The Kübler-Ross model of grief proposed in the 1969 book Death and Dying is actually a theory about dealing with death and terminal disease, both of which are way worse than just calling it quits with your special someone.

But breakups – even the mature, amicable kind where you know even before you split that you’re going to be better off – still suck and sometimes you’ve got to let yourself go through the five stages in no particular order just to adjust.

1) Denial – Lord of the Rings: Conquest – “This can’t be happening to me.”
Here’s a game that’s very good at denying that anything is wrong. It’s got a blockbuster movie licence behind it, a dream team in development and publishing and the gameplay is based on the Star Wars: Battlefront series. Conquest had it all… so how could anything be wrong?

Even after reality set in for everybody else when the reviews came out, the the game kept right on denying with a big, fat downloadable content pack.

But no matter how many big-name characters are included from the book, sometimes you just have to face facts and move on.

2) Anger – Prototype – “It’s not fair!”
Life isn’t fair – particularly when it gives you body-morphing, people-absorbing powers that send the whole US Government after you as a terrorist. But there’s no time to be sad when they send in the helicopters and the tanks. Sometimes you just have to get mad and Prototype is the game to do it with.

Between flinging pedestrians into helicopters and elbow-dropping tanks, you’ll get rid of a lot of bad feelings and find healthy ways to entertain those revenge fantasies about your ex. Way better than boiling bunnies.

3) Bargaining – The Sims 3 – “Just one more, hour, minute, whatever… please, just one more!”
It’s natural to feel like you could make things right if you just had a little more time or could do something with the departing loved one just one more time. But the reality is, no matter how many “just one more” times you get, there’s always going to be more – more you want to do, more you want to say, more skills you need to raise before you can get that next job promotion.

In The Sims 3, you’ll never run out of “just one more” things to do – one more trip to the mausoleum, one more Try for Baby, one more hour toward earning lifetime achievement points so you can buy the steel bladder perk. Maybe, eventually, it’ll hit you that no matter what kind of deals you make inside your head, no matter how many ingredients you get for the Ambrosia recipe, sometimes it’s just time to stop.

4) Depression – Bionic Commando – “I can’t go on… it’s just too sad.”
It’s okay to be bummed when a long-term relationship ends. It’s even more okay if the relationship ended against your wishes.

*Spoilers* It’s especially okay to be bummed if the relationship ended against your wishes and your loved one winds up embedded in your arm. *End Spoilers*

Just sit back and ride out the angst with a good, long play through of a game that truly gets it when it comes to being sad.

5) Acceptance – Street Fighter IV – “You can’t fight it. Just take it.”
The final stage of grief is sometimes the longest one coming – maybe even 12 years in coming. But as this game demonstrates, when this stage of grief finally arrives, it has improved graphics, flashier combos and is generally a better experience than you thought to hope for. Sure, everything feels a bit different and maybe you miss the way things were. But Street Fighter has moved on – why shouldn’t you?

The bottom line is we all have different ways of coping with loss. Some are more effective than others, just like some games really are better than others. Whatever you choose to do to handle your feelings in the wake of a breakup, just make sure you’re taking care of yourself.

And make sure you’re playing on your own Xbox Live account because you cannot recover Gamerscore points earned on an account you shared with your ex.

If you wonder why Dead Space cribs from other material, consider the fact that they were the sole new IP developed in competition with The Godfather, Lord of the Rings and The Simpsons.

There is no way EA would let a licensed game near the chopping block — not if a little-known new IP like Dead Space could be canceled first to free up resources.

“Dead Space doesn’t have much stuff in it compared to what we thought we were going to make,” Art Director Ian Milham explained. “We thought, let’s not get fancy with the art direction. Our risk tolerance was pretty maxed out from the start.”

For his panel on “Creating Horror and Immersion with the Art of Dead Space (which could be canceled any minute),” Milham discussed the myriad things stolen inspirations that led to EA’s only horror title ever created (at least until Dead Space 2 comes out).

p>A big one was David Fincher films. Milham explained that the colours in movies like Se7en and Fight Club “feel hopeless and decayed – while still varying up the colour so you don’t have the next-gen brown that everybody gets raked over the coals for.”

Colours like Fincher’s are consistent within one frame — but varied throughout the whole project, which is definitely what happens in Dead Space. Go back and play the Leviathan boss fight again and you’ll see what Milham was talking about: it starts out blue and warms to red as the boss comes closer and closer toward Isaac.

Next up was Gothic architecture for the actual innards of the Planet Cracker ship, Ishimura. I won’t bore you with specifics, but if you think to yourself “Gee, the inside of this place looks like a rib cage,” there’s a reason for that. Bonus if you can find circles with ribbing on them — Milham is fond of those.

