In addition to this interview, we have also simultaneously published our review of the first chapter of the game here at The Slowdown. “Over the Edge” can be downloaded from Skygoblin right now.

The Slowdown: Starting off, I would like you to return to the origins of the series for a minute: In the manual provided with “Over the Edge,” you reveal how the game’s origins actually lie in brainstorming sessions with your colleague, Mathias Johansson. How big a catalyst, though, was simply finding the correct tool to work with?

Theodor Waern: There’s no point denying that when me and AGS first laid eyes on each other, we both knew it was love. I realized right from the start that this was THE tool for me. The learning curve was perfect. I had a problem, I banged my head at it, I solved it. I had another problem, I banged my head some more, and I solved that one too. It has been that way ever since I started production on the game and I doubt I will ever come to a complete stop.

For a guy like me who knows what he wants, knows a little about basic scripting, and doesn’t mind the fact that making adventures actually is a bigger adventure than playing them, AGS truly is the perfect tool. We have had a rather stormy relationship though, me and AGS. But in the end my bugs have always been solved and we’ve made sweet, sweet adventure game love again.

l think the Journey Down might have had a chance without AGS though , the setting and characters just needed to get out of my brain. It would however most likely not have been a game. Maybe a graphical novel or just a large series of paintings or something. I’m incredibly glad it turned out as a game though. I have learned so much from the experience it’s just ridiculous.

The game’s storyline has seen quite a few revisions since 2005. When you finally hit on the current plot as we players will get to know it – what was it that made you go “This is it!”? Four chapters of storyline is no joke to commit to, after all.

Honestly, I think what made me finally lay down the script and say “this is the way it’s going to be.” was the fact that I felt I just kept pushing things around and never actually got around to finalizing the first chapter. Let’s face it. Four chapters, as you mentioned is a HUGE effort. I certainly hope I will release all four of them but who knows?

Now at least I can be certain part one got released. I would however not have released, had I not finally landed in a version of the plot that I felt comfortable with. Simplification was the key here. Strangely I found that the more twists and important characters I removed from the plot the better it became.

Bwana, Kito and Lina

A major part of development for you indeed seems to be polish – especially in terms of pacing and balance. We already know, from your deleted scenes thread, how you ultimately decided to scrap a considerable portion of material from the game. On the one hand, how hard is it to leave materials behind, and on the other hand, how important do you consider it for a designer to be able to swing the axe?

Making games is all about swinging axes. I work with online games for a living, mostly making content. I know for a fact that when we develop new features, try unproven techniques and new ideas, 80% of what we create is thrown in the trash. Not because it wasn’t good, but because it was for one reason or another, just mixing up the experience and blocking the parts that really mattered. I am convinced that throwing away stuff that confuses the player is incredibly important, and learning to do this is a must if you want to deliver a game with good flow and pacing.

To my surprise, you had stated before that “Most characters in the Journey Down are based on African masks of one sort or other”; while playing the game, I was almost certain you were utilizing Māori Tiki and/or Polynesian Moai as the foundation for the game. So, my question is this – you’ve actually not utilized a specific culture or mythology, instead going for a more eclectic mix of influences?

Kito is based on a east African style called Makonde, while Bwana, Lina and the main bad dude are all based a central African style of carving called Chokwe. Most of the other characters are actually just a big mess of different ideas and influences. There are definitely some Tiki and Moai influences in there somewhere! I have a couple of African art books that I like to skim through a couple of minutes before I go to bed now and then.

I haven’t copied any masks from them but I’m certain they have influenced me greatly. When it comes to designing characters for such a low res game though you really need to cut a lot of corners and remove a lot of the fine details, this changes everything a lot, so in short, let’s just say it’s a big mess.

What about the names – like Bwana, Kaonandodo – are these broadly African too?

Most names were just randomly given to the characters without any research whatsoever. There are however some exceptions. One of the two goons name’s is “Bunga” (not sure if this is mentioned in chapter one) his name, Bwana’s and Matoke’s are all Swahili words (Tanzania, Kenya). There are probably more of them in there somewhere I just forgot they have a meaning heh. So to actually answer your question: Correct, it’s a mess of different styles/mythologies/cultures.

While many players have already pointed out various parallels to Full Throttle and Grim Fandango – the first being thematic, the other stylistic – I strongly felt the episode also carried a Monkey Island feel to it. Apart from Kingsport, there are seven bays that surround St. Armando; will this maritime aspect return in the forthcoming chapters?

Yep. For some reason the maritime theme and adventure games go well together, no point fixin’ that which ain’t broken eh?

Aye aye! What probably reminds people most of Full Throttle, then, is probably your skilful combination of 3D CGI with 2D animation. How early in development did you make the decision to complement 2D with pre-rendered 3D?

It is fun that people have spotted the similarities with Full Throttle visually. This was my number one source of inspiration when it came to mixing 2D and 3D. I have looked at those cutscenes many a time and wondered why on earth they looked so damned good.

I think the first 3D item that appeared in Over the Edge was the crane. I knew what I wanted the puzzle to be like and I realized I would never have the patience to draw the crane in all of its angles so I made a simple non-lit 3d scene and without any real effort it melded nearly seamlessly with the 2d art. That’s when I  realized I could stick 3D in there and get away with it. After that I just kept going with the car in the intro and the airplane. I even had a quick go with Bwana as a 3D model but I gave that up fast. Character rigging and animation is a whole other science in itself and I would have no chance making that look as good as I wanted it.

Over the Edge’s puzzles gelled and rolled like no other adventure game in my recent memory. Is there a specific game or series that would exemplify the tradition and style of puzzles that you’re aiming for?

