We speculated back in August that the stars were starting to align for Sony around a Motion-controlled/3D future for the PS3. Our confidence in this fact centered around the recent motion-controlled demonstration that Sony gave for the PS3 at E3. Combined with the never-used EyeToy camera, what Sony was showing off looked comparable, if not better, than the motion control that Nintendo has been trying to sell us for years.

Coupled with the belief that the NVIDIA RSX platform shared quite a bit of tech with the eventual NVIDIA 8xxx series which does currently support 3D via the new 3D Vision product, we guessed that in very short order (2010-ish) Sony would begin promoting a 3D future for the PS3 when coupled with 120hz or 3D-capable televisions.

Kotaku covered details from a recent Sony presentation in which they did exactly that — specifying that all existing PS3s on the market can be made 3D capable with a firmware update. Sony expressed a desire to roll out such an upgrade by the end of 2010 to all existing and new PS3s. The entire rollout looking something like this:

This move by Sony would certainly get them out of the rat-race with Microsoft and the more multiplayer-friendly that is the Xbox 360 — a hardware move like this, if successful (as proved it can be by Nintendo), would force Microsoft into another hardware revision of the Xbox family in order to compete.

While Microsoft is bringing image-recognition-based motion control to market shortly with Project Natal, there are still no plans to cater to the 3D market… assuming there is one.

We are going to make another prediction right now and say that there will not be a significant 3D gamers market until after 2012. We aren’t basing that on any Mayan calendars or end-of-days premonitions, just our own experience with 3D and how solidly unimpressive it was.

We were at PAX 2009 this year and spent some time at the NVIDIA booth, watching Resident Evil 5 with the NVIDIA Vision glasses. The NVIDIA employee went out of his way to explain that Resident Evil 5 was “built from the ground up to fully utilize this 3D technology”.

We put the glasses on and expected to be amazed but were instead greeted with an experience that was lacking in all the ways 3D experiences typically are:

• Shifting your angle of view caused visual anomolies that you are likely used to if you’ve been to a 3D movie.
• There is some visual ‘leap of faith’ required to try and immerse yourself in the 3D experience, because the scene and some of the items in it look odd.
• 3D visualization of games that only expect 1 Point-of-View really exacerbates how “flat” a scene will look — sort of like the different layers of a scene in Little Big Planet sliding by each other.

There just wasn’t any significant shift in the experience for me to think that it was worth the $200 glasses or a $2400 TV to experience it.

Given this is 3D 1.0, and we’re bound to see electronics manufacturers play with different ideas until one “sticks”, I would not expect a solid 3D gaming market/experience until 2014 — some experience that is so expected that all the triple A titles are shipping with support for it.

And oddly enough, 2014/15 is the timeline Sony was looking at for the Playstation 4, and we’ll most likely be seeing the 3rd revision of the Xbox 360 by then as well.

Mainstream 3D is years away, but it will come.

Qwest has been rolling their new high-speed fiber-optic DSL service out throughout Denver and Arizona for the last year or so (it’s not fiber-to-the-house, but with 40mbps available, who cares?). I’ve been a happy Qwest DSL client for about 3 years now — no complaints and more importantly — no outages.

When the fiber service started rolling out with speeds of 12mbps and 20mbps offered, I would reflexively crap my pants and throw myself into jealous rages because it wasn’t available in my area — that all changed last week.

Not only has Qwest rolled out fiber in my area, they also rolled out a new 40mbps/20mbps service as well for $115/mo — that doesn’t have any bearing on this post, it’s just awesome.

Anyway, I ordered the 20mbps/5mbps service which required an upgrade to the Actiontec Q1000 Qwest-branded modem. This is a Gigabit-capable 4-port modem with Wireless-N capabilities — I’ve had Actiontec equipment in the past from Qwest and it was garbage — replaced within months by 2wire which worked much better. Fortunately after a week with this Q1000 it looks like Actiontec may have cleaned some things up, the modem works fine with some basic firewall, port forwarding and advanced routing rules — this was something the older Actiontec modem that Qwest was selling couldn’t no — no joke, it literally couldn’t employ port forwarding rules AND the firewall at the same time — fail.

Anyway, after getting the Q1000 setup and the service enabled, I hooked my Xbox 360 via a WAP (I’ll give a review of later) and when I tried to get the Xbox online, I would get an error similar to the following:

Unable to connect to Xbox live, the MTU setting of your router is less than 1365 and must be increased. Please fix the problem and try again.

There is literally no MTU setting anywhere on the Q1000 — and reading through some other threads online, folks had suggestions ranging from disabling uPnP all the way to manually changing the MTU settings on your Windows machine (yea, I have no idea how they thought that would help).

As the threads went on, more and more folks said upgrading the firmware did the trick for them and magically the Xbox 360 started working again without any problems.

This sounded easy enough, but believe it or not, I was actually confused by the Upgrade Firmware screen on the Q1000 — on the older 2wire I had, there was a button that I clicked that would check the firmware against the remotely available version and then upgrade it if available — it also automatically upgraded itself constantly too (which got annoying after a while).

On the Q1000, there is simply a Download button and you end up with a file that has no identifying name or type, just firmware.

Believe it or not, this s all fine — and it worked great. So I’ll give you the instructions on how to update your firmware incase you are bamboozled by this — and get your Xbox 360 back online:

1. Go to 192.168.0.1 (or whatever IP address you gave your modem)
2. Login to your modem — I believe the default credentials are “admin” or “admin”/”admin” or just try password “admin” — it’s one of those.
3. Go to Utilities
4. Click Upgrade Firmware in the left menu
5. Click the Download button in section #1 — you will likely be prompted to safe a file named “firmware”, save it anywhere on your local computer.
6. Now scroll down to section #2, and click the Browse button and select that “firmware” file you saved.
7. Now scroll down to section #3, and click the Upgrade Firmware button, this will upload the file you just saved and apply it then restart the modem

And you should be all set. Let us know if you run into any problems. Happy gaming!

Summary [5.5 out of 10]

A sequel to the 2006 original, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 offers up a hybrid Secret War/Civil War storyline and the same four character, top down beat-em-up action found in the first game and the X-men Legends titles before it. Vicarious Visions left the basic game play alone and streamlined the interface to attempt to fix the few issues the previous game had. Sadly, this attempt failed and a decent chunk of enjoyment was streamlined instead. Add to that a host of bugs and technical issues and you have a title that should have been a sure thing turns into a fumbling attempt at home plate before you’ve  even bought the girl dinner.

Introduction

I really loved the first Marvel Ultimate Alliance. I didn’t really get into X-men Legends mostly because I got frustrated by the terrible teammate AI, but everything the X-men games bungled, Ultimate Alliance did well. It had a great story, branching endings, varied characters, a wide variety of stages, tons of unlockables, and a preponderance of awesome goodies for fans of Marvel comics. It was just loaded with content and I played it over and over to find everything and use everyone I could. It wasn’t perfect. The User Interface(UI) wasn’t great and leveling could be tedious. The item collection was a cool idea but got confusing and bothersome to keep up with. Overall though, the game was awesome.

So by all rights MUA2 should have killed. Word was the UI was fixed and everything would be smoother and more user friendly. Somewhere along the line, and I think it was at that part in the line where the developers look at the calendar and realize they are running out of time fast, things went really wrong.  They didn’t really monkey with the core gameplay terribly much aside from adding Fusion powers which allows two characters to use their powers in conjunction with each other for a more devastating special move. That is pretty cool and is a neat addition, although it paves the way for some frustration but I will get to that later.

Where the developers really went wrong here is that there was a lot of half-assing going on. They tried to fix the item issue with boosts, but those are just as annoying and tedious as the items were. They tried to streamline the UI but managed to make things even more frustrating on one level and feel incomplete on the other. Also they forgot to make it very fun.

The Great

• Deadpool:  If Deadpool hadn’t been in this game I would have probably stopped playing pretty early on. He is funny in his quips in-game and his discussions with other characters are amusing and on point with the character. His moves and powers are awesome and his healing factor means he can stay in the game a lot better than a lot of the other characters. Even other characters with healing factors don’t pan out as well, like Wolverine some how manages to go down for the count quicker than anyone reading this would against Mike Tyson. This game is the best evidence I could give that Deadpool needs his own game and it needs not to suck.

The Good

• Gameplay: The core gameplay mechanics work pretty well. If you love running around beating things up with a sprinkle of cool visual effects, you are generally in good hands here.

• Graphics: The visuals are mostly good. There are times when it looks REALLY good and other times, not so much. Some of the cut scenes are iffy but generally the graphics are good.

• Character Interaction: They could have done more with the branching conversations like Mass Effect, but the conversations with other characters are cool and change depending on who you are using and who you are talking to. Spider-man talking to the Green Goblin is great and is one of the ‘Key Conversations’ which will net you an achievement or trophy if you get 10 of them. There is some cool comic background stuff that happens here without getting to be too inside baseball and it is a nice addition. This isn’t much different than the first game aside from being able to be aggressive, defensive or diplomatic but in this game keeping things the same is a definite plus.

• Trivia: The trivia game is cool and adds a bit of a time crunch in for you. You can compete against other players if you aren’t alone and it becomes a bit like You Don’t Know Jack: Marvel Comics without Buzz or Cookie making wisecracks. I am a comics geek so I dig the trivia. The game pretty much supplies all the answers to these questions if you pay attention during loading screens and, well, the game.

• Multi-player: Like the first one, MUA2 supports both local and online multi-player. This REALLY makes the game more fun. Four people can play at once and having other people control your characters rather than the game’s AI is always better. Not only can you do more and do it better with real people actually making good choices, but you have someone to talk to when things get repetitive or a boss fight takes 20 minutes for no apparent reason whatsoever.

• Roster of Characters: The game features a lot of characters to play and interact with and not all of them are the mainstream sort you would normally find in a game like this. Like the first one, this game makes the most out of its license and it is really cool to see video game representations of characters I never thought I would see in a game. It would be nice if there were more that were playable but it was good to just get to see so many of them around. If you are a Marvel comics fan you will probably not be disappointed with the characters here.

• Cut Scenes: While some of the graphics can be iffy, the cut scenes are generally pretty cool, particularly the ones that show key moments from the Civil War comics. Captain America jumping out of a heli-carrier window and commandeering a jet looks just about as cool in motion as I thought it would and seeing Nitro blow Stamford to hell was pretty awesome. This reinforces my belief that they should make an animated movie of Civil War.

The Bad

• The Bugs: First and foremost, the bugs are the downfall of this game. I have a lot of complaints but this was the big one. I am not sure how this thing got out of beta testing let alone finding its way to store shelves. This thing is buggier than a new Microsoft Operating System. For one thing, you can’t turn the auto-leveling feature off without turning it off and taking away a point from something and then putting it back. Otherwise, it will just turn itself back on every time you leave the menu. That is just annoying, but some of the other bugs are worse. Like when I did a guided Fusion with Wolverine and Spider-man that, when it ended,  melded them together like conjoined twins if one of the twins rode on the other’s back while flashing in and out of existence.Or the one at the end of the Wakanda level where the Green Goblin disappears and you just keep fighting a steady stream of bad guys forever. I went for an hour and leveled up something like six times. I eventually looked it up online to make sure it was a glitch. Sure it seemed obvious but I couldn’t imagine such a big problem making it to retail. It did. You have to turn your system off and back on to fix this. Sometimes, according to things I read on a message board, you have to do this multiple times. Then there are little things like beating everyone in a room to open the door to the elevator and the door doesn’t open…and the one you came in is closed off too so you are just stuck in the room until you reboot the game. Or when the game will stop in the middle of ANYTHING you are doing to load and then do it again and again for about an hour. Or when you perform a successful targeted Fusion so you can get a healing token to bring one of your characters back and the game arbitrarily doesn’t give it to you.  I could go on as there are more bugs but you get the point. The game has been out almost a month and there have been no patches. For shame.

