Trailer for MIRROR'S EDGE CATALYST

The E3 game expo is underway in Los Angeles, with the great and the good from the gaming world showing up to announce new games and what people will be getting excited about over the next year or so.

One of the more interesting games on the horizon is Mirror's Edge: Catalyst, the prequel to the original 2008 game. Set some years before the events of Mirror's Edge, Catalyst explores the origins of the series main character Faith and how she became a free-running courier/agent provocateur in a futuristic city ruled by a totalitarian regime. The big change is that whilst the original game was very short and quite linear, Catalyst will be set in an open world city with multiple missions, objectives and side-missions all going on at the same time.

Most encouraging is the news that the game will drop the risible gunplay from the original and focus more on environmental and unarmed combat. The game will be released on PS4, XB1 and PC on 23 February 2016.

Komarr by Lois McMaster Bujold

Komarr, second world of the Barrayaran Empire, is slowly being terraformed over the course of centuries. Key to the terraforming effort is an orbiting soletta, a massive mirror which increases the amount of sunlight being directed onto the surface. When the soletta is damaged by a spacecraft collision, the future viability of the planet is put in jeopardy. Newly-anointed Imperial Adjudicator Miles Vorkosigan is sent to investigate whether this was an accident or deliberate sabotage.

Komarr is the first novel in the series to focus on Miles Vorkosigan in his new role as an Imperial Adjudicator. Bujold wanted to freshen things up by taking Miles away from his support network of thousands of loyal soldiers and a fleet of powerful starships and it's a move that could have been mishandled. The loss of most of Miles's supporting cast from the Dendarii Mercenaries (who only warrant cameo appearances and the occasional mention from now on) is a blow and it was initially unclear if Miles as a (mostly) solo investigator is a compelling enough idea to replace the military SF feel of the earlier novels.

Komarr lays those fears to rest. This a well-written, crisply-paced and masterfully characterised novel. Bujold develops a new POV character in the form of Ekaterin Vorsoisson, a young woman and mother married to a difficult husband involved in the terraforming project. Komarr has the reputation of being a "romance novel", with Ekaterin brought in as a serious love interest for Miles, whose relationships up until now have mostly been more like casual flings and friends-with-benefits arrangements. However, it would be a serious mistake to dismiss Komarr as a light or frivolous book because of this.

Instead, Komarr is a serious book about adult relationships, motivations and fulfilment, and it layers those themes into a thriller storyline involving betrayal, murder and intrigue. Bujold has said she enjoys writing about "grown-ups", and the romance in the novel is between two adults who have been through the wars (literally and figuratively) and find something in each other they like and respect, but have to overcome personal issues before they can turn that mutual attraction into something more tangible. It's an approach rooted in character that works effectively without overshadowing the SF thriller storyline, which has all the required twists and turns of a solid mystery before Miles and Ekaterin can resolve the problem.

Komarr (****) is a solid entry in The Vorkosigan Saga which sets the books on a new course and does so effectively. It is available now as part of the Miles in Love omnibus (UK, USA).

Bradley Cooper's HYPERION adaption now a mini-series at SyFy

Four years ago, Bradley Cooper was reportedly interested in directing a movie based on Dan Simmons's Hyperion Cantos novels. The project disappeared into development hell and many people assumed that was that.

However, Cooper, now a much more well-known actor thanks to roles in movies such as American Sniper, has used his newfound starpower to get Hyperion back on track. The project has also - thankfully - transformed into a TV series. Itamar Moses, a writer on Boardwalk Empire, will write and produce the series with Cooper on board as executive producer (it is unclear if Cooper will also direct some episodes).

The Hyperion Cantos is set in the distant future and relates the journey of seven pilgrims to the planet Hyperion, where they must confront the enigmatic creature known as the Shrike to uncover the secrets of the "Time Tombs", which are threatening to open and trigger a devastating war.

It is unclear if this will be a one-off mini-series based on just Hyperion itself, or will include the sequel The Fall of Hyperion in some manner. Dan Simmons also wrote two further novels in the series, Endymion and The Rise of Endymion, set 275 years after the events of the first two books.