Adventure gamers in general won’t agree with me here, but my personal opinion is that a good puzzle is an easy puzzle. They make things flow and since they are easy they are more common and hence give the player feedback more often. It keeps people engaged and interested when things are happening. The only downside with an easy puzzle is that you need many of them to compensate for how fast you solve them.

What makes a puzzle a good one to you, then?

Admittedly a good difficult puzzle can be a lot of fun if it is well written and perfectly balanced, this however is seldom the case. I think the mood in an adventure game is totally ruined by “rub all items on all items” brute force puzzle solving. It flattens the whole experience. So do walkthroughs. If the player resorts to either of these, it is my opinion that the game has failed in keeping the player within the game world and has let them wake up from the experience that is the game. That is obviously a bad thing.

However, all games no matter how well written are full of moments when one resorts to brute force though, I’m sure people playing “Over the Edge” have done so as well.

A Waern puzzle!

One thing that does set your game apart from many other AGS-built adventures is your use of the 1995 “big” sprite style that is principally more about lines, shapes and forms and less about individual pixels – something that I’m sure is not lost on players. Did it take you long to discover a suitable workflow for doing art and animations in the very modest resolution of 320x and, more importantly, as a developer, what do you like best about the miniature work space?

The small workspace is great for efficiency. I love having those kinds of limitations. The more limitations you got the faster a project can be finished. On the character side however, I honestly think work might have gone faster if I had higher res and better alpha, as I would have less of a headache battling sharp pixel edges, so I’m not quite happy with the workflow I ended up with on them. Had I aimed for a more of a “pixel art” style, low res would be a blessing, now though… it mostly slowed things down. The best part with going low res is definitely how much faster work goes on cut scenes and backdrops, and the lovely retro vibe you get from the low res certainly adds to the mood as well. The low file size of low res games are nice as well.

I’d like to know a bit more about the background music. Beyond D’souza’s bubbly contemporary reggae stylings, what really stands out to me is how there seems to be a specific theme for every location, no matter how quickly they may be traversed by the player. It would be very interesting to hear about the way you two come up with a suitable tone and style for each scene.

Once I had explained the overall mood I was after, the reggae mixed with the jazz, Souza just went balls out crazy and started churning out tunes like mad to the different environments. We had a very simple workflow there where I made some short notes on what I wanted focus to be on, he made a first test, sent it to me, I give him some simple response (usually regarding what tempo things were in), he made the fixes, and we stuck it in game. He has been great at handling my feedback and implementing it immediately, just amazing.

The cut scenes were a lot more work though. I had to film the movies and send them to him so he could synch the music 100%. Also, the music in the cutscenes is split up in lots and lots of small bits, so the music wont break if people start skipping dialogue etc. I’m very proud of how well we made that work. Next time though I’ll most likely disable clicks during cutscenes, the result was good, but I’m not sure it was worth the effort.

The swift-but-sweet sax interludes, then, how did those come about?

That is a pretty interesting story actually. These sax samples were the first I added. Why? Back then I didn’t have any music, and I desperately wanted some. I headed to freesound.org and started hunting for jazzy little tunes to go with my slapstick animations to give them some punch. Just something temporary. When I thought I was starting to wrap the rest of the game up I figured it was the right thing to do to send an email to the author and ask if it was ok that I used his samples for a game. Amazingly enough he answered: Sure. Do you need anything else? My simple response to this was:  I need an entire soundtrack. He charged into the project head on with no sign of hesitation whatsoever and has produced things like crazy for me since. I owe him a lot.

Finally – and this is something that is very often brought up with AGS titles with great production values – what’s your take on voice acting and indie adventure games? I personally kept on reading Bwana’s lines aloud along the way, mon!

Heheh, me too, mon. I love it when games have good voice acting, it adds so much depth it’s just mad. There are actually lots of good freeware games out there with quality voice acting. Where they get the talented people from, I have no idea. I would love a voice over version of “Over the Edge” but I really don’t have a clue how to pull that off. It’s a BIG project, and honestly voice acting needs to be good, simply “ok” voice acting sinks a game in my opinion.

Hopefully, some time in the future, a voice acting solution will come my way. I too would love to hear Bwana’s nice relaxed attitude pour out of my speakers. One day this might come true!

Thanks again to Theodor Waern for his time and answers. While chapter two of The Journey Down, called “Into the Mist,” is slated for a summer 2011 release, “Over the Edge” is available right now at Skygoblin.com. Finally, if you didn’t yet get your full share of information on the game, our review can be read here, and there exists a production thread with big versions of some of the paintings for the game, and another post contains sketches and deleted scenes from Waern.

At this juncture, I would love to point you all to our interview with the game’s designer, Theodor Waern, published in conjunction with this review. In the interview, we discuss the game’s unique look and feel, Waern’s inspiration for the game and find out more about the game’s history and development.

The first chapter, “Over the Edge,” finally released after being four years in the making, tells the story of Bwana and Kito, brothers abandoned by their adoptive father captain Kaonandodo, whose abrupt disappearance left the brothers struggling to make a living. Apart for some slight “financial instability,” the duo has been running Kaonandodo’s Gas and Charter ever since, that is, until the Armando Power Company throws a proverbial wrench in their gears.

Suddenly, deus ex machina, a damsel in distress appears both willing and able to bail the twins out of their predicament; only, this mysterious bookworm – the university assistant Lina – soon reveals their adoptive father is somehow tangled up in a mysterious conspiracy related to the Armando Power Company. In the backdrop also looms the mysterious, forbidden Underland.

