BioWare has officially announced Mass Effect 2, the sequel to their hit game of 2007, hitting the PC and Xbox 360 in “early 2010”. A teaser trailer was released in late February, but there had been no formal press release about the game until now.
Wallace & Gromit Demo
Telltale Games is letting us know the Wallace & Gromit Grand Adventures demo is now (exclusively, at the time of writing) available at Yahoo and FilePlanet. After an admittedly brief play-through, as the short demo is only really designed to acquaint new players with the generic mechanics of the adventure game genre, I still found myself surprised enough!
BioShock 2 Information Starts to Surface
The marketing campaign for BioShock 2 has started in full swing. A viral site popped up a week ago, There is Something Under the Sea, showing a world map. Static and radio chatter fill the speakers, and curious annotations on the map mark out spots around the world. Alongside each cross and date is a handful of information, in the form of letters, newspaper clippings and photographs.
Merchants of Brooklyn
While Zeno Clash might have been on the receiving end of some hefty accolades already, we shan’t forget there are others in line for a title shot at the crown of the new Dark Messiah! A trailer recently reared its head for a new challenger in the seldom-seen HTH-FPS genre, Merchants of Brooklyn (MOB for short).
This CryEngine 2-based, Steam-distributed PC-only game from Paleo Entertainment pretends to the throne from vastly different origins than the two aforementioned fantasy games, for it presents to us a Babelian Manhattan in the year 3100. The city has been rebuilt – entirely skywards, this time – after a devastating flood caused by global warming.
As its inhabitants ascend, not enough work force remains; meanwhile, human cloning has advanced immensely and has primarily refocused on the Neanderthal DNA for its physical resiliency. However, due to a contractual miscalculation in producing workers for the city, too many Neo-Neanderthal clones end up being produced and are outright outcast to be the bottom feeders of the new society.
To the save the local mob – the Merchants of Brooklyn – who discover a lucrative opportunity in the plight of the clones and begin to arrange lucrative Neonean fights to the death. The player, a Neo-Neanderthal himself, has his arm unwillingly replaced with a chainsaw and realizes he’s had enough of the fun and games, and then begins his journey at the very bottom of this violent, bottoms-up society to work his way up – via gratuitous violence – and ultimately exact revenge upon his former masters and take over the Brooklyn empire together with his fellow clones.
The first teaser trailer for the project presents to us an ultraviolent, comic book –influenced dystopia with an off-the-wall setting equally influenced by the new resurgence of martial arts and the combat sports as it is by the environmental panic and the economic downturn. Perhaps. After all, sci-fi has always been a magnificent vehicle for social critique, and although several other games tackle similar ideas as presented in the backstory to MOB, it will be very intriguing to see if there’s more to the game than the bone-crunching melee.
Check out the teaser trailer and pictures after the jump and stay tuned for an in-depth Side to Side on both Zeno Clash and Merchants of Brooklyn!
Zeno Clash
This year’s standout finalist in the IGF “Excellence in Visual Art” category and ModDB’s Best Upcoming Indie game for 2008, Zeno Clash, a tiny yet potentially explosive close combat -oriented indie FPS built around the Source engine, is coming fresh off the back of a string of accolades preceding its actual release.
In the game, players settle in the role of Ghat, a young man fleeing away from his creator, the Father-Mother, the most powerful clan leader in the city of Halstedom. The rebellious chap must escape and fight his way thru the dangerous lands of Zenozoik together with his companion, the high-spirited and trust-worthy Deadra.
The most distinct quality of Zeno Clash seems to be its ability to potently divide an audience like Moses did water, and if anything, the fearless look and feel rooted in a mind-bending array of influences – including Hieronymus Bosch, John Blanche and Dark Crystal 1)http://www.moddb.com/games/zeno-clash/features/zeno-clash-interview-part-1 – seems like an open call for opinionage.
Obviously, for an indie game, it’s definitely better to go down in flames than simply fade away, and the ACE Team have this all planned: Project leader Andres Bordeu indeed notes that the team actually feels safer about the off-the-hook stylistics:
From a certain point of view going for the unconventional has been the safe thing to do for us. … We knew it was impossible to compete with big companies that tend to put a lot of their muscle in technology graphics-wise.
If you’re interested, RPS have posted an article on the game in their Unknown Pleasures series, and the two-part ModDB article can be found here and here, respectively. The team promises a solid 4-5 hours of gaming, for the competitive price tag of $20, and if Arkane’s Dark Messiah from 2006 is anything to go by, Zeno Clash is bound to be an exciting, corporeal experience at best, and a curious piece of gaming ephemera at worst.
Personally, I expect nothing but the best from the project. For a few more screenshots, check out the gallery after the jump.
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