Archive for May 10th, 2008
May 10, 2008
Emergency Mayhem proves the age-old theory that if you can’t think of a good name for your town, you shouldn’t name it Crisis City. That’s just asking for trouble. The problems facing this bustling metropolis go far beyond an inadvisable name, though. Even the raging garbage fires on every corner and an epidemic of nails lodged in the intestines of careless citizens aren’t the biggest issues here. Technology is the true enemy of Crisis City. The visuals wouldn’t have looked out of place on the Nintendo 64 (sans Expansion Pak), and the motion controls vary between overly sensitive and completely unresponsive. These issues make the crimes and health risks cropping up all over town seem like little more than stubbed toes.
At least slamming into people is mildly amusing.
Emergency Crisis is a free-roaming minigame adventure that has you take control of one of three emergency vehicles: an ambulance, a fire truck, and a police car. Once you select a vehicle, you are set loose in an open world brimming with people in need of help. Driving around the city in a nearly weightless car while you mow down lackadaisical pedestrians and run slow-moving cars off the road is easily the high point of this otherwise brutally challenging adventure. You won’t be able to spend much time terrorizing the people you are tasked to protect, though. With a timer quickly counting down the seconds you’ll have to enter missions to progress further in the game. If you want to progress.
Though each vehicle has its own specialties, they all share one common mission type: drive from one point to another. While the other, nondriving missions range from extreme repetition that incites carpal tunnel syndrome to nerve-racking tasks that would make a brain surgeon shake with frustration, the driving missions are merely bland and unobtrusive. These are broken up into three different categories: drive somewhere within a certain time limit, drive somewhere without crashing too much (this is the least entertaining), and drive somewhere without any restrictions at all. Driving around the same environment over and over again is hardly fun, but it feels like a welcome reprieve when you consider the other tasks that are out there.
The ambulance-specific missions are nearly impossible. Most of these missions have you fishing various objects out of people, and they are all excruciating. The most frustrating mission finds a rusty nail lodged in the belly of some foolish, foolish man. Using the pointing feature to aim your Wii Remote at the screen, you have to attach the nail to a magnet and slowly wind your metal foe through the victim’s digestive system. The business end of the magnet has squiggly lines billowing out of it to indicate where the magnetic charge is strongest. Coincidentally, this is the exact size and shape of the imbedded nail. You have to engulf the nail entirely in the magnetic field, sticking it loosely to your operating tool. Here’s where it gets interesting. Sometimes the nail will fall off if you get too close to the intestinal lining. If the angle of the nail shifts even slightly, you won’t be able to pick it up again. Trying to navigate through a narrow labyrinth with zero margin for error just isn’t fun.
There’s no point in boring you with more details of the extremely frustrating ambulance missions, but suffice it to say, they are all unforgivably difficult. When a minigame deems you a failure if you simply move your unsupported hand a centimeter in any direction, there is a serious problem. And though the other two vehicles don’t feature these stress-inducing motion-controlled minigames, they still lack even the vaguest hint of fun. Rapidly wiggling the Wii Remote to either put out a garbage fire (as the fire truck) or inflate a flat tire (as the police car) grew tiresome shortly after the Wii launched.
Why are people swallowing nails anyway?
Though the moldy visuals will not deter you from enjoying this game to the same extent that the broken controls and repetitive mission structure do, they are still irredeemably awful. From blurry textures pasted on every solid structure, to character models completely devoid of detail, Emergency Mayhem is one of the ugliest current-generation games around. It’s not surprising at all that this game started life on the PlayStation 2 more than six years ago. Development time may have been better spent bringing the graphics up to modern standards rather than implementing frustration-fueled motion controls.
Not even a multiplayer mode can make these treacherous minigames shine. In fact, playing Emergency Mayhem with more people makes the game even worse. The main problem is that you have to compete in the same tired minigames from the single-player mode. The mildly fun driving missions have been completely removed in this mode, replaced with one arduous task after another until one person decides to throw the match and end the torment.
Emergency Mayhem is a complete failure. The fact that many games properly use motion controls makes the problems in Emergency Mayhem even more damning. There is no reason to play this minigame collection.
May 10, 2008
Based on Northstar Games’ board game of the same name, Wits & Wagers is a trivia game that you can win without ever answering a question correctly. That’s because betting on answers given by other players is often more lucrative than giving a correct answer yourself, assuming you bet on the right ones. The Xbox Live Arcade version of Wits & Wagers does a reasonable job of bringing the popular party game online, but some odd design choices, a couple of irritating bugs, and a dearth of questions ultimately make it difficult to recommend.
You won’t want to dance, but in lieu of having anything better to do…
The Wits & Wagers board game is designed to be played by between three and seven players, but the XBLA version supports either four or six with any empty slots being filled by occasionally erratic AI characters. Everyone answers the same question and reveals their answers simultaneously, at which point the always-numerical answers are arranged in order on a board and you’re invited to bet any or all of your points (using casino-style chips) on the answer that you feel is closest to the correct one without exceeding it. The payout odds for each answer vary according to how they relate to the other answers given, with higher odds being paid for correct answers at either end of the scale. The highest possible odds of 6:1 are only paid if you’re proved right after betting that every player’s answer is higher than the correct one, but this doesn’t happen very often.
