Turn off the lights, puts some headphones on, and get ready to wake up in the world of Stasis. The trailers had us biting our nails off.

You wake up, covered in a green slimy liquid. There's nothing to indicate what time of day or year it is. You don't know where you are or what you're doing lying face-up in a dirty abandoned research facility. Yet, three defining thoughts enter your brain: Where's your wife? Where's your daughter? What are you going to do to get your family back? Stasis is an adventure horror game told in an isometric perspective, which is a viewpoint that is rotated slightly to reveal other facets of the game environment than are visible from a top-down perspective or side view, thereby producing a three-dimensional effect.

You play as John Maracheck, a man in search of his family within the confinements of an abandoned research facility. There is no beta or demo to try out, but there are two trailers that seem to capture the eerie horror of being clueless and alone in a facility reminiscent of one found in Dead Space or BioShock. The sound design in the gameplay trailer offers a bit of what to expect in the final product; eruptive sounds had us jumping out of our seats and creepy computer voices had us biting our nails. The game has no release date, but we'll be eagerly awaiting this one. Check out the trailers below and see for yourself.

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The Vita version of the crossover brawler will enable battles between the PS3 and Vita, and comes with the 12 new fighters packaged as DLC for everyone else.

When Street Fighter X Tekken arrives for Sony's handheld this autumn, the home console versions will have been kicking around for months. So it's just as well the Vita release is more than the same game squeezed onto a smaller screen. It also opens up cross-platform play between the Vita and PlayStation 3s--good news for Vita owners with more friends on PS3s than on Sony's portable console.

Smooth cross-platform matchmaking and battling like this is no mean feat; in a demo at Capcom's annual Captivate showcase (that is, admittedly, under ideal circumstances), there was no perceptible lag between action on the Vita and PS3 displays. And it looks terrific on the Vita, too.

The Vita version adds Blanka et al.

On top of the Sony hardware love-in, there's the new touchscreen battle system, which divides the touchscreen and the rear touchpad on the Vita into a few programmable sectors, to which you can map combos and other actions--in practice, not dissimilar to the 3DS version of Super Street Fighter IV. In our time with the game, part of the back pad could be swiped to tag in our second character. That's all layered over familiar gamepad-like controls assigned to the Vita's two sticks and face buttons.

Given the abundance and variety of input options, we're curious about the control habits into which players will settle in the long term to balance comfort and killer instincts; making the most of all the sticks, buttons, and touch surfaces at once in our first go made for some finger gymnastics, but we're sure there's a more elegant solution (for more elegant players). Yet to be answered is also the question of the competitive advantage in cross-platform play. Our hands-on was strictly Vita versus Vita, but between easy combos tied to touchscreen regions for Vita players and comfy, full-sized pads or even fight sticks for PS3 players, whose platform gives them the edge?

As to the other big addition, Street Fighter X Tekken arrives on the Vita with a fuller roster than that of its home console forerunner. There are 12 extra characters in the lineup, six from each side of the crossover fence: Blanka, Sakura, Guy, Cody, Elena, Dudley, Alisa, Bryan, Christie, Jack, Lars, and Lei. Among the new story-based fighter pairings with their own bespoke cinematics, the sparky duo of Blanka and Sakura is our favourite.

Those new dozen characters are the very same infamously burned onto the Street Fighter X Tekken home console discs and locked off as a slice of future downloadable content. At least PS3 players planning to pick up the Vita release won't have to pay twice; owning both versions of the game adds the new fighters to the PS3 version, where they will also be available for PS3-on-PS3 brawling.

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Now that we've gone hands-on with Ninja Theory's Devil May Cry reboot, we can stop talking about the hair. Right after this preview.

Tameem Antoniades is relieved to put DMC into the hands of the press at last--maybe now we'll stop banging on about how Dante looks and start on whether he's any fun to play. "Ironically, Dante's hair is black and mine's turning white now," says the Ninja Theory chief, referring to months of being denounced by fans for supposedly remaking the white-haired Devil May Cry star in his own image.

And we would stop banging on about it, if Dante weren't naked as a nudist jaybird as we find him at the start of DMC. He's sleeping off a heavy night in a grungy trailer strewn with pizza boxes and someone's girly underthings. But gratuitous this (non-graphic) nudity is not, says Ninja Theory. It's an allegory for Devil May Cry's fresh start, of course, in which its protagonist has been figuratively and literally stripped down, then rebuilt and reclothed from scratch. Therefore, you'll spot young Dante in an introductory fight cinematic, doing a slow-motion dive into his free-falling outfit, adult-rated anatomy slyly concealed with props (pizza slice, baseball bat).

