TechWeb - Parallel Processing Corp. says the cell processor developed by Sony, Toshiba, and IBM violates its patent for 'synchronized parallel processing with shared memory.'
The boss of SCE New Zealand has revealed that he hopes next year marks the release of a digital TV tuner for use with the PS3, essentially turning the console into a programmable TV recorder. Is there anything Sony\’s touted super computer won\’t be able to do…
The Axis and the Allies go at it online in Medal of Honor: Airborne.
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The test of longevity for most first-person shooters is not usually found in their single-player campaigns. Rather, it’s in how addictive or engrossing their multiplayer suites can be. This is doubly tough for World War II games, as the Call of Duty series has established a high bar in terms of multiplayer popularity. However, EA is no stranger to World War II shooters itself; indeed, its Medal of Honor series is older than Call of Duty. With Medal of Honor: Airborne, the company hopes to breathe new life into the genre with a dynamic style of gameplay that’s possible because you can parachute into battle, in both the single-player and multiplayer games. And we hit the virtual silk against EA’s finest to see what the online gameplay is like.
First, here are some key basics on the multiplayer game. Airborne will support up to 12 players in all three multiplayer modes. It’s a team-based game, so there are no one-against-all modes. Instead, you’ll belong to one of two teams. There are the Allies, which is basically the American Airborne, and the Axis, which can vary between the German and the Italian forces. Two of the three multiplayer modes feature the Allied side parachuting into action; the Axis never parachute since they were on the defensive during all the battles depicted in the game. There are some pros and cons to parachuting, which we’ll get to a bit later on.
At the beginning of each battle you select a primary weapon to carry (you can switch to a different selection while waiting to respawn). There’s a rifle, which translates into the familiar M1 Garand for the Allies and the bolt-action German infantry rifle. Next is the submachine gun, which is either a Thompson or an MP40. Heavier firepower is provided by the auto-rifle, either a Browning Automatic Rifle or an StG44. Then there are sniper rifles, and for fun with high explosives, an antitank weapon. Then are no vehicles in the game to use the antitank weapons against, but they are useful for taking out clusters of infantry. You can also carry a second weapon, which can be scavenged from dead enemies, for extra firepower. And everyone gets a pistol and some grenades, as well.
Sure, you’ve got a great view up here, but you’re also a sitting duck for the other team.
As you’d expect, there’s a balancing act going on between all the weapon types, so there’s no “perfect” weapon. The rifle is accurate and has a decent range but is relatively slow firing. The SMG can spew out rounds in a hurry, but it’s most effective up close. The auto-rifles are powerful, but their recoils make them difficult to control, and they eat through their magazines in no time. The sniper rifle is deadly accurate with a long range, but agonizingly slow. Then there are the antitank weapons, which can be fired only when aimed through their iron sights. This makes them slow to aim and fire, and even slower to reload, but the blast radius of their warheads basically makes them mini-artillery.
With all this firepower exploding around you, it’s no big surprise that you’ll die a lot, probably on par with other shooters. The game uses a regenerating health system. The health bar is divided into four squares. If you’re wounded, health drains from a square. Avoid fire for a few seconds and it will refill. If a square is fully drained, it won’t regenerate unless you pick up a health pack. If you’re killed, you’re out of action for a few seconds until you respawn.
All this is pretty standard for a World War II multiplayer shooter, though. We’ve come to expect the BARs and the bazookas. Where Airborne differentiates itself from the pack is in its modes, two of which depend on the parachute system to make the action pretty unpredictable. After all, in most games both teams start at the same place every time, which makes everything after that a bit predictable. In Airborne, one team is usually drifting down onto the map, landing all over the place. An Allied paratrooper can land almost anywhere on a level, from a rooftop to the objective itself to even on top of an enemy trooper, killing him instantly. On the other hand, the Axis can have a blast picking off the slowly descending Allies.
