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Gears of lawsuit. We're sitting in a presentation room watching a third-person cover shooter play out on a big plasma TV. Two burly men roadie-run to cover and slam their backs again...

Ishimura where that came from. In space, no one can hear you realigning solar arrays. To be fair, no one can hear anything in space, but that's not how it's generally portrayed by vi...

Rouge warrior. You've made an enormously popular action game built around huge open environments that you can rip to pieces with vehicles and explosives. In a genre where escalation ...

Dark respawn. We strongly advise against reading the things people write about you on the internet. It is, as Peter Mannion once said on The Thick of It, "like opening the door to a ...

Dubai or not Dubai? "Seen anything cool?" asks the Spec Ops producer as we file into his comfortable little gamescom prison. Nobody says anything. ...

Rehashing's a sin? Ah, middle management. If you're good at something, sooner or later you get promoted out of it and have to admire it from above while you do something less innocen...

Check out these Moves. If Guerrilla Games' Dan Nanni had emerged triumphantly singing Roy Orbison's "You Got It" no one would have blamed him for the transgression. His Killzone 3 sh...

Make your mind up. Who died and made non-linearity king? It used to be that you went left to right and that was it. Later we walked forward instead. Individuals we came across were s...

Soldier to soldier. "So," says the silver-haired man with the steely blue eyes, "What's your favourite videogame?" "Tomb Raider," I say. ...

The drive of your entire life. Kazunori Yamauchi is excited. He's showing us three cars from the 1967 Le Mans 24-hour race - the Ferrari 330 P4, the Ford Mark IV and the Jaguar XJ13 ...

Cross platform. We've spoken to various people from id Software during QuakeCon - Todd Hollenshead, Matt Hooper and the mischievous Tim Willits to name three - and there's one questi...

Top Gear, season 14, episode one. Clarkson, May and Hammond traverse Romania in a range of hyper-expensive grand tourers in search of the Transf?g?r??an: 90km of high-altitude tarmac that just happe...

Knife and Ork. The life of a Space Marine is not an easy one. Setting aside blood-soaked galaxy-spanning conflict and the fact that simply writing down the date in the year 40,000 is...

The shock of the old. Whether or not you think of BioShock Infinite as the true sequel to BioShock probably depends on your definition of the word sequel. We've already had a numeric...

Command and console. Despite some notable successes, it still doesn't feel like RTS hasmade a clean transition from PC to console. Bridging the gulf betweeninput methods has always ...

Jacko! Just Dance! Racket Sports. Ubisoft's press conference was undoubtedly a highlight of E3. Announcement-packed, full of surprises and spectacularly French, it even helped the co...

Dam it. Several months ago, I went to visit Microsoft's UK headquarters and ended up seeing a man's heart breaking right in front of me. The man in question was an in-house XBLA prod...

Licence to drive as well as kill. Apparently, Daniel Craig quite likes videogames. So far, however, videogames don't seem to like him very much in return. Part of the problem, aside ...

B-Boy document. I'm sitting at the back of Konami's E3 booth, getting my first demo of Def Jam Rapstar. There's me and two geezers from developer-publisher 4mm Games. Best way to sho...

Not the band. "It's like hiking," says Jenova Chen, towards the end of a fascinating, bewildering, inspiring, and well-hidden E3 videogame presentation. "You're hiking along and you ...

Between the Diablo and the deep blue sea. Always the bridesmaid... Poor old Obsidian Entertainment seems to be fated to ride the coat-tails of others in the North American RPG scene....

Child's play. Child of Eden is the child of Rez, which might explain why Tetsuya Mizuguchi's astonishing new synaesthesia epic feels both warmly familiar and wonderfully inventive at the same time. ...

Turrets syndrome. Everyone's smart at Valve. The designers are smart, the art teams are smart, and the lady behind the reception desk can answer the phone in Latin or Aramaic if she has to - trust me, ...

Alien in New York. Talk to anybody at Crytek about Crysis 2 and they'll quickly start explaining things. Eager to be helpful, they'll tell you about the game's move from the "open sandbox" of the South...

The Junior Apprentice. If you head into space, you want to take the right kit with you. For Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, that kit turned out to be middleware. It's hard not to have fun when you've g...

