Today’s interesting article concerns the Demoman, and how exactly they came up with his final look. Included are nine pieces of concept art showing how he could have ended up looking, all of which are still pretty awesome. You can kind of see TF2’s other characters in the faces of some of them, making it obvious why these mock-ups were scrapped.

I personally love these behind-the-scenes type things, especially when it’s about a game I love as much as TF2. I really hope Valve publishes more of these for the other characters and whatnot, because over the game’s nine or so years of development there must be an absolute mountain of juicy concept art and such.  Heck, they have whole versions of the game that were just abandoned!

In unrelated news, I’m currently finishing off a little project that I’ve been postponing for absolutely ages. I’ve been resisting working on any other stuff (ie: this blog’s long overdue redesign) as an incentive to sort it out, but clearly that didn’t work too well! Still, about done now — just in time to cover the continuation of the horrific abandonment of the game in question by Activision Blizzard.

Looks like fate is being a particularly cruel bitch at the moment, because would you believe that after having a seemingly rock solid publishing agreement Vivendi have just gone and pulled out? Kind of, anyway. Activision and Vivendi recently merged, producing Activision Blizzard. This ‘new’ company has been doing all sorts of restructuring, including canning all but five of their big games. Those five games do not include Brutal Legend.

It’s too early to speculate, but hopefully things aren’t as bad as they seem. It’s worth bearing in mind that other seriously weighty titles such as 50 Cent: Blood in the Sand, World in Conflict: Soviet Assault, and Ghostbusters are amongst those abandoned by Activision. I’m guessing they’re going to be aggressively trying to sell these games and licenses considering how far into development they are and how much hype they’ve received. Some of them are pretty much cash cows.

I’m sure we’ll have some more details soon. Hopefully they won’t make us cry.

Update: While not much in the way of details, some new information has some from the head honcho of Double Fine himself, Tim Schafer. To quote: “Brutal Legend is fine”. So there you have it! Hopefully the specifics will be along shortly.

• You love classic LucasArts adventure games
• You love Wallace and Gromit
• You love the recent Sam & Max game episodes

… then I have some excellent news for you. Telltale Games is making a Wallace and Gromit game!

If you’re not familiar with Telltale, I’d say they’re without a doubt the best crew for the job of turning Wallace and Gromit into the best gaming experience it could possibly be. Telltale is well known for releasing episodic games, beginning with Bone — the second episode of which I reviewed back in 2006. They then moved onto bringing the much-loved Sam & Max back to life, and will soon be releasing a Strong Bad game.

With staff comprised of developers of LucasArts’ old adventure favourites and fans from the community that grew up with those games, everything Telltale’s been putting out since their formation in 2004 has been pretty sweet. There’s every reason to believe that this game will be great, and one of the few film/tv-to-game transitions that’s worth a damn.

There’s not much beyond the announcement and the screenshot above, but this is definitely exciting news that I had to share. I’m certainly excited, anyway!

Original Post:

This isn’t the first time I’ve written a post like this, but it looks like a fresh rumour of an in-development Beyond Good and Evil 2 has hit the web — this time originating from a French magazine that interviewed Michel Ancel, the designer of Beyond Good and Evil.

According to Kotaku, a dozen staff have been working on a Beyond Good and Evil sequel’s preproduction for a year. Unfortunately, Ubisoft hasn’t officially given the game the go-ahead — and thus the funding — for full-scale development. It’s unknown why exactly Ubisoft is relunctant to green-light the project despite allowing a lengthy preproduction phase, but at least a sequel is a genuine possibility, right?

If you haven’t actually played Beyond Good and Evil, I’m going to take yet another opportunity to encourage you to do so. It’s regarded as one of the best games ever made by the majority of people who’ve played it, and I’d personally put it right up there with the greats such as Grim Fandango and Psychonauts. Watch the trailer, and then go buy it — preferably for a console.

And now, a bunch of leaked screenshots have hit the web. I have to admit that many of them leave me a little underwhelmed, lacking the bright, happy feel that the original game had (despite the deeply twisted slant). The environments also seem a bit clean to me, lacking much of the rich texture the previous games had. I do really like the two screenshots I included in this post though, so clearly it’s not a lost cause.

