Thanks for the heads-up, Caryn!

Here's the score: Bethesda sued Interplay, claiming the Fallout Trilogy bundle it was selling and marketing through digital distribution services was "confusingly similar" to Bethesda's Fallout 3 products going out this year. Bethesda also wants to terminate Interplay's contract to develop the Fallout MMO, a deal signed when Bethesda bought the rights in 2007 - for $5.75 million - from Interplay, the series' original publisher.

But U.S. District Court Judge Deborah K. Chasanow rejected Bethesda's request for an injunction, without giving any reasons, in a ruling first found by Fallout fan Web site Duck and Cover, and reported today by Gamasutra.

Court Denies Bethesda's Motion To Block Interplay Fallout Activity [Gamasutra]

These are from the same demo we saw at E3. Back in June. Was kind of hoping to see something else by December, but hey, this'll have to do.

It's the first part of the demo we saw at E3, showing off the game's free-running "autopilot". Hopefully the Mirrors Edge 2 team are watching this and taking notes. Oh, and if you missed it earlier today, the game's been delayed slightly.

Bethesda is bringing out a line of Fallout-themed avatar wear to the Xbox Live Avatar Marketplace on Thanksgiving day, giving players six new ways to show off their love for Fallout 3 and its creators, Bethesda Game Studios. There's three t-shirts priced to move at 80 Microsoft points apiece; the standard Vault 101 suit, complete with PipBoy, for 240 points; a Vault Boy suit for 240 points; and the pièce de résistance - a Vault Boy head that covers up your avatar's goofy cranium.

My advice? Just buy the head, and play Vault Boy dress up. It's simply the right thing to do.

Fallout 3 items hitting the Xbox Avatar Marketplace this Thursday [Bethesda Blog]

Over on the Interplay website, the development team posted that some of the concept art for the still-in-work MMO have been released due to the lawsuit. So they decided to post them in their forums.

"Keep in mind that this is concept art. It's not finalized art, but it will give you a feel for what we are aiming for with V13," Interplay's Chris Taylor wrote.

Welcome to the Concept Art Forum! [Interplay via Duck and Cover]

Halpin, the Entertainment Consumers Association's president, deployed the lightning bolt with ruthlessness on fellow racers attempting to jump the gorge on the stadium track. "Like my character [Wario], I rarely hesitated in sending other racers off the cliff," Halpin answered.

Todd Howard, the executive producer at Bethesda Game Studios, came up with a failsafe against his men getting mind-controlled by aliens in X-Com. Since they dropped their weapons under an alien spell, he equipped them with live grenades that, when dropped, went boom. No more mind control problem. No more soldiers, either, but that's their problem.

Of course, there's a lot of evil done in the Sims (a franchise with a capacity for cruelty unlike many others), Knights of the Old Republic, and plenty of RPGs, for that matter. One guy even gratuitously shot up all the cows in Call of Juarez. Check it out. And tell us about all the innocent people you've wasted with a headshot, down in the comments.

The Evil Things We Do [Bitmob]

A book blurb on the Waterstone's retail site reads "A novel that takes places forty-five years after the Oblivion Crisis, which is the story of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion game and the expansion pack Shivering Isles. It partly bridges the gap for the next game, which is set 200 years after the Oblivion crisis."

So, assuming "the next game" in Oblivion continuity isn't a ZeniMax Online massively multiplayer online game, this might be a hint at an Elder Scrolls V. Although, to hear Bethesda's Pete Hines tell it, that's the natural conclusion anybody could draw from how well The Elder Scrolls IV sold.

Well spotted, Silver!

P.S. Yes, I read The Age of Unreason series. When I was a kid. So Keyes' Star Wars work is how I think of him and I consider it a compliment.

Greg Keyes is perhaps best known for his steampunk series The Age of Unreason, which features historical figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Isaac Newton, neither of which will be appearing in The Infernal City. The novel takes place four decades after Oblivion, telling the story of a group of unlikely heroes banding together to unravel the secret behind the floating city of Umbriel, which leaves undeath in its wake. It sounds like your standard fantasy romp, but Keyes does some pretty fabulous things when shaping characters, so we can probably expect a great deal of personality at the very least. All I know is it's about time we got some officially sanctioned Elder Scrolls fiction to tide us over between games.

The Infernal City is due out on November 24th from Del Rey, and can now be preordered at Amazon.com.

