But as I hacked my way through the Xbox 360 game's first six hours of the single player campaign — putting me at about half-way through, according to the game's own Stats ticker — I began to mostly puzzled by what it was the team was doing with its time. Too Human seems surprisingly unpolished for a game that's been in some form of development for a decade, delayed multiple times, one due to be released in less than two months. Granted, the letter that accompanied our preview copy of Too Human did warn that our pre-release build was not "final retail code" and may have gameplay bugs that "will be addressed in the final retail game."

That was certainly taken into consideration as I completed Too Human's first two chapters, but some of the core issues I had with the game aren't the kinds of things that will likely be ironed out in the final thrust of development.

After going hands-on with Too Human for the first time at GDC, I was primarily concerned about the game's combat mechanics. They certainly take some getting used to. The player will use the right analog stick for melee attacks, simply pointing in the direction of the enemy to target it. While that may sound straightforward enough, being trained to use the right stick for aiming or camera control by previous action games may lead to some initial awkwardness.

You can spice up your attacks by lobbing robotic foes into the air with a double tap of the stick, keeping them aloft with gunfire, but that tactic felt largely pointless. As a Champion class character, bullets and laser-fire are no match for my hammer or sword, so I found myself doing it only out of obligation, occasionally an attempt to break the monotony.

It seemed more appropriate for me, as a Champion, to limit myself to melee combo chains and air attacks only, in an effort to raise my experience bonus and build up a cache of Ruiner moves — those screen clearing attacks that are accompanied by a light show and, later, a spirit animal (mine's a raven!). This leads to same rather repetitive gameplay. Adding to that repetition was a limited bestiary, some rather mundane puzzle solving and long stretches of slogging through wave after wave of enemies.

Too Human isn't just about swordplay and shooting, it's also about the hunt for loot. One of the more addictive aspects of titles like Diablo, World of Warcraft or Phantasy Star Online is the finding of something precious. Silicon Knights looks to have added loot in spades. There are swords, staves, pistols, rifles, leggings, helms and much, much more, all with various attributes and upgrades to collect. You'll regularly find, buy and build stuff that's better than what you're currently equipped with.

The interface for dealing with your massive amounts of loot is handy. Items that have better stats than your current equipment are shown in yellow. Less favorable stats are listed in red. You'll be able to salvage your unwanted goods from any point, no trekking back to a retailer to resell your outdated chest piece. Just hit the "Y" button. There's a hitch there, though, there's no going back to "town" until you're done with the quest at hand. That means item repairs will have to wait. There's also no way to stock up on health potions or green herbs or whatever one needs to heal their wounds. You'll have to settle for random Health Orb drops.

That means, unless you're of the self-healing BioEngineer class, you might die. You might die a lot. My character, Shin, has died 23 times in six hours. That's 23 times I've had to watch the rather long, unskippable scene of a gleaming white Valkyrie descend from the heavens and revive me. Good thing there is almost no tangible penalty to death... or is that a bad thing?

You might consider your in-game deaths bad if you expire because of Too Human's frustrating camera system. There are something like seven camera styles to choose from — like standard, near, far, iso and strategic — but all have their share of quirks. It wasn't uncommon for the camera to be pointing just slightly in the wrong direction, with something important out of sight. There's no free look while in motion either, you must pause the action to look around. One can reset the camera behind Baldur's back with the left bumper, but at times the game will override your chosen camera angle or simply refuse to reset it to your liking.

There are plenty of rough edges in Too Human, from questionable interface choices to the oddly placed voiceover to some very unattractive graphics. Some of the game's visuals are strong, others are just plain ugly. Too Human's mechanical beings look fine, but its flesh and blood humanoid characters can look downright ugly. Animation is stiff, lip synching is clumsy and never is the uncanny valley more prevalent than in some of the game's cut scenes. Character models have obviously been given a great deal of detail, but even in the game's major players, faces have sharp angles and poorly rendered hair, visual blights that do a disservice to the games cinematic portions.

There's much more to be explored in Too Human. Obviously, there's the second half of the game's core campaign, the cooperative multiplayer mode, and the game's five character classes. And we have yet to touch on the game's storyline. We'll have more hands-on impressions of these aspects of the game throughout the week.

I had it demoed for me by executive producer Jonathan Bunney and producer Justin Manning, and it came down to a fight.

Actually, the first part of the demo let me try out the potion-mixing minigame; you've got a bubbling cauldron and a desk full of ingredients like little vials, bottles, leeches and caterpillars, and symbol-based instructions for each step of the potion-making scroll up in a little wheel to the screen's right. A potion-making sim was a first for me, and I exploded the thing a few times, but it was mostly pretty fun, especially when you can tilt the Wii remote to spill a beaker's contents into the cauldron and then make a stirring motion to whirl it up until the color changes. It's all timed and ranks your precision, which was pretty fun.

Then, Bunney and I went at it with a Wii remote wand duel. He was playing Draco Malfoy and I was Harry. We faced off at either end of a long room, and you hold up the Wii remote to charge your wand for a powerful attack (leaving you undefended), or simply shake the remote in your opponent's direction to fire off a series of quick bursts.

You use the Nunchuk to move side to side, and swinging both Wii remote and Nunchuk across your body causes you to produce a deflection shield that can send your opponent's projectiles right back at him. Shaking both produces a special attack that can knock your opponent down or stun him.

I refuse to believe that Mr. Bunney politely allowed me to win, and instead, I'll tell anyone who will listen that I beat the game's EP in a wand duel.

I got a chance to give it a try, and I had a hard time putting it down.

Ninjatown, the home of "Old Master Ninja," "Consultant Ninja," "Anti-Ninja" and yeah, a ninja that looks like a turd, among others, suffers a mysterious volcanic eruption, and now little red demons are marching on the town.

To defend it, you play top-down style on a plot of land, with a smaller mini-map in the top screen showing you where your forces are laid out and where the enemy's coming from. Basically, you pick a plot of land and decide what type of ninja hut to place down there.

There are two kinds of melee ninjas and three types of ranged ninjas, each with different strengths and weaknesses, and you strategize - y'know, 'cause it's a strategy game - who to put where based on what direction the little demons are marching in from, seen on your map. Once placed, the ninjas will attack on their own once the demons come in range, and your objective is to keep the devils from following their path all the way off of the screen into the town.

Each time the ninjas defeat an invader, you get points that can be used to buy more huts and plant more defenders. You can also upgrade your existing huts, increasing the strength of the ninjas fighting there. My first strategy of putting a lot of huts all over the place without upgrading the ones I had didn't work very well, as you can probably imagine - stronger ninjas equals a better front line.

One cool feature is that Old Master Ninja accompanies you - defeating demons also accumulates his power, and in the demo I played he could do two different types of attacks when I'd saved up enough. Tapping the picture of Old Master Ninja's staff let me choose between attacking physically and blowing some enemies back. With the physical "Hickory Lunge" attack, you touch as many enemies as you can within the time limit to have Old Master Ninja hit them all. With the blow-away attack, you choose a wind direction with the D-pad and blow into the microphone to push the advancing demons back away from your overwhelmed front lines.

Strategy titles tend not to be my favorite sort of game, personally, but I was surprised at how engaged I got with Ninjatown. The cute art style and the simple gameplay made it a lot more accessible than what one might normally think of in real-time strategy.

