The Force Unleashed takes place right where Episode III left off. Darth Vader goes to the planet Kashyyk on a personal mission to find a hidden Jedi. The battle on Kashyyk is all around him (blasters coming at all angles), but that is not why he is there. Interestingly enough you cannot make Vader run — because well, Vader doesn't run.

As Vader, you get to use a lot of power from the force. I don't think it needs to be said because of the title but there aren't other weapons in this besides the force and your lightsaber. But who needs a blaster when you can just pull the roof down on your enemies? Vader rips apart a ton of warrior Wookies, trees, and doors and uncovers the Jedi's secret hideout. In mid-strangle Vader demands the Jedi to tell him where the strong presence he feels is coming from. Out of nowhere a little boy appears, grabs Vader's lightsaber and the Dark Lord realizes that this kid is quite powerful.

Fast forward over many years of torture by Daddy V (according to news reports) and the little boy has grown up and is Vader's secret apprentice. Secret because if the Emperor found out, Vader would be in a world of lightning pain from his master. What's the plan? Send the secret apprentice out to kill all the Jedi, and then team up to kill the Emperor. Oh yeah, and there can't be any witnesses to any of the events that take place, because remember you're a "secret" apprentice. Which means you get to kill everyone (good guys and bad guys). And players gain force points for the finesse in which they chose to use their force powers for slaying, so get creative. You will be able to use the force to push and pull, the force grip (choking!), the force repulse and lightning (which can later be used to electrify objects and hurl them as they explode).

As many of us know there will be a few new faces in The Force Unleashed.

Jedi Shaak Ti's Padawan, Maris Brood, is one of them. Brood wields lightsaber tonfas, is in hiding on the planet Felucia and is scary as hell upon first look.













Master Rahm Kota is the Obi-Wan figure. I expect lot of incredibly general predictions to come from him about the young apprentice's future as he seems to be tied to him in some spiritual Jedi way.












I didn't get to see Juno Eclipse in action. You heard her voice throughout each level guiding the apprentice along the way, and eventually getting much more personal and asking if he is injured in one scene, which must have been the first signs of their love interest. Planet Felucia is another welcomed visual treat during the game. Especially since you get to fight Felucian warriors and their pet Rancors.






And finally there's PROXY. Who looks like C-3PO without his clothes and bit more slender. PROXY is the plucky sidekick to the apprentice and can take the form into any personality profile that is loaded into it's memory. He takes the form of Lord Vader often when dolling out responsibilities to the apprentice.







Returning vets are Vader, the Emperor, Shaak Ti and Bail Organa, making a quickie appearance voiced by Jimmy Smits himself. Vader was brought to life by Matt Sloan who did the voice of Chad Vader (the Vader that manages a grocery store in all the online video shorts.)

There will be alternate endings and you can expect a lot of twists and turns. Many of the characters warned the young Apprentice over and over that you can't trust a Sith. Hope he watches his back.

The classic John Williams score is still intact, with an additional hour of new music from Mark Griskey. The music complements nicely the amazing graphics and new touches. It's quite gratifying, when embodying the whole "evil" side to the story, to watch the new surrounding characters' will to live. For example if you grab a stormtrooper or another character with the force they will struggle and try to grab people or things around them, or if you impale a character with a lightsaber they will try to take it out. With all the attention to detail combined with the twisty story it should make for one excellent movie, I mean video game. Alas there are no online capabilities but there will be multiplayer available on PSP and DS (up to 4 players) and the Wii version will allow you to duel your opponents. Sounds like a good time for the dark side.

Andrew Wyld crearted this piece of art as part of a competition by the BBC to win a very small part in the new radio drama versions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. They were creating an online adventure game set in the world of the books, and Andrew and Nolan Worthington (we'll be talking about him soon) were declared co-winners of the competition. He drew his pictures as a homage to the 2D look of the Guide in the television series, with a bit of an update, and he's created several other pictures from the series that you can take a look at in his gallery. You can hear Andrew as a bass player falling out of a window in one of the episodes, as well as play the game online.

