Orcs Must Die! is essentially a hybrid between tower-defense and third-person action, with rpg elements thrown into the mix in the form of unlockables and what some would call skill-trees. There is a story, but like most games of this type, it really isn’t the point of the game and is mainly used as an excuse to make fun of the main character (you) and to provide a background setting. You are a poor excuse of an apprentice of a poor excuse of a mage, and due to various circumstances, you are the only hope of humanity against an ever-increasing horde of Orcs. Bla bla, to be honest I paid attention for a very short while until I was handed control of the various glorious traps and devices – all aimed at slaughtering as many Orcs as possible. Did I mention this game involves killing Orcs? Loads and loads of Orcs.

I love the smell of burnt orcs in the morning.

In the first levels you don’t have much in the form of traps, and rely mostly on a few basic spikes, tar to slow your enemy down and your trusty weapon: a rather destructive crossbow. Your arsenal quickly expands, and you unlock new goodies every map you complete. Most of the traps are predictable, but there are a few pretty awesome ones – and all of them feel pretty punchy in action. The net result is absolute mayhem and destruction – with orcs being splattered, shot, burned, frozen and otherwise gutted in large numbers.

Pounder, that sounds sufficiently painful. (And it is!)

It doesn’t take long before you start unlocking Guardians which essentially are npc units that you can place on the map, such as archers and melee units – which help defend your rift. As in any tower defense game, your main goal is to prevent enemies from reaching your the heart of the map (in this case a rift, or on some maps multiple rifts), and each enemy which does reach it reduces the life of the rift until it reaches 0 and you lose. To prevent the Orcs from getting there, you use a combination of aforementioned traps, guardians and your personal spells. At the start of each map you select which traps and spells you wish to equip from the ones you unlocked, and off you go. This system means that going back to earlier maps once you’ve unlocked more powerful traps, spells and guardians can be pretty rewarding. (And fun!)

None shall pass! Archers are incredibly useful.

To add more depth to this, you also unlock ‘weavers’ which really just means you get access to skill trees. You can pick from a few trees, and these reset each map. Each skill/perk/ability (name it what you like) costs ‘money’ – so you have to carefully balance this with the purchase of traps and guardians between waves. All of this adds a nice layer of tactical depth – which combined with the fast-paced action makes Orcs Must Die! a very enjoyable experience. The developers seem to have managed to balance just the right mix of pace, destruction and strategy and experiencing this from within the map rather than the traditional top-down view in tower-defense game makes this much more immersive.

Wall Blades provide an adequate level of gore.

Now the game costs £12 on Steam, which I personally think is a little steep for a game like this. Yes, it’s highly enjoyable but it does wear off pretty quickly and I doubt that anyone is going to play this for a huge number of hours. If you can pick it up for about half that price during a sale, it is however totally and utterly worth it. Orcs Must Die! is an example of what Indie gaming is all about and there hasn’t been a tower defense game that was as decent since Defense Grid: The Awakening.

Still not convinced? Then watch some Orcs getting slaughtered below:

Global Agenda is a free-to-play mmo, mostly a shooter with some tiny bits of rpg blended into the mix. You get to choose from 4 classes: Assault, Medic, Recon and Robotic – and each perform very different functions in group-based content. Most of the game is based on PvP – though there is no open-world PvP whatsoever. All PvP is handled in battlegrounds and AvA, with more about that later in the review. You do get the usual MMO features: there are quests, gear, shops, crafting, auction houses, etc. Don’t expect weeks of content though, I played the game for a week straight and exhausted all quest content on 3 different classes. That said, it takes a while to get to maximum level and there are plenty of things to unlock.

Don't worry, I'll heal you.. By shooting you in the face with this green goo.

In terms of the classes, the Assault is essentially the tank class. Armed with miniguns, rocket launchers and skills based around damage mitigation this class can take a serious punch, as well as do an incredibly amount of dps. The medic is exactly what it sounds like: a class mainly based on healing, though you do have the option to spec poison and do a decent amount of damage. Most people will however expect you to heal them, so the vast majority of medics are healing specced. The recon is the stealth / sniper class and does by far the most dps of any of the classes. The last class, the robotic, is what one could call the ‘pet class’. Extremely versatile and largely a support class, the robotic places stations and turrets that heal, buff and do damage. The majority of gametime by a robotic is spend setting up and repairing their stations and turrets.

Obviously any class with stealth needs a katana.

As far as gameplay is concerned, besides for the quest content the game has instances which are grouped in medium security, high security, max security and ultra-max security. In a nutshell, the boss of the lower level becomes a normal mob in the next level up – so these are exponentially harder. The latter two are quite unforgiving and playing with people who don’t communicate or are completely ignorant can be an exercise in frustration. Since this is a free-to-play game, one can purchase a so called ‘Elite Agent’ status for a one-off fee of around £15 – which provides a substantial increase in experience, tokens, credits and most importantly: provides loot from instances and other activities. On top of this, players can buy a booster which doubles the rewards, and stacks with Elite Agent. Free players might find this a little irritating, but it’s done in a reasonably tasteful manner and isn’t too obnoxious.

There are tons of options for customising your colour scheme and looks - a nice touch. Most long-term players fly their Agency (guild) colours.

Other nice touches include the fact that all your characters share the same name, so people can easily identify you. They also all share the same inventory, credits, tokens, everything except gear which is ‘bound’ to that character. The nice thing is that you can purchase an item for your cosmetic slots and it becomes available for all your characters. Similarly, you can swap between classes without being penalized in progress when it comes to tokens/credits – which makes a nice difference from other MMOs. As a result, it’s much easier to find groups as people are far more willing to use different characters, especially once they’ve reached maximum level (50 at the moment).

