Previews

We’ve been talking all week about the turtles’ return to game form and the specifics of Red Fly Studio’s plan to unchain your inner turtle. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows is trying to do a lot of interesting things. It’s attempting to merge the original spirit of the fiction with the appeal and accessibility of the new animated series. It’s injecting personality into the titular characters, not just in their dialogue, but their combat styles and mannerisms. It’s building a fighting scheme that’s trying to marry fast and fluid with balance and intuition and imbue elements of control and variety more closely at home in a fighting game than a brawler. It’s attempting to do all of this, but at the end of the day, it’s still a game – so let’s talk about gamification.

There’s no place like home

If Out of the Shadows excels anywhere, it’s in going the extra mile to incorporate all those little pieces of Turtles fiction that really drives home the experience. The game’s main menu structure, which could have been a series of colored rectangles: Campaign, Mission, Extras – has been smartly incorporated into the turtles’ interactive underground headquarters. You’ll roam the halls and visit the many facilities, each one with a unique purpose, as Frechette explains.

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“I wanted to take the balance of Arkham Asylum, you know – when to attack, when to counter, that balance – and add in more of a fighting game element,” says Chris Frechette, Lead Designer of Red Fly Studio’s upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows. He wants to bring more control and variety to the scheme, as he says, “Recognizable combos and special attacks so you feel like, ‘I just did that,’ and it’s not just a random attack.” Frechette has been guiding us through his action brawler, intent on recreating the fast and fluid teamwork-centric combat that’s the cornerstone of Turtles fiction.

When it comes to three-dimensional fighting schemes, it’s hard not to consider Arkham Asylum’s one of the greatest of the generation. It’s easy to pick up and play, empowering when employed against the mobs of thugs and street-trash that attack from all sides, and it’s extremely difficult – and rewarding – to master. But Frechette isn’t content to just repurpose what’s been done. As he walks us through what to expect when Out of the Shadows arrives, it’s clear he’s aiming for a whole new level of combat.

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In our last look at Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows we learned how Red Fly Studio plans to bring thirty years of TMNT fans together. That’s no simple task. The TMNT name has been scattered to the wind since shortly after its inception, divided among the many incarnations of the fiction, each with their own differences. There are fans of the comics, fans of the movies and fans of the many animated shows. There’s no right way to appreciate the Turtles, it would seem. But as XBLAFans delved further into the game, guided by Lead Designer Chris Frechette and his passion for Out of the Shadows, we discovered the unifying appeal might be the differences in the turtles themselves.

If there is one universal truth that pumps through the heart of every Turtles fan past, present or future, it would seem to be this: everyone’s got a favorite. The dynamic personalities of each turtle are anchor points to latch onto, letting you identify with a personality that mirrors your own. Individually they hold their own strengths and weaknesses, but together they rely on one another to form a fighting force. Whether you’re the intelligent one, the honorable one, the funny one or the tough one, you’re represented in the diversity of the heroes in a half-shell. It’s a powerful sentiment that Red Fly Studio aims to leverage in its forthcoming title.

“One thing we wanted to do was not only have their personalities represented in their bodies and their facial animations, but blend that into combat in a way that hasn’t been done before,” Frechette says. He’s loaded up the Shadowboxing mode in Out of the Shadows, where players will be able to get a feel for a turtle and his unique combat style. Unlike earlier games in the Turtles saga, Out of the Shadows will incorporate separate fighting disciplines for each turtle, bringing their personalities to life during combat, not just when they’re cracking wise and talking trash.

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“I was a huge fan as a kid. I had the toys, watched the movies, memorized the soundtracks,” says Chris Frechette of Red Fly Studio, Lead Designer on the next chapter of the Turtles’ (TMNT) tale. He’s seated at the other end of a small demo room littered with consoles, peripherals and colorful cushions. To his right sits Shaun Norton, Public Relations Director at Sandbox Strategies, who invited XBLAFans to tour the forthcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows from Sandbox’s West Coast office, tucked away in an unassuming San Francisco backstreet.

