Kinect's Powerup Heroes gets comic, media flash
flood

There's not a whole lot about Kinect that intrigues me, but Powerup Heroes certainly does. While other motion controlled fighters have opted for realism, Heroes turns your avatar into a superpowered hero out to rescue the world from a series of alien invaders. Each boss you defeat imbues you with their power and, theoretically, the end game could be a lot of fun.

Fittingly, the game has gotten a comic book spin-off. Oddly enough it reminds me of the comics that used to come with kids' Skechers. The art style and the writing are fairly simple, but it seems like it could be fun. We've got some sample pages from the comic and a handful of screens in the gallery along with the new trailer. Like I said, media flash flood.

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Damnation was the best map from the original Halo

Seriously. I had the most fun on this map above all else. Sidewinder is definitely a close second, but I rarely had the opportunity to play with more than eight people to make that map really worth it. But yeah, Damnation. It was the best!

Halo Anniversary will be getting about a half dozen remade maps based on the original Halo: CE maps and this new video shows off Damnation's fancy new coat of paint. We also have a look at Beaver Creek below, but that map was boring so whatever.

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Your Kinect Disneyland Adventures kick off
November 15

Disney Interactive and Microsoft have announced that Kinect Disneyland Adventures is hitting shelves on November 15.

That's just in time for the holidays, making Kinect for Xbox 360 an even more attractive option when parents are deciding on presents. Disneyland Adventures brings players into the famous theme park, with a series of mini-games and walkthroughs of some of its biggest attractions.

On its own, this game holds absolutely no appeal for me as a gamer. But as a parent, I'm all about it. It's too bad that my daughter is too small to be recognized by connect properly, but you can bet I'd be playing it right alongside her. But if you've got a little one, this and Double Fine's adorable Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster are certainly good reasons to put Kinect in your living room.

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Snowed in by new Need for Speed: The Run trailer

It might be the dead of summer, but the latest Need for Speed: The Run trailer ought to help you chill out a little bit as it gives a peek into what Jack will face as he passes through Colorado. 

The thing that makes me a little annoyed by this trailer is how the most exciting parts of it seem to be all cut scene content. The bit where he's driving through the narrow pass and has to dodge the boulder might not play out all that well with full control, but if they're going to have us do quick-time events to handle Jack's action out of the car, why not just go whole hog and let us have that level of interactivity in all similar sequences?

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Dance Central 2 dated October 25, new trailer and
screens

[Update: We had originally reported Dance Central 2 would be launching on October 21, and while that's true for Asia and Europe, folks in North America will have to wait until October 25. Sorry for the confusion.]

The headline says it all. The news from gamescom is that you can expect to see Dance Central 2 hit on October 25. There will be 40 or so new tracks in this Kinect dancing title from Harmonix, and you'll also be able to import the tracks from the first game. Finally, there's a Dance Battle mode that supports drop-in/drop-out multiplayer. 

Be sure to check out the new trailer, screenshots and character art. 

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Interview: Arkane Studios on Dishonored

After posting my glowing Dishonored preview last week, I received some comments saying my post was overflowing with hyperbole – they must not be familiar with the track record of Arkane Studios’ Harvey Smith and Raphael “Raf” Colantonio.

The two have been keeping immersive, original first-person games alive with titles such as Arx Fatalis, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic and Bioshock 2 (they did a chunk of the level design).

During QuakeCon, I got to sit down with the two Austinites and discuss The Crossing’s current status, the fate of dungeon crawlers and what games inspired Dishonored’s development.

After things falling through with The Crossing, it must have been a big relief to have ZeniMax help you with this new project. Do you feel like it’s a new era for Arkane?

Raf: As an indie developer, you go through a series of good things and bad things. From 2007 to 2009, we had a lot of really hard things to deal with, so when ZeniMax showed up and proposed for us to work on Dishonored -- which was about a year before they acquired us -- it was fantastic. Every hardship we went through, even though we were slapped over again by bad luck or whatever, paid off. 