Last thing worth mentioning is the so-called ‘AvA’, Alliance vs. Alliance PvP. I only dabbled in this a very short while, but I really liked what I saw. This essentially is the organised mass-scale PvP, where alliances fight over maps divided in hexes and conquer/defend territory during specific seasons that last a specific amount of time. Alliances can build facilities on these hexes, get resources, bring in dropships with support equipment that can be used during matches, etc. etc. It’s really rather in-depth and pretty much anyone interested in PvP participates in this. The game keeps long-term halls of fame, and the good/competitive alliances are well-respected within the community so it can be a very rewarding experience. Matches are 10vs10 affairs and are extremely well organised by the alliances which want to have any chance of success. If you like PvP, I’d definitely recommend giving this a go.

Every single instance or PvP fight has a statistics screen. Fantastic for people addicted to numbers, like myself.

So would I recommend Global Agenda? Considering the game is free, if you have some spare time on your hands and you have a passing interest in MMOs or shooters, I’d definitely give it a go. It doesn’t take long to level a character to a point where you can PvP or do other interesting activities (raids, for example) and largely speaking it’s a pretty decent game. Don’t expect to be absolutely amazed, as it’s not really on par with the paid alternatives, but ultimately this game is free. Even if you end up paying for Elite Agent (which is highly recommended) and perhaps a booster here and there you are still getting a very good deal. I certainly enjoyed my time, and if it wasn’t for the huge titles coming out this time of the year I’d probably still be playing.

Utterly not, is my opinion. I’d qualify that by immediately adding that it depends a lot on how broken a game is, and obviously there are lots of factors at work here. Financial pressure on the dev team, manpower and time issues, the impossibility of knowing exactly how a game will run on every jerry-rigged PC across the world, how many quantum butterflies recently flapped their wings, price of tea in China, etc etc etc. At heart, however, the answer must be no – it just isn’t fair on customers to release a game at full price if you know it has severe issues. And it certainly isn’t even remotely fair if you know it has severe issues, don’t mention it to anyone and then hope you can get away with it, as seemed to be the case with Kerberos and Paradox’s launch of Sword of the Stars II.

Combat looks great, really great. Much better than it currently plays.

On it’s launch almost a month ago, the game was broken to the point of incomprehensible. Random crashing, faulty UI, graphics errors and text and gameplay placeholders everywhere, many of which made playing the game impossible. There was lots of public browbeating from the developers, who claimed some kind of mystery crash meant the wrong game code was released whilst the real game code was wiped out. That seems a little incredible to me, indicating careless stupidity at best and woeful incompetence at worst. But as well as public apologising from the devs and the publishers, there were grovelling offers of free DLC and continuous round-the-clock efforts to patch (at least three a week) until everything is fixed.

I followed the subsequent broo-ha-ha on the forums, fairly entranced, as two very angry groups screamed at each other over the thorny morality of a broken release. Most people were furious, they’d spent money on something that simply didn’t work at all. Something this bust, they argued, should have been flagged up in advance. They wanted refunds, apologies and various levels of retribution on those responsible. I agree, for the record, I just don’t believe this was some super-error on the release day, and everyone would have been a lot more forgiving if the errors were made apparent up front

Oh god the combat behind the title screen looks cool and sexy. It's sadly still sometimes better to watch this than play in-game.

On the other side, a hard core of apologists for the dev team fought hard to stop people asking for their money back. Kerberos has an excellent track history for tech support, they said – pull out now, and the whole game could be left without funds or hope. Sword of the Stars I, something of a classic, had similar problems and was patched over time to be a superb game. Which it is, I’ve played it, detailed, fun, fast and absorbing 4X gameplay, well worth a look. So the team can clearly pull this off, but at the same time, wait, what, they’ve got a track history of releasing broken games? That take months to fix? That’s just inexcusable. Sorry, but it is. Nobody buys broken cars for full price. Nobody releases drugs without testing them. Charging for a broken game is just fundamentally stupid and dishonest, no two ways about it.

That’s more than enough preaching from my soapbox, though. If you want more trollish tales of woe and horror, check out the forums on Steam or elsewhere, they’re very… lively, I guess, is the polite word. Now for the game itself.

Every race has its own ship designs. Hiver ships look like flies. Their freighters are maggots. That says something about commerce, I think.

I’m playing about a month on from that god-awful release, and there have indeed been extensive patches, two to three a week. There are still issues, but this is shaping up incredibly well. However idiotic (or horribly stressed to the point of idiocy, I suppose) they were to let it out broken, the devs are definitely making good on their promises. Free DLC for those who’d pre-ordered, and a continuing raft of changes and bug fixes in operation. Do not, my fellow gamers, give up on this title. Don’t buy it right now, necessarily, but keep an eye on it.

4X gameplay is set on an epic level of space exploration and empire building. You must eXplore, eXpand, eXterminate and, errr… the other one, eXresearch new technologies, something like that, as you guide your nascent race of spacefarers into the dark void. From a tiny clutch of homeworlds, you must conquer an entire galaxy either before your opponents get there first, or before some nameless horror descends from the depths of space to wipe all of you out. Okay, the nameless horrors usually have names, but they’re cool ones. And they’re optional, you don’t need to have them in if you don’t want them. Your campaign is very adjustable to your own preferences.

