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From their website: PAGE ONE.
Atari recently invited us out to San Francisco to check out a ton of new games it’s publishing in 2009. Two of them, Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena and Ghostbusters, were originally going to be published by Sierra-Vivendi until the Activision Blizzard merger. Both of those games were subsequently picked up by Atari and are set to be released early in the coming year.
In addition to checking out both of those highly anticipated titles—with this being the first time Dark Athena has been shown since its 2007 announcement—I got the opportunity to see and play a bunch of other games on the company’s roster, including a new entry in the Ready 2 Rumble Boxing series, an updated look at Codename Panzers: Cold War and a peek at Heroes over Europe.
Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena
Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena takes place immediately following the events of Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, but don’t think of using the S word. “To be clear, this is not a sequel,” says Ian Stevens, head of game production at Vin Diesel’s Tigon Studios. “We look at it as the next chapter in a story that’s episodic.”The game is set on the Dark Athena, a slave ship that’s picked up Riddick’s escape pod while he was dozing off in suspended animation. After learning that their captive has a bounty attached to his head, the ship’s crew is ordered to recapture the now-escaped antihero. (If you missed the first Riddick game for some reason, don’t worry. It’s included in the package, and players can choose to play either right out of the gate.)
As with Escape from Butcher Bay, the game is a first-person shooter with plenty of stealth elements. If you’re more of a run and gun player, though, that style seems to be a bit more viable than before. The Dark Athena is constantly patrolled by Ghost Drones, which are typical space bad guys with an interesting twist. They operate in two different modes—an AI-controlled state and one in which they’re remotely controlled by mercenaries. The black-suited enemies are equipped with color-coded headlights that alert Riddick to their status. If they’re red, that means that they’re under AI control. In that state they move in set patterns and patrols, making it easy for Riddick to either sneak past them or take out. When they’re illuminated with a white light, however, they’re being remotely controlled—in which case Riddick had better stay on his toes. Those enemies are able to coordinate attacks with other drones and fight more aggressively and intelligently. In addition to the lights indicating their status, they have a different gait depending on their operating mode—a subtle but neat little touch.
Regardless of their mode, after killing an enemy, Riddick faces an interesting problem: Their guns are physically attached. Rather than attempt to saw off the offending limb with his scary-looking Ulak knives, Riddick just grabs the whole drone—gun, body and all—and uses it to his advantage. Even though it’s in someone else’s hand, he can pull the trigger on the weapon as well as use the body as a human shield. As you’d expect though, Riddick sacrifices a lot of mobility when he’s doing this, and he can only move backward. He can’t reload these weapons either, so it becomes a game of stab, grab, shoot and move on to the next drone.
Mercenaries aren’t the only ones who can pilot drones, also. At several points throughout the game, Riddick can sneak into a control room and test drive some bad guys himself. In the sequence I saw, he had to take out the enemies before they were able to use a torch to melt through a locked door and get Riddick. First, a giant fan blocked a pathway. No problem. The first Riddick-controlled drone simply walked into its blades, seizing up the mechanism and clearing the path for the second one. They don’t call ‘em drones for nothing.
The game looks significantly better than its predecessors, which was no slouch back in its day. The textures are stunningly detailed, and the vo-capped actors—using a technique first used in the Darkness and now even more refined—give amazingly realistic performances. It looks so good in fact that Tigon and Starbreeze went back and gave Butcher Bay a makeover, too.
“We’ve gone back and remade every character model and given every single environment a pretty significant once over,” says Stevens, “in some cases we went back to concept art from 2002 and looked at certain ideas we had about what we wanted to do with this game on the original Xbox hardware and maybe couldn’t do but now have that ability.
“I know there’s a lot of speculation about what that remake is, and a lot of people are thinking that we’re just giving it the high-res treatment that we did with the PC version, but in fact it’s a really significant facelift to bring it up to the standard of the new content that we’re making. We didn’t want to have this weird disconnect between playing the remake and then going on to something else that takes this huge leap in quality between the two.”
