Grave Gamer News & Views — video games

Isolated

Fun fact about Creative Assembly’s Alien: Isolation – the game is playable from start to finish. With the core experience laid out, the developer is using the time between now and the game’s Q4 release date to polish, tweak, and refine the game.

I’m feeling pretty good about this one. It helps that it looks phenomenal. But I feel especially good that CA is approaching the material at a different angle and that, all around, even on Sega’s part, Isolation is being handled with the same meticulous care you’d show a newborn baby. Or a bomb capable of leaving a crater the size of Nebraska.

Check out more screens hereabouts.

Skulltula Ambush & Goron Cave Guard by Nate Hallinan

Michael Myers Answers the Call of Duty

Infinity Ward is making my childhood dreams come true this month. They’re letting me wield a sharpened axe, don a menacingly emotionless visage of a mask, and sending me on a psychopathic rampage.

No, no, no, it’s not my dream to pretend to be a serial killer. My dream is to be a pop culture icon that happens to be a mass murderer. Subtle difference.

Yes, in detailing the first downloadable map pack for Call of Duty: Ghosts, among the ranks of urban and industrial battlegrounds (that are indistinguishable from the scores of urban and industrial battlegrounds that make up the DNA of this series), there was one oddball map that stuck out: Fog.

Fog is CoD’s DLC as it should be: the designers letting their hair down and coding something ridiculous and fun simply for the hell of it. Siphoning the atmosphere and visual staples of countless horror movies before it, Fog is a darkened, dank slice of macabre geography featuring dead woods, a lonely, dilapidated cabin, and an Eli Roth approved torture chamber.

And that’s not even the cool part. Successfully complete an operation during an online skirmish and you’ll transform into a slasher flick icon – Michael Myers, straight out of John Carpenter’s seminal Halloween (mayhaps “Fog” is a slier reference to the director’s filmograhpy?). When Mikey hits the scene, you’ll know. The music takes a shift – featuring Carpenter’s now classic theme – and the chances of eating axe increase exponentially.

Call of Duty is no stranger to the weird – this is, in fact, a series that saw Danny Trejo and Sarah Michelle Gellar pistol whipping an undead George Romero just a couple of years ago – but it’s typically Treyarch gettin’ up to shenanigans while IW plays the straight man every other year. Ghosts being, in my opinion, the driest, by-the-numbers release in the franchise’s history, it’s nice to have a reason not to instantly forget this title like my mind has been desperately begging me to.

Does Michael Myers’ murderous inclusion make sense? No. There isn’t even an official implementation of the knife-only mode that fans have borrowed his name for. Does his inclusion make me happy? Shit yes; and that overrides logic.

Onslaught, featuring four new maps and a new chapter of Extinction, arrives on Xbox platforms January 28th. PlayStation users are likely to see the pack a month later.

Lords of Shadow 2 is Nearly Upon Us

Go ahead, revel in the next-gen and its succinct lack of titles to digest right now. The current generation still has some fight in it… or should I say bite?

MercurySteam’s imaginative and grandiose reconstruction of Castlevania lore is coming to a close next month. It’s bittersweet for me – though I crave a satisfying conclusion to the Lords of Shadow mythos, it means Mercury’s brief tenure on the franchise is at an end.

But it looks like they want to go out on a huge bang. The campaign, which pits Dracula’s fight against Satan in the (rustically) modern day, is promised to clock in near twenty-four hours. Gabriel’s armory has been expanded to include the life consuming Void Sword and the powerfully destructive Chaos Claws… as well as the ability to transform into a Smaug-caliber dragon. That’s right. You become that wickedly metal dragon up above.

All good things come to an end. And though Lords of Shadow still hasn’t jived with 2D purists in the fanbase (and probably never will), this sprawling, beautifully conceived reboot has definitely been a good thing. Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 releases February 28th on PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360.

Shadow Over Dunwall by juhoham