Future Soldier beta still a long way off, may not arrive until next year.

Ubisoft has told GamerZines that the Xbox 360-exclusive Ghost Recon: Future Soldier multiplayer beta will go live "a couple of months" before the game’s release next spring, suggesting that we may need to wait until 2011 for the chance to give the next Ghost Recon a whirl.

"It’s still coming," said Ghost Recon Future Soldier’s International Product Manager Aziz Khater when we asked what was happening with the beta.
"The game is coming in Q1 of next year and the beta is going to come out a couple of months before. We don’t have specific dates and we still can’t talk about the content of this beta, but all the guys who are waiting for the beta and have Splinter Cell will have the beta for sure."

However, when asked whether the beta might turn out to be a timed-exclusive for Splinter Cell: Conviction owners rather than an exclusive altogether, Khater said:

"It’s still under discussion. Maybe. These are things that we are discussing. Absolutely."
So, even if you haven’t picked yourself up a copy of Conviction, you may still be able to get in on the beta – if you’re prepared to wait even longer.

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The below is a reprint of an superb and brilliantly thought provoking article originally released on Kotaku. There’s a lot to get through here, but I thoroughly recommend reading it in it’s fullest and then joining the discussion of it over in the News section of the forums. I’m not going to put forward my personal view on the opinions raised here, but I would encourage each and every one of you to do so in the comments or in the forums.


The original version can be found here.

Are games our escapist fantasies, or our outlets for dealing with reality? Either way, why is our most common gameplay choice the pursuit of war?

I remember watching a long stretch of television footage of the United States dropping bombs on Iraq. It was late at night, so the broadcast was dark green and bright green, pulsating softly. There was a sound like a throbbing heartbeat from far away, or like the distant rumble of thunder; it was explosions, successive explosions. I remember the government called it “Shock and Awe.” I was both shocked and awed.

I hadn’t seen anything like Shock and Awe in my life. I never would again, unless you count the GDC 2009 teaser trailer for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and the hushed admiration that overtook the onlookers at its debut. The green line of a heartbeat, the vague shapes of soldiers in an elevator, pulsing softly luminous. Gunshots. Distant voices. I remember thinking that it looked very real.

When I say “real”, I don’t mean it as a quality of the graphics, as a unit of technical proficiency, of resolution and of vivid game design. I mean it felt sharply au courant; from the marketing period until launch, it seemed to me transparently a reflection of our times, of anxiety and aggression, either a latent and wordless support of warmaking, or some kind of unspoken coping mechanism for the opposed.

I imagine others felt the same, but I never heard it. All I heard was “fucking awesome.”

All I saw was that damn thing fly off the shelves.

All I heard of was people spending hours in the guise of a soldier, blowing each other away with a little trash-talk and a well-placed shot or two or five, rapid-fire.

It shocked and awed me that this fine-looking facsimile of modern warfare became a multi-million seller, made more money than God, and I felt alone in finding it a little bit of a strange thing to celebrate.

It’s strange, regardless of your political views. I and many of my colleagues near and far – our ranks are innumerable – have devoted countless words and column inches and printer ink and blog space to the miracle of “play” as visualized through the medium of interactive entertainment. We’ve talked you all blue in the faces about how interactivity lends added dimension to human imagination, to experimentation, to escapism. How the swift and sudden advent of multiplayer has allowed us to share, to create and connect to each other, made a formerly reclusive and ill-viewed activity “participatory,” “social.”

The cousin of someone dear to me got all but one of his limbs blown off in Iraq. This is our most popular way to play together? And we are all okay with this?

It is, of course, driven in part by economics. Modern Warfare 2, widely touted as the “top-grossing entertainment product of all time,” is a performance that many publishers are eager to repeat. Thus here we are in 2010, and the battle-royale to watch this holiday is among first-person shooters. Historical war. Modern war. Future-war. Reports of “Halo-killers.” We all sit back and anticipate the fall-holiday first-person-shooter shootout shit-show. Hallelujah.

At E3 this year, all that presenters could discuss at press conferences as they touted their FPS-of-the-year was “immersion” and realism. We have 3D now, so it’s even more in-your-face. I was in Sony’s press conference when everyone put on stereoscopic glasses and watched an elaborate demo of Killzone 3 in three dimensions. The blood that spattered my view with each concussive blast seemed as if it could be from my own head. To my left, an observer casually commented on the technical proficiency of the demonstration – further to my right, scattered cheers and applause greeted every explosion.

I knew I was looking at a fantasy scenario. A future that’ll never happen. Just a video game. But I still felt uncomfortable, I guess, with the net effect of E3 this year. Even the battle over new and innovative motion control technologies seemed time and time again to come down to one thing – “what good is Kinect when you can’t hold a gun, and how are you going to play an FPS with that?”

It’s not just money that drives the saturation of and heavy focus on these games. It’s simple game design logic; first-person gun mechanics are among the easiest and most sensible to design, my industry friend tells me. His team is hard at work on one of the big shooters launching this year, so he couldn’t let me use his name. “Projectiles have been part of gaming since forever,” he says, and it’s true – early arcades were all about shooting galleries. Think of old-school duels and kids playing cops and robbers; weapons have, in fact, been part of play for a long time. “When you get into the first-person view, shooting continues to be what feels most natural,” he says.

