EL33TONLINE Editorials

Editorial: PS Vita Coverage Round-up: Facts, Opinions and Predictions

Wed, 02 May 2012 10:00:00 +0000

The PS Vita has been available worldwide for just over two months now and all the pre-launch hype that surrounded it has died down considerably by this point. Although the Vita had an amazing launch line-up comprising over twenty titles, there hasn’t been much new software to speak of during the last couple of months and one can sense that the Vita user base is growing more impatient with each passing week.

Other than a paucity of new software, other issues that are keeping people from buying a Vita are its high price and lack of features. You still can’t watch internet videos on Vita, nor can you play PSone Classics or stream most PlayStation 3 titles to the system via Remote Play (a feature that Sony demonstrated at Tokyo Game Show 2011). The internet browser is nowhere near as capable as you would expect on a powerful device like Vita and tiling is a frequent issue even on the most basic of websites. Everything related to Vita also comes at a premium price at the moment - the system itself, memory cards and software. There are currently no PlayStation Plus discounts being offered on Vita games on the PS Store nor are there any price promotions being run. It seems like we’ll have to wait a few more months before Sony offers the same kind of excellent deals on downloadable PS Vita content as it does on PS3 related games and add-ons on the PlayStation Store.

Sales of PS Vita aren’t as healthy as Sony would have hoped for. In Japan the Vita has sold just 667 877 units since it launched there in December last year, with first week sales accounting for almost half this figure. From what I’ve read, Vita sales are not much better in Europe and the system lags behind the 3DS in most territories, including North America. This trend looks set to continue unless Sony drops the price of Vita to less than $200 and brings out the big guns at E3 in June. PS Vita needs an exciting new Monster Hunter game if it’s going to succeed in Japan, and the system would also benefit greatly from franchises like God of War and Gran Turismo appearing on Vita in the near future. Sony also needs to ensure that as many PlayStation Network titles as possible are playable on Vita as this gives owners of both PlayStation devices the welcome choice of being able to purchase PSN releases for either platform.

Sony should also assign a dedicated, full-time team of technical staff to constantly improving the Vita’s firmware. Apparently Sony already has a team working on PSone Classics support so once that is complete they should look at improving the internet browser, integrating PS2 Classics emulation and make all PS3 titles playable on Vita at full resolution via Remote Play. Sony should also try to provide Vita users with more apps - a YouTube app seems the most common request at the moment. I’d also like to see PlayStation Plus members being offered Vita related freebies and discounts, and price specials being offered on downloadable PS Vita games after they have been on the PS Store for a few months. Sony would also be wise to introduce a digital rental scheme for PS Vita software - imagine being able to pay $10 to rent a $40 Vita title for a week from the Store? I know I would be willing to pay for more games if such a scheme was in place. One of the most exciting developments PS Vita owners can look forward to is the introduction of PlayStation Suite later this year. This will allow Vita users to purchase a multitude of apps and games for the system in a similar way to how the App Store on iOS devices operates. If you’re interested in developing software for PS Vita or other PlayStation certified devices, be sure to head over here to learn more about the PS Suite Developer Program open beta that is currently underway.

In terms of my personal picks for new PS Vita owners, I believe the best games on the system are currently Rayman Origins, Uncharted: Golden Abyss, WipEout 2048 and MotorStorm RC. Some of the Vita’s upcoming titles I’m most excited about include Mortal Kombat and Gravity Rush. I’ve sifted through the El33tonline archives and come up with an essential round-up of PS Vita coverage for your reading pleasure. From the system’s South African launch event in February to last week’s El33t Tip about turning your Vita into a portable movie player, we’ve got you covered! Pre-launch Editorial - Ten things the PS Vita needs to succeed PS Vita Launch: - South African PS Vita launch kicks off in Jo’burg - El33tonline is there! - PS Vita launches in style across South Africa - My PS Vita launch experience in South Africa - pictures and videos included!

Community - DBNGamers go hands-on with the PS Vita El33t Tips: - How to get Near to obtain your position on WiFi-only PS Vita - How to switch accounts on PS Vita without formatting your memory card - How to maximise PS Vita’s capabilities as a movie player

Reviews: - Everybody’s Golf - Lumines Electronic Symphony - Uncharted: Golden Abyss - Ridge Racer - Wipeout 2048 - Rayman Origins - FIFA Football - Unit 13 - Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 - Dungeon Hunter: Alliance - Little Deviants

Upcoming Games: - Mortal Kombat - May 1st/4th - Resistance: Burning Skies - May 29th/30th - Gravity Rush - June 12th/13th - Street Fighter x Tekken - TBA - LittleBigPlanet - TBA - Metal Gear Solid HD Collection - TBA

Contributor: Tom

Editorial: Games That Changed Us: A trip down memory lane with Russell, Bryan and Oltman

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 08:00:00 +0000

As a gamer, I sometimes wonder how we become gamers. What identifies us as gamers, what gives us our motivation, what turned the switch in our brains that turned us into game fanatics? Many argue that everyone likes games but, in my experience, this is simply not true. In fact, I work with a group of people who look down on my hobby and passion and often have words to me about it, scoffing at me “wasting my time.” Their golfing / walking / gardening / drinking aside (talk about a waste of time!), I think I am entitled to choose for myself how to entertain myself.

So with this in mind, I decided to sit down and chart my progression as a gamer and identify key moments in my life that made me the gamer I am today. I thought I would also ask around and see if there is a common thread in this and, if so, whether this was triggered by specific games. Please note that this is an opinion piece - I know a lot of you will be saying “But what about…” Please add to this entry by filling in the comments below and let us all have a glimpse into what changed our gaming lives. I consider myself a gamer who primarily enjoys strategy and role-playing games. In fact, any game with character development and progression is something that I enjoy. The first games I can remember playing are, of course, arcade games. Going to the arcade and playing Pac-Man, Asteroids and, most often, 1943 are indelibly fixed in my memory and I can say with a great deal of certainty that the vast majority of my pocket money was fed into these awesome beasts - 10c at a time, if you remember those big silver 10c pieces! This is where my love for gaming developed, but I always felt that I was missing out because once your three lives were gone, that was it. Move on or start a new game. This left me unfulfilled. Then I met a friend with a Commodore 64, and my life changed.

The Commodore 64 At this point I think I started nagging my parents incessantly and it wasn’t too long after that (OK, to a youngster of about ten, if felt like years) that I was the proud owner of my very own Commodore 64… and, most importantly, the games that came with it. There are two games that I played most on the C64 and these were ‘Pirates’ and ‘Elite.’ I am sure a lot of you know of Pirates as this was rewritten a few times for the PC, the most recent of these being Sid Meier’s Pirates. Elite was a black and white space fighting and trading game which had a bug it in that meant that you could never finish the game but, to be honest, I never wanted to finish it. Elite was amazing because that was the first game I played in which you developed your ‘character’ (in this case by earning awards and enhancing your spaceship) and could continue to play as long as you wanted.

David Braben’s Elite Bryan (the boy genius) remembers this period of life a bit differently. Here’s Bryan’s take on his formative gaming experience: “My very first ‘personal computer’ game I ever played was a little gem called Manic Miner on my family ZX Spectrum 48k. It was an amazing game and I was totally hooked. Until my brother discovered a hack in ‘Sinclair User’ magazine we were doomed never to complete the game and spend forever trying to get past level four. Thankfully once we had the invincibility cheat, we finished the game a few times and enjoyed the theme music at the end as well as the sense of accomplishment.”

The ZX Spectrum “Never mind that I had participated in my very first ‘hack’ at the tender age of three years old, I was hooked on games. The Atari 2600 was my first foray into console gaming and I was a big fan of Air-Sea Battle (probably the most game time I ever had on my Atari 2600) and trying to beat my big brother. I would confidently wager that Air-Sea Battle would still hold the attention of most avid gamers from today’s generation simply because it had tremendous variety and a very addictive multiplayer component.” Oltman, on the other hand, remembers starting gaming on one of those old ‘made in China’ consoles, ripping off the old NES consoles. Oltman writes that he “played many games on them and was totally hooked. But what turned me into a game lover was Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. It showed me that games are more than just button mashing programs with endless enemies. It showed me that they can have substance, that they need some cerebral input, and that they can deliver an engaging story that makes sense, and is not just about saving the world from the invading aliens / demons / Nazis (OK, so maybe you did save the world from the Nazis… bad example)”. I’ve never heard of those games but, it just goes to show, our roots are all different.

Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis After quite a few years of my C64, I finally upgraded to a PC and it was at this point that gaming transformed from a hobby into a passion. It was also at this point that the gaming industry also started spreading its wings and the realization that gaming wasn’t just for kids anymore started becoming more and more obvious. During this time I discovered games that focused my passion. This was in terms of strategy games (Dune), role playing games which include the Sierra Quests – the best being Space Quest and Hero’s Quest - some D&D type games and one in particular, Betrayal at Krondor, my first experience of a game based on a book (fantasy fiction being my number two passion in life – sorry, gaming comes third after family and fantasy books). Bryan is what I call a cerebral gamer. He always seems more into the ‘thinking man’s’ games like Flight Simulator (and then Fighter Pilot). Here’s Bryan again: “Soon after I played Manic Miner to death I turned to the other of the first two computer games we ever had, Flight Simulator, and even though it was a 48k 8-bit rendition which basically just showed two different coloured halves on the screen, I could suspend my disbelief sufficiently to imagine I was flying. Even at the tender age of three years I could even distinguish up from down when my plane flipped and the light green segment was at the top and the dark blue at the bottom. I was a boy genius if I do say so myself! (Boy how times have changed - Russell)

Flight Simulator (ZX Spectrum) “I learned from that experience that not all games were action filled arcade games and yet they could still be fun and this opened up a world of possibilities for me. Of course, when Fighter Pilot came along it brought action to the mundane (yet still addictive) Flight Simulator and I discovered, yet again, that games could be immensely diverse from one another and still offer something intriguing and appealing to generate entertainment.” It was also at this time (1993) when I started university and was introduced to MUDs (Multi User Dungeons). This was a text-based MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) that quite a few of us played in the computer LAN’s when we were really suppose to be learning ‘Accounting,’ ‘Business Administration’ or some such. This game really opened my eyes to what online gaming is. It was also my first introduction into gaming communities and, although quite small, our university community of MUDders was an excellent bunch and we had good times. In fact, it is very similar to Gears of War Wednesdays, Battlefield Fridays and the local DBNGamers get-togethers.

A MUD (Multi User Dungeon) The next game that truly influenced me was the game that I think I have logged the most time on… ever. That game is Civilisation and this competes very closely with my favourite game of all time (Pirates) and was my introduction to turn-based strategy. I think I played this game at least four to five hours a day for quite a few months and that, for me who has quite a limited attention span, is a lot of time. I have a kindred spirit when it comes to Civilisation. Oltman writes that Civilisation is the game that always ends up pulling him back. Ever since Civ 2 he has not missed a single game and has played them all for many hours. He also writes that, “To this day, Civ 5 is the game I spent the most time on of all my Steam games.” As time becomes short, however, and other things take your time, Oltman, like me, ends up spending more time with shorter games. He reminds me of a problem that I often have when he writes: “I often played Civ 5 for a while, and when I get time to load it up I have lost track of units, forgotten what I am trying to achieve on the map and then I just start over. Shorter games on my tablet or on my console end up winning these days. How sad is that!?” Very, very sad indeed.

Civilization It was at about this point that gaming started exerting itself as a serious contender in terms of pastimes. Originally the domain of the select few (AKA gamer geeks), gaming started becoming more and more widespread with many different people taking up gaming as a hobby or pastime. Of course, the masters of gaming remain the ‘select few’ and games like StarCraft and Counter-Strike dominated gaming culture for quite some time. Games like Quake made the concept of ‘clans’ part of the gaming dictionary, but games like Counter-Strike became a true co-operative gaming experience. I remember many afternoons after work playing Counter-Strike with work mates and I think that this improved the spirit of the work environment. I don’t think I have ever enjoyed work, or worked with a cooler bunch, than the guys I played Counter-Strike with at work (incidentally, this is where I met Oltman AKA ACowYesACow). I never got into Doom or Quake, but these games definitely deserve a mention as I know a lot of guys got deep into them. It was then that I discovered Ghost Recon.

Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon - Title Screen For me, Ghost Recon epitomizes the pinnacle of the strategic first-person shooter that, I believe, is the precursor to such fantastic games as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Battlefield 3 and so forth. Man, what a game. Interestingly enough, apart from Counter-Strike, this was, till that point, my only experience of a game that focused on both singleplayer and multiplayer. (Yes, I know there were probably lots – remind me in the comments!). The greatest online experience though is the MMORPG (the massively multiplayer online role playing game). This phenomenon has been around since the late 1990’s (I remember friend’s playing Everquest when I was in the UK) but it really exploded with World of Warcraft (which I didn’t play) and Guild Wars (which I played quite a lot). Whilst you can play Guild Wars as a singleplayer game and use the AI characters that are provided to form a party, the true beauty of it was the social interaction and camaraderie that you can develop in your Guild or amongst a group of friends. Whilst singleplayer gaming will never go away, I think these games made huge strides in enhancing co-operative, online gaming.

Guild Wars Interestingly, Bryan’s history of online gaming is a lot fuller than mine. He writes: “Back in 1991 / 1992 I had a 2400bps modem (that’s 2.4Kbps, or 0.0024Mbps) and not much to do with it. I finally found a friend who owned a modem and we decided to give F-22 Interceptor a go. It was amazing. Playing against a real-life opponent not in the same room! I was hooked to online gaming but the problem was, there wasn’t enough to play online and even harder to find someone with a modem. Populous was also attempted but not very successfully, but it does deserve a mention. Around 1994 I started hanging around a MajorBBS called ‘Connectix BBS’ and used to dabble in some of the online games there which featured up to eight players (so this marked the start of my massively multiplayer online gaming experience). I don’t think playing the online games on Asphyxia BBS like Barren Realms Elite really count as online games since they weren’t real-time, but I’ll throw these into the mix too just in case it sparks some nostalgia out there.” Once again, I haven’t heard about most of these games, but I am sure some of you can remember them (if you are as old as Bryan, Oltman and I that is).

Barren Realms Elite Bryan mentions yet another game I have never heard of: “One of my first experiences of co-op action was a fighting game called ‘Target: Renegade’ which I still maintain is one of the best fighting games around and this, along with Ace, showed me that co-operative play created a deeper and more meaningful social experience when gaming. Competitive gaming is also social but the co-operative gameplay was at a totally different level for me. It was like being part of the A-Team instead of being a lone MacGyver trying to outwit a crazy Murdoc.“ If you don’t know who MacGyver and Murdoc are then you probably don’t know what a BBS is either.

