Game Daily News

Outspoken game designer Cliff Bleszinski, currently wrapping up Epic’s Xbox 360 exclusive Gears of War 2, had a lot to say about the PC and PlayStation 3–namely, that they’re unsuitable for the return of the gore-filled yet casual shooter.

“The person who is savvy enough to want to have a good PC, to upgrade their video card, is a person who is savvy enough to know BitTorrent, to know all the elements so they can pirate software. Therefore, high-end videogames are suffering very much on the PC,” commented Bleszinski to TVG.

Once again shooting down chances of a PC version of Gears of War 2, he added, “Right now, it makes sense for us to focus on Xbox 360 for a number of reasons. Not least PCs with multiple configurations and piracy.” After shooting those chances, he then curb-stomped them: “No,” he said in response to a direct question about a PC port.

“Definitely not?” asked his interviewer. “No.”

Meanwhile, on Videogaming247 the Gears director slammed the PlayStation 3–a part of it, anyway. “I hate the fucking controller,” he said. “I’m sorry, I can’t stand the PS3 controller. I love the Blu-ray player.”

EA LA’s squad-based shooter set in the Command & Conquer universe, Tiberium (PC, PS3, 360), has been cancelled for not meeting quality standards, resulting in some staffers being let go from the studio.

“The game had fundamental design challenges from the start,” wrote studio boss Mike Verdu in an internal memo obtained by Kotaku. “We fought to correct the issues, but we were not successful; the game just isn’t coming together well enough to meet our own quality expectations as well as those of our consumers.”

“Unfortunately, this action will result in several individuals on the team being released,” Verdu continued. “We will make every effort to place affected individuals on projects within the studio–and where that isn’t possible, to connect them with opportunities in other teams at EA.”

An Electronic Arts spokesperson confirmed the cancellation and the loss of staff. The game was originally scheduled for release in late 2008 but was pushed back to 2009 or 2010 for unexplained reasons. Verdu, for his part, is more concerned with moving forward, but doing a better job in the future.

“We need to make sure this doesn’t happen again. I believe we are already doing a better job of engineering success in from the start. The quality bar has been raised. Now we need to step up our focus on great design and execution, catching any problems early and correcting them quickly.”

Sega has announced that it will release a demo for its PlayStation 3-exclusive tactical RPG Valkyria Chronicles next week.

Featuring two levels, the demo will appear in the PlayStation Store October 9. The full version of Valkyria Chronicles, developed by WOW Entertainment, will be in North American stores November 11.

In between bouts of Insomniac’s Resistance 2 (PS3) at a recent press event, I had the chance to sit down with creative director and studio founder Ted Price.

In addition to Resistance 2, Price discussed the possibilities of a new Insomniac franchise in the future,the surprising sales of the recently released downloadable Ratchet game and the misconception that Gears of War and Resistance are rivals, along with his thoughts on games legislation and the future of the games industry.

Shack: How hands-on have you been with Resistance 2? I noticed you weren’t that involved in Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction (PS3).

Ted Price: Right. I’m the creative director on the Resistance franchise right now, so it’s very near and dear to my heart.

I’ve always been passionate about first person shooters and I think a lot of the team has as well. Also being able to work on a mature title has been a nice …alternative for a lot of the team. We’ve all been working on Ratchet for so many years, and this allows us to explore a different side.

Shack: I noticed there’s a lot more gore this time around.

Ted Price: [laughs] Yeah, there is.

Shack: With Resistance 2 in the finishing stages and a new Insomniac studio opening up in North Carolina, is there any chance we’re going to get a new Insomniac game that isn’t Ratchet or Resistance?

Ted Price: I’m not talking about our future games.

I can say our history has been to create new franchises. We love creating new stuff, so, certainly don’t count that out.

Shack: How has the Insomniac’s first downloadable game, Ratchet & Clank Future:Quest for Booty (PS3), sold since its release in August?

Ted Price: Actually, surprisingly well. We’ve seen the numbers and it got a lot of love when it came out. It’s one of those games that’s hard to define for people, because there haven’t been games like it, where it’s a triple-A quality title, but it’s short.

I think people may not know what to make of it. It’s not a full-fledged Ratchet game, you don’t get the 10-hour-plus adventure. What you get is a 2-3 hour kinda, bite-sized but high quality adventure.

We’re hoping that this is the first of many of its kind to hit the PlayStation Network.

Shack: Has it surpassed your expectations?

Ted Price: It was an experiment for us. We didn’t really know what to expect when we released the game, because it is a different beast. It’s something that you don’t see on PlayStation Network yet, not really.

Shack: Most of the time, downloadable games in a franchise like Ratchet are side-stories or 2D platformers. You don’t expect it to be the actual Ratchet game, just shorter.

Ted Price: Right. We had no real expectations. We didn’t know what to expect. And now that it’s actually selling well, we’re happy.

Shack: There’s a big emphasis on co-op with the new online mode, but can you still play through the story split-screen with a friend, like you could in the first Resistance?