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• Battlezone was developed in 1979 by Atari and released in 1980. Morgan Hoff at Atari was the lead designer, and Ed Rotberg served as the principal programmer. Both had worked on many of Atari's other classic games.
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• Battlezone was a tank simulator that gave you two joysticks, one for the left tread and one for the right, and a single button that fired your gun. You would drive all over an alien landscape, complete with an erupting volcano, and blast enemy tanks and spaceships while dodging simple geometric shapes.
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• In addition, the screen would "crack" when you were killed by an enemy, and would also play Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture when you would enter your initials for the high score.
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• Battlezone incorporated many new design elements that hadn't been seen in coin-operated games before, like a persicope-like viewer and realistic (for the time) simulated tank driving. The game also featured a built-in step to allow shorter gamers to reach the periscope.
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• The game featured wire-frame vector graphics in black and white, but they overlaid red and green cellophane onto the monitor to make it look like the game actually had different colors. The radar and warning messages were in red, while the main graphics were in green.
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• Once the game was released, it was an instant hit. In fact, it became so popular that the United States Army approached Atari and had them design a version of the game that would train gunners on the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Only two prototypes were produced that featured realistically modeled enemy helicopters, tanks, and other vehicles.
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• Ed Rotberg was so incensed that Atari was getting involved with the military, that he had several shouting matches with his bosses. He agreed only to stay on at Atari as long as he never had to work on another military project again.
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• Because players covered up most of the game with their face and body, other editions were designed like one without the periscope (because of concerns over hygiene as well, with everyone pressing their faces up against the viewer) and a cocktail table prototype.
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• Rumors persisted that you could drive up to the volcano, enter a secret passage, and then find and explore a castle. Also, people thought that if you continued driving straight for over an hour (!) you could eventually reach the mountains and find a tank factory that was building the enemy tanks. Sadly, neither were true.
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• Red Baron was a game released almost a year after Battlezone, featuring similar wire-frame graphics and gameplay except sit in a World War I biplane instead of a futuristic tank on an alien world. In fact, many Red Baron cabinets were just conversions of Battlezone units, and you could peel off the Red Baron stickers revealing the Battlezone artwork underneath.
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• Battlezone remained popular much longer than most games that came out at the same time, and several different versions of been produced over the years. The game was ported to just about every home and portable video game system, and there were multiplayer versions and sequels produced for PCs.
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• In Battlezone, the 1998 remake for PCs, they included an actual story. Meteors fall on the Earth in 1957, and the Americans and Soviets find a rare element inside them called bio-metal, which lets them build vehicles with special abilities. Of course, the Soviets and Americans use this ability to wage war across the solar system rather than better mankind.
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• Peter Hirschberg is an amazing computer animator and arcade owner who frequent makes 3D models of old arcade cabinets in his spare time. He contributed models to the retro-gaming documentary Chasing Ghosts, and you can check out his Battlezone and Tron models here. Keep in mind there are completely rendered in the computer, and are not photographs or filmed images.
  
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Wall-E: The Video Game will be out on June 27th, for just about every gaming platform you can imagine. Probably even on your car's computer navigation screen, or your internet-ready can opener.

New Wall-E Screens [Worth Playing]

According to the developers, the game is "realism-based. So no swooshy laser weapons or impossible Star Trek/Star Wars science. We're keeping it gritty, intense and war-like. So it's a bit like Halo, if we'd never gone to war with the Covenant and instead just started fighting with each other. You can check out more concept art, see the futuristic weapon designs, and even listen to the theme song they've composed for the game at their MySpace page. They have over 20 people working on this thing (supposedly), and it's almost been three years since they began working on it, so hopefully we'll start seeing more soon.