The detail and scope in SOTS2 is impressive. There’s a huge research tree of hundreds of different options, most of which link to ship and weapon design. Will you go for a trade empire, full of powerful space stations and freighter chains? Or super-fast dreadnoughts, bristling with giant laser beams? Diplomacy or death, which will you deal most of? Your agents can infiltrate enemy empires to steal research or hinder. Your giant broadcast ships can bombard them with propaganda. Enslave worlds with a mind-control virus, or use psychic battlecruisers to drive enemy crews mad. Or make friends with everyone and ally against the galaxy-spanning threats (if you opted for them) later in the game.

This is the auto-resolve screen. It's just as entertaining as it looks.

Ship design is particularly engaging, as you can name not just broad designs but also individual ships, an ability I’ve always wanted to see in Total War games. Once you’ve decked out your new designs with the latest in massive plasma cannons, send them off to raid, invade, scan and build across your growing network of worlds. Each fleet will have an individual admiral, with their own strengths and weaknesses, and what a fleet is capable of depends entirely on what ships are in it. Survey teams to find new worlds, constructor fleets to create defence networks or stellar shopping malls, enormous invasion fleets, carriers with swarms of tiny fighters or larger gunships – the choice is yours. Combat plays out in real time with very shiny graphics, and the potential for enormous tactical cunning and flexibility.

There’s also an impressive choice of different races, six in all, each of which plays very differently thanks to the imaginative differences their space travel works. Militaristic Tarka ships are the most straight-forward, able to fly their living metal ships anywhere at reasonable speeds. The Sol Force humans are generalists, and are stuck with using random, pre-existing node lines between galaxies for fast travel in limited directions. The insectile Hivers creep slowly to new systems, then build teleport gates for instant access later. Travelling flocks of Morrigi traders move faster across space the more of them there are; the whale-like super-technologist Liir-Zuul Alliance are fastest in the freedom of deep space and slower near planets. The horrific Suulka hoard rip their own own node lines using bore ships, carrying them on to devastate new worlds with their parasitic tendencies. Each race comes with different music and sounds, and feels very individual, both in terms of their appearance and what tactics and technologies work best.

Fully 3D, the universe map is where you spend most of your time, so it's lucky it looks pretty amazing.

I played a bit of SOTS 1, late in the day, and very much enjoyed it. It was intuitive and fun, with such a wealth of options that you never had the same game twice. Civilisations is the nearest in terms of gameplay, really, it’s a slow pace with plenty of intrigue as you decide what to build and who to ally with, as well as when to plunge into the inevitable war. SOTS 2 takes itself a bit too seriously compared to the original, which is good in places. Your galaxies are fully-realised gems, studded with gas giants and asteroid belts, often littered with relics or surprise enemies, even tiny civilisations that can be brought into your fold. The attention to realism (crazy space future style) is impressive. But it’s also brought some irritating, if intelligently intended, ideas. Research trees, for example, have a random element. Many new techs need to have a feasibility study done on them before you can even research them fully, and there’s a random chance you can’t get them, or have to risk putting the money in for no results. Personally, I quite like this, it adds to the thought and planning and stops games devolving into a race for the same old game-winners every time. But I can see how it’s annoying. Similarly, the first copy of a new ship you design is an expensive prototype that costs way more than later builds. Fine, very realistic. But annoying if the only change I’ve made to the design is a new set of guns. I’m sure this is being worked on, though, the mechanics are frequently changing as the patches go up.

Combat is disappointing – it feels like you start too far away from enemies, and there’s a lot of flapping about pointlessly in space, looking for things to kill. The title screen shows you the kind of combat you want and expect, all glistening rays and missiles tearing up floating death palaces.  By the time you’ve found someone, there’s usually not enough time left to blow them up, so you end up chipping away at them over several frustrating turns. And the ship AI is hopeless right now. Clicking on an enemy ship tells your boys to shoot at it, but they make no effort to steer or stay near, they only fly to where you told them. You have to micro-manage on an irritating level. Auto-resolve has some very odd path-finding issues going on, so you get a radar display of Benny Hill dots jumbling frenetically around. It’s quite funny, at least. All the re-patching means things are constantly breaking anew – save games particularly – and the diplomacy, trade and general UI still suffer from bugs, placeholders and generally being a bit ropey. Crash to desktop is a regular irritation.

Ships can be fitted out with an amazing variety of guns, sections and abilities. Then sent to die in the cold vastness of space. Heh.

All that said, though, I think this game will live up to its promise. It’s big, clever, detailed and exciting. It also looks great (when it works), glossy and impressive. Give it a couple of months, perhaps, but don’t ignore this one, it is a worthy successor to its (currently cheap and easier to play) original. Once everything works as it should, this will have excellent gameplay and replayability scores, but they let it down at the moment while it’s still being mended. Keep an eye on it, though, this is going places.

Sleep well, little orc. Soon, the world will be ours.

Dungeon Overlord models itself on the venerable and esteemed Dungeon Keeper, a classic management game from back in the day. You are the evil keeper of a foul dungeon, stocking your lair with traps, minions and horrors. Your ultimate goal is to crush all the fluffiness out of the world, replacing happy elves in thatched bungalows with an acid-stained, charred wasteland full of abused goblins wherever possible. It’s the same goal that rises up in my filthy heart whenever I look out of my bedroom window at the local community centre across the road.

The steps on your road to global horrification will be many and frustrating. First, establish your internal economy by mining iron, crystals and gold. Then build a series of rooms to store these resources and attract creatures to your lair. Then train them up and upgrade everything, researching new abilities with the help of warlocks in the library, until your single dungeon is a network of linked catacombs, replete with hordes of wicked beings ready to trash the rest of the world.

An idyllic village. We killed everyone and took their cows.

