Daylight. It's a rare commodity in the world of Resident Evil, a series typically entrenched in the unrelenting bleakness of underground sewers, hidden laboratories, bubbling swamps, and, more recently, medieval castles. But in this, Resident Evil's fifth incarnation, daylight takes a leading role in helping redefine gaming's premiere survival-horror series, shoulder-checking the rejuvenated zombie-blaster out of the darkness and into the light.
WHILE SHINJI MIKAMI, creator of the Resident Evil series and the driving force behind Resident Evil 4, has since moved on to other projects outside of Capcom, the creative nucleus of the Resident Evil 5 team-Kota Suzuki (sound composer), Yoshiaki Hirabayashi (art director, cinematics), Yasuhiro Anpo (director), Jun Takeuchi (producer), and Masachika Kawata (coproducer)-seem to have things well in hand. In the latest episode of RE musical chairs, Capcom's swapped out pretty-boy special agent Leon Kennedy for Resident Evil O.G. Chris Redfield, except this time he's accompanied by the lovely Sheva Alomar (a fellow BSAA?that's Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance?member). If every major installment of the RE series featured one principal innovation, then RE5 features two. Daylight, as we've established, is the first major shift in this chapter of RE lore. It's fair to think that survival-horror's a lot more frightening in the dark, but with a large portion of RE5 taking place outdoors and in the searing African sun, there's almost nowhere to hide...and that brings its own brand of terror. After all, it's hardly any more comforting to see the rabid, dozen-strong zombie mob than to merely hear them coming in the darkness. You might also think that having a partner with you the whole time-the second major innovation-might lessen the fear, but it's actually more stressful to see that buddy disappear underneath a swarm of plague-infected villagers.
Sure, retro-chic fare like Mega Man 9's all the rage now, but the trend of new, purposefully old-school releases arguably started with last year's Japanese import Game Center CX: Arino's Challenge. XSEED's publishing the localized DS collection as Retro Game Challenge, set for a January release. (For a more in-depth look at the overall game, check out our preview of the Japanese version.)
As in the Japanese version, Retro Game Challenge is based on the low-budget, highly successful Japanese show Game Center CX, but it makes little allusion to the program. Even the game's introductory sequence eschews emcee Shinya Arino's connection to the show as the host, simply referring to him as a man who "suffered countless defeats from his friends" at "current-gen" games, went crazy, and turned into an electronic demon. Arino then sends you back to his childhood of the '80s, when he actually had skills (the real-life show features Arino trying to complete retro games over the course of a day). The reworking's definitely a double-edged sword: There's little point in referring to a show that doesn't (yet) have an international version, but few players will know or care about this "Arino" character anyway, so it comes off a little weird regardless.
You know a franchise is oversaturated when it feels like a clich? to mention that there are too many games using its license, but that's Naruto. Fortunately, it's a license with mostly well-made games, so to help clarify what makes Broken Bond (the follow-up to last year's Rise of a Ninja, and Ubisoft Montreal's second Xbox 360 Naruto game) unique, we spoke with producer Stefan Cardin.
1UP: What's your approach with the playable Sasuke portion of the story mode?
SC: One of the core values that I wanted to work with was friendship...and also the rivalry between the two best friends Naruto and Sasuke. We didn't just want to add Sasuke's story in like a scripted event or cinematic. We wanted the player to really feel the emotion and understand why Sasuke decided to leave Naruto and his village. That's why we put him in as a standalone playable character, with his own powers, with his own missions -- to really make the player understand his personal struggle.
I wasn't sure what to expect when Square Enix invited me and Game Developer magazine's Christian Nutt to have dinner with the creators of The Last Remnant. Mainly awkwardness, I suppose. It's difficult to have a casual, relaxed conversation with Japanese developers, which is more a matter of cultural barriers than language; Japanese devs tend to be guarded around the press, and Square Enix's creators doubly so. Much to my surprise, though, the men behind Remnant were open and relaxed. Surprisingly, they didn't come to hype their game but rather to engage in a frank, informal discussion about the differences in tastes between the American and Japanese markets. Ironically, though we barely talked about Remnant, by the end of the night I found myself more and more intrigued by -- and excited for -- Square's next major title.