According to SEGA, here are the game's key features:

Unlimited Destruction: Become the Incredible Hulk and experience unlimited destruction. Players can demolish anything in their path and also use it as a weapon - pieces of a crumbling building...a passing car...a light standard. They can even demolish buildings with their bare hands. Damage is persistent, and gamers can use it to gain access to previously unreachable areas.
Powerful Rage: Rage is power. Build the Hulk's rage to learn powerful moves. Cause unheard-of damage to gain and upgrade his abilities.
Incredible Scale: New York City's towering skyscrapers allow for exciting vertically based gameplay, while powerful, massive enemies such as Bi-Beast and the Abomination challenge the Hulk's might.
Dynamic Open World: A realistic next-gen, open-world representation of Manhattan provides gamers with an immense playground of destruction that also contains sub-quests, minigames, and a story that reaches beyond the film to include elements from classic Marvel comics.

This game is based on a trilogy of novels by Russian author Alexander Zorich, which present an alternate future where the Russians end up dominating outer space. As they struggle to control their extraterrestrial colonies and work with four different alien races, you take command of a ship and help quell uprisings and explore the universe. Complete planetary systems are modeled, and you can take your ships all the way from high orbit down into the atmosphere for your peeping pleasure. Hopefully you've developed some extrasensory abilities along the way as well, because it looks like you'll need them to keep track of everything happening on-screen at once. The Tomorrow War will be out for PC gamers later this year, and with any luck there will be an English translation coming soon after.

• In 1978 Taito was a Japanese company that was struggling to make a profit on Pachinko machines. With the rise of electronic arcade games, Tomohiro Nishikado designed Space Invaders and created history.

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• The game was inspired by Atari's Breakout, by the descriptions of the aliens in H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, and by a freaky dream that Nishikado had about aliens appearing in the sky instead of Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. Which means you get lines and lines of relentlessly invading creatures, who all happen to look like an octopoids.
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• Arcades opened in Japan featuring nothing but rows and rows of Space Invaders games, so if you thought your corner convenience store with Galaga and Pole Position hardly had any choices, think again.
  
• The game was so popular in Japan that it caused a major shortage of coins, and they had to quadruple yen production to keep up with the demand.
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• Space Invaders was one of the first games to feature endless gameplay, as previous games had all worked on a timer. If you were good, you could go on blasting aliens forever... or until the game ran out of memory.
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• The upright cabinet version of the game in arcades actually had the monitor below the eyeline of the player, and the gamefield was reflected onto a piece of plastic on the back of the cabinet, which had cool artwork painted on it. The resulting combination had the gamefield on top of a lunar landscape.
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• The original Taito version of the game used joysticks, but the American version from Midway used buttons to control the laser cannon.
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• The game ran on an Intel 8080 as its processor, running at 2 MHz.
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• It was estimated that the game pulled in $500 million in its first year of release in the arcades alone, which still makes it one of the most profitable games ever developed.
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• In 1980 a version of Space Invaders was released for the Atari 2600, and it quickly became one of the "must have" games for the system.
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• Versions came out for other home gaming consoles, but due to copyright infringement they would have to be retitled. Like Space Armada for the Intellivision.
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• Coca-Cola even asked Atari to create a version for the 2600 called Pepsi Invaders, featuring invading letters spelling out Pepsi, so you could blast them out of the sky. Coke gave the 125 cartridges out to its employees.
  
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• Numerous sequels have appeared in arcades over the years, including Space Invaders Part II (or Space Invaders Deluxe), Return of the Invaders, Majestic Twelve: The Space Invaders Part IV (or Super Space Invaders '91), Space Invaders DX, and Akkan-vaders (or Space Invaders '95: The Attack Of The Lunar Loonies).
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• Guillaume Reymond created a human version of the game in 2006, which you can watch in all of its glory right here:
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• Shigeru Miyamoto, who created Donkey Kong and a slew of other games for Nintendo, has said that Space Invaders was what inspired him to get into game development.
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• The cover for Boston's "Don't Look Back" album was inspired by Space Invaders.
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• In an episode of Futurama, Fry fights off invading aliens because he's a master of Space Invaders. All he needs to rock the game are a two-liter bottle of Shasta, and a Rush mix tape.

