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Just how many genres can you combine in a game? Punchers Impact tries to find out with its vehicular multiplayer online battle arena game. 
Crasher takes the spells and controls of World of Warcraft, the team-based fighting and classes of Team Fortress, and the rocket-infused vehicular combat of Twisted Metal and melds them together in what developer Punchers Impact is calling a type of multiplayer online battle arena game. Is it possible to create a MOBA from such disparate components? We took a first look at the game to find out.
Five-versus-five multiplayer is the order of the day in Crasher, and most of the classic multiplayer modes are present, including Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag. Before each match, you choose from one of a number of vehicles, each with a different skill or weapon set. These include two-wheeled bikes tuned for speed; three-wheeled "Saboteur" trikes used for setting up traps, such as mines; and four-wheeled tanks made for all out attacks. You also select a control skill for the match, including boosts for extra speed and double jumps, which allow you to get to hard-to-reach areas.
The first thing you notice once you join a game is the control scheme, which borrows heavily from massively multiplayer online games, such as World of Warcraft. You view your vehicle in the third person--the standard W, A, S, and D keys control movement, while the mouse controls the camera. Holding down the right mouse button moves your vehicle, as well as the camera, allowing you to strafe. Aside from control skills, you also have regular skills. These differ among each vehicle and include the ability to heal, use rocket attacks, and double your size, which is useful for brute force attacks.
To attack other players, you target them with the left mouse button, which highlights them in red. Your vehicle then automatically begins launching rocket and gunfire at them. Your main job is to use your special skills tactically and coordinate your attacks with your team. Most maps are quite large, and one example we were shown was set in a massive sprawling desert complete with rocky outposts. This allows you to flank the opposition or set up surprise attacks with ease. Weapons, such as mines, can be used to force players into ambushes, while containment nets can keep them locked in one place for an easy destruction. However, you can't just spam your enemies with attacks because they require energy from a mana bar, which recharges as you play.
At the end of each match, you're awarded experience points, which push you up the rankings and allow you to upgrade your vehicle. You can add new skills and items, as well as boost your abilities, such as your health bar or speed. Your customized vehicle also appears on the leaderboards, allowing other players to see what you've equipped to achieve your ranking. This level of community interaction is something that Punchers Impact hopes will keep players coming back to the game as they form leagues and develop vendettas against other players. Though it's early days for the MOBA mash-up, Crasher's unique twist on vehicular combat is certainly different and one to keep an eye on in the run-up to release. It's due out in 2011 on the PC, and a beta is promised for November this year.
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We try out the next Sims 3 expansion, which will let you start a band, be a professional celebrity, and become a vampire...who isn't sparkly in the sunlight!   
Late Night will be the next expansion pack for The Sims 3, and while it has echoes of the Hot Date expansion for the original version of The Sims, it'll offer a whole lot more. We recently had a chance to briefly try out the new content, start a band, moonlight as a bartender, and explore the game's…unusual interpretation of rated-T-for-teen bloodsucking.
Producer Grant Rodiek describes Late Night as a "return to the open-ended gameplay of The Sims" in reference to how the expansion will focus more on socializing and exploration, in contrast to World Adventures and Ambitions, which were more focused on directed, role-playing game-like advancement. Instead, Late Night will focus on getting your sims out of the house and into the nightlife at various clubs throughout the brand-new town of Bridgeport, which was modeled after both the bohemian city of San Francisco and the home of tinseltown, Los Angeles. These clubs include anything from lowly dive bars to the trendiest of the venues, where the bouncers only let in the social elite. Late Night will have a "hotspot" system that highlights which of the town's clubs will be the most crowded and which will be flat-out empty.
