I say ‘sort of’ because other than confirming that the first Bulldozer CPUs, forthcoming eight core monsters codenamed ‘Zambezi’, will be branded ‘FX’ chips, there’s actually no new information about them at all to confirm clockspeeds and pricing details. Instead, today’s announced is that motherboards with the 900-series chipset and graphics cards from the HD6000 line-up will also be known as ‘FX’ parts.

These will be marketed alongside Zambezi processors as a platform for gamers and ‘HD enthusiasts’, whatever they are.

The FX badge may have fond memories for some. The last time AMD used it was, not uncoincidentally, the last time they had a significant performance advantage over Intel, around 2007. Clearly the company is hoping that it’ll be able to repeat that feat with Bulldozer, which is its first completely new chip design since the Athlon 64. Tantalising benchmarks leaked over the last few months have certainly suggested that it will take the fight to Intel with this processor, although it’s widely believed that performance issues led to it being delayed from a Q2 launch to Q3.

Unfortunately for AMD, since the relaunch of FX really is just an exercise in branding, it may serve to confuse buyers. Non-FX CPUs and graphics boards will still work with FX motherboards, while FX processors will require newer chipsets. The new naming convention doesn’t really clarify things much.

What this certainly doesn’t do is make up for our collective disappointment that Bulldozer wasn’t at Computex as expected, and that industry rumours suggest that performance issues are the reason for its delay.

Hopefully those fears will be allayed when Bulldozer finally makes an appearance sometime in the next three months.

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Tim, Tom, baby Boomer and Graham. Taking the pic: Craig.

Confirmed: Portal 2 will suck…you into a tube.

Excursion funnels: they’re like those fun tubes at bank drive-thrus that suck up deposit canisters, but now you’re using them to crush melodic robots with guns.

We had the best games

The best games at E3 in my opinion? Start with The Old Republic, then move to Crysis 2. Finish up with Civilization 5. Yeah – they’re all PC staples. But they show a level of polish and grace that has been sorely missing from PC gaming for years. The Old Republic, my pick for game of the show, is insane – it’s a monstrously well produced MMO that combines Dragon Age style storytelling with the open world questing of World of Warcraft. And every MMO staple system in-between. The Civilization 5 presentation was a perfectly produced snapshot of an experienced development house tuning their best work.

But it’s not just about PC exclusives. There are, at best, just a couple of console exclusives that aren’t available on PC. But everything else – absolutely everything else – incredible games like Deus Ex, XCOM, and Call of Duty, will arrive on our platform, with better, smoother graphics, smarter online support, for lower cost, and playable at your convenience on as many machines as you own through digital download platforms. PC gaming’s victory seems like a no brainer.

The word you're looking for is PSSSHHOEEWWW!

We had the best looking games

There’s no question about how far Crytek have come in their art design for Crysis 2. The precision and detail in their recreation of New York under attack is startling. Their demo was set in and around a pixel perfect version of Grand Central Station that was smashed to pieces by stompy robots, falling skyscrapers, and a player’s rocket launcher. We’ve seen the game running on multiple platforms now – and, yeah, it looks great on Xbox and PS3. But it looks stunning on PC.

Then there’s Rage – the base game for Id Software’s latest tech. It looked superb at a Jon Carmack mandated 60 frames per second. But all I could think about while watching the 360 demo was ‘god, how good is this going to look on PC?’

We had the best innovations

The nice thing about PC gaming? There’s always somewhere out there looking to innovate and surpass what’s already available. At E3, that level of innovation was everywhere. If you wanted motion controls, Razer showed the press a prototype of a motion controller more accurate, and more responsive than the Wii remote and Playstation Move. If you wanted to 3D gaming, you could play all your current catalogue in 3D using Nvidia’s already in place tech.

But it was online where the innovation was most apparent. OnLive used the show to launch their games-on-demand cloud streaming service – in which you can play high-end games on low-end hardware. While the consumer rental costs currently seem fierce – you can’t argue with the convenience and power of their technology. What’s more: Onlive is already up and running right now in California. World domination awaits.

We’re the platform that’s most likely to grow the market for games

There are console gamers on your lawn. Again.

Microsoft’s misplaced obsession with growing the market for the Xbox has taken a wrong turn. Throwing millions of dollars of capital into an $150 webcam, in the hope that all the mothers and daughters that bought a Wii will buy into the XBox dream just isn’t going to work. The cost  just don’t make sense.