Pre-Order The Infernal City [Bethesda Blog]

It's something that's been gnawing at me for a while now, but as we approach Christmas 2009 – the fifth holiday season for the Xbox 360, and fourth for the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii – that gnawing has turned into some serious, unchecked mastication.

After all, a new hardware generation is meant to usher in a new generation of games to go with it. And not just games that look prettier, or sound better; titles that give you something entirely new in terms of game design and mechanics, something that could only be done by taking advantage of the latest in console hardware.

Yet I think only a handful of games this console generation have done so. Which ones? Oh, I'm glad you asked. Games like:

Dead Rising – There has never been a game like Dead Rising. It's open-world in appearance, but the entire game is built around the concept of navigating an endless sea of zombies in numbers previous consoles simply couldn't get on-screen at once.

Oblivion/Fallout 3 – Two games, I know, but they do the same thing, so they go in the same listing. Nobody ever forgets that first time you leave the Imperial sewers/Vault 101 and take in the world around you, realising that Bethesda haven't crafted a level, they've built a seamless, living world well beyond the scale of previous titles like Morrowind.

Yes, they also appear on PC, but remember, these games were also built from the ground up with consoles in mind, rather than being crude ports.

Wii Sports/Wii Sports Resort – To this day, the only games that have truly delivered on the promise of the Wii Remote, integrating it so naturally within the gameplay experience that you can't imagine playing the games without it.

So as good as Modern Warfare is, as good as Mario Galaxy is, I don't call them truly "next gen" games. Why? Because they fail my "next gen" test, that's why.

Here's the test: If a game can be ported to a console in a previous generation and keep its core gameplay and overall design in place, it's not what I'm calling for the purposes of this piece a "next gen" game. Mario Galaxy was great, but really, it's a GameCube title with some star-shaking stuff thrown in. Modern Warfare? Amazing, but as the upcoming Wii port attests, it used the 360 and PS3 primarily for better graphics and sound. LittleBigPlanet? Another great game, but the PSP version shows the core experience could have been done on a PS2.

Other games I think fail this test are Halo 3, BioShock, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid 4…OK, pretty much everything. You get the idea. Sure, they're nice and shiny, and have lovely pre-rendered cutscenes, and there are advanced uses of physics and AI under the hood, and most important of all, advanced online connectivity, but all of those are just tweaks, improvements, icing on the cake, candy for the eyes. None of them fundamentally change the way you approach a game, or a genre.

Not like Mario Kart and F-Zero did with Parallax scrolling. Or Mario 64 with its use of 3D. Or Grand Theft Auto III with its living, breathing city. Those games re-wrote the book. You just couldn't do GTAIII on the PlayStation. Or Mario 64 on the SNES. They were true "next gen" games.

Now, I'm not saying all games NEED to be 100% innovative. That's an impossible requirement. Ridiculous, even. Not every single game idea is going to bust outside the box. I like my latest version of FIFA or Call of Duty as much as the next man, and the world will spin just fine with the majority of games simply plodding along, doing what the last one did, only slightly better. Still, a man can want, can't he?

So why do we have so few this time around? What's the problem? There's refinement under the hood. There's games that some, and especially the developers, may disagree with me on (GTAIV, for example, or Halo 3 and its extensive multiplayer modes). And there are some who could argue, with a fair point, that the same problem plagued the previous generation.

Certainly the cost of development can't help. Worlds are built with engines, and engines are built on rules. If you wanted to come up with something entirely new, you'd have to do it yourself, which for many developers and publishers in this current economic climate just isn't feasible.

It can also be argued that a single jump in the mid-90's – from the 16-bit era to the N64 and PS1 – will long be the most significant in gaming, taking us as it did from 2D to 3D, and that subsequent generations can't be relied upon to deliver the same level of innovation. Fair, to a point, but then there are still plenty of games like GTAIII that were able to innovate well past the 32-bit era.

One final possibility, however, is that there is innovation going on in today's games beyond the superficial. It's just, we can't see it. Chatting with Bethesda's Todd Howard on the subject, he put this idea forward:

"I think the visual component of it is the one that everyone notices first, and it's also the prime part that benefits from what the new hardware gives you" he says. "So it's just harder to see the innovations beyond that, but they're there. I'd guess there's just as much pure 'design innovation' with this generation as there has been in the last few."

"Look at the basis now for how games handle physics, difficulty, controls, save games, or simple load screens. I know it sounds silly, but I get excited by innovations in loading screens, because they're the worst part of a game. I'm interested in how games simply start."

