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E3 2011: Xbox press conference – where Kinect rules the roost

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OK, here’s my take on the Microsoft Xbox press conference that was held today (4.30am New Zealand time, so no wonder I’m a little tired now) and it was a press event that had a raft of Kinect games on show and a brief glimpse of where the Halo franchise is going.

The 90-minute Xbox event was dominated by Kinect, with Xbox’s Don Mattrick introducing the “next wave” of Kinect titles which showcased the device’s gesture and voice commands.

The event opened with a demo of Modern Warfare 3, showing a diver planting a bomb on a submarine before joining fellow operatives in boarding a enemy vessel and shooting their way to the surface and launching missiles. Next up was Kinect – which was the focus of the show – with EA’s Peter Moore saying there would be Kinect support for upcoming Tiger Woods PGA Tour, Fifa and Madden games, as well as in The Sims 3 Pets and Family Game Night 4.

Next up was Ray Muzyka, from Bioware, who was there to introduce Mass Effect 3, a game he said will support Kinect voice in both conversations and in combat. Players will be able to converse with players using voice, rather than the controller, as well as order commands to your squad during combat.

Ubisoft’s Yves Guillemot introduced Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Future Soldier, which will have Kinect support for weapon customisation – you can build something like 20 million unique weapons using arm gestures or voice commands. The demo also showed how you can reload, aim and fire a weapon using gesture rather than the controller.

“Xbox where’s my voice commands, huh?”

Xbox Live’s Marc Whitten saids YouTube was coming to Live and you’d be able to use voice commands to “control your entertainment” (NZ doesn’t even have operational voice commands yet: when are we going to get that, Microsoft?). Microsoft’s search engine Bing is also coming to Xbox Live so if you want to search for a particular game – say, anything with Lego in it – you can go “Xbox Bing Lego” and it will show all matches.

Whitten says Xbox Live TV is going to the United States and around the world (including Foxtel in Australia) but will such a feature come to New Zealand, and if so, when?

Halo and Gears of War 3: for the hardcore gamers

Hardcore Halo fans weren’t forgotten with a trailer of Halo Combat Evolved Anniversary, a fully remastered and remade version of the original featuring the full campaign and seven multiplayer maps, and Cliff Blesinski and rapper Ice-T played a co-op level of Gears of War 3 where Dom and his team had to fight a giant, ugly, google-eyed sea monster.

Blesinski said thanks to the GOW3 multiplayer beta, this game would be the “best and most polished Gears game to date”.

Peter Molyneux came out for Fable: The Journey, in what seems to be a first-person, on-rails Fable with Kinect support.

“Fable has always been about you being the hero but we wanted to know how we can make you 100 times more involved,” Molyneux said. The next Fable game would bring “power and control to your fingertips”. The demo showed a guy controlling a horse and cart, holding his hands out in front holding the reins, then conjuring up magic and spells during some combat. He also slapped enemies.

Minecraft, the game that swept the PC world by storm, is also coming to Xbox 360 as well as two Kinect games for children: Kinect Disneyland Adventures and Tim Schaefer’s Once Upon a Monster.

Use the fork, Luke

The briefly glimpsed Kinect Star Wars from last year’s E3 was shown in demo form today, and the intro showed rancors, cloud city, clone troopers, speeder bikes, pod racing and space battles. “Lightsabre on,” the dude playing the demo shouted – and his blue lightsabre sparks into life. He used force push to move a tank and push droids out of the way. The demo ends with two sith appearing, and both duel wielding lightsabres.

Something that is really interesting to me, though, is Kinect Fun Labs, which Microsoft’s Kudo Tsunoda said would be available for download over Xbox Live today – and it is: I downloaded it this morning but haven’t had a play yet.

Fun Labs is a collection of Kinect tools that lets you scan objects so you can play with them in-game as well as do 3D painting using finger scanning. Fun Labs supports individual finger scanning as well as body scanning, which means you can create an Xbox Live Avatar that looks like you.

Kinect Sports is back with Season 2 and it brings six new sports, including skiing and tennis, plus in-game voice recognition and new gestures. The demo showed a woman playing golf and two testosterone-fuelled dudes playing a game of American football.