My main concern is that Rare seem to be unsure about what art direction they want to take. One of the best things about Banjo-Kazooie is that it was largely a cartoon-like game, with bright, blue skies and beautifully textured areas. Some of these new screenshots — this one in particular — seem to be an awkward blend of photo-realistic textures and cartoon styling; and the lighting is very cold, painting harsh shadows on everything. It just doesn’t sit right on my eyes.

Still, it’s important to remember that the game is a long way from release, that not all the screenshots look unappealing, and that the original Banjo team — who also developed the eye candy that was Viva Piñata — are at the helm, so things could change a lot visually.

Guess we’ll see! You can check out Shacknews’s image gallery for all 17 shots.

Update: OK, I’m significantly more worried about this game now. Some video footage has been unveiled, along with a stack of new information — including the new title of Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. The game’s Wikipedia article has been appropriately fleshed out, incorporating these new details.

The most startling bits of information are the revelations that only “20% of the game retains traditional platforming elements”, and that all the moves (including those seen in Banjo-Kazooie and Banjo-Tooie) have been scrapped. Instead the emphasis is now on building vehicles to do stuff, with over 1,600 available parts. So clearly there’s going to be a heavy puzzle/construction element.

Now, while it does sound like Rare is trying to do something new here and coming up with inventive gameplay as they did in the N64 days, with Banjo-Kazooie 3 I kind of wanted something more conventional and iterative. If they wanted to produce a game totally detached from the series’ history, they should have produced a new world to go along with it. All this technology and focus on building stuff just doesn’t seem like it fits in with the old Banjo-Kazooie world, which had quite a fantastical, fairy tale tone to it. But then as I mentioned originally, these screenshots don’t really convey that old atmosphere anyway.

So I’ll admit that I’m disappointed, but I do think a good game is still likely to come out of this. The team responsible for it is good, as shown with Viva Piñata. And this isn’t the first time Rare’s mixed up two genres, with the Nintendo 64’s Blast Corps fusing action and puzzles to almost perfection — another game that’s dying for a current-gen sequel.

Perhaps Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts’ mixture of traditional platforming, construction, and puzzles will turn out to be great. However, it’s going to be a far cry from the sequel that many fans of the series were expecting, and I suspect that initial shock will frighten many people away; the very average Kameo and sequel to the legendary Perfect Dark have caused people to have significantly less faith in Rare.

Update #2: The head of design for Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts has been interviewed by Games Radar, and I have to admit that it has made me a little more confident about this game being good. A lot of the changes I was initially surprised by are justified somewhat, so it’s well worth reading if you’re an old Banjo fan like myself.

Update #3: There’s now a mondo-size interview with the Rare chaps about the game available on the Rare Witch Project. It goes further towards pacifying me and making me look forward to the game, for sure.

The Scout has always been my most disliked character in Team Fortress 2. There’s just something about the way he looks, sounds, and taunts that can really get on your nerves when he manages to slip past your personal defences and leaves you as a pile of mushy flesh. This video really doesn’t do much to change that! I felt sorry for the poor Heavy at the end.

Valve’s videos are always worth watching, so be sure to check it out.

While my recent countless hours spent on the PlayStation 3 will be a big influence, one of the predominant factors constantly getting on my nerves is just how dated the game looks. I’m not going to sugarcoat the reality: Mario Kart Wii looks almost technologically identical to Mario Kart: Double Dash, which is quite underwhelming when you recall that Double Dash was released five years ago.

What makes it even more underwhelming is that the vast majority of the play mechanics are also the same. Half of the 32 maps are directly lifted from past Mario Kart games, which I’ve played a billion times before. The remaining half are new, but don’t really innovate much beyond what we’ve seen before. Map elements that were once impressive such as the big barrel that launches you up the mountain return, but are actually executed less impressively and just fall flat. Moments that made me go “Wow!” and smile in Double Dash entirely fail this time around.

There only seems to be one new item added to the series too, which is the thundercloud (not to be confused with the lightning strike). Otherwise it’s the same items, half the same maps, and the same general racing mechanics. There’s almost nothing that significantly drives the series forward, with the changes that have been made — such as the addition of motorbikes — feeling very insignificant.