By far the most distinctive feature of The Journey Down is its unique graphical look and feel that, much like Grim Fandango’s (the closest point of comparison), also extends beyond the surface into a more coherent fantasy.

On the outset, I expected Waern to have utilized Polynesian materials as the base for his graphical style, but instead Waern has put together a real hodgepodge of various African sources. For instance, according to Waern, Kito – Bwana’s sidekick – was based on east African Makonde style, while some other characters, like Bwana, were inspired by central African Chokwe carvings. It is utterly striking how these designs seem to inhabit the very same space that the Calaca occupied in Grim Fandango.

In our interview, Waern also explained that while many of the game’s characters were simply given names without research, some of them are actually traceable to Swahili and other African languages. In this way, the game is, like Waern himself described the game, a “mess of different styles.”

Apart from the strikingly designed facial features for each character and the awe-inspiring presence of the metropolis that is St. Armando, looming in the background, the primary strength of the game is its immediacy and welcoming style of gameplay. The game succeeds in capturing the player’s interest at once simply by making the game’s fiction understandable in mere minutes – something that classic adventures always seemed to excel and even take pride in: A pirate wannabe? Check. A bad-ass biker? Check. An undead travel agent? Check. You’re instantly at home, pointing and clicking Bwana around Kingsport.

Now, beyond the unique visual direction and the aforementioned game influences, there exist at least three potential points of contention in “Over the Edge” that relate to the game’s allure.

Firstly, the game exhibits an uncanny ability to roll forward with superb momentum, constantly leaving you pleased with your puzzle-solving performance. In fact, some of the game’s puzzles are deviously simple, and as the game is medium length, it should offer an hour or two of gaming for most players. But this is no complaint – truly, where the game excels is in its carefully crafted balance, polish and eye for pacing; many locations were simply left out by the developer in order to maintain better and smoother playability, and Bwana indeed traverses Kingsport at true and tested LucasArts speeds (something that Telltale mucked up in their “Tales” series, for instance).

Like many adventures, the central puzzles figure around gathering ingredients – luckily made easy by the game’s highly intuitive (read: standard) interface. A directional arrow that appears when hovering over doors helps pinpointing passageways and entrances. The inventory is standard fare, too, with combination puzzles to go. Having only one save game slot is one of the few bigger offences towards adventure gaming aficionados.

Apart from the puzzles’ easygoing nature, another feature that may be divisive – and potentially a real deal breaker – is how in “Over the Edge,” Bwana has to have a reason why for his actions. If he is yet to find a meaningful use for an object or an item, he’ll simply shrug it off for the time being. I personally view this aspect to the game simply as successful writing, but others may disagree with Waern’s chosen method.

Finally, the game does utilize Ron Gilbert and Tim Schafer -like meta-level comedy and writing, and thus often pokes fun at the common threads found in adventure games, including the kleptomania that so deeply permeates the genre. There may be moments in the game where these aspects of the writing can take players out of the game’s base-level fiction.

There does exist a slight lack of polish with the writing, primarily typographical, but easy to shrug off as characterization appropriately remains its chief focus. Intriguingly, several dialog trees also exist with choices that can only be accessed on separate replays.

While the game’s debt to both Full Throttle and Grim Fandango – the former thematic and technical, the latter stylistic – remains obvious, the game primarily operates closest to Monkey Island, and not only because of Kingsport Bay, an industrial cargo dock and one of the seven bays that surround St. Armando. In conversation, Waern explained to me that he simply believes the maritime theme and adventure games go well together. “No point fixin’ that which ain’t broken eh?,” he quipped.

Simon D’souza’s bubbly and energetic reggae compositions also highlight the aforementioned marine parallel; furthermore, almost every location in the game impressively has its own musical theme or jangle. Surprisingly enough, it is also the sound effects that play a major part in the creation of the game’s ambience – a fact quite hard to believe as the game’s canvas of sound has been assembled strictly with the help of the Freesound project. You wouldn’t know that, though, as the sound effects never take you out of the fiction by sounding of poor quality or out of place.

Of special note is the very final stretch of the game, during which the game takes a brilliant audiovisual spurt and leaves players on a game-high note and expectant of the follow-up chapter, “Into the Mist,” which is slated for a summer 2011 release.

Visit Skygoblin.com for a download link to the game. For those more interested in the inner workings of the game, there exists a production thread with big versions of some of the paintings for the game, and another post contains sketches and deleted scenes. Combined, these make for a neat “making of.”

Finally, do remember to take a look at our interview with Waern.

Intent stare, intent marketing

A few months back, we lamented the fate of Russian developer Deep Shadows’ two latest projects, Xenus II (“Boiling Point 2,” or White Gold: War in Paradise, as it would have been called here) and Precursors, two very unique games that unfortunately remained both untranslated and unpublished in the English-speaking world.

Thanks to Badmofo’s comment on the original post, however, it came to our attention that fan-made English translations for both games are finally available at Patches-Scrolls. Both have already seen a 31th July update, and are now up to version 1.1. The Xenus II patch can be downloaded here, with the following changelog:

Fixed many small details, and manually translated many broken lines.

The Precursors patch is available here, with these changes:

Fixed many details and inconsistencies, and added item descriptions.
Removed Kasterley quest line and changed vehicle menu to roll/slide.
Corrected transactions with Perk, ice merchant and a race organizer

Let us know if you have any luck with these patches!

Unlike the previous Left 4 Dead 1 DLC, “Crash Course”, which did so in name only, the forthcoming downloadable content is all about Valve bridging existing gaps in the games’ storyline: “The Sacrifice” will reveal to players exactly what happens to the original four survivors, leading all the way up to the events of the previous DLC, “The Passing.”

