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- The Prototypes Behind Journey
- Power Rangers Online (KR)
- How Gravity Rush’s Designers Took the Third Option
- Phantasy Star Online 2 (JP)
- The Darkness 2 Already Looks Like Digital Extremes’ Best Game
- Wargame: European Escalation Review
| Posted: 10 Mar 2012 04:47 AM PST At one point shortly after finishing Flower, the developers at indie studio Thatgamecompany rounded up members of the God of War team and other staff in Sony’s Santa Monica office, sat them down “in random rooms and closets in the building,” according to producer Robin Hunicke, and presented them with a 2D Flash prototype running on a PC. It looked more like a 2600 game than anything the studio was known for, with the main character appearing as a circle with a line sticking out — “like a little tank,” says Hunicke — next to flat blocks in a top-down view. Focus testers moved from point A to point B, with mechanics designed to reward them for interacting with one another — when one left a path on the ground, the other could run along it for a speed boost; if the two stuck close together, the camera zoomed out to let them see farther into the distance. Thatgamecompany president Kellee Santiago, creative director Jenova Chen, and producer Robin Hunicke pose with the main character from Journey at E3 2011. “The whole idea of the prototype was to test the idea of anonymous mute action-based gameplay, where actions speak for you much more loudly than words, and where you wouldn’t know what the person you were playing with looked like or where they were from,” says Hunicke. The team’s theory was if they could make players connect with each other in an emotionless setting, then they could later amplify those concepts by adding art and music and a 3D world. A few hundred play tests later and their results have turned into one of the most critically acclaimed titles in recent memory: Journey, part adventure game/part experiment in creating a new form of communication between players by removing voice, combat, and the aggressive subtleties that exist in other games. The 2D Prototypes: Roping and DragonSitting down to talk at the Game Developers Conference this week in San Francisco, Thatgamecompany creative director Jenova Chen explains that the deconstructed tank demo was only one of many prototypes the team designed while working on the game. He opens his laptop and pulls up seven video clips showing ideas the team tried. Chen begins with the oldest of the batch, a “Roping” demo that looks like a 2D platformer in which players work together to make their way up a series of platforms — a skinny character can move quickly, a heavy character can break rocks, a big head character can boost the others’ abilities, and everyone can drop ropes for those below them to climb. Because the rope idea depends on co-op partners, Chen says the team ended up cutting it from the final game in favor of a solution where players could scale carpets on their own. Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| Posted: 10 Mar 2012 01:28 AM PST
Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| How Gravity Rush’s Designers Took the Third Option Posted: 09 Mar 2012 04:39 PM PST The existential crisis facing the Japanese game industry lurked beneath the surface of this year’s Game Developers Conference with uncomfortable omnipresence, often giving a sense of Japanese designers coming to San Francisco humbly to take notes on what sells in the U.S., only to be scorned and derided for their trouble. Of course, it wasn’t really so dire as all that, but one could certainly be forgiven for walking away with that impression. So it should come as little surprise that, like many Japanese devs at GDC, Gravity Rush’s Yoshiaki Yamaguchi devoted a fair amount of his panel to the conundrum of appealing to both Japanese and American audiences. Unlike many designers, though, Yamaguchi’s team side-stepped the conventional wisdom that games have to carry a conventional, realistic “American” feel or an anime-inspired “Japanese” feel. Rather than simply falling into either camp, the creators of Gravity Rush have chosen to draw upon a third option: Bande dessinée, or French comics. “I felt that games these days are starting to look too much the same,” said Yamaguchi. “They either use a realistic style or an anime style…. There’s art that looks real, and art that feels real, and I feel bande dessinées is better suited to the latter.” Going European certainly isn’t unheard of in non-European games, of course; the Professor Layton series is defined by its warm, Ghibli-esque visual style. Yamaguchi, however, very specifically drew inspiration from French illustrators Jean Giraud (Moebius) and Enki Bilal in order to create a visual style of which it would be (as Yamaguchi says) “difficult to determine the country of origin.” And Gravity Rush is a truly stunning game. Not only does its gameplay appear novel — applying the gravity-inverting mechanics of games like VVVVVV to an open, three-dimensional world — its style is striking. It combines polygons with cel-shading, painterly effects, and highly saturated unconventional color schemes. It looks like nothing else on the market, even within the Western indie space, and makes a strong case for PlayStation Vita’s merit as a platform. “We sought to strike a balance between realism and drawing, creating harmony with the CG,” said Yamaguchi. “But of course simply focusing on graphics will not move the audience… it’s like moving different strands of string to weave a tapestry.” The team’s solution was to create something they call a “living background,” environments that create the “sensation that the character actually exists in that space. “Games can do something that novels and movies can’t,” Yamaguchi said. “The player can interact with them. The concept is that the world that exists here is not simply a picture, but a living, breathing entity. The environment must convey information to the player; when players do not receive this information, they start to ignore their surroundings. As soon as the player starts to think of the background as a picture, they’ll stop paying attention to it.” Due to the nature of Gravity Rush’s gameplay (which sees players flipping heroine Kat’s personal sense of gravity across a variety of axes, allowing her to traverse any surface above a certain size), the team felt it essential to get Kat to look like she belonged within the world she inhabits. The illustrated-yet-natural style of bande dessinée served as the creators’ waypoint for creating this synthesis. At a time when rhetoric about the origins and nature of games so deeply polarizes the industry, it’s a pleasure to see someone approach their work from a different angle — and to come up with such an intriguing creation in the process. GDC 2012: What Can the Next Generation Learn from Gaming History? 1UP editor-in-chief Jeremy Parish’s mission at this year’s Game Developers Conference is informed by his enthusiasm for new ideas and affection for the games he grew up playing. Is it possible to march forward while occasionally glancing back? That’s the question he’s investigating this week. Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| Posted: 09 Mar 2012 04:39 PM PST
While the Vita version is only due in 2013, which is next year, the game was announced for the PC quite some time back. The game is currently in Alpha phase still for the PC platform in Japan. There is no news at all regarding an English version at this moment. Below are some trailers revealed previously. Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| The Darkness 2 Already Looks Like Digital Extremes’ Best Game Posted: 09 Mar 2012 01:26 PM PST Once upon a time, getting about in a Zelda game was such a clear-cut process. You had your dungeons (anywhere from four to 12, depending) and you had the overworld that linked them all together. Aside from the occasional spin-off (Four Swords Adventures was broken into levels, and Majora’s Mask centered around the hub of Clock Town), that’s how it always worked. You’d wander around, maybe poke into a cave for a Heart Piece, clear away some scrub, fight some bad guys, and eventually work your way to the next subterranean puzzle labyrinth. The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword is mixing things up, and — for the first eight hours of the game, at least — the results are pretty great. Skyward Sword’s design makes the distinction between overworld and underworld much muddier than in past games. Perhaps that’s appropriate, since this adventure divides its world into three layers rather than the usual two. Above the dungeons, you have the overworld; meanwhile, above it all is the realm of Skyloft, best described as an aerial take on Wind Waker’s sea. At the heart of Skyloft is a large city held aloft by (one assumes) ancient magic or technology or something, but the skies are littered with floating islands, and Link travels between them on the back of a huge red bird. Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
| Wargame: European Escalation Review Posted: 09 Mar 2012 10:36 AM PST Wargame: European Escalation boasts possibly the most obvious name for a game ever (it's like calling Super Mario Jumpgame: Plumber Rising: Revengeance). It is, as you can no doubt surmise, about war. An alternative Cold War in fact. Developed by Eugen Systems, Wargame, European Escalation is a real-time strategy title, so if the studio's name and legacy means anything to you, you'll know what to expect. Wargame: European Escalation is pretty minimalist presentation wise. No dazzling opening cutscene, no bleak state of the world introduction. It's actually quite refreshing to have something just say 'here's a game, play the damn thing' with a minimum of fuss. You're hit immediately with a business like, imposing menu screen and then