Video Game Previews

Sometime in the past few years, shadows became a curiously pervasive trend in game design. Not the presence of shadows, but rather the ability to play as a shadow. XBLA's Limbo is the most recent high-profile example of the trope, but Wii gamers will be able to partake of the trend as well early next year thanks to Hudson's Lost in Shadow.

Lost offers a different take on shadow play than Limbo, though. Whereas the latter used its bleak graphics as an homage to German impressionist films of the early 20th century, Lost resembles nothing so much as Sony's PlayStation 2 masterpiece Ico. Its visuals are saturated with light, yet fairly monochromatic at the same time -- ethereal and dreamlike. Unlike in Ico, though, you're not responsible for the welfare of a scatterbrained princess, and you're not simply fighting shadows; you are a shadow.

From what I understand, the number four has a similar cultural connotation in Japan as the number 13 does here. Something to do with how their alternate, Chinese-derived pronunciation of "four" sounds the same as the word for "death," or some such. In that light, Sega seems to be courting bad luck with the fourth entry in the Yakuza series by offering a total of four different playable characters for the adventure. Maybe it's only fitting, though. After all, the Yakuza do have a reputation for gambling.

We're told that the expanded cast of protagonists -- Kazuma Kiryu and three of his underworld compatriots -- will come into play throughout the course of the story by offering different perspectives on the plot. Whether that will simply entail shifting the focus from character to character with each new chapter, or a complex, Rashomon-like tale that interlocks to reveal the true events and motives of its shadowy cast.

I'm not going to lie: When I first heard that Bionic Commando Rearmed 2 would be following up on 2008's fantastic HD remake by adding jumping to Rad Spencer's skill set, my knee jerked so hard it's a wonder my desk didn't crack in half. The original NES Bionic Commando remains one of the very few games that, in my estimation, achieved near-perfection, and Rearmed was an amazing modernized recreation of its mechanics. But much of the essential genius of both games was in the way they presented players with engrossing platform-based gameplay while completely removing the genre's universal ability to jump. Without the ability to leap into the air, Spencer was forced to master his bionic arm to grapple, climb, and swing around the world. It worked in large part because of the game's spot-on physics and controls; zipping around on the bionic arm was natural, fluid, and precise.

Adding the ability to jumping into the mix seems like a terrible mistake -- not just an example of missing the point, but of completely undermining the essential point of the entire series. Or so I thought until I actually tried the game on the Penny Arcade Expo show floor. I'm still not sold on the ability to jump. The thing is, though, I don't have be. In fact, I don't have to jump, period.

If ever there was a mascot worthy of starring in a game called Brink of Extinction, it would definitely be Hudson's Bonk. The affable caveman was the de facto face of the NEC TurboGrafx-16 console, and he and his futuristic progeny Zonk starred in half a dozen 16-bit titles that ranged from good to great. And then, Bonk pretty much disappeared, only cropping up in a handful of releases for Nintendo's older consoles and the occasional port or remake. For all intents and purposes, Bonk was as wiped out as the dinosaurs he so determinedly head-butted in his Mesozoic travels.

So, I was pleasantly surprised when I spent a little time on the Penny Arcade Expo show floor this weekend and discovered that Brink of Extinction is neither a port nor a remake, but rather a completely new game with completely new features for the series. While it plays faithfully to the older Bonk titles -- players control a rock-skulled caveman who solves problems by smashing them with his forehead -- the entire game is rendered with high-definition polygonal graphics. More importantly, Brink also features cooperative multiplayer, both local and over Xbox Live.

If Wetrix had a baby with LocoRoco, it would... well, it would be a pretty damn weird baby. Alternately, it would look an awful lot like Fluidity, a WiiWare title that was freshly revealed at Penny Arcade Expo 2010. Combining a two-dimensional tilt-controlled world with puzzles built around complex water physics, Fluidity is nerve-wrackingly difficult... yet it's compelling in the way the best puzzle games often are.

Nothing about Fluidity is particularly surprising or mind-blowing; players use the Wii Remote to guide the movement of a mass of water by holding the controller horizontally and tilting it to rotate the game environment. That's where the LocoRoco connection comes in: You're not controlling the water itself, but rather the world around it. Water flows naturally downhill, so you tilt flat surfaces to turn them into inclines for the fluid to run down. Your actions affect other in-game objects as well; turn the controller fast enough and -- for example -- certain gates might close, or else your water might pool up in a corner and cause the bobber there to rise, activating the switch to which it's connected.

Where Fluidity differs from LocoRoco, however, is in the motion of the water itself. While the natural state of LocoRoco's title characters was to lump together into a single giant creature, the water here tends to spread out and cover every available surface. It's possible to cause it to draw together into a loose ball by holding a button, but this is a temporary solution: Hold the button too long and the water tension will cause it all to burst outward, leaving you in a worse situation than you were in before you pulled it all together.

