The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, out November 11th

Currently in development by Bethesda Softworks, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim promises to plunge the player into a breathtaking fantasy world populated with armed enemies and fire-breathing dragons.

Granted, these games always promise lavish graphics and elegant gameplay, but Skyrim really looks to be raising the bar and is earning its fans well ahead of its scheduled November 11th release date.

Moments of genius from the design team at Bethesda include the ability to look to the sky and see your character's abilities plotted out as stars in constellations, the heavens literally reordered as your game progresses and you learn new skills.

It's also nice to see two-handedness as a feature, with some spells able to be enhanced by equipping them to both hands of your character and firing both controller triggers together.


As the video above explains, the distant scenery is not just a background image - you can walk to it and, in the case of mountains, climb them.

This makes for seamless gameplay and is given a further boost by close-up details such as drifting snow at high altitudes, not to mention the in-game map - reached simply by zooming out until you can see the entire Skyrim world.


Bethesda's second preview clip shows more of the gameplay of Skyrim, and while it looks pretty impressive, I'm not fully convinced as yet.

A lot of the time it appears as though the character is on a fairly restricted path - a trail down a mountainside in the first clip, passageways through dungeons in the second. I'd like to see a less linear approach, both in terms of movement and story progression.


However, it's good to see some traditional elements in place - the combination of weapon-based combat and spell-casting, treasure chests that line the dungeon routes, and logic puzzles to solve in order to progress.

These are only sneak previews, but I suspect the highly detailed graphics of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim could overshadow the game itself. Come November 11th, we'll all be able to tell for sure.

The Joy of SFX

I love sound effects. From the rumbling bass of an airborne Terminator appearing over the horizon, to the shrill wheels-on-tarmac squeal of a Transformer as it adopts vehicle form, the SFX have made some recent action movies into more than they would otherwise have been.

But there's an important element in this love affair that deserves closer attention, and the Logitech Z-5500 speakers pictured top-left of this post are a clue to what it is. I'm talking about surround sound.

All the SFX in the world couldn't help a movie out if it weren't for the ability to place them in a realistic direction from the viewer - or listener, in the case of the audio. And while so many people overlook the quality of the soundtrack to a movie, for me it's an integral part of the experience.

Dragon Age 2 (PC)

On first impressions BioWare's sequel to the massively successful Dragon Age: Origins is a big, fun all-action role-playing experience, but somewhat lacking in depth of gameplay compared to its predecessor. Dragon Age 2 has been streamlined say the developers, but a section of the franchise's dedicated fanbase claim it has been watered down.

That all depends what you expect and what you want from an RPG. Apart from a welcome aesthetic overhaul, which has simplified and improved the in-game heads up display, the streamlining process also means that some of the traditional, but perhaps more mundane aspects of the role-playing experience have been sidelined.

SpaceChem on Steam

SpaceChem has been out since the start of 2011, but just hit Steam, the iTunes-style game downloading community from Valve (who you may remember from such computer games as Half-Life...).

We took the chance to have a look at this futuristic logic puzzle and try to work out whether it's any good or not.

While any game has its good and bad points, SpaceChem manages to leave a pretty wide gulf between the two - it has excellent points, and terrible points. The gameplay itself, thankfully, is absorbing and intricate; it's mostly just the presentation that lets it down.

Weirdly, the above video does a far better job of outlining the principles of SpaceChem than any of the in-game literature. It's also a chance to hear the incredible soundtrack, composed by Evan Le Ny, which helps to keep the frustration at bay on the more challenging levels.

Dragon Age 2 - Preview

Though sadly unlikely to reach the heights of the original Baldurs Gate, at least in my head (hey I was 13 when it came out and it blew my mind), a new Dragon Age game is the next best thing in my gaming world. I spent something like 90 hours game time on Origins, and actually, I haven't even completed it yet (must get round to that).

In any case this sequel promises to be even more epic, more exciting, more challenging, and looking at the concept art even more beautiful than the first. The full game doesn't drop until March 11th, but I have played the PC demo which Bioware posted online this week, and very encouraging it is too.


The demo lets you play through the prologue, and will probably take you around an hour to complete. Your reward if you do so is a free (virtual) sword, and if the demo gets 1 million total downloads Bioware will release another two extra in game items.

Advent Calendar - Christmas Day - Horace Goes Skiing

A true festive classic for Christmas Day - Horace Goes Skiing. Yep, the ZX Spectrum classic is back thanks to the efforts of MySpeccy.com. Click the screenshot below to launch the game in a new window - you'll need Java, but it's well worth it.


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Advent Calendar - Dec 20th - Super Santa Kicker

Some festive fun today - Super Santa Kicker, courtesy of Bored.com and Gameshot.org. If you find this as addictive as we did, you'll be here for at least the next half an hour - unless you're some kind of Santa-flinging ninja...


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Advent Calendar - Dec 8th - Back to the Future game trailer

Your treat for today really is a good one - it's the trailer for the Back to the Future five-part game series from Telltale Games. It looks pretty good, and it features Back in Time by Huey Lewis and the News. Not sure if there's a massive three-dimensional holographic shark in there though, but you never know your luck.

By the way - if you're looking for more about the Back to the Future 25th Anniversary Re-release on DVD and Blu-ray, check out our review of the boxed sets available here.


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Advent Calendar - Dec 4th - House MD game trailer

Today it's a heads-up on the upcoming release of House MD for the Nintendo DS, due out on December 10th. The trailer below is for the PC version, but you can expect the same combination of medically themed puzzles and imagery from the show. The only question that remains is... could it be lupus?


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Razer TRON Gaming Peripherals

I was born in the early 1980s. Computers were new and the internet was something nobody understood and few people had heard of - the Matthew Broderick movie WarGames is a fine example of how things worked back then. All we knew was what we saw in the movies - that the inside of a computer contains lots of skyscrapers laid out like city blocks and information flies around between them like an emergency response helicopter.

But TRON, the 1982 Jeff Bridges movie, actually goes one step further than that and suggests computer programs are almost sentient beings, with their own personalities and ambitions. It's probably no coincidence that I've always named my computers - and even given separate names to separate hard drives - working on those kinds of influences. And it's probably not surprising to anyone who knows me that I'm pretty thrilled to see Razer's TRON: LEGACY Light Cycle mouse, matching mouse pad and keyboard go on sale after being announced back in the summer. The countdown to the release of TRON: LEGACY in the cinemas is well and truly on.

Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit (PS3)

Right, new feature time guys and girls. We haven't done game reviews on Popsiculture before now, mostly because we aren't big gamers, and I have only recently become the proud owner of a Playstation 3 (320GB, slim, and oh so sexy...check out Amazon for probably the best PS3 bundle deals on the internet). Yep, after certain adverse football results at the weekend, I was forced to cheer myself up by spending some serious money on the first console I've owned in a decade, with two brand new games, Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit and Assassin's Creed Brotherhood.

The Lowdown

Once we had overcome the technical difficulties associated with linking said PS3 to a Sony Bravia LCD VPL-AW15 projector, and Altec Lansing FX5051 speaker system, the first game in to the slot was Need for Speed, for some hi-def, big screen, surround sound action, racing around the beautifully rendered scenery of Seacrest County. Not that there's much time for looking at the scenery, as the game launches you straight in to Career Mode, and reveals a strange definition of a career in this fictitious little corner of America, where you are by turns either a maniacal criminal street racer, or a maniacal Police driver.