RIP Sir Christopher Lee, total legend

Sir Christopher Lee has passed away at the age of 93.

The British actor is known to genre fans for almost too many roles to count, including Dracula in half a dozen Hammer Horror movies of the 1960s and 1970s; the villainous Lord Summerisle in the classic The Wicker Man; Bond villain Scaramanga in The Man with the Golden Gun; Comte de Rochefort in The Three Musketeers, Four Musketeers and Return of the Musketeers; Captain Wolfgang von Kleinschmidt in Steven Spielberg's 1941; Dr. Catheter in Gremlins 2: The New Batch; and Mr. Flay in the BBC mini-series Gormenghast. Lee's own favourite role was as Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, a role he played in the 1998 film Jinnah.

However, he is best-known to modern movie-goers for his role as Count Dooku in two Star Wars movies (Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith) and as the wizard Saruman in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. He later reprised the role in the Hobbit movies. For the latter films, Lee felt unable to make the long trip to New Zealand so filmed his sequences separately on a soundstage in London and was green-screened alongside his co-stars. Lee was the only person involved in the films to have met J.R.R. Tolkien, as he had spent time in Oxford in the 1950s. Lee had also met C.S. Lewis and Gormenghast author Mervyn Peake.

Lee's early life was as action-packed as anything in his movies. He was born in London in 1923 and raised both in London and Switzerland. He was the step-cousin of James Bond creator Ian Fleming. During the opening stages of WWII Lee was a number of British men who, unhappy with the lack of action in Europe, chose to fight alongside the Finns in the Winter War with Russia. However, he soon returned to the UK and joined the RAF, being deployed at home, in South Africa and in Egypt. He fought alongside Gurkhas at Monte Cassino and climbed Mt. Vesuvius shortly before it erupted. Lee is credited with helping defuse a near-mutiny among disaffected British soldiers and airmen during the Italian campaign. He also took part in the capture and interrogation of Nazi war criminals. Alongside his other duties, Lee also took part in operations for the Special Operations Executive, the forerunner of the elite SAS. He declined to speak of these operations, but later confirmed (during the filming of Lord of the Rings) that he was familiar with the sound someone makes when killed by stealth.

After the war Lee became an actor but found it tough going: he didn't get his first speaking role until 1947 and spent a decade playing heavies, muscle or background characters. In 1957 he made his breakthrough as Frankenstein's monster in Hammer's The Curse of Frankenstein, alongside Peter Cushing. Lee and Cushing became fast friends, remaining so until the latter's death in 1994. They made twenty films together. The following year Lee appeared as the titular character in Dracula, a role with many sequels. Lee enjoyed the attention and fame the films brought, but was unhappy with the quality of the sequels. He felt that the character was too often shoehorned into the scripts for no real reason and rarely had a substantial role. After almost twenty years Lee ended his association with Hammer with 1976's To the Devil a Daughter.

Seeking to avoid the typecasting that had afflicted fellow Hammer actors Cushing and Vincent Price, Lee moved to the United States. He sent up his horror movie roles with an appearance on Saturday Night Live, showing a hitherto rarely-hinted dry sense of self-deprecating humour. Impressed, Steven Spielberg recruited him as the villain in his comedy movie 1941. Lee enjoyed a career boost from his time in America, especially when a new generation of directors who had been impressed by his Hammer appearances as children (such as Peter Jackson and Tim Burton) broke through.

In later years Lee continued working, shrugging off suggestions that he should retire. When he became too old for physically demanding roles, he switched to cameo appearances and a lot of voiceover work. His deep voice, undaunted by age, also saw him reprise his role as a narrator and singer. To the bewilderment of many, he released two heavy metal-influenced albums about the life of Charlemagne, for which he was honoured at the Metal Hammer Golden Gods Awards.

Sir Christopher Lee passed away on Sunday, 7 June 2015 from respiratory problems. He had a full, well-lived life and leaves behind a truly amazing body of work.