Promising, yeah, but does that really hold water when compared to more fundamental changes? Not really. "There's been innovations in AI, but it certainly hasn't kept pace with the graphic fidelity, which yields this overall feeling of it going backwards" Howard adds. "The environments are so complex now in games, that building good AI just to manoeuvre them takes serious time. But that's not an innovation, that's simply the AI doing what it could do before in a game.

"My hope is, as we developers turn the corner on how to make the games simply 'work,' that we can innovate more on how the games respond to the player, whether that is the AI, or socially, or something else."

Maybe that explains it, and in 30 years, we'll look back on the current generation as one where developers were finding their feet, laying the groundwork for sprawling, innovating and revolutionary titles of the future.

The first DLC to hit the PS3 version of Fallout 3 will be Broken Steel, available Sept. 24. That will be followed by Operation: Anchorage and The Pitt on Oct. 1, and Point Lookout and Mothership Zeta on Oct. 8.

Bethesda also announced that the Fallout 3 Game of the Year edition for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC will be available at stores on October 13.

The Game of the Year edition includes the game as well as all five downloadable content packs. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions will retail for $59.99 and the Games for Windows version will be available for $49.99.

Bethesda would like to send their fans a big thank you for sticking with them on the Xbox 360 Fallout 3 downloadable content front. Even after at least two of the five packs was released broken, you stood by the game, purchasing each new chunk of content as soon as it came out, from Operation Anchorage to Mothership Zeta. Your reward for such loyalty comes on October 1st, when the premium Fallout 3 Xbox 360 theme goes live. As long as you've purchased all five DLC packs by September 22nd, it won't cost you any bottle caps at all.

The rest of you can be prepared to pony up 240 Microsoft points. That's the price you pay - $3. Next time maybe you'll buy all the downloadable content, Dr. Cheapypants.

The Prey trademark was assigned to ZeniMax Media in July by The Radar Group, which acquired it from Apogee the previous month. Superannuation discovered the trademark change-of-hands along with two new trademark applications submitted by ZeniMax regarding the Prey property, specifically for:

Entertainment services in the nature of an on-going television program in the field of science fiction; Entertainment services, namely, providing on-line interactive computer games and providing information relating to electronic computer games via the internet

as well as:

Computer and video game user instruction manuals; magazines, books, and pamphlets concerning video games; computer and video game strategy guide books and magazines; graphic novels, novels, and comic books, all in the fields of video games and science fiction

Now what would ZeniMax want with a solid if a bit under-performing first-person shooter IP?

Trademark Assignment [Superannuation via Actiontrip]

This short video gives us a taste of how and why the developers decided to go with seventies music for the soundtrack of Bethesda's upcoming action shooter Wet.

Don't forget, you need to be at least 18 to click that play button or your computer will explode and everyone at the ESRB will faint.

Brink will be a highlight at Bethesda's PAX booth this year, with live demonstrations of Splash Damage's first-person action adventure title being held on an hourly basis all three days of the show. Gamers will also be able to score Brink t-shirts, along with posters of upcoming releases WET and Rogue Warrior. Both of those titles will be playable on the show floor, along with Bethesda's upcoming Xbox Live Arcade offerings, Doom II and Quake Arena Arcade.

Stephen Totilo and I will be making our trek to Seattle in the middle of next week, so if you are attending the show, keep an eye out! I'll be the large sweaty guy, and he'll be Stephen Totilo.

PAX 09 Details [Bethesda Blog]

If Wet isn't going to turn out to be the game action-move master John Woo would make, it sure seems like it could at least be one Quentin Tarantino would create. It gives that impression with its non-stop action, its love of the gunfight, its car chase, its use of 70s film grain, its kick-ass heroine, and its diva in the diva hall where shooting is about to start, who begins her song by screeching: "Are you ready to rock bitches? One, two... fuck you!"

I also wouldn't expect Tarantino to code a better jumping mechanic.

What Is It?
Wet is a September-dated single-player action game from Artificial Mind and Movement, a third-person shooter with an emphasis on slow-motion shootouts, a la the Midway-developed John Woo's Stranglehold. It's also one of the games Activision chose not to publish when it assumed control of games formerly being published by Vivendi. But I didn't hold that against the fun 50 Cent: Blood On The Sand, so why would I against the now Bethesda-backed Wet?

What We Saw
Not even a day before our Michael McWhertor dove into the game in Germany, I tried three sections of the game in New York: The intro, a car chase and rage mode.

How Far Along Is It?
The game is coming out on September 15, so even though I did not play a retail build, this thing is done.