Dance Central 2 was also shown off, then Don Mattrick returned, saying that this year Xbox 360 would change living room entertainment forever and that “Xbox 360 will become the bestselling console globally”. He closed the conference by announcing a “new trilogy for the Xbox 360”, then the Halo 4 trailer played, showing a Master Chief on board a damaged spaceship  heading towards a giant white ring.

EA and Sony also have their press conferences today. I missed the EA one – I had to go to work – but did watch the Sony one on a most unreliable livestream. I’ll get my thoughts on Sony’s presser later tonight.

Nintendo’s is tomorrow, where it is expected to show off its next console.

It’s going to be an interesting week: E3 kicks off on Tuesday (for us in NZ)

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UPDATE: I probably should have mentioned that I’m not going to E3 this year. Yeah, I’m gutted too but that’s life. There’s always next year.

This time last year (day wise, not time wise, I can’t be bothered working out what time it is in LA right now) , I was probably sitting in a coffee shop in downtown Los Angeles supping back a double shot latte and people watching – and wondering whether I’d brought everything I needed to cover E3 2010 properly.

For those that haven’t been to LA it’s an incredibly massive city with beautiful people everywhere, especially in places like Beverley Hills and Wiltshire Boulevard. It’s also where the crazy game show E3 takes place.

It would have been a couple of days before E3 started and I would have been gathering my thoughts, on how I was going to make it through four days of mayhem – and that I’d remembered to bring all the accreditation I needed to get into the press conferences and the show itself, which was due to start at the  LA Convention Centre in a couple of days.

OK, so E3 2011 is going to start in a couple of days for us: this is what I’m most looking forward to.

  • Much of the focus this year will be on Nintendo and its new rumoured console, Project Cafe. Gamers will want to know just how many of the rumours flying around the internet are actually true.  Here is some of the speculation doing the rounds: the console will use 25Gb optical discs and have 8Gb of on-board flash memory; there won’t be a built-in HDD but it will use SD cards; the controller has a touch-screen as well as a standard button layout; the console will be more powerful than both the PS3 and the Xbox 360. Whether all this is true will be revealed in a few days time.
  • This year Microsoft needs to show gamers that there is more to Kinect than just party-style and fitness games. Hopefully there will be reveals of games that hardcore gamers can actually sink their teeth into. Last year’s Xbox event showed brief glimpses of an on-rails Star Wars game, so who knows? Maybe we’ll see more of that this year. I think that if Microsoft don’t start getting some decent stuff for Kinect, the technology will be wasted and hardcore gamers – those that bought Xbox in the first place – will start to get frustrated.
  • Sony’s been rocked severely by the recent hacks to its PlayStation Network, so it will want to bring its A-game to this year’s E3 to restore the confidence of gamers in its PlayStation brand. I’ve heard that its pre-E3 press conference is several hours long – several hours long- what the heck are they going to showcase there? Last year it was all about 3D but this year I’m sure it’ll be all about the Next Generation Portable handheld (a name change would be a good start) as well as more information about the next game in the Uncharted series, Drake’s Deception.

E3, though, is mostly about the games, and here are some of the game’s I’m looking forward to hearing more about:  The Last Guardian,  Hitman Absolution, Uncharted: Drake’s Deception, Batman Arkham City, Mass Effect 3, Battlefield 3, Assassin’s Creed Revelations, Gears of War 3, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

A week of game related spending

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I’m not usually one to outwardly express that I’m a gamer, at least not in a way that screams “Look at me, I play games”. I love playing games but just don’t publicise it on my body.

I don’t  tend to wear game-related t-shirts in public (although I do have a Mario Old Skool tee and various t-shirts given to me by game publishers I tend to wear them around the house) and don’t have a lot of gaming memorability on display around the house. No Master Chief figures, no Zelda posters, no Portal soundtracks playing on iTunes. Any way, most t-shirts from game publishers are pretty terrible in terms of subtlety and design.

That’s all changed over the past week. A work colleague – who is much a movie geek as I am a gaming geek – send me a simple email titled: “Have you seen this?” – and it had a link to a company called Insert Coin Clothing. I hadn’t heard about it so clicked the link. Now I’m $80 poorer – but I’m not complaining.