You’re given around 30 seconds to answer each question by scrolling through a huge list of possibilities to the find the number you’re looking for. You then get around the same amount of time to place your bets, before the correct answer is revealed and the chips are doled out to all who made the right bet and to the player whose answer was the winning one. While 30 seconds might not sound like a long time, it’s long enough to make Wits & Wagers feel painfully slow at times and, if you’re so inclined, it’s plenty of time for you to cheat by looking up the answers online. Some of the questions are obscure enough or structured in such a way that finding the answers in under a minute will be difficult, but those are the exception rather than the rule, and even if you can’t find the information in time for your own answer maybe you’ll get it in time for the betting round. With that said, not all of the answers in the game agree with what you’ll find online, so either the World Wide Web has it wrong or this games does. We’ll let you decide which.
Although additional question packs will inevitably be released for Wits & Wagers at some point in the future, the game boasts only 700 questions at launch. That seems like a good number at first, but repeats will almost certainly start appearing in your games after only an hour or two of play. We should also mention that many of the questions have a distinctly American flavor and, where applicable, rarely reference statistics gathered more recently than 2004.
Finishing with more points than your opponents won’t always make you the winner.
When you’re not busy attempting to cheat during a game of Wits & Wagers, you might find yourself inexplicably compelled to make your onscreen avatar “dance” like a marionette using your controller’s right analog stick. Avatar options include dozens of faces belonging to real people as well as a bunch of other, more unusual characters that include a skull, a tiger, a smiley face, a dinosaur, and a female robot. Your chosen face is pasted onto a different, themed body for each of the seven question rounds during a game. During a sports round you might find that you’re in control of a hockey player or a football referee, while during a nature round your avatar might be replaced with a fish or a large insect, for example. You have far too much time both during and between rounds to play with these oddly animated figures, and you’ll almost certainly bore of it shortly after (or even before) unlocking the “dance in every round” achievement. Plugging in an Xbox Live Vision camera gives you the option to make an avatar of whatever it’s pointed at instead of using one of the aforementioned options, but the implementation of the camera support is horrible at best since it just replaces the avatar’s torso with a television set and then displays whatever you’re doing on its screen.
At its best, Wits & Wagers is an accessible trivia game that can be enjoyed by up to four people on a single console or up to six online. At its worst, this is a trivia game that rewards gambling savvy over general knowledge, sometimes declares the wrong player the winner at the end of a session, and occasionally crashes to the extent that the entire console freezes up and even the navigation blades can’t be called up to end the game prematurely. Wits & Wagers can be fun if you play it with the right people, if you don’t encounter questions that you’ve memorized from previous games, and if it doesn’t crash. Get any one of those three things wrong, though, and you’ll be wishing you spent those 800 points on something else instead.
May 10, 2008
On March 24, the PlayStation Portable turned three years old. Three weeks prior, one of the most anticipated games ever released for the system, God of War: Chains of Olympus, hit stores.
A prequel to the popular PlayStation 2 fantasy-action series, the games was billed as a system-seller for the PSP, which has lagged behind the Nintendo DS despite boasting higher-powered hardware and a more robust set of multimedia features. Sony was so confident the game would be a smash, it announced a special blood-red edition of the portable would be packed in with the game and a UMD copy of the teen comedy Superbad in a bundle which will go on sale in June.
However, when the NPD Group released its US March sales numbers, Chains of Olympus success was solid–but not overwhelming. The game sold over 340,500 units at retail and cracked the top 10 bestseller list, becoming the first PSP game do so since Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories in 2005. However, Chains provided only a modest boost to sales of the PSP hardware, which climbed 54,000 units to sell 297,000 systems during the month.
While Chains of Olympus wasn’t a savior for the PSP, its developer Ready at Dawn likely held a bacchanal when reviews of the mythologically themed adventure descended from the heavens. The game currently enjoys an average
91 score on Metacritic, the highest of any PSP game yet released. Coupled with the success of
Daxter and the Wii port of Okami, Chains of Olympus helped solidify Ready at Dawn’s reputation as one of today’s fastest-rising independent studios.
Now, two months after Chains of Olympus’ deubt, If Its Games caught up with Ru Weerasuriya, Ready At Dawn’s co-founder and creative director, to reflect on Kratos’ first handheld rampage, developing for the PSP, and what the future holds for the studio. A new IP, perhaps?
If Its Games: So Chains of Olympus sold 340,000 units in March–making it the fifth most popular game of the month, and the first PSP game to crack the top 10 since Liberty City Stories. Were you pleased with the results?
Ru Weerasuriya: Definitely. It’s not easy selling on the PSP as seen from the past, so getting in that top 10 is great recognition for the work done on the game. With Daxter having gone well over 2 million since its release, we wanted to follow up in the same way with Chains of Olympus and hopefully overtake it in time. I would say it’s off to a good start.
IIG: Were sales higher or lower than you expected?
RW: Honestly, we didn’t know what to expect. All we were looking for was to surpass our last game’s early numbers, which it did. So, mission accomplished on that front. Now that we’ve had a little time to sit back and contemplate on the last couple years, we feel really good about how the game is being received. We make games to entertain people and knowing that’s it’s selling well and that people are enjoying it is pretty gratifying.