I realise this is sounding very critical, so I’ll clarify: Mario Kart Wii is not a bad game. Instead, it’s one that rests far too heavily on its laurels and fails to innovate. While Mario Kart and even Nintendo games in general do often reuse past elements and we’re normally fine with it, in this case it just doesn’t work. I’m not excited by the game at all, with a constant feeling of “I’ve seen this before” creeping around in my head.

The only thing that actually makes the game feel different to Double Dash is the steering wheel, which is admittedly very well done. Everything else is so derivative that I just cannot genuinely enjoy the game, despite me really, really wanting to. I suppose someone who’s never really played Mario Kart before will have a lot of fun with this, but for series veterans it brings little to the table. It almost looks like they directly imported the animations and whatnot from Double Dash when it comes to many of the items (bananas, shells, bombs, etc); they look and behave exactly the same.

I guess a lot of the blame lies on the Wii itself, though. The developers were clearly limited by the technology, which has allowed them to do little in the way of fancy environment physics (a huge part of modern racing games) and core graphical beauty. The only real distinction between the graphics in Mario Kart Wii and Double Dash is the addition of a bloom lighting effect, which does little to help the game escape looking like a last-generation relic on today’s high-definition televisions.

Perhaps those who’re more serious about their Mario Kart will get more mileage out of Mario Kart Wii than me, but I for one am really disappointed. Mario Kart 64 and Double Dash felt like they really pushed the series forward, but Mario Kart Wii simply doesn’t. Even Double Dash didn’t introduce that much new stuff, but due to its graphics and course complexity being far beyond Mario Kart 64’s it still felt very different and new. I have a hard time seeing how anyone could get the same thrill from Mario Kart Wii that they felt when they tried Mario Kart 64 or Double Dash for the first time.

One final thing worth noting is the online play: it’s pretty good. The execution is much better than Mario Kart DS’s online component, although the core online play experience hasn’t changed much. Still, it’s a feature that may enable you to look past all the shortcomings mentioned above if you’ve never really experienced Mario Kart online before.

In short: this is the best Mario Kart game yet, but may not bring enough to the table to impress you as much as its predecessors did. If you’re new to Mario Kart then definitely pick it up, but if not I recommend trying it out before buying.

Update: I’ve bought this month’s copy of Edge and it looks like they share a lot of my discomfort with the game, awarding it 6/10 and clearly picking up on the same “I’ve seen this before” vibe. Their chief complaint seemed to be the tracks themselves, which are much wider than in past Mario Kart games. Nintendo were obviously trying to cater for the new maximum of 12 carts, but in the process removed much of the furious bashing and overtaking that was present in the past. They also disapprove of the removal of normal balloon battle mode, and the way that trying to mix the feel of online/offline play has resulted in both being not as good as they could have been (tracks too big for a few people, AI ruining online games, etc).

I pretty much just got the console for the upcoming Metal Gear Solid 4, the latest and supposedly last in the amazing Metal Gear Solid series. But having been sampling the many other delights on the console, the general notion of the PlayStation 3 not having plenty of fun games seems unwarranted. There’s enough here to keep me going for ages!

Some of these are a bit old so I’ll just drop down some general feelings of mine regarding the PlayStation 3 games I’ve played (all supplementary screenshots are in-game):

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. I’m enjoying the thick storyline of this, and the overall tone of the game gives me some serious vibes of Broken Sword — a classic adventure game. It even looks superficially reminiscent of some parts of Broken Sword 3 (yes, you have to climb those cliffs). Gameplay-wise it’s above average but not fantastically original, with gunfights being very similar in nature throughout the game but always tactically interesting due to your fragility and the emphasis on using cover. It’s more a game of exploration and storyline though, so it’s appropriately right up any adventure game fan’s alley.

Heavenly Sword. I haven’t got very far into this, but the scale of the combat has been repeatedly astounding me and it looks like another quality storyline’s on the cards. Great voice acting, sound effects, characters, and accessible but deep combat options keep things spicy. While I don’t want to focus on graphics too much, they really do deserve note here — just check out IGN’s image gallery for a taste, which pales in comparison to how intense it looks in motion. Easily one of the most technically accomplished PS3 titles.

