61 Frames Per Second : playstation 2

Shadow of the Colossus: First Impressions

Nadia Oxford — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 19:06:00 GMT

Fear not. Shadow of the Colossus is a pretty epic title, but I won't run to the computer and bang out a report every time I actually get Agro to run in the direction I want him to—though if you ask me, that's an accomplishment in itself. First impressions are fun to read, though, so I will accommodate the good readers of 61FPS.

It probably won't surprise you when I say the presentation in this game is absolutely gorgeous. I usually give an opening cinematic ten seconds to please me before I mash the Start button, but when I sat back and watched Wander's ponderous but purposeful journey to the Temple, I felt something familiar pull at me. Like I was watching a favourite sequence from a well-loved movie. Various flashes of imagery and sound in this game already remind me of The Neverending Story, a book that never fails to instill me with a sense of solemn adventure despite multiple readings.

Doubtlessly you already know that Shadow of the Colossus features a quiet, calming atmosphere that stands to be butchered by Hollywood, so I'll talk a bit about how it plays. What you need to know: this game is creaming me.

Shadow of the Colossus thrives on its singleness, so there are no menus to shuffle through and no items to sniff out. Most everything you need to hunt the Colossi is available from the very beginning. Wander has the moves standard to a warrior: running, jumping, clinging (very important) and horse-calling. Rolling, aiming, and swinging his sword should be familiar territory for the average 3D Zelda player.

Where Shadow of the Colossus differs from Nintendo's series is you are expected to hone these skills to a needle-sharp point if you're going to stand a chance against the Colossi—and the game isn't about to give you any freebies. I'm only on the first Colossi. I sauntered up to the big bugger thinking he'd be the prerequisite giveaway “tutorial” monster. Next thing I knew, he was wiping me off the bottom of his boulder-sized hoof.

The game doesn't leave you completely blind. Gentle prompts hint at what you need to slay these stone giants, but you won't be easily forgiven if you mess up. Getting smashed by a stone club twenty times the size of a human being hurts about as much as you'd expect it to.

What really caught me off guard was Agro. I'm so used to handling Link's steed, Epona, that I forgot real horses typically don't stop on a dime or make 180 turns as easily as a boy flips a Matchbox car. Like most horses, Agro needs to be coaxed, not controlled. But the bond between Wander and his beast feels more rewarding for it, somehow.

There will be further musings down the road, as this is a muse-worthy game. If I don't get utterly stuck at the first Colossi, mind.

Related Links:

Time For Me To Play Shadow of the Colossus
The Legend of Zelda: Manifest Destiny
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Stupidity

Time For Me To Play Shadow of the Colossus

Nadia Oxford — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 00:33:00 GMT

From the Department of “Oh God, Why?” comes word of a Shadow of the Colossus movie. Hollywood has yet to get a game movie right, and there's no immediate reason to decide that the movie based on this Playstation 2 masterpiece will be any different. In fact, Justin Marks, the talented hero responsible for Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li will be penning the script. May as well hunker down in the fallout shelter with your Civil Defence helmet pulled over your head. Feel free to sigh: that weary, defeated feeling that comes with most game movie announcements is no doubt familiar by now.

What's especially sad is that a Shadow of the Colossus movie truly stands to be a heartbreaking waste of the source material. It's a game that thrives on its sparse atmosphere and quiet but riveting heroics. Sadly, Hollywood requires by law for action movies to waste approximately five words per second, and God only knows how it classifies video game movies. I suspect the categorization involves a filing cabinet marked “FOR AUTISTICS.” The Shadow of the Colossus movie is likely going to be very loud and it might contain jokes about horse boners.

Admittedly, I am talking partially out of my bum. I have never played Shadow of the Colossus, but reading this dire news has driven me to bloody well start.

I once mentioned that the era of the Playstation 2 nearly passed me by: it was a very, very poor time for me, and I lacked the money to do anything much beyond keeping a roof over my head and peanut butter in a cupboard under said roof. I've been playing a very slow game of catch-up, and a friend helped me out by loaning me his copy of Shadow of the Colossus. I've been having trouble finding the time to make the disc connect with the Playstation 2's CD tray, but that's going to change.

Expect plenty of commentary about the game: Shadow of the Colossus is a favourite for many, and I think it will be fun to write a running retrospective on it (I've been doing something similar with Phantasy Star IV for the 1UP Retronauts Blog.

Away, Agro!

Related Links:

Super Secret Castle Discovered in Shadow of the Colossus
FIve Games That Will Be Awesome to Remake in LittleBigPlanet
Screen Test: Blood of Bahamut

Silent Hill, Killer 7 and Not Having Fun With Great Games

John Constantine — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 02:00:00 GMT

I am less than taken with Bit.Trip Beat. Subsequent playings have not improved my opinion of the game. As I’ve gotten further into it, the fundamental flaws in its design I spotted at the beginning have been born out later in the game. Some people love it. I don’t. They think it’s fun. I don’t. C’est la vie.

As I mentioned in my article about Bit.Trip, though, I don’t think that games need to be fun in order for them to be good. I was pretty vague in making my point though. 61FPS reader Kit wrote me an email last week to ask just what the hell I was talking about. How can a game be good if it isn’t fun to play? Isn’t fun implicit in the very act of playing?

When’s a game good but not much fun?

Some games aren't fun in a traditional, visceral sense but are still substantive, engaging, and well designed. The two best examples of this are Silent Hill and Suda 51's Killer 7. Silent Hill games, particularly 1 and 2, are frustrating as hell. It's hard to see where you're going and your character is difficult to control even by survival horror standards. Beyond your basic interaction though, the games fill you with dread; they are never pleasant to play. The story, world, and actual play (moving your character, fighting enemies) are designed to make you feel uncomfortable. It doesn't matter. Silent Hill 2 is a good game because it taps primal emotions, like fear, at the same time as deeper, social emotions like guilt in the player. (David Cage from Quantic Dream actually gave a talk on the difference between social and primitive emotion in games last summer, and I haven't been able to get it out of my head since. If you're curious, check it out.)

Suda's Killer 7 is a little different, less about emotion than it is about dispassionately confusing the player. It discomfits with a dense narrative that is confusing and full of emotionally distant characters, strange noises, and weird camera angles. It also intentionally limits your range of movement and your perspective; you have to explore to succeed, but the game is constantly forcing you down rigidly defined paths. You cannot freely move through the environment. You have to stay on set path. Killer 7 isn't fun. It is artful. It's about challenging its player's perception. (What does it mean, does it mean anything at all, etc.) It's rare for a game to ask its player to think beyond solving a puzzle.

Neither game is what I'd consider fun in the way that say Super Mario Bros. 3 is fun, but they are nonetheless great.

What do you say, reader? Am I nuts? Or does a game have to be fun in order to be good?

Thanks again, Kit!