You'll control a squad of four Colonial Marines in the game, issuing commands and dealing with their different personalities as you investigate the disappearance of Ellen Ripley and the team of Colonial Marines she left with aboard the U.S.S. Sulaco. Key areas in the game include the derelict spacewreck from the first Alien movie, and the LV-426 colony from Aliens. You'll use weapons like the pulse rifle, the M240 flamethrower, and the M56 Smart Gun that Vasquez kicked much ass with.

The thing sure looks a bit like Doom meets Quake, but we loved the world of the Colonial Marines so much that we'd watch a television show or movie about them even if it didn't have a single Alien in it. Oh wait, we did... and it was called Starship Troopers. Actually, there were a lot of aliens in that, except they looked like bugs instead of creepy H.R. Giger nightmares. Still, we loved it and have high hopes for Part 3, especially if it includes shower scenes.

Colonial Marines was originally being developed for the PS2, but was cancelled by Fox back in 2001. Then SEGA announced in 2006 that they were working on a game set in the Aliens world, and it'll be out for the PC, the PS3, and the Xbox 360 in late 2008. Which of course means we're going to have to wait on it, a lot more than 17 days. As Hicks would say. "17 days?!?! We're not gonna last 17 hours!"

Artist Ben Mauro put these images up on his blog as a "proposed sequel to BioShock," but it turns out that they were pieces for a class project where they had to design a sequel to a film or a movie that they chose. However, it didn't stop them from racing around the nets as official confirmation of a sequel. However, that doesn't make his artwork any less pretty to look at. While the other images are all mass-transity, that whale stands out as very cool, and intriguing.

BioShock brought a gorgeous world of 1930s era extravagance and decay to gaming consoles around the world last year, and the critical acclaim and financial success will probably launch a sequel, although nothing has been announced so far. However, developer Take-Two has referred to the game as a franchise, and they've opened a new development house which is rumored to be solely working on BioShock, so you can be sure there will be another one. In fact, if you own an Xbox 360 or a PC that you can game on, and you haven't done so, give this game a whirl. We'll try and keep it spoiler-free, but when you finish the game you can understand the need for a lot of brand-new concept art.

Possible BioShock 2 concept art?

You play through the game as weaponless systems engineer Isaac Clarke aboard the USG Ishimura, and not only to you have to survive the onslaught of demon hordes out in space, but you also have to seal up their doorway so they can't get back out. All in a day's work. It seems like spacefaring folks don't ever have things go that well. Just ask anyone in the Doom universe. However, we sure wouldn't mind having a Planetcracker to fly around.

It'll leave your retinas in a bit of pain, but it's the only time we've ever seen anything come close to approximating the view from inside one of those Hot Wheels loop-de-loop courses we used to play with back in the day. Some of the lines in the trailer made us cringe a bit, and we'll be missing the ultraquick dialogue and the speed lines... but we're marginally starting to look forward to what these races look like both in the movie, and in the game. We just hope you can use all of the gadgets that the Mach 5 has to offer while you batter your opponents.

Take a first look at Speed Racer [Palgn]

That experimental laser that turns Bridges into a video game character actually zips an orange across space first, early in the movie. It's only later that a pissed-off Master Control Program does the same thing to Jeff's pesky ass. Of course, no one at the company seems to remember that they've invented teleportation either, at the end of the movie. Probably a more lucrative line of work to go into than gaming. Here are more secrets of Tron:

