Dirt 3 Game Guide

When DiRT 2 was released in 2009 it boasted a lengthy and varied career mode, numerous multiplayer options, and uniformly excellent presentation. Split-screen multiplayer with support for two controllers is now an option, there are more vehicle classes to choose from, gymkhana events and snowy conditions pose fresh challenges, and new multiplayer modes put interesting automotive spins on some first-person shooter favorites. Dirt 3 brings a lot of superb content to the table, and because it offers a plethora of customizable difficulty settings and assists, newcomers and veterans alike can enjoy its excellent off-road action.

Demanding new gymkhana events in which you're challenged to perform tricks in specially designed arenas reinforce how excellent Dirt 3's controls are. In these exciting sessions you score points for crashing through carefully positioned destructible blocks, and for performing donuts, spins, slides, and jumps. Stringing successful tricks together against the clock is still plenty challenging, though, and as a result, gymkhanas are great practice for other events. Every event in Dirt 3, whether it be a point-to-point rally through a Kenyan desert, a head-to-head race in the Aspen snow, or a circuit-based rallycross event that weaves in and out of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, demands precise driving. Many of the events in Dirt 3's lengthy Dirt Tour career mode span multiple back-to-back races at the same location, but the game does an excellent job of keeping the action from feeling stale.

Infamous Game Guide

Will you become a noble hero, striving to bring peace to a city in ruins? In Infamous, the choice is yours. From unleashing electrical blasts to corral your enemies, to scaling the highest skyscrapers with finesse and ease, Infamous lets you seamlessly control the powered-up hero you've always wanted to be. The buggy visuals and gameplay glitches can't quite live up to the excellent action, but the overall experience crushes these small problems like so many petty criminals. A powerful bomb has exploded in Empire City, bringing the thriving island metropolis to its knees. At the center of the cataclysmic blast is Cole, an ordinary bicycle messenger. The explosion killed thousands and leveled buildings like they were fragile card houses, but it gave him superpowers. Whenever Cole is faced with a moral decision, the action pauses and Cole spells out his thoughts to you. Empire City is split into three large islands, and by the end of the game, you'll be able to travel across the whole city, jumping into missions or on top of buildings without restrictions. There's a slight stickiness to Cole's leaps, so when you jump close to objects that you can grab, you'll be pulled into their path. Although leaping from building to building is a blast on its own, there are worthwhile goodies hidden around the city that give you a tangible reason to explore every nook and cranny.

From Dust Game Guide

Like the villagers you shelter, you must contend with the inexorable power of nature. You slither around the world of From Dust as a small wormlike cursor called The Breath. Your basic ability lets you gather substances into a hovering ball, move them wherever you please, and then release them. You begin with simple applications of your skill, like gathering soil and building a land bridge across shallow water or sucking up water and dousing a fire. Water flows, soil settles, and lava hardens into implacable rock. Flowing water can wash away soil, and lava evaporates water even as the water cools it more quickly. The sights and sounds make the world of From Dust look lively, and the interplay between substances and natural laws make it feel alive.

Many totems, once settled, grant you temporary powers that are crucial to success. Stones grant villages the ability to repel fire, lava, and water, and sending a villager to retrieve this knowledge from a stone is often your best hope for survival, especially when tsunamis roll in and volcanoes erupt. Furthermore, because the game automatically determines a knowledge bearer's return path, you might watch him run right by a village that is threatened by lava to first deliver the protective knowledge to another, safer village.

De Blob 2 Game Guide

The blob known as Blob made his debut in de Blob when it landed on the Wii in 2008, introducing the world to a funky new hero whose ability to absorb color and spread it around was put to great use in that charming platformer. With the help of his friends in the Color Underground, Blob overthrew the oppressive, conformity-enforcing INKT Corporation and unceremoniously evicted Comrade Black from Chroma City. Above all else, de Blob 2 is a celebration of color and freedom.

Blob's weapon in the battle against oppression is color. As Blob, your goals typically involve traveling around the levels, restoring color to the buildings and citizens. Sometimes, you're required to paint buildings specific colors, which can require a little thought. For instance, if you need to paint the sides of some buildings orange but have to paint the surface that you need to stand on to reach those sides red, you have to paint the orange sides first. Blob's touch brings life in other ways, too. De Blob 2's visuals aren't technically impressive, but they have a charming and very distinct style that makes the colorful environments of Prisma City immensely inviting. Restoring color to this world just feels good.

