Mafia II is a gritty drama which chronicles the rise of World War II Veteran Vito Scaletta, the son of Sicilian immigrants. As the game progresses, Vito will join a crime family and become a made man.

The story begins with the player character Vito returning home on leave from World War II. Vito had joined the U.S. military as a way of avoiding jail time for a botched robbery. He then discovers that his father died and left his family $2000 in debt. Vito reunites with his old friend, Joe Barbaro, and the two quickly embark upon a life of crime. Their criminal ascension starts with Mikey, a car mechanic who gets in a conflict with Joe. Mikey also needs a certain type of car to chop for parts, and will pay $400 for one that the police are not tailing. Soon enough, Vito, Joe, and Henry Tomasino (already a made man in the Clemente family) find themselves battling with, for, against, and around three crime factions: the Falcone, Vinci and Clemente families. The player is later introduced to Eddie Scarpa (a capo in the Falcone crime family).[13] Another character is Marty, a young, novice getaway driver who takes Vito and Joe to the Empire Arms hotel in the mission "Room Service" involving the assassination of the Clemente family’s don.

The game will contain two hours of in-game cutscenes. The original game, Mafia: The City of Lost Heaven, had a screenplay of 400 pages, opposed to the 700 pages of the sequel. Daniel Vávra, the writer and director of the original and the sequel, discussed the new angle of the game stating: "The old game was a tribute to gangster films, a romantic vision. Mafia II is grittier, real, a darker world, and the effects are based in reality." Official PlayStation Magazine states: "A high body count is still promised in this tale set in a fictional city ‘inspired by’ New York of the 1940s and ’50s, but those casualties will come the hard way — through small-scale operations rather than mass firefights."

Vito will also be able to pay for food and drinks, such as coffee, pie and various dishes to replenish health or stamina.

Transformers: War for Cybertron is an upcoming third-person shooter video game developed by High Moon Studios and published by Activision. It is scheduled to be released on June 22, 2010 for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PC. Two portable versions will be released for the Nintendo DS. A game for the Nintendo Wii called Transformers: Cybertron Adventures is being developed by Next Level Games and utilizes the same characters and setting as War for Cybertron. Hasbro also has a toy line releasing in 2010 based on War for Cybertron. The multiplayer demo was released on June 10, 2010 onto the Xbox Live Marketplace and is an Xbox 360 exclusive and allows players to experience either "Soldier" or "Scout" class warriors.

Transformers: War for Cybertron is a third person shooter that takes place prior to the original Transformers animated series, when the Transformers still lived on the fictional machine planet Cybertron. The game has two distinct campaigns, one for each faction. The story of the Decepticon campaign is a prelude to the Autobot campaign’s story. Both campaigns can be played in single-player or cooperatively via online multiplayer, and can drop in or out of the game at any time.[2] Each campaign level features three playable Transformers. If fewer than three players are present, the game’s AI controls the remaining playable characters.[2]
[edit] Multiplayer

War for Cybertron has several multiplayer modes to choose from. "Escalation" is a mode for exclusive pre-order characters and characters unlocked during the campaign. Non-stop waves of robots attack until the player(s) are defeated, similar to Gears of War "Horde" mode. Players are also able to spend points earned from defeated enemies on health, ammo, new weapons and unlocking new areas in the map. "Deathmatch" is a free-for-all game type where the player with the most kills at the end of the game is the winner. In "Team Deathmatch" players are divided into Autobot and Decepticon teams.[2] The winning team is the one who earns the most kills. "Conquest" is a capture-and-hold style game, similar to the conquest mode found in the Star Wars Battlefront series.[2] In "Countdown to Extinction" players must take an active bomb and place it at an enemy base, similar to the Assault mode in the Halo series. "Power Struggle" is the game’s equivalent to the common Capture the Flag game type. Finally "Code of Power" is a mode consisting of two and a half minute rounds where teams vie for a giant melee weapon.

Competitive multiplayer games do not allow use of canon Transformers. Players must create their own Transformer based on the class they wish to play which determines their vehicle form. They may then choose a specific look for that form, and customize the color scheme, weaponry and abilities they take into battle. Classes include a "Leader" class, a "Soldier" class, a "Scientist" class, and a "Scout" class, each with unique abilities, vehicular transformation, and weapon loadouts. Scouts are cars, Leaders are trucks, Scientists are jets and Soldiers are tanks. The multiplayer aspect also features a experience and leveling up system, including perks, and upgrades.[2]