Combos in limbo.

Demonic forces have brought a grudge match to Dante's front door, turning the pleasure pier on which he lives into a nightmarish limbo dimension, a twisted version of the real world with a sneering layer of satire, where neon arcade signs read "Spend Money" and "Gluttony's Good," and omnipresent security cameras house twitchy red eyeballs. Only Dante can see (and shoot and skewer) the denizens of limbo, though the impact of certain actions crosses back into the real world; when Dante and his hunter demon adversary tear down a Ferris wheel, it's sent crashing and rolling down the pier in the land of the living as well.

But nakedness and hellish backdrop aside, how does it play? Very nicely, in fact. The action doesn't cleave quite as close to Devil May Cry 4's as claimed (if it did, why bother with a reboot?), but it's emphatically a Devil May Cry game, with the essentials firmly in place. There are scores and combos and grades to beat the band, and paths locked off with supernatural obstacles until you clobber all the demonic nasties in the area.

Dante is armed with his canonical twin handguns and sword, but also an angelic and a demonic weapon (an ethereal scythe and a fiery axe in our hands-on), tied respectively to the left and right triggers. The face buttons call up a familiar set of moves--shoot, stab, launch--but, in combination with a trigger, also bring the corresponding special weapon into play.

A demonic smackdown on the pier.

With an angel weapon active, Dante can grapple across an arena to a distant enemy (or up to a flying one) or swing around with a quick, wide-ranging attack, and the "launch" manoeuvre with the angelic weapon equipped can whirl a whole host of spindly demons skyward. With the devilish weapon enabled, Dante can drag a lighter enemy from across the arena into stabbing range, pull a flying foe out of the sky, or bash a shielded, heavy enemy with a more powerful blow.

The angel and demon weapons amount to a combat system with instant switching between a quick and a heavy mode, lots of variety for creating combos, and the means to stay all up in the enemy's grille for chained attacks. A flock of cherubic flying monsters, for instance, lets you string together a series of grapples, hoisting Dante higher and higher over the battlefield, smashing demons all the way--and staying aloft by shooting and skewering the enemy is gleeful good fun, with the soundtrack music and vocals ramping up according to how high your grade rises. So relax: there's much more to DMC than a bratty hero with a controversial haircut.

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Unless you expected a civilian hero, a personal story, and Western developer Spark Unlimited (in which case, good job).

After Lost Planet 2's modest sales and lukewarm reviews, Capcom must have had a long, hard think on its sci-fi shooter series. A change of direction was probable, then, but not an about-face like this: Lost Planet 3 is a character-driven, primarily single-player adventure set years before the events of the first game. It's recognisably a Lost Planet outing (frozen plains, armoured mech suits, glowing akrid weak points), but there's a civilian hero, a personal story, engaging voice acting, and nary a nod at multiplayer co-op in its debut presentation at Capcom's annual Captivate showcase.

The new direction comes partly of a new studio. Lost Planet 3 is in the works at US studio Spark Unlimited, not with a Capcom in-house team. The new looks come of a new engine--not Capcom's own MT Framework, but ubiquitous workhorse Unreal, doing a spiffy job on the bluish alien glaciers, orange sunlight, and glinting mechs of E.D.N. III. The action, meanwhile, combines third-person shooting and exploration with first-person mech piloting and robo-brawling.

Where Lost Planet 2 took place after a thaw, revealing new jungle and desert environments, Lost Planet 3 turns back the clock to when the alien world was fully frozen, in the early days of human colonisation. Franchise director Kenji Oguro, still overseeing, promises a return to strictly cold climes, implying the second game steered too far from the icy terrain that marked out game one. "When you think of Lost Planet," he says, "you think of snow and ice and a very desolate world. This is one of the core concepts of Lost Planet 3."

Capcom producer Andrew Szymanski, meanwhile, talks up the story, a tale of "surviving in a harsh environment and unravelling its mysteries" as everyman protagonist Jim, a bearded construction labourer working to support his wife and baby back on Earth. ("The more I earn, the sooner I get to hold you both again," he says.) The hands-off demo was heavy on the cutscenes, charmingly voiced, showing Jim waking from a nap in the cab of his construction mech suit--the game's main vehicle and the series' biggest mech to date, says Oguro-san.