Related links:

The New Graphics Whores: Bit.Trip Beat is Gorgeous, But Retro Style Does Not Equate Quality
Interview Round Up: Suda 51, Shinji Mikami, and Mikami’s Replacements on Resident Evil
Ceci N'Est Pas Une 1-Up: The Surrealist Future of Postpunk Gaming
10 Years Ago This Week: Silent Hill

Chiptune Friday: Spring Is In the Air With Okami

John Constantine — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Two truths. Today is March 13th. It will not be spring for another eight days. Also, the original soundtrack to Okami is not chiptune. At all. In fact, it is fully orchestrated and entrenched in traditional Japanese composition, a far cry from the heavy metal and pop roots of the blissed-out blip songs composed on the NES or similar consoles.

Have you gone outside though? It is freaking gorgeous out there. It may rain, it may be cloudy, but the bitter miasma of late winter has lifted, washed away as if by… a celestial brush! Given, it’s likely that the fine weather is a result of the Earth’s natural solar orbit and axial spin, but I like to think that there’s a sun goddess wolf out there making it nice outside. I’m going to find her. We’ll go to the park and play fetch. Beautiful women will be all, “Oh your dog is beautiful!” And I’ll be all, “Check dis.” Then Amaterasu will make a bushel of fragrant botanicals grow at our feet.

Here are three selections from the Okami soundtrack. Listen, be in bloom, and grab your DS or PSP. Go play outside today!

The Great Goddess Amaterasu’s Revival

We’ll Always Be Together!

Two People Gazing At Each Other

Related links:

Chiptune Friday: Ethernet’s “Theme For the Water Shrine” Makes Me Want to Adventure and Possibly Defeat an Ancient Evil
Chiptune Friday: Trip to the Beat
Best NES End Credits Music in the History of NES End Credits Music
Chiptune Friday: Shut Up and Jam!
Chiptune Friday: Blaze a Blaze in the Mushroom Kingdom

Miami Law: Welcome Back Victor Ireland of Working Designs

John Constantine — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 01:05:00 GMT

Somehow I missed Victor Ireland’s re-emergence last December. I shouldn’t be too surprised. It might be big news to me, but the return of a niche industry icon best remembered by a handful of geeks for his American localizations of niche videogames ten years ago isn’t exactly Edge Online headline news material. It’s sidebar at best.

For everyone reading who doesn’t smile when they hear the word Alundra, here’s the score. Victor Ireland co-founded Working Designs. After opening in 1986, Working Designs was one of the only publishers in the Western world devoted to localizing strange Japanese games, particularly those JRPG things we enjoy so much here at 61FPS. Working Designs translations tended to be a bit strange, littered with juvenile humor and American pop culture references. They serviced a very small audience; not only were they putting out games in an unpopular genre, they had a habit of releasing them for doomed consoles like the Turbo-Grafx 16, Turbo CD, Sega CD, and Sega Saturn.

Working Design’s golden age was when they started releasing Playstation games at the end of the 1990s. Now that there was a growing market for Japanese games, the publisher was able to put out some extravagant packages. (Most notably the PS1 releases of Lunar, Lunar 2, and the Arc the Lad Collection. They all game with cloth maps, hardbound instruction manuals, and even zany bonuses like boxing puppets.) By the time the Playstation 2 came around though, Working Designs was in decline. They released three games for PS2 and shut their doors in 2005. Irleand put an impassioned statement on the company homepage which you can read here. In 2006, he opened a new publishing house called Gaijinworks and then promptly disappeared into the ether.

Today, Vic and Gaijinworks are finally on the map for real. Their first game, a Hotel Dusk-style DS adventure called Miami Law, is currently being developed for America by Hudson in Japan. It’s the perfect cultural stew, considering the man’s history. I’m psyched he’s back.

(Link: Joystiq)

Related links:

Where is Victor Ireland?
FMV Hell: Lunar, The Silver Star
Sega CD on iPhone: I Like Where This Is Going
The One That Got Away: Arc the Lad

The One That Got Away: Arc the Lad

John Constantine — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 01:00:00 GMT

Romanticizing the pre-internet age of games criticism is common amongst those of us born before 1990. With the presses stopped on Electronic Gaming Monthly, the last survivors of gaming print’s heyday are Gamepro and Nintendo Power. Those magazines still cater to the adolescent audience they always have, but they’ve lost all of their old schlocky appeal. It’s a good thing. Gaming print isn’t dead, and games criticism is slowly but surely emerging from its fandom-based larval form. Yeah the internet’s glutted with drivel, but there’s a lot of substantive, well-written study of the medium happening. *cough*

One thing certainly hasn’t changed. Gamefan may be long dead at this point, but Dave Halverson is still publishing monthly volumes of unabashed fandom in Play. Play, like Gamefan and Gamer’s Republic before it, isn’t really criticism. The magazine doesn’t engage in heady intellectualism like Edge, but it also doesn’t fall into Consumer Reports-style, reviews-and-previews tradition of Gamepro. Halverson’s publications are professionally made ‘zines, literal love letters to the industry they cover. The furor surrounding Halverson’s praise for Golden Axe: Beast Rider a few months back was surprising. The man isn’t a critic. He’s a lover. He publishes The Girls of Gaming, for crying out loud. Despite his flighty editorial mandate, Halverson’s pubs have had a surprisingly lasting impact on North American gaming culture. Today, Treasure is an iconic development studio beloved the world over. Gunstar Heroes wasn’t responsible for that notoriety. It was Gamefan’s constant lionization of the company that birthed the cult of Treasure.

Gamefan was, for me, a message in a bottle. Every single month, I would open an issue and be overwhelmed by bizarre foreign games I would never have a chance to play. And at the back of every issue waited the most cryptic and vexing passages of all: the advertisements for Halverson’s import games shop Game Cave. The ads were four-pages long and littered with miniscule pictures of games accompanied by nothing more than a title. That was where I saw this:

“Arc the Lad – PSX”. What in the hell was Arc the Lad? It had that JRPG look about it, but other than the stumpy characters and the vivid color, there was no way of figuring out what the game even was. It fascinated me. I always kept an eye out for Arc after that. It wasn’t until a few years later, as the JRPG boom took hold in the States that I learned that Arc the Lad was indeed a role-playing series. Since it was a first-party Sony game, and Sony refused to publish most 2D games outside of Japan, I had more than a language barrier standing between me and Arc.

Arc the Lad did eventually come here in 2002. When it did, it represented both the end of the Playstation era and the beginning of Working Designs downfall. It was a lavishly packaged set; cloth map, hard-bound instruction manual, the whole Working Designs shebang. It included the entire Playstation Arc trilogy and a side-game called Arc Arena. I couldn’t have cared less. In 2002, the PS2 library was finally heating up, the Xbox was proving its mettle, and the Gamecube was promising glossy, traditional Nintendo goodness. Sucks to the weird JRPG from 1995! Have you seen this game Maximo? That looks crazy! Eventually the Arc the Lad Collection disappeared from shelves and finding it in decent condition used proved problematic. Over the past seven years, I’ve regretted not picking it up. Arc the Lad, the one that got away.

