Activision’s annual extravaganza has been and gone for this year, and the big news for Xbox’ers is a bunch of “definitely maybes”!

Every year or so, the big publishers put on their big shows, and invite media outlets big and small to attend the marketing festivities. So it was that Activision’s big to-do for 2006, Activate Asia, unleashed the unwashed hordes of the videogame press on the Shangri-La Hotel at The Rocks, Sydney. The results were predictably tragic: a dash of Activision-centric gaming; excessive consumption of finger-foods; drunken nerd arguments about Nintendo’s Wii; and the obligatory appearance of Imperial Stormtroopers. Subsequently followed, of course, by giggling manchildren clamouring for photographs, while proudly reciting such classic lines as “aren’t you a little short to be a Stormtrooper?”

In other words, it was a typical press event in the videogame industry. And while we could thrill you with tales of culinary experimentation, lecherous sport spectating, pizzas garnished with the dead meat of emblematic Australian animals and drawing dead in high stakes poker, all you’re going to get is the goss on the games.

Activision’s CEO, Mike Griffith, was on-hand to present the company’s 2006/early 2007 line-up, which boasted a reasonable number of Xbox and Xbox 360 titles. But it was the non-Xbox titles that gained the most attention, notably Guitar Hero 2 for Playstation 2, and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars for PC. Being Xbox World Australia, we couldn’t let the opportunity go by to derail question-time by repeatedly asking Activsion reps whether these and other games were going to be embracing the Xbox family in future.

The answers may surprise you.

When asked directly about the chances of Guitar Hero making its way to Xbox 360, CEO Mike Griffith was as slippery as an eel, but we pinned him down until he conceded that it was a “fair assumption” that Guitar Hero would be coming to our beloved box. “Our philosophy is that we develop games across all platforms”, he said, adding that “all our core games will be offered across multiple platforms.”

Spoken like a politician, but the implication was that Activision is committed to bringing their big guns to bear on every console they possibly can. This is great news for those of us suffering from guitar-envy, and Griffith was pretty candid in a follow-up question that the age of “exclusivity” is probably going to draw to a close in the coming years – provided it’s financially viable to bring their products to said platforms, of course.

It was a sentiment echoed by Tim Willits, Lead Designer and Co-Founder of id Software, who flew over from the USA to demo Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. It’s not often you share the room with gaming royalty, and even less common to call the guy out when he discusses how Quake Wars will feature unique “Gamertags.” When pestered by Xbox World Australia on the topic, he admitted that his choice of phrase wasn’t confirmation of an Xbox 360 version in the works, but that the 360 was “proving itself as a online multiplayer platform”, and that its continued success in the online arena makes it pretty likely that we’ll see an Xbox 360 version at some stage.

Call of Duty 3:

With two quasi-confirmations under our belts, it was time to enjoy the actual Xbox 360 demonstrations, which dominated the Activate Asia event. The headline act was of course Call of Duty 3, with the shock-twist being there were no plans for a PC version at this stage. Given earlier comments it seems unlikely this will hold true for long, but in the short term COD’s biggest fanbase is going to be left out in the Siberian cold…unless they pick up a ‘next-gen’ console, of course.

Unlike previous Call of Duty games, Call of Duty 3 eschews the multiple campaign, battle-hopping format gamers have come to grow and love, instead focusing on one intense period known as the Normandy Breakout. This 88-day period of the Second World War featured some of the fiercest fighting of the conflict, and refers to the time between the Allied landings at Normandy on D-Day through to the liberation of Paris on the 25th of August.

While the action is focused on only one campaign, the different perspectives remain, including American infantry, British SAS commandos, and, for the first time to our knowledge, Canadian and Polish armoured divisions (probably as part of Operation Totalise or Operation Tractable). It would have been great to play as part of the French Resistance who played an important role (and paid a heavy price) in the Liberation of Paris. Still, it’s great to see that Activision are committed to exposing gamers to perspectives they otherwise might never have known even existed during this tumultuous period of human history.

