General gaming

General gaming

Mark of the Ninja Aims to Redefine 2D Stealth

Posted: 24 Aug 2012 06:42 PM PDT

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Klei Entertainment, the talented team behind the Shank titles, is on the cusp of releasing their next downloadable game. Mark of the Ninja brings a strong sense of style similar to Shank, but instead of drawing inspiration from the gritty history of Grindhouse films, they've decided to head in a slightly different direction. Ninja is a foray into relatively uncharted waters -- a stealth-action 2D platformer. But don't let that wealth of adjectives deter you; Mark of the Ninja is shaping up to be a unique experience packed tightly with incredible ideas and mechanics. As Jeremy pointed out in his gushing preview from PAX East, the game uses the concept of, for lack of a better term, fog of war in very interesting ways. But instead of focusing on the same features he covered back in April, I've decided to take an in depth look at a few of the game's other systems and mechanics.

Without the luxury of a three-dimensional space akin to Metal Gear Solid, Thief, or Splinter Cell, the folks at Klei had to think a bit outside the box. They came up with a means in which sounds could be represented through visuals. While remaining out of sight behind the cover of darkness is still an important part of the game, much of the experience involves using sounds and silence to your advantage. The audible volume of your actions -- from footsteps, to broken scenery -- are represented via sound ripples that increase in circumference depending on how loud your actions are. For example, treading slowly across a hall will create tiny ripples that can only be heard that enemies in close proximity, while running across that same space will create larger ripples that can be heard through walls, floors, and even ceilings.

The Essential 100, No. 51: Devil May Cry

Posted: 24 Aug 2012 06:18 PM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF AUGUST 20 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART TWO

The Essential 100, No. 51: Devil May Cry

Cover Story: Capcom's second step away from survival horror rescued the action genre on PS2.

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y the time Devil May Cry came to market, survival horror had started to show signs of overstaying its welcome. After releasing a small menagerie of Resident Evil titles -- with a whopping eight RE games in a five year span -- Capcom started its tour on the PlayStation 2 with Onimusha, an action adventure game that still felt rooted to survival horror. Instead of guns and prerequisite zombies, players could use swords and magic to fight off dangerous demon spirits -- a small tradeoff, sure, but similar tank-like controls didn't help Onimusha's case to distinguish itself from RE.

Perhaps Onimusha's obvious parallels to survival horror games indicated the difficulty in making games early on for the PlayStation 2 -- a situation that could have caused designers to stick closely to what they knew rather than rock the boat too hard. Of course developers welcomed the increased hardware specs of the PS2, but an intricate internal architecture made getting the most out of the Emotion Engine a tricky task. As a result, year one on the new Sony console appeared a little rote compared to the creativity demonstrated later on in the console's life.

The Essential 100, No. 52: Final Fantasy

Posted: 24 Aug 2012 05:55 PM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF AUGUST 20 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART TWO

The Essential 100, No. 52: Final Fantasy

Cover Story: Square's flagship franchise proved the potential of console RPGs.

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ithout Nintendo, it's doubtful that console RPGs would have eventually gained so much traction in the States. This claim may seem outrageous, but keep in mind that The House That Mario Built played an instrumental role in getting American kids hooked on the same digital drug that drove their Japanese fans into a frenzy. Dragon Warrior stood as an excellent proof-of-concept for Nintendo Power readers, but to really catch their attention, Nintendo would need something a little less dated; a game that offered the same degree of freedom as computer RPGs, with a friendly console-style safety net to catch players who wandered too far from the correct path.

So maybe Final Fantasy was a little dated by 1990; like Dragon Quest (the Japanese version of Dragon Warrior) before it, the series had already hit its third installment in Japan by the time the first one made it over here. And even though three years made for quite a leap during the NES generation, Final Fantasy gave console gamers something they hadn't yet grown accustomed to: an entire world to explore at their whim, a world so big it required hijacking a ship (and an airship!) in order to see its many sights. And instead of a single party member, Final Fantasy offered four, with six character classes to be determined by the player. In Dragon Warrior, you at least knew that grinding against enemies would lead protagonist Erdrick down a linear path of improvement; in Final Fantasy, players could screw themselves over from the first minute with a lousy choice of characters -- just one of the many instances of terrible, terrible freedom that made Final Fantasy stand out in Japan amid a sea of Famicom Dragon Quest clones.