I saw a couple of Southpeak's upcoming titles today, including one that I didn't even know existed, to be perfectly honest. A development team of Russian Japanophiles - get this, their name is Gaijin - set out to create the most anime-styled action title they could, and came up with X-Blades, headed for PC and next-gen consoles in the Fall.

Like anime style? Like cel-shaded 3D cutscenes? Like crazy outfits? This one could be for you, maybe.

The lead character is a relic hunter named Ayumi, and the character design is distinctly RPG-inspired, right down to the fact she has three blond ponytails, robot shoes, and ass-less pants with just about nothing covering her butt except a piece of strategically placed floss.

The basic idea is, against better advisement Ayumi tracks down a dark artifact of great power, determined to win it for herself, and must wrest it away from some hordes of monsters both great and small. I didn't see more than the intro sequence and the first stage of gameplay, but the cutscenes are, in a word, absolutely beautiful, and so are the action animations. The art just looks great, and the character moves feel especially fluid and responsive. I loved the way Ayumi's hair and blades moved around - think Nariko a little bit, but in cute 3D cel-shaded art.

In addition to the blades, Ayumi has a gun and can also learn various spells that can be manually assigned to any button on the controller - I tried a fire spell against an ice elemental, and an earthquake spell in a craggy area full of little beasties.

The build I played was quite early, and the rep told me the team's still working out game balance and some control issues. That sort of work still obviously needs to continue, as it got a little hard to tell what was going on with some of the enemy swarms, and the gun, using the trigger buttons, doesn't feel nearly as spot-on or satisfying as the hack-and-slash X button moves.

So it's hard to tell whether this title will be a big win, but considering I hadn't heard of it until today, I was pleasantly surprised and impressed with some key aspects of the look and feel. We'll see if the rest of the gameplay comes up to snuff.

Up to four players can compete together locally or co-op, and online multiplayer is for up to eight. You can also compete against three AIs all by your lonesome, so there are a lot of options - You get the idea.

So did I get creamed on the video game the same way I used to as a little geek?

Short answer is yes - but my team actually won one round, too, thanks to my heroics once my partner got knocked out. Gameplay's actually quite simple; you can jump and throw the ball from midair, dodge backward with the right shoulder button, or pick up the ball simply by running over it. There are several different pirates and several different ninjas to choose from, and each one has its own special move.

The character animations are really cute, and the different characters are all rather different (surprised?) One of the ninjas looks more like a samurai than a ninja, technically. I tried playing a female ninja who did one of those spread-armed crane-winged jumps in the air. One thing I didn't know is that zombie and robot teams will also be featured as unlockables, with sets of abilities all their own. When I played as a robot, the sprite I chose was able to stun both her enemies and allies via a bright laser beam from her chest.

Essentially, two teams scrabble for the ball and beat each other senseless with it until all the members of one team are out of stamina. You can recoup your stamina by catching the ball instead of being hit by it. Making things a little more wicked is the fact that you can perform normal attacks on your opponents with weapons to drain their stamina as well, or to keep them from reaching the ball so that your own teammate can get it.

Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodgeball was actually supposed to be out earlier this year, but the rep told me the reason for the delay was to add additional game modes - for example, if you'd just like to play straight dodgeball without the ability to hit and be hit with the weapons, you can now do that.

I played a few rounds of two-on-two local against the reps, and had a blast. It's a little bit like the fun and chaos of Smash Bros. but without all the complexity. It's simple enough that even your non-gamer buddies would probably want to play it with you when they're all over for beers or something. Not that you'd need to drink to enjoy it, mind you, but it feels like a great party title.

A war story influenced by real-world events that prioritizes stealth action? Sounds like a certain other title that I can't take my eyes and hands off of lately, so I was eager to get a look at Velvet Assassin today.

Violette's story is told through flashbacks and memories - in the opening of the game, she's in a hospital, remembering back on her career, and in the scene I saw, Violette was sneaking through the sewers and up into a Warsaw ghetto under patrol by Nazi soldiers. The PR rep told me that the team is prioritizing authenticity in creating the WWII environment, with the aim of recreating the grittiness of that war's horrors.

For example, a man would be seen hanged in the sewers, as the Nazis actually did back then to try to warn people off attempting to escape through there. During my demo, I watched soldiers taking turns shooting at the walls of buildings, as they often did to try and kill or scare out anyone who might be hiding.

If Violette keeps to the shadows, a purple aura covers her, letting the player know she can't be seen by enemies in the light. The shadows are sharp-edged, and the contrast between them and the sunbathed, forbidding landscape was very eerie, exactly the sort of spooky atmosphere you'd expect from a story about what goes on behind enemy lines in WWII.

I was told there are over 50 different kinds of stealth kills in the game that Violette can perform when she sneaks up behind an enemy quietly - I watched her seize a soldier around the neck and stab him in the back before he could alert his compatriots. Though I was watching a very early build, the rep told me that in the final game, players will be able to drag enemy bodies out of sight to keep the Nazis from catching on, similar to the way it's done in Metal Gear.

Also, Violette can enter "Morphine mode" in an emergency. The painkiller ties into the fact that we're playing through Violet's memories while she's hospitalized, and if you use morphine, you can kill a target in range quickly and directly - for example, if a soldier sees you, you can run right up and kill him, the screen a white, violet-blotted haze, before he has the opportunity to alert his mates.

Throughout the gameplay, Violette narrates her story, woven together with factual information about the progression of the WWII story. She has a lovely English accent, and the voice acting in conjunction with the imagery was lovely.

While it was too early for hands-on with this game, and some of the features, like the body-dragging, haven't been implemented yet, I definitely saw enough to pique my interest and let me know that this stealth war drama, featuring what looks to be a strong, compelling female protagonist, is worth keeping an ear attuned to.

In this title, seminal antagonists Dr. Neo Cortex and N. Brio have invented some kind of technological device that has turned everyone into zombie-like obsessives, and Crash is the only one unaffected. To stop the evil scientists, Crash will have to liberate the area's mutants - not unselfishly, of course. The core mechanic relies on using the unique abilities of the beasties you save to fight other monsters, navigate areas and solve puzzles.

I watched the rep use Crash to knock some sense into a big, knuckle-dragging brute, and then ride on his back - once jacked onto one of the creatures, the player can use that creature's special ability - in this case, the player slowed down time enough to get through a fast-chomping skull obstacle safely (think God of War 2's Amulet of the Fates).

I actually haven't played a Crash Bandicoot game since the first PlayStation, so it was interesting to see what's changed - and what hasn't.

Even though, like I said, it's been a long time since I saw Crash, I noted many of his classic mechanics, like spinning around in a fluid rush to smash open boxes, are still intact, and you wiggle the Wii remote quickly to accomplish this move. Another thing I thought seemed promising was the drop-in-and-out two-player co-op; your friend can pick up a second Wii remote and try being Crash's friend Coco, and when your friend is finished playing, they can simply put it down and you can go back to your game.

Interestingly, though, the characters can be carried not only by monsters, but by one another. So let's say you and your friend are playing co-op and you want to get up to get a drink - you can hop on your buddy's back and they'll simply carry you through the level until you return.

The Wii visuals were decent and colorful, and the gameplay looked like it would be fun to try. When my colleague Flynn saw the Xbox 360 version a few months back, he thought it was a little "more of the same" in terms of the platforming and free-roaming, and suggested it might appeal to kids a little bit more.

Kids definitely are into it - one feature I saw was Crash's house, where you can try on skins for Crash from the monsters you've beaten and page through a concept art notebook. The rep told me that 6 kids were chosen from a big concept art contest to have their drawings appear in the game, and that they were very excited. Aww.