Plot

Alan Wake, a bestselling crime fiction author who hasn’t managed to write anything in over two years, and his wife, Alice, go to the idyllic small town of Bright Falls to recover his creative flow. They are greeted by the friendly townsfolk before driving to their house in the middle of Cauldron Lake. After an altercation with Alice, Alan leaves the house, knowing that she will not follow him as she has a fear of the dark. Upon hearing screaming, Alan runs back into the house only to find that Alice has fallen into the lake. He dives in after her. Suddenly, Alan wakes up in a car, his head bleeding. He heads towards the nearest gas station after being attacked by the Taken, people from Bright Falls that have been taken over by the Dark Presence. When he arrives, by seeing a festival advertisement he realizes it’s been a week since he jumped in the lake after Alice. He calls for the police, and when he says that his wife is missing and they lived in the house on Cauldron Lake, Sheriff Sarah Breaker informs him that there is no house in Cauldron Lake, not since the 1970s. They drive past it and, much to Alan’s horror, she’s right.

After being interrogated by the Sheriff and meeting his agent Barry, who arrived after not receiving any response from Alan’s phone, Alan receives a call from a kidnapper who shows he has Alice by her speaking over the phone, saying to meet him at Lover’s Peak in Elderwood National Park. He gets keys to a house in the park with Barry, and sets out to meet him while Barry stays in the house. On the way Alan finds Rusty, the kind Ranger whom he met earlier at the diner and gave him keys to the house, badly wounded after being attacked by the Taken. He gives Alan a piece of paper: A page of a manuscript to a story with his name on it that he cannot remember writing, and everything that it says is coming true. After being forced to kill the possessed Rusty, he continues down the Lover’s Peak and finds the kidnapper. After holding off the Taken at Lover’s Peak, the two get into a scuffle and end up falling off the edge of a cliff, though neither are injured. Alan receives a call from Barry, who says all the lights have gone out in the house. On his way back, the kidnapper says he has two days to give him the entirety of the manuscript at the old coal mine, or his wife dies. After Alan saves Barry they decide to head in town the next morning to see if anyone knows someone fitting the kidnapper’s description. Barry while in town gets a call from Rose, a waitress who is a die-hard fan of Alan’s books. She says that she has the entirety of the manuscript. But when she makes the call, a woman in black behind her, a possible manifestation of the Dark Presence, says "Good girl".

Both Alan and Barry go to Rose’s trailer during the day to get their hands on the manuscript. But when they arrive, they both fall unconscious after drinking Rose’s coffee, filled with crushed sleeping pills. When Alan wakes up (by this time a day had passed so he only had another 12 or so hours to find the manuscript) after a vision involving the manifestation, with Barry still unconscious, he finds the police waiting for him: The owner of the trailer park thought that Barry and Alan did something as Rose was very different when they woke up. For no reason, an FBI agent, Nightingale, begins to open fire on Alan, who is forced to flee into the woods. Alan heads to the local radio station for help, but Nightingale turns up and opens fire yet again, so Alan flees once more. He finds a car by sunrise and begins to head to the coal mine. He arrives on time and waits for the kidnapper to turn up late into the evening, but he never shows up. He gets a call from the kidnapper telling him to find him in the woods, and when he does the kidnapper reveals that he never had his wife before being engulfed by a tornado of the Dark Presence. Grabbing a flare before the Dark Presence can finish him off, Alan falls off the cliff and is saved by someone.

He wakes up in the Cauldron Lake Lodge, which was a hotel and now runs as a mental institute for ‘artists’, lead by Dr. Hartman. He says that his wife died and all of the events that have transpired were figments of his imagination. Alan refuses to believe him, and as night began to fall two other patients, the Andersons (former rock stars of the 1970s), begin to cause havoc in the institute. In all the chaos, Alan manages to get the keys to the Staff Room and, along with Barry who came to visit him, finds most of the manuscript. Dr. Hartman finds him and asks to work together on ‘this’, saying they can make something beautiful. The Dark Presence begins to engulf the Lodge, and Alan leaves Dr. Hartman to die. He begins to realize that the Andersons understand what is going on, and so heads to their farm along with Barry. When they arrive at the farm they find out a hidden message is on an old record that says "Find the Lady of the Light": They then remember a woman, Cynthia Weaver, who was clutching a lantern in the diner Alan visited upon arriving in Bright Falls. In the morning they agree to head into town to find her. After having some moonshine (which uses water from Cauldron Lake as one of the main ingredients) with Barry, he has a vision. Alan begins to remember exactly what happened during that week.

