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When you get to the fourth game in a series, sometimes you have to do some reinvention to the franchise to keep things fresh for new players. At the same time you also want to keep enough of what made the first three games in the series work to keep fans of those titles interested as well. That's the situation that developer Volition and publisher THQ are encountering with Red Faction: Armageddon. The sci-fi shooter series had a good game with the last entry, Red Faction: Guerrilla, but for some reason it wasn't the big sales hit that either developer or publisher were expecting.

So for the fourth entry the development team decided to go back to basics, in a way, by setting the game underground on Mars as it was during the first Red Faction game. And yes the Geo Mod engine is also back again for lots of property destruction. But what new elements are in Red Faction: Armageddon? At E3 2010 we got to see a live but hands-off demo of the game to find out for ourselves.

Developer High Voltage Software has been around for a long time but lately the team has been working a lot on console only titles. That is scheduled to change for The Grinder, a horror themed action game that recalls their work on the classic Hunter: The Reckoning titles.

The developer is making the game for the PC as well as consoles and is currently shopping its game to publishers. Big Donwload got High Voltage to answer some of our questions about the game and received responses from Eric Stoll (Lead Designer), David Pellas (Design Directo) and Eric Nofsinger (Chief Creative Officer).

Developer Frozenbyte created a sleeper critical hit in 2009 with the release of Trine, its downloadable title that combined platform action with physics-based puzzles and co-op. After lots of hints, it was announced At the tail end of E3 2010 that Frozenbyte would be making a sequel to the game in collaboration with publisher Atlus.

While the game isn't due out until the spring of 2011, Big Download has gotten some of the first details about the sequel direct from Frozenbyte's CEO Lauri Hyvärinen. In the first official interview about Trine 2, he gives us the scoop about what to expect from the next game in the series:

While the PC game industry is still a viable way for developers to release game titles, it looks like the industry is moving more and more to a digital download model versus selling boxed copies of CD and DVD-ROMs in retail stores. In that kind of environment, niche titles like strategy and war games are getting less and less of a presence in stores.

That's one of the reasons behind the announcement late last week that two smaller publishers, Slitherine and Matrix Games, would be merging their companies. Both publishers have long track records in releasing strategy, war game and historical titles on the PC. Big Download got a chance to ask some questions via email to Slitherine's director JD McNeil about the merger. McNeil is now chairman of the holding company that was formed as a result of the merger of Slitherine and Matrix Games.