All of a sudden those near successes had an influence, and they made sense to the entire team. Whenever you get a game that is canceled or shelved or you don’t have enough money to go on or whatever, the people that stay in your company show their passion and you know why they are there.

Is The Crossing canceled for good?

Raf: At this point, it’s on hold.

Have some elements of The Crossing carried on into Dishonored?

Harvey: Well, our collaboration with Viktor [Viktor Antonov, art director on Half-Life 2] has continued.

Raf: Even if you look at it from a team perspective, we learned so much from The Crossing – it was the first game Viktor worked with us on. He trained our artists so well. You look at Dishonored’s design, and everyone has been so fast and efficient to do things.

Viktor told me he traveled across Europe to do research for this game. Not too many companies do that sort of thing (maybe Valve and Irrational Games). Why was this an important investment for you guys?

Harvey: Those guys just wanted to go to Edinburgh and London to take lots of photos for architecture and the faces -- to get the faces right of very British people, the way they carry themselves and look. Of course, you can’t generalize too much. They went to construction crews and took some photos of some hardened guys – that’s why our guards in the game look so pissed off.

You guys are culling a lot of elements from Deus Ex, Thief and System Shock. What elements of those games do you think can live on in modern games, while keeping the game marketable?

Harvey: I am drawn to that type of game. Raf and I are the biggest Ultima Underworld fans, period. We’ll fight anyone else in a pile of Jell-O to claim that. We are both drawn to System Shock. [Raf] was working in Europe and I was working at Origin, and we were both testing System Shock.

We are already drawn to these guys making these games. As soon as he got a chance he created Arx Fatalis, and as soon as I got a chance I worked with Warren Spector on Deus Ex.

If you look at the Xbox 360 and PS3 audience, you can’t easily throw Deus Ex at them…

Harvey: Well, if you look at the evolution of those games -- we love Thief, we love Bioshock and we love Far Cry 2. If you look at Bioshock it’s a good game, period. Whether you play it on the PC or on console. That’s our goal.

Raf: The values don’t change, only the implementation of how deep you go with them in the execution. The values in games like Thief, Deus Ex, and Ultimate Underworld. If you compare their values to those in Dishonored, you’ll find at a high difficulty level they are the same.

Of course, you cannot give a player Ultimate Underworld now. It will freak them out, now-in-days, due to the controls and all of that. It’s all about how you present it.

Harvey: I think Raf is trying to talk about accessibility. The depth is there in Bioshock, but it’s presented with accessibility. Every now and then, I go back and try to replay a game like System Shock and I forget it didn’t have mouselook. And, it blows my mind! I played hundreds of fucking hours on that game – I tested it for ten months: On the floppy then on the CD. I put in hundred hour weeks during that period.

Anyway, it says grab this gamepad and a joystick. You just can’t do that today. So, now you have a controller and some saving conventions. We allow save anywhere, actually.  I would say on the depth-side we try to be hardcore, and on the accessibility side we try to appeal to everyone.

That’s cool that you have save anywhere. I wish every game had that option. I’m sick of these obligatory checkpoints every five minutes in recent games.

Raf: A checkpoint every five minutes wouldn’t even work in the type of game we are making, because you might want to go back. Maybe you didn’t want to do that.

Harvey: I totally agree with him. The other thing is that in this type of game you want to experiment. You want to load up a save and try something out. There are five guys over there: I’m going to use the rats to do “blah,” then I’m going to bounce a grenade and then I’m going to posses this guy and do “blah.” Oh, wait. That didn’t work. Let me back up. And, you did it four or five times and you have a blast experimenting. It’s like alchemy.

It seems like Arx Fatalis might be the last dungeon crawler made by a studio. Does that make you sad or proud?

Raf: I don’t know. I think there may be more.

Harvey: Every now and then we talk about making some sort of self-contained environment where you need to scrounge up food or even make your own food.

Raf: We will do a game like that one day that is super deep and hardcore, but once again it’s all about presentation and the context. Will we ever do another medieval fantasy setting like Arx? Maybe and maybe not, but the format is something both of us really like.