• Unskippable cut scenes: Yeah I praised the cut scenes above and I stand by that, but I was talking about the first time you see them. When you just died because of some cheap bullshit or because you have just had to restart or reboot because of one of the many bugs, you don’t want to sit through the same cut scene over and over. I know that the game is loading behind these scenes and that is why you can’t skip but it is a huge pain and is reflective of bad game design.

• Civil War Storyline: Okay, so I am not a hater on the Civil War story at all but using it for this game created a lot of problems. For one, it limited the characters that could be used at any given time. For another it locked the story into a sort of static framework that kept the variety out altogether. The storyline for the first game was kind of crazy and sprawled all over everwhere, from Atlantis to Asgard and Latvaria to Hell. This game has a lot of labs, warehouses and city streets. Not much variety to be found in the locations and it is mostly because of the story. Also, the branching of the story, where you have to choose Pro or Anti Registration forces you into another play through to unlock all the characters and see everything there is to see. If you save your game before you choose, you can just go back and make a different choice but you have to unlock everything again. So if you don’t have Thor, Hulk or Jean Grey yet before that save then you have to get them again. The alternative is to play again at a higher difficulty which has you retreading a lot of the game before you get to the choice and only really gives you a handful of new stages, which aren’t really new as much as just mirrors of the ones you already did. Some cool things could have been done with this but weren’t.

• Streamlining: The first game had a ton of cool stuff to collect. Every character had four extra costumes, each with their own bonuses and attributes. There were different powers for your characters you could assign based on your preference and a lot of cool things to find. This game gives you one alternate costume per character and only about four of those are worth having. Each character only has four powers and that is it. No choice here whatsoever. Also, because of the auto-leveling bug, manual point distribution is more tedious.

• Boss Battles: While some of these are cool, the majority of them drag on forever and are more of a chore than they are challenging. When you add in the fact the game will actively screw you out of healing tokens when you’ve earned them and you end up having to replay the fight it really sucks. Given that boss fights are supposed to be exciting and intense, to have them be boring is never a good sign. I hate the boss fights in this game generally just because I knew I was going to have to be doing the same thing over and over for a really long time. Build up fusion meter, perform target fusion, repeat for what seems like four hours. Thanks a bunch Titanium Man.

• Healing/revival system: I understand what the designers were trying to do here. In the first game, in order to revive a fallen character you had to wait until you got to one of the hubs scattered around that would let you revive characters, teleport back to base or switch out characters. Here you can change characters on the fly and revive a character with a health token. The problem is, unless the game randomly decides to bestow a token on you, the only way to get it is to pull off a successful fusion. If you do a clearing fusion, typically you need to hit between 15-10 enemies to get a token. The guided is pretty much the same way and a targeted fusion you need to hit someone important. So that is no big deal generally except that this is the ONLY way to revive a character and you can ONLY do a fusion when you have two characters. So if three of your guys get taken out, and the magical healing token fairy doesn’t give you any, you are out of luck unless you make it to the end of the level. The other option is to just let the last guy die and do stuff over again and hope that you are better this time or that there are no more bugs.

• Balancing: I understand the need to balance the characters so that each one is playable but I absolutely refuse to believe that a pantywaist like Shocker is going to take out the Hulk. The way the balancing works, there is little difference between a lot of the characters. It doesn’t really matter that much if you are playing Iron Man instead of Miss Marvel or Iron Fist instead of Daredevil. They all just sort of break down to projectile vs melee or flying vs ground based. There are a few characters that stand out and seem more effective but in general, a lot of the characters are interchangeable and the repetition of fusions further highlights the problem. Also whoever decided that Wolverine should be on death’s door the second you take him over is an idiot. Seriously, he is supposed to be the best at what he does. In this game what he does is go down like a bitch.

• Camera: The camera in this game is ridiculously bad. I lost track of the number of times that I was in the middle of a heated battle and I was suddenly looking at the rafter in the ceiling and not seeing the action at all. You can move the camera a bit but it doesn’t really help that much as in a lot of the cases of this the camera is stuck somewhere. It also sucks when you try to do a targeted fusion on someone standing right next to you, probably hitting you  upside the head at the time, and your target circle goes flying off screen and you can’t bring it back or even find it even when trying to move the camera around. Also, the camera will zoom out to weather map distance so that you can’t tell what is going on because you can’t find your character in the virtual ant farm of explosions and laser beams. The number of times that the camera zoomed back in to let me know that I had been beating up a tree for the past 10 minutes is staggering.

• Controls: The button placement, which you can’t change, is very strange. The jump button is mapped to the Y/triangle button and it feels really weird. This may just be my own personal thing but it seems like it should have been mapped to the A/X button. Regardless, the layout feels wonky and I found myself doing the wrong things a lot because of the confusing and uncustomizable configuration.

The Ugly

• Black Widow: How can they take one of the sexiest women in Marvel comics and make her look like she’s been hit with a brick made of ugly? Nick Fury looks sexier and I think pictures of him naked are the punishment for stealing in some countries.

Conclusion [5.5 out of 10]

I really wanted to like this game. I was really excited and I traded in Batman Arkham Asylum so I could get it. I’ve been kicking myself ever since.  The basic gameplay is intact but gets bogged down by bugs and systems that lack polish. Really that is the biggest issue with this game over all, it is not polished at all and feels like a fourth tier effort instead of the AAA title it is supposed to be. The old axiom ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ applies here and they really should have taken that to heart. As it stands, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 is deeply flawed and very broken. If you really, really want to play out of deep devotion to the series or because you think I am an idiot, then do yourself a favor and rent the thing. You should be able to beat it in a weekend and hopefully haven’t broken any controllers.

Thanks to Ted Regulski for the heads up on these. We actually had about 10 mins of alone-time with God of War 3 at PAX 2009 and can say this: It’s exactly what you want.

If you liked God of War 1 and God of War 2, the God of War series continues with the exact same controls, exact same epic world-feel, exact same style of play and level transition — it feels like home; if your home were caked in gore and you were running around your living room with a sword tied to a flaming beast.

We love it.

Thanks NeoGaf!

Well it’s coming and everyone is waiting for it, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare 2, so we figured we’d put up as many screenshots as we could find that were tasty. Unfortunately it looks like still no main-story-line co-op, but they are offering co-op in the SpecOps mode which is taking down foes in special levels for multiplayer.

If you haven’t seen the Infamy trailer yet, it gives an excellent overview of the look/feel and environments from the game — I’m impressed to say the least, just hope it lasts longer than Modern Warfare 1, which I just finished recently.

Overall we’re pretty pumped for the title and it looks like Gearbox hired a pretty savvy marketing group to put together a mock advertisement about how “mainstream” Borderlands really is — I found it hilarious so wanted to share it here with you.

Take note of how awesomely “Stiffler-esque” the main character is, the end sequence I found hilarious with his growing rage:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Most of the Dragon Age: Origins screenshots we’ve seen up until now have focused primarily on battle and the party in the game. That is why I was excited when an environments-only screenshot pack dropped in our lab tonight.

These screenshots show of the world that Dragon Age: Origins takes place in. The type of environments, both inside and outside of towns, that you will be walking through and experiencing as you go on your journey.

Absolutely a darker tone to the environments which we’ve noted before, the game definitely makes you feel like you are in a sullen/repressed world that is in need of helping.

Dragon Age: Origins was a game we got some special time with at PAX 2009 back in September. It was about a 30-minute private playthrough that honestly took about 2 hours to get into. Curses on BioWare for running their demo like that at the conference — they never bothered to walk back in line and tell everyone after person 30 that they would never play the game that day.

Honestly, we were about 15th or so in line first thing one morning and it took us almost 2hrs to finally sit down and play — they took people in groups of 10 and let them play for 30 mins, even if you finished the private demo early and left, they still held the computer unoccupied for the full 30 mins until everyone was done… bah.

That’s neither here nor there now, the game is done and coming out soon, so here are our thoughts on it:

• It’s Mass Effect set in medieval times
• Graphics were solid. Although with BioWare games you come from the intricate stories and and inter-character relationships and Dragon Age looks set to deliver on that.
• Check point system seems a bit lacking — we were playing the 360 version and I ended up walking out of the demo because I got 3/4 of the way through it, died and respawned at the checkpoint coming out of the town where the demo started… there was no way I was going to replay all that stuff again. This may have just been part of the PAX demo though. I would imagine the check point system will be identical to Mass Effect — which I think was like this, but I don’t recall dying much in that game.
• It’s a darker game — there is this foreboding seriousness that drips all around this game… sort of a depressed/angry/suppressed feeling — I dig it, it makes the times seem more dark and intense.



• You can TOTALLY burn other NPCs in conversations. There are a lot of great choices to retort with like “Why don’t you shut your mouth before my sword shuts if for you” — so if you like playing like a dick, you will likely spend a lot of time laughing.
• Combat was confusing — I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to Final Fantasy-esque RPG attack mechanisms, but I found myself juggling controls a lot during combat trying to figure out how to make things die.



• You can play ANY member of your party, not just the “hero”. At any time you can switch to the other characters.



• The attack styles of the different members of the group is very different.
• Attacks are not as action-oriented as Mass Effect, they are some hybrid between World of Warcraft (timing/targeting/recharge cycles) mixed with Mass Effect (live-action, you can run around during). It felt odd… I think you can pause time during attacks in this game as well like Mass Effect.

Overall I’m cautiously optimistic about the title — it looks like easily a 20-30 hr game straight through with some good story elements to it. Caring about the Gray Wardens cause (that’s the group of soldiers you play) will be part of connecting with the game and the story and I’m not sure that clicked for me.

Abusing my squad-mates and killing innocent people (which I did during the demo) is hilarious and could be funny to watch unfold… I rarely play evil in these types of games.

If you have already decided you are picking this up for PC, don’t forget to grab the Dragon Age Character Creator software for the PC to start working on the character you want to import into the game on release date.

Also if you are excited about the game and want to talk with other fans, BioWare has a community setup for that as well.

Summary [9.5 out of 10]

Set in the world of Empire by Orson Scott Card, Shadow Complex is a 2D side-scrolling adventure game in the vein of Metroid. You play Jason, a fish out of water who finds himself embroiled in high tech action and espionage when a hiking trip turns into a rescue mission which turns into a save the world mission. The game play is tight, the graphics are excellent and the cut-scenes and voice work are exceptional. Oh and did I mention it is an XBox Live  Arcade title? It is amazing that so many retail games get so much wrong when a download only title gets just about everything right.

Introduction

I think the general perception with downloadable titles on services like Live, the Playstation Store or the Wii store is that they are good for nostalgia or a quick diversion from real games but they aren’t much in and of themselves. At least that is how I have always felt. Initially, the idea of forking over $15 for a game that looks like a quicky downloadable title made my stomach churn but seeing the videos made me change my mind. Shadow Complex is a revelation and if this is what the future has in store for downloadable games then sign me up.

