61 Frames Per Second : mirror’s edge

One Real Man Runs Along the Mirror’s Edge

Joe Keiser — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 13:00:00 GMT

Here’s the first example of what I hope will become an extremely dangerous fad: videos of parkour filmed in the style of Mirror’s Edge. You’ll want to stay for at least the first minute, when filmer AZO is most dedicated to the tribute—he even finds a properly color coordinated factory and makes a beeline for the red pipes.

Some of the rest of it is pretty out of place, like the bike tricks and the, um, magic cup thing, and some of his other moves wouldn’t look impressive filmed any other way. They do look impressive this way, which reiterates two things:

DICE really found something powerful with the combination of camera angle, camera motion, and animation in Mirror’s Edge, if someone else can use that same combination to make standing on a two-foot fence feel dramatic.
Doing athletic things while holding a camera is unfathomably awesome to the internet.

The video, after the jump.

Related Links:

What Faith of Mirror’s Edge Really Looks Likes
Mirror’s Edge: Everything You’ve Heard Is True
Trailer Review: Mirror’s Edge

What Faith of Mirror’s Edge Really Looks Likes

Joe Keiser — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Someone’s gone and created a third-person camera mod for Mirror’s Edge. Doesn’t that sound just awesome? Faith is after all a totally badass parkour superhero; certainly those smooth animations and perfectly chained motions would look great on the entirety of her lithe body, right?

The video’s after the jump, but a word of warning—this will make you feel like that time you were shown a video of yourself and came to the horrifying realization that actually, you can’t dance at all:

Yeah, you're not supposed to play the game this way, but man. I can’t even begin to imagine what the gunplay looks like.

Related Links:

Mirror’s Edge: Everything You’ve Heard Is True
Trailer Review: Terrifying New Mirror’s Edge Content
Trailer Review: Mirror’s Edge

Games I Probably Should Have Played in 2008

Bob Mackey — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 21:30:00 GMT

Since we've reached the point in January where last-year retrospectives have become completely lazy and tiresome, I figured I'd squeeze at least one more out because, hey, I've still got some 2008 baggage left. It was a super-busy year for me, full of new assignments, responsibilities, and that maelstrom of neverending crap known to most of you as "fall." Since my free time was so limited, I had to make some serious decisions about what to play; and some choices, like spending over 60 hours on Grand Theft Auto IV, were clearly wrong. This poor planning left many games I wanted to play untouched and unloved in a GameFly distribution center as they sat in their paper sleeves and desperately waited for me to add them to my queue. Why must inanimate objects make me feel so guilty?

Maybe you can tell me if I made the right decisions by looking at--and judging me by--the games I had no time to play. It's the only way I'll learn.

Tales of Vesperia - Ever since I spent over 100 hours with Tales of Symphonia back on the GameCube, I've been waiting for the series to wow me again. Legendia was a cheap cash-in, and I wasn't even able to judge Tales of the Abyss because its god-awful loading times made me shelve the game forever after just a few hours. I've heard that Vesperia is a real return to form for the Tales series, but my healthy skepticism might have prevented me from becoming too interested.

Tomb Raider: Underworld - To be honest, I've never really sat down with a Tomb Raider game since the second one. But after watching a friend play through a little of Legend back in 2006, my opinion on the series did a complete backflip. Even so, the stigma that haunted Tomb Raider from the late 90s to the early 00s seems to be one that's hard to shake--which could explain why I was never motivated enough to play more than the demo.

Mirror's Edge - I feel the greatest amount of shame for not playing Mirror's Edge over the holidays. As a semi-real games journalist, I feel somewhat responsible for playing and supporting refreshingly new gameplay concepts, even if they happen to come out of a mega massive studio like Electronic Arts. Rest assured that I will play Mirror's Edge at some point; it is my duty to you, the reader. (Unless someone can convince me otherwise.)

Fallout 3 - Even though I'm mighty tired (some would say plum tired) of medieval trappings in role-playing games, Fable 2 won out over Fallout 3 for me this fall due to the chip I have on my shoulder for developer Bethesda. It's not that they've spited me personally, or anything; I've just been misfortunate enough to discover how much the design philosophy of games like Morrowind and Oblivion clash with my sense of fun. It seems to be a common theme with the games I missed in 2008, but once again an established bias kept me from playing what might be a fantastic game.

Persona 4 - I had a little addiction to Persona 3. It kinda got out of hand. So, intent on not wasting my entire holiday break on a single game, I refused to touch Persona 4 and... didn't really end up spending my time productively, anyway. The Persona 4 cravings have started, but I think I'm going to save the game for the summer, when I'll be finished with graduate school and have two fancy book learnin' degrees to my name. I'm sure the hundreds of hours of P4 will give me something to do, because I don't foresee steady employment in my near future. And when I'm done with the game, I assume I can cook and eat it? Wish me luck.

Related Links:

Whatcha Not Playing: Persona 4
Facepalm: Crispy Gamer
Mirror’s Edge: Everything You’ve Heard Is True

Trailer Review: Terrifying New Mirror’s Edge Content

Joe Keiser — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Ah, Mirror’s Edge. There’s so much to think about when talking about it. It is, without doubt, a flawed, frustrating experience, the kind of game experience that you hate just as much you love. It also just happens to be the most important, must-play AAA title of the year. And it’s beautiful, and also nauseating. It has dizzying production values, and cheap looking Flash-like cutscenes. For every positive point, DICE’s opus has an equally negative counter-point, save for the one negative that stands alone: Mirror’s Edge is pretty darn short.