Enough with the history lesson though. As part of their single-campaign commitment, Treyarch (who have replaced Infinity Ward on this third iteration) have done away entirely with loading-screens by hiding them behind the semi-interactive, in-game cutscenes. This will be one of the biggest changes for the Call of Duty experience, since players will no longer get even that short break between the unrelenting challenges that the series has become famous for.

Speaking of unrelenting, the build Activision demo’d showed the battle for Saint-Lô, a fierce street-to-street engagement that made Call of Duty 2’s most intense scenes seem like a leisurely year in Provence. A lot of this is thanks to a new particle-engine that allows the game to recreate dust, smoke and debris with an almost eerie authenticity. In this early build the smoke in particular didn’t seem to persist for too long in the environment, but the particles interact with the physics of the game to drift and warp in a fairly realistic manner. Whether the short smoke duration is just a side-effect of the early build, or whether it’s a deliberate move to keep the player’s field of vision from getting cluttered, we don’t know. Either way, it looks pretty damn cool.

It wasn’t too far into the demo before Treyarch’s other new feature, BattleAction, popped up. The BattleAction system is just a fancy name for the brutal mano-a-mano struggle of mortal combat that was often more decisive in the 2nd World War than a bullet. In this example, a German soldier ambushed the player, and a tug’o’war for the rifle began. Essentially a mini-game that requires buttons to be pressed and triggers to be pulled, it’s hard to determine just how much impact this will have on the final game. We only saw it once in the demo, which is heartening…once or twice a level at key moments would be cool, but it would be easy for the system to be overdone.

Although not on show at Activate Asia, Activision talked a little about Call of Duty 3’s new emphasis on multiplayer mode. No longer will epic battlefields be populated only by a handful of players; from here on in expect 12 v 12 online action. Hints were also dropped about user-controlled vehicles (ranging from jeeps right up to tanks) and character classes like medics, which should no doubt get the Live community salivating.

On the whole, Call of Duty 3 is shaping up to be another impressive title for the Xbox 360. The graphics are better, there are a slew of new features, and the dramatic multiplayer expansion is a step in the right direction for the series. Whether the decision to focus only on one campaign for singleplayer will be embraced by fans, or indeed whether another WW2 shooter is going to work, remains to be seen.

Tony Hawk’s Project 8

Another day, another Tony Hawk game. It was suggested by one cynical reporter at Activate Asia that by now Mr. Hawk is probably so rich he can skate off a ramp and land in a giant money-pit like old Uncle Scrooge in Ducktales, and it’s hard not to be a little jaded when yet another Tony Hawk game is announced. Or rather a pair of them in the one event. But there’s obviously a bunch of people out there buying these games, and for what it’s worth, Project 8 doesn’t look too bad at all.

The premise of Tony’s latest outing is that the man himself is scouring the country (being America, naturally) for the top eight unsigned skaters, with the intention of creating some sort of dream-team. The fact that this is the 8th child of the venerable T.H. cash-cow has nothing to do with his desire to only pick eight people, apparently. At any rate, as an up-and-coming skater, it’s up to you to prove you’ve got the skills to roll with Tony and his team, which won’t be as easy as it sounds.

Activision have said that this is an “all-new” Tony Hawk game, and that for the first time, Neversoft are not using the old T.H. engine, rather they have rebuilt the game from the “ground-up” to create a new experience. They also said that Project 8 marks a return to the core Tony Hawk gameplay, so expect a game more like the first four than American Wasteland or the Underground series. From what we saw of the game, this looks to be at least half true.

You see the big storylines and huge levels that defined the Underground and American Wasteland games have been refined into a much purer formula. Now the story is just about your skater’s rise from a lowly rank of 200th to the top 8 skaters in the region. And regional it is too; gone is the big urban sprawl of the most recent games, replaced instead by a small-town USA feel that doesn’t seem to diminish from the experience. While the scale is greatly reduced, there are still stacks of areas and objects to skate and trick off, and the smaller size allows for a seamless world with no load-screens or those extra-long tunnels that allowed American Wasteland to load the levels behind the scenes. Now, if you want to go from the skate-park into town, all you have to do is go!