• Director Steve Lisberger saw video games in the late 1970s, and was fascinated with the world they existed in. However, he wanted to open that up to people in a non-cliqueish way, and he and his partner Donald Kushner set up an animation studio in 1977 to start developing the film.
• The film was supposed to be animated, with live-action bookends setting up the "human" side of the story. However, Lisberger met with Information International, Inc., who showed him footage of filming real actors in front of back-lit animation. They filmed test-footage of a frisbee champion hurling discs, and this convinced Disney to fund the film.
• Information International, Inc. had previously animated the android-vision in the movie Westworld, and they scanned and animated Peter Fonda's head for the sequel Futureworld, which was the first appearance of 3D computer graphics in a film. They also did animation tests for Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars, but they ultimately achieved the most success for creating a newspaper and technical document publishing system.
• Moebius, Syd Mead, and tech artist Peter Lloyd all contributed to the production design of the film, with each designing different elements: Moebius the set, Mead the vehicles, and Lloyd the environment. Mead also created the iconic Tron logo.
• Speaking of vehicles, when I was a kid those Recognizers scared the hell out of me. Yes, it's not really trivia related, but can you imagine one of these, on fire, and piloted by a Sleestak? Holy hell.
• Peter O'Toole was originally signed on to play Sark/Dillinger, but when he arrived on set and didn't see any of the physical sets or props, he balked.
• Apparently Jess Bridge's manhood created too much of a bulge in his "Clu" outfit, so he had to wear a dance belt to conceal it. The Big Lebowski, indeed.
• Debbie Harry screen-tested for the role of Yori. She probably told the producers to "Call Me," which they never did. Yes, that was a bad Blondie joke. Sorry.
• The scenes of the ENCOM labs with the laser teleportation array were shot at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Their own real laser is able to produce 28 trillion watts of power on target. The lab is now the home of the faster computer in the world, Blue Gene.
• The Tron videogame was a smash hit compared to the movie, which did moderately well. The game has far outgrossed the movie. In fact, it took several dozens of my quarters back in the 80s. It spawned a sequel called Discs of Tron, which is worth it just for the black light effect alone.
• A game sequel that ties into the movie, Tron 2.0, was released in 2003. It features Jet Bradley, the son of Alan Bradley (Tron) being zapped back into the computer world. It didn't do that well financially, but is worth picking up and playing. I still play the damn thing from time to time.
• Supertramp was supposed to provide two songs for the movie, but eventually those were provided by Journey. They are "Only Solutions" and "1990's Theme," and are pretty forgettable.
• Composer Wendy Carlos provided the rest of the soundtrack, doing most of the work on MOOG synthesizers. She had also provided the scores for The Shining and A Clockwork Orange.
• The Academy left Tron out of the voting for any visual effects awards, because they felt they'd cheated by using a computer. Oh Academy, always so forward-looking.
• A sequel for the film has been in the works since 1999, and last September Disney announced that the project continues to move forward based on a script by Eddie Kitsis and Adam Horowitz, who both write for Lost. Jeff Bridges has said he's excited about possibly reprising his role as Flynn.

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Vanguard Entertainment, who produced Valiant and Happily Never After, is animating the film, and Brash Entertainment is making the game. They're also working on games based on Saw and 300, so you've got visceral gore and bloody battles on one end, and happy-go-lucky flying space monkeys on the other. We think the monkeys should just rebel against what the humans have put them through and they create a supercool simian space rocket and use it to fire missiles containing their own poo at the planet.

News-Space Chimps Movie Game Confirmed [Pariah's Guild]

Here's how the game went: You spent your hard-earned allowance on the game controlling Dexter, the teenager that Ace reverts into, and tried to rescue your bitchy girlfriend Kimberly. Who just happened to look an awful lot like the buxom Daphne from Dragon's Lair. Now for the back story.

