61 Frames Per Second : ea

The 61FPS Review: Battleforge

John Constantine — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

When not volunteering for the Somali Pirates' Union or attending live tapings of Glenn Beck, guest contributer Dan Thompson can be found teaching in the South Bronx. In moments free from agitating for pirate rights or being corrupted by the youth, Dan dedicates his time to battling his cat, Bishop, and heckling John Constantine's Persona 4 play sessions.

Phenomic’s Battleforge terrified me. Not terrified that this chimeric mix of collectible card game, real-time strategy, and MMO would be bad, oh no. My soul-shaking fear was that it would actually be good. I could already see it happening: my descent into a dark, screen-glare jaundiced, asocial existence, my only activity the furious clicking of virtual cards to unleash winged beasts of burning doom. Like the first time I read about aerosol alcohol’s promise of inebriation through inhalation, I was overtaken by a mixture of horror and wonder. These are three gaming genres I hold dear, and the battles looked great. This hybrid had the potential to cost me my job, friends, and family. I popped in the disc and watched the install bar crawl to the right. Thankfully, none of my fears were realized. Battleforge just doesn’t work.

Its genre blending premise is actually a front; this is just a real-time strategy game and nothing else. Rather than spend time building bases in your campaign and climbing tech-trees, Battleforge lets you put together any combination of units you like based on the virtual cards in your deck. This take on the RTS genre’s staid formula is really just a cosmetic streamlining of old play conventions meant to speed the game up. The problem is that Battleforge is too fast. Losing the more ponderous pace of a traditional real-time strategy game (like building bases and slowly accumulating resources) reduces the actual strategy. I felt like I was throwing units at the enemy just to keep up with the game. The problematic pace is compounded by an awkward interface for grouping units. Assigning groups and calling units to the front of the battlefield is straightforward, but the game automatically has those selected units join the closest group. Provided you were building a force at a base before moving out as in genre mainstays like Starcraft or Command & Conquer, it would work quite well. But since new units are summoned anywhere on the map, you end up with giant, unwieldy mobs instead of a tight, strategically arrayed army. With no time to fix groups before you’re drowning under another wave of enemies, you lose the precision timing and control that are the hallmarks of a well-built RTS. Most missions are based on a time-sensitive goal or escorting some hapless fantasy cliché around the map. Any reasoned decision making is subsumed to saving General Who Gives A Shit from the giant rhinos.

(Speaking of the good General, Battleforge’s story is terrible. It’s the kind of insipid Tolkien knock-off you expect to find scrawled on a legal pad behind the trifold of some post-adolescent dungeon master. Not only is it bad, but the vast majority of the story is delivered in blocks of text presented during loading screens. It’s almost as if everyone at Phenomic read the thing and thought the only place to hide it would be in plain sight, when most people are too busy grabbing a drink to be arsed around with reading.)

Well, at least the collectible card game stuff will be cool, right? Eh, not so much. I wasn’t joking about it just being an RTS. The “cards” and “decks” are completely unnecessary, nothing more than a shallow schema on which the simplified RTS play is hung. These aren’t cards in any meaningful sense, just glorified units and spells. In the same way that Battleforge lacks the strategy and pace essential to a good RTS, it’s also missing the strategic card interactions that are the backbone of a good CCG. Worse still, the rock/paper/scissors feel of combat makes it so there’s no incentive to explore and create novel decks. What these cards do let you do is pay EA, Battleforge’s publisher, to unlock content you already paid for on your disc. The problem of buying new cards goes beyond EA squeezing you for a few bucks. The game employs its own virtual currency, which you buy with real-world monies, and this virtual cash can be used to either buy more cards from EA, or from other players in the game’s auction house. The ability to buy rare cards at auction destroys the game’s balance, and an RTS is only as good as it is balanced.

Finally, how does it fare as an MMO? Not terribly. There is fun to be had in the two-to-twelve player cooperative campaign missions, but I had a hell of a time finding anyone to play with. It’s not just that you’re waiting for someone who wants play a particular mission, they also have to be playing in whichever of the three difficulty levels you’ve specified. My shortest wait was fifteen minutes for a two-player game and my longest a ninety-minute wait for a four-player match. The player versus player, on the other hand, is brutally not fun. For every match I was in where there was solid interplay between the combatants there were two where one of us would just not have an answer for the other player’s deck thanks to the game’s inherent imbalances.

Battleforge seems like a great idea: take the strategy of an RTS, add the variety and depth of deck construction from a CCG, and create a deeply social game with cooperative and combative aspects. Unfortunately, what Phenomic made is just a deeply flawed RTS with a money hole carved in the middle. The whole is exactly the sum of the parts. At least it looks good.

Grade: D+

Previous Reviews:

Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.
Suikoden Tierkreis
Eat Lead - The Return of Matt Hazard
Dead Rising: Chop Til You Drop
Resident Evil 5
Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

Henry Hatsworth Prototype Not as Awesome as Final Game, Still Awesome

John Constantine — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 23:30:00 GMT

A few weeks ago, I saw a trailer for Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure. Then I freaked out. Because it looked fantastic. Last week, Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure came out. Turns out it isn’t fantastic. It is totally fantastic in every possible way there is to be fantastic and sweet.

Okay, in fairness, I’ve only played the first few levels, so I’m not sure how deep it is or how good it is overall. (Derrick tells me it gets hard near the middle. We’ll see.) From the start, though, the platforming’s methodical and silky smooth, the puzzling simple but oh so satisfying. You already know the music’s great. Its sense of humor is everything the trailer promised as well. Hatsworth is a funny, funny game. I want to tell you about Tea Time in the game, but I also don’t want to ruin it for you. Tea Time made me laugh out loud on a crowded subway. I can, however, show you what the prototype of Tea Time looks like without ruining anything!

I’m not positive where or when this footage was shown — the YouTube video is dated February 24th, 2008 — but, as you can see, the game was very, very different early on. The trademark humor is there but the visual style is much more spare, recalling Craig McCracken Powerpuff Girls and Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends cartoons. Very, very cool. I wonder what else changed between this early prototype and the final game?

More on Hatsworth as I get deeper in.

Related links:

OST: Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure
Trailer Review: Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure
Portrait of the Prince Pre-Persia

OST: Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure

Derrick Sanskrit — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 21:00:00 GMT

I've been playing Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure for just under a week now and am utterly stunned by the quality of the product. The art is appropriately vibrant, the story is wonderfully goofy and the gameplay is nostalgically frustrating (seriously, the action is hardcore not unlike Mega Man and Castlevania). Of course, this finely-crafted other-worldly goodness would all be for naught without an accentuated atmospheric soundtrack to tie it all together, and Henry Hatsworth does not skimp in this department either.

Take, for example, "Pompous Adventurer's Club Theme" which plays on the overworld map:

My word, but that is hilariously pompous! The air of militaristic pride in the snare, cello, and trumpets is countered marvelously by the vocals, a mish-mash of drunken voices with stuffed sinuses, each trying to sing the incomprehensible "la," "nah," "yah," and "dahn"s louder than the adventurerer next to him.

Or what of "Go, Go, Golden Robo Q!" which plays every time Hatsworth activates Tea Time and dons his giant suit of robot armor:

The switch from harpsichord to electric guitar within the first six seconds perfectly encapsulates the voice of the game, using traditional adventurer stereotypes from television and film for comedic fodder and parody. Also, it's totally awesome.

Both of those tunes are presented wih tongue planted firmly in cheek, but here's one that just out and out rocks.

"Molotov on the Rocks" plays when Hatsworth enters puzzle mode during particularly tense parts of the game. The funky slap bass creates a driving rhythm while the ochestral blasts generate excitement, two things the puzzle mode at these times would not be fun without.

All in all, it's hard not to agree with the good adventurer Hatsworth when he enthusiastically exclaims "Good show!"

Related articles:
Trailer Review: Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure
OST: Big Bang Mini
OST: de Blob
OST: Everyday Shooter

Star Wars: Battlefront III Refuses to Die, Heads Home

John Constantine — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Come on, everyone. No complaining. We’re going down the rumor road. I don’t like it, you don’t like it, but by gum, it’s going to happen. Reading up on rumors, hearsay, and general tittering about the net is like going to the dentist. You have to do it regularly, whether you like it or not, and you will most likely end up bleeding out the mouth afterward.