And make no mistake, this is a Square title. Even after the better part of a decade, Square Enix is very much two companies, and Remnant has all of the hallmarks of its Square half. It's internally developed, for one; while all Enix properties are created by outside collaborators like tri-Ace and Level 5, this is a strictly in-house project. In fact, at launch it will be Square Enix's first internally made title for the current console generation. It's also Square's first new in-house IP since 2001's The Bouncer. And it's the work of an impressive number of company veterans led by Hiroshi Takai, whose r?sum? includes a number of SaGa, Mana, and Final Fantasy titles stretching back to his work on Final Fantasy V's exceptional combat system.
If you haven't figured out by now, getting hands-on with the campaign of a Halo title tends to be a long, arduous process, which, if nothing else, seems to signify that the game is almost done. That the time for talk is over, and with the game in the final stages of polish and tuning before release, the developers finally let us play the damn game instead of merely talk more about it while showing off a snazzy looking demo. For this recent hands-on session with Halo Wars, not only did we play the first few missions of the single-player campaign, and checked out the Covenant army in skirmish mode, but we did it threefold. Why read one guy's take, when you have three fellows ready to jump in and command a bunch of Marines around? Get ready for the RTS Roundtable starring Anthony Gallegos, Thierry "Scooter" Nguyen, and Justin Haywald.
Scooter: I've seen and written a fair bit about Halo Wars, but this is the first time I've actually played it. My instant impression: Solid! First thing's first: at least within the first three missions, I noticed a distinct lack of Spartans. I have no idea which mission they are introduced in, but you'll have to make do with Marines, Warthogs, and Scorpions for a bit. Additionally, these first three levels were firmly stuck in the "we gotta go easy on the newbies" territory. The first tutorial is all about using the analog stick to move the camera around and spamming the X button to make things go. A cynic would say that it's the game talking down to the player as though he's an idiot. I say it's giving a generous learning curve to the legions of Halo fans who will most likely pick this up, despite not being RTS fans at all (especially thanks to the Halo 3 multiplayer maps included in the Limited Edition).
The Chase tells the story of Felix and Felicity, two people who meet by chance, instantly fall in love, and plan a first date for the beach. Yeah, it's a weird setup, and it's a weird game, too -- rather than saving the princess, your reason for playing is to make it to your date on time. It's like The Running Man for kids and without the extreme violence.
Apart from the trappings, the game acts like a platformer with a few twists. You move with the face buttons rather than the D-pad, which looks like it should work since your character is almost always in motion and it's up to you to guide him (or her, depending on which character you choose). You also have the ability to draw lines on the screen ? la Kirby: Canvas Curse, and these act as platforms to help you make jumps and reach new areas.
50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, the follow-up to the much-maligned 50 Cent: Bulletproof, changes the locale from 50 Cent's hometown of New York City to an unnamed burg in the desert that you would assume is somewhere in the Middle East. In the interests of good taste, the developers stressed that it doesn't actually take place in the Middle East -- it's actually set in a fictional place that just resembles a real place, much like Outer Heaven from the Metal Gear franchise. That's right -- a developer just dropped a Metal Gear reference when talking about 50 Cent.
Now I'm sure you're wondering how 50 Cent ends up in the "not Middle East" fighting "not Arabic (honest!)" militants and how an entire game comes out of this premise. Well, here goes: After a sold-out show at the local arena, 50 Cent and the G-Unit go collect their money, only to find that the promoter doesn't have it because the local guerillas robbed him. Notice the "ue" there -- that's important in differentiating them from the Gorilla-Unit (the good guys). After 50 Cent holds the promoter at gunpoint, threatening to blow him away lest he gets paid, the man offers 50 Cent an ancient diamond-encrusted skull as compensation for his 90 minutes of rapping. Soon after, the G-Unit gets ambushed, the skull's stolen, and the game begins.