I’m actually pretty impressed with this. This doesn’t mean I’ve suddenly come round to online social browser games, far from it. The painfully slow progress forces you to play at an extremely casual speed. You really can’t play for more than a couple of minutes before you’re faced with a series of two-hour waits, but that’s fine. Simply queue up the orders you want done, and go and do something else (hint: choose Skyrim). There’s no clear way of winning or losing, other than measuring your progress against friends or the wider online world – not to my taste, but perfectly reasonable. And as my previous incursions into this field have indicated, these games aren’t fond of pushing boundaries. This follows the formula religiously, as all the browser games I’ve ever played do.

Here's my holding at an early stage. The central heating is a little overpowering, but there's a lot of potential here.

However, Dungeon Overlord succeeds in being welcoming to play, amusingly animated and fairly addictive. I’ve got an addictive personality, so I’m easily hooked on things. And gaming is one of the world’s only markets where being addictive is viewed as a positive thing. Cigarettes? Bad. Gambling? Bad. Heroin? Bad. Addictive games? Amazing! Yes please, hook me up and take my social security number! Someone will almost certainly clamp down on this sooner or later, it’s only sensible. Thank goodness that’s not yet.

The graphics are nice – your dungeon is neatly animated, with goblins dashing about fetching and carrying things and other minions wandering around eating and working. The sounds are evocative of underground evil, although you need to turn the music off unless you really really love Halls of the Mountain King from Pier Gynt. And there’s a decent amount of complexity and ‘oo I’ve almost levelled up’ feeling to warrant further investigation.

My main criticism is the waiting times, here. Upgrades and training take start at the sort of 5-10 minute time and rapidly increase to many hours. I suppose that stops it getting too addictive, in that you are forced to go and do something else for a while. And that keeps the game casual, fair enough. But you can skip these restrictions by paying dungeon marks, the purchasable in-game currency, an idiotic waste of anyone’s money. I disapprove quite strongly of this sort of angle in Free to Play games, it’s fundamentally miserable. ‘Here’s some good gameplay, but if you want to get on with it, give us cash,’ it seems to say. Which is fine as a business model, I get that, but very mean-spirited in terms of providing free-to-play fun. I got a free load of marks to review the game, and I very much think I’d have lost interest without the advantage they brought. You do at least slowly earn these marks as you play the game, though, and the tutorial quests merely point out how the system works. As these game go, this one is pleasingly gentle about how often it swipes at your wallet.

Here's a better indication of how it looks in the browser, although you can play fullscreen if you want. You'll see these loading screens a bit too often, the transitions are a bit slow.

Dungeon Keeper was a real favourite of mine back in the day, and this game has all the hall-marks that made that one such a winner. If this could be played as quickly and smoothly as DK, I’d recommend this game wholeheartedly – you could have your dungeons rise and fall much more rapidly, sometimes winning, sometimes getting wiped out. I know that’s not the aim here, though, this is effectively the same game as the ‘build your farm’ types, just with a vicious fantasy streak to it.

But the gameplay is fun enough to be worth a look. I get the same delight from having my orcs pillage a settlement as I used to in DK. I’ve been cheerily tuning back in over the last week to keep my dungeon ticking over, and I can’t see why anyone else wouldn’t enjoy doing the same.

You have been banished to this underworld, never to see the light of day. While the surface continues to suffer under the iron fist of Emperor Hawthorne, you will enter into a battle for survival in Avernum, a hungry and fragile nation deep in the underworld. The people of this world have not given up, however, and they are forging a new nation of their own with steel, magic, and dreams of returning to the sun. Join them, explore a huge game world, hunt for hundreds of magical artifacts, choose from hundreds of quests, and become the hero of the underworld!

Originally known as Exile: Escape From the Pit and released in 1995, this remastered version of Avernum: Escape from the Pit will contain immense overhauls to the system, graphics, compatibility, and interface of the indie classic. The entire award winning series will be redone from the ground up and make its debut on Macintosh in December, 2011 and iPad  and Windows in April, 2012.  More information is available at http://www.avernum.com/avernum/index.html

ABOUT SPIDERWEB SOFTWARE

Spiderweb Software, Inc., an independent game-design company based in Seattle, WA, is fanatically dedicated to creating fun, exciting fantasy role-playing games for Windows, Macintosh, and the iPad. Past titles include the award-winning Exile, Geneforge, Avernum and Avadon series. More information on the company is available at www.spiderwebsoftware.com.

That’s really what this game is all about – it’s a platformer where you have the ability to turn reality inside out in order to help you get to the end of the level. You can do this at appropriately named ‘eversion points’ which can be found at multiple places in each level. Each eversion point lets you switch between two specific layers of the world, with deeper layers becoming accessible as you progress through the game. Each layer of the world has different environmental effects – for example, clouds are immaterial in the first layer but become solid in the second. But apart from this interesting feature, Eversion plays much like Mario: run around, jump on enemies to kill them, collect coins (gems, actually), rescue the princess…

That’s right, you get to rescue a princess in this game! Since I’ve said pretty much all I can about the gameplay, I figure I may as well tell you about the plot now. Said plot can be condensed into one sentence – your princess has been kidnapped and you need to rescue her. That’s all there is to it. To elaborate, you play the role of a cute flower-like critter named Zee Tee romping around in a cute world and trying to rescue the Princess of the Flower Kingdom, who was kidnapped by the Ghulibas of the north (presumably the enemies you kill in droves during the game). There’s nothing more, nothing more at all! _{She’s lying! There’s much, much more! Don’t save the princess! Don’t save her!}

As for everything else… There are two versions – the freeware one you can download straight from the Zaratustra website, and the HD version you can get for about 4.99 USD on Steam. The graphics vary from retro (for the freeware version) and somewhat better (the HD version, obviously). The music, I think, is the same for both versions, but I can’t be sure because I haven’t actually got the HD one. There are multiple endings to unlock, and an extra ending is included in the HD version. The only thing you really need to watch out for with this game is that sometimes, you need practically pixel perfect accuracy to get some of the jumps right. _{She’s lying! There’s more! Be cautious in World 4!}

All in all, this is a game worth checking out – it’s really short if you don’t go for 100% completion. Get the free version here: http://zarat.us/tra/offline-games/eversion.html

Oh, and by the way… the disclaimer at the start of the game is a lie. It’s a really cute, sweet game; it won’t drive you insane or anything. _{She’s lying! The disclaimer’s true! This game is not good for your sanity: it was inspired by Lovecraft!}

Seeeee? Cute. Not insanity-inducing at all.

