XIII goes gold

Ubisoft's comic book-based first-person shooter XIII ("thirteen", rather than "ex-three") has gone gold and will be released on PC, PS2, Cube and Xbox in a peculiar order over the next month or so, starting with the PC version next week if Ubi's latest schedule is still accurate.

For those who missed all the hype, XIII is a cel-shaded first-person shooter based on a very entertaining "whodunit-cos-it-probably-wasn't-the-protagonist" comic, quite Bourne Identity-like, in which the bloke you play wakes up uncertain of who he is, under attack and accused of assassinating the president of the USA.

Although I've given XIII a hard time in the past (because the demos I played and were sent were, sorry to say, a bit crap - and the ECTS award was bizarre), having since got stuck into a more complete Xbox version I'm preparing to chew on my own words and spit out something approaching a recommendation - as despite a few hiccups (and spots of evil design) it is well bound together by an interesting plot and offers one of the best applications of cel-shading since Zelda: The Wind Waker.

I guess we shall we how it fares soon. XIII starts rolling out next week on PC, followed by PS2 and Xbox versions on November 28th and the Cube version on December 5th.