Do you two like the direction that modern first-person shooters have gone?

Harvey: There is a lot that we love.  I’m a big fan of Left 4 Dead, Mirror’s Edge and we both loved Bioshock.

Raf: At the end of the day, we are fans of variety. The worst thing for me is if every game mimicked this one game that made so much money -- so now we are all going to do this one type of game. There is more space for games than that. That’s what matters to us.

Is this the first game you are making with consoles in mind?

Raf: Individually, probably not, but as a company – well, no, we worked on Bioshock 2 before this so that was our first contact with making a game for consoles.

Harvey: We actually picked up a couple level designers from Bioshock 2 along with some members of the modding community of Deus Ex and Thief.

Would you say to a Thief fan that Dishonored is its spiritual successor?

Raf: [laughs]

Harvey: No, we wouldn’t say it in those words but we would definitely say that Thief is one of our big influences right now.

Raf: I would say if you liked Thief, there is a big chance that you’ll like what we are making right now. You’ll find a lot of things in common, but then there are a lot of other layers involved. There are some Deus Ex things, the combat is more like Dark Messiah – it’s a mix of everything that we like.

Harvey: We always use the term “immersive simulation.” It’s that school of thought that it’s a first-person game, but it’s not a shooter. It’s a first-person game with depth and world cohesion.

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East vs. West: Challenge accepted

_{[In today's promoted blog for our East vs. West topic, DiscoStu argues in favor of the East and argues that Japanese games tend to be more memorable and distinctive. Want to see your own blog make it to the front page? Make sure you write something on this week's topic, Handhelds. -- JRo]}

For decades, a line has been drawn in the sand between Eastern and Western developed games; allegiances to either side have become commonplace among us, the avid consumers. In recent years, the market has seen a decided shift in favor of Western developers, and their competitors are the first to admit it.

Last year Keiji Inafune, then head of global research and development at Capcom, openly stated, “I look around Tokyo Games Show, and everyone’s making awful games; Japan is at least five years behind.” Today, most anyone would agree that, from a business perspective, the Western studios are coming out on top. However, like any red-blooded American, my love goes to the underdog.

At this point it should be made clear that my level of satisfaction, not my average financial investment, ultimately dictated the choice I’ve made on this subject. Dollar for dollar, the last five years have seen a great many American titles added to my collection and a relative few new Japanese titles. Despite this clear dichotomy, those few Japanese titles hold significantly more weight in my heart. A simple analogy would be to say that I eat chili-mac on a semi-regular basis; it’s cheap and satisfying, to boot. Then, every once in a while I sit down to a spinach, white raisin, goat cheese, and vinaigrette salad, a small plate of whole wheat penne in zesty lemon pecorino sauce, and a chicken, basil, and green pepper gourmet meatball. The latter is a more satisfying, well-rounded meal and I’m happy to take my time savoring its nuance.

Even a comparison of fast foods shows a striking difference in complexity

Unlike most modern Western hits, Japanese games are typically released as truly finished products. Games like Demon’s Souls, the Metal Gear Solid series, and the Final Fantasy games are not plagued by DLC, DRM, or any similarly annoying acronyms. These titles have a lasting impact on their players. To bring a little context, I only recently finished my first run of Demon’s Souls, a game that I began playing nearly two years ago. For those  familiar with Demon’s Souls, it should be apparent that this game illustrates a departure from the traditionally narrative-heavy nature of Japanese productions in favor of a mechanically deep hack-n-slash gauntlet. This simple paradigm allows Demon’s Souls to play (and often prey) upon the simple human drive to triumph over increasingly difficult challenges.

The Metal Gear Solid game series is well known for its heavy narrative, constantly drawing from topical global issues: terrorism, war, global resource crises, and freedom of information are a few of the concepts addressed throughout the Metal Gear saga. These games challenge us emotionally and moralistically by having us bear witness to, and take an active role in, the horrors of conflict. Unlike many Western games, however, these narratives are much more personal; their “villains” are humanized by all-too-real accounts of injustice and outrage. In this way, Eastern games have a unique edge over many Western titles; our Western hits have all but ceased to legitimately challenge us.

