A. PotF is DAH3. Big Willy is some strange nebulous prequel to the third outing in the series but it's clearly just a stand alone game shoehorned in between the 60's and 70's of DAH 2 and 3. Besides, the name is Destroy All Humans 3: Path of the Furon. Big Willy doesn't have any number anywhere in the title.
A. No, except for the "challenge" missions. You remember them from the first game - the zap twenty cows kind of thing.
However, scattered throughout the world are several DAHMs ("DAH Moments") to find and these unlock Achievements. Some are quite simple, others are very difficult. And on the subject of Achievements, the Xbox version has a full suite of Achievements to unlock.
A. If you are familiar with the DAH2 controls, there won't be any surprises here. Some functions have been remapped for ease of use, though. The biggest change is that Left Trigger is dedicated to Psychokinesis. So, if you grab something in PK, you can still shoot, jump and so on. Similarly, on the saucer, Left Trigger is dedicated to the Abducto Beam.
On the 360 controller, Temporal Fist resides on the B button as does Stealth Mode on the saucer. Jetpack is still on the A button, of course, but it handles a bit differently from the other games. In DAH 1 and 2, the jetpack would give Crypto a big vertical burst first, and then glide. In PotF, the jetpack can either go straight up or straight ahead, based on whether or not you are holding forward on the Left Analog. The more vertical you fly, the less horizontal you travel and vice versa.
In the saucer, you have vertical control over your flight now. While the Left Analog moves the saucer, the Right Analog moves your aiming reticle. If you move far enough upward, the saucer will ascend. Far enough downward and the saucer will descend. It's a bit like the flying vehicles in Halo 3. The weapon wheel is back from DAH2 for easy weapon selecting, though you can still select them one-by-one with the bumper.
IIRC, left bumper is Mental Lock, right bumper is weapon select. Holding right bumper brings up the weapon wheel while tapping it switches the next weapon. Under Mental Lock, you have Disco Fever, Cortex Scan and Transmogrify for humans.
A. Crypto will try to imitate the voices of the characters he has snatched instead of talking in his normal voice. This will lead to a lot of funny dialog!
A. No, you can Cortex Scan whenever you want. Doesn't matter if you are Crypto or in body snatch. As in the first game, if you are in Body Snatch, Cortex Scan will recharge your mental energy. There are hundreds if not thousands of lines of Cortex Scan dialog to play!
A. He won't be.
A. Each Invasion Site is the same throughout the game, so Paradiso is always dusk, Sunnywood is always sunny, and Shen Long is always dreary and rainy.
A. The whole story of Natalya and Crypto was conceived well after we had finished recording voices! You will hear about Natalya, but Blasto is not accounted for. I don't know if any future games would treat him as canon or not.
A. You use Landing Zones and find Arkvoodles as in the second game. However, one thing we do more often is force Crypto into the saucer (and vice versa) in order to keep missions going at a reasonable pace. There are several objectives where you will simply start off in the saucer at some predetermined location instead of having to walk over to a Landing Zone, board the saucer, fly to some point... (*snooze*).
A. No. This is something everyone has brought up. If you body snatch a cop, why wouldn't you get his gun? Aside from the question of why a powerful alien would ever want to use such a pathetic Earth weapon, there's a more practical reason. Cops shooting civilians would get you an M rating.
A. Of course! You can also draw on terrain and write all sorts of, um... well, everyone knows what the first thing they'll draw is. XD
A. Hmm, some that come to mind. Brain Surgeon, Sleeping with the Fishes, Donut Holed, Barge Boomer, Monkish Bowling, Not In Kansas Anymore...
A. I can summarize what's already known so far. Nexos are indeed cyborgs from Crypto's homeworld. They come in two flavors - the more diminutive Nexo Warrior and the three-story-tall Nexo Walker. The token Nexo vehicle is the Nexo Saucer, which you've seen in various screenshots.
By the way, the Nexo Walker is a living thing. It's not a vehicle. It's just a giant cyborg.
A. PK has its own little context menu while you are using it. So, if you are holding LT on something, Y will PK Throw and X will engage PK Magnet.
