Assassin's Creed Brotherhood (Sample Post)

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood Single-Player Impressions

Ezio gets to control an army of assassins in Brotherhood, as we found out ahead of Ubisoft's E3 2010 press conference.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood continues the story of Ezio Auditore da Firenze in dramatic fashion. After waking up in bed next to a buxom redhead who's begging him for another round of action, Ezio finds Villa Auditore under attack from a torrent of cannonballs. Our hero makes his escape across the rooftops, before jumping on a horse and mounting a counterattack. It's an impressively bombastic return for the Italian assassin, and considering that we called him a "terrific new character" in our review of Assassin's Creed II, we're incredibly pleased to see him back.

Brotherhood takes place pretty much immediately after Assassin's Creed II, in 1499. Ezio is happy and his villa is prospering, but there's a new villain on the scene named Cesare--the general of the Papal army. Cesare happens to be the son of Rodrigo Borgia--the villain of ACII--and they're both out to get the newly contented Ezio. Cesare launches an attack on Ezio's villa, with cannonballs lobbed into the town as large towers deliver the evil general's soldiers over the walls.

Ubisoft promises that new advanced equestrian moves will improve on the horseback riding from the last game, with new attack and acrobatic skills on offer. Ezio is also able to use the town's cannons to launch a counterattack on the army, using it to destroy other cannons and towers that are used to get soldiers over the walls. All of the action is directed in a fast and frantic manner, highlighted by Ezio's new ability to use merchandise lifts to scale heights quickly. Ubisoft claims to have listened to fan feedback about ACII, particularly in the combat system. You'll now be rewarded for striking first and hard, with one combo that we saw ending with him shooting his opponent dead from close range.

Ezio's fight didn't end successfully in the demo we saw--despite Ezio's valiant attempts, Cesare breached the gate, showed off an item called the Apple of Eden, and proceeded to shoot Ezio's uncle Mario. At this point, Ezio passed out and fell off the rooftop, in a cutscene that hinted at a major new development in the story. Ubisoft then moved on to demonstrate Brotherhood's new gameplay mechanics. You'll be able to give hope to the people by building up an army of assassins--the Brotherhood of the title--and help restore balance to Italy.

The section we saw jumped forward to Rome in 1503. The archers on the rooftops are now gunmen, and we watched as Ezio called in another assassin to jump in and use concealed blades to bring the guard down. If you need to take out a group of enemies, you can call in an arrow shower, or your team can jump in and fight alongside you hand-to-hand. We watched as Ubisoft demonstrated all these techniques to kill a religious figure in a church, before fighting a group of enemies outside. We didn't get a good feel for how the commands were issued, but it looked simple and impressive in action.
You'll be able to upgrade your team of assassins as you progress. You'll have a set number of tokens to spend, and you'll have to allocate them wisely so that you have the right balance of skills for each situation. The assassins can also die in a fight, so you won't want to send them into a situation they won't be able to handle. If you improve their experience enough, they'll become master assassins and will really be able to help you take care of Cesare.

Brotherhood will also continue the story of Desmond, and according to Ubisoft, "very important things" will happen to the contemporary character. We weren't given specifics, other than that the developer will "start to close some doors" on Desmond's story, so we'll have to wait and see what that rather ominous statement means. Thankfully, Rome will be three times the size of Florence from ACII, so there will be plenty to do in the game as Ezio. Watch out for Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood on November 16 2010, and in the meantime, you'll be able to check out our multiplayer hands-on later on during this year's E3.

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Call of Duty: Black Ops (Sample Post)

The most recent trailer for Call of Duty: Black Ops bridges its two halves with a very serious voice uttering the line, "We live in a world where everything you know is wrong." It's a bold but not entirely universal statement--you probably know for a fact that trying to fist fight a shark is an objectively terrible idea--but there's truth in that proclamation when it comes to the military history that the Call of Duty series has long steeped itself in. With Black Ops, Treyarch may not exactly be exposing all the secrets in American military history, but the developer is nonetheless focused on exploring some of the shadowy covert operations that went down during the height of the Cold War, in addition to some of the more famous conflicts of that era, such as Vietnam. The game appears to be a mixture of the frantic run-and-gun action the franchise is known for and a generous sprinkling of new gameplay options. Treyarch has plucked those gameplay options from this period in history to help paint a better picture of what went on both in and out of the public eye. 