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• Besides creating Dragon's Lair and Space Ace, Don Bluth was a chief animator at Disney, and also directed The Secret of NIMH, An American Tail, The Land Before Time, All Dogs Go To Heaven, and Titan A.E., among others.
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• Space Ace appeared only four months after Dragon's Lair, and was offered in a standalone cabinet, or as a conversion kit. You just popped out the Dragon's Lair disc, popped in Space Ace, changed a few stickers and the control panel and bingo.
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• Space Ace was promoted as if it were a movie, with movie-style promo posters and press kits. Bluth even did interviews with film journalists to promote the game.
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• Just like they did with Dragon's Lair, to save money Bluth's studio didn't hire actors for the voices of the characters, but used employees to provide them. Bluth himself is the voice of the evil Borf.
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• The animators made actual physical models of Ace's ship, the Star Pac, his motorcycle and the tunnel seen in the dogfight for the game. These were filmed and then rotoscoped to provide a more realistic look.
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• The original concept for the game was based on the Billy Batson / Captain Marvel comic book model. Dexter would be able to turn into super space hero Ace at different times in the game. However, since they were marketing the game to teenagers, they thought they would relate to an adult better. So that model was reversed.
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• Unlike Dragon's Lair, you could choose your difficulty setting when you popped your quarters in: Cadet, Captain, or Ace. At the Cadet level you'd only see roughly 50% of the game, and you'd need to choose the Ace setting to see it all.
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• The game also offered multiple paths for the player to choose from, rather than having to follow one course of action in each scene. At different points in the game the player had the opportunity to slap the "Energize!" button to turn Dexter back into Ace, which would result in the scene being played differently. You could complete the scene as either character.
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• At one point in the game a decoy Kimberly turns into Hexter, an evil version of Dexter, and you have to do battle. He then turns into a mega-giant evil Ace, and you have to shoot him in the mouth. Ouch.
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• Although Borf wanted to take over the Earth with his weird de-aging ray (and who wouldn't mind being a teenager again?) he sure spent a lot of his time trying to kill Ace/Dexter with laser beams, giant drilling robots, and massive traps.
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• In 1984 twelve Space Ace episodes were produced for the "Saturday Supercade" of shows on CBS that featured other video game cartoons like Pac-Man and Frogger. Nancy Cartwright, the later voice of Bart, provided the voice of Kimberly.
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• The game didn't anywhere near the popularity that Dragon's Lair did, and it's high cost sent the laserdisc game fad into a tailspin that it didn't recover from. In 1991 Space Ace II: Borf's Revenge was released for the Amiga and PC platforms, but quickly faded into obscurity.
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• Although it's been on DVD before, in April a high-definition version of Space Ace will be out for HD-DVD and Blu-ray players. You play the game with your remote, which sort of sucks. However, there's a ton of extra material on the disc, including the ability to just watch the game all the way through. It's one way to relive the time you spent in the 80s, without rolls of quarters in your pocket.

We love the idea of multipupose bot-like armor suits, and these perfectly juxtapose the images of life and death in war. You might have some massive bionic titans slugging it out and destroying the landscape, but these little suckers will be scurrying around everywhere, filling up guns and patching up wounds. In fact, why don't they put them to work in every facet of life? You could have a little mailman suit of armor, policemen, firemen, pizza delivery, and even Jehovah's Witnesses with backtanks full of copies of Watchtower.

New Bionic Commando Concept Art [Capcom Unity]

We know for sure the first game will be based on one of the games that Ender plays during his training, but the company wants to turn this into a series, and eventually they're going to have to tell some sort of a story. Of course, in the book, the game is literally everything.

In the novel, Ender Wiggin is selected at the age of six to attend the Battle School, which the military uses with the hopes that they'll one day train a great military leader who will lead the fight against the "Buggers," an insect-like race that is at war with the humans. They do this by teaching via video games and simulations, and without spoiling things, those become extremely important. Games range from simulations computers, to what amounts to zero-gravity versions of Laser Tag.

Warners is developing the movie with Wolfgang Peterson at the helm, but they abandoned work on the game that usually accompanies every big scifi film these days. Does that mean they couldn't crack the idea and decided to leave it up to someone else? If you've read the book, you'd probably say yes.