The online phenomenon has become even more apparent with my interaction with El33tonline. The Gears of War Wednesday, Battlefield Friday and the website itself have gathered together a community of gamers who enjoy gaming as a group. Sometimes members of the community play with each other, sometimes against each other, but it is always fun (especially boasting about frags and tags stolen). Nowadays, I don’t have as much time to play games as I used to and, like Oltman, I find myself playing shorter games. For instance, I play a lot more Battlefield 3 online than I do singleplayer because I can join and play for a short period and then get back to the business of life. Hopefully I’ll win the lottery soon though and I can become a professional gamer.

Battlefield 3 Oltman likes to use the term ‘Platform Agnostic’ when describing what kind of a gamer he is. This means that he’ll play any game, anywhere, any time and on any platform. He writes: “I also used to be a PC gamer at heart, especially when it came to first -person shooters. There is something about playing a game with a keyboard and a mouse that just beats a silly controller. Then I played Left 4 Dead split-screen on an Xbox, however, and forever the way I play games has been changed. Split-screen console co-op is the ultimate way to enjoy gaming. “Sitting next-to your buddy and getting the fright of your life when you run into a room to get a desperate medipack, only to run into a tank is priceless. Whenever I buy a game now it has to have a co-op mode!” Like Oltman, I was a PC gamer and, whilst it remains my favourite platform, the cost involved in keeping up with the gaming industry is just far too much. Therefore, I have become an Xbox gamer and whilst I do love my Xbox, I miss my PC gaming.

I hope this has given you a bit of nostalgia and a nice trip down memory lane. Please let me know what games changed your gaming life – I am sure there are some that I have completely forgotten, despite how important they are. Games that deserve and honourable mention are: - Star Wars: Jedi Arena on the Atari 2600 - Rampage - Lemmings - Bubble Bobble - Star Control - Tetris

Contributor: Russell

Editorial: Developers are gamers at heart - insight into a few things we should keep in mind

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 07:00:00 +0000

I’ve been aware just how cynical and hard to please the videogame crowd (present company mostly excluded) is for a while now. Since becoming a member of the industry as a journalist and being a gamer myself, this awareness has deepened into an understanding of sorts. When you’re a gamer I believe it’s easy to be critical of developers for two reasons. Firstly, games are not cheap, you’ve spent your hard earned cash on this title and you feel you have the right to complain if you’re not happy. Secondly, you’re probably quite isolated from game development, you may have watched developer interviews, read about games and even feel you’re qualified because you play games, but the reality is that you’re pretty far removed because you’ve never actually met the developers. Now I understand that getting the chance to meet developers is not something that everyone has the chance to do. But perhaps you’ll allow me to give you a little insight that I’ve gathered from my fortunes of meeting different development teams over the past few years.

I suppose it’s easy to put developers on a pedestal of sorts. They did after all create our favourite gaming franchises, and in our minds become legends. The first time I met Charles Martinet, the man behind the voice of Mario, I was truly awestruck. Since then I’ve met a number of industry greats, people like Warren Spector, Peter Molyneux and Kaz Hirai, as well as some of the development teams behind some very successful gaming series. It’s been a humbling journey, and I can honestly say that it never grows old and it always feels awesome. I’ve often felt that the videogame industry as a whole is too harsh on the games that it produces. Journalists in particular are quick to hand out harsh judgments with phrases like ‘cash-cow,’ ‘lazy,’ and ‘movie tie-in’ often being thrown about without regard. This type of criticism has never felt right to me, in fact the aforementioned phrases are officially banned in my review guide. Yet I still see them cropping up on the internet, and it causes me endless frustration. Now I do understand that not everyone is in the position I am, to have had the opportunities to meet developers and get ‘behind the scenes’ insight, but allow me to give you a glimpse into my understanding and hopefully this will help to break the perception and give you the chance to understand developers as I see them. During Capcom’s Captivate 2012 event recently held in Rome, I was given the chance to meet a few recognised and highly regarded developers. But over the course of the few days of the event, I was once again shown just how developers are normal people like you and me. When I arrived at the reception dinner a group of Japanese folks from different Capcom development teams were huddled over a Nintendo 3DS, enjoying a game and laughing together. Such a simple picture, yet a strong reminder that developers are gamers at heart. When they are not at their jobs, they probably sit back, relax and take time to enjoy a game, not so different to you and me. The next evening the very popular Yoshinori Ono, Street Fighter X Tekken Producer, was walking around the hotel taking pictures of himself and his figurine Blanka, genuinely happy to be in Rome to talk about games - just an ordinary guy, just a gamer at heart. At breakfast the following day Kenji Oguro, the creator of the Lost Planet series and franchise creative director, who I had interviewed the day before, walked by my table and waved Hi to me - just another example of an ordinary guy who most definitely is not too important to say hello to the little folk on the ground like me.

Street Fighter X Tekken Producer, Yoshinori Ono with Blanka

I will be the first to admit I was completely in awe when I met the Resident Evil 6 development team, the creators of one of my most revered franchises. Yet it soon became apparent that Executive Producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi, Director Eiichiro Sasaki and Producer Yoshiaki Hirabayashi were all nervous to be showing their game to us. In fact during the presentation they got the order that they were supposed to be speaking in mixed up, had a good laugh about that and then apologised for the mistake, saying they were very nervous to be talking to us. Who would have thought such industry legends would be nervous talking to a bunch of gamers like us who loved their games?

The Resident Evil 6 team

Later that day I was playing Dragon’s Dogma when the Assistant Producer, Tomohiro Saito, came to ask me what I thought about the game. We chatted a while, and he gave me some advice on how to beat the drake on the level I was playing. Before he moved on he asked me if I was going to the dinner that evening, and said maybe we could chat more then. Well that night he came and sat next to me and we had a grand evening chatting not only about gaming, but about South Africa, Japanese comedy shows and the birds and frogs of Brazil (in no particular order), which information came from my new Brazilian friends who also sat at my table. We also discussed our favourite Street Fighter X Tekken characters, because the Street Fighter team was at our table as well, which led into a heated debate about fighting games in general.

Dragon’s Dogma Assistant Producer, Tomohiro Saito

These experiences combine to show me (and hopefully you now too) that developers are just gamers at heart. They’re doing what they love, but they work hard at what they do and I can assure you that I have yet to meet a lazy developer or a developer that has only half-heartedly worked on a game. They put their all into their games, and they work harder than you and I could ever imagine. Hopefully you’ll keep this in mind from now on, and when you’re playing their games give them the respect they deserve, and remember they’re not that different from you and me.

Contributor: Lisa

Editorial: Exclusive Borderlands 2 Interview: Gun lust, clever skags and Claptrap's return

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 11:00:00 +0000

The original Borderlands in 2009 was a game that definitely surprised many players with its perfect storm of ingredients: Addictive RPG elements, fantastic loot, millions of possible gun combinations, incredibly creative enemies and environments, as well as that signature humour, all came together to form something truly special.

Releasing in mid-September this year, Borderlands 2 is set to do it all over again but if our time at gamescom 2011 and the debut trailer is anything to go by, Gearbox Software’s sequel is going to outstrip the studio’s previous effort in every way, with over-the-top action, characters, scenarios and enemies! And that signature humour? Borderlands 2 dials it up way past levels deemed safe for human consumption! So it was with excitement that El33tonline’s Editor-in-Chief Lisa recently spoke with Gearbox Software’s Anthony Burch to find out a lot more about Borderlands 2 and what makes it tick - there is a ton of fantastic information in here so grab a cup of your favourite hot drink, settle into a comfy chair, and enjoy:

That Trailer:

El33tonline: Firstly, please can you tell us a bit about yourself. What is your role at Gearbox Software and how are you involved with the current Borderlands 2 project? Anthony Burch: My name is Anthony Burch. I am the main writer of Borderlands 2 and one time I made a guy fall off his skateboard just by looking at him funny.

El33tonline: The trailer showed us just how much variety we can expect in Borderlands 2, whether that be character classes, weapons, enemies or environments. How important was it to the development team to build on the variety that Borderlands 1 offered, and how are you achieving this? Anthony Burch: Extremely important. We wanted to make more of everything, and also make it better. So we not only have more guns, but the guns themselves are more varied and unique thanks to the manufacturer system. We not only have more environments, but the environments themselves are ludicrously varied – you’ll go from snow to grass to dust to a pristine, futuristic city, all within a few hours. We want Borderlands 2 to be a true sequel – to deliver more, and better. El33tonline: During the trailer we see a few familiar faces (Mordecai, Dr Zed and Scooter, for example), a few new ones and a few mysterious ones. We know the four characters from Borderlands 1 will be making a re-appearance in the game – how important will this role be and how will their stories be weaved into the stories of the new characters? Also can you tell us a bit more about the new faces we see during the trailer and what roles they will play during the game. Anthony Burch: The four Vault Hunters from the first game will be extremely important. A new villain named Handsome Jack plans to take over Pandora, and given his immense power (he’s a trillionaire with an entire army of killer robots on his side, because who wouldn’t buy a bunch of killer robots once they made a trillion dollars?), the player will need the help of the original four Vault Hunters to take him down. As far as new characters go, the trailer showed off Tiny Tina – she’s the little girl jumping on the dynamite plunger. She’s a nine-year-old explosives expert who happens to be slightly insane. We also saw Handsome Jack, who, as mentioned earlier, is the antagonist of the game – a complete egomaniac who wants to rebuild Pandora in his image.

El33tonline: We also got a glimpse of new enemies in the trailer, can you tell us any more details about what new enemies we can expect to face in Borderlands 2 and which enemies we will be reacquainted with? Some of those enemies seem rather large too! Just how large can we expect some of these enemies to be and will any require teamwork to take down? Anthony Burch: We’ve got a lot of enemies returning from the first game – psychos, skags, and so forth – but we’ve got at least a dozen new enemies in Borderlands 2. We’ve also improved the AI for all the enemies in the game: skags will now transmit their elemental type to other skags (so a fire skag can do a ground pound and set all the skag pups around him on fire, turning them into fire pups), our new Loader enemies will lose and regrow arms by calling for healing beams from Surveyor bots, and so on. Our enemies are now more complex and require more strategy – really effective teams will be able to take down, say, a Nomad Torturer (a new enemy who fights with a midget strapped to his massive, bulletproof shield) very easily by using one player to draw his aggro while another flanks him. Even if you aren’t playing with a friend, however, there are always options for taking down any enemy by yourself. For instance, you could free the midget strapped to the Torturer’s shield so it’ll fight alongside you briefly, giving you the opportunity to flank the Torturer from behind. El33tonline: New vehicles have also been spotted, in addition to flying vehicles we saw bigger, more interesting vehicles – can you tell us any more details about how players will interact with these vehicles and how they will change the gameplay? Anthony Burch: The vehicle that shows up during the ’catch a new ride‘ part of the trailer – is our new, four-player vehicle. One player drives, one player mans the turret, and the other two stand in the flatbed and fire their own weapons from the sides. The flying vehicles you saw were actually Buzzards, which is what the bandits call the gyrocopters they’ve built by taking pieces from other vehicles and reassembling them. You won’t be piloting any of those yourself, but you’ll quickly realize that you wouldn’t want to – they go down pretty easily.

El33tonline: The weapons and, more importantly, the variety of weapons in the game are impressive. Do you really have 870 Gajillion more guns in Borderlands 2? Are there any particular new guns that you’d like to describe a little for us? Anthony Burch: We definitely have more guns, and they all look and feel very different to those in the first game. Just take SMGs, for instance. If you get a Dahl assault SMG, it’ll only shoot in burst-fire mode, but it’ll do really high damage and have a practically non-existent bullet spread. If you get a Tediore SMG, you’ll chuck it like a grenade every time you reload it. If you get a Maliwan SMG, it’ll always do a buttload of elemental damage. Each manufacturer has its own gimmick, so each gun feels totally different from every other gun. El33tonline: We were happy to see that Claptrap will be making a return in Borderlands 2. Anything you can share with us about his role in the game and if we can expect to see him doing the robot in the final game too? Anthony Burch: Claptrap is on the same quest the player is – to take down Handsome Jack and free Pandora. Handsome Jack murdered every other Claptrap unit on Pandora once he got there , so Claptrap is actually the last of his kind – and he wants to take down Jack just as much as the player hopefully will. However, since Claptrap is a deluded moron, he thinks that he, and not the player, is actually the star of the game. I’d be very surprised if Claptrap didn’t end up dancing at some point in the game.

Four character classes:

El33tonline: Lilith was one of our favourite characters in Borderlands 1 and now Maya will take Lilith’s place this time around with ‘Phase’ abilities. Can you talk about Maya’s relation to Lilith and what improvements you’ve made to this character class? Anthony Burch: Maya and Lilith are both Sirens, but they have completely different action skills – Lilith’s Phasewalk is completely different from Maya’s Phaselock. Maya’s Phaselock skill is a crowd control ability. By Phaselocking an enemy, she takes them out of the fight for a limited time – the enemy can’t hurt the players, but the players can hurt the enemy. The Phaselock is also one of the most versatile skills in the game – if you invest in the ’Helios‘ skill, every Phaselock will create a massive fire blast that incinerates any enemies who were near the poor bastard you grabbed, and if you invest in ’Res‘ you can use Phaselock to revive your partners instead of running over and manually getting them back to their feet.

El33tonline: How do you ensure each of the character classes are equally balanced, and how important is this to the development team? To balance diversity of character with equality of strength, and ensure one character class is not more powerful than the next. Anthony Burch: We do a lot of focus testing and peer review. All four characters are being designed by a dude named Jonathan Hemingway, and he’s fantastic at tweaking the stats so that every character class feels useful in their own way. El33tonline: How can players look forward to modifying Salvador’s skills, which skill are you most excited about with Salvador, and how do you think they will influence a gamers’ experience when playing as the Gunzerker. Anthony Burch: Salvador has three skill trees: the ’rampage‘ tree, which is about all dual-wielding all the time, the ’brawn‘ tree, which is about being a badass tank who takes lots of damage, and the gun lust tree, which is about doing crazy stuff with weapons. Personally, the gun lust tree is really exciting to me because you can combine the skills to create really fun combinations. For example, there’s a skill called ’No Kill Like Overkill‘ that converts all excess damage from a killed enemy into health – so, say, if you do 100 damage to a guy who has only 1 hp left, you get 99 health. You can then combine this with a different skill that adds bonus damage to the last bullet in every magazine, so that if you kill an enemy with the last bullet in your magazine, you’ll do so much damage that, with a single shot, you’ll recharge all of your hit points instantly.

