The game will be available for PS3, PS2, Xbox 360, and Wii. So far, it’s release date stands at Holiday 2008. Sega says that the new title will feature their ‘Hedgehog Engine’ (a three year project) which incorporates new lighting effects and brings Sonic’s speed to life.

Storyline is as follows: Dr. Eggman once again threatens to terrorize the world, and it’s up to the blue hedgehog to reunite the seven continents using the chaos emeralds. The time of day will also play a factor during gameplay and new adventures will open up once the sun sets. Players will also be able to play around with “four new speed mechanics” while blazing around the levels in both 2D and 3D. However the details of these new mechanics are still unknown.

Sean Ratcliffe, Vice President of Marketing at SEGA of America says: “It is an exciting time for the Sonic franchise as we look to reinvent our hero while staying true to the spirit of what made him an industry icon. Sonic Unleashed will introduce a new, unexpected storyline along with innovative gameplay that compliments traditional skills and features, allowing players to experiment and engage in new ways.”

Look for Sonic’s new story this holiday for the PS3, PS2, Xbox 360 and Wii.

Link

This is a summary of the new stages taken from Xbox.com-

Ghost Town- This map is a battle-scarred maze of narrow passages and dangerous ruins outside the once-prosperous city of Voi. Collapsed ceilings and shell-battered buildings provide both valuable cover and deadly traps, as catwalks and stairways take the fight from claustrophobic ground combat to dizzying rooftop battles. “Ghost Town” is a mid-sized map ideal for Team Slayer games and smaller objective types.

Avalanche- “Avalanche” is a tribute to “Sidewinder,” a Halo: Combat Evolved fan favorite. This massive, vehicle-oriented objective map adds a twist to its classic predecessor with all new interiors, dramatically reshaped exteriors, and brand new vehicle variants. Take a ride and admire the visual variety from the cockpit of the re tuned Hornet.

Blackout- As its name suggests, “Blackout” is a remake of the Halo 2 classic “Lockout,” a cold series of interconnected platforms and walkways. Where “Avalanche” was re tuned, reworked and massaged into something both familiar and unfamiliar, “Blackout” is a remake in a pretty strict sense of the word.

Here at grayhouse we agree with Bungie on the “healthy competition issue. With both games trying to tackle the top spot, each one has to be improved and updated. It is very possible that Bungie could return Halo 3 to its former uncontested online glory if they can deliver with the release of the Heroic Map Pack. These next few weeks will be very interesting for the Xbox Live world so be sure to check grayhouse for weekly updates.

Xbox 360 Top Live Titles

1. Call of Duty 4
2. Halo 3
3. Guitar Hero III
4. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2
5. Gears of War
6. Rock Band
7. Army of Two
8. Forza Motorsport 2
9. Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas
10. FIFA 08

Dark Sector is supposed to be a superhero saga, although saga may be a generous term. You play as Hayden Tenno; CIA operative and an attempt at creating an antihero with a Fallout Boy look – whoever thought of that as the epitome of dark and brooding needs a reality check. The game opens with Hayden embodying his appearance – whining about being on a mission in Lasria, a Soviet bloc state somewhere in Eastern Europe. He’s crying crocodile tears because Lasria is full of metal encrusted zombies and the virus that created them might be airborne. Maybe I’m being hard on our protagonist, but for this CIA operative it’s either grow some cojones or become zombie meat.

Oddly enough, both happen within the game’s first fifteen minutes: the virus infects his arm and it becomes a nasty fleshy mess, but for some reason (which I’m still unsure of) Hayden fights off any notion of eating brains and the infection becomes the cojones of Dark Sector – from his powerful infected metallic arm sprouts the glaive.

The narrative is pulled straight from a made for TV sci-fi movie, complete with a random old European man, a lover from Hayden’s past and a crazed antagonist with a British accent – it’s all completely forgettable. The basics that you need to know: Hayden is responsible for savings lots of folks and atoning for bad (and unelaborated upon) stuff in his past. And more importantly: his newly infected body grows more powerful as the virus spreads, and in turn, you’ll be treated to neat powers to play around with throughout the game.