The Great

• Fun: I am not sure when the last time was that I had so much fun with a game. From beginning to end this game grabbed me and didn’t let go. There is always something going on, the puzzles are just challenging enough but don’t bog down the game play, and the action is frantic. Even when I found myself dying in certain areas I kept coming back for more. I never felt particularly frustrated and the learning curve is pretty much perfect.

• Graphics: Built with the Unreal Engine 3, Shadow Complex is gorgeous. The backgrounds and levels look great and the character models and animation are pretty much spot on. That the graphics are this going on a download title is just amazing. Clearly a lot of care went into this game.
• Level Design: This sort of game is made or broken in large part by the level design. If you have bad design then the best ideas, graphics, controls and gameplay are rendered moot. When the emphasis is on exploring the place has to be interesting. Shadow Complex offers up intricate levels which never get repetitive or boring. Going from one room to another is often a puzzle unto itself and adds a ton of spice and variety into well rounded gameplay.
• Item collection/upgrades: The variety of upgradable items, weapons and armor is impressive and everything you collect is worth something. You aren’t looking to items because that is just what you do but because they genuinely help out. The usefulness of the upgrades and the cleverness of their hiding places makes for a very satisfying experience. You don’t do anything just because and you don’t spend time looking for things that weren’t worth your time.

• Replay: The game took me just under 8 hours to finish with 78% of items found. That is a pretty decent length for a game like this. That it is compelling to play through again to try to get everything and find every secret is remarkable. You add in the Proving Ground and Challenge modes and you have a game that keeps giving over and over. When you have full retail games giving you a 12 minute experience this one is packed with value.

The Good

• Jason: Your character is pretty bad ass. He starts out a regular dude trying to get some play in the forest and turns into an action hero that would make John McClane blush. He invokes Nathan Drake from Uncharted, not just because he looks an awful lot like him but also because Nolan North does the voice for both characters. His backstory has his dad teaching him tactical military things when he was younger in hopes he would follow in his father’s footsteps so it isn’t ridiculous that a random dude becomes the savior of the world…or at least of San Francisco.
• Controls: The controls here are super intuitive and easy to use. There is a bit of learning curve but the game eases you into things enough that this isn’t a problem. Anytime you have a hard time doing something in this game it is a skill based issue and not a broken control issue…except for some of the shooting, which will get its own bullet point later. Once you spend a little time with each of the upgrades and new abilities you will be pulling off impressive feats that will make you feel like a badass.
• Story: Based on established cannon and adapted here by Peter David, you don’t get a super involved story but what you get is very good. I wouldn’t have expected much story at all from a game like this so the fact that it has a compelling one is really cool.
• Difficulty: There are several difficulty settings to choose from but the normal, default difficulty is pretty much perfect. It offers up a challenge but not such that you get frustrated and walk away. The only reason I ever stopped playing this game was when I had to never because I wanted to. If I didn’t have a job and a girlfriend I would still be playing right now.

• Variety: You have a lot of ways to deal with enemies from shooting, to CQC, to running away. Solving exits and figuring out how to get through a room or to a hidden object seldom has just one way to do it. Getting creative not only helps improve your play but also makes everything more fun and keeps the game feeling fresh.

The Bad

• 3D shooting on a 2D plane: I get what they were going for here but it doesn’t really work out. Basically what you have here is enemies coming at you from various points in the background. You can auto-target these guys or sometimes aim for them by pressing up but in those moments when you have a lot of foes at once it is really difficult to take out the dick sniping at you from behind a box in the background. A nice idea but it just doesn’t deliver.

• Boss Fights: The boss fights leave a lot to be desired. They are just too easy. The final battle was a cake walk and generally none of the bosses gave me any real problem. You have a great opportunity here to have some really epic boss fights but they fall short. Everything else in the game puts this on par with Metroid and Castlevania: Symphony of Night and so too should the boss fights. Those classics had truly memorable and challenging bosses. It is a shame that Shadow Complex can’t say the same thing.

Conclusion [9.5 out of 10]

Shadow Complex is fun, fresh and beats the holy loving crap out of a lot of full retail titles. For $15 you owe to yourself to download this if you have Xbox Live. Seriously unless you hate games like Metroid and Castlevania, and by extension fun, then you will love this game. It is just that good.

Summary [10 out of 10]

When Joker turns a prison transfer into Arkham Asylum into a full fledged take over of the island it is up to Batman to round up the inmates and stop whatever Joker has planned in the first game to ever fully and accurately capture the Batman experience. Finally, Batman’s entire skill set is on display as you use stealth, gadgets, combat ability and detective skills to figure out what Joker is up to and stop him before it is too late.  With flawless controls, a great story, voice acting straight from the animated series and a plethora of extras Batman: Arkham Asylum is what every Batman fan has been waiting for all these years.

Introduction

I would start this review off by mentioning that I am a big Batman fan and that he is my second favorite super-hero and I have been into him since I was age 4 but given that pretty much everyone in the fanboy geek realm is in mad, passionate love with the Dark Knight (unless they are the sorts of contrarian haters who can’t wait to diss the thing that everyone loves because they are so much cooler yet oddly just as unlikely to kiss a girl) I don’t really feel like I need to make huge pronouncements of love for the character as it is probably a given.

All that being said, Batman games have classically been really, really terrible. I think the last one I enjoyed (and I should mention I haven’t played Lego Batman) was the   of the ‘89 Batman movie. It was that long ago. Even then it wasn’t a great Batman game so much as a decent platformer. In the years since we have seen a lot of earnest efforts in capturing the magic but none have managed to do so.

Generally this is due to games trying to focus on only one aspect of what Batman is about or only manages one of them properly while other aspects suffer. One of the remarkable things about Arkham Asylum is that it juggles all the major aspects of Batman masterfully and there is never a time when I felt like I wish I could hurry past the section I was on to get to something fun. It is all fun. I can’t think of a super hero game prior to this that has so completely ‘gotten’ it. I don’t want to get to far into hyperbole-ville but with Batman: Arkham Asylum, the hype is well deserved.

The Great

• Game-play: First and foremost the game succeeds tremendously at being easy and intuitive to play. When I say easy to play I don’t mean the game itself is easy but rather the mechanics work wonderfully and none of the systems in the game are broken. There is never a time when you will fight the game itself or find Batman doing things you didn’t tell him to do.  In a game where you have three main game-play styles there is a lot of room for things breaking down or having a lackluster component. That doesn’t happen here. Each of the styles is the best possible example of that style and other franchises should take notice of what is going on here.

• Graphics/Art Design: The game is gorgeous. The backgrounds and environment are pretty enough to stand and stare at and the character models and animation are terrific.  The level of detail in both the environmental assets as well as the character models is truly impressive. The art design reflects the darkness of the story with aesthetics reminiscent of Jim Lee’s work on the Hush storyline or All-Star Batman and Robin. These are gritty looking characters to go with a gritty looking game and Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy have never been sexier.

• Story: The story, written by Paul Dini of the animated series,  isn’t intricate particularly and there aren’t many twists and turns along the way but it is very much a classic Batman story that is both interesting and engaging. Joker’s plan unfolds nicely as you progress through the story and there is just enough intrigue to keep you interested. The scripting is also spot on and easily stands with the Animated Series. It is also very dark and gritty, much more so than we’ve seen in previous game efforts. The language and violence is roughly PG-13 and tracks with the general feel of the Nolan films without quite getting to Miller’s Dark Knight Returns level of darkness.

• Voice Acting: The major voice actors from the Animated Series reprise their roles here including Kevin Conroy as Batman, Mark Hamil as Joker and Arleen Sorkin as Harley Quinn. It takes a minute to get used to the voices from the Animated Series coming out of dark and edgy looking characters but once it sinks in the voices really make the experience feel like Batman. Conroy has been voicing Batman for over 10 years an is true to form here. He is a relief from the raspy and almost unintelligible delivery from Christian Bale in the movies.  Mark Hamil is absolutely flawless as the Joker which is a really good thing since he talks to you over the intercom incessantly. And Sorkin does a great job of Harley, which makes since given that the character was created for her. The other voice actors all acquit themselves equally well with Wally Wingert’s Riddler being another stand-out.

• Controls: I am always very appreciative of games that don’t make me want to break my controller. In the case of some melee heavy combat games and stealth games, I find myself wanting to put my controller through the wall. Intuitive controls seem to be particularly elusive to the stealth genre. As much as I like Metal Gear the controls make me want to scream. Watching Snake lay down on the ground while enemies put bullets in his ass is very frustrating. Sneaking and CQC in such games also usually make me want to rip my hair out. In fact, I will go so far as to say that I don’t really care for stealth games at all and most of that is due to the controls. When it comes to stealth here, I have no complaints.  It is never frustrating to do what I want to do and the controls are very precise and responsive. Likewise, the combat and detective segments work so well in large part because of how successful the controls are.

• Combat: I’ve mentioned it a couple of times already but the fighting in the game is really good. It is a very simple concept and is easy to get the hang of but is difficult to master. There is one button to attack, one to counter, one to dodge and one to distract.  One attack buttons sounds like things will get boring and stale but this is not the case. As you are surrounded by enemies you hit the attack button and press in the direction of the attacker you want to deal with. Batman responds in a contextually appropriate manner and you can keep hitting the attacker in front of you or you can press in the direction of another attacker to move on to him. You also get a spider-sense like indicator when one of them is going to attack which allows you to counter, a simple button press that triggers a series of moves that often include stripping a weapon and scoring multiple hits. The evade button allows you to dive over and around attackers to flank and maneuver the attackers where you want them. If you did this repetitively to one or two attackers all the time, it would get boring fast but in this case you are often surrounded by several attackers at once and you do all of these things together to form combos that are truly bad ass. Batman has some crazy moves and he uses them to put some serious hurt on Joker’s thugs. It really looks painful. What really makes the combat shine here is that you can change up your tactics on the fly and each fight is unique. That they throw in special thugs with knifes and stun guns that require special techniques to take them down just further shows the level of variety in what could have been a really boring system.

• Stealth Sections: Now I mentioned this in the controls but more needs to be said. Basically, Batman wears body armor that is somewhat bullet resistant but a dude with a machine gun is going to kill him all kinds of dead. You get six such guys together and Batman has to be a bit more subtle. Enter the stealth segments. Generally you get four to six machine gun and shotgun carrying fools patrolling and area and you have to deal with them. You can do this a variety of ways. If you go up into the air on to ledges and gargoyles you can hang upside down and grab them and string them upside down by a wire or you can perform a glide kick which allows you to do a follow up knock out move. If you want to be more ground based you can sneak up behind them and do a silent take down or hit them with a batarang and then finish them off with some quick punches while they  are down. You can hang from ledges and pull them over the side, or set up charges to blow up sections of wall to knock them out or take out sections of the floor to drop them to the level below…you just have a staggering number of options here and Detective Mode, which is essentially an infared view showing the thugs’ skeletons through walls and the floor, allows you to set up your strategy with ease. These sections could have been tacked on but they are very fun and challenging and are every bit a puzzle as the actual puzzle segments. Occasionally they will throw some extra variety in and put a hostage at risk if anyone even hears you. Good times.