The advantage to this scheme, that Jon noted before, is that you can use PK and all of your other functions at the same time. You can fly while holding something in PK. You can mercilessly shoot your grappled target in PK.
One of the most interesting things to do is to PK a human, launch a sticky Ion Detonator at him and throw him into a crowd. Then detonate the Ion Detonator
A. Humans do have the ability to distinguish between various threats. For the most part, Crypto is their target. However, things like the Venus Human Trap can distract them and draw their fire.
A. Crypto can't swim, but there's no reason for him to do this either. If you jump in the water, you'll just get warped back to the shore.
A. Body snatch run speed is about as the same as it was before, but different humans can yield different speeds. For example, if you body snatch a rollergirl, you will be able to use her skates to move faster.
A. SWAT is an alert level between Police and Military, where SWAT teams will begin to persue Crypto. They also carry riot shields, as if those puny human plastic toys will stop a Furon Warrior.
A. Arkvoodle looks a bit different, but not a whole lot.
A. There is a statistics screen, just like the other games, that tracks all sorts of random information as you play.
Q. Can Crypto Freely enter and exit buildings?
A. Crypto does have the ability to enter certain buildings as part of missions. The Shen Long Monastery, however, is an example of a building you can freely enter and exit whenever you want.
Q. We have a feeling that "Sammy and Faire" are spoofs of Sonny & Cher, but since their screenshot features a glimpse of the conversation mode, can you fill us in on either of them?
A. "Sammy and Faire" are indeed spoofs of Sonny & Cher in the game and one side mission involves Crypto filling in for Sammy. Crypto sings, I kid you not, "I Got You Hon."
One thing we do differently with Body Snatch is that Crypto tries to imitate the voice of the character he has snatched instead of talking in his normal voice. This leads to a lot of funny dialog!
A. I've seen the Venus Human Trap eat a helicopter once. It's not a very common event because helicopters rarely engage Crypto on-foot. I'm not sure if it still can eat helicopters, but I don't see why it couldn't.
You can use the VHT on any surface big enough for it to spawn. I've launched it inside the Monastery before and there was much laughter.
There was a time when the VHT could be spawned anywhere, which led to a lot of bugs. One of the funniest things was spawning it on top of a bus. As the bus drove around, the plant stayed with it! XD
A. I don't really have an answer. The last I heard, it was September. But things have been pretty chaotic lately.
To make a long story short, a couple months ago, THQ decided it was going to conduct "phased layoffs" at Sandblast. This made news on the gaming blogs, but the end result is that they are shutting down the studio. As such, all that remains is a skeleton crew of people trying to finish it up.
Because of all of this, you can imagine how there's a lot of uncertainty about what's going on.
A. I believe it remains on the ground unless you leave the level. Otherwise, the damage done to the ground persists.
A. Grant and Richard are doing the voices in PotF. No cheap knockoffs like in BWU. I have no idea why the trailers don't feature Pox's voice.
PotF actually has the same soundtrack as BWU. Believe me, I was shocked when BWU released with much of OUR soundtrack. I thought it was incredibly cheap. The music was originally composed for PotF and, as a result, feels really out-of-place in BWU. There are some musical differences, like the Harbor City and Fantasy Atoll themes, but there's no getting around the fact that Shen Long's soundtrack is playing in Vietmahl.
A. Yes, weapon upgrades (for Crypto and the saucer) are bought through Pox-Mart with DNA. Mental ability upgrades (for Crypto) are granted through the Meditation Chamber, which is based on how often you use that power.
The actual weapons and abilities, however, are given through the course of the game.
A. The guy in yellow on the dragon is Saxon.
There is a PK miniboss in the game which is a fun little battle.
A. The HUD is mostly like the one in DAH2. No real surprises. The one from DAH2 was pretty effective.
The alert level system has four bars:
Green is Police.
Yellow is SWAT.
Orange is Military.
Red is...