Ted Price: No. The co-op follows a separate campaign all together. We are not playing through the single-player campaign.

Shack: At all?

Ted Price: Correct. But there is split-screen co-op, so you can play split-screen with–if you’re sitting next to your buddy, you can play player A, he claims player B, you’re with six other people who are online.

Shack: Are any of the vehicles returning from the first game?

Ted Price: No vehicles.

Shack: Why’s that?

Ted Price: It was a tough call for us. Vehicles, like bosses, take a lot of special code, a lot of one-off code, and they end up being one-off design challenges. Instead, we decided to put all that energy into bosses.

Shack: I was playing single-player earlier today, and one of my attack drones came flying in and took out an entire squad that had me pinned down. It was a pretty cool moment, and I was hoping I’d get to control that later on.

Ted Price: You don’t, you do not get to play as the attack drones. You do get a lot of cool weapons through, and you do get to play with the weapons that the Sentinels, your buddies, have. One of the guys has a machine gun with a big shield on it. The mini-gun does incredible damage and it’s fun to just lay waste to lots and lots of Hybrids.

Shack: Can you talk about some of the other weapons?

Ted Price: We haven’t really talked much about the Marksmen. The Marksmen is the weapon that Sergant Warner carries in the game, and actually we were using it in co-op, it’s your main weapon if you’re Spec Ops in co-op.

It has a three-shot burst and it has a scope view, so it’s particularly effective against humanoid enemies who have a head, use it to get headshots. The secondary fire, it fires out this projectile that will hove around and do electric damage, it will actually zap multitudes of enemies. But enemies will recognize that the projectile’s out there and will turn and start firing at it.

It’s good to distract them, first of all, because they’ll start firing at it, and secondly, it does a lot of damage.

Shack: I know you’re not talking about anything beyond Resistance 2 today, but with 60-person online multiplayer and 8-player class-based co-op, are you at all worried that you’re setting the bar too high for yourself?

Ted Price: I think there’s always the worry that when it comes to whatever next game it is that we do, we’ll hit a wall. But we’ve already got plenty of great ideas about what’s next, whether it’s… whatever game we do.

Every game we’ve done has been a learning experience too, in terms of what works and what doesn’t, where we can push and where we can’t. That’s a pretty nebulous answer, but because we’ve been making games so long, it’s been 15 years now, we always run into that same worry, and we’ve always been able to figure out a way to provide something fresh for the next game that we do.

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Eidos Interactive has issued new Shellshock 2: Blood Trails (PC, PS3, X360) media, in the form of screenshots as well as a video which you can stream below.

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Set during the Vietnam War like its predecessor Shellshock: Nam ‘67, Shellshock 2 features a storyline that has the U.S. losing a covert ops cargo plane in the jungle. Carrying something known as “Whiteknight”, it polutes and corrupts everyone who comes in contact with it.

“Survival takes on a new meaning as you fight against all sides of the conflict: your enemy, your allies and the victims… the casualties of Whiteknight, an enemy that ultimately has no side.” said Eidos Game Studios general manager Lee Singleton.

The “brutal and twisted psychological first person shooter” is in development at Rebellion, developer of games such as Alien Vs Predator, Rogue Trooper and Sniper Elite. It is currently planned for a Christmas release.

PLAY 2008: first quick report

Hi Gamers

PLAY 2008: The Game Festival has been a great success. More than 10,000 visitors in the two days, more than double the visitors in ModCon 2007. Gamers and family all together in an this game festival with more than 170 events and more than 40 tournaments.

In the next days my real full report with the usual attention to the new releases. I was able to play Leader 1 and Magnifico, and also take a look to Ventura, Moto Grand Prix, Age of Conan and One more Barrell and a lot of other new interesting games.

PLAY 2008 Media Partner, Gioconomicon.net, made a lot of interesting pictures of the new games and soon will be available also videos.

Here also my pictures of the event

Good Play
Liga

© 2008 Andrea Liga Ligabue

Fraser McHarg: First Impressions of Metroplys

Welcome to another of, what may become a semi regular series, “First Impressions of…” (assuming I keep trying new-to-me games).  This time the game is Metropolys.

The first impression of Metropolys and the reason Melissa wanted us to buy it at the Australian Games Expo is that it has a really great cover if you like that sort of art.  Normally I don’t pay much attention to box covers, certainly in some cases I would be struggling to tell you what is on the cover of a game that I have owned for years and played many times, but the cover of Metropolys is very pretty.

The board art is good, but being a representation of a map instead of a view of a city doesn’t quite live up to the expectations raised by the cover.

But what of the game itself?

We had three people and none of us had played it.  The game was still in shrink, but we were up and running within ten to fifteen minutes.  If you have played Manhattan (which could be another entry in this series) there are a few obvious similarities.  You are trying to gain control of areas with your buildings and the height and number of your buildings counts towards this.  However Manhattan has nine independent regions and scoring occurs multiple times, where as in Metropolys the districts are not independent of each other at all, and are connected by bridges over rivers.  In Manhattan you play a card to place a building, in Metropolys you bid with building proposals until one players proposal is accepted (i.e. the other players pass or cannot put up a counter proposal), then the highest value proposed building is built.  So actually there are that many similarities at all, there is just a similar look to them.