IIG: So Chains of Olympus received a sparkling 91 average on Metacritic,
which many publishers use as a metric for doling out bonuses to developers. Did you reap any rewards for delivering a game that was so highly rated across the board?
RW: It’s a huge boost to our collective egos! But seriously, the highest reward we get from the scores is for our reputation as a team. There’s a saying that I think will always hold true and that the team never forgets; you’re only as good as your last game. Having those high ratings definitely reflect on how we are perceived as a developer. As many out there know, it’s not easy being independent in today’s industry and with God of War, we wanted to make sure that we improved on who we already were as a team after Daxter.
IIG: What is your opinion of the practice of tying payments to developers
to Metacritic scores?
RW: There’s definitely a lot of merit to it. As a developer, the only sure control you have is on game content and how it will be delivered–although that control sometimes can go out the door depending on the partner you work with. Some measure that success from sales, which is also important and should definitely influence rewards as well. However, sales are sometimes not a true measure of quality as there are many factors that affect game sales that are beyond the developer’s control. And as it’s been the case many times before, high ratings don’t always correlate with high sales.
So, if a game’s ratings are the measure of a team’s value, then it should [be] more than fair that that team is rewarded to reflect the quality of their work. The problem today is that developers are generally still not the ones reaping the rewards of a successful game. For example, I don’t know how common and widespread the practice of bonuses tied to ratings really is, as it’s not something I’ve seen in many of the studios I know. It’s strange to think that still today, with the amount of creative effort and dedication it takes to make a game, the talent is still struggling to get recognized and compensated. Especially when you think that there would be no games industry without the software–a console would just be another piece of hardware sitting on your shelf.
IIG: Which aspects of the God of War franchise did you think it was most
important to faithfully reproduce in the PSP version?
RW: That’s an easy one; the combat. Without that, the game would not stand a chance of holding true to the franchise. We made sure to address the core of God of War in tiers and nail those down in order so that we ended up with a coherent game; number one was combat and that includes Kratos’ combat and magic system, the enemies and bosses. Then story. This is, after all, another chapter in an already epic franchise. Of course, puzzles were a must to pace the game correctly. Music is also one of those pillars that not only completes the experience but more often than not enhances it.
[Editor’s Note: SPOILER ALERT]
IIG: When Kratos chooses to fight Persephone instead of stay with his
daughter, he pushes her away in one of the series’ familiar button-tapping sequences. Some players we’ve talked to either found that incredibly touching–or on the other end of the spectrum–just plain hilarious. Why did you choose to put that interactivity in there? Had you intended it to get that sort of split reaction?
RW: That’s the risk we had to take. I knew that it wouldn’t gel with everyone but that moment was needed. As for interactivity, I hate the idea of not allowing the player to truly experience those kinds of moments.
In games, we often take the stance to relay story and emotion in non-interactive sequences because that’s often the easier path to take. I knew that people would be split over how that moment would play out, but that’s a risk worth taking in order to get the player to get emotionally involved in the story and characters. If it was up to me, I would make sure that each and every moment of a game remains an immersive experience that the player never detaches from.
Ultimately, that’s where we need to head towards in interactive storytelling. We have the unique opportunity to give players more than what they would get by watching a movie or reading a book. We can make them care and feel for everything that a protagonist goes through by making them play out the story and experience the consequences of their actions first hand. It’s definitely not an easy task but it’s a worthy endeavor.
[END SPOILER ALERT]
IIG: Which parts of the formula were you the most comfortable tinkering
with?
RW: The most comfortable area to tinker with was the story. I was looking for that freedom and luckily, that was something that David and Cory were opened to. We had seen two epic God of War games, with Kratos taking on the Olympians head-on, kind of brute force. I thought it would be interesting to touch on themes that David did with the first game, which is ultimately what makes Kratos the man he is. He really has to be pissed off to do what he does by the end of the second game. Creating that foundation behind his anger and hatred was definitely interesting and challenging.
IIG: The least comfortable?
RW: The least comfortable area to tinker with is the combat, as the God of War 2 team had really perfected an awesome fighting system. Early on, we tried to take a different direction with it, but ultimately, it came back to what the Sony guys had already done. However, we did keep one big part of what we developed and that was the gauntlet. From the looks of it, people have really enjoyed the different gameplay it brought.
IIG: The two PlayStation 2 God of War games were credited with pushing
the limits of the platform. Did you feel the PSP restricted your ability to create the same sort of in-game areas as the console edition? Or did you feel its technology was such that very few compromises had to be made?
RW: Well, different platforms, different problems. There were things we could not do on the PSP to match the sheer content found on the PS2 games, but what mattered most to us was the overall package. It’s all about how immersive the game experience is. So we didn’t set out to just match what had been done before but create our own take on it. Even then, we were sometimes able to pack more stuff in this game than any other PSP games had ever done.
We knew however going into this that we wouldn’t necessarily be compared to other PSP titles, but held against the last two God of War games and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
IIG: What was your favorite aspect about developing for the PSP?
RW: The challenge. We felt the system was still untapped and pushing the platform was an interesting process to say the least. We didn’t have a template to go by and wanted to see how far we could push without going insane. There were times when we set out to do things that we first thought not possible, only to tackle them later and find ways of making them work. It’s kind of like solving a big puzzle, although I’m not sure the programmers would agree with me on that.