So of course there’s new DLC coming out for it, and it’s not just more of the same—for starters it’s called the Pure Time Trials pack, time trials being the one thing that everyone unequivocally loved about the original.

And judging by the trailer, which I’ve just watched for the sixth time in a row, it is also in its way more beautiful than the rooftop playgrounds of the game’s story mode. If you thought that was a clinic in Swedish minimalism, you’ve seen nothing—these new levels are made entirely of blocks of solid color hovering in space. The camera twirls as the mind boggles, searching for the seemingly limitless paths of flow in this pristinely artificial landscape. Here is the game that design mechanic fetishists wanted the original to be, this trailer seems to say. I personally couldn’t be happier.

Previous Trailer Reviews:

The Chase - Felix Meets Felicity
Yakuza 3
Dragon Quest IX
TGS Trailer Time: Resident Evil 5
Retro Game Challenge
Golden Axe: Beast Rider
House of the Dead: Overkill
Riz-Zoawd
Idolm@ster PSP
The Last Guy
Tecmo Bowl: Kickoff
Captain Rainbow
Mega Man 9 and Chrono Trigger DS
Densetsu no Stafi 5
Sonic Unleashed
Infinite Undiscovery
Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood
Street Fighter IV
The Conduit
Mirror’s Edge

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

Ceci N'Est Pas Une 1-Up: The Surrealist Future of Postpunk Gaming

John Constantine — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:30:00 GMT

While reading Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds’ sharp history of postpunk, I started thinking about videogames. I’m nothing if not predictable, I know. There’s a slight corollary between the gaming zeitgeist and punk rock. Not politically, of course. Videogames are, at least popularly, more conservative today than they’ve ever been. Just look at Bobby Kotick’s reasoning for dropping Brutal Legend and Ghostbusters from Activision’s release schedule: "[Those games] don't have the potential to be exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential and have the potential to become $100 million dollar franchises.” I realize that Activision is in the business of making money and not artifacts to inspire the human soul, but publicly stating that your publishing ethos is assembly-line-production makes it difficult to assess the creative merits of Guitar Hero: Buy This One Too, Just ‘Cause.

No, videogames in 2008 are, like punk rock in 1974, taking a medium that’s become marked by excess and stripping it back to its most basic. Even beyond Capcom’s retro efforts and traditional two-dimensional, genre exercises (Braid, Castle Crashers) on Xbox Live, designers like DICE are trying to keep games simple and raw. Mirror’s Edge, for all of its visual polish, uses only three buttons for the bulk of its action and the game’s goals are uncomplicated (run to, run away.) Games are also trying to put the power of creation back into the audience’s hands. Halo 3’s Forge, LittleBigPlanet, and Maxis’ Spore might not be putting players into the guts of design, but they are inlets for everyone to make their own games. You don’t need to know how to play guitar to rock, and you don’t need to know C++, or draw, or write to make a game. Add these mainstream juggernauts to the booming independent dev scene, the confrontational tedium of games like No More Heroes (as Goichi Suda says, punk’s not dead,) and we may look back on the 2010s as gaming’s punk rock era. But how does punk lead to postpunk, the rebellion of aestheticism through the surreal and the futurist against the simplistic and traditional? What would that game even look like?

Modern gaming’s genesis came during postpunk’s six year lifespan and the two, strangely enough, shared many of the same audio/visual tics. But where postpunk’s visual tendency toward angular, primary colored geometry and aural predilection for jittery electronics and propulsive bass lines were born of artistic statement, videogames came to them out of necessity. This is why envisioning a surrealist gaming experience is problematic; the hallmarks of surreal a/v media are traditionalist hallmarks in games. While a game like Deus Ex Machina, Mel Croucher’s 1984 Spectrum title – a game that could very well have been a Fast Product Records release a few years before – look like ready examples of surrealist design, but were it released today, it would look like little more than retro fetishism. In order for a game to be successfully surrealist, its mode of expression will have to be tied directly to play and not traditional presentation. The game has to subvert expectation based on established mechanical tropes to garner the desired subconscious effect. The seeds for this are out there, in places you might not expect. Mario tends to be associated with childlike psychedelia, but the manipulation of perspective and gravity in Super Mario Galaxy are a larval form of potential surrealist play; for twenty years, Mario would die if he jumped into a void, and here the void propels him to new heights.

A game can be most anything the designer wants it to be. In the coming years, the most difficult task for both designers and players will be looking backward, seeing what games are and have been, and figuring how they can break them to create something brand new for the future. Punk play to postpunk to whatever comes next. Now if only we could figure out how to get the vital social commentary in there…

(Thanks to 1UP for the Bobby Kotick quote and Edge Online for the Deus Ex Machina retrospective)

Related links:

Yeah, But Is It Art?: It Will Never Be the Same
Kenji Eno Is a Mule of Epic Proportions
Far Out, Man
Easy Access

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!

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.