To celebrate the release of Tomb Raider Anniversary in Europe today (comes out in America on June 5th), Eidos has booty-called each of the Lara Croft models from the last ten years for a family reunion photo at their London studio. If I had the chance to invite them all over for four player polygamy, I'd pass and call up a few of the Chinese Lara Crofts instead.

I've never even seen these ladies before, how did two of them get cast for the role with blond hair? The totem pole with tits on the left looks like a less ugly Morgan Webb in her other photos, and I couldn't even fit the beast on the east into the damn picture. Last time I was in Europe all the women were hot, what the hell happened? If the one in the middle pretended she was Sophie Marceau we might have a deal, but she'd have to be convincing.

Normally when a game has new pictures and a new video clip, I'll put the video up top and the pictures down below. However, when a game like Manhunt 2 looks like shit, the last thing you want to see is Rockstar taking a shit on screen. It's like they had lessons from Uwe Boll himself. I finally took the time to refresh my memory on how good the graphics looked in the first Manhunt game on the PS2 in 2003, and I honestly can't tell any noticeable difference between the quality of the 3D models in the two games. The Wii might use slightly more detailed texture maps, but it seems like that's it.

You can see the video here, although no new plot is revealed in it. I'm more interested in these pictures -- the bloodiest Nintendo game pictures I've ever seen. And by bloodiest, I mean most excessive cheap use of red color filters on screen. I'll probably still buy this game due to its decent sounding storyline, but Manhunt 2 deserves a new title for its efforts to bring out the worst in the Wii. If it dethrones Red Steel of that trophy, then I'll start referring to this game as Red Shit, just so nobody mixes the two up.

It feels like this game has been in development forever, and the most we've seen is a simple multiplayer level in action. These new pictures will help for now, but its October release is still far away. The images show Link indoors, outdoors, in dungeons, on the ocean, and even immersed in battle. The textures and characters look good for a DS game, as long as they keep the amount of ship traveling time to a minimum it should be a great purchase.

The highly anticipated Mass Effect is still months away from its expected September release, and I'll take whatever updates BioWare will give. These new pictures of the science fiction action RPG aren't as revealing as the ones we saw in February, although there's a piece of concept art included in this update. There's also a recent interview with Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk about the game's progress. They've managed to fit their entire galaxy-sized game, including over one hundred voice acted characters, on just one DVD. However, they suggest they'll release downloadable extra content in between each game of the trilogy that they're calling the "best game BioWare has ever done."

And by kinda, I mean you'd better bring along a plastic bag when you play it, so that when someone else walks in the room and sees the shit you can pick it up and apologize for shitting on their TV screen. Don't get me wrong, I bought a PS3 and 360 for awesome graphics and the long term investment, and I bought the Wii purely for innovative gameplay and all its possibilities. I don't expect great graphics from most Nintendo games, but the one game that warrants top of the line visuals is definitely Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. These pictures look okay at best, when they should be above and beyond what's already out on store shelves for the Wii.

I don't see how Nintendo can give some dude in overalls these awesome graphics, and then somehow make a cybernetic space pirate bounty hunter game on the Wii look possibly worse than its GameCube predecessors. I don't care at all if games like Manhunt 2 look terrible, but where's those 2-3 times better-than-GameCube graphics the Wii is supposed to deliver? Even fucking Luigi's Mansion looks better than this. I can't even tell what's going on in this picture, is Samus holding a black bowling pin? Because we already own Wii Bowling, and it looks better than this piece of shit.

Neversoft has announced it's hard at work on its next Tony Hawk game that will come out later this year for PS3, Xbox 360, Wii, PS2, and DS. With the title of Tony Hawk: Proving Ground, it sounds like a stab at Electronic Arts' Skate game, proving that there's only enough room for Tony Hawk skater games on store shelves. Neversoft is boasting that T.H.P.G. will give players more freedom for character defining and course customization than ever before, which sounds like the same half-kept promises we got for Tony Hawk Underground. The only truly new things Neversoft has mentioned are terrain altering and skating from single player to multiplayer seamlessly. The video capturing and level editor and all the other good stuff will be there too, but this doesn't seem like a Skate killer yet.

T.H.U.G. was the last Tony Hawk game I ever bought, and I think I stuck around for the series updates a lot longer than most people. For now I think I'll approach skating games the same way I approach football and other sports games -- buying just one or two at the birth of a new generation of consoles, and then waiting several years to see how far things have come.

Army of Two is Electronic Arts' game where one player goes co-op either with the computer playing by his side, or with the help of a friend on the second controller. If you take a look at these new pictures and zoom in on any of the character models, you'll see stunning normal mapped textures full of detail. The more you zoom out though, the more trouble you run into.