The first mode is objective airborne, which is basically a seize-the-objective mode that uses three flags. The Allies parachute into the level in this mode, and each team has its own flag at opposing ends of the map with a neutral middle flag in between. To seize one of the team flags requires a single player, but to seize the middle flag requires two teammates working in conjunction. If a team manages to control all three flags simultaneously it wins the round. The first team to win two of three rounds wins the match. Then there’s team deathmatch airborne mode, which does away with the flags altogether and focuses on killing the other team. Again, the Allies parachute into the battle in this mode. The third (and most conventional) mode is regular team deathmatch; this does away with the entire parachuting bit, so both teams start out on the ground.
Be careful of friendly fire in multiplayer. For one, it’s not friendly.
All three modes are supported on all six maps. These aren’t particularly huge maps–if they were too large, they’d simply be too big for just 12 players–but they’re designed so that there are plenty of ways to get around each level. Their names are pretty self-explanatory. Destroyed village is set amid a gutted village not unlike the one seen in Saving Private Ryan. Neptune is set amid the Norman hedgerow country and a German radar bunker. There’s a small trench network in front of the bunker, as well as a tunnel that bores through a small hillside. You can go through the tunnel, or up and over the hill. Husky is a scaled-down version of the Operation Husky level in the single-player campaign, and you’ll parachute into a circular Sicilian town. This is a brutal level thanks to the narrow alleyways and streets, as well as the ubiquitous rooftops, which makes it easy for the airborne to rain down death. Three of the maps are taken from the single-player campaign, while the remaining three have been adapted from previous Medal of Honor games.
Finally, Airborne will feature both ranked and unranked matches. Unranked matches are basically unofficial, so players can tinker with the various server settings, allowing access to unlockable upgrades. The ranked servers will basically be official, and you’ll be able to build a persistent character over time, gaining access to various unlockables. These are mainly weapon upgrades, similar to those seen in the single-player game. For instance, you can unlock rifle grenades, which lets you launch grenades a lot farther than you can throw them. This persistent mode will reward long-term play, which is the obvious hope.
Even without the parachute system Airborne’s multiplayer mode looks to be pretty solid. But throw in the ability to rain men upon the battlefield, and it becomes wilder than most World War II multiplayer battles. Medal of Honor: Airborne ships at the end of the month.
-If Its Games
With the rugby World Cup set to kick off in France in September this year, it was only a matter of time before EA Sports put on the headgear and pumped out another game in its Rugby series. Sure enough, Rugby 08 has landed on the PlayStation 2 just in time to take advantage of the upcoming World Cup hype, but fans looking for a significant leap forward from the last game–Rugby 06–may be a little disappointed. While Rugby 08 does introduce some new elements, the game is a little too close to the 06 offering for comfort.
What Rugby 08 does well–as did its predecessor Rugby 06–is distill the complex parts of the sport into a gameplay experience that ramps up nicely in difficulty once you’re past the novice stage. At its core are simple-to-handle controls: The left stick is used to move a player, while the L1 and R1 shoulder buttons are used to pass left or right of the current ball handler. Tackling is handled automatically; all you need to do to take down an opponent is steer your chosen player into the opponent’s path, and presto–a bone-jarring tackle is applied. When you add the X button to power up and release a kick, as well as the L2 button to dash, newbies are armed with all they need to know to start playing the game. A simple-to-follow tutorial also helps out greatly, although it doesn’t offer much in the way of illumination when it comes to the more complex rules of rugby.
Rugby 08 features all of the international teams competing in this year’s World Cup.