IIG: Your least favorite?
RW: The challenge! [Laughs]
IIG: Did you find the lack of a second thumbstick limiting in any way?
RW: Not really. I think we succeeded in addressing the concern everyone had with the second analog. Of course, it’s always nice to have that extra analog but I don’t think the gameplay experience suffers from its absence. Of course, during development, we did have to spend some time thinking about how to map all the required controls on the PSP. The dodge/evade was probably the only point of contention we had at one time but in the end, that got solved as well.
IIG: Do you think you will ever develop for the PSP again? If not, why
not?
RW: As of now, the answer is “no.” We did what we wanted to do on the platform. We saw the opportunity to bring Sony and the PSP two great games and system sellers with Daxter and God of War, which is what I think we’ve accomplished.
Something that a lot of people don’t know is that we proposed both those games to Sony because the team wanted to make those games and we felt that we could push a platform we felt was still untapped. It was never asked or imposed on us. I’m sure we could have gone on to do more on the platform. In the current market, you need to stand out of the noise in everything you do and the team’s interest and goals had shifted to other things, namely tackling the PS3 and 360. If in the future we feel that we have something to bring to a certain platform, whichever it is, then we’ll propose something, and that might include the PSP.
IIG: What feature would you most like to see in the next PSP?
RW: A dual-screen! But seriously, I think the PSP is already pretty awesome as a system, something that I think is lost on many.
IIG: What do you think Sony can do to expand the PSP as a platform?
RW: I think that Sony, and other publishers for that matter, should take some chances on the system and allow for some big productions on the platform. More often than not, the PSP is seen as a secondary console with only a few great games developed exclusively for it. And even if some of the games are exclusive, the execution is not all there and in the end, the player is the one who has to suffer for it.
Ultimately, you reap what you sow, and if publishers are not willing to bank big on a platform, then the market is not going to see any expansion. The PSP has the capacity to be a great platform to develop and be successful on for many teams out there so publishers also need to make some gambles on the types of projects they pick.
Again, whether the PSP, PS3, 360, Wii or DS, the systems will only be as successful as the games that are made for them and right now, not enough good stuff is available out there for some of the platforms.
IIG: How difficult is the PSP to develop for? What was the size of your
development team?
RW: The console has its quirks. The fact that there is only a single bus to squeeze everything through is one of the major roadblocks. But there are ways to work around that. The color reproduction on the screen was another, everything tends to tint slightly bluish, so it’s not easy getting clean warms sometimes. I think the difficulties are there regardless of the platform, as we’re seeing from the current work we are doing on PS3 and 360.
As for our headcount, I think the dev team was 35 at the height of production. We started off with about 20-25 people and remained that size for most of the first 12 months and then ramped up.
IIG: What aspects of PSP and PS3 connectivity do you find most appealing?
What PS3/PSP connectivity feature would you like to see introduced?
RW: I’m waiting to get some time to go download and play echochrome, so I’d have to say the download feature is pretty nifty but that’s kind of the basics.
IIG: Would you work with Sony as the publisher on a PS3 product?
RW: Only the future will tell. With the work we’ve done, we’ve been fortunate to be in a position to choose a partner that would fit our vision and style of development. So if Sony fits in our vision in the future, then it’s definitely a possibility.
May 10, 2008
Codemasters is certainly no stranger to the racing genre, having produced rally and touring car franchises such as DiRT and GRID, the latter of which is due out in Europe on May 30 (June 3 in North America).
However, Codies obviously isn’t content with merely having those two racing games in its virtual garage, as the publisher has just announced an exclusive licensing agreement with Formula One Administration.
The first game to come out of this agreement will be released on “home console, handheld and PC gaming formats” in 2009, and is expected to be based on next season’s roster. The game is being developed with the developer’s own EGO engine, the same one being used in GRID.
Prior to this agreement, Sony Computer Entertainment had held the rights, with its first game being Formula One on the original PlayStation in 1996, and culminating in Formula One Championship Edition, which arrived at the European launch of PlayStation 3. Sony Computer Entertainment Europe was unavailable for comment at the time of publication.
May 10, 2008
Last month Sony Computer Entertainment America launched Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, the latest entry in Polyphony Digital’s venerable racing series. Though it received decent reviews, the critical praise was disproportionate to the massive hype touting it as the next generation of racing for the PlayStation 3. One major factor for the less than stellar reception is that, like 2004’s Gran Turismo 4 Prologue, the title isn’t a full-fledged game, but rather a sampling of cars and tracks from the forthcoming Gran Turismo 5, due out later this year.
Press skepticism aside, Gran Turismo 5 Prologue will go down in history as having helped the Gran Turismo series reach a major milestone. Today, SCEA proclaimed to the world that the racing franchise has sold 50 million units worldwide, thanks in large part to this latest entry, which is available both at retail and digitally via the PlayStation Store.
Series creator and Polyphony head Kazunori Yamauchi took time to reflect on the series’ success. “Initially, Gran Turismo was an ‘alternative’ racing game, kind of an outsider in the genre, and we made it thinking that it would be OK as long as it reached out to the select few who would agree with us,” he said in a statement. “It’s simply mind-boggling that this has been repeated 50 million times all around the world in the last 10 years.”