• Gadgets: Batman is well known for his gadgets and they are well on display here. From batarangs to grappling hooks everything you get is effective and useful. Your standard grappling hook lets you reach the high ground and get out of situations most people couldn’t and can allow you to grab thugs and pull them toward you or off ledges. The standard batarang can be upgraded to allow you to throw up to three at once and also comes in a remote control and sonic emitter variety. Then you have small explosive charges to set and a wireless hacking device. All of the stuff Batman carries makes sense and seems like it could exist if there was actually a Batman and makes sense for the character. There’s no ‘Batskates’ nonsense nor is there anything that you will never use. Everything is useful and you will use it often.

• Replay: There is just a ton to do here in addition to main story goals. That isn’t to say that you get Spider-man style side quests, but there are a lot of things to collect and puzzles to solve. Aside from that stuff, some of which will get its own bullet point, the game is just fun enough that you want to go back and do it again. The moment I finished the thing I wanted to jump right back in.  There isn’t mode to play through with your skills and equipment beefed up but it does let you explore Arkham so you can find all the stuff you missed during your play through and that is pretty handy.

• Riddler Challenges: While the Man in Green never physically shows up in the game, he cuts into your radio from time to time to give you a series of 200+ riddles around the asylum. Generally solving these is as simple as going into Detective mode and doing an environmental scan of the answer to the riddle. The riddles aren’t super difficult but many are clever and they are a fun diversion while you are making your way through the game. Aside from the riddles, there are also Riddler Trophies to look for. These are scattered around, often in hard to reach areas. Collecting these things become a matter of bragging rights to have actually found them.

• Easter Eggs: The game is loaded with fan service content. In addition to the Riddler Challenges you also have interview tapes to look for and another mystery involving the spirit of Arkham. The interview tapes are a series of psychiatric interviews with various inmates. These are reminiscent of the recordings you find in Bioshock and are very interesting and often times pretty disturbing. Some of them flesh out the storyline in the game and some are just generally messed up. One interview with the Riddler involving a riddle about a baby is particularly messed up. The Spirit of Arkham is a series of stone obelisks throughout the game that contain coded messages from Arkham’s founder leading to  a particular mystery.

• Challenge Rooms: As you collect Riddler Trophies and solve mysteries you unlock challenge rooms, a series of combat and stealth rounds where you compete for high scores. This seemed kind of tacked on to me until I started playing and I found them to be addictive. They are pretty much just rooms from the game with time limits and point scores but they are a fun distraction from the story mode. I bought the Xbox version of the game  mostly because of my controller preference but I am kicking myself for not getting the PS3 version which has downloadable challenges where you can play the Joker. Oh well, hopefully it will eventually be available for the 360. I suppose the charge that would accompany it content would be stupid tax.

The Hot

• Harley Quinn: Damn. That is all I am saying.

The Bad

• It ended.

Conclusion [10 out of 10]

I am kind of forcing myself to wrap up here. There is a lot more that can be said about this game and my love for it is the sort usually reserved for one’s children. I don’t give it a perfect score lightly and I am not one to throw that sort of score around willy nilly. This game deserves it, though, and while game reviews are just subjective opinions, if you don’t like it I have to seriously question whether you really like video games or not. I really hope that a sequel will be forth coming and I hope they don’t change it too much. If other developers use this game as a template we could see some really great things come out of it. I can’t recommend it highly enough and you really to go out at get it as soon as possible.

Back when the PS3 and Xbox 360 were first announced, we aren’t ashamed to say that we were avid fans of the PS3 platform… much more so than the self-aborting Xbox 360. It was a much higher build quality, the technical achievement of the Cell Processor was ridiculously complex and therefore impressive, it played Blu-ray disks… the list went on and on.

The unfortunate reality, 2 years later, is that my Xbox 360 sees 80% of my game time on it because the multiplayer/online experience is just so much better — that’s a software problem, not a hardware problem. Unfortunately Sony likes to move at the pace of an elephant, and instead of matching parity with Microsoft immediately with friend-connectivity functionality and at least keeping the argument of “Which one is better” going, in true Japanese fashion, they decided to focus on hardcore functionality instead.

Right now, the Xbox 360 is a better gaming experience. Sony has promised us a 10-year product cycle with the PS3 however, and with some of the more recent PS3 platform and 3rd party engine enhancements, it looks like the platform is finally starting to come into it’s own.

While PS3 still cannot rival Microsoft’s crafted gaming experience on the PS3, they are getting closer… but that’s not the interesting part.

When you sit and think about what it would take for Sony to “win” in the long-run, you have to think about what the new hotness is in gaming, more specifically two things:

• Motion control
• 3D (???)

Nintendo did pioneer motion control and got it into everyone’s minds and homes, but it wasn’t the “1:1″ experience we thought it would be, nor is the new Wii MotionPlus.

Sony has already shown us that they’ve been working on visual motion control, again promising 1:1 motion-mapping experience… maybe we’ll get it this time?

Click here to view the embedded video.

In addition to that, NVIDIA has quietly been promoting their 3D Vision product, to deliver a true 3D gaming experience to PC gamers that have:

• GeForce 8-series or higher
• Display capable of 120hz or higher

If you recall, the NVIDIA RSX graphics chip inside the PS3 actually provided the launch base for the 8-series of PC graphics cards. And as far as 120hz displays, they are all over the place when it comes to televisions (but not necessarily PC monitors).

… do you see the trend forming here? Let’s recap:

1. Sony’s R&D to Product cycle moves at a glacial pace, but it moves.
2. Sony launched the PS3 as an unnecessarily complex/functionally advanced technology platform.
3. Motion-controls and 3D are becoming the new hotness in gaming, discussed at all the gaming conventions for the last year.
4. Sony showed off some R&D progress they’ve made with visual motion-control last year.
5. Sony has a 3D-enabled graphics processor already shipping inside the original PS3
6. Most television sets sold in the last year (and possibly longer) provide support for 120hz, the base requirement for successful 3D rendering.
7. FUTURE: In 2011 Sony releases motion control for the PS3
8. FUTURE: In 2012 Sony releases 3D glasses for the PS3, providing a comprehensively detailed “experience” in your living room.
9. FUTURE: 2013 Sony hints at the PS4, which will ship with all these features out of the box.
10. FUTURE: 2014 Sony demos off advanced tech for the upcoming PS4
11. FUTURE: 2015 Sony announces the PS4 for Christmas of 2015, it includes 1080p 3D rendering, full 1:1 body-motion control (no more need for devices)

The bread crumb trail is there and it all seems to point at this. I have no idea what Microsoft and Nintendo will do in response. I wouldn’t expect main-stream 3D from Nintendo until 2018 or later (that sounds like a long time, but Nintendo won’t do anything that is ‘cutting edge’, they make too much money re-selling us their last-gen game systems).

Microsoft will absolutely fight Sony tooth and nail down this path, but given Microsoft’s history with human-computer interaction, I’m going to guess their motion-mapping is going to have problems for years.

Deciding Factor: It’s cheaper for content developers to leverage their existing technology stacks, engines, frameworks and previous game assets for a long-standing platform than it is to develop new technology for a new platform. We saw this with Windows XP for 100 years and again with Nintendo Wii.

Giving game developers 10 years to develop an expertise and asset library around a platform and then letting them continue to leverage that for better and better selling titles is going to be huge. I fully expect Microsoft to introduce a new revision to the Xbox family in 2012 that will cause moaning and groaning from game companies that have to re-evaluate their tool stock and see what works and what doesn’t — starting from scratch in some regards.

It’s interesting to think about… in a few years, the PS3 might win afterall.

The enhancements that Crytek have gotten into CryEngine 3 are nothing short of amazing, specifically on the PS3. Cevat explains that over the years they have had two R&D engine teams internal to CryTek: 1 PC Team and 1 PS3 Team.

As some of you may know, developing for the Xbox 360 was made intentionally easy by Microsoft by wrapping most all of the PC-based APIs up in some proprietary Xbox 360 APIs, but for the most part leaving them intact. So developing for the Xbox 360 and PC were really straight forward, especially for companies with a long history in PC gaming like Valve — who hate the PS3.

Unfortunately it seems like developing for the PS3 has been a mind-raping experience for most developers. It was either the bare-metal APIs at launch that weren’t doing much abstraction away from the core design principle of “stream everything, nothing goes in memory” or the incredibly complex hardware — that was apparently designed to be complex intentionally.

Because of this, a good majority of the games that have come out of 3rd parties for the PS3, have been sub-par behind their PC or Xbox 360 counterparts.

Cevat explains that the two R&D teams inside of Crytek have actually been combined to move CryEngine 3 so far forward, that now PS3 is performing like their premiere platform — it’s pretty incredible when you see the detail and complexity of what they are demoing here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Something to keep in mind is that there is a lot not going on in these scenes that a finished game would need processing power to drive; like complex AI, many animated characters, complex physics, scripted sequences, sound mixing, etc. There are some portions of that in the demo, so at least we can get an idea of the ballpark they are playing in, and I’m seriously impressed.

Poker apps quickly became one of the most popular genres when Apple release the iPhone and App Store, and for good reason. Not only do millions of people around the world love to play poker, but it’s a great fit for the iPhone in general, as it lets people enjoy the game of poker no matter where they are. If you’re going to while away a few hours playing a game on your iPhone, why not do it playing poker, instead of yet another random puzzle game moving blocks or jewels around, with very little strategy or thought involved.

Apple itself quickly jumped on the poker bandwagon, releasing their internally developed Apple Texas Hold’Em app shortly after the iPhone was released. It quickly shot up the charts as one of the most popular iPhone poker apps, and for good reason, as it offers a great way for beginning and advanced poker players alike to enjoy their favorite game. The app has continued to prove to be very popular since it’s release, as it offers a quick, easy way to jump into a game of poker whenever the urge strikes you.

Apple Texas Hold’Em is primarily designed to let you battle it out on the felt with a variety of animated computer opponents. The developers built in artificial intelligence into the computer players, so they actually have their own tells and tendencies when it comes to how they play. Unlike other poker games where your opponents are mindless and easy to beat, you need to keep a close eye on your opponents in Apple Texas Hold’Em, as you can actually learn how to pick up on their tells and take more of their chips, more about Texas hold’em here.

The look and feel of the action is very polished, and you can choose from various table views and level of animation, including changing the location of the background of where the game is taking place. While the app is largely geared for solo play versus the computer opponents, you can play with up to eight friends if you all connect over a Wi-Fi network, so it is possible to play with other real players.

If you are looking to get into the action, but don’t have an iPhone and want to know more about the game you can find some great tips from this texas hold’em resouce, including official rules, strategy play and more.

Summary [ 5.5 out of 10]

King of Fighters XII brings the long running mash up series into current gen but developer Ignition apparently didn’t notice as there is very little upgrading or innovation going on here. This ‘effort,’ if you can call it that, looks and plays last gen and charging $60 for this should get you 10 to 20 and count as at least two strikes.

It can be an amusing distraction if you are playing against someone sitting next to you but mostly just makes you think of other fighting games you’d rather be playing and maybe that you should go and see about cleaning the toilet.

Introduction

I’ve at least dabbled in just about all of the major fighting game franchises since I was in high school. I always found the SNK fighters fun and interesting if not particularly original. The King of Fighters series is something of a best of collection of those games although it disregards Samurai Shodown and World Heroes. The series has seen iteration after iteration over the years and this one was meant to revitalize the series.