So what’s the latest hubbub, bubs? Star Wars: Battlefront III, the last project running at Free Radical before the studio collapsed and had to start sleeping on Crytek’s couch, has found itself a new home. Demo footage of the game leaked onto the net in January, accompanied by some of the nerdiest, not to mention sweetest, concept art ever created. Sith Ben Kenobi? At the risk of insuring my bachelordom for the rest of history, I’m going to go ahead and say that’s cool as hell. It was sad, then, that the project was reportedly handed to Rebellion. That studio’s recent work isn’t terrible, by any means. They’ve managed to turn out not-embarrassing licensed games for the PSP in very short time frames. (Their Aliens vs. Predator tie-in was finished in just six months. It was pretty sucky, but you could play it. Six months is damn impressive.) That said, their contribution to the Battlefront series, Star Wars: Battlefront Renegade on PSP, was outright terrible. The rumor spreading like a very slow, small wild fire across the net today is that Rebellion has now handed Battlefront III back to the series’ creator, Pandemic.

I can’t decide if this is good news or not. I love Battlefront II, Pandemic's last work on the series, but I’d never say it was a great game. It’s fun and it works well, but it's very clunky. Pandemic also hasn't made a smooth transition to this generation of consoles. They’ve released just two games for the PS3 and 360, and while Mercenaries 2 is a decent, mindless slice of fun, Lord of the Rings: Conquest is one of the worst games released in 2009 so far. What’s worse, Conquest is modeled after Star Wars: Battlefront. The studio has worked on two other projects for those systems, a Dark Knight tie-in and an original property called Saboteur. The Dark Knight was cancelled. Saboteur was announced and previewed in 2006 and hasn't been heard from since late 2007.

I think it might be best if Battlefront III just dies at this point. The most recent issue of GameInformer reported that despite the apparent quality of the game under Free Radical, the project was a flaming mess by the time the company went bankrupt. (Footage in the leaked trailer was apparently taken from a PC build that never had a prayer of running on home consoles.) Between Pandemic’s trouble shipping games like Saboteur and The Dark Knight, Free Radical’s demise, Lucasarts liquidation of staff last summer, and Rebellion’s spotty track record, it seems like Star Wars: Battlefront III is damned on all fronts. Once you start down the dark path indeed.

(Rumor mongering courtesy of DarkZero via Joystiq)

Related links:

Videogames: Star Wars' Last Hope
Free Radical is Safe, but Haze is Still Bad
The High Cost of Gaming: Free Radical, Creators of GoldenEye, Close Doors

Trailer Review: Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure

John Constantine — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 20:00:00 GMT

Videogames do bad things to your brain. Not games themselves, but the business and marketing that surrounds them. Familiarity, as they say, breeds contempt. When I see a name like Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure, I immediately think of poop. It’s bound to some terrible Professor Layton clone, right? Surely, it has to be Data Design Interactive’s latest abomination. You don’t expect it to be some awesome 2D platformer/puzzle game hybrid. You especially don’t expect it to be coming from EA’s Tiburon studio. Tiburon makes Madden!

Watch this trailer and get excited.

How great does that look? An action platformer with slick, colorful art starring what appears to be the protagonist from Braid aged thirty years and doing some kind of Doctor-Livingston-I-presume cosplay. You attack enemies who then turn into blocks who have to be color matched to make them disappear and then fill an ammo/special move meter. That is amazing. You solve columns style puzzles and get “super exciting robot juice” as a reward. The robot juice turns you into a Big Daddy.

Nintendo, this is the sort of game you used to make. Now I have to go to EA, to the freaking Madden team, to get this kind of glory. Talk about defied expectations.

Previous Trailer Reviews:

Dante’s Inferno is Looking Even More… Something
Machinarium
Mightier
Demon’s Souls
Final Fantasy XIII Looks Disturbingly Interesting
Priston Tale II: The 2nd Enigma
King of the Fighters XII
Edge
Dante's Inferno
Star Wars: The Old Republic
Resident Evil 5

Trailer Review: Dante’s Inferno is Looking Even More… Something

John Constantine — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 01:00:00 GMT

I just don’t know about you, Dante’s Inferno. You sort of have a God of War thing going on. Even more than you did back in December. That’s a cool scythe with its blade on a chain you get there. Looks like the sorta thing you can have a good action-y time with. That giant monster boss covered with barnacles? I don’t remember any God of War bosses having barnacles. Yours are hell barnacles, too!

I don’t want to pry, Dante’s Inferno. You’ve clearly got some things you’re working through. But I wouldn’t be your friend if I didn’t ask what was up with the pink monsters with tube socks full of teeth for heads.

You’ve got a few of them in here and it’s concerning. Are those tooth-tubesock dudes on loan from Brutal Legend until you get something else? The guy I’m talking about is in the picture up there. It’s cool, you can tell me.

That’s enough glibness for today, I think. I’m really not sure what to make of Dante’s Inferno. Is it just going to be a giant brawler? An adventure game? Castlevania 3D before Iga tries it again? Who knows. Dead Space just looked like a Resident Evil 4 clone, and EA Redwood Shores proved just how awesome that could be. Time will tell.

Previous Trailer Reviews:

Machinarium
Mightier
Demon’s Souls
Final Fantasy XIII Looks Disturbingly Interesting
Priston Tale II: The 2nd Enigma
King of the Fighters XII
Edge
Dante's Inferno
Star Wars: The Old Republic
Resident Evil 5

Where Is SSX?

John Constantine — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 00:30:00 GMT

Let me ask you a question, EA Canada: must it all be so gosh darned realistic these days? I’ve played Skate and Skate 2. Cool games. Cool games that helpfully reinforce, digitally, that my brain is not ready to take up skateboarding. The sheer amount of things I need to take into consideration whilst performing a simple trick in Skate terrifies me. If I tried to do this in real life, and I had to think about all the different things I was asking of my body, a plank of wood, some wheels, and gravity, I would experience complete ego disintegration right before rupturing my testicles on a railing in some public park. Why oh why can’t you take me back to the good ol’ days of extreme-with-a-capital-TREME sports, EA Canada. Why can we not head back to the mountain for some good times with a new SSX, the awesomest fake snowboarding game of all time?

SSX 4 showed up on a few release lists back at the end of 2006, right around the time that the Xbox 360 was ending its first year and just before the release of the Playstation 3. These were the systems said to be home for such a wonderful sequel. Alas, that game was never ever officially announced and has failed to materialize since. A sort of remix of SSX 3, SSX: Blur, came out for Wii in March 2007 and it remains the single most frustrating game I have played in my entire life. They added some new cel-shaded graphics and motion controls that give a shockingly real simulation of a crippled nervous system. You move following onscreen prompts and then NOTHING HAPPENS. Playing it is demoralizing and makes you hate things. Even your pets. After trying to play SSX: Blur for an hour, I ended up yelling at my cat and blaming her for the hantavirus.

DJ Atomika, the chipper voice of SSX Radio throughout the game, re-emerged in Criterion’s Burnout Paradise and hinted at some fresh snow on the mountain. Please don’t lie to me, Atomika. My heart couldn’t take it. I long for sweet, sweet fake snowboarding on 360 and PS3. Grant me this simple desire.

(Much love to NeoGAFfer Wario 64 for asking this very same question. Props.)

Where Is?

The PSP
Hydrophobia
Prototype
Shuichi Sakurazaki, Creator of Ninja Gaiden
Yasunori Mitsuda

The Wii is Not Killing Video Games

Cole Stryker — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

IGN says that the Wii's shovelware and mascot romps are killing video games. Australia's Gameplayer wonders if casuals are killing video games. Destructoid thinks we have to "save the Wii" by just giving the little guy a chance.

First of all, "Is the Wii Killing Video Games" is a stupid question. A few years back everyone claimed that EA was killing video games with their endless sequels and big budgets. I've been vocal here about my disappointment in Nintendo's Wii, but I can appreciate what they've done for the market on an economic and social level.

Nintendo has created millions of new gamers, bringing in billions of dollars of revenue. Even if you don't like to see people buy casual games (and what do you care, anyway?), be comforted in the knowledge that today's casual gamers may be tomorrow's hardcore. Anytime that anyone finds success in the industry, it's better for everyone, whether or not you buy into what they're shilling. Go ahead, spurn Nintendo and only buy imported bullet hell shooters from Japan. You're better off with Nintendo's success, considering that all that new money moving around means that more developers will be able to branch out into riskier types of games, contrary to popular belief. Sure, we'll still see lots of shovelware, but we're also going to see a golden age of indie development, partially thanks the Big N.