Chris Avellone leaves Obsidian Entertainment

Chris Avellone, one of the best-known writers in the CRPG field, has left Obsidian Entertainment, the company he co-founded a dozen years ago, for pastures new.

"What can change the nature of a man?"

"Being reduced to a floating, disembodied skull."

"Oh, right."

Normally, a change of career for a video game staffmember would not be news-worthy, but Avellone is one of the most critically well-regarded writers in the genre. He started out at Interplay, in particular its Black Isle RPG development team, where he won early acclaim for directing the development of Fallout 2. Following that he worked on what is widely regarded as the greatest CRPG ever written, Planescape: Torment. He proceeded to work on Icewind Dale and its sequel before leading development of Project Van Buren, the code-name for the original Fallout 3. During the development of Van Buren Black Isle was abruptly shut down due to financial issues and Interplay effectively ceased to exist as a games development company.

Avellone and several of his Black Isle colleagues regrouped to found Obsidian Entertainment in 2003. BioWare, who had produced the Baldur's Gate series for Interplay and worked alongside Black Isle, gave Obsidian their first break by convincing LucasArts to hire them to make Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, with Avellone taking a key writing role. Although hamstrung by budget and time constraints, Knights of the Old Republic II won critical acclaim for its subversive deconstruction of the Jedi and the simplistic black/white morality of the Star Wars universe. Obsidian subsequently developed Neverwinter Nights II, Alpha Protocol and Fallout: New Vegas, the latter of which re-used some of the old Van Buren ideas. Avellone worked on all of these games, gaining kudos for his key work on the Mask of the Betrayer expansion for NWN2 and Old World Blues for New Vegas.

More recently, Avellone has been allowed to branch out and outsource work to inXile Entertainment (made up of other ex-Interplay and Black Isle staff), contributing quests, dialogue and characters to both Wasteland 2 and the upcoming Torment: Tides of Numenera. His last big project for Obsidian was working on the hugely successful crowdfunded RPG Pillars of Eternity.

Avellone's writing is noted for being rooted in character and thematic development, philosophy and internal realisation, unusual for a medium which is usually more story and action-focused.

According to Twitter, the break with Obsidian was wholly mutual. Avellone's next project is unknown, but speculation is rampant that he may team up with inXile, who recently regained access to the Van Buren trademark. Although it won't be a Fallout game (the rights for which reside with Bethesda, who recently announced Fallout 4), there is speculation that Van Buren will be re-tooled either as a whole new post-apocalyptic franchise, or may form the basis for the inevitable Wasteland 3.

DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS: SWORD COAST LEGENDS to be released in September

The new Dungeons and Dragons video game - the first based on the 5th Edition of the tabletop rules - now has a release date. The game will arrive on 8 September for Windows, Mac and Linux, with XB1 and PS4 versions to follow.

Sword Coast Legends will be set in the Forgotten Realms universe along the titular Sword Coast, where both the Neverwinter Nights series and the Baldur's Gate series were located (although in different parts of it). The new game will comprise a story-driven campaign which can be played solo or co-op as well as a robust multiplayer engine where one player can assume the role of the Dungeon Master and create new scenarios for players.

The game is played from a top-down, isometric viewpoint and looks like it has been inspired by the recent success of crowd-funded CRPGs like Divinity: Original Sin and Pillars of Eternity. Most intriguingly, there is no major publisher involved. The last few official D&D games were MMORPGs and action titles, with this being the first actual, proper CRPG in the setting since 2007's Neverwinter Nights 2.

SENSE8 released tomorrow

Netflix release all 12 episodes of Sense8 tomorrow. This new series is a collaboration between the Wachowskis (The Matrix Trilogy, Bound, Cloud Atlas, Jupiter Ascending) and J. Michael Straczynski (Babylon 5 and way too many comic books to count).

Early reviews are promising, praising the performances, mystery and premise but warning against a slow opening episode.

Straczynski claims that the show has a projected five-year story arc but that the first season is self-contained enough to satisfy viewers.