Now that 2K's College Hoops franchise is a dropout, NCAA Basketball 09's the lone college hoopster on the market this season. That's bad news for 2K fans/purists -- the 2K titles have trumped EA's offerings the past two seasons -- but the good news is that EA's baller has undergone more than just a name change (the series had been branded as March Madness). This installment's made significant strides by cleaning up dozens of tiny gameplay air balls that kept it from my Xbox 360 starting lineup last year: NCAA now shares the gameplay engine with the much-improved NBA Live -- a smart way to improve both titles, and pretty much the only way to compete with NBA 2K9, the best hoops option on the market right now.
NCAA Basketball 09 sports two back-of-the-box additions this season: team tempo and coach feedback. The former feels a little forced and doesn't really offer much of an impact, though. You'll choose the style of play you want to implement -- find open shots, crash the boards, and so on -- and the game sets a tempo based on your decisions. If you play to that tempo (shown as a meter at the bottom of the screen), you'll supposedly have more success. If your opponent wins the tempo battle, they'll have more success. Personally, though, I'm a bigger fan of last season's momentum meter.
Mirror's Edge generated a fair bit of hype when it was debuted, and its parkour-inspired platforming from a first-person perspective was enough to grant it a cover story in the October issue of EGM. We even recommended it as far back as February in our Decision '08 feature, and more recently highlighted it as one of the Best of E3 2008. Perhaps taking all this as a positive sign, EA has already taken cues from various big franchises and planned it as a trilogy.
Of course, all of this excitement came at a price, and Mirror's Edge has had enormous pressure put on it to live up to expectations. In an early preview, our own Nick Suttner said, "whether its creators want the pressure of the attention or not, [Mirror's Edge] has been pegged by the press as having the potential to be a triple-A, genre-changing title."
The game has finally released this week, and we've combed the reviews of various gaming sites to see if it's managing to live up to expectations. While the game is getting generally positive reviews, the constant deaths seem to frustrate some critics. Certainly it's a game that relies on trial-and-error, and a reviewer's patience for the "error" half seems to be a major factor in just how much a review score is marked down.
Because of a recent delay, the newly titled FEAR 2: Project Origin is now scheduled for an early 2009 release. Which is probably for the best, considering how many other high-profile shooters have come out in the past month. But with those releases behind us, we felt it was time to take a look at what's coming next -- read on for an interview with associate producer Eric Studer, and head over this way to check out an exclusive video feature on the game's story provided by Monolith.
1UP: Do you view story as a bigger factor in FEAR 2 than it was in the original game?
ES: I don't know that I would say the story is a bigger factor, but we've gone to great lengths to ensure that it resonates with players more than it did in the first game. FEAR had a very deep story, but you had to want to discover it through the process of listening to voice mails and investigating laptops. For FEAR 2 we've integrated the storytelling into the gameplay more significantly. You will spend more time with other NPCs, the story will occur as you're playing, and the use of collectable items has been reduced significantly to lower the commitment required from the player to become invested in the world.
Why is Animal Crossing: City Folk's release date set for November 16, a mere two weeks before my shared-with-Shane birthday? To give you enough time to wrap my present, of course! "But the world doesn't revolve around you, Alice," you say. And to that, I respond, "In Animal Crossing, it does!" And the social simulation series' third installment for the Wii, City Folk, is no different...at least, not by much.
As in previous Animal Crossings, you'll still be shaking trees for fruit and working odd delivery jobs for neighboring animals, in order to pay off the greedy Tom Nook (evil tanuki, or evilest tanuki?). But in truth, you're running the show. You beautify the town, fill the museum with wildlife and artifacts, and entertain your neighbors. Without you, the town is just a weed patch full of miserable dwellers.