However, there are arguably more than four alert levels. For example, the police alert level has two stages, Investigation and Police. Investigation is the same as the "(!)" alert level in DAH1 where police arrive at the scene of the crime, but are yet not aware of what happened. If they spot Crypto, it escalates to the actual Police alert level. Likewise, the Military alert has a couple levels of response.
A. Hypnoblast in this game only exists as Disco Fever, which is essentially the same as the dance in DAH2 and Sleep / Distract in DAH1. As far as Hypnoblasting "orders" to humans or getting them to fight alongside with you, that is one of the (few) things that hasn't carried over from the previous games.
Q. Will we be able to actually kill humans with PK, unlike DAH!2?A. You can kill them with PK. It typically takes a couple tosses to kill a human, but it depends a lot on if they crashed into anything on the way or if they fell from a great height. Obviously, cops and soldiers are stronger.
Our control scheme makes it really easy to bash a PK'ed object into other objects, however! One of my strategies when confronted with a hoard of enemies is to PK a nearby car and slam it into them. You don't even need to throw the car, just plow them over with it. It's pretty satisfying. The move speed of our PK is a LOT faster than it was in DAH1 and DAH2, which makes this strategy more feasible.
A. I've never really tried to destroy enemies using something trapped in the Abducto Beam. I don't think it would be very effective.
However, you can use the Abducto Beam to pluck aerial enemies, such as helicopters, out of the sky, which is pretty funny.
A. Honestly, I don't know. We have Xbox Achievements, of course, but Sony's PS3 Trophy system is a very recent update. Because of that, we didn't have plans for it.
A. I don't think the saucer speed or the cloak are upgradable items, but I could be wrong. You can gauge from the existing videos how fast the saucer moves. I can't remember how it compared to the one in DAH2, but I'm tempted to say that it moves faster in PotF. Cloak definitely recharges faster and is very useful.
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A. You get Temporal Fist in the course of the game... you don't have it from the beginning.
It works on a timer, just like PK Throw did in DAH2. After you use Temporal Fist, you can't use it again for a few seconds. Right now, Temporal Fist lasts a pretty long time, so you can manipulate a fair amount of the world.
One thing that hasn't really been noted is that when you resume time, objects that you've "impulsed" in Temporal Fist have over-the-top impacts when they collide with things. What I mean is, if you impulse a human at a group of humans, when time resumes, you'll likely launch the whole group instead of just the one human you targeted. It's like having super PK abilities! Another fun use is to just fling a human down the sidewalk. It will bowl through other humans like a Koopa shell.Q. Can you tell us anything about Gorta, the 5th location?A. It's a very elaborate site, possibly the most involved one in the whole game, packed with far more content than Solaris had. Believe me, it's a full on city. Even more, it's got a city within a city.
A. PK can be used freely without concentration.
A. Pox is still the most common mission giver. You'll walk up to him and discuss the mission with him before you do it. He's not the only mission giver, though.
There are a few missions involving Pox and he does show up more often during missions, but not in combat roles. The plot of the 4th Ring of Furon focuses on Pox.
Hippe that has seen you: "You looked taller in the first game"
Crypto: 'You realize the player's in the kitchen right now makin' nachos..."
A. Heh, Oh yes, the 4th wall is breached frequently. All over the place. Slash and I even wrote some of those lines.
Q. What can you tell us about multiplayer?
A. No system link or Xbox Live multiplayer. It's all local splitscreen 2-player. One of the multiplayer gametypes is Co-op, but not through the story mode.
That being said, multiplayer is a blast.
All MP modes are unlocked from the start. There is no tether in the co-op MP mode.
Q. Will there be a DAH movie or tv show?
A. FOX currently owns the rights to make a DAH cartoon (think Family Guy, Simpsons) and at one time they almost started production. But it's unlikely we'll see anything like that anymore unless Furon sells 5 million +
"DAH1's mission design was what annoyed me more than anything. Especially when you got to Capitol City, so many cheap deaths and "Oh, by the way, you fail!" objectives.
PotF has CHECKPOINTS. Did I mention that? Often more than one per mission! No more redoing the whole mission because you screwed up on the last objective! Yay!"