Futurebrighter is a FPP action shooter game taking place on unknown frontiers of a distant univers. The player takes the role of a convicted anti-hero Alex Carver, who performs various missions challenging both reflex and tactical skills. There will be an opportunity to execute missions in few different environmental locations, such as interstellar prison ship and surface of mystery planet ruled by demagoging dicatator. Very often a success of a mission will depend on tactics, reflex and use of enemy premises and vehicles.

Taking the role of a convict Alex Carver, the player is armed with a massive arsenal including pistols, sniper rifles, machine guns, plasma rifles and rocket launchers. Our hero is also given Implants, which can improve character's parameters (like accuracy, health, or speed), and Equipment, which includes flashlights, radar, sonar, med-kits, drugs (stimulators), various explosives & grenades, and other non-firing weapons, which can be used during missions.

The Freeway
New to the Grand Theft Auto experience are the twisting freeways that will serve as your rapid conduit through and around the city, as well to San Andreas' other major cities of San Fierro and Las Venturas. If nothing else, the Los Santos freeway will be a welcome timesaver--local street traffic can often delay your trip from one place to another. If you're trying to get somewhere in a hurry (and what street thug isn't), the freeways will be the way to go. In case you were wondering, Rockstar assures us the traffic on Los Santos' freeways will never be as bad as the standstills you see on those of the real Los Angeles.

Unlike in previous Grand Theft Auto games, if you do keep to the city streets, you'll get a little extra navigating help in the form of street signs that you can use to locate buildings by their actual addresses. Unlike in the cities Liberty and Vice, Los Santos' streets actually have names, and you'll need to pay close attention to names and intersections if you want to really learn your way around the place.

Clearly, Los Santos is a big place, and a seedy one as well. How will you blend in with the locals and find your place in the criminal hierarchy? Read on to find out one way you'll be able to carve out your own identity in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

Moderator: Do you think that there will ever be a substitute for face-to-face, pen and paper role-playing?

Dan Ogles: Not until we successfully get artificial intelligence that can compete with the human brain. And that won't be anytime soon.

Pete MacDonald: I hope not. Like my daddy always said: "If it ain't broke don't substitute it with ... something else ... not broken." But I do I hope online gaming will replace sitcoms and reality shows.

Dave Eckelberry: All depends on your definition of substitute. For me, nothing will take the place of sitting down with friends face-to-face, killing a dragon, and eating a pizza. On the other hand, there are more people playing online fantasy games right now than playing pen and paper RPGs.

Ed Stark: Substitute? No. Complement? Yes. I think that technology will continue to advance so that player and DM interaction through a computer will become easier and more dynamic until people who can't play in the same room can share almost the same experience over the Internet. We aren't there yet -- we still need to rely on the computer's intelligence and preprogrammed responses to run our games quickly -- but I think we're taking steps in that direction. I'd like to see a game experience where the computer does all the "hard" or "slow" stuff for the DM and the DM and the players are left having all the fun.

EA has listened to the feedback of critics and consumers who have played an early build of Medal of Honor Pacific Assault; their high expectations encouraged us to add some extra time to the development schedule in order to add new features and an extra coat of polish to the game. Medal of Honor Pacific Assault will now ship in November of this year. Be sure to check the official site for more information as it becomes available.

GS: What impact do you hope Psychonauts makes on game players?

TS: I hope it changes people's expectations for games, especially regarding originality and story. People say players don't want story in games, but I think that's because what they've gotten so far is bad story. I hope to give them good story so they realize that they can enjoy it!

Also, creatively speaking, we're really going for it with this game; I mean we are not trying to be timid. We're putting the crazy stuff in there. And I hope that inspires other developers to do likewise, to make their games more unique and personal to themselves, so that we get more variety in games. I'm tired of seeing games that look like they could have been developed by any studio, anywhere. When Psychonauts comes out, I want people to say, "Man, only Double Fine could have made that game." And really, I want it to be that way for all games and all studios. I have a dream, GameSpot, I have a dream.

While the single-player experience should allow for dozens of hours of gameplay alone, Obsidian is keeping true to the vision of the original and making sure that the multiplayer experience is just as deep and refined. They're even looking into ways to add to the multiplayer side of the game. "A lot of what we're looking at is what some of the MMOs are doing now and how to incorporate the good points of that into the online experience," Darren told us. "The best way to describe it is a micro-MMO idea. There are a lot of Neverwinter players who have persistent world servers up now, and we're looking at these guys and seeing that they've built some pretty interesting stuff. These guys are running four or five servers that you can play across -- how do we make it so the community can set this up in an easy way?" However, just because Obsidian is looking toward massively-multi player games for some inspiration, the multiplayer experience in Neverwinter Nights 2 will not require a monthly fee to play as the servers are set up by players instead of having central servers for the game.

"Strategy First" has accepted design documentation for the game, so we have contacted with Yaroslav Astakhov - head of the developers team and he has provided some details:

- The size of game locations will be 200x200 meters. You cannot destroy walls, but furniture and doors will be destroyable.
- There will be multy-storey buildings
- You can freely rotate camera or switch to one of several fixed positions.
- The story takes place in Africa in 1990-s
- Character development and combat mechanics will be exactly the same as in original game (weapon improvement possibilities will also remain).
- There's no final decision on looting yet - whether dead enemies will retain all their equipment or not.
- Character inventory will remain the same as in original game, but will be hidden until opened, as well as character screen.
- Actual work will be started in september, and release date will be announced later.