Spacetime Games are played on a single global server, which means it is now possible for someone in the U.S. to play on their iPhone with someone in Germany on their Android tablet and someone in South Korea on their computer.

“There have always been technical walls between players of different platforms,” says Gary Gattis, CEO of Spacetime Studios. “Now, people are free to play on the device they choose with anyone, anywhere, anytime, whether they are at home or on-the-go.”

Pocket Legends and Star Legends are Powered by Spacetime, technology built to support a global player-base on different devices and platforms interacting together within the same server-set. Spacetime Studios integrated Google Chrome Native Client (NaCl) technology with the Spacetime Engine to create the desktop clients for Pocket Legends and Star Legends.

Pocket Legends and Star Legends: The Blackstar Chronicles are the world’s largest mobile MMOs with more than seven million downloads and a million play sessions weekly. Currently, Pocket Legends and Star Legends are playable on most Apple and Android mobile devices as well as Windows, Mac and Linux computers.

About Spacetime Studios

Spacetime Studios is an independent game development studio located in Austin, Texas. The company was founded in late 2005 by online game veterans Cinco Barnes, Gary Gattis, Jake Rodgers and Anthony L. Sommers.

In 2010, Spacetime released Pocket Legends, the world’s first cross-platform, 3D, persistent mobile MMO. The game’s pick-up-and-play format, expandable nature, and unparalleled instanced gameplay have propelled it to become a landmark title on Apple and Android-based mobile devices.

Spacetime has been recognized by Develop as one of the world’s 100 most successful game studios. The company continues to expand its content and technology lead in the mobile multiplayer market.

To learn more about Spacetime Studios, please visit www.spacetimestudios.com

After successfully concluding one of the largest-ever Beta tests for an MMO, BioWare™, a Label of Electronic Arts (NASDAQ: ERTS), is now making final preparations for one of the biggest entertainment launches of the year as Star Wars™: The Old Republic™ reaches stores on December 20, 2011 in North America and on December 15^th in Europe. BioWare also revealed today that Early Game Access for players who pre-order the game will begin on December 13, 2011 at 6:00 AM CST, giving some players as much as a seven-day head start to their personal Star Wars™ saga. To participate in the Early Game Access program, customers must pre-order any version of Star Wars: The Old Republic and redeem their code** at www.StarWarsTheOldRepublic.com/preorder before the official launch of the game. Pre-orders are still available in limited supplies at most participating retailers and via Origin.com.

Die-hard MMO gamers and passionate Star Wars fans worldwide are gearing up for the launch of Star Wars: The Old Republic. During the weekend of November 25 – November 28, 2011, over 725,000 unique gamers participated in a highly successful Beta test for the game, logging in over 9 million hours of gameplay. With two weeks to go until launch, more than 78,000 guilds have participated in the Pre-Launch Guild Program and over 2.4 million players are registered on the game’s official web site www.StarWarsTheOldRepublic.com. Critics around the world are equally excited, as Game Informer has proclaimed that “The Old Republic is poised to reshape the MMO landscape,” and MSNBC has said that “Star Wars: The Old Republic is looking strong and the attention to story is paying off in a big way.”

“Star Wars: The Old Republic is a go for launch on December 20,” said Dr. Greg Zeschuk, Co-Founder of BioWare and General Manager of the BioWare label’s MMO Business Unit. “We are extremely humbled by the surge of players who have joined us on this journey and participated in the Beta Weekend. Their participation has given us the opportunity to stress test the game and allowed us to tune the experience, ensuring that we deliver the smoothest possible MMO launch later this month.”

Set thousands of years before the classic films, Star Wars: The Old Republic is a story-driven, massively multiplayer online game challenging players with epic quests, featuring dynamic combat across iconic worlds in the Star Wars galaxy such as Tatooine, Alderaan, Hoth and more. Each of the game’s eight primary classes will enjoy their own unique storyline, all of which are fully voiced by a huge cast of actors and features a sweeping musical score.

* Conditions and restrictions apply. Early Game Access may be up to 7 days.  The length of your Early Game Access depends on the date and order in which you redeemed your Pre-Order Code. See www.StarWarsTheOldRepublic.com/preorder for details.

** Codes are redeemable at www.StarWarsTheOldRepublic.com/preorder. Pre-order quantities are limited and Early Game Access will be granted during the Early Game Access period in the order pre-orders are redeemed.

*** Subscription pricing in the United Kingdom will be £8.99 per month, £25.17 for three months (£8.39 per month) or £46.14 for six months (£7.69 per month). Subscription pricing in Europe will be €12.99 per month, €35.97 for three months (€11.99 per month) or €65.94 for six months (€10.99 per month).

