DJ Hero 2′s realigned focus on two turntables and a microphone was actually designed to be more than fodder for games journalists everywhere, who will now make coy references to Beck’s “Where It’s At” at every possibly opportunity from now until launch. Look, I just did it. Still, it’s the one thing FreeStyleGames is determined to get across for the (first) sequel: DJ Hero 2 has two turntables and a microphone.

The cynics will probably point out how, actually, DJ Hero 1 had support for two turntables and a microphone. But the microphone’s now been made a proper part of the game, with its own scrolling lyrics indicator and scoring system, instead of something you can sing into if you fancy it. You might as well have just used a hairbrush last year.

It’s easy to imagine nipping round your mate Dave’s place and belting out Jon Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer in Guitar Hero: World Tour. It’s harder to imagine performing karaoke in a custom DJ Hero mix with pauses, rewinds and the lyrics you know being cut into another track. I can picture FreeStyleGames looking enviously across the room at the Activision staff parties, their jealousy of Guitar Hero’s naturalistic co-operative experience uncontainable. Note: Jon Bon Jovi’s Livin’ on a Prayer has not been officially announced as part of the DJ Hero 2 tracklist, nor will it ever be. Probably.

But with the vocal experience featuring plenty of spoken word lyrics, and with a game having a scoring system based on beat and rhythm alongside pitch, actually being the person on the microphone looks set to be a whole different kind of experience than it is with Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Crooners need not apply, presumably, and those with a musical bone in their body will be delighted to see a game that’s about sticking to the beat instead of missing all the high notes on Don’t Stop Believin’.

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Like any self-respecting band of aging rockers, Guitar Hero’s having a moment of realisation after trying to stay current for the past few years. The adoring fans don’t want a modern tune – they want the old band back together. Who ever thought it was a good idea to put the Kaiser Chiefs in last year’s iteration? Guitar Hero is supposed to be about the gargantuan power of thrashing your tiny plastic guitar as an ode to the might spirit of rock.

So now Neversoft is taking the series in the opposite direction of the super-slick Guitar Hero 5, which was comfortably on par with Harmonix when it came to the Rock Band mould if you ask me. Then again, I’m the kind of person who last rolled out my Rock Band band (Goretopsy) to do a marathon Journey session. That’s clearly not what Neversoft is after: now we’re riffing off Guitar Hero 1, with an even more accentuated sense of nostalgia regarding the rock classics.

Of course, ‘rock classics’ is a bit of a subjective term and, with so many iconic tunes already rinsed and repeated throughout the series, Neversoft is left dishing out a setlist you probably wouldn’t include in your Desert Island Discs. Twisted Sister – We’re Not Gonna Take It was the opening track of choice in a recent presentation – need I say more? – and with Gene Simmons providing the game’s narration you could be forgiven for thinking it’s come over a little bit too glam for the most hardcore guitar heroes.

That’s until Black Sabbath – Children of the Grave blasts out of the speakers and cranks it up to 11. Just listening to it makes me want to grow my hair down to my knees and permanently dress in black. Rock. The full tracklist promises over 90 songs, and currently confirmed are tracks from the Buzzcocks, Rammstein, ZZ Top (a live version of Sharp Dressed Man – which should bring back memories of anyone who remember Guitar Hero from back in 2005), Slayer and Queen. Yes, it’s Bohemian Rhapsody. Goretopsy will knock that one out of the park.

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Hideo Kojima spent years polishing his vision of the Metal Gear series for the PlayStation 3, so it still comes as a bit of a surprise to see the spec-gobbling developer opt for the PSP with his cherished series’ next iteration. It’s very serious business: Peace Walker has often been touted as the spiritual Metal Gear Solid 5. Unless it doesn’t sell very well, that is, and in that case Konami will do its best to forget it ever happened.

Kojima can’t seem to let go of the series despite his frequent proclamations otherwise – make no mistake, he’ll be producing Metal Gear games long past the point people stop caring. Our latest jaunt, pressed up against the walls and shrubbery of Costa Rica, is because the venerated director, alongside the whole of Japan, has gone a little crazy for Monster Hunter. Which means 4-player co-op is in (for some of the game) and there’s plenty of references to Capcom’s gaming giant during the lengthy cutscenes. The game doesn’t strut around with the po-faced priggishness of MGS4, either, so if you grind enough hours into the game (how many I’m not certain – let’s just say lots) you can even play some Monster Hunter themed levels.

