Tag Archive for 'Xbox 360'

Previews of ‘Too Human’ Enjoy Story But Not Shortness

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on July 3, 2008
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Early run-throughs of Silicon Knights’ upcoming game Too Human have drawn interesting responses from critics.

Creator Denis Dyack has already promised that story will be essential to his upcoming opus, following the tradition of past Silicon Knights games such as cult classic Eternal Darkness.

Chris Kohler at Wired enjoyed Too Human’s story, a cyberpunk retelling of Norse mythology, but saw combat gameplay, not story, as the game’s main drive.

“Too Human is not the story-driven Silicon Knights title that we, the long-suffering fans of Eternal Darkness, have been waiting for these last five years,” says Kohler.

“Just as I came to grips with the gameplay,” Kohler adds, “and just as the story seemed as if it was starting to ramp up into overdrive — the game ended.” He took ten hours to finish Too Human’s campaign, which ends in a cliffhanger.

Tycho at Penny-Arcade took a more leisured fourteen hours to finish the game and was more satisfied with his experience.

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‘GTA4′ Star Dissatisfied With Pay

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on May 31, 2008
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Even though Grand Theft Auto 4 shattered records by netting over $500 million in its first week, the voice of protagonist Niko Bellic, actor Michael Hollick, is not happy.

Niko Bellic

A New York Times article on Hollick looks at just how little the aspiring actor made for his voice acting work in the profitable game. According to the article, Hollick was paid about $100,000 over the 15 months of voice acting and motion-capture work, and his contract allows for no royalties or residuals.

Actors in most other fields, including television, movies, commercials, receive residual payments depending on the success of their work after the initial payment, as per the Screen Actors Guild. Video game actors lack this protection.

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REVIEW: ‘GTA4′ Initial Impressions

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on May 11, 2008
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I picked up Grand Theft Auto 4 last week and was immediately struck by how fantastic its storytelling is.

To tell it’s gangster-themed plot of Serbian immigrant Niko Bellic’s arrival in Liberty City, GTA4 uses excellent cut scenes with great characters and writing. Niko and friends often continue the conversations while driving to mission objectives, adding more to the story and cutting down on boring grind time.

Gameplay contributes to the narrative development in GTA4, adding to the player’s immersion in Niko’s world by keeping him there. Trains, taxis and helpful paths to show you where to go on the radar make getting around the massive Liberty City easy, without the need to frequently pause the game and check the map or have a convoluted interface.

Niko’s cell phone is cleverly used to manage plots, chose which missions to do, ask Niko’s friends to hang out or help out, and to talk to characters while on a mission. It also plays other roles in the game, such as sending and receiving pictures. It’s a very good device for managing a complicated game without breaking the immersion with convoluted and show-stopping menus.

The plot for GTA4 is fairly linear, and the missions are as well. Some missions are unique, but most have Niko either hunting down a target in a scripted chase scene or fighting through a building full of enemies, and there’s really only one way to do either of those.

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A Great Year for Role-Playing Games in 2008

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on March 6, 2008
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A feature in Australia’s Gameplayer looks at the state of the Role-Playing Game for 2008. The article includes interviews with many of the genre’s top players and highlights the most promising RPGs of 2008, including Last Remnant, Fallout 3, and Fable 2.

“I would like to insist about the difference between the RPGs of the East, the J-RPGs, and those of the West, such as Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion,” says Takeahiro Kaminagayoshi, director of Mistwalker’s Lost Odyssey. “In J-RPGs, especially under Sakaguchi-san, emotion is a fundamental part of the game, as well as certain narratives, which are also extremely important to the storyline.”

Todd Howard, executive producer of the proudly Western Fallout 3 at Bethesda, puts it more simply. “We stay away from all the big cut-scene/story-telling stuff, to be honest,” he says. “We’re more fans of the ‘make your own story’ idea.” . . .

But different as they are, both types of RPG are recognizably the same species. They’re big, involved, complicated worlds that support big, complicated storylines — and they are extremely expensive to create. Really, really mind-bogglingly expensive and that’s not just expense in terms of money, but in terms of time, resources and, occasionally, sanity.

