We take a look at destruction-centric Unbounded, the start of a “new branch” for the Ridge Racer series.
You have to squint to see a Ridge Racer game in Ridge Racer: Unbounded. It looks, in many ways, closer to any number of racing titles built around violent takedowns and environmental destruction. The way producer Joonas Laakso tells it, Unbounded is the product of his racing specialist studio, Bugbear Entertainment, being tasked with bringing its technology to bear on a “new branch” of the Ridge Racer series–that is, racing damage and physics technology grown out of making the demolition-focused FlatOut games. “We are really good at smashing things up,” he says.
Bugbear has matched that destructibility tech with Ridge Racer “intensity”, says Laakso, in the fictional East Coast city of Shatter Bay, where illegal racers (the titular Unbounded) battle to dominate the streets. The city, inspired by New York and Chicago, is designed for “carnage and risk-taking”; built for dynamic, piece-by-piece, physics-based destruction rather than scripted spectacle that is the same each time it’s triggered. (Laakso admires Split/Second but says that unpredictable, procedural destruction gives Unbounded the edge over it.)
The driving experience itself takes drifting and boosting from its Ridge Racer heritage–otherwise, says Laakso, nothing has been brought over wholesale from earlier Ridge Racer games, except for some classic cars. We are shown Crash Race mode, in which you charge up your destruction power with drifting, chasing other drivers, and post-jump airtime (other modes will be more purely about crashing, and others more purely about racing). With this power charged, you’ll see markers thrown up on certain buildings and obstacles, indicating a target in need of your destructive attention. Unbounded, then, has unscripted but not universal destruction–there are certain spots designed specifically for taking dynamic damage.
As part of the publisher’s strong fiscal year-end earnings report this morning, Ubisoft confirmed that Ghost Recon: Future Soldier will be arriving toward that back end of that revised schedule. In a post-earnings conference call, CEO Yves Guillemot said that the game is now scheduled to release during its January-March 2012 quarter.
“It will be released in fiscal Q4 as we want first to have the best quality possible, as well as to avoid the very crowded Christmas landscape in the shooter genre,” Guillemot said. Shooters that are expected to arrive during the holiday quarter include a new Call of Duty game, Battlefield 3, Resistance 3, and Gears of War 3.
Ghost Recon: Future Soldier gets its name from the “Future Soldier” programs being conducted by the US and its NATO allies. The initiative, currently part of the US Army’s Brigade Combat Team Modernization Program, focuses on outfitting infantrymen with networked communications and high-tech equipment.
The latest installment in the Ghost Recon franchise has been announced for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PSP, Wii, and DS. For more on the game, check out GameSpot’s previous coverage.
Square Enix launches teaser trailer for next installment in stealth action series; Io Interactive developing.
Shortly after launching the trailer, developer Io Interactive and Square Enix Europe officially announced that Hitman Absolution is indeed in development for the PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360. The announcement did not offer a release window for the title but did say it had been built from the ground up using Io’s proprietary Glacier 2 engine. The game will be shown off behind closed doors at next month’s Electronic Entertainment Expo.
The trailer, which also surfaced on the official Hitman.com website, shows series protagonist Agent 47 screwing a silencer onto the end of a pistol. The scene then fades into a shot of one of his trademark Silverballer .45 pistols with a rattlesnake curled around it. The shot then fades to a UPC barcode with the numbers “110706″ and “47″ highlighted in red.
Both the YouTube page and the official announcement offered a brief synopsis of Hitman Absolution’s plot: “Hitman Absolution follows Agent 47, a cold blooded assassin, who takes on his most dangerous contract to date. Betrayed by those he trusted and hunted by the police, he finds himself at the centre of a dark conspiracy and must embark on a personal journey through a corrupt and twisted world, in his search for the truth.”
Hitman Absolution will be the first entry in the series since 2006′s Hitman: Blood Money, which saw 47 bring silent death to locales ranging from mid-Mardi Gras New Orleans to the White House. The series follows the murderous exploits of Agent 47, a bald killer genetically engineered to be the perfect assassin. Hitman: Codename 47 (2000) told the tale of how the protagonist found work with the International Contract Agency (ICA) whacking high-profile criminals. In Hitman 2: Silent Assassin (2002), 47 is pulled out of retirement after his priest friend is kidnapped by the Sicilian Mafia. In Hitman: Contracts (2004), he revisits many missions from the original game, albeit in reverse.
We get back into the mud for a look at a very near-final version of Codemasters’ upcoming off-road racer.
Dirt 3 wastes no time in making the point that rallying is back. While it was present in Dirt 2, the extreme sports aesthetic and overall feel made it seem slightly out of place–but in Dirt 3, point-to-point races in classic rally cars are front and center.
The first thing you notice when starting the game is that the paddock and RV from the previous game are gone, along with all the product placement and extreme sports lifestyle gubbins. Your pre-race car selection is now set up as a team selection but can be done on an ad hoc basis, with the vehicles determined by your reputation rather than by your ability to afford them.
Once you’ve picked your team and car, you find yourself in the “service area” near the start of the race, where you can tweak individual car settings, as well as the difficulty level of your opponents, the number of available flashbacks, and the driving assists.
To begin with, you’re presented with two classic rally stages in Finland, which do a good job of setting the scene for the game. Despite the trimming of the fat that got between you and races in Dirt 2, it will feel instantly familiar for fans of the series. The two stages you hit first are challenging but not punishing: relatively open bends and small jumps that help to ease you into the driver’s seat.
The choices of a Peugeot 207 and Abarth Grande Punto are hardly the most thrilling, but they’re good little rally cars that are fun to throw around the track.
2K Games today detailed its plans to spread Darkness throughout the world. The publisher confirmed that The Darkness II, the sequel to 2007′s well-reviewed supernatural first-person shooter, is set to arrive in North American stores October 4, with an international launch October 7.