For those that don’t know what Insert Coin Clothing is – and I was one of those people up up until this week – it’s a British-based t-shirt maker who makes cool video game-inspired shirts and hoodies.  What really impressed me with the shirt designs is that they’re subtle enough for  gamers to know what they’re saying while cool enough for non-gamers to probably ask what the logo means.

There are t-shirts referencing Portal, Mass  Effect 2, Resident Evil, Limbo, Bioshock, Halo Reach, Goldeneye, Pikmin, Killzone 2 and Dead Space. In the end, I plumbed for a Dead Space one, featuring the name USG Ishimura, and one called Gamer’s Voice which has an image of four gaming controllers and the words “Contrary to popular opinion, these do not make me a killer”. It ended up costing me 40 pounds (NZ$80.20) for two good quality t-shirts – heck, one decent t-shirt in New Zealand will cost upwards of $60. The free postage also swayed the deal.

I’m now waiting patiently for my package to arrive – it’s left Insert Coin Clothing’s depot already apparently – so I can get my geek on and wear these puppies out in public.

Oh, I also had another gaming-related purchase this week that I’m not so sure about but will probably keep, anyway. I was out getting Edge magazine on the weekend from the gaming store I go to and for some reason – perhaps it was because my son persuaded me – I bought a Altair, from Assassin’s Creed,  collectible figure. It’s still sitting in its packaging.

My  son keeps asking me if I’m going to open it and I say no. Part of me wants to take it back because I don’t need it but secretly part of me wants to rip it open, prop it up on my desk and dream about climbing renaissance Italy cathedrals. Perhaps seeing Altair on my desk will prompt me to start saving so we can actually get to visit Italy sometime before I die.

 

 

 

More thoughts on L.A. Noire

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Someone asked me the other day what I meant when I said in my review of L.A. Noire that it was a flawed game.  So what do I mean by that?

I mean that it’s a good game hampered by a few niggling issues that stop it from being a masterpiece. Settle in and I’ll tell you what I mean.

I like L.A. Noire and I enjoyed playing it, for the most part. It’s a groundbreaking game from Rockstar that will be remembered for a long time. I loved its production values, gorgeous recreation of Los Angeles, and soundtrack but it’s not perfect.

L.A. Noire is strongly narrative driven – set in Los Angeles 1947 – the story is the focus here first and foremost and the way that it plays out in an almost episodic manner is well done. The facial scanning is uncannily realistic and really draws the player into the game – never before in a game have I had to stare so intently into the eyes of a suspect to determine what they were thinking.

But the further I got into L.A. Noire the more I realised how linear it is – I guess it has to be for the sake of the story.  Each case, be it arson, homicide or traffic, follows the same pattern:  go to the scene, examine the scene, talk to witnesses and suspects, then interrogate a suspect and hope for a confession.

The game is very different from previous Rockstar games like GTA4 and Red Dead Redemption in that it’s set in a sprawling environment but it’s not an open-world game. There are no side branching story lines to investigate or multiple characters with their own tales to tell: it’s just Cole Phelps making his way up the ranks of the L.A.P.D. solving cases and putting the bad guys in jail. The game follows a prescribed direction  and doesn’t deviate from a prescribed path. Ok, there side missions like answering police call outs and searching for film reels, hidden cars and landmarks, but try to do thinks in a different order than the game wants, and interesting things happen.

I don’t want to spoil the game for those of you still working your way through it, so you might want to skip the next par or three as I sort of talk about a case,  but near the end of one case Phelps has to hunt down a killer by deciphering excerpts from the poet Shelley left around Los Angles landmarks. Phelps and his partner have to go from one landmark to the next, each new location garnered from the previous clue, until he has them all and confronts the killer.

To keep the story flowing  you should visit each location in a specific order, but I misread one excerpt and went to what I thought was the right location (note: this was the first time I had been to this location but I didn’t get an indication that I had discovered a new area). I wandered around, no cutscene kicked in, no controller vibration to indicate a clue was around, so thinking I had gone to the wrong place I jumped back in my car, asked my partner’s advice and drove to another location, which was the right one.

