Like Captainface shouted in the shoutbox a couple of days ago, the biggest announcement in the past few days was Portal 2, hinted and slowly spoiled by valve in the last years and more frequently on the last weeks. No release dates have been announced so far but we’ll probably be playing it this holiday season. Lots of people are speculating if this could be sold with Half Life 2 :Episode 3 or will be Episode 3 itself but I think it’s a waste of time to day-dream on a plot where the last villain in the series was an AI addicted to cakes.

The second Valve-related news is the (likely) upcoming Steam support for Macs. The Orange box games have been made object of some Mac-inspired ads so it’s not difficult to guess what Valve is hinting.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light has also been announced recently. It’ll be a downloadable game for XBLA and PSN. The game has already been nicknamed Diablo Raider or Lara of Persia. Allow me to say that I knew that Square-Enix would have screwed up. You’ll get a couple of related comics in the next weeks. You can bet on this.

Before giving you the last sad news of this post, I’d like you to know that Super Street Fighter IV will have some extra content for the players that own Street Fighter 4 for the same platform. Hokuto no Ken costume for Abel. I called this first.

Some people complained that we didn’t get a new video of Metroid Other M at the Nintendo Media Summit this year. Well, it got released a few days after that and it’s full of cinematic. I wouldn’t even consider this game in my must-buy list after seeing this if the game wasn’t directed by Yoshio Sakamoto himself. Still, next time models and animations should be done by Epic Games because I just can’t stand plain reflective surfaces with no detail after the awesome work that Retro Studios did with Metroid Prime.

Literally, in italian it means spare time. It’s a funny expression and I don’t mind if you want to use it in english too. I’m writing this because I’m sorry. I’ve been a little absent in the last month due to the fact that I’m working on multiple projects for my exams and I didn’t have time to write a couple of news.

Probably the most important news from the last week is that Steam finally came to Mac. Oblviously the game library isn’t the same of the pc. Mac games are mainly indie games with only Portal and Civilisation IV from large companies. I’m really wondering if there’s marked for such a thing, considering that in the environment I work in 99% of the people use a Mac but none of them use it for gaming, except facebook and flash games in general.

Anyway, to celebrate and promote this step into steam integration with a new userbase Valve is giving away Portal for free until May 24th for both PC and Mac users. Team Fortress 2 will come later, probably after the Engineer update, to avoid fixing something on a platform and breaking something else on the other. Don’t look at me like that. We know how it goes everytime.

Almost siltently, TF2 got a lot of tweaks and updates recently. Adding four medals staing how far back in time your first frag (or death) goes, new community weapons and some important changes to the pyro. The flamethrower is now less effective in burning and more irritaing in airblasting enemies in the air and the Sledgehammer (it’s the Homewrecker’s filename and I like it better) guarantees the pyro a babysitter job for sentries. I’ll stick with the backburner like I always did, thanks. Now the Heavy is also faster when spinning the minigun and moving, the Sniper can nock the arrows while in the air and the bonk doesn’t slow down the Scout.Other unlockables are the Crit-a-Cola drink for scouts and the

Another free DLC comes from Futuremark Games as Shattered Horizon got the Firepower Pack, adding 4 new primary weapons, 2 secondary weapons, 3 grenades and a mining pick. The game now is way more various and unpredictable as some weapons also change the speed and aim of the players. The new grenades, again, can’t damage enemies but they can blind them, or fool with their radars. The only downside is that it greatly affected the performance on low-specs PCs but it has been mostly fixed.

The last freebie I’m giving you today is Mechwarrior 4, which got a completely free release two weeks ago from the Mektek servers along with the mektek 3.1 pack with extra mechs and weapons. Since Mechwarrior (MW5, it’s a reboot) is on hold this is the best we can have at the moment and trust me, this is really the best.

Super Street Fighter IV has been released a couple of weeks ago but I won’t be able to try it unless it comes to PC. Blame Capcom with me. I have a comic in my mind though.

Time flies. It’s been almost a month after the last post already. I know I should have written this earlier but I had some exams to pass. I passed every one of them by the way and only three remain in October but I have the whole summer to work on those, between some Mario Galaxy and Metroid.

You may have read the latest news on game announcements at E3 but let’s recap, just to make sure what we’re going to buy and why.

Microsoft

Probably the most embarrassing conference I’ve seen, even worse than that Nintendo conference from 2009. Let’s face it, Kinect (Natal’s new name) is just an improved Eye toy and what they showed was a more multimedia box than a gaming console. Movies, Facebook integration and sport events aren’t that interactive when it comes to actually play. And about Skittles, I’m sure that the little girl enjoyed that part as much as we didn’t. You’ll see my comic on this later. There’s at least a really good news in the release of a new 360 model, with built-in wi-fi and larger HDD.

