Dirt 3 Updated Hands-On

By Guy Cocker,GameSpot UK


While Dirt 2 was another highly praised, commercially successful racing game for Codemasters, the studio received plenty of feedback from fans about how to improve it. Tackling criticism is never an easy task, but the team is up front about how it aims to appease fans. More rally driving, more cars, and more variety in stages are the main points they are aiming to address, as well as a greater level of visual and aural fidelity. We found out about the developer's aims during a recent visit to Cardiff, Wales, and spoke to legendary driver Ken Block about gymkhana's inclusion in Dirt 3--the first time the discipline has ever appeared in a racing game.

Beat Ken Block at his own game with gymkhana runs around Battersea Power Station.

The main criticism that Codemasters faced post-Dirt 2 was that the game sacrificed rallying for other disciplines. As a result, Dirt 3's career mode will be 60 percent rallying. We got to race the Audi Sport Quattro around one of the new rally stages set in Finland and were impressed with the myriad of improvements. The physics engine is noticeably more advanced, resulting in very realistic differences between surface types. As we went around corners, the wheels touching the grass would slow down, meaning that we could use the rougher surface to tactically aid drifting. As one representative noted, the undulating dips on some of the tracks can also be used to your advantage, acting as grooves for your wheel to follow round the bend.

There are also new assists that help novice rally drivers when they're just starting out. These were turned on by default in our playtest and included stability control, corner braking, and throttle management. Once disabled, the car became more difficult to drive and more prone to spinning out, but not uncontrollably so, just adding another layer of challenge during our third and fourth run-throughs of the track. Codemasters has also chosen to keep the flashback feature of the second game, allowing you to rewind and retry any section of your run. However, the overall difficulty levels are still being tweaked at this stage, so we'll have to wait and see what levels of accessibility and simulation are catered for.

One thing's for sure--with gymkhana now included in the game, rally aficionados are going to have a serious challenge on their hands. Gymkhana is a series of stunts and jumps that are performed in quick succession, and it's a sport that has been popularised by Ken Block on YouTube. The track that we got to play on was a short section of the DC Compound, otherwise known as London's Battersea Power Station, which also appeared in Dirt 2. The compound will gradually open up as you progress through the career, but we got a short section to drive around and test our skills in.

The compound run contained six challenges that we had to try to complete as quickly as possible. Pole Dancer required us to lock the handbrake and donut around one of the pillars on the track--a tricky skill that needs a gentle finger on the accelerator and precise application of the brakes. Other drifting challenges were Trailer Thrash, Pipe Dream, and Can You Dig It, which have you balletically careering your car under trailers, through pipes, and under a digger's arm, respectively. Finally, there were Airborne and Block Buster--the former rewarding a jump with a clean landing, and the latter being about smashing all the foam blocks dotted around the track. This course took us many minutes to complete, even after numerous runs, but it's clear that gymkhana will offer hardcore players proving grounds that will separate the best from the best.

Developers at the studio have managed to clock a 36-second record--an impressive time that they admit will no doubt be

Heads explode in our first look at Fist of the North Star

Exploding heads and punching go together like Peabo Bryson and Celine Dion. Fist of the North Star looks to take this classic combination (the former, not the latter) into the realm of video games. This video game adaptation of the comic book focuses on the ridiculous bloodshed and unending swath of enemies that fans might expect, but it's going to see quite a few changes from its original Japanese release to its North American debut. It's too early to know how this will turn out, but fans of wanton violence should pencil this into their appointment calendar.

There are two separate stories in Fist of the North Star: Ken's Rage. The first, called Legend, retells the original story from the comic. Dream is the other mode, letting you rush through a unique story made just for this game, and it's the only way you can play with a friend by your side. We saw a level from the Legend mode, though the story was cut out entirely so we could get a good look at the punching, kicking, and other life-ending melee maneuvers.