Ender's Game In The Works [Sci Fi Wire]

It's a tale of two planets, Earth and Arkanar, who live together in brotherly love and all that boring jazz until a bitter war broke out between the two worlds. Afterwards, the Earth ages, matures and develops things like technology, computers, and digital watches. However, Arkanar stays rooted in medieval-era weaponry and warfare and starts stagnating. No one know why until the forces on Earth decide to send a spy to Arkanar, and guess who you get to play? It sounds a bit like Assassin's Creed where you get "regressed" back into the a similar era inside your head, except this time you get to take a blaster, a missile pod, or a hand grenade with you.

This might be the closest that a game has come to sticking you into a Harry Turtledove novel, except you have to also unravel the mystery of Arkanar's situation to boot. Bonus points if your character gets to brandish a laser rifle and tell everyone "This is my BOOMSTICK!"

Nerfhaven is a forum where Nerf junkies talk about modifying stock Nerf gear. Now, sometimes people paint a gun a different color, like these cool Steampunk Nerf pistols, but several members get a bit more hardcore. Like Forsaken_angel24, who gutted a stock Nerf rifle and a toy chainsaw, and built this amazing piece of amalgamated plastic. The image above shows the final product, but just look at what he started with. You can see incredibly detailed step-by-step instructions on the site, which are also shown in the video below.

We're all for chopping and mashing things up, but this just goes above and beyond our feeble hackery. Next up, we'd like a Nerf Wave Motion Gun please, thanks. [Kotaku]

You'll play Eliott, a character who (surprise!) we haven't seen before. He's suffering from amnesia, and will be sent all over the island solving mini-games, deciphering clues, and yes, even punching the sacred numbers into the hatch computer. You'll find out a bit more about stuff like the mysterious black smoke and the Black Rock ship that's been marooned on the island for years. You'll also interact with the main characters, although they've used soundalikes for most of them, which is fairly lame.

Since we've been wasting far too much time on the Lost viral marketing games, this game looks even more promising. Check out the trailer for it here. However, we wonder if automatonic versions of Jack, Kate, and Sawyer can tide us over. Will we be playing all of our favorite shows as video games in a few months? Come to think of it, we'd welcome the chance to play a cool Doctor Who or Battlestar Galactica game. Keyword being cool.

'Lost' Video Game Preview — Writer Taunts Me With Knowledge Of Black Smoke And Four-Toed Statue [MTV Multiplayer]

Choosing a main image was especially difficult because here's this amazing crashed FedEx plane with a bridge for a wing, these enormous turrets that look like they've grown out of the landscape, or this massive coastal battle.

Korean developer Reloaded Studios has only been open for a month, and this ambitious massively multiplayer action game is scheduled for release in 2010 and will be their first.

Set in the near future, The Day finds mankind discovering a way to travel between two connected parallel worlds. Players will face a changing world never before seen in an online game as they travel back and forth between the past and present, accomplishing critical missions that extremely influence and affect their present-day world. With the fate of mankind at stake, players are thrown into brutal warfare and a fight to keep humanity from slipping into self-destruction across time.

The Day screenshots [Gamers Hell]

Bungie writing director Joseph Stattten oversees all of the writing that goes on for the games that the studio pumps out, and he has a deep knowledge of the storylines as a result. When he was asked if fans would want to see the always armored Master Chief's face in the oft-delayed Halo feature film, he said

I think what it boiled down to with the film was really a question of "Who is the main character of the movie?" Is it the Master Chief or is it somebody else? And over time I think everybody around the table agreed that the Master Chief is best left as the most important supporting cast member.

Where the Master Chief doesn't have a face, but he has a whole body to emote with, whether it's his spine, or his shoulders. or the tilt of his head, or the way he slumps or reloads his weapon. There are these kinesthetic responses that he'll have which will really easily communicate the character and what he's feeling.

