Sadly I didn’t get to interview Jun Takeuchi, the producer for Capcom’s newest iteration of the Resident Evil series. However, I did watch the interview (I laughed when they referred to Resident Evil as Bio Hazard – think about it, as a pure translation, you can see how it fits) and this post will mainly be an overview of what Jun talked about.
The main theme that came across throughout the entirety of the interview was that they wanted everything to be unparalleled in terms of quality (nothing to complain about from this end).
The first major point Jun talked about was the idea of Light and Dark. He outlined how the Resident Evil series had always worked on the abstract concept of Light vs. Dark but could never really implement it directly. Resident Evil does just that. If you’ve seen any screenshots or videos of RE 5, you’ll notice that it has a very harsh lighting scheme to it and the contrast between outside in the broad daylight and in the shadow is huge. When the player goes from the sunlight into a dark area they will nearly literately be blinded as the “eyes” of the game adjust to the change in light. RE5 plans to use this to their advantage in terms of scaring the player when they are the most venerable.
The second and really only other major point that Jun talked about was the additions/changes to the game-play from RE4. The majority of close-quarters combat was done with the “action” button and the action done then depended on the situation it was used. Jun says that he wants this back and wants more emphisis on it, especially during close-quarters combat. He also mentioned that he wants the gun-play to let the players have a large selection of weaponry to destroy the hoards of zombies and for the player to not have to worry so much about watching the number of bullets left in the player’s pistol.
Check out the interview in its translated entirety over at GameTrailers - http://www.gametrailers.com/game/2036.html.
It was never really explained to me how the Spartans of the Halo series were so strong and resilient to attack. Well, I’m still not too sure on the resilience front but if they are humans inside some suits, it might not be as science fiction as some may think.
Introducing the Sarcos XOS exoskeleton, a suit that has a working prototype (see here: http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/humanoids/sarcoss-exoskeleton-is-more-amazing-than-we-thought-326128.php). A normal person can jump into the suit and as they move the exoskeleton will move with them, except for the fact that the endurance of metal is far above a human’s. That and the suit is far stronger than a human. Planned for use in the military, the XOS could be the next step in one on one combat. All that is required now for the “combat evolved” that the original halo spoke of is some ability to take a large amount of bullets without getting any bigger or cumbersome (check out the video, I personally want to see what it can do to a punching bag with full force).
When the Original F.E.A.R. was released, it was praised for its many qualities; from its spectacular A.I., to its horror filled scenes and its the ability to manipulate the environment due its detail to physics. From previews that I’ve read, Project Origin (the spiritual successor to F.E.A.R. – legal issues halt the ability to actually name it F.E.A.R.) will have a much larger focus on the narrative of the main character that the player controlled throughout the first game and the young, tortured girl Alma.
Other than the narrative, the game promises to make the “the best first-person shooter combat ever” – Lead Producer Troy Skinner. They plan to do this; for one at least by “making the destruction happen an inch from the player’s face”, which from personal experience of dealing with the intricacies of immersion, this is a good way to make the player feel as though they are there in the drama and only barely surviving.
From the previewers (www.gamespot.com) descriptions of their hands-on experiences with the game Monolith (the developers of the game) are doing a pretty good job at making the player feel like their placed in such intense situations.
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With PSP games reaching wow-levels in the field of technical achievement one must ask, how powerful is the PSP and will it eventually overtake the PS2 in its ability to output technical masterpieces?
We’ve seen a steadily increase of technical achievements on the PSP. Daxter could be seen as one of the first that tried to push the system to its limits and Daxter has been challenged by games like GTA III: Liberty Stories, God of War: Chains of Olympus and most recently Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core; each being able to squeeze little more juice than the previous. When comparing some of these titles to predecessors on the PS2 (original God of War for example) the main complaint is that there is less. Less game-play, game-time, weapons, etc. This is the main problem with technical progress on the PSP and that is fitting everything on that tiny UMD disc.
To have a look at the nitty, gritty technical specs of the PSP vs. the PS2 we find that the CPU of the PSP is 33MHZ faster than the PS2 but this is not all we must concern ourselves with. The hardware designed specifically to deal with graphical calculations on the PS2 is split into three parts, making for the ability to run in “parallel” and therefore theoretically faster than the PSP. The other major comparison is storage space. The PS2 uses DVDs which hold 5ish gigs, whereas the UMD discs only hold 1.4. I’ve also heard that the time that it takes to extract data from the discs into a running game is a lot slower with UMD than DVD. Personally I would say that doing the same thing the PS2 would usually prevail, however the trick here is that the size of the PSP screen is a lot smaller than that of your average T.V. that you run a PS2 from and because of that; textures and models in the game require less detail.