We were recently treated to a pair of demos showing two very different sides of Black Ops. The first was a slow and deliberate trek through the snowy mountains of Russia circa 1968. It began with a first-person view of a pilot boarding an SR-71 Blackbird aircraft in a dusty, windswept air force base in Northern California. The plane starts a booming sprint down the runway, the player pulls back on the left analog stick, and one flash forward later, the SR-71 is high above the earth ready to do some reconnaissance above enemy territory.

The player is shown a screen with a rough outline of a road, some buildings, and a few bright blue blips moving in a group. It turns out that these blips are actually ground troops, and it's up to the player--sitting in an aircraft capable of flying 80,000 feet above the earth while wearing what's essentially an astronaut outfit--to direct these troops on where to go, almost as if this were a real-time strategy game. But these commands aren't just for show. Where you send these blips on the screen actually determines how you approach the next sequence of the mission. In a matter of moments, the game cuts to those men on the ground as they're suddenly greeted by enemy soldiers.

This next part picked up with a first-person view of someone hiding deep in the woods under the cover of branches and leaves while a Russian patrol walked by unaware, no more than 10 feet away. The player and his squad then jumped out of the bushes--a crossbow in hand--and began moving down a steep, snowy hill. After repelling down a sheer cliffside using the two triggers to alternate holding and releasing the rope, they breached the windows of a Soviet communications station to start a good old-fashioned Call of Duty-style shootout. The breach itself was especially impressive, with the crew repelling down the outside of the window before jumping back and kicking in the windows in slow motion.

What happened next was familiar Call of Duty punctuated by shiny new ways to deliver hurt. The player used a combination of '60s-era automatic weaponry to dispatch frantic enemies when things were hot and sniped them from afar with a deadly silent crossbow when it was quiet. One of the new features is the inclusion of alternate weapon types. In the case of the crossbow, it can fire timed arrows affixed with timed explosives. The onscreen result is an enemy stuck in the leg with an arrow flashing a bright green light for two seconds before exploding and taking out any nearby friends with him.

This Russian level--dubbed WMD--ended with the player and his squadmates escaping out onto a snowy ledge overlooking a huge abyss just in time for an avalanche to start rumbling in the distance. They dashed down the ledge but soon ran out of footing, reaching a point overlooking nothing but clouds below. With no other choice, the player took a running start and leapt from the ledge. The sound of sweeping wind quickly faded away while the main character's heavy breathing rose. With the ground quickly approaching, the screen cut to black and the demo ended.
The second demo was a marked departure from the first. This much was obvious from the title screen, which introduced the level as a sequence called "Slaughterhouse" set in Hue City, Vietnam. The action began with the player in a helicopter above a chaotic warzone splashed with an eerie reddish hue from all the fires and flares in the area. Things got ugly in a hurry as the helicopter that the player was repelling from got shot down, sending everyone falling down into the building below.

Inside, they managed to pick up a few combat shotguns equipped with incendiary shells. This helped the crew tear through waves of enemy soldiers with fiery shotgun blasts that looked more like a malfunctioning racecar tail pipe than any shotgun we've seen in Call of Duty before. The rest of the action in this level was just as over the top as the weaponry. It felt a lot like an early level from Modern Warfare 2 where players scrambled their way through Iraqi buildings fighting insurgents; only this time, it was enemy Viet Cong with their sights set on both you and any civilians trying to flee the premises.

Outside, the player grabbed a radio from an injured marine and used it to call in a helicopter strike against a series of nearby buildings where enemies were terrorizing the characters from balconies and rooftops. The action moved at a fast clip, with the main character weaving in and out of demolished buildings under that unsettling red sky while occasionally stopping to call in another chopper strike. This outdoor section looked like absolute chaos, with building rubble showering down onto the streets, explosions all around, and an enemy soldier taunting you over a loudspeaker all the while. 