Apparently it was Aykroyd who got all of the other cast members on board to do the voice-overs, and he was so enthusiastic about the game that he helped name and create specs for many of the game's weapons, to make sure they sounded and played like something that would have really been part of the franchise. In fact, Aykroyd is co-writing the entire script with fellow Ghostbusters writer Harold Ramis, so it's a game adaptation with what look to be strong ties to the original material.

The city of New York plays a major role here, too, and from what I saw and was told, the developers are aiming for a true-to-life NYC that echoes the environment in the films, from indoors to out - the city as a "character," as the reps said.

They told me they're aiming for a "seamless" transition between the game's indoor and outdoor environments. I also learned why you won't get to play as any of the four Ghostbusters.

In the game, you play a new recruit to the team whose primary role is to act as "guinea pig" for all of Egon's new weapons. You play as part of a team with the other Ghostbusters, and the reps told me they really want to capture the "comedic timing" of the interaction among the characters - with the player controlling one, it might interfere, as you can probably imagine.

Ghostbusters: The Video Game is set in 1991, three years after the second film. The mayor has just been re-elected on a pro-Ghostbusters platform, and he's now funding the team's latest activities. However, it looks like the team will end up racking up more in city damages during the poltergeist fights than it earns in fees for eliminating the beasties.

In the scene I saw, the player and two teammates fought a ghost inside New York Public Library. That scene alone, the reps told me, had about 4,000 destructible objects inside it, and as items were destroyed, they got sucked into the ghost's body. Characters can be created out of physics objects in realtime, the reps explained.

And for every shelf, chair, book and lamp the team bashed up, a little running cash tally in the corner of the screen showed how much dollar damage the player had racked up. There's no penalty for this, the reps explained - it's intended as a fun sort of points system.

New weapons become available from Egon and they can be upgraded and customized using your earnings from successful ghost hunts. The way the weapons system works, you can see what's going on on the back of your equipment pack - for example, instead of an ammo system, you watch your heat cylinders and have to take a pause when you overheat. Keep an eye on it, though, and you can vent it manually.

In another scene, I watched the team battle the iconic Stay Puft Marshmallow Man from inside a city building, escaping out onto the roof to trap little bits of him that had separated off and begun attacking. When you use your beam to lasso a ghost, the reps said, the teammate AI knows what you're up to and will provide a trap for you.

I also learned a little bit about how the multiplayer will work on Xbox Live and PlayStation Network - it's cooperative for up to four players who compete against each other for the leaderboards.

The team also said the PlayStation 3 was the game's "anchor platform," and built in Sixaxis controls for the beam weapons on that version. For the less-powered system, developer Red Fly is preparing a more stylized, cartoon version that's more mission-based for Wii and PS2, while the DS version is more focused on being a "throwback to the 90s." (We also hear the DS can connect up to the Wii and act as a PKE meter). Each version, I was told, is totally different, but they're all "by fans, for fans," as the reps said.

"In fairness to them, you don't turn around an oil tanker in a day," said Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter.

A few titles stood out to me - I'm intrigued to see how Deadly Creatures turns out, as I like the creepy-crawly concept, and I thought Lock's Quest was an unexpected surprise, looking like more of a hardcore title aimed at fans of Japanese-style RTS games. And De Blob put me just enough in mind of Katamari Damacy to pique my interest.

In case you missed it yesterday, check out my posts from the press event:
Hands On With De Blob
Impressions: Lock's Quest
Impressions: Viva Pinata - Pocket Paradise
Impressions: Drawn To Life - SpongeBob Edition
Impressions: Wall-E
Impressions: Deadly Creatures

What do you think, guys? See anything you like?

THQ's Rainbow Studios, known for the Cars game and the MX vs. ATV series, developed Deadly Creatures as a "labor of love," according to the rep, since the studio's based in Arizona, where its team was inspired by the desert crawlies native to the warm region.

As such, in Deadly Creatures, you can play the action-adventure game either as a venomous scorpion or fabulously gross tarantula, and the different strengths and weaknesses of each animal mean that navigating the game's areas and defeating its bosses, which include a rattlesnake, a gila monster and a horned lizard, among others.

After watching the rep demo it for me, here's what stood out:

First of all, if the title didn't clue you in, you play as - and against - dangerous creatures.The tarantula's animation was spot-on and cringe-inducing, as spooky as a real big, hairy spider can be. The tarantula, it was shown to me, is more agile than the scorpion, who can climb walls, leap gaps, and wrap hostile creatures in its webbing. I didn't get to see the scorpion, but the rep told me that the scorpion is more of a "tank" character, able to do damage with his venomous stinger and burrow underground.

Your creature of choice navigates the level in its own unique way, gradually opening more areas of the forbidding landscape as it defeats bosses and accomplishes objectives - gameplay blends action with problem-solving and exploration. The rep told me that gameplay would gradually expose a backstory leading up to the creature's confrontation with its ultimate predator (drumroll), mankind.

Getting up close and personal with the more dangerous aspects of Mother Nature by controlling fiends we normally find repellent is a really cool idea - I was actually reminded of how much I loved to play as the hive-devouring spider in Sim Ant back when I was young.

The graphics look good, too, in full 3D with a 360-degree camera, letting you see all the creepy crevices, gross bugs and spider leg hairs you can stomach. The rep told me that Deadly Creatures is aimed at Wii users who have been waiting for something a little more mature to play than the usual brightly-colored fare, and this sure looks like a fun choice - especially if you're as vaguely sadistic as I am and love watching things eat each other on National Geographic.

Unlike most of the games I saw today, Wall-E's coming out this month, so we'll know for ourselves soon enough, but I still thought I'd share my impressions of the title, along with some screens of the Wii version.

The rep who demonstrated Wall-E for me on the Wii said that, not being a "gamer" per se, she'd struggled often with Wii controls, and that playing Wall-E was the first time she'd found them accessible.

Makes sense, as like much of THQ's audience, this game is geared at a wider audience and intended primarily to be appealing to kids. It's simple mission-based gameplay and doesn't look too challenging or complex, but it definitely appears to be solid. For what it's worth, the self-proclaimed "non-gamer" rep seemed to play it with ease, so unless she was totally lying to me, its level of complexity is appropriate for young people and families.

Each stage has a different theme, like item collecting, driving, or puzzle-solving, and in some of the stages, Wall-E's robot love interest Eve helps him jump. I couldn't see all of the levels, because the later ones are spoilers for the upcoming film, whose story the game parallels. I know that I won't be able to resist going to check out Wall-E when it hits the theaters, hopefully with a young family member like my little cousin, who would really get a kick out of it. While it's probably not the kind of game I'd play on my own, it looks like it'd be genuine fun to play with her.

A rep demoed the DS title for me, and explained the gameplay is similar to the original Drawn to Life - this time, obviously, with a big SpongeBob cartoon theme. It's actually based, she said, on an episode of the TV series where Spongebob accidentally scribbles himself an enemy, "DoodleBob," a drawing come to life.

Like I said, I never played Drawn to Life, but I heard at length from lots of friends and readers that the platforming was nothing to get excited about, so I asked whether they'd taken that feedback and cleaned it up this time.

Apparently not so much - the rep explained that Drawn to Life is actually targeted at kids, not older gamers, so we'd be mistaken to expect particularly complex, high-level gameplay. The appeal, she said, lies in how customizable the world is, giving the player the opportunity to draw and customize not only the player character, but gameplay elements like buildings, background elements and platforms in an MSPaint-like pixel-based stylus interface.

