Introduction

Hello, you! Happy our first anniversary! I've bought you something.

If you're a regular person, you probably don't remember Lost Planet: Extreme Condition as more than a tiny blip in your gaming peripheral back in 2006/2007. It was a fairly successful and actually quite good third person shooter-thing which stopped itself fading into total obscurity by setting itself in the far-flung future and having you fight massive aliens (no, bigger than you're imagining) in big robots with extremely satisfyingly bang-y guns strapped to them. As you've probably surmised from that description, the story wasn't brilliant; it kept everything chugging along at a decent pace and gave you reason enough to shoot some aliens, at least! If you're one of the few people who actually did play LP1, and you remember the story through some fluke, I'm going to take a minute to get everybody up to speed on the story of the last one so you might want to just wander off for a minute. Get a cup of tea or something.

Alright, so, 160 years ago in the past (although many years in the future for us (I can see you slipping already, keep up)), humans flew off into space to colonise other planets because they'd managed to mess up earth with loads of wars and pollution and that--thanks, Al Gore, you prick! On their travels, a massive interstellar blue chip called NEVEC stumbled across a vaguely-earthy planet called EDN III which was almost perfect for colonisation except for the fact that it was in the midst of a massive ice age and happened to look a little bit like this. Bother. As though that wasn't bad enough, ice-freezy-ball-planet was also infested with a race of incredibly violent and inexplicably luminescent aliens known as the Akrid! Still, stubborn as they are, NEVEC tried to build a load of cities and colonise the hell out of the place.

Predictably, it didn't go well.

All of the colonies that NEVEC had built on the planet were rather quickly wiped out by massive alien attacks. Erm, both attacks by aliens which are massive and attacks by massive numbers of aliens, that is. Right about when everybody had decided they'd had more than enough of this whole EDN III business, some bright spark realised why it was that the Akrid were all bright orange: a substance called thermal energy, which just so happens to be a tremendous source of energy and a surprisingly good way of stopping yourself from freezing to death if you happen to be an alien hiding underneath the snow! It's also the main fuel source for gigantic robots that people can ride around in, known as Vital Suits (rubbish name), which were invented as an attempt to level the playing field with the gigantic alien menace.

Using these VSeses, NEVEC planned to get approximately all of the T-Eng in the whole world and terraform the planet to be less frozen and horrible using future-science in a plot that they called the Frontier Project. Unfortunately, their future-science was a bit flawed and crap, meaning that they'd have ended up killing absolutely everything on the planet if they were allowed to go ahead with it. That didn't sit well with the local non-NEVEC human population (known affectionately as the Snow Pirates), who banded together to stop them. The Snow Pirates won in the end, because NEVEC are the evil ones! I did tell you that NEVEC were the baddies, right?

Right, done. We're all up to speed. Lost Planet 2 is set ten years after the first game, after the particular band of Snow Pirates that the first game centered on (you remember Luka, right? No?) devised and put into action a much more every-living-thing-friendly version of the Frontier Project. It's actually been fairly successful, too, which means that in the course of LP2 we're going to be seeing a few different environments! Some of which even have trees! Bloody trees! You don't know how exciting bloody trees are unless you played the first game, alright?

As well as bloody trees, LP2 also added one other major feature to the formula of the original game: co-op! Up to four players can play the story mode together at any one time, which means I'm not going to be suffering on my own for the course of this thread. As time and videos go by, I'm going to be dragging in a few different people to bolster the numbers in order to actually give me a chance against the enormous aliens that the game's going to throw at me. Other than co-op, LP2 is incredibly similar to LP1 in the way it works: use big guns to kill big aliens. I'll go into the subtleties of this in fairly explosive detail in the course of the videos. (Can you use the word "explosive" like that? I don't think so)

Oh, and the story's quite a bit more rubbish this time around. You'll see! Anyway, that's a bit too many letters for now. Videos, videos..oh, here they are. Videos!