The first Gran Turismo was released for the original PlayStation in 1997 in Japan and 1998 in North America. Since then, there have been six more installments in the series: Gran Turismo 2 (PSone, 1999); Gran Turismo 3 A-spec (PlayStation 2, 2001), Gran Turismo 4 Prologue (PS2, 2004), Gran Turismo 4 (PS2, 2005), and Gran Turismo 5 Prologue (PS3, 2008). During its decade on the market, the series has been praised for its stunning visuals, massive car selection, and fetishistic attention to vehicle detail. However, in recent years, it has been criticized for not having the same sort realistic vehicle damage as the Burnout and Forza series.
In addition to announcing the 50 million-unit figure, Sony also reminded gamers today that it would support the Gran Turismo series through the next game and beyond. “SCEI…will continue hereon to vigorously promote development of the Gran Turismo series, which can be expected to evolve even further through the PS3 platform and broadband network environment,” the company said. The series is also set to debut on the PlayStation Portable sometime in 2008.
May 10, 2008
It’s only a matter of weeks before Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the next big-screen adventure of everyone’s favourite archaeologist, is released. LucasArts will follow hot on its heels with Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Trilogy on practically every current gaming platform available. We recently managed to snag some time with the PlayStation 3 build of the game, and it’s clear that developer Traveller’s Tales has so far managed to re-create the same charm and accessibility that made the Lego Star Wars games so appealing.
Lego Indy is just as accessible as the Lego Star Wars series.
For the uninitiated, Lego Indiana Jones breaks down the content of the first three films into six episodes per film in the same way previous Lego Star Wars games did with each of their source movies. Our last hands-on with the game focused on the first two levels of the Raiders of the Lost Ark section, so we decided to jump straight into the first level of the next section, based on the second film, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. This scene takes place in a Shanghai nightclub, where a white-suited Indy is poisoned by some Chinese gangsters. A mad scramble ensues with the good Indy trying to grab the antidote. As in previous Lego games, you can switch control between characters on the fly (the supporting character in this opening scene is the singer Willie Scott), and another player can jump in at any time.
Cooperation between the playable characters seems like it will be as big a part of this game as it was with Lego Star Wars. You have to exploit the various capabilities of each of the characters to solve puzzles and defeat enemies. It’s particularly important in this level, because the Indy character is handicapped due to the poison and is unable to jump to the same height or perform his normal attacks. Gangsters have surrounded Indy, and you will need to throw fake blue antidote bottles at the baddies until they spill the real thing. Willie has to carry most of the burden here, and although she doesn’t have the same strength as Indy, she can jump greater distances (something she shares with the other film characters in the game). She also has a piercing scream attack that can shatter glass, which is useful for grabbing an essential item to get out of the room.
Once down to street level, Indy and Willie are joined by Short Round, who is needed to crawl into small spaces and grab some vital car parts for the trio’s getaway. There’s a small taste of vehicle action here. Indy can drive the completed car around a short distance and slam into enemies, which is good fun if a tad brief. Finally, the trio moves into an airport, where after a bit of light puzzle solving, Indy, Willie, and Short Round make their getaway.
The next level we played–the first in the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade section–showcased much of the same cooperative action as the Shanghai section. This one takes place in Venice, with Marcus Brody and Elsa joining the action. Both Brody and Elsa share the same special move, which is the ability to “decode” special tablets that can unlock certain doors. This takes the form of a basic Simon Says-style minigame where you have to repeat a specific pattern that occurs on the tablets. Starting on the streets of Venice, the level moves inside a large library before heading underground to follow Indy and Elsa. The finale of this level takes place on the canals, with Indy jumping into a small speedboat to chase down the baddies.
Fans of the Lego Star Wars series will be happy to hear that apart from some small additions to gameplay, Lego Indiana Jones feels very much like those games. That is, it’s cheery, easy to control, and just a little taxing on the old synapses with the occasional tough puzzle to conquer. Indy himself is a fairly durable character to play, and his whip acts as a standard attack as well as a way to cross large chasms, pull levers, pull enemies closer to him, and more. Indy and the other characters can also pick up and use objects in attacks–chairs, spears, swords, and even guns can be used (although guns have limited ammo). There will be more than 60 playable characters in the final version of Lego Indy, and the ability to mix and match Lego pieces from various characters will also make a return.
Lego Indiana Jones: The Original Adventures will be released in early June on the PS3, Xbox 360, PS2, Wii, PC, PSP, and DS. Check back soon for our full review.
-If Its Games
May 10, 2008
Steroid abuse in Major League Baseball is feared to be widespread by many, but if one were to judge by Take-Two and Konami’s MLB Power Pros series (Powerful Pro Yakyuu in its native Japan), every last player in the league is an unnaturally proportioned and inflated freak of nature.
Finally, a baseball game without legs.
After introducing the series to US gamers last year, the two publishers are teaming up again to release MLB Power Pros 2008 on the PlayStation 2, Wii, and Nintendo DS. The game will feature 10 different modes, including multiple career modes. Players will be able to assume the role of a Double-A minor leaguer balancing professional aspirations with a personal life, follow a created pro through a 20-year career, or jump into the cleats of an existing player and swing for the fences.