drafted straight into the heat of battle, starting off with smaller scale melees before you ascend fully into total war. It's a good way to exercise your inner Napoleon. The thing that strikes you immediately about European Escalation is the sheer scale and detail of the thing. It's madness. You can view the proceedings from as high as above the clouds to a few metres off the ground with virtually no framerate loss (if you're running on a high end PC at least). Not only that, but there are little incidental details everywhere. Tanks will make tracks wherever they go, fires will affect nearby flora and fauna and towns appear to be painstakingly rendered, before you blow them to smithereens at least. You'll probably spend a few moments admiring the tiling in some chap's patio before suddenly remembering that half a mile away your forces are getting utterly mulched by the communist menace. You see, Wargame: European Escalation has no time for idiots. It requires more patience than other strategy standards like Starcraft and Command and Conquer, and you can't rely on overwhelming your opponents through sheer numbers alone, as you're likely to get utterly decimated by some incredibly cheeky flanking enemy hordes. You need to plan your attacks, make sure you've accounted for every possibility. There's a rock paper scissors element to the game, as each unit has its own strengths and weaknesses. For instance Tanks have a tendency to get utterly mulched by well hidden, strategically placed infantry, but can make short work of command units, while aircraft, surprisingly enough, have a particular weakness to stationary missile units. There's no base building or resource mining either. The only way to replenish your ranks is to capture a point and station a command vehicle at it, meaning you're always constantly on the move and looking for new areas rather than hunkering down and fortifying a specific area. You'll also need to account for the terrain. Vehicles will occasionally get stuck going through swamps, whereas gaily bumbling along through a field will have enemy crosshairs on you in an instant. You need to use your surroundings to your advantage, take cover in the trees, or use the roads to travel more quickly to your next fracas. There's a lot to consider. The game also has you take into account the mental wellbeing of your troops. They're usually pretty stout, but if you end up putting them in a hairy situation they can get jittery. If they're getting completely pummelled though they'll sometimes rout like awful cowards, throwing your ranks into yet more disarray. This isn't harsh though, it's just European Escalation being cruel to be kind. You'll see the defeat screen a lot, but you'll also likely shrug it off and press the replay button, as there's something oddly compulsive about it. Wargame: European Escalation is an enjoyable, diverting time sink. There's something oddly relaxing about sending your troops to their death as some tranquil background music lightly froths away. It does feel like things are overly stacked against you though. You can only use a limited number of units for instance, which feels stifling. Meanwhile, enemies spotted by recon units will also disappear when out of range again, meaning you'll feel like you're going out to war blind a lot of the time. It's all slightly overwhelming. The number of units at your disposal (unlocked through earning stars throughout the single player campaign or levelling up in multiplayer) is ridiculous, and it's easy to get bogged down in a cavalcade of stats. However, Wargame: European Escalation is also incredibly dry and characterless; the only light relief coming from some of the unintentionally funny things your troops will say when you order them about, all cut glass English accents and gung ho machismo. Wargame's multiplayer will be the real draw for the strategy nuts though. You can team up with a few others and go head to head ag It's the nature of the beast though, and all's' fair in war and eh, war. You'll get destroyed when you first play, but you'll learn should you give it time. Wargame isn't something to be sped through in an afternoon. It's more like a long term investment, rewarding patience and attrition. Wargame: European Escalation is maybe aimed too squarely at hardcore strategy nuts, and it's desperately lacking in character, but once you wrap your head around the various intricacies it's far too easy to lose an entire evening zooming in and out in amusement at all the carnage being meted out. Standing proud among the rank and file of the strategy genre, Wargame: European Escalation improves upon elements explored in Eugen's previous game R.U.S.E. Get past the negligible plot and steep learning curve and you'll find an engaging, good looking RTS. 7/10 Posted by: admin in Gaming News Thank you for Visiting Gameforumer.com, Hope you enjoyed the stay with us. |
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