The hotspot system plays into several of Late Night's new features, such as the new "celebrity level." All sims can gain up to five levels of notoriety (indicated by a 5-star meter that floats above each one's head). At lower levels of fame, your sims will be able to only get into low-end clubs and will get checked by bouncers unless you have other skills that can sneak you through, such as computer hacking, which can get you in through the back door. At higher levels of fame, not only will your sims be welcomed with open arms through the velvet ropes, you may even be able to pick up some extra cash being a professional party-crasher, taking in a little extra cash from nightclub owners to grace their parties with your presence and have your picture taken, not unlike certain Los Angeles-based starlets whose primary claim to fame is…showing up at parties.
Parties are important for making a little extra scratch in Late Night. For instance, if you're taking advantage of Late Night's new bartending feature, for which you can collect recipes from books and from skill advancements. Late Night has plenty of new, and goofy, animations for stirring, shaking, and mixing up advanced "juice" cocktails to serve for cold, hard cash. And if you happen to be in a band, your bread and butter is playing gigs. Fortunately, Late Night actually expands the range of instruments you can play beyond just electric guitars--you can also play piano, upright bass, or a drum kit (no Rock Band 3 playset, though). While your musically-inclined sims can try to earn a little spare change outside the subway station playing alone (assuming they don't get mugged, which they can be in Late Night), they'll make the most scratch playing a happenin' club.
This is why, if you're in a band, you need to keep an eye on the local paper or your ear to the ground (talking to the town's movers and shakers) to make sure that you can play a venue that isn't totally dead. You get gigs from The Sims 3's opportunity system (so they'll pop up randomly)--we got one to play a dive bar downtown, so we used Late Night's new "group" system to get everyone there. This new system causes grouped sims to stick together when on the go and hang out with each other--this increases the likelihood that they'll stick together (rather than have the annoying tendency to wander off), and it also seems to accelerate the rate that grouped sims grow closer, since they're more likely to interact with each other continuously. They're also more likely to get involved in Late Night's new social activities, which include pub games like darts.
In any case, music groups can either use a "jam session" social action to practice their skills, or they can use a full-on "performance" social to put on a show. While performing, sims can attempt to pull off a "sweet move" social in the middle of their set, which, with a high music skill will mean a dramatic guitar windmill that delights the crowds, while with a low music skill, your sims will likely fall on their faces and fail utterly. Not so good for their ego, but a humorous scene--something the fans have been asking for more of.
As mentioned, Late Night will also let you play as a vampire, and as Rodiek explains, "they won't get all sparkly, like in Twilight--they'll have more of a soft glow." The producer described vampire sims as being "badass" and "powerful"--primarily because although they can't survive during the day, they thrive at night with enhanced motives (The Sims' version of personal needs) that require very little maintenance. However, being vampires, they do need to drink "plasma" from other sims, and the best way to do so is to hunt for a prime victim.
Vampire sims can trigger a "hunting" social which causes non-vampires to appear as heat-generating silhouettes. Once vampires find a prime target with the best plasma, they then need to convince their target to consensually let them feed--an act that can be done gladly if the victim is a close friend (at which point the feeding looks like an affectionate embrace), or it can be done reluctantly, which causes the victims to grudgingly roll up their sleeves to allow for the act. Vampires have powerful mind control abilities they can use to convince their victims, and they can also read minds--meaning they can immediately ascertain a stranger's entire list of traits, rather than having to chat them up.
In addition to all the clubbin' and vampirin', Late Night will add more customization and building options to play with, including expensive new penthouse apartments that have limited size, but can be tricked out with the absolute latest in high-end swank, such as a gigantic digital fishtank that hangs on the wall, and a returning Sims favorite, the hot tub, which can seat up to four characters. In addition, you can expect to see plenty of new clothing sets and character customization that befit the social elite (and all those poseur wannabes), like draw-on muscle T-shirts, and new, more-muscular body types for those who prefer to play as a spray-tanned muscle man. When we asked the producer whether the new body types had anything to do with the popularity of MTV's Jersey Shore, Rodiek replied, "we here [on the Sims development team] are all about The Situation." And oh yes, Late Night will add a much-requested breast adjustment tool for those who absolutely must increase their bust. So, yes…there's that.