Gran Turismo 5: Prologue. I’m disappointed that there’re no damage models (supposedly being included in an Autumn 2008 patch), but for £17 I’ve been having a great time with this — in no small part because of the online play, which is a far cry from the offline play and has nutters running you off the road at every opportunity. It’s definitely a much purer racing game than most though with absolute focus on the driving/track physics, so I’ll need something like MotorStorm to satisfy my more destructive side. Especially fun if you have someone to play it with.

Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. The in-engine cutscenes are amazing, and the gameplay is fun and varied too. There’s a lot of scripting going on, but it makes the experience of stuff like the opening level’s city incredible due to how much is going on around you. This is one of the few platform games other than Nintendo’s efforts that’s worth your time thanks to a great combination of classic platforming, weaponry, and presentation. No particular part is outstanding, but it all comes together beautifully.

Assassin’s Creed. This is actually much better than I expected after witnessing the initial flurry of disappointment following its release. The graphics are amongst the best, the storyline seems pretty reasonable, the environment interaction and controls are brilliant, and I’ve been having fun going around doing what I’ve been asked to do. I imagine it’ll get repetitive if it doesn’t go beyond listening to conversations, picking pockets, and killing, but it’s fun while it lasts. I play it in short bursts so perhaps that helps.

Ninja Gaiden Sigma. I think this is really poor to be honest, and not my type of game at all. The environments are clearly of a last generation and’ve been given some superficial improvements, the gameplay doesn’t appeal to me at all, and the general atmosphere of the game just turns me off on every level. While I’m sure it’s a good buy for die-hard fans of the original (it would seem to be the definitive version), I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t have liked it back when that came out either. I just don’t like how it feels and was unable to derive any real joy from it. Mostly just frustration.

MotorStorm. Crazy fun! MotorStorm has provided me with lots of laugh-out-loud moments, with thematically limited but insanely intricate courses leading to all sorts of crashes, near-misses, and road rage. The magic is in the opposition, with the AI vehicles being surprisingly vicious: they push you into rocks, they nudge your back so you spin out, and will generally do anything they can to screw you up — pretty realistic as it’s exactly the kind of scumbag behaviour online players exhibit too. My only real criticisms are that more courses would have been nice, and the surprising lack of non-online multiplayer: it’s quite clearly the type of game that’s begging for split-screen social play.

I’m of the opinion that all the above games sans Ninja Gaiden Sigma are must-play titles for any PlayStation 3 owner.

My LOVEFiLM list (monthly subscription for unlimited holding of 1–3 games/films at a time) is currently populated with Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, Burnout Paradise, Turok, and Resistance: Fall of Man. On my to-buy list is Metal Gear Solid 4, Battlefield: Bad Company, and Grand Theft Auto 4. I’m hopeful I can review all titles in the latter list after their release.

On a non-gaming note, the multimedia capabilities of the PlayStation 3 are quite an unsung asset. The level of polish to the music, DVD, and Blu-Ray playing software is impressive, with slick menus for navigating practically any format you stick in it — including a data DVD full of AVI files (which I found useful for watching some television programmes I’d missed and downloaded). With the console physically looking good too and outputting via HDMI, it’s a very feasible replacement for a lot of your home cinema equipment, and is probably more configurable/extensive than a lot of people’s home cinema equipment too. While I knew it could do this stuff, I didn’t expect it to be as sophisticated as it is.

I’ve been doing a bit of catch-up with games having taken a week off work, and one I meant to play but never did was Black & White 2: Battle of the Gods, the expansion pack for Black & White 2 — a superb game in my opinion. It’s become very difficult to get hold of though, so with little choice I ordered from HMV’s online shop. For those of you outside the UK, HMV is one of the largest music/game/film chains in the country and has stores in practically every town and city; as such, you’d think their online shop would be pretty reliable. You’d be wrong.