In the SpongeBob edition of Drawn to Life, players can pick either the titular sponge, his friend Patrick the starfish, or surly Squidward as a companion for gameplay, and each one lends a certain ability - SpongeBob provides a shield, and Patrick and Squidward have different special attacks.

The game looks rich with trademark Nickelodeon style, and one thing I'd think would make it really appealing to kids is that there are modes that teach them how to draw the key characters, so if they want to draw themselves a SpongeBob character and play as him, they can, but maybe not so much there for an audience our age unless you really love SpongeBob and don't mind simplicity.

Judging by what I saw, THQ's aiming to take what fans of the original Viva Pinata liked best and put it front-and-center, while also making it portable and by tying it in to the TV series in the hopes of opening frilly neon pinata guts and raining candy down on a whole new audience of fans.

So how's it look?

Really exciting, actually. The rep who demoed it for me explained that the real-time strategy-esque elements of the original VP were not so much at home on the console - she'd been a fan of the game, but found herself wishing she could point-and-click to manage things more efficiently.

The stylus controls, she said, provide a more direct access to the interface, and you can zoom in on individual pinatas with just a tap and view various stat screens on them with the buttons. Providing tutorials on all the controls are Fergie, Paulie, Franklin and Hudson from the TV series, and there are full-motion video clips pulled straight from the show (which I confess to occasionally viewing on Saturday mornings. Okay, I almost always watch it. Shut up.)

The game has two modes, also - the traditional mode plus a free-play, sandbox-style mode where money's no object, if you just want to mess around. The thing I found most interesting is that you can ship your pinatas and items even among your own saved games, of which you can have up to three. So if a Sour enters your garden, the rep said, you can box it up and ship it to a different garden of yours. You can also trade among your friends, and some of the pinatas to collect can only be unlocked through trades (think Pokemon).

So it looks like all of the necessities are there for traditional Viva Pinata fans, and new ones may be attracted to the series for the first time by the DS's huge install base, the relationship to the TV show, and the different modes for more accessible play.

As we've told you in the past, you play as a pretty cute blob. Squishy blobs are in right now - just think of Independent Games Festival buzz-generators World of Goo and Goo!, to name just a couple. In fact, as Crecente reported last year, De Blob is actually the result of a student project from the 2006 Independent Games Festival.

As such, it retains both the simplicity and attractively colorful, offbeat vibe we often associate with promising indies. What are you a blob of? Color, it looks like, a heroic little splat plunked down in Chroma City, an adorable world that's had all of the hues sapped out of it by the evil I.N.K.T. Corporation.

It's super cute and quirky, but how does it play? Details and screens after the jump.

My tendency was actually to be a bit leery of THQ's Wii-heavy strategy. As I've mentioned before, I've got a little bit of "waggle fatigue," and you may recall I was not pleased with Battle of the Bands, where I felt the motion controls seemed a little bit frustrating and redundant.

De Blob, however, controls very simply and tightly judging by the few minutes I had with it - the way you roll your blob around with the nunchuk's thumbstick works particularly well, and put me distinctly in mind of Katamari Damacy. In fact, a lot of De Blob's gameplay seems to take a Katamari cue, from the camera control to the fashion of rolling over Chroma City's poor trapped citizens to set them free.

As Flynn explained, you hold the Z button to lock onto objects you can smash, and swing the Wii Remote down to jump on them. When you hit a paint can, your blob takes on the color you splash through, and colors can blend - if you're red and hit a blue can, for example, you become purple.

And as you roll through Chroma City, you paint it with the colors and patterns you're currently hanging onto, and you earn higher scores for a broad color palette and pattern diversity. The more paint you soak up, the heavier and less agile your blob becomes, and if you roll through two colors that don't blend well, like purple and green, you turn brown. Roll through water to rinse off and become colorless again, taking off some of that weight.

Your blob has to avoid stumbling into ominous-looking black rivers of ink, though - if you get inked, you'll spread depressing blacks and grays all over your colorful handiwork, killing trees and even obliterating your cheerful Chroma City citizens. You can wash off the ink by rinsing in water if you get there in time, though, and an optional onscreen map can point you in the general direction of the nearest water source.

The game features some platforming elements, and you swing the Wii Remote upward to jump, higher if you want more air. Flynn had said he noticed some issues with this - while I've never found motion controls to be ideal for platforming, I found it at least workable here, even if getting the timing and size of the movement just right might take some practice through playtime.

Just rolling the blob around and painting with color is surprisingly engrossing, especially because of the outstanding sound effects and music. The THQ rep told me that the entire soundtrack was done by an Australian local band who plays jazz music, and all of the game's tunes are sprightly and clever. My favorite part was how the music changes depending on what color you are, with the accompanying sound seeming to go with the hue.

Katamari Damacy succeeded through surprising aesthetics and simple gameplay, and it looks possible for De Blob to do the same - my one uncertainty about it is that it's still not clear to me exactly how much structure there is to the missions, or how you obtain the satisfaction of completing a single objective. That's not necessarily a problem - it might still be simple fun as an open-world, color-saturated free-for-all, but personally, I thrive on the joy rush of beating the clock and accomplishing something.

The first thing that caught my eye when it was shown to me was its old-school vibe: traditional-looking 2D sprites and animation plus anime aesthetic, a little bit of a surprise from a publisher who seems to have hitched its star on family-friendly titles with broader appeal.

So what's cool about Lock's Quest? Hit the jump for impressions and screenshots.

Lock's Quest's gameplay is part resource management and building, and part tower defense. The player's tasked with defending an objective on the world map, while little helmeted folk march forward to siege. The dual screen works well here, with your basic stats on the top half alongside a small map that shows where the enemies are approaching from and how many there are.

The game's primary resources are "source" and "scrap," and it costs both to build various types of defensive equipment, like protective walls, traps and turrets that you set up in realtime, to hold off the marching onslaught. More source and better scrap equals better defensive options, and you earn more with each victory you rack up. Your spiky-haired young hero can also leave the ramparts himself and go hand-to-hand against enemies on the field using various attacks, while the structures you built do their job behind him.

The player's individual attacks are played simply enough, while tapping numbers 1, 2 or 3 that appear at the bottom of the touch screen in the order indicated. When you're not attacking, you can continue to expand your ramparts depending on the resources you have saved up.

Your turrets, retaining walls and such take damage from the enemies, and you'll have to repair them continually as the battle wages on - it's cheaper in terms of scrap and source to repair an existing item than it is to forge and place a new one. The battles become more complex as the game goes on, building up to the kind of always-on, continuously hectic action that gives the genre its appeal.

The building mode isn't the only way to defend an objective, though - Lock's Quest also has a battle mode, where you fire your cannon at soldiers as they walk toward your wall from left to right in 2D. Similarly to how you can upgrade your turrets and defensive items in building mode, you can eventually earn upgrades and options for your cannon, and you can also buy little troops to help keep the enemies at bay. This mode is a little bit less interesting to watch, but the idea of having multiple modes in which to defend your towers is appealing.

A big plus for Lock's Quest as an RTS is the idea that you get to actually control the hero, as opposed to distantly managing your battlefield. Personally, I liked the idea of having a more direct sense of control, and to control a person instead of simply faceless objects. Interestingly, the game allows you to directly visit the villages involved in the ongoing narrative thread, talk with people in town and get tips or information on the storyline or the next stage of gameplay. This fashion of "personalizing" the strategy genre is what I liked best about Lock's Quest

Overall, it looks like it could turn out to be an ideal blend of nostalgic throwback and pleasing innovation - and in plain terms, it just looks fun! I don't even like real-time strategy games, and I found it promising. Let's keep an eye on this one.

