June 2009 Archives

It was probably inevitable, but as video games have evolved, so has its music. Although you might not hear any of its more famous pieces on the radio, the internet always manages to find a way to deliver the goods...legally, of course. What did you think I was going to say?

A game where the fighting was done with dance moves, music, robots, and transforming magic, Sega's Moonwalker was only one of the ways that Michael Jackson's talented persona brought together everything that made him the King of Pop.

UPDATED: Added video links to Captain EO and Moonwalker's Genesis and Arcade versions

Here's Damnation, pressed onto a plastic platter for easier consumption.

Don't cross the streams. Go get her, Ray! Back off man ... I'm a scientist.

If you remember those lines, then you might be ready to believe "Ghostbusters: The Video Game" is the perfect title for you. But if not ... the experience will haunt you.

I remember when Burger King had $20 games featuring the King. They weren't absolutely horrible games, either.

Wanna know what's bad? This. This right here.

I'm a gamer. I enjoy fast food on occasion with virtual death-dealing. But to quote an innocent bystander in Assassin's Creed ... what has happened here?

Zenimax Media has apparently caught every other publisher by surprise in acquiring iD Software, placing the legendary developer underneath the same roof as Bethesda according to this press release. It was only four years earlier that Activision had made a quiet bid to acquire the developer or its IPs only to be turned down.

For those of you that have no idea who Zenimax is, you aren't the first, but they have an impressive roster of who's who in Hollywood on their Board such as Jerry Bruckheimer and they've been Bethesda's home for nearly more than a decade. They just seem to let their developers do most of the talking.

So does this mean that the next Elder Scrolls will have Hell-borne wickedness oozing out of every megatextured portal? Probably not. Does it mean that John Carmack's programming wizardry might find its way into projects elsewhere within the Zenimax empire? That's more likely.

Ever wonder what the Brotherhood of Steel in Fallout 3 do on their days off? Now you know.

And, by the way...Tunnel Snakes rule.

E3 has come and gone and now that the dust has settled it's time to look back at some of the games that for one reason or another, weren't really given the coverage they deserved.

I shouldn't have been surprised at the treatment of the film after the first Godfather game from EA, but in playing through Godfather 2, I found myself impressed yet again with how they have continued to pillage the venerable film for ideas. If you're a fan of the films, I'd advise you to stay away, but if you're remotely curious about the game and are willing to stomach what it does to the franchise, then read on. This isn't going to be pretty.

If you have played an FPS, then you know how often that you have had to deal with that annoying little baddie dug in behind a column, corner, or wall while taking potshots at you with impunity. So you can imagine how satisfying it was to blow away the obstacle along with the trooper for a change in Red Faction: Guerrilla.

Prototype isn't so much the Hulk with enhanced, genetic powers, or Crackdown with another superhero, but it's hard not to draw comparisons.

We love superheroes, mainly because they can do things we can't. They fly, have metal claws, control things with their minds -- but at some point, they had to choose whether or not to fight for others or just start tearing everything up.

That's the same choice game players face in Sucker Punch's inFAMOUS, a brilliant bit of comic-book fantasy about a free-running courier who wakes up with the ability to control electricity.

When I saw this game for the first time at last year's E3, I came out slightly underwhelmed. To me, the only thing worth mentioning was the fact that you could have 500,000 weapons at your disposal. Tons-o-guns are great, but what else is there?

Turns out, there's plenty, and now this game's near the top of my must-have list. What grabbed me in Gearbox's presentation this year was their artistic direction ... this is NOT the game I checked out last time.

It's the end of Day Three at E3 and I am exhausted. Completely and utterly wiped out. So many games, so little padding left on my feet meant that the end was actually a welcome event. Kudos to everyone at all of the booths that continued to repeat the same spiel again and again all day long over and beyond the three days of the conference. They're the real heroes.

With that said, I did a final sweep of the halls to see what there was to see and get in a little more play time with the titles that I could get to. So here we go...

After my adventure in the morning, I headed off to the floor to check out a few more games and demos, hitting up Capcom and Activision to get a taste of what was going on there.

I've seen a lot more than this game, but it had a high spot on my mental checklist. I loved Indigo Prophecy, so I felt the need to see how this game was coming together.