I finally sat down with Arc in January. As tends to happen with the ones that get away, Arc turned out to not be what I imagined. I expected a traditional JRPG, the usual morass of clichés coated in a typical Working Designs translation (a mix of pop-culture references, glib humor, and stoicism.) What I got was a simple, brief tactical RPG, sort of Duplo blocks to Tactics Ogre’s Lego. The colorful world implied by that night time screenshot wasn’t there. There’s no exploration whatsoever in Arc actually. The world spanning adventure takes place almost entirely on a map as you’re shuffled between single-screen locales for dialogue and dungeons. (The dungeons, in fairness, do have multiple levels.)

I haven’t delved into Arc 2 or 3, yet. My understanding is that they’re far deeper, more interesting games than their progenitor. I may try them out at some point. If nothing else, my long lasting saga with Arc the Lad exemplifies the biggest difference between following videogames during the print and internet eras. Today, Googling a game title will get you billions of words detailing just how the game plays, how long it is, and how it stacks up to every other game ever made. Back when I saw that screen, a whole lot was left to the imagination. It’s a strange thing, following videogames. Sometimes, you like them even more when you don’t play them.

Next time, I’ll close out the White Whale/One That Got Away triptych with The Second Chance: Vagrant Story. See you then, y’all.

Related links:

The White Whale: Terranigma and Ahab Gaming
Where is Victor Ireland?
FMV Hell: Lunar, The Silver Star
Sega CD on iPhone: I Like Where This Is Going

Do Girlz REALLY Rock? - Liveblogging Bratz

Derrick Sanskrit — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 21:00:00 GMT

Our fearless Editor-in-Chief knows a few too many things about me. He knows I love any excuse to turn on my Wii. He knows that I have a soft spot for "girl games". He knows that I spent many a summer at performance art camp. I could see the wicked smile peeking out from behind all of his best attempts to hide it when John handed me a copy of Bratz: Girlz Really Rock for Wii with the simple request of liveblogging my first play session. I resisted, I recoiled, but ultimately I relented. With President's Day off and a lingering Valentine's Day hangover to soothe, the time was ripe for bright colors and vapid pre-teen idols:

12:12 PM - Today we are celebrating our nation's fine history by liveblogging the Bratz game for Wii!

12:14 PM - Oh dear sweet lord, the Wii menu even calls it "Bratz: GRR" (girlz really rock), also, menu graphics shouldn't be this pixelated!

12:16 PM - No menu font could possibly say "girls can rock!" quite like Futura!

12:18 PM - Do these four girlz share one voice-over artist?

12:19 PM - "pretty princess"? "camp starshine"? what???

12:22 PM - Of course when you miss the bus to summer camp, your next best option is skydiving. Of course...

12:27 PM - Music mini game: longest most monotonous song I've heard since I stopped watching Hannah Montana.

12:28 PM - Four girlz with egos bigger than their terrifying skulls and none of them choose to sing in this rock band???

12:30 PM - All four girlz are wearing sports tees, miniskirts, knee-high socks and sneakers with heels. How unique!

12:34 PM - Point and click with B to move? Don't most games use A? Also, most annoying ringtone since that six-year-old kid's at the Super Bowl party I went to.

12:35 PM - Six-year-olds with cell phones are probably the target demo for this game, though, so I guess it makes sense...

12:37 PM - Oh my goodness, this camera is WAY too loose! I'm getting dizzy just walking down the road. Maybe that's just simulating the imbalance of the girlz' enormous craniums?

12:40 PM - Ringtone from the Wiimote completely drowns out the expositional dialogue from the tv. Now I'll never understand what's happening!

12:42 PM - Oh, what a surprise, a rival preteen bitch. Wait, these girlz ARE pre-teen, right?

12:45 PM - Do these girlz all have some illness that prevents them from ever covering their thighs?

12:48 PM - I need to change my clothes for ballet? I'm wearing the same thing as the instructor, just in a different color! Skankz!

12:54 PM - Slow-motion krunking does not equate to ballet.

1:00 PM - Apparently "the mashed potato" is an "advanced" dance. No newbies on that one!

1:01 PM - I should not be inspired to sit down during dance lessons, yet here I am, happily sitting down. Thanks, Bratz, for making life easier!
(editor's note: I always stand up when playing Wii games, except Smash Bros.)

1:10 PM - If there was any stereotype from Project Runway I needed reinforced, it's that fashion designers always have terribly "stylish" hair.

1:12 PM - Makeup studio: do I cover her in paint or clean her off?

1:16 PM - She winds up looking like Björk joined the army in a Ziggy Stardust era Bowie video. I sure hope I'm playing this game correctly...

1:20 PM - Photoshoot lesson complete? I didn't even take a picture, just waved the camera around!

1:23 PM - I seem to have inexplicably found my way into a game of mini-golf. Why is there mini-golf at a performing arts camp?

1:25 PM - Scoring under par is "totally wicked"!

1:30 PM - That was simultaneously easier and more frustrating than WiiSports golf.

1:34 PM - I keep getting the same two text messages over and over. No, I haven't found out what kind of music Anna likes. Maybe you should just ask her! Honestly, Dylan, you're such a child.

1:37 PM - What day at performing arts camp would be complete without a trip to the mall?

1:41 PM - It's astounding how similar playing electric guitar and "ballet" dancing really are.

1:43 PM - And with a stinging headache and mild nausea, I fear I must take a break. Fare well at skank camp, girlz.

Final thoughts: I was surprised to find this game was essentially a point-and-click adventure without all the adventure. The mini games I played (dance, band and mini-golf) used the Wii controls rather miserably. I actually wished I'd been playing the game on Playstation 2 instead because it would have to control better that way. Bratz may seem like an accurate portrayal of angsty kids at performance art camp, but it more closely resembles the rapidly-relevence-fading High School Musical. Real girls at performance art summer camp are waaaaaaaaaaaay sluttier. Maybe that was just my experience (surely an early inspiration for working at Nerve), but this view seems to be seconded by the cult film of my generation Wet Hot American Summer. Maybe it's just a goofy-New-York-nerd thing.

Related articles:
Avatar: Into the Inferno - The First Hour or So
Going Back In There: My Very First Hour With Pokémon part 1 & part 2
WTFriday: Atlus Takes On Third Wave Feminism

Trailer Review: Demon’s Souls

John Constantine — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

From Software, you guys got some weird in your blood. Who in the hell makes console exclusives these days? Not only that, who in the hell makes exclusives for every console on the market? And who in the hell makes console exclusives that are spiritual successors to cult hits that were console exclusives in the previous generation? You guys, whew, you guys are nutty. You’re nutty nut bars and I love it.

It’s a big month for From Software. Just last week in Japan, they released Ninja Blade on Xbox 360. Ninja Blade is a third-person action game that is a modernization, in both tone and technology, of their Xbox-only franchise Otogi. Today, they released Demon’s Souls in the land of the rising sun. Demon’s Souls is the Playstation 3 version of From’s PS2 oddity King’s Field, a series of distinctly western RPGs full of the dungeon crawling and character customization Elder Scrolls fans go ga-ga over.

