Army of Two E3 demo blunder

Saturday 13 May 2006
As you might have read earlier this week,we've seen Army of Two- EA's slick-looking two-man shooter - in action and it was amazing. Or, at least, we thought we'd seen it in action, but after a second showing we're no longer sure of quite what we've seen.

In the demo, one of EA's pad-men led us through a level, using a wireless 360 headset to issue voice-activated controls. For all intents and purposes, the demo was presented as real-time gameplay, with our guide actually taking control of the action. However, our belief was shattered when - undoubtedly dog-tired from countless carbon-copy presentations over the last few days - the man with the pad fluffed his lines.

The game's voice-activated controls work by calling up a menu and then speaking out loud the command you want your mercenary buddy to perform. But in today's demo the menu popped up and a selection was activated without the pad-man speaking a word. Once he saw what was happening he quickly spurted out the related command, but our suspicious hackles were already up.

If he'd kept schtum we'd probably be none the wiser, but by attempting to salvage the muck-up we were convinced that he hadn't just bypassed the command system with a button press.

All of which suggests that what we were actually seeing was a rendered, non-interactive demo - which would also explain the numerous cut-and-jumps the presentation made between scenes. It'll be fascinating to see what Army of Two looks like when we finally get our hands on a more developed version.