MLB Power Pros will arrive on the PS2 and Wii in July, with the DS version following in the fall.
May 10, 2008
According to canon, Superman has only two major weaknesses: kryptonite and magic. However, gamers might want to add a third: interactive entertainment. It has been 30 years since the Man of Steel first took on games with the Atari 2600, but he has yet to land a signature success, with major releases ranging from fair to abysmal.
“Rings! My only weakness!”
Gaming adaptations have claimed more victims than just Superman. Characters like Batman, Spawn, the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, and a host of others have endured uncanny beatings at the hands of reviewers over the years. While there are definite exceptions, the intersection of comics and games is still littered with disappointments. To find out why these titles might have a less-than-super track record, If Its Games spoke with creators of superhero games past, present, and future.
With great powers come great logistical difficulties
As vice president of Marvel’s interactive business, Justin Lambros works with development studios to create games based on the comic book maker’s vast catalog of characters.
“One of the biggest challenges is just making sure that the character is game-able, frankly,” said Lambros. “Not all characters are meant for games.”
For instance, the brute strength of the Incredible Hulk and his relatively simple motivations (”Hulk smash!”) are a natural fit for games. But Lambros says it would be much trickier to represent the abilities of characters like the wheelchair-bound psychic Professor X or the sorcerer supreme, Doctor Strange, in a way that would live up to the expectations of their fans.
“Take Hank Pym,” Lambros said of the size-shifting character that has fought crime under the aliases Ant-Man, Giant Man, and Yellow Jacket. “His character is science and experiments and trying to figure things out. One of the challenges is how that would translate into gameplay.”
An Ant-Man game would have to make compelling gameplay out of talking to ants and shrinking…
Lambros might have to address the issue of an Ant-Man game soon enough. While there’s no gaming tie-in yet, director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Spaced) is set to helm a 2010 feature film based on the diminutive do-gooder. If there is to be an Ant-Man game, expect it to arrive directly alongside the film. Lambros pointed out that all the advertising to increase public awareness about films works to promote the merchandising tie-ins as well.
“The amount of money and marketing power and reach that’s put behind any movie is going to dwarf any game’s [marketing] budget just with the reach and the power that the studios have,” Lambros said.
If Ant-Man has a movie coming out and his gaming glory is still far from assured, the picture is that much bleaker for other, movieless Marvel B-listers.
“I would love to do that,” Lambros said of making games based on more obscure characters along the lines of Moon Knight. “There are a lot of characters I have fondness for that aren’t the top roster guys but have cool power and backstory. But I’m still in the licensing business, and I rely on my game partners and publishing partners to get behind these products, and they gravitate toward the known quantities, the movie launches and that sort of thing.”
Striking while the Iron (Man) is hot
That translates into hard deadlines for development teams, as few companies are willing to delay a game and miss out on the lucrative theatrical promotion window. (Although that’s exactly what Electronic Arts did with Superman Returns, pushing the game back to coincide with the holiday DVD release of the film because of the difficulties associated with making an open-world game.)
As Lambros explained, “We always want to do the best thing for the product and the brand, so there are discussions about [delaying game tie-ins], but we always want to hit when the iron is hot and come out with the film.”
In addition to having a hard deadline on one end of the development, Lambros said gaming tie-ins often aren’t brought into the process early enough in the film’s development.
“It’s very rare that you have over two years [to make these games],” Lambros said, “but we’re working hard to get those plans working and get early preproduction work on games way in advance of the movie so we’ve got more than two years to build a stronger game and raise the bar.”
Sega’s Marvel deal allows game development to get a jump on movie production.
Part of Marvel’s solution to that problem lies in its current movie-based game deal with Sega. The four-brand deal involves games based on the Iron Man movie, as well as upcoming projects for Hulk, Captain America, and Thor. While those last two film projects don’t have too many specifics nailed down, the deal lets Sega get the gears moving on those projects further in advance of the release of the films.
Hulk smash conventional wisdom!
To see the impact a film tie-in can have, one need only look at the last couple of Hulk games. In 2003, Vivendi Games and Radical Entertainment launched Hulk, a game tie-in for the Ang Lee-directed film of the same name. The game was released about a month before the film and received unspectacular–but still respectable–reviews. Fast-forward to 2005 and Radical’s second crack at the license, The Incredible Hulk Ultimate Destruction. The game had no movie tie-in, but its open-world approach to the character and ability to “weaponize” anything from a car to a cow led to a much more positive critical reception. Even so, Lambros said the second game sold “not nearly as well” as the first.
“Ultimate Destruction was a superior game definitely,” Lambros said, “but it didn’t hit as big an audience… It’s that awareness that came with the big-budget Hulk film, the Super Bowl TV spot, the hype, and the big June opening.”
Why puny humans no buy good Hulk game?
Marvel is taking lessons from that for the next game featuring the green goliath, Lambros said. With a new Hulk film set for release this summer, Marvel has development studio Edge of Reality working on an accompanying Ultimate Destruction-style open-world game that he hopes will capitalize on the Hulkamania at its highest point.
Having worked on both Hulk and Ultimate Destruction, Radical Entertainment executive producer Tim Bennison is well aware of the special challenges a superhero game presents developers. Many of the problems are cascading, perhaps aggravating or creating new challenges.