As you can see from this trailer, Demon’s Souls is a real odd duck.

The presentation is polished but by no means mindblowing and the same can be said of its art direction. It really doesn’t look like a product of the east or west, its RPG-tropes coming across as just… neutral. I have no idea what to make of it. There’s still no word on whether or not this one’s coming to the States. The Asia version of the game, though, has both full English voice acting and all English menus. I don’t know about y’all, but this one’s so strange I might just have to import it.

Previous Trailer Reviews:

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

Get Your Tensor Bandage: Wii-Whip Action Comes With New Indiana Jones Game

Nadia Oxford — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 03:32:00 GMT

Lucasarts recently opened its mouth and spilled its guts on Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings for the Wii, the Playstation 2 and the current family of handheld systems. I feel like I'm in a brave new world: my brain's having a hard time remembering when Indiana Jones games didn't feature a squat, plastic yellow protagonist with pincer-hands and a primitive drawn-on smile.

Not to say we're not old enough to remember such a time. Sigh.

The Wii version of the game will (of course) feature waggle. The press release plays the gimmick up in the obvious manner: “Wield your Wii Remote™ like Indy's signature whip for a variety of uses — from combat to navigation to puzzle-solving.”

Oh boy. I'll leave the light on for you, tendinitis.

Castlevania's current caretaker, Koji Igarashi, once mentioned that producing a whip-heavy Castlevania game would be difficult for the Wii. Everyone would immediately expect to use the Wii remote like a whip, and while that would indeed be fun at first, there might be a small danger of fatigue by the time the zombie body count reaches one thousand.

“You're right, Igarashi,” I said after he stated his case. “You always are.” Igarashi nodded sagely and went back to the Chamber of Farts and Screams, where Castlevania Judgement was being produced at the time.

It's not to say Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings will be an awful game—it's Indiana Jones, for crying in the beer. Turning out a boring Indiana Jones game should be impossible, like failing with a Yo-Yo Ball. Alas, it's not. It might be best to opt for the Playstation 2 title instead of wrapping up your wrist with an Icy Hot patch every night. There is a proper way to incorporate Wii waggle (Super Mario Galaxy, Wii Sports, Twilight Princess) and an improper way (nearly everything else). I'm happy to forgo waggle Until the introduction and perfection of Wii Motion Plus.

When I was a kid and the NES hit its stride, news reports used to talk about “Nintendo wrist”, the early onset of arthritis that came with holding a Nintendo controller all day. I can only imagine what kind of scare reports the news cooks up today. Wii wrist? Wii-induced amputation? I played Star Wars the Clone Wars: Lightsaber Duels for twenty minutes and I felt like all my bone marrow was going to fly out my pores. Maybe kids are just hardier than I am.

By the way, here's a Staff of Kings trailer for your perusal.

Related Links:

Indiana Jones, We Hardly Knew Ye
Where Is the New Indiana Jones?
Fortune and Glory, SNES Style

At Least Batman: Arkham Asylum's Story Will Be Good

John Constantine — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 01:30:00 GMT

It’s been pretty disheartening to see so many people losing their game industry jobs these past few months. First and foremost, it’s terrible to see thousands of talented people out of work. It’s also tragic to see so many games get cancelled. I’m still upset that Free Radical’s Star Wars Battlefront 3 will never come out. That game looked unbelievable. That’s not always the case with cancelled games though. For example, I think the world’s a better place now that Pandemic’s The Dark Knight tie-in won’t clog up shelves across the land. From the sounds of it, that game was troubled with a capital OUBLED. It’s cancellation also means that Rocksteady Games’ original Batman game, Arkham Asylum, will have a much better chance of getting noticed by the millions upon millions of people obsessed with Bruce Wayne and Joker.

This new trailer doesn’t have any play in it, so it’s pretty useless for giving an impression of Arkham Asylum as a game. What it does have is plenty of story. Competently written and awesomely voiced story. Not to be too gigantic a geek, but that’s Mark Hamill and Kevin Conroy you’re hearing! The Joker and Batman of Paul Dini’s Batman: The Animated Series! Speaking of Mr. Dini, he’s the man in charge of writing Arkham Asylum. This game is going to be like a giant playable episode of that show, albeit an episode with graphic violence suited to the drippy, bumpy textures of a game built on Unreal Engine 3. Sounds like a winning combination to me.

Rocksteady Games only has one other title under their belt, a PS2 first-person shooter called Urban Chaos: Riot Response. Anyone out there ever play it? Should we trust these guys to make an awesome Batman game?

Related links:

Batman Can't Even Land a Punch on Superman in a Video Game
A Silver Lining to the Dark Knight
Of Children and Lego Games: A Valid Concern

Sony’s New Year’s Resolution

John Constantine — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 00:00:00 GMT

For all intents and purposes, 2008 was an excellent year for Sony and the Playstations. Was it the salad days of 2001, when the Playstation 2 was coming into its own and Sony was crushing every proverbial ass in the world? Certainly not. But the Playstation 3 managed to finally get itself a stable of quality exclusives that weren’t completely ignored by the public and panned by the media. The Playstation Portable, despite receiving only a scant few notable games, had a banner year in Japan and continued to grow its install base in the rest of the world. The Playstation Network worked out a few of its kinks, and even if it’s the ugliest baby since Sloth, at least Home launched. And the good ol’ Playstation 2 continued, eight years after its birth, to both sell and play host to great new games. The end of the year, however, did not look so hot. The Playstation 3 got trounced by its competitors leading up to Christmas. You see, it didn’t matter how damn good Resistance 2, LittleBigPlanet, Motorstorm: Pacific Rim, or Valkyria Chronicles were. What mattered is that the average person in every country where the system is sold does not have $400 for a videogame console right now. Money, as you may have heard, is something of a concern for everyone right now. They don’t have much of it, and there isn’t a whole lot of work for them to make more of it, so it’s no wonder they aren’t paying for your box which costs just about twice what everybody else’s box does.

Sony? Resolve to make the damn Playstation 3 cheaper in 2009. Making the console profitable should not be the priority right now. Getting it into as many homes as possible needs to be priority one. Your first and third party line-up for 2009 is a traditional gamers’ dream. Rely on it. And if the box is cheap enough, you just might grab back a piece of that casual pie. March price drop, no new SKU. Done.

Oh, and also, software backwards compatibility. You shouldn’t have taken it out in the first place.

