Midway's Area 51 game franchise has always been a little on the goofy side, whether it was the light gun arcade game or the more recent console-PC first person shooter. Well, things just got more serious in Midway's sci-fi conspiracy series. During last week's Midway Gamer's Day we got a chance to play a very brief demo of the newest entry in the series, BlackSite: Area 51, and also got a chance to chat with its project lead Harvey Smith who knows a thing or 12 about sci-fi conspiracy games from his earlier work on the Deus Ex series.

The single player demo itself took less than five minutes to get through. You are the leader of a squad with two other soldiers backing you up. We found ourselves in a small town at night during a torrential rain store. The town in the demo had obviously been trashed by something. After breaching a door that lead inside a gas station our squad encountered the first of many alien beasties, a tall thin creature that didn't look happy to see us. We and our AI squad members fired our machine guns to take it down but we got a bit of a surprise; while the body went down the head detached itself and started crawling to our position and then detonated. It made a messy situation even messier.

The rest of the demo was pretty much non-stop shooting as we and our squad fired our weapons against more of the tall thin alien alone with smaller creatures, including a multi-legged monster that looked like a cross between a crab and squid. The environments around us also got a beating; our firefight caused quite a few explosions in the surrounding (BlackSite: Area 51 is using the same destructible environment tech that Stranglehold is using). Finally the last part of the demo saw a massive object come down from the sky and destroy a nearby liquor store (that's it; no one blows up our booze) and a massive work like creature is seen coming from the wreckage.

As with many of Midway's 2007 games, BlackSite: Area 51 uses Epic's Unreal Engine 3 as its basis and the visuals were very much up to snuff with great looking alien character models, impressive weather effects and of course the destructible surroundings. The game definitely generates a feeling that one got when playing Valve's Half-Life 2; combining fun shooting with an advancing plotline that you don't quite know where it is going to go.

After playing the press event demo we got to get a couple of answers from Harvey Smith, the project director of the game at Midway's Austin studio. Smith said for the first two years at the studio, he worked on building the studio's design department. "I was helping frame up two games at a very high level, and I was hiring designers, setting up values and pushing the team in a certain direction." Yep, he did say two games. Smith was working on another title which he said was very different than BlackSite: Area 51 but that his bosses at Midway asked him in the past year to take over the reigns on BlackSite (the second unnamed game is still in development, according to Smith and he told us that he hopes a third game will soon start development at Midway Austin).

So what's the attraction for Smith on BlackSite: Area 51? "I love shooters," he told us. "I like the immersive sim games like Deus Ex, of course, but I also play a lot of shooters and I always think something interesting can be done with shooters. Smith feels that in the games that he has worked with in the past, they have had innovative features but feels, "I have not succeeded as much on the polish side. We put a lot of our effort into be one of those studios that delivers highly polished well crafted stuff.

Smith isn't abandoning innovation in BlackSide: Area 51, however. One of the things that the game will have is a more serious storyline with references to Iraq, global warming and other topical subjects. "I wanted to give people chills. I wanted to give people an emotional experience. So I think you are guided as a creative person as a gamer where you want to go. And Midway has been very supportive actually. I thought they were going to fire me or something. We were talking about Iraq and black sites (government locations that the government does not admit exist) but they were very supportive".

Another innovation is the morale system for the squad AI. Smith says that you can target your squad to attack enemies, break through barriers and other commands pretty quickly. "It's as easy as firing a gun; very fast paced," he said. "But during the entire time the moral is running. So if you are a very bad player and you are not making headshots and you are not killing enemies and you are not giving orders and you are missing with all of your shots the moral goes down. So (the squadmates) start to panic. They fire less often, they hunker down more. They eventually start blind firing and then stop firing." The reverse is true if you are a better player. "Their moral goes up. Their aggression goes up. They fire more frequently Behind the scenes they get a little damage multiplier."

More features in BlackSite: Area 51 include plans for alien weapons. Smith told us, "When we talk about alien weapons we don't mean a gun that shoots a giant purple ball of lightening. We think, 'What would DARPA do if they had access to lighter ceramic materials that harder than metals? What if they had particle weapons?. What would three leaps later be?' So our alien weapons are more like that." While aliens are in the game, Smith told us that the main threat is what is being called the Reborn. "They are represented by abducted humans taken down to a restricted site an experimented on. So they are an insurgency."

Multiplayer features will include two player co-op mode through the single player campaign and at least 16 player modes like deathmatch, CTF and new modes where you play as the Reborn. Smith told us that they have thought about Xbox 360 and PC platforms playing against each other but that no decision has been made yet. Our time with the demo and with Harvey Smith was brief but the final result could be a very entertaining FPS. We will have more info and hopefully more play time with BlackSite: Area 51 before its release for the PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 this summer.

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