Honk Kong Phooey? True Crime's plot, while perfectly serviceable, is pretty traditional stuff, so let's kick off with a relevant paradox or two instead. They may not actually be genuine paradoxes, obvi...

The concept album. This is quite interesting: Dave Mustaine from Megadeth has written a song for Warriors of Rock, the new Guitar Hero game. A Megadeth song designed, from the ground up, with note-trac...

Alien resurrection. PC gamers: XCOM is a very different prospect to X-COM, the revered strategy game. You'll probably dig it anyway.Console gamers: XCOM is a re-imagining of X-COM, the revered PC strat...

Returning Japanese. Moonlight bathes the rolling hills and forested glades, glinting off our serried rows of troops. Up ahead, a white castle gleams from the top of a steep hill, torches flickering dis...

Duty bound. It was all going so well until they tried to explain it. We've just been privy to a little bit of hitherto mysterious shooter Homefront, which features absurdly lavish environments and some...

Don't call it a comeback. Like those packets of bacon that come with sandwich-destroying pictures of the farms the meat originated from, it would be interesting if annual videogame r...

Personality+! Pro Passing! Er, custom chants? While other 10-million-selling game developers throw their lawsuits out of the pram and cuddle up to new sugar daddies, one of the biggest and most bankabl...

Web chat. A lot of people must hate Rocksteady right now - a lot of superhero game developers must, anyway. Unshackled by a movie tie-in and free to focus on a single location along ...

Whip-whip. Hooray? "Lone warrior battles supernatural creatures with a whip." As high concepts go, that's a pretty straightforward one - and a familiar one to anybody who's played a ...

Frikkin' goresome. 15 seconds. 15 seconds. That's the amount of time spent between putting the Splatterhouse disk into your console and hearing your first squealing, crashing power ...

Taliban hammer. Some people love music, others love comic books. Some people love more than one thing, and how they fit it all in their heads I will never know. Me, I love listening to people talk. Som...

Shotgurn. We're sure you would agree with Bulletstorm's assertion that it's "time to break out the awesome". Clearly there is a gap in the market for a demented shooter where you're constantly sliding ...

No limits. If you don't like cars, I guess all these car games are quite hard to tell apart. If you do, however, you'll know that you're not dealing with a single genre so much as dozens of the things....

Brain training. If you thought Alan Wake took its sweet time getting out of the door, spare a thought for hardcore adventure gamers who have had to wait a patience-testing seven years for Gray Matter. ...

Sack to the future. As the name always suggested, LittleBigPlanet was pretty comfortable with its own contradictions. It used complex technology to render a world of needle and thread, tweed and cardbo...

inXile comes home. It's not that long since we last (and first) saw Hunted: The Demon's Forge. When we were introduced to the game then, studio founder Brian Fargo announced his intention to revive the...

Splash Damage on the edge. Whether he's cranking up the surround-sound for a thundering game demo, or just talking - something he does at speed and without pause, reeling off a five-minute answer to on...

Obsidian falls in. Sometimes, in order to step up, you need to take a step back. Over the last couple of weeks, Bethesda Softworks has shown the world's gaming media what it thinks is the strongest lin...

21st Century Toy. At last: an answer to the ancient question of how videogame heroes manage to lug around enough military hardware to turn Stevenage into a smoking hole in the ground...

Blue screen of love. You can imagine the scene. A high-powered SEGA meeting, somewhere in a Tokyo high-rise. The brass is gathered, and PR and marketing representatives for each territory shuffle notes...

Monkey brawl. Tameem Antoniades, Ninja Theory's chief creative ninja - that's according to the business card - looks like he's been yanked back in time from some promising point in the dim future where...

Ragnar rock. Ragnar Tornquist, Funcom's in-house auteur and creator of its next MMO The Secret World, is as bright-eyed, effusive and animated as ever, even if his hair seems to have...

Die another deity. Age of Conan game director Craig Morrison is presenting the game's first expansion, Rise of the Godslayer, to the press in a darkened hotel suite in San Francisco,...

Tomb it may concern. Tomb Raider is my favourite game of all time. Of course, this is mainly because it allows me to live out fantasies of being intrepid, acrobatic, clever, rich, po...

None more Black. If ever a man reflected the character of the game he was making, it's Stuart Black, the wild creative lead behind Codemasters' gun porn shooter Bodycount. Loud, effervescent, uncomprom...

