Pandemic : Hello there, fellow Xbox owners. Folks call me Brad Welch, and government sources say that I may or may not be Director of Destroy All Humans. I spend my days sitting in a deck chair emblazoned with the word 'Director', I like to wear berets and most of the day I can be found shouting 'Action', 'Faster' and 'More Intense' through an obscenely large megaphone. Unlike famed B-Movie director Ed Wood I don't currently cross-dress but I am willing to learn.

Pretty much. Quality sci-fi also has a big influence too, though. It's amazing, there's this collective consciousness about aliens that seems so obvious to make a game from, and I think people will really dig playing the game and seeing all the sci-fi references and jokes we make. We also looked at the current range of games on the market and noticed a profound lack of probing in the games we saw, so we wanted to make a game where you could probe things to, ah, fill this hole in the market.

Sure he's here for peace! All he wants to do is find his brother and save his race from extinction. Totally non-violent agenda; get the family back together, retrieve the Furon DNA that was planted in the brain stems of some primitive monkey-like chattel of Earth. Once he retrieves it, then he can go home.

We have several environments in DAH!, you visit each one several times over the course of the game. These areas range from the quiet farmlands and towns to the sleepy suburbs, then to the industrial coastal ports, the mysterious Area 42, and finally Capitol City.

One of the great things about DAH is you can play it the way you want. Want to go in all guns blazing? No problem. Prefer to sneak about in human form and cause problems from behind the scenes? Also do-able. Some missions do require a certain amount of, well, let's call it tact, but generally as long as you don't screw up the mission objectives you can play it however you want. The saucer does not have a stealth mode, so pretty much all those missions are concentrated on out and out destruction.

Crypto has 3 main weapons; the Zap-O-Matic, the Disintegrator Ray and the Ion Detonator. Each weapon is designed to help the player in a different manner; the Zap-O-Matic will incapacitate, the Disintegrator Ray doesn't leave a human trace behind, and the Ion Detonator is a pipe bomb style weapon for when you need to take out a crowd. Crypto has another tool - the Anal Probe, which I find a little uncomfortable talking about.

The AI has a number of senses – they can see and hear things. Another key sense was the sense of humor. Sorry for a terrible pun there. We don't just want smart AI, we want funny AI. That's tough! You can use the abilities to manipulate them – find out what they are thinking, put them to sleep, tell them to go somewhere or make them do a silly dance and distract everyone in the vicinity. Then there's the more overt abilities like picking people up and throwing them around, or extracting their brain in a rather painful manner. Mmmmn mmmn tasty brains.

There's almost 30 missions in the story mode, and there's around 10-15 hours of play in there. On top of that the player can open up each Invasion Site for free exploration (we call it sandbox mode) and there's a variety of things to do in there – including another set of missions.

A man and an elephant walk into a bar…you heard that one? OK, OK…an Englishman, an Irishman and an Australian are sitting in a …oh, heard that one too? OK, I've got it.

Q. How many Furons does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A.

What, you wanted a punchline?

I was trying to encourage audience participation!

Actually I can't tell you the punchline, its classified. If I tell you, they'll make me disappear. They'll probably make you disappear too!

We took submissions from a variety of talented musicians who were all very keen to work on the game In the end we selected a chap called Garry Schyman, whose brain is doing a great job providing us with hours and hours of very cool and genre specific music. Bernard Herrmann was the influence, and Garry has done an awesome job of providing us with an original score inspired by that influence.

I think the X-Box version is scarier. Really. However, the X-Box version will have Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound, and some of the graphical effects such as specular masks will look a little better on the X-Box. The X-Box is a great machine and has been great to develop for.

Well they'd only commission an invasion simulation if they *actually* had aliens in Hangar 18 and if aliens *actually* crashed at Roswell and aliens *actually* had a secret moon base full of abducted rednecks who they probed and turned into an army of killer zombies bent on destroying humanity.

Got a little excited there, sorry.

Of course aliens aren't real and the government is not preparing to fight a war with alien invaders and using Pandemic to create alien invasion simulators. Not happening.

Could you just look into my memory erasing device for a second, please.