Everyone in the room is a professed Turtles fan – it’s a safe place. We reminisce about TMNT: the films, the comics, the action figures and the animated series. We chat while the big-screen TV loops a placeholder Turtles tune from the ‘90s, fueling the nostalgia-laced conversation. It’s here that we discuss why the has-been franchise is ready for another run, and why Out of the Shadows is more than just a license – it’s fate. Read More

In a time when a lot of games are stretching themselves to incorporate co-op as a selling point, some game developers have slapped the feature onto their games in a way that feels forced, gimmicky and even annoying. Other games integrate co-op perfectly, yet they sometimes make players feel as though they’re playing simultaneously but not necessarily playing together. Former Ubisoft developers Simon Darveau, Malik Boukhira and Atul Mehra set out to crack the co-op code and deliver something that is cohesive, exciting and truly cooperative. Their creation is Tiny Brains, the first title from their startup independent studio Spearhead Games.

A mad scientist has imbued four lab rodents (that’s you) with superpowers and placed them into test tank puzzles. The catch: each rodent has a different power, and you will need every one to solve your way to freedom. The four rodents are named after the powers they wield: Force, Vortex, Teleport and Create. This forces you to communicate, brainstorm, experiment, coach and encourage each other. Every player is needed for success to be possible, so every player contributes. When you succeed, you succeed together.

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If PAX East 2013 is remembered for anything, it will undoubtedly be the contagion that swept the showroom floor. It wasn’t some handshake-induced strain that whipped through attendees and across the vast reaches of the internet. It was something far more potent: the long-dreamed resurrection of DuckTales and its infectious tune, spreading with airborne hums and whistles. By day’s end nowhere was safe, and among the eager mobs huddled around Capcom’s display booth hoping to catch a glimpse of their childhoods, it was ground zero.

When sounds of the infectious DuckTales Remastered theme song caught the ear of XBLAFans, we naturally investigated. We were intent on finding the culprit, daring to believe rumors of the nostalgic possibilities at the end of the line. What we found was Capcom Senior Product Marketing Manager Matt Dahlgren manning an arcade machine surrounded by toe-tapping onlookers and a flurry of questions.

“The whole game has been built from the ground up. They did start with the 8-bit version but everything’s been layered on top of it,” said Dahlgren, speaking of developer WayForward Technologies. “It has hand-drawn and animated sprites – the game looks like the cartoon.”

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“To take what everybody loved about Sanctum and elevate it,” Reverb Publishing’s Ted Lange says, speaking to the motivation behind Coffee Stain Studios’ upcoming sequel. Lange is leaning comfortably in his chair, discussing Sanctum 2 with XBLAFans in a small white room on the second floor of a San Francisco gallery. As point man for the game, you would expect a flurry of information and glossy rhetoric about the many wonderful things that are in store. But Lange exhibits a calm enthusiasm, content to let the game speak for itself — which says quite a bit.

The original Sanctum released exclusively for PC and Mac markets, garnering praise for its innovative concoction of methodical tower defense and furious FPS elements and selling notably well for an independent venture. Though there were criticisms. Sanctum shipped with only three maps and a similarly restricted number of weapons. There were no connecting threads between each of the maps or explanations for these vibrantly glowing aliens in the first place. Who was this spunky redhead with an arsenal of future-tech? Why must she single-handedly stem the onslaught?

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The pesky mythological creatures filled the sky, regularly swooping down to wreak havoc on the undead rock band engaged in a fracas with other, less well-intentioned zombies below. Our group of zombie rockers had been punching, grabbing and throwing its way through the streets towards a cemetery for maybe 15 or 20 minutes at this point, with seemingly everyone but the screaming living trying their darnedest to send us back to hell for good. There was enough chaos being caused by the slow, lumbering zombie baddies and occasional “accidental” punching of each other that the airborne aggressors were being largely left to their own devices.

But there is only so much pushing that a bulky undead drummer is willing to take before he grabs an agitator by her throat and repeatedly smashes her face into the ground. It had fallen to me to make the skies a little friendlier, so that’s what exactly what I did at PAX Prime while playing Ska Studios’ Charlie Murder. Another scream escaped from her throat as she bit the dust, and that was that. However, the magical flying creature impeding our progress had friends. Well, two can play at that game. The other members of the group had continued on their merry little way pummeling the crap out of the enemy zombies, causing various pickups to drop, including guns.

A few pulls of the trigger later and the XBLA Fans crew had achieved complete air superiority. The screams of a unicorn ringing through the headset were music to my ears. On-screen, the tormentors actually took the form of witches on broomsticks, but they were voiced by the studio’s very own one-horn. Ska Studios Art Unicorn Michelle Juett-Silva smiled proudly when explaining that she and her husband, Lead Dishwasher James Silva, had performed nearly all of the voice-over work for their game.