El33tonline: Axton the Commando bears more than a passing resemblance to the Soldier class from Borderlands 1. We believe that playing as the Commando will feel familiar if you played as the Soldier – can you elaborate on this a little and describe what similarities and differences to the Soldier we can expect to encounter when playing as Axton? Anthony Burch: Axton has an auto-turret much like Roland did in the first game, but Axton’s can be upgraded to do stuff that Roland’s turret could only dream of. For example, if you invest in the ‘Mag-Lock’ skill, you can toss the turret onto walls and ceilings to flush enemies from cover. Players who were comfortable with Roland will find a home with Axton, but he has so many more skills (in fact, each character in Borderlands 2 has around 30% more skills than any given character from the original game) that he will feel like an entirely new character class. El33tonline: Please tell us more about the Commando’s new turret, how much more modifiable it is and how the appearance will change depending on a gamers’ skill build. Please also explain how the longbow turret will work – it sounds exciting! Anthony Burch: Depending on how you spend your skills, you can put a second gun on the turret (doubling its damage), or attach missile pods to it, or any number of other crazy things. The longbow turret basically allows you to place the turret anywhere you’re aiming – rather than just tossing the turret in front of you, which gives you a tragically limited range, you could stand at the top of a mountain and longbow the turret into a group of enemies at the mountain’s base. It’s great for sniping – you can use the turret to draw aggro and pick off the enemies that attack it.

El33tonline: Zer0 the Assassin seems to us to be the most new unique character on the Borderlands 2 team. Can you tell us more about his skills and this intriguing calling card we’ve heard about. Anthony Burch: Zero is both a melee fighter and a sniper – depending on which skills you purchase, Zero can either be spectacularly strong at close range, or at long range, or both. He’s got a skill tree that’s all about sniping, as well as a skill tree that’s about getting in close and dealing ludicrous damage with melee weapons. His action skill, Deception, allows him to become invisible and create a decoy of himself on the battlefield. While in Deception, the player’s critical hits do more damage, so there’s an advantage to either hanging back and sniping, or getting close and swinging once Deception is active. In regards to his ’calling card’ you mention – the big zero that appears on his face whenever he kills someone – we don’t want to reveal too many answers. Zero is intentionally designed to be something of a mystery: where did he come from, who is he, and why does that big ’0‘ appear every time he gets a kill? We like to imagine that his name isn’t actually ’Zero’ and that people just call him that because the number keeps appearing on his face.

El33tonline thanks Gearbox Software, 2K Games and Anthony Burch for their time! Borderlands 2 is due for release on September 18th in North America and September 21st everywhere else, across Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.

Contributor: Lisa

Editorial: 7 Deadly Sims

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 10:00:00 +0000

It is no secret that I quite adore The Sims. Yes, I groan every time a new expansion is released, but I have to keep up the appearance of a serious games reviewer. And The Sims just does not bode well for a gamer of my caliber. But the problem with that is the fact that The Sims are simply too addictive to overlook. And if you look at the sales figures for The Sims I can take comfort in knowing I am most certainly not alone in this!

The Sims turns 12 this week, and now that it is heading into its teens you can expect a few changes to happen. Besides hair starting to grow in places where it did not even know it had places, you can expect a lot of new things starting to appear. Luckily for the secret Sims fan in all of us these new things have been arriving long before puberty. Yes, expansions go hand in hand with The Sims franchise and we have had some crackers up to now. So without further ado, let me present you with the 7 Deadly Sims expansions. The 7 that really have changed the game from being a doll house simulator to being a life simulator. 1.) The Sims 3 – This not an expansion in its own right, but is the root of all evil. As a base game you obviously need it to enjoy the expansions, but it also has a great marketplace where buying new items and buildings are as easy as entering a credit card number. This lays the foundation for all bad things to come! 2.) The Sims 3: World Adventures – Your Sim might enjoy his little hometown, but going on holiday is as much fun to them as a real one is for you. So save your cash, go to Paris, Egypt or the Far East and enjoy new tasks and adventures! Take photos to show your friends! 3.) The Sims 3: Pets – Companionship is a massive part of The Sims franchise, and a dog is man’s best friend. So is a horse, or a cat, or a snake, rat, or turtle. Yes, pets bring out the best and the worst in your Sim’s behavior. Now try to explain to your Sim children that their pooch went to heaven. 4.) The Sims 3: Generations – The biggest thing missing from The Sims up to this point was a good upbringing. Generations fixes that by giving your children schools, libraries and play areas to get up to their usual no good activities. Not only is this a nice way to be more involved with your children, it also molds them into their adult selves. Be careful how much you let them get up to! 5.) The Sims 3: Night Life – Your Sims need an escape at night, somewhere to hang out and meet new people. Night Life adds clubs and bars, as well as vampires that thankfully do not glitter in the sun, but actually start to burn. But beware, being a vampire may let you live off other Sim’s blood, but there is no turning back! 6.) The Sims 3: Ambitions – As if real life is not hard enough, you now have the chance to get more involved in your Sim’s fictitious life. And where would we do this? At his place of work, of course! Now your Sim not only have more jobs to choose from, but each job gives tasks to perform and more reward for completing them successfully. Hey, why is real life not like this? 7.) The Sims 3: Stuff Packs (The Sims 3: Fast Lane Stuff, The Sims 3: Outdoor Living Stuff and The Sims 3: High-End Loft Stuff) – Just as in real life you can never have too much stuff. If you need a new sofa or a new car, don’t sell the old one, just build a new room for the new one. Stuff packs only add furniture, clothing and accessories, but you can never have too much of them. So start collecting now!

The Sims 3 have come a very long way from its release, and with new expansions you get to experience new things with your Sim friends all the time. Just like real life I guess. The only thing it really needs is an online mode, where your Sim can meet other real life Sims from across the world. EA, if you are reading this, please make it happen! My Sim needs REAL interaction! You can also read over Oltman’s reviews of the expansions for The Sims 3 not listed above, below: - The Sims 3: Town Life Stuff - The Sims Medieval: Pirates and Nobles - The Sims 3: Town Life Stuff - The Sims: Medieval

Contributor: Oltman

Editorial: Are you addicted to Battlefield 3?

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 07:01:00 +0000

Battlefield 3 is by far the most fun I have had online since I discovered online gaming. What makes it so good for me has to be the squad system where smaller squads fight in the same big team towards the bigger goal. Everyone who has played some Battlefield 3 online has immediately been hooked. Apart from Oliver who has owned the game for more than a week and is yet to play a game with me. I figure he is avoiding the addictive nature of this online phenomenon. Don’t worry OL, stick with me and I will look after you.

But some of the El33t P33ps might actually be a little bit too hooked, and have started to develop some symptoms that would seem to suggest a slight case of addiction to their favourite game. Below you will find five symptoms that I have identified in my own life that show a hint of addiction. Can you identify with any of them? 1.) When standing in a long queue at the movies for a new release, you start to hear “that tune” that gets louder as the tickets run out. 2.) Instead of waking up your wife in the morning you revive her with your imaginary defibrillator (bonus points if she wakes up by choosing “A” to accept your revival!). 3.) When seeing a helicopter or plane in the sky you tag it for your buddies to see. If it comes toward you you paint it with your laser designator. 4.) Every time you walk past a flag pole you jump in the bushes next to it and wait for a different flag to be hoisted. 5.) When waiting at a traffic light you drive forwards and backwards to prevent a pedestrian planting C4 on you. These are just the five that happened to me on the way to work this morning. Can you add to the list? Share with us in the comments below, and prepare for tonight’s Battlefield 3 Friday!

Contributor: Oltman

Editorial: The El33t Team's Top 10 Most Anticipated Games of 2012

Thu, 02 Feb 2012 06:00:00 +0000

2012 promises to be another busy year in the videogame industry. You just have to take a look at El33tonline’s Great Big Release List of 2012 to know just how many great titles we’re looking forward to this year. To kick 2012 off properly we asked the El33tonline Team what their most anticipated games of 2012 are, and you can read what’s on our Top 10 list of 2012 so far below. We’d love to know what you are saving your pennies for as well, so let us know what you’re most looking forward to in the comments section below. The El33t Team’s Top 10 Games of 2012 Please note that these are listed in no particular order.

Peter

1.) Picross E (3DSWare) - the killer app on handheld systems for me is Picross. Can’t wait for this sequel to Picross DS. 2.)Wii U Launch Title (Wii U) - Nintendo will likely have something great planned for launch of the Wii U, so this is place holder for whatever that is. 3.) SSX (PS3/360) - This looks like a great downhill snowboarding game, and there hasn’t been one in a long while. 4.) Dragon’s Dogma (PS3/360) - Epic looking and fresh and interesting. 5.) XCOM Enemy Unknown - Firaxis making an update to the classic XCOM. A great recipe for success. 6.) Paper Mario 3D (3DS) - Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi are some of the best RPGs ever. The trailer for this uses the 3D effect really well, can’t wait to see what they do with it 7.) Rhythm Heaven Fever (Wii) - One of my favourite rhythm games series comes to the Wii and allows for multiplayer. 8.) Pandora’s Tower (Wii) - Fascinating looking action game that also looks decidedly fresh 9.) Resident Evil: Revelations (3DS) - RE4-like, that is all, let’s hope it can catch the magic 10.) Escape Plan (VS Vita) - A unique puzzle game with a unique art style.

Oltman

1.) Mass Effect 3 2.) XCOM Enemy Unknown 3.) Max Payne 3 4.) Syndicate 5.) Fez 6.) Aliens Colonial Marines 7.) SSX 8.) Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning 9) The Next Jonah Lomu rugby game 10.) Guild Wars 3 Bonus: Half-Life 3

Bryan

1.) Alan Wake’s American Nightmare - I haven’t yet played the Alan Wake series but I am very drawn to the light vs. dark aspect of this psychological thriller. You could say my giddiness for this game is making me a little … ‘light’ headed! 2.) Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City - T-virus. Zombies. Umbrella Security Service. Zombies. Multiplayer. Zombies. Must have. Must play. Zombies. Miiiiiiiiiine. 3.) Dragon’s Dogma - large open world with nine or more playable characters. Plus it has the words “dog” “dragon” and “ma” in the title. 4.) Borderlands 2 - I’m still playing Borderlands and loving it so to get my paws on Borderlands 2 will just make my day. Uh. Year, I mean. 5.) Aliens: Colonial Marines - I grew up on the Alien franchise. I loved it. I made up my own movies and sequels. Acid blood, face huggers, strange alien crash-sites. I even pretended that the James Cameron worlds of T2 and Aliens were merged and the aliens had come to present day earth (not like those stupid AvP movies)! The story’s been written by the writers of Battlestar Galactica and supports splitscreen co-op. Have to have to have to have to play this. 6.) BioShock Inifinte - a BioShock game that takes place on a steampunk air-city called Columbia. It’s irresistable. 7.) I Am Alive - if there’s one thing I enjoy almost as much as Zombie games, it’s post-apocalyptic games. Bring it on! 8.) Lego Batman 2: DC Superheroes - My wife and I simply love the Lego games for their humour, good, clean action, and unmitigated connection to our childhood Lego toys. This is definitely a must-have title for us! 9.) Lollipop Chainsaw - a cheerleader fighting zombies in California! Oh, and the title has the words “Lollipop” and “chainsaw” in it. 10.) Metro: Last Light - the original (Metro 2033) totally freaked me out and made me sleep with the bathroom lights on. I have already mentioned how much I love post-apocalypse stuff, so this is a no-brainer for me.

Honorable mentions: 1.) Mass Effect 3 - I’ve finally got my hands on Mass Effect and I’m really looking forward to playing through this series. Added in multiplayer and co-op makes this a sci-fi love affair! 2.) Minecraft - I’ve heard a lot about this game so I should probably check it out. 3.) WWE Brawl - not too much is known about this game yet but a ‘re-flavouring’ of the typical WWE game series could be a strong hit or a strong miss. Here’s hoping for a strong hit! 4.) Counter-Strike: Global Offensive - erm. I’ve been a Counter-Strike player since around 1997 or thereabouts and if there’s a CS game out there with the initials “CS GO” available on Xbox 360, I must simply obey! 5.) Diablo III - Diablo II sequel available on Xbox 360 6.) Gotham City Impostors - sounding like it’s basically Call of Duty in Gotham City with men dressed up like the Joker and Batman, it’s probably going to be a lot of fun and a welcome deviation from the run-of-the-mill FPS titles that seem to come out every year.

Oliver

1.) Bioshock Infinite 2.) Darksiders 2 3.) Tomb Raider 4.) The Last Guardian 5.) Max Payne 3 6.) Resident Evil 6 7.) Borderlands 2 8.) Prey 2 9.) Metro: Last Light 10.) DmC (Devil May Cry)

Lisa

1.) Tomb Raider 2.) Resident Evil 6 3.) Darksiders 2 4.) Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City 5.) Metro: Last Light 6.) SSX 7.) DmC (Devil May Cry) 8.) Borderlands 2 9.) The Last Guardian 10.) Syndicate

Warren

1.) Bioshock Infinite 2.) Borderlands 2 3.) Diablo III 4.) GuildWars II 5.) Hitman Absolution 6.) Journey 7.) Max Payne 3 8.) Mass Effect 3 9.) StarCraft II: Heart of the swarm 10.) Tomb Raider

Wayne

1.) Mass Effect 3 2.) Resident Evil 6 3.) Darksiders 2 4.) The Last Guardian 5.) Max Payne 3 6.) Metro: Last Light 7.) Borderlands 2 8.) DmC (Devil May Cry) 9.) Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City 10.) Syndicate

Contributor: Lisa

Editorial: The El33t Team's Top 10 Games of 2011

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 06:00:00 +0000

2011 has come and gone, but that’s not to say that we’ve forgotten the games that the industry gifted to us during the past 12 months. In fact many of us are still playing these titles with our friends online, and many more are still eagerly waiting to play these titles, they’re either sitting on our wishlist or in our backlog as we struggle to find more gaming time. Let’s take a look at what titles found a special place on the El33tonline team’s gaming shelf in 2011. You’re sure to spot a few of your own favourites too, so feel free to let us know which were your top games of 2011 in the comments section below. The El33t Team’s Top 10 Games of 2011 Please note that these are listed in no particular order.

