61 Frames Per Second : heavenly sword

Brawler Theory

Cole Stryker — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

We've come a long way since TMNT II, folks. You might not think that brawlers are the most cerebral of genres, but there's a surprising amount of theory that goes into the creation of games that allow players to do little more than smack NPC's around.

Gamasutra has posted an interview with Creative Director Tom Smith from THQ, who discusses different beat-em-ups, and how they managed to occupy specific niches within the genre. Here he talks about attack groups:

Prince of Persia and Ninja Gaiden both keep enemies in a single group, with one enemy breaking from the group to make a single attack. This works well with smaller groups, but for our game, we want over a dozen enemies at once, so we need to spread them out more if we're going to fit everyone.
Mark of Kri and Genji felt a bit artificial, because one enemy from the group would call the player character out for multiple attacks while the others watched. Genji could at least argue that the pattern fit the dueling style of the game. I did like the surprise attacks that Mark of Kri added from the far group-it made those distant enemies much more meaningful. The player has to keep half an eye on the outer ring at all times.
But overall, God of War and Heavenly Sword had the best feel. Having multiple enemies near you keeps things on edge and makes it harder for the player to tell what to expect next-which was reassuring, since that was the basic direction we were already considering.

I never really gave it any thought! He also throws in a nugget of weird human psychology:

God of War: Enemies in the far group just stand around and look relatively uninvolved. But they're zombies, so it looks OK. (Personally, I believe the popularity of zombie-killing games is partially fuelled by the lower AI expectations-they're supposed to be mindless, so game development is easier. That, and zombies are the only thing as fun to kill as Nazis.)

So, zombies are an easy way for developers to slack off a bit when it comes to programming peripheral enemies. Sneaky.

There are six more pages of crunchy design theory. Go read it!

Related Links:

Trailer Review: Golden Axe

New Watchmen Throwback Browser Game

NYCC 2009 - DC Universe Online

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves Announced, Most Likely Awesome

John Constantine — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 01:15:00 GMT

Let’s just get this out of the way right now. Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is freaking great. It is the best game that Naughty Dog has ever made and it is an absolute delight to play. The stories in games like Gears of War 2 are often forgiven for being like “b-movies”, but Uncharted actually is a b-movie, a bitchin’ pulp adventure full of likable stereotypes, absurd feats of physical prowess, physics defying escapes from death, and more one-liners than you can shake a number of different sticks at. Its character animation is astounding, its shooting tight, and its environments are linear but convincingly natural. It is awesome. So awesome. Bionic Commando awesome.

It didn’t sell that great though. It sold well, but not nearly what it deserved and there has been some question as to whether it would receive a sequel or go the way of Sony’s other first-party titles from 2007. (Rest in peace Lair and Heavenly Sword. May your makers learn their lessons. Particularly you, Ninja Theory. Next time you make a game that has Andy Serkis yelling about his “holy genitals”, you can expect a very stern phone call from the proper authorities.)

But, lo, Nathan Drake has returned. Behold the trailer delights.

Word is Nate’s chasing some Marco Polo-related treasure this time out. Among Thieves will also sport free climbing as opposed to the rigid, set platforming of the original (totally rad) and stealth sections (not rad, but I will give Naughty Dog the benefit of the doubt.)

It’s a rare day that non-gameplay trailers get me all aflutter. Much like Beyond Good and Evil 2, Uncharted 2 fits the bill. It will be awesome.

Much love to NeoGAFfer Jtyettis for dropping all the knowledge.

Related links:

The Curious Case of Playstation Home
BREAKING: Beyond Good & Evil 2 Debut!