Secondly, they've helped steer the industry away from the devastating idea that pretty graphics lead to sales, a design philosophy that had to die sooner or later.

Even if you think Nintendo isn't serving you directly, and boy I sure don't, you are better off as a gamer for their existence.

New Year’s Resolutions For a Few Of Our Favorite Publishers

John Constantine — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:30:00 GMT

Now, to close out the first full week of 2009, we will do for videogame publishers what we did for console makers: we will tell them how to live their sordid, godforsaken lives! You’d think developers would make the list, but no. No, I tend to trust them, so they will be left to their own devices, free from the crushing logic of advice from 61 Frames Per Second.

In 2009, the following folks should resolve to do the following things:

EA – Stick to your guns and keep investing in new IP. 2008 was good stuff, Riccitello. Keep promoting Mirror’s Edge and Dead Space, they will find their audience. And EA Sports? How about SSX4 already.

Capcom – Resolve to support Dark Void with an aggressive marketing campaign and release it during the summer. Do not let this one die during the holiday rush. Also, Street Fighter III HD Remix. You know it would be sweet.

Atari – Do not release Ghosbusters until it is perfect.

Namco – Push Klonoa like you have never pushed a game in your entire lives. Tell people it will make them lose weight, tell them it will make them smarter. And knock it off with the nickel-and-dime DLC already, what is this, 2006?

Square-Enix – S-E, I want you to go out tomorrow, hop on a train, and pay Jupiter Games a visit. You cut them a check, and you tell them to make whatever they can imagine. The people who made The World Ends With You should be allowed to make whatever they like.

Konami – Release a press statement claiming you were forced to make Rock Revolution at gun point.

Midway – Um. Hang in there?

Activision – Give Neversoft the vacation they so desperately need and deserve.

Atlus – More PS1 reprints!

Take-Two – If Bioshock 2 looks stupid, don’t be afraid to cancel it.

Ubisoft – Release Beyond Good & Evil 2 by the end of the year. Please. PLEASE!

XSEED – Keep on keepin’ on, you guys. Can’t believe you actually localized Retro Game Master. Just awesome.

Tecmo-Koei – No Dynasty Warriors: Dead or Alive games. Just don’t. I know you're thinking about it.

SEGA – Disband Sonic Team. It’s over. Enough.

And that about covers it. Happy New Year, everyone.

Related links:

Microsoft’s New Year’s Resolution
Nintendo’s New Year’s Resolution
Sony’s New Year’s Resolution
Virtual Console New Year's Resolutions

The Band Joins the Plumber: Nintendo’s Strategy Finally Bears Its Sweetest Fruit

John Constantine — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 23:30:00 GMT

It’s pretty amazing how effective Satoru Iwata’s business plan for Nintendo has been since he took over as company president earlier this decade. I’m not even talking about the company’s focus on videogames for broader, specifically family, audiences. No, it’s how Nintendo has, under Iwata’s direction, created a line of games that don’t need annual sequels or iterations to be successful. Just one, quality, iconic game, that continues to sell to alongside your hardware. There won’t be another Wii Smash Bros. because Brawl is never going to stop selling and chances are there won’t be a New Super Mario Bros. 2, because the first one continues to do gangbusters at retail. It may not always make me the happiest person in the world — like everyone else who plays way too many games, I’m always hungry for the next new thing and, yes, the next sequel — but I have to admire it, and celebrate its positive effect on the business of videogames broadly.

I see Nintendo’s influence in Alex Rigupulos’s comments at this year’s CES conference. The Harmonix CEO let slip that there wouldn’t be yet another iteration of Rock Band in 2009. This is great news, for Rock Band fans and videogames broadly. It means that, now that Harmonix’s best instruments and basic software is out there, there’s no need to continue flooding the market with the latest version. Once the existing stock of Rock Band 1 is depleted, Rock Band 2 is going to steadily sell and downloadable content, boosted by disc song collections, will keep the game fresh going forward. Like Nintendo, EA and Harmonix has recognized that their game will keep making them plenty of money.

I love sequels and recognize how videogame creation is inherently an iterative process, but annual, even biannual, franchise installments are counterproductive. If more game publishers follow Nintendo’s lead, this will lead to one very important thing: more shelf-space at retail for original games. Given, in fifteen years time, there won’t be physical retail space, but still.

Related links:

My Top 10 of 2008 in No Particular Order: Rock Band 2
Rock Band: My Anti-Music
I’ve Got a Driver, And That’s A Start: Now That Harmonix Has The Beatles, What Should a Fab Four Game Even Be?

The Sky is Falling: Gaming Industry Job Cuts Roundup

Cole Stryker — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 23:30:00 GMT

Jiminy Christmas, people. It's tough out there in the so-called "recession proof" gaming industry. And all right before Christmas. My heart goes out to these guys. The industry experienced explosive growth over the last few years, it only makes sense that downturn would come. Hopefully these people will be rehired when things turn around. They will turn around, right?

Scary statistics, after the jump:

Midway: 160? jobs
Factor 5: 37 jobs
Sony: 8,000 jobs
Brash Entertainment: 20 jobs
Electronic Arts: 600 jobs
NCSoft: undisclosed
THQ: 30 or 40 jobs
Ensemble Studios: shuttered
Lucasarts: 75-100 jobs

So what does this mean for the industry? Executives like to pull out words like "restructure" or "refocus" or "adaptive strategy" when tough times come, so it becomes a matter of cutting through the bull. I think that it's going to get worse before it gets better, but the average gamer probably won't feel the hurt. As long as demand stays constant, developers will scramble to come up with innovative ways to capture the market.

Dante’s Inferno and the Lit-Based Game

John Constantine — Tue, 16 Dec 2008 00:00:00 GMT

The announcements at Spike’s Videogame Awards weren’t exactly shockers. Gears of War 2 downloadable content? That’s like telling someone they’re going to get a pickle with their burger. Then again, a game based on Dante’s Inferno developed by EA Redwood (Dead Space) is a little out of leftfield. Games based on literature are not common. Better examples, like Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure, are even rarer. (It’s actually debatable whether or not Hitchhiker’s should even count as an adaptation considering it was more of cross-medium narrative Adams retold for a decade in the first place.) More often than not, when a work of literature crosses into games, it either becomes something else entirely like the Call of Cthulu games or it’s a tragic mess like Universal Interactive’s Fellowship of the Ring. The linearity of fiction – and epic poetry for that matter – does not suit even the most linear game types. Yes, Signor Alighieri’s poetry is outwardly suited for game adaptation. The man’s vision of Hell is broken into levels, each one filled with, as Cole pointed out, plenty of enemy types. But sociopolitical commentary isn’t something you can convey through bludgeoning demons with blunt crucifixes.

I’m a strong believer, as I’ve mentioned here on 61FPS before, that most everything doesn’t need to be turned into something else. Videogames shouldn’t be adapted into movies and vice versa. Prose and poetry, rigid, intractable forms of expression, are the antithesis of games, especially action games that demand the player have constant agency in the narratives progression, albeit largely implied. Not to mention they convey everything through language instead of through moving images, sound, and digital interaction. But adaptations are an inevitability when a story is good and part of me wonders why we don’t see literature being transformed into games with the same frequency of, if not film, than television.

It would probably be smart to wait and see just what Dante’s Inferno is as a game before claiming it’s the start of a trend. But in the meantime, I’m just going to continue being mystified by its existence.

Related links:
Unknowable Horrors and Spiraling Madness: H.P. Lovecraft and Videogames
Trailer Review: Dante's Inferno
Nintendo: Two Screens of Literature, the E-Book Trojan Horse, and Console Evolution
The Three Stigmata of The Halcyon Company: Philip K. Dick Comes to Games
Along Came a Gamer: James Patterson and Authors in Games
Summon Baphomet With Pokemon

Brütal Legend Has a New Home

Joe Keiser — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Well, this is the best news I’ve heard maybe all year. Tim Schafer’s upcoming heavy metal roadie action adventure Brütal Legend has finally found a new home. Before I tell you who it is, you should properly prepare—watch the sweet new teaser trailer above, then close your eyes and throw up the horns.

Are you still reading somehow? Okay, then open your eyes. It’s EA.

