The Xbox 360 has been labelled something of a one trick pony when it comes to its diversity of games titles, but research shows that a mere 17% of titles for the Xbox 360 are shooters, meaning that 83% take other forms. The biggest slice(s) of the pie go to sports games and action/adventure titles with a mighty 26% each.
An anonymous reader writes “A poster on DVDTalk and CheapAssGamer has posted the weekly ads for Circuit City, Best Buy, and Target ahead of time for the last few years. A few weeks ago he confirmed that there was an intended price break on the PS3 and stole Sony’s thunder from E3. A Circuit City ad was used for confirmation. Circuit City has threatened DVDTalk and CheapAssGamer.com to give them personal information about the poster. CheapAssGamer has hired a lawyer and is going to fight. The story is similar to the Black Friday ads being posted early and FatWallet fighting back.”.
Not that we’re keeping track or anything, but the release of Halo 3 is just 46 days (roughly 1,100 hours, or just over 66,000 minutes) from now. Yeah, OK, just like the rest of you, we’re excited about the release of what is surely going to be one of the biggest releases in an already jam-packed year for games. To help assuage our anticipation of the upcoming release of the third game in the Halo series, we recently spoke with Frank O’Connor, writing lead at Bungie Studios, to get some insight into how the final stages of development are going for the game. We also dove in for some details on the recently announced four-play cooperative play for the campaign mode and found out how the Bungie team has been tweaking the game since the Halo 3 multiplayer beta program ended in early June.
It won’t be long before Master Chief is blasting his way through your
Xbox 360 in Halo 3.
If Its Games: How’s development been going?
Frank O’Connor: I’d have to say, all things considered, very smoothly. You can attribute that to excellent planning and production, as kind of a general impetus among the staff to ship something special and ship it on time. The main challenges and pressures have been, as ever, internally generated.
GS: Why didn’t you show playable at your E3 briefing?
FO: The gameplay demo that we did behind closed doors of a single, playable level was something we felt would work well in the more intimate setting of the meeting rooms. On stage, on a big screen, a lot of the nuance and impact of the combat we showed would have been lost and an important part of that demo was the chance for those smaller audiences to ask detailed questions–again–impossible during a live stage show.
We chose instead to run a “music video” of sorts, to paraphrase our composer Marty O’Donnell, and just give a taste of Campaign. In hindsight, I think we made the right choice. We knew we had plenty more to show and tell. We still do, as a matter of fact.
GS: What have you made of the rabid speculation going on around the Internet on the game?
FO: Same as any developer. We watched as misinformation, both hilarious and tragic, spread like wildfire. Not to mention the occasional guess where someone nails it.
GS: Is the single-player portion of Halo 3 finished? If not, what aspects of the campaign are you still working on?
FO: At the time of this interview, I would say 99 percent done. Right now, the only things we can do are polish difficulty, tune some minor gameplay items, and fix those lingering bugs.
GS: Has it turned out the way you expected? Or did it evolve into something else throughout the course of development? How much did player feedback affect it?
FO: Player feedback largely reflected our own internal criticisms of our game. With that in mind, we set about fixing the things we didn’t like about Halo 2, reinserting some of the stuff that made Halo 1 cool, and inventing some new stuff that should ensure Halo 3 is everyone’s favorite Halo–fingers crossed.
GS: The Arbiter showed up in the E3 trailer. How will he figure into the game this time? Will you play as him or–for that matter–anyone else besides Master Chief?
FO: We recently announced a four player co-op mode wherein one of the playable characters will be the Arbiter. When playing solo Campaign, the Arbiter will accompany you on many of your missions, this time controlled by artificial intelligence.
GS: How important was it to have co-op in the game?
FO: Very important. It’s something we’ve always had in some form in Halo, and it was only natural to want to expand that feature to Xbox Live and throw in something extra: four player co-op.
Take one Spartan, add two Elites and an Aribiter and what do you get? A recipe for four-player co-op fun.
GS: How did that affect the development cycle?
FO: Obviously, it has been challenging. A lot of development, design, engineering, and test work has gone into making it a reality. But it has always been in the plan, so it affected the development cycle as much as any other planned element.
GS: Why extend co-op to four players this time? Come on, four Master Chiefs?