Lastly, Dead Space drew from dentists offices to create the lighting concept for the game. The point of that, said Milham, was both to cut down on the troubles of deferred lighting and to make the player feel constantly uncomfortable. “You sort of feel interrogated,” he said, showing a slide of a room dotted with dentist lights. “A lot of our lighting is on arms like that. We wanted no indirect light.”

The result, along with a lot more borrowing from Sci-Fi Horror classics like Alien, was this:

Not everything in the game was cribbed, to be fair — sometimes the things that we saw are the direct result of the dev team applying some of Kojima’s problem-solving skills. For example, the game was never meant to include heads-up displays, maps, or helpful terminals that tell you where to go. Everything has to be communicated visually — from Isaac’s health bar to whether or not a door is open.

The art team rose to the challenge, coming up with the Japanese subway-style signs above doors and a landmark system using the lurid advertisement posters throughout the ship. The result is something that looks a like like other stuff, but still scares you just the same. Even anachronistic things like fire extinguishers (which you’d think would have evolved a little in a hundred years) were choices made by the art team that drew you into the world and made it truly scary when you finally saw an alien.

But you wanna know what’s really scary? The they might have canceled Dead Space to make this.

The Lord of the Rings: Conquest gets $10 worth of heroes and maps with Pandemic Studios’ release of the aptly titled Heroes & Maps Pack, now available via Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network.

The Lord of the Rings: Conquest might not have gotten the best critical reception, but Pandemic isn’t letting that stop them from delivering more heroes of lore and arenas of war to their Middle-earth epic battle simulator. Available today, the Heroes & Maps Pack adds three additional heroes, two new multiplayer maps, and two hero arenas for use with the previously released Hero Arena content pack.

$9.99 or 800 Microsoft points gets you Gothmog, Boromir, and Arwen as playable hero characters, the lava fields of the Battle of the Last Alliance and the forests of Amon Hen multiplayer maps, and arenas in the form of Minas Tirith and Weathertop. Whether or not that’s worth $10 of your precious, precious monies is completely up to you.

Lord of the Rings: Conquest should have been a hit. It’s an official LotR product, it’s easy to play, it’s modelled after the hugely-successful Battlefront series… but in the end, it all just kinda… fell apart.

So upon seeing the rather substantial downloadable content pack announced today – which adds a number of the biggest/baddest heroes and villains from the books/movies, along with some new levels – we can’t help but wonder whether this is the kind of stuff that should have been included on the disc, instead of nickel-and-dimed out a month after release?

Who knows. Just saying, it may have padded out the original product and made it slightly more tolerable, instead of hitting a digital marketplace and trying to appeal to customers who have long since abandoned the troubled game.

Those sticking with it, though, will be thrilled to see that this pack includes three new playable heroes (Arwen, Boromir and Gothmog) as well as two new levels (Amon Hen & Battle of the Last Alliance). The pack will be out this Thursday, and will cost 800 MS Points/$10.

Lord of the Rings: Conquest DLC Revealed [IGN]

Pandemic have released the PC system requirements for upcoming Middle Earth kill-em-all LotR: Conquest. Going by the install size and specs, looks like a straight console port. Which is OK. Means it’ll run!

From the game’s official forums:

System Requirements
===================

Lord of Lord of The Rings: Conquest™ requires at least the following:

FOR WINDOWS XP SP2 or Windows Vista
* 2.4 GHz Core Duo processor or equivalent
* 1 GB RAM
* A 256 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 3.0 – nvidia 7800 or equivelent
* The latest version of DirectX 9.0c
* A DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card
* At least 6 GB of hard drive space for installation.

See? Quite doable.

Though strangely, you can’t test it out just yet. While console owners already have a demo to play around with, there’s no love for the PC crowd, meaning you’ll have to wait a few more weeks til the game’s release to see whether Pandemic can – unlike the Battlefront ports – actually make this one look like a PC game.

Lord of the Rings: Conquest PC System Requirements [Pandemic, via Big Download]

Xbox 360 owners now get to taste the delicious flavor of large scale battles over the fate of Middle Earth as the demo for EA and Pandemic’s Lord of the Rings Conquest hits Live.

Out for the PlayStation 3 for a good week and a half now, the Lord of the Rings: Conquest demo is now available on the Xbox 360, allowing players to try out the Star Wars: Battlefront style gameplay in Tolkien’s fantastical world of Hobbits and Orcs. It’s a multiplayer demo, but since this is a Middle Earth game I’m sure they’ll keep the racial epitaphs strictly in-character.

