May 2011 Coming Soon: Under the Radar

In this new monthly segment, I will throw a few positive vibes out for some games that may or may not have found their way onto your vidya gamin' radar.  I won't say too much about them here, but there will be videos.  Oh...there will be videos.

For the month of May, my picks are L.A. Noire, Brink and Hunted: The Demon's Forge.

  L.A. Noire is made by the fine folks at Rockstar Games who brought us such glories as Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption.  It's a Detective cop drama based in the 1940's.  Think of the game as playing like a mixture of story telling from Heavy Rain meets gameplay from Grand Theft Auto.  The thing that warrants this being on my Under the Radar list is that it uses a new type of motion capture. This capture allows the recording of every slight facial nuance that the voice actor makes while he's reading his lines.  It gives such an extremely precise facial animation capture, that, just during normal gameplay, if you were deaf, you'd be able to read the characters lips as they are speaking.  Extreme, man.  Real extreme.


  Brink is an FPS game from Bethesda that feels a lot like Battlefield Bad Company 2 meets Team Fortress 2.  It's not really bringing anything unique to the table like L.A. Noire is as far as gameplay experiences are concerned, but, if you watch any of the gameplay videos, it looks like a console version of Team Fortress 2 that will actually be fun.  Anyone who know's me knows I fucking hate Call of Duty and this ultra modern shooters, but this steampunk apocalypse style of characterization and the class based FPS elements have put it on my radar, and it should be on yours too.


  One last May 2011 release I want to throw a few words out for is Hunted: The Demon's Forge.  I won't say much because I don't know much, but I've been following it (poorly) since E3 last year and it's finally time to start seriously looking into it with a May 31st release date.  So, here's a video of the E3 stage demo they did last year with a wealth of great information about it.  If this one isn't on your radar, it should be.


Not much else I can say on these three, I just wanted to bring them to light for anyone who's been living under a rock these last few months.  Just check out the vids and these links to more info on the games.  Brink retails for $59.99 on PS3/Xbox 360 and $49.99 on PC and comes out May 10th, 2011.  L.A. Noire will be the same for Xbox360 and PS3 but on May 17th.  Hunted: The Demon's Forge will be the same price on the same systems with a release date of May 31st.