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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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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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

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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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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Our Editor-in-Chief, Dan, has tucked himself away in a little building and left me out in the open capturing the point. Tick. I see ten, fifteen, twenty enemies marching in our direction, but more than half of them are felled by Dan before they get close enough for me to pick off with my AK47SU. Tick tick. I don’t mind that he’s getting all the kills, as I proved my worth a few minutes ago when I blew up a battleship. Tick tick tick.

The enemies are relentless. The satisfying ding that accompanies each kill in Bad Company 2 is continually echoing as scores of the dead begin to pile up. A tank rolls down the hill and I’m torn between my desire to run away and my need to stay on the capture point. Tick tick tick tick. The blast from my RPG-7 connects and the thing explodes. We cheer. The point is captured. Engineer was a fine choice.

This is Onslaught, and at the beginning it doesn’t feel quite right. These are familiar sights – Valparaiso, Atacama Desert, Isla Inocentes and Nelson Bay – but they’re dotted with an altogether different enemy and the change to the beat is eerie, as if you’ve stepped into a different dimension where Valpariso is occupied by gangs of harmless puppets with a duff shot instead of Medics who like to hide in the low ground at the fishing port.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2’s multiplayer component is so outstanding it makes the single-player seem like an unnecessary distraction, so I’m not immediately convinced that we need some premium DLC where human players get to fight computer-controlled allies. Still, it can’t be any worse than flogging some palette swaps for 400 points.

Continue Reading @ Xbox360Achievements

Like the developers of EA’s Medal of Honor reboot, I’ve seen The Hurt Locker – clearly a major source of inspiration for the game – and it’s a pretty grim portrayal of the politically perilous situation over in the Middle East at the moment. So, who wants to grab an M4 and shoot some terrorists right in the face?

“We’re Rangers. This is what we do,” enthuses a marine to his family over the phone, presumably directly referring to the act of shooting terrorists in the face but said to assuage his family’s fears over him being riddled with bullets or blown up by a roadside bomb. He doesn’t bother to remind the family about regenerating health and generous checkpoints.

The action takes place in the north of Afghanistan, we’re told, so we’re left to assume that the narrator is either safe in the south or simply lying to his family. In my mind, his son is waving an American flag for the duration of the conversation, although the imagery being displayed on-screen is decidedly less patriotic: an American Chinook is being destroyed by rocket fire. Crumbs. Is the child now without a father? Medal of Honor is trying very hard to make us empathise with these characters on a human level.

You do not empathise with these characters on a human level. You can’t, because as soon as the action starts they’re little more than a regular gung-ho military superhero type who blasts away scores of enemies without a care in the world. I am told this is not what it is like to be an actual marine – just like the developers, most of my military knowledge comes from old war movies and the odd documentary on the History Channel when I’ve lost the remote control – so no matter how hard EA strives for authenticity, it will forever be out of the game’s reach. Might as well toss in a few snowmobiles and explode a nuke in space, eh?

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Isaac Clarke was a mute as he reduced alien foes to limbless chunks of blood and mush within the twisty corridor confines of the USG Ishimura in the original Dead Space. In the sequel, though, he’s not afraid to flap his gums. You’d think it would be the opposite, but it’s just more proof (if proof were needed) that Isaac has a stronger constitution than most.

After cracking hundreds in half, he’s also seen fit to grow his own spine. He’s not the errand boy anymore – this, according to developer Visceral Games, was the biggest flaw of the original – and is now taking charge of sorting out the latest undead invasion pickle.

It looks, sounds and feels almost the same as the original. But the familiarity should not breed contempt; Dead Space after all was a splendid action-cum-horror game that was the greatest tragedy in 2008’s flood of underappreciated titles, and the core of the game requires very little tweaking to competently put competing titles to shame.

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Street Fighter is always guaranteed to provoke a response. From the legions who will return the game in a week because of their disgust at repeated online batterings to those who will invest in an arcade stick costing hundreds of pounds and countless hours of their life, Capcom’s iconic fighter is a dense, complicated arena of rules, moves, tics and ultra combo finishers.

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