The portion presented comes from early in the game, starting in the enormous ice cavern hangar of the colony construction squad to which Jim is contracted. He ambles around this quest and upgrade hub in third person, whipping out a Dead Space-style holographic menu interface projected from a gauntlet gizmo. When he's piloting the mech suit, on the other hand, the game pops into first person: a cockpit view through the rig's frosty windows, from which he controls its mighty power arms--one a giant claw, one a giant drill, both strictly meant for construction work and clearing paths, but also handy in a scrap with a giant akrid crab beast.

Of which there are plenty on Jim's first mission. In it, he's despatched to plant ice-melting thermal posts at an intended building site. When a sudden storm ices up the cockpit canopy, he has to kick his way out--and the rest of the time, we're told, you can hop in and out at almost any point. Initially there are man-sized, four-legged akrid to see off; later come the colossal crab monsters, inevitable glowing weak spots protected by thick plates of translucent ice, as well as smallish, skittering, buglike variants. These latter beasties turn up in a mysteriously abandoned base Jim discovers while going about his day job; locations like these are inaccessible by mech, leaving Jim to tramp about on foot.

And the view from his mech suit.

The strategic akrid battles that combine shooting and mech controls are the most interesting. In one scuffle with an armoured, scorpionlike akrid, Jim uses the suit's claw hand to seize the monster's giant arm and pin it in place, before leaping out of the cockpit to fire away at exposed underbelly. In other fights, the mech can do all the work, grabbing with one arm and drilling with the other, spattering the windows with glowing akrid goo.

As first impressions go, this was a good one--a blast of icy fresh air after the ho-hum shooting and stomping of game two. Spark's last offering was the mediocre Legendary, but that's ancient history (2008), and on the strength of the demo, be prepared to keep an open mind. Capcom's approach here to rejuvenating Lost Planet (hand it to a Western studio) resembles the Devil May Cry reboot given to British developer Ninja Theory. Here's hoping it pays off.

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And the blonde girl is Sherry Birkin. Also: real zombies, "horror entertainment."

Is the future of Resident Evil action or horror? The series of late has been evolving towards action, and you could call it adapt or die; the producer of the 3DS instalment Revelations says the market is too small to support horror as we once knew it. But the makers of Resident Evil 6 talked up a "return to horror" at Capcom's annual Captivate showcase, where they balanced the all-out action of January's announcement trailer with a slower, darker gameplay presentation.

First things first, though, since they settle a great wodge of the speculation raised by that trailer. Resident Evil 6 stars a trio of protagonists: series veterans Leon Kennedy and Chris Redfield, plus buzz-cut mercenary Jake Muller, son of one Albert Wesker, the longtime Resident Evil villain last seen taking a faceful of rocket inside a volcano at the end of game five.

Each member of the trio has a story path to tread. Leon's begins in the American university town Tall Oaks, where a bioterrorist attack has zombified the visiting president, while Jake starts out in the fictional Eastern European nation Edonia. In the course of the game, he and Leon converge on Chris in China, Resident Evil 6's main location, where the bulgingly bicepped one and his squad are tackling further bioterrorist atrocity. And with three tales to follow, each a bit shorter than Resident Evil 5, expect a reasonably lengthy adventure.

In the actual action, which we are, by degrees, getting to, each protagonist also has a partner. Leon's is US security service agent Helena Harper; Chris' is sharpshooter Piers Nivans; Jake's is Sherry Birkin, daughter of Umbrella scientist-turned-mutant William Birkin. As in Resident Evil 5, these partners are controlled by the computer or a second player--but with less fuss than in the previous game, we're promised, now that co-op play is properly drop in and drop out.

In old-school Resident Evil fashion, you choose the order you play each of the main characters, though executive producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi says he would prefer you take Leon first. Accordingly, the Captivate demo took in the very first part of Leon's story, which "really encapsulates" the horror flavour of Resident Evil 6, claims Kobayashi.

The longish section is dark, spooky, slow, and taut, set in a big old university building that harks back to the haunted mansion of the first game. How fully it represents the whole game experience remains to be seen, but this early segment could have been engineered specifically to placate grumpy survival horror fans. In it, Leon has just been forced to kill the zombie president and must escape the university and the city with co-op sidekick Helena.

They work their way through the Tall Oaks campus building, navigating grand lobbies, dark corridors and kitchens, and a great dining hall still decked out with streamers and balloons for the presidential reception. The lights are out in the wake of the attack, a storm flashes outside, and a handful of victims' corpses lie slumped along the way, awaiting eventual reanimation.

