I recently went to an event in New York where EA Games was displaying what they feel are the 'seven hottest games of the New year.' I can't say I completely agree with that statement, but there are at least four titles on the list that I would say have a good chance of making EA at least partially right.
The games that were featured at the event are as follows.
- Army of Two
- Battlefield: Bad Company
- Burnout Paradise
- Command & Conquer 3: Kane's Wrath
- Mercenaries 2
- Rail Sim
Let's take a closer look at these six titles and I'll give you my impressions of them.
EA Games' Seven Hottest Games of the New Year
Alright, so if EA says these games are going to be the hottest games of the year they must be right, right? Nope!
The games are only going to be hot if you and I think they are, a game developer can say whatever they want about a game, but until we say it, it doesn't mean much.
Fortunately, I think they are on to something, at least in part, because there are quite a few games on the list that will have us playing for hours and hours. Let me start out with the four titles I personally think will capture the hearts (and time) of gamers; Burnout Paradise, Army of Two, Mercenaries 2, and Battlefield: Bad Company. There's actually a fifth, but I can't talk about it just yet. So lets get started.
Burnout Paradise - Impressions
The Burnout series of video games have been around for a few years now, and if there was one nagging thing about the series that really was a cause for disturbance among us it was the load times. Not any more! We looked at the PS3 version of the game and I have to tell you, the load time issue is gone. In fact, there are barely any load times to speak of. Granted, this is on the PS3, we'll have to see what they actually do for the Xbox 360 version. From what they told me there will be no load times on the 360 version either, but given the fact that the PS3 platform is so open, and the Xbox 360 (Xbox Live) platform has a much tighter 'network belt' so to speak, we'll have to wait for release to really know what we're getting.
Load times - let me go into a bit more detail about this. It was the issue that made me stop playing Burnout on Xbox Live, so it deserves a bit of extra attention. Burnout Paradise is a sandbox type game, meaning you are free to roam the world and find events as you come to them, or use the map to find them. Whatever the case, its not a linear game. It appears that when connected to the PS3 network, or Xbox Live, you can simply shoot an invite to a friend that is on-line. Once they receive the invite and accept, they pop into the world with you, at whatever location they were in. EA calls it Instant Online, I call it 'close enough to instant.' It kinda just blends your worlds together, pretty neat, and real quick.
So let me get into why I decided to talk about Burnout Paradise first, when there are clearly more popular titles on the list. Burnout this year looks fantastic, its now an open ended world set-up, its blazing fast, it runs at 60 frames per second, and it has features and game play modes that will have me on-line much more than I have free time available.
Selecting an event in Burnout Paradise is as simple as pulling up to a stop light, once at a stop light where an event is marked, after a short pause the race will begin. You have your normal race modes that we've seen before, such as the standard Race, Road Rage, and Burning Route. They have also added new modes; Stunt Run and Marked Man. I'm going to assume you know a bit about Burnout and just outline the new modes.
Stunt Run - These stunt run races are basically races where you need to get an indicated number of points by performing stunts, the key to mastering these will be mastering the world itself, since you'll need to know where the good stunt locations are to perform them in the required times. The mechanic of scoring is to keep doing stunts in succession, pretty standard fare really.
Marked Man - OK, the marked man races are going to do one thing for the series; gain Need For Speed fans! Seriously, the marked man races make up for the loss of police chases in the latest Need For Speed ProStreet (a shocking event in and of itself). In a marked man race you need to get from point A to point B, you can only destroy your vehicle three times before you lose, and the entire time there are black cars trying to take you out. Its serious fun.
