article isn’t to argue that video games are boring, and a waste of time. It’s more so to get people thinking about what ideas are used far too often and still expected to grab top dollar. Keep and open mind, and enjoy this insightful look at gaming and innovation as a whole.

Your princess is in another castle…

Let me start my article off with a classic; Mario. Appearing first off in “Donkey Kong” in 1981 his game play was simple and character development, zilch. You guided him up an angled level jumping barrels and trying to free Pauline (Yes, it isn’t Peach) from the evil clutches of Donkey Kong. Within a year the title had shipped 60,000 units and made 180 million dollars for Nintendo. In its second year of circulation it amassed another 100 million dollars for the now ecstatic Nintendo.

Mario has gone on to appear in something like two hundred games, made millions of dollars, and caught more stars than there is in the sky. But is it enough in this modern day? Gaming is growing more and more extreme. Titles like Heavy Rain basically encourage you to live someone else’s life and carry out tasks instead of furthering your own and partaking in your own. Modern Warfare 2, Halo 3, Medal of Honor, what do they all have in common? Clichéd yet well received story lines with over the top character emphasis and development you would expect to see in a soap opera on TV not something you could be paying one hundred dollars for.

Modern Warfare 2 has been out less than a year and is already the most successful release in the history of entertainment. Millions of copies shipped, millions of kids pleased and some very rich top men at Activision rubbing their hands together and contemplating how they’re going to spend all their money. Is it that games have gotten more advanced, developed and are worthy of the money, or is it that we have seen the same ideas and features used so many times that we’re now jaded to innovation and exciting features that are actually worth our hard earned dollars?

The Call of Duty Effect

When Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare launched in 2007 it was heralded as bringing new fresh innovative game play to and otherwise overused, overworked and bland setting. We were taken out of the ever familiar World War 2 theatre and launched into a new world of in your face grab you by the balls action. The story line was new, the locations were brilliant and it’s honestly one of the best titles this decade. 3 years later, and nothing has changed. Every game to follow it has the same features. Call of Duty: World at War just introduced new perks, new guns and new attachments and didn’t further the series at all. Then Modern Warfare 2 came out and in my opinion went backwards. The game essentially listened to the community, and the road of solid game play was ripped up and the pavers of over indulgence and fan service replaced a once great and innovative road.

Now every game feels the need to have some levelling up/unlocks/rewards system even when it isn’t needed. Command and Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight had a levelling system. A damn RTS had features that an FPS introduced, what the hell is that? You had to level up to unlock new units, powers and goodies to unleash in other modes. How is a rewards system like COD4 even applicable to a game like C&C in which you’re meant to build your base and make whatever units you want, not work to unlock them before you even get the chance to use them. Think of this simple motto; “I jump therefore I am.”. Mario didn’t need features like this because the goal was clear cut and simple. Maybe this levelling up system and having to unlock stuff is a thin veil to cover the shallow game play and features or lack of. It’s old and stale now.

The media is partly to blame for this and we can’t shy away from that fact. I was reading Australian Game Informer #5 and it was an article by a favorite writer of mine; Matt Bertz. He was writing a preview for the upcoming Crysis 2 (Successor to the amazing Crysis) and mentioned how the enemies will now “flank you” while others keep the pressure on you. Wow big deal. It seems that if you can mention enemies flanking you that is a pretty big improvement these days. So many terms are overused in game development; “exciting” or my personal favourite “exhilarating”. Game companies as well play a large part by repeating recycled terms and telling us the same stuff every game they make. Sequel to sequel, franchise to franchise, so are the days of our lives. We get told that this game is going to feature innovative game play and never seen before AI technology only to find it’s as simple as the original title and has even more copy/paste features.

I sense a great disturbance in the force…

Of course with time comes development and eventually publishers and developers alike click onto certain markets and realise when things have stopped trending and are now drifting into the zone of “boring”. Games like Little Big Planet, World of Goo and even titles we never saw coming like Trials HD, bring the freshness back to otherwise what will over time become a stale market. As gaming becomes more and more mainstream, and more and more campaigns like the “Pick up and Play” trend mature gaming will become more and more new, fresh and original.

New fun titles like Borderlands and the huge boom in the support of titles in the form of post Downloadable Content is setting the trend for developers to test the water with their title then please the fans with content after the game has launched and if it’s really worth the time and money.

I commend all the independent artists out there producing new content and features for games, as it seems the bigger corporations don’t see the freshness in video games anymore and only smell the fresh and crisp scent of money. What thoughts do you have on this subject? Do you think the gaming content is ruled by trend and as such has no room to grow, or do you believe people are just running out of creativity?

The first level was saw was WMD. You’d recognize it from the gameplay trailer that aired not too long ago. This level was in the snow and you are equipped with a camouflaged crossbow with a scope. Talk about badass. You see a couple different weapons in this level: the crossbow which also had bolts with exploding tips, an AUG with multiple attachments and camouflage, and an AK-47. We got to see the SR-71 in this level and found that you got to direct troops from the air. There is also a slo-mo breach in this level after doing some rappelling. At one point you see someone get a throwing knife to the neck. I gotta admit, I didn’t see that coming, but wow, was it extremely well done. At the end of the level you take a running leap off a cliff into nothingness. What is cool about this jump is you can actual move your guy as you’re in the air. I know I’m not even doing this level justice. You really have to see it. You have the option of either moving stealthily or rushing in balls to the wall. The guy who was playing through the level chose to go balls to the wall and thank god for demigod mode because I’m pretty sure there were times he would not have survived through the level. Not all of us can be the best player, I know I’m not. I could use my own demigod mode to get through campaigns, I just can’t do it without dying multiple times, and I play it on Normal!!

The other level we saw was Slaughterhouse. This is the Battle of Hue City during the Tet Offensive. We are in a chopper to begin with and rappel down the rope air assault style. In this level we see the SPAS-12 with incendiary rounds called Dragonsbreath. I gotta tell you, I’m REALLY looking forward to using that weapon. It is the epitome of awesome. Generally, I avoid shotguns in the Call of Duty games but this one I’d really like to try out. Who wouldn’t want to set people on fire?? We also see the CAR-15 Commando as well as the RPK. You see the SOG take over command and order fire on various points in which you direct. I do recall seeing an M113 tank named Bottom Feeder during this battle. I like their style.

There was also some information mentioned about Multiplayer;

Dan Bunting and David Vonderhaar also took the stage to talk to us a bit about multiplayer. One change that came about in the making of this game was the fact that the team working on MP began working on it from Day One. They told us that there were maps that were designed specifically for MP and that no maps were taken from SP for MP. Host migration will also return. One thing that really hit home for me is they said “why change something that works?” What does that mean? Leave with party is back! No more telling the party you are with, provided you’re the party leader, to back out on you. No more losing people left and right because they didn’t hear you were backing out and regrouping. That right there made my day. Oh and I’ve got one last thing to say about their MP talk—Barebones baby, barebones.

It’s possible that “Nazi Zombies” is returning in some form as Treyarch mentioned there is a 4 Player Co-op gametype returning that is completely seperate from the main campaign and is seperate from 2 player co-op story mode.

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