FALLOUT 4 confirmed

As hinted yesterday, Bethesda have indeed confirmed that Fallout 4 is on its way with a trailer:

The trailer confirms that the game will be set in Boston. Your character this time appears to be from Vault 111 and you will, once again, have a canine companion. We can assume that the game will be set in and around the city and out in the surrounding countryside. In Fallout lore, Boston is the home of the Institute (built in the ruins of MIT) and the capital of the Commonwealth, a new nation forged from the ruins of the old world. In Fallout 3 it was hinted that something was wrong in Boston, with androids escaping from the area to seek safety in Washington, DC. Fallout 4, we can assume, will expand on that storyline.

Fallout 4 will be exclusive to PC, X-Box One and PlayStation 4. However, this is surprising as graphically the game does not appear to be a significant improvement over New Vegas and Skyrim. The next-gen exclusive nature of the game may be down more to memory requirements. Previous games in the series were sorely constrained by the tiny amounts of memory available on the PS3 and X-Box 360, necessitating frequent loading times. Hopefully the greater power of the new machines should allow seamless area and interior/exterior transitions. Fallout 4 will likely (and hopefully) be the final game to use the geriatric GameBryo/Creation Engine (which debuted with 2002's Morrowind), since Bethesda have indicated that all of their future games will use the Void Engine, based on the new id Tech being used to power games like Doom 4.

No release date has been set for Fallout 4. However, Bethesda typically announce games between 12 and 18 months before release, so a 2016 release date appears likely.

Bethesda tease new game

Bethesda will be revealing their next game at 3pm GMT tomorrow, posting this impossible-to-decrypt image:

Bethesda's previous solo game was The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, released to immense success in late 2011. Although their partner studio Zenimax subsequently released The Elder Scrolls Online, the core Bethesda studio hasn't let much slip about their next single-player game in the past four years. Fans and media alike have been anticipating Fallout 4, based on the immense success of both Fallout 3 (2008) and Fallout: New Vegas (2010), the latter co-produced with Obsidian Entertainment.

The teaser image suggests that this speculation is correct and that Bethesda will almost certainly announce Fallout 4 tomorrow, possibly with a CG video produced by Del Toro Studios. A longer presentation, rumoured to focus on actual gameplay, will be made at the E3 games expo later this month.

It has been heavily rumoured that Fallout 4 will be set in Boston and focus on the Institute (probably descended from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), an area of advanced scientific study responsible for the androids and some of the other crazy backstory elements in Fallout 3. With Bethesda also saying they wanted to focus on the east coast and leave the Mid-West and west coast areas to other developers (probably Bethesda), this makes the suggestion of Boston as a setting more likely. The other crowd-pleasing choice, New York, would likely require a more advanced engine to depict the massive city in more convincing detail. Bethesda indicated a while ago that their next game would still be using Skyrim's Creation Engine (itself only a modestly-weaked version of the old GameBryo Engine used to power everything from Morrowind onwards) instead.

We should learn more tomorrow.

XCOM 2 announced

Firaxis and Take Two have announced that XCOM 2, the sequel to 2012's XCOM: Enemy Unknown and its expansion, Enemy Within, will be released in October this year.

The new game is set twenty years after the events of the previous ones and features a bit of an about-turn from the end of those games: the aliens have invaded, again, but this time in much greater force and have won, occupying the planet. XCOM has been forced underground, waiting until some degree of complacency has set in on the part of the aliens, and then striking back unexpectedly. The game features a mobile base, the Avenger, and XCOM teams launching attacks on alien forces both in rural areas and inside the gleaming, futuristic cities they have built for their human sympathisers/drones. There is more of an emphasis on stealth and guerrilla warfare this time around, with the game apparently drawing inspiration from the third of the original 1990s XCOM games, X-COM: Apocalypse.

The game will also use procedural generation to create battle maps, rather than simply rotating through the same eighty-odd default maps as in the original game. There will be new weapons, alien types and new character classes.

XCOM 2 is, unexpectedly, a PC exclusive with no console release mooted at the current time. Enemy Unknown did surprisingly well on console, so the decision to limit the release to PC only is interesting. Firaxis should be revealing why shortly, but there are theories that the new game will feature a much heavier modding focus than the previous ones.