Trailer Review: Golden Axe

John Constantine — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

In the grand pantheon of beat-em-ups, brawlers, hack-and-slashers, kiss-your-mother-with-that-mouth-ya-jerk, dick-punching games, Golden Axe is a middleweight. Hell, it started as a welterweight in 1989. The fantasy setting, magic powers, and ride-able dragons and chicken-salamanders were novel, certainly, but how could it compete with Final Fight, a game that let you be a pro-wrestling mayor who compulsively took off his clothing? How could its triumphant trio of sword-guy-in-underpants, little person, and Red Sonja-cosplayer compete with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Golden Axe was plain outclassed for its first couple of games. That is, until arcade-only sequel Death Adder’s Revenge came out, a game so gorgeous, strange, and playable that it stands as the best beat ‘em up ever made outside of Capcom and Konami (yeah, that’s right. It’s better than Streets of Rage. All of them.) Right when the series started showing its mettle, it all but disappeared. Death Adder’s Revenge’s legacy lived on in a cruddy Genesis sequel, a Saturn fighting game, and a bizarro PS2 remake of the series debut. Until now! Yes, the new Golden Axe that Sega first showed way back at E3 2006 is finally coming out and, as you can see from this trailer, it’s got a case of the browns. Golden Axe: Beast Rider looks competent for a modern beat ‘em up; not quite a God of War or Devil May Cry, but at least on par with Conan or Heavenly Sword (though more brazenly cheesecake than either.) Returning Red Sonja-cosplayer-protagonist Tyris Flare actually appears to be wearing more clothing than she used to, but not much, and her vocabulary has been greatly expanded. The biggest problem here? No multiplayer. Golden Axe’s best selling point, stripped right out.

I’m actually kind of excited about this game. It looks like readymade Up All Night fare.

Related links:

A Perfectly Cromulent Beat-Em-Up

Previous Trailer Reviews:

House of the Dead: Overkill
Riz-Zoawd
Idolm@ster PSP
The Last Guy
Tecmo Bowl: Kickoff
Captain Rainbow
The Past and Future With Mega Man 9 and Chrono Trigger DS
Densetsu no Stafi 5
Sonic Unleashed
Infinite Undiscovery
Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood
Street Fighter 4
The Conduit
Mirror’s Edge

LittleBigPre-Order Confusion

Derrick Sanskrit — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 18:00:00 GMT

It's almost hard to believe that after all we've seen of Media Molecule's LittleBigPlanet in the past seventeen months, the game still isn't out yet. Sony saw fit to make these last two months of waiting even more difficult last week when they unveiled a number of incentive goodies for LBP pre-orders: a guide to the game's massive creation tools, a book of stickers from the game, a Sackboy burlap pouch to hold your game case (shown at right), and downloadable costumes to transform your Sackboy into either of Sony's favorite scantily clad barbarians, Nariko from Heavenly Sword and Kratos from God of War. The fan community's reaction was expectedly positive to the power of outrageous. What most didn't realize, however, was that each pre-order would only receive one of these gifts, and which one depends on where they place their order.

As explained on the official LBP blog this week, those who preorder from Amazon will receive the creation guide and those who preorder from Gamestop will receive the exclusive downloadable Kratos costume. Though many fans have requested a "special edition" of the game that includes all of the bonuses, reps from Media Molecule have said there are no such plans. Still no word on where one would need to pre-order to receive the sticker book, burlap pouch, or Nariko costume, nor if any of these will be made available seperately after the game's release, but producing this many store exclusives is bound to only upset fans, much like the recent Smashing Pumpkins album "Zeitgeist" (which featured a different bonus track for each Best Buy, Target, and iTunes and then another bonus track for the Best Buy reissue). Also like "Zeitgeist," this move reeks of desperation to attract buyers to a third-place console.

Worse still, recent reports have indicated that LBP will not support music or graphics from the PS3 hard drive, requiring instead that all user-generated graphics be captured with the PSEye peripheral. Though this is as yet unconfirmed by Media Molecule or Sony, such a decision would cripple the creative element of the game that seems to be its entire focus. Say goodbye to those gorgeous stickers of zombie Schwarzenegger you Photoshopped last night and your Pink Floyd collection, say hello to poorly lit webcam photos of your cat and the same Go! Team song over and over again. I'm still looking forward to this game, but I really hope this last part about user-generated content on the hard drive is wrong. I gots to have my zombie Ahnolds.