EA

Nice stuff, really. I’ve got a couple of friends overly excited about Battlefield Vietnam just for the lack of Carl Gustav and seeing Dead Space 2 in action with more quick time events was really a bang. I’ve been re-playing Dead Space lately after EA’s big sale on steam and I perfectly recall the adrenaline i felt the first time a drag tentacle grabbed me.

Crysis 2 is nearing completion and it has been optimized for slower machines while faster machines will star in Need for Speed: Hot pursuit featuring multiplayer police car chase.

Ubisoft

Ubisoft presented a handful of very interesting games, starting with Child of Eden, from Tetsuya Mizuguchi, and ending with Rayman Origins, passing by Assassin’s creed brotherhood. They also showed a new non-video-game with plastic guns and laser sensors that allows you to battle in your living room or set up checkpoint runs. I don’t know if you have ever seen this but in the 90’s there was a game called “Laser combat” sold with 2 guns and 2 chest sensors. It’s pretty much the same, even in the look.

The most interesting product is probably the UBIart Framework: a new in-house development engine. I hope they release it as free someday, like the Unreal Engine or Quake Engine.

Nintendo

Everyone that wasn’t expecting anything big after the leaks in the months before E3 got terribly shocked. Nintendo threw on screen a huge number of games for both DS, Wii and the new 3DS, finally unveiled. Goldeneye, Donkey Kong Country Returns, Kid Icarus Uprising, Zelda Skyward Sword, Kirby Epic Yarn, Golden Sun: Dark Dawn and many more. I really can’t figure out precisely how much I’m going to spend within the next year.

My bad, I couldn’t see the Nintendo 3DS in action as you don’t get the 3d effect from videos but from what I’ve read it works like a window on another world. The black border around the screen helps to isolate the 3d image from the rest and your brain reads it independently. It sounds awkward but it’s possible if your eyes aren’t too close or too far from the screen and not tilted. With the amount of games revealed and awaiting us within the end of Nintendo’s financial year (March 2011) there’s no doubt they owned the show this year.

Sony

Sony’s motion control, named Move, is finally priced at $49.99 and supported by good games and not only tech demos, like Sorcery and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11. Media molecule’s Alex Evans unveiled a little more of Little Big Planet 2 and how it will be a platform for games and not just a platform game. I admire their intents but I feel that the LBP franchise would work way better on PC with external applications and a supportive community. Just look at how far Garry’s Mod made it.

The big bomb came with Gabe Newell, announcing that portal 2 will be released on PS3 too. I wonder what made him change his mind considering that coding forPS3 is actually time-consuming, despite his previous statements were jokes or not. Medal of Honor and Dead Space 2 went on the screens again with Dead Space Extraction as bonus playable with the PlayStation Move. The conference ended with a disturbing clown in an ambulance promoting a new Twisted Metal game.

The worst part was Kevin Butler, charging up the crowd  and mocking the products of other companies like Sony invented everything in gaming since the creation of PlayStation. That’s not something you do in front of people who probably owns every console on the market.

I was unsure if it was the case to post these because they’re just cinematics but whatever…

Regarding Mass Effect we have some bad and good news:

The bad news is that the Call of Duty styled FPS from Bioware you may have heard about does not exist. The good news is that it’s Mass effect 3 instead.

Uncharted 3 is due for November 1st. It looks gorgeous as always.

On November 2011 it’ll also be the time to be a criminal scum once again in the lands of Cyrodiil.

The short making of for the two droids in Portal 2 gives us a little glimpse of their inexplicable personality.

You might not know, but here in Italy we’ve a small holiday on December 13th in which children receive the gifts they asked some weeks earlier. Well, my childhood times are long gone but I still get something every year and today it was the turn of Donkey Kong Country Returns. I didn’t have the time to try it though, so you’ll have to wait for my comments on the spur of the moment.

From an artistic point of view, a screen will always display only 2-dimensional images. It doesn’t matter if you cross your eyes, selectively watch light sources or coloured outlines: you’re looking at light coming at you from a rectangle. Then I ask myself “what’s this fuss all about?”. From what I’ve seen, they’re trying to sell us an illusion in a way that’s very different from switching from black and white to color tv or from 2D graphics to 3D. I’m sure everyone of you has at least seen a glasses-3D movie in the recent years so you may have noticed that you don’t have to focus on anything. You just point your eyes at the screen and everything else happens on its own. Even the depth of field has been decided for you by a screenplay writer.

