There’s not too much to be gleaned from this video, though the presence of underwater swimming makes me hopeful we’ll be able to explore the seabed in-game. Also, does hero Thingy Kenway really need fourpistols? Is this a hint he’ll be able to fire guns with his feet, Bayonetta-style? Undoubtedly yes.

Check back tomorrow for our preview. In the meantime, Blackbeard wants to tell you a little story…

Source: PCGamer

Mass Effect 3 is RPG game for Xbox 360, PC and PS3 developed by BioWare. Electronic Arts set this games release to be March 6th this year.

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Check out new multyplayer modes for thic Capcom title.

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The Sims games have traditionally received two types of add-ons: “stuff” packs that give fans new items like decor and apparel, and full expansions that add brand new gameplay elements. The Sims 3: Generations is an awkward middle child, granting you more than just hairstyles and new chairs but none of the inventiveness found in previous expansions like World Adventures and Ambitions. This addition is a pleasant extension of what The Sims 3 already does–not a game changer–and series addicts will undoubtedly enjoy how well Generations captures the essence of life’s individual milestones. Children get tree houses and playground equipment; teens learn to drive and go to prom; adults have midlife crises; and grumpy oldsters shoo away annoying kids with their canes. These enhancements are subtly integrated into the main game, but they don’t have the overall impact of previous expansions. And that’s this expansion’s real problem: lack of impact. It’s nice to have new playthings, but at almost the cost of a whole new game, even the most dedicated devotees can probably do without these toys.

As you can guess from its title, Generations deepens and broadens your sims’ various stages of life by adding mechanics suited to their age. It begins in childhood, with one of the expansion’s most charming and surreal additions: the imaginary friend. This semicreepy stuffed wonder morphs from plush toy into a combination of best friend and personal assistant. Watching your child’s purple Martian mutant saunter about with an exaggerated bounce is as charming and silly a sight as any in the series, and you only see him when you are directly controlling your child. Want a snack? Send your pal to grab you one. Want help with making the beds and cleaning the toilet? Ask your invisible friend to help with your chores. Heck, you can even turn him into a controllable sim if you mess around at the chemistry table often enough. You make potions here, one of which will make your virtual Pinocchio a real boy. Well, almost, anyway. You can craft other potions at the table too, such as mood enhancers and the like, though potions aren’t exactly new; the Makin’ Magic expansion for the original game included a similar mechanic.

As you move through the years, you also unlock new features. Children don’t just get living plushies: They can play on seesaws and in tree houses or use any of the other playground equipment added to the Buy mode. They can also pull pranks, at home or elsewhere. Your cackling kid may sneak up to his parents’ laptop and set it up to scare the next sim that uses it or plant a whoopee cushion on the sofa. The sim that falls victim to the prank is disgusted by the sound, and temporarily suffers from a negative moodlet. If your kid prefers milder forms of fun, you can always dress him or her up as a dinosaur using the new costume chest. Here, as in other ways, Generations encapsulates an important truth of youth: Children dressed as fairy princesses and astronauts are adorable. Teens are more known for angst than adorableness, so perhaps you’d like to prank the school and release frogs from the science lab; it’s a pity you only read of the results in in-game text rather than witness the hysterical results. Your teens can also go to prom, but this is an option sadly underutilized. Perhaps your prom was a slow-dancing delight, or perhaps it was a public display of romantic awkwardness. Either way, you can’t relive those moments in The Sims 3: Generations. Your teen and his or her date simply disappear into the building, and you get periodic updates in the corner of your screen.

