volition-studios posts

The Red Faction movie is scheduled to start production this week and today publisher THQ and the Syfy cable TV network announced the line-up of actors for the film, Red Faction: Origins. It's filled with a ton of veteran sci-fi actors, lead by the T-1000 himself Robert Patrick as Alec Mason, the main character from the last game in the sci-fi shooter series Red Faction Guerrilla.

The movie will also star Brian J. Smith, who played Lt. Matthew Scott in the recently canceled TV series Stargate Universe. He plays Alec Mason's son Jake Mason who in the movie is trying to find his lost sister on Mars. Jake Mason turns out to be the father of Darius Mason, the lead character (shown above) in the upcoming Volition developed third person action game Red Faction Armageddon.

Other actors in the movie include Kate Vernon (Ellen Tigh and, as it turned out, a Cylon on the Battlestar Galactica revival series) and Gareth David-Lloyd (Ianto Jones of Torchwood), The movie is set to be shown on the Syfy network in May, around the time Red Faction Armageddon is scheduled to be released.

The great fantasy filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro has been telling pretty much everybody that he is getting into the games industry with publisher THQ for a while now. Tonight at the Video Game Awards, Del Toro finally announced the name of that game: inSane.

Other than the fact that the developer of the game will be Volition and that it's due out sometime in 2013, there's not much else that's known about the game at this point. All we have to go on is the teaser trailer which you can see after the jump. If the final game is as creepy as the trailer suggests, it should be something to look forward to.

Update: THQ exec Danny Bilson "tweeted" word that the game's title should be formated as inSane. So we will go with that.

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.