In addition to the new playable content, a digital L4D comic by Michael Avon Oeming (best known for the Powers comic with Brian Michael Bendis), of 150 pages and four separate parts, will be released. Each part will tell the background story of one of the original four survivors, the first of which will be released as early as September. Gathering from the screencaps below, we’ll probably see Louis’ story first:

The attachment we have for the original cast is tremendous and Oeming’s comic is an intriguing extension to the franchise, though it must have been rather difficult for a writer to get deeper inside a game series that has always relied principally on its intangibles – all those writings, posters and spray tags that have kept us constantly guessing. Hopefully the comic doesn’t go too far into a world-building mode, instead focusing to further develop players’ relationships with the original cast.

According to Faliszek, while the official storyline will be continued as is in the comic, in the game, players will actually be able to make the campaign’s ending their own by choosing which of the original survivors gets to live and who dies. Additionally bundled up with the DLC will be the original “No Mercy” campaign for Left 4 Dead 2, despite the fact that the campaign was the first thing that fans ported over.

As you can see in the screencaps below, there is a sign that reads “Armed Forces Reserve Center” in reference to the end of The Passing, where the survivors complain about having enough of the military. In addition to the survivors battling the horders aboard a ship, the campaign also inches closer and closer to New Orleans as the survivors make their way towards the new survivors (can you spot a familiar hazmat suit?):

This informative announcement from Faliszek is not without its share of problems, though. While it’s fantastic that Left 4 Dead 1 is finally getting the DLC that it sorely needed, after constant promises and the short and drab “Crash Course,” by making the DLC available simultaneously both for the 1st and 2nd game, what was expected to be a display of Valve’s unwavering support for the game became more of a restrained gesture, with the symbolism of the move somewhat diluted by the shared launch.

Similarly, it remains to be seen whether Valve will be truly be able to deliver on the promise of (the name of) the campaign, by including that extra degree of player agency and choice. In retrospect, the names of the campaigns we’ve had in the past have spelled out far more empty promise than they have delivered, with only The Passing really standing out of the crowd.

At the end of the interview, Faliszek notes that “The Sacrifice” is not to be the end of L4D – except for Bill, obviously, he’s “done.” When questioned for an all-new survivor, Faliszek remains his non-committal self: “Eh… maybe.”

Stay tuned for more info after Valve make their official announcement.

Though the original never saw its promised sequel after the Belgian company went out of business (you can see existing screenshots of the project at Unseen64), the ageless gem is now fortunately available at GOG.com, in full working order – if you’re interested in running your old mothballed copy, the OpenOutcast team have a good tutorial.

The original remains utterly beautiful to this day mostly thanks to its stronger-than-most audiovisual direction and rare feeling of “being there.” The same, however, can also be said of the new fan version:

A February 2010 downloadable test, Oasis 1.0, already exists for sampling; a revised and polished version is promised to follow shortly. While its gameplay currently consists rather exclusively of menial back-and-forth and carrying missions, and although the dialogue from Cutter Slade (perhaps in an attempt to better synch the dialogue with the protagonist’s name?) remains littered with off-kilter enunciations and uncharacteristic, fourth-wall breaking quips, the wealth of work and craftsmanship already present in the project makes what little game there is to be experienced ultimately quite pleasurable and a joy to look at.

While the current 1.0 version is still clumsy and admittedly bug-riddled, its team is publishing a flow of updates at a development blog that illustrates many of the tasks that go into developing such a large-scale hobby project.

A potential point of contention for Outcast fans might nevertheless be the game’s narrative: as detailed in a blog entry, the team have chosen not to emulate the storyline of the original game, instead brainstorming an all-new narrative. Another bump in the road for the project might also be the questionable popularity of Crysis Wars; while Crysis Warhead certainly sold well, not too many mod projects have been released on the platform to date. Perhaps the forthcoming “Wars” version of Mechwarrior: Living Legends will change the landscape to the better?

Luckily, as the game is single player, it can be tested out with the Crysis Wars trial, as detailed on the project’s Moddb page.

Yesterday, Zenimax Media announced, during the opening segment of QuakeCon 2010, their acquiring of Arkane Studios:

This is an exciting moment for Arkane. After 11 years of independent development, we couldn’t think of a better publishing partner,” said Colantonio. “We share so many creative values. Joining the ZeniMax family will allow us to grow stronger while staying true to the games we love.

Now, as it relates to the comments above, I know what you’re thinking, and you know what I’m thinking! Whereupon I’d like to guide us all to Will Porter’s April 2009 CVG article entitled “The Biggest Games We’ll Never See.” In the story, Porter interviewed various project leaders on the topic of failed big budget productions, one of them Arkane CEO Raphael Colantonio. In the interview, he explained why the studio had put The Crossing on hold:

Being an independent developer has great advantages as you can do the games you want, but it has a constraint too: money! We self-funded enough of the game that we could demo it to potential publishers. However, of the proposals we had, we never managed to reach an agreement that we felt was fair. Having been burnt in the past under similar situations, we decided to not do the game until all the conditions for doing it right were met. This happened at the same time as another publisher invited us to work on a very sexy game with good financial terms, so the choice became obvious.

While much of the rest of the interview details how fun The Crossing’s 20-minute gameplay demo was (baww!), in closing, Porter questions Colantonio on the game’s future probability:

It’s a possibility. We’re really happy with how things turned out for us since then: our collaboration on BioShock 2 along with some other stuff. I’m also co-directing the game of my dreams with Harvey Smith [lead designer on seminal classic Deus Ex] now, so who knows?