“People expect the Hulk to be the strongest guy in the Marvel Universe; otherwise you’re not delivering the Hulk,” Bennison said. “Everybody knows Hulk can jump across buildings, so you’ve got to deliver that and put it in an environment where he can jump over buildings, and that means an open-world game, which is hard to develop and get right.”
And even if a developer can create an open-world game that faithfully replicates a character’s powers and can deliver it in time for a theatrical tie-in, there are other issues to consider. While Radical was fortunate that the unchecked rage of the Hulk lends itself to a game like Ultimate Destruction, it’s not an appropriate solution for more straight-laced heroes.
“There’s this concept of a moral code that a lot of superhero characters have, which, quite frankly, players don’t have,” Bennison said. “The concept of a Superman game is really tough to pull off, and not just because of technical issues. It’s because of the fact that Superman doesn’t do bad things, and players–especially in an open-world game–want to do bad things. Being told that you can’t push the school bus off the cliff because that’s not what Superman does is annoying to a player.”
Finish him…or not.
As annoying as that design decision might be, it isn’t always the developer who is making the decision. When a developer makes a game based on a comic book, a film, or any other property, the licensor has the final say in how its brand and characters are depicted.
For instance, Midway is developing the recently announced Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe, but the game won’t feature the gory fatalities for which the fighting franchise is known because DC isn’t about to sign off on having its heroes rend opponents limb from limb (or vice versa) in an M-rated game. Despite the absence of severed heads, Mortal Kombat creator Ed Boon said the gameplay will still be distinctly MK.
You can do this to Scorpion. You can’t do it to Batman.
“This game without a doubt is going to be brutal and intense and dark,” Boon said. “That whole presentation we’ve always given Mortal Kombat is not going to go away. In fact, the general fighting experience is going to be more intense than in previous games, but there will definitely be a line we won’t be able to cross without becoming an M-rated game.”
The level of violence wasn’t the only uncrossable line DC set.
“[DC] gave us guidelines that in my opinion were pretty general,” Boon said, “It was stuff like Superman does not kill, basic actions their characters don’t do. And then there were things about the looks of the characters, making modifications.”
Boon said the developers could have guessed most of the guidelines, but when it came to how DC characters would act in the game’s situations, the team enlisted DC scribes to ensure authenticity to the comic brand. However, Mortal Kombat is a brand unto itself, having been licensed for movies, cartoons, toys, and more, so Midway isn’t about to turn over complete story control to external parties.
“The DC writers help with the DC characters,” Boon explained. “How Scorpion behaves or what he says is written by our writers, the guys on our team who wrote the story. The DC guys really helped us with the DC characters and how they would react in a situation when they’re confronted by this Mortal Kombat character.”
The integration of the two universes and the resulting approval process prompted Boon to design the development schedule to mitigate any associated delays or hold-ups.
For the MK vs. DC game, Boon needs to blend the two brands without alienating either fan base.
“We have a cast of 20 characters, 10 from MK and 10 from DC, and we front-ended our production of the characters,” Boon said. “We did all of the DC ones first because we wanted to get them through the approval process. You send them design sketches of the characters, you send the final 3D model of the character, the special moves… There’s a lot of back and forth to get those approvals, so we front-ended it to get ready in case there were any major hiccups.”
Even if Midway and DC representatives agree on how to handle something in the game, it’s not necessarily a done deal.
“There’s DC, and then there’s also [DC parent company] Warner Bros.,” Boon said, “and within each group there are multiple people who look at the content and comment on it. We’ve had incidents like that, and anytime you’re licensing something, you’re going to get that. There have been things one approved and the other had issue with, and vice versa.”
Creative license revoked?
The problem of dealing with multiple licensors is a familiar one to Secret Level’s Jeffrey Tseng. The director of Sega’s just-released Iron Man movie adaptation had a particularly trying licensor experience working on Atari’s 2003 Magic: The Gathering - Battlegrounds game for the Xbox and PC.
“That one had many issues in what the underlying direction for the title would be,” Tseng said. “Atari wanted to do a more action-based game. It was tough for the guys at [Magic creator] Wizards of the Coast to wrap their heads around that because they basically just do the card game. And in between there was also [WOTC owner] Hasbro, which wanted to be in on the communication between us. It’s not that anybody was really screwing things up; it was all about the speed and frequency of communication to make things go smoothly.”
Tseng said that the process was greatly streamlined for Iron Man. Where most Marvel movie adaptations would require approval from the comic book creators as well as the film studio, the two were one and the same on Iron Man, the first in-house film from Marvel Studios. He also called it the best relationship he’d ever had with a licensor, which might not be surprising considering that his contact at Marvel, Lambros, was a producer at Iron Man publisher Sega immediately before assuming his current position.
While other comic-movie games run into problems with developers getting the filmmakers and the comic owners to sign off on everything, the Iron Man film was made by Marvel’s own movie studio, so Sega needed only one party’s approval.
Beyond tight time schedules, translating powers into fun gameplay, and communication issues with licensors, Tseng said there are additional problems caused by making games based on films and stories that are themselves still in the process of being made.