In that respect, the PC has already won. Practically everyone already owns a laptop, and those laptops are the primary infection route for viral, free, gaming. Free PC games were everywhere at E3 – from casual, fun-fare from guys like Playfish, and Zynga, to multi-million dollar hardcore titles like Lord of the Rings Online and Company of Heroes Online. While Microsoft attacks the casual space with expensive hardware – smart PC developers are making their fortune with free games that can be played on the same hardware you browse the web with.

This is the reality of today’s gaming market: Sony and Microsoft chase Nintendo’s tail with increasingly arcane hardware. While PC developers, quietly clean up online. E3 was the same exactly the same story. But no-one ever declares the PC the winner of E3. Until now.

As the demo began, reps from Square Enix explained that both the Supreme Commander, and Dungeon Siege intellectual properties had been purchased from their former developers (Gas Powered Games, led by Chris Taylor) and were now wholly owned by Square Enix. Dungeon Siege 3 is the first time Square Enix have really created a western style RPG – and it’s a market they’re keen to crack. Obsidian clearly have the talent to make this work. They’ve just completed Alpha Protocol and are beavering away on Fallout: New Vegas.

They’re known for their emphasis on story, and the developers are keen to impress that that dedication will be transferred to the new game. “We’ve taken Chris Taylor’s lore,” says lead designer Nathaniel Chapman, “and really expanded on it.” In the game, the 10th Legion, heroes of the previous game, have fallen into disgrace and ruin. As the hero, you’ve got to return their honour.

Obsidian’s design for the game is much more open compared to the strict linear path of previous Dungeon Siege games. It will also be the first game to debut their own ‘Onyx’ technology.’ The quest I saw was a simple proof of concept – a few lines that asked the player, quite simply, to ‘eliminate evil in the crypt’.

The dungeon itself was remarkable. The Onyx engine, according to Obsidian, allows the developers to produce vast draw distances. The view off the edge of the marbeled blue cliffs, stretched on forever. It was a pit that didn’t seem to end. Across the edges of the chasm, the path down was clearly visible. You could stand and plot your route down into the caves from far above. The tech also allowed for some ragdoll deviancy – when the player was attacked by sinister Murloc thingies, the warrior punted them over the edge with a vicious shield bash.

The demo was played with an Xbox 360 pad, and delivered a neat trick. A second designer picked up the controller, and pressed Start, and instantly appeared on-screen in the first player’s party. He was a mage, and used crowd control and stuns to hold the bads in position while the Warrior scored critical hits on the vulnerable enemies. When the time came to defeat a hulking boss, the warrior cut chunks into his armour, while the mage stood back and pelted him with fire magic. When done, the mage exited, and the game quickly adjusted difficulty.

While the game is being built jointly across PC and console, Obsidian promise a new interface for the mouse and keyboard, but players will still be able to add a 360 pad for same-box co-op play. When pressed about what the PC version would deliver over and above the 360 version, they replied that they have ‘additional multiplayer plans’.

The game’s due in the first half of 2011 – and it already looks sharp. Obsidian are an odd choice for making an action RPG – it’s not really in their DNA, but what I saw gave me confidence they understand the violence required of the genre. And the importance of Murloc punting.

Revolutionary tech in Fable 3 allows even the dog to feel dismay at Microsoft.

Cross format development is now so inexpensive, it makes zero sense to push money into a single format exclusive. At the show, that was quickly made clear. The vast, vast majority of the major third-party publishers’ showings concentrated on games that are playable on all formats, and will be available on the day of launch through Microsoft’s Games for Windows Live store.

Yet you’d be hard-pressed to tell from Microsoft’s show presence. The PC wasn’t mentioned once during the Microsoft E3 press conference. On the show floor, they built a vast green booth, surrounded by glass pods in which gamers, analysts and journalists petted pretend animals or jumped and down on boats. There was no sign of the Games for Windows intiative anywhere. Nor did they do any PR to counter the signs of developers jumping ship: at the show, Fallout: New Vegas and Kane and Lynch 2 both ditched the Games for Windows Live service in favour of the Steamworks.

Fallout: New Vegas is a boot, stamping on Steve Ballmer's face, forever.

From Microsoft, there were no PC related announcements, no PC games on display, and no interest in promoting the PC as a gaming platform.

The funniest part of this, though, is that they were embarrased by their rivals from console land. Sony Online Entertainment, the online arm of Sony, brought multiple new PC games to the show. They had exactly the same goal that obsesses Microsoft – to broaden the market for games – but were doing it through great software, rather than flawed hardware.