The game arrived, and I was all in the mood for some epic god action. Then I noticed a strange red piece of plastic lodged into the part of the DVD case that you open. Intrigued, I went to open the DVD case so I could see what it was — but it very quickly dawned on me that this was in fact the security seal. I couldn’t get into the damned thing! Slightly irritated but undeterred, I tried to ply it out with a knife. All I accomplished by doing this was breaking part of the plastic around the edges of the case, so I went searching online and found that some other fellow got exactly the same thing a couple of years ago. The result? Well, it’s not pretty.

There are three things I’ve managed to establish about this red piece of plastic:

• It will make normally opening the case impossible
• Fridge magnets and any amount of banging on the case seems to have no effect on it
• They are typically removed in HMV shops with an ultra-strong magnet
• It goes through the entire case, so using physical tools to extract it will almost certainly fail

For anyone else who stumbles across one of these security seals (I’m sure more than a few people will), the best way to remove it without irreparably destroying your game assets or going to your local HMV shop is to:

• Use scissors to cut open the thin plastic sleeve that holds the cover art
• Remove the cover art
• Pull the case open from the bottom until you have enough room to remove the manual
• Remove the manual
• Do whatever it takes to remove the entire front cover, thus revealing the disc
• The security seal goes underneath the button used to release the disc, so you need to push together the two halves of the circular button so you can simultaneously remove the disc
• Find an unused DVD case or buy some (it’s useful to have a stock in your house for general storage and situations like this)
• Put the cover art, manual, and disc into the new DVD case

Hope this helps. And remember: order from somewhere else if you can! If you receive a DVD case toting this monstrous security seal, you’ll most probably have to either go to your local HMV shop or destroy the case.

Update: The customer service manager of HMV got in touch with me a few days after writing this article and offered to send me a replacement box, explaining that the mix-up was due to the same facility mailing out games to the physical shops and the online shop. Makes sense I guess, although I hope they improve their quality checking routines to ensure it doesn’t happen to more unfortunate customers. Still, I’m pleased that HMV contacted me of their own accord, and the gesture of sending a replacement — complete with cover art and manual — is appreciated. I guess it was an honest mistake that they will rectify if you ask them to.

Back to the point at hand though, TechEBlog have produced a really nice video that shows how they’d see Super Mario Galaxy looking if it were created over a decade ago (Yikes!) on the Super Nintendo. Complete with 2D elements grabbed from some classics of the era such as Yoshi’s Island, it’s probably not that far off!

It kind of saddens me that it could have easily been a lot better, though. I wish they’d put some sound effects in instead of a generic remix of the star music, thus solidifying the illusion of watching a non-existent game. Some of the animation is also pretty flaky, with the rotation in particular often seeming a bit rushed. Still, pretty good stuff! Just, if you’re going to all the trouble of making the custom artwork and whatnot for a video like this, why not spend that little bit longer perfecting it?

I’ve seen a bit of negativity concerning this from forums and whatnot, but in my opinion this is a great idea. The unlockable weapons will be based on your in-game achievements, which all vary tremendously and will total at about 35 per class as the new equipment is introduced. So what Valve are doing is giving you new goals to aim for while playing as usual (at the moment there’s no real incentive to go out of your way to earn an achievement), and keeping their ’simple for newbies’ style by not overwhelming new players with too much equipment.

The unlockables will apparently be similar to what the classes already have, but will of course differ in critical ways, none of which make any unlockable better than another — just different. For example, Valve is on about giving the Medic an alternative healing gun that cannot ubercharge (or can do so extremely slowly), but instead permanently buffs people’s health up to 200% instead of only temporarily to 150%.

No other weapons to be introduced have been announced, and they’ll also be rolled out gradually so you won’t suddenly open the game and find dozens of new weapons firing all over the place — existing players will be eased in as new weapons slowly make their debut. I’m hoping the second Medic unlockable will be a healing gun that sacrifices ubercharge in exchange for the ability to infect enemy players with disease just like the Medic from Team Fortress Classic.

Also in the article is the much-expected announcement of Badlands (overview of Team Fortress Classic original), and a new map called Goldrush that will feature a new style of play where you have to push a mine cart from end of the map to the other while fighting off the enemy. The cart moves if friendlies are near it, and it doesn’t if enemies are near it. Simple, and very different, but it’ll probably be great in typical Valve fashion.