I haven’t played King of Fighters in years so I am not sure how much the most recent installments have flagged in quality but if this is a step-forward then I am surprised those games actually booted up when you pressed the power button. The game retains the three-on-three format in which you choose three characters and fight against your opponent’s three. If one of your fighters loses, the next one steps up while your opponent’s health bar refills a bit for the next brawl. There is no ‘tag-team’ option to swap characters but you do get to set the order in which to use them. And that is pretty much all there is to the game.

The Great

• Other Fighting Games: Seriously, spend an hour with this one and it doesn’t matter how burnt out on Soul Calibur 4 or Street Fighter 4 you are, they play like a dream.

The Good

• The Engine: The fighting engine is pretty solid. It isn’t the best or most exciting gameplay you will find but there is nothing really wrong with the basic mechanics of the engine. There are combos and strategies that work well and the character balancing is generally okay. Some of the special moves and attacks have strange trajectories and ranges but when used properly they fit well with the stylized characters. At its most basic level, the fighting system works with no major hiccups.

• Animation: All of the actions and movements are fluid and have just the right amount of style. The dynamic camera is used to good effect zooming in and out during the action and the movement looks really good.

• Character Design: The character design here is interesting and quirky. Some of the characters are fairly standard, but the majority of them are stylized and different. The hair in particular is noteworthy.

• Local Multiplayer: Playing with someone in the room with you is pretty fun. Because the engine is solid and hopefully your friend isn’t brain dead you can have some decent fights this way. You are given the option to do a straight one-on-one fight or the full three-on-three brawl. The special moves are flashy and using a pink haired school girl with sparkly magic to knock Terry Bogard on his ass is pretty funny and great for trash talking.

• Controls: The controls are pretty responsive even with the 360’s garbage d-pad. An option for Simple special moves helps level the playing field if you don’t have a fight stick or a decent fighting game controller.

The Bad

• Graphics: While the animation is top-notch the same cannot be said for the graphics. The game looks so pixelated that it would be at home on the SNES. Maybe I am spoiled at this point but the characters and backgrounds have more blocks on them than a 10-round game of Tetris. The lighting is really weird too. I think it was meant to suggest shadows but mostly it just looks like you are playing at an arcade where the monitor is about to go out. Things look intermittently fuzzy and the pretty animation gets buried in murkiness. One would think that putting a game out for the first time on current gen consoles would mean the hand drawn animation style would be sharp and detailed but one would be wrong. I think that there is a distinct possibility that I could produce smoother and more detailed characters with the basic art program on my lap top. Don’t let the screen shots fool you, when you start playing the game you will wonder if it is the same one.

• Presentation: Everything about the presentation is lack luster. The goofy anime scenes in the beginning, middle and end of the game look and sound terrible and add absolutely nothing to the proceedings aside from irritation and they take away precious seconds of your life that you will never get back. The menus are bland and difficult to navigate. This seems like a small thing but if you choose the wrong character, which happens easily as there is lag when you highlight a portrait to display the character name and model, you are unable to back out of the selection. You have to quit to the main screen and start again.Finding options is annoying and reconfiguring the controls for a fighting stick takes far longer than it should. The stage backgrounds look really bad and make no sense at all. One stage is set in Paris and features a crowd of fat women eating at tables and having epileptic fits while watching the action. At the end of the fight, a killer whale breeches and arcs behind the crowd. I have no idea why. The voice work is bad too but that is going to get its own bullet point.

• The Voice Work: Alright so I get that they wanted to have the ring announcer sound Asian. I hated when Street Fighter went to an effeminate dude saying ‘Go for BROKE!’ in the Alpha series but even he would beat what is offered up here. At the very least they could have gotten someone who can pronounce English properly. As it stands the girl sounds like Alex Borstein’s Mrs Swan character from Mad TV. I understand that in Japanese the R sounds like an L but having the announcer say ‘LEADY? LO!’ really doesn’t cut it and might actually be offensive to Asians. It is offensive to my ears anyway and I think I am owed reparations.

• No Mai: This is criminal and cost the game a whole point. What were they thinking? She even showed up in a Samurai Shodown game for godsakes and that wasn’t even era appropriate. And yeah I know she wasn’t playable and just showed up during a character’s ending but her boobs were there and that is all that matters. Poor form.

• Variety: There is none. You have a six match arcade mode, a versus mode and a training mode. That is it. Nothing unlocks, there are no extras. When you can conceivably beat the game in under 6 and a half minutes (there’s an achievement for it) you can see that this will get old very quickly. The first time I sat down with it, I beat it four times and used the remaining 20 minutes in that hour to clean out the cat box and put a pizza in the oven. Every-time you come back to play it is the same thing over and over again. Sure fighting games tend to be repetitive but most of them at least try to give you a reason to come back. Given the broken presentation and aesthetics this game seems to be DARING you to come up with a reason to play. So far masochism is the only reason I can think of that stands up to scrutiny.

• Online Multiplayer: Wow. I can’t say enough bad things about the online component. One of the coolest things about the current gen for fighting games is the ability to play other people without having to have them over to your place or go out to an arcade. Given how bad this feature is on KOF XII I wish they hadn’t even included it. Now I have nightmares about Street Fighter IV behaving this way and it makes me cry. Playing against another person online in this game is sort of like watching one of those flickering shadow boxes that animates herky jerky characters on the wall by spinning while light shoots through only with less control. The laggiest NES game in history didn’t lag as much as online battles do here. It flickers so much that I was afraid I was going to get a migraine. In a game like this with few features, a solid multi-player could have really saved it. As it is, it just sank it further in a sea of regret and squandered potential.

• Control Assignments: This is an odd bullet point because the engine is generally good and the fighting is okay but some of the characters have odd control assignments. KOF XII follows the standard fight game conventions of quarter circles forward and back and charging either back or down and then forward or up. Nothing new here, but in certain cases it seems like the control assignments for the moves were counter to the moves’ intent and got in the way of proper usage. The best example of this is Leona Heidern who is an odd charge fighter. She has an air cancelling move and a sword slash to ward off an advancing opponent. The control assignments for this are backwards and counter intuitive. If someone is performing a jumping attack, it make sense to do a defensive crouch, which would charge the move, and then pop up to counter attack. In Leona’s case the move is a charge back and forward which tends to move your character out of range of the attack and renders the move useless. Likewise, charging down when someone is advancing on you spoils the flow of movement and makes this a hard move to hit with. Things like this take away from any sense of polish and hurt the over all experience.

• Lack of Story: In my Street Fighter IV review I suggested that I would prefer no story to a half assed one that made no sense. KOF XII has made me rethink this. If you aren’t up on the series you would have no idea at all who any of these people are and why they are fighting. Having no context for the characters is a drag and in the absence of ANY other substance in the game it hurts that much worse.

Conclusion [5.5 out of 10]

I am not sure what happened here. Maybe the game was in development before there were worthwhile fighters on the market and they thought they didn’t need to make any sort of effort but with Blazblue (which I haven’t played but hear wonderful things about) and Street Fighter IV out at retail and plenty of 2D arcade fighters available online this game looks that much worse.

The gameplay can be fun but you have to work to find that fun far harder than any game should require. If it weren’t for the solid local multiplayer, it would have scored a two or three. As it is, if you have to play every KOF XII game there is as some kind of psychosis then rent it. If you buy this thing at retail at any price then you make the baby Jesus cry as well as causing God to kill a kitten. Please, think of the kittens.

If you missed it, here’s the E3 announcement trailer… did EA spend an entire 5 months on this game? I think if they had just re-skinned Fight Night Round 4 or NBA Live that probably would have been a smarter move:

Summary [8.5/10 (for fans) 6.5/10 (for anyone else)]

Set in 1991 the Ghostbusters game effectively serves as a de facto third movie This is a cannon installment in the series which will apparently be relevant to the actual third movie. Written by Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis, the game finds the Ghostbusters thriving and happy working off a new contract with the city. Business is booming and they find themselves in need of some extra help. That is where you come in. You are a nameless and voiceless new recruit to help the Ghostbusters and test new experimental equipment. When things go wrong at the Gozer exhibit and you inadvertently damage the storage facility, you find yourself knee deep in on the job training doing both new and iconic things in the series. You get to take on Slimer, the librarian and the Stay Puft Marshmellow man as well as  visiting new areas and ghosts.

Introduction

I am a big Ghostbusters fan. I saw the first movie in the theater when I was a kid and watched it so many times when it came out on video I stopped counting at 50 in the first month. I even like the much maligned second movie. So obviously when I found out that they were doing a continuation of the series with the original cast coming back to reprise their roles in voice  (except for Rick Moranis and Sigourney Weaver) I was in.  Of course, excitement aside, game adaptations of movies do only marginally better than movie adaptations of games so the outlook was pretty grim. Thankfully, unlike a lot of movie game tie-ins, this one actually tries.

The Great

• The Story: The story isn’t as good as the first movie but better than the second and is engaging and funny. I was worried initially when I heard about all the call back levels to the first movie but the return to these locations makes sense in context and you never feel like you are retreading anything at all. Everything that happens and every thing you do feels Ghostbusters and there is never a time when you are yanked out of the story by something feeling out of place. If I were watching this in the theater I would be very happy.
  

• The Voice Work: With a cast that includes Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, Harold Ramis, Ernie Hudson, Annie Potts, William Atherton, Alyssa Milano, Max von Sydow, Brian Doyle-Murray, and Joel Murry, you are in very good hands. All the main characters sound as they should and the new supporting characters are expertly voiced to match. In some cases you can hear the age in the actors’ voices which doesn’t match their younger game counter-parts, but for the most part they are all pitch perfect. There has been some criticism of Billy Murray but I found his performance just as good as Peter as it has always been.
  

• Graphics: The game looks great. The locations and backgrounds are detailed and vibrant and the characters are almost creepy at times in terms of their realism (except for the times when their eyes make them look creepy in a scary and unnatural way). Character movement looks natural and the equipment is insanely detailed. The ghost and proton stream effects are perfect looking like a cleaned up version of the effects in the movies. The visual aesthetic matches the quality in the voice acting and storyline such that the overall presentation is almost without reproach.
  

• Feel: This game just straight up feels like Ghostbusters. I am not sure I have played anything that so accurately conveys the source material. From the overall design to the things the game has you do, you always feel like you are a real Ghostbuster working along side the other real Ghostbusters. Even the level of damage you can do feels the way it should. The attention to detail is superb. They even got Max von Sydow to do the voice for the Vigo painting that hangs in the firehouse kvetching about the sorts of things dead magicians trapped in paintings kvetch about.  I can’t overstate enough that everything on this end of things is pitch perfect.

The Good

• Gameplay: The general set up of the gameplay is much like how they do business in the movie. You search for ghosts using your PKE meter and when you find them you wear them down with a proton stream and capture them in a trap. You do this a lot. If you are a fan of the movies and have always wanted to run around doing this then you are golden. If you aren’t then it may get repetitive after awhile. The game does a decent job of changing things up with a variety of equipment and upgrades and different sorts of ghosts require different techniques so it isn’t the same thing over and over all the time. Still, if you aren’t already invested in the property then you might find it somewhat tedious after the first few levels.
  

• The controls: Generally the controls are responsive and intuitive. Proton streams behave pretty much how you would expect them to and wrangling ghosts feels right. Your character can move around pretty well and can dash  Gears of War style when you need a little something extra. Swapping between weapons is generally easy although if you are a bit clumsy with the D-pad you can end up with the wrong tool at the wrong time but typically it is easy to do what it is you want to do. The accuracy of the aiming is pretty good and you won’t find yourself trying to bust the controls rather than the ghosts.

