The end-of-the-year extravaganza has passed, and now you’ve come into 2013 with a clean slate and an empty backlog, right? (It’s okay, I know your pain).  As the industry readies itself for another console generation, we the consumers are left wondering: what’s next? What more could they possibly do to change how we perceive games? Technology will always improve, but it’s how we interact with the medium that leaves the lasting impression.

Over the last year we’ve seen a number of things that make for a promising future; many of those things are the games themselves, the entire reason we exist as contributors to this industry. Some hope to remove the boundary between gaming as an interactive versus a passive experience, while others aim to build upon a foundation in order to evolve with the standards.  The gaming industry is in dire need of a renaissance, and if we’re lucky, some of these games will be the start of it.

Cyberpunk 2077

CD Projekt RED is perhaps best known for bringing to life one of Poland’s most popular fantasy novels, The Witcher, but what many people don’t know is that they also run GOG.com, a digital catalogue of thousands of classic games no longer available in physical format. When word spread that RED was intent on turning the classic pen-and-paper RPG Cyberpunk into a video game, it just made sense. But not only did it seem right up their alley, it was something sorely lacking in the market. The cyberpunk setting is a road so rarely traveled in the gaming industry that often it feels watered down and underrepresented when we finally do see it on the screen. It’s most known for games like Deus Ex and System Shock, and of course popularized by movie classics such as Blade Runner and Brazil, but it’s about time we started to see the cyberpunk setting really make a name for itself in the gaming world and step out of the shadow of its younger, more popular, albeit less attractive brother, steampunk. And CD Project RED is the perfect studio to bring about that revolution.

Watch Dogs

When Ubisoft first unveiled their radical new IP at 2012’s E3, most people didn’t know what to expect. The vast majority was impressed, but left wanting more. Since then the Montreal-based team at Ubisoft working on the project has remained relatively tight-lipped about the project. The premise centers around the player’s ability to hack into any electronic device in the immediate area: street lights, cell phones, cameras – anything. Not only did the game look stunning, but it showed off tremendous animations and lighting that emasculates anything of recent years. This gadgets-and-gizmos open world game looks to shake the genre up and provide a sandbox experience like few others, and in our modern world consumed with the lust for technology, it couldn’t have come at a better time.

Star Citizen

Star what? If you’re not familiar with this game, educate yourself quickly. Star Citizen is an upcoming space simulation game developed by Chris Roberts, the man behind the Wing Commander series. It is also, to date, the highest funded crowd-sourced project ever. As of November 17, 2012, it has earned over $4.2 million dollars from both Kickstarter and donations via the game’s main website, the latter of which is still ongoing. Star Citizen promises to bring immersion to the front of the table. Taking cues from Demon’s Souls and a little virtual sim known as real life, atmosphere will be Roberts’s top concern, wanting to make a game that not only looks and plays right, but feels right; one that isn’t bogged down by logistics and spreadsheets. If it goes off without a hitch, Star Citizen could quite possibly become one of the most important games ever made.

Dark Souls 2

I admit this is a bit of a personal admission on my part. I hold the Souls series to such high standards; it almost feels unfair of me to include it, near nepotistic. But one cannot deny the impact that this franchise has had on the industry. Demon’s Souls answered one of the most seminal questions that many had pondered over for decades: can a game with absolutely zero mass marketing, with an unquestionable sense of danger and urgency, be a commercial success? The answer was a resounding yes. Dark Souls took the series to another level by introducing a meticulously crafted, interconnected world full of shortcuts, pitfalls, and hidden rooms. Dark Souls 2, helmed by new directors Tomohiro Shibuya and Yui Tanimura, promises to retain the sense of accomplishment in a world fraught with peril that made the first two so genuinely satisfying, as well as the second game’s heightened exploration, all while refining and polishing up some of the admittedly rougher edges (like the game’s ingenious yet fickle multiplayer system, and the obtuse Covenants introduced in Dark Souls).

Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes

The Metal Gear Solid series has always been on the cutting edge of technological advancement. Ground Zeroes hopes to take that precedent even further. The first-unveiled trailer for the game, coming in at near 11-minutes long, boasted some of the most impressive visuals seen in a game to date. Not only that, but the game’s cutscene transitioned seamlessly into gameplay without a pixel of lost resolution or texture quality. This kind of precision engineering is courtesy of the Fox engine, built from the ground up specifically for this game. If Kojima and his team can perfect that marriage of visual spectacle and interactive entertainment, then the future of the industry has just had its bar set pretty high.

In the next article, I’ll examine five more games that have the potential to make a serious dent in the state of modern gaming, but have equal the chance of becoming outright failures.

If you’re one of the many many gamers on Xbox Live that can’t help but spout a bedroom or kitchen joke when you meet a girl online, then you may want to steer clear of Halo 4.

“I’ve seen many of the sites that have documented some of the more gender-specific slanderous comments,” Ross said.

“This is behaviour that is offensive and completely unacceptable. I’d like to think most of our Xbox Live players don’t support this kind of behaviour.”

Halo 4 executive producer Kiki Wolfkill (I want that last name) and 343 Industries head Bonnie Ross have spoken out against sexism on Xbox Live. They have said that there is a zero tolerance policy for any and all Xbox Live users who make sexist or discriminatory remarks towards others. Anyone found doing so is issued a lifetime ban.

“It can be dangerous to give adolescents a broadcast mechanism,” Wolfkill added. “There are always going to be jerks out there, and if you give them a way to express that side of their personality without being seen, you’re going to see this type of behaviour manifest itself.”

“As developers, we have a personal responsibility to think about how our games come across,” Ross said. “With Halo 4, we were very deliberate in thinking about who should be female and who should be male in the game, and if we came off stereotypical, we went back to question what we were doing and why.”

“Most people look at a franchise like Halo, and automatically assume it’s run by a guy,” Ross said. “People are surprised to learn that it’s a woman who’s running the Halo 4 show. When Microsoft created 343 Industries to take over Halo, I was given first choice to run the studio because I had proven myself. My gender played no part in it.”

Halo 4 is due exclusively for Xbox 360 on November 6^th.

Source: Gamespot.

The latest Indie Bundle has been released! The newest of the (ridiculously successful) Indie Bundles comes with:

• Torchlight
• S.P.A.Z (Space Pirates and Zombies)
• Shatter
• Rochard
• Vessel

As usual, you can pay absolutely any amount you want for the bundle, then manually divide the money between charities, developers and the humble bundle itself. Anyone who pays more than $1 can get the games on steam as well as the direct download. If you pay more than the average (currently $5.55) then you’ll also receive Dustforce as well as any other games that may be added later.

Considering that purchasing the games individually it would cost you $86, this is once again a brilliant deal. That’s probably why there have already been 75,000 purchases totaling $415,000.

The charities donated to by the Bundle are: Childs Play, famously started by Penny Arcade and which outfits childrens wards and hospitals with games, and the Electronic Frontier  Foundation, which stands up for digital privacy rights and fought against SOPA last year.

I suppose the only question now is: Will Notch once again get into a “Top Contributor” war with the society of gaming bronies?

You can purchase the bundle here for the next 14 days, and I highly recommend that you do.

Sony today surprised nobody by proving recent rumors true, regarding a new even slimmer model of the Playstation 3.

Primarily the new console manages to limit the space taken up by previous models of PS3, although the new model also has an interesting disc-tray cover that slides down the face of the console, showing off the slot in which the disc will spin. Unlike the PS3′s primary market rival, the original and follow up models included a slot which pulled the disc in, rather than pushing a tray out for a disc to be placed in. It appears that Sony have decided to keep up with the PS3 style, in their own way, by not forcing any aspect of the new ‘super-slim’ PS3 to project outwardly, whilst still giving players the ability to place their disc into the tray themselves.

The internet recently has been awash with rumors of such a model enhancement. Sony have announced a number of important details from the size reduction, a whole 50% from the original PS3 model; the price, $269.99 which isn’t much more than the upcoming basic model of the Wii U; the release date, September 25th (yeah: Next week!) and, arguably the most important detail, the hard-drive size, a smooth 500 GB’s, more than ten times the size of the upcoming $300 Wii U’s hard-drive.

