Feature List

“So the basic idea being, what would happen if you could become your shadow, and I’ll start walking on shadow lines in the world. That really, at its core is where the game concept first evolved. In the same way as Portal, I wanted to create a mechanic that really fit well and [you could] learn well. So something that had enough depth that as long as there is a light source in the game you can become a shadow and use this mechanic in several ways.”

This is how Compulsion Games Studio Head Guillaume Provost presents his game to XBLAFans and a smattering of other members of the games media. He does it behind closed doors at Contrast‘s Electronic Entertainment Expo booth. It’s a little backwards. Having played the demo half an hour ago, I’ve already walked on the shadow lines to which Provost refers. I’ve already manipulated the power of light to illuminate a cabaret stage and subsequently born witness to a less-than-harmonious meeting of lovers after the close of the show for which I played at stagehand. I’ve already become a shadow to platform across the dark contours of merry-go-round horses at an eerily deserted circus in an old town.

Now, after they’ve already been experienced, these things are explained for the first time, and that leads into some questions. Chief among our curiosities are finding out who these characters are and what it means when they become shadows. Provost and Complusion’s public relations and community man, Sam Abbott, are mostly forthcoming with the answers. Mostly.

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Standing in front of a PC demo station at E3, City Interactive Creative Director Steve Skelton describes Alien Rage to XBLAFans as a shooter that takes “the modern sensibilities of shooters — you know, control setup, mechanics, and applying the old-school fun and games, run and gun, frenetic action to it.” Unfortunately for fans of that style game, that pairing has considerably slowed down the raw speed of Unreal Tournament and Quake III (the “old-school” games mentioned by the developers as inspiration) to create space for those modern sensibilities.

Alien Rage takes place on a space station in which something has gone horribly wrong – the premise is not unlike that of the first episode of the classic Doom. There are no hellspawn here, however. The playable level pitted us against aliens that might remind older players of the first Predator film, complete with invisibility on a select few of them (these cause distortion to the surrounding air and environment, a particularly nice effect).

Since so much of City Interactive’s efforts were spent attempting to channel the magic that makes Unreal Tournament such a fondly remembered classic, it’s worth exploring some of those elements more specifically. Part of what made the late-90s/early-2000s generation of PC shooters what they were was that there were no limitations on the number of weapons a player could carry, which allowed players to be extremely creative in finding solutions to problems. Taking out an enemy around a corner in Unreal Tournament could be accomplished by setting a series of traps down with the bio-rifle, by bouncing a grenade off of the far wall or by detonating a shock rifle combo that would reach around the corner with its massive explosion.

Alien Rage limits the number of available guns to two, following the conventions of more modern shooters such as the Halo series. This means that while the player may have up to two or three different strategies for any given encounter, the full range of options will never be simultaneously available.

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He knows what he wants, Christian Allen does. He’s known since the start. Even before the start, actually. Before Takedown: Red Sabre’s 2012 Kickstarter campaign successfully raised over $200,000, Allen, creative director at indie development studio Serellan, knew he wanted to go back.

He wanted to take gamers back in time. Not too far, only a few years. Back to a time when “tactical” shooters felt more, well, tactical. They had realistic combat — or as close as video games of that could come to approximating it, at least. The Tom Clancy video games from early last decade didn’t play anything at all like the myriad Halo, Gears of War and Call of Duty releases that dominate today’s shooter market. Certainly there is nothing inherently wrong with the approaches those games’ developers have taken to creating an FPS. There is something wrong, though: most everyone else is trying to make the same games as them.

Not Allen and his team at Serellan. Allen knows what he wants, and it isn’t Halo or Call of Duty. Lucky for him, he seems to have a team that knows how to deliver it.

Being a team player

He estimates that the least amount of experience anyone at Serellan has is eight years. Each member of the team has shipped multiple shooters for multiple platforms. As for Allen, between 2002 and 2007 he worked for Tom Clancy factory Red Storm Entertainment on various titles in the Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six franchises — tactical shooters. I ask if that deep and varied shooter development background meant Takedown would feature a lot of different concepts.

“I wouldn’t say it’s about concepts, because we’ve had a really clear vision from day one about what we wanted gamers to experience,” Allen responds. “The great thing about the different devs is that we’ve all shipped at least a billion dollars in revenue of games and almost exclusively shooter titles. So I know, for example, our weapons artist, our character artist, our environment artist — they know how to build shooter levels and content that works, so I can really fire and forget.”

