General gaming |
| Creative, Compelling, and Canceled: Lost Games that Could Have Shaken the System Posted: 10 Aug 2012 01:00 PM PDT
Feature 1UP COVER STORY  1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF AUGUST 6 | DARING GAMES AND DESIGNERS Creative, Compelling, and Canceled: Lost Games that Could Have Shaken the SystemCover Story: Nine daring games that proved too unorthodox for the mass market.S o you have an idea for a unique and spectacular game? One that'll change the whole industry and prove once and for all that games are art? Well, too bad. It's highly likely that no one will fund it, leaving your pet project to wither away in the planning stages. Even if you acquire the necessary funding and approval, there's no guarantee it'll get finished. Games are canceled in mid-production all the time, so budget cuts or new management may very well kill your beloved, half-formed creation at any moment. The majority of canceled games aren't trailblazers, of course. They're often forged in familiar, popularized genres, and some are dropped just because they're so similar to what's already on the market. Yet others stand out as strange and potentially great -- until they're canceled, that is. Below, we profile some games that tried new ideas and never quite made it. |
| Posted: 10 Aug 2012 10:31 AM PDT
Feature 1UP COVER STORY  1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF AUGUST 6 | DARING GAMES AND DESIGNERS XCOM: Strategy for All?Cover Story: We talk to Firaxis about bringing a beloved classic to the masses without alienating fans.T he glimpses I've seen to date of XCOM: Enemy Unknown -- admittedly just a few demo walkthroughs and a little hands-on with the tutorial -- looks incredibly promising. Enemy Unknown aims to appeal to fans of the classic PC strategy title that it remakes in a way that the other XCOM (2K Marin's first-person shooter) simply can't; yet at the same time, its visual polish and no-fuss interface should make the game palatable for more casual players. I don't mean "casual" in the sense of your aunt who keeps sending you Farmville requests on Facebook, but rather gamers who don't really share the grognard's love of micromanagement and hex grids. So, when a 2K representative mentioned something about "XCOM doing for strategy games what Halo did for first-person shooters," it caught my attention. I understood the intention immediately, but I was also intrigued by the perhaps unintended subtext of that statement. Bungie's Halo, of course, broke down the final barrier between first-person shooters and console gamers. Rare had done the early work with GoldenEye 007 and Perfect Dark for Nintendo 64, of course, but Halo took the genre that final step into console-friendliness with its stripped-down mechanics and refined, intuitive controls. It paved the way for today's Call of Duty mania and made the FPS arguably the dominant genre on consoles. |
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