These basics will be enough to get players cruising in the game’s club level of difficulty, but the step up to the pro or elite levels will require more tactical thought and a lot of patience–just like a real-life rugby encounter. Rugby 08’s artificial intelligence stiffens in both attack and defence at the harder difficulties. While the easy club level will tutor beginners in most aspects of the game, there’s still a lot that’s left unexplained. This obviously won’t bother more hardcore fans of rugby, although it would have been nice to have some of the more oblique rules explained. In addition to tougher opponents, higher difficulty levels bring more player-management issues to handle. For example, injuries seem to happen at a much higher frequency at even the midrange pro level. Because the game features somewhat strict AI when it comes to substitutions, putting a player into a position that he doesn’t specialise in will result in basic errors and a greater chance of injury. This means that losing a key position player can often make the difference between winning and losing a match.
Rugby 08 contains many of the same offensive and defensive special moves found in 06. These include the shoulder charge for plowing through wannabe tacklers, the sidestep for extra evasion, and the hand-off to fend away opposition players. All of these moves are performed with the right analog stick. For example, shoulder charges are performed by pushing the right stick in the same direction as the left stick. These special moves become a valuable tool in Rugby 08, although their effectiveness is somewhat limited by the amount of time that passes between performing the required right-stick move and the onscreen player’s response.
General passing also seems to suffer delayed responses. For example, a half-second will pass from the time you press one of the shoulder buttons to when the player actually makes the pass. However, it’s no deal-breaker because it’s easy enough to compensate for once you get used to it. Passing, at any rate, becomes only one part of a successful strategy in Rugby 08. As in a real rugby game, smart kicking is vital both for better field position and to score points. In this aspect, Rugby 08 once again features game mechanics that are simple to learn yet hard to master. It’s easy enough to kick for touch, using the X button to set power and the left analog stick to aim, but it’s more difficult when it comes to setting more precise distances or bouncing a ball infield beforehand. Kicking for goal also becomes harder the farther a player is from the posts.
Rugby 08 has an abundance of game modes on offer, and the centerpiece is the upcoming World Cup to be held in France. All of the national sides competing at the World Cup are represented with nearly up-to-date rosters (though there are some exceptions, such as George Gregan still being the Wallabies captain), as are the French stadiums playing host to the tournament. Players can also take part in other real-world national and club competitions, such as the Tri-Nations, RBS Six Nations, Super 14, Guinness Premiership, or European Trophy. Rugby 06’s world league mode also makes a comeback. World league is as close to a management mode as Rugby 08 gets; in this mode, players have to take charge of a Division 3 club side and play their way to the big leagues. In addition to playing the matches, players will need to manage player purchases and transfers from season to season.
New to the franchise is the challenge mode, with 30 scenarios from previous World Cup tournaments that present the player with the task of either emulating or changing history. Each challenge has three objectives that need to be completed, with a fourth opening up once the first three are successfully done. Some of the objectives are straightforward. Examples include winning by 30 points, keeping the opposition to a certain score, and completing a set play. But many objectives are, frankly, pointless busywork and seem like a cheap ploy by the developers to extend the life of the game. Some of the stranger ones include having to run around for eight seconds in the goal area before scoring a try, gaining 52 meters with consecutive soccer kicks, or having to perform two consecutive shoulder charges with any player before scoring.
One area Rugby 08 is severely lacking in is multiplayer; the extent of the multiplayer offering comes in the form of the person sitting next to you on the couch. Yes, it’s late in the PS2’s lifespan, but that’s not an excuse for getting lazy and leaving online multiplayer out of the package altogether.
Some of the challenge objectives seem rather pointless.
Visually, the game looks crisp, with the players featuring quality likenesses when compared to their real-life counterparts. However, the player models aren’t super detailed, which won’t matter for the most part because most gamers will probably find themselves using camera angles farther away from the action to gain a better overall view of the field. Rugby 08’s soundtrack contains 12 songs from up-and-coming artists, which you’ll hear ad nauseam by the time you’re a few hours into the game. The same goes for the commentary; it’s passable at the start, but it only takes a few games to hear the same phrases repeated over and over again.