You may have guessed by now that I’ve tried out the latest iteration of the 3D experience, the Nintendo 3DS, and I’m not as impressed as I was when I tried out the DS in February 2005. Back then, touch technology was already well-known but It yet had to be adapted for the videogame medium. Nintendo did it first for the masses and I was amazed how responsive and precise many action could be, ditching the dpad in favor of the stylus. The 3DS tries once again to deliver a brand new experience but this time the “new” 3D effect feels already old, being the same thing you’ve already seen in the movies or on your 3D enabled tv screen. The only difference is that it’s without glasses, but this awesome breakthrough comes to a price. The effect only works if your eyes are in the “sweet spot” as Nintendo itself called it. Shortly, there’s only one (one) distance you can see the 3D effect from. Basically it depends on the distance between your eyes but the real problem is that nobody is going to keep the 3DS in the exact same place all the time while playing. Even while trying it out i was trying to relax my arms but as soon as I moved the 3DS away from me the 3D effect was gone and I had to spend another ten seconds to find the sweet spot again. Forget playing with your 3DS on the bus, train, seaside deck chair: every little misplacement of your arms will mess up.

Furthermore, the actual depth I could see was about 1cm further than the surface of the screen (I’m not going to write the distance in inches. You should have learned the metric system by now) and 1cm of depth for the horizon in Pilotwings Resort is BAD. I hope other games can overcome this limitation or I’m going to call it “paper sheets glued one on top of the other”-D. There’s also a minor glitch I’ve experienced consisting of duplicated images near the left and right edges of the screen, probably due to the proximity of the wrong eye to the light beams directed to the other eye. I’ve combined a stereoscopic screenshot from Mass Effect to give you the idea (click the picture to see it in stereoscopy).

Sure, there’s the slider to turn the 3D effect off, but then I ask Nintendo: “what are you trying to sell”? It’s obvious, if you’ve seen the games at launch, that 3D is an option, even for the augmented reality card games. For the same reason that 3D is an Illusion and it’s expendable, I doubt any game will solidly base its gameplay on it. If you see it from this perspective you’ll realize that the 3DS is on sale because Nintendo wanted to say, once again, “we did it first”. This isn’t bad per se, but it’s not what I would expect from the same Nintendo that changed the direction of gaming with motion controls and openness to a broader audience. It almost feel like they wanted to take the same road Sony was walking on at the cost of forgetting why they build hardware for (suggestion: support the games they want to make).

I’ve read that the best part of the 3DS isn’t the 3D screen but its accessory features. Let’s consider those features then. StreetPass and SpotPass are as useful as the connectivity in games like Farmville and Pet Society and, for you to know, I don’t have a facebook account due to disgust. I’ll mark the aforementioned features as “useless” until I hear of a couple that met through them and successfully married and consummated afterwards. The ability to take pictures in 3D is interesting for artistic applications but as soon as you export them you’re back to the traditional 3D methods and I’ve already seen people doing it with 3D cameras or just two webcams on a stick. The web browser was already installed on the DSi and you know how fun is to find countless protected connections around you. The Icing on the cake is represented by the dreadful friend code comeback. The Prisoner once said “I am not a number. I’m a free man!” so why can’t we all live on the continent, instead of Nintendo’s Island?

Right now I’m only interested in Super Street Fighter IV 3D and I wouldn’t mind buying a new piece of hardware with this gimmick if it weren’t for the absurd price (and knowing the production cost doesn’t help either). I’ll probably wait for the inevitable price cut right after the first big title or  when Sony’s NGP will force Nintendo’s prices to appeal to parents with crying children once again.

In the meantime, I’ll “co-operate” with my friends in Portal 2. Don’t look at me like that. I always help my friends in New Super Mario Bros. Miscalculating gaps… but good intention do count, don’t they?

Apparently Valve is pushing really hard the marketing for Portal 2, publishing special e-comics and even ovveriding the songs I want to play. If you’re looking at the score, well, I suck at pointman, ok? I play mono for a reason. While you wait for the official release of the game you might consider buying the new Humble Indie Bundle, dedicated to Frozenbyte, developers of the gorgeous Trine and his sequel.

If you’re not into indie you should hang from a lightpole check out what the future holds for us, or at least for those who are willing to make the jump to a dx11 video card.

I remain confident that Epic will make a great work for the optimisation, like they’ve always done, making those polygons run on my 4-years-old desktop pc.

For now, I know for sure that I’ll run Brink almost flawlessly, after I put some money on my pre-paid card for the pre-order. You can find the system requirements on the official Bethesta blog.