The bulk of the game plays out like a 3D version of Double Dragon. Your mindless foes are little more than fleshy bags of blood, and you do them the service of ending what are most assuredly miserable lives. There are super moves in addition to the standard punches and kicks. At one point, the hero Kenshiro picked up a dude by his neck, punched him a few times in the face, and then punted him 10 feet away. At another time, he conjured flaming pillars from the ground. Clearly, this guy doesn't take guff from anyone. He can even make his enemies' heads explode after performing a thousand-hand punch. Violence is his mother's maiden name.

Kicking grown men in the chest and head can get exhausting after a while. Fortunately, there are vehicles to ferry you around when your legs are tired. We saw Kenshiro ride on top of a horse and motorcycle, knocking down foes on his way to his next location.

The version we saw today was still the Japanese build of the game, but the developer promised us that the mindless enemies would be given more thoughtful AI, and the violence would be made even more extreme. Fist of the North Star is due out this fall for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Tune it to GameSpot to see if claims of even more bloodshed came to fruition, and if the game is fun to play.


~ Tecmo
~ Koei
~ Beat - Em-Up
~ Realease : Nov 2, 2010
~ ESRB : Mature

We tear through the Sports and Performance series events in the first Need for Speed from Burnout studio Criterion.

Need for Speed publisher EA is frank about the position of its premier racing series, that is, in the doldrums, after some recent lacklustre offerings. "We were beating up the franchise," says Patrick Soderlund, EA senior vice president. "We wanted to come back from [Need for Speed] Undercover." The decline was attributed to an unworkable one-year development cycle--"You can't make quality that way," he says--and so development duties for this latest instalment went to Criterion, the British studio behind the Burnout series.

With its racing game pedigree and a longer development period in hand, Criterion settled down to making Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, which Soderlund describes as the 1998 PlayStation game (Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit) built for a new generation.

Accordingly, cops-versus-racers action is the hook, and Criterion is well suited to deliver it. The multiplayer modes centre on aggressive, top-speed, eight-driver chases, with players cast either as illegal racers or as the Seacrest County police, who are dispatched to shut them down by any means necessary--with those means ranging from barging them off the road, to spike strips, to electromagnetic pulse weapons. The career mode, on the other hand, is split between that of the racer and the police. You can independently make progress on either side, unlocking events and vehicles for each and earning the bounty you need to reach wanted level 20 (as a racer) or rank 20 (as a cop).

The racer's career is mapped out as time trials, races, duels, and hot pursuits pinpointed across West Coast USA Seacrest County--a state that conveniently spans timber forest, desert, canyon, valley, snowy mountainside, and sandy seafront. Career challenges for the police differ, adding the likes of the chase-and-takedown interceptor event. The developer has declined to go open world; locations are discrete and routes straightforward, with the occasional side route that may or may not be a shortcut.

The game is keen to remind you it is "powered by Autolog"--an overarching social network that links your experience to that of friends, tracking your accomplishments against theirs, sharing photos, and recommending events to try. And though Autolog is the chief innovation in Hot Pursuit, it will still be the core action--that is, the actual driving--that carries the day, or not. It has been up to the task so far, with great drifty arcade handling set off by handsome environments and, as you'd hope, even better-looking cars.

As a racer in career mode, your first vehicles include the sports series' Porsche Boxster Spyder, the BMW Z4 sDrive 35is, the Mazda RX-8, and the Nissan 370Z, and then, as you progress into the performance cars of the second series, you gain access to motors such as the Maserati Gran Cabrio, the Jaguar XKR, and the Alfa Romeo 8C. As a cop, you start out with the classic Ford Crown Victoria and then graduate to a highway patrol Subaru Impreza WRX ST1 and beyond.

Before you reach the rarest and fastest cars in the uppermost series, you get a taste of what's to come in preview events. These time trials temporarily loan you one of the most exotic models: a Pagani Zonda Cinque, for starters, followed by a Porsche 911 GT3 R5, and then a McLaren F1. Hooning down a highway through a snowfield at 200-plus miles per hour in the latter makes the earliest drives feel practically leisurely. Some events in the performance series are designed specifically to showcase car types, pitting American muscle cars against each other along a desert highway, plus Italian convertibles alongside a beach, and German all-wheel drives on a stormy night on wet roads.