Slicing up zombies with the glaive is a blast

The prologue arms you only with a pistol; players of Gears of War will feel immediately at home. Dark Sector copies and pastes the cover based gunplay from Epic’s shooter note for note – too bad it can’t play the music. Aiming is wonky at first and takes a while to get used to – it also lacks the intensity, weight and polish that made Gears so great. The “roadie run” makes an appearance as well, but it’s more of a delicate glide – matching Mr. Tenno’s meek demeanor – when compared to the chaotic gallop of Gears.

Thankfully for Dark Sector, this mediocre gunplay is only the focus for about fifteen minutes, because after the infection, it is all about the glaive.

Again, it’s best to describe this extension of Hayden’s body as a boomerang (or the Krull, if you grew up in the eighties) – throw it with the right bumper, let it slice and dice and it will always come back to your hand, ready to go again. While the rotating blade is making its rounds, claiming limbs and victims, you can shoot your pistol to finish off any stragglers – no assault rifles or shotguns while the glaive is out and about. There is great a rhythm to combat found in letting the glaive loose, capping some heads, rolling to another place for cover, and always finding it back in your grasp.

There are series of special abilities that are unlocked as you progress. The first is a power throw that has you do a timed toss of the glaive (think Gears’ active reloads) and if done correctly it will glow yellow, meaning it deals four times the regular damage. The second is the “aftertouch” which lets you guide the glaive around with the analog stick (or sixaxis on PS3) and it gives precision to ranged combat as well as encourages you to kill in wild angles that you wouldn’t think were possible. Another is the glaive’s ability to absorb elements (fire, ice, electricity) and use them in combat, also key in solving some very simple environmental puzzles. The last (and the least of them) is a shield, invisibility and grabbing objects at long range – they don’t do much in the way of mixing up gameplay, but serve their purpose in making you feel powerful.

Other aspects of Dark Sector don’t fare quite as well as the combat mechanics. Human enemies have brains, but they aren’t the sharpest tools in the A.I shed. And the zombies are… zombies through and through. But since when has a flight of stairs or a doorway ever stopped the brain eating mutants? A lot of the time when you pass an entryway to a room or courtyard, the minds of the enemies that are pursuing you simply turn off. What they are waiting for, I have no idea… maybe they just want a helping hand up some stairs, but I didn’t stop to care – I was too busy throwing the glaive at their stupid motionless faces.

Boss battles also rear their confusing head several times throughout the game. Now, I am not against a difficult boss, one that takes time to think about and defeat – if done well, boss battles can improve a sagging level dramatically. “What are its weaknesses?” and “where should the focus of attack begin?” are excellent questions to have during a boss fight; in Dark Sector my questions were mainly “what the hell am I doing?” and “how am I supposed to know I am doing this right?”. There are no visual clues to let you know if your methods are effective (a giant beast can’t look a little hurt each time I attack it in the proper fashion?) and it breaks down into a frustrating mess of shooting rockets and throwing the glaive at the giant enemies for almost ten minutes straight.

Most of the action takes place in courtyards… lots of courtyards. Level designs get repetitive within the first couple of hours of playtime and there isn’t a single memorable locale for the rest of the eight to ten hour game – it all looks and plays exactly the same. Even worse, what’s repeated isn’t particularly good. You will often find yourself in a corner of a map thinking that the excessive nooks and crannies have a point – they don’t. Levels designs are pointlessly large and empty or completely predictable and claustrophobic. It’s been there done that, and none of it plays or looks very interesting.

But that isn’t to say Dark Sector doesn’t look good, on the contrary. Digital Extremes poured many hours into their proprietary engine and it shows; on a technical level Dark Sector trumps everything else out there. You might mistake it at first as the Unreal III Engine because of its gray, brown, derivative style but watch it for a couple of minutes and you’ll realize that no Unreal Engine game has ever had textures as sharp, lighting as impressive or frame rates as silky smooth – it’s a shame that there is such sparse variety to it all.