X3: Albion Prelude provides a welcome bridge from the X Universe we know and love to the X Universe that will be experienced in X Rebirth. This new adventure will also feature more than 30 new ships and stations. A new Stock Exchange feature will enable players to speculate in local markets in a bid to increase their wealth. With this will also come tools to monitor and analyse economic developments and progress. Users with high-end machines will also benefit from some improved graphical quality settings. It is important to note that X3: Albion Prelude will NOT feature savegame compatibility with X3: Terran Conflict.

For owners of the X Superbox, X3: Albion Prelude will be available as a free download on Steam, while for owners of X3: Terran Conflict it will be available at the ‘add-on’ price of €9.99. For players new to the series, X3: Terran Conflict and X3: Albion Prelude will be available for purchase as a bundle. Time your purchase right and you could enjoy substantial discounts in the Steam holiday sale too!

X3: Albion Prelude will be available on Steam or direct download in English, German, French (text and audio) and Italian (text only) languages. X3: Albion Prelude will also soon be available for MAC OS through the Apple App Store and Deliver2Mac. A boxed retail version of X3: Albion Prelude will also be available for the PC early in 2012.

In order to find out a bit more about Albion Prelude and get some inside info on its surprising arrival, I grabbed a few moments with some of the development team to ask them some questions about it.

Q: What!? Why?
A: [CBJ] With the development of X Rebirth still going strong and the hunger for information about it among members of the Community even stronger, we realised that the Universe the player would be entering on its release, although nominally the same, would be almost unrecognisable in shape and scale. There are a number of key events that take place in the X Universe which affect how it develops. These events are, we concluded, too important to gloss over in a Rebirth intro video and too complex to try and convey in a Rebirth press release. We took the decision to provide a ‘bridge’ in the saga to try and tell the story of these events.

Having been heavily involved in the development and organisation of the original X3: Terran Conflict release, I personally felt there was some unfinished business to take care of before we moved onto the next chapter of the Egosoft story. There was a growing feeling that members of the community wanted one last ‘fix’ of X3 to keep them going. There have been some really good mods released for Terran Conflict over the last couple of years, so we felt it would also be appropriate to draw on the talents and products of some of the community’s finest in order to help in Albion Prelude’s relatively accelerated development cycle. On the subject of modding, we also wanted to give the people even more scope to modify the game. To that end we’ve added more script commands, more access to the UI from scripts, more global variables, and more MD features.

Q: What’s the Albion in the title?
A: [Markus Pohl] Albion was only recently discovered when the new game starts. What makes it stand out from other systems is the fact that it has an excessive amount of mineral resources, because the main planet of this system is geologically unstable and appears to be breaking apart. Two of the largest corporations are now competing to make use of this unique system; the Plutarch Mining Corporation (PMC) have mineral monopoly on their mind wherever they operate and they see Albion as a chance to tighten their grip on the whole Argon economy.

Jonferson Space Dynamics Division (JSDD or Jonferco), on the other hand, are a high-tech organisation specialising in propulsion technology. They can build accelerator gates based on the same technology used in the Terran system and want to improve this technology to build a highway system. They see Albion as an example of how the whole universe could eventually bring a lot more of its economy into open space.

Q: What can you tell us about the development of Albion Prelude?
A: [BurnIt!] Well, my primary focus was on implementing the war system for the game together with Klaus. But when that was still in the very early planning phase I spent some time adding new script commands and among other things I got to play with the new graph display CBJ just implemented.

When I got to the war system this was a whole new dimension of game functionality. Where we only affected the universe in little bits before, having some stations built or destroyed, the scope of an actual war spanning multiple sectors was much larger. Keeping track of all the involved objects, setting up scenarios and changing several sectors depending on who is currently winning (and also taking into account how the player can influence our plans ) was something that we have never done before. In the end we hope all our hard work will pay off and the players will have a lot of fun doing their part for the war effort, be it on the front line or further back supplying the fleet with what they need to win!

Q: The trailer video for Albion Prelude is a little different to what we’re used to. Can you tell us a bit more about it?
A: [metalvenom] There was talk in the office at Egosoft of maybe including some limited live-action footage for this project. I just so happens that I have a very nice DSLR camera that can shoot HD video (I finally found a use for it!). After locating some talent that I thought would suit the part, I set out to buy some lighting equipment. I walked into my flat the following week with a truck-load of studio lights, a huge green screen and some tripods. My girlfriend was not too impressed that I turned our living room into a film studio (no dinners for week ). This was the first time I’ve worked with green screen and it was quite a challenge but also very rewarding. I merged this live footage with some normal in-game action and Alex Preuss, Egosoft’s lead artist, was kind enough to take time out of his hectic schedule to help with some CGI work that really brought this video together. So in this new video expect a nice blend of in-game footage, live action and CGI.

Q: X3AP will include a new Stock Exchange feature. Can you tell us a bit more about how this works?
A: [mark_a_condren] The Stock Exchange adds another element to the TRADE and THINK parts of the game. Early on in the game before you have your own trader ships and stations you can be a bit limited in the ways you can get the credits coming in, and let’s face it, flying from station to station yourself early on can get a bit repetitive. The Stock Exchange provides another avenue to try to build your fortune, or possibly lose it. Each cluster of sectors owned by a particular race or faction may have a Local Stock Exchange present. With the introduction of the Stock Exchange some Trading Stations in central sectors have started advertising as Stock Exchange stations in an attempt to draw in new customers and clients.

