Category / Gaming

by Xavier Voigt-Hill

The Last of Us gameplay video steals the show at E3

In Sony’s E3 press conference, Naughty Dog, the studio behind the Uncharted and Jak & Daxter games, unveiled the first gameplay video of their new IP, The Last of Us. The game is set in a post-pandemic world destroyed by a plague, and players take control of Joel, a ruthless survivor, and Ellie, a brave young girl, as they try to survive across America. The gameplay video, created live at the keynote from a PlayStation 3, shows Joel and Ellie treading through an abandoned hotel, before death ensues for many enemies. At the end, an assailant sporting a rifle enters a derelict room, before getting stabbed and losing his head to the gun. Watch the epic 7:23 video below (18+) and take a look at the previous trailers and a few screenshots, and prepare for the PlayStation exclusive launch in late 2012 or early 2013.



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by Xavier Voigt-Hill

Ubisoft unveils Watch Dogs and stuns E3

Companies have come out with all guns blazing in the first day of press conferences at E3, but Ubisoft undoubtedly stole the show with their announcement of Watch Dogs. The game’s trailer, accompanied with just two sentences of description, debuted during the company’s conference, which also included information about Far Cry 3 and Assassin’s Creed 3, but it is believed that Watch Dogs is our first peek at a next generation game. Watch the trailer and first demo video below, visit the game’s website and try to spot the hidden Windows Phone.

Update: Joystiq is reporting that Ubisoft’s press site lists the game for PS3, Xbox 360 and PC, but their own Xav de Matos thinks it might just be a placeholder listing and Polygon‘s Arthur Gies suspects that what we saw today was not the current-gen version.

Everything is connected. Connection is power.



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by Xavier Voigt-Hill

E3: The Preview

E3 is just around the corner, so we thought we’d give you a peek at some of the stuff that we’re looking forward to this week.

The Last of Us

The Last of Us is the latest title from Naughty Dog, famous for the Uncharted and Jak & Daxter games. This PS3 exclusive is set in a post-pandemic world destroyed by a plague, and players take control of Joel, a ruthless survivor, and Ellie, a brave young girl, as they try to survive across America. Think Dead Island but better.


Tomb Raider

Lara Croft is back, and she’s determined to get her crown back as queen of action games.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim: Dawnguard

Skyrim came out late last year to almost universal acclaim, including our own game of the year award. Now, Bethesda is set to give us more information about the recently-announced Dawnguard DLC.

Lego Lord of the Rings

Lego games are always awesome, and the minifgure take on Lord of the Rings promises to be no exception.

Hitman: Absolution

The Hitman series returns with death, death and even more death.

The Testament of Sherlock Holmes

Despite being an obvious attempt to cash in on the ongoing Sherlock fever, this LA Noire-esque detective game seems intriguing.

Far Cry 3

The Far Cry series returns to an isolated island, and this time you get crazier the longer you stay there.

Assassin’s Creed 3

With a new protagonist and a new continent, AC3 promises to be epic, but can it differ enough from its predecessors to make gamers happy?

Have we missed anything? Let us know in the comments, and get ready for the biggest week of the gaming year. E3 here we come!

by Jasper Edwards

Why Battlefield 3 is awesome

Since October last year, half of my life has been devoted to one amazing creation that is Battlefield 3. Getting mostly 9’s from the critics, the only real competitor to this huge FPS is obviously the CoD series. Since both series have been going on for over half my life, they both certainly have the experience and knowledge to nick £40 out of your pocket and make you feel good about it, but Battlefield 3 does it in a way that nobody would’ve ever imagined before. Using the Frostbite 2 engine and the multiplayer element of the Medal of Honor reboot as a warm-up, DICE made this game the most epic and awe-inspiring game of, well, ever. With 5 million sales in the first week, I am going to explain to you why you should get this game if you haven’t already.

I will start with the part of shooters that is dying a slow and painful death: the campaign. Having completed it in a day on hard difficulty about 4 months ago, it remains a sweet memory in the heart of my mind. You start off as a foot soldier in the middle of some war-torn Iranian city as part of a small squad of soldiers. After a short while of the atmosphere consuming you, quick fire-fights and realistic situations begin to steal your mind and eyes from the real world. You are quickly shown the amazing destruction engine and realistic sounds as well as things like suppressive fire which makes killing the enemy a lot harder. With all the realism intact, you are still left feeling like you are a super soldier, until of course you get cocky and take a bullet to the face. Skipping on a bit as, although I’d love to, I can’t take you through the whole campaign, you are put in the shoes of an F-18 pilot, an M1A2 Abrams (i.e. a big tank) and a Russian guy trying to help the world – for once. After the mind-blowing good lengthy missions that lead up to the finale, some good twists and revelations give that grin a widening and leave you feeling as if you’ve just completed the BF3 campaign because there’s nothing really that compares to it.