Civil reunion. When Civilization IV came out - and I'm using the z spelling with the same counter-intuitive courtesy that allows me to refer to drag acts using "she" - it was difficult to say, "Hey! Ev...

Knight and day. For all the shortcomings of Reality Pump's rather awful RPG Two Worlds, at least it gave the developer something to focus its efforts on for a sequel. Most reviewers quickly decided tha...

Platinum seller? Hello, this is Shinji Mikami here. I'm just barely keeping my head on my shoulders these days. But how about all of you? ...

For the stars. "Bungie's greatest game ever and truly, in our minds, the defining Halo title from Bungie." Brian Jarrard, community lead at the Seattle developer, isn't mincing his w...

You rule. "Our job at Lionhead is to surprise and shock you," says Peter Molyneux, kicking off his presentation of Fable III at Microsoft's X10 event in San Francisco. Does he shock us? Not quite. Does...

Abrickadabra. Adults, according to most fairy tales, have stopped believing in magic. The people at Traveller's Tales probably haven't, though. And why should they? Just five years a...

Band Aid. "Whether we were developing the game for Save the Children or a puppy-killing Evil Mega Corp is irrelevant to me." Ste Curran, creative director at Zoe Mode, is adamant. "I...

Glockumentary. IO Interactive has spent the last year or so thinking about what's real. That doesn't mean the developer's selling its car, renting out the flat and heading to Goa wit...

ACU in the hole? There are two possible reactions to any mention of Supreme Commander. Yes, just two. Don't pull that "how dare you force the entirety of human experience and attitud...

Mild chaos, turning heavier with a risk of thunder. Almost universally well-received for its clever integration of RPG elements into the strategy mix, Dawn of War II was a high point...

Catch-kick as catch can. "I think everybody can agree the visuals are very pretty," says Hedrick "Rocky" Rivero, one of the designers on MMA, as he presents the game. Are they? You t...

Retaking the Mickey. Here's a fact you almost certainly didn't know about Warren Spector: he is exactly the right height to stand upright on the top floor of an old Routemaster double-decker bus. The c...

SEGA's superseries broadens further. Imagine a game that depicted a living, breathing London - not 1940s London, not post-apocalyptic London, but today's London, with every homeless ...

Earth to earth. Someone asks Atli Mar Sveinsson if DUST 514, the console shooter that will share a universe with sci-fi MMO EVE Online, will have character classes. You know, like en...

Double agent. Making the sequel to a blockbuster hit must be tough. On the one hand, you've got to keep the existing fanbase happy by offering more of what made it a hit in the first...

Light-motif. For all its cinematic and televisual influences - Hitchcock, Lost, Twin Peaks, The X-Files - Alan Wake isn't just another action game that wishes it were on the big scre...

Ron Gilbert gives us some skin. "I'm betting," says Ron Gilbert, settling into a killer pause with the practiced air of a world-class vacuum cleaner salesman, "that you've never foug...

Stop in the game of the law! Mark Rein, star of the maddest thing we've ever published, is a lot of things. He's a former id Software play-tester. He's a vice president of Epic Games...

Guitar Hero: Pop Edition. Band Hero has long been lurking at the bottom of the Activision Blizzard release list in perplexing proximity to the more self-explanatory DJ Hero and Guita...

Engage? Star Trek Online is the stuff of dreams: not only for fans of the series who've dreamed of piloting their own starship since they were six, all tucked up tight in their Next ...

Family reunion. New York, meet New York. While Grand Theft Auto IV's Liberty City could not and would not claim to be a facsimile, it wears its influences proudly on the sheer glass ...

Summoning and soundbites from director Motomu Toriyama. Our last meeting with Final Fantasy XIII - playing the half-hour demo on the bonus disc nestled in the Advent Children special...

A confusing first meeting with Square Enix's new MMO. It's a general rule that Japanese developers are nowhere near as effusively forthcoming about their games at preview stage as th...

Ice ice baby. Platform games have come a long way in the last couple of decades. Remember when this was all just 2D side-scrolling fields? Now there are huge 3D environments to explo...

Renaissance. Non-linearity may be everywhere these days (with the option of being everywhere else), but as inFamous suggested and Assassin's Creed II now hopes to prove, a bit of lin...