Another stretch of the demo showed off the unicorn’s pipes even more. A quick cut-scene showed some NPCs attempting to escape from the zombies with their lives intact by navigating through the clearly haunted cemetery. They ran right smack into a ghostly little ghost that bore a striking resemblance to the girl from The Ring. (Silva would later admit that they are indeed his homage to Japanese horror films.) The girls can’t attack, but operate more as environmental hazards moving in fixed patterns. Coming into contact with them elicited one of Juett-Silva’s recorded screeches and meant death for the player.

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The XBLA Fans team is unable to say for certain whether or not stepping on a butterfly in the past can drastically change the future. However, members of the crew that made their way over to Capy Games’ booth at PAX Prime last month did discover that blowing away a gun-toting Tyrannosaurus rex and the asteroid responsible for the Big Bang will, in fact, do just that. The good news is that all political arguments can stop, because playing through the latest build of Super Time Force has revealed next month’s election winner here in the U.S. — a T-rex. Talk about the ultimate second form of a boss.

If you’ve been following Capy’s game at all, and shame on those of you who have not been, then you already know it’s centered around a dysfunctional group of what Capy refers to as “time-traveling ultra-badasses.” Their leader, Colonel Repeatski, had them zipping into the future to fight in outer-space after battling their way through a crumbling city when last XBLA Fans played Super Time Force. This time around, however, the Toronto-based indie dev had a new level on display, one set in prehistoric time. Its final section has players running along the enormous wings of a Pterodactyl while fighting the infamous dinosaur-obliterating asteroid in a desperate attempt to save the ancient reptiles from extinction. The whole experience felt like the SHMUP level the pre-adolescent me would have dreamed up about 20 or so years back. In other words, it was totally radical, dudes.

As much fun as blasting away dinos with a bazooka or a sniper rifle is, though, one had to wonder just what the hell the Force was hoping such an absurd endeavor would accomplish. Apparently they have the noblest of intentions: save the world by altering historical events. Unfortunately, they execute on that plan about as successfully as Marty McFly and Doc Brown did in the film trilogy that all time-traveling works of fiction must ultimately be compared to. “It’s like Back to the Future, right? The best of intentions but you always [expletive] it up. Because the thing is, they can go back and fix it after they’ve tried to fix it but broke it,” Nathan Vella, co-founder and president of Capy, told XBLA Fans.

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“This is by far the largest and most ambitious XBLA game ever made. No question,” Undead Labs CEO Jeff Strain said matter-of-factly of State of Decay when we spoke at PAX Prime. Though XBLA Fans has been unable to verify that claim, my brief time with the sandbox zombie game proved this much, at least: it’s huge. To put a measurement on it, Undead claims the overworld is 16 square kilometers.

In the demo, the player arms himself with a pistol and walks outside into deserted Anytown, USA. It is quickly apparent that not all living(ish) creatures have actually vacated the municipality. A few zombies shamble towards the player, as zombies are wont to do. Years of zombie games have prepared gamers for this situation; unloading a few shots into their noggins should eliminate the threat with little drama. Indeed it does, but they’ve got friends, and my, what big ears they have. There are small clusters of the undead doing their shambling thing on every block in sight. The unmistakable sound of gunfire alerts a couple of groupings of the town’s 99 percent, and, not the least bit concerned over the prospect of parting with the rotting lumps atop their necks, they quickly converge on the player’s location.

The first ones on the scene go down easily enough, but they just don’t make pistol clips big enough for this sort of job. Thankfully, Detroit was kind enough to make bumpers for just such an occasion. Jumping in an abandoned car, I stomp on the throttle and attempt, unsuccessfully, to make a controlled turn around the block. True to real life, the ’70s-looking muscle car is uncontrollable in anything other than a straight line.

Attempts to regain traction don’t go so well — not for me or for the zombies who thought it was a good idea to hang around in the middle of the road just past the intersection where irresponsible drivers are wont to swerve through, not the least bit concerned about braking for pedestrians. Zombies fly like bowling pins, inspiring another go at the group a bit farther down the road. The Undead Labs representative recommends motoring right on by to the side of them and hitting B. The car’s door is kicked open, and more zombies meet their end. At this point, it wouldn’t have been surprising if State of Decay‘s zombies began chanting “Braaaaaakes!” instead of “Braaaaains!”

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