Related articles:
E3 Opinion: Because It's Cool To Complain...
Games Cost Money: Sony Cans The Getaway and Eight Days
SCEE Playstation Day 2K8 Roundup: Killzone 2, Home, LittleBigPlanet Dated
Alternate Soundtrack: The Go! Team vs. Super Street Fighter 2

The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial, Part 3

John Constantine — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:13:00 GMT

Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!!

We cite Punch-Out!! here not for starring Mike Tyson (a controversial figure, even before his rape conviction), but for the degree to which it epitomizes a trend that would dominate gaming in the late-'80s and early-'90s: the "beat up stereotypes from around the world" gameplay model. Granted, most of Punch-Out!!'s characters are too ludicrous to really offend; it's hard to imagine Pacific Islanders getting all up in arms about King Hippo being kind of a jackass. That said, the sight of cross-eyed Piston Honda babbling "Sushi, Kamikaze, Fujiyama, Nipponichi!" as a mid-match battle cry is a little unsettling. — PS

Persona 3

I’ve written about Persona 3’s disturbing imagery before: “It’s always strange when games filled with truly troubling imagery go unnoticed by the most vocal anti-game pundits. Persona 3, Atlus’ exceptional RPG in the long running Shin Megami Tensei series, has been released not once but twice in the past twelve months without eliciting even a peep out of Joe Lieberman or Focus on the Family. For those unfamiliar with the game, the reason Persona 3 might ruffle some feathers is its protagonists, a team of troubled high school students who control guardian spirits to battle demons. And oh yeah, they release these spirits by shooting themselves in the head.” Seriously! Teens! Shooting themselves repeatedly in the FACE! No one even said anything about all the teens shooting themselves in the face. — JC

Metroid II: Return of Samus

Metroid II is about xenocide; your goal is to slaughter an entire alien species. Yes, there are many games about destroying evil alien species. Usually, though, said species are attacking the Earth or something. Or they're at least competent to make moral decisions. Metroids are space jellyfish. They're not evil, they're just hungry. And the series storyline establishes pretty clearly that the Space Pirates are breeding the things for their own evil ends. Exterminating the Space Pirates would be one thing, but the Metroids are mere low-functioning animals. As you proceed through the game, you watch a steadily declining count of how many of the poor little bastards you have left to vaporize. Imagine if this thing was set in a nature preserve. — PS

Fable

Peter Molyneux may not have delivered on his promise of creating the greatest role-playing game of all time with Fable but it was still a remarkably forward thinking game. Consider this: Fable was released in the United States on September 14th, 2004, a mere four months after Massachusetts started issuing same-sex marriage licenses and two months before senatorial, congressional, and presidential elections where constitutionally banning same-sex marriage was a tent pole issue. I applaud Molyneux for creating a game where a man can fall in love and marry another man. But I am shocked that Fable didn’t cause videogame content to be another talking point that election season. — JC

Click here for Part 1
Click here for Part 2

Previous Top Tens:
The Ten Greatest Opening Levels in Gaming History
The Ten Most Adventurous Sequels
The Ten Greatest Fire Levels

The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial, Part 2

John Constantine — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:12:00 GMT

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Call of Duty 4 is a game obsessed with realism, its depiction of combat situations and the tools of war meticulous to an almost terrifying degree. Early in the game, you are placed in the gunner’s seat of an AC-130 Spectre over a Ukrainian field, the night vision view of an aerial assault looking no different than an Iraq war newscast, the radio confirmation of kills unsettlingly casual; a game so realistic that it mimics a soldier’s detachment from killing. It’s strange then that the game, for all its incessant specificity, sends the player to kill Arab soldiers in “the Middle East”, and not an actual nation. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare has sold over seven million copies in a war-weary United States in under a year. Am I the only one who finds this sort of depersonalization unsettling? — JC