It may be technically impressive, but a sense of deja vu creeps up very quickly

On the audio front, Dark Sector impresses as well. The score (although slightly cyclical) is quite good and the voice acting performances from the leads are mostly strong – even if they are speaking a bunch of nonsense. Ambiance and combat are mixed well; nothing can trump the whoosh of the flying glaive and the cries of your enemies as they drop to the ground in halves.

There is a limited Multiplayer offering in the form of Infection and Epidemic, but serious balancing issues keep it from treading on Gears of War’s turf. Infection pits one player as Hayden against (up to nine) regular foot soldiers and if it weren’t for a completely broken melee system, it might have worked. On multiple occasions I downed Hayden and the B button prompt came up (brutal close quarters finisher!), but it doesn’t work half the time and usually some other player will come along and snatch up your rightfully deserved kill (and the chances of becoming the next glaive wielder). Epidemic fares better and has two teams square off, each with their own single glaive wielder and the match ends whenever either of them are killed. But it also suffers from the same broken melee system. Until a patch of some kind comes out, multiplayer is mostly a throwaway.

Even with a heap of problems Dark Sector is still a good game. It rips off a plethora of design choices from plenty of other titles and doesn’t capture the magic of any of them, but it does the basics decently. The little bit of magic that Dark Sector does have is in its combat and more simply, the glaive. The rhythm of the pistol with the tossing of the bladed disc, power throws decapitating a couple enemies at a time and leaving soldiers in a shower of fire can’t be beat. Digital Extremes were most definitely searching for the voice of Dark Sector and they found it in the glaive.

Unfortunately, outside of the combat the game doesn’t have any original spark: levels are repetitive, boss fights are weak, the overall the style is completely average and the narrative is ridiculous. It does have the makings of a great game, but when you have one brilliant idea like the glaive it’s beneficial to further that innovation and polish into other aspects of the experience – it’s what ultimately separates great games from the good games.

(played on Xbox 360)

Presentation 7/10

Gameplay 7/10

Graphics 9/10

Audio 8/10

Value 6/10

Overall 7/10

• Rumour One: Banjo and Grunty team up against a new threat, falling in love in the process.

• Rumour Two: Kazooie is abducted by aliens and Banjo heads out to search the cosmos.

• Rumour Three: Banjo and Kazooie travel back through time in pursuit of the witch’s giant T.I.T.

• Rumour Four: Banjo comes out of retirement to stop his home being redeveloped into tower blocks and malls.

• Rumour Five: War comes to Spiral Mountain, and Banjo becomes a reluctant leader.

So which one are you betting on? Which one do you hope to be true? Or, is Rare cruel enough that they are pulling our leg with all of them?

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Even if you respect Tom Clancy, you have to accept that he is not a good novelist – it simply can’t be argued with. He has a heap of knowledge and it bodes well for mindless (yet militarily accurate) stories of freedom under attack, but none of them are particularly good. For example, here is what you can gather from Rainbow Six, the novel that started it all: eco-terrorists are evil and they hate anyone who isn’t a dirty, leaf eating, shrub munching hippie. And, in another fantastic display of social insight, here is what you can gather from the first Vegas game: terrorists from across the border are evil and they really hate tourists… talk about insightful worldly views. Now, Mr. Clancy did not pen the Vegas script, but the very fact that his name is on the cover means that the bar isn’t set very high – you shouldn’t be expecting anything more than a pointless action romp, and not even a good one at that.

Vegas 2 picks up where the first one left off; Gabriel has betrayed you and your team because he’s angry about some bad stuff that went down during a mission in France five years before the events of the first game. You play as a new character named Bishop, but it’s completely inconsequential other than the new persistent character feature (more on that later). The story is unclear and it won’t hold your attention – it would be nice if developers would start hiring Hollywood writers to pen a good action script. But then again, that probably isn’t why you are playing this game.

So the singleplayer story is complete letdown – no surprise there. But, the real stars of first Rainbow Six Vegas were its refined tactics and awesome set pieces in a glowing neon paradise gone to hell.