But do you really need to start anew with City Folk, if you already have a perfectly pimped out town in Animal Crossing: Wild World for the DS? Since the Wii game's announcement at E3 2008, Nintendo has revealed some new features, such as the titular city where you find new shops and animals. The game also supports the new Wii Speak microphone, an omni-directional set-top mic that lets you chat online with friends who visit your town (read our E3 preview for more basic information, like who's in the City, etc.). While the Animal Crossing games are by and large the same, after just a short while with the final retail copy of City Folk, I've already come across little details you probably didn't know -- and sometimes, it?s the small things that make a world of difference.
Clocking In
Aside from just loading up your saved game, the menu at the game's starting screen lets you select additional options, one of which is the ability to change the game's clock to whatever date you please, just like in the GameCube original (Wild World required you to change your handheld's time). Though, after monkeying around with this easier timechange option, there seems to be a cap out on how many years you can skip ahead; presumably because after a few decades, your Animal Crossing character would likely be dead. Since events in Animal Crossing are tied to the date and time, having an easy way to time travel is crucial for those who don't have time to check their Wiis on special occasions, but want to participate in holiday events nonetheless. Your hair grows long and shaggy, and your animal townies will be upset that you slept through the past six months (or however long you've been away), but otherwise, the game gives no real consequence for time traveling. Not even a horribly long diatribe from the series' infamous mole, Mr. Resetti.
Going on Holiday
Since it's so easy (or should I say accessible -- time traveling was never that difficult) to head on to the holiday events, it's not surprising events have been tweaked a bit as well. You presumably will not be carrying your Wii around with you wherever you go, so it seems as though events are now designed to be less time-intensive. For example, Wild World's harvest time used to see a daily gathering of acorns that would fall on the ground based on how many pine trees you had planted in town. And you'd then need enough points from said acorns to purchase pieces of the special mushroom-themed furniture set. In City Folk, each day has a bunch of mushrooms spawn around town, one of which will be a piece of the "Mush set." You simply have to run around each day gathering all the mushrooms to find your guaranteed piece. It's quite convenient if I only have five minutes on any given day during the event, but making holidays as easy as being on a real vacation also consequently makes those holiday sets feel a little less special.
DS Moving Van
As I was starting a new game, I was really excited when City Folk asked if I'd played Wild World, and whether I'd like to use the moving van option to, well, move my character to the new Wii town. How glorious that would be! But after a quick download transfer of my DS save to the Wii, I roll into town on the bus and? am back at square one with Tom Nook offering me a part-time job to pay for my shack of a house. Yes, my character looked like my Wild World character, but the only other difference from starting the game fresh seems to be that your catalog from the DS game carries over. So, you can repurchase all the rare furniture you obtained from Redd, which is almost as good as having all your items come with you. Unfortunately, gyroids, fossils, and special event items (like the Mario-themed items) aren't included in the catalog, so you'll have to reacquire those.
Shampoodle's Makeover
As mentioned in the E3 preview, the city will house a bunch of boutiques and shops where you can visit some familiar faces. Rather than opening up a beauty shop in an expanded part of Tom's store, the hairstylist now has her own storefront in the city. You can get your hair done as usual (or fixed if you're time traveling), but the new option here is to get a makeover, which essentially lets you create a facemask out of any Mii character on your Wii. Walking around wearing a Mii's face can be a bit jarring, and hilariously good fun as well. But, since this is a "mask," and not a true character change, you won't be able to wear any hats or accessories with your Mii face, which is unfortunate, because I would've loved to put on my Mario hat with a mustached Mii face.
A few weeks ago, I made my way to Ubisoft's Montreal studio to interview a pair of team members working on the latest Prince of Persia, and it turned out to be one of those interviews where we kept talking longer than we probably should have. Over the course of almost two hours, we discussed why the game's art style changed to suit the North American audience, why Ubisoft took a different marketing approach with it than they did with Assassin's Creed, why there's a secret about the game that the team doesn't ever plan to reveal, and tons more.