The article goes on to discuss differing treatment of story in Western and Japanese RPGs, namely that Japanese games have stories defined by the game makers while Western RPGs allow the player to create his own story. And games from both sides of the world inevitably focus on a hero achieving great heights from humble origins.

Not much to comment on here. Whether you’re into linear games or open worlds, this year promises to be a excellent one for RPG fans, especially on the Xbox 360.

‘Grand Theft Auto 4′ More Realistic Than Predecessors

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on February 28, 2008
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A preview of April’s “Grand Theft Auto 4″ at VideoGamer.com shows a departure from the almost cartoony gameplay of the past few iterations in the series.

Damage to cars affects their performance: get in a head-on collision and your car will slowly grind to a halt. Tanks, airplanes and bicycles are cut in the interest of realism. Niko, the game’s protagonist, gets text messages when he fails a mission. The world itself is more realistic, with destructible environments and animated crowds of pedestrians who do more than walk up and down the street.

A lot of what made the previous GTA games so fun and engaging were devices like the star count that could be called unrealistic, but the article is quick to point out that these aren’t being left out.

Still though, GTA 4 is no Holodeck. During my few hours of hands-on time I experienced plenty “oh yeah, this is still a game” moments that reminded me that, despite Rockstar North’s efforts, Liberty City still plays by virtual rules.

Pull a gun on a random bystander, perhaps someone casually walking down a street, or withdrawing money from a cash machine, or sitting on a bench reading a newspaper, and they’ll either run away or cower - and that’s it. Cause death-filled carnage in an area, drive the cops absolutely crazy, escape their line of sight and search radius (visible in the mini-map in the bottom left hand corner of the screen) and then return to that area, and everything will be returned to normal. Fail a mission and you’ll be sent a text message offering you the chance to reset and retry. I’m not criticising the game here. I’m just saying that you shouldn’t expect a virtual world simulation. Liberty City is quick to react, but it has a hard time remembering.

Liberty City is still a world open to experimentation. The violence is over-the-top, and satire and humor are ever-present.

It remains to be seen how much of the game will be influenced by this struggle for realism. Hopefully we’ll see a good modern crime story instead of a retelling of “Scarface” or a rap-infused gangbanger mess. Either way, I think the added realism will make what has already proven to be an incredibly immersive series even more so.

Also, Rockstar will be careful to not include a scrapped sex game in “GTA4.”

REVIEW: ‘Assassin’s Creed’ Has Immersive World, Bad Story

Published
on February 21, 2008
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“Assassin’s Creed” is more than meets the eye. Behind the roof-jumping, sword-swinging medieval gameplay is a bizarrely science fiction explanation. The modern day setting — where bartending assassin Desmond Miles is kidnapped by a mysterious corporation bent on tapping his genetic memories of medieval assassin Altair (got that?) — not only explains the Holy Land gameplay but also more conventional aspects of the game, aspects normally taken for granted.

[Spoiler Warning: This review covers many aspects of the game's plot, but does not reveal the ending or anything really significant.]

For example, when you die in “Assassin’s Creed,” you revert back to a checkpoint. Sounds normal, but it’s not. Rather than dying, the game says that Miles becomes desynchronized with his genetic memory of Altair. What appears to be a health bar is explained as a synchronization count, and going back to a checkpoint is explained as going back to a previous memory to ensure proper synchronization.

All this seems semantic, but it has the effect of turning player death, which should be a jarring aspect of a storyline, into a fully rational occurrence. (Imagine it in a book: All the main characters just died because you read the chapter wrong, and now you have to read it all over again.)

“Assassin’s Creed” draws from the storytelling technique of its predecessor, “Prince of Persia.” Both games were developed by Ubisoft Montreal, and “Assassin’s Creed” takes the platforming model of “Prince of Persia” and plunks it in an open world with a very much expanded fighting mechanic. When you die in “Prince of Persia,” the Prince tells the story speaks up and says, “That’s not how it happened.” If the Prince plummets to his death during the game, it’s a failure on the player’s part to stick to his plot, just as dying in “Assassin’s Creed” is a failure to adhere to the memories of Miles/Altair.