Take a game like Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures, Sony’s kiddie friendly Star Wars MMO. While Microsoft showed off a lightsaber game that required their (rumoured) $150 dollar camera toy, Sony brought a brand new franchise to the table. While it’s clearly not being aimed at PC Gamer readers, it is gloriously well presented, and remarkably innovative. It’s based on the Clone Wars cartoon, but the missions in the game are based on what happens in the TV series each week. I’d bet that within the first year of release, Clone Wars Adventures will hook millions more gamers than Microsoft’s entire Kinect catalogue.

Crysis 2: playable on consoles. Still sexier on PC.

PC games were everywhere at E3: there was barely anything that wasn’t playable on PC. The PC had the best format exclusives at the show: games like Civilization 5, The Old Republic, and The Witcher 2. And the PC had the best looking games at the show. Nothing will close to Crysis 2 running on a high-end system this year.

Yet Microsoft just didn’t seem to care. That to me, as a journalist and gamer, seems shameful.

The game is developed by Perfect World’s Chinese team and is a tie-in project with John Woo’s Red Cliff, released in China in 2008. Heroes of Three Kingdoms is expected to enter closed beta in North America before the end of this quarter.

The minigame is called “Stunt Gungan”. While you’re technically supposed to be guiding Jar Jar to safety, Lead Designer Matt Higby showed me how guiding Jar Jar into explosives and piles of “poodoo” nets the high score, while simultaneously feeling strangely cathartic.

There are tons of mini-games, including Starfox-esque rail-based starship combat, shooting ranges, and lightsaber duels. The lightsaber duel plays out more like a dance game, so check out the video for a full explanation.

Civilisation 5 (or ‘V’, if you’re from Ancient Rome) will be out on the 21st of September on the PC, and consoles will be getting it, er… huh. I guess consoles won’t be getting it. That’s weird.

Front: Mission Evolved

It’s got the mandatory Square Enix plot – silly people doing melodramatic things with strained accents – but pulp is good, you know? Sometimes, you want your nemesis to have a big black scar over one eye, and a black goatee, and to be screaming “KILL ME!” with all of his many throats. It’ll be big missions with lavish cutscenes – Squeenix, she love the cutscenes – but you’ll spend the interstitial periods fighting giant “Wanzers” (walking tanks, pervert) with your own walking death machine.

Mech Mission Evolved

Mech Mission Mech

Mech Mech Mech

It’s set in a major city, with Wanzers trampling cars and, presumably, taking cover behind crate factories. There also appear to be some ground combat sections where you hop out of the mech and shoot assault rifles at zzzzz… but then you fight a mech on foot!

Okay, okay, Front Mission Evolved

It’ll also have the usual smattering of multiplayer arenas and team deathmatch modes. Square Enix may not be pumping out fiction that’ll reduce you to tears or change your life, but this is worth keeping an eye on for the promise of piloting an agile, anime-style walking tank through a modern city in a big old mecha-war. I’m down.

What’s impressive, already, is the mix and flow of Bioware style storytelling, and the usual MMO open world questing. The first trial sees you dealing with looters in a long abandoned tomb. As a level four character, you already have strong skills available. An ‘on next attack’ melee swing that does significant extra damage. Force lightning, and force shock. At level 5 you learn Force slam – an area of effect skill that scatters and stuns any NPCs caught in the blast.

When the open world trials are done, you head back to base. And you’re presented with a story interlude. You have two problems. First – you have a rival, a studied, learned, and smug Sith apprentice called Fon who already walks, talks, and has the red skin of a long-accomplished Sith. And an Sith Lord who thinks you’re slave scum.

You have to work extra-hard to prove yourself. When your master calls for the second task, he sends Fon to the library to translate some dusty texts. But you’re sent to wildlands to discover and free an ancient artifact. This artifact “has remained sealed for centuries”. Tough gig.

Between the trials, you’re asked to ‘interrogate’ a prisoner who witnessed an ‘unauthorised killing’. I wanted to try and complete the quest without torturing the poor sap, and was able to. At every stage of the interrogation you’re presented with multiple conversation options – and you can talk your way to victory.