The next part of the game to explain is the ground-breaking multiplayer that wins most people. The multiplayer has been patched and tweaked and added to constantly to maintain its beauty. From DLC’s to sounds that literally are real, I bow to DICE for giving this brilliant game the upkeep it needs, as any good game does. Analogy alert: nice cars cost a lot to run. The multiplayer is for pretty much anyone. If you are an adrenaline junkie crazy guy you can enter the close quarter maps and game modes which allow simple quickly changing games, but if you like a tactical teamwork inspired game that includes vehicles for land, sea and air then jump into Conquest. As well as the game mode you’re looking for, the type of player you are is taken into account as well. From mounting bipods and massive scopes and keeping your gun on semi-auto to using nothing but your fully auto side-arm and fear to kill your enemies, you can pretty much do anything, use anything or be anything you want to. With plenty maps, weapons, attachments and vehicles the multiplayer is almost flawless. However every game has its bad points and Battlefield 3 is no exception. On large maps against a skilful enemy you may find yourself spawn-trapped with no escape apart from the AA gun that’s being hogged by Brian Peppers’ downy brother. Another problem that may occur which has happened to me twice in total (in my 100+ hours of game time) is when your guns or menu do not appear so you find yourself useless and stuck. The last problem is that you find hours of your day vanish in front of your eyes, although I’d rather that than watch parts of your controller sprinkle across the room after your latest venture on to Modern Warfare 3. Another small part of the game for extra fun is a co-op mission strand consisting of 6 missions that you complete with your friend to unlock some extra guns for online games. The co-op does not need much explaining apart from that it is fun and fulfilling.

A problem however that people have with the game however is that it constantly wants your money to rent a server, buy a new map pack or get access to online features. First of all, most of these are avoided if you preordered or bought a limited edition (which costs no more than a regular copy), both of which give you codes for online play and free DLC. Secondly, you cannot blame DICE or the game for this as all the previous stuff was originally going to be free until EA stuck their big, money sucking noses into it and persuaded DICE to let them charge for it. No wonder they’re the worst company in America.

Overall Battlefield 3 is a great game and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone that is a new gamer, an FPS fan or just anyone with a PC or console. With things like a never-ending achievement list, upgrades to get, people to shoot and wallet-melting DLC combined with other things like dozens of maps, completely customisable weapons and orgasmic sounds and graphics, for me this game couldn’t be better.

Cue epic BF theme tune.

by Jordan Davis-Bernier

Minecraft: What the hell should I do?

I know I said things in previous posts and I really need to start writing more stuff but I need some help. Please take 10 seconds to vote for what you would like me to do in Minecraft!

by Eddie King

Birdwatching: Is Assassin’s Creed starting to dull?

Birdwatching is a column by Eddie King. Views expressed are not necessarily those of Digixav.

The first time I ever played Assassin’s Creed was in Germany many years ago. I spent a full half hour navigating the tutorial trying to figure out what it trying to tell me to do in German. Despite the difficulties in this, I fell in love and when I got my first Xbox it was the first game I bought. Needless to say I got bored fairly soon.  The first Assassin’s Creed definitely deserves the title of a classic game, but at about the halfway point in the plot it requires the determination of a donkey hell bent on avenging his mother’s second cousin’s murder to finish. Five years later much has changed, so how has the memory mooching megalomaniacal man in a dressing gown been getting on?

After the revolutionarily intriguing first episode, Assassin’s Creed was well known but not perfect, but then came the sequel Assassin’s Creed 2. If you have not played this game then you should be taken out and shot in front of your families. It was the second coming and it had nothing wrong with it at all. It set the standard for any game that wasn’t racing or shooting. The aspects that made it so successful were the fact that you could climb just about anywhere you could see, the fighting looked absolutely insane, the plot was brilliant and had you wanting the next piece of the puzzle and all of this was in a manageable package that didn’t require ultimate gamer reflexes to operate. At the same time it wasn’t easy either and it certainly wasn’t boring.