Related links:

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

John’s Games of 2008: Year of the Character

John Constantine — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 23:45:00 GMT

Next time you start telling somebody about a game you were playing — not a puzzle game or anything equally abstract — pay attention to how you refer to what you were doing in the game. Are you saying, “Then I jumped on the goomba!” or are you saying, “Then my guy jumped on the goomba!” Is it you finding the boomerang or is it Link? Are you driving the car, making the basket, managing the farm? Or is it your proxy, that little character walking about when you push a button to the right, that window meant to be a human being’s field of vision? As much as I thought about open worlds in 2008, I spent just as much time wondering what role character plays in great game design. A great game character doesn’t need to be one specific thing. It can be you, a literal representation of how you see yourself physically and even spiritually. It can also be a suit for you to put on, a fiction that you can inhabit, a doorway into story that isn’t just different from your daily life, but quite literally impossible. There was no shortage of astounding games in 2008, but there were a handful that, for me, were wholly defined by how they let you inhabit their characters, and characters made both for and by the player.

In my first look back at ’08, I mentioned how it was character that ultimately kept me from getting the most out of Grand Theft Auto IV. There was just too much dissonance in how Niko Bellic was represented. There were three Nikos. There was the Niko you see speaking in cutscenes, a haunted, practical man of honor, making a new life for himself in a new country by hunting down the demons of his past. There was the Niko you guided through the game’s structured missions, a ruthless, opportunistic murderer who would destroy anything and anyone for a buck. And, finally, the Niko that you played, the blank slate who could do anything in Liberty City, whether it was enjoying a nice walk on the beach or assaulting an international airport with nothing more than a motorcycle and a baseball bat. At no point in GTAIV did these three Nikos meld into a single character, and the constant contradictions between them made it impossible for me to enjoy the game after a certain point.

Metal Gear Solid 4 and Yakuza 2 (my absolute favorite game of 2008) were two of last year’s greatest achievements precisely because they didn’t fall prey to GTAIV’s representational failures. Both games are concerned with narrative — unchangeable, locked, and passively engaged narrative in both cases — but when you, as the player, take control of Old Snake and Kazuma Kiriyu, the actual play is designed to reinforce and serve those characters. The game is literally about them and thusly, depending on what type of player you are, they are about you. It impressed me to no end that, in both games, this was sufficient incentive to keep playing; I always wanted to know what was going to happen to Kiriyu and Snake. It’s convenient, then, that the play in both games was every bit as good as their mutual cutscenes were long. MGS4’s stealth and action finally felt organic after a decade of refinement and, of the hundreds of things you can do in Yakuza 2, even the most mundane were entertaining. (Selecting booze from an in-game menu and then reading about how it tastes? Awesome.)

The World Ends With You (my second favorite game of the year) utilized character just as effectively as Yakuza and Metal Gear, but in a much different way. TWEWY is an expertly designed game, flush with color and mechanical delights. No other game released in 2008, not Fallout 3, not anything, gave you as many options for customization as TWEWY did. You can, at any point, fundamentally change the flow of the game by altering its settings and your characters' attacks/apparel. What impresses me most about TWEWY, and what’s made the most lasting impression, is that the game doesn’t hook you into its story or battles through a single lead character or even an ever expanding cast of usable characters, as is the norm for role-playing games. TWEWY grabs you by framing every action in the game and story around a principal character’s relationship with their second. Not only does Neku grow as a person through his relationships with his partners, but the game layers complexity and nuance into its actual activities as a result of personal growth. Your role in the game isn’t Neku, his friends, or even a sort narrator (another RPG commonality.) You play the bond between characters. There’s nothing else like it.

Had I played and finished Fallout 3 before 2008 ended, it would most likely be included here at the end alongside Fable II and Soulcalibur IV, games that put the burden of character directly on you. But I didn’t, so more kudos to Fable and Soulcalibur. These two couldn’t be more different, but they share one distinct strength: they both allow you to mold character to an absurd degree. Soulcalibur IV is the best version of one of the best fighting games made, and its core character design, as is the case with fighting games in general, is half of its appeal. Its character creation mode, however, is the star of the show. Point me to a single other game that’s as versatile and accessible in letting you make a body to inhabit a game and have fun with. I’ll wait. Some people called Soulcalibur IV a let down. They are wrong. Fable II, on the other hand, doesn’t give you a whole lot to play with when it comes to making your character look how you want them to. There are far fewer costumes, hair styles, and other variables than there were in its predecessor. But Peter Molyneux finally delivered a game that allowed you to be a person of complex morality. Fable isn’t an unmitigated success. Its illusion of simulated society is often crippled by familiar boundaries (you can’t bring x person to x locale, etc.) and it’s far too easy to manipulate the NPC masses through simple actions. Despite its imperfections, the game does break the dualism that has dominated moral-choice-as-mechanic in games previously. You can be good but corrupt, bad but pure. The game fails because your character’s nature isn’t always reflected in the world around them, but it’s a monumentally important step forward and deserving of both praise and canonization.

I’ll be wrapping up 2008 once and for all in a couple of days. In the meantime, if you haven’t played any of these, what the hell are you waiting for?

Games of 2008: Yakuza 2, Metal Gear Solid 4, The World Ends With You, Fable II, Soulcalibur IV

Related links:

John’s Games of 2008: Year of the Open World
10 Games Nadia Played in 2008 Instead of Working
Joe’s Top Ten Games of 2008
My Top 10 of 2008 in No Particular Order
Derrick's Top 13 Games of 2008

Katamari Christmas - Rediscovering the Cosmos... Twice

Derrick Sanskrit — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 23:30:00 GMT

December 23rd, I'm home for the holidays, as are both of my sisters. I am just finishing my self-appointed task of the morning by clearing 100% of the Chroma Dam in de Blob when my elder sister asks what the gameplay is like and if she can learn. I begin to describe and then compare the feeling to that of Katamari Damacy. She is intrigued. I hand her the case to the original Katamari Damacy for Playstation 2. Her eyes light up as she pages through the manual. "Can I play this one?" "Sure." I turn off the Wii and go to make some tea. "Can I play it now?" "Oh, um...yeah, okay!"

A bit of background very quickly. My sister is not an avid gamer, but she is also not a n00b. She is at present the typical "casual" gamer. She plays Brain Age, Wii Fit, Guitar Hero and Scrabulous, but to the best of my memory she has not touched a traditional platformer since the original Super Mario Bros. And now here she was, playing a cult-hit Japanese game that required not one analog stick, but two!

Watching her play for the first time was a perfect case study in Katamari exposure: at first cautious of the unusual controls, then frustrated by the immense destructive properties of tiny household objects, then delighted to begin picking up the same objects that had once thwarted her, gradually gaining more and more control over her ball of junk. She yelped with excitement when first able to roll through a LEGO house, collecting each individual brick. She fumed at the King of All Cosmos and wondered aloud about the game designer's daddy issues. She began bopping and humming along with the notoriously upbeat and charming soundtrack. She failed at challenges repeatedly and exclaimed "One more time!", increasing her ball's size each attempt until completing the star to father's insincere approval. Her continued excitement over the game drew us all in, and soon enough our entire family was watching my sister roll up every scrap of household junk in the Takeda household.