Yes, Double Fine is putting out this game through EA Partners, that wonderful independent-minded branch of the company that has given us Rock Band, The Orange Box, Left 4 Dead and Crysis (and Hellgate: London, but who’s counting). Brütal Legend is the latest score for a stacked-looking EA Partners lineup that also includes id Software’s Rage and whatever the crazy horror thing is that Suda51 is making at Grasshopper Manufacture.

This news just absolutely made my morning; I don’t even think I need coffee now. There’s a couple interesting things to note about this announcement, like how weird it is that a company that used to be demonized for releasing exploitative, non-innovative titles is now saving the strangest game from the corporate shenanigans of its largest rival. But watch that trailer again. Brütal Legend is weird, but it’s not Psychonauts weird. It’s got a hook that almost anyone can appreciate. With music games now in the broader cultural zeitgeist, could this be the first Schafer game in the last decade to become a blockbuster?

Man, I’m actually excited for the Spike VGAs now. I wonder if it’s even okay to say that.

Yes, There is a New Dungeon Keeper. No, You Can’t Have It.

Joe Keiser — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 17:00:00 GMT

I love my morning feed of press releases as much as the next guy (read: not very much, but at least it’s not as depressing as real news), but this morning I seriously considered never, ever looking at it again. And not because it was boring, because that I can take. No, this morning it was actually cruel to me.

The release in question had a title that contained the words “New Online Game – Dungeon Keeper Online.” In a perfect world that phrase would be...well, less redundant, but also sacrosanct, the sort of words that would come down a mountain embossed in a pillar of bronze. The ensuing party would last for days.

But just before popping the champagne, it occurred to me to actually, you know, read the release. And, of course, this was not the return of Peter Molyneux’s beloved good-to-be-bad strategy game that left me cackling into the wee hours of 1997. This despite its name, and despite "themes, characters and other game content" that will be coming from that game. No, this Dungeon Keeper is by NetDragon, a company you’ve never heard of because it primarily makes those inscrutable grindfest MMOs for Asia. Oh, and by the way, Asia is the only place you’ll be able to play Dungeon Keeper Online.

This tells me two things:

1. EA absolutely does not care at all about the venerable Dungeon Keeper license, if the only thing it can do with it in nine years is give it a single-region release developed by a company that has, by its own admission, never made a 3D MMORPG before.

2. Us westerners will be stuck playing thematically similar games, like Overlord (not such a bad fate, but not the same), Dungeon Maker (too goody-goody) or Master of the Monster Lair (see Dungeon Maker, add cuteness).

Sigh. Time to crack open something harder than champagne.

Need For Speed is Hilarious: Return of the Live Action Cutscene

John Constantine — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

First, the tiny confession: I have never ever played a Need For Speed. I’m no racing fanatic, but I’m shocked I’ve managed to avoid them this long. I tend to play one racer obsessively every couple of years, a cycle that began with Rage Racer way back in, yes, 1998. (It actually came out in mid-’97, but I didn’t play it until a full year later, curious after reading previews for R4: Ridge Racer Type 4. That year really was awesome, wasn’t it?) The arcade-style delights of Ridge Racer are really what appeal to me in a racing game, something Need For Speed has in spades, so it’s surprising I’ve never played one of its fifteen different entries until this week. If Need For Speed: Undercover is anything to go by, I haven’t been missing much. The game’s something of a poor man’s Burnout: Paradise, giving you an open world to drive your licensed rides about but not letting you do much interesting inside of it. You can’t just stumble into races, you’ve got to select them from a menu or press down when driving near them, prompting load times and cutscenes. The driving is no great shakes, either, fast and presentable but with none of the edge of your seat spectacle that makes the aforementioned Burnout such a treat. I’m going to keep playing Need For Speed, though, for no other reason than to keep watching it’s hilarious live action cutscenes. Check out the goods a couple of minutes in:

Now that’s the kind of campy deliciousness that we haven’t seen since the halcyon days of Wing Commander. The weird color saturation in NFS’ scenes doesn’t quite compete with lumbering cat people, but it’s a close second. I have to wonder, though, why EA put the money into hiring these, ahem, actors. Yes, Maggie Q is a sexy spokesperson and all, but cutscenes with flesh and blood folks died with FMV games back in 1996. Have there always been live action scenes in NFS? Is EA trying to get post-modern with their franchise?

Second, and much bigger, confession: I have never ever played a real-time strategy game. It’s not that I’ve avoided them on purpose, it just happened somehow. Well, that’s all changing, because I am going to play the hell out of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3. Why? Two words: Tim. Curry. I know that cheesy live action cutscenes have been a Command & Conquer staple, but I feel like I need to indulge in this new treasure trove. Look at this:

Curry’s accent here is almost as funny as the one he had in Congo.

EA, I am disappointed in you for disbanding Blueprint. But if you keep putting archaic nonsense like live action cutscenes in your games, I will forgive you.

So, reader? Thumbs up or thumbs down for live action cutscenes?

Related links:

A Decade of Gaming Excellence
Love-Hate: In Defense of the Cutscene
FMV Hell: Star Studded Casts - Do you Give a Crap?
Alternate Soundtrack: Need For Speed: Underground vs Justice's †

WTF EA?: Boom Blox Blueprint Studio “Closed”

John Constantine — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Had you told me a year ago that EA would publish not one but three of 2008’s best games, I would have called you a liar and then kindly asked you to stop letting your dog defecate on my perfectly kept lawn. Had you then told me that said three games would all be original IPs and that among them was one of Steven Spielberg’s gaming projects, I would have promptly put on my heaviest pair of boots and kicked you square in the groin for lying even more. And yet here we are. Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge, while not perfect, are far and away two of the most memorable things I’ve played in the past twelve months. Unfortunately, I still haven’t gotten to play Boom Blox but it’s sitting at the very top of a long list of games I need to play before January rolls around. Derrick’s been singing its praises since it came out and the promise of a quality original game for Wii with great single and multiplayer is just plain alluring. I do, after all, want to use my Wii for something.

So it’s with a heavy heart that I tell you good readers that the unofficial EA studio known as Blueprint, the network of designers responsible for Boom Blox, has been dissolved. The news comes to us via a Variety report that, following EA’s recent restructuring and firing of some 6% of its work force (rumored to be close to 600 employees,) every member of the Blueprint team has either been canned or have moved on to greener, more secure pastures. It’s a god damn shame. Not only was Blueprint behind excellent new ideas like Boom Blox, but they were also responsible for aligning Armature with EA. (For anyone who missed their formation, Armature is the new studio made up of former Retro Studios power trio of art director Todd Keller, director Mark Pacini, and engineer Jack Matthews responsible for Metroid Prime.) Word is that Blueprint’s current projects, a rumored Boom Blox 2 and Spielberg’s adventure game known only as LMNO (pictured above,) are still in production, but the tight knit crew behind Boom Blox are no longer in charge of them.

As the Penny Arcade boys put it a couple of weeks back, the fact that EA’s newfound creativity is resulting in creative people losing their jobs means we live in an amoral universe. World? You are a cruel bitch.

(Link: Variety via Gamasutra)

Related links:

Mirror’s Edge: Everything You’ve Heard Is True
The 61FPS Review: Dead Space
The Revolution WILL Be Colorized
Ain't No Party Like A Motion-Control Party

F**k Your Future: Mirror’s Edge, Blade Runner, and the Future City

John Constantine — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:00:00 GMT

The image above is a little bit of Deus Ex 3 concept art from Eidos Montreal, the crack design team who broadened our sexual horizons with Fear Effect and taught us that controlling sociopathic murders is boring as sin with Kane & Lynch. I can imagine the dialogue between the artists and producers when this image was submitted for approval:

"What do you got for us today, concept artists?"

"Check dis!"

"This isn't Deus Ex! This is just a screencap from Blade Runner with the guy from Deus Ex 1 smoking in front of it!"

"I'm fired aren't I?"

"No! It's perfect! That’s all these nerds want anyway."

I kid. There is no Deus Ex without Blade Runner, after all. While its influence isn’t quite on the level of Aliens, Blade Runner’s vision of a nightmare cityscape in the far-flung-but-familiar future is a close second. Its towering super-skyscrapers and dank alleyways are the aesthetic meat of beloved games like Shadowrun and Snatcher, but you can also see them in mid-period Contra, Flashback, Abe’s Odyssey/Exodus, and even recent blockbusters like Mass Effect. Then again, it’s not just games. Syd Mead’s Los Angeles has been the template for depicting the urban landscape of the future in all media for close to twenty-five years.

