When Ubisoft captured the flag from the annals of computer gaming history to bring strategy enthusiasts the latest chapter in the Heroes of Might & Magic franchise, many were skeptical. After all, the series had already been in a slump prior to the company taking up the reigns, and would-be developer Nival Interactive’s back catalog up until that time read like an exercise in inconsistency. Even so, few could argue against Ubisoft’s track record at delivering steller game experiences, though most of that success was resigned to the console market. Could the same company that gave us Splinter Cell and resurrected Prince of Persia work that same magic on a series that traced its roots all the way back to the Apple II with 1990’s King’s Bounty?

Some would say yes, though as expected the critics were conflicted. While those of us at eToychest enjoyed the new spin on the franchise, others, such as 1UP’s Matt Peckham, were not as impressed. However, both of us, as well the lion’s share of reviewers, agreed that the game was flawed. It was just an argument as to what degree.

However, sales don’t lie, and Ubisoft and Nival soon announced an expansion. Subtitled Hammers of Fate, the expansion will broaden the scope of the original game, introducing a new faction, dwarves, which are made up of heroic warriors and rune magic adepts who stalk Ashan’s deepest mountains and most hostile regions. Hammers will also boast fifteen new missions, new heroes, improved cut-scenes, and the new campaign. All of this adds up to an array of new spells and abilities, as well as five new single-player maps, ten new multiplayer maps, new buildings, new artifacts, and new neutral creatures. Nival is introducing a lot of new meat to the game, but even with improved gameplay mechanics such as caravans and a random map generator, will it still just be more of the same?

To find out more on this, Heroes of Might and Magic V producer Fabrice Cambounet has offered up his insight into what players can expect from Hammers of Fate when it ships this November.

Of all the possible factions to add, why did you decide to add the dwarves in this expansion?

First, I think the dwarves are a race that was eagerly expected. I hope they will fulfill these expectations! They are a tradition in fantasy worlds and they couldn’t shy away from fame in Ashan. We indeed have other factions in mind but the dwarves were the logical next step in terms of history and game balance.

What are the main abilities of this new faction?

Dwarves will have a specific magic school, the rune magic. They are the only ones who can access and use it. They have runes on themselves or on their equipment. The rune mage (the dwarven hero) commanding the army can activate these runes by spending resources (not mana). So you will have to be careful of choosing the right moment to activate them and not waste resources! Runes will have various effects such as allowing a unit to attack twice or to dispel any negative spell effects.

What kinds of units will be available to the dwarven faction? Can you give us more details on 1 or 2 creatures?

Here are a few details on one nice unit, the Berserker. It’s basically a storm of flesh and armour and pointy bits. It may be a dwarf storm, but not one you would like to encounter! It’s a melee fighter with very powerful offence and immunity to mind control. They can also charge the enemy for improved damage, but at the expense of all defence.

It seems some of the dwarves will look like gigantic dwarves, is it due to gameplay or design?

One of the dwarf units is a giant dwarf indeed – ending up as quite a normal height. We are talking about the Thane, who is a clan elder, a warrior imbued with magical abilities. They actually need to be quite big if they want to be able to wield the huge axe they carry around. This axe is imbued with magical runes of thunder and his allows them to add a chain lightning effect to each of their strike or to cast once per battle a Storm Bolt attack.

Where does the add-on take place in Ashan? Will we have new environments?

Yes, from the screenshots released you see that the dwarves there are situated in a new, snowy environment. They mostly live in the mountains north of the Griffin Empire, a fact that was already guessed by the people who looked closely at the Ashan map provided in some game editions. The add-on scenario will bring you there and also underground to settle a few accounts the dwarves have with some of their neighbours.

What is the background of the dwarves? Why did they remain silent and hidden in Heroes of Might and Magic V? Who is the main opponent of the dwarves? Who is their leader?