Luckily, other elements are more interactive. You can throw bachelor parties now for engaged sims, and if things get wild and crazy, why not pull out a video camera? You activate cameras from your personal inventory and “tape” events from a first-person view. It’s actually pretty amusing to step into the shoes of an individual sim in this manner because you suddenly feel like you are actually eavesdropping on your neighbors’ conversations rather than having your virtual doppelganger do your dirty work for you. Later, you can watch your home videos on television, though reliving these moments isn’t nearly as fun as capturing them in the first place. Perhaps you aren’t so much into the partying aspect of The Sims 3. Luckily, there’s at least a little something new to mess with for most types of players. Builders and buyers will appreciate spiral staircases and the new wedding arch; family-oriented folks will like how you can reprimand your kids when they’re particular naughty; and if you’re into woohoo, beware: You now have to worry about your romantic reputation.

These changes are all fine in and of themselves, but they don’t bring anything significant to the table; they simply broaden existing features. Previous expansions added game-changing mechanics like celebrity fame, puzzle-solving adventures, and interactive careers. Granted, Generations adds a new profession–Day Care–but attending to a roomful of toddlers that need constant changing and socializing isn’t as fun as busting ghosts or fighting fires. (Though to be fair, Day Care is not a career, but a profession, which is an important distinction to Sims 3 players.) But Generations mostly stretches out what already existed and offers nothing exciting enough to lure you back to the game if you’ve moved on from it. Its final impact is that of a “stuff pack” with added social features rather than a true expansion. Generations is in part aimed at the “Sims 3 as sharing experience” crowd, as evidenced by the new social networking integration, which allows you to upload key moments to the Sims 3 website and share them on your Facebook wall. Now, the virtual life you live in The Sims 3 has more bearing on your actual life than ever before. But even voracious Sims lovers might wonder whether $39.99 is too much to ask for a product that feels less like an expansion and more like a collection of gameplay odds and ends.

Those odds and ends are agreeable at least, though they aren’t all that’s new in The Sims 3: Generations. You could run into bugs you’ve never seen before. You might receive notice that your teen has made a new friend at school: himself. Or your normally endearing child might temporarily morph into a hideous long-armed freak, with her head in the middle of her abdomen. Glitches aside, Generations adds entertaining moments to a franchise that turns routine duties, like taking showers and tossing salads, into compelling delights, but these new moments are too infrequent and unexceptional to justify the high price tag.

Storm: Frontline Nation is smack-dab in the middle. Colossai Studios’ turn-based strategy game occupies the neutral zone between encyclopedic franchises such as Hearts of Iron and mainstream fare such as the Civilization series. But this captivating saga about an all-out global war in the near future is anything but a middling effort. A tremendous amount of depth and replay value are the big positives here, along with aggressive enemy artificial intelligence that turns every campaign into a war for survival.

Anyone who has experience with voluminous games of grand historical strategy, such as Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron, and Victoria, will immediately know what Storm has in store for you. The main difference here is the time frame. Where those games deal with history, Storm: Frontline Nation deals with the very near future. It is January of 2012, immediately following a war that has caused oil exports from the Middle East to be virtually shut down. As a result, economies have collapsed, and big players in the USA, UK, France, Russia, and Germany are fighting over the scraps, namely oil resources in places like the North Sea and North Africa. The story campaign takes place in Europe and North Africa, where you take control of one of the big five nations noted above and deal with hundreds of conquerable provinces and cities. Victory conditions involve everything from building up an army, to sending a spy to steal research from an enemy capital, to simply building facilities like naval bases.

You can also forgo the story and go for the open campaign. This option features some 45 nations, including all of the smaller nations in the region, such as Spain, Egypt, Greece, Austria, Slovenia, and so forth. You get a ton of replay value, because every country comes with a unique range of pluses and minuses. Running Greece, for instance, is a whole lot different from running the US, so moving down requires big changes in how you conduct yourself with neighbors. Situations where you might want to throw your weight around tend not to work out so well if you have only a tiny military and not a whole lot of cash at your disposal. Some of the playable countries seem ridiculous, though. Taking over countries like Montenegro, Morocco, and Estonia is nearly pointless, because they just don’t have enough power or territory (although having just two territories to look after sure does cut down on the management duties) to provide an interesting game. Choose one of them, and you’re generally stuck either trying to survive onslaughts from bigger enemies or staving off boredom while watching the big guys go at it for black gold.