Every player with a character over level 55 will be able to create one Death Knight per realm. The new character will start at level 55 with a full compliment of abilities at their disposal, the reasoning here being that anyone who has leveled that far will be able to get the hang of the new abilities quickly. Anyone who has ever played with a recently eBayed character can tell you this is a complete falsehood, but it'll be amusing to watch at least.

Speaking of amusing, Death Knights will also gain the ability to raise fallen enemies and comrades as ghouls to continue the fight. If you raise an ally in this fashion they will get a choice of whether or not to take control of their violated corpse. Good times!

Death Knights will also be the first character class that harnesses the power of disease, so expect to see +disease items going for a premium in the auction house come the expansion's release.

Other new information involves the raids present in WofLK, which instead of forcing players into 10-man or 25-man groups will come in two varieties each. That means that any raid dungeon in the expansion will have a 10-man and a 25-man option, with the drops for those gathering a bigger group being relatively more powerful.

This feature alone is worth the price of admission for me (like I wouldn't have bought the expansion anyway). As a more casual player (my current guild has 2 people in it), I regret that I've never gotten a chance to see some of the bigger raid instances from past updates. Scaling the raids is an excellent way to let folks experience all the expansion has to offer while still rewarding the big raiding guilds for performing the enviable feat of keeping 25 people from tearing each other's throats out every five minutes.

Incidentally, not one raid boss has been created yet. I'm sure they'll get around to that eventually.

Another fun fact, Northrend will have it's own flying mounts, as well as allowing players to use their Burning Crusade flying mounts in the new zones, while the old world still remains sadly flying mount free due to design constrictions. Maybe they'll come up with some suitable lore reason for this. Whirring sky razors infesting the two main continents perhaps? The Blizzard writers are nothing if not resourceful.

There really is a ton of information out there from several different source, including GameSpy and Curse.com, so I'm extremely grateful to the folks at MMO Champion for rounding up all the pertinent information in one place. Hit the link below and prepare to spend the rest of your Friday reading about Wrath of the Lich King.

Wrath of the Lich King Preview [MMO Champion - Thanks Wingsoverglory!]

Boom Blox's main gameplay draw lies in the ability to knock down towers of inconsistently shaped blocks with the toss of baseballs, bowling balls, whatever, all of which adhere to an accurate physics model. Simply line up your shot, after a careful panning and scanning of the camera, then whip the Wii-remote at the screen to start knocking blocks off. Special blocks and multipliers pile on the tactics, but gamers of any skill level can compete from the get-go.

If any game needs to be bundled with the Wii Remote silicone safety condom, it's Boom Blox. Players may be encouraged to violently whip the Remote at the TV, adding extra force to their throws—and extra muscle strain. It's not entirely necessary to give it your all with dramatic, forceful throws, as side pitches and underhanded tosses were just as, if not more, effective in toppling blocks efficiently. A more measured flick of the wrist recommended, as is a tight Wii Remote wrist strap.

Spielberg's first collaborative effort with EA may not have been what you were expecting, but there's something indescribably fun about deconstructing the pre-built levels with up to three other Wii gamers. The only downside to four-player competitive Boom Blox-ing is often the long wait between turns, as your rivals can take an extended period to plan out their shots as you watch. They'll be taking all the good shots, too, or so it seems as you're left with nothing but clean up duty.

The concepts behind Boom Blox may not sound like much, but the impressive number of puzzles and game modes, combined with a deceptively simple mechanic, may warrant more looking into.

Taku can only progress through the game with the help of the wind, displayed on-screen as a pale blue cursor, a sentient being whose motions are controlled by the Wii Remote. The nunchuk is used to control Taku himself—his motions are quite limited—with the two working in tandem to lift the wee protagonist to high ledges and across wide gaps.

The wind in LostWinds can be used to manipulate more that just Taku, as stiff breezes can move fire, water, even rock to other locations on the map, lighting torches, watering plants and weighing down levers respectively. Players will, however, find themselves moving Taku to and fro with the help of a strong gust and the little boy's cape.

LostWinds looks to be rich in puzzle solving and platforming, a winning combination that doesn't seem to be represented elsewhere on WiiWare. Add to that solid gameplay mechanic a gorgeous artistic design that evokes warm memories of Ico, The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and various Square Enix classics, and Frontier may very well have a hit on their hands.

LostWinds is innovative, especially easy on the eyes and the clear product of high production values, making it one of the most high anticipated titles to appear on Nintendo's system, regardless of how it's being delivered.

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After pulling Crecente from SFIV, we'll be scoring impressions of Silicon Knights' Too Human. Ahh, but we've all seen Too Human before, you say? True, but that was way back at E3 2006 when it was gliding along the show floor at a smooth 15fps. A lot has happened since 2006. Silicon Knights sued Epic, E3 died and we started wearing skirts. So be sure to tune in next week for our full impressions.

Expect hands-on impressions and tears of joy later next week, with more Game Developers Conference announcements over the next few days.

I'm with the Fallout forum regulars here...this is just too similar to the Capitol building concept from three weeks ago to really be all that interesting. They should have ended it with the spectacular piece from last week, which highlighted the 50's vibe that we know and love.

And that's it for the concept art. Now we just have seven days til the extremely important teaser trailer, as the more rabid Fallout followers sit by their computers, lighters poised under Molotov rag wicks as they watch for the slightest misstep. You can do it Bethesda. I believe in you. Michael Fahey

Fallout 3 [Bethesda Softworks]

1Up is currently featuring a huge six page preview of the new God of War game for the PSP, God of War: Chains of Olympus. They got a chance to have a nice sit down with creative director Cory Barlog who talked a bit about the new game's storyline.

A lot of what we're telling with the later stories is Kratos when he's just really realized he's a puppet of the Gods, really realizing that he's getting screwed over, and [the PSP game will] flesh out when he did have maybe a little bit of faith and when that faith started to crumble a little bit — when he started to see some cracks in the stories they were telling him.

Barlog remains coy about giving away too much about the plot and enemies and says that the details of this project will be much more guarded than God of War II. The new title promises to be every bit as epic as it's PS2 predecessors and the newly released screenshots that accompany the article look really sweet. I can't wait to start seeing some gameplay footage so we can see exactly what we're in for.

For the full article and a bunch of exclusive screens, head on over to 1Up and check it out!

Previews: God of War PSP

Yesterday, after being forced to sit through the latest Texas Chainsaw Massacre flick, gamer audiences in Chicago were allowed to play Gears of War on the theater screens. All reports I've read have said the same thing: Massacre boring, Gears of War amazing.

Once we got past the bore fest that was Texas Chainsaw Massacre we got see in my opinion what is the must have game of the holiday season. The controls were great, even though you had to adjust for them, and the game is just plain old fun! My only complaint would be that I wasn't able to play it again.

- Antonio Mercer (Chicago, IL)

You will find more reviews on Endangered Gamer, Jystiq, and probably everywhere else. I don't think any Kotakunauts got their hands on it, since we all live very far away from the various selected cities, but everyone says the same thing: super badass totally sweet oh my god rad.