In an attempt to separate this iteration from the last, you will get to see the grittier, grungier, brighter side of Vegas – hardly any neon and no strolls down the strip. Why would I want to see a city that prides itself on gaudy nightlife during the light of day? There is a reason why Las Vegas comes alive at dark – any other time it’s gray, boring and monotonous. Regrettably, in the attempt of showing the city in a different light (no pun intended) there are hardly any memorable locations or set pieces in Vegas 2, but luckily the core gameplay will keep you fighting through.

One of the few levels that takes place in that neon glow you remember… if only it had lasted longer

Not much has changed for team Rainbow: stack up your duo (Michael and Jung) in front of a door with the A button and have them breach, smoke, flash or frag the next room. Meanwhile, you usually take a different entry point to flank the terrorists. The success of your assault on each room depends on carefully planning beforehand, and then adapting on the fly should that plan fail. This formula is repeated over and over again but each burst of action is complex, full of adrenaline and controlled intuitively with a simple interface – it never gets old.

On the technical side of things Vegas 2 somehow fares worse than its predecessor; occasionally the frame rate chugs to five frames per second, which is simply unacceptable considering the first Vegas ran smoothly. A year ago it was all about the glitz and this sequel is all about the grunge – not only is Vegas 2 stylistically dull, it doesn’t see a single leap in the graphics department. With dozens of fantastic looking games that came in 2007, the grand Vegas you remember hasn’t aged very well.

The audio department fares better with cracking gunshots and flashbangs ringing in your ears. Voice acting is solid even though the script is a complete throwaway – it’s still neat to wait in front of a door and listen to terrorists crack jokes with one another, before you come in and drop them all in a hail of bullets. But, in another exercise of cutting corners, much of the audio and score are recycled from the last.

The meat of Rainbow Six has always been found in its multiplayer – Vegas 2 delivers the goods, and then some. The entire singleplayer mode can be played through in co-op mode both online and off - playing with a friend improves the experience considerably. Terrorist Hunt makes a return with its supercomputer AI, which again performs far better than anything on display during the campaign mode. Your favorite multiplayer modes like Attack & Defend and Total Conquest make a return, as well as a new mode called Team Leader. It offers an excellent twist on “protect the MVP” game type found in many other titles. And rejoice, because you can finally invite friends to ranked matches.

Rappels and fast ropes make their return and yes… you can still cap terrorists while hanging upside-down

What ties all these styles of play together is the new persistent character creation. When you load up the singleplayer you have to create Bishop from scratch and that created character will exist in every mode you play, stats and all. The new A.C.E.S system (Advanced Combat Enhancement Specialization) adds RPG-light elements to the game: kill at close quarters and get CQB points, kill at long range or with precision and get Marksman points and finally, kill through cover or take down defenses and get assault points. Each of the three styles provide upgrades and weapons specific to your area of expertise – it is incredibly addictive and is tailors the game to your experience.

More often than not, when a sequel comes out it only tweaks the basics set out by the original, yet revamps the game in other areas to make it feel like a completely fresh experience. Rainbow Six Vegas 2 leans more towards an addition rather than a full fledged sequel – the presentation, graphics and audio are identical to the previous game and are in some ways worse. The singleplayer lacks the flashy and ritzy style that pulled the first above its weak script – this time the game simply descends into monotony.

Fortunately, the gameplay that was so strong before has seen little tweaks here and there that make it familiar, yet a step up from before. The persistent character creation is something that will be sorely missed in other games – it ties together the package in an incredibly cohesive way. In the end, Rainbow Six is meant to be played with friends and for friendly (or not) competition – if you don’t plan on playing online you will feel completely cheated with the lackluster singleplayer mode. However, the multiplayer offering here is so substantial that it saves the overall experience in a huge way – you will be playing this one for months to come.

(Played on Xbox 360)

Presentation 7/10

Gameplay 8/10

Graphics 6/10

Audio 8/10

Value 9/10

Overall 8/10

Leaving many users worried, it is possible that hackers have access to some of their account information. Hackers also might have access to gamers’ accounts to download software or change their password. However, credit card info has been kept private and under no circumstances should hackers be able to retrieve them.

Sony claims that they have patched the network as soon as they noticed the problem. Accounts are still accessible and Sony says that you should not worry about your account anymore.
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