Archive for: E3

‘Splinter Cell’: Sam Fisher Gets a Partner

There are a couple of new trailers for Tom ,due this August before the fall Call of Duty rush. The game’s two-player co-op mode allows you to play as longtime hero Sam Fisher or his new partner, CIA operative Isaac Briggs. You’re tasked with retrieving a nuclear warhead from a group of terrorists. There are 4 mission types, 14 maps and a two-player split-screen option. +Continue Reading

Assassin’s Creed Goes to New Orleans

The Assassin’s Creed series continues its new Colonial America theme with Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, a handheld game to be released exclusively on Sony’s struggling PS Vita system on October 31.

The game takes place in New Orleans between 1765 and 1780 and focuses on the French and Indian War rather than the American Revolution. You play as Aveline de Grandpré, a Creole daughter of a French father and African mother. She’s the first female assassin in the game and wields a variety of weapons, including a whip, a blowpipe, a machete, knives and various firearms. +Continue Reading

Fight Hong Kong Triads in Sleeping Dogs

One of the big surprises at E3 was Sleeping Dogs, a Hong Kong-set open world game that lets play as Wei Shen, an undercover cop taking on (and trying to take down) the local Sun On Yee Triad.

Developed by United Front Games as True Crime: Hong Kong, the game was dumped by Activision last year for being over budget and behind schedule. Square Enix stepped in as the new distributor and the retitled game is due for release on August 14th for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3.  +Continue Reading

E3 Instagrams

Here’s a slideshow of photos we took at the E3 Expo in Los Angeles, a lot of which you might have seen before if you follow our @MilOffDuty twitter account. Everything was processed with Instagram and shot with an iPhone 4S, a combo that makes it easy for almost anyone to fake being a real photographer.

Assassin’s Creed Visits the Revolution

One of the biggest surprises for us at E3 was Assassin’s Creed III, which continues the game’s Assassin’s-versus-Templars plot line by introducing a new character Connor Kenway and setting the action on the Eastern seaboard during the American Revolution.

Connor is a half-British/half-Native American ancestor of the game’s protagonist Desmond Miles, filling the same role taken by earlier Creed lead assassins Altair during the Crusades and Ezio in 15th/16th-century Italy. The new game takes place in Boston, New York City and the American frontier and features the same open-world, free ranging gameplay that has made the series so popular. +Continue Reading

Sam Fisher: Action Hero

Looks like the Hollywood studio people were creeping around E3 last week in LA and saw the awesome preview of Ubisoft’s new Splinter Cell: Blacklist game. Or maybe they just saw Tom Clancy’s name on the sign and thought it was a new novel.

Anyway, Deadline Hollywood is reporting that Paramount Pictures is negotiating for the right to make a movie based on the exploits of operative Sam Fisher. Considering that there have already been six Splinter Cell games, it seems like they took a long time to notice. Plus how many good movies have been inspired by video games? (Answer: zero)

Master Chief is Back

It’s hard to believe it’s been 5 years since the release of Halo 3, half a decade where Call of Duty and Battlefield stepped into the void left by the absence of Master Chief. Halo almost singlehandedly created the market for the Xbox and Microsoft held onto the franchise when original developer Bungie ended its affiliation with the company.

So Halo 4 is a big deal for Microsoft. It’s still an Xbox exclusive game and this is the first version developed by their own 343 Industries division without any input from Bungie and the company wanted to make a big splash at E3, starting with a live-action trailer that sets up the new campaign plot. +Continue Reading

Black Ops 2: Los Angeles is Burning

Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 was a dominating presence at E3. The latest game in the wildly successful series arrives November 13th and Activision promoted the game with the largest, loudest booth in the building.

It seemed like the entire building was dominated by the 140-foot wide 6336×720 screen displaying a countdown clock and the world’s largest game trailer. The thing played over and over and the entire area looked like Times Square on New Year’s Eve for three solid days. The video above doesn’t really capture how hard it was to hear anything that wasn’t Black Ops while the movie was playing. +Continue Reading

Medal of Honor: Pay Attention

All of you with short attention spans need to focus here because we’re going to talk about Medal of Honor: Warfighter and get into some gray and not-so-gray areas about war gaming. One of the coolest things we saw at E3 last week was the preview version of the new game but not everyone in the media understands how awesome Warfighter should be when it hits stores in October.

The backstory for you newcomers: Medal of Honor was originally a sort-of-square WWII game inspired by Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. It got a modern Afghanistan-set reboot in 2010. Warfighter continues that theme but adds 12 different Tier One units from 10 different countries to the multiplayer version. +Continue Reading

Splinter Cell: Killing in Motion

Sam Fisher is back in Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist, due for release in spring 2013. Now Sam’s the leader of the Special Ops teams that reports only to the President of the United States and he’s tasked with taking out “The Blacklist,” a group of 12 rogue nations that band together to create a series of escalating attacks on U.S. assets.

Ubisoft premiered the game this week at E3 in Los Angeles and the on-site gameplay demo hypes the new “Killing in Motion” feature that allows Sam to accumulate Execute points in hand-to-hand combat and use those points to tag enemies and then kill them all in one fluid motion.

Every time Tom Clancy’s name shows up on one of these products, you have to wonder: does Tom have approval anymore over the brand? Has he ever played Xbox? If so, why doesn’t he use the webcam on his computer to record a Welcome to Blacklist video that Ubisoft can show at these conferences? Last, most important question: do any of the kids who learned his name playing video games ever graduate to buying his books? That’s the kind of thing you wonder about waiting in lines at E3.

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