That effort wasn’t purely cosmetic, either. “As a producer, I can vouch for this being a humongous task,” says Samuel Ranta-Eskola. “It’s been like making two games. It’s required a lot of work. As you release a game, you have a ton of things that you want to fix. We were able to complete a few of those, and a few frustrating moments were fixed. I know some people had a lot of trouble navigating their way out of the mines in the previous version, so we’ve fixed that.”
Interestingly, getting dropped by Activision was the reason why the teams were able to do these kinds of things in the first place. “We were getting ready to do some solid PR at the time; I think the goal was to ship the game of September of last year,” says Stevens. “Then things suddenly began to slow down. We didn’t immediately find out why that was, but we knew it was happening to more developers than just ourselves. It’s a small community—people talk. Eventually we realized what was going on. It kind of ended up being an ideal situation for us. What every developer in the world wants is for somebody to give them money and then leave them alone. That’s kind of what happened. People in marketing and PR and production and what not stopped returning calls if they had something we needed to figure out, but we were getting paid in the meantime, so we could just focus and be creative and figure out for ourselves what we wanted to do and the direction we wanted to take things in.
“I think it was probably the most blissful period of development that any of us have had in a decade plus of making games. The result is something that’s more polished than any game that Starbreeze has ever released. I think we’re definitely happy about having had this opportunity and have moved on to a partner like Atari and working with Phil Harrison obviously. Also, Jim Wilson, Atari’s CEO was our CEO at Universal Interactive who started the first game and greenlit that and funded it. So we really got the band back together in a strange, ironic way. It’s been a good experience for us.”
Source: http://gameinformer.com/News/Story/200812/N08.1205.1642.33139.htm
PAGE TWO:
Ghostbusters
According to developers Terminal Reality, the reports of Ghostbusters’ unfortunate demise were greatly exaggerated. After Activision Blizzard passed on the game after gobbling up previous publisher Vivendi Games, executive producer Brendan Goss was a bit anxious about the project’s future—albeit temporarily. “While there was a certain amount of nervousness, that went away the morning that it became public knowledge and it was announced,” says Goss. “I probably had 25 calls that day from publishers saying, ‘Who do we need to talk to?’”With input from the original cast and a script co-written by Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis, why did Activision decide against publishing such a seemingly sure thing in the first place? According to Goss, it was a matter of the game not gelling with the company’s overall philosophy. “’How are you guys doing a movie IP without a movie,’” Goss recalls Activision asking. “It doesn’t make sense—it doesn’t fit our model, so you’re not going to make the move over to Activision.’”
Fortunately for fans of the beloved franchise, Atari won out in the courtship between several other publishers, and the game is set for a 2009 release—just in time for the 25th anniversary of the first film. “We know that Sony has huge plans for that, and also Atari,” says Goss.
While there wasn’t much new content shown since I last saw it, it’s looking as good as ever. Players can expect to spend an hour or more in each of the game’s eight levels, with the library level on hand taking almost two to complete. Wrecking things with the Ghostbusters’ Proton Packs is so much fun that we expect to squeeze even more time out of each destruction-prone environment.
With the game originally set to come out this fall, I asked Terminal Reality if they’ve been taking it easy with that extra time. “We’re definitely not sitting idle,” says producer Michael Fetterman with a laugh. Goss says having those extra months of development time has been a godsend for the team. “It’s given us the opportunity to go back through—as every developer wants—and have more time to put in more polish and to also take a look at some of the feedback that we’ve had and identify if there’s low-hanging stuff that we can do that the fans will really respond well to. I think we’ve got some tricks up our sleeve that people are going to be really pleasantly surprised by when the game does come out.”
Ghostbusters (Wii)
The Wii is also getting a version of Ghostbusters, but it’s definitely not a port. The game features the same story as the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 version, but it includes new equipment, ghosts, boss creatures and areas. It’s packaged together in a Pixar-inspired art style. As you’d expect the game highlights the Wii’s motion controls, and it’s pretty effective. It took a little while to get used to the controls, but once I got the hang of them I was busting ghosts like nobody’s business. Trapping spirits is a pretty complicated process. First, you have to snare them with your proton beam (by pointing and zapping them with the Wii’s remote). Unsurprisingly, ghosts aren’t exactly the most cooperative subjects—they try to escape your grasp by rushing all over the place. Arrows light up on the screen showing you which direction you need to pull to maintain control. After a while, your beam will turn blue, which means it’s time to slam them into the ground. Once they’re dazed, you toss the trap under them with a bowling motion (using the nunchuk) and they’re all yours.Red Fly Studios managed to include some fairly destructive environments into the mix, which means that your stray shots are bound to at least hit something. As one of the developers told me, if you put the game down for a few weeks and can’t recall where you were when you return to it, you can at least break a bunch of stuff until you do remember. There you go.
