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After nearly a whole months absence, the Ignition team return to bring you all the latest news including: the possibility of a PSP phone; Bioshock Infinite; Stephen Merchant’s appearance in Portal 2; the future of desktops and much more.

Duration: 120 mins

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OK, in the recent preview demo I played of HAWX 2 (the Tom Clancy game with jets in it), there were few surprises really. It’s still taking place in some sort of near-future war zone, however this time the influence of PMC’s is perhaps a lot less played (they were so 2009), instead you’ll be battling heavily armed and pretty mean insurgents. Most of the time. You’ll also be flying around in planes that don’t require a thick manual to work out how to manually adjust pitch and yaw to obtain the correct flight path. This is no flight simulator.

The slick quality of the presentation is also still there from the original, but then here are where some of the surprises factor in. The first game was a little tech-demo in its approach. Yes it had decent ground graphics, which is something all flight games are based on and had pretty hectic combat, fighting air and ground based units, but that was that really. Rio De Janeiro had never looked so pretty, but there was only so many times you fly past the cristo redentor and be impressed.

Instead, in HAWX 2, you’ll switch and changes between characters in war zones, for example, one moment you’ll be flying with the Russian’s over a mountain range battling insurgents who have nicked all your decent planes, to a HAWX operative, operating just off some unnamed middle-eastern country’s coastline. The good thing about this is that it probably represents real warfare better than the typical Tom Clancy tropes. Big foreign invasion forces all of a sudden appearing on your doorstep and double crosses and betrayals are not really the thing in modern conflicts, instead it being a constant, multi-front battle against a number of ‘funded’ insurgency groups. So at least in premise, HAWX is grounding itself in a little more reality.

The tech you are using is also not too over the top to be un-believable. The planes, even some of the later ones I have seen, if not flown, are the kinda things that, whilst you wouldn’t expect to see over your house any time soon, are relevant enough to current technology to make sense. It also doesn’t attempt to re-invent the wheel. One of the missions I played was all about precision bombing, launching essentially guided missiles from my stealth jet at ground targets. If you’ve played either of the Modern Warfare games, this will be instantly familiar, as the black and white thermal screen flares up as you hide in the clouds.

Speaking of which, the missions utilise the fact that the game seems a little bit more grounded in reality. For example, in the mission I was just talking about, first you have to take off from the air craft carrier, which is almost like a bit of a mini-game style thing and then fly to a nav point so you are on the optimal flight path. In the mission, you have to try and take out the bombers who are trying to escape the airfield you are leaving a lot of craters in, and if any escape, you then have to engage in air-combat, whilst staying above 1500m, otherwise, you’re in the firing line of enemy flack. Then you’ve got to try and land back on the carrier.

For those of you sitting there thinking that you don’t actually want to play a combat flight simulator, don’t worry. It seems that the game is going to give you plenty of assists to make it easier for you to approach, for example, the re-fueling plane, if you’re not so much a dab hand at manoeuvring behind another aircraft, and doesn’t penalise too much for inaccuracy on the regular difficulties. The flying definitely feels more like a simulation though, as opposed to an arcade, with all the stuff from the last game, with random ‘stall falls’ where you would drop out the sky to avoid missile lock has been got rid of in favour of good old barrel rolls.

However, what has remained is the in-flight, quasi-military chatter and occasional Top Gun, campiness that would have to be in the game in order for them to actually be allowed to release it. There are not particularly cut scenes, as it’s also carried out in battle, but it allows for a briskness in the story telling without going too deep and dramatic between missions. I’m not expecting miracles from the story, we’ve all seen it before, but it feels so far like it complements the game.

There is a bit of a void of flight games at the moment, with another Ace Combat game not being in production, leaving HAWX pretty much the remaining mainstay of the genre. By the looks of this preview, the game is much more appealing to both simulation and arcade fans than the first game, and makes some logical improvements on what the first game fell down on and keeping up with the high production values. The question will be, of course, can it keep it fresh and new for the full game.

Ever fancied riding round a track at an incredible speed in perspex shell for a living? If you have, then Codemaster’s Formula 1 2010 may be the game for you. Containing all the real cars and drivers for the 2010 F1 season and the 19 circuits that are in the season. Taking from GRID’s career mode, F1 2010 will follow the story of your life as an F1 driver, with all the competition between team mates that you expect from the real F1 season.