Peter

1.) Super Mario 3D Land 2.) The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword 3.) Forza Motorsport 4 4.) The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D 5.) Pullblox 6.) Rayman Origins 7.) Mario Kart 7 8.) Pokemon Black/White 9.) Kirby’s Epic Yarn 10.) Kirby Mass Attack

Warren

1.) Assassins Creed: Revelations 2.) Batman: Arkham City 3.) Deus Ex: Human Revolution 4.) Gears of War 3 5.) Killzone 3 6.) L.A. Noire 7.) Mass Effect 2 8.) Portal 2 9.) The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim 10.) Uncharted 3

Oliver

1.) Battlefield 3 2.) Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim 3.) Gears of War 3 4.) Rayman Origins 5.) Uncharted 3 6.) Batman: Arkham City 7.) Resistance 3 8 ) Need For Speed: The Run 9.) The Black Eyed Peas Experience 10) Crysis 2

Oltman

1.) Portal 2 2.) Battlefield 3 3.) The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim 4.) Batman: Arkham City 5.) Uncharted 3 6.) Deus Ex Human Revolution 7.) LA Noire 8.) Infamous 2 9.) Rayman Origins 10.) Bastion

Lisa

1.) Resistance 3 2.) Uncharted 3 3.) Gears of War 3 4.) Batman: Arkham City 5.) The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword 6.) Rayman Origins 7.) Crysis 2 8.) Battlefield 3 9.) Need for Speed: The Run 10.) The Lord of the Rings: War in the North

Bryan

1.) Toy Soldiers: Cold War - Curiously addictive game that is good clean fun in co-op mode and versus. We’re talking 80’s-era plastic soldiers, Apache gunships, and John freaking Rambo. 2.) Portal 2 - The co-op element of Portal is simply fantastic! 3.) Dead Island - What all zombie games of the past have forgotten to focus on is the reality that guns are a rarity and stamina is a necessity. Dead Island was rough around the edges, but it’s a great co-op game and you finally get to see some sun. 4.) Battlefield 3 - Still my game of choice since getting it on launch day. ‘Nuff said. 5.) Call of Duty: Rezurrection Map Pack for Black Ops - Zombies on the moon. ‘Nuff said. 6.) Fruit Ninja Kinect - Crazy fruit-chopping entertainment no matter which way you slice it. 7.) Lego: Pirates of the Caribbean - Every Lego game (yes, I said EVERY Lego game) is oodles of co-op fun, and this one is no exception. To play the ever-quirky Captain Jack Sparrow to the impish soundtrack of Pirates magnifies the fun factor to new heights. 8.) Just Dance 3 - Four player dance party game with a swathe of current billboard hits? What’s not to love! 9.) Gears of War 3 - Very refined, very impressive graphics and a game that offers some of the best co-op action around. 10.) Insanely Twisted: Shadow Planet - I haven’t even touched on the single player yet because the four-player Lantern Run in co-op mode has kept me busy for weeks. Can you tell I enjoy co-op? Well, if you do too then grab this breath of fresh air from the slightly overcrowded shooter stable.

Wayne

1.) Batman: Arkham City 2.) Uncharted 3 3.) Resistance 3 4.) The Lord of the Rings: War in the North 5.) The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword 6.) Battlefield 3 7.) Dead Space 2 8.) Gears of War 3 9.) Rayman Origins 10.) Crysis 2

Contributor: Lisa

Editorial: The Games of 2012: El33tonline's Great Big Release List

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 08:00:00 +0000

Did you think 2011 was jam-packed with fantastic videogames? Were you unable to keep up with the pace of releases due to time and budget constraints? Then we’ve got some bad news for you: The 2012 videogame release slate is going to be just as manic as 2011 with titles that promise to be just as spectacular as the best that last year could throw at us!

El33tonline has compiled a wonderfully huge list of games due for release in 2012, split up into monthly and weekly release windows. We’ve also included a healthy (READ: Overwhelming) list of games that don’t have set release dates just yet, but are still expected to launch in 2012. Keep checking back here throughout the days, weeks and months this year as we’ll be continually updating this list with more concrete release dates and more games as they’re announced. If you want to keep up with the games of 2012, then bookmarking this page might be useful… Without further ado, here are the (known and unknown) games of 2012!

May:

Week of April 30th: - Fable Heroes (Xbox LIVE) - Mortal Kombat (PS Vita) - Sniper Elite V2 (PS3, Xbox 360 - US Release)

Week of May 7th: - Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition (Xbox LIVE) - Starhawk (PS3)

Week of May 14th: - Diablo III (PC) - Max Payne 3 (PS3, Xbox 360) - Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 2 (PlayStation Network, Xbox LIVE Marketplace)

Week of May 21st: - DiRT Showdown (PS3, Xbox 360, PC) - Dragon’s Dogma (PS3, Xbox 360) - Silent Hill: Book of Memories (PS Vita) - Sorcery (PS3) - Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier (PS3, Xbox 360) Week of May 28th: - Resistance: Burning Skies (PS Vita)

June:

Week of May 28th: - Game of Thrones (PS3, Xbox 360, PC - European Release) - Resistance: Burning Skies (PS Vita) Week of June 11th: - Lollipop Chainsaw (PS3, Xbox 360) - Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Future Soldier (PC)

Week of June 18th: - The Secret World (PC)

Week of May 28th: - Max Payne 3 (PC) Week of June 25th: - Spec Ops: The Line (PS3, Xbox 360, PC)

July:

Week of July 2nd: - Anarchy Reigns (PS3, Xbox 360)

August:

Week of July 30th: - Risen 2: Dark Waters (PS3, Xbox 360) Week of August 27th: - Transformers: Fall of Cybertron (PS3, Xbox 360) Unknown week of August: - Darksiders II (PS3, Xbox 360, PC)

September:

Week of September 3rd: - Far Cry 3 Week of September 16th: - Borderlands 2

October:

Week of September 29th: - Assassin’s Creed III Week of October 1st: - Resident Evil 6 (PS3, Xbox 360, PC) Week of October 8th: - Dishonored Week of October 22nd: - Medal of Honor: Warfighter

November:

Week of November 5th: - Halo 4 (Xbox 360) Week of November 12th: - Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 PS3, Xbox 360, PC) Week of November 19th: - Hitman Absolution (PS3, Xbox 360, PC)

December:

- Unknown

Unknown Release Dates:

We may know the release dates and windows of dozens of 2012 games, there are still many dozens more that haven’t received official launch days to better help us plan our future play sessions (and budgets). There are so many games that don’t have a release date, in fact, that instead of smashing them into a single, messy list, we’ve split them up into their respective genres so you can more easily look over the types of titles you might be interested in. Here we go:

Action / Adventure: - Epic Mickey 2 - Fable: The Journey - LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroes - Luigi’s Mansion 2 (3DS) - The Amazing Spider-Man - The Last Guardian - Yakuza Black Panther 2 - Zone of the Enders HD Collection

Fighter: - Persona 4 The Ultimate In Mayonaka Arena - Dead or Alive 5 - Tekken Tag Tournament 2

First-Person Shooter/Action: - Aliens: Colonial Marines - ArmA 3 - Brothers in Arms Furious 4 - Counter-Strike: Global Offensive - Dishonored - Hawken - Overstrike - Prey 2 - Resistance: Burning Skies (PS Vita) - Ryse

MMO: - DUST 514 - Guild Wars 2 - MechWarrior Online - Planetside 2 - TERA Online - Transformers Universe - Wakfu - Wildstar - World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria

Platformer: - Deadlight - Sonic the Hedgehog 4: Episode 2

Puzzle: - Fortnite - Professor Layton and the Mask of Miracles (3DS) - Quantum Conundrum - Sound Shapes (PS Vita) - Super Monkey Ball: Banana Splitz (PS Vita) - The Witness (PC)

Racing/Action Racing: - Carmageddon: Reincarnation - Project Cars

RPG: - Dota 2 - Dragon’s Crown - Final Fantasy Type-0 (PS) - Game of Thrones - Gungnir - Heroes of Ruin (3DS) - Pandora’s Tower (Wii) - Paper Mario 3DS - Penny Arcade Episode 3 - Persona 4 The Golden (PS Vita) - Ninokuni: Wrath of the White Witch - Skulls of the Shogun - South Park: The Game - The Dark Eye: Demonicon - XCOM: Enemy Unknown

Sports: - FIFA 13 - Inazuma Eleven 2 Firestorm/Blizzard - London 2012 – The Official Video Game of the Olympic Games - Madden NFL - Pro Evolution Soccer 2013 - Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD

Strategy: - End of Nations - Kingdom Under Fire 2 - Natural Selection 2 - StarCraft 2: Heart of the Swarm - Warlock: Master of the Arcane

Third-Person Shooter/Action: - DmC (Devil May Cry) - Firefall - Metal Gear Solid Rising Revengeance - The Last of Us

Wii U: - Aliens: Colonial Marines - Assassin’s Creed - Batman: Arkham City - Darksiders 2 - Dragon Quest 10 - Killer Freaks From Outer Space - Pikmin 3 - Project Cars - Tekken

Delayed Into 2013

- BioShock Infinite - Metro: Last Light - Tomb Raider - XCOM

Releasing 2013

- God of War: Ascension - Lost Planet 3

Unannounced/Uncertain Release Date

- GRID 2 - GTA V - Need For Speed (2012 edition) - Thief 4

And there you have it - the known (and unknown) games of 2012! Was there anything we missed that you think should be on the list? Any dates or launch windows you think might be incorrect? Let us know! Also let us know what games you’re most excited about and which games you’re interested in finding out more about.

Contributor: Oliver

Editorial: A complete history of role-playing videogames: Part 4

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 05:00:00 +0000

I hope you’re ready for some more history, because it’s time again to bend our minds to understanding where RPGs have come from, and possibly posit where they’re going. When last we left off, we had just finished off the Western-end of the iconic year of 1997, so let us go back and see what was happening in the East in the meantime before we pick up the Western strands again.

After the release of Final Fantasy in the East, Enix released Dragon Quest III in 1988, bringing a number of important changes. One was the creation of a more open world, allowing for far less linear gameplay and bringing in a heavy exploration element, something that remains an important part of the series today. Dragon Quest III also allowed the player to switch a character’s class and participation in the party at will, and having certain quests only available at specific times of the day or night. Many studios would go on to include many of these mechanics in their own games. After the roaring success of Final Fantasy, its sequel was released in 1988, and it introduced many features of what is considered a staple of Final Fantasy games, including broad, highly emotionally-charged, world-shattering dramatic storylines, chocobos (for those of you who have never played Final Fantasy, they’re large, yellow, ridable birds), Cid (a series of vastly different characters all bearing this name, one of the most bizarre ‘carry-overs’ from Final Fantasy game to Final Fantasy game, and possibly worthy of an article in his own right!), and, like Dragon Quest III, a measure of open-world exploration.

Much hubbub is made of Final Fantasy as a series and as we delve deeper into the history, we begin to see why: almost every Final Fantasy game contributed so much to the genre that it’s almost impossible to think of impactful JPRGs and not think of Final Fantasy. This is also the reason recent Final Fantasy games have been such disappointments to the fans: the games are adding less and less with each iteration, and the fact that was Final Fantasy XIII opened up so late in the game that many gamers felt that it wasn’t worth the effort to play through seven or eight hours of something bad just to get to the good bits. But I digress.

1989 saw the release of Phantasy Star II for the Sega Mega-Drive console. At the time, it was the first RPG for Sega’s console and was one of the first few serious, epic, science-fiction themed RPGs. The game featured heavily strategic battles, making the game difficult to newcomers, or those with a less tenacious bent (I suspect many gamers today would have no patience for it). The game’s story was also something not seen in a sci-fi game before: a reversal of the invasion theme common to sci-fi stories, with Earthlings being portrayed as the evil invaders. Many of the features introduced in Phantasy Star II would inevitably inspire similar features in other RPGs, including Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.

1989 also saw the release of a game called天外魔境 (Tengai Makyou, or Far East of Eden [lit. Devil’s World Far From Heaven]). What made this PC Engine game so notable was that it was the first console RPG to ship on a CD, and to use traditionally animated cutscenes and voice acting, and a CD audio soundtrack. The game, although set in feudal Japan, also had a high emphasis on humour. Like many RPGs, Tengai Makyou spawned a small army of sequels and spin-offs. Its English release was also the first console RPG to feature a dubbed vocal track and received, amongst other things, the Game of the Year award from OMNI Magazine. It wouldn’t be until 1992, with Lunar: The Silver Star for Sega CD that an RPG would take advantage of the enhanced space that a CD offered. The next few years would see a number of RPGs that followed the moulds of prior games, including Dragon Quest IV, Final Fantasy III, and Phantasy Star III, the last of which featured a storyline that spanned generations and four possible endings. Nintendo’s first Fire Emblem game for the NES, called ファイアーエムブレム暗黒竜と光の剣 (Fire Emblem: Ankoku Ryou to Hikari no Tsurugi, or Fire Emblem: Dragon of Darkness and the Blade of Light), is quite possibly one of the first tactical turn-based strategy RPGs. One interesting innovation that has become a staple of Fire Emblem games is that characters that die (due to a lack of hit points) stay dead with very little to no chance of return.

1991 saw the release of Final Fantasy IV, a game that set the mould for so many RPG features we see today, including the intricate plot, complex characters and the Active Time Battle (ATB) system, which essentially was a battle timer that never stopped, crossing the barrier between turn-based and action games. The following year, Final Fantasy V improved on the ATB system by including a gauge to show the player who’s turn was to follow. The ATB system has, in one form or another, appeared in almost every Final Fantasy game since, and has spread out from there to many different RPGs. In the same year, Lunar: The Silver Star for Sega CD was released. Dragon Quest V also made an appearance in 1992, bringing with it the same collection mechanic that we see today in such games as Pokemon (and every Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 Achievement and Trophy in existence, by extension).

Things would remain in the same sort of vein for the next few years. Square’s Secret of Mana in 1993 mixed things a bit by adding dynamic drop-in-drop-out co-op multiplayer, something of an innovation at the time and something that has only recently come back into the light with Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE and the PlayStation Network. Most RPGs of the era, right up until recent titles, only included a token effort at co-op multiplayer. The big exciting release of 1995, however, was once again from Square: Chrono Trigger. The game has become something of a phenomenon and still sees highly acclaimed re-releases. Chrono Trigger introduced a whole slew of new mechanics to the RPG genre toolbox while refurbishing and reintroducing some old tricks. No random battles. Non-linear gameplay. A ridiculous number of endings. Artwork by Dragon Quest and Dragonball Z artist Akira Toriyama. Time travel. And the list goes on. The original PlayStation release of the game also included animated sequences (as did many PlayStation re-releases of SNES games).