In campaigns, you play as the leader of an entire nation in a far-reaching game of geopolitical conquest. On the main map screen, you guide the fortunes of your country through turns that last a month of real time. This is where everything begins. Here you declare war on the Swedes, produce conventional units like tanks and planes, sneakily order up weapons of mass destruction like nukes and biological weapons, stage covert ops like assassinations, ink treaties with those nice guys in Russia, advance research levels to gain nifty new weapons, and so forth. While the sheer number of things to do is impressive, most of the options are somewhat scaled back from those in other grand strategy games. There is no massive, varied cultural tech tree as in the Civilization games, for instance. All of the tech levels earned generally just open up bigger and better ways to kill enemies, like suitcase nukes and bioweapons such as anthrax and smallpox.

The options stop well short of kitchen-sink territory. At the same time, this doesn’t quite make Storm more manageable than many of its genre predecessors, largely due to a terrible tutorial system of blurry videos that walk you through the interface and some strategic and tactical features. Fully interactive tutorials would have made a big difference. Visual quality is dark and murky as well, making it hard to tell units apart at times. Audio is equally unhelpful, including a musical score that sounds like something heard over the closing credits of a straight-to-DVD action flick, and repetitive unit acknowledgements that consist of nothing but the unit name, often mispronounced. Still, at least the interface is intuitive for the most part. You have to fiddle around at times (uh, how do you build a nuclear research facility again?), although generally you can work things out in no more than a few minutes of experimentation. Story mode also provides many missions that serve as guideposts pushing you in the right direction when it comes to building your navy for eventual North Sea attacks or getting a spy over to the UK to see what it’s up to, for example.

As with last year’s installment, developer EA Bright Light has envisioned the wands of Harry and his friends as guns–but instead of switching between weapons, you switch between spells. Stupefy isn’t a stunning spell in this game: It’s a pistol. Expulso isn’t an exploding spell: It’s a rapid-fire machine gun. Confringo isn’t a blasting curse: It’s a grenade launcher. And forget everything you know about apparating, which you probably never imagined as a short-range teleport. Perhaps this disrespectful take on the beloved Harry Potter license wouldn’t be so disastrous if the resulting game were fun, but for the most part, it just isn’t. Switching between spells provides some welcome variety in the second half of this unusually short cover-based shooter. Otherwise, Deathly Hallows Part 2 is tedious and dumb, failing both as a game and as a licensed product.

So Deathly Hallows Part 2 isn’t for Harry Potter fans–but it isn’t for shooter fans, either. You shoot the same nameless generic enemies time and again, and then you move down a narrow path so you can take some cover and shoot more clones. You occasionally break free of this predictability, only to find yourself having even less fun than before. Perhaps the aforementioned sniping section might have provided a brief spot of variety, but once you finish sniping one set of baddies, you’re directed to another group–and then another. Even more boring is your trek into the chamber of secrets where, as Hermione, you shoot spiders while Ron takes his sweet time opening more doors. Most of this level doesn’t involve shooting, however; you just follow Ron through dark caverns. The bright eyes peering through the darkness are a nice touch, but while this level might have been meant to create tension, the only emotion it generates is boredom. There’s an early moment in which the trio rescues a fire-breathing beast, and you might get momentarily excited by the possibility of taking to the skies. But no. The most interesting possibilities are confined to cutscenes, while you carry out all the drudgery with your gun-wand.