The interesting part so far is the way the game is actually going to simulate being a driver. As well as making the racing as realistic as they ever have done, they have made the career mode a lot deeper than you’d typically expect. For example, you’ll be able to pick between a single season or multiple seasons. In a single season, you could choose one of the top F1 teams, and attempt to keep on top form throughout the season, or start with one of the smaller teams and move yourself up through different teams as you get better.

Another nice touch is not having the ‘single track’ style of being given the objective of “win every race”, as there is no way Virgin Racing for example, could really compete, but instead, may be given the goal of getting two podium finishes in a season. That kind of progression is pretty clever, as it prevents the problem you find with a lot of games like this where player skill beats everything. As a player, you will be limited by the machine you are driving.

Of course, a key staple to F1 games is that they look damn good, and this one does. Some of the best looking things are the weather effects, such as the rain filter and something called Procedural Water. That means that if it rains on the track, the water can actually be moved by the cars (whilst it sounds pretty obvious, it’s pretty new tech). The implications of this is that the track will develop ‘dry lines’ as cars repeatedly follow the same line of the track, and going away from this will probably end in disaster.

As seen in the developer diary above, Codemasters know their F1 and their racing games, so F1 2010 looks promising, after the dissapointing F1 2009 Wii and PSP game.

F1 2010 is due out on Xbox 360, PC and PS3 in September 2010

Whilst I’ll admit to the tagline being ever so slightly misleading, the idea of Tony Hawk: Shred having snowboarding in it just seems weird, but then, when you consider that these extreme sports dudes tend to transfer from one piece of wood to another, it perhaps seems weirder that Mr. Hawk hasn’t changed his style a bit earlier than this.

Without really knowing a whole lot about it, some screens of SHRED have been released that show that it’s got a more cell shaded, and almost a ‘Sim’ style look to the characters, as opposed to the simply ‘poor’ looks the characters in the badly received Tony Hawk: Ride. Speaking of which, I’m not sure, but then I have a feeling that, just for the hell of it, the board that was oh so important for Ride will be usable here, if of course, you feel a need to justify purchasing that board anyway.

I’m still generally confused at what direction this series is going. Skate as a series has pulled ahead hugely in terms of critical acclaim, and perhaps soon name recogniton, so the question Activision will have to ask when thinking about this series is whether it’s worth it. If I were them, they need a couple of years to break away, similar to what the SSX franchise has done, so people can actually come back and think ‘Yeah, I a Tony Hawk game’, as it’s taken to about now for people to be asking EA for another SSX game.

Anyhow, here are some of the screens, courtesy of Destructoid, and just so you know, Tony Hawk: Shred is supposed to be coming out this year, despite is still knowing pretty much nothing about it.

Don’t watch this intro movie if you are a member of the RSPCA or are just a little bit sensitive, perhaps you shouldn’t watch this video. However, the worst part about not watching this video is that you are going to miss out on the beginning of Fable 3, the next instalment from Lionhead studios.

By the looks of the video, the game is a more industrial 17-1800 setting, with a more large-scale style, but still with the same style as was established in Fable II. Which means, of course, fart jokes. The other big concept is that you are going be the leader of a revolution against the king, but as part of that, you will almost have to ‘deal make’ your way through the game, influencing and promising people things that will change once you become king, and then you’ll have to decide whether you are going to deliver on your promises.

In other news, we’ve found out that the Kinect features that will play a part in Fable 3 will not be available from launch, and will instead be patched in. Another thing is that Peter Molyneux has also said that if they were going to make the Kinect a huge part of the game, they would have built it from the ground up. Time to wait for Fable IV…

Fable III is out on Xbox 360 on October 26 2010

Seemingly mindless puzzle games are pretty cool, I’m a purveyor of poor flash games and bizarre indie titles, but apparently, according to resident Angry Birds fan Matt, Angry Birds for the iPhone is a pretty awesome game and news that it is making its way to Nintendo DS, PSP and PS3 will brighten his world up, more so than a copy of Final Cut Pro landing on his door step would ever do.

For the uninitiated, Angry Birds is a little like Boom Blox, where you attempt to destroy a variety of structures by firing explosive birds at them. Whilst that doesn’t sound a mind-blowing concept, Boom Blox and the sequel were fantastically well received and Crush the Castle, a game with a similar concept, was one of the highest rated games on flash game community website Kongregate.