In addition to all this, Chrono Trigger introduced a combo system which allowed multiple party members to combine their individual powers to create new effects. This combo system would go on to be used in dozens of other RPGs, including Level 5’s Rogue Galaxy for the PlayStation 2. The other feature you can thank Chrono Trigger for is New Game+, which allows the player to restart the game with the same levels, equipment, etc. as they possessed at the end of the game, allowing the player to uncover new challenges. Things would once again remain quiet on the RPG front with many game sequels making appearances, but with few contributing anything new to the genre, and once again, the RPG as a genre started taking second place to other game genres. Certainly, there was Star Ocean and Sakura Wars, but mostly it was stuff that had been seen before. 1997 changed all that. Again, computing power surged forward and the CD was taking over as a storage medium. The Sony PlayStation was the most successful in a line of a consoles that used the CD, and arguably the one game that the PlayStation owes its long, successful existence to was Final Fantasy VII. This latest game in the series was possibly one of the single most compelling reasons for the eventual slow decline of the PC RPG in the West, and it introduced a whole new generation of gamers to the wonders of the JRPG.

Final Fantasy VII brought so much to RPGs that it’s difficult to find a place to start. Certainly, it evolved from the previous games in the series, using the ATB, chocobos, Final Fantasy VI’s steampunk themes and settings, strong character development, a dark and emotional storyline and so on. Final Fantasy VII also introduced seamless cut-scene cinematics that have become a staple of just about every single modern game. It introduced a quest that could potentially run well over 100 hours. The game world was simply immense. Across the globe, Final Fantasy VII broke sales records: 2.3 million copies sold within its first three days of life in Japan, 330 000 copies sold in the US on its first day and over 100 000 copies sold on its first day on the PSN. All told, over 10 million copies sold and still selling. An impressive achievement for a game that’s well over ten years old. With that, let’s head back West and see what was happening in the RPG world over there.

In 1998, a new development studio, BioWare, rose to prominence with the release of their second game: Baldur’s Gate (published by Interplay, the same chaps who released Fallout a year earlier). What made Baldur’s Gate so amazing at the time was its adherence to the D&D rule-set, which had in turn been licensed from TSR. The release of Baldur’s Gate was hailed as an immensely successful revival of the ‘pure’ RPG, setting a new standard for D&D-based games to come. It, along with Diablo, was almost singly responsible for rejuvenating what was seen as flagging genre. The game was a tremendous success, leading to well over two million copies in sales. Baldur’s Gate opened a floodgate of sorts and some of the most successful and well-remembered games are based upon it, including Black Isle Studios’ (incidentally also a developer under the Interplay publishing label) 1999 release, Planescape: Torment, the 2000 release of Icewind Dale, 2002’s Icewind Dale II, and BioWare’s own sequels and spin-offs. Because BioWare and Black Isle Studios were under the same Interplay studio, they often shared game engines and staff, at least until Interplay shut down Black Isle Studios in 2003 (the developers of which went on to form their own studio, Obsidian Entertainment). At the opening of the new millennium, computing power jumped once again, and nowhere is this more evident than the impressive differences between Baldur’s Gate (indeed, even Icewind Dale) and Neverwinter Nights, developed by BioWare (for Atari) in 2002. Interestingly enough, Neverwinter Nights used the more recent third edition D&D rules, and players familiar only with the old rules felt understandably a little lost to start with.

Neverwinter Nights was a pure RPG all the way to the core, but what separated it from almost every other computer-based RPG at the time was the ability of its fans to create and run actual D&D campaigns, complete with game leader (affectionately called the Dungeon Master, or DM) and player characters. From this point in, the RPG development scene in the West started to decline, with a number of very important highlights on the way, but the glory-days of the genre started to wane, with fewer releases as budgets began to grow. Next time, I’ll cover the important releases of the last few years in the West, including the rise of the Massively Multiplayer Online RPG (or MMORPG), and cover the continued tour-de-force of JRPGs in the West. Till then!

Contributor: Fayyaad

Editorial: Lisa's List of Top Party Games

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 02:00:00 +0000

One of the perks of being in the videogame industry is that over the years I have built up a solid collection of games. I am also lucky enough to own all three consoles, which allows me to really enjoy the fruits of my labour. Of course we all know that playing videogames with a couple of friends is the best way to spend a Saturday night, and over the years we have swatted, strummed and sang into the wee hours of many a Sunday morning. So I’ve made this list of my Top 10 Party Games (in no particular order) to help you plan your next big shin-dig, and perhaps even bring something new to your gaming shelf. Please feel free to share your favourite party games in the comments section below – remember that sharing is caring, so the more the merrier!

1.) Start The Party: Save the World

This is a really innovative title from Sony that makes use of the PlayStation Move perfectly. You’ll be tasked with saving your friends in various ways: escorting them safely through asteroid fields; catching them before a hungry shark devours them; and even burning would-be blood sucking insects. The wonderful Augmented Reality of Save the World means that you will see yourself on-screen, while the PlayStation Move controller will be transformed into a number of different items, ranging from a net to a fire stick and even a wrench. It’s a four player game, but you can make the rounds short so more players can join in on round two. The first Start The Party game is also really fun, but the interaction of Save the World has been stepped up a little (players can now use the SixAxis to interfere with the active player) giving it the upper hand.

2.) Just Dance 3

If you can convince your friends to join in, dance games are always loads of fun. Push the couches back, move the coffee table, pump up the volume and you’re ready to go! Just Dance has been a popular series since its debut on the Wii a couple of years ago, but fast forward a few years and Just Dance 3 has reached a new level of awesome on the other consoles too. Four player simultaneous dancing, bright neon colours and a banging soundtrack make this one of the best dancing games on the market today, not to mention a sure hit at anybody’s party. Leave your inhibitions (and your cameras) behind and you’ll have fun until the sun comes up, as well as a few aching muscles the next day.

The price you pay for not confiscating all cameras at the door. Oltman, Oliver, Peter and I dancing up a storm!

3.) Buzz: The Ultimate Music Quiz

I have always enjoyed trivia type games, but also have vivid memories of being annoyed by the Trivial Pursuit boardgame that can see you trying to aim for the centre spot with all your pies intact for many hours before you manage to secure your win. Buzz: The Ultimate Music Quiz has taken the annoyance out of trivia titles, and infused it with a few fun ways to test your grey matter in a not so serious kind of way. The series has also evolved over the years, with the host Buzz becoming somewhat less annoying and the mini-games more inventive. There are also a number of different titles out there now, so you can choose to play to your strengths or your friends’ weaknesses, whichever you prefer. Four player action means you can team up, or you can even invest in another set of buzzers for eight players to join in. And with a turkey or a basket of kittens up for grabs, why wouldn’t you want to give this game a go! You can also check out Buzz: Brain of the World for more brain testers.

4.) Rock Band 3

Rock Band was diligently lugged by a friend all the way from the USA to find a happy home in our lounge in Durban. This was the game that occupied 90% of our time for a good few years: we formed a band (Pile-o-Tasty) and set off on a tour across many lands to many venues, with rockers (Lars �mla�t leading the charge) getting new outlandish outfits along the way and eventually a better van to transport our stuff to new gigs. New songs were purchased weekly with vouchers acquired from over the sea, and over the next weeks and months we grew in skill and fame. During some of our raucous concerts we broke a drum pedal and even had to get the drummer a fan to cool down before he passed out from heat stroke. But we carried on, you can’t call yourself a real band unless you have completed all of the songs on expert now can you? And that includes the infamous ‘Green Grass and High Tides.’ We were happy when we were able to add a keyboard to the band, and now we even have a professional guitar! Good times folks, give Rock Band 3 a go but be prepared to be addicted.

5.) Kinect Sports: Season 2

Hands-free motion control gaming is at its best in sports games, and Kinect Sports: Season 2 includes some awesome sports that you will enjoy with some mates. Not since Wii Sports have I had so much fun with tennis and not since Wii Fit have I enjoyed such competitive skiing, and that’s only two of the six sports included with Season 2! You can also try out American Football, baseball, darts and golf, either as a team or competitively. The game is very responsive and clearly shows the advancements that have been made with the Kinect technology over the past year. It’s fun, an excellent work-out and will have you either laughing or cringing at the highlight reels! The first Kinect Sports is also a great party game so you can check that out too.

6.) Pictionary with uDraw

I’ve always enjoyed the Pictionary boardgame but unfortunately not many of my friends do, so I was happy when I saw that THQ were bringing Pictionary to the Wii with their new uDraw GameTablet. The tablet works excellently since you just draw on it with a stylus as you would with a pen on paper. The game of Pictionary remains the same in essence, but has been revamped with more fun modes and the choice of shorter rounds, which make it both exciting and easier to encourage those who may dislike the boardgame to join in. You’ll be challenged with drawing your clue in different ways: without lifting your stylus, drawing with a limited amount of ink and even drawing while not looking at the screen – all of which makes for much laughter and sometimes even friendly ridicule!

7.) SingStar

While many gamers will not freely admit to enjoying the SingStar franchise, this gamer has enjoyed many a party with friends belting out the lines to popular tunes from the 80’s, 90’s and other periods that the franchise has seen fit to include in its catalogue. What started as crazy times of getting microphone wires crossed during the Pass the Mic mode has progressed to the modern day era of wireless microphones, and even adding dancing and guitar to the mix. Things have got heated with competition turning fierce in Battle modes, while Duets have sounded out clearly across the valley. SingStar turned out to be a great forerunner to Rock Band, which saw me assuming the role of lead singer in our band Pile-O-Tasty, and remains the definite standard for singing games to this day. Whether ABBA, Queen, or various songs from the 80’s tickle your fancy, there’s something for everyone in this series so give it a go and find out whether you and your friends should audition for the next IDOLS. You can check out SingStar Vol 3, SingStar Pop Edition, SingStar Guitar, SingStar Dance, SingStar ABBA, SingStar Queen and SingStar Hottest Hits.

8.) Wii Sports

It would be amiss of me to not mention Wii Sports, the game that was at the forerunner of motion control gaming, and one that set the standard for all sports games that followed. All of the sports featured in the game were addictive, with friends competing for longest hit in baseball, highest score in ten-pin bowling and many a bruise being sustained in four player tennis matches, while patience and swing were tested on the golf pitch. We quickly learnt that motion control gaming came at a price – sore muscles – and that Nintendo weren’t playing around when they said wear the Wii Remote’s wrist strap. We were also grateful when the Wii Remote jacket was launched, it did help to tone down the bruising a little!

9.) Wii Play

It’s hard not to include a game that kept most of my friends up to the early hours of the morning. It just so happens that Wii Play is also be one of the best selling retail games ever made, coming bundled with a Wii Remote at a very good price. And while the Shooting Range, Find Mii, Table Tennis, Laser Hockey, Fishing and Pose Me mini-games were all enjoyed when the Wii first launched with Wii Play, it was Tanks that quickly became known as one of the most addictive games ever played. Such a simple game, yet so challenging to reach level 20 on two player mode, and even harder to attempt on singeplayer. The sound of those little trumpets playing the theme music, the sight of those tank’s tyre tracks and the look on faces when a tank went invisible and blew them to smithereens is priceless. Check it out if you have a Wii, it’s still got bang for its buck.

Now you can all have this catchy little tune stuck in your heads too!

10.) LittleBigPlanet

Who would have thought that a little boy made of sack could warm our hearts and provide endless hours of co-operative and/or competitive fun (depending on your friends)? And yet SackBoy did just that in LittleBigPlanet, he gave us limitless opportunities to Play, Create and Share in a world where your imagination could take over, while four player gameplay make this an excellent choice for parties, even for friends who don’t traditionally enjoy videogames. LittleBigPlanet 2 then arrived and expanded this gaming experience even further, and with regular updates and costumes being released on the PlayStation Network, as well as support for the PlayStation Move, this is a solid choice for some party fun.

Contributor: Lisa

Editorial: El33tonline Cribs: Our Gaming Setups Revealed!

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 13:00:00 +0000

We asked to see photos of your gaming ‘cribs,’ and you certainly all delivered allowing us to fill three features with pics of the places that you game. You can check out part one, part two and part three of the ‘El33tonline Cribs’ feature to catch glimpses of the gaming setups El33tonline’s community chose to share with us, but below, you can see photos of where members of El33tonline like to sit down and play a few games:

Lisa (Leeloo and LeelooZA) and Wayne (Numphie)

“Here’s the pics of my gaming set-up. I was lucky enough to visit Nintendo World in New York last year where I got most of the crew from the Mushroom Kingdom. The big plushie Yoshi is from Gamescom, Germany and he joined the family two years ago. He was followed by the star, Gumba and Bowser, all gifts to me. “Ratchet and Clank came on board this year August, and are also from Gamescom, Germany. Nathan Drake, The Batman and Cole are all fairly recent acquisitions, while the standing Batman on the left is from DC Universe Online and was a gift to me from Sony Online Entertainment in Austin, Texas.”

Oltman (Oltman)

“Here you get to see my gaming heaven :) You can just make out my guitars on the left and the drum kit on the right. My games are just through the arch on the left, and my Angry Bird I perched on the left speaker! Don’t touch his eggs!” (Note: This photo is BB - Before Burglary)

Tom (tom110584 )

Tom’s setup is super neat and tidy, with not a dust particle out of place. See for yourself:

Bryan (Brattex)

“Here are shots of my untidy lounge which also functions as a garbage heap and baby play room. The two critters are my daughter’s play friends so they also have jurisdiction over the play room. It was Hope’s first birthday recently (well, technically second birthday) so there are some pressies located just to the left of the TV cabinet. It’s a 40” FHD Sinotec TV on top. “Around the corner of the lounge is a little corner which holds some more techno junk including my WIFI ADSL router (recently moved out of Hope’s bedroom) and some Guitar Hero guitars. The little pink balloon is actually my little girl’s very own Wilson friend :) “Also featured are two of Hope’s bestest play friends and companions on anything to do with the TV (not that we let her watch much TV, mind you!). When they’re off duty they like to huddle together and play “real-life” a bit in Sims 3. “Lastly, there is a close up of my makeshift Xbox drawer. Most of my games are in there as well as a portable plastic tub which houses all the controllers, cables, and paraphernalia that one would need when going walkies. That brontosaurus toy isn’t mine - he’s just wanting to be in the picture I think. Ignore the book on the left and the Kinect - those aren’t ours either :) To the right is our “display cabinet” full of alphabetically ordered DVDs and Blu-Rays (in category order too). Don’t judge me.”

Oliver (Ofiler and El33tOliver)

“This is where I work and play, everyday. “My Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 don’t get along so well anymore, so now I’ve got a PlayStation corner with lots of room to breathe, while collections of game boxes are scattered about the place in a semi-ordered fashion. I’ve got older PC, SNES and PlayStation games in boxes somewhere…”

“Special mention goes to this awesome poster that was signed by the voice of Mario, Charles Martinet, at a Nintendo event in Johannesburg a while back. Who tasked herself with bringing the poster back to Durban, in perfect condition, to give to me as a surprise? Thanks Lisa.”