Multiple new features for the game have been announced at the show, even if they’re not playable. All players will get their own starships – Republic players get a Vanguard class Corvette, while the Empire players get a TIE style ‘Fury’ interceptor. Think of the ships as The Old Republic’s equivalent of the Normandy – they’re where you can hang out between missions and where you can talk to your companion characters. The Sith Fury has the standard Imperial war-room and conference table. Force choking is inevitable. As are comparisons of the power of the Force compared to that of a battlestation. Here’s their trailer for the feature:

BioWare’s Greg Zeschuck says “we want a player ship not only to represent a rite of passage in the game, but also an expression of his or her own personal style.”

Also announced, but not demo’d here at the show, is the game’s first ‘warzone’ – TOR’s equivalent of a battleground. It’s a lovely little planet called Alderaan – I have a good feeling about this place. The Alderaan warzone is the focus of their ridiculously exciting new CGI trailer for the game, which I’m sure is exactly how the game will play.

The developers I spoke to wouldn’t explain how the PvP progression system works, or whether PvP XP would translate into the PvE character progression. But they’re not a hollow addition – and their impact is being thought through. Much of the combat in TOR revolves around stuns – and they’re wary of how that will play out in a PvP situation. There’s nothing more frustrating that being stunlocked to death in an MMO.

The demo then segued into a look at the armour sets for a bounty hunter character. At the start of the game, the bounty hunter character simply has a hodge-podge of improvised armour. But there’s a definite progression and style to what he can earn – taking him via customised trooper gear, right through to the Old Republic version of Jango Fett who can hover with his jetpack and rain down explosive shurikens on his foes. See for yourself:

There were two weak spots in the demo. The first comes from how tiresome MMO combat can look when you’re not actively involved, and it hit when the team demonstrated a four player dungeon sequence. The mission was to hold off a steady stream of droids. The tank, in this case a Trooper, was responsible for pulling the aggro of groups of large walker droids. We watched as the damage classes – a Smuggler and a Bounty Hunter – pew pewed the droids down, but it felt very MMO. A Jedi Consular was the healer of the group – and he just didn’t seem to be having much fun.

The second: there are significant unanswered questions. What does the end-game look like? How will raids work? How will crafting work? Will you be able to upgrade and decorate your spaceship? And how long do we have to wait until we can play it at home?

There is at least part of an answer to the last question. In the E3 demo, the Bioware team repeatedly emphasised that the game would be on-sale in Spring 2011.

Until then, consider this: the developers at Bioware and Lucasarts have nailed the feel of questing in The Old Republic. They’ve managed to perfectly combine their story systems with an open world, and they’ve made an MMO that’s as fun to play as a single game. This thing is going to be enormous.

But I don’t believe we’ll see a proper, native PC release for Rock Band. It doesn’t take a genius to understand that the franchise, and the multitude of plastic gear and friends that you tether to the experience, wouldn’t be comfortable around a tiny monitor. That’s not me expressing that familiar “we don’t need it” of the Too-Proud, PC Gaming Elitist – that’s me recognizing that it’s not a logistical possibility. In 2010, the living room is still the place in our homes that can accommodate the most people. That’s a grounded, cultural thing: the console heritage of couch-sharing, same-screen gaming, and shoulder-to-shoulder co-op isn’t something the PC can emulate well. Desks are smaller than living rooms; PCs are usually a one-passenger vehicle.

Honestly, Harmonix’s demo was one of the best I’ve seen at the show (the others: Crysis 2, and a brilliant indie game called Hazard: The Journey of Life). Harmonix is one of the most unique developers in the industry–mostly a team of trained musicians, technical gurus, artists and hardware designers, and that background is well-conveyed on stage. They kicked off the demo with Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again,” two-part harmonizing and leaning on plastic keys. It’s about having, not emulating, the same fun you’d expect to have with six friends and a bag of karaoke.

PC gamers have homemade alternatives like Frets On Fire. It can’t match Rock Band or Guitar Hero’s production values, but it captures that open, communal aspect of music gaming in a classically PC way: it’s open source. Song importing, song editing, and access to hundreds of community-composed songs are the main benefits of the unlicensed alternative. Everything from Daft Punk to Coldplay, from Nirvana to the Mega Man soundtrack, have been transcribed by the community. And it’s all free: most of Rock Band’s songs individually hover around $2 on their respective marketplaces: a downside of needing to pay the game’s publisher AND record label for the download.

“I wouldn’t say that dungeon crawlers were our biggest influence,” Neuburger told me during our alone-time with the co-op platformer at E3. “Even though it has the isometric camera – people look at it and go ‘It’s like Diablo!’, right? - but it’s not very much like Diablo. Really, my biggest inspiration for this were classic co-op adventures. The games I used to play with my sister when I was a kid. For me, it’s just as much fun playing the game as it was bickering with your co-op partner. I played through Toejam & Earl so many times with my sister, and Bubble Bobble.”