• The Equipment: The tech in Ghostbusters has always been cool and I have always wished that real ghost hunting was anything even vaguely like that. Getting to fire proton streams and trap ghosts is great fun but if that is all there was, things might get stale. Because you are helping test new equipment for your team, you get to play with some new weapons and modified old ones. The basic is the proton stream which wears the ghosts down, then you can use a capture stream to wrangle the ghosts and allows you to slam them around to loosen them up a bit more for trapping. The basic proton pack also offers a Boson Dart which functions as kind of a missile or grenade launcher. You also get a shock blast that is not dissimilar to a shot gun with a secondary stasis stream which can immobilize or stun a ghost for a few seconds. The third mode is the slime blower from Ghostbusters 2 which dowses the ghosts (or anything else) with positively charged green slime and includes a secondary slime tether mode. The slime tether is pretty cool in that you can use it to pull platforms together, open gates, pull things across the room and even yank a ghost into a trap. It is a really cool idea I would like to see expanded further if there are more games in the future. The last bit of proton pack goodness is the Meson Collider which is a rapid fire projectile that has a secondary homing feature. Unlike other games with a variety of weapons, this game encourages you to use all of these things often and in interesting ways. The only thing I never really did much with was the stasis stream.
  

• The Achievements/Trophies: It seems like a goofy thing to praise but the achievements here are actually fun to go after and provide a reason to replay outside of just seeing the story again.
• Artifacts: You have the option to use your PKE meter to track down cursed artifacts around the stages. Some are things like the dancing toaster from the second movie and others are just hilarious items that the writers have come up with. It is an interesting diversion and appear in the firehouse after you collect them.

The Bad

• The Difficulty: The difficulty is majorly uneven. If you play on casual, the easy mode for people who just want to see the story, you can blow through this game in around four or five hours. It is REALLY easy. If you go up the next notch to Experienced you will fall victim to a level of frustration unheard of since the 80’s. Now, the thing is that it is not that it is hard on a skill level where you just need to get better at the game to do well, it is difficult on holy god that was the cheapest thing I have ever seen level. Your health meter is on your proton pack which you will never be looking at when you are trying to fight anybody and if you get hit a few times you go down. One of your fellow Ghostbusters can come over and revive you but what happens a lot in the cheapest segments is that your fellow Ghostbuster will get busted in the ass while helping you. If there are only two of you then you are restarting the sequence. About midway through the game on Experienced it starts to take multiple tries to get through any given stage. Not for nothing but I don’t think you should have to replay each sequence for an hour each to get lucky enough to survive. There is some strategy involved that can help you advance but for the most part the deaths are cheaper than a one legged hooker with syphilis. I never even tried the hardest difficulty because I don’t have the money to replace a controller hurled through the flatscreen.  As a special note, there is a sequence near the end that is damn near impossible even on easy and made me want to score this game a 2. After 45 minutes I finally managed to pull it off and then proceeded to the final boss who I killed easily and without losing any life. There are SERIOUS balancing issues here.
  

• Lack of Extras: One would think with this level of fan service going on there would be some cool supplemental material here like something about the making of or some extra modes. But there isn’t anything like that. You can’t even play the Q-bert arcade machine in the firehouse.

• Replay Value: There really isn’t any unless you care about achievements/trophies.

• Online Play: The online play that is here is sort of mediocre and flat. What SHOULD have been here is an option to play through the game in co-op. Now I understand why they didn’t do that, because of the story, but dammit it still should have been available.  In its absence I reject any other online mode.
  

Summary [8.5/10 (for fans) 6.5/10 (for anyone else)]

I liked the game a lot. The story and presentation was incredible and I recommend it to anyone who is a Ghostbusters fan. The balancing issues with the difficulty is a real problem though and I doubt very strongly that any one who isn’t a fan will have the patience for it. The easy mode isn’t challenging enough to be worth it for the casual player and the greater difficulties are so broken that there wouldn’t be much enjoyment for someone who isn’t a fan. Still, there was a ton of love that went into this project and for a fan it is really great to experience. It was strong enough to get all the major players back in and kick started the plan to make an actual third movie. If you are a Ghostbusters fan then you need to play this even if it is only a rental. If you aren’t a Ghostbusters fan there really isn’t a lot here for you.

EA is up for trying this again with Army of Two: 40th Day — this time around it seems there is a lot more attention being paid to environment activity. We also saw somethings during gameplay along the lines of choosing how you wanted to handle different scenarios that you and your partner could find yourselves in. For example, Ambushing a group of hostage takers OR trying to save the hostages. Or pretending to surrender while your partner circles around on the side — or just going in guns blazing.

It’s an interesting game mechanic and I think it could lead to some fun/funny setups with a co-op human player. If the dev team takes the RPG elements further in this one with power ups and not just bejewelled weapons, I think we’ll have a winner.

You can check out the latest trailer for bits and pieces:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Summary [5.5 out of 10]

Terminator Salvation is a terrible game whose unfinished feel, technical hickups and terribly scripted sequences all punish the player for trying to play it. Terminator Salvation has the feel of a game that only had 8 months of development time in order to make it’s launch along-side the movie. I wouldn’t even bother renting this title regardless of how much you enjoy the Terminator universe.

The Great

• Nothing…

The Good

• The Cover System — It feels like GRIN pulled this right out of Wanted: Weapons of Fate and re-purposed it for Terminator Salvation… while blatant re-use like this is lame (given that the transition animations are almost the same), the cover system still ended up feeling pretty good so we didn’t mind. Not as polished as Gears of War 2, but pretty good.
• The weapon/item/NPC highlight indicators are easy to spot as they “hover” in the world like a HUD indicator which is important in a game like this with blown-out environments and rubble everywhere, otherwise it would be hard to find ammo and other items in the world.
• Your NPC team members are actually useful. You can hide for entire battles and they will take out the enemies. If the NPCs had been useless, that would have made this game impossible to play, so this was one redeeming design choice.
• LT + RT aiming and shooting worked as you would expect and felt natural.
• Hit-detection is liberal which makes up for the crappy shooting mechanic so it’s not too punishing to try and put down enemies.
• Picking up ammo and items is as easy as walking over it — I prefer this mechanic over “pressing X to pickup” type of approaches — is it odd to anyone else that this game is so barren I’m praising the ammo-pickup mechanic here? Not the sort of thing you would see in a Gears of War review…

The Bad

• Cutscenes and scripted sequences were very roughly animated — in a handful of sequences character’s mouths didn’t even move as they talked and all the animations we saw were canned “robot-esque” animations with nothing touched up by hand. So robots, humans and everything else moved in a very herky-jerky or unnatural fashion.
• Actual flow and telling of the story in the cutscenes and scripted sequences was garbage. Early on in the game you have sequences that make no sense, characters are ridiculously stupid like any D-list action movie that goes straight to rental and the Terminators behave slow, cumbersome and retarded exactly like real terminators would not. This can be summed up as “terrible acting”, but when you think of animated cutscenes that may be absurd… but you get the idea.
• Weapons sound pretty good, but feel/look terrible. Almost no muzzle flash, fire, tracers or good impact effects help to make you feel like you are firing an unimplemented weapon in an example play-level or something.
• NPCs never stop cycling the same 20 or 30 lines over and over. “We gotta get going”, “Stop holding us up Connor”, “Nice shot Connor!”, “Nice job Connor!”… usually while you are already doing something.
• You are apparently John Connor — and apparently John Connor looks nothing like Christian Bale… my guess is that the publisher knew this game would be a flop and didn’t want to lay down the cash for any likeness licensing. That kind of “attention to detail” permeates the whole game.
• Gameplay is completely predictable — you walk through some alley or blown out building, come into a “scene”, X number of enemies spawn infront of you, you kill them, and then someone says something and you move forward again.
• When you walk into each “scene” or “arena”, especially when there is a weapon you are suppose to use, enemies will “post up” at certain locations and in certain positions to ensure that you go to the right spot to kill them or use the right weapon… once you start noticing the pattern you realize this completely nullifies the re-playability — not that re-playability was a huge concern, but not even enemy AI seems to be implemented, it’s all scripted.
• There is absolutely no gore in this game… I don’t think the dev team sampled a single effect/texture that is actually “red”. I’m not saying we need to be knee deep in blood but besides being a barren experience, this game also plays like a PG-rated title which makes it mind-numbingly boring.
• The actual game didn’t look as good as any of the screenshots the Terminator marketing team released to game sites — those screenshots looked a lot more colorful and sharper, the actual game looks about 10% more blurry and less detailed.
• The weapons in the game is a pretty plain lineup of grenades, machine guns and shotguns. Not a whole lot else going on.

The Ugly

• No online co-op, just offline co-op.
• Loading… seriously, if you added up the entire play time it takes you to start Terminator Salvation, play it and finish it, 35-45% of that time is spent looking at “Loading…” screens — even for levels that don’t last any longer than 3mins of gameplay.
• Lack of effects — The game, likely due to it’s short dev cycle, lacks most world/environment effects you’ve come to expect from a shooter, overall it just ends up feeling “dry”.
• Clipping issues with gun fire (both friendly and enemy) in the environment was frustratingly rampant. Leaning out from behind a wall and shooting a rocket at an HK resulted in the rocket exploding in our faces because it clipped the wall somehow — no worries though, the useless health system kept us alive.
• Frequently we would see enemy fire coming straight through block walls and hitting us as the Terminator on the other side lay into us with no concern for there piece a massive piece of clipping level between us and them.

Worth Noting…

• If you skip cutscenes you can finish this game in 3hrs on Easy… given that it’s such a poorly executed title, I can’t figure out if this is a bad thing or a good thing…

Conclusion [5.5 out of 10]

There is nothing redeeming about this game that would cause me to recommend this as a purchase to anyone or even as a rental. Sometimes low-budget games like this will have a particular gimmick that might make them redeeming, like over the top stunts, gore or nudity — but in this case, this game literally has nothing redeeming contained on it’s disk.

Just skip it — go rent Mercenaries 2 if you haven’t for a slightly buggy game that was hilariously fun.

Areas of Improvement

Like our other game reviews, we don’t feel right criticizing a game without providing constructive feedback on what could have been better, so here goes:

• Better/More complete animations. Even more so than “better graphics”, improving the animations would have gone a long way to make the game feel like a higher-quality production.
• Online co-op
• Gore, not such PG-themed gameplay… so boring.
• Destructible environments or use of physics anywhere in the game to make the world feel more real/alive.
• Better graphics, effects, world/environment details
• Better weapons and more of them
• Introduction of minigames or QTEs for the more epic sequences/boss battles.
• Boss battles… of any kind

Screenshot Gallery

Ok so I bought into the hype-machine that is everything-Nintendo and plopped down my $19.99 for a Wii MotionPlus when it came out and along with the only other highly rated Wii MotionPlus-enabled game that launched with it: Grand Slam Tennis.

Here’s my single sentence description of the experience for everyone that was curious “Was it worth it?”:

Playing a Wii MotionPlus-enabled game with the new controller addon yielded no noticeable improvement in game immersion, realism or fun — you still end up playing “wrist tennis”.