Hilariously, the marketing scheme to get geeks in seats for Massacre probably backfired, as no one is talking about the movie except to breathlessly mention how crap it was before delving into their Gears descriptions. Of course, it probably boosted the opening day numbers quite a bit. Eliza Gauger

Gears Of War - What The Fans Had to Say! [Aeropause]

Bapenguin over on the Evil Avatar forums has a detailed rundown of his firsthand observations of Bully, Rockstar's latest attention-getting title.

When Bully was announced back at E3 2005 to a small closed door group of press it immediately garnered a ton of attention. Unfortunately it was the wrong kind of attention with numerous groups and a lawyer that should not be named claiming the game was a Columbine Simulator. These people went as far as saying the game should be cancelled and that it was irresponsible of Rockstar to make such a game. These people are also idiots. They were irresponsible for not getting all the information on this game before making these outrageous claims. Bully is a caricature of boarding school life. Bully is no more a Columbine simulator than robotic crabs are a part of Japanese history.

After reading his full report on the game, I'm well vindicated that the Peaceaholics, the biggest group protesting the release of the game, and their various lawyer and politician chums have egg on their face.

And that's enough to make me preorder. Eliza Gauger

Bully Hands-On Preview [Evil Avatar, via Digg]

Microsoft was kind enough to send me an Xbox 360 Vision Camera on Friday. It's a cute little thing that plugs into the USB port of your Xbox 360. I had a chance to mess around with it over the weekend, though I'm still waiting for Totemball to come out so I can really put this thing through the wringer.

The camera's design matches the sleek vanilla look of the console and even has a green ring of light to show when it's transmitting a signal over the Intertube.

I still haven't figured out where to put the camera in my entertainment center, but fortunately it has a fairly long cable, so I should be able to put it just about anywhere in my set-up.

After plugging the camera into the console I hopped over to the setting's blade where I was able to adjust for the type of room and the lighting. After you set up the camera, you can manually fine tune the focus by twisting a ring around the camera lens.

Next, I hopped over to my Gamertag settings where I was able to take a picture to use as my personal Gamer photo. Again, the process was fairly straightforward. The camera supports two levels of zoom, though by the second one the image is pretty grainy. Instead of just zooming automatically, the software lets you drag a box around the screen to highlight what you want to zoom in on.

After taking the picture, you can add effects to the image. The end result was a fairly grainy image of me. Even after I tried walking up to the camera and taking the picture without the zoom, I found it to be a bit on the grainy side.

I didn't get a chance to video chat with anybody, but I did play a few games of Uno with the camera on. What this did was replace my normal gamertag picture with a live video stream. While this did make the image a bit bigger, it was still way too small to really see any sort of emotions or such. I mention this because there's no way you could use the camera as a way of judging if someone is bluffing in Uno. I hope when it's introduced for poker they manage to clean up the stream and make the image much larger.

The people I was playing with in Uno did say that the video seemed relatively lagless, which was nice, but I'm still unclear why you'd want to have video streaming in a game of Uno.

While I think it will be neat to check out some of the games that Microsoft is going to be releasing specifically for the camera, I sorta had my fill of those with the Playstation 2. What I'm really excited about is the in-game face technology. I didn't really mess around with that much on the few games that did that with the Eye Toy and I'm assuming the technology has improved a bit since then.

I'm not sure if I would rush out a buy this camera when it hits on Sept. 19 (Oct. 6 in Europe). I think I'd likely wait until a good shooter came along that supported it and perhaps a few of my friends or family got the camera.

The camera is going to come in two flavors: For $40 you get the camera, one-month of Live Gold, a 360 headset and Uno and TotemBall. For $80 you get the same thing plus q year of Gold membership, a copy of Robotron and 200 Microsoft points.

What do you think, are you planning on buying the camera when it hits? I'll slap up a short video a bit later today showing me annoying people by inability to video myself and play Uno at the same time. Brian Crecente

It's called LocoRoco.

I've been playing the full build for about a week now and I'm addicted. I'm not allowed to talk about anything beyond the first three levels until the embargo lifts, so let me just say that it's a genuinely fun, portable gaming experience.

I think that's what the PSP has been missing. With a few exceptions (most notably Lumines) most of the decent PSP games have not really been portable games, they've been light versions of a PS2 game. I don't mean that they've all been knock-offs of current franchises, though that is true for some, I mean that they weren't really designed with portable gaming in mind.

I take the train to work now. It's a 40 minute trip or so. I could probably spend the time playing GTA or SOCOM or Daxter, but I wouldn't really get as much gaming in as I would with a portable game like LocoRoco.

It's been taking me about five to 15 minutes to complete a level, depending on how much I suck or sight see. So I can go through a few levels without having to rush. That's what the PSP needs more of, fun gaming that you can experience fully in tiny chunks of time.

If you've played the demo, you've gotten a sense of what the game is like. You use the left and right triggers for most of the action, tilting the world in either direction so your blob of a character slides and tumbles across a level.

You can also leap by holding both in and letting go. Finally, the circle button lets you break your big blob up into a bunch of little blobs so you can get through tiny openings. The controls, which take a bit of getting use to, become quite intuitive over a short period of time.

The level layout, while visually simplistic, become very ingenious as you progress through the game. I almost felt as if I was playing a surreal version of Super Mario Bros. The game has that sort of fun, pure-gaming feel to it. As you continue the lengthy game more and more tricks and twists are introduced to this basic element of rolling from side to side.

While the first and second levels are both basic lands of hills and over-sized purple flowers, by level three the level becomes much darker with some interesting new mechanicsms like a giant blubbery launching pad and spinning levers you have to fall through.

Sony seems to have done everything right with this game. I can see it being used quite well to sell more of their portables. Brian Crecente

Let's have some videos all up in here, yeah?

This appears to be a side-by-side f the Okami intro, one fully rendered and one cel-shaded. I don't think this is, as people are claiming, a before-and-after, but more a simple comparison. Pretty. Thanks Justin. Eliza gauger

Demian sent this in and I'm very pleased with them. This is the newest Rule of Rose trailer, appropriately titled "Creepy Kids" over on GameVideos.

Lots of sadism, short skirts, and spooky smiles. And my special friend, the fishblimp, makes another spectacular showing at the very end.

This video is completely nonsensical but I couldn't look away. Eliza Gauger

Upcoming next-gen game The Darkness will be on -hand at Comic-cCon International in San Diego this weekend.
Starbreeze Studios say they will be previewing the game at the show every half hour at Platinum's booth.
Makes sense. The game, slated to hit the Xbox 360 and PS3 in 2007, is based on TopCow's comic series of the same name.

If you're heading to Comic-Con this weekend make sure to check it out, then take pictures and send them in so we can pretend we covered it. :) Brian Crecente

The E3 directory is useful, but not perfectly accurate. I have a meeting with RealTime Worlds and the directory leads me to Scottish Development International, where several nice people with Scottish brogues confer among themselves and eventually point me to the Xbox 360 booth in the another hall.

Once I get through Microsoft registration (presumably next year I can just give them my gamertag) I'm lead into a presentation room and on the screen all Hell is breaking loose. Bodies are flying, cars are exploding into pieces, and the streets are filled with thugs, unfazed by the carnage around them, unloading round after round of small arms fire. In the middle of this is a burly man dressed in a dark blue body suit, calmly shooting and throwing grenades, orchestrating carnage like an incredibly violent symphony conductor. The game is called Crackdown.

