This shouldn’t come as a surprise, since Epic Games has been known for a while to have one of the best multiplayer bots in the industry, as the Unreal Tournament/Unreal Championship series showed.

Back in 2006, we were surprised when we learned back that Gears won’t feature bots, but since the developer had a hard time finishing the game’s versus multiplayer mode (later, Mike Capps revealed that at one time they even considered scratching it at all), it was reasonable the lack of such a feature.

Fast forward to 2008, Epic Games has more time, more resources (UT3 is out on PC and PS3 and soon on Xbox 360) and the expertise to add some cool bots to this sequel. We wouldn’t expect less. After all, Cliff’s motto for Gears of War 2 is “Bigger, Better and More Badass.”

The EGM preview also revealed that the meatflag in the game type of the same name is actually a Stranded, the humans that were left behind after Emergence Day.

Additionally, this preview has provided further info on the take-a-screenshot feature. Senior Producer Rod Fergusson told EGM that when using this free-floating, user-controller camera, users will be able to hit the A button to take a shot. The game will automatically score it based on the amount of particles, blood and position of the characters or even if there’s an execution happening. The screenshots will be uploaded and scored to a leaderboard, so you can compare your pictures with other Xbox Live users.

Furthermore, EGM saw a “Watching a Video” status instead of a “Playing Gears of War 2” message in some of the Xbox Live users playtesting the demo, which led the magazine to think that Gears of War 2 could also incorporate some video-capture functionality such as that seen in Halo 3.