To go more in-depth into what I mean there — even with the Wii MotionPlus addon enabled and a game that supposedly makes great use of it, the Wiimote still cannot properly discern the differences between fast hand movements and you end up executing the wrong swing.

I’d also point out there is no 1:1 or even 1:3 motion-mapping taking place here, it is still basic movement recognition used to trigger pre-scripted swings and strokes, exactly like Wii Sports 2 years ago.

NOTE: I’ve been playing tennis for years, really actively for the last 3, and playing this game felt nothing like real tennis. It felt like Wii Sports for anyone interested if you “really get to swing at the ball” or “can I really put top-spin on it?!” — no, no you can’t.

An example of the problem with motion detection is when you see a forehand coming at you, and swing your arm back to get ready for it — the swinging back motion registers in the game as a backhand instead of you preparing your forehand so your character executes a backhand in the game, inevitably missing the ball and you screaming in frustration.

I’d also point out that slices, lobs, dropshots, etc. are not done with swings of the remote, but again, just using the A and B buttons as modifiers.

This was hugely disappointing to me. I really tried to give this thing a chance, logging in about 8 hrs of gameplay in the last few days just to make sure I was “doing it right” as well as reading all the tips online — many people said to treat the side of the remote as the “face of your racket”. I couldn’t see any difference at all in the accuracy of playing with the MotionPlus regardless of the “side” of it I pretended was my racket face.

Overall the MotionPlus will likely provide excellent 1:1 motion mapping for any game that doesn’t require fast movements, but if you are hoping to finally get some awesome simulation of your favorite sports game or lightning fast sword-fighting or may light-saber fighting in the future, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Honestly, I’d sell your Wii and wait for whatever is next if that is what you want (which I do).

Summary [7.5 out of 10]

Assault on Dark Athena is a great followup to the award-winning Escape from Butcher Bay title landing just-shy of perfect due to what I can only describe as a lack of “balls”. The well paced levels, interesting NPCs and fun melee combat are all back, but instead of bumping the Riddick franchise up a notch with some more of this and more of that it just sort of re-delivers the same Riddick experience we already had.

Story

Good Enough. The story is straight forward and very in-line with the existing Riddick lore out there and picks up right after Butcher Bay’s escape. Riddick is this super-badass that tends to find himself accidentally included in some sort of crazy situation that he is forced to participate in, in order to get himself out of said situation.

The mechanic worked in Pitch Black, it worked again in Chronicles of Riddick, it worked in Butcher Bay and it works again here in Assault on Dark Athena.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The story was a bit sparse… when I would get to cutscenes that would remind me of what was going on, they were sometimes so far apart from each other that I had forgotten what I was doing. But it wasn’t really a huge issue.

Graphics

Pretty Good. I remember when I played Butcher Bay, I was blown away by the graphics from this completely unknown developer. The melee/hand-to-hand combat was phenomenal, the use of bump mapping was everywhere and the texturing and modeling of character faces was so fantastic I couldn’t believe how good the main characters like Riddick and Johns looked.

In Assault on Dark Athena, everything looked good enough that you didn’t think about it. I was never struck by anything looking fantastic and only in a few instances did I think “oh that texture is muddy”. I did notice that facial animation was excellent though, I don’t know if Starbreeze hopped on the GTA IV facial animation bandwagon with Image Metrics or not, but it was great.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The levels are pretty sparse when it comes to detail, but I didn’t ding the game’s score for this because (for some reason) I didn’t notice it until I really thought about it. Just the way Starbreeze makes these Riddick games, you never think “Where’s the bustling ship I should be walking through” like Assasin’s Creed or something, you just accept that there only seems to be like 20 people on this entire ship and it never dawns on you otherwise.

There are little environment touches that get you into the world though that I liked — like punching the wall and making it bloody in addition to busting your hands up pretty bad:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Music & Sound

The voice acting is excellent in this game. I didn’t hear a single NPC that made my ears bleed and if anything the purposefully enigmatic and confusing lines from Riddick himself were the most annoying.

Most of the NPCs are perfectly cast with voices that match their characters perfectly. One of my favorites was Dacher:

Click here to view the embedded video.

The facial animation adjoining the voices were also excellent.

The sound effects in the game were “great”, no complaints. The guns sounded good, melee combat sounded good and meaty. Environmental sounds were high quality and fit the scenes well. I think it says a lot about the quality of something when you don’t notice it as a detractor in a game — bad sound could ruin any game and good sound that stands out to the point of you noticing it above and beyond everything else is rare, so some credit is due to the Starbreeze developers for doing such a solid job with the sound.

As for music, besides the “combat” music, I didn’t actually notice any other music in the game. It’s a fairly quiet game.

Combat & Gameplay

Great. The melee combat was by far my favorite part of Butcher Bay, even though it seemed like you could always have a gun with you, I still chose to use melee almost exclusively the entire game. Fortunately the melee in Assault on Dark Athena still feels excellent:

Click here to view the embedded video.

In Assault on Dark Athena you can rarely find guns that you can keep on you as the game encourages you to stick to melee combat, especially around meat-targets (on the few levels that have many enemies or robotic ones, you get more weapon drops to use). It’s not quite as bad as Condemned where guns can only be picked up with 2 shots left in them, but it’s also not Quake.

The mechanics of shooting in Assault on Dark Athena are similar to most modern shooters, LT zooms you in and RT fires. In this case the only thing I had to “learn” was that B reloads instead of X:

Click here to view the embedded video.

It all felt pretty natural.

Climbing and stealth mechanics are again just as they were in Butcher Bay, thankfully (again) they were excellent in the first game and there was really no reason to mess with them.

Sneaking up behind enemies will ready your weapons as soon as you are within “striking” distance to initiate a context-sensitive kill (just click Attack and let the scene play out):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Conclusion [7.5 out of 10]

Assault on Dark Athena by itself is a good game, there are no qualms about that. By completely remastering and re-including Escape from Butcher Bay in the same box that makes this bundle an excellent value and “awesome” if you like the Riddick movies and the Riddick character.

What you’ll notice about Assault on Dark Athena is that it feels identical to Butcher Bay — that’s not bad, but that is what kept the game from being “amazing”. Instead of amping up the Riddick character and his exploits for us in this sequel we pick up right where we left off and keep moving forward.

This would have been a lot like if Gears of War 2 hadn’t had the improved cover system, more epic battles, awesome co-op or any of the other enhancements in the sequel and they had literally just done some new levels with no attempt at making it “bigger and badder”. Assault on Dark Athena feels a lot like that.

Overall, if you loved the first game, you’ll like Athena. If you liked the first game, you probably want to rent this.

Areas of Improvement

As with our video game reviews, we don’t feel it’s fair to criticize a game unless we can provide feedback on how it could have been better, so here is our feedback for the Assault on Dark Athena team:

• Gore… more damn gore. You have an M-rated Riddick game, I know Riddick has never really been about insane gore, but when you Ulak someone in the face or in the chest, it would have been awesome to get some dismemberment from time to time… it would have made melee combat feel much more intense.
• More badass Riddick moments — I didn’t feel like a super-calm/smart indestructable badass in this game like I did in Butcher Bay… I think part of that is the lack of NPC interactions where I can be revered. This is a really hard intangible to describe, but in the movies Riddick tends to get to be a badass when doing something super-strong or really smart to double-cross someone or kill someone else… I just didn’t get that “omg I rock!” moment. An example of what I thought sucked, is when Revas dropped down from the cieling on Riddick after he found Dacher dead… that is the type of stuff that dupes chumps, not Riddick!
• Gore… did I mention gore? Serious… punching someone’s face in just to get the screen splattered with blood and cave in their nasal cavity would have been so awesome. More specifically, either matched Condemned 2’s gore or exceeded it slightly.
• More action-oriented cutscenes.
• More context-sensitive super-kills, like with the Alpha Drone, but more often and with more characters.
• More ways to kill people — I kept the Ulaks armed almost the entire game because other weapons were boring. Guns were the most boring and for melee the hair-pin and knife were really boring to use… you just “poked” the person straight on until you got lucky with a “disarm” or context-sensitive sequence… atleast the Ulaks slashed all over the screen like crazy.
• No magical boss fight requirements. We ripped Turok a new asshole for this one and up until the 1st Alpha Drone fight there were no special requirements for killing anything… then suddenly I spend a half-hour and 30 rounds of explosive ammo only to go online and find out I have to plant 4 or 5 rounds on the thing before detonating them… god lame.

Gameplay Video Gallery

Laurence Hartje just sent me a link over to Charlie Wiederhold’s blog where he reiterates the “Chair Story”.

We were talking about 3D Realms’s announced death and thought things started to sound fishy when Laurence sent this along. At first glance “The Chair Story” sounded stupid, but it was from a 3D Realms insider from back in 2001 when the company became infamous and EPIC started taking over the world with engine licenses and game exclusives.

A few paragraphs into it I was glued to my screen. Charlie purports that a deal was hatched between the leads of 3D Realms and EPIC (Mark Rein, Cliffy B, Broussard, Scott Miller, etc.) where 3D Realms would work on Duke Nukem Forever, acting effectively as a game-engine brainstorming and R&D factory for the Unreal engine and publicly report that they were using different/incremental/better versions of “Unreal Engine” over the years while never actually delivering anything.

On the flip side, the rumor-mongering using the incomparably popular and well-known “Duke Nukem Forever” name would drive licensing sales of the Unreal game engine for EPIC.

Pretty interesting story in an of itself already. At the end of the story Charlie clarifies that in the secret meeting where everyone had to sign off on the agreement, to hold everything as a secret for decades, he was attacked by Cliffy B, Mark Reign and Tim Sweeney to the tune of getting hit with a chair, held down on the floor and threatened with shoving his face into a broken chair leg to sign the contract because:

I apparently wasn’t aware how *real* business is done and that if I didn’t want to find out why those two companies had maintained such a strong position in the industry dating back to the shareware days (when it seems people didn’t ask nearly as many questions about why developers appeared, made a game, and then disappeared without a trace)… I had better reconsider my answer.

Damn… not that hard to believe if you have the least bit of vision and could see in 1990s how many billions were on the table in the gaming industry if you were able to pull it off the table.

I wonder what Microsoft’s secret deals have looked like… I could totally see Balmer hitting someone with a chair.

Solely in the interest of archiving the post forever, it’s pasted below. Please see the original link for Charlie’s original post though.

Update #1: I’m not claiming this is either right or wrong, but it’s a entertaining read non-the-less.

Original Post

This is a story I wrote on another site in response to someone wanting me to elaborate more on a “chair story” I had referred to that happened during my time at 3DR. It’s not something I wanted to lose to the shifty waters of the Internet though, so I’m re-posting here. It’s left as is except for some typo cleanups and other minor details. Enjoy.

Note: Unfortunately due to 3D Realms’ website being down, the images will not work. I’ll try to get the originals and host them here but I don’t imagine that’s the first thing on their webmaster’s mind right now so it may take a while.

I’m going to regret writing this and probably get myself into trouble but here it goes…

This all took place at E3 2001. I don’t know who here knows much about what things were like at that E3 but I’ll give a brief breakdown. DNF was being published by Gathering of Developers. They were known for being eccentric as publishers go, but had the best booths at E3 if you could get in. Rather than putting up a booth on the main floor, they rented out the parking lot across from the Staples Center, fenced it in and blocked off visibility. You could only get in if you were on the list, or for certain specified viewing events.