One of the things that grabbed us about both demos was the chatter between characters. Specifically, the playable character has a voice for the first time ever in a Call of Duty game. You're no longer playing a mute supersoldier but someone capable of chiming in with his own thoughts and ideas about what's going down. We're eager to see how Treyarch handles the storytelling in Black Ops, considering that Modern Warfare 2's plot tended to veer out of control for much of the adventure--much more so than previous games.

All things considered, Black Ops looks impressive. Of course, it is a Call of Duty game, so that's probably not much of a surprise. But the varied pacing, new gameplay features, and fresh setting make for an intriguing combination. We're looking forward to seeing what else Treyarch has up its sleeve leading up to Black Ops' November 9 release date.

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Medal of Honor (Sample post)

Medal of Honor Multiplayer Hands-On

Medal of Honor was a first-person shooter franchise steeped in the history of World War II and some of its most famous battles. However, the latest game in the series sheds its historical leanings in favor of a modern setting--in this case, the ongoing war in Afghanistan between coalition and opposition forces. While we have yet to see how Medal of Honor approaches this potentially sensitive subject in single-player, we have played portions of the game's multiplayer mode, which is being developed by a separate team at DICE--the same developer behind the Battlefield series. 

As such, it's probably not surprising to learn that Medal of Honor's multiplayer has a Battlefield-like quality to it in that it's fast paced and there's rarely a lull in the action. We got our first taste of this in the Helmand Valley map, which pits the opposing forces against each other on rugged terrain sprinkled with bombed-out fortifications. As the coalition forces, our goal was to make our way through these structures on the map before proceeding through two checkpoints to the final defensive stronghold located in a dilapidated building. Naturally, this was much easier said than done because the coalition forces also had the task of trying to find an optimal path across the rocky terrain and move swiftly through entry points so we didn't get bunched up. Of course, this happened several times and the opposing team--which often has the higher ground--managed to fend us off until the closing seconds of the match.

But before the match completely ended, we tried some of the other selectable classes for the coalition forces--each with its own weapon loadouts. The three classes we saw were rifleman, special ops, and sniper. The rifleman has access to all-around solid equipment, including the M16 assault rifle. Special ops makes use of the M4, as well as the 870 modular combat shotguns. Lastly, the sniper has the M21 and M24 sniper rifles. We had some decent success with the sniper because it was easy to step back, let everyone else charge in, and then pick off enemy forces when they were drawn out of their hiding spots.

In the following multiplayer match, we took to the streets of Kabul in a team assault match. This map is quite different from the previous maps in that all combatants are restricted to a single, ravaged downtown area. The abundance of structures also made for some excellent sniper hiding spots, but for the most part, some of the confrontations boiled down to firefights in the streets. Actually, a lot of these firefights devolved into members from opposing teams running around trying to shank each other with their combat knives. Throughout the course of the match, we also got a glimpse of the classes and weapons for opposition forces, which included sniper, special ops, and rifleman as well. As expected, many of these weapons are of Russian origins, including variants on the AK-47, the TOZ shotgun, and the SV-98 sniper rifle for the rifleman, special ops, and sniper classes, respectively.

Unfortunately, our time with Medal of Honor's multiplayer was all too brief, but we'll have more on the game in the coming weeks and months before its October 12 release date.

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The Karate Kid (Sample Post)

Storyline :

12-year-old Dre Parker could've been the most popular kid in Detroit, but his mother's latest career move has landed him in China. Dre immediately falls for his classmate Mei Ying - and the feeling is mutual - but cultural differences make such a friendship impossible. Even worse, Dre's feelings make an enemy of the class bully, Cheng. In the land of kung fu, Dre knows only a little karate, and Cheng puts "the karate kid" on the floor with ease. With no friends in a strange land, Dre has nowhere to turn but maintenance man Mr. Han, who is secretly a master of kung fu. As Han teaches Dre that kung fu is not about punches and parries, but maturity and calm, Dre realizes that facing down the bullies will be the fight of his life.