But as games get ever more immersive and lifelike, it starts to feel less like healthy play and more like unsettling aspirational fantasy to me. And as the economic competition around the genre heats up, the push for bigger-bloodier-more seems especially opportunistic and shameless. I don’t understand the continuing appeal; I don’t understand the unquestioning audience.

I research evolutionary theories on the hard-wired instincts of males in hunter-gatherer societies, and how technology’s eliminated the need for combat and aggression, but not the urge. When we play first-person shooters, we could be scratching an old, old itch that the comfort and complacency of modern living can no longer reach. That might explain why far more men are interested in war shooters than women, who under that same evolutionary paradigm, were supposedly geared toward keeping the homestead safe.

I try mining gamer culture for clues. Forum thread after forum thread makes it plain that most of these people don’t even know how to speak to one another, let alone engage in what marketing copy calls “healthy social play.” The Internet’s vocal ranks have something in common with soldiers from Halo to Helghast – they’re faceless. Behind the veil of anonymity one looks the same as the next, and the salvos they fire are brief and remorseless.

Has escapism desensitized core gamers to real-world consequences? The popularity of war simulators in and of itself isn’t what’s most alarming; it’s the absence of emotional connection, of conscience and of discussion. Just as hardcore gamers online often deliver casual slurs without conscience, maybe they’ve forgotten that bullets cause wounds and that war causes deaths. Or maybe there was something wrong with the core audience to begin with: maladapted people seeking maladaptive coping, and the industry that rose up to greet it.

But these games wouldn’t be the gold mines they are if they were limited to core gamers. Even the buyer who never goes online, who buys a game or two a year when the new-hot-thing comes out, is buying these up. The last time I was in GameStop, a pair of happy guys behind me struck up a conversation, and as it turns out, one was there to buy the other Call of Duty: World at War as a birthday present.

“I’m really into the history,” the guy explained.

He looked excited, and sort of like a normal person, and not like the kind of person who wanted to wire up and plug in and glaze out on a virtual battlefield all day long. I thought being “into the history” sounded like a much more comprehensible reason to be interested in these games. In the end, nationalist war, faction against faction, has been part of the human experience since the very beginning. Like it or not, it’s always been something deeply part of who we are; it makes sense that our simulated experiences, that our play, should seek to tap into understanding and experimenting with those concepts.

What continues to concern me is that we don’t think about it and we don’t discuss it. We’re able to witness grenade-flung bodies, we’re able to crush enemies under the treads of our vehicles, we’re ourselves able to die in trenches. And get up again, and keep doing it. How far can we push things before video games like these stop being a way to interact with and process the human experience, and instead cross a line to where they’re trivializing it?

[ Leigh Alexander is news director for Gamasutra, author of the Sexy Videogameland blog, and freelances reviews and criticism to a variety of outlets. Her monthly column at Kotaku deals with cultural issues surrounding games and gamers. She can be reached at leighalexander1 AT gmail DOT com.]

Just  a few screen shots for you FIFA fans. Click on the images to enlarge

360G are back after a week off and mostly discussing what we have been playing.

The crew discuss some news and  have a discussion about why people listen to the podcast.

We hope you enjoy the show and don’t forget to leave those very important itunes reviews

For those of you that are not aware, the podcast is changing hosts next week.

Because of this change all the old shows will only be available here http://www.gcast.com/u/webby317/www_360gamercast_com

All the new shows will still be available on the current itunes feed so no need to worry.

We hope you all continue to enjoy the podcast and keep those Itunes reviews coming

As you may be aware the website www.garageband.com which hosts the podcast for free closes down next week. I have now had to move the podcast to www.podbean.com which charges for hosting at $10 per month.

To offset the cost of hosting the podcast as well as the website itself I am asking for donations to help run the site and to keep it advert free.

Your help will be much appreciated

It’s the 7th day of the 7th month and that means it’s Bungie day! As a thanks to the fans Bungie, in association with Rooster teath, have released this quality video showing off some hereto unannounced features of Halo: Reach. Coagulation, aka Blood Gulch, will be making it’s return to the Halo franchise. As a fan of big team battle from Halo 2 I’m rather excited by this news and it’s now absolutely safe to say I’m fully on board the Halo hype train! Also look out for a new armour ability!

Alien Breed is returning as Alien Breed Impact and has released a set of screenshots from the new game. Launched back in 1991 on the Amiga and then later on MS-DOS PCs, the game was a big success for the company spawning several sequels. Alien Breed took inspiration from Ridley Scott’s Alien and saw gamers take on the role of a lone marine, fighting against the alien horde in 2D top-down action.

The Worms maker has promised the new game will be a “drop-dead gorgeous retro-modern remake” and will be powered by the Unreal3 engine. There will be a single-player and co-op modes, though it’s not clear whether the cooperative play will be local or online.

Here’s another rather sexy looking clip of Platinum Games’ upcoming 3rd person shooter: Vanquish. Gotta love the weapon switching system, it just looks totally awesome. The gameplay’s not looking too shabby either and calling it fast paced may be something of an understatement!

Since the mp3 files was first released digital media distribution has been on a massive upwards curve. This form of distribution hit the 360 with the launch of “Games on Demand”. But is it worth it? Is it a good idea poorly executed?

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