Tonight's event is a new one we're trying, called Try a Title night. This is where we take a demo or two from the PSN store and sample it, swishing the game around in our mouths and commenting on the nutty aftertaste. Take a chance, on the BPC!

Following in the grand tradition of raiding stories from the wonderful Kotaku gaming news site, I bring you both screenshots and an advanced trailer for what is essentially Deus Ex 3, actually titled Deus Ex: Human Revolution.



The original Deus Ex was released for the PC by Eidos in 2000, developed by Ion Storm Austin. They were a branch-off of Ion Storm out of Houston, a "supergroup" software development house founded by former id Software staffers such as the mercurial John Romero, as well as Tom Hall. The game was a watershed FPS/RPG hybrid that took the market by storm and won dozens of Game of the Year awards. It was ported to the Playstation 2 a couple of years later, under the title Deus Ex: The Conspiracy. The original's production team was headed by Warren Spector, producer of other classics such as the Thief games, and the seminal System Shock, where Spector had also dabbled with the idea of combining the FPS and RPG genres through the use of human augmentation upgrades.



Deus Ex is a remarkable game, a cyberpunk thriller known for its elaborate conspiracy theory plots. It was a game that helped move first person shooters from the sparse "you shoot them because they're there" narratives of games like Doom and Quake and into a more literary landscape. It was followed by Spector in 2003 with Deus Ex: Invisible War, where a number of design choices were suspected of being a result of dumbing the game down for console gamers and caused an outcry among fans of the original.

And now we have a third Deus Ex game, produced by Square Enix (who bought out Eidos earlier this year), makers of the no-introduction-needed Final Fantasy series of RPGs. A conspiracy even the most hardened UNATCO agent could love.

RANDOM ELEMENTS:

Karma Star, A new strategy game coming up for the iPhone done by Harvey Smith, much maligned creative director of Deus Ex: Invisible War

Epic Mickey, A new and rather unusual Wii exclusive Mickey Mouse platform game by Warren's production house, Junction Point.

Bioshock, The spiritual successors to Spector's System Shock games.

Kotaku has a bunch of product shots of the finished version of Sony's new motion controller, officially known as the Playstation Move, but affectionately referred to by me as the Sony Electric Ice Cream Cone. Here is a taste:







For all the japes about how it looks like a sex toy, I like what Sony has done here. It looks to be a very nice evolution of Nintendo's Wii-mote, with real-time tracking built-in (for that, you have to update the Wii's controller with the Motion Plus module) and a wireless nunchuck which helps reduce the clutter. I'm not sure if Sony's device has built-in speakers like the Wii-mote, which are used quite effectively in a lot of Wii games, but it does have some additional visual feedback in the tracking ball on the top, which changes colour depending on certain conditions.

It's a tad goofy looking, and of course, its success depends on how well the game developers implement the technology in games, but so far I'm thinking I might just give this thing a twirl when it releases.

The Intarwebs had been abuzz lately, over some "leaked" images from Valve (known as the makers of a little-known game series called Half-Life, among other things), which featured several Apple-centric images such as: Half-Life protagonist Gordon Freeman donning a gleaming, iMac-like suit with a partially obscured Apple logo, and the Heavy character from Team Fortress 2 in an iPod advertisement pose. The rumour has since been confirmed, and this April, Valve will be porting several big valve releases to OSX, including TF2, Left 4 Dead, and the sequel to the wonderful surprise hit Portal, all to be released through an OSX version of the company's Steam distribution service.






This got me wondering exactly why Macs have never really been known as a gaming platform, expecially when you consider that the computer line that proceeded them, the venerable Apple II line, is one of the greatest computer gaming platforms of all time, pretty much establishing the "PC gaming" market, with literally thousands of game titles released over the life of the various Apple II iterations.

One reason might be that, while the Apple II introduced colour to the personal computer, the inital Macintoshes, from their inception in 1984 up until 1987, sported only monochrome monitors that would hardly do games justice. This kind of start for the line severely hobbled it as a gaming rig. Another reason could be that, up until the processor switch in 2006 from PPC CPUs to the same kind of Intel processors used in Windows machines, the Macs were seen as closed, proprietary systems that were not very friendly to game programmers. Or perhaps it's simply a question of numbers: Macs just don't have the kind of market share that Windows based computers enjoy, and thus represent to small of a market for publishers sinking millions into the development of their big, marquee games. But Apple's share of the PC pie has grown remarkably over the last few years, with analysts prediciting they could be commanding a 12% share in 2011 in the U.S..

With Valve giving its blessing to the Mac as a viable gaming machine, perhaps the long and illustrious Macintosh line has finally reached the pivot point for gaming goodness.

EDIT* I'd like to add a commendation to Valve for the way they're doing this. If you already own any Source game on the PC, like TF2, you get the Mac version automatically, for free. Also, Mac and PC gamers will be able to fight together on the same server. Attention, UBIsoft, THIS is how to treat your customers. You FACILITATE their gaming, not deprive them of it, with draconian DRM methods.

Some of you already know this, but for those of you that do not. Beautiful People's Club has a group on Facebook.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=4 ... 630&ref=mf]



So if you have a Facebook profile you can join the group. You may also want to add your PSN under the Discussion Tab so we'll know who you are