It’s still a convoluted medley of world politics between America and Russia, with Kojima’s preachy message about advocating nuclear disarmament occasionally blurred by his desire to express how chuffing awesome it would be to have a fleet of bipedal robots that could shoot nukes. Later into the game, for instance, Snake and his apolitical mercenary band acquire a Metal Gear for themselves with the belief that the only way to deter countries from meddling with their affairs is to acquire their own cache of nuclear missiles.

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We’ve not had to wait long for the Resurgence Pack, have we? It’s barely been two months since the Stimulus Package first spread like wildfire across Xbox Live, and here we are with another batch of 5 maps for the same hefty price of 1200 points. Oh Infinity Ward, you do spoil/exploit us and so on.

Map packs. We’ve been here before, we’ll be here again. Do they add anything to the game? Will they divide the player base? How on Earth am I supposed to find the time to work out new hiding spots? I’m a busy man you know. Oh, and price. I ended my review of the Stimulus Package with some thoughts on the pricing, but the initial community reception to the announcement of the Resurgence Pack shows there’s still plenty of venom regarding the cost.

It’s probably worth expressing some personal thoughts on the matter, so there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind as to which side of the fence I’m on. My Modern Warfare 2 clock stands at a little under four days, so dropping down about three pints worth of money on five new maps isn’t too much of a big deal for me. I’ll get my money’s worth.

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If Alpha Protocol’s dialog system is to be believed, all super spies work by uncomfortably modelling their lives around DVD boxsets they’ve picked up with leftover Christmas money. Michael Thorton is our super spy of the moment, living the jet-set life of international espionage and wooing ladies with (in my case at least) a massive hobo beard, but every few minutes a dialog pops-up and poses Alpha Protocol’s all-important question: do you want to be suave like Bond, professional like Bourne or aggressive like Bauer?

The logic is sound, and on paper Alpha Protocol reads like a rather tip-top action RPG; Mass Effect with spies instead of space. But all is not well in the world of video walls, plush hotel rooms and shady back-rooms, with the game having some of the limpest and counter-intuitive opening levels from any RPG in the last few years. It doesn’t hesitate to kit you out with an arsenal potent enough to make a gun fanatic swoon, provided they’re fond of a bog-standard weapon selection, but the problem comes from when you want to use those guns to actually shoot someone. Until you’ve funnelled hours of time and money into levelling up your skills you’ll have better luck taking out your enemies by jumping up and shouting “bang”.

Because of this, the game is radically different at the ten-hour mark than when you’re two hours in. You can actually fire in a straight line by this point, provided you’ve not spent your points on levelling up the shotgun or SMG abilities which have been added as comedy joke options. Despite the awkward teething problems, and the initially overpowered enemies, by the time you’ve sunk some time into your character sheet each subsequent trip to the levelling up screen becomes a guilty pleasure, and unlocking the bounteous wealth of fancy bits and bobs becomes a bit of a guilty pleasure that nicely spurs you onwards.

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Skateboarding is as much about chilling out and soaking up the communal atmosphere as it is trying to make a plank of wood defy gravity: the nature of the sport is social. EA is focusing on bringing that skater ethos to the series by emphasising online modes and adding a suite of team-based features into Skate 3. But its singleplayer mode is an altogether more corporate beast.

The aim is to guide your foundling Skate company to unimaginable riches by peddling a million of your own-brand boards in the new skating holy grail of Port Carverton. To do this, you and a posse adopt a slightly unorthodox -but impressively hands-on- campaign of wooing potential customers by pulling tricks on every pipe, rail and ramp you come across.

But in designing the city around online team play, EA has rendered their new playground devoid of the same spirit that proved so delightful in former games. The big-budget introductory sequence returns as an immediate jaw-dropper, but once the sheen of the nicely represented, chilled-out-to-the-max real-life skaters starts to wane, you realise part of Skate 2′s soul died in transition. Instead of being shooed away by groups of incensed pedestrians and security guards, you’re landing tricks into adoring crowds of fans reaching for their wallets. In former games the series promoted some off-kilter message about freeing New San Vanelona from corruption, now it constantly praises even the most low-key of accomplishments with an unrelenting celebration of gratuitous moneymaking.

