A Horror Gaming Flood Is Coming
E3 is well under way, and for us horror fans the news is coming fast and in large amounts. With every big announcement about Halo 3 or Mario comes a bunch of little ones geared towards us, the horror community. Just take a look at all these titles coming for the PC and all three next-gen consoles…
Hellgate London
Hellgate London was one of the best games at the last E3, and since it isn’t out yet, it’s making another E3 appearance. With that here are a new batch of screenshots and an updated look at the promising PC title game.
Flagship Games, made up of many people who worked on the Diablo games, is behind this unique looking action RPG, and the past year of development certainly hasn’t hurt the game any. Gamespy had a chance to play a new area, and it’s quite different from the randomly assembled cityscapes of previous demos.
This level saw them traversing the inside of a characters mind… hinting that the game might be a bit deeper in story than you might expect from what’s looking to be a hack and slash dungeon romp.
One goal of the game is to let people play it how they want. Gamespy got to look at some of the different classes: the engineer that gets to build custom robot friends to fight alongside him and more instantly obvious classes like ‘marksman’ or ‘blademaster’ which each specialize in the game’s first person shooting and melee combat, respectively.
Check out Gamespy’s article for more.
F.E.A.R. Unafraid to Continue
So it’s like this. You publish a critically acclaimed first person shooter by talented developer Monolith. As part of your deal, you own the brand, but they own the ongoing rights to the characters and world in which the game is set. The game comes out to much success.
However, a rival publisher buys that talented developer. Now you’re left with a game you can’t make a sequel to. The developer can’t call their sequel F.E.A.R. 2, but that’s their problem. Your problem is you have this hot property you can’t use…
At least that’s what you might think. Vivendi Universal announced F.E.A.R. Perseus Mandate for the Xbox PC and F.E.A.R. Files for the Xbox 360.
Perseus Mandate is a new expansion pack (F.E.A.R. Extraction Point was the first) that sidesteps the issues of a sequel by telling a side story to the original game. It introduces a new team to gamers (one that presumably can be taken on into their own sequels) and shows a different side of the Armachem incident… the storyline Vivendi still has access to.
F.E.A.R. Files on the other hand takes Extraction Point and Perseus Mandate to the Xbox 360, bringing 360 fans up-to-date with the storyline.
IGN has some screenshots of both games. No PS3 version of F.E.A.R. Files has been announced at this point.
Hobo Fight Club is Condemned Too
People are finally getting a chance to get a hands-on look at Sega and Monolith’s sequel to the Xbox 360 launch title Condemned 2: Bloodshot, which is heading to the Xbox 360 and PS3 sometime early next year.
The original was a brutal jaunt through abandoned buildings full of crazy vagrants and bizarre serial killers that became more seemingly supernatural as the story went on, allowing Condemned 2 to be more overtly weird.
According to GameSpot, Ethan gets lynched at the beginning of the game by a psycho with a brick, and he comes around in a hellish and seemingly deserted city where vast portions of it are covered in strange black tar that looks like something out of a Japanese horror movie or that weird thing in The Raft from Creepshow 2.
The tar isn’t out to kill you, but anything covered in tar is a gateway through which the tar covered monstrosities can come crawling out of. It sounds like an intense and disturbing situation, which is perfect for any Condemned sequel.
From the IGN article it sounds like the deeper melee combat is shaping up nicely, as is the new optional but better realized forensics system, but it’s the former that has lead to a whole new instant action mode.
Hobo Fight Club was designed as a simple space in which to test out the new combat engine, but it proved so popular amongst the developers that it’s being fleshed out into its own mode, backed up of course by online leaderboards. Enemies keep jumping into a pit with you and you keep fighting until you die.
Hobo Fight Club should provide a breather from the dark brooding intensity of the single player with a more arcade slanted focus, and it should also add even more longevity to the game along with the as yet unrevealed multiplayer modes.
Darksiders Has Monsters Galore
What the hell is Darksiders? Well, I wish I could tell you.
From the looks of it, it’s some kind of action, shooty, horror thing with industrial environments and big alieny demony things.
Given that we only have 13 screenshots to go on, it’s hard to say much other than it does look like a horror game, it’s coming to the Xbox 360, and it may or may not be coming to the PlayStation 3.
Silent Hill 5 Finally Steps out of the Fog
Oh yes. Only one name can stand next to Resident Evil in stature when it comes to horror gaming. Since you already clicked on this story, you know what that name is, and though it isn’t much at all, our first glimpse at anything to do with Silent Hill 5 is huge news.
So yes, it’s just a badly narrated video and a few screenshots… but that doesn’t matter. It’s still very exciting to be able to say that Silent Hill 5 is coming to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.
Electronic Gaming Monthly has the exclusive on the game, so the wraps won’t be properly taken off it until the October issue hits newsagents (in early September naturally).
Konami just issued a press release on the game that sheds a little more light into the plot.
“The game follows Alex Shepherd, a war veteran returning home from an overseas tour of duty to investigate the mysterious disappearance of his younger brother, Joshua. His travels will lead him through the small, insular community of Shepherd’s Glen and eventually through the hauntingly empty streets of Silent Hill.“
Head to 1up.com for the teaser and an exclusive screenshot, or if you’d like to take a look at a bunch of uncompressed, non-exclusive screens, just click here.
Zap Zombies with Wii!!!
Some cynical people might say that it’s just a piece of plastic that you slot the wiimote and nunchuck into, but all the same today Nintendo unveiled the ‘zapper’… showcasing it with Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles.
While it is indeed a piece of plastic you slot the wiimote and nunchuck into, it pretty clearly looks to feel a lot closer to using a real gun than the controllers by themselves would, changing not just the form of controller but also adding a much more gun-like trigger.
The zapper is going to sell for $20, and it looks like RE:UC is the game that it’s going to debut with. It should be the defacto way to play the game and should bring it that much closer to feeling like the arcade experience it looks like on paper.
Click here to see it in action!
Well, that wraps things up for right now. Don’t worry though as there is much more in store as E3 keeps on rolling.
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