Rugby 08 is another decent stab by EA Sports at rugby, which will please both newcomers and long-time fans of the sport. On the downside, it doesn’t offer anything radically different to fans who may already have the previous entry in the franchise. The game is also hampered by its lack of online play, which is practically a standard in today’s sports games. Here’s hoping a possible leap to next-generation platforms for the next game in the Rugby series will bring with it some more major improvements.
Role-playing games don’t come much cheaper or generic than Gods: Lands of Infinity. This by-the-numbers RPG isn’t so much awful as it is afflicted by a total lack of innovation by the developers at Cypron Studios and bargain basement production values. With that said, this is still a relatively competent take on the genre that you might enjoy, depending on your tolerance for tedium, as well as some of the goofiest voice acting and dialogue ever committed to an RPG.
As is the case with a lot of these generic fantasy types, the story is sufficiently ridiculous. It may actually be a little dumber than most. The plot relies on the antiquated hero-with-amnesia gimmick. Every character and place has also been stricken with absurd names like Svatopluck or Woda Gdely. You play Vivien, a magical hero created by a fire god named Arsvaargh. Her goal is to end a war of the gods on the world of Bellarion and find the mysterious artifact needed to defeat the god of darkness, Xarax (not to be confused with his older brother Xanax, the god of “please don’t take these with alcohol”). To accomplish this mighty task, Vivien is sent to another world on a quest to contact the different gods there. Of course, she manages to lose all of her Arsvaargh-granted special abilities en route to this new land. So you’re the typical neophyte adventurer, gaining experience points, leveling up, and choosing a career path from fighter, mage, or alchemist options. The only thing that stands out in this insipid saga is Kyla Cole, the 2000 Penthouse pet of the year, as she supplies the face and voice of Vivien. It’s not every day you get a former nude model starring in an RPG–reasonably clothed, at that.
OK, who ordered the generic fantasy non-player characters?
Despite the goal of averting an apocalypse, your mission doesn’t involve a lot of earth-shaking assignments. Almost every job that Vivien accepts has been scarfed from the big book of clich
When it comes to real-time strategy, few franchises are larger than the Age of Empires series. Famed for blending history with RTS gameplay, Age of Empires games have allowed you to take civilizations or nations from the past and then guide them through the struggle to survive and thrive. The game centers on the concept of building a city, an economy, and then an army, which can be used to defend your borders or to expand them.
The Japanese are one of the powerful new civilizations in The Asian Dynasties.
2005’s Age of Empires III focused on the age of colonization in the New World. As such, it featured mainly European civilizations. Native American civilizations were added in The WarChiefs expansion, released last year. Now Big Huge Games, the developer of Rise of Nations and Rise of Legends, is currently working on The Asian Dynasties, the second expansion for the game. This will shift the focus more to the Far East and introduce a number of key Asian civilizations. To get the very first details on the new Japanese faction, we turned to Brian Reynolds, CEO and creative director of Big Huge Games. The expansion will ship later this year.
If Its Games: Give us an update on the expansion’s development. What aspects of the game is the team working on at the moment?
Brian Reynolds: We’ve just reached content freeze, meaning that all of the art, units, maps, scenarios, and other types of content are complete. We’re now mostly working on final balancing of the new units and civs for multiplayer and polishing the game for release.
GS: Give us an overview of the Japanese faction. What are the faction’s major strengths and weaknesses? What unique features or abilities does it bring to the table?
BR: Japan’s major strengths include its extremely powerful military units (such as samurai), but these units are also expensive, so you’ll need a good economy. One interesting Japanese power is that most home-city cards can be sent twice. An even more dramatic difference from other nations is that in reflection of restrictions on hunting and eating meat other than fish–restrictions which remained in place for hundreds of years in Japan–the Japanese are not allowed to acquire food from hunting or herding.
GS: Could you explain how the team used real-world history to inform the design of the Japanese faction? How in-depth will history figure into their design? What major historical events will be reflected in the faction’s design?
Japanese armies are built around their fearsome samurai warriors.