The graphics look stylish, with a bright, hard-lined style reminiscent of the comics in Heavy Metal magazine. They call it the "graphic novel look." The game is instantly recognizible as one of the many illegitimate children of Grand Theft Auto III: You run freely around a large city, dispensing mayhem at will and picking up missions when you get tired of free-form destruction. In this case, you're the good guy working for "The Agency," and mowing down innocents is discouraged but certainly an option.

Much of the presentation is focused on explaining that the game is even more open-ended than its predecessors. You can go anywhere on the three available islands, take missions in any order, and all without load screens. I'm told you can even go straight to the end mission and theoretically win the game without playing any of the parts in-between, although it would require someone with the gaming skills of Kevin Flynn.

The other gimmick is that the character has skill ranks. The more you blow things up, the better you get at blowing things up. If you lift and throw things enough, you can eventually toss around cars. This is reflected in the game, with the explosions becoming massive, your muscles becoming even more bulging, and so forth. In the nicest effect in the demo, when your driving skill is maxxed out, special Agency cars morph into cooler forms when you get into them, with a plain old regular semi cab turning into a futuristic hyper-truck before your very eyes.

There's going to be no shortage of sandbox games in this next generation. It's way too early to pick winners, but Heavy Metal artwork and morphing hyper-trucks aren't a bad place to start.

When David "God of War" Jaffe posted an infamous blog entry last year, complaining about how members of the gaming press kept referring to themselves as part of the game industry, a lot of them were understandably hurt. For of course the gaming press is part of the game industry— and E3 is the proof.

In the next few days of hard sell, the marketing and publicity departments of every major publisher will spend millions of dollars trying to convince retail buyers that 95% of their games aren't the mediocre and unoriginal rehashes they really are. (And have no doubt, while the gaming press likes to flatter itself thinking E3 is all about them, they merely supply the lubrication for an intercourse between the bloated corporate powers who really matter, the Walmarts and Best Buys of the world, represented in the main by middle-aged men in hotel suites who couldn't care less about any of the games on the roiling Convention Center floor below.)

Read what ruffles James' feathers after the jump.

The gaming press' real job is to ease that transaction, writing breathless "news reports" that are almost always indistinguishable in content from the press releases they're usually cobbled from. Most of the games on display aren't worth even a second glance, but nearly all of the gaming press is reluctant to tell you that. At the end of that sordid week, they'll hand out a series of Best of Show awards that highlight a few genuinely worthwhile games, but gestures like this are designed so as not to deviate from the main task: to keep the product flowing, crappy or not.

After five consecutive E3s, I've decided to sit this one out, but Joel and Brian of Team Kotaku are there, offering their show floor insights with opinions unfiltered. If you can't be there with them, or you're foolish enough to read other gaming sites, here's a few tips to at least read them with a skeptical eye.

Beware Staged/Limited Previews

Any E3 preview written without the benefit of extensive, unmonitored, hands-on play is useless. Actually, even worse than useless, since it's really just a preview of a cinematic ginned up to seem like a game. It's like reading someone's description of the trailer of a Milla Jovovich movie.

It gets even worse: games on the showroom floor are almost invariably just a single level, so even a hands-on preview says nothing about the overall quality. Still worse are the "exclusive" demos held in closed meeting rooms off the floor, usually demonstrated by a developer and a prim-but-sweaty PR girl giving you a carefully controlled walkthroughs.

It's About the Parties, Stupid

"The way to get into the big parties," a game press writer told me happily once, "is ask the PR ladies for a demo, and while they're setting it up, hint that you're looking to get in."

During E3, most of the gaming press spends an inordinate amount of time trying to rustle up party invites. (Not the main editors, who've gotten their invitations in the mail weeks ago, but the low level functionaries who write most of their Expo coverage.) The greatest effort is spent trying to gain access into the crown jewel, the E3 Sony Party. The Japanese mega-corporation is legendary for leveraging its wallet and top artists in its music division to throw parties the size of a city block, lit up by electric blue. One heroic friend regularly runs an "underground railroad" into the party, smuggling out the mylar bracelets that act as invites, so we can secretly hand them to our comrades huddling in the cold outside. (Security is so tight it resembles East Berlin during the Cold War, except all the good shit's inside.)

All this fun wasn't such a bad thing when Sony undisputedly ruled the game industry. (And while I can honestly say I've never written about any game because of them, I'm not above going a few times. Hey, Foo Fighters, live. I mean, come on.) But now that they're struggling in the console wars, it's incumbent on the company to keep the game media mesmerized. (My guess is Sony will be a lot more generous with invites to the gaming press this year.) And though it's too simple to assert one-to-one payola, party invites definitely buy attention.

Picture a Cheering Press

If you think game press previews are hyped up, you should see how their authors act, when they're supposed to be reporting. I can't count the times I've sat in on Expo previews and press conferences where reporters for top gaming publications actually cheered. (One guy next to me got so openly enthused during an E3 demo for Max Payne that I actually turned to him and said, "Dude, are you even trying to act like a journalist?") But while they're entirely over-excited about the graphics or cool power-ups, I've never witnessed a game writer once ask probing questions about design or story. It's the image you should keep in your mind when reading the coverage coming from E3, almost all of it written not by passionately engaged journalist gamers but for the most part, by uncritical enthusiasts who are unwilling or unable to discern originality from retreads.

Which is, I guess, a good way to bring us back to David Jaffe's exasperation with the whole charade, and his frustration at not being taken seriously by the fanboy reporters clustering around him at these things. He could show them finger puppets hitting each other with wooden dowels and call it God of War II, and he'd still get a nice blurb the next day. ("While all the art assets for GoW II aren't totally finished, everything we saw at David's demo suggests it's on track to be a contender for BEST GAME OF E3 2006.")

Send samples of egregiously fawning game previews and information on backroom deals that influence them to au@kotaku.com. Tips from editors and writers in the game press especially welcome—all correspondence kept strictly confidential.

Nearly all of them you are likely to play for a few hours, lazily yawn a "Meh!" and go back to playing World of Warcraft... although we know Aschraft, for one, is looking forward to Hello Kitty! Online World. But don't let the fact that almost all of these games are likely to be pretty marginal stop you from engaging in the excited reveries of the credulous gamer. Hell, that's what gaming fanaticism's all about!

Pre-E3: MMO roundup [Update 3] [Joystiq]

Six new screens show off the graphical style and Crackdown creator David Jones' gives insight into the games unique Xbox Live acheivements, including the "Keep a corpse in the air with a rocket launcher" endurance contest.

Crackdown Preview [CVG]

By: Wagner James Au

In this column's March debut, we laid out the basics that gave life to Preview Ho, explaining how hyped-up previews are the enemy of good games, since publishers use them to secure shelf space from the major retailers, no matter how crappy the ultimate title. (And read this great Escapist story to understand how dependent the industry is on chains like Walmart.)

Later in the month, we found out it was even worse than that, with major gaming sites selling premium editorial space to publishers. When called on it, one editor adorably defended the practice by saying it was "pretty common both in print and online".

I was curious what the game industry's leading advocate thought about the practice, so I contacted the press office of the Entertainment Software Association but despite repeated requests, received no answer. Though they're sponsored by publishers, you'd think the ESA would be disturbed by a "pretty common" practice that's totally at odds with its goal of presenting the industry as a respectable medium with fair, ethical standards for promoting their product. (What, they'll take a controversial move like banning booth bimbos from E3, but they can't say anything about this?)

But hey, maybe the ESA doesn't check their e-mail much.