Do we know anything about prospective changes to the game? Nope, we know very little apart from what the games creator Joe Wee has said;

“We are also releasing it on Nintendo DS, Sony PSP and PS3″

Of course, the game does have it’s detractors, and in the name of balance I’ll address them. To start with, people claim that whilst the DS will be alright, the novelty is based around the touch screen and the way that controls, which may not translate too well to the PS3 or PSP. Others are just fed up with all these types of games appearing over the App Store, but other than PAIN the PS3, there are not too many games like this on the three consoles mentioned, so it wouldn’t harm for it to appear on it. Let’s face it, if you have listened to our recent podcast, DSi-ware needs a boost.

Angry Birds is currently available on the App Store for £0.59 for iPod Touch and iPhone

Quite recently, there has been a lot of bitchy back and forth comments between defenders of Canonical and what seems to be the rest of the free-software-overse into the upstream contributions of Canonical to the GNOME project. I don’t really think either party has a leg to stand on because they both see development ideals in completely different lights; Canonical focussing more on making downstream enhancements and the rest of the world more focussed on contributing back to parent projects.

So I thought it would be apt, no pun intended, among all the politics and ideals to post an article into the technical and preferential reasons into why I use Ubuntu over another distribution.

I think I am in a position to write this article because I am not – at the moment – a developer, I have been around pretty much every distribution and I know my way around Linux systems in general.

I don’t mean the rest of this to sound bitchy but, God forbid, if I do sound like I’m verging on the fish-net tights remember that this is just my opinion and a flame-war would bring A LOT of traffic to this site.

#2 at DistroWatch: Fedora

Now don’t get me wrong, I love Fedora. If Ubuntu didn’t exist I can quite comfortably see Fedora becoming my primary distribution. It is secure, it has a great community and it features cutting edge packages. It also benefits from Red Hat sponsorship which means it usually is first of the line with new technologies.

However, I do have a few gripes with Fedora that stop me from deploying it everywhere I go. Firstly, when compared to Ubuntu, Fedora crashed more times than Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang strafing through a Flak-88 deployment. I understand that not everyone has this problem, but it wasn’t just an X-server hang: the entire thing would just go unresponsive – not even a kernel panic message or anything!

Secondly, Fedora is great if you are only deploying it on the one computer you love and care for. The time it takes to configure Fedora into a usable state makes deploying it quickly completely unrealistic. Maintenance is also an issue – security is so tight on Fedora even getting WINE to work is a challenge without trawling through the SELinux configuration. Not a problem if you know how to deal with it and have time on your hands but for inexperienced or time constrained people it’s not amazing. To sum up, Fedora is less appropriate to put on your Gran’s desktop PC than the pics you sent to your girlfriend/pen-pal in Brussels last night.

#3 at DistroWatch: Linux Mint

Linux Mint is an interesting distribution to write about since it it based on Ubuntu with a strong emphasis on working out of the box. In all fairness, it accomplishes this quite well in the way in which codecs  and flash are installed by default.

Apart from this, Mint holds no other merit over Ubuntu. In fact, all that downloading Linux Mint does is save you typing ‘sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras’. Many selling points of Linux mint, such as the theme and the software manager, also fall short of Ubuntu’s native offerings. The default theme isn’t spectacular and having the menu at the bottom left makes the desktop less functional by requiring more clicks for most common tasks.

Really, Mint shows promise and will always have a few dedicated ‘ease-of-use’ followers. However, I fully expect Mint to go down several places in the rankings once elementary OS is released – as will Ubuntu, actually.

#4 at DistroWatch: openSUSE

openSUSE seems to be a great distribution if you like looking through YaST and tinkering with random features you will never need. Don’t get me wrong, YaST is awesome but the distribution itself… not so much.

I can see openSUSE would be great for admins who just want a solid and stable OS to deploy but it seems like some of the developers took that notion a little bit too literally. Quite frankly, you are more likely to find a bleeding-edge on a rock. It’s not even easy to enable more up-to-date repositories either. I heard a great story that only the recent versions of openSUSE had included upstart as opposed to sysv-init, a technology that has been around for quite a few years and has proven itself to shave a lot off boot-time.

Also there is always a undertone of evil to openSUSE. I don’t know if it is the strong links with Microsoft or the fact they are Mono evangelists but using it just feels wrong.

Are you ready to become a warrior of rock? Or to embody the spirit of many rock legends? Well, as opposed to Rock Band 3, which is taking a more realistic approach to playing plastic (or now real) instruments, Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock looks to be going insane, with all fantasy craziness that looks ripped straight off an Iron Maiden Album cover.

