PCGH: F.E.A.R. 2 won't support DX10. Why did you decide to do without the new API? Do you plan to integrate DX10 later on? What is your opinion about upcoming DX11 or the future of rendering where techniques like ray tracing or CUDA become more and more important?

John O'Rorke: While we would have loved to have added DX10 support, unfortunately time didn't permit. However, we have managed to get all of the features that we wanted for this title to work with DX9. So even though we don't support DX10, no features were cut because of it, so you are still getting the game as it was intended. The future for graphics will be very interesting as a lot of new technologies and interfaces such as DX11 and CUDA are providing access to very powerful hardware in never before possible ways which will allow for some very innovative techniques to be used that would have been impossible or impractical given the current limitations of how hardware can be interacted with.

James Ohlen
Lead Designer, Star Wars: The Old Republic
Lead Designer, Baldur's Gate

I had a lot of fun as lead designer on Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II. Those games were a chance for me to bring everything I love about Dungeons & Dragons to a computer game. I remember trying to cram every creature, setting and class that I could think of into the latter in an attempt to outdo the first game. As much fun as those titles were to make, we did go a little crazy, and built a world that really was just a pastiche of everything that had been done in fantasy. The main city in Baldur's Gate II had a beholder cult, a lich, vampire assassins, a crazy illusionist, etc. While we did try hard to bring it all together into a consistent story, in the end, the world still felt a little like a comic book.

Based on the acclaimed animated series starring and executive-produced by Samuel L. Jackson, Afro Samurai expertly blends hip-hop culture and traditional Japanese aesthetics into a brutally fresh cinematic experience.

Follow Afro on an epic hunt for his father's killer, as he ascends into the timeless mysticism of the Samurai code. Staying true to the soul of the animated series, Samuel L. Jackson reprises his role as the aloof protagonist and his loud-mouthed sidekick, Ninja Ninja. Featuring additional material and background for fans of the series and newcomers alike, players can bludgeon to the beat of music as Afro Samurai is set to an original hip hop musical score with a new track by The RZA of Wu Tang Clan fame.

Visually innovative, Afro Samurai's striking cross-hatch art style and cut scene paneling gives the game a truly unique animated look and feel as Afro wages a brutal war against anyone standing in his way. Featuring a one-of-a-kind combat system, players can dismember opponents with surgical precision in limitless ways by executing dynamic finishing moves. Make a statement by cleaving an opponent in two from skull to sandals or perform cosmetic surgery, samurai style, by lopping off the nose of an adversary with an effortless swing of the blade. Afro Samurai lets the player feel the swagger and swordsmanship of the ultimate hip-hop warrior.

Manipulating the camera with the controller's analog stick is effortless. Selecting command triggers and targets with the the right analog stick is not quite as tight as we would like it; it feels a little loose, a truth probably attributable to the fact that Halo Wars' fluidity is sometimes sluggish, particularly with lots of action unfolding on-screen. If you've been holding out for the developer to completely overhaul the framerate or suddenly spruce up the graphics since the title was last on display, it's time to put those hopes to rest. To its credit, the visual presentation definitely looks like Halo from the top-down viewpoint.

On a side note, Halo Wars was demoed on a development system encased in glass. Not a good idea, as it turned out. The console overheated about a dozen times as we played and kept crashing, temporarily displaying the glowing red lights of doom -- two, not three, thankfully. Rest assured this will not happen with the final demo, coming to a system near you in just a few weeks.

"We have a lot of seriously exciting plans for DLC. We really want to give our players a top-notch online experience and we want to reward our players for playing our game. We want to give out steady doses of free downloadable content because we believe in rewarding people who buy the game" said Ebbert.

When talking about DRM solutions, Ebbert said that it would be taking the approach that Valve pioneered to try and avoid implementing any DRM procedures; "the reason we don’t like DRM solutions is because they punish the innocent and they have to jump through all these hoops. We don’t want to do that so we’re going with the approach that Valve pioneered to just reward the people who actually bought the game with cool stuff. Free downloadable, regularly accessible stuff that enhances the game and then that’s an incentive for the people who didn’t buy the game to buy it. So we’ve got a really bold, robust strategy for that and we’re going to be revealing more details in about a month, but I think players are going to like it."

The game has sold an estimated 1.5 million units worldwide, and although Eidos said it held its own against competitor products, its performance has been disappointing.

"On a global basis our sell through to 31 December, which we estimate at approximately 1.5 million units, is below our internal forecasts, primarily due to a lower start in North America," said the company.

"In a difficult North American economy we have seen retailers restricting inventory levels and triple-A products being price discounted above our expectation."

In other sales news, Sony is happy to have sold 1.3 million copies of LittleBigPlanet.

Boards

• EVGA X58 SLI Classified - VR-Zone

  Cases
  

• NZXT Guardian 921 Mid Tower Case - Modders-Inc

  CPU
  

• AMD Phenom II X4 940 Black Edition - AMDZone
• AMD Phenom II X4 94 - Bjorn3D
• AMD Phenom II X4 940 & 920 - Legion Hardware
• AMD Phenom II X4 940 - Hartware
• AMD Phenom II X4 940 - T-Break
• AMD Phenom II X4: Deneb - PCGH
• AMD Phenom II X4 940 & 920 - TechSpot
• AMD Phenom II X4 940 & 920 - ExtremeOCing

  Video
  

• Asus GTX-295 - Bjorn3D
• BFGTech GeForce GTX 295 - [H]
• BFG GTX 295 - Neoseeker
• BFG GeForce GTX 295 - Guru3D
• Gainward’s GeForce GTX 295 - Tweaktown
• GeForce 3D Vision - NV News
• GeForce GTX 295: ASUS ENGTX295 - Hartware
• Geforce GTX 295 - PCGH
• GeForce GTX 295 Quad SLI gaming test - Guru3D
• GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 295 - Tweaktown
• NVIDIA GeForce 3D Vision Gaming Kit - BMR
• Nvidia 3D Vision - Bjorn3D
• NVIDIA Unveils GeForce 3D Vision Glasses - HotHardware
• Nvidia GTX 295 - OCC
• NVIDIA (BFG) GeForce GTX 295 - Hexus
• NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 - HotHardware
• Sapphire HD4870 1GB Toxic - OCC