Phelps read the excerpt and was directed to another location – the one I had just come from. Arriving to the location I got an on-screen pop-up telling me I had discovered a new location – despite the fact that I’d been there 10 minutes before –  and the controller started vibrating telling me that there were clues to discover. I was confused: I had visited the location earlier and nothing happened. It hit home just how linear L.A. Noire is and there is no leeway to deviate from what the game makers want.

I could also mentioned that while L.A is beautifully crafted there’s nothing to do in it – but if there was it would obviously break the storytelling – and I couldn’t understand why in some chases Phelps could pull out his gun but in others he couldn’t. As a cop wouldn’t he be able to pull his gun out at any time?

Look, I still enjoyed playing L.A. Noire, and again I recommend it to people to play,  but I can’t see myself searching for every hidden car or film real and it was instances like what I’ve mentioned above that made me realise that L.A. Noire is a good game but not a masterpiece.

Oh, my daughter also wants to know why when Phelps examines a crime scene he isn’t wearing gloves or any sort or use a pencil or anything to pick up evidence? He’s contaminating the crime scene, she reckons. I couldn’t answer that.

Just a quick thought where I ramble a bit

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On the eve of my L.A. Noire review appearing in hardcopy for the newspaper I write for, I’m starting to think about how I write my game reviews. I’ve decided I want to do better.

As humans, we all evolve, we all change. Be  it personally or career-wise, and as a writer,  I’m always wanting to evolve my writing style for the better, while keeping the things that I think identify me as a writer.

After years of writing reviews, I’ve decided I want to approach my game reviews differently.  I want to write them more about how I feel about a game rather than the tired old structure of game play, storyline, graphics, closing comments, score. This has partly come about because I’m tired of writing my feelings down in a review then sometimes seeing them appear differently once published because someone down the production line decided they’d re-write a sentence or paragraph. Did they play the game in question? Chances are no.

I’ve tried to change my formula in the past  – for example, written a review from the point of view of what I’m witnessing as a game character – and it’s worked, most of the time, but then I fall back into the tried-and-true formula. It’s comfortable but safe.

Other times, though, I’ll write a review then read it the next day, in the cold light of day, and think “What the hell was I thinking writing it like that?” I often post-mortem what I’ve written.

I think game reviews should be more about feelings and the emotions they create than just a list of all the parts that a game is made up of.  I’m regularly guilty of writing reviews that just describe the components then slap a score on the end.

As a writer my writing should evolve, it should continue to grow, it should convey me feelings.  From now on, I hope it does.

Interview: American McGee talks about Alice: Madness Returns

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Eleven years after gamers were first introduced to American McGee’s take on Alice in Wonderland, the game maker is back with a sequel, Alice: Madness Returns, due for release by EA on Windows PCs, PS3 and Xbox 360 next month. The game has been made by McGee’s Spicy Horse studio, which is based in Shanghai.

Alice: Madness Returns sees Alice released from the asylum that kept her captive at the end of the first game but she is still haunted by the death of her parents and returns to Wonderland. I spoke with American McGee and Ken Wong from Spicy Horse about the new game when they were both in Australia last week.

GC: Gentlemen, it’s nice to speak to you both.

AM: Yeah, it’s nice to speak to you as well.

GC: American, if we can start with you. It’s been 11 since the original Alice game what can we expect to have changed in the world over that time?

AM: Obviously it’s changed a lot in terms of visuals, which Ken can speak to, and also in the scope and the scale of the game which has grown quite a bit, but in terms of the core of what made the original game so attractive to so many people, we actually kept a pretty classic approach to exploration, combat and platforming are all there but with a different tone in the story telling and puzzle solving. But at the same time we tried all this time to try and listen to the fans to tell us what they love most and also some of the things that they loved not so much and that allowed us to update things like combat, for instance, which in the first game at lot of people felt was a little bit too one dimensional, so the combat this time around … there’s a definite strategy on how you apply your weapons and your timing against specific NPCs. So that’s one areas that’s received quite a lot of attention but I think that people who played the first game are going to find that the formula that was there with the first is still there, only it’s been improved across the board.