At the start of the game each player is also dealt a “neighbourhood” and “area” objective.  The neighbourhood objective gives you bonus points for a particular type of neighbourhood if you build one of your buildings in it.  There are five different types of neighbourhood.  The area objective gives you specific long term goals for a larger number of bonus points.  One area objective it to build on both neighbourhoods on either side of bridges, another is to build in all three neighbourhoods surrounding statues.  These objectives are secret and scored at the end of the game.  The area objectives reminded me a little of the secret objectives of the building type you are trying to save in Drunter und Drüber.

There also a number of trendy neighbourhoods, which give you bonus points if you build in them, subway stations, which give you a bonus point and the person with the most subway stations gains the longest road subway bonus and archaeological sites which give you minus one victory point and the person who most recently built in an archaeological site gets a “bonus” of minus two.  At the end of the game there is also a bonus for the highest building in each district.  In the family version of the game you can ditch the highest building and objective cards for a simpler set of area objectives.

The game ends when one player has built all of their buildings.

You start with 13 buildings numbered 1-13 which are your bids for proposals.  I start with any building I like and then the next player can put down a building of a higher number in an empty adjacent neighbourhood or pass.  If the next player does not have a higher numbered building, or there is no empty adjacent area then they have to pass.  The last player to propose a building then builds their building, collecting any immediate bonus or penalty and all over bid proposals are returned the players.  The player who just built then submits the first proposal for the next building.

For the first few rounds we thought the building placement was pretty aimless but we soon realised that due to the topography and rivers and lack of bridges in certain areas, one building could cut off an area making it ripe for a quick and cheap proposal and suddenly the placement of proposals became much more strategic and important.  Especially when you realise you can bid in a neighbourhood knowing full well that the next player would have to take a penalty to outbid you and the other players are completely cut out.  Evil glee can crop up quite a bit

Also once you had a built a few buildings and had a few gaps in your set of 1-13 it reminded me a little of Ra where someone can up the bid a little knowing full well you are going to either have to pass or put in a very high bid because that is the next lowest bid you can make.  The problem being is the neighbourhood really worth that much to you?

Given that it is a French game, I am not sure why they went with the generic no-name Metropolys instead of Paris, we even thought of it being Paris as we played.  With the different neighbourhoods, the subways and so on the theme is there.  It would be pushing it to call it “richly themed”, but it hides the underlying abstract quite well.

The component quality is good and it plays quite quickly.  I’m looking forward to playing it again.

© 2008 Fraser McHarg

Lucas Arts announced that future DLC will bring 4 new skins and a new mission. The 4 new skins will be Luke Skywalker, Obi-Wan, Ki-Adi-Mundi and Kit Fisto. The new mission will take place in Jedi Temple on Coruscant, which will delve deeper into Starkillers demons, and learn more about his father. There is no set date or price on the DLC yet, but time will tell young padawans!!

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1Up did an interview with two of the developers for Guitar Hero: World Tour about the process of creating the game. One of the interesting things they mention is that they won’t be putting up with people who use the song creation tools to make covers of existing songs. “We’ll be actively monitoring the site. And, obviously, if the copyright holder complains, Activision will pull it down immediately. We can’t condone people putting up covers of music. It’s really there for original content.” We discussed the creation tools themselves recently. Since then, Activision has announced that they’ll be including a MIDI sequencer to assist with making your own tunes.  [+] games, music (tagging beta)

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[+] Guitar Hero World Tour Music Creation Demonstration 27 comments 1Up has a video of a detailed demonstration of Guitar Hero: World Tour’s music creation system from GamesCon 2008. Activision shows off its robust note-recording system, which features dozens of different tones and sounds as well as the ability to play full musical scales. Tilting the guitar up and down can change octaves (or loudness for the drum machine). Users will also be able to record loops and tweak them for inclusion in full songs, which can accommodate all four players. The songs can then be uploaded and shared with the community. Guitar Hero World Tour Won’t Allow Copyright Infringement More | Login | Reply The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
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GameSetWatch has an interesting essay about the relationship between games and art. Matthew Wasteland discusses the difficulty in translating other artistic creations to video games, giving Moby Dick as an example. “If Melville had so much as allowed for any possibility at all where Captain Ahab ‘wins,’ no matter how remote, the work’s message and its interpretation of the world completely changes. Instead of destiny and fate, we would now speak of probability and chance.” He then goes on to examine whether the logic systems and rules that define a game can achieve the status of art. “Distancing the work from the ‘entertainment’ of popular games is fine, but even the most artsy, obscure and difficult works must connect with an audience somehow. I am not sure a system of rules by itself is the best method to achieve that. If rules are art, could not one just as easily publish a rulebook, and leave it at that?”