She played the game every opportunity she had over the next five days. Mostly just making bigger and bigger stars, but occassionally the constellation challenges and a long morning of head-to-head multiplayer against our younger sister and me. When she started routinely kicking my butt in multiplayer, it was clear she'd fully wrapped her head around the game controls and mechanics, which unlike pretty much every other game out there are almost entirely unique to this franchise and unseen in games that don't include the word "katamari" in their title. She asked repeatedly if there was a version for DS or Wii so she could play it at home. When I said "not yet," she was relieved, knowing that owning a Katamari game of her own might result in never going to work again.

Inspired by this rediscovery of the modern classic (and some newly acquired iTunes gift cards), I downloaded the new I Love Katamari game (shown at left) onto my iPod Touch. It plays just like the Playstation version, only with tilt and touch controls and smaller environments. And it is fantastic. "Why doesn't everybody know about this game?" my sister asked, Dualshock controller back in hand. "I love it so much!"

So, Namco, I know you've been hearing thing for a while now, but you should really release a Katamari game for the Wii. The tilt controls from the iPod version would translate splendidly to a sideways Wiimote (with the minimal other controls mapped to the buttons), the bright, happy aesthetic will fit in wonderfully on the Wii, and casual gamers like my sister will absolutely buy and play the sweet heck out of it once made aware of what the game is. Strong word of mouth made the series a hit on other platforms, and that should carry over to the Wii as well, but there's a huge audience of Wii Fit and Guitar Hero players out there who've never heard of Katamari Damacy and would love it if given the opportunity.

Related Articles:
Katamari in the Classroom Part 1
Katamari in the Classroom Part 2
What Games Actually Appeal To Casual Gamers
What The Hell Does Casual Mean?

Sony Might Just Hate You

John Constantine — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 22:30:00 GMT

Even before the company’s dramatic fall from grace, there has been a number of reasons a discerning individual might think that Sony hates them. The original Playstation had a failure rate to challenge the Xbox 360’s and the first DualShock controller didn’t become a pack-in with the system for months after its release. The Playstation 2 launched at a pricey $299 and that price held until May of 2002 when Sony suddenly and without forewarning dropped it to $199, leaving thousands of gamers out a hundred bucks when a simple press release could have saved them the trouble. The PSP launched and its screen was plagued by dead pixels and the Playstation 3 cost half a grand at the cheapest when it launched in ’06. One day, they’re committed to backwards compatibility and against rumble in controllers, and the next they’re asking you drop sixty smackers on a controller that shakes and backwards compatibility is for the birds. Yep. Sony hates you. Sony hates all of us.

Well, today, Sony hates your potential creativity. If you’re anything like us, you looked at LittleBigPlanet and thought, “Oh man. I am totally remaking Castlevania III in that sumbitch.” As the game plowed through its autumn beta, it turned out there were many like minded souls out there, making all sorts of homage-laden playgrounds for Sackboy to romp about. Then, last week, Media Molecule started disappearing levels from LittleBigPlanet’s servers en masse. Claiming that these deleted levels were the target of user complaints, it turned out that they were almost all removed under the auspices of copyright infringement. Most of the levels erased were based on classic videogames, but as Kris Erickson pointed out on PS3 Informer, some levels were removed for so innocuous a reason as they shared a name with a movie. (It’s actually just as well this one was taken down. No one needs to be reminded that Failure to Launch exists.) Today, Sony released a statement outlining some “suggested” LittleBigPlanet rules of conduct:

• Ensure that the content you share with other users is suitable for all ages - everybody has access to your level if you publish it.

• Please respect other people's intellectual property rights. For example, don't use images, brands or logos that you're not entitled to use.

• If you come across any content that you feel the need to report, then please do it responsibly. Hoax reports will be considered inappropriate behaviour.

Nothing says creativity like a nice set of rules! Regarding the all ages part, I don’t see why Sony and Media Molecule didn’t incorporate age settings that reflect a given PS3’s parental settings in the first place. No hoax reporting? Fine. But the intellectual property issue is both prickly and offensive. As Erickson also points out in his excellent editorial, the majority of these levels deleted from LittleBigPlanet fall within the boundaries of fair use. The levels inherently don’t diminish the value of the work that inspired them because, especially with game homage, they have to run in LittleBigPlanet. But more importantly, none of these levels are made for commercial consumption. They are free, provided you already own the game and a Playstation. PSN member RoboAlucard92 isn’t getting paid for his Symphony of the Night level in LittleBigPlanet. When Konami releases their inevitable LittleBigPlanet Castlevania content pack, then that level might need to be taken down. But not before.

The very existence of LittleBigPlanet seems like an act of love. But this sort of corporate kowtowing looks a whole lot more like hate.

(Our thanks to CVG, PS3 Informer, and NeoGAF user newschool)

Related links:

Microsoft Just Might Hate You
Nintendo Might Just Hate You
Five Games That Will Be Awesome to Remake in LittleBigPlanet
Waiting: Four More Games That Will Be Awesome To Remake In LittleBigPlanet
Four More Games That ARE Awesome Remade In LittleBigPlanet

Watcha Playing: The Palette Cleanser

John Constantine — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 21:45:00 GMT

The past six weeks have been teeming with meaty, action games. I’ve been working through them slowly but surely, like an elegant seven course meal. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed was thick, hot comfort fare, a brief appetizer of sloppy design coated in delicious Stormtrooper and rancor killing action. The game’s a buggy mess, really, the gaming equivalent of empty calories, but definitely satisfying. Then there was the dynamic horror duo of Dead Space and Silent Hill: Homecoming, a soup and salad combo built to terrify. They didn’t really scare, but instead delivered visceral body simulations. Both games succeeded by making you constantly aware of your avatar’s physical presence and the heft of their actions, and they achieved this through a careful synergy between atmosphere and play. Yakuza 2 was truly the main course, a game I had no expectations for whatsoever that turned into an all time favorite. Its broad adventure, pulp tale of cops and crooks, and simple but ceaselessly engaging fisticuffs were nourishing, more substantial than anything released on current gen consoles. For dessert, Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia. Another bonafide surprise, Ecclesia turned out to not be another retread through Igarashi’s decade-old formula, but a challenging successor to Castlevania 2 with fierce action whose variety and elegance was exceeded only by the game’s environments. Yes, it’s been a great month of big games, but it’s been the small things I’ve played in between them, games I’ve played for no more than a handful of minutes here and there, that have given the most *ahem* food for thought.

The palette cleansers, as it were, aren’t what you might expect either. These quick play sessions, no more than fifteen or twenty minutes, haven’t been with simplistic small titles. Far from it actually. The ones I keep returning to are Wipeout HD, Mega Man 9, the original Katamari Damacy, and Castle Crashers, all games that sport demanding mechanics, all games that get very stressful very quickly. Hairpin turns at high speed in Wipeout and precision jumps toward clandestine robot master confrontations don’t exactly seem like the ingredients for refreshment, but they’ve been restorative between the larger games. What makes these games perfect palette cleansers isn’t their immediacy, nor is it their lack of an expansive narrative. The key characteristic is that they don’t demand a serious investment in their world before and after. You don’t have to remember what you were on your way to do before your last save, what sidequests you’ve half completed. You simply need to know how to control them, and all of them take practice to control well.