If you're not familiar with Heavy Rain, here's a general story rundown. It's about the perspectives of hour people looking into the phenomenon of the Origami Killer, a murderer who leaves a little origami piece at the bodies of his victims. There was a playable demo on the show floor featuring Norman Jayden, an FBI profiler, but Sony's breakout session about the game revealed a new female character named Madison, an insomniac photojournalist who likes to rest in motels. The scene we saw was at a nightclub called the Blue Lagoon, where she had to find a way to talk to the sleazy club owner for information. The direct approach doesn't work, so she had to doll herself up and dance on a small platform to get invited to this guy's private room.

I found the placement of the QTE icons interesting ... they work within the flow of the scenes rather than being layered on top of the actual visuals. You've got button icons near heads, elbows, feet. Thought processes and decisions orbit the head of the player and get harder to read the more stressed out the player becomes. This was wild to see in a non-combat situation, where we saw how one can control everything from how Madison put on her makeup to having to strip off some of her clothes for the odious, gun-toting club owner, who orders her to strip or die. We saw her strip, nervously, try to figure out how to buy time while stripping (her thoughts are very hard to read at this point), work her way into position to grab a lamp (by shaking her booty in his face), and then smack him with the lamp to knock him out. My favorite part, but also the most painful to watch, was how she extracted information by taping him to a chair and then squeezing his ... well, the things on guys that aren't supposed to be squeezed. This is all player controlled of course, so you have to mash on a button and use whatever controller motions are available to you.

It was made very clear to us that Heavy Rain is going to be more grounded than Indigo Prophecy, so you're not going to see aliens or any other extreme weirdness. Also, there's no such thing as a game over screen. If one character dies, his or her death becomes part of the story, and you move on. If all four characters perish, it's simply how the story ends. This is essentially the game's way of making sure you play it over and over again, looking for stuff you missed and seeing how the story evolves. I also think it'll be a challenge to my own gaming sensibilities, which run hot and cold on the concepts of QTEs.

Most of my appointments are in the afternoon giving me a chance to finally wander the floor and check out bits and pieces of everything else.

Started off the day getting an eyeful of Mass Effect 2 and Dante's Inferno in a couple of short demos. I've got no pics to dress this up, so you'll have to settle for words for now. I think you'll be fine. Here are some small bits on each game:

Mass Effect 2: This is being seen as the "dark second act" of the Mass Effect trilogy, much like "Return of the Jedi" was for the Star Wars movies. Commander Shepard reprises his (or her, depending on how you built Shepard in the first game) role as the central character, but this time must hop around the galaxy and try to recruit only the nastiest, deadliest people for his/her group. You can import your character straight from your original Mass Effect save file (if you have it), abilities, choices and all, and essentially pick up where you left off in the last game.

With every sequel, there's always the promise of more finely tuned gameplay elements, but it was the conversations that caught my eye. While the last game featured two people standing still and face-to-face for verbal interaction, ME2 now features real-time cinematic conversations. For example, the first conversation of the demo took place in a moving car, with stuff whipping by the windows at high speeds and the characters looking far more refined. It was essentially a talk in the car. There's also an "interrupt" feature via the left trigger, which lets the player take action in the middle of a conversation if the situation calls for it. An example of this was Shepard pushing someone through the window of a high-rise building because he wasn't being very helpful. The left trigger icon flashed on the lower left side of the screen, and out went the talker.

Of course, story has been the cornerstone of the ME universe, and the sequel looks like it's going to stress survival. Shepard is not expected to make it through this latest adventure, and we're told there out of the multiple endings featured in the game, some of them are actually going to involve Shepard's death. Not in the game over, load saved game sense ... as in, you see Shepard perish (or at least it appears that way). The moral of the story is, build a good team, make sure they like you, and try not to get killed.

Dante's Inferno: I don't know what this says about me, but my high school assignment that dealt with reading the Divine Comedy and Dante Aligheri's verbal road map of Hell has remained one of my strongest and favorite high school memories. It required us to create our own version of Dante's hell, complete with circles, sinners and punishments. By the way, I was a Catholic high school student. Anyway, I remember thinking to myself that someone should make a game about it ... and now it's here.