Now that Arkane is in the big leagues with what can only considered an amazing line-up of games of the same style – Brink, Rage, Fallout: New Vegas and The Hunted – the studio might finally have both the financial possibilities and freedoms to actually go back to The Crossing. Fingers crossed, eh? Eh!

If you’re interested in the Colantonio/Smith joint venture mentioned above, Rock, Paper, Shotgun published an extensive interview with Colantonio and Smith just last July.

BioShock Infinite.

The announcement of the latest game in the BioShock franchise, slated to launch on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC in 2012, seems to belong to the category of “expect the expected:” As we all turned to the unexpected (Freedom Force, SWAT, X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter, Kingdom Hearts or Yar’s Revenge), I don’t think many of us really did see the new BioShock game coming – not one by Irrational, at the very least. How unpredictably predictable!

First and foremost, let’s concentrate on the much-hyped teaser trailer, now housed at www.bioshockinfinite.com instead of whatisicarus.com. After the jump, we’ve used screen captures from the video to illustrate the post, and you can also find the trailer embedded below.

In a cunning move that must have “shocked” many viewers, Irrational’s CG teaser starts with an underwater shot that is then revealed to be, instead of a return to Rapture, an aquarium built in the memory of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair (one that comes with an eerily Big Daddy –looking statuette):

Soon, the protagonist is sent crashing through a window by a larger golem/robot, revealing to players the actual setting of the game:

The posters, statues and texts that so ubiquitously decorated the walls of BioShock 1 and 2 also make a prominent return in the teaser; on the left, one poster reads “IT IS OUR / HOLY DUTY / To protect them from the foreign hordes and the traitorous anarchists;” on the right, another proclaims “Burden not Columbia with your chaff,” in other words, the former touting xenophobic propaganda and the latter urging citizens towards genetic purity:

What is not making a return in Infinite, though, are the philosophical undercurrents of the previous two games; instead, set in 1912 in the fictional floating city of Columbia, the game shifts its focus slightly further away from the philosophical towards the political and societal, more concerned with the apparent boundlessness of modern progress, the idea that “technology will transform everything” as well as the politics of the early 20th century, “the era of McKinley and Roosevelt … [the U.S.A.] foreign policy at the time.”

In these terms, Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo describes Columbia’s look and feel, based on an ingame demonstration shown to the games press, as “American Obnoxious” after Levine himself dubs the style as “American Exceptionalism.” Eurogamer’s Welsh seems to agree with Totilo’s characterization of the cityscape, stating that compared to the original games, Infinite seems to be more straightforwarded, with Levine “…aiming for a more robust, satirical tone and more pointed engagement with politics this time around.” Additionally, Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Gillen mentions an additional point of importance:

“The fascinating thing about Columbia is that while it’s a failing utopia of some sort, it’s far more functional than Rapture. It’s a game set in the period before World War I has reshaped and coloured this kind of thinking.”

While the heroes of the first two BioShocks were mostly empty vessels for the player to overtake and inhibit – sometimes more, sometimes less successfully – in BioShock Infinite, the protagonist is to be more fully realized and storied as we are to play as the “disgruntled former Pinkerton agent” Booker DeWitt who is “hired under mysterious circumstances to bring home a woman named Elizabeth from the city of Columbia, where she’s been held since childhood. Finding her is the easy part; retrieving her is more difficult, as she’s soon revealed to be at the center of conflict in Columbia.”

Curiously, in Elizabeth, Irrational have suddenly produced a, uh, a more standard video game heroine, and indeed this well-endowed character has already earned the dubious distinction of being characterized as a “skinny-waisted, dark-haired, cleavage-showing damsel” and a “big-eyed, dark-haired and buxom in her Edwardian frock.”

While Elizabeth is to be but an NPC (yet another failed opportunity at a co-operative mode!), Levine nonetheless promises players that she will never feel like the common escort mission nuisance that so many games are burdened with. Neither is she altogether bulletproof, however, as Levine explains that “[DeWitt is] not a super hero and she’s not a super hero, and you’re both up against a very difficult challenge that pushes you to the extremes.”

As the game boldly goes beyond the previous games’ setting in Rapture, lead artist Shawn Robertson pre-emptively explains to Gamasutra that Irrational Games “…always thought BioShock was bigger than the city of Rapture,” stating that they “knew that moving on to this title there couldn’t be any sacred cows; we knew story we wanted to tell. Little by little, it became apparent that we didn’t have any more stories to tell in Rapture. We wanted to take the audience to a completely new place.”

In these terms, Infinite is not quite sequel, and not quite prequel – despite being set before BioShock 1 – nor does it seem to narratively connect, in any tangible way, with the earlier games of the franchise. In speaking to Kotaku, Levine seems rather ill at ease with speculation on this topic, stating that he does not think it “particularly constructive to have that conversation”, instead choosing to draw a parallel to Square’s treatment of the Final Fantasy franchise.

According to Levine, from hereon the BioShock series will adhere to two “core principles:”

“First, it has to be set in a world that is both fantastical and yet also grounded in the human experience. Second, it has to provide gamers with a large set of tools, and then set them loose in an environment that empowers them to solve problems in their own way.”

Unlike with Irrational’s earlier FPS games – SWAT 4, Starsiege: Tribes and BioShock 1 – the team has now moved on to newer, Unreal 3 -based tech. According to Levine, in order to “bring Elizabeth to life, we had to build brand-new animation and AI systems. To create wide-ranging indoor and outdoor fire fights at 30,000 feet, we had to rethink, rebuild and expand the BioShock arsenal.”

