By Brian Perry

When asked what Pandemic Studios does best most people would cite open world action games. So it is good to see them playing to their strengths with their new game “The Saboteur”. You take the role of Sean Devlin, based on real life resistance fighter William Grover-Williams, who is an almost over the top race car driver, womanizer and as the name implies saboteur in 1940’s Paris during the German occupation.

The Saboteur’s major twist on the genre is as much artistic as practical. The new system called “The will to fight” reflects the Nazi and resistance influence on Paris using a Schindler’s List style black and white in occupied areas punctuated with iconic reds on Nazi paraphernalia. But those areas liberated by the resistance are revived to full colors ala Pleasantville, restoring their vibrant life and exemplifying the populations “will to fight” the Nazi regime. This will hopefully give the players a much needed refresher by allowing them to escape from the oppressive color scheme of occupied zones, and indicates to players where to focus their efforts as a quick jaunt to a rooftop will reveal where occupied zones remain as the effect palls over the cityscape.

If you’ve enjoyed games like pandemics previous mercenaries games, or the GTA series, The Saboteur is a game to keep your eye on as it is showing incredible promise. The Saboteur is due in fall 2009.

By Brian Perry

What do you get when you mix a Nintendo DS card, an adventure game, and dictionary? Apparently Scribblenaughts, This inventive new game by 5th cell was the buzz of e3 this year and for good reason. The premise of the game is fairly simple, you need to you’re your character Maxwell collect starite in each of the 220 levels. But to get each piece of starite you must summon tools to help you grab or cajole from where ever it is in the challenge. Sometimes it can be as simple as summoning a ladder and climbing up to claim your starite. In others it may involve achieving a separate goal to unlock the starite, as demonstrated in a demo level requiring you to “refresh” a man lost in the desert. But each challenge offers endless opportunities to claim your prize.

This is where the game shines. Scribblenaughts charm is in the inventiveness and breadth of choices you have in obtaining the stars. That simple ladder challenge could be solved with a ladder, or with a jet pack, or a helicopter, or a giraffe wearing a top hat. Where the man can be refreshed with a drink, or a rainstorm, or any number of other items.

All of this summoning is achieved by typing common, non trademarked nouns of a pg nature with your stylus into the digital keyboard. To make things even easier 5th cell predicted that many of you like myself are spelling impaired and also included a built in spell checker to boot, a godsend to say the least.

Overall the demonstration has me looking forward to Scribblenaughts release later this year so I can fulfill my dreams of a zombie Darwin vs. God death match set in 12,000 BC.

As a follow up to Red Steel, the sequel Red Steel 2 didn’t have to do much to be an improvement. But to say just that would be a disservice to the hard work the people at Ubisoft have done to the franchise. Red Steel 2 has stepped away from the modern setting and taken a dive into the surreal with a cowboy punk setting including new stylized graphics and saloons to match.

Going to the stylized approach has done wonders for the visual appeal of the game, allowing the lower polygons to be cleverly hidden in artistic strokes the game instantly feels less visually dated than some of it’s competitors, however despite their efforts the limitations still manage to shine through in the settings and repetitive character types shown in the playable floor demo.

When speaking with Jason Vanderbourghe on the show floor he indicated that he felt the game was more of a brawler than a FPS, and it shows simple actions such as opening doors are shifted into sword swiping actions, and regular armored opponents requiring sword combat over gun combat show the emphasis to the developers dream of “remembering what it was like hitting things in the back yard with sticks”.

While a great dream it is, the Ubisoft team still hasn’t mastered the Wii controls well enough to make the swords feel right during the hands on demo. I often felt like I was flailing ineffectually as my broad strokes were ignored even with the Wii Motion Plus enabled controllers.

While not a bad game, without a lot of work on the controls Red Steel 2 will probably not excel to the great game they want it to be when released in the holiday season 2009.

By Brian Perry

First Person Shooters on the Wii are like the Philosophers Stone to alchemy. Everyone wants one but no one seems to have gotten it right, possibly, until now. High Voltage software’s “The Conduit” has been a back burner game in our mind space here at Life Inside the Box, but that is going to have to change. After hands on time with the game in both single and multiplayer modes, High Voltage Software has built a solid Wii FPS that manages to control well and look impressive on the Wii’s limited hardware.

The first attempt at a Wii FPS Red Steel’s downfall was it’s lack of responsiveness and the horrible turning via scrolling along the screen edges, the folks at High Voltage appear to have taken this to heart amplifying the turn speeds and more importantly allowing the players to adjust the sensitivity themselves.

While the game shows it’s excellence in spades, the limitations of the Wii’s hardware in graphics and the perceived casual domination of the Wii market are working against it being the mass market hit it could potentially be otherwise.

If you are looking to put your Wii through a whole new set of paces and possibly have a lot of fun along the way, The Conduit is releasing today in North America.

By Brian Perry

When looking at Home Front my first impression was, “Gee this looks like that canceled Jaffe project homeland“. After being assured otherwise and sitting down for the tour, you can tell that Home Front is looking to be a beast unto itself. The game takes place around twenty years in the future in an occupied United States, and is supposed to give the players flashbacks to Red Dawn. That shouldn’t be surprising since the team at Kaos studios have been coordinating with John Milius, of Red Dawn and Apocalypse Now fame, on the story.

The hands-off demo shown on the floor was definitely impressive, the graphics looked clean, the sound was impressive, and the engine features they were touting showed a lot of potential.

One of those features was the “Drama” engine, a background system that would attempt to give the player that edge of the seat feeling the entire time they are playing. The example from the demo involved shooting a missile at a moving Jeep. When the Jeep exploded the drama engine applied a slight magnetism to the player character drawing the Jeep slightly towards him as it flew through the air; as to provide a near miss on screen.

While immediately impressive Home Front will need to overcome some obstacles before its estimated release sometime in 2010. This includes a cartoony characters facial design and the industry’s endemic shooter fatigue. Despite those obstacles, Home Front appears to be a game to keep your eye on.

by Brian Perry

Dragon’s Age: Origins is a game that is sure to disappoint many of Bioware’s newer fans. Those looking for a KOTOR or Mass Effect should look elsewhere. Instead, Bioware is hearkening back to its older roots with Baulder’s Gate series as inspiration for its latest adventure.

Graphically, Dragon’s Age continues to excel, and is an excellent show of their art team’s skill; however other technical aspects seem to have suffered in favor of the dazzle. During the closed-door demo, the most jarring aspect had to have been the voice acting. Each line uttered appeared to be read in a void with no regard to the scene at hand, making “romance” lines fall flat, and a jilted lover seem indifferent to betrayal. To add to this deficiency was a total lack of expressiveness from the character models themselves. After the efforts put into their other games, it is disappointing to see emotionless mannequins on screen instead of the dynamic characters we’ve grown to expect from the folks at Bioware.

While we discuss missing innovations, gone are Mass Effect’s dynamic conversation options, instead the “pick a sentence” system returns with the mute protagonist, who doesn’t even bother to read his lines.

With more time I’m sure Dragon’s Age: Origins would be a triple A title, however based on the E3 showing, I can’t imagine it meeting the expectations of the fans.