Voice Actor Confirms Mass Effect 3 Leviathan DLC

Last month, leaked files suggested that Mass Effect 3’s next single-player downloadable content would focus on a rogue Reaper named Leviathan. Now, voice actor Anthony Skordi has confirmed the content, telling Eurogamer that he provided a voice for Leviathan in the add-on.

While BioWare hasn't officially announced the content, according to the leaked files the expansion will focus on Shepard hunting down Leviathan, a Reaper that has taken control of a mining facility and indoctrinated its inhabitants. BioWare is expected to make the news official at its Comic Con panel on Saturday, as the description says it will include “hints at upcoming DLC.”

The Leviathan content would follow the From Ashes add-on that was available alongside Mass Effect 3's launch, as well as the Extended Cut endings released last month.

Separately, new Mass Effect 3 multiplayer content was confirmed this morning, set to focus on Earth. More details will likely be coming very soon, so keep an eye on our Mass Effect 3 downloadable content wiki for all the updates as they’re announced.

Andrew Goldfarb is IGN’s associate news editor. Keep up with pictures of the latest food he’s been eating by following him on Twitter or IGN.

Source : ign[dot]com

E3 2012: SimCity preview

Heading into E3, the big news surrounding SimCity was the new multiplayer feature.  Up until now, SimCity had only been a single-player experience. Cities, however, are always part of something bigger, and that was EA’s goal with the latest installment to the long-running, popular franchise.  They wanted to make it bigger, and they wanted players to interact with other town’s mayors — trade resources, work together for common goals, and thrive off of each other’s cities — like real cities should do.

In our E3 preview, we were shown a few separate, but very distinct towns working together to create an airport, one of several major buildings that can benefit everyone.  The distinct cities, which included a friendly neighborhood, thriving metropolis, and a booming but rundown coal town, each provided the necessary resources to build this airport.  The goal was for each of them to benefit in some way from it being built.

Outside of them benefiting from the airport, each town relied on the neighbors in some form.  Some of the examples showed to us include one city providing electricity to the other. The multiplayer spreads beyond just providing resources.  The cities relied on neighbors in other ways.  For instance, the metropolis was looking to expand its commerce and retail, but it needed people to run the businesses.  Therefore, it relied on the neighborhood which needed to increase its population to provide the necessary workforce.

Here is where the airport enters.  In addition to the extra people it would bring in to the newly built stadium, it could help people arrive in the neighborhood suburb.  The airport also allowed goods and resources to be flown in for the coal town.  It may sound complex, but SimCity simplifies everything.

From electricity to water pipes to public transit, SimCity says goodbye to spreadsheet numbers and introduces color-coded or other useful symbols to convey the message.  They showed us building an above-ground electrical railcar, and instead of just building tracks, a colorful line showed where traffic would be heavy for the railcar.  Green was good, yellow was medium, and red is heavy.

Multiplayer isn’t the only addition, however.  EA showed off SimCity’s new Glassbox Engine which literally simulates everything going on in the city.  From the street lamps turning on to the street lights switching from red to green, Glassbox simulates everything going on in the city and presents it as if it were real life.  Individual lighting for buildings, cars’ headlights, street lamps, and more are all present in the game.  It doesn’t only simulate lights either.  It simulates sims’ actions.  In our preview, the devs showed us a bank robbery play out as a result to crime from the neighboring city pouring in.

Neighboring cities don’t only help your town, but can also harm it. The coal city focused heavily on production and business, but lacked the necessary police stations. Because of that, the city was littered with graffiti and crime began spreading into adjoining towns. Unfortunately, that friendly neighborhood we saw was right next to the coal town.  As a result, crime began spilling into the streets and the aforementioned bank robbery occurred.

SimCity was already a fun game, but this added multiplayer component just adds a whole new level of interesting gameplay.  You can choose to help or harm friends’ cities.  And it’s not like everyone’s city is the same.  You can choose to make the city you desire.  If you want a bustling city, create it.  Just remember, you need people to work there and that is where the fun begins. There’s an all-new aspect to , and EA has done a remarkable job incorporating multiplayer.

Source : gamezone[dot]com

Livingstone Claims We'll Always Want Single-Player Experiences

Eidos president Ian Livingstone has claimed that gamers will always want high-quality single-player experiences, despite the diversifying industry.

In an interview with MCV Pacific, the man behind Lara Croft said that the increased prominence of social and casual gaming doesn't necessarily threaten demand for core single-player experiences, such as the Tomb Raider reboot.

“

A game like Tomb Raider has historically been a graphically intensive single player experience, and that’s not simply going to disappear overnight.

He explained, "I think people still want a single player experience. The games industry is diversifying and is making new ways of delivering, new ways of playing games. One is certainly not totally at the expense of each other, and I think games as a product and as a service can live happily alongside each other for a long time to come.