Levine in fact mentions that Infinite shares no code, at all, between Irrational’s previous projects, stating that their latest project is “about getting out of our comfort zone for us, because we had used [Unreal Engine 2.5] engine on several games before.” As an illustration of the new tech, you can view the first and latest official screenshots from the game below:

According to early write-ups of the in-game demo, the game’s combat remains much the same, with a weapon housed in the right hand and plasmid-like abilities in the left. While no references to plasmids or tonics have yet been made, DeWitt’s abilities seem to be acquired much in the same way: For instance, for the player to acquire the ability to send forth a flying murder of crows, a bottle of the same name must be drunk. DeWitt also utilizes lightning and even telekinesis to “pull a shotgun out of a man’s hands. The gun floated in front of the man, pointing at him, shot him, then zipped into the grip of our hero.”

Previously, criticism was hurled towards the bathyspheres and trains of the first two games, both in which transportation figured as a neatly camouflaged loading mechanism only. In the latest BioShock, however, Irrational have introduced Sky-Lines, rails that are used for travelling “from room to room and from one city block to the next.” Furthermore, according to Totilo, these Sky-Lines are also used by other citizens, not just by the protagonist DeWitt., a move that seems to effectively tie in with the way Columbia is “not a city that’s as devolved as Rapture”

Effective implementation of the neutral NPC is indeed an all-important step towards creating more believable game worlds, and while Levine points out, in a Joystiq interview, that the earlier games too had what he calls the friendly “guy on the other side of the glass window”, these characters were shielded and separated from the rest of the game worlds, never at once betraying their role as nothing but pre-programmed cutscenes. PC Gamer’s McDougall draws further attention to the topic stating that he expected

“Splicers to have personalities and dialogue, to be characters. They were characters, but that didn’t stop them from running at you with a knife. They were basically monsters with voice actors.”

If you’re craving for more information despite the whole of internet already being Infinitely full of it, PC Gamer have a minutely detailed playthrough of the closed-door in-game press demo, and Joystiq have additionally posted a transcribed video interview with Irrational Games creative director Ken Levine:

Expect the floodgat… I mean, a tornado of Infinite news to come crashing over your gaming news feed over next few days.

Internet detectives have traced the site’s domain registry info back to Take Two games, and a rumour some months ago connected the project codename ‘Project Icarus’ to Irrational Games, so it wasn’t difficult to put two and two together. However the company made no acknowledgement of it until yesterday in a tweet.

Things have been building up to this for a while now. Irrational came out of hiding in the beginning of the year with a shiny new site and a focus on community and company culture. Since then they have stuck to a regular schedule of updates that includes podcasts, employee spotlights and a look into the company’s back catalogue with previously unreleased material. Earlier this month fans were invited to call in and try and guess what the new game was going to be, and the clips were featured this week in the latest episode of the Irrational Behaviour podcast.

At long last they have addressed the pressing question of what they’ve been working on since their seminal BioShock three years ago. We thought it was an X-COM remake, but it turns out that that’s someone else’s project. Rumours point to it being a brand new IP in the form of an “ambitious” FPS. So what is it and when will we know? Invitations have been sent out to a press event in New York on August 11, where they will unveil a demo to journalists. The next day will bring us a CG trailer and more information in the next podcast.

It’s been a long wait for fans, but finally we’ll get a chance to see the highly anticipated mystery game; the 12th can’t come quickly enough. I want to know just what the heck Icarus is.

Though their previous project, the original Unreal Tournament 2004 mod version of the game (that you can still try out and play, by the way; its unrelenting difficulty level and gritty gameplay is something to behold), illustrated in the screenshots below, had laid down a steel-solid foundation for future games to build on, their PR unfortunately started mirroring Black Widow Games’ They Hunger: Lost Souls on the other side of the fence.

This is why I am all the more happy to report that more than three years later and completely out of the blue, Valve have just released Alien Swarm, a Source-based top-down co-op corridor shooter, completely free of charge.

So whatever happened to Black Cat Games in the meantime? According to Valve,

Two years ago Valve hired the talented team behind the popular top down co-op mod Alien Swarm. Since then they have been busy working on the Left 4 Dead Series, and now Portal 2. However, we never forgot about Alien Swarm and the team has spent a lot of time bringing the game to Source in between their contributions to the other Valve projects.

Gaming journalists like PC Gamer’s Craig Pearson have jumped in to compliment Valve on setting yet another precedent by “leaping into a genre other than first-person”, and while the company must absolutely be commended for once again boldly pushing out their content delivery service by handing out Steam-bound games for free – much like they did with Portal for free just a while ago – let us not forget Alien Swarm is still by and large a Black Cat Studios project that now delivers on the promise of the previous version of the game.

Like you can see in the screenshots above, while the curvature of the character designs as well as the particle-based sheen of the new footage does not instantaneously read “hard” as much as it reads “soft” (note: Space marines are always “hard”!), there is little doubt in my mind that the game should be vastly more casual than its predecessor, as the original was in fact notoriously hard and unrelenting, creating a fantastically effective fiction of the players as just another bunch of utterly discardable space troopers.

While level-based unlocks, statistics and a slew of 64 achievements should help players maintain interest in the game, especially a coupled map generation tool as well as the complete SDK for Alien Swarm should ensure a longer half-life for the game. The launch trailer for the game can be found below:

More video, including gameplay footage, can be accessed at Steampowered, and the actual game can be downloaded from here, servers permitting. Say what you will about the sudden announcement, as far as we are concerned, there can never be enough small-scale co-op games, and Alien Swarm looks to be exactly what co-op is for! (And if you should happen to disagree on the shoot-up-aliens-dead-in-dingy-corridors bit, there’s always NASA’s Moonbase Alpha.)