Contributor: Oliver

Editorial: El33tonline's Reader Game of the Year Awards: The Results

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 11:00:00 +0000

We’ve said it before, but it hasn’t yet become any less true so we’ll say it again: 2011 was jam-packed with amazing videogames! These titles appeared on every platform, too, and across every genre making for one of the most diverse and quality-filled years in gaming yet! Gamers love to pick favourites, however, so in the fine tradition of bringing order into the chaos of this wonderful world of videogames, El33tonline asked our friends and readers to vote on their top picks of the year to help us form our final, mighty ‘Game of the Year List’ for 2011. And vote you did. We’ve tallied the votes and the results of your contributions lie in wait below, starting at No. 20 and working our way to No. 1 - the Ultimate Game of 2011. What do you think it could be? Let’s find out, together:

20.) Resistance 3

“[Resistance 3 is] an outstanding first-person shooter that will rival the best 2011 has to offer and deliver one of the most excellent gaming experiences you’ll have this year. With an exceptional singleplayer campaign, offline and online co-operative play, and a range of multiplayer modes, you’ll definitely get more ‘bang’ for your buck with this title.” Read our review.

19.) The Witcher 2: Assassin’s of Kings

“It’s about hunting monsters and elves and collecting the best gear along the way. It’s a game about magic, royal politics and intrigue. In a word, it’s a classic. Not many people will have the time or patience to give this game a try and they will miss out on one of the best role-playing games of the last ten years.” Read our review.

18.) LA Noire

“… But look for a game with a fantastic atmosphere and detective story, and this is the only real option. You need to focus while playing LA Noire, making notes and listening to every detail as you go!” Read our review.

17.) Bastion

“Bastion is a must-play game and will definitely be a top contender for Xbox LIVE Arcade game of 2011. It seems simple on the surface, but there are many unique touches and levels of depth that will keep you engaged and interested… I’m convinced Bastion will be regarded as one of the best Xbox LIVE Arcade games to date.” Read our review.

16.) Forza Motorsport 4

“Top quality graphics, lots of content, tight controls (depending on your car of course) and lots of difficulty settings make Forza Motorsport 4 great value for your money and a racing game worth investing your time into.” Read our review.

15.) Mario Kart 7

“One thing you can bet on: there will almost certainly be no better kart racer on handhelds for at least five years. If that doesn’t convince you to get Mario Kart 7, nothing will.” Read our review.

14.) Mortal Kombat

“Mortal Kombat is a dream come true for fans of the original games. It should seem as exciting to connoisseurs of the 2D fighting genre as a Final Fantasy VII remake would to RPG enthusiasts – it’s that monumental of an accomplishment.” Read our review.

13.) Killzone 3

“Killzone 3 is a blockbuster title, no doubt about it. Gameplay mechanics and hidden systems have been honed and hammered out to near-perfection, the visuals are top-notch, and the production values are through the roof. These things are expected. What wasn’t expected was the near-perfect pacing that manages to keep the adventure careening at all cylinders while remaining fresh and inviting all the way through – a massive accomplishment for an essentially linear rollercoaster ride of a game.” Read our review.

12.) Dead Space 2

“I ultimately believe it to be a game of incredible quality and production values, imbued with a gripping story and an expertly realised world, some fantastically memorable moments, and that magical factor of ‘gameplay satisfaction.’ Plus multiplayer.” Read our review.

11.) Rayman Origins

“So it is with Rayman Origins, an action platformer quite unlike anything I’ve played before. A game that’s fit to bursting with sights and sounds of utter delight and spellbinding charm to spare. A game that combines the speed and precision of the best Sonic games with the ingenuity and flow of a classic Mario adventure.” Read our review.

10.) Dark Souls

“Dark Souls is one of those rare titles where you truly feel like the master of your own destiny and realise that you need to up your game if you’re going to get through it in one piece. The sixty hours I spent with Dark Souls during my first playthrough are some of the most memorable in all my years of gaming, and there are countless moments of greatness contained within it that I’ll leave you to discover for yourself!” Read our review.

9.) Portal 2

“With its sensational execution of humour, action and cerebral challenges, Portal 2 may just be the most perfect game ever created. No, that is not an exaggeration. Play it and find out. Sadly, if I have to find one fault with Portal 2, it’s that there is still no cake!” Read our review.

8.) Deus Ex: Human Revolution

“Deus Ex Human Revolution comes together in a perfect balance of all that makes gaming so great. I got lost in the world and felt involved in how it ended. The fact that I had a choice in how the objectives are accomplished was the icing on the cake. And this is a cake you definitely want a piece of!” Read our review.

7.) The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

“If you haven’t played a Zelda game this is a great one to start with – being both accessible and challenging and using the full extent of motion controls. If you’re a regular player of the series you don’t need much convincing: it’s a Zelda game with some small twists on the formula but most importantly with its heart intact.” Read our review.

6.) Assassin’s Creed: Revelations

“One thing’s for sure: Ubisoft Montreal has not been resting on its laurels, capitalizing on its strongest draws with blockbuster storytelling and incredible action. The wealth of content included both online and off is sure to keep you synchronized with the series and busy for hours.” Read our review.

5.) Batman: Arkham City

“Rocksteady Studios has followed up the outstanding Batman: Arkham Asylum in fine fashion and upped the ante with a game of blockbuster proportions. It’s not a question of if you’ll play Batman: Arkham City, but when.” Read our review.

Tied for 3.) Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception

“Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception delivers the whole package: An engaging, deep and enriching singleplayer campaign experience that pulls together the series like no other game I have every played, as well as a killer multiplayer component that is as rich as the singleplayer campaign, offering a mode for everyone’s tastes, including my favourite, the co-operative campaign mode.” Read our review.

Tied for 3.) Battlefield 3

“First-person shooter fans (and multiplayer enthusiasts in particular) definitely won’t be disappointed with Battlefield 3, while action gamers and thrill-seekers owe it to themselves to discover one of the best games of the year.” Read our review.

2.) Gears of War 3

“There’s a certain addictive quality to Gears of War and when the series gets it really right, you can forget about breaking free from its charms. Something about the loop of visceral rewarding combat, excellently paced encounters and perfectly timed sequences combined with just enough story snippets all add up to a powerful concoction that goads you into pushing forward to the next action set-piece, in spite of any worldly cares like physical fatigue.” Read our coverage.

And El33tonline’s Reader Game of the Year is…

1.) The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

“Squeezing the awesomeness of Skyrim into a review of a few pages is simply not possible - Skyrim is the most immersive and complete game I have ever played. It has a few snags but when you consider the immense amount of data and variables that come into play I’m surprised that it’s as solid and stable as it is.” Read our review.

Thanks for your votes everybody and for helping us create such an awesome and comprehensive list of the best games of 2011!

Contributor: Oliver

Editorial: A complete history of role-playing videogames: Part 3

Fri, 23 Dec 2011 08:00:00 +0000

Welcome to the third part of this RPG historical review. When last we left off, we had just finished off the Western decade of the 1980s, and were finding out about what happened to RPGs in the East in the early 1980s. Let’s jump right back in! The late 1980s saw the return of Hydlide, and this time Hydlide 3 introduced some new innovations including day-night cycles and cut-scenes. Hydlide 3 also aligned its battle system to be closer to The Legend of Zelda’s (that’s how influential the Zelda game was) and it introduced a weight-based inventory to the game mechanics.

The same year that Hydlide 3 appeared, the first survival horror RPG—死霊戦線 (Shiryou Sensen, or War of the Dead [literally, Ghost War]) made its appearance. Although it had many standard RPG elements such as a large, tile-based overworld, Shiryou Sensen also had many of the elements of a survival horror genre, including a (green-haired) girl in the middle of nowhere, limited ammo, creepy enemies and creepy music. Oddly enough, the game’s battle screen switched to a side-scrolling view, where your health and remaining ammo were shown. By this point in time, RPGs were hitting an immense stride and titles were coming out faster than people could competently play them. 1987 saw a massive slew of important releases include Zelda II and Dragon Quest II for NES, the sci-fi-based Phantasy Star for the Sega Master System, the first Megami Tensei game in the series (also for NES), The Magic of Scheherezade (a major innovation in its own right, introducing multiple time periods, time travel, and team attacks in battles), Castlevania II (which, unlike the first game, introduced RPG mechanics to the action-oriented title) and Square’s クレオパトラの魔宝 (Cleopatra no Mahou, or Cleopatra’s Magic Treasure).

1987 also saw one very important release as far as JRPGs and Western audiences are concerned: Final Fantasy. As anyone who knows anything of the origin of the series can tell you, the game is so named because the series creator, Hironubu Sakaguchi, was hedging all his bets in the videogame industry on this one final game; if the game did not do well, he’d leave the industry. In so doing, Sakaguchi decided that he’d make the game he wanted to make and poured his heart into it. In essence, it was potentially his final game and it was a title that embodied his own fantasy of what a console JRPG should be. Needless to say, the game did brilliantly and the Final Fantasy series - which is still going strong with the direct sequel to Final Fantasy 13 out early next year — has been a blazing success ever since.

The number of big, blockbuster RPGs continued to snowball in number, both on PC and console, in both the Eastern and Western markets. As titles crossed back and forth, the gamers in each of these territories started showing a distinct preference for certain types of games. Console games gained a firmer footing in Japan and the Eastern regions, while the main platform of choice for RPGs in the West was the PC. It wouldn’t be until well into the new millennium that this statistic in the West would change. The difference between Western and Eastern RPGs was far more marked than a simple platform differentiation, however, as there were many stylistic and gameplay mechanic differences, and these differences had much to do with the games that were popular in the regions in the early years. The East, for example, preferred more story-driven style games with ridiculously tight narratives, pre-defined characters and very little choice or morality issues to deal with. Western RPG gamers, on the other hand, began to prefer far more open-ended experiences, allowing the player to choose their own looks and character abilities, often ignoring the storyline for the sheer enjoyment of just exploring the world and revelling in the avatar that the player had created. At the modern extremes, this is essentially the difference between Final Fantasy XIII and Skyrim.

Before I head into the 90s, I need to highlight two 1988 games that changed the RPG landscape forever: Might and Magic II, and the Bard’s Tale III. Although both games released within months of each other, they contributed something to RPGs that no other game had given us until this point, but is something that we take so much for granted these days: automap. Prior to these two games, all 3D-style RPGs left the cartography to you, which meant lots of graph paper and many hours of meticulously drawing the maps. Granted, part of the fun of playing the old games was the cartography aspect, and this was a throwback to the good ol’ tabletop D&D games, but having the game draw the map automatically as you explored meant that you could spend more time gaming and less time with a pencil. It wouldn’t be for another few years before automapping was the only way to go — many games between 1988 and 1998, 1990’s Eye of the Beholder, for example, still required that you draw your own maps. Some recent games (such as the excellent yet brutally difficult Etrian Odyssey for the Nintendo DS) even recognized that this was part of the transition from pen-and-paper role-playing to digital role-playing, and have gone back to letting the player draw the maps and get lost as a result of bad mapping skills.

In PC games (essentially, the Western RPG market), the early 1990s gave us the Quest for Glory series of games by Sierra Online. Although Quest for Glory was not the first game in the ‘Quest’ series — having followed, among others, Space Quest, Police Quest, and King’s Quest - Q4G (as it became known for short) was more RPG-ey than the preceding Quest games, which played out more like straight-line adventure games than RPGs. What made Q4G different was that it combined the adventure elements reasonably well with RPG elements, despite the painful battle sequences. Subsequent Q4G games, like many older Western RPGs, allowed you to import a saved character from a previously-finished game, making the next experience that much easier.

1993 brought two of my personal favourites from the golden age of RPGs: Betrayal at Krondor and Lands of Lore. What made Betrayal at Krondor so different to other RPGs of the era was that it was built upon an existing fantasy series of books written by Raymond E. Feist and set in a familiar narrative universe. For once, it was an amazing experience to walk through and experience a world that many readers had previously only seen in their minds. The character system was based purely on a percentage of attributes (e.g. a 43% ability in lock picking, which could be levelled up with practice) instead of the standard ‘experience points and levels’ system that was the staple of 90% of RPGs. Granted, the graphics were a little dated and the turn-based tactical battle system might have been a little unforgiving to novice players, but the point of Krondor was the experience more than the mechanics. And what an experience it was, indeed! The game was successful enough that Mr. Feist would go on to novelize the main plot of the game as Krondor: The Betrayal.

Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos (by Westwood studios, the same fellows who created Eye of the Beholder), on the other hand, was memorable more for the later CD-ROM re-release than the original release version. In addition to supporting play from within Windows 95, the CD-ROM version also included voice work by some famous actors, including Patrick ‘Jean Luc Picard’ Stewart. The animation was impressive for the time, and had more of a TV cartoon feel than similar games of the age. It was a huge pity, then, that the subsequent games in the Lands of Lore series never quite lived up to the wonderful premise and promise of the first game. The mid-to-late 90s saw yet another boost in PC hardware power, and riding on the crest of that electronic wave was possibly some of the most iconic games to ever grace PCs. In the mid-90s, the first Elder Scrolls game, Arena, appeared (1994 to be precise), as did several spin-off games based on the Elder Scrolls mythos. Its sequel, Daggerfall, appeared two years later.

1997 was a golden year for RPGs, and saw the first release of the one game that everyone thinks of when someone mentions ‘Action RPG:’ Diablo. Diablo was an amazing game for the time: randomized dungeons and items (just like Rogue!), point and click battles (heretofore seldom seen), hordes of enemies (more than seen in many RPGs until that point) and multiplayer (not common even back then). Although the story was a little on the thin side, what Diablo brought to the gaming table was sheer accessibility, infinite replayability and so much fun that you had to pour it back into the fun ocean with a rubber boot. So iconic was Diablo that it spawned an entire sub-genre — the point-and-click RPG — and led an army of dozens of clones, all called ‘Diablo-likes.’

One last important game for 1997, at least as far as Western audiences were concerned, is Fallout. Set in a post-apocalyptic future with the stylings and trappings of the 1950s, Fallout was one of the few brilliant RPGs to take a retro-post-apocalypse sci-fi setting and make a complete success of it. Fallout was originally supposed to use the ‘Generic Universal Role-Playing System’ rule-set (better known as GURPS, and itself a parallel system to TSR’s Dungeons and Dragons system) but the deal between Steve Jackson Games — the owners of the GURPS system — and the Fallout developers, Interplay, fell through. Interplay developed the SPECIAL system (which is still heavily based on the GURPS ruleset) for use with the Fallout series instead, and has been part of the game series ever since. (Incidentally, while GURPS was created by Steve Jackson, it was not the same Steve Jackson who wrote the Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, although both Steve Jacksons contributed to the book series… confused yet?)