For entire minutes, though, there's nothing to shoot at or run from, just dark rooms to explore, a survivor hunting for his student daughter, and a spot of mysterious distant piano playing. It's a slow and deliberate buildup to a genuinely good jump scare, embellished with the classic violin horror sting. If anything spoils the atmosphere, it's the waypoint marker, hovering white and obtrusive over the gloomy environment.

But determined to show off its horror chops, the game quickly follows that fake-out scare with a grisly real scare: Leon and Helena trapped in a lift, in pitch blackness, as the survivor's daughter suddenly turns zombie and tears into her dad. In the dark, flashlight swinging about, there are only glimpses of gore, but the squelchy, gruesome sound effects are more affecting for it.

The panicky lift fight marks the demo's shift into upper gear, as from here on there are flocks of zombies to battle through. These are honest-to-goodness real zombies, too, as the gamemakers take pains to point out: shuffling, shambling zombies, slow at a distance but with a fast lunge up close. Leon wades out of the lift into an underground car park, busting out his new melee moves--a wide-ranging mix of contextual strikes and grapples, among them an unlikely running bulldog takedown.

The controls are "all new," we're told, and though a hands-off demo can't prove they feel right, they look just the job, properly enabling--whisper it--moving and shooting at the same time. It's not quite flat-out running and gunning, but that suits us fine. There's dual wielding too, and shooting from prone; after diving to the floor, Leon can blast away at the swarming undead from on his back.

Among the horde of "real" zombies are a few with weapons, a point of contention for purists, but for what it's worth, the weapons are things they would have been carrying pre-zombification. One ghoul swipes at Leon with a pipe; Leon can wrench it away in a contextual melee move.

Leon and Helena at Tall Oaks' Ivy university.

Everything looks mighty fine, as dark and moody as Resident Evil 5's opening was bright and jarring, but it's the minor show-off details that leave an impression. When Leon gets bitten, his arm spurts blood. When he shoots a zombie in the midriff, fleshy chunks blow off. When you steer him against a doorframe or a banister, he reaches out to touch it, convincingly natural.

It's all very promising, then, but is it horror? Kobayashi diplomatically calls it "horror entertainment"--horror in the service of a plot rather than horror for its own sake. That's borne out by the second, story-led trailer, which emphasises the three protagonists' intersecting paths and the game's globe-trotting plot, playing down the full-on action elements of trailer one (gunfights, a cover system).

It's telling that our demo didn't include the game's "main" enemy, a quick-mutating creature called the J'avo. Leon's mooch around an ominous old building could play the same part in Resident Evil 6 as the opening of Resident Evil Revelations, in which Jill explores an abandoned luxury liner (another haunted mansion stand-in): a slower, spookier intro to anchor a game that later tips the scales away from creeping horror and towards frantic action. But what we've seen so far is encouraging--if finding the perfect balance between the two is the future of Resident Evil, so be it.

Capcom has brought the release date for Resident Evil 6 forward from November 20 to October 2.

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We check out the bizarre results of Idea Factory's latest work.

Here's a fun fact about Mugen Souls, a quirky little role-playing number from Idea Factory: the game was produced by an unnamed developer calling himself the new Keiji Inafune (that is, the Mega Man creator who left Capcom to form his own studio). The "new Keiji Inafune" stint was nothing more than a publicity stunt to get people turning their heads to the game. What's even more surprising is that the real Inafune is in fact contributing a few character designs to the game.

With recent news of the former Capcom producer turning to Idea Factory and Compile Heart, it's no surprise that the company's PR would use his name for self-promotion. Does that automatically mean that Mugen Souls needs a bit of help in the image department? If you're judging it from first looks alone, then yes. However, this role-playing game has a few tricks up its sleeve in terms of personality.

You control a girl name Chou Chou (pronounced "Shoe Shoe"), whose sole goal is to conquer the seven universes. Accompanying her is an angel named Artis and a manservant named Lute. The former wishes to turn back into a demon by going along with Chou Chou's plans, while Lute was Chou Chou's first servant who somehow managed not to be turned into a shampoo rabbit. Yes, we forgot to mention that the majority of servants piloting Chou Chou's ship, the G Castle, are rabbit creatures called shampoos.

Chou Chou striking a pose with Artis.

During battle, you can move the party members within a designated pink circle and choose any attack command made available. To keep with the recruitment-by-force theme of the narrative, Chou Chou can convince enemies to join her cause and subsequently turn into shampoos. We were offered three empty brackets to fill up with random choices of text, and we could form a love confession at the start of a sentence, before capping it off with a rejection.