What Needs Improvement?
Mid-Air Movement: It might be too late for the developers to do anything about this, but that's fitting as this problem is about how it is too late for Wet's heroine, Rubi, to control her movement once she has committed to a leap. This is an issue in a game that presents the player with the ability to have their heroine jump, climb, wall-run, swing from polls and do just about everything else a Prince of Persia would be able to do — and do it in slow-mo, and let them shoot guns with each hand while doing so AND include a scoring system that encourages you to only fight using such techniques — but doesn't let you auto-correct an accidental slow-mo jump that is going to land you in the wrong spot or off the side of a skyscraper. If she's going to be nimble, let her be nimble.

Target Confusion: Rubi can shoot two dudes at once. That's cool. She's got a pistol in each hand (or a shotgun in each or a crossbow in each, etc.). But jumping in the air and trying to target two enemies involves trusting the computer to select one of them for you. Then you manually aim at the other one. Pressing the trigger fires at both. I killed dozens of characters this way and still don't understand what determined which character was auto-targeted and how I could use that to my advantage.

What Should Stay The Same?
Devil May Care Attitude: I like a game that has it's heroine dropping down a ladder head-first in slow-mo with guns out, shooting at thugs. To be clear, any time Rubi jumps or slides and starts shooting, the game's in slow-mo, so we've got a game that feels like it's always trying to be stylish. Why not? I like a game that offers, as its health power-up, its heroine taking a swig of what looked like a Jack Daniels bottle and then tossing the bottle in the air and shooting it for good measure. Whether it's Grindhouse, House of the Dead: Overkill or whatever your B-movie-inspired passion, Wet feels designed to satisfy that same taste. Why else would she also take a sword into battle?

Eccentric Detours: Wet would appear to be everything I described above, except when it turns into a long, scripted, violent car chase sequence that has Rubi jumping from speeding car to speeding car, shooting bad men in black vehicles and dodging tractor trailers (orchestrated with quick-time-event button-presses and real-time shooting)? And except when the story calls for Rubi's face to get splashed with blood, switching the graphics to a molten take on Sin City (pictured up top) with its action sped up, Rubi's health increased and the kill-count multiplier capable of hitting double digits?

Final Thoughts
A Bethesda rep suggests this game will be about eight hours long, which sounds short (8-10 to be specific). But it seems like it could be quite the ride. It's not clear to me that Wet is a game its players would re-play, but its showing a verve that might make some control oddities tolerable and its gameplay a blast while the action lasts.

The game is "getting closer," the Fallout and Oblivion game director told me during our interview at QuakeCon in Dallas.

"I put some of that on hold, because I knew we would be doing some stuff with id." That "stuff" was Bethesda parent company ZeniMax's June purchase of the renowned first-person shooter development studio. id co-founder John Carmack has been aggressively working on the iPhone platform, now promising an iPhone game just about every other month. He remembers thinking, "I'll wait and see what John has to say about it."

The game is not a personal Todd Howard project. Think of it as a Bethesda game, though Howard wouldn't offer gameplay details or subject matter. I asked if it would be a Fallout or Elder Scrolls project, but he'd only remind me that "those are things we really like."

Carmack willing, it seems, the game will proceed. "It's one of those things where I wish it would happen sooner," Howard said, "But we're definitely going to do some stuff."

The developer's Pete Hines posted a statement on the Bethesda Blog today, clarifying Howard's comments regarding the future of the Elder Scrolls series.

That was not a direct quote from him. That was someone's interpretation of what he said. I know, I was there. At his QuakeCon talk he was asked when TESV is coming out and Todd replied, "Don't look for a new Elder Scrolls game in the near future." He also went on to say how much the franchise means to us and that it definitely will continue. He just wasn't going to provide any timeframe on "when." This should not be news to anyone that has been paying attention. Both Todd and I have said repeatedly that, of course, we're going to do another Elder Scrolls game. The last one was enormously popular. So was the one before that. You get the idea. So do we.

In other words, the fate of the series isn't in question, and it shouldn't be.

Hines goes on in his post to clarify statements Howard made about an Elder Scrolls MMO, pointing out that neither Todd nor anyone on Todd's team worked on MMOs, and when the studio that does work on them - ZeniMax Online - is ready to show what they are creating, they'll show it.

I am trying to imagine an angry Pete Hines here, and it terrifies me. Just believe the man and move on before anyone gets hurt.

Clarifying About Next Elder Scrolls game, MMO, etc. [Bethesda Blog]