FO: Nope. One Master Chief, one Arbiter, and two brand-new Elites: N’tho ‘Sraom and Usze ‘Taham, respectively. Only one player actually plays as a Spartan in co-op. And yes, that would be the host.
GS: How are you balancing the four-player gameplay? Will the difficulty scale increase with the number of players in a co-op game?
FO: We’ve actually included a whole layer of ways to make co-op more challenging. But the first and most important step for players is to forget that easy and normal even exist. If you have any chutzpa at all, you might as well forget heroic while you’re at it. Real men (and ladies) play co-op on legendary. We’ll reveal more about the other stuff later this month.
GS: What were the technical challenges of getting cooperative play to work online at all, much less with four players?
FO: Obviously, performance is a big deal. But the most challenging aspect is making sure that four separate consoles running four separate games are communicating fluidly and perfectly, so that each player enjoys a seamless experience. To keep the game in sync while tracking all that geometry and AI is a significant task.
GS: What kind of feedback did you get from the multiplayer beta? Did you make any significant changes to the game based on what players loved or hated?
FO: Although we gathered tremendous amounts of hard data to improve networking and matchmaking, we also made careful notes of trends, preferences, and techniques. As a result, almost every aspect of multiplayer has been touched to varying degrees. Some changes will be subtle and some very obvious–but beta players should at least feel at home.
GS: You’ve mentioned the multiplayer in Halo 3 is visually less complex and impressive than the campaign. What graphical corners did you have to cut to keep performance consistent in multiplayer matches?
The multiplayer beta helped Bungie gather a tremendous amount of data for use in fine-tuning the online experience.
FO: Actually that’s a mischaracterization. We would never state that our MP levels look “less impressive” since they all look pretty darned nice. What we have said is that MP maps require a different, cleaner aesthetic as a baseline in order to achieve a good balance of visibility, playability, and clarity. We certainly don’t go as bananas with atmospherics and cover as we do in Campaign, but the overall aesthetic of the game should not be jarring when switching from MP to Campaign; it should feel familiar and correct to Halo’s visual style. So in fact, we don’t cut corners at all. We carefully plan line of sight, elevation, and so on, and let our artists build beautiful new multiplayer spaces.
GS: Thanks for your time.
-If Its Games
You may recall the recent announcement of Silicon Knights’ suit against Epic over the Unreal engine. The Escapist reports that Epic is firing back, launching a countersuit against SK and claiming this is all just a ploy to renegotiate their licensing deal. “In its counter-suit, however, Epic says that Silicon Knights was aware that the Unreal Engine 3 was still under development when the licensing deal was signed, and that new features would continue to be added as part of Epic’s development of Gears of War. ‘SK’s lawsuit is a pretense,’ [Epic’s Mark] Rein said in his statement. ‘SK does not have any valid claims against Epic. SK filed suit in a bid to renegotiate the License Agreement, in the hope that Epic will prefer that to the burden of responding to discovery and associated adverse publicity.’ Epic is seeking minimum compensatory damages in excess of $650,000, as well as other injunctive relief.”.
Proof that everything Nintendo turns out is pure Gold in Japan is once again evident. A recent poll conducted by Famitsu magazine indicates that Japanese gamers are most looking forward to the arrival of Wii Fit, and rank this title as more anticipated than the arrival of the PSP slim, any upcoming software for the PS3 and Little Big Planet.
Future Publishing\’s GamesRadar website has posted up a review of the \’rating pending\’ and highly controversial title known as Manhunt 2. Despite all the negativity surrounding the title from various bodies, the title truly seems to be a work of art with GR claiming it offers an experience that you\’ll never forget and on the process warrants a 9/10. They only give it three negative points and they include the fact that the excessive gore will be revised and the title is banned in countries such as the UK at the moment.
A website is claiming that Home may be being pruned to replace the XMB of the PS3. They claim that this would be a bad move from Sony as Home will not appeal to all gamers despite being interesting in its nature, it is believed that Home is simply nothing more than a novelty.
Best Car Magazine recently published an interview with Mr Gran Turismo himself Kazunori Yamuchi who hinted at release dates for the PS3 and PSP versions of Gran Turismo. According to Gamefront, Gran Turismo 5 will be available in Japan from July 2008 and after this date on the PSP. Further to this, he stated that Gran Turismo Mobile for the PSP will be available towards the end of 2008 for European gamers.