Unfortunately, the one major announcement from Microsoft – the seemingly abrupt re-branding of “Project Natal,” a move that G4TV speculate was an extremely recent decision – had been spoiled only days before much in the same vein as Sony’s PSP Go last year. Nonentheless, the Microsoft hype train steamed forth as planned, with Senior Vice President Don Mattrick (on the left) opening up the show.

Despite first airing footage from the decidedly nondescript Call of Duty: BLOPS, the behemoth got off to a great start once Kojima Productions founder Hideo Kojima and producer Shigenobu Matsuyama (on the right) waltzed on stage to show off Metal Gear Solid: Rising in what ultimately turned out to be the most notable announcement of the whole conference.

The difference-maker surprisingly came in the form of a stunning gameplay reveal: “Rising,” while obviously also relying on the generic strength of the franchise, is being effectively sold to us on the wings of “zan-datsu,” or “cut & take,” as illustrated in the trailer below:

What Raiden’s newfound ability illustrates, above all, is how great a technical marvel Treyarch’s indomitable 1998 PC game Die by the Sword really was – to this day, its fluent mouse-based controls remain perfectly unreplicated, as if the holy grail of sword-fighting in video gaming. Perhaps MGS: Rising will be the first game to step up to the plate?

While the sword-on-watermelon brutality seemed at first to hark back to an April 2010 tweet from Kojima, in which he promised to “challenge a certain type of taboo” in his next game; however, as reported today by Andriasang, Kojima subsequently revealed that the game in question was in fact not Rising:

The thing that I in the past Tweeted ‘It might touch upon a taboo’ is a separate title, one that am doing game design and directing.’

Finally, the game is indeed a multiplatform title that will be available for 360, PS3 and PC. Hooray!

Regarding the follow-ups in Fable III (which came with a new 26th October release date), Codename Kingdoms, Gears of War 3 and Halo: Reach, I don’t have very much to say; beyond the third Fable, which is also surprisingly slated for release on the PC after the bypassed sequel, these are presently all 360-exclusive titles. In fact, the one major surprise here was how Crytek’s Codename Kingdoms should also be a 360-exclusive project.

While I have groaned about this before, I would still like to sternly chastise whomever was playing Halo: Reach during its demonstration. As it stands, whatever impact the gameplay was meant to have on the viewer was successfully sucked out thanks to way too much landscaping and too little thought: For certain, looking around at cool stuff while in the trenches is no way to survive an intergalactic war, the same of which can be said for not using any cover or tactics whatsoever. Why are we given these illusions of gameplay instead of how games really play like?

A wild Justin Bieber appears!

As mentioned before, Microsoft didn’t seem to mind their motion sensor reveal getting leaked much at all; Kinect (a combination of kinetic and connect?) was, as was the trend this year, the focal point of the show.

The absolute lowlight of the show must have been a segment dedicated to Live’s VideoKinect feature; not only was an employee’s personal space quite grossly invaded, the whole shebang was awfully, awfully scripted. Laura Massey, or “Lollip0p,” and her sister, “Velveteen,” demoed the setup in such a horrendously scripted exchange (image below) that I had a hard time staying put for the duration of the presentation. The sisters bade farewell to a miserable “bye” from three persons in the audience.

Of course, the aforementioned social features (video chat, Facebook), “easy and interactive gameplay, video chat, and more” are offered to users with the dreaded asterisk – a required Xbox LIVE Gold membership, of course. Here are the features of the peripheral, by the way:

• Color VGA Motion Camera 640 x 480 pixel resolution at 30FPS
• Depth Camera 640 x 480 pixel resolution at 30FPS
• Array of 4 microphones supporting single speaker voice recognition

Also announced was a Live content delivery deal with ESPN. While certainly a touchdown from the point of view of discovering an all-new way of infusing the system’s user base with fresh blood, the ESPN deal was another glaring example of the current publisher rat race for the most-expanded user base. I did have to stop to ponder what relevance this announcement could have possibly had to the video game journalists in the audience; after all, NCAA-level college sports and even higher-level leagues like the NBA are horribly insignificant to those residing outside the United States.

Following the ESPN reveal, Kudo Tsunoda (on the right), the haggardly hipster and Kinect creative director entered the stage, wearing his trademark indoor shades, to unveil the software line-up. The line-up of demoed titles began with Kinectimals, a cute “petting zoo ” app aimed for children. Like all children’s games, it seemed a mystery to me as to how its gameplay could be humanly sustained for longer periods of time.

KinectSports, then, was a brightly shining example of how late (four years!) Microsoft really is to motion controls. Furthermore, the Xbox 360 avatars that were introduced in late 2008 will probably draw further negative comparisons to Nintendo, potentially questioning the validity of the whole enterprise.

Just as I slipping into a com… deep thought while cursing the idea of simulating reality one to one in a video game, cue in Kinect Joy Ride and Adventures!

“EXCITEMENT! AWESOME PHOTOS! IT ALLOWS YOU TO SHARE IT WITH YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS!”

After the long-winded, cringe-inducing advertisement for Your Shape: Fitness Evolved from Ubisoft (which was also demoed in the Ubisoft conference a few hours later; a keen observation of the presentations here) had stopped playing, we were treated with something that nobody could have foreseen beforehand: Your Shape, demoed on stage.

In the areas where Your Shape failed, though, Harmonix’ Dance Central (as announced by co-founder/CEO Alex Rigopulos) excelled, especially in honest-to-god demoing the actual impressive technical capabilities of the new peripheral. The problem with dancing games, as popular as they are in Japan, is that some people like to dance, others don’t, and this will never change, resulting in limited market appeal at best.