When I signed up to attend Penny Arcade Expo 2010, the last thing I expected at the show was to be the recipient of virtual double fellatio. But I guess that's just because -- like the rest of the world -- I had no idea that I'd actually be playing a real, live demo of Duke Nukem Forever.

And hell, why would I? Supposedly the perpetually delayed game died (forever) last year under a fusillade of bankruptcy, legal maneuvers, and desperate bailouts by developer 3D Realms and publisher 2K Games. While there were rumors that Gearbox had been tasked with salvaging the game, I don't think anyone could have predicted that we'd see the fruits of their labors quite so soon. And, honestly, the name Duke Nukem Forever has become inextricably associated with failure and empty promises, so even if we'd been told that a playable demo of DNF would be showing up at PAX, I don't think most people would have believed it.

Earlier today, we had a brisk and information-dense presentation followed by some quick play sessions of the multiplayer features for Call of Duty: Black Ops. The easy assumption to make with Black Ops would be that it simply features "more stuff." Take the current number of quantifiable items like killstreaks, perks, weapons, and levels, and crank out a bunch more. And that is indeed one aspect of Black Ops' multiplayer.

Examples of the above include stuff like an expanded Killstreak list that includes Cold War-ized versions of popular Modern Warfare multiplayer tropes; the UAV has given way to the Spy Plane. The Napalm Strike replaces your typical airstrike. The gunship is an appropriately Cold War era helicopter rather than a modern behemoth. And there're new Killstreak rewards, like the exploding RC buggy (affectionately referred as the "bomber buggy") or the minigun called "Death Machine." But once you get past the traditional, "here's more stuff," you can see that Treyarch is actually adding five major changes or additions to what we would traditionally associate as Call of Duty multiplayer.

I'm a big fan of seeing America through the eyes of others, especially in videogames. Whether it's how Rockstar satirizes the American dream in Grand Theft Auto, or how the Polish perceive the Western in Call of Juarez. And there was a little bit of the "foreigner getting hyperbolic and silly about American culture" vibe in Platinum Games' MadWorld; that same sense of style and exaggerated "American-ness" is present in Shinji Mikami's upcoming Vanquish.

The easy way to describe Vanquish would be, "the Japanese take on Gears of War," as there's a pretty equal blend of Japanese aesthetics and style with traditional Western cover-based gunplay. The game opens with a crazy scene of Russians taking over a space station and then using it to destroy San Francisco. The spaceships and robotic Russian foes look like something from a typical starship anime, but then you see the primary characters, and they then open their mouths.

Bangai-O for Dreamcast was a cult hit, that's for sure. Bangai-O Spirits, the DS sequel, was also a cult hit. You could come up with several depressing theories why: It's too wacky, too hard, unappreciated by the unwashed masses, and so on. But with gaming platforms like Xbox Live Arcade around, Bangai-O can not only attain a visual splendor it hadn't completely reached, but it could reach a lot more people, too.

D3 Publisher and developer Treasure might be going for just that with Bangai-O HD: Missile Fury, the name of the new game for XBLA and coming out in November. And if you know Bangai-O, then by name alone you know you're in for two things with Missile Fury: Better graphics, and, well, simply more graphics. By expanding out to widescreen, this version of Bangai-O can now zoom out much further -- not to a super unmanageable bird's-eye view like the extremes of Castlevania: Harmony of Despair, but enough to wow you, all the while maintaining the same speed, regardless of how much danger you're facing.

Id Software hasn't created a brand-new IP (intellectual property) in over ten years. That's a long time. And while we love our sequels to the Quakes and Dooms, there is always something fresh to be had behind a new game we've never played. Enter Rage, a game that looks and sounds familiar but sounds like it's finding a new way to bring us into an apocalyptic narrative. I had a chance to sit down with Tim Willits recently, and he was kind enough to field some of the questions from the 1UP community.

The Community Questions

1UP: METAgamer468 asks, "How expansive will the world of Rage be? Also, how is Id handling character interactions? Will there be dialog trees, or anything like that?"

The release of the next chapter in the Fallout universe is nearly upon us in the form of Fallout: New Vegas with developer Obsidian Entertainment at the helm. We recently had a chance to sit down and talk Fallout, the challenges of creating a game within the shadow of Fallout 3, as well as have Obsidian CEO, Feargus Urquhart, field some 1UP community questions.

The Community Q&A

1UP: EXTomar asks, "Are either [Editor's note: he is referring to both Fallout and Rage] worried that the themed setting (post-apocalyptic wasteland-ish) is getting overplayed?"

A ranger, a warrior, and a necromancer walk into a keep under siege by centaurs...This isn't the start of a terrible variation on a cliché joke, but an apt description of the quest system that powers Guild Wars 2. Rather than adopt the traditional "walk up to a fellow or femme who has an exclamation point floating above their head, read the quest blurb, and hit accept," you instead simply stumble onto events in motion. It's up to you to jump into the fray; I guess you could be an anti-social sort and simply walk away, but why are you playing an MMORPG if you don't intend to perform quests in the company of other players? If you do decide to stay in the fight and throw in an arrow, sword-swing, or fireball, then you're judged by how much you participated in the battle, and rewarded accordingly.

