There are rumors and then there are dead certs. There’s a small army of PR people running about behind the scenes of videogame publishers desperately trying to control what people know and when they can say it. However, this army can’t control an over-enthusiastic developer wanting the world to know about the awesome new game he or she has spent the last two years of their life coding. Enthusiasm wins hands-down every time. Some new games will surprise, new details on known "secret" projects will tease your interest, and some revelations may come with a befuddled “huh?”
First up we have Crysis. Now it’s no secret that Crysis is coming to PS3 this year. The excitable, hard-worked coders over at Crytek have said as much in many interviews - they’ve even produced a new, multi-platform engine in readiness - but the real juice here is that it won’t be a straight conversion of the PC game. We understand PS3 Crysis will be an almost 50% new game, with many of the original games staff taken off PC Crysis months before release to begin work on Crysis 2 and a port to PS3 that will include aspects of the sequel - but a new structure, environments, weapons and enemies will feature on PS3. This should be one of the year’s biggest console shooters.
There’s more gunning in two other ‘undercover’ games coming from LucasArts and Ubisoft. We know LucasArts has recently approached Haze developer Free Radical Design to work on a new shooter set in the Star Wars universe. It would appear that secret project could well be a proper sequel in the Star Wars Battlefront series; Star Wars Battlefront 3 on PS3, coded by some of the team behind legendary Nintendo shooter GoldenEye would surely overtake Call of Duty 4 as our preferred online FPS. And what of Ubi’s big news? It turns out that five years after release on PS2, the French publisher is considering resurrecting its comic book title XIII - though what this will be called has us perplexed… XIV? If you don’t remember XIII, it was a clever cel-shaded FPS that combined stealth, run-n-gun gameplay and Half-Life 2 scripting seamlessly into a tale of espionage and memory loss. It sold chuff all, but those who played it, loved it.
Newly formed Eat Sleep Play, God of War creator David Jaffe’s new venture, is at work on a new installment in the Twisted Metal series. Head On: Extra Twisted Edition recently came out on PS2, and eagle-eyed fans have cracked a code contained in its ‘Making Of’ documentary. The message reads ‘Twisted Metal is on PSThree’, and Jaffe recently confirmed the speculation.
Another golden oldie making a comeback will be Red Faction. Volition has stated that following the release of Saints Row 2 later this year, work will begin in earnest on the sequel to the 2001 FPS. At the time, Red Faction offered some revolutionary gameplay that enabled you to burrow through the levels and deform the landscape in a similar vein to LucasArts' Fracture. The sequel will certainly offer something new in a genre overpopulated by poor sci-fi cash-ins and sequels. We want this one a lot.