Anyway, let's roll out the two top candidates for April's biggest Ho, and explore how they work, like most of the gaming press, to serve the publishers' interests (who are also their advertisers) at the expense of you, the gamer. (And yes, we started with way more than two; believe me, Preview Ho could be a daily column.)

The first Ho contender was spotted by Kotaku editor Brian Crecente on the blog of a site called, appropriately enough, RedAssedBaboon. (If a Preview Ho were a baboon, he'd have a...) Props to Red Assed's "Rappateng" for joining us, whether he knows it or not, in a bloggers' call to arms against the gaming press. His post focused on "Splinter Cell Essentials" for the PSP, a game that was, on review, almost universally slagged, even by Gamespy, which gave it a withering 2/5 review. But Gamespy's preview by Will Tuttle called it "One of the best games on PSP".

And that's the line Ubisoft used in the advertising for the game.

Pause and consider that. Gamers like you stop at the PSP retail shelf, presented with a few dozen games to choose from. You pick up "Splinter Cell Essentials", maybe because you like the Clancy franchise— and hey, since Gamespy says it's among the PSP's best games right on the goddamn box, you blow your $40 on that one.

I contacted Gamespy editor John "Warrior" Keefer for an explanation. Staggeringly, Keefer says he authorized Ubisoft to use the "best games" line in their advertising copy for "Essentials".

"It is the publisher's job to try to make their game look as good as possible in their marketing of the game," Keefer e-mailed me. "My job is to make sure they don't use our quotes out of context. All quotes have to be approved through me." For the preview, Tuttle actually played just three levels made available at the time by Ubisoft, which is also a Gamespy advertiser— and that was enough, both of them insist, to nominate "Splinter Cell Essentials" into the Best Game pantheon of an entire platform.

"Bottom line is that it was unfortunate that the game was radically different from what Will originally saw," Keefer explained, "which makes our quote stand out even more. He said he stands by the original quote because at the time he made it, the graphics and lighting were phenomenal and it did a very good job of fleshing out the universe. Unfortunately, the rest of the game did not pan out with the demo."

The qualifier "at the time" is particularly delicious— sort of like a Nevada working girl who says you're her favorite client ever, because at the time, she's trying to pry a $40 tip from your fingers. Still, we have to credit Keefer for at least attempting an explanation.

The other nominee in this month's Ho search is PC Gamer, as helmed by editor-in-chief Greg Vederman. As it happens, Vederman brought himself to our attention by publishing a widely-praised editorial announcing that his magazine would no longer accept ads from "virtual gold farming" companies which sell gold coins from World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs.

In the US at least, this is still a small cottage industry, so it's hard to believe a teeny company like IGE could afford to spend much in advertising, certainly not compared to multinational corporations like Microsoft, Sony, Vivendi, and EA that already swamp the front pages of magazines like PC Gamer.

But still, it's at least some kind of stand, isn't it, with Vederman the lone hero of the gaming press drawing a line in the sand?

Maybe in his own imagination. Because here's the thing: the pages of PC Gamer may not run ads from virtual gold companies, but the magazine's entire preview section is an advertisement.

Have a look at May's issue:

Preview for "Medal of Honor Airborne" from Electronic Arts, by Chuck Osborn: "[This game] has already done something I previously thought was impossible— it's gotten me excited about yet another WWII shooter... I'll be there, ripcord at the ready."

Preview for "World in Conflict" from Massive Entertainment, by Logan Decker: "ITS UPCOMING RTS PHENOM... ABSOLUTELY BLOWS OUR MIND." [sic... and sick]

But the clincher is the cover story, an extensive preview of BF2142, also from Electronic Arts (via DICE studios). Now Battlefield 2 is a great game for its genre (though hardly 2005's all-time best), but judging from advance gameplay footage, BF2142 is basically just a mech warrior-themed add-on, with little new added to BF2's basic design. You'd have a hard time convincing preview writer Dan Stapleton of that, however, since when shown a library of futuristic weapons and vehicles in action he is capable of achieving orgasm:

"Come the end of the year," he promises, "DICE will be giving you an all new reason to practice your skills... [in a game] that fundamentally changes the nature of warfare. Could BF2142 be our Game of the Year in the making? It wouldn't surprise anyone here and... we're not so bad predicting the future."

I guess it wouldn't surprise me, either, since in May's Letter From the Editor, Vederman speaks obscurely about how he "inked this month's Battlefield 2142 cover contract" with Electronic Arts, and that he personally "brokered the deal". In my experience, a "deal" that is "brokered" usually involves an exchange of money or services, so it's unclear what Vederman means here, unless it was just that; his phrasing certainly leaves that impression. In any case, something was expected by Electronic Arts when they let PC Gamer have exclusive advance coverage of their unfinished game. (What that was, exactly, will have to remain secret between EA and Vederman,. Greg Vederman didn't reply to my e-mail asking for his commentary for this article.)

Here is what Vederman said in his acclaimed editorial denouncing gold farming companies: "For the record, PC Gamer's official stance on these types of companies is that they are despicable... [because] they all-too-often ruin legitimate players' fun." Call me crazy, but it will also ruin players' fun when they pre-order copies of BF2142, Medal of Honor Airborne, and World in Conflict, based in part on the hype PC Gamer gave them, then discover all-too-often that they've wasted their time and money on ass product. (For by simple iteration of Sturgeon's Law, they'll be lucky if even one in three of these games truly lives up to the magazine's hype.) This is not even mentioning how press previews like PC Gamer's are used by publishers to promote and market their product, or as we saw with Gamespy and Ubisoft, actually made part of their advertising campaigns.

It's why Vederman's refusal to accept gold farmer ads is so disingenuous, considering all the thoughtless, unqualified boosterism of incomplete, undistinguished titles PC Gamer does on behalf of its potential advertisers. It's sort of like the madame of a Paris whorehouse waddling into her lobby filled with clientele and pointing a chubby finger, not at the banker or the Parliamentarian or the bishop already paying their bills, but at the peg-legged dwarf with 20 Francs waiting his turn in the back of the room, and thundering "ZIS IS A RESPECTABLE ESTABLISHMENT! WE DON'T TAKE ZE MIDGET AMPUTEES IN ZIS PLACE— GET OUT!"

Which is also why, after a close race, Vederman helps PC Gamer take April's Preview Ho crown.

For in the end, there's no bigger Ho than a Ho on its high horse.

Send samples of egregiously fawning game previews and information on backroom deals that influence them to au@kotaku.com, including previews that are used in advertising copy. Tips from editors and writers in the game press especially welcome—all correspondence kept strictly confidential.

Update: Although we try to give companies opportunity to respond before a column is run, PC Gamer's Dan Morris had this to say, "Wagner James Au made a ridiculously cursory attempt to contact PC Gamer for comment on this article, sending one email to a general reader mailbox. Our spam filter killed it, probably due to his misspellings in the subject line. He failed to follow up, despite the fact that editors' email addresses are prominently published in the magazine, or, for that matter, that I have repeatedly invited him to contact me by phone for comment on stories such as this.

If he had made a serious attempt to get comment from us, we'd have told him that PC Gamer accepted nothing from EA for our Battlefield 2042 cover story. I continue to be dismayed that Au is allowed to skirt the most basic ethical consideration of his trade — a good-faith effort to get comment from his subjects.

Sincerely, Daniel Morris, Associate Publisher, PC Gamer" We have offered Mr. Morris a comments invite which he may or may not use to respond to any questions from readers in the comments.