Continue reading @ the Telegraph

UFC Undisputed 2010 came out this week, so plenty of ardent UFC lovers spent their weekends practicing arm bars, leg locks and guillotine holds – and in the game, too! Resident X360A reviewer, Lee Abrahams, gave the game an 86 and declared it to be “a fine addition to the blossoming franchise”.

The only problem with Yuke’s latest brawler seems to be if you rent it or buy it second-hand and decide you want to play it across the information superhighway, as each new copy of the game comes with a single-use code to enable online play. Those without this code will need to cough up 400 MSP. Are THQ right for doing this? And is this going to become standard practice across the industry?

Signs certainly point to yes for the latter. Alongside THQ’s online entitlement scheme, EA (who coined the scheme last year as ‘Project Ten Dollar’) has extended free online for new copies to their Sports products, but we’re yet to see the extent of that. Ubisoft has said they’re considering it, too.

Continue reading @ Xbox360Achievements

Call of Duty: Black Ops takes us back through time or, more specifically, to one particular stretch: the Cold War. It’s another case of history being told through the eyes of videogame designers, with military vignettes being picked out and displayed on account of their raw violence. Real life soldiers don’t have checkpoints, but let’s not worry about that.

From the get-go, Black Ops looks to be doing what Call of Duty does best – bombastic scenes told with explosive relish, scripted down to the very last tree trunk. The two levels on show at Activision’s pre-E3 press conference confirm the series’ age-old mantra of if it can explode, it will explode. And things certainly do explode.

The first level, WMD, takes us to the snow-kissed peaks of soviet Russia, with an elite black ops squadron (wait – that’s the name of the game!) named Kilo One tasked with infiltrating a dodgy weapons lab. Seeing as this is Call of Duty, ‘infiltrate’ loosely translates to ‘roughly shoot everyone in the face, jab them with pointy blades and toss them off mountains’. Who’s not down with that?

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Forget simple pylons, the reality of StarCraft II is that you must construct additional everything. My gaggle of Mauraders was my pride and joy until I looked up and saw the sun blotted out by a Mutalisk swarm. GG, f10, surrender. I even thought I was doing a pretty good job, up until the game told me I was performing a terrible 83 actions a minute in the post-match report.

I’m ashamed of myself and you, the reader, probably pity me. StarCraft fans still without access to the beta are probably fuming: “how did he, someone who is rubbish and a bit fat, get to play this game early when I was left out in the cold?” The answer is luck, mostly, alongside the fact StarCraft II is so daunting every other member of our staff was too afraid to have a go. That’s the kind of game it is.

Blizzard’s taut dedication to difficulty is impressive, and whilst other developers seem to be going out of their way to simplify every conceivable facet of the RTS genre it’s refreshing, admirable but still somewhat fear-inducing to see Blizzard proudly declare their game has been built from the ground up for the competitive eSports crowd. It’s serious business, for serious gamers, and it elicits such dedication that peripheral designers will release keyboards and mice specifically tailored to StarCraft II. People who just nip into their games for six hours and then move on need not apply.

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In designing a sequel to a cult classic, a developer has to walk a fine tightrope between innovation and familiarity. Turning a twee, colourful-linens franchise into a bevy of blades and metal will probably upset some of the fans, for instance. Coincidentally, my role in sequel development is sitting on my bum and making snide remarks whenever the process goes wrong. I am an integral cog.

Still, I have learnt a thing or two in my time. Such as this nugget: staying contemporary helps, but sometimes bucking a popular trend doesn’t pay off – just imagine if Master Chief popped up as an all-singing, all-dancing member of the USMC Glee club in Halo: Reach.

Ruffian Games will understand this better than most, having chewed their fair share of pen nibs thinking about designing Crackdown 2. Thankfully, they came to the right decision: Crackdown’s announcer is back. And he’s still happy to put a squad of agency peacekeepers – “this is going to hurt them a lot more than it’s going to hurt you” – on your tail as punishment for nonchalantly ploughing through a pack of civilians while trying to make your car do some totally sweet flips.

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