The familiar, Burnout-like handling is accompanied by Burnout's trademark spectacular crashes and bodywork-crumpling slow-mo instant replays. These come thick and fast in the most aggressive career events, between the feisty AI and the constant incentive to drive into oncoming traffic; your nitrous boost is refilled by slipstreaming other cars and driving in the wrong lane. Play feels agreeably accessible; the crashes, if they don't wreck you, are spectacular hiccups rather than race-losing, controller-clenching disasters.

Accessibility extends into the game's steady tick of unlocks and levelling. Though finishing a race in the top three will land you bonus experience points (bounty), these can be picked up all over the place, with encouraging onscreen pop-ups for dodging police roadblocks or nearby crashes, for reaching top speed, for wrecking a cop, and so on. That accessibility, combined with Criterion's eye for quality and detail (the eclectic soundtrack mixes Pendulum, M.I.A., Plan B, and Bad Religion), should serve it well upon launch in November. EA will be praying the studio has turned out what Soderlund calls the "first real comeback for Need for Speed."

EA's latest shooter takes the best bits of Bad Company 2 and brings them to a free-to-play audience.

Looking at the feature list for Battlefield Play4Free, you'd be forgiven for thinking it had been ripped straight from Bad Company 2. You can choose from classes such as soldier, medic, and engineer; use vehicles such as tanks and planes; and battle with up to 32 players online. Many of the maps also come from Bad Company 2, along with weapons and visual design. However, the RPG-like levelling system from Heroes is still present, albeit with different career paths. Instead of gaining power-ups for your character, you now work your way through ranks, all the way from infantry to special ops. Each time you level up, new weapons and abilities are unlocked, which you can use to upgrade your character.

In our brief hands-on, we played a capture-the-flag mode. It took place on a dusty map filled with sand, war-torn houses, and wide roads, which were perfect for driving tanks on. Playing as American soldiers, we battled our way to flagpoles and secured them from the enemy. While capturing a flag, we had to fend off tanks and enemy soldiers, who were raining down bullets and shells on our location. The game felt instantly familiar, and players with any experience with Bad Company 2 will feel right at home. The same precise shooting and character movement were present, and there was no indication other than the visuals that we were playing a free game.

Though the visuals were impressive for a free-to-play title, with plenty of detail in the environments, weapons, and explosions, they lacked the crispness of the game's retail predecessors. EA explained that this allowed it to run on low-spec hardware, so even gamers with old PCs could get in on the action without upgrading. Like Heroes, Battlefield: Play4Free will use purchasable battle points, allowing flush players to buy vanity items such as character costumes, as well as more practical items such as boosts, which let you temporarily gain more experience points. Fortunately, powerful items won't be purchasable, so players won't be able to buy their way to the top of the leaderboards. Battlefield: Play4Free is due for release in 2011, with a closed beta launching later this year. Interested gamers can sign up over on the official site.

Skate 3 Updated Hands-On

EA hit the ground running with its Skate franchise, which from day one offered a uniquely analog-stick-driven control scheme and a refreshing, true-to-the-sport approach to skateboarding. Now on its third installment in four calendar years, the development team at EA Black Box is looking to keep the series fresh when the next game arrives this May. The team's approach is twofold: introduce a brand new city to work your skateboarding magic in and shift the focus of Career mode to the social aspect of the sport.

The city, this time around, is a fictional metropolis called Port Carverton. It replaces San Vanelona, which had been the setting of the first two games in the series. Like San Van, Port Carverton is designed as a skater's Mecca that draws inspiration from famous skate spots from all over the world then drops them into one great big hodgepodge of benches, ledges, and impossibly inviting urban architecture. The team's cheeky approach to using real-world locations has resulted in areas like Second and Navy, a waterfront pier skate spot with a suspiciously similar look to San Francisco's Third and Army, or the Aletown neighborhood that will invoke a distinct sense of deja vu for anyone who's been to Vancouver's Yaletown.