Considering my launch PS3 only shipped with 60 GB’s and still runs on only 60 GB’s with little trouble, this sort of hard-drive space is probably unnecessary for most gamers but then again I’m a lot more willing to part with downloads, installs and save-games I’ll never use again than some are. Also, whoever said no to more memory for less money?

Nintendo have confirmed that the details of the Wii U launch will be announced this Thursday, September 13th via a Nintendo Direct Wii U preview, available to the public online. This coincides with a scheduled event for the media in New York, that very same day, to announce new details surrounding the Wii U.

While it’s been obvious for a while now that the Wii U would hit shelves before Christmas this year (or at the very least, in the fourth fiscal quarter of 2012) the move to release the Wii U at such a time is no-doubt an effort to replicate the holiday success of the Wii.

When contacting media outlets about the NYC event, Nintendo surmised the event as one which will teach us “more about how the Wii U will change the future of gaming and entertainment”, although there’s not been much said on the specifics. Nintendo will remedy that this Friday with the Wii U Preview presentation. The event will be hosted by Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Amie.

Nintendo of Europe president, Satoru Shibata, announced over twitter, “Hi everyone! I’d like to invite you to watch the Nintendo Direct Wii U preview, Thursday 13th September at 4pm CEST [3pm UK]“

The Direct Wii U preview will be viewable here: http://www.nintendo.co.uk/NOE/en_GB/news/nintendo_direct_47764.html

Valve is a hot commodity in the gaming media right now. With reported buyout propositions by EA (to which founder Gabe Newell said he’d rather Valve “disintegrate” than sell out), the recent launching of Steam Greenlight, and the rumors of a “Steam Box” console, it seems you can’t go anywhere without hearing the name Valve. Today, the house of Gordon Freeman unveils a new endeavor: “Big Picture,” a streamlined way to play your Steam games on your TV. The interface, akin to the 360 Dashboard, is designed for use on Televisions. The conceit behind it is that gamers want to play their games in the living room. With Big Picture, all you’ll have to do is hook up your computer to your TV, hit a button on Steam, and the new interface will pop-up, allowing you to play all of your games from the comfort of your couch.

The real benefit of Big Picture is that the new format is configured to work with your controllers. The product is true to Steam: you’ll be able to browse the Store, manage your games, pull up your friend’s list – do everything you’re able to do previously, only now in a more sleek, clutter-free interface. The format works on computer monitors as well for those wanting to use it, but that defeats the purpose. While this isn’t necessarily a giant leap in the console race from Valve, it’s certainly the first part of a learning process. Perhaps when and if the infamous “Steam Box” does get released, the Big Picture format will serve as a guideline for its user interface.

I’ll definitely be sure to try this out when the format launches later today. Head on over to Kotaku to see all of the finer details of Big Picture.

Photos Courtesy of Kotaku.

Gold farmers and spammers are already trying their luck at accessing Guild Wars 2 accounts. Having stolen e-mail addresses and passwords from various other websites, these hackers are probing accounts to see if they can access them and use them for no-doubt nefarious purposes, such as gold-selling. ArenaNet confirmed this after a large number of accounts had failed login attempts originating from China.

“Hackers have lists of email addresses and passwords stolen from other games and web sites, and collected through spyware, and are systematically testing Guild Wars 2 looking for matching accounts,” ArenaNet advised through the Guild Wars official wiki. ” To protect yourself, use a strong, unique password for Guild Wars 2 that you’ve never used anywhere else!”

When these hacked accounts are used for gold selling or spamming, they are instantly banned until they can be returned to the owner. If you receive a message saying you have been permanently banned for violations of the user agreement, you are advised to contact customer support.

If you receive an e-mail authentication message asking you to approve a login from an unknown source, then the hackers have your password but the automated authentication system is keeping them out. If this happens the best course of action is to quickly change your password to something you have never used before.

For more information or updates on the situation, please see the official Wiki page here. 

