11 years ago
Alien Rage attempts to pair modern conventions with old-school speed
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.
11 years ago
Takedown: Red Sabre preview: This is your father’s Tom Clancy
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.”
11 years ago
Rumor: Microsoft no longer charging devs for patches
The cost of developing a title update may have just gone down significantly.
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11 years ago
Killer Instinct poised to be a killer exclusive for Xbox One
The first punch of the next generation of fighters has been thrown, by a classic franchise returning in top form.
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11 years ago
Opinion: No sense in worrying about third-party DRM
You’re angry, and I can understand that. You didn’t much care for Microsoft’s announcement last month that its next-generation console, the Xbox One, will feature oppressive DRM measures. The once-every-24-hours online check-in when playing on your own console and the once-an-hour check-in when playing on someone else’s is only slightly less draconian than what the public was fearing would be announced. On top of that, publishers will also have the option to limit gamers’ ability to buy, sell and trade used games.
The anger is based on the gaming public’s deduction that Microsoft’s goal is to minimize the used game market on the Xbox One. And while it does not appear poised to put forth any mandates to make that happen, it will be giving publishers, itself included, a host of new tools that will make it possible to achieve that goal. It would seem, then, that the public is right to be angry. It’s right to remain angry, too.
On Monday of last week I took my seat at University of Southern California’s Galen Center and watched as Microsoft talked about precisely what it said it would at E3: the games. That’s great, because the games are ultimately — or should be, at least — the main reason anyone decides to invest in a new gaming platform. It’s also bad, though, because it meant the platform holder did nothing to assuage gamer fears of an ironfisted Microsoft crippling the used game market.
That evening, rival Sony held its own press conference in which Sony Computer Entertainment America President and CEO Jack Tretton all but sat Microsoft Interactive Entertainment Business President Don Mattrick over a dunk tank and handed the audience softballs. Forget about bad. Things were now looking terrible for Microsoft.
11 years ago
Secret Ponchos and the virtual Wild West
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
11 years ago
XBLA is going away, and that might not be so bad
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?