Anyone else as excited about this as me? I’ve got tonnes of hours logged in Team Fortress 2, and I have to admit the ol’ basic selections of weapons are wearing a little thin (even if I am still coming up with new ways of using them). Some fresh equipment is just what’s needed, as well as new maps. Good to see Team Fortress 2 is continuing Team Fortress Classic tradition and keeping content coming (the teleporters were introduced to TFC years after it came out)!

Update: A capture-the-intel version of Well is also due to be released during the next few days. Hot damn, Valve!

Update #2: Someone has pointed out that Goldrush is almost certainly the new version of the much-loved ‘hunted’ game type from Team Fortress Classic. Valve confirmed that a hunted map was in production quite a while ago, but things went quiet apart from Valve expressing that they’re having difficulty finding a way of making the game fun for the weak civilian who traditionally only has a melee weapon. Looks like their solution was to do away with the civilian completely and replace him with a mine cart — presumably only one team has one.

Update #3: The capture-the-intel version of Well is now live! Here’s the patch notes for the January 25th updat, which also include a rack o’ performance fixes:

• Added new capture the flag map CTF_Well
• Added Spanish map descriptions
• Added new option to auto-save a scoreboard screenshot at the end of a map to the Multiplayer->Advanced dialog
• Added more particle optimizations for mid range and low end hardware
• Updated CP_GravelPit to fix all known exploits and changed the scoring method to score per capture rather than per round
• Updated “nextlevel” CVAR to trigger a changelevel at the end of the current round (not mini-round)
• Fixed SourceTV demo recording problem
• Fixed mp_stalemate_enable not preventing Sudden Death mode on some maps
• Fixed a couple cases where player stats were not being recorded correctly
• Fixed some log entries being truncated
• Fixed crash caused by trying to import a custom player spray
• Removed the “Reset Stats” button from the Player Stats screen

This game continues to intrigue me. First announced pretty much right after Half-Life 2 was released, it generated a lot of buzz and the prospect of being able to play a real remake of Half-Life 1 on a newer engine really got people excited. However, it slipped into a lull of information and apart from some rubbish media we didn’t see much of it for a very long time. Indeed, it was widely regarded as vapourware quite quickly. I guess people were expecting it to somehow be developed in a few months.

Interest picked up again a couple of years later as more media began to roll out, with a quality standard far exceeding that seen earlier. At this point my faith turned from ‘pessimistic’ to ‘optimistic’, and I decided that this might actually be a really good mod after all. At the time, January 2007, I wrote a post about the trailer (Still great!).

Here we are almost a year later, and things still seem to be coming along nicely. It’s important to remember that this is an unpaid team of volunteers, but I do know a few of them through forums and there’s serious dedication to the job here. The results speak for themselves, with the many environments of Half-Life 1 lovingly remade and made visually more expansive now that engine technology allows it.

Have a look at all the screenshots, and if that gets you in the mood be sure to check the trailer out again and listen to the soundtrack samples on their home page (very nice). They also now have an interesting development blog up that peeks into the design process. Some pretty useful stuff is already for people interested in game/level design themselves.

There’s still no clear indication of how long it’ll be until this thing is out, but the sheer amount of love and time being poured into it is clear and they deserve to have occasional exposure for it. The production values match that of a commercial game in most cases, and I know just from looking at the mappers involved that the experience of playing them will be just as compelling.

Make sure this stays on your radar!

Following much effort from gamers and the games industry, Child’s Play has again managed to break the million dollar barrier with a whopping $1,135,000 donated (about £567,000). These funds will be used to provide gaming joy to the 50 hospitals involved.

I personally think this is a fantastic initiative and it deserves mainstream attention, what with the majority of mainstream attention having focused on violence or sales during 2007. For once games are being used to do something unquestionably good (Assuming the games given to the hospitals are rated for children!).

Hopefully the charity will continue to grow, and provide increasing amounts of hospitals with gaming kit. A million dollars goes a long way when it comes to gaming, so every donation is going to be significant.

Well done guys! And it’s good to see there’s now a UK hospital as one of the participating hospitals. Certainly better hospital gaming news than the scumbag I wrote about a couple of years ago.