BR: Japanese history figured strongly in our design of the civilization, from military units to technologies to home-city cards, and especially of course, the single-player campaign. A particularly good example is the Japanese ban on hunting and eating meat other than fish, which was a result of the influence of Buddhism and had been in place for centuries as of the period of this game. At the same time, there are shrines in Japan where tame deer roam free, so we allowed shrines in the game to attract nearby animals to provide a gather bonus.
GS: Give us a rundown of the Japanese army. What are the most unique units at the Japanese faction’s disposal? How do they help determine the faction’s best strategies in battle?
BR: Japanese units, individually, tend to be expensive but powerful. The backbone of the Japanese army is the samurai warrior, whose powerful melee attack deals area damage to nearby units. The special hatamoto samurai, available from the consulate, is even more powerful than ronin mercenaries.
The most strategically powerful unit in the Japanese force is the daimyo, a special commander unit available from home-city shipments and one of the wonders. The best thing about a daimyo is that he’s a mobile unit who can receive home-city shipments. So if you’re careful not to get him killed, he can bring reinforcements right into the middle of the battle! The daimyo can also train units and provides a bonus to units fighting nearby. And the most powerful daimyo of all is the shogun whom you get late in the game.
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Picross, short for picture crossword, is a puzzle not entirely unlike Sudoku, in that it forces you to use logic to deduce the particulars of the puzzle. But rather than focusing solely on numbers, Picross has you using numbers to determine which boxes in a grid get punched out to eventually form a picture or a pattern. With a ton of puzzles to keep veterans busy and a helpful tutorial mode to get new players up to speed, Picross DS is the sort of game that will keep you staring at your Nintendo DS long into the night.
You may know these puzzles as nonograms, griddlers, or paint by number. Regardless of the name, the horrific addiction is still the same.
The grids vary in size, starting with very simple 5×5 grids. Numbers mark each row and column, and they tell you how many blocks, in a row, are part of the puzzle. So in the starting small grid, seeing a “5″ next to a row or column would mean that each block needs to be punched. Seeing a “3″ means only three, and seeing something like “1 3″ would mean that there’s one block, followed by one or more blank spaces, then three more connected blocks. By seeing how the numbers form up and deducing which spots must absolutely be punched for the hints to make sense, you eventually work your way around the grid and complete the puzzle. Those small grids get larger as you play, eventually leading you to huge 25×20 grids. The game’s normal mode runs on a timer, giving you 60 minutes to complete each puzzle. That’s usually more than enough time, but as you make mistakes, penalty minutes are packed onto your time. There’s also a free mode, which runs without a time limit, but it also doesn’t let you know when you’ve made a mistake, only when you’ve completed the entire puzzle. These, as you might expect, get tricky fast.
The game’s a natural fit for the DS touch-screen controls, but unfortunately they start to become very cumbersome as the grid size increases. You’ll eventually have to deal with zooming in and out to better see parts of the larger grids, which isn’t ideal. For the later, larger puzzles, playing with the control pad and buttons might actually be faster.
In addition to playing the single-player mode, you can go in and create your own puzzles, which can be sent to other players locally. There’s also an online mode where you can download additional puzzles (though none are available as of this writing), and a head-to-head mode where two players try to solve two 10×10 grids. The fastest player wins, and if you can’t finish two 10×10 puzzles in two or three minutes, chances are you’re going to lose. It takes what can be a very casual puzzle experience and makes it totally hectic, and also a great deal of fun. There aren’t any leaderboards, but your own personal win/loss record is kept, and you earn different ranks as you play. Locally, you can play with up to five players using only one cart. You can also send demo puzzles to other nearby players without a copy of the game.
By offering a ton of puzzles to play alone and the constant challenge of online play, Picross DS is a long-lasting puzzle game and an awesome value at $19.99. If you’re already a fan of logic puzzles like Sudoku, this might just be your next brain-teasing habit.