Next time, I’ll discuss the gradual fall of the PC RPG and the meteoric rise of the console RPG that eventually eclipsed the PC RPG scene, and why this reversal occurred. Until then!

Thanks for reading part three of Fayyaad’s feature on the history of role-playing videogames - don’t miss out on part one and part two if you haven’t already read them! Look forward to part four in the near future!

Contributor: Fayyaad

Editorial: A complete history of role-playing videogames: Part 2

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 11:00:00 +0000

When last we met, we’d been taking a peek under the duvet of history and marvelling at the influences that Western RPGs had on Eastern RPGs. This influence would continue for a while, and later on even be reciprocated, but for now let’s pick up the trail of this history back in the West, and see what followed in the footsteps of Wizardry, Ultima, Rogue-likes and Telengard. At the time that RPGs were seeing a momentous rise, another genre, with many similarities, was also seeing its star beginning to blaze brightly on the screens of yore: adventure games. Anyone with an ounce of genre-savviness will know that the chief differences between RPGs and adventures is the amount of character stats. Adventure games were still in diapers at the time, but they did one thing supremely well: stories.

The early adventure games - such as Zork and Dungeon - were still little more than text, but their heavy leanings toward narrative had a drastic and dramatic impact on their role-playing brethren. If there’s enough call for it, I’ll probably cover the rise and fall of adventure games in another article, but suffice to say that early adventure games had a greater affect on RPGs than just ‘better stories,’ although the full culmination of that impact wasn’t to be seen until much later. The impact I’m rambling on about is that of the natural offshoot of early text-based adventure games: MUDs, or multi-user dungeons. Without going into too much detail for those who haven’t experienced them, MUDs can be visualized as ‘World of Warcraft: now with more text and little to no graphics!’ Once again, keep MUDs at the back of your mind as I continue this history.

The successes of Ultima and Wizardry led naturally to spin-offs, sequels, and clones. Ultima, for example, spawned Ultima II in 1982 and Ultima III in 1983. In the same vein, Wizardry II and III followed in 1982 and 83. Both series of games were incredibly successful, as was a contemporary RPG, The Temple of Apshai. By this point, RPGs were no longer limited to PCs, but were being ported to early home consoles, too, allowing more people access to these games. At the same time that these games were arriving, computing power was on the rise, allowing developers to put more complex interactions and more detailed worlds into their RPGs. Which games remained PC-shackled versus which games were ported to home console made a huge difference to how Western and Eastern developers perceived, developed, and marketed RPGs in their respective territories.

With another hop back East, 1982 saw what was possibly the first true home console RPG, Dragonstomper for the Atari 2600 console, but almost definitely the only true RPG for the Atari 2600. The game made use of device called a ‘Supercharger,’ which essentially plugged into the 2600’s cartridge slot and connected to a cassette tape player to play cassette games on the usually-cartridge-only console. Dragonstomper was revolutionary for its time, and included such ‘well-loved’ staples as random battles with monsters. 1984 saw the release of a game called Dragon Slayer on the NEC PC-88. The game was ported to the MSX system by a then little-known company, Square. One of the students hired to work for Square, Hironobu Sakaguchi (whom many JRPG aficionados will recognize as the father of Final Fantasy), used to play a lot of a certain influential game: Wizardry. If you missed the connection in the last article, I’ll make it more explicit for you now: it’s almost certain that Wizardry had more than just a passing influence on Final Fantasy. But back to Dragon Slayer.

Dragon Slayer was an interesting beast for a number of reasons, and one of them was the fact that it was almost certainly the father-game in a new sub-genre of RPG: the action RPG. Although exploration of the game’s environment happened on a side-scrolling screen, engaging in battles took you to an overhead view real-time battle screen, where you could move around freely and kill enemies at will. Dragon Slayer also introduced puzzles based on items that you had collected from around the game world. Both of these gameplay mechanics very likely had an influence on Shigeru Miyamoto - whom some of you will recognize as the father of The Legend of Zelda - and Masaya Hashimoto, the father of the Ys series. Dragon Slayer was so successful that it spawned its own slew of sequels and 1985’s Dragon Slayer II: Xanadu, was one of the best-selling games in Japan that year. Xanadu kept many of the same mechanics that made the first Dragon Slayer so successful, and introduced some new mechanics that we find common in JRPGs, including experience and levels for weapons, armour that changes the character’s appearance, and even an expansion pack for the game. Xanadu was a massive success, racking up over 400 000 units in sales. It’s possible that you can’t comprehend that number without a little context: in 1982, just three years prior, the best selling game in the West was Temple of Asphai, at 40 000 units, one tenth of Xanadu’s sales figures. Dragon Slayer’s successes would be instrumental in influencing two other game franchises in different ways, namely Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.

Another NEC-PC game, Hydlide (released to Japan in 1984), also made several contributions to the action-RPG genre, including password saves (allowing the player to bypass save files) and passive health regeneration. Hydlide eventually made its way west to American audiences in the late 1980s, but by this time, another game had taken the throne in the action RPG castle. I’ll keep you guessing until we hit the late 80s in this history. The following year saw Hydlide II, which introduced a morality feedback system; although players could attack just about anyone and anything, killing villagers and good monsters would have repercussions for the player, essentially denying the player equipment, training, and the usual townsfolk chit-chat so common in RPGs. It was a tactic that made players lonely enough to avoid evil behaviour if they wanted to finish the game at all.

Back on the NES, the first Dragon Quest game by Enix hit the Japanese public like a horrible natural disaster. The game’s creator, Yuji Horii, wanted something more accessible to the general public and the inspiration list for Dragon Quest reads like an RPG parts shopping list: bits of gameplay mechanic from Ultima, dungeon mechanics from Wizardry, story elements from visual novels, and the like. Dragon Quest also introduced a few new mechanics of its own, including side-quests and sub-quests, romance sub-plots, an amazing musical score, artwork by a credible manga artist (Akira Toriyama, the artists and writer behind the Dragonball Z stories, amongst others) and the general use of the RPG as a bildungsroman. The Dragon Quest games have not only given rise to multiple sequels, but also spin-offs, and even its very own urban myth regarding a law surrounding a weekday ban in Japan on releases of Dragon Quest!

Although high fantasy was (and still is) the prime subject for RPGs, a few sci-fi RPGs also entered the stage in the late-80s. Prime amongst them was 星をみるひと (Hoshi wo Miru Hito, or Stargazers [literally, “People Who Look at Stars”]), set in post-apocalyptic New York. Enix and Square weren’t being idle, however. Enix released the sci-fi themed 地球戦士ライーザ (Chikyu Senshi Raiza, or Earth Fighter Rayieza), while Square delivered Genesis: Beyond The Revelation in the same year. Most sci-fi RPGs lent their themes well to cyberpunk- and post-apocalyptic-type stories less than far-flung-future-space-opera style stories, but a fair mix of both occurred. The post-apocalyptic ones in particular would lead to a later, very popular series in the West: Fallout. But once again, that was much further down the line.

Going back West again, 1985 saw the release of Bard’s Tale, an almost straight RPG that saw the player doing little else but gaining experience and raiding dungeons. What Bard’s Tale brought to the table was something that had been missing from many RPGs since the start of the genre: accessibility. The Bard’s Tale simplified gameplay enough that even novice RPG players found it simple to get into, yet hard to master. Wizardry’s influences on The Bard’s Tale are abundant, from the 3D dungeons to multiple party members to simply being able to import Wizardry save files (and Ultima III files as well) for use in The Bard’s Tale! The Bard’s Tale series was also applauded for fully explorable towns (the most famous and well-remembered being Skara Brae) as opposed to the menu-based towns seen in other games. The Bard’s Tale proved so endearingly popular that a series of books - written by famed fantasy authors Mercedes Lackey, Holly Lisle and Mark Shepherd, amongst others - was commissioned to be a companion to the game series.

In 1986 a new competitor in the RPG battle entered the arena: Might and Magic Book One: The Secret of the Inner Sanctum. Like many games of the era, Might and Magic Book One was written almost entirely by a single person. The game was first released on the Apple II system, but was so popular that it was later ported to well over half a dozen other systems. Might and Magic proved so popular, in fact, that it eventually spawned a total of nine games in the main series, as well as a number of spin-off games. Ultima and Wizardry aside, few other Western RPGs have managed to stay alive and spawn so many sequels. Around 1988, table-top gaming and digital gaming converged once again. TSR, the owners of the Dungeons and Dragons franchise, offered up the license to the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (AD&D) game rules. Much of the motivation behind the offering was the successes that TSR saw in Ultima and Wizardry, and in the rise of RPGs in general. The license was won by a company called Strategic Simulations Inc (SSI), which heretofore had produced mainly strategic wargames similar to the Warhammer series, and the odd fantasy-based RPG title such as Wizard’s Crown.

Development soon started on a new game engine - called the Gold Box engine - that relied heavily on the AD&D rules. Shortly afterwards, the first Gold Box game, Pool of Radiance, appeared on the market. It was the first digital RPG that truly followed the D&D rule-set devised by Gary Gygax almost a decade before, and was superbly received. To close off the Western end of the decade, Times of Lore was released to the Western public, arguably one of the first seriously accessible action-RPG games to grace PCs. The game’s top-down view was heavily reminiscent of JRPG games such as Hydlide, and the game was lauded for its huge environment (an alleged 13 000 screens of map) and its accessible, menu-driven gameplay.

A final jump Eastwards again for this chapter of the review, and 1986 finally saw one of consoledom’s most famous action RPGs: The Legend of Zelda. Zelda first appeared on the Famicom disk system before being ported to the NES. The game was an almost instant hit, selling over six and a half million copies. Compare that to Dragon Slayer II: Xanadu’s paltry 400 000 just a year earlier, and you can begin to understand just how powerful the action RPG had become, from its humble roots in Dragon Slayer.

Zelda also introduced a kind of non-linearity to action RPG games, allowing players to complete the dungeons in any order they wanted. That, combined with the many hidden dungeons, puzzle elements and simple save system, made Zelda so well-received that the series is still alive today, and the latest game, Skyward Sword, is just as popular now as the first game ever was.

Thanks for reading part two of Fayyaad’s feature on the history of role-playing videogames - don’t miss out on part one if you haven’t already read it! Look forward to part three soon!

Contributor: Fayyaad

Editorial: El33tonline Cribs Part 3: Your gaming setups revealed!

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 12:00:00 +0000

We’ve already seen photos sent in by El33tonline’s community revealing the areas of their homes where they like to relax and dig into a few sessions of their favourite videogames. Where have we seen these photos? In part one and part two of our El33tonline Cribs photo feature! Want to see even more pics of game ‘cribs’ belonging to friends and readers of El33tonline, this time in part three of our round-up? No problem:

Craig Gordon (Viking)

“You can see me playing Gears 3,” says Craig. That. Is. An. Enormous. Display. Craig. And we like the lava lamp, too! What can you see in the photo? Do you spy a full HD, 51-inch 3D plasma display? Can you see a Sony HT-DDW885 surround system? What about Craig’s Xbox Elite and PS3, both cranked with massive hard drives? Yep, all present and accounted for, below:

Bronwin October (Bro October)

“These are my pics, thanks EL33T staff,” writes Bronwin, short and sweet style. Uh… OK, thanks Bronwin - roll the clip!

Garth Stuurman (GaaTY)

“Not the most comfortable setup, but it works for me,” Garth says. If it works, it works and if it lets you get into games easily, more power to you! Garth also provided us with a few explanations of the pics, including the way everything “is set out in a unique order,” with looks at where he stacks a veritable “gaming shrine,” and where his Xbox is placed. We don’t know if Garth is kidding or not, but he also referenced an ‘aircon,’ which amounts to a gap in-between his window and computer where cool air gushes in on a hot day… Regardless, here is a selection of Garth’s photos:

Gian-Paolo Buffo (MacDeath_ZA and L0rd0fTheFrags)

“Here are some pics of my gaming crib, which spans two rooms and a few metres worth of cables,” writes Gian-Paolo. “Can you spot the el33t stress ball and key chain I (not so secretly) hid in some of the pics?” Very crafty indeed! “Awesome website guys, keep up the good work.” Whoops, how did that get there…

Kelvin Addicott

“So I thought I’d send a photo of my dedicated gaming crib,” Kelvin tells us. We’re glad you did Kelvin! “You’d be surprised at what some shops are willing to throw away,” he exclaims, referring to the game stands and displays now decorating his room. Nice acquisitions!

Hassen NoorMahomed (Beanz777)

“Here’s my setup,” writes Hassen. “Pretty neat I’d say but it’s the comfort that counts!” Very neat, with some very fancy chairs! Who’s coming ‘round for tea, Hassen? Hopefully us!

Werner Marais (Thanticore)

“I know this is a very late addition…” yes Werner, it is very late… but we’ll forgive you (smiley face). “You can go ahead and add it to the site if you want!”, Werner continues. You’re being defeatist and you’re shouting… but we’ll forgive you (smiley face). “My Xbox collection is the size it is because I’ve had an Xbox since April 2007. Got my PS3 in May 2011.” Werner, those game collections are too much - we’re getting very jealous (frownie face):

Thanks once again again to everybody for your submissions - don’t forget to check out part one and part two of El33tonline’s community gaming ‘cribs’ photo feature! Is this the final part of our look at your gaming setups? That’s up to you! If you’re still keen to send in photos of your game spaces, be sure to mail them through to oliver[@]el33tonline.com and lisa[@]el33tonline.com

Contributor: Oliver

Editorial: A complete history of role-playing videogames: Part 1

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:00:00 +0000

Role-playing games have a fascinating history - one that stretches back much further than you might at first suppose. It’s a genre of videogame much beloved by its fans, and I daresay that few other genres have created as rabid or divided a fan base (with the possible exception of first-person shooter games, but that’s a history lesson for another day). To best understand where RPGs are today and where they’re going, it’s best to take a look at where they’ve come from. The RPG equivalent of cro-magnon man and the eventual devolution to the ape, one might say. This is going to be a fairly long treatise in multiple parts, purely because RPGs have done so much, come so far, and have been a part of videogames almost since the rise of the computer processor. The story goes back much further than that, however, to a game many of you are probably quite familiar with. Look into my crystal ball… let the murky mists of time part for you… let your mind open and see days long gone. Once you stop coughing from the time smoke, you’ll find that this history lesson, curiously enough, starts back about as far as 600 A.D. in the Far East with a little game that we can think of as one of the early precursors of modern RPGs: Chess.