Depending on the combination you make, you either raise or reduce an enemy's emotion level. Saying the wrong things can make your enemies go berserk, rendering them immune to being servant candidates. Since it takes a lot of shampoo minions to pilot Chou Chou's flying fortress, she needs as many as possible to fulfill her world domination plans.

When all else fails, just bash them to bits. In addition to your standard attacks, you can team up with your party members within the pink circle to initiate a coordination attack. Whether it's with another party member or two, each attack is different and deals different amounts of damage.

Combat isn't relegated to on-foot party battles. You will also have to take your flying fortress into air battles against other uniquely shaped enemy ships. This, too, is turn-based, meaning you'll need to select the appropriate command depending on what your first mate Lute says on the bottom left of the screen. From there, you can choose to either fire, reflect projectiles, defend, or dodge against enemy retaliation. The effectiveness of your commands depends on the number of servants you have together with how well you read your opponent's attacks. We had fun engaging in these fights, as each of our attack and defensive commands were presented in '70s space anime opera style.

Combat can get bizarre if you play your cards right.

Chou Chou also has the ability to turn into one of her seven different personalities to bolster her combat and linguistic skills. While the masochistic personality is more childlike and klutzy in nature, the tsundere personality is more cold and eventually warms up to people over time. All seven personalities are obvious parodies of anime stereotypes.

Dialogue options to win minions over change depending on the personalities adopted. A dominatrix-style sadistic personality would be better suited against submissive opponents, while a vigor personality would fare better in winning over hyperactive enemies.

From what we've seen, part of the game's presentation could benefit from improvement. Frame rates when moving around overworlds were horrible, while the overall aesthetic, while keeping in tone with its comic nature, looks more like a budget title.

Regardless, we felt that there is still potential to be found within the game's odd combat system and bizarre narrative. It's not every day players get to woo minions to their side by uttering seductive or damning praises, all while doing party tag team attacks involving spinning rainbows of death and slot machines.

Mugen Souls will be out in English this fall.

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Say good-bye to plastic peripherals and hello to some streamlined, fast-paced rhythm action.

Before Guitar Hero and Rock Band reduced our living rooms to a plastic peripheral junkyard, developer Harmonix made a little-known title for the PlayStation 2 called Frequency, a fast-paced rhythm game that used a standard PlayStation 2 controller to perform songs. So too did its follow-up, Amplitude, which upped the pace and made the seizure-inducing visuals even more outlandish. Both were incredibly tricky beasts to master, arguably much more so than even the most difficult of Rock Band tracks. They were games for the hardcore rhythm nut--frantic, fast, and completely ruthless.

If you've been hankering for a return to the old school, then we suggest keeping an eye on the upcoming XBLA and PSN release Rock Band Blitz. Though it bears the Rock Band name, there are no plastic peripherals required. Instead, you navigate the familiar scrolling note charts with your controller. Like in Frequency, you're tasked with performing each part of the song simultaneously, which in this case includes the drums, bass, guitar, and vocal lines.

Each instrument has just two note markers to follow, but don't for a second think that makes things easy--you need some serious coordination to rack up the points. That's down to having to navigate multiple tracks by flicking between them using your controller's triggers: spend too much time on a single instrument, and your multiplier goes down. The key to success is finding a balance between all the instruments before you hit one of the strategically placed checkpoints in each song, which increases your score bonus.

Mmm, shiny.

It's incredibly frantic stuff that's made all the more hectic by various power-ups you can assign yourself before each song. There's the bottle rocket power-up, which blows up a bunch of notes on the chart; the autoplay power-up, which is exactly as it sounds; and the pinball power-up, which places a ball on the chart you can bat around with the chart selector and use to remove notes from your stream. And, of course, there's the Star Power-like Blitz mode for all-out high-score carnage. Further powers are unlocked by earning XP, which you accumulate by your super-awesome rhythm skills.

While Rock Band Blitz is only a single-player experience, its longevity lies in leaderboards. All your scores are linked up with other users, and there's nothing more infuriating than seeing your once-mighty high score toppled by a friend. There's asynchronous multiplayer too, which is basically a virtual version of smack talk, letting you send out custom challenges to other players.

In terms of songs, Rock Band Blitz introduces 20 new ones, but also lets you play tracks from the huge Rock Band library. Any content from previous games, and any DLC you've bought, can be imported into Blitz for free. And, if that's still not enough songs for you, a music store--complete with recommendations based on the songs you play--is integrated into the game.

SkullCrusher Mountain: Deerstalker optional.