Strange as it is to say, after recently starting a game of Fable 2, I immediately thought that it would make for an excellent palette cleanser. The game may be huge in scope and have a sweeping story to tell, but its play and guiding hand towards objectives don’t ask much of you beyond an understanding of the world’s rules. Molyneux’s made a sprawling RPG that’s less of a filet mignon and more of a small dish of sherbert. I’m wondering what other fall blockbusters may hide the same quality.

What are some of your favorite palette cleansers, everyone?

Related links:

The 61FPS Review: Dead Space
Katamari in the Classroom, Part 1
Style Over Substance: Why I'm In Love With WiiWare's "Art Style"
Screen Test: Star Wars – The Force Unleashed
Whatcha Playing: Weight of the Stone
Surprise of the Week: Sega Releases a Good Game
Impressions: Fable 2
Gears of LittleBig Fable Music: Considering the First-Party Blitz
New Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia Pics
Suffering Castlevania Fatigue

Castlevania: Curse of the Stupid Red-Headed Kid

Nadia Oxford — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:11:00 GMT

So I'm one of about three people who really enjoyed Castlevania: Curse of Darkness for the Playstation 2. It was pretty easy, pretty linear and pretty dull next to my personal Saviour, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, but I really liked hatching and evolving the Innocent Devils. I had dragons, a phoenix, a maggot-gnawed crow named Bonnie Brae and some kind of deity that looked like the product of a questionable encounter between an angel and a devil. I am okay with alternative Pokemon raising.

I was pretty excited when I heard Tokyopop is publishing a Curse of Darkness manga adaptation. I was even more excited when I landed a review copy. When I opened 'er up and was hit in the face by a red-headed lead boy named Ted, my excitement drained like a fratboy's bladder on a Sunday morning.

There are a lot of situations in this life that make us want to shake others and say, "Oh my God, why are you so stupid? Can't you see what's in front of you?" ::Smack.:: If God gave me the opportunity to do that to anyone in the world, I would make a bargain with Him (God loves cookies) and corral every single writer, producer and artist who ever stunk up a perfectly good property with a smart-mouthed kid.

The game Castlevania: Curse of Darkness is about a silver-haired bishonen boy who breeds devils to help him take revenge on Issac and/or Dracula for his dead wife/girlfriend/dog. Dracula, in response, says, "Oh no you did-n't girlfriend," and throws the forces of Hell at him.

Where does a kid factor into all of this?

Where does a red-headed, smart-alecky kid factor into all of this?

I know I should be whacked with a Hotwheels track for mentioning "Castlevania" alongside "historical accuracy" in the same sentence. Still, this "Ted" character talks back an awful lot to his elders in an era when boys and girls got whipped for forgetting their manners. What's more, they usually had to take their punishment under the mournful eyes of a carving of Jesus Christ suffering on the Cross for their sins.

Eff minus minus.

Related Links:

When Good Developers Go Bad: Koji Igarashi
Castlevania Fighting Game Elicits Anguished Moans From the Living
Games to Film: Paul W.S. Anderson's Castlevania

The Worst Voice Acting You Will Ever Hear, Guaranteed

Nadia Oxford — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 23:36:00 GMT

I have a certain attachment to atrocious video game voice acting, so I'm ashamed of myself for bypassing the exceptionally bad chatter in O3's Chaos Wars until something like ten minutes ago. There has never been anything quite this bad in the realm of voice acting, and if God truly loves His Creation, there never will be again.

Oh sure, we can groan over "Jill Sandwich" and "WHAT AM I FIGHTING 4RRRRRRRR?????" (note the Pee-Wee Herman scream at the very end.) But even Resident Evil and Mega Man X4 had excuses: it was 1998 (or somewhere thereabouts), voice acting in video games was a Brave New World, and, more often than not, the "English" voice actors were actually Japanese people with a moderate grasp on English. If I were to offer a Japanese voice-over for an American-made game, we'd end up with a character whose commentary on the flaming destruction of his hometown wouldn't go far beyond, "Kawaii desu! Baka neko! Boku no Sexual Harassment!"

Chaos War has no excuse. It was produced in 2006 for the Playstation 2. And though my sinking gut wishes otherwise, its voice actors are clearly native English speakers. For this, someone needs to be pushed up against the wall and beaten with a yaoi paddle.

That YouTube link is only the beginning. Audio Atrocities features a delightful gallery of Chaos War-related torment. We must always remember, so this will never happen again.

Related Links:

Mother 3 Translation: We're Not Worthy!
FMV Hell: Lunar The Silver Star
Final Fantasy VI: Love, Hope and Betrayal for the Busy Commuter

Fun Fact: Dylan Cuthbert - The Genre Masher

Derrick Sanskrit — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 18:00:00 GMT

So you think PixelJunk Eden is a deliciously freeing, genre defying romp through psychadelia but that the whole experience is vaguely familiar somehow? Maybe that's because Eden was designed by the same dude who programmed Star Fox back on the Super Nintendo. In fact, a quick look at Dylan Cuthbert's history in game design shows a pattern of smashing game genre conventions, all the while producing addictive works of beauty.

Way back in 1992, Dylan designed and programmed X, a first person shooter/puzzler that showed off wireframe 3D graphics on the Nintendo Game Boy, a feat that had never been achieved on the clunky grey box before OR after. Based on this exciting new style of gameplay, Nintendo hired Dylan's team at Argonaut Software to develop a 3D arcade shooter for the brand-new Super Nintendo. This led to the production of both Star Fox and the impressive Super FX chip hardware that powered it and many other great SNES games. After designing the unpublished Star Fox 2, a game which was set to mix up the shooting with healthy doses of action and RPG elements, Dylan went to work for Sony, where his prowess for showing off new 3D technology led to memorable tech demos for the Playstation 2, Playstation Portable, and Playstation 3

At his newly-formed Q-Games studio, Dylan and company designed the Playstation 3's XMB user interface, Star Fox Command for the Nintendo DS and Digidrive, an example of twitch-gaming that brilliantly mashed the puzzle and race genres into the must-have game of the Game Boy Advance's bitGenerations series (and the only one not designed by skip ltd.) Of course, Dylan's current work is the PixelJunk series of downloadable Playstation 3 games, including the action/puzzle/racer Racers, the arcade/real-time-strategy Monsters, and the hallucinogenic platform/racer/chill-out Eden, with more on the way.

Dream on, Dylan, you lovable madman.

Related articles:
Fun Fact: Metroid Meets Metronome
Far Out, Man.
Whatcha Playing: How Does Your Garden Grow
The Ten Most Adventurous Sequels in Gaming History, Part 3 (Star Fox 2)

Sonic Unleashed Wii: Should Dimps Be Trying Harder?

Nadia Oxford — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Sonic the Hedgehog has the pull of a train wreck: no matter how tired you think you are of his lacklustre 3D adventures, you can't help but take a good long stare whenever one is announced.