I’ve been curious for awhile now as to what the next popular conception of the cityscape is going to be. The Blade Runner type came on the heels of the ultra-slick Logan’s Run-style, cities of spires all white and sterile that typified science fiction from its 1950s heyday through the 1970s. This may not be the most academic logic in the world, but since sci-fi literature gave us our Future City model post-WWII, and sci-fi film bore its successor, I’m looking to videogames to create the next archetype.

If you’ve been reading 61FPS regularly, you probably won’t be surprised to hear me say that I think Mirror’s Edge features the most likely model for tomorrow’s City of Tomorrow. Edge’s nameless city has the same whitewashed sterility that was the hallmark of the 60s/70s future city but twists the model by coating it in streaks of primary color and keeping the architecture familiar. The buildings, subway stations, and shopping centers recall today’s Montreal but with a consistent modernist bent. Edge’s dystopia is also a recent institution. The story constantly reminds the player that the totalitarian government responsible for the city’s current shape hasn’t been in power long, and so the omnipresence of architecture-as-construction-site provides a fine narrative metaphor: you play behind the future city’s façade of perfection. Whether or not this model fully captures the zeitgeist of 2008 and beyond remains to be seen, but I certainly wouldn’t be surprised if we start seeing Edge’s city more often then Blade Runner’s, especially in games, going forward.

Note: Forgive my hate against Eidos Montreal. Yeah, Fear Effect and Kane & Lynch suck, but they made Soul Bubbles. They’re alright.

(Link: Gamereactor via Kotaku)

Related links:

The Three Stigmata of The Halcyon Company: Philip K. Dick Comes to Games
Mirror’s Edge: Everything You’ve Heard Is True
Trailer Review: Mirror’s Edge
The Eternal Question: Why Is Super Mario Bros. Fun?
Ceci N'Est Pas Une 1-Up: The Surrealist Future of Postpunk Gaming

The Eternal Question: Why Is Super Mario Bros. Fun?

John Constantine — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 17:00:00 GMT

No, seriously, take a minute to think about it. Pour yourself a stiff drink or brew up a nice cuppa tea, put on your thinking cap and try to summarize your conclusion in a single sentence. It’s a peculiar question, really. I found myself trying to answer it late last night after spending some time with Mirror’s Edge. DICE’s platformer shares a lot of the same fundamentals as good ol’ SMB and, concerning the question at hand, both are fun for similar reasons. Super Mario Bros. lets you go wild on a playground where the laws of gravity are paying only loose attention and injury is not a threat. You can run and jump to your heart’s content, and if you see something, like a shiny coin or glowing box that might hide unknown treats, you can hit it with your fist and never worry about bloodied knuckles. Super Mario Bros. is fun because running and jumping, whether in real life or on a screen, is fun, and it’s this maxim that’s fueled platforming as a genre for twenty-five years. But the greatest platformers, the Marios and the Mega Mans, owe their success to more than just running and jumping. They also let you change their world. In Mario, especially in later series entries that allowed flight, crushing bricks opens new ways to move through the Mushroom Kingdom’s surreal landscapes. Mega Man has to destroy robots to ensure safe landings after a jump. If jumping and running was all you did in Jon Blow’s Braid, it could barely be called a game at all.

When you settle into Mirror’s Edge, when you trust yourself to move through the level properly and let DICE’s carefully laid out obstacle courses subtly guide you, it manages to transcend the natural abstraction that comes from making things on TV move. It is physically and mentally affecting. It is fun. But, and mind you I’ve only played the first three levels of the game, all you do is run, jump, and climb. It is purely a jungle gym, and when you’re confronted by hostile elements, your chief task is to avoid them, not eliminate them from the play field (at least, not unless it’s absolutely necessary to do so.) As I continue through the game, I find myself stopping to wonder if there’s something else I’m supposed to be doing, some other facet of the challenge that is going to change the rules after you’ve learned how to run. What is its platformer hook and, more importantly, does it need one?

I’m beginning to suspect that Mirror’s Edge isn’t revolutionary because of its presentation, perspective, or control. It’s revolutionary because it’s redefining the plumber’s definition of fun.

Related links:

Mirror’s Edge: Everything You’ve Heard Is True
Trailer Review: Mirror’s Edge
E3 Day 4: No Blades, No Bows. Leave Your Weapons Here.
Mario Will Not Retire. He Will Outlive Us All.
Super Mario World is Terrifying!

Yahtzee on Dead Space: Competent But Bland

Bob Mackey — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Everyone's favorite fedora-wearing snark king is back again this week with another review, this time dealing with EA's new action/horror title Dead Space. On a certain podcast I can't quite remember, I heard Dead Space referred to as Now That's What I Call Survival Horror Vol. 1; meaning, of course, that the game combines several popular features of existing survival horror games into a single compilation. From what Yahtzee says, it looks like this description is pretty accurate:

I really do think Dead Space's familiar-to-a-fault game play is a result of the publisher; really, anything with the EA brand these days is designed to be friendly and inoffensive. In this era of gigantic publishers, it feels like a certain dumbing-down is happening. Take a look at Activision's Call of Duty 4; the game refuses to tell you what Middle Eastern country you're in--although it should be pretty obvious to anyone with a passing knowledge of current events.

It's strange how a title so committed to the depiction of semi-realistic (and at times, horrifying) warfare is unwilling to extend its narrative to the real world, where it could possibly offend. As I've bitched about man-a-time, the view of games as "safe," inoffensive products is really holding back the gaming industry's creativity. This is obviously a symptom of increasing development costs, which may explain why some of the most innovative and interesting games this gen have been on the DS, PSP, and on digital download services like XBox Live. Wouldn't it be nice if the big-budget blockbusters weren't afraid to step out of their comfort zone?

Related Links:

Yahtzee Wannabe Warns You About the GameStop Devil
The World Ends With Yahtzee
Yahtzee's Homecoming

Left4Dead: The Most Important Training Simulation You Will Ever Play

John Constantine — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 01:00:00 GMT

I am not embarrassed by many things. For example, when I invite a delightful young woman over to my apartment for a romantic liaison, I know full well that one of the first things she is going to see is a gigantic vinyl Godzilla. It sits on a mantle over a television surrounded by seven videogame consoles. The fridge is empty save for countless individual packets of soy sauce, a pitcher of water, and a lonesome bottle of Miracle Whip that may or may not have been there when I moved in. There is a framed map of Zebes from Super Metroid hanging in my bedroom. These are not things that label me “a catch.” I am also not embarrassed to admit what a terrible cliché I am. Like countless other men of my generation, raised with a nigh on religious devotion to media, I too have a Zombie Plan. The plan details what I will do during the initial weeks of the zombie apocalypse, that is to say, when my urban home is overrun by the brain-hungry undead. The plan is multi-tiered and incredibly thorough. I have this plan because it is important to be prepared for zombies. I also have it because I enjoy daydreaming about the zombie apocalypse. I am not embarrassed by this, and apparently neither is Valve, makers of Half-Life, Portal, Team Fortress, and this fall’s Left4Dead.

Left4Dead, a four player co-operative FPS built on Valve’s Source engine, is like a training simulator for zombie plans. The game plays out over four “films”, each one broken into five chapters and the goal of each is to move across city streets, dilapidated buildings, and other locales infested with zombies – 28 Days Later-style speedy zombies, not Romero-esque shamblers – to reach safe rooms. You load up on ammunition and healing items and then you go back out and you always, always stick together. There is no surviving the zombie apocalypse alone. The game plays with the same speed and immediacy of all Valve’s games, foregoing a realistic feeling of character weight in favor of brisk play. It is awesome.

I got to play Left4Dead’s split-screen co-op today, which only allows for two players, though you can still invite an additional two to join you via Xbox Live. At first, I felt like the game was just Half-Life 2 with head-crabless zombies. That was before I went into the apartment building and a horde of almost twenty sprinting corpses flooded into a single room. Since I was using a shotgun, one of only a handful of weapons available in the game, I found myself having to bludgeon zombies away to give me enough time to load just a single shell and blast them away. This was all while still looking around to make sure my companions weren’t getting overrun or in my line of fire. It was an intense and unique moment, unlike anything else I’ve played. I was equally impressed with the unscripted nature of Left4Dead. While the rush in the apartment was triggered by walking through a door, I accidentally brought on an onslaught of zombies outdoors because I accidentally set off a car alarm. If I hadn’t gone to see if the environment was fully interactive (read: Can I break this car window?), our trip through the level would have been much easier.