The Stock Exchange is by no means a sure thing for making credits; you can lose them just as fast as making them if you don’t invest wisely. The more ‘THINK’ you put into your investments the more credits you are likely to make. Working out just when to buy and when to sell is all part of the experience when trading, just like any other trading part of the game. You can buy and sell Commodity shares, which are the normal wares that are in the game, like e-cells and Maja Snails etc, and the share prices are based on the actual in-game supply and demand for these wares. You can also invest in Corporate shares for any of the Corporations found in the game, and in true Teladi style where profit is concerned, they have successfully petitioned to allow some ‘not so legitimate’ factions to be listed also. Company shares are also available for smaller companies that may have registered for share listing with the exchange; these are the kinds of businesses you would think to find spread out across the X Universe. Since the Teladi are involved in Stock Exchanges, each transaction, both buying and selling, attracts a small ‘transaction fee’ that goes towards the operation of the Stock Exchange system (and lining Teladi pockets). As the economy evolves the Stock Exchange will become a more lively place to make short and long term investments, making it the perfect way to try to ‘get those extra credits’, whether it’s to pay for more missiles or more Universe Traders.

The first thing I have to mention before you read the rest of this review is that I purchased a Microsoft Xbox 360 controller for Windows. Regular readers know that I’m not a fan of how console games cause us PC gamers to have more and more shallow games but when it comes to racing the keyboard & mouse combination is completely inferior. I’ve tried a steering wheel, but I’m not a huge fan. Unless you are in a car or have a fully simulated cockpit, personal preference goes to a controller. That said, many of my fellow gamers prefer a racing wheel for this game and I’ve been told it works incredibly well. Just don’t expect to do fantastically well with a keyboard. The second thing you should know is that I’ve not played F1 2010. A few of my fellow Mana Pool writers played the game and after reading their articles I wasn’t fully convinced that the game had everything I wanted it to have.

A quick try after installing the game and as per murphy's law: Rain.

So onwards to some racing. When you first fire up the game, you create the usual profile, etc. This allows you to set things such as your nationality, which is referenced in race results and initially sets your KPH/MPH settings and the like. This one is always a bit confusing for me as I’m a Dutchman living in the UK. I settled on the Dutch flag as there are no Dutch drivers in F1 at the present, but changed my settings to MPH, just because I’m quite used to that after living here for such a long time. I love that I am able to do so, as there are racing games which insist that as a Dutchman, I *must* use Euros and Kilometers. You also select an Audio name, similar to Grid but at a far more limited level. Honestly, I was a little bit disappointed by the number of choices here. You have the first names of all F1 drivers, a bunch of ‘Legendary’ drivers and 3 nicknames: Iceman, Rainman and Champ. Let’s just say Iceman is rather popular, as Rainman sounds like your driver is mentally retarded and being referred to as ‘Champ’ makes you feel like you’re in some sort of cheap porno… Either way, unless you share the first name of a F1 driver, you will likely have to settle for one of the 3 crappy nicknames. Grid had a far greater selection and included my first name, so it was a shame that F1 2011 didn’t have this as well.

In terms of Game Modes, there are quite a few options. The mandatory challenges and time trials are there, complete with leaderboards. There’s an online mode where you can race with up to 16 people I believe. Quite frankly I haven’t tried this as it’s not even nearly as interesting as the core game: Career. This mode let’s you play through 5 full seasons of Formula One with the ultimate goal of winning the Drivers World Championship. The really interesting thing is that you can choose to co-op this with a friend, driving for the same team. The career mode places heavy emphasis on the ‘team mate challenge’, and keeps constant track of how you perform vs. your team mate both in qualifying, races and in the number of points you collect for the team. Doing this with a friend makes this incredibly interesting and after playing for about half a season in cooperative mode so far, I can highly recommend it. Obviously due to the time investment required for this, you need to find a pretty reliable friend to make this work. Cooperative mode is pretty similar to single player, though it misses some of the ‘fluff’ in between races and places more emphasis on the action.

LFFPicard and myself have engaged in some cooperative play, and we're having a great time.

At the very start of your career, you pick from one of five teams: Virgin Racing, Hispania Racing Team, Team Lotus, Force India and Williams. Obviously these teams provide a completely different level of challenge, as you can quite easily compete for points and even podiums in Force India and Williams. For a proper challenge, Virgin and Hispania are highly recommended. I chose to drive for Virgin Racing just because Hispania has about zero appeal to me. You also get to pick a difficulty level, though be warned that the difference in difficulty between these settings is immense. I don’t recommend playing on Easy as you’ll quickly adapt even on Intermediate and start finishing in the points and then winning quite comfortably. Unfortunately the difference from Intermediate to Hard is far too large for my liking. You can literally go from a position where you are 3-5 seconds quicker than all your opponents in Intermediate and finish 2 seconds a lap slower on Hard. I’d have liked to see something in between these difficulty level – as hard also takes away some of the assists and forces you to use manual gears. There are a lot of players who wish to play with the settings of Intermediate but just have the AI be a bit more competitive. Hopefully Codemasters will patch this in or take notice for F1 2012.

Once you’ve selected your team you will be greeted by some journalists who will interview you. It’s fluff really, but it all adds to the immersion. You then sit inside your motor home, where you see the staff of your team carry crates, tyres and other supplies around. You’ll also see some other drivers walk past, who are easy to recognise from real life. I found it quite awesome to see Button walk past my window, followed by some journalists. Codemasters have done a brilliant job at making F1 2011 an immersive experience in this regard. Either way, this stage is used to check e-mails, receive offers from other teams, check the standings and look up information about the tracks and other drivers. Popping to the race calendar gives you a great overview and let’s you move on to the Race weekends.

