So… it’s basically Unreal Tournament but in a grubby desert?

If anyone wants to try it out, you can still get Hedone closed beta keys from Rock Paper Shotgun. I’m downloading it now. Let me know what you think.

Get more info on Hedone from their Twitter, the Facebook page or Hedone.tv.

Concept Art

Dem’s some sneaky tactics.

[Sorry, I forget whose tweet I clicked on to find this]

Steam are holding a week-long sale right now for this game and for the new co-op character add-on called Roesha – One Bad Mutha. You can buy The Baconing for just under a fiver and Roesha for 99p. The full game is also available on Xbox Live for 1200 MSP and Roesha for 120MSP.

Here’s what I’ve been doing for the last 30 minutes. It flickered less on my screen though. Urgh… Sorry about that. Will try to fix it for the next time. Pop over to my Livestream channel, you might catch me broadcasting over there.

Okay, I’ve done another livestream for The Baconing and this one seemed to work so I’ll replace the flickery video. Ta-dah!

The game engine certainly looks to be a fairly powerful one, with some nice lighting effects and level design to immerse you in the gritty, dark world of 2035. The enemies don’t look terribly varied, but they certainly are interesting: strange animated bits of rubble and wreckage, not to mention the requisite mutant freaks and zombies, rising up to oppose you. With the story of Albert, a medic from “The Republic”, emerging from a shelter from the last war nearly 20 years ago, it could easily fit alongside the Fallout series and id Software’s upcoming shooter Rage. There’s no doubt that the post apocalyptic genre is alive and well in computer gaming.

Screenshots

The Kinect Party mode has been demonstrated quite a lot at E3 and Gamescom but what you don’t often realise is that there are actually three traditional controller-based modes that make up most of the game:

• Road Trip
• Pile Up
• Rush Hour

When it comes to pure actions, the modes are very similar. Block off the incoming cars, blow things up. Each scoring method, however, requires a different approach. In Road Trip, if you let 5 cars escape the map, the level ends. Catch loads of cars and you’re rewarded bonuses like a row of police cars who will block a whole road for you. Catch all the cars and you’ll get the end-of-level destruction that wipes out all remaining building. Watch out for the clockwork shark. In Pile-up, you’re free to cause as much destruction as possible, which includes smashing down buildings and racking high scores by doing “skillshots” – i.e. exploding next to a car to send it careening across the map into another, preferably triggering a chain reaction of explosions when it hits.

There’s also gold car hidden on every map. Crashing into this will give you a huge bump to your score. You’ll know when you find it because the stirring strains of Spandau Ballet’s Gold will chime in over the explosions. Yup, most of Burnout CRASH! was inspired by the music of the 80s and early 90s, with Vanilla Ice, Salt ‘n’ Pepa’s Push It and half a dozen other songs making an appearance. The team wasn’t directly trying to target us gamers in our late 20s and early 30s but with most of the developers in that age range, the soundtrack “just seemed to fit”.

As a fan of the “traditional” crash mode seen in Burnout 3 and Burnout 4, I admit that I was horrified when I saw the first screenshots. Having sat down and played through a good few levels, it’s actually a good game. It’s fun. You need tactics and you can take a variety of approaches to beat your friends high scores which, thanks to the integrated Autolog, you won’t be able to avoid.

If a friend has beaten your score on a map, it will be shown in the menu during map selection with an A symbol. Rather more helpfully, you can use the Autolog feature to send direct challenges to your friends through the main game menu, choosing a venue, type and car. They’ll get ONE chance to beat your score, so no Cheaty McCheatersons playing a bunch of times and submitting the best score.

And so we come to the final mode: Kinect Party. Playing this by yourself makes you feel like a complete tit, running about your living room laying pretend eggs. Kinect treats your position from centre as an analog stick position and you have to do certain motions to crash your car – jump, squat, wave, lay aforementioned eggs and so on. Silly to do solo but fun in a group. As is always the way with Kinect, “you are the controller” so even people who are afraid of the 17-button shockers to which we gamers are all accustomed can join in. The imprecise level of control does a nice job of levelling the playing field and when you combine the Pizza of Fortune modifiers and other level features, everyone has a chance. Except me.

Watch the video of me and Asim Tanvir from Next-Gen Gaming Blog playing against EA’s Dan Sheridan and Criterion Games’ Dan McDonald, Garry Casey and Sean Donnelly.

Burnout CRASH! will be released on XBLA for 800MSP and PSN on 20th September. No PSN price confirmed yet.

You still have two-and-a-half weeks to try to beat his time. Go on, tootle off to your PS3 and look for the special Mercedes-Benz Driving Event.

After Nick’s RWC 2011 preview we were challenged by a group of rugby and games bloggers to a test of virtual rugby skills. Here’s what happened:

Rugby World Cup 2011 is now available on Xbox 360 and PS3.

Watch out for the v-up near the end. I was impressed. I honestly didn’t think those things were physically possible.

Remember how I said the the PS Vita takes a photo of you before the race? You can see that beauty in action at 00:30 (My eyes! They burn!)

Most of the technical demos were pretty dry, as you might expect. I have spared you the video footage of me failing to draw a 70° angle, so consider yourself lucky. We did see a couple of stands showing beautiful high-definition footage of a zen garden and of Zelda’s Link, presumably from an upcoming game. It’s not the most original but I do quite like the idea of using a hand-held touch screen to manage an RPG’s map and inventory.

The Controller

Nintendo Wii U Controller And Console

The thing about the Wii U controller is this: we’ve been shown nice concepts like the shuriken demo shown at the 2-minute mark of Nintendo’s reveal video but we’ve already seen this type of human-computer interface across several of the many Nintendo DS iterations. The touch and dual screens have been out since 2004 and I’m still waiting for that mind-blowing implementation to capture me the way Kinect did on day one.

As you could see in the video, the gyroscopic/directional sensor can be a fun way to give you a window into another world. This year’s 3DS does the same thing. I’ll admit, as someone who exclusively plays handheld consoles on the Tube or when sick in bed, I’m far more likely to use any gyroscopic controls in the safety of my living room than on a train. Scaling these up to a big HD screen is no bad thing. However, I have yet to see or hear a killer idea that would make me want to fork out for yet another console, especially if only one gamer will be able to use the tablet controller. Buying a games console to magnify a web page? Please…

Why Buy?

Nintendo tried to sell Wii U in their reveal trailer with the point that if someone wants to use the television, you can carry on playing your game on the small screen. No. Just… no. When I’m playing a game from a HD console on a 40-inch television I want the full, immersive, big screen, surround-sound experience. If I wanted to play arcade-style games on a small screen I’d borrow Nick’s iPad. Transferring to a portable machine would have been a huge advantage 10 years ago when we were all reliant on save points to preserve our progress. Expectations are different these days.

Let me be clear – I think that having a powerful machine capable of HD graphics will be a great advantage in that more companies will be willing to develop for it. More minds, more ideas, more creativity. I am excited to see what concepts better minds than my own will come up with for this, but wary given the similarities to the (3)DS.

Even though prancing around to the jaunty demo music was fun, I just can’t see a reason to start saving the pennies yet. Can you?