I do love the fact that the game comes with a dead simple move tutorial though; it seemed as though if you ever wanted to learn how to do pop dance in the solitary confines of your own home, Dance Central might very well be it. Massive, massive latency was present, though, and we can only hope it was caused by the conference setup rather than the actual Kinect system.

While eliciting what was possibly the most enthusiastic response from the crowd at hand, Kinect Star Wars from LucasArts at once revealed to us the physical impossibilities inherent to Kinect: Instead of being an on-the-rails shooting game, I suppose the game is an on-the-rails waving game instead. Simply put, it is physically impossible for players to walk forwards and turn at the same time without the aid of extra buttons, a spear that Sony would later drive into Microsoft’s side in their conference.

I do believe this realization effectively means that all we are going to see for Kinect is a flood of static games and rail shooters trying to hide the fact as well as they can. Serious games have serious demands, after all, and these demands are solved with a proper controller. What is absolutely possible, like Sony (and Nintendo, four years before) demonstrated, is making compromises and meeting the limitations of the system half-way.

(Cue in random Ferrari fetishism from the latest Forza Motorsport:)

All-in-all, it seems that Kinect games are going to be a full-body cardiovascular onslaught, even moreso than the Wii launch games ever were. What I don’t get, at all, especially having seen Sony’s conference, is why Microsoft chose not to announce a price tag for Kinect. Not even a price point? Don’t get it.

Also unveiled during the show was the new black edition of the 360, which Mattrick Ophrah’d the entire audience with. The new design comes, notably, with built-in 802.11n support and a 250 GB drive; Arstechnica, who called the new version a “thoughtful, refined system”, have a fantastic hands-on of the console. I can’t help but note that the system does look a helluva lot like a toaster in the photographs, though.

Don Mattrick – whose Miles Fisher -style American Psycho expressions and mannerisms were an integral part to the show – waved off the audience stating that with Kinetic, “The new era of entertainment has begun!” I couldn’t agree more: Microsoft’s 2010 E3 conference perfectly illustrates the ongoing force push of gaming from behind closed doors into the living room. Like last year, there was not much on offer for the ordinary WASD guy.

In any case, let us just linger on for a moment on these fantastic quotes I pulled from the show – a veritable checklist of games marketing bullshit:

“Games you can feel.”
“Full body experience.”
“A magic inner journey.”
“The mind and body are controllers.”
“The player is a design pillar.”
“Playing in the real world.”
“Feel the magic of my environment.”

McHale’s off-kilter performance equally reminded me of a story from CVG’s Vernon Kay, called “How NOT to host a games event” (Kay’s list delightfully also includes what can be classified as the Pong Trap.)

The host’s constant barrage of sarcastic interjections and one-liners came relatively close to Jamie Kennedy’s classic E3 2007 Activision press conference, which he started off with “This is exciting. We’re at E3 and… I just wanna say… this place is the only place… that makes the guys at ComicCon… look like Ocean’s 13.”, instantly breaking Kay’s final rule of “Assume your audience are a bunch of closeted shut-ins.”

Another example of game-changing hosts is Jay Mohr, who single-handedly soured the 13th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards. You can watch his potty-mouthed performance at Joystiq – this was a show after which 3D Realms’ George Broussard asked for his contract terminated “so he *never* does another AIAS awards show.”

The difference between McHale on the one hand and Kennedy and Mohr on the other, though, is that McHale actually focused on the relative ludicrousness of Ubisoft’s line-up instead of lingering on the apparent deficiencies of the crowd and the industry overall.

This minor detail made for vastly more amusing a show!

On this website, we will be following up, at the very least, on four of the major press conferences: Microsoft and Electronic Arts today, and the Nintendo and Sony on Tuesday.

We probably won’t be parroting the more generic announcements – don’t know about you, but my fingers are already worn out from scrolling thru the sudden flood of Kinect news – but anything we think is worth mentioning will certainly find its way on to the blog with some commentary to boot.

Finally, if you’re interested in watching the conferences yourself, the Gamespot live feed has been pretty reliable in the past.

As the earlier previews suggested, the game really does take a lot from the Gears of War series, and plays like a tight third person shooter. There is more to the basic formula with the addition of abilities unique to each Transformer as well as, of course, the option to transform into a vehicle at any time. Tieger explains that the vehicle form has two modes, a hover mode in which the vehicle controls exactly like the Transformer on foot, with strafing and jumping, and a regular mode in which you can travel forward much faster to “roll out” in style.

Some more details about the multiplayer are known now too. Players will have the choice of playing as the existing Autobots and Decepticons in the myriad multiplayer modes, as well as the ability to create whole new Transformers with a character editor, based on pre-built classes each with their unique capabilities.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I don’t have extremely high expectations of the game, but I’m still looking forward to it. It seems to hit the right notes in terms of fan service and the hands-on impressions out there indicate that it will probably provide some decent value through sheer content. The multitude of Transformers to choose from and the drop-in co-op will no doubt ensure a decent amount of replayability.

After the jump, the videos. War for Cybertron is hitting stores on June 22, 2010 for every platform imaginable.

The game employs a new Progress Bar system within each chapter too, revealing how far towards solving a specific problem you are and detailing how many ‘bonus actions’ you’ve managed to solve along the way. Although not necessary to advance the plot, bonus actions allow you to discover more detail about the back-story. (They also reward you with those inexplicably tempting Gamerscore morsels on Xbox 360.) –Kristan Reed, Gray Matter Preview @ Eurogamer

(See also: Mata Hari)

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