The Saboteur

EA's PC subscription service Origin Access just received three new games in its vault: Furi, Aragami, and The Saboteur.

Some of the key developers behind the first two Star Wars: Battlefront games and the Mercenaries series have announced their new project, a Facebook title called CelebrityMe.

The Atari 2600 is going back on sale!

When I first heard that someone was making a game set in occupied Paris, casting the player as a member of the French resistance, my imagination ran away with me. Like everyone else I've played a lot of World War II videogames, and I'm sick of brainlessly shooting Nazis.

The arrival of 2010 brings us into year three of Eurogamer's cross-platform development coverage, and with it the arrival of a brand new release that defies analysis. It's full 720p. It's a rock-solid 60 frames per second. It's literally the same game on both platforms. A great way to kick off the New Year.

Joining this new title are five other releases subjected to the rigorous Digital Foundry analysis. As per the norm, this feature is accompanied by an enormous mountain of bonus assets for you to check out for yourself.

Shots derived from lossless 24-bit dumps of the HDMI ports of the Xbox 360 and PS3, high-quality h264 videos, and of course our exclusive support for 1080p screengrabs (where the game offers it on PS3). In truth, I was close to binning this particular layer of support within the Face-Offs, but the fact that five of the six titles covered this month feature 1080p upscaling suggests the format might well be getting a second wind, so the coverage continues for now.

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EA has issued a beta patch for the PC version of The Saboteur in the hope of alleviating some of the problems encountered by players following the game's release earlier this month.

The readme notes for the patch, released on Friday, claim that it "no longer freezes during play" on systems with ATI 3000, 4000 or 5000 series graphics cards running Windows Vista or Windows 7 in 32-bit or 64-bit configurations, which gives you an idea of the scope of the original trouble.

However, the publisher is still advising those of us with quad-core CPUs to disable a couple of processors in order to avoid "streaming glitches". You can do this by following instructions in the readme, although it's "not a full proof fix" [sic].

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The PC version of stealthy openworld World War II game The Saboteur does not work with ATI graphics cards. At all.

Update: This morning, Christer Ericson, director of tools and technology at Sony Santa Monica and part of the hugely respected God of War team, got in touch to set us straight on the technical background to the effect seen in The Saboteur. Christer's knowledge on this subject obviously far outstrips our own and he took issue with several points in yesterday's article, which you can still read in full below this update.

Better the Devlin you know.

Apologies for mangling a quote I can only half remember, but I'm pretty sure someone clever once said the true appeal of fascism is largely aesthetic. That's a fairly depressing notion: the 'philosophy' that reduced so much of Europe to a crumbling cinder was, at least in part, born from Hitler being crazy enough to have an idea about how the world should actually look.

It's also a theme that gives The Saboteur its one big idea. Pandemic's final game stages the fight for the soul of occupied Paris primarily as a battle between different fashion houses, pitting the nasty militaristic chic of the National Socialists against Sean Devlin - a man clad in rustic hues who appears to have been kitted out by the Edinburgh Woollen Mill.

At the start of the game Paris is beautiful, swathed in stylish black and white and shot through with the blood red flags and banners of the Nazi party. By the end the city of light is just a big brown blur: far, far uglier, yet presumably now free of the deadly elegance of the Jackboot.

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Footage from what appears to be Pandemic's canned multiplayer Mercenaries game has leaked onto the internet.

Pandemic's stealth-action creeps closer.

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Out in early December.

Deep in the Los Angeles branch of Electronic Arts there is an office where developers fear to tread. And in that dark, fearful room sits EA's vice president of in-game boob representation. It was here that Pandemic must have been ushered when Saboteur was in the planning stages. They would have sat in front of this impassive and unreadable man, and explained what they wanted to do. Create five square kilometres of Nazi-occupied France, rewrite history so that an Irish racing driver kick-started the Gallic resistance, adopt a beautiful art design in which German occupied areas are rendered in black and white with patches of primary colour shining through in vibrant Sin City style... all the good stuff. Then the vice president of in-game boob representation would have lent heavily on his desk, rested his chin on his hands, and shut his eyes as he made his decision. "Your game..." he'd begin, pausing for dramatic effect. "... must have boobs." As so it was decreed, and as so it became form.

Cheeky.

Well, it's that time again - more top quality titles have been announced for the Eurogamer Expo and, like some kind of cross between Gareth Barry and an BidUp TV infomercial, we're passing the facts on to you with unerring accuracy.

Electronic Arts has announced that open-world action game The Saboteur will be released on 4th December.

The Saboteur sees you taking on the role of Sean Devlin, an Irish race car driver who misses the last ferry home and ends up trapped in Nazi-occupied France. You'll get to explore 1940s Paris as you derail trains, blow up zeppelins and generally f*** with the Nazis' s***.

Combat involves powerful weapons and good old fashioned fisticuffs, there's a unique film noire style to the visuals and the plot involves some nonsense about revenge. The Saboteur is coming to PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 and you can find out more about it over on the gamepage.

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360 and PS3 images.

"We didn't want to make a World War II game," says Tom French, lead designer on The Saboteur. Things don't appear to have gone according to plan. The Saboteur is set in the early 1940s, in France, and is mainly about killing Nazis. If they meant to deliver a tennis game or an an innovative new twist on the Cooking Mama genre, a rethink may be required.

A new website for Pandemic's attractive war game Saboteur has appeared. There are pictures to look at and some scene-setting text to read.

Remember Saboteur, the World War II-themed game from Pandemic that was announced 18 months ago? Well, it's been delayed.

Between 1983 and 1987, Durell Software produced a handful of games which could compete with the best their fellow 8-bit publishers had to offer. Largely remembered for the big-selling Falklands tie-in, Harrier Attack, Durell also tried their hand at more outlandish projects - such as the superbly named Fat Worm Blows A Sparky. In the middle of this mainstream weirdness was Saboteur's early stab at the stealth genre; though one which relied heavily on traditional arcade elements.

The player is cast as a pyjama clad ninja, who must infiltrate a business complex, make off with a data disk and then scarper in a chopper. Rather charmingly, this disk is a 5.25", so you're presumably stealing a copy of Granny's Garden for the BBC Micro.

Blocking the way to this primary school classic are a selection of guards, automated weapons, angry mutts and (on higher skill levels) strategically placed doors. Luckily, having studied hard at ninja camp, our sneaky fella has an array of nifty moves at his disposal. Security forces can be immobilised with a punch or flying kick, whilst dogs and ceiling-lasers tend to require some nimble dodging. Some careless person has also left a selection of weapons lying around, which it would be rude not to take advantage of. Where else will you get the chance to dispatch a persistent pooch with a hand grenade?

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Pandemic Studios has been leaking top secret information about it's next-gen WWII stealth action title, which puts you in the role of a saboteur for the French resistance.

Pandemic is working on a stealth action game (wait wait, stay here) set during World War II (seriously - don't wander off), which sees you working as a saboteur in the French resistance. (See?)