This epic third-person action mashup features Dante, an ass-kicking knight who is loosely based on the poet who wrote the Divine Comedy. Beatrice, the love of his life, gets dragged into Hell and it's up to Dante to go in and get her back. He comes in rocking a holy cross and a giant scythe he stole from Death as his main weapons. The most stunning aspects of the game are its sense of scale and visuals, which feature intriguing interpretations of all of the characters in Dante's Hell. You actually have to hop on the boat on a living boat to Limbo, eventually having to tear the head off the boatman (whose actually IS the boat instead of the guy driving it). There's also King Minos, the judge of the Damned; Virgil, the poet Dante encounters who spouts line from the Divine Comedy; the unbaptized children, who are a little ticked about being in Hell; and eventually Lucifer himself.

The circles of Hell based on the seven deadly sins are all individual stages of the game, so each stage has it's own twisted personality while remaining loyal to the poem. You want to see Anger as a putrid swamp? It's there. You remember how the city of Dis is described in the poem? You'll see it on a massive scale. Of course, combat is paramount and as gory as humanly possible ... as evidenced by Dante completely disemboweling a fat, gluttonous maiden from the inside. The game comes out in 2010.

All right, time for me to run off to see God of War 3 and even more third-person gore. It's third-person action day, apparently. Maybe I'll get to play something for once.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves was one of the few things I kept thinking about after the Sony pre-E3 press conference. Of course, it had sales figures, new hardware (the PSP Go) and some innovative stuff on their own (a wand-like super-controller that impeccably senses motion), but my attention was all on the games. With Microsoft whipping out Project Natal and Nintendo tossing out a vitality monitor, more Mario and a new Metroid, I wanted to see how Sony's stuff was going to stack up.

Sony Playstation hold their E3 presser at the Shrine Auditorium. They requested everyone to please be seated, so i guess the shows about to begin. We'll keep you posted as fast as we can during the show.

James Cameron and Pele showed up to this thing, which gives you an idea of the kind of mojo Ubisoft was rolling with on the eve of E3. I don't have an exact time down, but this had to be the longest press conference of the day. The theme of their show was confluence, which in short, is attempting to merge the minds of Hollywood and gaming to create a universe of uber-creativity. We saw some of that, at least conceptually, with Peter Jackson's King Kong, an original launch title for the 360 that was tied to the movie.

There was a lot of stuff to digest here, most of which dealt with the confluence thinking. I'll spill my 2 cents about some of the other games. I've got my man-crush on Sam Fisher and Splinter Cell: Conviction (seen above) and Reggie will expound on his man-crush on James Cameron's Avatar. Enjoy, post-jump.

The next press conference was EA's at the Orpheum Theater in downtown Los Angeles where we didn't have to deal with waiting for our car as much as we did with the crazy line queue massing outside. And then there was the WW2 bunker in which we had to park our car.

So here I go with a brain dump of all of the things that EA had shown off for the crowd after the jump. I'll be the one starting things off this time.

In case you haven't seen Al's previous posts, a few of us at Tech-Out are actually attending the sea of gaming madness called E3. Today was press-con day: Xbox, Electronic Arts (which I almost forgot I registered for), and Ubisoft. Instead of inundating you with reams of text about stuff you've probably already heard about (see links on the right side for actual news), me and Reggie will share our thoughts about some of the things that really clawed at our eyeballs and collective gaming psyches. No tears of joy were shed in the viewing of these conferences ... except perhaps the from the Final Fantasy crowd. Oh yeah, and Steven Spielberg, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney showed up. That sets the tone for the discussion, which comes after the jump.

I start it off after the jump. And no, we haven't forgotten the fact that Hideo Kojima was there.

Tony Hawk just walked out to introduce Tony Hawk Ride along with the wireless board controller. Users can turn, tilt, grab and do all the tasty tricks with out the pain of concrete. Unless you count the pain from rug burns.

Now showing Modern Warfare 2 trailer and actually game play of battle action in snowstorm.

Just announced at the Xbox 360 media briefing, The Beatles Rockband will be released on September 9, 2009. More photos and info to come after the briefing.