Word is that Konami is asking websites to remove the newly released trailer for Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes. The request is made under the pretense that Konami is having some difficulty with the rights to a song used in the trailer.

The trailer, which premiered last week at Penny Arcade Expo Prime, featured some instrumental music but primarily made use of the Ennio Morricone and Joan Baez song ‘Here’s To You’, written for the Italian film Sacco e Vanzetti.

I don’t see any reason for Konami to be lying about their reason for needing the trailer to be pulled, both they and Kojima have been hitting gamers with a whole bunch of news regarding both MGS:GZ and the future of Metal Gear in general, recently. If the problem stems from the rights to ‘Here’s To You’, though, then the situation must be indescribably messy. Fans who pay any attention to game scores should recognize ‘Here’s To You’ as being used to great effect in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, although that rendition was sung by Lisbeth Scott and arranged by longtime series composer Harry Gregson Williams. As an aside, I just want it noted that if Konami and Kojima don’t secure Williams for MGS:GZ and the referred-to MGS5 then they have well and truly screwed up. In a series of insane highlights, Williams’ scores for the MGS games are one of the more enticing reasons to come back for more craziness.

It’s entirely possible that Konami had the rights to rearrange and record the ‘Here’s To You’ track but never necassarily had the rights to use the original Morricone masterpiece, not even for advertising. If this is the case, you can probably expect Konami to release a new version of the Ground Zeroes trailer with their reworked version from MGS4 relatively soon, even though the tempo for the latter is much more somber and wouldn’t have the same effect that the original had in the GZ trailer.

Let’s face it, though. This is the internet: even if Konami get that trailer taken off of every single game site, there’s always Youtube.

There’s a Rambo video-game in the works and every month or two, a little bit of information crops up. Like most others, I found myself blowing news of the game off entirely (mostly because the last Rambo game I ever heard of didn’t turn out too well…) but having recently rewatched the first (and best) Rambo film, First Blood, I found my curiosity had been piqued. Maybe this time could be different. Maybe…

I turned to the press releases. The latest one started well with what might be the best line from the entire tetralogy of films.

I could have killed ‘em all, I could kill you. In town you’re the law, out here it’s me. Don’t push it. Don’t push it or I’ll give you a war you won’t believe…

–John Rambo

And the screens of the worlds taken straight out of the original three movies looked pretty great. Then came the kicker. That one phrase I didn’t want to hear. First-person shooter. “Rambo: The Video Game will be a fixed-perspective, first-person shooter & action game allowing players to fill the combat boots of John Rambo on a violent journey through iconic action sequences from the original three legendary Rambo movies.” And the video chosen to accompany this press release? Well…just watch.

Okay, let’s take this one step at a time. We’ll ignore the fairly unforgivable marketing decision to not include any gameplay or even pre-rendered cutscenes and ignore the fact that this doesn’t tell us a single thing about the game that people with associative abilities haven’t already figured out.

That is not Rambo. Well, it is. But not really.

How many people out there have actually ever seen First Blood, because I suspect it’s far less than the number of people who know about the Rambo character. If you haven’t yet, make a point to watch it because aside from being the second best Vietnam film of all time (despite only having about 20 seconds of footage set in Vietnam) First Blood will break down every preconception you ever had about Rambo as a character. The sequels soon became satired and parodied in everything from Hot Shots to The Simpsons but all that was kind of unnecessary because they were pretty much already parodies of themselves. First Blood, however, still stands up as both a masterful psychological thriller as well as an utterly kick-ass action film. Don’t believe me yet? Okay, here’s a slight spoiler that won’t make any sense to you until you’ve seen First Blood: There is literally only one death in the whole movie and even that was an accident.

That is the game I want to play. I want to play as John Rambo from First Blood: a good man, a loyal soldier, misunderstood by his fellow civilians. Mentally scarred and fractured after an exhausting war and an even more tiring life, living with PTSD. Deadly, but not murderous. Violent, but not evil.