Watch me driving (poorly) in my very first career race here:

Race weekends can be played in several ways. You have short weekends and long weekends, where short weekends give you 1 Practice session, 1 qualifying session and then the race. Long weekends give you 3 practice sessions, and the fully simulated F1 qualifying – including the three different sessions, exactly as per real life. This is pretty awesome, especially on higher difficulty levels where tyres and fuel are fully simulated. Do you use that other set of Options to secure your place in the second or third phase of qualifying or do you risk waiting and hoping nobody beats your time? Awesome stuff. In addition to this, you can select from a wide range of race lengths: 3 laps, 10%, 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, 75% and 100%. Codemasters have been adding some options to this, so I might have even overlooked an option here. When I first played, the only options were 3 laps, 20%, 50% and 100%. My personal preference goes to playing 20% races as this is where the pit stop rule is first enforced. (You must use a set of Option and Prime tyres during the race.) This length is also long enough to use some minor tactics but short enough to be doable with my limited spare time. I would probably enjoy 50% races but I just don’t have the time for it these days.

Practice sessions might sound boring but they serve an incredibly useful purpose. Car set-ups make an absolutely huge difference in F1 2011, and it’s very much worth doing a few laps just to get a decent set-up going before you enter qualifying or the race. This is an absolute must, especially, on higher difficulty settings. To further make this aspect interesting, Codemasters have implemented the Research & Design element into the game. During some practice sessions you will receive a target to beat within a number of laps, or a number of other challenges. Beating this will unlock new components or other improvements on your car during an upcoming session which in some cases can be as early as that very same race weekend. To make this more interesting, some of the major upgrades are provided to the number one driver first, thereby making the challenge of consistently beating your team mate even more fun. Becoming the recognised first driver in the team provides real benefit, and Codemasters have done a great job here.

At least I beat my team mate, Glock. Though that hasn't proven to be particularly difficult.

Qualifying sessions are fully simulated as they are in real life – so they need little explanation. If you’re playing on the right difficulty for your level of skill, you’ll find that this is very well simulated. Don’t expect to set Pole Position in a Virgin Racing car on the more challenging tracks if you’re playing at a higher difficulty setting. I had a particularly challenging weekend in Monaco in my first season as I just couldn’t qualify high enough in the Virgin, which made for a very difficult race weekend. Even more lovely is how the rules are enforced. If you cut so much as the tiniest section of a corner, your lap in qualifying will be invalid. If you block other drivers on their fast lap during qualifying, you’ll receive a 10 place grid penalty. Honestly, this is great stuff.

When it comes to the race, things are equally impressive. The AI drives remarkably well for a racing game. They move aside for the race leaders, respond to blue flags (mostly, there is still the occasional douche exactly as per real life.) and they can be very competitive. Largely speaking, the teams are positioned at the right levels of speed but you do get the odd surprise result. There’s full simulation of the safety car, car damage, tyre punctures, engines blow up, the works. Add a fully dynamic weather simulation to this and you genuinely have one of the best and most immersive racing simulations I have ever played. Your first moment in heavy rain is truly spectacular. I must add that I absolutely love how the pit stops are modelled as well. You feel like you are in the F1 season, and not just cheating your way through some half-arsed game.

That's much better. Also, night races add a whole new dimension, especially between barriers.

Throughout the race your Engineer will keep you appraised of the latest, including the tyres your direct opponents on the track fit on their cars and the distance between you and the person in front/behind you. He’ll also tell you to push harder or when you are setting race pace comfortably. The whole experience is very well put together. There is the odd issue where he will shout that you need to push while actually you are leading the way and pulling further away by 2 seconds a lap, but largely speaking it works very well. The major gripe here is that they need to include more first names as this made the experience much more immersive in Grid. For a race game which, in my opinion, is currently leading in terms of immersion, it would be relatively little effort for Codemasters to increase the database of names referenced in the game.

After the race, you will see a little cut scene of yourself which will reflect your result vs. the objectives set by the team. Your team will come congratulate (or scold…) you, and you’ll find yourself back in your motor home. Somewhere halfway into the season, you will start to receive offers from other teams (provided you are doing reasonably well and at least meeting your objectives), usually started by a contract renewal offer from your existing team. In my case I waited quite long to make a decision and ended up signing for Williams near the end of the season – with the intention of using them as a springboard to drive for one of the better teams. I can tell you that the Williams is significantly faster than the Virgin and I am having a much easier time, to the point of needing to bump up the difficulty as I won the opening three races outright with 2 pole positions. If I have to give a point of criticism here, is that it would have been nice to see the teams/driver situation and team colours/sponsors change between seasons. The ability to start at say, a season in the past and evolve through the seasons would have been great. Given that Codemasters made F1 2010, at least give us the option to start in 2010 and see some changes, rather than essentially play the 2011 season 5 times. I am sure they’ll build on this franchise though, and add more depth to it over time.

And yet you keep giving upgrades to Glock first. Sir, you offend me.

Conclusion

Graphically, F1 2011 is one of the best looking racing games I am yet to see. As far as Formula One games is concerned, it’s absolutely the best looking, most immersive and best playing game on the market today. The audio is equally impressive, the weather effects are outright impressive. The most important aspect is that this game is fun. REALLY good fun. Once I started playing, I couldn’t stop for nearly 40 hours, which is incredibly rare for a racing game as there are usually a bit more casual and occasional for me. In most racing games I drive for an hour or two, and then go play another game and come back to it another day. In F1 2011, I want to keep playing and have to force myself to take a break. I’m so engrossed to the screen that I forget everything else around me and the heavy concentration required to do well can really drain you. This for me, is the sign of a fantastic game and I hope that F1 2012 builds on this and takes the franchise to a near-perfect level. If you like Formula One, or even have a strong interest in racing games in general, go buy this now.

And just for good measure, here you can watch an awesome fight with Hamilton in Heavy Rain. Which, like a true Rookie, I cock up royally.