Our hands-on demo was full of opportunities for that kind of playful “co-opetition,” a terrible buzzword that I hope to never write again. Playing as Totec, Lara’s Mayan warrior chum, I was chased down a trap-choked alley by a walking, cave-dwelling enormo-fish. Three times, Neuburger had to stand Lara on a pressure plate to summon a bridge for my stumpy Totec to cross with. On the other side, I put my weight on an identical tile to hold the bridge down for him. Twice, we made it across safely, but on the third, I made the quick, selfish decision to leave him stranded. The boss creature gobbled Lara, Neuburger lost a few points, cursed me, and then respawned a few seconds later. That’s an example of the opportunities for antagonizing your co-op partner that Crystal Dynamics are encouraging.

As a multiplatform title, Guardian of Light lends itself to gamepad controls, but it will support mouse and keyboard input on PC. Here are some annoyingly watermarked shots:

"Your conditioner smells wonderful, PIG."

One of K&L2′s best-looking features is a revamped version of the first game’s Fragile Alliance multiplayer mode, in which you and your team cooperatively rob a bank, then (optionally) turn on one another during your escape to take the loot for yourself. The mode was the best part of K&L 1, but it was nearly impossible to play online due to GFWL’s crappiness. I asked IO Interactive game director Kim Krogh if I’d have the same experience this time around.

“No, for that reason. We’re using Steamworks,” he said. Awesome. Music to my ears. Steamworks is Valve’s free set of tools for integrating multiplayer and copy protection via Steam – it’s a lot more reliable, and a lot less intrusive.

So Kane & Lynch 2 is off to a great start: we’ll be able to play it. The original Kane & Lynch: Dead Men wasn’t a terrible game, though without the review scandal surrounding it, it might have been forgotten by now. This one, I think, people will remember for its merits as a shooter. The gunplay feels much more kinetic and powerful, the cover system is smooth and easy to use, and cover objects (and many walls) disintegrate under heavy fire. The way you get knocked down when you’re hit, but continue to fire from the ground, makes you feel like you’ve really taken a bullet.

Screenshot of Kane & Lynch 2 or cellphone picture of Shanghai? You decide.

The clever camera effect is still impressive. IO Interactive is going for a found-footage look, as if it were shot through a cheap cell phone camera and uploaded to YouTube. When you’re hit, the screen shows distortion and bad compression artefacts; looking at a bright ceiling light sprouts a vertical banding effect. There’s no telling if it’ll start to grate as the game wears on, but in the short time I played it, I loved it. IO says it takes them around eight hours to get through the campaign, which puts the player in the shiny suit of the unhinged Lynch and the AI (or optional co-op buddy) controlled Kane providing cover.

Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is out in August.

I won’t lie: I want to throw a frisbee at someone and have them explode. It’s not likely that TRON will fail me in this regard, but it might. Stay tuned for Tim’s impressions later.

Isengard is the tower of Sauramon the White, Gandalf’s former friend who works for Sauron (the bad guy), and the setting for one of the most epic wizard battles in the entire LotR series. A central figure in several key moments in the storyline, it hasn’t been decided yet how involved the players will be in with Sauramon’s plight – but there is precedence for players taking control of central lore figures to act out these types of big moments.

Paiz also told us that they’re going to wait and see how players react to content packs (as opposed to expansions) before deciding if Isengard will be part of a content pack purchased through the in-game cash shop, or a full expansion.

That ’50s aesthetic is immediately fresh; where fellow 2K game BioShock’s beautiful art deco was dimmed by its dank setting, XCOM’s “idyllic ’50s America” is brilliant, pristine, and pastel. “It was a time of purity and innocence – 2.5 children, lemonade stands, rock and roll,” says Slater.

In the demo I’m being shown, William Carter is responding to a distress call in a small neighborhood, a cul-de-sac smorgasboard of “Leave It To Beaver” homes. He exits his vehicle in the street with two fellow agents – AI-controlled comrades in ties and hats, each wielding a pump-action shotgun. It’s perfectly silent. A children’s bicycle lies toppled in the road.

He makes his way through a backyard – an idling lawnmower in half-cut grass is the first evidence of something amiss. A few feet away on the patio, there’s a dead man smothered in blue-black oil, a grease that paints a trail into the house. “I’ve seen this before,” says a nameless agent, kneeling to inspect the body. “But it doesn’t get any easier.” Carter snaps a photo of the body with his camera and moves inside.