This “memory” theme of “Assassin’s Creed” lends itself to other aspects of gameplay. Selecting from old assassination missions to replay, while essentially just a level selector, is disguised as a menu of genetic memories. Teleporting from one town to another instantly is fast-forwarding through the memory of Altair’s travels.

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Romeo & Juliet, 2553 A.D. (A ‘Halo 3′ Machinima)

Published
on December 8, 2007
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This stupid video is why I haven’t posted (or slept) in the last few weeks. It’s a machinima of Act I, scene i, from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, acted out in Halo 3, that I put together for a class. Enjoy.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Downloadable Content for BioShock

Published
on October 19, 2007
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Ken Levine commented this week on downloadable content for BioShock. As the writer points out, BioShock with it’s very closed narrative is not the first game you’d associate with DLC.

For comparison, Half-Life 2’s episodic DLC works well with that game, extending the story after the cliffhanger ending. BioShock’s conclusion (at least the happy one I saw) tied up all the loose ends and left no room for post-plot antics. Another level just would not fit.

Bethesda has provided DLC for Oblivion since launch, with the final pack coming out next week. As an open-ended world, Oblivion readily facilitates the addition of new content, be it an expansion of the story, a new quest, a new weapon, or a new player house. The story in that game can be tackled at the player’s leisure, so it’s easy to add in a new level.

On the other hand, the Rapture of BioShock is such a tight experience that forces the player to move along a set path but in his own way. You can chose what skills to employ in combat and of course whether to save or harvest the little sisters, but you still run through the same number of levels and end up at the same boss. It’s an excellent way of telling a story, but leaves little leeway for a new level or expansion.

“Diablo II, to me, was a great model for an expansion, because it enhanced the original game, but also extended the game, too,” said Levine in an interview with Games for Windows magazine. “I’m not a really big fan of expanding things just by linearly adding to the experience, adding a new campaign, as much as I am of enhancing the original experience and adding replayability to that experience.”

“I think that certainly BioShock’s combat experience is great, but it could be broader. I’m a little more confused as far as how to expand the narrative experience,” he added.

The game is not fully linear, but there’s a definite starting and ending point, and the pacing is perfect. It could only be disrupted by attachments to the narrative. New plasmids though, that’s another story entirely. If they are implemented completely and don’t feel tacked on or useless, such DLC would be a welcome addition.

Lost Odyssey to Have 20 Hours of Cutscenes

Published
on October 3, 2007
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At a pre-Tokyo Game Show conference, Mistwalker’s Hironobu Sakaguchi revealed new information about the developer’s upcoming Xbox 360 JRPG Lost Odyssey.

One of the most surprising details Sakaguchi, the creator of Final Fantasy, mentioned pertains to game length. He estimated that Lost Odyssey will take 40 hours to beat and includes 20 hours of event scenes. Essentially, it’s Xenosaga on steroids.

The game has a deep backstory, with the cursed main character having lived for no less than 1,000 years, and many event scenes explore his accrued memories. Interestingly, much of the backstory is explored via passages written by Japanese author Kiyoshi Shigematsu.

According to Sakaguchi, there are 34 written passages, and each takes between 5 and 10 minutes to read. That means as much as 6 of the game’s 20 hours of event scenes are reading.

I understand that a good story needs depth, and many a good game employ writing to explore it, including the recent Oblivion with its library of history books. But Sakaguchi may be going to far with this, entirely divorcing gameplay from what may be necessary developments in the story. It will be interesting to see how this game is received.

Lost Odyssey will release in Japan this December.

REVIEW: ‘Halo 3′ Ending Melds Gameplay and Story

Published
on September 30, 2007
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I spoke about using plot pressure rather than actual pressure to create compelling gameplay in a previous post, and Halo 3 provides a perfect example of such a device.

[Spoiler Warning: Details on the end of Halo 3 follow.]

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