Says Mathew Everett, the Pandemic Community Manager, in a message on Saturday afternoon:

I am very proud to communicate today that The Saboteur has officially gone “GOLD” on all 3 planned platforms (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 & PC). This has been a very difficult week for Pandemic Studios, but does not change the fact that a team of amazing people worked very hard to make The Saboteur a great game that fans will be able to enjoy this holiday season. As planned, The Saboteur will be available across Europe starting December 4 and throughout North America on December 8. Vive La Resistance!

It’s another batch of screenshots for Pandemic’s The Saboteur, featuring protagonist Sean Devlin doing things other than wading through the seedy underbelly of World War II’s burlesque scene. Marvel as he blows up a blimp! See him climbing a thing! Behold — he’s totally talking to that one guy!

Yes, we’ve posted a couple of these screens before, with the E3 trailer that first took us outside the Belle De Nuit, and we pointed out that the video was a whole lot tamer than the screens were. EA explained that the ESRB was rather strict about video, which is probably why the women in this little club walkthrough are wearing much more than their screenshot counterparts as well, making it seem less like a seedy dive and more like the bar from Cheers, only in World War II France.

That shot of Sean in his race car is probably the most colour I’ve seen in any one screenshot for Pandemic’s The Saboteur. It sort of gives you an idea of what you’re fighting for in the game, restoring colour and life to Paris by liberating it from Nazi occupation during World War II. Sure, it’s still just a next-gen de Blob, but there isn’t anything wrong with that.

Back in January, while researching what happened to Pandemic’s ill-fated Batman game based on The Dark Knight, we heard about something called “The Next Big Thing”. Our sources told us it was an ambitious open world game for the Wii. They said it was “impressive”.

Australian Gamer has dug up a trailer for this “Next Big Thing”, an open world game where your Mii transforms into a Hollywood celebrity/stuntman. It looks like there’s a lot of customisation of both your character and also the world as your stardom grows. It also appears to be some sort of strange open world mini-game collection hybrid going under the working title of “No Limits Racing”. And features a guest appearance by none other than Mr. T.

It’s also, sadly, unlikely to ever be released.

Do you think it looks “impressive”?

Pandemic’s Next Big Thing [Australian Gamer]

Saboteur protagonist Sean Devlin may have been inspired by real-life Grand Prix motor racing driver and special agent William Grover-Williams, but Grover-Williams look didn’t quite fit what Pandemic was looking for in terms of a rugged, good-looking main character. Lead designer Tom French and Hunt explored the difficulty they had finding the right look for Sean Devlin during their “Rethinking The WWII Gaming Genre” panel at the San Diego Comic-Con this weekend.

After the original concept of Tom French wailing on an electric guitar was vetoed, the team tried for something a bit more period appropriate. A nice look, but it was a bit too fragile for their liking.

Then, inspiration struck. Chris Hunt found their hero at a concept artist convention, but it wasn’t a piece of art that caught his eye. It was this guy:

“Then we ran into this guy. He had the hat, he had the hair… even him walking around… he was the embodiment of what we wanted, so we approached him, got permission to use his likeness, and now we had the hero we were looking for.”

The moral of this story? Always wear a kick-ass hat. You never know when you’ll be asked to be the main character in a video game.

December is generally a bad month to release video games, but this year could be could be an exception. With a great many of the big titles we were expecting in the fall being pushed to 2010, The Saboteur’s newly-announced December release date shouldn’t be much of a problem for the eagerly anticipated title. After all, it does have that lovely colourising the world game mechanic going for it, as well as its unique tone and setting. Plus, nothing warms you up on a cold winter evening like a visit to a 1940s Paris brothel.

The Saboteur ships worldwide for the Xbox 360, PC, and PlayStation 3 on December 8th. For an early look at the game, stop by EA’s San Diego Comic-Con booth this week to put the game through its paces.

Novelty is not a predictor of quality. So, really, who knows how good EA’s holiday game The Saboteur will be any good. I haven’t played it.

But, until earlier this week, I didn’t really understand The Saboteur either. The game’s lead designer from EA’s Pandemic Studios, Tom French, remedied that by spending about 20 minutes demonstrating the game in a rented New York City nightclub earlier this week. And while I can’t say whether the game will veer toward unusual-good or unusual-bad, I can at least report that The Saboteur is rightly described as not just another World War II game.