Late Night appears to be a return to the classic open-ended Sims gameplay of schmoozing, building, and designing. The expansion will ship next month.
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You read that right. The video game equivalent of the walking dead is playable here at PAX 2010. 
We'll spare you any history lessons on Duke Nukem Forever. If you follow video games at all, you likely know the long, rocky, infamous--and did we say long?--history behind this first-person shooter. All you need to know is that it's actually playable here at PAX 2010. Granted, as you'd expect, there's quite a line to see it. But if there was ever a game where a lengthy queue was appropriate, it's this one. CEO of Gearbox Randy Pitchford certainly knows. "I heard the line outside was 13 years long," Pitchford joked while giving a presentation on how new developer Gearbox picked up the project after 3D Realms collapsed last year.
To give a quick summary, Pitchford described his personal attachment to the franchise (Duke Nukem 3D was the first game he worked on before forming his own studio) as well as the reason publisher 2K Games trusted Gearbox to salvage the project ("we brought them a megahit with Borderlands"). But it was a quick introduction, followed by a new trailer and the opportunity for everyone there to get some hands-on time with a couple of different levels.
The trailer was Duke at his ridiculous best, punching giant aliens below the belt, spouting one-liners, and taking more than a few self-referential jabs at himself. After that, it was time to play the game. The demo started off simply enough: You're standing in front of a urinal in a men's room with the screen politely directing you to pull the right trigger to begin urinating. This opening scene sets the table rather appropriately for a brief but utterly absurd demo. A few seconds later, you walk up to some EDF forces in a locker room drawing plans to deal with the current alien invasion on a whiteboard. One soldier--the only one left standing amid a number of mangled survivors--invites you to offer your advice, and after a little first-person whiteboard scribbling by the player, that soldier remarks something to the effect of, "That's a great plan! If we had done that, that guy over there would still have his arm!”"Pause. "And at least one of his balls."
Duke, being a man of action, quickly runs through the tunnels of this football stadium--it turns out that's where the demo starts--and out onto the field. Standing on the 50-yard line is a giant one-eyed alien monster called the Cycloid. Fortunately, Duke has just picked up a rocket launcher called the Devastator. Using this handy little weapon, you run all over the rain-soaked field dodging the boss's attacks while occasionally firing rockets at his single, solitary eye. After a couple of minutes, the beast is felled, and Duke celebrates by ripping out his eye and kicking a field goal with it.
After this, the game's first level, we were quickly transported to the 15th level. This one begins in some arid canyons with Duke cruising along in his signature monster truck. The controls are simple: just pull the right trigger to accelerate and hit the B button to handbrake around a corner. This sequence seemed like a bit of a palate cleanser, as there wasn't a whole lot of challenge--just cruise along, look cool, and splatter the occasional pig alien too stupid to get out of your way. But you run out of gas before arriving at a small canyon village and have to do on-foot battle against a bunch of ugly aliens.
To help even the odds, the game scatters a few useful guns around the little town. There's the railgun, which comes in handy for remote sniping; the shrink ray, which turns your enemies into tiny things that are almost too adorable to kill; and a turret gun for dealing with a landing enemy spaceship. Unfortunately, we weren't able to progress past said spaceship before the allotted demo time was over. But we'll go ahead and assume there were aliens, guns, and one-liners to be found after a successful completion. Call it a hunch.
If there's one thing that surprised us about the demo, it's this: Duke Nukem Forever is pretty darn fun for a game with such a tumultuous development. The comic timing was impressive, the guns felt satisfying, and the graphics were quite pleasing to look at. Of course, this is a Duke Nukem game through and through, so there are some inherent elements to it that will instantly turn some people off. But pick up a controller, spend a few minutes with it, and you'll be surprised at how well it has turned out. Whether the rest of the game can follow suit is something we're eager to see. Stay tuned for more.
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