While the environment textures might also look pretty damn good, their geometry all boils down to simple blocks and sloped hillsides. No elaborate levels like in Call of Duty with action around every corner, this game would rather give you a compass and send you off to the horizon apparently. EA Montreal wasn't kidding when they titled this game Army of Two, where the hell are all the enemies and excitement? This makes the game look like two soldiers are on vacation and asking locals to step aside and take their pictures while they pose in front of the camera. These look nothing like the sweet preview pictures I've seen in magazines before.

And check out the picture above, where you blow up a bridge from a mile away like a complete pussy, and then probably have to trek across another three miles to the next weak mission. The guns around your shoulders barely have a texture - slapping a standard gray hexadecimal color onto a gun and pumping up the specularity level doesn't cut it. Also, I'm no weapons expert, but wouldn't all those guns clanking around your back detonate your Blunderbuss Rocket Launcher thingy?

Don't get me wrong, if there was a colossus stomping out of the mist in the background I'd be drooling all over these pictures, but there's not. It's Blue Dragon with guns - nothing is going on in any of these pictures, it all looks empty, and I wouldn't be surprised if the plot was reminiscent of Pokemon Snap in some parts of this wandering war game. Give these dudes a badass vehicle or some sweet X-ray vision - no wonder they're running a design a weapon contest, EA Montreal doesn't know what else to put in their own game.

Army of Two won't be out for Xbox 360 and PS3 until the end of this year, so it's very possible that these are just early renders from bad angles, although there's a million war games out there and I'm not going to buy this just because a solid game team's working on it. I'll need to see a lot more before I spend my money on this hollow game, for now Army of Two gets two out of five stars from me. I threw in an extra render from an old game just to make things a little more exciting, see if you can spot the ugly winner in the group of pictures. It only took maybe ten polygons for the whole scene, yet it has more emotion than any of the other five.

Earlier this week there was an interview with one of the people working on Blacksite: Area 51, and now we have more pictures of the tactical FPS game showing off its  Xbox 360, PS3, and PC graphics. The majority of the new images stay true to its grim nighttime mood that we've seen before, although these screenshots look a little more clean than the ones in the past. The rain helps make simple scenes look busy and an abundance of scratches on the metallic and stony textures does a good job of letting simple geometry appear more immersive to the players. I like how they make the flat streets a bit bumpy and shiny without wrapping it in saran wrap and making it all look fake like many games do.

These pictures aren't too amazing, although they put the next pictures I'm going to post to shame. I'm still curious as to how damageable the environments will be since this game uses some of the Stranglehold Unreal Engine 3 code. Midway's giving us a sneak peek though, if you've got an Xbox 360, a short demo for this game should be up for download.

According to Jeux-France, the newest Game Informer magazine issue should have news about Square Enix's new game The Last Remnant that will be coming out on PlayStation 3 and/or Xbox 360. Instead of coming out in Japan first (or being announced in a Japanese magazine first) it will release simultaneously in America and Japan. With the Unreal Engine 3 technology within his reach, Hiroshi Takai will direct the new RPG with help from Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy: Spirits Within's Kouzi Kobayashi.

The two main characters are Rush Sykes and The Conqueror, although Rush is the only playable character, and the gameplay revolves around Remnants:

“of one era the magic fragments spent, entered in contact with the human beings thousand years ago” which destabilize the world from their immense capacity, these Remnants can take the shape of vehicles, weapons and even of the creatures. The adventure begins on a called insulated island Eulam on which Rush and its Irina sister live peacefully. But Irina is unfortunately kidnapped by a mysterious organization, and Rush is found in the middle of a war related to these invaluable Remnants if coveted.

The Conqueror is the guy with the red clothes in the pictures, and his goal is to find the greatest number of Remnants. However, it seems like Remnants and their length through a certain timeline is important, so I'm gonna predict he's either the last Remnant from the future looking for the first, or he's actually Rush Sykes from the future. Combat consists mostly of magic battles and large numbers of enemies, and four races are available to join up with: "Mitra (of human), Yama (of the watery creatures), Qsiti (of small lizards humanoïdes), Sovanni (of the cat-like beings with four arms)."

Square Enix has definitely set up a unique looking Intellectual Property, but I'm not convinced it will be much fun at all. Check out the interfaces in the scans below, the morale bar could be fun to push around with different battle tactics, but everything else looks pretty simple and repetitive so far. Maybe Square Enix is trying to create a White Knight Story styled game of their own, we'll have to wait for this weekend's Square Enix party for more details on characters, combat, and story.

Past Manhunt 2 details made me excited for for the Wii game, although as far as graphics go, not so excited. Maybe the trailer's fast camera cuts and pans distracted me from noticing how simple it looks graphically. Listen to this video while looking at the pictures below. With the raspy narrator and the boring graphics, it had me thinking of the first Half-Life game. I'm fine with great graphics and no story, or great story and no graphics, or anything that's just solid fun, but this is a pretty inferior example of 3D graphics. I mean, the texture work on this face is pretty sweet, but how many polygons is that? Are we talking Paper Mario Manhunt? The story better be damn good to make this game worth picking up.