Of the many, many exciting games coming out this fall, Left4Dead might be the most important. Yeah, it’s fun. But it’s also educational. After all, no zombie plan should go into effect without being tested first.

Related links:

The Ten Greatest Fire Levels in Gaming History, Part 2
Games to Movies: Why Is It So Gad-Danged Hard?
Unknowable Horrors and Spiraling Madness: H.P. Lovecraft and Videogames
Trailer Review: House of the Dead – Overkill
The 61FPS Review: Dead Space

Mirror’s Edge: Everything You’ve Heard Is True

John Constantine — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

Since the beginning of 2008, I’ve been watching Mirror’s Edge from a distance, pining away for its delicious cityscape, smitten with its sterile and pristine blues, whites, reds, and yellows. It was, and is, a visual panacea to cure the over-bloom-lit, over-brown, over-textured HD gaming landscape. When the first gameplay videos started hitting the net at the beginning of May, Edge’s smooth parkour action and emphasis on non-violent flight transformed my infatuation into full-on love. I needed this game to be as good as it looked, to deliver on its proposed fluid play. I’ve been dreaming about a game based on momentum and escape for years now, and here it was in action. But the proof, as always, is in the play. After playing Mirror’s Edge at EA’s fall preview event today, my first impression is it’s exactly what developer DICE has been promising. Everything you’ve heard is true.

Much has already been written about ME’s brand of platforming – most everything in the environment is climbable given the right positioning, almost every wall can be used as a surface for running or leverage, and the appropriate path over rooftops and through hallways is typically marked in red – but its controls have been something of a mystery to me. It turns out that Mirror’s Edge is quite simple to play, but deceptively so. The four left and right triggers on a PS3 controller (the triggers and bumpers on 360) are coupled with traditional first-person analog controls (left analog to move, right to look) as the main inputs. L1 let’s you jump but it’s also a context sensitive catch-all used to climb up surfaces or interact with usable objects, such as support cables between buildings. Mirror’s Edge wants you to never stop moving through the world, constantly jumping, climbing, or sliding under any obstruction. As a result, the majority of the game finds you using only a few buttons. Actually cutting your path through the world is a different story though. I miscalculated a number of jumps repeatedly, having to re-do them until I had a better sense of the actual timing in the game. This was more reassuring than frustrating; it meant that the game requires practice and skill to play instead of automatically making you look cool with limited inputs. The game, like David Belle’s art of movement, is elegant.

The demo I played is the same one seen in this video. That is the game. It’s only a tiny chunk of the game’s introduction, so it remains to be seen whether or not the rest of Mirror’s Edge exhibits the same level of creative environmental design throughout. This appetizer was enough, however, to get me excited, even downright amorous, all over again. An action game about not killing, a platformer about escape, a game of speed that gives you constant control. I could not be more excited.

Related links:

Trailer Review: Mirror’s Edge
E3 Day 4: No Blades, No Bows. Leave Your Weapons Here.

The 61FPS Review: Dead Space

John Constantine — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

1986 bore witness to one of gaming's watershed moments, an event whose profound impact on the medium is still seen today, in games released every week. Protagonists, game worlds, sound effects and art direction; there is no facet of design that this single creative work hasn't influenced. It isn't The Legend of Zelda or Metroid. It isn't Out Run, Adventure Island, Kid Icarus, Bubble Bobble, or Castlevania. It isn't even a videogame.

The gaming legacy of James Cameron's Aliens cannot be overstated. Ignore all thirty games actually based on Aliens and consider the past twenty-two years of gaming as a whole. Syd Mead's art and designs cover every game from R-Type to Halo 3. H.R. Giger's titular xenomorph is mirrored in hundreds of enemies, even beyond Contra. The film's group dynamics and character archetypes are the template for almost every squad-based shooter ever made. And the forbidding labyrinth of colony LV-426 has defined entire genres, particularly the first-person shooter. This movie is the womb of the space marine, modern videogames' essential lead. Aliens made many, many games what they are.

But no one game has ever gone as far in recreating the Aliens experience — allowing you to enter a dilapidated, abandoned science-fiction world full of monsters hunting you from the shadows — as EA Redwood Shores' Dead Space. The Ishimura and its broken, dimly lit passages, the bloodthirsty and relentless necromorphs spawned from the ship's dead, the weapons you wield as Isaac Clarke (pulse rifles, flame throwers); even the dissonant score is lifted straight from the film.

And the gameplay follows Aliens' episodic structure precisely: at the start of all twelve chapters in Dead Space, you are instructed to go to a place, locate that chapter's MacGuffin (a machine that needs fixing, a creature that needs killing), eliminate a specific obstacle and survive a constant and seemingly unstoppable, unpredictable threat aided only by limited supplies and unreliable supporting characters.

Dead Space's premise and aesthetics aren't the only things on loan. The game's third-person shooting and adventuring are straight out of Resident Evil 4, but Dead Space improves on every aspect of that classic. RE4's great advancement in combat was enemies who responded dynamically to gunshots; shoot a zombie in the leg and it falls down, shoot it in the arm and it drops its weapon. Dead Space makes this surgical gunplay its focus: the only way to defeat its disgusting monsters — who are, admittedly, less Aliens and more The Thing — is to remove their limbs. So the majority of encounters are exercises in precision, and each new enemy type offers a tense moment of strategizing.

Dead Space's greatest evolution over Resident Evil 4, though, is its environmental challenges. On the surface, Dead Space's puzzles don't seem to deviate from RE4's find-the-key-then-flip-the-switch approach, but in execution they become wonderfully distinct. One scenario half-way through the game finds you manually jettisoning a gigantic meteor into space (the Ishimura is a "Planet Cracker," a ship that gathers huge chunks of planetary mass and space debris to process for raw materials). Four tethers hold the office-building-sized rock; you have to sever them in zero gravity. Two are in plain sight, so you jettison yourself across the room and quickly disable them. But two others are labeled as objectives on your holographic map. (Menus and maps are projected in front of the player, so you're never pulled out of the action for anything. It's the game's most original piece of design and you should expect to see it imitated by many others in the future.) The map indicates that they're outside of the room, and that's when it dawns on you that you'll need to go into the vacuum of space, crawling over the surface of the meteor, to find the remaining tethers. There's no prompt, no tutoring voice telling you exactly what to do. In oppressive isolation, you have work out the solution on your own. Dead Space transcends its influences in moments like these, becoming more than the sum of its borrowed parts.

So, as an interactive entertainment that works to recreate a very specific experience, Dead Space is an incredible success. In its graphics, audio, controls and design, the game is a paragon of quality. Few games are this beautifully and carefully considered. But Dead Space falters as a narrative. Its story (about an alien artifact that transforms human beings into genocidal monsters) is as derivative as everything else in the game, but devoid of the creative spark that enlivens the play and setting. The few human characters that populate the story are just as shallow; both the plot and cast end up as little more than facilitators for the action. The game would have worked better with you completely isolated: no human contact whatsoever, a lone engineer sent to fix an a ship adrift in space, up against insurmountable odds. I'd hope for the sequel to take this tack, but given EA's support of the game with all sorts of multimedia — a comic series and animated movie are already available — meant to enhance the narrative alone, I doubt it will happen.

The story isn't bad, per se, just beside the point. Dead Space is a flawlessly constructed ride, a digital suit for you to wear that lets you go to a place, see and do things, that you could never do. King Aliens has birthed a shrieking prince. Go play it.

Grade: B

Previous 61FPS Reviews:

LOL
Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen
Metal Gear Solid IV
Ninja Gaiden 2
Grand Theft Auto IV
Wii Fit

Star Wars, Lucasarts, Bioware: You’re Doing It Wrong.

John Constantine — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 22:30:00 GMT

Come October 21st, the inevitable will finally happen. After years of hemming, hawing, clamoring, and speculating, Bioware and Lucasarts are going to announce an MMO based on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. This is not a guess. Bioware’s leash-holder, EA, already spoiled the surprise in July when chief executive John Riccitello flat-out admitted it existed. I couldn’t be more disappointed. I’m not inherently opposed to MMOs, far from it. In fact, I’m very excited about the impending boom of console-born MMOs and how, as is the case with everything designed specifically for consoles, the genre becomes streamlined and more readily accessible to players without two-thousand spare hours to hunt for rare armor. I’m disappointed because Knights of the Old Republic is Bioware’s narrative masterpiece. Even stripped of its abused license, Knights of the Old Republic’s story and characters are legitimate milestones in game development, successes that Bioware has yet to surpass. Obsidian’s sloppy-seconds follow-up The Sith Lords, despite being an unfinished mess, made the ongoing saga started in the original even more compelling, hinting at a grand conclusion that would reveal the hidden machinations behind both game stories. And now, after four years, we won’t see an actual single-player climax to the story of Darth Revan. We’re going to get a game built to accommodate literal millions of players, Xbox Live goons named Darth Ballz marching about with lightsabers, yammering bullshit in your ear that will make George Lucas penned dialogue sound like Lord Byron.