12-year-old Dre Parker (Jaden Smith) and his mother, Sherry (Taraji P. Henson), arrive in Beijing from West Detroit to start a new life. Dre develops a crush on a young violinist, Mei Ying (Wen Wen Han), who reciprocates his attention, but Cheng (Zhenwei Wang), a kung fu prodigy whose family is close to Mei Ying's, attempts to keep them apart by beating Dre, and later harassing and humiliating him in and around school. During a particularly brutal beating by Cheng and his friends, the enigmatic maintenance man of Dre's building, Mr. Han (Jackie Chan), comes to Dre's aid, revealing himself as a kung fu master who adeptly dispatches Dre's tormentors.

After Han mends Dre's injuries using fire cupping, they go to Cheng's teacher, Master Li (Yu Rongguang), to attempt to make peace, but the brutal Li, who teaches his students to show no mercy to their enemies, challenges Dre to a fight with Cheng. When Han declines, Li threatens him, saying that they will not be allowed to leave his school unless either Dre or Han himself fights. Han acquiesces, but insists the fight take place at an upcoming tournament, and that Li's students leave Dre alone until the tournament. The amused Li agrees.

Han begins training Dre, but Dre is frustrated that Han merely has Dre spend hours taking off his jacket, hanging it up, dropping it, and then putting it back on again. After days of this, Dre refuses to continue, until Han demonstrates to him that the repetitive arm movements in question were Han's method of teaching Dre defensive block and strike techniques, which Dre is now able to display instinctively when prompted by Han's mock attacks. Han emphasizes that the movements Dre is learning apply to life in general, and that serenity and maturity, not punches and power, are the true keys to mastering the martial arts. During one lesson in the Wudang Mountains, Dre notices a female kung fu practitioner (Michelle Yeoh, in an uncredited cameo[4]) apparently copying the movements of a cobra before her, but Han informs him that it was the cobra that was imitating the woman, as in a mirror reflection. Dre wants Han to teach him this technique, which includes linking Han's hand and feet to Dre's via bamboo shafts while practicing their forms, but Dre's subsequent attempt to use this reflection technique on his mother is unsuccessful.

As Dre's friendship with Mei Ying continues, she agrees to attend Dre's tournament, as does Dre her upcoming recital. Dre persuades Mei Ying to cut school for a day of fun, but when she is nearly late for her violin recital, which has been rescheduled for that day, she tells him that her parents have deemed him a bad influence, and forbid her from spending any more time with him. Later, when Dre finds Mr. Han despondent, he learns that it is the anniversary of his wife and son's deaths, which occurred years ago when he lost control of his car while arguing with his wife. Dre reminds Han that one of his lessons was in perseverance, and that Han needs to heal from his loss, and tries to help him do so. Han then assists Dre in reading a note, in Chinese, of apology to Mei Ying's father, who, impressed, allows Mei to attend the tournament.

At the tournament, the under-confident Dre is slow to achieve parity with his opponents, but soon begins to beat them, and advances to the semifinals, as does Cheng, who violently finishes off his opponents. Dre eventually comes up against Liang, another of Master Li's students, who is instructed by Master Li to break Dre's leg. When Liang insists that he can beat Dre, Master Li sternly tells him that he doesn't want him beaten, but broken. During the match, Liang delivers a devastating kick to Dre's leg, along with a series of brutal follow-up punches. Although Liang is disqualified for his illegal strikes, Dre is incapacitated, which would allow Cheng to win by default.

Despite Han's insistence that he has earned respect for his performance in the tournament, Dre convinces Han to use his fire cupping technique to mend his leg, in order to see the tournament to the end. Dre returns to the arena, where he confronts Cheng. Dre delivers impressive blows, but Cheng counters with a debilitating strike to Dre's already injured leg. Dre struggles to get up, and adopts the one-legged form he first learned from the woman on the mountain, attempting to use the reflection technique to manipulate Cheng's movements. Cheng charges Dre, but Dre flips, and catches Cheng with a kick to his head, winning the tournament, along with the respect of Cheng and his classmates, both for himself and Mr. Han.

