Preview: Indiana Jones and The Next Crusade

LucasArts has announced at E3 that their first internally developed title for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 will be Indiana Jones 2007 (set in 1939, we’re assured it’s a working title.)

Adventure games based on the franchise have been some of a sleeper hit previously, so we have high hopes for Jones’ next outing. The game is being written with "direction from George Lucas", which either means he walked past the design offices looking for a coffee one morning and somebody thought it’d look good in a press release, or this game is going to be terrible. I mean... err... ohh damn, well maybe he’ll be better at doing videogames than he is at doing films these days.

Technically LucasArts is promising us quite an impressive package, with a feature they’re calling NaturalMotion sounding the most impressive of all.

It seeks to have characters in the game react to their movements in real time, so they they’ll do things like stumble and then try to brace themselves against a wall. It certainly makes things look more lifelike, and LucasArts is promising us that it’ll do wonders for the realism of the gameplay as well.

All the environments are completely malleable as well, so you can dish out creative destruction in order to get one over on your opponents. This is becoming more and more standard fare on next-gen games, but it should be a welcome revolution come the holiday season.

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