If Assassin’s Creed was to Assassin’s Creed 2 what Call of Duty 3 was to Modern Warfare, then Assassin’s Creed 2 was to Brotherhood what Modern Warfare is to Modern Warfare 2. Anal analogies aside, Brotherhood was perfection with every little bit being a little bit better. The introduction of the multiplayer was all that was needed to keep me glued to the screen for a very long time. Even Red Dead Redemption took a back seat at this point. The choice of things to do became more in depth and the graphics were just getting sharper; much like Ezio’s blade, maybe a little too sharp. The first signs of problems had begun to emerge. I had trouble dying. Apart from the occasional stumble and misjudging the occasional free running stunt was all that ever stopped my heart beating. I was becoming worried that Assassin’s Creed was slowing to a crawl so far as new developments were concerned. Admittedly Brotherhood was nicknamed Assassin’s Creed 2.5 but as a new game I was expecting more and certainly more of a challenge.

Revelations again wasn’t quite Assassin’s Creed 3 but more Assassin’s Creed 2.750861 and it was the same story yet again, with the same easy combat systems in which one button push could dispatch six guards stunningly enough to make Qui-Gon Jinn’s bottom jaw hit the floor and the same fleet of efficient friends who could remove any threat in front of you without even having to draw your sword and the same ability to defy gravity as effectively elephants’ ears when jumping from building to building. Yes, the story has set the stage for a grand finale and pieces of the puzzle have fallen into place that you couldn’t have added otherwise, but it could have been so much better if Ubisoft had injected a little of the original Assassin’s Creed elbow grease and grunt.

Despite all this, I still have the bottom half of Ezio’s face staring me down from behind my desktop and Ubisoft will undoubtedly continue to relieve me of extortionate amounts of money for the privilege of finding ever predictable ways of killing people. I really love the Assassin’s Creed series and I will continue to play it because it is one of the most fun and unique games available today. That being said, I hope that when I hear the gentle rip of plastic that indicates I have Assassin’s Creed 3 in my grasp I will not give a sigh of sadness as I realise I have already played this very game before only with a man with a different accent, but rather a gasp of excitement as I am grabbed by the balls and dragged to a new world of tomahawks and tea into a new experience.

by Eddie King

Birdwatching: Minecraft vs. Lego

Birdwatching is a column by Eddie King. Views expressed are not necessarily those of Digixav.

Many moons ago, before the red ball of fury was angry and consumed with rage at the idiots who run the world, he spent his time building the most tremendous Lego structures the world has ever seen, and spent hours planning the most complicated battle plans in an attempt to outwit the little yellow men on the other team. Now, I play Minecraft whenever I have an urge to see an insane idea of mine on a screen and soon my little brother will too. The problem is he has never spent hours on some incredibly complex technological project that will rock the world of your own innocent dreams and never feel that awesome feeling of success. The real question is, despite my nostalgia, is this really a bad thing?

There is a little thing called evolution that I am rather fond of and I consider it the ultimate succession of life. Up until now, each generation has thought of something new and old people have complained about how much easier life was or how much worse it has become. The problem is that in the last hundred years we have made technological progress at a rate which is beyond comprehension. People are getting worried because every stereotype or old wives tale which we feel comfortable in is being rewritten thanks to computers. They are attacked and teams of individuals have made it their lives’ work to prove they are bad. But are they? I think that any change society makes on a mass scale must, by definition, be positive, otherwise that change would not happen on such a large scale. Take smoking – thirty years ago it was the pinnacle of cool and advertised at or sponsoring almost every major event. Seventy years ago it was just one of the things you did like breathing. It has however been clinically proven to kill you, so they stopped the advertising and sponsorships and today smokers are shunned. People still smoke, but the ones that do know how they could be compromised. The technological revolution is a compromise and one that I have not really made. For instance, how many people – especially teenagers – who are reading this post know how to skin a rabbit? On the down side, I am a terrible zob and I can’t touch type, but I am happy with that compromise.

My point is this – the technological revolution has not yet completed revolving and the more we fight it the longer it will take. I think we should sit back and let it take its course. If it works out then great, but if not then people will change because I think one of the biggest problems today is people don’t trust themselves. There is no confidence. People have been adapting for quite a long time now and they’ve got quite good at the whole survival thing.

My brother won’t have those great memories and I might feel bad for him, but he will have other memories and other experiences that I shall not have, and so we have come to the end of this sermon. I think that people should sit back and let this period of social evolution take its course.

by Eddie King

Birdwatching: Fus Ro Damn I’m bored

Birdwatching is a column by Eddie King. Views expressed are not necessarily those of Digixav.