GC: American, I know that in Madness Returns you revisit Wonderland but also visit Victorian England. Is the game a lot darker than the original was? I mean in tone?

AM:  The thing you have to remember about Wonderland is that it all springs forth from Alice’s imagination so we had a rule during development that what we saw in Wonderland had to be something that we could reasonably expect would have come from Alice’s mind. I mean, it had to be something that she drew upon from her real life experiences so I’d say that the tone isn’t more or less dark, I mean, it’s a continuation of what she saw in the first game, though the new threat to Wonderland … there’s something else attacking Alice, attacking Wonderland … I would say that it was much darker in many respects than what was threatening her the first time around. The first time around it was all potentially about her losing her mind, going insane. This time around there’s a real world component to it, as you said in London and that spills over to potentially affect characters other than Alice and so that horror’s kind of spread out and I think in that way when people finally see what it is that’s happening I think they’re going to definitely feel that this is a much darker game in that sense.

GC: Had you ever wanted to make a sequel to Alice earlier than now or did you feel that now was the right time to do it?

AM: Well, we knew that there was sequel potential in there, even as we were developing the first, but the timing for this was really just about right place at the right time. I had left EA and travelled the world, then met up with Ken shortly after going independent. Then Ken and I moved to Hong Kong and made some games there and we moved to Shanghai and once we’d established the studio in Shanghai and the capabilities became apparent we realised that there was an opportunity there to talk to EA about a sequel. So really it was just a question of timing.

GC: As you said, you left EA for a while then did the independent route. Did you feel that you grew as a developer during that stage?

AM: Yeah sure. I mean this study that we built in Shanghai is pretty unique in that it required a lot of growth, not just about in the sense of how we go about making the games but also having had to move to China, and the culture and learn the language. We had to learn the ins and out of setting up a business there and so I’d say for me, personally, it’s been a tremendous growth experience and apart from moving to the moon or something I don’t think you can pick a more challenging thing to do. And out of that challenge, of course, there’s always growth.

Ken Wong: And I think for us as a studio, American has been the leader of all of us and for some of us this is our first or second game and he’s really bought his considerable experience to the table and really taught us a lot about what he’s learnt. I think it’s a really unique studio where we have about 50 per cent Chinese employees and made a really interesting game in a really interesting city.

GC: American, what do you think Louis Carroll’s take would be on your take of the character that he created? Do you think he’d approve?

AM: That’s a really interesting question. I think first of all Carroll would have loved video games because of the possibilities available there. It was clear that in his writing that he was trying to stretch the possibilities of the medium that he was working in, which was print and when you look at the style that was present then he was really pushing boundaries in that sense, so I think for him to see an adaptation of that work in something as dynamic as a game, I think that he would appreciate it. The question of whether or not he would see the story progression that we’ve created as a natural one – that’s a tough call but I’ve heard a lot of people who are artists, musicians, film makers that I respect a lot who have said that they think that this is the truest interpretation of the fiction that they’ve ever seen and I think that means something. I think that it’s clear that we’ve tried to stay true to the original material while at the same time creating a branch that feels logical and meaningful.

GC: For you both, how does hearing people talk about your work like that make you feel?

AM: I think, like I said, the ideas really flow out of the characters that for me it’s always been about Alice and being true to her and so in some respects it’s almost automatic – she almost guides where we’re going and, sure, I think we feel good that we’ve built a product and it’s come in on time, and it’s looking great, and people enjoy it, but I think you have to look at the source material for some of the credit for what’s good about it. You also have to look at the team that’s built it. Of course, this isn’t a one-man operation – it is the imaginations of multiple people over two years so there’s a lot in there and a lot for people to feel proud about.

KW: The source material was so rich that often it wasn’t finding a solution but picking what of the many solutions that we could go with, where could we take this character, where do we take this one location from Wonderland and how can we interpret that and how has it evolved in the time that Alice has been away. It’s actually been a lot of fun to work with: Wonderland and Alice are just rich.

GC: It’s a hugely rich experience but for both of you, what drives you as game makers. What is it that gives you the direction you go in your games?