Controlling Blob is fun, thanks to responsive controls and a mostly great targeting ability that lets Blob stomp switches, enemies, paintbots, and the like with unerring accuracy. Holding down a trigger targets the nearest targetable object, and the jump button sends Blob crashing down on top of it. By targeting the Inkies, Blob can stomp out or charge through just about anything they throw at him, provided he has the paint points.

Demon's Souls Game Guide

The Kingdom of Boletaria is an unforgiving place. Entering it means embracing a seemingly endless cycle of death and resurrection as you slowly tread through sullen swamps, scavenge dark caverns, and sneak between looming castle walls. Developer From Software's action role-playing game Demon's Souls houses this kingdom, and you should not expect the game to welcome you as an old friend and willingly share its deepest secrets. Demon's Souls is a stark and sulky beauty and is one of the finest games of 2009.

Demon's Souls' uncanny ability to ensnare you in its web starts with its five gloomy, meticulously crafted worlds. It takes some of the usual elements of dark medieval fantasy--roaring dragons, demon knights clad in well-worn armor, crumbling stone castles--and then molds them into a cohesive and enthralling universe. Every element is in exactly the right place, from soaring demons that look like manta rays to rows of fiends using their pickaxes to unearth unspecified valuables. Each world feels and looks authentic, as does the hub world (called the Nexus) from which you access them. Souls are the game's currency, and the primary way of accumulating them is to kill demons. You can't sell looted weapons that you don't need, nor can you put souls in the bank for use later. You can return to the location of your death and touch the bloodstain you left behind, which returns the lost souls to you. Be careful, though: if you die on your way to your bloodstain, it will disappate and be gone forever, along with all your hard-won souls. The constant specter of death means you should plan how you want to spend your souls in advance. What makes extreme difficulty and incessant trial and error such wonderful qualities in Demon's Souls, when they are so loathsome in other games? If your sword hits the wall instead of the enemy, it will glance off. The challenging combat is enhanced by a number of innovative online features that invite players to interact with each other. The game's online integration is nothing like you've ever seen, and it's a core component of the Demon's Souls experience.

Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City Game Guide

It's a third-person shooter with a story campaign that will see teams of four players make their way through the titular Raccoon City zombie outbreak that provided the setting for Resident Evil 2 way back when. Operation Raccoon City is being developed by Slant Six, a studio whose history thus far consists entirely of SOCOM games. That background is evident the moment you pick up a controller because Operation Raccoon City feels much more like a traditional third-person shooter than any recent Resident Evil game. There have been some pretty huge changes made to the standard Resident Evil formula, but it's still a Resident Evil game. In the co-op campaign, you'll be joining up with Umbrella Corporation's black ops/tier one/really-good-at-shooting-guns security squad. It seems the streets of Raccoon City have seen a noticeable uptick in zombie infestation since the events of Resident Evil 2. It's a points-based contest in which you get one point for a zombie kill, 10 points for killing an enemy teammate, and so on, based on good deeds you do for the team and special zombie types killed.

The elephant in the middle of the room is certainly this game's resemblance to Left 4 Dead--another zombie apocalypse series with four-player co-op. Anyone who has played the Left 4 Dead series knows what a high bar was set for any game trying to imitate it.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations Game Guide

In many words, the multiplayer in Assassin's Creed: Revelations isn't a radical overhaul of the previous game's offering, but instead, it's a richer, refined experience that builds on the comparatively bare bones of Brotherhood, as well as adding the expected new maps and skins. The core free-running and stealth-killing action feels much the same as in Brotherhood, but with a handful of mechanics retuned or rebalanced. Outside of the action itself, Ubisoft promises to cut down the time players will spend queuing for their next match (Brotherhood multiplayer fans will recall the frustration of long and occasionally unfruitful wait times). We also sampled two of the new modes: Deathmatch and Artifact Assault. We're told Deathmatch is intended as a kind of entry point for those inexperienced in Assassin's Creed multiplayer, delivering the basic experience with less sneaky evasion going on than in the other modes. In your team's half, you are an assassin; in the enemy's half, you are its prey. New, also, is a storyline layered over the multiplayer progression. Customizable avatars are the icing on the multiplayer cake in Revelations. Cosmetic customization spills over into new social features in Revelations, in which a player's Templar profile divulges his or her stats, including favorite skin, favorite ability, kill-to-death ratio, and the like. It might be hard to beat the revelatory leap of no multiplayer to some (rather good) multiplayer, as between Assassin's Creeds 2 and Brotherhood, but Revelations looks ready to take Assassin's Creed's first stab at multiplayer somewhere special.