The game is open-world and sits, in terms of graphics, somewhere between the Godfather IIs, Prototypes of the world and the GTA IVs, Infamouses. The hero is Sean Devlin, an Irish inspired-from-real-life, race car driver turned resistance fighter who winds up fighting Nazis throughout France in order to get revenge for a tragedy that befalls him early in the game.

The game isn’t just in Paris, stretching its adventure from Germany to the countryside, with a good amount time set up in what French described as a Disneyland-version of the famous city. It’s Disney-fied in its scale. The city is shrunken from its real-life counterpart, except for its landmarks, like the Eiffel Tower, which is built to scale.

The game world and Devlin are rendered primarily in black, white and shades of grey, with splashed of red supplied by the Swastika armbands of Nazis. The drained colour represents a low will of the locals to resist the Nazis. But some locations in those regions, like the aforementioned Parisian brothel, are rendered in colour, a sign that it is there where resistance is brewing. As missions are completed, the game is designed to restore colour to regions of Paris and the rest of the game world or to take that colour away. When colour is restored, the locals will help resist the Nazis, making a quick escape from a black-and-white area to a fully-coloured one a dash toward friendly reinforcements.

In the midst of this game are some oddities. The Nazis, for example, aren’t authentic Nazis. They are Nazis with bazookas and flamethrowers and anachronistically high-powered machine guns. Also less than obvious is the inclusion of some car races for Devlin to enter. French said one of these is aggravated by the Nazi’s attempt to expose Devlin as a resistance fighter by messing with him while he drives.

Devlin’s a good climber, can snap to cover, don disguises and wield lots of guns. So combat or stealth options are varied. He can also duck from his pursuers, French told me, by running to a urinal and using it while his enemies run by. Or… he can do the same by grabbing a nearby lady and kissing her.

One other game design quirk worth noting: French promised a persistence to the player’s interactions with the game’s open-world that is still rare for this genre. Paris contains several sniper towers and anti-aircraft gun emplacements. These can be destroyed and treated as collectibles. But some are set up where missions occur. Taking them out prior to those missions will register with the game and make those missions easier. I saw this in effect during a mission that tasked Devlin with destroying a big cannon. A sniper tower nearby was an aggravation that would have been absent had it been destroyed before the mission began. (One other Saboteur quirk: while that mission was timed as a race against the Nazis firing the cannon, the timer was eliminated when French sniped the scientist trying to fire the cannon. Then, he had all the time in the world to blow up the cannon and make his escape. That’s an optional wrinkle, not a required way to play it).

The Saboteur is one of those games that seems full of ways that it’s more different than the norm. As I wrote above, it’s hard to say whether it will come together to be special in terms of quality. But what I saw looked enjoyable and imaginative, a game that deserves attention rather than eyerolls by those who are sick of killing virtual Nazis.

The Saboteur is slated for a PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 release this holiday season.

Pandemic’s Thomas French says “…we don’t even really think of our game as a WWII game, it’s the backdrop to our game which gives us arguably the best real world bad guys of all time”.

Slightly silly, maybe, but also perfectly understandable from a marketing standpoint. I think people are just… done with the Second World War. We’ve been hit with too much of it over the past ten years, and even with fancy colour design and boobs, it’s hard getting psyched for another game where you’re killing Nazis in the 40’s.

Pandemic tells us about The Saboteur’s setting [Destructoid]

For a game as unashamed about showing female nudity as Pandemic’s The Saboteur, you’d think they wouldn’t feel the need to censor naked artwork in the E3 trailer. Let’s peek behind the blur.

As you watch the trailer, you’ll notice two things. First, the game is looking pretty damn fine. Second, there’s blur all over the place. It’s most noticeable when they pull away from the bar as Sean Devlin makes his exit. Not only do they blur out the artistic side-boob, they even give the statue atop the building a little smudge so we don’t accidentally glimpse statue crotch.

We found an uncensored screenshot of the bar in the official fansite kit of all places, and as you can see, it really isn’t a big deal.

In fact, we probably wouldn’t have thought twice about the imagery had they not felt that it needed to be blurred in the first place. It’s even more ridiculous when you look at the actual nudity that appears in the game itself, as see in this screen shot from Polish gaming site Gamikaze.

Did you see how many fish I had to use in that image? It’s like a mini-aquarium.

Come on, EA. We’re all adults here, and even those of us who aren’t can tune into television most days and see far worse than naked statues.

Oh, and “>Gamikaze has the uncensored image, if that’s your thing, though clicking that link is definitely a work no-no.