Interview with Bungie's Joseph Staten [Newsweek]

Halo Wars takes place before the first game in the series, Halo: Combat Evolved, when the war with the alien Covenant was just beginning to break out. Set in the year 2531, the United Nations Space Command has colonies spread throughout the galaxy, turning previously barren planets into thriving communities. However, once the war breaks out people start fleeing in terror from the onslaught of the Covenant. Artist Jason Merck from Ensemble Studios makes it clear in this concept art of a group of people with bags packed and sporting warning signs in the background that it might be high time for a change of scenery. Either they've just arrived, are waiting on some sort of a hovertrain to take them away, or maybe they're watching a battle unfold in the sky.

Sadly, by the beginning of the gaming series 21 year later, most of these colonies have been lost, which means these poor painted people probably didn't survive. Check out more concept art from this upcoming game in the gallery and keep your bags packed for a quick exit.

The Necrum level had quite an impact on fans of Oddworld even inspiring fanart around the net. People loved the spooky setting the level took place in, and were drawn to the reverence of the resting place of the mudokon dead. In this part of the game, you have to drive out the baddies in the mines below and return the city to a place of mourning, which artist Rob Brown took into account while designing it.

Brown has worked as an artist and art director for a slew of companies from Disney to Activision, but his stint on the Oddworld games is probably what he's best known for, since he provided a real look and feel to this alien world. He brings a dark, brooding intensity to his artwork, which normally isn't seen in such a lighthearted game, and made it seem like a living, breathing world. Check out some of his other concept art on his website, and lament the loss of Oddworld.

There's a central statue of Atlas holding up the world, which has been smashed by a piece of the city falling from overhead. In the background you can see untended plants growing out of control while water pours in from overhead. Meanwhile schools of fish drift lazily by in the background. It's a fully-realized vision of a utopia gone wrong, and we highly recommend getting inside the game and exploring it.

Here's a picture taken by rumpleteaser in Japan (left) side-by-side with an image of mysterious rock formations from the Myst game End of Ages.

Here you have Bowen Island off the coast of Vancouver on the right, and an island from the game End of Ages of the left. What I love about this real-life photograph from jurvetson is that it captures a landscape turned into a massive game, which is exactly what every Myst game captures too. The rocks you see in the Myst image are also a puzzle, of course.

Over the past two years, there have been in-game protest marches and legal action against WOW because Blizzard had shut down guilds that advertised themselves as queer-friendly. And of course, WOW also tries to prevent players from getting into sexual positions with each other, though there are many ways around that.

Given the number of kids who play WOW, I get why Blizzard might want to limit sexual escapades. But preventing characters from calling themselves gay-friendly, or from switching genders? Isn't the whole point of MMOs that they offer us a chance to escape our biological bodies and plug into the post-human universe? C'mon, Blizzard people, get with the program. Switching genders is the whole point of MMOs. It's part of our cyber-destiny to be elves with twelve sexes.

Change Your Gender? Blizz Says No. [WOW Insider]

We've heard it compared to the video game series Sim City, although it sounds more like a version of the Schwarzenegger / Stephen King film The Running Man than anything else. Gerard Butler plays a convict who is forced to compete in the games. If he wins 30 matches, then he gets set free. Pretty straightforward, right?

Not so fast. costar Alison Lohman let it slip today that although Gerard plays the gamer convict, there's also a player playing him. Which brings us full circle to 1982's Tron. In that movie, we were shown how the "players" in the games were basically slaves serving out sentences under the evil Master Control Program. In one memorable scene, one of the players in the popular "Light Cycles" game dies, and we see two kids playing the game in an arcade. They shrug their shoulders and walk off, having unknowingly killed off some poor sucker.

So if you take one part The Running Man (win the game to be set free) and toss in a bit of Death Race 2000 (the government forces you to play in a game that is popular all over the nation) and mix it liberally with Tron (human gamers controlling the lives of players), you'll come out with Game... or a big tasteless mess of bubbling goo.

Alison Lohman's got 'Game' [MTV Movies Blog]