Sonic Unleashed, for example, exists only as a handful of screenshots and a couple of trailers, but gamers who insist they're thoroughly tired of the hedgehog are still finding plenty to mouth off about. The August issue of Nintendo Power created a stir with some new screenshots for the Wii version of the game. When compared to the preview material for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 versions, Sonic Unleashed for the Wii looks very...well, last gen.

Dimps, the company responsible for modern 2D Sonic titles like Sonic Rush Adventure, will be handling the level design for the Playstation 2 and Wii adaptations of Sonic Unleashed. Dimps' track record is pretty excellent; it's co-developing Street Fighter IV and it also developed a game called Rumble Fish (I've never played it, but any reference to S.E. Hinton is a-okay by me). I don't doubt that if Sonic Unleashed turns out decent, it'll turn out decent all across the board. But going by screenshot comparisons, it looks as if Dimps is doing the usual Wii phone-in, which involves one part Playstation 2 port and one part waggle.

This is especially disappointing considering Sonic and the Secret Rings not only looked good, it was developed around the Wii, not hammered into it. The Wii might not have the power of the Playstation 3 or 360, but let's face it, Super Mario Galaxy was not a bad looking game.

Regardless, screenshots tell very little about a game these days. Something that looks unimpressive in still-frame is wholly capable of blowing away the world when in motion. Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker, anyone?

We'll just have to see how things go.

Related links:

Trailer Review: Sonic Unleashed
The Ten Greatest Opening Levels in Gaming History
Alternate Soundtrack: Sonic the Hedgehog vs. Ratatat

Team Ico’s Fumito Ueda at the Nordic Game 2008 Conference

John Constantine — Wed, 21 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

As self-professed gaming aesthetes, we here at 61 Frames Per Second obviously have a deep and abiding love for the work of Sony Japan’s Team Ico and, more specifically, resident auteur Fumito Ueda. Ueda’s work on the Playstation 2, including the stylistic milestones Shadow of the Colossus and his team’s namesake Ico, are the go-to namedrops for anyone engaging in the persistent games-as-art discussion. His trademarks are characters that convey emotional depth through body language instead of dialogue and austere worlds that imply long histories and lost grandeur. It’s been three years since Shadow of the Colossus and the world’s been waiting with baited breath for any word regarding Ueda and Team Ico’s Playstation 3 debut. His recent talk alongside Siren designer Keiichiro Toyama on disruptive game design at the Nordic Game 2008 conference yielded no news on that project but provided some rich insight into his history in the industry and the early forms of his seminal works. Jimmy Marcus Larsen posted up a summation of the talk on his blog, Game Design Chronicles:

The next session was the highlight of the conference. ICO designer Fumito Ueda and Forbidden Siren designer Keiichiro Toyama had joined a session on disruptive design. They did not talk much about that subject, but we all knew about their innovations anyway. The interesting bits was about their backgrounds. Fumito Ueda showed his early art exhibition design, and told that his first computer was an Amiga. He was thrilled to see the high amount of hands raised when he asked how many (former) Amiga users there were - in Japan no one knew the Amiga. His design philosophy was to affect people’s life, and he went about doing it by working on the visual side first. He also showed an early PS1 prototype of ICO, and an early multiplayer version of Shadow of The Colossus - three horse riders were battling a colossus together. Very nice and too bad it was left out of the final version! I was quite impressed with how much of the games Ueda himself had created - design and story are obvious, but he even did some of the character models and animation. Keiichiro Toyama talked about the new Forbidden Siren (New Translation) game, and how the sight jacking system had been improved using a split-screen setup. He also told the audience that he and Ueda was the only two designers within Sony who were allowed to do what ever they wanted. The last interesting bit from that session, was about Another World - apparently that game is an all time favorite and a great inspirational source to many Japanese game designers. Kind of strange that a western game has that position.

Head over to Larsen’s blog for more details on the conference. Our thanks to NeoGAF user Issun23 for pointing us to Larsen’s post.

Alternate Soundtrack: Need For Speed: Underground vs Justice's †

John Constantine — Tue, 20 May 2008 14:00:00 GMT

Written by Derrick Sanskrit

Until 2003, the most serious racing game I'd played was probably F-Zero. This became a problem with my roommates, who LOVED racing games, and so I was baptized into the world with Need For Speed: Underground on the Playstation 2.

Now, if your experience with this game was anything like ours, you loved every minute of gameplay to be found in NFS:U. The characters felt human and you felt genuine affection for Samantha and disdain for Eddie. The city felt alive, and oncoming traffic was a plaything to use to your advantage. Circuit races were intense, drift races were ego boosts, and drag races separated the hardcore from the wimps. Everything about the game just bubbled with glowing, neon awesome.

Except for that soundtrack! Ugh!

Turning on the game meant being assaulted by the full-blast synth whoops and inebriated grunts of Li'l Jon & the Eastside Boyz' "Get Low", an obnoxious club banger that would later be resurrected as Usher's "Yeah" and, subsequently, EVERY OTHER SONG EVER. The mute button quickly became our MVP. The problem then became finding music that would keep our blood pumping fast enough to win races without being distracted by an avalanche of crap pooling out of the speakers.

What was aurally difficult to achieve in 2003 has become easy with the rise of “new rave”. Moronic as that name is, this new genre inspired by the brilliant electronic music of Daft Punk and the dance-punk scene of the early-aughts is perfect for just such a racing game. 2007's Need For Speed: Pro Street's soundtrack of Chromeo, Cansei De Ser Sexy, Datarock, Foreign Islands, MSTRKRFT, and The Rapture, among others, would indicate I'm not alone in this opinion.

My personal favorite for street racing has got to be † by Parisian electronic duo Justice. The slap bass and wild, squealing synths of "Let There Be Light" call to mind the heart-pounding moments at the start of a drag race, when engines are roaring and tires are screeching against black top. The relentless oscillating sirens of "Stress" induce a cold sweat as you scream around a narrow overpass at illegal velocities. The fuzzed out synth guitars that blanket most of the album's tracks are like the gentle purrs of your exhaust exploding with full tanks of nitrous oxide. And then, of course, there’s "D.A.N.C.E.", "The Party", and "DVNO". The only tracks with discernible lyrics, their cocky, self-assured swagger seems to say, "Oh, I'm sorry, are you trying to race me? I've been ahead of you this whole time having a tea party. How rude of me! Ah, is that what passes for a body kit these days? Your mom does terrible work when she's not in my bed." The entire album plays like the DJ set at the best club in town and sets a fantastic atmosphere for the dark and sexy world of illegal street racing.

There's plenty of other great tunes you can swap in while you race, but I find that † is just about perfect. But then, what do I know? Feel free to disagree in the comments!

Come back next week for a new Alternate Soundtrack featuring hot video action highlighting just how kick ass these soundtrack combos are and be sure to check last week's Alternate Soundtrack right here.