Peoww News

IO Interactive may be known as the people responsible for the risible Kane and Lynch games but before that they used to be good.  No, really.  Their Hitman series (and the wonderful Freedom Fighters) still has its fair share of fans, including many that visit this site, and so this week’s teaser trailer has been met with a lot of excitement and more than a little trepidation.

Hitman: Absolution throws you back into the black suit of Agent 47 as he carries on killing people in inventive ways.  Will it be a return to form for IO or yet another reason to hate them in the face?  If this ends up being anything like Kane and Lynch we’re shaving our heads and going round to their office armed with ‘twin ballers’ whatever they are.  Rich

Peoww News

Dramatic headlines aside, we really fucking hate Activision.  I mean really a lot.  Their list of crimes is up there with Jody ‘One Man Crime Wave’ Morris’ but to be honest everything they do irritates us a bit.

Currently, their publishing CEO, Eric Hershberg (a man presumably born of jackals) has plans to milk the tits off of you silly sausages who still play Call of Duty with plans to ‘monetise’ the online experience.

We don’t know quite what this entails – it sounds worse than adding premium DLC (which they already do anyway) – but he describes it through a series of demonic growls as “”Well, we haven’t yet released the details of the business model of Beachhead. The passion that people have for the game, the amount of time they’re willing to engage with one another in a connected way. Our goal has been to create an experience that was amplifying enough and energising enough and igniting enough to that community to be able to be monetised.”

Monetised?  You arsehole.

Peoww News

Sometimes we send out the PEOWW news vulture to steal gaming news from other sites because we’re too strung out on heroin to find our own and today the Karen flew back in through our window with this piece of horror stuck in her craw.

Rumour has it that EA’s long-awaited Syndicate remake has been under development for some time and is, according to the makers of some PC RPG bollocks, going to be a GTA rip-off.

This makes us unhappy.  The original Syndicate remains one of the greatest games and is pwopa nawty and the sequel, Syndicate Wars was also apparently good (although we’re not so sure).  So turning it into yet another fucking sandbox game is as welcome as when they did it on Far Cry 2, which is to say ‘not welcome at all.’ 

At this point we’re hoping the whole thing gets canned.

Peoww News

EA’s yearly football simulation game is due another near-identical iteration.  We gave up reviewing these fucking things last year as THEY NEVER SEEM TO CHANGE.  Still, idiots who want to throw forty quid at Activision’s just-as-evil nemesis will get this list of fuck all for their money.

Here are your bullet points:

• FIFA 12 introduces the ‘Impact Engine’ which properly tracks and formulates contact between players, including their hips, knees etc.
• The AI will also keep track of areas of the body players have been injured during a match. Players can also become injured off the ball if abused too much, especially late in the game.
• FIFA 12 also introduces ‘AI Vision Game’ (rough translation), which promises to make passing more realistic. If you try to complete a pass to a player that’s not within visible range, for example, it’s less likely you’ll complete the pass. EA hopes this will get rid of “blind passing”.
• Personality Plus is more developed and should influence AI players’ passes this time.
• AI is said to be “more human”, with each player acting more or less according to his abilities. One example given is when an AI player sees Fabregas coming towards him with the ball, he’ll act more carefully.
• OPM describes “new presentation” of matches in FIFA 12, which are said to be very much inspired by English football crowds.
• The game includes three new arenas, this time with integrated benches along the sidelines and “impressive lighting effects” according to OPM France.
• Integration of a new short dribble with the left stick.
• The game features a new camera that’s noticeably closer to the ground.
• There’s also a new menu interface that appears to be simpler and more ergonomic than before.

Oh fucking whatever.  That list translates as ‘a bunch of shit you won’t even notice’ and the game will just be 99% of the code of FIFA11 but with more Barcelona shit all over the menus.  Probably.  Rich

Peoww News

I don’t know what the eponymous creed in Assassin’s Creed is, but if I had to take a guess, I’d say it was something along the lines of, “Bring out an Assassin’s Creed game every year; preferably with a subtitle instead of a number after it, in order to curb expectations as to what a sequel should entail. Also, stab people in the throat if they don’t agree with you.”

It seems Ubisoft have taken at least the first part to heart and so unveiled Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. The cryptic teaser trailer merely contains the the name of the first game’s protagonist written in Arabic, implying a return to his era, just as Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood continued the story of Ezio.

Whether this also implies a return to the Holy Land is a different matter, but I for one won’t be interested unless it turns out he discovered a way to time-travel to Revolutionary France and become the Scarlet Pimpernel. (Or one of The Three Musketeers, I’m not fussy.)  Adam

Peoww News

After teasing the announcement a few weeks back, Ubisoft have released a trailer for the aptly-titled TrackMania 2: Canyon, featuring TrackMania larks (i.e. lots of fast cars, loops and loose physics) in a canyon. Suffice to say, I came.

Currently a PC exclusive, due to it’s heavy reliance on user generated content, it’s expected to be released late 2011. If you haven’t sampled the delights of this modern-day Micro Machines, there’s a free version of the original available to download through Steam.

French developer Nadeo also have ShootMania and QuestMania in the pipleine, and if they bring as much joie de vivre to the FPS and RPG genres as they have to racing, then… tres bon!  Adam

Peoww News

Oh dear.  When a hacker exploit becomes the most popular story on the BBC News website, you know it’s bad and this, the latest of Sony’s fuck ups, is as bad as it gets. After goading the hacking community with their claims that the PS3 was unhackable, the PS3 got hacked to fucking bits by angry hacker/rapper(!) GeoHot, leaving it possible for gamers to play pirate copies of games if they ran a bit of code via a USB stick.

Well since then, it’s gone from bad to worse for Sony and their Hindenberg of a console. Last week, they were forced to take the PlayStation Network down, without explanation, for days (six and counting so far) and details are only just emerging that the reason for this is that their users’ details had been compromised. Names, addresses, log-in details and possibly even credit card details may have all fallen into the hands of nefarious hackers.

So if any of our PS3-using chums have ever signed into PSN, they might want to consider changing their passwords for other services such as emails, websites and whatever. Unless you fancy seeing some Russian hacker calling himself Dataspunker or something assimilating their lives.

‘Played Sony. Rich