The storage issue may become irrelevant in the future as SD-Memory cards storage space is continuing to get bigger or game developers may move to multiple UMDs to offer a better experience. As it stands at the moment the biggest problem is storage and until that problem is resolved we’ll continue to hear reviews complain that there could have been just that little bit more content.
What with the release of Metal Gear Solid 4, GTA IV, Fallout 3 and many other largely anticipated games, a few goodies are falling under the radar. This post plans to showcase some that I have found.
MLB 08: The Show – PSP
Baseball, while not so celebrated in New Zealand (we deal with Rugby) is a great sport to emulate in a game and MLB 08 does just that with great precision. While also on the PS3; the PSP version is not a straight port with dropped down graphics for more sales just based on the franchise. MLB 08 works from the idea “if it ain’t broke, then don’t fix it”, so if you’ve played MLB 07 don’t expect anything new to blow your mind. However, it found what was broke with the last game and fixed nearly every major issue. If you have a PSP hungry for a great baseball experience, MLB 08: The Show will hit all the right spots.
Ikaruga – XLA
While Ikaruga may not reach the height of triple A titles, it gets a place as one of the best top-down shooters out there. Originally released in 2002 on the Dreamcast; a review of the original from Gamespot’s Greg Kasavin sums it up nicely: “Ikaruga achieves the impossible: It's an accessible, over-the-top, extremely intense, highly challenging, utterly action-packed space shooter, but one that demands the utmost of care and restraint on behalf of the player.”
The World Ends With You – DS
Square Enix may quite possibly have been a strong influence in starting the emo craze, with its stories containing angsty, teenage lead characters being put in situations where anything that could go wrong, did then it’s no less bluntly obvious in The World Ends With You where the name itself screams emo. An emo style isn’t necessarily bad, especially when you add it with the stunningly amazing artists and designers at Square with a game that’s target audience is (I dear say it) emo. So moving on from the fact that its emo, the game is full of unique game play. First off, the combat uses both screens of the DS at the same time; the top screen utilizing the d-pad and buttons in a DDR’esque fashion while the touch screen uses a system of pins that have different powers that players manipulate with the stylus to defeat foes. This, added in with character development in the way of buying cooler looking (and stat increasing) clothing, the ability to read characters’ minds and an angst driven plot; The World Ends With You is definitely a game you want to take a closer look into as there is more depth than there may seem.
With the expansion to Command and Conquer 3 hitting stores I thought we should have a look to see if it’s worth the effort.
If you’re a true nod player of the command and conquer series, you would have finished the nod campaign in C&C3. I have no doubt that you would also have felt at least a little ripped off (and possibly a bit of deja-vu remembering that you we ready to finish the fight in Halo 2) at the ending of the campaign so an expansion who’s campaign focuses entirely around Nod sounds like the perfect solution, at least in story terms. Those wanting to know what happened to the unnamed character you played as in C&C3 will be sadly disappointed as you control a new character called “Legion” in the expansion – I know, epic name right?
Okay, so there’s no closure from the ending of C&C3 in the expansion campaign, so what is there instead?
The story is split up into three acts: Act I takes place after the events of the second tiberium war (for those who don’t know, C&C3 starts with the third tiberium war). Act II takes you through events that happened during C&C3, but looks at them from a different angle. Act III, following the pattern gives events that happen after C&C3. The game play through the campaign varies, but for the most part contains simplistic “go capture this building” or “destroy this target”. In saying that, there are still a few very memorable moments (being thrown into a battle where an M.A.R.V. is attacking your base, then after surviving and going offensive having to fight two more as they attack from both sides; is one such time).
The acting from Joe Kulcan does not falter, however the addition of Natasha Henstridge (think Species) was possibly a bad choice as she comes off as a piece of cheese that is trying to act as though she is obsessed with Kane but doesn’t quite pull it off. Carl Lumbly, the leader of the Black Hand does a good job of being a zealous, religious preacher in his own right.
So the campaign isn’t amazing and if you don’t like playing nod, you’re already disappointed. What changes to the game play of skirmishes?
Well, EA Los Angeles has created sub-factions from each of the main teams (ala Generals->Zero hour) each sub-faction having different styles of play, with additions and removals of units.
Below is detail on each of the sub-factions, if you just want to know what I think about the game-play, please skip ahead.
Nod is split into the Black Hand and the Marked of Kane.