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The cost of developing a title update may have just gone down significantly.
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Today it’s all about randomness.
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The first punch of the next generation of fighters has been thrown, by a classic franchise returning in top form.
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Generations after the release of Sergio Leone’s classic western movies, two game developers from different companies sat back to listen to the iconic music. As the trumpets sang of the modern gladiators pining for infamy, these gamers looked at each other and instinctively thought, “We have to make a fighting game out of this.”

This is more or less what Yousuf Mapara told us back at PAX East where his studio, Switchblade Monkeys, showed off Secret Ponchos, a game has grown from a clubhouse hobby project to a unique take on competitive multiplayer.

After a brief look, we instinctively described it as a third-person isometric-action twin-stick shooter. “Yeah, that’s a cool way of describing it,” Mapara, the game’s creative director, agreed. “You know, it’s a hard game to describe, because you can’t say it’s a team shooter, you can’t say it’s a fighting game, you can’t say it’s a MOBA, but it has a little bit of everything. That’s what we like — we made up something that’s its own thing, but once you play it it feels really natural. It’s reminiscent of something… but I don’t know what it is.” Read More

Xbox Live Arcade is a dead platform downloading. Microsoft’s designated home for small and inexpensive downloadable video games will not make the jump to the next generation. When the Xbox One releases later this year, all of its video games will live in the same space. The nearly nine-years-old Xbox Live Arcade might continue to exist on the Xbox 360 and slowly fade away during the transitional year(s), or Microsoft might quickly yank it like a Band-Aid through a dashboard update. In either case, XBLA has been read its last rights.

One day soon, gamers everywhere will turn on their Xboxes and find all available games under an aptly named Games section of the dashboard. It’s tempting to read this move as another case of Microsoft pushing independent developers farther away from the green glow of the Xbox spotlight. It’s tempting to assume that the new dashboard will shine that light even brighter on big-budget game releases and multimedia options, and that may well end up being the case. However, some indies, believe it or not, actually enjoy working with Microsoft. Additionally, Microsoft’s Phil Spencer told Eurogamer that he feels the new layout, which includes a recommendation system, will “solve fantastically some of the challenges that independent developers face, particularly around discovery and connecting their game to an audience, by some of the platform features we have in the machine itself.”

We’ll have to check back in a few years into the Xbox One’s life to verify whether or not Spencer spoke truly — but no one wants to wait that long. So here and now, what does the elimination of Xbox Live Arcade mean? Will it continue the Flight of the Indies? Or will it better a system that obviously has more than a few kinks and bring back the downtrodden and departed?

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Yesterday, Microsoft pulled back the curtain on its next-generation home game console. Dubbed “Xbox One,” the machine will hit retail shelves at an unannounced date later this year. With E3 right around the corner, Microsoft held back much of its next-generation software, among other things. Still, much was shown and discussed during the console holder’s presentation, and XBLAFans has more than a few feelings towards it all. Read on to find out how we’re feeling about the Xbox One’s look, TV and Kinect focus, lack of game announcements and more.

Nick Santangelo: Let’s start with the obvious. Microsoft came right out and showed the new controller, Kinect sensor and console. Sony of course showed its PlayStation 4 controller back in February but not the console, so that was a pretty big departure. Were you guys happy to see what the box actually looks like? Does that matter to you? Did you like the hardware design?

Ryan Thompson: I thought the design was excellent. I especially enjoyed the textured analog sticks on the controller, which are taking a beat from the MLG Pro Controller, it seems.

Shawn Saris: It was nice to see. It looks like what I had expected. They kept it pretty straightforward, although it does seem a little bland, more like a cable box and not a console full of power.

Shawn Ryan: It’s a bit boxy, but I personally love how it looks. I don’t mind the size either. The controller looks like a great evolution of the 360 design, and to me it just looks “next-gen.”

Ryan Thompson: “Like a cable box” is an excellent observation. (Editor’s note: Perhaps “like an alarm clock” is a more apt comparison.)

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Thanks to our friends at Kalypso Media and Reverb Publishing, we have another great console prize package to give away. As listed above, we are giving out the custom 250 GB Alien Spidy Xbox 360 and more! We were very excited to get a hold of this prize package, but we’re not keeping it for ourselves. One lucky site reader will be gaming on this console very soon! All you need to do to enter this contest is answer the following question in the comment section below:

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