No flash photography!

It takes only seconds for the aliens to detect him. One crawls along the wall between the kitchen and the living room he’s  standing in, bubbling and spasming along the surface. He’s fighting the scariest flavor of Jello ever: they look like living puddles of pure, glossy black – more are lunging down the hallway as he fires away with our shotgun, bringing the barrel to eye-level for better aim. Fighting them is like trying to corral a rabid, amorphous cat. Killing one is more like capturing a ghost in Ghostbusters: you need to stun it with a buckshot blast or two, then finish it off as it clings to the ground.

You should never leave chocolate mousse on your dashboard on a hot day.

Carter survives by hurling one of our first pieces of tech, the spherical “blobatov” cocktail crafted from samples of the same aliens we’re fighting. Chucking one at the ground ignites the carpet and the walls, forming a firey barrier to keep the gang of amorphous death-Jellos at bay. They’ve downed one of his fellow agents – like the original X-COM, it seems these teammates will be pretty vulnerable – and the 2k Marin rep presenting the demonstration made no mention of the ability to revive them.

Carter saves the other agent with a timely shot as one of the alien blobs entangles around his chest and arms, and there’s a sense that he had only a few seconds to liberate him.

He uses the same technique a moment later to free a housewife, the only soul left in the house. Saving one civilian and making it back to your vehicle is enough to complete a mission. You earn more bonuses back at our base for each rescue, and additional research options for any new evidence caught on camera. “Let’s blow this joint,” huffs the surviving agent.

Leaving proves difficult. Carter’s feet hit the carpet of the living room, and there’s an immediate high-pitched squeal that saturates the air. Everything turns red. Something is here. Something big. He runs toward the street – there’s a black wind of distortion hanging in the air. A field that warps light around it. The mass manifests a strange rectangle-obelisk in the sky: it looks like a giant, textureless Jenga piece. Without warning, it rearranges itself into the shape of a ring and spits a beam of white-hot energy into the street, disintegrating a car. Then, it does the same to the remaining agent.

"Hey Xzornox, come check out my magnifying glass trick."

Fry up

He runs, back-pedaling away from the ring as it hovers after him. A handful of the blobs slither along the concrete in pursuit – they’re minions, on this stage, trying to distract Carter from the larger threat. He pulls out his heavy tech to dispatch them: a lightning gun. It charges for a half-second, parting a pair of coiled copper rings at its tip, then spills volts into the street. This isn’t a precise weapon – it pours a web of watts down the boulevard, frying most of the globs within seconds. But he can’t escape the ring: its laser-iris is the last thing we see as the demo ends.

I love the fact that XCOM is HUDless – there’s no ammo counters, artificial radar, or health bars to clutter your perception. The art design is one of the game’s strengths – in the secret, aeroplane hangar base earlier in the demo, we see a whole team of ’50s agents milling about: scientiests slaving in labs and phone operators working behind vintage equipment. I’m holding out hope that we’ll see humanoid enemies in the game. The blobs are admittedly expressive enemies – leaping, strangling, and ceiling-crawling is all very well, but you can’t shake the feeling that a few Roswellian, eggheaded E.T.s would be incredibly fun to fight in this setting.

Our full XCOM preview feature, along with a batch of new shots, is up here.

Nothing particularly new here, but the apparent ability to chose your allegiance, either following DC’s darker heroes down a rather corrupt and vile route, or to remain righteous and true, sounds promising.

Andrea Varotsis

We did warn that Valve’s surprise probably wouldn’t be the megaton everyone seemed to be expecting. The ‘surprise’ was intended to replace a suddenly cancelled pre-E3 event at the Reagal Theatre in LA. In the end, Valve made their announcement as part of Sony’s E3 press conference. It seems likely that after that event was arranged, Sony invited them to make the reveal as part of their main press conference instead. Obviously you can’t pass up an audience like that, so they aborted their planned event and made a fun little joke out of it.

Really, the only problem with the whole thing is that Valve have so many exciting projects that announcing a ‘surprise’ tends to make our naive imaginations run wild.

Here’s the Portal 2 trailer they showed:

In Fable III, you’re tasked with overthrowing the government and taking the throne for yourself. According to these screens, you’ll be doing that by shooting nothing in particular, standing with a bunch of purple guards, and jumping around with a big shiny sword. Screens go!