The Essential 100, No. 53: Chrono Trigger

Posted: 24 Aug 2012 05:36 PM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF AUGUST 20 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART TWO

The Essential 100, No. 53: Chrono Trigger

Cover Story: Lightning in a bottle from the 16-bit era's greatest RPG developers.

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e Americans didn't know it at the time, but Square's Chrono Trigger promised to be the best RPG ever -- and with the degree of talent involved, how couldn't it be? Years before the 2003 Square-Enix merger, this 1995 collaboration united the best of both developers: Dragon Quest creator Yuji Hori, Square mainstays Hironobu Sakaguchi, Takashi Tokita, and Yoshinori Kitase (along with up-and-comers Masato Kato and Yasunori Mitsuda), and a certain manga artist by the name of Akira Toriyama -- who put together a little cult comic you may have heard of called Dragon Ball. These certainly weren't household names for American gamers back in 1995, but Japanese RPG fans no doubt salivated like dogs at the mention of these gaming greats bashing their heads together in an attempt to create the Best Thing Ever. And the strangest part of this story? They did just that.

The Essential 100, No. 54: Metroid

Posted: 24 Aug 2012 02:41 PM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF AUGUST 20 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART TWO

The Essential 100, No. 54: Metroid

Cover Story: With arcade immediacy and PC depth, Metroid demonstrated the unique potential of consoles.

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great gulf between PC and console games has always existed -- ever since Ralph Baer cobbled together his Brown Box to coax interactivity from a wobbly television image. But those who treat the two formats as rivals in sharp opposition fail to see the bigger picture of the video game medium. Since the beginning, computers and PCs have occupied the deep end of the game content spectrum, ideally suited for rich, immersive, complex, involved software. At the other end we once had arcade games, designed for quick, simple hits of entertainment built around spur-of-the-moment microtransations: A niche now occupied by mobile games. Consoles straddle this divide, always at their best when bringing together the immediacy of impulse games and the more complex pleasures of PC titles.

Within this rubric, Metroid represented a bold early attempt to unite run-and-gun twitch action with the persistent world design and character progression of an adventure game or RPG. Metroid couldn't claim to be the first game of this kind; Nintendo's own The Legend of Zelda predated Metroid by several months, and in turn Zelda simply expanded on games like Atari's Adventure. Japanese and European PC game designers were beginning to explore similar concepts as well.

The Essential 100, No 55: Shenmue

Posted: 24 Aug 2012 11:33 AM PDT

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1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF AUGUST 20 | THE ESSENTIAL 100, PART TWO

The Essential 100, No 55: Shenmue

Cover Story: Sega's ambitious action adventure didn't catch on as intended, but the series brought many ideas to the forefront.

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oor localization. Bizarre characters and uneven pacing. Jokes about repetitive dialogue, black cars, and sailors. This is the unfortunate state of Shenmue's legacy: an uneven scale of humor and finger pointing at one of the most expensive console projects of a prior hardware generation. Honestly, it's time to give Shenmue, Sega, and creator Yu Suzuki a break. While the future fate of the Shenmue saga may sit in an unfortunate state of limbo, few can deny the game's impact on the world of video games, or the level of ambition behind its technically complex world. Suzuki set out to create a detailed and realistic 3D setting on consoles, one that players could slowly lose themselves in, and he pulled it off to a degree -- an impressive feat for a home console game from 1999.

Up until Shenmue's release on the Dreamcast, the concept of an open world 3D game hadn't reached its potential. Players saw glimpses of what 3D open worlds could do in games like Super Mario 64, Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask -- even the Driver series fumbled with an open setting for its high speed chases -- and though the results each had their own charm, none pushed the idea forward quite as much as Shenmue.
Posted by Shri Krishna

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