Sierra Entertainment, a division of Vivendi Games, today announced PROTOTYPE, a completely new kind of open-world game, featuring a rich story line of conspiracy, deception and deadly shape shifting action.
A website is claiming that the new 333MHz clock mode on the PSP is only available when WiFi is disabled, so therefore during network play the CPU clock is limited to a lowly 222MHz. They claim that this has some slightly worrying consequences for games developers.
Some shots have surfaced on how you can easily tell whether your Xbox 360 is a new HDMI enabled premium verson or not. The new versions are clearly labelled as having a HDMI port, with the packaging refering to the model as the \’Zephyr\’ which happens to be the name of the codename for the Xbox 360 Eite board. This suggests that the new Premiums do not feature the new \’65nm Falcon Motherboard, so therefore do not come with any additional improvements.
A number of people have been spotted playing Halo 3 Epsilon, which is supposedly the newest pre-buil of Halo 3 given to Microsoft employees including the infamous Major Nelson.
Few sports games translate better to multiplayer action than hockey. The game is fast enough to keep the action flowing at all times, momentum can change with the drop of a puck, and leads are never safe. And while EA Sports’ NHL series has been online for a while now, there’s always been significant room for improvement. With the upcoming NHL 08 on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, the publisher is taking a big step forward in its online ambitions for the series, as we discovered today in a hands-on session with the game.
NHL 08 is looking to raise its multiplayer game with four new online modes.
Four new gameplay modes anchor the core of NHL 08’s online offering: leagues, shootout, versus play, and team play, and each of these offers a slightly different puck experience. The addition of online leagues is probably music to the ears of the year-in-and-year out hardcore NHL fans who’ve been clamoring for just such a feature in the series for a while now. Here, you’ll be able to play a league comprised of anywhere from two to 32 teams–and you can choose teams from the NHL, AHL, international, even 32 of the exact same team if you so wish. When setting up the schedule, you can choose to play every team on the schedule up to eleven times in the season; as a result, you can play pretty close to a regular 82-game season, or a season that’s far longer than normal. League games will feature full stat-tracking via Xbox Live, so you can keep track of league leaders in a variety of categories.
Last year’s NHL 07 let you play a shootout minigame that was a fine way to introduce you to the then-new skill-stick controls. NHL 08’s online shootout mode will let you compete against a friend in a shootout; the twist here is that for ranked shootouts, you’ll play each round both as the shooter and then as the goalie, defending against your friend’s shots. Naturally, playing the goalie will make use of the manual goalie controls, and you’ll need to have skills on both sides of the puck in order to be successful.
Online versus play will allow multiple people to play online on the same consoles. Here, up to four players on the same Xbox 360 can take on up to four players on another Xbox 360. Folks playing the game on a PlayStation 3 will be able to enjoy six-on-six gameplay on two PlayStation 3s (yes, one player can control the goalie on each team). If the idea of playing on the same console doesn’t appeal to you, then online team play is the mode for you. In this mode, up to three players can connect online and play on the same team from individual Xbox 360s or PS3s, creating three-on-three match-ups on six distinct consoles (of the same type, naturally), all playing over online connections.
In both online versus and online team modes, you can play any combination of players up to the maximum on either team. For instance, in an online versus match, you can play five-on-one, with five players on one PS3 playing against one player on another PS3. Similarly, in an online team match, you can have three-on-one games, or two-on-two, and so on, with the rest of the positions on the ice filled out by CPU-controlled players. Before a game begins, you can choose to lock yourself into a certain position or have the ability to switch between open players as you go, so if you’re looking to play center the entire match, you’ll be able to do so.
While we haven’t had a chance to see the online play in action yet–we had only one copy of the game available to us–the new modes have some interesting implications with regard to how you’ll play online hockey. For one thing, it will likely quickly separate the men from the boys in terms of strategy. We expect to see plenty of online matches where every player on the ice is chasing after the puck, leaving holes wide open for those who know where their position is on the ice and how to take advantage of it. Another interesting aspect in online team play is voice chat: You’ll be able to communicate with your teammates, but your opponents won’t be able to hear your conversation, adding another layer of strategy to the action on the ice. Finally, NHL 08 producers are quick to point out that last year’s game didn’t perform that well online and, as a result, EA has spent a great deal of time ensuring that current online performance is comparable to the offline game.