AM: That’s a complicated question At the most basic level it’s put food on the table (laughs), right? But beyond that, we have a lot of people in the team that are experimenters – they want to try new things and they want to push boundaries, and I certainly am in that place where I see games as a way to tinker, to try different things and so that’s one of the areas where I get a lot of pleasure but I think for each person in the studio they’re driven by different things and it’s been very clear for us in the development the personalities that have come out and who is driven by what. It’s a pretty broad question and I think it depends on who you talk to. I don’t know: what drives you, Ken?

KW: Well, what I enjoy at Spicy Horse is that it’s an environment that encourages us to buck the trend and look for things that haven’t been done before and that’s great for an artists and a creative as it’s a really good environment to work in. We try to keep things as egalitarian as possible and everyone is encouraged to volunteer their opinions and ideas. So that’s what drives me: I want to make unique games, games that have something surprising or something we haven’t seen before.

GC: Are games art? Do you think that games can be classed as an art form?

AM: The thing about the constituent pieces – each being art in themselves: the 2D art which becomes 3D art, the music the story, the narrative is as sprawling as a typical novel – is that when you start to put them together people start to question whether it’s art. I think it really comes down to the creator’s intent: I mean did the person who created the game believe that it was art? I think it depends on the game and what the creator was thinking about.

KW: In my thinking the term art is more relevant to scholars or journalists than to the artists themselves. I think us as creators we are simply making things for people to enjoy and consider, and in that sense I think we are making something expressive which has something to say about emotions and the way we interact with each other and you can compare that to books and film and what have you that are all considered art.

AM: I had some friends who went to the Biennale (in Italy) and they were there and they were walking around the galleries and came across this big pile of crates and cardboard boxes and they stood there admiring it for a while and were thinking ‘This is quite interesting. What does this mean?’ and finally the janitor came along and swept it away. Until someone told them it wasn’t art they were happy to stare at it so really it’s in the eye of the beholder and also maybe in the intent of the creator.

GC: Would you consider yourself a risk taker in the industry?

AM: Yeah, I think that in a lot of respects. Just picking up and moving to another country to start a studio is taking a risk ..

KW: Doing this game, in the country we have, with the team we have, was not the safest thing that we could have done. A safer thing would have been for us to work with an entirely Chinese team and make a very Chinese game.

AM: This was a team that had never made a console game before so we certainly took risks but I think in terms of the game design itself there are also some risks there and some of those risks we had to take out because we couldn’t prove them out, and I think that happens a lot in game development and of 50 ideas, maybe only 20 survive because 30 of them were risks that didn’t pay off.

GC: How do you hope gamers will receive Madness Returns?

AM: I hope they’ll each buy three copies! (laughs) That would be great. I think that the first game was hopefully a model for this one – and it still sells today quite well, it still has a following. I went to Japan for one of our shows and the press manager for EA Japan said “Alice looks great” and I said “Yeah, the new game looks awesome” and he said “No, no, the first game”. It’s still selling in Japan so I think there’s something enduring about the IP, about Alice in general. I just hope we’ve managed to once again listen to the characters and the world and let that come through in a way that will also endure in the same fashion.

Impressions: my time with Duke Nuken Forever

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For the first time in my several years as a professional gaming writer, I’m sitting on the fence about a game.

The game is Duke Nukem Forever and I just don’t know what to think of it: the cynical gamer in me feels that gaming has moved on and there’s no place for a dated hero in today’s gaming landscape.

Has there ever been a game that will come under so much scrutiny and has so much expectation resting on its shoulders as Duke Nukem Forever? I think not.

Gaming has changed since Duke Nukem last flexed his considerable muscles and growled, “Hail to the king, baby” and there’s a lot of expectation weighing down on the game that’s been 14 years in the making and until last year, when Gearbox Software announced that it was, indeed, finishing the game, was a game that many had written off as nothing but vaporware: a game that existed as an idea but would never see the light of day.

Well, it will see the light of day: June 10, apparently. That’s like three weeks away, maybe.

While graphically things look a lot better than when pixellated Duke appeared in Duke Nukem 3D, what hasn’t changed is the juvenile toilet humour that most of us used to chuckle about when we were 15. That’s still there – by the bucket load.