One could, I suppose, argue that role-playing games stretch further back and into ancient Rome and Greece with mock naval battles and the like, but what I like about chess as a starting point is that it has a lot in common with modern RPGs: One player acting as a proxy for a party of characters faced with a common adversary and quite conceivably staring defeat in the maw. Each character has their role and their place in the system. Combat is turn-based. There’s a mini-boss that, in the hands of a skilled player, can torment you over and over long after you’ve killed it, and the end boss is usually pathetic. Narrative wasn’t important, although a simple one could be concocted quite easily to describe the game at hand. Damage numbers had yet to be invented, but still, not half-way shabby for a game that’s still popular. Chess eventually made its way to Japan, and one variant, shōgi, became incredibly popular, in a way that can only happen in Japan. Shōgi’s difference from garden-variety chess is relevant to us because that East/West difference is the root of the distinctions between Western and Eastern RPGs. Due to the greater number and roles of the pieces, shōgi lent itself more to a kind of narrative and its complexity informs the Eastern RPGs of today. We’re going to leave the East for now, so keep shōgi’s part in this history at the back of your mind until the rest-stop at Eastern RPGs (just around the corner from lingerie).

From the murky, incense-scented mists of the ancient East, we jump forward more than a millennium to very early 1800s Prussia, where the precursor to Warhammer-style games was being enjoyed by the Prussian military. The game had even more in common with our modern games than did chess, but much more in common with today’s real-time strategy games than role-playing games. What makes the Prussian wargames interesting as far as RPGs are concerned is that each toy military unit had an assigned amount of health - HP, if you will. Furthermore, damage dealt by and to units was determined by the roll of a die - randomly, in other words. Jump forward another 150-or-so years, and these games were seeing more in the way of fantasy settings - settings popularized by a similar rise in fantasy fiction, chief among them being J.R.R. Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings.’ In fact, by the 1970s, fantasy wargames were beginning to influence the settings of fantasy and sci-fi novels, and vice versa.

The reason you are all enjoying your Mass Effects, your Diablos, your Dragon Ages, and your Final Fantasys can be traced, essentially, to a single man: Gary Gygax. Mr. Gygax (who sadly passed away a few years ago) was the man who would eventually go on to create one of the most popular tabletop role-playing games ever: Dungeons and Dragons. D&D, as it became known, contains many of the same elements that we now consider almost essential parts of a classic RPG: hit points, mana points, armour, damage numbers, strategic play, copious quantities of enemies, and most importantly, epic narrative. It’s at around this point that we get up from our metaphorical table and start heading for the world of digital gaming. The largest consumers of D&D, university students, were also discovering the wonders of computers at around the same time. Arguably the very first RPG was a little game called pedit5, which came out the same year that D&D did. It only featured a single level, but it was the essence of RPGs triple-distilled to glittery perfection: kill monsters, acquire money. Very little in the way of narrative, of course - the mainframe computers at the time didn’t have even a thousandth of the power of today’s cellphones. But it was a start.

As if some sort of digital floodgate had opened, the short-lived pedit5 was soon followed by similar games. Many of these games carried most of the stat-based characters that D&D popularized, and soon students were programming narrative structures into these games too. The very early 1980s saw games such as Akalabeth (written by Richard Gariott, aka Lord British, the man who would eventually go on to write the infamous Ultima series of games), Wizardry and Rogue. These three games alone have given many of today’s games much of the features we see as standard. Rogue, for example, is the ASCII precursor to Diablo-style randomized dungeon crawls with tons of random inventory items - story was minimal, but because of the randomized dungeons, it had endless replay value. Ultima is the precursor to today’s morality-based gameplay as seen in The Elder Scrolls or Mass Effect. Wizardry gave us menu-based and party-based battles, deep, storylines, and first-person combat.

1982 saw the release of Telengard, which was essentially Rogue in real-time. Play was no longer turn-based, and monsters came at you whether you moved or not. This was a huge step forward in RPGs and Telengard did splendidly in terms of sales. It was popular to the point of being ported to five different computer systems, allowing more and more people to experience real-time combat. Let’s press ‘START’ to pause the history for a bit, and head East again, because the rise in Eastern RPGs started at approximately the same time that Rogue and Wizardry were busy becoming popular in the West. If you know anything about Eastern RPGs, and if you’ve been paying attention up till now, you’ll have a very good idea of what happened and where all this is going.

Japan saw a fair number of computer systems that were never released to the West. Most of these systems - including the Sharp F-1, the NEC PC series, and the MSX - were superior to Western systems in a number of ways, not limited to a higher screen resolution and a better sound processor (many of which provided by Yamaha). These key differences meant that, although Western games were easily ported Eastwards, the reverse was almost never the case. Important highlights in Japan’s RPG (JRPG) history include ドラゴン＆プリンセス (which quite literally translates, and transliterates, to Dragon and Princess — see for yourself!), 剣と魔法 (Ken To Mahou, which translates as Sword and Magic), and important to our understanding of the evolution of Japanese RPGs, ボコスカウォーズ (Bokosuka Wars) and 信長の野望 (Nobunaga No Yabo, or Nobunaga’s Ambition). Nobunaga’s Ambition, in particular, was a turn-based strategy RPG that gave rise to an entire sub-genre of strategy RPGs that focused heavily on battles and conquering regions. Many of Japan’s early RPGs were heavily story-driven, much more so than Western RPGs, and often enough gameplay not only took a back seat to story, it was often shunted into the trunk of the last car in the JRPG cavalcade. In fact, a further sub-genre of JRPGs unique to Japan had their genesis here: visual novels—story-driven RPGs quadruple distilled to story and very, very little else.

Here comes the ‘aha!’ moment: Wizardry’s popularity in the West meant that it was inevitably ported to Japan. The game was badly translated, of course, but it was a roaring overnight success. So popular was Wizardry, in fact, that a whole metric bunch of merchandise and spin-offs were produced solely for Japanese consumption; manga, novels, anime, new Wizardry games, and more besides - it became big in a way that can only happen in Japan. Many of the structures that made up Wizardry’s gameplay became a heavy staple of future JRPGs. Suddenly, the intense prevalence of the menu and party-based combat in modern JRPGs make a lot of sense. Combine this with the heavily story-driven nature of early popular RPGs, and the roots of games such as Final Fantasy becomes clearer. But that was not to be for at least another five years…

Thanks for reading part one of Fayyaad’s feature on the history of role-playing videogames - look forward to part two soon!

Contributor: Fayyaad

Editorial: El33tonline Cribs Part 2: Your gaming setups revealed!

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 11:00:00 +0000

Following on from part one, it’s time again to expose the awesome gaming setups of El33tonline’s friends and readers in the second part of our ‘El33tonline Cribs’ expos� feature! It’s also another chance to satiate our inquisitive, curious nature and go behind-the-scenes of the places El33tonline’s community members like to call their ‘comfort zones.’ Here’s part two of ‘El33tonline Cribs: Your gaming setups revealed!’ - check back next week for part three!

Nadine Franzsen - Achtung!Baby

“Very simple, my PS3 and my TV,” writes Nadine. “Oh and a couch of course. That’s all I need :)” Simplicity is the key - what else do you need to game other than a couch, TV and console? We’re drawing a blank. Maybe chip packets and empty cups strewn about the floor? That’s what we’ve got, but Nadine’s setup is immaculate:

John Tidwell - Bearded_Warrior

“My ‘El33t Crib’ isn’t anything extravagant so I understand if you don’t use mine,” John says, humbly. John… that TV is looking pretty darn extravagant! If you need the guided tour, then the photos below display John’s 40-inch 1080p display, sound bar and sub to the right, a PS3 tucked away neatly on the shelf and a Street Fighter IV fight stick chillin’ on the left. Also, John’s love seat which could double as a throne for a criminal mastermind:

Kent Jansen - Beanibil1ty

“My cocoon,” wrote Kent in-between Lancer kills. And what a nice cocoon it is! Kent is a man of few words, but then again, he doesn’t need to say much when he’s tearing through fools in Gears of War:

Pieter de Bruyn - POItjie

“Here are the pictures of my setup at home and I’ve also included shots of my game collection,” Pieter tells us. “I still have 3 boxes of PC games packed away.” Humblebragging is the best kind, don’t you think? Let’s peer in envy at Pieter’s immense game collection:

Courtney Hundermark - clownfish95

“Here are 2 images of the locations which I dub my ‘comfort zones,’” Courtney writes while simultaneously coining a great phrase for gamers everywhere. “The PC setup (please excuse the excess of wires)… and the PS3 setup in the lounge, which I often find myself struggling to walk to (it is about 5 meters from my computer room/bedroom, so you can imagine.)” We don’t have to imagine Courtney. We live the struggle, daily. Also, what’s up with everyone apologising for mess and wires? Isn’t this what’s expected in your gaming zone? These are perfectly acceptable visions:

Thanks again to everybody for your submissions! You can check out part one of our El33tonline Crib feautre over here, and part three will go up next week, with more photos of El33tonline members’ gaming areas! If you’re still keen on sending through photos of your gaming ‘crib,’ you can mail them to oliver[@]el33tonline.com and lisa[@]el33tonline.com

Contributor: Oliver

Editorial: El33tonline's Kinect Buyer's Guide for Holiday 2011

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 06:00:00 +0000

Kinect has grown from strength to strength this year, and as a result of increased developer support you can choose from more software titles now than ever before. The list of Kinect titles available this year include top class dancing, sports and exercise games, as well as a good selection of games suitable for the younger generation. It should come as no surprise then that El33tonline’s Top 5 Kinect recommendations include three dance, one sports and one fitness title. Here’s what games you should be looking out for if you own a Kinect or if you’d like Santa to leave a Kinect under your tree this year. El33tonline’s Top Five Kinect Game Recommendations:

The Black Eyed Peas Experience

Banging tunes, slick presentation, hot dance moves, accuracy and an outstanding tutorial method make this one of the dance games to have in your gaming collection. Even if you don’t own a Peas album or don’t consider yourself the biggest fan, check this one out because you’re guaranteed to enjoy most of the songs and have your friends tapping their toes too! Read our coverage.

Kinect Sports: Season 2

Kinect Sports is back with Season 2, and you can look forward to all new games with the same awesome presentation and accuracy as before. This time round you can try your hand at Darts, Skiing, Tennis, Golf, Baseball and American Football, plus enjoy the calorie counter and monthly game add-ons. Read our coverage.

Your Shape Fitness Evolved

If you’ve been looking for a fun fitness title that works look no further. It offers a lot of variety, promises to make you work up a good sweat, and is the cheapest personal trainer you’ll ever find! Read our review.

Just Dance 3

A psychedelically fun dancing game that you’ll enjoy even more with a bunch of mates. Four player dancing, karaoke options and a hot tracklist make this a must-have for Kinect owners. Read our review.

Dance Central 2

Full-body tracking and a focus on teaching you the correct dance moves make this the most technical dance game on the market at the moment. But if you just like to dance and enjoy an awesome tracklist you’ll also enjoy the bright colours that this game has to offer. Read our coverage. El33tonline’s Top Five ‘Must Have’ Kinect Games for Kiddies: There have been a number of great Kinect titles released this year that the younger generation will enjoy. Here’s a list of those that we think your kids just may put on a list and sent to Santa this year. Cautionary note to parents: Don’t be alarmed if you enjoy these games as much as your children, that’s perfectly normal behaviour! - 1.) Raving Rabbids: Alive & Kicking - 2.) Sesame street - Once Upon a Monster - 3.) Disneyland Adventures - 4.) Kinectimals: Now with Bears - 5.) Puss in Boots Kinect owners can also check out Grease Kinect, The Sims 3: Pets, Child of Eden, Motionsport and PowerUp Heroes, all new Kinect titles to arrive on our shelves this year.

Did you enjoy this Holiday 2011 Buyer’s Guide? Check below for more: - El33tonline’s 3DS and DS Buyer’s Guide for Holiday 2011 - El33tonline’s PC Buyer’s Guide for Holiday 2011 - El33tonline’s PSP Buyer’s Guide for Holiday 2011 - El33tonline’s Xbox 360 Buyer’s Guide for Holiday 2011 - El33tonline’s PlayStation 3 Buyer’s Guide for Holiday 2011 - El33tonline’s Wii Buyer’s Guide for Holiday 2011 - El33tonline’s PlayStation Move Buyer’s Guide for Holiday 2011 - El33tonline’s Special Price Offers and Savings for South African Gamers in Holiday 2011

Are there any Kinect games that you think are missing from the list? Any you think don’t deserve to be here? Tell us about your Kinect games of the year below!

Contributor: Lisa

Editorial: El33tonline Cribs Part 1: Your gaming setups revealed in photos!

Thu, 15 Dec 2011 11:00:00 +0000

Early last week we put out a call to all of our friends and readers here at El33tonline to send in photos of your gaming setups, mostly because we’re extraordinarily nosy and can’t help but try to satisfy our curiosity about the secret lives of the El33t community. This mental disease notwithstanding, we’ve been lucky enough to receive batches of photos from a number of you and with your permission (and not), we’re going to proceed to post to the internet photos of the special place in which you enjoy the wonderful world of videogames - for everyone else to see. Here’s part one of ‘El33tonline Cribs: Your gaming setups revealed!’ - check back tomorrow for part two:

Shaun Fourie - Fullmetal MDK

“Here is the photo of my crib, sorry about the mess,” Shaun wrote. We still can’t find the mess. Shaun added: “Here is also a picture off my small gaming collection only missing a few games from the collection at a friend’s house.” Shaun’s missing game collection has since phoned home to let him know it’s OK:

Mathew Clarke - Smuroh

“Ok so this is my setup, I took over the Bar as it was the only place I could find big enough for everything,” Mathew tells us. A large portion of the gaming population would be very envious about now:

Brendon Bosch - SKWEH

“Here are my images of my setup cause you asked so nicely,” Brendon says. Thanks Brendon, we did ask rather nicely didn’t we?

Sahil Lala - L1ghtn1ng

“Old pic is old,” writes Sahil, “[but] hey, it shows what I look at while gaming. (even though it’s not much XD) PS3 is under the Screen on a pull out shelf.” Gaming area is gaming area, no matter how you slice it - it still provides the fun:

Zhameer Hashim - Trebzz

“As per your request to show our crib pics,” Zhameer wrote. That’s a fancy way of replying, Zhameer. You’re very fancy. We like that:

Thanks for your submissions everybody, we’re really enjoying seeing where you game! Part two of this feature will appear tomorrow with more photos of El33tonline members’ gaming areas, and if you’re still keen on sending through photos of your gaming ‘crib,’ you can mail them to oliver[@]el33tonline.com and lisa[@]el33tonline.com

Contributor: Oliver