Mick and Mack: Global Gladiators

Fast-food promotional games are pretty fucked up, as a whole. Selling this nasty grub to kids via smiling cartoon characters and hop-and-bop platforming — well, it may not cross over into "immoral", but it's certainly sleazy. The 1992 McDonald's promo-piece Mick and Mack: Global Gladiators, however, crosses that line by hopping onto the kid-friendly environmentalism in vogue at the time. (See also Captain Planet, Sonic the Hedgehog, etc.) The problem here is that McDonald's' own environmental record was far from clean; as a massive distributor of factory-farmed beef, the company was (and is) directly responsible for a huge amount of pollution, deforestation and energy wastage. Bastards were cutting down the same sparkling-green rainforests through which their grinning shills were merrily traipsing. — PS

Heavenly Sword

It might seem strange that we’ve chosen to single-out Heavenly Sword as our example of an absurdly over-sexualized female protagonist. Dead or Alive, a series that’s persisted for just over a decade now without causing a kerfuffle despite its bizarre, hyper sexuality, might seem like a more logical target. You might even say that Heavenly Sword’s a poor example considering its emphasis on Nariko’s empowerment in a male dominated fantasy world. But let me ask you, if Nariko is such a great warrior, savior of her people even though they hate her for being a woman, why does she go to war in her underpants? She is fighting people with swords in her underpants. No one thought mention to developer Ninja Theory that underpants are not effective armor? Nariko stands in for the legions of silly, objectified, hyper-sexualized female game protagonists. We’re giving Lara the day off on this one. — JC

Click here for Part 1
Click here for Part 3

The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial, Part 1

John Constantine — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:11:00 GMT

Games have been raising hackles since their inception. Howell Ivy kick-started gaming and controversy’s relationship when he designed Death Race in 1976, a simple black and white game that was, well, about running people over for points. That was enough to get America riled up, prompting 60 Minutes to run the first of many, many televised news stories about the psychological effects of gaming. But public outrage is unpredictable. Politicians and parent groups have been shocked by d-list titles like Manhunt and Night Trap while more popular, widely played games with far more inflammatory content have passed by unnoted. Today, 61 Frames Per Second presents The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial. A number of these are games that we are surprised did not cause uproar in a number of communities. The rest are games that we ourselves find seriously questionable in content. How do you feel about these videogames? Indifferent? Appalled? Leave a comment and let us know. — John Constantine

NARC

I don't know about you, but I have at least a couple of friends who have occasionally sold drugs. They're pretty lucky they grew up in the relatively permissive '90s, and not in the merciless, Reaganite '80s presented in NARC. Sure, NARC gives you bonus points for arresting dealers instead of killing them, but that's because it's almost impossible to do. Far easier is just perforating them on the spot. As my fellow blogger Cole notes, "I guess dismembering hundreds is okay if they're pushin'." In fact, there was some parental outrage over NARC's unprecedented level of gore, but its moral assumptions went pretty much unchallenged. — Peter Smith

Pokémon

Have you ever noticed that there are no regular, powerless domesticated animals in any of the Pokémon games, cartoons, comics et cetera? Let's say your pre-teen brother/sister/cousin goes out for a walk one day and comes across a pigeon in the street. They then capture this pigeon in a small cage and train it to fight the dogs, lizards and ponies that the other neighborhood kids have captured and trained to fight, as well as stray cats and sewer rats that can then be captured and trained for similar purposes. Yeah, that scenario is a little awesome, but it's also pretty horrifying, right? When Michael Vick is involved in a dogfighting circuit, the media explodes with rage, but when your kids do it in a Nintendo game it gets rated E for Everyone by the ESRB. — Derrick Sanskrit

Final Fantasy Tactics

As much as Final Fantasy Tactics’ tale of political intrigue in the feudal fantasy-scape of Ivalice is concerned with a power struggle between church and state, it’s hard to get past the game’s barely veiled indictment of Christian lore. Tactics' villains are essentially the Catholic Church. Their central figure is Saint Ajora, a 'child of God' with twelve disciples, one of whom betrayed him and sent him to his death. 'Cept it turns out Ajora wasn't really the son of God, but a power-hungry war-mongering mortal who was sneakily made divine through church skulduggery and historical revisionism. Good thing RPGs require so much reading, otherwise there might have been some good ol’ fashioned game burnings back in 1998. — JC

Click here for Part 2
Click here for Part 3