But unlike the San Vanelona of Skate 2, which was a city overrun by the anti-skateboarding Mongo Corporation, Port Carverton is a city that feels like it wants to reach out and give you a big ol' hug. Gone are the capped handrails that you had to recruit a friend to pry off, as are the guards that came out of nowhere to knock you off your board whenever you found a particularly shiny marble ledge in the center of the financial district. Instead, Port Carverton is described by Black Box senior producer Jason DeLong as a genuine skater's paradise; a place where security guards will go out of their way to point you toward cool spots and the sun never seems to stop shining.

A new Career mode will act as your tour guide through Port Carverton. As a continuation of the previous two games, Skate 3 has you more or less at the pinnacle of your career, and now it's time to do what seemingly all famous skaters do: start your own board company. Selling boards and building your brand is the main thrust of the Career mode, with each career challenge offering a reward in the form of board sales. It feels similar to an experience points system that will trigger new milestones at increasing intervals, which unlock more challenges, gear, and new spots to skate throughout the city.

Because a board company isn't complete without sponsored riders, you'll need to go out and recruit some folks to join your team. The cool part about this is that it opens up the possibility to play the entire Career mode cooperatively with friends over Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network. We got a chance to play a number of co-op challenges and walked away impressed by the different experience that pulling off a challenge with a friend can deliver.

The photo challenges were easily our favorites. With these, you and your teammates all need to perform a trick on (or over) a specific object before a timer runs out, such as launching over a huge gap or grinding a specific ledge. With more than one player, you now have the opportunity to coordinate your skating so that you all wind up in each other's shots. So you might have one guy grinding a bench while the other airs over him, or both of skaters might launch over a gap in tandem--that sort of thing. You can, then, take that sweet photo and tweak it with a number of postproduction options (brightness, contrast, depth of field, and the like) before seeing it turn into an in-game magazine cover that you might later find plastered all over the city as a flier or even a billboard.

All the other usual suspects return in the Career mode challenges, including downhill races, high-score competitions, and video challenges. We asked DeLong about one of the criticisms of the last game that had to with the way later challenges in the Career mode got very specific about what sort of trick you had to do and what you had to do it on (anyone who remembers doing a handplant on a basketball backboard will know what we mean), which often turned into a roadblock in your career progression. For Skate 3, DeLong says they've focused more on creating tiered pools of challenges that let you pick and choose which specific challenge you want to complete in order to unlock the next pool. Another criticism--pedestrians getting in your way during critical moments--has been remedied with a button that now lets you raise up your arms like the boogeyman and scare people away instantly. Supposedly, the volume of physics-enabled litter has been scaled back as well, so at least now there's not quite as much tripping on stray soda cans just as you are about to ollie onto a handrail.

Our time with Skate 3 also revealed a few other notable additions. Besides three difficulty levels, which is a first for the series, you can now take part in an extended tutorial system. This system is called Skate School with Coach Frank, and the coach is a thoroughly goofy character voiced by actor, as well as former pro skateboarder, Jason Lee. You can also now place an invisible photographer at any point in the game, letting you snap photos quickly and easily at any location without having to pull up the video editor to place a tripod camera then scroll to where you want in the video timeline to pull out a still shot. You'll see the customized character of anyone you're friends with on PSN or Live cruising through your city as an AI skater, even if you're just free skating around town. And in a nice little touch, if you appear in a friend's video that becomes a smash hit on the skate.reel content sharing system, you'll gain royalties in the form of boards sold in the Career mode.

It's hard to get a good idea of how well the whole online component will work in Skate 3 from the relatively limited time we spent with it, but overall, we liked what we saw. The new city should infuse some fresh air into the series for those who were disappointed by the reuse of San Van in Skate 2, and there are definitely some features that should make the game more accommodating to new players. We're looking forward to spending more time with the Career mode to see what sort of trouble we can get into online, so be sure to check out our upcoming coverage leading up to Skate 3's May release.