Fable wouldn't be the same without pointy hats.

Not wearing purple, eh? We don't trust your type here!

Take that, evil masonry!

Oh God, the dog. We hoped they'd forget to put the dog in.

There are lots of shirts to choose from in Fable III. Not just this one, for example.

Bowerstone has been shelled by cannon fire. And also magic? Maybe?

"Desert Pleasure Cave," according to the filename. It doesn't look that relaxing.

It's got the same mix of old english architecture and improbably tall buildings as previous games.

"There's water and palm trees, but it's still a cave. I'm going back to the hotel."

Oh fine, I'll concede that I'm excited about the shiny sword.

It’s easy to be distracted by the colosssal stompy robots and the gratuitous violence, but in the midst of the action we also catch glimpses of a daemon of Nurgle, some Khorne beserkers, Imperial Guard soldiers, Orcs and the ever indomitable Space Marines. There’s some footage of the UI, too, showing a fairly standard MMO layout, with a taskbar full of skills at the bottom.

There seems to be plenty of evidence for squad-based gameplay as well, with groups of Space Marines taking on a Chaos Deadnought and a charging army of Chaos Space Marines. We’ll be interviewing the lead developers later today, so we’ll let you know more about the game then. For now, more surprisingly lovely shots.

Dust is a god game, putting you in charge of a technologically simple people, using your powers to manipulate the world around them as they’re assaulted by natural disasters. As Earth tosses tsunamis and earthquakes at them, you use your powers to divert the natural disasters, to allow your people to survive and grow.

It’s being creatively directed by Eric Chahi, who made the classic platformer “Another World” and who likens the game’s tech to building a sandcastle on the beach: the world’s scooped and manipulated, breaching a lake open and dragging a huge channel will let the water inside flow, relieving pressure. But it’s not a pre-determined path: the entire world is dynamic, enabling the player to rip it up as they see fit.

It looks like every game Peter Molyneux has ever made, but in a good way. Extreme Populous! We’ve uploaded the E3 trailer for your eyes only.

Night-fighting still deserves a quiet night. And swords! More swords than quiet. There’s a stylised look to this pre-battle lineup, the castle on the hill more striking against the skyline than Creative Assembly’s other, muddier looking titles.

Naval combat’s back, but it’s utterly different to Empire and Napoleon’s wind-based turn-fests. Instead of swathes of material to chart your watery progress, you’ve got a hull full of oarmen, heave-ho-ing hard to speed your boat up and slow it down when needs be.

This is worryingly pretty. The danger here is the landscape being too pretty, leading to you deciding to call off all that nasty war business and make your 25,000 strong army have a nice little sit down in the sunshine instead of ripping the throats from your enemy while they curse your family’s name.

The game’s developers are taking their cues from Japanese woodblock prints, intricate pictures of conquest and defeat like the ones Creative Assembly released below. Looking at the screens, we can see the game has definite nods to this overtly physical style, with its use of contrast and colour a world away from the grey and brown of European battlefields. Also, a castle on fire. Who builds a castle out of wood? A bad castle-maker, that’s who.

Tim’s off to see the game in action at E3 today, so expect to see his thoughts on the site later on. For now, hajimemashite, PC gamers!

At the show, 24 developers played on a map set in Kabul,  a tight, brutal urban map where close combat was the order of the day. The interface and rewards for doing well were pure Modern Warfare. XP was awarded for stylish kills (including headshots, saving a friends, and explosive multi-kills). After kill-streaks, players landed camera guided bombs, or deployed counter-intelligence unlocks.

If you want early access to the beta – join EA’s newly announced Gun Club – Battlefield VIP players will get a headstart.

We’ll do everything we can to play Medal of Honour tomorrow, when the show proper opens. The game proper releases on October 12th in North America, and October 15th in Europe.

Autolog is Criterion’s in-game social network, which keeps players updated on the progress of their friends and rivals. It also acts as a matchmaking service. On-stage, Criterion producer Craig Sullivan drove against a rival who’d recently beaten most of his online records in a Hot Pursuit mode. Burning through a forest, Craig deployed roadblocks to try and knock his enemy off course. It looked smart and slick, even if the landscapes lacked a bit of detail. But then, it appeared to be running at a smooth 60 frames per-second on current gen consoles. The PC version, which was confirmed in a press release, will be better. It always is.

It was bloody loud, too. My ears hurt.