Take a look at Heroes of Mana’s strategy gameplay in this footage.
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Square Enix and developer Brownie Brown have faithfully re-created real-time strategy on the Nintendo DS with Heroes of Mana, an early version of which we’ve been putting through its paces recently. The game is set in the same whimsical universe as the classic action role-playing Mana games stretching all the way back to the Super Nintendo, though Dawn of Mana on the PlayStation 2 and the DS’s own Children of Mana are more recent examples of this popular fantasy franchise. Heroes of Mana is the series’ first real foray into strategy, though, and so far we’ve been impressed that Brownie Brown not only has preserved the genre’s basic tenets on the diminutive DS, but has packed a good amount of depth in here, as well.
As we’ve mentioned before, you’ll play as a ragtag group of fighters (including the rapscallion Roget) who are sent on a secret mission by the kingdom of Pedda to infiltrate the beastmen’s neighboring kingdom of Ferolia. While there, however, Roget’s band learns that Pedda has begun to ruthlessly conquer the Ferolians, causing them to question their allegiances and ultimately join up with the oppressed beastpeople to fight off their attackers. The gameplay follows a formula RTS aficionados will be intimately familiar with. You start out with a sparse home base, gather resources to construct new structures, and then start pumping out units so you can fight your enemies. There are two types of resources, stones and berries, and you’ll use stones to build your structures and berries to produce troops. Mission objectives vary, but they all tend toward typical RTS objectives such as “kill all the enemies” or “move important guy to point X on the map.”
Thanks to the dual screens and touch-based interface, Heroes’ gameplay has worked smoothly for us so far. Commanding a unit is as simple as tapping it to select it, then tapping its target to perform the appropriate, context-sensitive action. Tap the ground and the unit will walk; tap an enemy and it will attack. To select multiple units, you can hit an icon that will pause the action and allow you to draw a loop around all the characters you want to select, then the game will resume automatically. You can rotate the camera 90 degrees with the shoulder buttons and move it around with the D pad, although both actions can be accomplished easily with the touch controls as well.
The touch-based interface makes gameplay easy to get into.
In fact, the developer has done a good job of using both screens and the stylus to make it easier for you to issue commands and absorb information. You’ll be able to swap the images on the top and bottom screens at almost any time, so even though only one of the DS’s screens is touch-capable, you can essentially control everything by touch simply by bringing the top screen’s contents down to the bottom. For instance, rather than using the D pad to manually move the camera across the map, you can simply bring the map display (which defaults to the top screen) down to the bottom screen and then tap the point on the map you want to move to. This works within missions, while you’re browsing through topics in the game’s extensive knowledge base on gameplay concepts and story points, and on the characters’ equipment screens.
Speaking of equipment, you’ll be able to outfit your characters in full RPG-style regalia. Each map will be littered with special gear that you’ll automatically pick up if one of your characters wanders over the right spot. Furthermore, you’ll be ranked at the end of each mission based on your speed, casualties, and so on, and your ranking will determine the quality of bonus equipment you receive. The gear confers typical RPG upgrades, such as extra hit points or bonuses to speed, range, or attack power. Some gear actually carries a mixture of pros and cons, such as one that might give you extra speed but subtract 40 hit points at the same time. If nothing else, this should provide an impetus to play each mission as well as you can, so you get the best items possible as a reward.
Presumably due to hardware constraints, the battles in Heroes of Mana aren’t of the same scale you’d see in a strategy game like, say, Starcraft. There aren’t scores of troops running around at the same time; at least in the early missions, you’ll typically be controlling only a handful of offensive units, along with two or three resource gatherers. But even if the battles are smaller, Brownie Brown hasn’t skimped on the typical checks-and-balances sort of strategic depth you’d find in “larger” RTS games. There are four basic classes of units–ground, air, ranged, and heavy–and the game’s tutorial mission will give you a nice flow chart that shows which classes are stronger or weaker against certain other classes.
