Rockstar's Upcoming Manhunt

From Slashdot Games, a link to some Gamers.com coverage of Manhunt. GTA plus stealth gameplay plus SmashTV.

Manhunt is an upcoming title from Rockstar North, company responsible for the Grand Theft Auto series. They're a primarily Scottish development team; the GTA games played like an absurdist satire of urban American life. From this preview, their upcoming title Manhunt sounds like a cynical distopian take on a media-saturated society:

The hero -- or, at any rate, the playable character -- is James Earl Cash, a prison inmate who discovers an unpleasant life after death. His lethal injection is faked, and he finds himself in a ruined city that is the property of the Director, a wealthy dilettante who amuses himself by staging violent games of survival. "Carcer City," as it's called, is populated with wrecked buildings, roving armed gangs, and closed-circuit cameras, all of them feeding into the Director's control room. It's Mr. Cash's goal to escape the city without dying for the Director's vicarious entertainment.

They've taken the already downcast world of GTA and made an even darker playground of it. It seems to be a parable on media, urban living and violence. Here's A Clockwork Orange moment for a jaded gamer:

every weapon can be used for an automatic kill if you approach the target undetected. In a neat twist, though, the ensuing death is presented from the Director's perspective, forcing the player into his unpleasantly voyeuristic role.

There's a Valiant Entertainment stealth-promotional web site. It crashed my browser with inline streaming Quicktime videos!

Don't Enter the Matrix

Justin and I are totally excited to see The Matrix Reloaded tonight at Mann's Chinese, of course! But as for the game, well, we're not holding our breath.

Justin was asked by Julian if the game was going to be any good. He replied, "Oh, you know what it's going to be. They're going to take the three popular genres - there's going to be some shooting, some driving, some sneaking around - and they're going to cobble it together into a great lumbering mutant monster glued together with long, amazing, unskippable cutscenes."

Well, yeah. And the mainstream press agrees. And you?

"Just say 'NO!' to Boring and Dull MMORPGs!"

From Phantagram comes Shining Lore, an online game for girls. You know it's for girls because the website is done up in pale pastels, and one of the features is "Cute and Bright Atmosphere". MORE...

final fantasy tactics advance

The Magic Box has some screens. The job system seems a simplified version of the PSOne game.

You can bet I'll be getting this in Japan this winter!