Sadly, Harmonix hasn't announced exactly how much Blitz is going to cost but has mentioned it'll be priced similarly to other XBLA and PSN titles. Regardless, it's shaping up to be a great little game, one that goes back to the roots of the genre for some seriously hardcore button bashing. It's definitely one to look forward to.

Rock Band Blitz is due for release this summer on XBLA and PSN. Look out for more on GameSpot soon.

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We got to play two maps and two game modes to find out.

While Far Cry 2 boasted a long and varied single-player campaign, its multiplayer didn't really manage to compete in a post-Modern Warfare world. For Far Cry 3, a separate team at Ubisoft Massive is hoping to create a multiplayer experience that can compete with the shooting genre's heavy hitters, as well as carve a niche of its own. We were lucky enough to get to play the game at a recent preview event to find out how it's shaping up.

The first mode we got to play was Domination, a first-person shooter staple that should be instantly familiar to anyone who has played an online shooter. The map featured in this mode was called Sub-Pen--a small village made up of corrugated iron huts that surrounded a battered submarine pen. Raised areas offered sniping spots to fire at those capturing points, while zip lines allowed you to move quickly through the map while firing a handgun--which was not only a lot quicker, but way more badass.

As we quickly discovered, teamwork is vital in Far Cry 3's multiplayer. Whereas other shooters usually restrict medic abilities to those in specific classes, anyone in Far Cry 3 can revive their fallen comrades. If you're the person who has been downed, you can tap a button to keep yourself alive until someone hopefully rescues you--if not, you bleed out and are respawned after a short wait.

Then there's the new Battle Cry feature, which allows you to give a rallying cry that buffs up teammates around you. These perks vary depending on the class you're playing as, but they can increase the speed, accuracy, or health of those around you, which is useful for when you're all trying to capture a node.

Tagging is another feature based around working together. Whenever you tag enemies, fallen teammates or strategic points, you earn team support points that can be redeemed against bonuses. These include a scout that reveals enemy positions, and psyche gas, which blurs your opponent's vision and turns all other players into dark demonic figures. The inability to tell friend from foe is worsened by the fact that friendly fire is temporarily activated, meaning it's easy to kill a teammate in the chaos. If you do shoot at the wrong person, not only do you risk killing them, but you'll also be stripped of your own team support points as a result.

One of our favourite features was the animation at the end of each game. The top scorer on the winning team is given a choice--either to punish the highest-scoring member of the losing team, or to show them mercy. Choose punishment, and the loser is punched repeatedly in the face; choose mercy, and they are cut free and let go. Ubisoft Massive promises a mix of animation movies in the finished game to add a bit of variety.

Teamwork is the key to success in Far Cry 3's multiplayer.

The second game mode we got to play was called Firestorm, where you have to ignite an enemy fuel dump while defending your own. Each team has two supply points to protect, and teams need to work together to ignite both of the enemy's oil drums in quick succession. The Firestorm map we played took the form of a temple ruins, with oil dumps littered around an ancient ruined structure.

Getting to the depots and knifing the barrels released fuel that was then set on fire to cut off a good chunk of the map. At this point, the objective changes--a radio antenna is activated at the centre of the temple, and the attacking team races in to call in air support. If the defending team manages to hold control of this location, the fires are extinguished and the process starts again. However, if the attacking team holds it, they call in air support, and a plane flies in to add more fuel to the fire, setting the whole map ablaze and winning the game in the process.

Our preview session gave us a good taste of both Far Cry 3's standard multiplayer game mode and the more unique fire-based mode. We're also promised an improved level editor, as well as mobile apps that will allow you to unlock new weapons while you're away from the game. We had a great time playing Far Cry 3 in multiplayer, and thankfully we don't have too much longer to wait for the finished game, which is out on PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 in September. In the meantime, keep it locked on GameSpot for more on the game as we get it.

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Randy Pitchford on why he wants you to experience your own personal Aliens: Colonial Marines.

Randy Pitchford is an enthusiastic guy. With an infectious smile and a limitless supply of energy, the man at the helm of Gearbox is always willing to tell you why he's so excited about his studio's latest project. But unlike most CEOs, he has a level of blunt honesty interspersed with all that energy that can reveal some interesting details about his work as a game developer.

"I've been stealing from the Aliens films my entire career," says Pitchford before showing us a demo of Aliens: Colonial Marines, the canonical sequel to 1986's Aliens. You get the sense that he's kind of joking, but kind of not. Whichever it is, simply talking to Pitchford tells you all you need to know about his status as a diehard Aliens fan.