The dwarves are led by their king, Tholgar. He was once a brave warrior but has grown complacent and is now relying on counsellors. One of them, Hangvul, leads the belief that dwarves should only care about their own problems, and thus led them to isolationism. This is also helped by the fact that they have lost contact with their god, since the death of the Haven king Alexey. Perhaps the fact that they didn’t help at the time is being punished? The ravaging civil war in the human kingdom will awaken the dwarves and also their hatred of the dark elves, which they fought in the A

In terms of racing, drifting is a term that refers to a particular driving technique wherein the car moves into and out of curves at an extreme angle, oftentimes resulting in the rear end of the car appearing as if it is chasing the front around the turn. The goal of this technique is to make the best use of the car’s speed and inertia by maneuvering around corners in such a way as to lose as little speed as possible. The concept of drifting or oversteering has been around in one form or another for decades, though it is only in recent years that the technique itself has become the central focus of an entire sport. Because of this, many video games have been built around this technique, though admittedly it wasn’t until Universal Pictures’ ‘The Fast and the Furious’ romanticized the underground racing scene that the concept of street racing and drifting truly began to take root within the mainstream video game market, most notably with Electronic Arts’ Need For Speed: Underground.

However, while that game sold well, and was generally lauded by critics, the game was panned by many players as an unwelcome departure for that franchise. Even so, its success helped open the doors for a bevy of other ‘me too’ underground and drift racing games, though few, if any have enjoyed much more than a modicum of success, if that. Namco Bandai and developer Eutechnyx hope to change that with the upcoming PlayStation 2 racer, The Fast and the Furious. Inspired by the events in the third film, ‘The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift’, the game looks to become the first mainstream drift racing hit for the console, but there is an old saying about the best laid plans.

To find out more about this upcoming title, which ships in North America on September 26, we recently spoke with the game’s associate producer, Mitch Boyer, who, along with Dan Tovar, are currently helping to bring this game to life.

Hello Mitch, and thanks for taking the time to speak with us regarding The Fast and the Furious. Could you give us some of you background on this project, as well as what other projects you have worked on prior to coming on board with this game?

Absolutely. As a production team, we are enthusiasts ourselves who track our personal cars with NASA. We have a great number of friends in the actual pro-drifting and tuning communities and have gone drifting with some of the best drifters in the world over the past few years. This has allowed us unparalleled access to the culture that the film is based upon and that comes across in the game. When we’ve shown the game to people in the actual scene, they’ve been pretty stunned at what we’ve been able to accomplish.

The Fast and the Furious is based upon the third movie in the ongoing film franchise, yet is separate from the events in the movie. So why call it ‘The Fast and the Furious’ at all?

The game is unique in that it meshes the best elements of the films with the actual scene that the films are based upon. You will have the chance to directly compare and compete with both the cars from the film as well as the most amazing real-world tuner cars in the world! You won’t get this experience anywhere else but in The Fast and the Furious.

The third film largely takes place in and around the Tokyo Bay area and we’ve extended this even farther in the game. You’ll be able to roam and race on the famous A

In 2005, Namco Bandai formally announced Warhammer: Mark of Chaos, a new PC real-time strategy game set in the renowned Warhammer fantasy world. Developed by Black Hole Entertainment, a subsidiary of Cinergi Interactive, Warhammer: Mark of Chaos is poised to recreate the popular miniatures war game, complete with its massive sense of scale, when it ships later this year. In this latest interview, we had the opportunity to speak with Chris Wren, the game’s senior producer at Namco Bandai, to get a little more insight into the game.In my geekier days, I was the proud owner of several Warhammer and Warhammer 40K armies in various stages of assembly. Truth be told, I still occasionally yearn for those days of sculpey and flock, exacto knives and acrylic paints – to say nothing of actually playing the tabletop games. However, time has a way of shoving favorite pastime into the background, and as such, my infatuation with Games Workshop’s many miniatures games set both in the far flung future and distant past have been reduced to a cardboard box in the shed, marked in bold black lettering ‘Until We Meet Again’.

Thankfully, however, there are alternative ways to satisfy my need to roll the dice, and take up weapons to turn back the tide of chaos (or Empire, given my mood). Video games have long since proven to be a viable alternative to the tabletop game, from early releases such as Gremlin Games’ Space Crusade for the Amiga in 1992 and Mindscape’s Shadow of the Horned Rat three years later, to even more recent efforts such as THQ and Relic’s fantastic Dawn of War.

And the list continues to grow. In 2005, Namco Bandai formally announced Warhammer: Mark of Chaos, a new PC real-time strategy game set in the renowned Warhammer fantasy world. Developed by Black Hole Entertainment, a subsidiary of Cinergi Interactive, Warhammer: Mark of Chaos is poised to recreate the popular miniatures war game, complete with its massive sense of scale, when it ships later this year. Recently, we had the opportunity to speak with Chris Wren, the game’s senior producer at Namco Bandai, to get a little more insight into the game.