The Black Hand sub-faction spends a lot of its efforts on burning things and as such flame tanks start as veterans, Avatars are called Purifiers and have automatic flame throwers attached to them and they get a spiffy new anti-air tank. To balance this out they don’t have any aircraft and don’t get stealth units (or abilities for that matter).
The Marked of Kane are cyborgs and as such are stronger than other infantry. The different units here are in the infantry tab. Replacing the machine gunner militia of vanilla Nod are the Awakened; who (with the Enlightened) have the ability to use an EMP charge. Replacing the Black Hand infantry are Tiberium Troopers, which interestingly act similar to the flame soldiers, except that, for a loss of damage dealt, they slow their targets down as they are being attacked. The Marked of Kane has access to the new Nod artillery as well (which comes stealth’ed =D).
GDI splits itself into mechs and an army of dykes who turn out to be able to kill anything they come across with relative ease.
The mech army is the Steal Talons. Players of older command and conquer games will notice that the Titan and Wolverine are back and added with an engineer who has a hand-gun and “heavy harvesters” that can garrison units, you’ve got a team that’s all about the large and overwhelming.
The other army is ZOCOM. ZOCOM is all about the technology, with all the existing GDI units but with better weapons or armor. The only unit addition to ZOCOM is the Zone Raiders which replace the Zone Troopers of vanilla GDI. The Zone Raiders are the dykes I was referring to before and they seem to do an amazing amount of damage to anything they encounter and that’s without the upgrades.
Scrin too gets its own sub-factions.
The first faction is named “Reaper-17” and the main idea behind the team is that their units are boosted as they are more in tune with tiberium and use it to their advantage. One example is the Annihilator Tripod which has the ability to absorb the power of a tiberium patch to fire more powerful green lasers. Reaper-17 also get the bonus of having their growth accelerator act like a tiberium spike. The faction lacks all but the barest of air-force and does not get a master mind.
The second faction is named similarly “Traveler-59”. Traveler is all about speed and mind-control. In terms of new units, they have the cultist which has no attack other than to control a enemy (but cannot control air units, epic units and structures) but you can build as many as you want. They receive an upgraded mastermind – the prodigy; who can mind-control with an area of effect and teleportation for both himself and a group of units. The other infantry change is the addition of the Stalker, who has the ability to deal large amounts of damage to anything that has tiberium in it (think refineries) as well as being good against infantry/tanks. Traveler loses out by not having the Devourer Tank or shields for its units, but can give upgrades in movement speed for many of its units.
The factions bring diversity to the table; but are they, a bunch of new multi-player maps and a small campaign worth your time? If you’re a fan of the C&C series, you will only be disappointed if you were expecting major changes to the game play. The expansion “expands” very cautiously and tends to tread softly so not to anger anyone who is already a fan of the series. In this way, it could have been a lot better. The only new team that plays drastically different to the original is the Traveler-17 with their mind-control abilities. Everything else is very similar to what it is in the original. Some might say that it’s too similar.
I want to make some distinction between the idea of Aggression and the idea of Violence. I have had various talks about how violent video games cause an increase in aggressive behaviour and even violent behaviour.
Firstly, I hear people speak of how violent games cause increased aggression in the players. To be honest I would say anything where competitiveness is a major factor (games included) would lead to increased aggression. Think about it, being aggressive doesn't mean to grab a gun and kill people, it means to be more forward, more confident about the action you are doing and is by no means violent by principle.
The only way to win a competition is to be the most aggressive, whether it be chess, where the more aggressive of analyzing the board and understanding your opponent will be the winner or soccer where the team who is more aggressive with their training, more determined not to give up, the most aggressive tacklers, to learn and perfect new techniques etc. wins out.
When described in this way I really doubt many would argue that giving players a virtual channel to learn how to control and focus this aggression is nothing but a good thing that would help them in many other aspects of competitive life.
What society is really scared about is the violent behaviour. I've always believed that violence stems from frustration. I see friends play Halo 3 online and I see one of them die multiple times obviously due to latency issues and then watch him as he gets tense, blames the latency for giving other people an unfair advantage over himself and is generally frustrated about the situation. As he does this he speaks in an angered voice and throws his controller to the floor. Both actions which could be considered violent, but were created out of frustration rather than aggression. It could be said that the reason for his frustration was because he was playing aggressively to win and that is true, but doesn't mean that his violent actions were due to aggression.
In terms of how video games could ever possibly make their players become violent, the only way then is to frustrate the player and as game designers know well, good game design comes from giving the player the perfect balance of making it not too easy, but not so hard that it is frustrating.