FIFA 12 Game Guide

Much of the emphasis is on FIFA 12's improved career mode, which promises more depth, particularly for managers. Conversely, AI-controlled managers can come in and make offers for your players, raising their morale but ultimately costing you more money. This ties in to an overall set of enhancements to player growth. Younger players develop faster and carry a higher potential than older players, whose performance worsens as they age.

All the improvements tie in to the new EA Sports Football Club feature, which is an online service that connects players to a single persistent online profile. While the focus is on career mode, additions have also been made to the game on the pitch, including precision dribbling, tactical defending, and a new player impact engine. The new player impact engine provides the most change on the pitch. Players jumped over downed opposition, while push and pull mechanics saw heavier players given the advantage during challenges.

Dragon's Dogma Game Guide

We're not just referring to the title when we say that Dragon's Dogma is an interesting beast. Despite the fact that this is an open-world fantasy game in the vein of the Elder Scrolls series, it's not a role-playing game; rather, it's a frenetic sword-and-sorcery action game. We're talking about a game where you can set a goblin on fire, pick him up, and throw him into a group of his goblin buddies like a living Molotov cocktail. It's almost if the minds behind Devil May Cry made a game heavily inspired by Lord of the Rings. Other Capcom influences are on display as well. The game has three player classes: mage, fighter, and strider. Lacking any glowing orange weak spots, the griffin boss fight was an open-ended affair where we could use any number of strategies. You've got the usual options, like reviving a fallen ally or using the mage class to buff a teammate's abilities. Dragon's Dogma is running on the same engine as Lost Planet 2, which was certainly one of the more visually impressive games of the past year. While the camera was a bit problematic during the frenetic boss fight we played, the game itself is already rather pleasing to the eyes. What we've seen of the game has us cautiously optimistic, but there are a great many questions left to be answered to see if the game is going to live up to the potential it's showing in these early stages. We'll see if Capcom's new open-world fantasy action game can deliver when it's released on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 next year.

L.A. Noire Game Guide

What awaits Cole Phelps at the next crime scene? Inspired by film noir classics and hardboiled crime fiction, this tale of a complicated and troubled cop in postwar Los Angeles makes the business of detective work absorbing and rewarding, and it's drenched in so much authentic late-'40s style that you'll practically be able to smell the acrid mix of glamour and corruption in the air.

As a detective, your work investigating crime scenes is often about the smallest details, and the richness of these details in L.A. Noire makes rummaging around grisly crime scenes and perusing the personal effects of victims a compelling process. This attention to detail makes the often unsavory business of being a detective deeply absorbing. The art direction that pervades every aspect of L.A. Noire is simply outstanding, and it's a huge part of what makes this game such a memorable experience. And if you want the game to look more like Out of the Past than Chinatown, there's an option to play in crystal-clear black and white.

Thankfully, L.A. Noire is worthy. Phelps is played by Aaron Staton, best known for his role on Mad Men, and thanks to L.A. Noire's use of a new technology called motion scanning, his performance goes far beyond voice acting. You start out playing Phelps as a newly recruited uniformed officer. While investigating, you move Phelps around the environment and look for clues. As Phelps makes a name for himself in the department, he's called upon to start heading investigations himself, and that means questioning witnesses and interrogating suspects. If you believe the person is being honest and forthright with you, you can select Truth, which results in Phelps responding positively to the witness or suspect and coaxing more information out of him or her. If you think a person is being less than entirely honest, you can select Doubt, which often translates into "press the witness or suspect harder," and if your instincts are correct, this generally results in the suspect giving up something useful. For instance, if you ask a suspect what shoe size he wears and he tells you he wears a size 9, you can use the size 8 work boots you found in his home to prove that he's lying.