The 1.25GB download is available right now, giving players plenty to do over the remainder of the long holiday weekend. Enjoy!

Demo: Lord of the Rings: Conquest™ Multiplayer Demo [Xbox Live's Major Nelson]

Pandemic’s attempt at Battlefrontin’ the LOTR franchise, The Lord of The Rings: Conquest, is looking rather pleasing. I suppose it shouldn’t be too surprising that bits of this trailer look so cinematic – much of the third film was essentially a really well done cut scene, after all.

Notable features here: 1) it does look a bit odd seeing Middle Earth wizards actually doing magic of the fingerzappy death ray variety 2) That Ent looks a lot more like a really angry pot plant than I remember from the films.

Hit the jump for hazy, disjointed hands-on impressions for Infinite Undisovery, Animal Crossing: City Folk, Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, Damnation, Rise of the Argonauts, Lord of the Rings: Conquest, and Mirror’s Edge.

I literally got no more than 10 minutes with each title in the Exhibition Hall and with the exception of The Conduit, I didn’t get to chat up the demo-keepers for the usual details a journalist needs to report on her games. But since most of these titles are coming out soon, already have demos available or were previewed at E3 and Leipzig only a week or so ago, 10 minutes is really all you need to get to know a game for yourself, if you’ve been following it in the news.

Above: Tabletop… meh.

I bee lined for Infinite Undiscovery first thing, since it’ll be the first thing I buy in that list of games. This action JRPG is the closest replacement Square Enix has offered me to replace Kingdom Hearts, and while I could deal with the lack of Disney, I’m not sure I could deal with the art design. Like Lost Odyssey, everything was proportional and colours were muted for a more realistic-looking experience – to me, it seemed ugly, but we were only playing in two areas that weren’t very well-lit (caves and stuff). The combat served me well enough – button mashing is what I expect when someone says “action” RPG. I sort of liked that you could be strategic when it came to setting up your primary party and your secondary party, and even a third party to have in reserve – but then I realised all of these characters were onscreen with me as I ran off to locate hidden energy crystals. Talk about crowded! At least Goofy and Donald weren’t so far up Sora’s arse, you couldn’t see the boss.

Despite not being able to see the demo boss, I took him out in short order (the save featured over-leveled characters, huzzah!) and gave up the controller to the girl in line behind me.

Above: You catch more bees with honey… and more gamers with food.

Then it was on to Animal Crossing: City Folk, but that was only because the line for Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World was longer. Animal Crossing: City Folk looked like it was directly imported from the GameCube Animal Crossing, with a larger town area to run around in and different NPCs. I was the most fugly-looking little boy with a beanie and I spent most of my time in the demo, running around and trying to find my house so I could empty my pockets. Failing that, I just settled for dropping cherries, fossils and decorative end tables to make enough room in my inventory to put my watering can away.

Then the line for Symphonia abruptly got shorter, so I made my move. However, the guy ahead of me got his hands on the controls and played Dawn of the New World for a solid 23 minutes straight. Other people gathered around me, fidgeting, wondering when this guy would give it up – but nobody wanted to be the asshole who asked for a turn. So I watched him play and marveled that he couldn’t seem to get the motion controls to work. How hard could it be to point the cursor at the flower and press A to trigger the flower bridge? He kept getting attacked from behind as he struggled, and most of the battles he spent mashing on the artes button to send his character into aerial attacks. Dude didn’t even bother to change his elements the way Nintendo Power says you’re supposed to…

Finally, I got my turn and wandered around the world map, trying to trigger the flower bridges. But the motion controls sucked and I found myself piddling around just as much as the guy ahead of me had. The only difference was I gave up after only 10 minutes instead of making the poor bastards behind me wait another half hour.

In disgust, I wandered over towards the back of the Exhibition Hall, maybe to get another look at the Pink Godzilla store, but I got turned around and wound up getting my hands on Damnation – since there wasn’t a line. I’d read a little bit about the game and knew that it was supposed to be this big, open-world adventure that featured acrobatic-type stunts and stuff. But I hadn’t read anything about cowboys, so I was surprised to see myself playing as one – gun slinging some far-off enemy I couldn’t figure out how to target (yeah, yeah, I don’t do shooters, so kill me). A small cluster of 12-year-olds formed behind me and one of them told me to use my “spirit vision” to target the sniper I was having trouble hitting. When I couldn’t figure out how to do it, I handed over the controller and watched to see what he would do – but I’d left him in a bad place and the sniper took him out three seconds later.

Above: Mountain of Pink Godzillas!