"One of the reasons I was so excited to get involved with Halo--when Microsoft and Bungie trusted Gearbox with the PC version--is because Halo was the closest I'd ever got to playing an Aliens game with Colonial Marines," reveals Pitchford with no shortage of excitement. "The sergeant in Halo was basically the sergeant in Aliens! And the dropships were all Cameron's stuff!"

Pitchford is practically smiling from ear to ear as he tells us this, but the game itself is far from a bucket of sunshine. The demo Gearbox has in store is steeped in tension and bleak atmosphere. A marine boards the Sulaco starship, or at least what's left of it after Ripley's climactic battle with the alien queen. Everything here has gone to hell. Lights are flickering in the darkness, blood trails run the length of the floor--it's like a disaster zone that everyone besides you was smart enough to flee.

"The marines boarding the Sulaco don't know the events that you know," explains Pitchford. So as you explore the dark rooms and creepy hallways of this terrorized military vessel, you know that something has gone horribly wrong here, and you can bet there's plenty of terror left onboard.

The marine pulls out his motion sensor, looking at the blips on the screen to see if there are any aliens lurking in the dark. Sure enough, he's not alone. A few moments later, a stalker appears--one of the new alien breeds Gearbox has created for this sequel. It seems to enjoy tormenting the marine, running in and out of the shadows before finally falling victim to the marine's assault rifle and grim determination to survive. From here, the action ebbs and flows with a couple of large shoot-outs (including one that lets you take control of a smart gun with lock-on capabilities), some more creepy hallway crawls, and an explosive escape that threatens to jettison the marine into the vacuum of space.

Seeing this demo, we can't help but wonder how co-op is going to work here. This scene seems so focused on tension and isolation that Colonial Marines' support for four-player drop-in co-op could drastically alter the experience.

We ask Randy Pitchford and he agrees: co-op will probably affect the overall mood of large chunks of the game, to the point that some players will play it as more of a horror game and some as more of an action romp. But what matters most for Gearbox is giving you the means to create a variety of "shared experiences," because when you build a game around a beloved franchise like this one, you're always going to attract a wide audience of players.

"This does bring some challenges," Pitchford admits. "For some players, the minute that second, third, or fourth guy is in the game, we just start rampaging through it. And maybe the tension has softened a bit because we're not alone, but that experience is fun too! Just because there's one way to play, why would we prevent all the other ways to play?"

"Imagine if the Halo guys did that," he explains. "I love Halo as a co-op game. When I get in the warthog, I'm the driver! Sweet! And the second guy, cool, I'm the gunner! Oh, and we have a third guy in the game. Well, he's kind of in the passenger seat. And the fourth guy, he's all, hey wait up! Where are you going! So maybe you throw in another warthog or throw in a banding system that teleports you up. Look, those are just the technical realities of [the co-op] experience. But it's better that the fourth guy got to come in the game than not at all."

Letting players experience the game in distinctly different ways is something that applies to the competitive multiplayer side of things as well. Colonial Marines' online offering is unabashedly asymmetrical, with one side playing as marines and one side playing as the aliens. No matter which side you're on, there's a significant learning curve to deal with: those playing as aliens need to learn how to cloak themselves in darkness, run along ceilings, and attack only from short range. Conversely, the marines have to deal with the fact that they're slower than their enemies, can't see through walls, and must travel as a group to survive.

There's a huge difference between the way those two sides play and feel, and in a lot of ways, it's one that echoes the audience as a whole. Pitchford acknowledges that there's going to be a mixture of diehard Aliens fans playing this game, those who are simply in it because they enjoy shooters, and even those who are attracted to the Gearbox name after the success of Borderlands.

Aliens: Colonial Marines, then, is a game that needs to be a lot of things to a lot of people--hence the reason for letting players build their own experiences. Want to play multiplayer purely as a xenomorph? Go ahead. Want to play the story campaign by yourself the first time around and then with a full four players the second run through? Feel free.

Ultimately, Pitchford wants us to know that while Aliens fans like him are the top priority, they're not the only priority. "As creators, yes, we can commit ourselves to the narrative and the crafted experience," he explains. "But let's let our players enjoy it, too. They'll manage their own fun."

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Does twice the guns mean double the fun in Borderlands 2? We find out when we take Salvador the gunzerker out to the target range.