For the single-player game, the team’s focus on improved controls and smarter artificial intelligence seems to be paying off. The create-a-play feature, profiled in our last look at NHL 08, has proven to be a test for the game’s improved AI. The goal for the developers has been a defensive scheme that continually adapts to your play on the ice and, from our time with the game, it seems to be heading in the right direction. CPU-controlled players are always looking to fill up passing lanes and interrupt your play, forcing you to keep the puck moving with smart passes, and they aren’t afraid to lay into you if you leave yourself open. Playing with the manual goalie controls will be a test of your skills with the analog sticks and your reaction times. Interestingly, if you pull your goalie while manually controlling him, you’ll have to skate yourself off the ice, and then play as the sixth skater who comes on to replace him.
For those players who are worried that the create-a-play feature will give away their best strategies in multiplayer matches, it should be noted that you can choose to turn off the illuminated lines that show up on the ice when you are in the correct position to trigger a created play. Your players will still move to the correct spot once you get into the trigger zone, and it will be up to you to run the play as you designed it. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to bring your created plays into online matches, but we expect that, if the feature proves to be popular, you’ll be able to do so in next year’s game.
Slowpokes need not apply: Manual goalie controls will test your skill with the sticks and your reaction time.
Hockey purists looking at videos of NHL 08 and wondering where the all-new Reebok NHL jerseys are will be pleased to note that they are in the game but, due to licensing issues with the NHL, they won’t be immediately available. Instead, once all of the NHL teams have introduced their new-look uniforms, a code will be provided on the EA Sports web site that, once entered into the game, will unlock the new uniforms for use in your matches.
With a host of new multiplayer features, EA Sports seems to be taking online play seriously with its hockey series. Are the days of full six-on-six online gameplay in fully formed leagues that far away? Time will tell, but if NHL 08 is anything to go by, things look to be heading that way, and quickly. Expect a five-on-five demo (Ducks vs. Sens, naturally) to be up on both the Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network in the weeks leading up to the game’s September release. In addition, we’ll be bringing you more information on the game in the near future as well.
-If Its Games
;)
Ramayan 3392 A.D. concept art.
With games like The Agency and Kung Fu Hustle in the works, Sony Online Entertainment is expanding its portfolio of massively multiplayer online role-playing games beyond the fantasy staples of EverQuest and EverQuest II. Today the publisher provided the latest evidence of this, announcing a partnership with Virgin Comics to create an MMO game based on that label’s futuristic reinterpretation of Indian mythology, Ramayan 3392 A.D.
SOE will work with the creative team behind the comic as part of an exclusive multiyear worldwide licensing agreement. In a statement, Virgin Comics cofounder and CEO Sharad Devarajan explained that the game’s cultural roots will help bring a fresh perspective to the genre.
“In a world increasingly dominated with games influenced by a western Tolkien mythos, Ramayan will offer gamers a chance to experience a whole new universe of characters and archetypes derived from one of the oldest cultures on Earth,” Devarajan said in a statement.
No release date was given for the game.
One criticism leveled against Take-Two Interactive by analysts is that the company is a one-studio corporation, relying on Rockstar Games to make the company’s money while 2K Games and 2K Sports lag behind.
With Take-Two’s Irrational Games studio is set to release the much-anticipated BioShock later this month, the publisher today announced a rebranding to “symbolize the studios’ further integration into the 2K Games family.” Henceforth, Irrational Games’ Boston, Massachusetts studio will be 2K Boston, while its offices in Canberra, Australia, will be 2K Australia.
“Irrational Games is widely recognized as one of the most innovative development studios in the world,” 2K president Christoph Hartmann said in a statement. “Following their incredible efforts in bringing BioShock to life, we are proud to make the newly renamed Irrational Games studios a cornerstone of our game development family.”
It won’t be long until gamers can judge those efforts for themselves; BioShock has gone gold for the Xbox 360 and PC and is expected on store shelves August 21 in North America and August 24 in Europe. For more on the game, check out If Its Games’s previous coverage.