I wandered away before the demo level restarted and found myself staring at Rise of the Argonauts. And my only question is: how have I not heard of this game before? I’m totally down with mythology and I even suffered through God of War and God of War II just because I get a fangirl’s thrill of watching Zeus interact with Hera (it’s like the original soap opera). The game is still in early days yet, so the graphics were a bit chunky and the frame-rate was crap – but it played pretty well as far as movement. The environments were rich with detail and the cartoon-ish style of the characters totally worked for me; so I was really loath to give up the controller after only 10 minutes. But I didn’t want to be a dick and there were a lot more games to play.

Later, I felt bad because I realised I hadn’t actually experienced any combat in Rise of the Argonauts – I just ran around a hallway and made slaves open doors for me. But when I went back for a second bite at the apple, the line had suddenly swelled to ten people (I guess that E3 Game of the Year Nominee sticker above the demo table got some attention). However, it turned out man friend had played through the demo from the start and he filled me in on what I missed later.

Apparently, this game is ultra-violent between light attacks and execution moves. “Like Ninja Gaiden II?” I asked. “No,” he said. “Like Conan – except all the animations are canned.” He totally dug the big arse mace, the big arse shield, the big arse spear and the smaller-arse sword. You can switch weapons in the middle of the combo, so if you start out hacking someone with a sword, you can finish by pulling out the mace and caving in a guy’s skull. “It’s a pretty big deal,” said man friend. The combos didn’t feel really fluid to him, but we agreed that that had more to do with the game being in early development stages as opposed to the game potentially sucking.

Oddly enough, man friend was sold on the deep-looking advancement system. I had Googled the game for info about the god-based affiliations, but he was talking about aspects related to astronomy. Whatever that means. I don’t care, because I’m totally going to get this game just based on my 10 minutes with it – never mind man friend’s experience.

Next up was Lord of the Rings: Conquest – and that’s only because Mirror’s Edge had a line out to next week. My man friend volunteered to start waiting while I wandered off, and the closest console available was where I wound up. There wasn’t much of a wait
to play Conquest – I assume because everyone’s already seen it. Even I’d already seen it at EA’s last Showcase event; and not much has changed between then and now – it’s still a Star Wars: Battlefront-style of action game where you can get by with button mashing. It’s pretty, though.

Man friend stood on tiptoe and waved me over to him. I dashed, thinking he’d gotten his chance at Mirror’s Edge, but it turned out he just wanted to vent. Some Parkour expert had cut ahead of everyone in line and was being given the royal treatment by the demo handler. The guy right behind Parkour dude got a consolation shirt, but the rest of the the jilted line-waiters had to suffer.

“It’s because of his shoes,” I consoled my man friend, staring at the funky-toed footwear the Parkour guy was sporting. It certainly wasn’t because this guy was good with games – he died like half a dozen times. To be fair, the demo level started you off with a pretty serious jump and if you botched it, down you went. But after that, he was getting shot because he wasn’t running up stairs fast enough to get away and he kept over-balancing on the part where you’ve got to walk across a cable stretched between buildings.

“Why is everything red?” Parkour guy demanded. Clearly, he hadn’t read up on the game… Then the PS3 overheated and I thought he’d give up and go away. But the demo handler – anxious to please – restarted the demo for him and ran through the level to get back to the point where he’d left off.

I checked my watch. It’d been more than half an hour with just this one guy!

Finally, he finished the level and the line moved up. At long last, we got our turn with the game and I let man friend take it since he’d been a dear about waiting in line. Man friend says the controls were a lot simpler than he thought they’d be. He was really impressed by the sense of moment and speed – the faster you went, the better it felt. And the combat was very minimal, which fit in with the rest of the game. He disarmed at least three guys and stole their guns – but “it didn’t feel right” so he threw each firearm away and kept running. He also didn’t really use the “bullet time” feature because it made the free-running feel less fluid (even if it did make disarm moves look cooler). The little touches impressed him the most – the multiple paths through environments, the way Faith touched the wall before rounding corners. I thought it was kind of dumb that you had to punch open doors, but he didn’t seem to mind.

My favourite part? The dot they added to the middle of the screen to reduce motion sickness. Seriously – a life-saver.

Man friend finished the level in 10 minutes and I pried him away from the console, stressing my etiquette about not taking too much time. I felt like I had been pretty efficient with the whole day, but when I check my watch again, I realised three hours had gone by and I hadn’t even seen half the games on the floor.

And that’s why I’m glad Crecente had his magic yellow badge and that I had three friends with me at the convention. Because there is no way one PAX-goer could ever do it this year all without some way to cut in line or some way to be in four places at once.

Stupid Parkour guy…*mutter, mutter*