They had a stage with a huge screen behind it, midgets, strippers dressed as schoolgirls, punk and rockabilly bands, etc. Beer and burgers being grilled up by Levelord. The games were demoed in cool 50’s era trailers (not so cool for game demos but hey… they made the lot look cool). This was all affectionately called the GoD lot and it’s where the booth babes from all the *other* booths came to hang out in their off time.

Needless to say there really wasn’t much reason to go anywhere else for those few days.

I’ll use pictures from 3DR’s site to help match up visuals to the story.

So for example this was the line to get into the GoD lot:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e30…g_5125.jpg.html

The Stage:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e301/dsc00092.jpg.html

sCary (Shacknews Steve Gibson) playing around in the middle of the lot:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e30…g_4712.jpg.html

Levelord grilling some burgers:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e30…g_4337.jpg.html

Chicks sucking on popsicles:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e30…g_4406.jpg.html

etc…

Strangely enough it’s hard to find stuff about the actual games being shown there. Dunno if that would have anything to do with why the Gathering isn’t around anymore.

Anyways…

The DNF 2001 trailer was out as everyone knows, and it was doing insanely well. The entire team was jazzed, people seemed to really love it and all anyone kept asking was “When the hell do we get to play this oh god!?!?!”

Before heading out to E3, George and Scott Miller had arranged a meeting between Epic, 3DR, and the people who had worked on Duke 3D but weren’t working on DNF. The intent of this meeting was… you guessed it… how best to handle the future of the Duke franchise. Epic was invited because having Duke around on the Unreal Engine was a constant PR boon for them. So they are almost just as invested in how well Duke does as 3DR (as you will see later). It was a secret meeting (there were actually two meetings, but I’ll get to that later), not even the publisher knew about it (except Mike Wilson… he was operating outside of the Gathering of Developer’s authority). The people there were Scott Miller, George Broussard, Cliffy B, Mark Rein, Tim Sweeney, Levelord, Allen Blum, Keith Schuler, myself, Brandon Reinhart, Mike Wilson, and even Todd Replogle and Ken Silverman made the trip out there.

Interestingly, Cliffy B wore his damn suits:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e30…g_5118.jpg.html

Which I don’t have to tell you was incredibly distracting and made it hard to take his points seriously. But at least we knew when he was raising his hand to speak. Due to the level of “heat” in this meeting we had to have a more formal process for speaking because we’d all just wind up talking over each other if we didn’t.

Brandon, Allen, and Cliffy on the way to the second meeting. Note that they aren’t as happy as in other pictures. There is a reason for this:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e30…g_4867.jpg.html

Don’t forget that this is what we would see when we would look out the rear window of our trailer while having our meetings:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e30…g_4509.jpg.html

The silver trailer behind Scott and George is where it was being held:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e301/dsc00090.jpg.html

Anyways…

Most of us didn’t really know what the meeting was for going into it… and for the guys at 3DR at the time, we thought it was just going to be current 3DR people. Imagine our surprise to walk in and see that group of people sitting there! I’m such a huge Duke 3D fanboy, that I have to admit was a little intimidating being in the same room as pretty much all the core guys that made the game that got me started down the path of a game developer in the first place.

Anyways (for real this time)…

Scott quickly got to the point. Max Payne was going to do gangbusters… and 3DR had some other stuff up their sleeves that would be generating so much revenue for 3DR that they could continue on indefinitely… or at least another 5-10 years… without making a dime on internal development. Scott being the marketing buff he is (and Mark Rein being pretty much the same for Epic), they got this idea for how to generate the biggest story in the history of gaming. DNF being a monster hit is fine, but it wouldn’t make “forever” history. As you can tell from the name and what I’m about to describe, Scott and George apparently had this idea from the very start but weren’t sure they were going to act on it, but there wasn’t any harm in using a name that would play into it. So in order to make “Forever” history there was only one way to do that, and that is to turn it into something completely unprecedented in the industry. Turn it into the sort of thing that will be talked about 100 years from now.

I’m sure you can guess where this is ultimately going.

See in 2001 the jokes about DNF being late and vaporware were already widespread. It had already won the damn Wired vaporware award twice. Here was the funny thing… the attention on the game was actually only getting stronger, not weaker. It was the release of the video and how it was received that put the nail in the coffin. The game just had something that nothing else in the industry had and there wasn’t any way in hell such an opportunity could be missed. The attention had peaks and valleys, but it was looking sustainable.

When Scott and George put this out there, those of us on the DNF team were furious. I felt like I had been told my childhood was just an implanted memory, my parents were really actors, and that my penis was about 50% smaller than I thought it was. What the fuck had we been doing the past 3 years? Everyone else actually seemed to already see this coming though, and took it in stride. Mark and Scott were a force to behold when they would get going on the possibilities. George seemed torn, because he loved the game and wanted to see people enjoying the stuff we had put together for the video, but he also knew this was just not something that anyone else in the industry would have a chance to try again for a very long time, if ever.

Todd and Ken didn’t say much, I think they were wondering why they were there. Levelord thought it would be fun to watch, but other than that had his own stuff going on with Ritual that was really his main focus. Mike Wilson kept cracking jokes, but he was clearly on board.

After they put it all out there, those of us on the team started to come around to what they were aiming for, and by the end of it we were bought in. It would be a lot of fun, we’d be paid well, and it would be a part of history that nothing else we would do would live up to. We didn’t quite know what we were getting into, but that’s why all the other guys were the experienced biz guys and we were young naive developers.

This was me during a break in the first meeting… I was actually wobbly in my legs and really did need to lie down:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e30…g_4841.jpg.html

I don’t think this was actually taken on any of the meeting days, but this is Mike Wilson. Ignore the label on the image… I think Joe was in a hurry:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e30…g_4710.jpg.html

The fateful video that I now wish hadn’t been as good as it was:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e301/dsc00004.jpg.html

Keith and I after the first day… trying to distract ourselves from what we had just learned:
http://www.3drealms.com/gallery/e30…g_4860.jpg.html

So about that chair?

The first meeting was really just getting everyone up to speed. We all needed time to absorb it… and what was being proposed. They needed everyone involved to buy off on it because we’d all be working through the years to maintain the plan.

The plan was actually pretty simple… create the longest developed game in history that eventually is one of the greatest games ever made. You have the time to work on it properly (no shit), so given the intelligence and talent of all the people involved, it was a pretty good bet. All 3DR had to do was make money on other stuff. All Epic had to do was open up a wide channel between the two companies. 3DR would serve as a research house for future Epic engine updates, but also give 3DR everything they did as well. The boots on the ground just had to keep the drum beating and keep the image of business as usual going. The truly hard to swallow part of this was some of us had to eventually leave, but we were guaranteed we’d be ok. All we had to do was let go of the idea of just making DNF in the traditional way… which I’m ashamed to admit was easier to let go of than I thought it would be.

In fact, with my role in this, I wouldn’t ever really work on the “real” DNF. That was a tough pill to swallow, but again the big picture looked good.

The beauty of the plan is that even though I’m telling you about it now, it is too late for it to have any negative impact on the long term goal. That’s something that took me a long term to come to grips with. It just *works* and I’ll be damned if I understand fully why or how. That’s biz and marketing brilliance for you… I just know how to put maps together or script up some gameplay. *sigh*

What Epic got out of this whole deal was basically this mystery project that is a constant “customer” of their engine, with people always speculating on whether it was updated to the newest one or not, etc. You would be surprised at how many licenses this has helped sell through the years. Who said business made any sense? Not to mention a team to just do research into engine upgrades without any pressure of actually releasing anything. Huge advantage. Notice that Epic really pulled ahead in the engine licensing business after 2001? That’s *not* an accident.

So that chair again.

We didn’t end the first chat on a particularly *good* note, but I think we were mostly exhausted… but there was an undercurrent of “can we really trust each other on this?”. That’s typical of any big business deal, but this was a case where we would be agreeing to hold this story steady for decades. Yes, decades. You don’t go into this lightly.

We all came back the next day (Cliffy in white thankfully, not red). We went around and gave our thoughts on things after having a night to sleep on it. Scott and George wanted to get paperwork signed that day if we were going to attempt it at all. This seemed *way* too soon and I didn’t have a lawyer around to read the contract or anything. I was young, but I had had enough experience by that point to know you don’t sign a contract of any significance without having a lawyer read it. Unfortunately it was made clear that this offer was active only so long as we were all in the room. Once any one of us left it was void and Scott, George, and Mark Rein (the three that put it together) would deny all knowledge. They had never done any discussions of this in written form except the contracts which Scott Miller was holding.

That was pressure… here was this deal where I would be set for life, and if I backed out of it, it would blow the whole thing for both companies and everyone involved. Not only would I be backing out of the opportunity of a lifetime, but I would also be ruined in the industry because those guys have way more power than I do. I wanted to do it, but how do you commit on such short notice and without really knowing what you are signing?

Brandon, Allen, Keith, and I kept hemming and hawing and we could tell we were really causing problems with everyone else in the room. I said that I wanted to do it, but I *had* to have a lawyer review it before I signed it. The fury in the eyes of the guys sitting across from me was literally enough to give me a third degree burn. I have *never* felt that much fear in my life. Well… up to that point at least.

I was told to think about my next words very carefully before giving my final answer. Honestly, I felt this was a test to see how well I would hold up to pressure later when we had to “hold the lie” (the similarity to “hold the line” isn’t on accident), so I held firm and said I really wanted to, but needed to have it reviewed…

oh fuck…

Faster than I can even remember (literally… I don’t remember) I was knocked out of my chair by I *think* of all people Tim Sweeney (it was a wooden kitchen chair) and was pinned on the ground by Mike Wilson and Cliffy B (he’s so much stronger than I ever expected). George walks over to my chair and fucking stomps the shit out of it until the legs are broken off. He casually picks up one of the legs that had split into a shit your pants style point and starts tossing it up and down. Scott and Mark Rein alternate on and off saying that I apparently wasn’t aware how *real* business is done and that if I didn’t want to find out why those two companies had maintained such a strong position in the industry dating back to the shareware days (when it seems people didn’t ask nearly as many questions about why developers appeared, made a game, and then disappeared without a trace)… I had better reconsider my answer.

I do remember the next part very very well though… I will never forget it and I have to admit that I have dreams about it pretty frequently.

Cliffy and Mike pulled me up and shoved my face about 6 inches from the point of the chair leg. I was drenched in sweat (the trailers didn’t have decent AC so it was already hot as hell in there)… and if they had let go of me I would not have been able to stand on my own.

George looked me in the eyes and asked me one more time what I was going to do… so at that point I did what anyone would do…

The bar for movie-tie-in games has officially been raised. In my estimation it began officially with Wanted: Weapons of Fate, right before that the Bond tie-in games were still a little weak, but after Wanted we had Wolverine and now Terminator that are both looking like pretty solid B/B+ games from what I’m seeing. The gore-fest alone that is Wolverine makes me want to play it.

Looking at the new Terminator Salvation gameplay video reminded me a lot of the Wanted cover-transition effects (which looked great, so it’s a +1) as well as some of the run-and-gun of Uncharted… I think it’s the pacing of the game that made me think of Uncharted:

Looked a little bit “shoot the machines… over and over and over”, possibly falling into the trap that Star Wars: The Force Unleashed fell into with repetitive gameplay, but who knows, there might be more under the covers.

Screenshot Gallery