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The Expendables (Sample Post)

Storyline  :

Barney Ross leads the "Expendables", a band of highly skilled mercenaries including knife enthusiast Lee Christmas, martial arts expert Yin Yang, heavy weapons specialist Hale Caesar, demolitionist Toll Road and loose-cannon sniper Gunner Jensen. When the group is commissioned by the mysterious Mr. Church to assassinate the merciless dictator of a small South American island, Barney and Lee head to the remote locale to scout out their opposition. Once there, they meet with local rebel Sandra and discover the true nature of the conflict engulfing the city. When they escape the island and Sandra stays behind, Ross must choose to either walk away and save his own life - or attempt a suicidal rescue mission that might just save his soul.

Cast:

• Sylvester Stallone
• Jason Statham
• Jet Li
• And More From IMDb

Synopsis :

A group of elite mercenaries, the Expendables, are deployed to the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Somalia to halt local pirates from executing the hostages. The team consists of leader Barney Ross (Sylvester Stallone), former SAS soldier and blades specialist Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), martial artist Yin Yang (Jet Li), sniper Gunnar Jensen (Dolph Lundgren), weapons specialist Hale Caesar (Terry Crews) and demolitions expert Toll Road (Randy Couture). Jensen instigates a firefight, causing casualties for the pirates. Yang and Jensen fight over moral disagreements about hanging a pirate, with Ross finally intervening. As a result of his psychological problems, Ross reluctantly releases Jensen from the Expendables.

Ross and his rival mercenary leader Trench (Arnold Schwarzenegger), go to see Mr. Church (Bruce Willis) who names himself after the church they meet in. He offers them a mission in Vilena, a fictional island in the Gulf of Mexico, to overthrow a brutal dictator, General Garza (David Zayas). Busy with other things, Trench gives the contract to Ross. Christmas visits his girlfriend, Lacy (Charisma Carpenter), whom he discovers has left him for another man, Paul. Ross and Christmas do initial reconnaissance after meeting with their contact, Sandra (Gisele Itié), only for the mission to go awry. Ross learns that Garza is backed by ex-CIA agent James Munroe (Eric Roberts) and his henchmen Paine (Steve Austin) and The Brit (Gary Daniels), who manipulate and keep Garza in power by making his people fear him. Sandra is revealed to be Garza's daughter. Ross decides to abort and causes casualties among the army as they escape. Meanwhile, Jensen approaches Garza and Munroe to help their side.

Christmas visits Lacy again to find that Paul has beaten her. Christmas defeats Paul and his friends, showing Lacy what he does for a living and winning her over. Ross, Christmas, and Yang deduce that Mr. Church is a member of the CIA and that the real target is Munroe, as the CIA could not kill one of their own. Mission coordinator and former teammate, Tool (Mickey Rourke) makes an emotional confession to Ross about letting a woman commit suicide during the Bosnian War. Hearing this, Ross decides to go back for Sandra. Yang tags along, and they are chased on the road by Jensen in an intense shootout. The pursuit ends in an abandoned warehouse, where Yang and Jensen fight a second time. Jensen attempts to impale Yang on a pipe, only for Ross to shoot Jensen. A wounded Jensen makes amends and gives the layout of Garza's palace. Ross boards the plane with Yang and finds the rest of team, ready to aid their friend.

The Expendables infiltrate Garza's compound. Christmas, Yang, Caesar, and Toll plant explosive charges throughout the site. When Garza has a change of heart after Munroe tortures his daughter, Munroe kills him. The entire team fights and shoots their way through Garza's soldiers. Ross and Caesar manage to destroy the helicopter Munroe was to escape on. Christmas and Yang manage to kill The Brit while Toll kills Paine. Ross and Christmas catch up to Munroe and kill him, saving Sandra. Instead of taking the payment for the mission, Ross gives it to Sandra to restore Vilena. The team celebrates their victory at Tool's tattoo parlor, with the reformed and recovering Jensen. Christmas and Tool challenge each other to a game of knife throwing and Christmas recites a poem about his respect for Tool, before throwing the knife perfectly in the center of the board.

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