I cut some of the fat and still ended up with a pretty hefty story, so if you want to skip ahead to what interests you, here's what we cover on each of the following pages:
With its Lord of the Rings aesthetic and tilt functionality, Aurora Feint: The Arena stands apart from other match three puzzlers. The game's predecessor, Aurora Feint: The Beginning, is a free downloadable iPhone application where you slide blocks horizontally to line up similar colors in order to "collect" them as experience points. You then use these points to improve your character's special abilities. The blocks always fall downward, so you can tilt the iPhone in order to alter the grid's orientation. And in a first for iPhone games, Aurora Feint: The Arena will take its RPG-like elements online.
While The Arena won't be free, it builds on The Beginning's highly enjoyable single-player game, adding player vs. player competition. You can use your character from The Beginning to participate in a 90-second Summoning Challenge, a ghost-run mode that records your score and uploads it for other players to compete against. This enables asynchronous combat -- after you record your own run, you can let other people play against your ghost in the Battlegrounds at any time, adding a mildly social aspect to an already addictive puzzler. And future versions of Aurora Feint promise to have more online features, making this the first of hopefully more surprising steps into massively multiplayer competition for iPhone.
SCREENS: The Arena encourages communication with a news ticker-like chat window called the Tavern at the bottom of the screen. In addition to letting you leave messages for other players, the Tavern keeps track of which ghost runs are being played. Click the image above to check out all Aurora Feint: The Arena screens.
SCREENS: Taking a cue from Facebook, other players can view your character's "wall," which you can customize with personal details. Other players can challenge you from this page as well. Click the image above to check out all Aurora Feint: The Arena screens.
Deep Silver is prepping a new survival-horror game for Wii. Set in the '80s in a fictional location in the Himalayas, Cursed Mountain is the story of one man's search-and-rescue mission for his brother, who went missing on a climbing expedition.
We recently took a look at the game in its prealpha stage, and one of its most prominent details is its mountainous setting. Since the events in the game occur from altitudes ranging from 15,000 feet to 25,000 feet, the developer has elected to use "forward is upward" as a visual cue to guide the player's progress. If you ever find yourself facing downhill, you're most likely heading to an area you've already traversed. And the view provides not only a look at the summit (the presumed goal) but also the completed areas down the mountain. But aside from providing a great view or an easy way to track your progress, climbing up the mountain also limits your character's ability to sprint due to the lack of oxygen at higher altitudes.
Cursed Mountain's intent to be a spooky rather than gory affair distinguishes it from other survival-horror games. You don't use traditional weapons to fight the ghosts you encounter on the mountain -- you engage in bloodless battles using Buddhist prayers. This works by having your character look beyond the game's standard view into a perspective called the "bardo" (a Tibetan term for the intermediate state between life and death) to see the ghosts. Once you target a ghost, you pull back on the Wii Remote to wrench free a prayer gesture from the ghost that you'll mimic with the Wii Remote to attack it. Weaker enemies may only withstand one attack, but others later in the game require multiple, more complicated gestures to defeat.
Now that they've had some time to tinker with Guitar Hero World Tour, what does Rock Band developer and Guitar Hero series creator Harmonix think of the competition's innovative music creation suite? According to an interview on VideoGamer.com, it hasn't made a very strong impression on Rock Band 2 lead designer Dan Teasdale -- going so far as to imply that the tools are "half-arsed".
Teasdale echoed the statements made by Harmonix' public relations guru John Drake following this year's E3, telling VideoGamer.com, "We've dabbled around with stuff like that before, with Frequency and Amplitude, and we learned a lot of lessons from it," continuing, "The main one is that you can't do it half-arsed. If you want to do a way to let players create and distribute music, you have to go all-in -- not just do it as a bullet on the back of a box."
The designer went on to deliver some thinly-veiled criticisms of Neversoft's song creation system in Guitar Hero World Tour. "We actually want to find a way to for people to create music and express themselves, but when we do we want to make sure that people can sing, or the songs can be longer than three minutes, or that you can have more than 1200 notes, or that you're not tied to some dodgy sample somewhere," said Teasdale, adding, "We want to make sure it's an authentic experience and it fits on the platform."