Basically, they are developing a story for Guitar Hero that revolves around the Demi-God of Rock, voiced by Gene Simmons of KISS fame, who battles against some mechanical creature thingy, and eventually gets turned into stone. But not before he is able to call out to his rock friends, all those memorable Guitar Hero characters.

In addition to this fantasy vibe they are giving the game, they are providing each of the characters you can recruit into your band special powers, such as being able to transform into a “night elf”, which gives them different abilities in the actual game mode, such as having a constant 2x multiplier.

It looks like they are shaping up Quest Mode to become the primary feature of Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock, and if I’m honest, I’m not too convinced that a rhythm game needs a contrived story to really appeal to players. Making the actual game part enjoyable with a good song list and DLC support is probably more important. It kind of seems that this style is there to appeal to a broader audience of players, who have gotten used to objective based gameplay in all games, as opposed to just people who enjoy playing (imitating?)  music.

Even so, it’s nice to see them trying something different with the franchise, as opposed to simply rolling out a re-skinned song pack. I’m sure we’ll get to see when Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock is released by Activision later this year.

 

On this week’s Ignition we discuss Starcraft II’s release; Apple’s latest product announcements; India’s $35 tablet computer; the saga of the Daily Star and ‘Grand Theft Auto: Rothbury’; Firefox 4 and the upcoming gaming releases.

Duration: 100 mins

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During the time of the MegaDrive, Sega was pretty much responsible for producing many Disney orientated games, with World of Illusion being one of the seminal games they produced at this time. As a semi-sequel to the older Castle of Illusion, though having a completely different style, and following on from the high production values the studio proved with Quackshot, which will be covered later in the week.

World of Illusion allows you to play as either Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck, or both, through 5 sets of levels, using a magic spell and a cape in order to travel through the Disney inspired landscapes. The game took much of its inspiration from previous Disney movies, such as Alice in Wonderland, with its style, with characters who look very similar to the Mad Hatter appearing in different guises. In terms of battling the enemies, it’s pretty straightforward, simply stun/destroy them with the cape. Whilst it takes a bit of practice to get used to the range and speed of the cape, because it’s pretty much the only combat mechanic, you get your head around it pretty quick.

Graphically, the game has a style, though it is not particularly striking, the worlds are nicely designed, with good backgrounds and well animated sprites. Each world has a different influence, with the first being based around being shrunken inside a forest, then flying through the sky, underwater and so on. Perhaps one of the nice touches is the way you transition from level to level, rather than simply fading to black and appearing in a completely different area, the characters may jump inside a cake tin to appear in a world made of cakes and chocolate.

Whilst the music is perhaps not the strongest point of the game, with the tunes not being quite as memorable as some others from the era, it’s not an annoyance. Again, the synthesised voice effects in the game, such as ‘Alakhazam!’ or “Ouch!” are not the top of what the MegaDrive can possibly manage, with The Lion King probably being one of the best examples of the sound chip trying its hardest. Even so, it all complements what the game appears to be trying to achieve, with a more than workman-like quality.

One of the most original and innovative things in this game is the multiplayer component. To start with, depending on which character you play as, Mickey or Donald, you will encounter different levels, with for example, Mickey having to navigate a mountainous region in part of the second level, with Donald instead having to ride river rapids down a mountainside. This is sometimes because the character can’t fit through a gap, and sometimes, parts of levels are different depending on who you play as. The biggest change comes where two players go through the game cooperatively, with them having to work together on see saws to launch themselves into the air and a mine cart, on levels that don’t appear in either of the single player levels.

I think that World of Illusion is one of those games that people hold very dear to their heart without really recognising the strengths and weaknesses of this game. Whilst not as strong as some of later Disney titles, such as Aladdin, that Capcom took care of, World of Illusion plays responsively, with a fairly generous difficulty curve, which could have meant that it was the first game many people completed. Couple that with re-playability, it was probably one of those childhood game that became as much a memory as your first day at school. However, it was short, only being around five full levels long, and some of them, particularly the water level, whilst looking great, is still difficult to players who have not played it extensively as a kid. Other things that have forever confused me include the collection of cards in the game, which seem to form some sort of collectable function, but was left out of the final game.

Overall, World of Illusion is a solid Mega Drive title, containing enough depth and limited flaws to be a recommended, if not classic, of the console.

For those interested in such things, here is a comparison and rundown of the beta version of World of Illusion.

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