When he jumped in to save Alice, he could not find her and thought she had drowned. He broke down crying on the dock before heading back into the house. The Dark Presence, in the form of Barbara Jagger, wife of a writer from the 1970s who was the Dark Presence’s last puppet, tells Alan to start writing a story, saying that the story will come to life and he can write Alice back into existence; The Dark Presence lets people write stories in Cauldron Lake then heavily edits them, so its influence can spread throughout the land. After writing for a week, some part of Alan realized he was under the Dark Presence’s control, and wrote his own escape into the story. As he ran, Tom Zane, the writer from the 1970s, distracted the Dark Presence as he got into the car, but he was too tired and crashed the car, thus concluding what happened during that week.

Alan wakes up and is greeted by Agent Nightingale at gunpoint, who takes him and Barry to their cells. When there is a sudden power outage, both the Sheriff and Nightingale come to watch over them, but as Nightingale reaches into his pocket to check a page, the Dark Presence takes him away. The Sheriff frees them, and they explain they need to find Cynthia. The Sheriff says she lives in the old power station. All three of them reach a helicopter and fly over there. However, on the way there is a disturbance, and so Alan is forced to jump while the Sheriff and Barry remain in the helicopter, providing support against the Taken on occasion. When Alan finds Cynthia, she tells him to go to the Well-Lit Room, and so Alan, Barry, Cynthia and the Sheriff all meet there. Alan finds a page from Tom, and mentions a ‘clicker’, a snapped-off light switch that Alan was given by his mother, that turns on a magical light and gets rid of all the darkness. At this moment, Alan knew exactly what he needed to do: He needed to go to Cauldron Lake and use the clicker to save Alice and the town of Bright Falls.

Alan begins to drive to Cauldron Lake, telling Barry, Cynthia and the Sheriff to stay in the Well-Lit Room as this is something he must do alone. After several encounters with large groups of the Taken and possessed objects, he reaches the lake, diving in and pressing the clicker. He ends up in a world filled with darkness, and as he illuminated pieces of giant text they began to form the house that disappeared. When the house reappeared fully, he heard the Dark Presence talking and Alice screaming for help. When Alan heads into the house, he sees the Dark Presence in front of him, a hole in her heart from Tom’s attempt in the 1970s to kill her. He grabs her, puts his hand in her heart and clicks the clicker. The light fills her body, coming out of her eyes and mouth before the house is engulfed by light as well. Alan then walks to the typewriter in his study (with dark shadows still at his windows) and starts writing, saying that he knows how to write the ending and that the scales need to balance: Everything has a price.

The ending is ambiguous and is left to interpretation. A flashback of Alan jumping in the lake to save Alice occurs, after which a time lapse which seems to be going backwards happens. Alice is then shown swimming out of the lake and sitting on the dock, calling out "Alan?", with the house still gone and Alan nowhere in sight. Bright Falls is shown prospering in the middle of its yearly celebration, Deerfest (which was two weeks away when Alan and Alice arrived), with Rose clutching the same lantern Cynthia, the Lady of the Light held. Rose’s eyes swirl with shadows and a dark, shadowy Nightingale is seen standing in the window behind her. Alan is then seen at his typewriter again, the shadows still at his study’s windows. He then says "It’s not a lake… It’s an ocean."

Alice is heard saying "Alan, wake up." before the game ends.

The next instalment in the popular action series returns in Lost Planet 2. Lost Planet®: Extreme Condition, the landmark third-person shooter that debuted on Xbox 360, went on to sell over 2.2 million units worldwide after its release. Lost Planet 2, will offer deeper insight into the world of E.D.N III and the uncertain fate of future mankind. A decade has passed since the first game, and the face of E.D.N. III has changed dramatically. Terraforming efforts have been successful and the ice has begun to melt, giving way to lush tropical jungles and harsh unforgiving deserts. You will enter this new environment and follow the exploits of your own customized snow pirate on their quest to seize control of the changing planet. You will control your heroes across 6 interconnected episodes, creating a truly unique interactive experience that changes depending upon your actions. With this concept, you will have the opportunity to engage in the story in a much more dynamic way as plot threads evolve from different players’ perspectives. Beyond the deep single player mode, Lost Planet 2 is loaded with extensive multiplayer modes. The intense and action packed campaign mode comes with the ability to form teams of up to 4 players online to clear mission objectives with friends. The grappling hooks that made the gameplay in Lost Planet a true 3-D experience are back, allowing gamers to gain tactical advantage by quickly scaling buildings. No action game would be complete without an arsenal of weaponry, and Lost Planet 2 has a huge variety of hardware for you to unleash on unsuspecting enemies. Machine guns, shotguns, rocket launchers, lasers, sniper rifles, grenades and a host of other weapons are scattered across the game. However, Lost Planet 2’s biggest weapons come on two legs: the heavily armed and armored robotic Vital Suits return in greater numbers and variety than the first game. There are VS that transform into other vehicles, hold up to three players and some that even take multiple players to operate.