The emphasis is squarely back on a purer form of skating too, with a nice variety of challenges for the player to engage with. First up are the “chalk challenges”, where your fellow skaters have simply scrawled their achievements on the footpath, ramp or what have you. Attempting one of these is simply a matter of grinding the same rail or launching off the same jump as they did, and if you earn a rank, voila, you’ll be in the chalk yourself. From here you can engage in more challenging activities, which may involve having someone film you pulling off tricks (not the Paris Hilton kind) to impress Tony Hawk. Here, much like the old Classic mode in the earlier games, you’ll need to beat a certain amount of challenges to succeed.

The catch is that Project 8 doesn’t have a fixed difficulty system at all, rather every challenge like this has three possible rankings: amateur, pro or ‘sick’, as in fully, dude. The beauty of this means that players who want to cruise through the game can do so or, to use a better example, if you don’t care about grinding and just want to focus on aerial tomfoolery, all you need to do is grab an amateur rating in the grind to ‘win’ that challenge and move onto more important things. It’s a clever move, one designed to open the game up to an even more casual player, while keeping the hardcore fans pleased by giving them three goals within any one challenge. Plus, Activision said for Xbox 360 the game will connect to a global leaderboard much like the excellent Amped 3 did, so you aren’t just competing for local props, you’ve got an international audience.

So far so good, right? Well, the only concern we had was the inclusion of a ‘bail’ mode – which is very reminiscent of the mini-games in FlatOut – where the sole objective is to implement the ubiquitous Havok physics to launch, propel, or tumble your hapless avatar into a variety of objects. Admittedly people stacking it painfully has always been a drawcard of every extreme sport, but it doesn’t strike us as particularly “pure” to skating, and it’s far from realistic.

Still, it’s a minor point, and there’s enough other stuff here to make Project 8 a game to watch for Tony Hawk fans. The graphics have been dramatically improved, and while the character models look a bit plastic, the physics have been well implemented to create a more natural skating experience. There’s even a bullet-time style ‘nail the trick’ mode that lets you use each thumbstick to control one of your character’s legs and feet in slow-motion to set up and perfectly execute some insane tricks. The RPG-lite elements of stat increases remain too, so there should be enough depth and variety here to please most of Tony’s fans. There isn’t a whole lot here to make non-skateboarding fans pick this one up, but we’ll keep an eye on Project 8’s progress as we lead up to its release.

LEGO Star Wars 2: The Original Trilogy

LucasArts, now distributed in Australia by Activision, were on hand at Activate to demo some of their proprietary ‘next-gen’ technology, as well as a couple of games for good measure. The tech-demos were pretty impressive, showcasing DMM, Digital Molecular Matter, and Euphoria, also known as biomechanical A.I. DMM allows objects in levels to have atomically correct properties, so wood will splinter, glass will shatter, metals will dent etc in a realistic manner. Euphoria’s effect is harder to gauge, but essentially means that NPCs, enemies and allies in a game will be more aware of their surroundings; the most common example shown being that they’d try to grab onto something when thrown off a ledge or something.

This future-tech was great to see, but the real winner for Xbox owners in the LucasArts line-up was of course LEGO Star Wars 2: The Original Trilogy. The first LEGO Star Wars outing was a hit with critics, kids and grown-ups alike, selling some 4,000,000 copies across all platforms. The sequel takes us to where we all really want to go however, and that’s the original trilogy of Star Wars films: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of The Jedi.

The formula seems largely unchanged: take all your favourite Star Wars locations, characters and scenes, then redo the whole thing in LEGO with tongue firmly planted in cheek, add a bunch of puzzles and co-operative gameplay, and let the player go crazy! Developer Traveler’s Tales have listened to comments from the fan community however, and they’ve made a number of important changes under the hood. First and foremost, the ‘on-the-rails’ feel of some of the levels in the original has been lessened by larger, more open levels that encourage exploration and experimentation.