I didn’t manage to impale a sharp projectile into my patella but regardless I have managed to lose my sense of humour over Digixav’s favourite game of 2011, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Yes, the small red flying feathered ball in the sky is going to be taking the big, scaly, fire breathing monster that is Skyrim. It was one of the most highly anticipated games since the release of Oblivion back in 2005 and when it arrived at school on a November morning even the quietest and most reasonable students became national standard rugby players and managed to barge past most of the school to play it. I did observe and despair, and this is why.

A game should stimulate you mentally. It should make you think and feel and it should be an experience. Skyrim is just a way to waste time. The mechanics of the game are repetitive and there are enough side missions to get lost in. Replay value? I think not because the chances are you will never finish the entire game before your mind is reduced to a whimpering mass at the back of your cranium. You play as a violent oaf who can somehow swing some stupidly large piece of some unknown element at some impossibly alive bag of walking bones which can absorb more damage than a Nokia. I guess what I am so angry about is that it claimed to be so good; it claimed to be a vast, open world to lose yourself in. Well yes, I certainly did lose myself in it, the problem being that I didn’t manage to find a way out. The story is just too big and there needs to be an end. An infinite story should not be allowed. I want to be able to enjoy understanding the various intricacies and twists instead of having huge amounts of nonsensical myths and obscure cults that everybody I meet seems to want me to join dropped into my lap and let me wonder what the hell I am supposed to do with it all. This is prominent when you get into the game and you check your mission catalogue, only to find about three pages worth of objectives that you have no intention of completing. Then when finally you do get round to starting AND finishing a quest the formula is the same every single time. Namely go here and talk to this person, pick up another two quests, go there and enter a mildly scary looking cave, wait at loading screen for too long, go inside and navigate a complex array of tunnels, encounter a few enemies which you can get rid of by button bashing which results in the same three moves until they die and finally collect your reward which is the ability to talk to some stars which help you in some practical way. Because stars now control how good we are at stuff, don’t you know.

The game lies to you, and after a few hours you have seen everything you are ever going to see. The combat systems are overly simplistic and movements are very slow. Now at this point those of you who are still reading and haven’t taken offence will note that I admit that Skyrim isn’t all bad as the graphics are insane and certain parts of the story are pretty epic. It is also a very good addition to the Elder Scrolls series and the people who have grown used to this style of game will have no qualms where I was tearing my hair out. Also, despite me claiming that it is a mindless game, some of the puzzles are quite challenging but the end is always inevitable. The slow and unrealistic fighting and repetitiveness of the gameplay unfortunately mean that this game becomes boring by the time you are in desperate need of a pee in front of laptop. Skyrim is a good game but is let down by being hyped up far too much and it isn’t the completely free universe it claims to be.

by Henry Hunt

Minecraft mod of the month: Mo’ Creatures

Recently I have been playing a fair amount of Minecraft as it is a great game (and unfortunately extremely addictive), so I have decided to take a break from building my castle and write about some of the many thousands of mods that are out there to improve this already superb game.

The first Minecraft mod of the month is Mo’ Creatures. This is by far the best mod that I have personally installed. This mod introduces a vast number of new mobs, including creatures such as snakes, birds, bears and even dolphins, but my personal favourite thing about this mod is the addition of werewolves. These mobs are incredibly hard to kill and thus simultaneously the best and the worst part of the Mo’ Creatures experience. The fact that they are almost impossible to kill with anything other than a golden sword is incredibly aggravating, meaning that they are the one thing that you do not want to meet on a dark night away from your castle/tower/hole in the side of a mountain. But, no matter how annoying they can get, killing you the second you go outside, it is impossible to hate them, due to the fact that during the daytime they turn into normal humans, screaming ‘OUCH YOUR HURTING ME!!!!!’ when you hit them. This makes up for the fact that the second the moon comes out they are out to kill you.

If you play Minecraft, I highly recommend that you download this fantastic mod, created by DrZhark. If you don’t play Minecraft, go and buy it as it is scientifically proven to be awesome.

by Xavier Voigt-Hill

Caine’s Arcade gets its 9 year old creator a place at college

Caine Monroy is a 9 year old boy from Los Angeles. He loves arcade games, so he built his own arcade out of cardboard. Nirvan Mullick, a filmmaker, became his first customer, and posted about it on the internet. Then a flashmob turned up, and the arcade made enough money to put Caine through college. Watch Mullick’s fantastic documentary below and visit the website.