This could sound somewhat like the Public Quests that were a major feature of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, but while WAR featured a few of those scattered around the region, the main calling of Guild Wars 2 is that most of the game follows this structure. Even the beginning tutorial, which I get a chance to play, actually unfolds like the first line in this story. But let's rewind a bit.

The way that executive producer Yoshinori Kitase refers to The 3rd Birthday as a "new series" at the start of our chat in Cologne, Germany, is interesting to me -- and I make it a point to have him explain how he views it in relation to the Parasite Eve series as a whole. While he's quick to state that Square Enix doesn't have anything officially in the works beyond The 3rd Birthday just yet, he could very well see the Parasite Eve series continuing on the PS3 and Xbox 360 in the future -- in fact, you get the sense that he very much assumes it will. But for now, all of his attention is on Aya's 3rd Birthday, as it's called, which is the celebration of her return in a third game -- because after such a hiatus, it's significant enough to fans, and even to Square Enix, to see her back. What originally started as a small cell phone project two years ago has evolved into a full-blown PSP title, with many of Square's biggest talents on the project, including Kitase himself (though now he serves as producer on many other titles as well).

Kitase demos the game for me, showing me some of the basics we'd seen in the past, and explaining to how this Parasite Eve game is far more action-oriented. This time, however, we take a deeper dive into the hijacking mechanic, which, if you hadn't heard, is your ability to hack into other peoples' minds and take over their bodies (huh, sounds a bit like another Square Enix game you might have heard of). But this is more than just some sort of combat gimmick, it actually sits at the core of the entire experience. The way the game works is that you're always in a squad of CTI members (CTI, not to be confused with Jack Bauer's CTU, is the name of the organization fighting the Twisted, the creatures that have been attacking New York city). And as Aya, you basically can hop between members of the squad by hacking into their minds (when you do this you also assume their bodies; the game then displays them as Aya). This obviously comes into play in a lot of ways -- not only can you use this to your advantage tactically (such as by hacking into a squadmate and moving him into position to surround an enemy), but it can be used strategically in terms of using a specific member's weapons or relying on their health when another's is low. As you make your way through levels, you're actually not the real-life Aya -- you're constantly assuming other peoples' bodies. In fact, Aya is never actually out on the battlefield herself -- she's safe within the confines of CTI -- she's controlling all of these squadmates remotely.

If you tuned into the Sony press conference at Gamescom last week, you got to see Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One revealed and played for the first time by Ted Price and a couple of other Insomniacs. Which means you also got to see why it's a cool new direction for the Ratchet series: one that allows up to four players to play together (either locally or online). As a hardcore Ratchet fan, I was pretty much sold on the concept within minutes of seeing it in action, but after getting a chance to check out some more of the game and chat with Chad Dezern (studio head at the new North Carolina Insomniac studio) and some of the other team members at the show, I'm even more excited about what's in store.

As you see in the first videos, the game is very much like the Ratchet titles we all know and love, except here you can have up to four people playing on the same screen. According to Dezern, the project originally started as a two-player affair, where one person would play Ratchet and another would play as Clank, but when the team realized how much co-op added, it experimented with adding a third and then a fourth player. So now you can play as Ratchet and Clank, obviously, but also Captain Qwark and Dr. Nefarious. And why would these four ever be teamed together? Well, it turns out Nefarious had this elaborate scheme involving a creature collector, but in addition to abducting Ratchet, Clank, and Qwark, it also sucked him in. So they're all basically forced by circumstance to work together -- which means they all need to rely on each other, but that doesn't mean they always play fair (more on that later).

Crysis 2 executive producer Nathan Camarillo summarizes the basic philosophy behind the multiplayer: "We want you to be the weapon." The titles have always emphasized the nanosuit -- a spiffy power armor that grants speed, strength, cloaking, and armor abilities to its wearer. And while Crysis 2 will play like any other first-person shooter (run, gun, die, respawn, repeat), it'll be the players that smartly use the nanosuit who will grasp Crysis 2's distinct playstyle and flexibility.

Camarillo notes that by default, the suit amplifies your strength and speed, so you already move a bit faster and can lift heavier things. The additional strength also means that you can jump higher; he comments that to him, something like a fast sprint combined with a high jump and an easy mantle feels, "kind of like parkour with guns -- it's as though you smashed Mirror's Edge together with Call of Duty." Like in single-player, you can easily toggle either armor (which slows you down, but amps up your damage resistance) or stealth (a cloaking device) whenever the situation arises. Camarillo believes that dynamically switching your abilities around alters the pace of a match -- you go between zipping and jumping around very fast for navigation to being slower for actual combat (by flipping on armor) or maybe for sneaking (by turning on the cloak).