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Silent Hunter is all ready to set sail for the fifth time, harnessing the raw power of the modern day PC’s to deliver a richer and more life-like experience of what it feels like to be the commander of a hulking mass of bullet-shaped steel and sail right under the nose of enemy ships. Silent Hunter V has a bevy of improvements lined up of the previous iterations of the game. The most important one all these changes is that you no longer can change stations just at the flick of a switch. So now, if you want to go from the gunner’s station to another section of the ship, you will have to actually walk through the submarine, brush against other crew members and slid through port-holes to get to your destination, all in a first-persons view.
Thankfully, the realism factor can be toned down at will, keeping the game accessible to both the causal gamer as well as a true submarine-warfare sim fanatic. So if you are one of those who would rather prefer to have a third-person view of their submarine or just let loose a salvo of torpedoes on the enemy battle-ship, you can do just that by bringing the realism a notch down. Thankfully, by doing that, the game doesn’t turn into a cake-walk and still manages to throw enough challenges at you to keep you hooked.
Ever since the concept of Downloadable Content (DLC) gained popularity within the gaming scene, we have been offered everything as a DLC in games; right from new islands (Burnout), brand new single player campaigns (GTA IV) to new multiplayer maps (COD4, COD:WaW, BF:BC) and even something as inane as horse armor (Oblivion)! Infact, now it is assumed that any new game will eventually have a DLC for it.
Anything that would extend the life of a good game is always welcome but if a couple of chapters in-game are dropped in order to be sold to us later on, then that raises certain doubts in mind. Battle for Forli, the first DLC for the brilliantly made Assassins Creed II manages to raise a few doubts of its own. Fans of the series will love the fact that Ubisoft is releasing two additional chapter (the second DLC sometime in February) missing from the main campaign, which purportedly would have delayed the game. Leaving the questions aside for a while, let’s see what the DLC has to offer.
With 2010 just around the corner, our mailboxes have started recieving press-releases of games that we will be getting to see in the early months of the new year. Leading the pack will be Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell: Conviction. E-xpress Interactive have sent this press-release indicating that the game will be in India in February 2010. Though no concrete Indian release date has been mentioned, we are hoping that we get to play this game on our PCs and Xbox 360s on the same day as rest of the world i.e. Feb 20th, 2010.
E-xpress Interactive already has it its kitty full with some sweet AAA titles all set to launch over the course of next few weeks, Assassin’s Creed being one of them. This hasn’t stopped them from going all out and bagging the distribution rights for couple of other titles that will set the adrenaline pumping for some and for others, a great way to live the movie they just watched.
December 2009 will be seeing the release of Avataar, the official videogame based on the movie by the same name by Academy Award winning director, James Cameron. Avataar is his first movie after the runaway success of Titanic.
Those who prefer living in the fast lane will have their thirst for speed quenched with the release of F1 2009 for the PSP and the Wii. There are no concrete Indian release date revealed yet for F1 2009 but trust us to keep you posted.
E-xpress Interactive are slowly lifting the curtain on their Assassin’s Creed Indian launch plans. Some days back, we got the confirmation that after a long time, the console version of an Ubisoft game will be seeing an Indian release. Now E-xpress Interactive has revealed the pricing strategy and we must admit, after the shock that was Modern Warfare 2, these prices are indeed looking sweet. Have a look!
Just when we had given up on the hopes of getting the console versions of Assassin’s Creed 2, here in India, an unexpected mail dropped in to make them soar high again. Apparently, E-xpress Games will be bringing both the console version of the game in November. We don’t know the exact release date or price yet but expect to hear a word about it soon.
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After a dearth of games this summer, TGS ‘09 promises to bring in a new breeze of title announcement to flog in the ever ongoing console wars and drool at all the screenshots and videos of the soon-to-be-released games.
After wowing us during E3 2009, Sam Fisher sneaks in onto the TGS show floor. Here is a video of that, giving the sneaking a miss and rather concentrating on all the close-quarter combat. Sam Fisher seems to be in his element here, taking no prisoners and dispatching off enemies with a cold detachment. Have a look.
I remember my childhood obsession with airplanes very well – spending hours in a large wardrobe where I’d painstakingly “recreated” the cockpit of a fighter aircraft as realistically as I could at the age of 12 – exquisitely detailed HB-pencil and Crayola renditions of flight instruments, avionics and multiple bogeys, twelve o’clock high – where I’d sit for hours with a motorcycle helmet and a cricket bat serving as my HUD and my control stick, engaged in vivid imaginations of life-and-death dogfights at twenty five thousand feet. My poor parents assumed their kid was probably going to grow up to become an ace fighter pilot (or at the least, fly for an international carrier), that is, until television, videogames and an insatiable lust for pastry made sure my vision nosedived while my midriff went in the opposite direction.
With my flying career aborted before take-off, I found my lust for taking to the skies satisfied by the likes of Dale Brown’s tales of aerial derring-do and games such as Falcon 4.0, Jane’s Combat Simulations, Crimson Skies and Blazing Angels before being welcomed into the experienced embrace of Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator, IL-2 Sturmovik, Ace Combat and the unparalleled Lock On: Modern Air Combat, incidentally another Ubisoft IP. After having suckled at these teats for the better part of a decade now, Ubisoft dangles a brand new pacifier in the form of Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X. – a game that challenges Ace Combat to a 1:1 dogfight in its own airspace – toting an all new graphics engine, pick-up-and-play mechanics and a roster of aircraft that puts Fires of Liberation out to pasture. The real question is – can it deliver?
Much sand has slipped through the hourglass since Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time made its debut many moons ago, redefining a franchise that many of us began our long gaming journeys with. When the trilogy wrapped up with Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, there was not much left to do with the story considering how beautifully it tied off all loose ends. A new Prince of Persia, if it was ever to be made, was required to cast off its earlier roots and do something new, very much like what The Sands of Time managed to achieve. True to that, the new Prince of Persia game manages to shed off almost all the references to its predecessors and how!
Discarding the soft-tone look of The Sands of Time and the gritty look of Warrior Within, the new Prince of Persia instead looks in the direction of “illustrative” art-design, otherwise known as cel-shading. While dozens of other games like XIII, Crackdown and and Jet Set Radio Future dabbled with cel-shading in games, Prince of Persia emerges with, well, flying colors. The moment you fire up the game, you cannot help but be mesmerized by the visually stunning fantasy world the new Prince inhabits. It’s like the same art style as that of Braid has been multiplied tenfold and represented in glorious 3D for good measure. Every moment of the game feels like you are running through a living, breathing, pulsing watercolor painting in 3D.
Back in the days when the World War II genre was dying a slow death, with no COD4 in sight to revive it, the first Brothers In Arms title came like a fresh whiff or air, bringing with it real battlefield tactics and allowing you to step in the boots of a real commander. Nearly three years after the first in the series, Brothers in Arms: Road to Hill 30 tasted critical and commercial success, Gearbox Studios readies Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway (BiA:HH) to storm our consoles and PC in glorious HD. The ANGRY Pixel got it hands on PC preview code of BiA:HH to get a first hand taste of what the game has in store for us.