I ragged on Rambo: The Arcade Game earlier but I can’t bring myself to hate Sega for developing it. Even a few years ago, in 2009, I don’t think they could make a true Rambo, or should I say a true First Blood game. And besides, the machismo stereotype that Rambo became is too easy a ‘sell’ for video-games: Give players a big gun, plenty of targets and the job’s a good’un! But now however…I think right now is the time that First Blood could be truly realized in an interactive form.

Earlier this year, we had Spec Ops: The Line, which may have lacked in certain gameplay elements (whether that was the point or not is a discussion for another day), but made up for such ‘shortcomings’ with a tremendous story that carefully portrayed the destruction of a sane mind, the practically desensitizing  mindset of a soldier pushed too far. Although it’s plot was liberally lifted from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now! (the best Vietnam film ever made, by the way), First Blood certainly courts the same themes.

Telltale Games have been releasing a Walking Dead episodic game throughout the year that shows how effectively emotional story-telling can trump banal life-less action, every single time. Although I don’t think an episodic adventure game would work for a Rambo game I can’t say I wouldn’t be curious to see what Telltale would do with it.

Or how about Naughty Dog’s upcoming post-apocalyptic thriller/horror/action game The Last of Us? It’s a bit early to draw any absolute opinions as we won’t be playing The Last of Us any time soon but honestly, I could see the systems and mechanics they’ve shown off so far working wondrously in a First Blood game. Tone down the violence slightly, bring in a couple of Uncharted style set-pieces such as Rambo hanging from a cliff or riding a motorcycle, consider a way to incorporate traps (which may even be in TLoU, who knows?) and borrow the self-medicating gameplay vignettes from Metal Gear Solid 3. Hell, I’d play that just to see what works and what doesn’t and I still have a feeling it would be great.

Remember when Batman: Arkham Asylum came out and everyone was in awe of a licensed game not only being okay, but being great? None of the ideas above are likely to happen any time soon, but it illustrates the potential that licensed properties have, going forward, and although I couldn’t care less about the Rambo sequels, I would really hate to see First Blood tarnished.

Of course, all this concern could be for naught. Teyon, the developers behind Rambo: The Video Game, could be onto something great. If only there were some sort of trailer we could see to gauge how the game might turn out.

Oh, wait…

Not everybody out there follows films as intensively as I do so let me sum up Iron Sky for you: Space Nazi’s. It shocks me that this isn’t already a game and it must shock the people over at Reality Pump because sooner than later, you’ll be able to get your hands on the video-game tie-in to this comic-sci-fi-historic-action schlock-fest.

Iron Sky was a movie released earlier this year about the defeated Nazi party of 1945 packing up and heading to the moon, with plans to return to Earth with a space fleet in 2018 and continue the work of the Third Reich. It was funded by Finland, Germany and Australia and although I haven’t seen it, I have been assured by friends that it is the sort of ridiculousness that I expect from my B-movies. As well as plans for a prequel and sequel (Hitler planning the moon excursion and being reanimated after the events of the original film, perhaps?) there are now plans for a video-game tie in.

Iron Sky: Invasion is being developed by German studio Reality Pump and will “the player in the pilot seat of defending Earth from a sudden Nazi invasion – from space.” with an arsenal of experimental space fighters.  Developer Miroslav Dymek comments how the studio wanted to create a space sim game blending political and tactical components, with the absurdity of Moon Nazi humour, which the press release shows off with abandon.

Iron Sky: Invasion will bear the major underlying theme of politics: everything, even defending your planet from “luna-r-tic” villains, requires skillful political maneuvers. You will need to know who you are fighting for, whose boots you are stepping on, and choose your friends, or more importantly, enemies carefully.

Is “luna-r-tic” a joke from the film or does it simply not make sense? Absurdist humor, although awesome, is difficult to get a handle on, in text.

The film’s director, Timo Vuorensola, explained that he’d “always known that Iron Sky needed a proper video game around the franchise, one where the whole complexity of the world of Iron Sky could be examined” which either has to be a joke or means I need to get out there and purchase a copy of Iron Sky right away.

Iron Sky: Invasion is currently due for a release on PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 on November 30th, 2012. It will feature optional stereoscopic 3D for those of you who like your Nazi’s with extra dimension.