The only other thing games could do to provoke violent actions would not directly provoke them as such, but rather give those with the direction and ability already (before playing any games) an glimpse to what these violent actions may feel like to do in real-life; to basically “enable” the player to understand from this perspective. Only those with a predefined fixation would have a higher chance to do violent actions from video games. However if these people can be manipulated by video games then they can also be exposed to books, real-life events and film in the same way, removing any blame on video games as a medium for creating violence in our society.
Presentation
The most focused on point previewers of GTA IV are touching on is how the game responds to players’ input. By this I mean that when you are running through the streets, if you run into an un-expecting pedestrian, the pedestrian will be shoved out of the way and look disgruntled as the player continues on their way. This dynamic animation reminds me of Assassins Creed; however not to the same extent. The mobile phone has been integrated to a far greater extent into the user-interface, the main example being described is when you are have just been wasted or busted while on a mission and are outside the spawning point you have the ability to bring up your cell and restart the mission from there.
Story
The story is based around a guy named Niko. Niko is a fresh immigrant to Liberty City and as such starts at the bottom of the food-chain. The story follows him on his way to the top via some of the less conventional social groups (drug dealers, the mob, etc.). This comment seems to follow very closely after comments made about the presentation, and that is that the voice acting is superb. One of the earlier missions is described where the player has to transport and protect a Jamaican drug dealer. The trip is rattled with context fitting, hard to understand (due to the strong Jamaican accent) conversation. Context being that if you’re taking your time the drug dealer might tell you “you’re going to slow!” to which Niko replies: “I’ll get there in my own time.”
Cohesion
The main other focus that previewers have been raving about is how well the game feels like a cohesive experience rather than just a play through of another game. One previewer describes his first experience with a gun and no specific objective. He finds an old man walking down a path and as he firstly shoots him in the hip he sees the old man convincingly grimace and twist at the intense amount of pain he must have been in. After shooting him in the head the previewer states how he felt empathy towards the character and found it hard to deal more pain to the already wounded man.
Most describe the cohesiveness as mix of: Firstly an unscrupulous attention to detail and secondly how well the many great additions from all fields of the game flow together in a synergetic way.
The Overview
(If you know what it’s all about, skip ahead to the next section)
To that small minority who don’t know what the GTA franchise is all about, you’re about to find out. The idea behind GTA was just that Grand Theft Auto, stealing cars, killing people and generally not giving a damn about the law. The third instalment of the game and the first not to use a birds-eye view could be considered the game that made GTA go mainstream. Compared to the games before it GTA III brought a completely new style of game-play which these days is referred to as the “sand-box” style of play. This meant that players were placed in a gargantuan-sized city where they had the power to whatever they wanted, including breaking into cars, jumping off buildings and rampaging to the extent where you could jump in a tank and drive down the streets of a city not so different to New York. Sounds pretty fun eh?
The Game-play
“The fuel that drives the machine”; The game-play of the GTA series definitely suits such an analogy and as such I’m sure your wanting to know more than anything else how IV plays compared to its predecessors.
Driving
The differences in driving style from car to car have been made even more prominent; making players appreciate the handling and acceleration of that sports car over the (lack of) ability of a soccer-mum van.
Players will also have the ability to break the window and fire out (or throw in the case of a grenade) with any of their weapons, this of course would be invaluable when trying to get away from the authorities.
Combat
Think Gears of War. That, Rainbow Six: Vegas or Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. That’s right, you guessed it: covering. I personally have no problem with it, I found the gun fights in San Andreas hard to deal with in terms of how the targeting system worked and this adds another level of sophistication to it. The other major change to the gun fighting combat is the targeting system. Players can auto target an enemy and then switch to a more precise aim to shoot specific parts of the body.
The physical combat has had refinements to it as well. I won’t go into too much detail, but suffice to say that players have the ability to block, punch and kick with varying degrees of power and create combos with certain button presses with correct timing.
In Part II I’ll will look at the story of GTA IV and how well the developers pulled off the look and feel of the game.
If you’re reading this then you’ve probably already figured out who I am, however I'll introduce myself anyway.
My name is Jonathan Rickard and I’ll give you peek into what I am: I’m all about video games. I’m a programmer by trade, have dabbled on the journalist side and have spent the most recent of my days on an R&D project for a local games company; venturing into the deepest depths of immersion in video games and come out the other end with some wacky results. I currently reside on the western boarder of Auckland City, New Zealand.
“Why are you telling me all this?” you may be asking; this is because I plan to build this blog into a hub for up-to-date news and information on video games and anything you could possibly relate to them (Like mind-control =D). So if you like what you’re reading then stick around.
