Operation Flashpoint: Red River.The US marines are, as the game delicately puts it, "balls deep" in Tajikistan.
PS3XBox 360
Operation Flashpoint Red RiverCodemasters LimitedSet on its desolate and strikingly beautiful steppe, Red River puts you in charge of a four-man team in a series of increasingly brutal firefights, first with local insurgents, then against the far better trained, equipped and numerous Chinese army. It's an experience charged with more authenticity than most, its tense, protracted engagements requiring you to marshal your time among picking off aggressive bad guys, healing your team and making sure everyone's standing in the right place. Your team's AI is sometimes guilty of rank stupidity and you'll have to watch your men running through more kilometres than you could possibly believe of totally empty countryside, but its serious battles and chatty, fly-on-the-wall styling separate it from the legion of pumped-up Call Of Duty wannabes.
Codemasters, £49.99
SOCOM: Special Forces. Previous SOCOM games have been distinguished by a leaning towards tactics and a habit of diverging into plots about mutants, aliens or zombies. Special Forces keeps its desert boots firmly on the ground, with only humans to shoot at in this tour of a generic south-east Asian revolution. Apart from occasional stealth missions, the majority of the action sees you commanding two fire teams, and although you'll end up shooting a few enemies, it's your near-unkillable super-soldiers who do most of the work, frequently spotting, targeting and killing enemies before you even realise there's anyone there. Levels are often quite open, but since you're led everywhere by rigidly-defined checkpoints, you may as well be in a corridor for all the freedom that provides. Despite moments of interest, Special Forces' lacklustre demi-thrills make it hard to muster much enthusiasm.
Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, £49.99
Nintendo's Wii should never have worked. Eschewing the games industry's decades-old scramble for technical superiority, it even did away with the joypad, a trope few even sought to question, yet in doing so managed to outsell both of the market's safer, more conventional players. But all good things come to an end, and Wii's sales have finally started to slide, which lends more credence to a persistent set of rumours regarding the announcement of a new Nintendo console. Current speculation is that it will be more powerful than Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, feature a touchscreen on its controllers and potentially be compatible with this generation's Wii games and accessories. The official word from Nintendo is expected in June at the Electronics Entertainment Expo - both players and retailers will be waiting with bated breath.
Big news from Asia’s social games industry today: Japanese mobile social gaming juggernaut GREE and mig33, a mobile community that’s especially popular in Asia, have just announced [PDF] a cooperation with the potential to change the social gaming market in the region.