Sam Fisher is a walking, talking action movie cliché in Splinter Cell: Conviction. The super secret agent set free from all of the restrictions placed on him by his controlling agency, using his skills for selfish reasons, driven-by-passion and revenge, etc, etc. Luckily he’s a cliché that we’d really like to play as, or our delicate sensibilities would be offended.

As Cameron puts it, Pandora is really the garden of Eden, and humanity is here looking for apples. Behind all of the special effects wizardry and lush visuals, the story is really a heavy-handed tale about humanity encroaching on the wilderness and how stepping into the shoes of those we encroach upon will change or perception and potentially our actions. Still, very pretty world. I’d pillage that for resources any day.

It’s amazing what a young Italian nobleman can learn over the course of Assassin’s Creed 2’s 30-year time frame.

The latest in a series of developer diary videos starring Ubisoft’s Patrice and friends looks into progression, one of the most important aspects of AC2. There’s a lot more choice is character progression than there was in the first game, allowing you to tailor your Ezio to your liking. And speaking of tailoring, I love the additional armour sets, and I suspect cosplayers will love them too. There’s only so much you can do with the all-white cloak ensemble.

The developers here touch on one of my biggest gaming pet peeves in the video — enemies that don’t react to being hit. If I hit someone with an axe, they are going to stagger, get wounded and possibly die. At least I am assuming this, as I’ve yet to test that. I can’t stand games where you swinging away at the enemy and they don’t react until they suddenly fall down dead. I guess what I am trying to say is that I want to feel like I am actually beating someone to death.

OK, that might have come out wrong.

When Dead Space hits the Wii later this month it will be a mostly on-the-rails shooter. But that doesn’t mean it won’t be scary.

In this latest developer diary for the title, we’re told all about the things the team did to ensure the original Dead Space experience wouldn’t be watered down.

When they first announced that The Old Republic would be fully-voiced during E3 2009, those of us involved in the more massively-multiplayer side of gaming collectively gasped. The average MMO title has players interacting with hundreds of different characters over the course of the game. Providing real voices for each of those characters as well as the player characters themselves is a monumental task.

As I said, The Old Republic is the size of at least 10 KOTORs recorded back to back. Basically, it takes a very large team all focused on the same outcome – producing the most VO assets ever produced at the highest quality possible. There are dedicated internal teams at both LucasArts and BioWare, and externally, there are also multiple studio audio engineers and post production teams. On any given day, there can be over a dozen people working specifically on The Old Republic voice-over and that doesn’t include any actors!

And there are hundreds of actors working on the project, with recording spanning four cities – Los Angeles , London, New York, San Francisco, and Toronto. The most staggering statistic? According to Perry, the script for the game contains enough material for more than 40 Star Wars novels. That’s completely insane.

Check out the full blog post to get an idea of how much work poor Shauna is being put through in order to make Star Wars: The Old Republic the most talkative MMO ever created.

Developer Blog #10 [Star Wars: The Old Republic]

This first developer diary for upcoming Ubisoft action-title Assassin’s Creed 2 gives us a glimpse into the backstory of the main character.

The graphics and some of the play looks improved for this latest iteration, but will it be enough to outperform its predecessor.

In this developer diary for the PlayStation 3’s MAG – Massive Action Game, Zipper Interactive talks about the challenges of creating a first-person shooter in which 256 players can participate all at once.

While this clip does go into some of the technical side of creating a game for 256 simultaneous players at once, the main thing it does is talk about how awesome it is going to be, and how big of a leap the 256 player mark really is. I think we’ve established that already though, haven’t we? Until I am actually in the middle of a firefight with 255 other people around me, the game still remains a pretty yet slightly above average shooter.

Conflicting emotions run rampant as I watch this developer diary for EA’s Dante’s Inferno, which turns one of the great works of literature into an over-the-top action game.

The game serious makes my head ache. I made a study of Dante’s Divine Comedy in High School, probing deep into the themes, his representation of hell and how his work has been integrated into the more popular perception of hell. To see it turned into an action title just makes me dizzy. What’s worse, the game actually looks like something I would really want to play.

Perhaps it’s simply the fact that I feel the work should be treated with a certain amount of reverence and weight, and seeing impishly cute assistant producer Tracy Espeleta talk about how brutal the game is just makes the whole thing seem adorable.

The first in a series of developer diaries for Capcom’s Dark Void explores the game’s setting, lost somewhere within the mysterious Bermuda Triangle.

I remember being terrified of the Bermuda Triangle as a child, with documentaries on the subject with spooky music and deadly-serious voiceovers by the likes of Leonard Nimoy and Robert Hatch. The same sort of documentaries that made me terrified of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and Amelia Earhart, who I am sure was a lovely woman undeserving of such a terrified reaction. This was all before video games, of course, which completely desensitized me to violence, leaving me prepared to fight the alien hordes should I ever get sucked into a parallel dimension.