Amid the tedium are some bright sparks worth celebrating. One is a battle between McGonagall and a hulking giant, in which you use your impedimenta homing missiles to knock the big guy off balance while fending off teleporting death eaters. You can’t cast the same spell too many times in a row because doing so leads to inaccurate aiming. Thus, you must stave off these meanies by switching between spells. The giant battle is fun because it demands such switching, and it even requires you to use the protego shield to protect yourself from boulders the giant flings. A few sequences have you sprinting toward the camera as you fend off an oncoming apparition or destroying flaming debris as it hurdles toward you. These sequences are done well because they convey something the rest of the game lacks: a sense of urgency. Even on its hardest difficulty (unlocked after you finish the game), Deathly Hallows Part 2 isn’t challenging, though you could suffer one or two cheap deaths when, for example, Ron stands between you and the only available cover spot and refuses to budge. Or you may perhaps find yourself in a poorly designed sequence in which a narrow doorway into a room loaded with enemies acts as a frustrating chokepoint.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 is over in three and a half hours or so, which is a mercifully short playing time for a game that sells at a too-high $50 price. You can replay story missions on their own or as timed challenges that might earn you a place on the game’s online leaderboards. But these missions don’t make for very good challenges, in part because you still have to wait around for your AI companions to open gates or to trigger scripted events. If you enjoy the immediacy of motion controls, you can play the game using PlayStation Move accessories. This option works just fine, though switching between spells is more cumbersome with a Move controller than a standard DualShock 3 or Sixaxis, so it isn’t necessarily the superior way to play. After you finish, you’re treated to a montage of gameplay moments from the prior Harry Potter games, which serves not to inspire fond memories, but only to remind you just how much potential was squandered in a series of games that never lived up to their inspirations.

The most important aspect of a sports sim is the gameplay, and NCAA Football 12 shines in that regard. The core action has been iterated upon for a number of years, and that refinement leads to the most realistic portrayal of the college game yet. This is especially apparent in nonglamorous aspects, such as blocking and artificial intelligence. You may take these basic features for granted, but when you look closer, you see tiny details that mirror what you find on television every autumn Saturday. Your offensive line smartly hunts down blitzing defenders and halts their progress before they can make a tackle, which gives you confidence whether you’re dropping back to pass or trying to bust a big one on the ground. Even running backs aren’t scared to get their jerseys dirty to give you a split second more to get off a pass. On the defensive side of the ball, it’s clear the secondary has been putting in work in the film room. Quick reactions ensure cornerbacks don’t give up easy passes, which makes it all the more exciting when you burn them for a deep play.

Unfortunately, although that refinement leads to an impressive representation of the real thing, the stagnant visuals are showing their age. This is especially noticeable in regard to the animations. For instance, when a safety crashes into the knee of a hurdling wide receiver, the offensive player meekly falls to the ground with barely a whimper. Two versions of Backbreaker (most recently Backbreaker: Vengeance) have been released in the last year, and the advanced animation in those games is far beyond that in NCAA Football 12. A lot of the joy of football is derived from the brutal clash of two powerful athletes, and that force is largely absent in this game. Furthermore, there are visual glitches that offer even more distractions from the exciting action. Remodeled grass has a hazy, shimmering look that’s woefully out of place. And there’s a frequent bug that turns the receivers’ route markers into dancing squiggly lines. None of these problems destroy the fun of running a perfect option play, but they do take you out of what should be an immersive experience.

Dynasty mode returns as the chance to turn a woebegone school into a national power or take the reins of a BCS big boy, and see how you hold up when the pressure is weighing you down. A coaching carousel is the biggest addition from last year’s game, giving you more flexibility in how your career plays out. When you’re first signed by a program, you can decide to be a coordinator instead of the head man. If you take charge of just the offense, you don’t have to worry a lick about the defensive side of the ball during the course of the game, which is a relief if you enjoy one side more than the other. There’s also constant pressure to perform. Metrics gauge how well you’re doing, and if you don’t accumulate the expected wins or statistics total, you could find yourself out of a job. But if you do take your program to new heights, you could land a cushy role in any school you want. This is a good idea in theory, but in practice, it falls flat. Because you can choose to coach any school from the onset, there’s little incentive to build up your credentials to get your dream job. Coaching carousel gives determined players something to strive for, but doesn’t add much to the overall experience.