After a rather barren 2007 -- with Persona 3 being one of the few standouts among mediocre fare like Blue Dragon and Eternal Sonata -- 2008's shown that the much-maligned Japanese role-playing genre still has some life yet: Tales of Vesperia, Lost Odyssey, and Valkyria Chronicles are some of this year's top games, period. But the best may actually be yet to come: Persona 4 -- and mild spoilers follow, so be warned!
The latest entry in Atlus' always controversial demon-collecting, dungeon-crawling, social-sim RPG once again sees players taking the role of a Japanese high school student -- but rather than living the high life in a Tokyo-esque megalopolis, this formerly big-city protagonist gets shipped off to the fictional rural town of Inaba to live with his uncle. Don't think that means he's safe from the bizarre happenings of the Persona series, though! Some sicko's gone on a macabre kidnapping/murder spree, tossing victims into a deadly "TV world" known as the Midnight Channel -- a world that just so happens to already be inhabited by an anthropomorphic stuffed bear named Teddie, who's not exactly happy at all the madness and mayhem infesting his formerly peaceful home. OK, this all probably makes a helluva lot more sense in the context of the game! 1UP editors Ray Barnholt and Andrew Fitch have spent some serious time with the game over the past week, and they offer their takes on what's likely the PlayStation 2's last epic RPG.
"But it's this thing that haunts you, that you didn't match your target render.... Everybody makes such a big fucking deal of it. Who gives a shit? That's how we make games. If people have got a problem with that, tough."Continuing this conversation, Hollywood noted that the video was created before the E3 2005 Sony press conference where the PlayStation 3 was unveiled, but the developer didn't actually know the technical specifications of the PS3 until the conference itself. "They actually announced the specifications on a slideshow presentation [at E3]. We sat and jotted them down, and then they showed our movie," Hollywood explained. "It was like, 'This is what the PlayStation 3 can do, and this is what you'll get on it.' We're sitting there trying to do the math in our head and asking, 'Can we really do this stuff?'"
If that's not shocking enough, Kershaw also discussed the always relevant question of whether or not the trailer was misrepresented as in-game footage. He admitted that although nobody may have said the game was "in-game code," no one denied it either. Kershaw did reveal one amusing anecdote from the experience, though: "The only thing was it was done by a company up the road called Real Time, so in theory it was 'real time.'"
Last year's Japanese role-playing game for Xbox 360, Blue Dragon, will soon be making the leap to handhelds. But rather than sticking to its Xbox 360 forebear's turn-based formula, DS entry Blue Dragon Plus sheds the traditional Japanese role-playing trappings in favor of a real-time tactical style that completely changes the game's nature.
A number of characters from the Blue Dragon universe make a playable turn in this version, which should please fans of the first game. And we're not just talking original protagonists Shu, Zola, Kluke, Jiro, and Marumaro, either -- 16 characters will be playable in total, and all characters have their own special (albeit simple) tactical abilities. Each unit automatically attacks nearby enemies, and you can use have them use their Shadows -- fantastical magic beasts, for the uninitiated -- to execute special attacks, as well as support items when needed. A green circle or red X over the intended target's head clearly states your attack's efficacy, and depending on the adversary's pose, your Shadow can also trigger a short "Shadow fight" -- scratch the bottom screen rapidly with your stylus to gain the upper hand and deal big damage.
Games you import from Japan seem to fall into one of three categories. First, you've got the type that you can play with little or no knowledge of Japanese. Next are those where a basic command of Japanese is essential to grasp the finer details of the story and gameplay. Finally, you've got the games with screen after screen of text full of tiny, barely readable kanji that prove to be inscrutable to anyone who's not a native speaker of the language. Tactical role-playing game Knights in the Nightmare is this third type.
The DS game clearly has a rich story that unfolds in the lore and style of developer Sting's previous titles (Riviera: The Promised Land and Yggdra Union), but it's nigh impenetrable to anyone for whom Japanese isn't already second nature (I humbly include myself in that group). Since Sting has not announced plans for a U.S. release for Knights in the Nightmare, those who don't speak the language will have to aim to be immersed solely by the gameplay.