Source: http://gameinformer.com/News/Story/200812/N08.1205.1642.33139.htm?Page=2
PAGE THREE:
Heroes Over Europe
Fans of arcade-style flight sims are in a bit of a dry spell these days, which is something that Heroes Over Europe aims to fix. The game includes more than 40 real-world planes from the World War II era and has missions based on historical events, too. Playing as Canadian, English and American pilots, players will get to knock tons of German and Japanese pilots out of the sky. Missions aren’t just limited to dogfighting though. In some, you’ll have to root out German pilots who have infiltrated Allied formations with decoy planes. Others will have you do things like bomb the wall of a jail where resistance fighters are being held to facilitate their escape. It’ll also support 16 players in online dogfights, which sounds like a fun, chaotic time.Heroes Over Europe has a pretty cool gameplay mechanic, too. You aren’t equipped with guided missiles or other anachronistic technology. Instead, you can make ace kills. If you keep your target reticule highlighted over an enemy long enough, a meter will fill around that target. Once it reaches a certain point, you can trigger ace mode. Time slows down as long as you have juice in the meter, and vulnerable parts of the plane in your sight are highlighted in yellow. With a steady hand you’re able to take out the pilot, wings or other vulnerable spots, downing the enemy aircraft in a single shot. It’s not an instant win button though, since they’ll try to evade you the whole time. Skilled pilots can chain multiple kills together in a single sequence, earning bonuses. Heroes Over Europe definitely lives up to its arcade-action billing, and it’s something that thrill-seeking flyboys (and girls) should watch out for in 2009.
Ready 2 Rumble Revolution
Ready 2 Rumble Boxing is pulling itself up from the mat on a nine count—nearly the number of years it’s been since it was last seen. When Ready 2 Rumble 2 came out, the Dreamcast and Nintendo 64 were still alive and well and the PlayStation 2 and Game Boy Advance were shiny and new. Technology has obviously changed, and the next installment in the arcade boxing series is coming out exclusively on the Wii—with all the motion-sensing bells and whistles.Players take on AI opponents or their friends by punching in the air with their Wii remotes and Nunchuks. Moves like uppercuts, hooks and jabs are made by swinging in the appropriate fashion. Those punches can be charged up for a more powerful version, but be careful. If you telegraph your moves too often, you can expect to have your blow parried and be forced to watch helplessly as your stunned boxer takes a beating.
I played a few rounds and found the same hectic action that I remembered from back in the day. Successful punches fill up the familiar Rumble meter, which can be used to unleash devastating combo attacks. Pugilists have their own unique moves that draw from a variety of influences—such as kung fu, wrestling and other martial arts. Kaiser Kong’s Rumble attack flings his hapless opponent high into the air and out of the ring, for example.
The controls weren’t completely precise in the version I played, but even if I release an uppercut when you meant to jab, I was still throwing some kind of punch. The original was a bit of a button-masher, and Ready 2 Rumble Revolution has that same overall feel. If you want to practice your moves, there are a handful of minigames based on various boxing skillsets, like jumping rope and working the speed bag. In addition to honing your gaming skills, you can also use them to upgrade your custom-created boxer in the all-new championship mode.
I only got to see a glimpse of the character roster, and it’s filled with celebrity parodies. There’s action hero Kaiser Kong, extreme-sports star Red Dermato and Dewey Streudal, a washed up B-lister with tan lines who bears a passing resemblance to the star of a certain show about lifeguards. The boxers start off as fairly grotesque caricatures, and the bruise-inducing matches don’t help their looks (that’s a compliment). I was a bit surprised that Afro Thunder, the series’ de facto mascot, wasn’t shown anywhere during our demo. Maybe he’s in training.
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