October 21st makes me sick.

(Link: Joystiq)

Related links:

Screen Test: Star Wars – The Force Unleashed
Star Wars: A New Halo
Why Wasn’t The Clone Wars A Video Game?
DC Universe Online and the Console MMO Conundrum
MMO Predicts Life in 10 Years

Question of the Day: How Do You Make a Horror Game Horrifying?

John Constantine — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT

Don’t be afraid. There are no ghouls here. Just nerds.

‘Tis the season for delighting in frights, is it not? That time of year when Halloween is just around the corner, the days get darker, and the things that go bump in the night start getting goosebumps, because, hey, it’s cold out there. As I mentioned last week, it’s also the beginning of game season. Horror, as a genre, doesn’t have quite the presence it did in gaming a few years back, but autumn 2008’s seeing a number of high-profile scary games hitting consoles across the land. Silent Hill’s back after a four year absence, EA is releasing their brand new IP Dead Space in just over a week, and Atari is re-launching their ill-fated Alone in the Dark on PS3. Horror games are an absolute favorite of mine. There’s a visceral thrill they provide that is distinct to the medium, mixing the tension-and-release dynamic essential to horror in any medium with the deep satisfaction of accomplishment that comes from successfully playing a game. The best of them are unique amongst videogames for being almost exhausting to play. The original Silent Hill excelled at this; it made me physically uncomfortable after a certain length of time, further enhancing the reprieve of safety in the game world. This is an essential ingredient in making a horror game truly scary. If it doesn’t make you uncomfortable, if it doesn’t put you, the player, in the shoes of that character compelled to discover what’s making those noises in the dark, it fails. But that’s just my opinion. What is essential to making horror games scary to you, reader? Is it making the game difficult to play on a mechanical level, making it unfair, as Jenn Frank from Infinite Lives hypothesizes? Is it making dogs jump through windows when you totally don’t expect it? Let me know in the comments.

(Note: The image above is from the glorious mess of a horror game called Rule of Rose. It is one of the best games I have ever played. It also happens to be one of the worst.)

Related links:

Gears of LittleBig Fable Music: Considering the First-Party Blitz
OST: Rule of Rose
Overworld: Friday the 13th
Screen Test: Alone in the Dark
Silent Hill: Homecoming is, Thankfully, Both Silent and Hilly

Tales of The Focus Group: Peter Moore Takes No Guff

John Constantine — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 18:00:00 GMT

I get latching onto game designers as personalities. It’s no different than the cult of personality that sprouts up around musicians, writers, and film directors. Gaming’s rich with characters too: from the robot-building eccentrics like Will Wright, frothing madmen like David Jaffe, and mean drunks like Tomonobu Itagaki. What mystifies me is the way gamers latch onto publishing executives and marketers. Seriously, who cares about Reggie Fils-Aime? The guy doesn’t make Nintendo’s games, he just makes sure they’re profitable. Or how about Peter Moore? When that wily Brit was in charge of Microsoft’s games division, there was no end of fanboy chatter about his antics. Oh, Peter Moore got a Grand Theft Auto IV tattoo! Take that, Sony! Once he moved on to EA Sports, the guy disappeared from the limelight, no longer a face for console war jibber-jabber.

Well, after today, I am forced to admit that I am interested in Peter Moore. Not because he’s starting some wild new business initiative to ramp up EA’s creative output or anything of the sort. No, I want to know more about Peter Moore because one of his last actions as president of Sega of America was to tell Yuji Naka, creator of Sonic the Hedgehog, to fuck off. Games Radar’s running a story that, during the Dreamcast’s final days, Moore ran a focus group that resulted in young consumers labeling Sega a "granddad with dementia who used to be cool but you couldn't remember why." Burn. When Moore had recordings of the focus group translated into Japanese for a meeting with Sega Japan, Naka accused Moore of doctoring the recordings. Moore’s response?

"I lost it. I turned to the interpreter and said, ‘Tell him, fuck you.’” Although the translator refused to convey Moore's feelings, he was pretty sure that his message got across. "Naka had lived in the US for three years, so I knew he understood. I walked out and never returned."

Why does this make Peter Moore interesting? Yuji Naka is responsible for Sonic’s shitty friends. Fuck that guy.

(Link: Games Radar, via NeoGAF)

Related links:

FMV Hell: Sonic CD
Trailer Review: Sonic Unleashed
Do You Hold Any Hope For Sonic Unleashed?
Alternate Soundtrack: Sonic the Hedgehog vs. Ratatat
Sonic is for Porn

Fix It: Alone in the Dark, Tiger Woods, and the Death of the Glitch

John Constantine — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 23:00:00 GMT

Today was an interesting day for getting a keen look at what happens when games come to the public in less than perfect shape. For starters, Atari and developer Eden took the middling reception of Alone in the Dark to heart. They’re showing off the Playstation 3 version of the game in Leipzig at the moment featuring in-progress fixes to the game’s unmanageable, glitchy camera as well as the iffy driving and inventory control in the game. They will also be releasing these fixes as a patch for the Xbox 360 edition of the game. Of course, Eden didn’t have to do this. They could have just gone the EA route, and (hilariously) said that those aren’t glitches! That’s just the way the game’s meant to be played.

Chances are though, EA will go ahead and patch Tiger Woods ’09 regardless of the funny marketing. This is the way of it with games in the age of net-enabled consoles; ship the game as soon as you possibly can, fix it later if you have to. PC games have enjoyed patching for well over a decade at this point but it’s still a new phenomenon in the world of devoted gaming machines. It’s a good thing, ultimately. If NES games with crippling slow down could have been patched, they would have been. The romantic in me, though, can’t help but be sad to see console games lose their permanent state. Glitches in classic games have a rich, memorable history. Take the classic infinite 1up exploit in Super Mario Bros.

Or, my personal favorite, the Mega Man 3 “pit” glitch.

Glitches may break some games, but they also have the capacity to add an entire layer of interaction with a game that the designer never even intended. The fact that games are now fluid objects and can be changed limits, to a small degree, how we can interact and explore within their boundaries. Not to mention how fixing glitches alters speedrunning. Patches are great, but game developers would do well to remember that not everything broken needs to be fixed.

Our thanks to Joystiq, Eurogamer, and YouTuber pabrtrky.

Related links:

Screen Test: Alone in the Dark
Follow Up: Mega Man 9 and Design Resurrection Part 2
We Are Watching Many, Many Speedruns. Join Us in Some Castlevania!
Free Running: How Speedruns and TAS Make New Games

Everyone Will be Able to Rock

John Constantine — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

At the end of June, my concerns for the future of videogames' burgeoning rock star genre were growing by the hour. Activision was waving their new drum kit in EA’s face while Konami tried to get people to like their music games outside of Japan. The big problem? None of those companies appeared to give a damn that they were flooding a market and audience already drowning under a torrent of plastic instruments. Not to mention that none of those instruments were guaranteed to be compatible with games that didn’t come packaged with alongside them. Yeah, Guitar Hero 3 and its electronic axe might be one of the ten best selling games in the history of games but that doesn’t mean the genre bubble can’t burst. Today, another faceless company has helped to allay my fears.

And, would you believe it, it’s Sony doing the allaying.

The once haughty Japanese giant stated on their Playstation blog that they have reached an agreement with Activision, EA/MTV, and Konami to allow every single publisher’s rock & roll instruments will work with every publisher’s games on the Playstation 3. Bought Rock Revolution but want to get in on Rock Band 2’s killer track list? Go for it. Feel like using that gorgeous new Guitar Hero World Tour drum kit with Konami’s new opus? Fine, have fun. Not only that, but SCEA also said that, though it isn’t happening just yet, they’re working on a fix for the original Rock Band and Guitar Hero 3 as well.