Hello Chris, and thanks for taking the time to speak with us regarding Warhammer: Mark of Chaos. Could you please describe what your role has been on this project? Before we get too deep into Mark of Chaos, could you talk a bit about other projects have you worked on in the past, and how has working on Warhammer differed from your previous experiences?

I oversee the entire project — sometimes this involves giving daily feedback on builds and submitting designs, other times it is tracking bugs or working with marketing assets and online efforts. In short, I do a little of everything.

I started in the industry about 12 years ago at Microprose, my first title was Falcon 4.0, which was an F-16 flight sim simulating a modern war on Korean peninsula. I was a lead artist back then, doing a lot of production responsibilities as well as art. I did some special effects work on a Star Trek RTS there as well, Birth of the Federation, and was working on a sequel to Falcon 4.0 when Microprose finally shut it doors. My next stop was Maxis; I was a producer on many Sims games including Sims: Hot Date, Sims: Vacation, Sims: Unleashed, Sims Online, Sims Bustin’ Out, and the Urbz before I left to help start up the PC division at Namco Bandai Games.

But are you a fan of Warhammer? Or, I guess more accurately, were you a fan of the tabletop game prior to your work on Mark of Chaos?

I played for a while in high school, it was my secret geeky thing to do besides playing video games at the arcade every conceivable moment. I had a Chaos Army, mostly Khorne, although a couple undivideds in the mix (need them for the magic). By the time I got to college, I stopped playing Warhammer altogether; just didn’t have the time for it, and to date, I have no idea what ever happened to my Chaos army.

Since we started working on Warhammer: Mark of Chaos, the musk of chaos is in the air again…our team has spent a lot of time getting back into the hobby, attending tournaments and painting new armies to get familiar with it all again. We spent a lot of time at the Games Workshop store nearby to prepare for this title and get up to speed on all the A

The Xbox 360 is really starting to pick up speed now, nearly a year following its launch in November 2005. Recent releases such as Dead Rising, Chromehounds, and Table Tennis have helped showcase the platform’s diversity, while fantastic ports of titles such as Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth II and Battlefield 2: Modern Combat demonstrated that the Xbox 360 is positioned to be a real contender for gamers’ hard-earned dollars this holiday season.

Of course, as was the case with the original Xbox, the console has thus far been lacking for a good, solid role-playing game, and genre enthusiasts have thus far been left with naught but an empty bag of holding, filled with promises of a brighter tomorrow. However, Ubisoft plans change all of that this month with the console’s first real RPG in the From Software-developed Enchanted Arms. From Software has long been considered a developer of niche titles, and again proved that with the release of Chromehounds, which was almost universally panned by critics (though not by us), yet proved to be a popular online experience for the player community.

Today we have word directly from Enchanted Arms‘ producer Marc Fortier at Ubisoft regarding the game, and just what players can expect from the title once it ships on August 29, 2006.

Could you give us an overview of Enchanted Arm’s battle system?

Enchanted Arms features what we call the SpeedTactics Battle System, which is a fast yet flexible system allowing both in-depth tactics and fast-paced battles. The dev team’s approach was to bring the best RPG features together into one system that offered a wide variety of tactical options for hardcore RPG fans, but could also be used easily by mainstream users. The result is a hybrid system blending grid-based and turn-based elements.

Just what kinds of tactical options does SpeedTactics allow?

SpeedTactics promotes tactical thinking from the moment players choose their party. They’ll have to consider their character’s Attributes and Friendly Points to create the most balanced and effective fighting team.

Once a battle begins, players choose their own party action order, rather than relying on initiative ratings. Players align their characters on a Battle Grid to set movement and combat actions. Then, they can gather intelligence about the enemy position by switching through multiple viewpoints. And once the enemy attacks, players can discover more vital info such as Attributes and attack patterns. There are many other options in SpeedTactics, such as long-range and close-quarter tactics, the use of cover to protect against Direct Attacks, mastering Indirect Attacks to hit heavily protected targets, strategic use of items and upgradeable weapons, mighty Co-Op Attacks where all party members combine their strength against a single target, and last but not least – devastating super attacks known as EX Skills.

Speaking of attacks, can you tell us more about the spell system?

In Enchanted Arms, spells are actually referred to as A