But that’s not a definite recipe for panic, friends. Microsoft have confirmed in a press release dated May 21 that the PC would be receiving its own version of Molyneux’s action-RPG, albeit a touch later than the console outing. If that official announcement is to be believed, we’ll be getting a PC version of Fable 3 around Christmas of this year.

We’ve been through this rigmarole before with Fable III. In May, Joystiq saw box-art for the Xbox 360 version of Lionhead’s upcoming game that suggested us PC gamers will definitely get a release, but the official pictures of the pack that surfaced days later direct from Microsoft fuelled rumours otherwise.

For the hard of seeing, the before version had a happy little ‘Only on Xbox 360 and Windows’ tag; the most recent shots of the box direct from Microsoft scrubbed these off, suggesting a 360-only release. This’ll probably be due to the inevitable difference in release dates though, rather than some nefarious scheme.

For now, we’ve got our best men over in LA, who’ll bring you confirmation as soon as they’ve got it.

A Battlefield: Bad Company 2 expansion may be on the way. According to a translated press release at NoFrag, today EA are to announce a cross-game reward scheme that would give items and beta access to players of Dead Space 2, Medal of Honor, Bad Company 2, and “a brand new digital expansion pack for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 taking place in Vietnam”. It would reward players for owning one game by giving them new weapons in another, or early access to the Medal of Honor beta. The translated (and possibly garbled) press release states “By using their profile as a profile of existing EA Member of the Gun Club, players will access content that could give them an edge in combat.”

Lending some credibility to the story, the Gun Club site the supposed release links does exist as part of ea.com, but currently requires a username and password to access. We’ll be at the EA press conference today, and bring you more, and more pertinent details.

People will change their minds about Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

The demonstration they’ll be showing at E3 is the same one I saw at their studios in Montreal, and you can read exactly what happens in it in our blow-by-blow account.  So I know exactly how persuasive it is. The trailer, however exciting, primarily shows off rapid-cut ultra-violence and out-of-context plot nonsense. When you see the game actually played, you realise it’s all about stealth, planning, and the back-routes. All the usual Deus Ex options are viable, but each is swift, slick and fun instead of slightly clunky. There are plenty of ways it’s not like the original Deus Ex, and it’s not likely to be better, but it really is a Deus Ex game. I think and hope people are going to see that.

The PC will be under-represented.

Sad, but true. We always get stiffed at E3, precisely because we’re a free, open platform: no-one owns us, so no-one represents us. The giants of PC gaming like Blizzard and id have their own conventions separately, which only really leaves Valve. They have a surprise planned, but I’m betting it’s not “We’ve decided to step up and champion the PC, here’s a three hour press conference highlighting the most exciting PC games that are coming out on Steam in the next year or so.” Speaking of which:

Valve’s surprise won’t be a major new game announcement.

Look, this thing got blown out of all proportion. Valve sent out an e-mail to journalists playfully announcing the ‘gala cancellation’ of their Portal 2 E3 event, instead promising a surprise from Aperture Science. Like anyone who knows them, most of us chuckled at the fun teaser and wondered what Portal stuff they might be planning. Half the games media, on the other hand, missed that the surprise would be from Aperture Science, and believed seemingly every loon who e-mailed in announcing it would be Half-Life 3, Counter-Strike 2 or a new game engine.

I have virtually no idea what it’ll be – a new game mode for Portal 2 maybe – but it’s not likely to be the company-revolutionising megaton everyone seems to be assuming. As Valve themselves exasperatedly explained in a follow-up press release, it’s “PORTAL-2-THEMED-FOR-GOD’S SAKE”.

XCOM will steal the show.

A lot of ill will towards the 2K Marin and 2K Marin-that’s-really-in-Australia folks for making a first-person shooter from our beloved, turn-based strategy heritage. Mostly, by the raw force of statistics, from people who haven’t seen the game in action. It’s not that it immediately looks or feels like the slow-paced think-em-up, it’s just that when you see a game this imaginative, evocative and exciting first-hand, you realise it was profoundly worth making – whatever the series’ roots.

Natal will look a bit silly.

Well, it already does. This E3 is Microsoft’s chance to show how their motion sensing controller – which Bill Gates says is ultimately headed for the PC too – can actually make games better in some way. So far we haven’t seen much evidence of that, and while I’d love to see motion control get interesting, I can’t help but be pessimistic about it. It’s not about the hardware, I’m sure it can sense a frightening amount of detail. I just think correctly inferring player intent from that data is going to be tough to do in a precise, flexible and fun way. I would love to be wrong.