Pictured: A character singularly more complex than any "Last Action Hero"

These days Western developers inundate us with innumerable iterations of the insurmountable action hero, an archetype that unabashedly spits in the face of danger. This protagonist typically answers the call of duty (that’s the joke) to snuff out the looming threat of a faceless and hostile group, often taking the form of a thinly veiled cultural stereotype threatening our hero and his way of life. The best selling games of our generation bear a title most popularly recognized in the form of an acronym: the first person shooter. We Americans are steeped in a culture that glorifies guns, pride, and retribution; FPSes are simple representations of these principles.

Take Call of Duty, the highest selling game franchise in history, as an example. Idyllic American soldiers defend their homeland from ruthless, bloodthirsty, and morally depraved invaders from the Middle East or Russia. Subsequently, dozens of game studios release simulators for shooting Middle Eastern or Eastern European terrorists, hoping to piggyback onto the success of the Call of Duty and Battlefield franchises. In the process of doing this, we're setting new standards, standards which encourage us not to ask questions and just blast the "bad guys" as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Somewhere along the line, we've stopped associating these images with one another

Furthermore, our Western games come out of their cases in a state of half-completion. Day-one downloadable content, while understandably instituted as a piracy prevention practice, insults those customers who choose to purchase the game on the day it releases. We pay $60 for a new game, then immediately pay another $10 for exclusive content. I understand that day-one DLC’s purpose is to incentivize new purchases, but I take offense when a developer tells me, “So you bought the game, but it’s not the REAL game until you buy these extra maps and missions.” Not only am I paying extra for a less complete game, but as is the case with franchises like Call of Duty and titles from EA Sports, that game will quickly become irrelevant when the sequel comes out next year. Who cares if you bought the extra maps -- no one’s playing on them anymore.

Make no mistake, I’m not suggesting Japan produces more gems than Europe or North America, but what Japanese hits lose in global sales they more than make up for in cult status, deriving from their distinctiveness, memorability, and longevity. In the past, this cult following would be attributed to the stylized world and characters that surrounded the tried-and-true turn-based formula (e.g. Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, and Suikoden). In years since, however, characters in these games have become simple copies of the archetypes that we fell in love with throughout the 90’s. What we’ve been left with is a slew of RPGs cheaply trying to recapture the charm of their forebears.

Where the Japanese market has begun to truly shine, though, are the various divisions of the action genre. Games like Demon’s Souls and Metal Gear Solid capture the philosophy of Eastern game development while proving that Japan still has something unique to bring to the party. American games, like our choice of cuisine, embody instant gratification, but Japanese titles still offer us more complete and decisive works of electronic art.

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Crytek bringing free-to-play Warface to 'Western
markets'

It seemed odd that a company like Crytek would produce a free-to-play first-person shooter for PC and only talk about how it's going to be available in China. The powers that be are now discussing further plans: Warface "will hit the Western markets in 2012."

Short story even shorter, they are starting with Asia to gain experience in the market, which can then be used to (in theory) better the product we receive. Sounds like a plan.

The amount of games coming out with this business model is rapidly approaching absurdity, yes. But it's not every day you see a title with so much attention to detail; Crytek has the technology to make it rain men, after all.

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SQUIDS Preview (PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android)

Brand new French indie studio The Game Bakers have revealed SQUIDS, their upcoming title for iOS, Android, PC and Mac. The game is described as "Angry Birds meets Worms with a dash of RPG." Intrigued yet? Learn more about this unique game behind the cut.

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Lord of the Rings: War in the North Preview

Developer: Snowblind StudiosRelease Date: 2011Platform: Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PCLord of the Rings: War in the North is an action RPG title based on the northern front war briefly mentioned by Gandalf. Developer Snowblind Studios, with notable RPG pedigree, took liberties with the Lord of the Rings property to craft a unique experience for fans. [...]

Read The Full Article:
http://monstervine.com/2011/08/lord-of-the-rings-war-in-the-north-preview/

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