"A game like Tomb Raider has historically been a graphically intensive single player experience, and that’s not simply going to disappear overnight. What we’re seeing is an emergence and a growth in the digital area and a new consumer which has come along (the casual gamer, which has almost reached ascendancy), but niche gamers are still going to be here and want content delivered specifically for them."

Livingstone suggested that consoles will remain the natural home for that type of experience for the foreseeable future, due to the intense power needed by the dependent system to run it.  He compared this preference to choosing to watch a film at the cinema, rather than view it at a considerably lower quality on YouTube.

"Well, you’ve got to create a game that’s relevant to the platform on which it’s delivered, therefore the graphic-rich interactive experience of console Lara is inevitably going to be different to the experience that you’d expect on a mobile device" he mused.

"The important thing is that they’re all linked by the IP and type of experience you get with that IP will depend on the device."

Given the recent furore surrounding scenes from the Tomb Raider reboot, it's debatable whether the same issues could have been rendered as emotively on a handheld device.

His comments paint a contrasting picture of the diversifying industry when compared with the claim by EA's Peter Moore that the future of games lies entirely in going free-to-play, regardless of content quality.

Luke Karmali is IGN's UK Editorial Assistant.  You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on IGN and on Twitter.

Source : ign[dot]com

E3 2012: God of War: Ascension Single-Player Revealed

A live-demo of God of War: Ascension's single-player campaign gave us a look at Kratos' new combat stylings, which looks to be faster, typically violent, and filled with experience orbs. Kratos can now manipulate the environment to create usable platforms from wreckage, pick up weapons on the ground (or in the backs of corpses) for use against enemies, and rewind time.

Developing...

Source : http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/06/05/e3-2012-god-of-war-ascension-single-player-revealed

Read This Book: Ready Player One

Ready Player One is geek crack, a novel that reads like a cross between Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Tron, with a healthy dose of Avatar, The Matrix, The Last Starfighter and The Hunger Games thrown in for good measure.

It combines sci-fi, romance, action and drama, while referencing all manner of 1980s pop culture brilliance, from Ghostbusters and The Goonies to Dungeons & Dragons and Dungeons of Daggorath. The Ladyhawke soundtrack plays a big part in the narrative and Pac-Man makes his presence felt throughout, while Wil Wheaton reads the real-world audio book, and it doesn’t get any geekier than that.

Story-wise, it’s a futuristic spin on the kind of quest adventure that authors have been chronicling for centuries. Proceedings are set in 2044, when The Great Recession has brought the planet to its knees. To escape the misery, the majority of humans spend their every waking hour in the OASIS, a massive multiplayer online simulation where the sky, and pretty much anything beyond, is the limit.

The OASIS was created by Gregarious Simulation Systems chiefs James Halliday and Ogden Morrow, but when Halliday mysteriously dies, he throws the OASIS into chaos with the video and book he leaves behind.

They explain - Willy Wonka-style - that whoever manages to collect three keys and pass through three gates hidden within the OASIS will receive his fortune and a controlling stake in GSS.

The bulk of the novel takes place five years after this announcement, and follows the efforts of Wade Watts to hunt down the keys and win the contest. A lonely Oklahoman teen, Wade goes by the name of Parzival in the OASIS, and he’s a likeable central character with a quick wit and a passion for all things ‘80s, from Galaga to Rush to The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension.

His journey spans the length and breadth of the OASIS, taking the reader on a magical mystery tour to distant planets that are influenced by everything from Blade Runner to Back to the Future. Along the way he finds friendship, love, and the ultimate enemy in the shape of Innovative Online Industries, a powerful corporation who will stop at nothing to win the contest and turn the OASIS into a purely commercial destination.

It’s hugely derivative stuff - a grab bag of pop culture citations and allusions - but there’s a charm to the way in which Ready Player One wears its influences on its sleeve, and part of the fun is trying to pick out the multitude of references peppered throughout.

Indeed, so detailed is the 1980s knowledge that one wonders if author Ernest Cline has a time machine (housed in a DeLorean) facilitating his fact collecting and checking.

Yet as well as being geek central for overgrown children of a certain age, the book is also quite simply a gripping adventure that unfolds at a breathless pace and builds to a grandstanding conclusion.

So whether you know your Voight-Kampff from your Kobayashi Maru or not, Ready Player One is quite simply a must-read, an epic adventure crafted from the ground up for nostalgia junkies who love the movies, games and music of the 1980s, and those who simply like a rip-roaring story.

Chris Tilly is the Entertainment Editor for IGN in the UK and although he was born in the 1970s, he considers himself a child of the '80s. Chris can be found going on and on about Back to the Future on both Twitter and MyIGN.

Source : http://www.ign.com