What's got two itchy trigger fingers and loves the hunt for phat lewt? This guy! At a recent event, Justin Calvert and I had the chance to sit down and take Salvador the gunzerker and Maya the siren for a spin in Borderlands 2. Since the machines were set up next to each other (PCs with Xbox 360 controllers), it made sense to tag-team the two-zone demo and play cooperatively. In the interest of getting down to the nitty-gritty of how each of the new characters felt in our hands, we both played the entirety of the demo with our respective characters. My thoughts below are on the gunzerker, and you can read Justin's impressions of the siren here.

Two guns, two river threshers.

Each of the four new characters in Borderlands 2 leans on the archetypes set up by their previous counterparts. For those who played the first game, Salvador felt most like brutish big guy Brick. He's heavyset and never afraid to drop fist bombs when push comes to shove, but he also packs a new card up his sleeves: the ability to temporarily wield a pair of guns when combat gets a little too hot. The extra firepower comes with a cooldown, so you won't be constantly riddling prey with akimbo machine guns, but when you do, you forgo weapon sights to fire from the hip. With two effective elemental weapons equipped, targets tended to die pretty quickly at our hands. Just the way we like it.

Both of our characters came pre-played to level 20 and packing one of three different weapon loadouts. We were presented with a handful of skill points waiting to be spent, and doing so gave us the chance to customise our own areas of priorities for expertise. Like in the first game, three skill trees are available, but rather than spend an initial point for your class-specific special ability (Lilith's phasewalk, Brick's berserk, and so on) before drilling down further, this time your first point is spent directly in your tree of choice. The Brawn tree is all about optimising your special attack, with the "come at me bro" skill allowing you to taunt in gunzerker mode to return you to full health. Taunting attracts the current target's hate, making it useful for taking on a group tanking role, or wrestling danger away from another member of your crew. Using it doesn't spell imminent death, however, as activating it also rewards you with a buff that helps mitigate damage--presumably long enough for someone else to throw you a heal, pass on the aggro, or put down the target. Brawn isn't solely about punching things either, and the early tiers also pump up your chance at landing critical strikes, as well as increasing your effectiveness with certain weapon types, such as pistols.

The Rampage tree offers the "keep firing" (Spaceballs reference?) talent that speeds up your rate of fire in line with the speed at which you tap the triggers on the controller. Faster presses result in faster shooting, and when it's used with gunzerking double weapons, you'll chew through bullets at a rate of knots and provide enemies a free session of lead acupuncture in the process. "Inconceivable" and "5 shots of 6" were our standout abilities in the Rampage tree. The former granted a coin toss for each shot fired not to consume a round, while the latter was a maximum 25 percent chance to add an extra round of ammunition to the chamber when blasting away. Used together, they give you a chance to stand your ground and shoot with only minimal concern for running out of bullets. Gearbox devs on hand at the event even told of experiences during testing where players had fired 40-second bursts of chain gun weapons without needing to reload, simply by getting lucky with the perks.

Gun Lust is the third and final tree and offers extra health early, but upgrades your things that go bang a few tiers down. "No kill like overkill" adds a damage multiplier to your next shot fired after killing an enemy, giving you an instant leg up on your next victim, and will be invaluable for speeding things up when mowing down groups of poorly armoured, low-hit-point enemies.

That's right, gunzerk is totally a verb now.

With each of the three skill trees composed of fewer than a dozen unique abilities each, very few appeared to be filler to get you to the next big reward. As a result, we were forced to be brutal with the placement of our points, using them to raise our health or rate of regeneration, pump up critical strike chance, or weigh it up against permanent damage increases to specific parts of our arsenal. With only 15 points to spend during our play, we couldn't purchase all the abilities available in a single tree, let alone across the three distinct categories. We're interested to see how players will distribute them later in the game; whether buying out the juicy talents in each tree, or forcing your hand to pick and then feed a single approach to combat.

Gunzerker dual-wielding was our get-out-of-jail-free card for emergencies, and while we'd be lying if we said we didn't feel like a complete badass when we were pinging off rounds by the fist load, it is worth paying attention to the weapons you've got equipped. Activating gunzerking pulls the next weapon in the queue into your hands, and on more than one occasion, we realised after lighting up our target that it was an enemy resistant to that particular weapon type. You can still swap to something else more effective in combat, but it's worth keeping in mind before you activate your skill.

Playing the gunzerker was a blast, and while we have to admit it's probably not the most cerebral experience played solo, when he was paired with Maya's phaselock energy prison, we had a lot of fun whittling down enemy health bars in a hurry by playing off both special skills. This is clearly an experience best played with others, as evidenced by this Borderlands 2 video preview in which Justin and I discuss our time spent with the demo. Borderlands 2 will be out on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC in September this year.

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