“… and I’m all outta gum”

The game opens with Nukem urinating in a urinal. Yes, you get a first person viewpoint of Nukem pissing in a urinal. You can even control the direction of the stream. In another toilet cubicle Duke can pick up a “floater” from the bowl, carry it around then toss it, landing on the ground with a brown splat. He can draw on a whiteboard – emblazoned with the words “Operation Cockblock” and crude drawings of aliens – with vivid markers and after an easy battle against a giant rocket-firing alien in a football stadium – ending with Nukem kicking the alien’s eyeball over a goalpost and Nukem muttering “It’s good” .

It’s then that we see that the opening moments have, in fact, been nothing but a video game itself, with Nukem playing a video game starring him. “Is it any good,” ask two identical twins who rise up from Nukem’s nether regions (the less said about this the better). “After 12 f***** years, it should be,” Nukem replies.

And that’s the tone throughout the entire demo, which was made up two parts: the game-within-a-game section and one where Nukem drives a monster truck through a desert which runs out of petrol. Here, Nukem faces off against pig guards using railguns, shotguns, the shrink ray and an RPG against an attacking alien ship. After smashing his way into an underground mine and shooting up some beetle-like things Nukem rides a mine cart – in a very Indiana Jones like sequence – on a rail way until he’s back at the monster truck, takes out some pig guards and refuels it.

2K says the game is littered with parody but I didn’t really see much evidence of that in the demo – unless the literally on-rails section at the very end of the demo was parodying Indiana Jones?

To be honest, Duke Nukem Forever has me scratching my head. It’s a game with a tone and humour that feels like it belongs in the ’90s but a graphical look that fits right in with today’s modern games (although games like Battlefield 3 have nothing to fear).

Sorry, but I’m just not sure how a game like Duke Nukem Forever will do: I think it’s going to appeal to nostalgic gamers who want to relive the glory days they had with Duke Nukem 3D  but  have they, like games, moved on? Or am I completely missing the point about Duke Nukem Forever?

I guess we’ll know sometime after June 10.

I’ll get my impressions of The Darkness 2 up tomorrow. Promise.

First impressions of L.A. Noire with Radio Wammo

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Yep, it’s that time of the week again, where I discuss games with Glenn “Wammo” Williams at Kiwi FM.

This morning we chewed the fat about L.A. Noire, Rockstar’s latest game that uses a revolutionary head-scanning technique to give credible performances from the in-game actors. It’s pretty impressive, actually.

I’m only about an hour and a 1/4 into the game but I’m enjoying it so far, even if the first hour was a little formulaic and predictable. I think now that my character, cop Cole Phelps is now a detective, thinks will start to pick up and get interesting.

Enjoy. Oh, I saw Duke Nukem Forever and The Darkness 2 yesterday afternoon – I was in Auckland for a Microsoft Windows Phone 7 thing and an appointment with 2K came available. I’ll post on what I thought of those two games either tonight or tomorrow, but I think I like the look of The Darkness 2 more than Duke Nukem Forever.

Game Junkie 2.0 interviews Suda 51

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If there is a game designer that fits the rock star tag, it’s definitely Japanese game designer, Goichi Suda.

Suda, or Suda51 is he is more well known to gamers, is the CEO of Grasshopper Manufacture and the brain behind the No More Heroes series and killer7.

He was in Australia last week to promote his latest game, Shadows of the Damned, a game he jointly made with another famed Japanese game designer, Shinji Mikami.

Shadows of the Damned takes place in the realms of Hell, with the game’s hero Garcia Hotspur having to save his girlfriend, Paula, after she was kidnapped by the game’s villain, Fleming, and taken to Hell.

Thanks to EA, I was able to spend 15 minutes chatting to Suda over the phone last Thursday afternoon. He was a delight to talk to.

Here’s the interview:

GC: Suda, it’s a great pleasure to talk to you. I guess firstly, could you tell me how Shadows of the Damned differs from the earlier works you’ve done.