This is the first step on the road to peripheral-based music games finally coming into their own. Guitar Hero made them an institution but this agreement will help cement the instrument set as an expandable platform that doesn’t necessitate annual hardware revisions. What else needs to happen to guarantee this glorious, melodious future? Microsoft and Nintendo need to step up to the plate and make the same arrangements on their respective consoles. It’s likely Microsoft has already got this in the bag, but Nintendo? They enjoy screwing over their customers a little too much, methinks. All that would remain after that would be a centralized music store that supported every game and hosted a library akin to iTunes that offered procedurally generated tracks based on the engines developed by Harmonix, Neversoft, and whomever else gets in on the action.

The future, she is bright this day.

(Link: via Joystiq)

Related links:

Everyone Should Be Able to Rock
Why Dontcha Cry About it, Saddle Bags: Konami Sues Viacom Over Rock Band
Warner Music Wants More Royalties

Interview Round Up: Suda 51, Shinji Mikami, and Mikami’s Replacements on Resident Evil

John Constantine — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 18:00:00 GMT

This is what happens when Shinji Mikami and Suda 51 work together.

The greatest interviews in the gaming world can’t all come from 61 Frames Per Second, dontcha know! While we’ve been chatting with the OCRemix crew about Street Fighter II HD Remix, Gamasutra’s Christian Nutt has been chatting with director Yasuhiro Anpo and producer Jun Takeuchi of Capcom about their controversial sequel, Resident Evil 5. Nutt gets into far more interesting territory than new weapons and enemies and broaches the geographical background of Capcom’s creativity as a Japanese developer:

Nutt: Is there something creative at Capcom, too, that's part of the equation? Ultimately, Resident Evil, all the way back to PS1, is the game coming out of Japan that best captures that Hollywood movie feel -- and I feel that if you look at Lost Planet, Dead Rising, Resident Evil, and other major Capcom games in this generation, they really bring up the polish and manage to retain that. It's become a Capcom style, in a certain sense. What drives that, at Capcom?

Takeuchi: Well, I think that there are two reasons, mainly, why that is. First of all, we at Capcom, when we set out to make a game, we make it on a world-wide basis.

We make a game that people all over the world are going to buy. And I think that that way of thinking is one of the reasons for our successes.

Maybe at other developers, they first of all look at the Japanese market, and then say, "Oh, we can also sell this in the west."

They develop it first for the internal market, for the Japanese market; but we at Capcom, we look at it first of all as selling something for the whole world.

The second reason, I think, is that we in Capcom are based in Osaka, unlike most of the other Japanese developers, who are based largely in Tokyo.

And I think that gives us -- we have a lot of creative people, and the atmosphere and feeling in the workplace is a little bit different, and I think that gives us a little bit of originality, and allows us also to make something that's technically very high level.

Meanwhile, 1up’s Thierry Nguyen got face time with the RE5 team’s forebear Shinji Mikami and his new partner in EA crime, Suda 51. While they don’t get into too many specifics about their new “action horror title”, Suda and Mikami do shed even more light on the difference between Eastern and Western game development.

Nguyen: You've worked with other publishers to get your games to the West. Are there restrictions with those other publishers, and is there a sort of blank check "do what you want" feel with EA? How is EA different from other companies you've worked with?

Shinji Mikami: Both of us are the creators. In terms of being a creator, having people understand what I want to do, that's the biggest thing. Also, EA has strong marketing power. If Suda just keeps on doing what he wants to do, players might not understand what they're playing. But with EA's strong marketing power, they know what people want from a game, and we combine both their knowledge and his creativity to help create a better game.

Suda 51: I actually presented two ideas at the same time, and EA really liked one idea. They instantly said "we like that exact idea; we don't want the other one." Too many publishers say that they will think about it and let you know later, but EA was the one that said exactly how they felt the first time. The idea they liked was the game I really wanted to create the most, and they understood what I wanted to do, which helps.

Both are ripping good reads, so head over to Gamasutra and 1up to check ‘em out.

Related links:

The Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix Soundtrack - An Inside Look
61FPS Q&A: David Lloyd and Larry Oji of OC ReMix on the Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix Soundtrack
Revenge of the Port: Dead Rising Shuffles, Moans on Wii

Overworld: Friday the 13th

John Constantine — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Overworld examines how one game or series establishes a unique sense of place.

Buzz for EA Redwood Shores’ Dead Space has gone from indifference to genuine excitement in the weeks since E3. Now that people have actually played the interactive paean to Cameron-Carpenter-styled horror, they’ve found that its forbidding atmosphere, sound, and HUD-free presentation are hype-worthy and legitimately scary. I haven’t gotten to try it out myself but I’m anxious to get my hands on it. Redwood Shores have taken the essential road to designing quality interactive horror; Dead Space is, at its core, a game about confinement, about being trapped in a hostile environment with limited means of survival. Videogames lend themselves to this method of creating tension and anxiety because their environments are, naturally, closed. System Shock’s dilapidated space station, Resident Evil’s mansion, and even the more expansive town of Silent Hill are perfectly closed spaces, places that simultaneously create dread and a functional goal: how do I get out?

It’s far rarer to see a game take the opposite route. After all, it isn’t easy to make a game that makes you feel lost. If a game forces you to lose yourself in its environment, by way of randomly generated environments or trick passages that lead to incongruous locations (as in Zelda’s Lost Woods), it risks frustrating the player – this is especially bad if the game’s intent is horror, since frustration can easily replace anxiety. It’s equally difficult to create a closed environment that is delicately constructed to confuse the player. The original Metroid and its Game Boy sequel are two of the only games that manage to successfully pull this off thanks to its series of identical hallways and dead ends. Another is Friday the 13th.

LJN’s Friday the 13th for the NES is, as the internet has noted on many occasions, a bad game. The film franchise itself isn’t good, best known twenty-five years after its inception for camp value (forgive the pun) than creating memorable chills. The game has cloying sound, poorly defined goals, terribly inaccurate controls, and inappropriate enemies (bats and endless waves of zombies were not common fixtures in the movies.) But the game’s world, Crystal Lake, and its surrounding caves, cabins, and forests, is remarkable at creating a sense of overwhelming fear through a mixture of mundane graphics and by leading the player off course.

The manmade structures in particular are sterile, empty, and eerie, even in daylight and the over-the-shoulder perspective and control in these environments cause constant disorientation. During outdoors sidescrolling, Friday the 13th is constantly altering your perception of the environment. If you follow a path down from one forest trail, you will not necessarily see the path leading up in the next. This might be bad design from a playability perspective but it manages to actually affect the feeling of being lost in the woods without directly using trick passages. Your map exacerbates the confusion, only giving a location on paths around the lake proper but not indicating the direction you’re actually moving in. Crystal Lake feels as confounding as any actual place you are only cursorily familiar with. You are being actively pursued by an unpredictable threat, and you are armed with a map you are forced to read on the run and often in the middle of the dark. Friday the 13th fails as a game but its world is a terrible, misleading success.

More Overworld:

Marble Madness

Related links:

For Love of the Game: Metroid II Remakes
Rebuttal - Say What About Metroid: Zero Mission?
Rebuttal Rebuttal – I Stand With Metroid

Brett Favrerererer Wins: The Inexplicable Popularity of Madden

John Constantine — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

You may or may not have noticed this whilst reading 61 Frames Per Second, but we don’t talk about simulators that often. Personally, and you’ll most likely find this true of the rest of the team, I don’t play Gran Turismo or Microsoft Flight Simulator. If I’m playing a videogame, I want my cars going too fast and defying physics a la Burnout. If I’m playing a videogame, I want my airplane to be shooting many other planes while looking awesome and defying physics a la After Burner. The same goes for sports. Tecmo Bowl, NHLPA ’93, and Hot Shots Golf are fun because they don’t provide authentic football, hockey, and golf experiences. This is why I’ve always been somewhat mystified by the Madden franchise’s massive popularity; in its modern incarnations, it is a brutally realistic simulation of football. In order to play Madden well – not competition level, but actually using the game’s mechanics properly – you need to have both a deep understanding of the actual sport’s rules as well as the game’s incredibly complex controls. Football rules, sure, but how did a game so hard become so damn popular?

Anyway, Brett Favre-mania got me thinking about it. The Madden cover-Methuselah will apparently do quite well for the Jets. So says a Madden simulation conducted by EA. Sheesh.

Many thanks to Deadspin for the linkage.

Related links:

Trailer Review: Tecmo Bowl – Kickoff
Guns and Football: The Ten Best Selling Games in America