Additionally, there’s a bunch of user-controlled vehicles (we saw an AT-ST blasting away at a horde of stormtroopers for one), more emphasis on co-operative puzzle-solving, and new Gold Brick collectibles hidden in the level. These threepio-stylin’ blocks are the equivalent of the holy grail in each level, and are the kind of thing only really dedicated, hardcore players will find. What they unlock in the game is a bit of a mystery at this stage, but given the spiffy secret level you acquired for 100% collection in the original LEGO Star Wars, we’re gonna take a guess that it’s going to be something very cool indeed.

Another novel development is user-creatable characters. In true LEGO tradition, you can disarticulate any of the LEGO characters and mix’n’match their appendages. For those of you who thought Carrie Fisher was a dog, give Princess Leia a wookie head and some hairy legs. Don’t think C-3P0 was very bad-ass? Give him Darth’s helmet and a blaster rifle! Again, this is something more geared towards younger players, but we got the impression that building some sort of uber-character might be the only way to reach certain locked or inaccessible areas. Time will tell on that one though, but speaking of time, LEGO Star Wars 2 is one of the few games with a concrete release date at Activate: September 13th is the lucky day, designed to coincide with the latest version of Star Wars DVDs. Old George is probably going to be releasing these ones until someone invents an actual Holocron, we think.

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance

If you didn’t play X-Men Legends on the Xbox, you missed out on one of the best action-RPGs on the big black box. It was one of Activision’s most popular new series in the last few years; so naturally, they have plans to bring it to every single platform known to man this year. However, those audacious chaps at Raven are no longer content to limit themselves to the X-Men universe…this time, they’re assembling almost 150 characters from Marvel’s stable of superheroes/villains, and they’re calling it Marvel: Ultimate Alliance.

The shift away from X-clusivity means that a whole bunch of other heroes can partake in the festivities, including Thor, Blade, and Elektra to name a few. Recently announced at ComicCon were Human Torch, Iceman and Invisible Woman, so as you can see the list of actual X-Men is pretty slim so far. Speaking of slim, there isn’t exactly a wealth of playable characters either; of the 140+ characters included in the game, only 22-25 will be user-controlled. So for those of you keeping count, that’s only a few more (or about the same) as X-Men Legends 2, depending on which version you played.

So what about the other 120-odd characters? As far as we could tell, they’ll either just be cameos or enemies you beat on during the course of the game. Either way, there’s going to be a lot of unfamiliar faces unless you’re an absolute Marvel maestro. Downloadable Content was hinted at but not confirmed in any meaningful way, but we’ve got to admit the ability to acquire new characters via the Marketplace would be pretty damn awesome. And given that Raven had a variety of bonus characters for each version of X-Men Legends 2, it’s not out of the realm of possibility either.

Like X-Men Legends, players will have 4 heroes at a time in their group, directly controlling one while the others do their thing. From the demo shown at Activate it seems like there’s going to be a great variety of levels in the game, including underwater battles for Atlantis, crazy shenanigans in the life-size pinball table of Murderworld, the Mandarin Palace and a bunch of other locations. Not only is the variety good, but the graphics are looking great; better with every build of the game. Advanced shaders, realistic water and particle effects bring the levels to life, and the character models looked fantastic. Fans of X-Men Legend’s cel-shaded style may be a little disappointed in the move towards a more realistic look, but fans of eye-candy should be blown away by the Xbox 360 version. We didn’t see it running on Xbox, but the chances are it’ll look pretty good.

Much was made about the ability to change the Marvel world through your actions, but on further inspection this seems to be limited mainly to different end-game cinematics. Still, with multiplayer co-op, RPG elements and all the other things that made X-Men Legends work so well, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance is shaping up to be a solid title for the Xbox 360, filling the action-RPG niche nicely for those of us desperate for a fix.