EA E3 2010 Keynote

Currently showing Criterion's Need for Speed effort. It's already gone a bit wrong.

If they don't give me something about Mass Effect I'm going to be disappointed.

Also, Valve are an EA Partner. Likelihood of seeing something from them?

E3 2010

So, another summer rolls around and we get another E3. What are you guys hoping to see, and what do you think we'll actually see? Are the two the same? Only time will tell.

Anyway, here's what I'd really like to see.

- Some new Arkham Asylum 2 details.
- Uncharted 3 announced.
- A Mass Effect 3 teaser. (I know it's still early days after Mass Effect 2, but we already know it's coming.)
- Dreamcast games for XBLA and PSN confirmed.
- Something. Anything. From Valve about Half Life 2 - Episode Three. Or even Half Life 3. I don't mind either way. It's a long shot, but this image gives me hope. http://img375.imageshack.us/img375/5426/536906.jpg

Halo: Reach Multiplayer Beta

After several attempts to sneak onto the servers without them noticing, and falling over, I think I've played enough of this to have a fair enough impression of the game. I'll break it town into things I like, and things I don't.

Things I Like

- The new control scheme. It's largely the same as Halo 3 and ODST but they've shifted a few things around. Melee is now on the Right Bumper, with Reload moved to X and change grenade moved to B. Left Bumper is now used for the armour abilities, which I'll get into later. Still, I wish all FPS games had all common actions, like jump, reload and melee on the same buttons. Going from Battlefield, to Halo, to Call of Duty can get confusing.

- Assassinations. Sneak up behind someone and hold Right Bumper to perform a cool third person view assassination, rather than just hitting them in the back. Not managed to pull one off myself yet, but I've seen them, and they do look cool.

- The Pistol. The old Halo pistol is back. The silenced pistol from ODST was pretty good, but was still nothing compared to the original Halo pistol.

- The Designated Marksman Rifle. Precurser to the Battle Rifle, the DMR is a scoped, semi automatic rifle. Great for headshots when using the jetpack. Which brings me on to...

- Jetpacks. They're jetpacks. What's not to like?

- Team SWAT. Everyone has the same armour abilities and is armed with a DMR. Perfect for marksmen.

Things I Don't Like

- Armour abilities. There are four in the beta. Sprint, Armour Lock, Jetpack and Active Camo. Choose one of the four when you spawn. I'm sorry, I like my multiplayer FPS games to be a level playing ground, with everyone having the same stuff available to them at all times. I have never liked perks in CoD, and now Battlefield, and Halo was one of the few games that didn't have them. Now it does, and I'm not happy.

- The Lobby Voting system. Now, instead of a veto option that was in Halo 3, there's a voting system, whereby the players get to choose between three different game modes for that playlist. In theory it's not a bad system, but invariably people end up voting for shite like Oddball, or 1 Flag CTF. Also, everyone automatically votes for the first option on the list. So if no one changes their vote because they've gone for a piss or whatever, that's what you get.

- Every new game mode other than Team SWAT. So far I've played Headhunter and Stockpile (as well as Team SWAT of course), and I hate them both. The goal of Headhunter is to collect skulls and get them to a designated area to score. You get skulls by killing people and collecting the skulls they drop. Seems simple enough, but the skulls are fiddly to pick up, and they're so much going on that you're lucky if you can see where the skulls landed before you get shot in the back of the head, never mind pick them up. Stockpile is basically CTF, but you have to get flags to a designated area before the timer runs out for them to be counted in the score. I hate CTF, so automatically hate Stockpile.

- Most of the new weapons. They're utterly pointless. In a straight up fight the assault rifle will win every time. What good is a Needler Rifle if it doesn't do enough damage? Stick with the normal Needler.

Currently, I'm really not feeling it. It's definitely got the Halo multiplayer feel, but I much prefer Halo 3. I'll stick with the Reach beta for the duration to see if it grows on me, but if not, I think I'll be sticking with Halo 3 for the foreseeable future.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

If so we should organise some games at some point.

If there are enough people playing we could have our own private games (needs eight people). Failing that, just create a squad, jump into a game, and completely own everyone in the face GHZ style.

Video Game Baftas 2010

Apparently the Video Game Baftas took place tonight. The BBC has a few articles and an interview with Charlie Brooker, but otherwise it seems to have slipped by largely unnoticed.

Unsurprisingly Uncharted 2 seems to have run away with the most awards, which is good, because it was excellent. However, it failed to grab the Best Game award, which went to Batman: Arkham Asylum, which I've still not played.

Anyway, here's the full list of nominess and winners. The winners are in bold.



It's nice to see Flower getting some recognition. It really was a lovely little game. I'd forgotten it was a 2009 game mind you. Charlie Brooker has some quite nice things to say about it in his interview on the BBC News website.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8577537.stm