“Let’s say you’re doing a game on a new fantasy movie that’s coming out,” Tseng said. “Sometimes it’s hard to get access to the script. Sometimes there isn’t even a script. A lot of times they’ll change things halfway through a project and say, ‘Oh, he’s not going to use a sword; now he’s got a bow.’ And you can obviously see the effect that has on a game in terms of level design and all sorts of things.”
Tseng said his team was fortunate that Iron Man was a firmly established character, so they knew they could rely on certain abilities and game mechanics that would be in the film. For instance, the team had Iron Man’s in-game flight mechanics locked down before the filmmakers had theirs finished, although tweaks in the film did require some last-minute scrambling, such as to incorporate the suit’s “air brakes.”
It wasn’t just additions to the film that put restrictions on the game’s developers. Things left out of the movie placed entirely different limitations on the Secret Level team.
“The first question everybody asks is, ‘Is he going to be drunk in the game?’” Tseng said, referring to Iron Man’s alcoholic alter ego Tony Stark. “The second thing is, ‘Is [supporting character] War Machine going to be in there?’ That’s pretty much across the board. But both of those things are dictated by the film. Obviously the guys over at Marvel are aware of this and they’re looking at it maybe for the next film. Those are things that we wanted to integrate too, but we can’t get ahead [of the movies]. Maybe in the next title.”
Bizarro World
Games are a bigger business than ever before, and companies are banking on tie-ins as more than just an afterthought. Just as they might command more respect from outside licensors now, games are themselves becoming hot licenses and jumping the divide into the various media from which they so frequently borrow. Marvel has produced a variety of Halo comics in recent years, Image is working on a comic for Electronic Arts’ Dead Space, and DC is making comics based on Gears of War and Radical Entertainment’s current project, Prototype.
Having seen the licensor approval process from the other side with the Hulk games, Bennison is gaining a new appreciation for his counterparts’ concerns as Prototype prepares to branch out beyond games.
Prototype was designed from the ground up to be adapted into other media, but comics will be the first extension of the brand.
“It’s very interesting because you really do have to have a solid set of written-down ideas as to what the universe is about,” Bennison said. “It’s not just the character and his name and what he can do. Way beyond that, what’s the backstory? What are the bios of all the secondary characters? What are the rules we do break, and what rules don’t we break? What’s the tone of the whole IP? How do we treat humor? Do we allow the humor in? If so, what’s the style? How do we put a clamp on things getting over the top? Everything about the IP is translated into the other medium and has to conform to that.”
At the same time, Bennison has to straddle the line between preserving the integrity of his own brand and preventing his partners from doing their jobs properly.
“We’ve got a lot of control,” Bennison said. “We review every mock-up cover from the artists, we reviewed the over-arching plotline for the multi-issue series, and we’re doing multiple revisions and comments on the script we’re getting from the writers. We’ll be reviewing mock-ups on the pencils and whatnot too. DC has been really great, really collaborative in allowing us to participate in the process, but we don’t tell them how to do their job; they’re the comic book experts.”
While many of the challenges facing developers of superhero games are inherent to the process, Bennison believes things are getting better, particularly with the film adaptations.
“Movie people now are starting to understand how long it takes to make a game and how the timescales are different than for a movie,” Bennison said. “They’re understanding that if they want to get a quality product out, they have to approach developers earlier. In terms of which games work for superheroes, more successful models are coming out. The problems will still be there, but people are getting smarter about them.”
While it’s possible for a shoddy game to rack up sales on the strength of a strong tie-in, Lambros said licensors would be wiser to make sure all the games bearing their brands are of a high quality.
“Gameplay is king at the end of the day, so you can’t put the Spider-Man or Iron Man or Hulk name on a crappy game, because it may sell but you won’t sell the next one and you won’t be moving the industry forward or changing the perception of [licensed games],” Lambros said. “Nobody wants another lousy licensed game.”
May 10, 2008
USATODAY.com - We’ve seen this plot before: Blockbuster summer film hits theaters. Mediocre video game tie-in hitches along for the ride. The latest is Iron Man. Weapons mogul Tony Stark is kidnapped by militants in the Middle East and forced to build a superweapon. Instead, Stark creates the Iron Man armor and escapes. After returning home, Stark decides to cease weapons production and destroy the remaining remnants of his arsenal.
May 10, 2008
NewsFactor - While Grand Theft Auto IV is racking up sales records, console makers are vying for bragging rights of their own, and Microsoft seems to be the victor.
May 10, 2008
AP - In a May 8 story about Activision Inc.’s earnings, The Associated Press reported that the company expected earnings of $1.30 per share after excluding Vivendi Games. The story should have said the adjusted earnings excluded other items as well.
May 10, 2008
AFP - Award-winning videogame “Bioshock” is to be turned into a movie by “Pirates of the Caribbean” director Gore Verbinski, entertainment industry media reported Friday.
May 10, 2008
Reuters - Take-Two Interactive Software Inc said on Friday that “Pirates of the Caribbean”director Gore Verbinski will make a movie version of “BioShock,” its hit video game about an underwater utopia gone disastrously wrong.
May 10, 2008
Apple filed a patent back in November 2006 for a controller device that seems to work just like the Wii remote does. It is believed that the devices design would work perfectly with the rumored casual games platform \’Apple TV\’.
May 10, 2008
Get a look at some of the classic and exciting games that are coming to WiiWare.
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