Or whatever it's called. Modern Warfare 2? Modern Warfare 1 minute and 58 seconds more like. Nobody from Infinity Ward has made the trip to gamescom, the nervous Activision man demoi...

First details of NCsoft's new fantasy. Since the game's announcement in 2007, NCsoft's Seattle-based developer ArenaNet has been quiet about what's been going on behind its doors wit...

Superiority complex. So then, Napoleon. One of history's greatest military strategists. A man who almost single-handedly took the reins of power in one of Europe's greatest nations, ...

Handling with care. At the risk of labouring an already witless introductory riff, now they're cheating. It's my third visit to Black Rock to catch up with Split/Second, the racing game where everyone ...

East meets West. It's about time tri-Ace had another hit. The studio scored a big fat 9/10 with Valkyrie Profile 2 but that was nearly two years ago. Neither Infinite Undiscovery no...

The C&C arc comes to a close. We visit EA LA to find out how and why. Let's begin at the end, because that's what Command & Conquer 4 is: the conclusion to a sweeping PC favourite, t...

License to skill-points. A few minutes of footage is always unlikely to be representative of a role-playing game, because in a few minutes of videogame footage, in the face of lots o...

Chimp off the old block. Within the first few minutes of the Super Monkey Ball: Step and Roll presentation at SEGA's latest press event, we learn three disappointing facts. Firstly,...

Charles Cecil on resurrecting the classic adventure. If we had a new point-and-click adventure game for every time someone said: "That was definitely the last point-and-click adventure game," then we'd...

Russian attack. Do you want to know what a really expensive Russian-made MMO might play like? If Allods Online is any indication, the answer is that it might play a lot like one of i...

Rollover jackpot? London's Namco Centre, the location of this evening's hands-on event with Katamari Forever, sits almost exactly opposite the Houses of Parliament. Cast in the tall shadow of Big Ben, ...

Iron fisting. "Europe is kind of a big deal for us." Katsuhiro Harada, producer of Tekken 6, is eager to point out that this visit to London is much more than a matter of courtesy. While the latest tit...

Menage a terror. Call it Freudian if you like, but I'm a bit of a wet lettuce when it comes to chitinous murder-beasts that impregnate people with their foul spawn, and an ill-advise...

Gutsy. Space, it turns out, was not to be Mario's final frontier. Super Mario Galaxy 2 will no doubt offer players the chance to explore on uncharted planets, each with their own id...

Cliff hanger. Most mythology, by definition, has been around for donkey's years - when you're dealing with ancient legends and creation stories it's hard to come up with new material...

Counting the seconds. Remember when it was fashionable for action-adventure series to "go dark" a few instalments in? Jak II: Now With Guns, Prince of Persia: He's Got Dreads, Tomb R...

A new hope. When LucasArts, BioWare and EA revealed their new MMO Star Wars: The Old Republic last year, it was with a flourish, a loud fanfare, a lot of grand rhetoric, and almost no information. The ...

One man and his dog. Trends in gaming come and go just as they do with everything else. This year it's all about pretty action-adventure games and magic controllers. Last year it was shooting monsters ...

Tropic thunder. "Just Cause 2 is bigger and better than Just Cause 1 in pretty much every way possible," says lead designer Peter Johansson, beginning our E3 demo of the game. No offence, Peter, but th...

Modding off. As Sony's latest poster child for user-generated content, it's hardly surprising that people are already likening ModNation Racers to LittleBigPlanet. But it's not as similar as you initia...

Madder Max. At the end of our E3 Borderlands preview, Gearbox's Randy Pitchford, who's been talking for the last 20 minutes at an insane rate of knots without, apparently, ever needing to take a breath...

Shepard's delight. By the end of BioWare's first Mass Effect game, regardless of the gender, facial features, moral alignment and sexual predilections of your own personal Commander Shepard (ours was a...

Is 3D the future? Games companies are notoriously protective of their hottest properties, but film companies are even worse. Prior to the behind-closed-doors demo of Avatar we're told to hand in all el...

Ice climbers. This preview is arriving twenty minutes late, because the rigid demo schedule for Modern Warfare 2 was thrown into chaos earlier today when Verne Troyer arrived unexpectedly and was grant...