Suda: A: Thank you for having us for the interview. Well, there are a lot of differences. We developed games for the Wii for a very long time and this is really the first HD title that we’ve done using Unreal (engine) so we definitely had to change the development environment, and also this was the first collaboration with EA, which was to create a game for a worldwide audience. This game was definitely difficult and challenging for us, but at the same time, in a creative sense, we had marvellous support from EA and we remained the same throughout the course (of development).

Q: How did EA react when you first pitched Shadows of the Damned? What was its reaction?

A: It was really surprising. We had a representative meeting with EA’s top members and their immediate reaction was that it (the game) was really different and new and something that EA didn’t have. They wanted to start development very quickly so I was really surprised at how quickly they could actually decide on something and move.

Q: Suda, so do you like to be revolutionary in your games? Do you like to push the video game medium as far as you can?

A: Definitely. I think that it is our job as a game designer to offer something new, always, so I definitely keep that in mind, being revolutionary

Q: How does your design process work? How do you come up with the ideas for your games?

A: OK, first of all, normally my style is to go to the bathroom, get rid of things, and come up with new ideas – that was my style. For Shadows of the Damned I thought my style would change, but actually it didn’t, so …  bathroom (everyone laughs)

Q: I’ve heard Shadows of The Damned described as a punk rock take on grindhouse. Is that how you would describe it?

A: Yep, I think that is very accurate.

Q: With Shadows of the Damned it looks like it has lot of light and dark and parallels with good and evil. Would that be a good description?

A: Actually this game focuses on Hell and you basically kill enemies throughout the world but when you venture through this world you actually encounter this darkness and also the enemies are wearing this darkness around them. In that state, Hotspur (the hero) cannot kill them so you need to use the forces of light to get rid of the darkness – and that’s the logic behind the game.

Q: Has this been the most challenging game you’ve worked on so far?

A: Actually, this wasn’t exactly the hardest game to develop. Of course, yes, it’s taken a long time and it was challenging, but the length of the development and the product testing doesn’t necessarily equate to how hard it is to develop. I think the challenge is always to come up with something new and revolutionary. It’s really hard to say but I wouldn’t say this was really the hardest one.

Q: Suda, is it hard to constantly come up with revolutionary ideas for your games?

A: Ah, I’m OK. I’m doing OK. I still have like 40 other ideas that I want to do but I think the challenge is to really achieve what is in my head as an idea.

<EA’s PR person cuts in telling me I have two questions left>

Q: Suda, you collaborated with Shinji Mikami on this game. How was that process for you?

A:  We got along really, really well and in fact some people think that we could be gay, but of course this really was the second time we had worked together and so we know exactly what’s expected from each other and so we understood each other completely, so it really was a perfect match.

Q: Last question, Suda, your games seem really popular in the west but what do you think it is about them appeals to western gamers?

A: Well I’m really glad that they are popular in the western market, actually more than in the Japanese market, but I’m not really sure. I guess when I was young I really liked a lot of different things and I tried out things and saw and listened to different things. Of course, I like a lot of things from the western world.

Q: Suda, thank you for your time.

I’ll get the American McGee interview done tomorrow night. I promise.

Who I interviewed today: Suda 51 and American McGee

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A short posting tonight, but it’s an oh, so cool one.

I interviewed one of the true rock stars of video games this afternoon, Japanese game maker Goichi Suda – or Suda 51 as he more commonly known to gamers.

Although I only had 15 minutes to talk to him over the phone from (I think) Sydney, he was an absolute delight to talk to (through an interpreter). The only downside is that the 15 minutes went by too quickly and I could have spoken to him for a couple of hours.

Suda 51 is the CEO of Grasshopper Manufacture and is behind such games as killer7 and the No More Heroes series. He was visiting Australia to promote his newest game, Shadows of the Damned (EA). Sorry I can’t actually remember any of the cool things he said at the moment as I’m so freaken tired.

I’ll get the interview transcribed and written up shortly (tomorrow, hopefully) then post it here.

I also spoke to American McGee, also in Australia to promote his new game for EA, Alice: Madness Returns, the sequel to the 2000’s Alice. He, too, was charming and talkative, which is always nice in an interview subject.

I’ll try and get that interview transcribed and posted as soon as possible too.

Good night.