Something is amiss in the kingdom of Ferolia.
On top of that, you’ll have some special units and leader units–similar to hero units in some other RTSs–that are exempt from these specific rules. The leaders in particular are the same story characters you’ll see jawing about the plotline’s political strife in the cutscenes between missions. Just like your basic units, your leaders have varying abilities (some are melee fighters, while others attack from range, for instance), so you’ll want to tailor your gear distribution to their basic properties. Leaders also have area-of-effect skills that will come into play at various times in battles.
Heroes of Mana is due to hit the DS in the middle of August. We like what we’ve seen in the first couple of hours of the game; stay tuned for a review around the time of release to find out if the strategy gameplay on offer here can hold up throughout the entire storyline.
-If Its Games
Internet reports are suggesting that Nintendo will not be making themsleves present at this years Tokyo Game Show. Unfortunately this implies that we won\’t be getting some good new looks at Super Smash Bros. Brawl or Super Mario Galaxy.
Just yesterday Bizarre Creations announced that it was having trouble fitting all the content they wished for PGR 4 onto a single disc for use with the Xbox 360. Sony has since responded on the matter by saying that this example justifies their investment in the higher capacity Blu-ray format. The spokesperson also commented that next-generation games simply need more disc space, a first gen title like Lair is already on the verge of 25GB…
In a refreshing turn, over at Newsweek’s LevelUp blog N’Gai has some suitably chastising commentary on the newly-announced FPS entitled simply THEY. This overly-simplistic name is accompanied by a nearly informationless press release, and reinforces the idea that whatever THEY is, it’s not worth looking into. “Generally, the role of a press release is to inform. But having read the THEY press release, all we’ve taken away from it is hyperbole and buzzwords, assembled Mad Libs-style for maximum unintended hilarity. What is THEY? Apparently, THEY is a ‘next generation mystery first person shooter for PC and next generation consoles.’ Who are THEY, you ask? ”THEY’ are huge–’THEY’ are different–’THEY’ are hostile!’ How good will THEY be? It’s ’so mysterious, so stunning and so amazing–that ‘THEY’ might become one of the most anticipated world premiere titles from this year’s Games Convention!’”.
Bungie has confirmed that Halo 3 will feature up to four player co-op in campaign mode on Xbox Live or even System Link. As per usual split screen co-op is limited to two players per screen but it is possible to join two other friends online or via system link once again.
While Bungie gave the world a good look at the upcoming Halo 3’s multiplayer battles in the form of a hugely populated beta program, it has been much more tight-lipped about its plans for the sci-fi first-person shooter’s campaign mode. Today the studio confirmed a much-speculated piece of information about the campaign mode, stating on its Web site that it will indeed support online cooperative multiplayer for up to four players.
Since there’s only one Master Chief, the four-player online campaign mode will include three more playable characters: Halo 2’s Arbiter and two of his fellow Covenant Elites. All characters will play identically, but the Elites will wield carbines instead of battle rifles. That’s an awful lot of firepower to throw into the same situations as the game’s single-player campaign, but Bungie says it’s addressing the various gameplay issues it creates.
“You’re going to want to play co-op as hard as you can stomach it,” Bungie’s Web site warns. “We’d certainly recommend Legendary, but we’ll be revealing some more ways to make the game more interesting and challenging for multiple players in the very near future.”
The online cooperative mode will support the game’s film-saving functions, but gamers will not be able to join in midgame. Players will have to congregate in a lobby first, from which point they can pick up the campaign at any saved checkpoint. As in previous games, players will have the option of cooperative split-screen play, but it is limited to two people. However, once matched, a pair can complete its foursome through system link or by going online.
For more on Halo 3, check out If Its Games’s previous coverage.
It’s become standard practice for massively multiplayer online games to release expansion packs to update their core offerings sometime down the road. Since launching in late 2004, Blizzard has placated it
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