Wakeboarding HD, A Rare Wakeboarding Game, Goes To PSN [Playstation Network]

How many games have been based on the water sport of wakeboarding? One? Two?! No, three , now that Creat Studios is bringing Wakeboarding HD to the PlayStation Network this week, perhaps the most shark-jumping of the bunch. More

The Crazies Review: Left 4 Dead In a Small Town [Review]

An idyllic American town plunges into murder and mayhem after a toxin finds its way into the water supply, leaving a sheriff, his deputy, his wife and her friend to survive a town now peopled by The Crazies in what looks an awful lot like a zombie apocalypse. Sound familiar? While this is no Left 4 Dead, there’s plenty about the remake of 1973’s The Crazies that will feel familiar to fans of zombie games and movies . Lets see if it’s worth the nearly two hours to check out. Loved Zombie 2.0: How quickly we grow bored of zombies, or at least the way they were created and how they behave. What started as an off-shoot of voodoo rituals and resulted in mindless, ambling, brain-eating undead, has seen quite a few changes over the year. The slow, moving, unthinking zombies of movies like White Zombie and Dawn of the Dead, gave way to faster unthinking zombies in movies like 28 Days Later, Resident Evil: Extinction and Zombieland. The Crazies brings us a kind of zombie that, while slowly decaying and murderous, can still plan out attacks and use tactics. The In Cold Blood: What makes zombies creepy on such a deep level is the fact that they don’t make sense. The dead stay dead, they don’t get up and start eating you. The Crazies magnifies this uncanny effect by setting the entire movie in a tiny isolated Iowa town where everyone knows everyone. It’s frightening not just because of the startles and mayhem you witness, but because deep down you know violence like this isn’t supposed to ever happen in small towns in America’s heartland. The Moral of the Story: The Crazies, as Fahey pointed out on Friday, is a remake of a 1973 movie of the same name. The 70s original was directed by the king of zombies himself: George A. Romero. Like other Romero movies, The Crazies was a film very much tied to the current events surrounding its release. While 1968’s Night of the Living Dead took careful aim at the American society of that decade, The Crazies seems more driven by the politics of its time, landing in the midst of a general distrust of the government driven by Vietnam, the Watergate imbroglio and President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. In the 70s version, the movie worked best as a critique of the moral ambiguity of Nixon and concerns over the war. That version followed a Vietnam veteran turned firefighter, and elements of the story included scenes of Washington politics. In the remake, the movie’s government is faceless and heartless. The only responsible party ever show is a sweaty white guy pulled from a Cadillac Escalade, who asks the hero sheriff “What do you expect of me.” “An apology,” is the reply, driving home, perhaps, the fact that the movie isn’t just talking about zombies, but something more. Scares: Fans of frightening movies should get a kick out of the flick’s skillful navigation around the typical startle moments in a scary movie. The mirror scare, the closet scare, the happy music scare, most of these and other horror cliches get little attention in this film, which instead finds new ways to squeeze our a few screams from its viewers. Tension: Early in, the movie slowly cranks up the emotional tension and it never turns it back down. The pacing delivers a taut tale, an unwavering movie that blasts past you in a single gasp. Tight editing, camera work and plot deliver a film with little wasted moments and no time to relax until the very, sadly expected ending. Hated Throwaway Cast: A sheriff, a nurse, a deputy, a frightened teen, The Crazies isn’t very creative in forming its band of survivors. Even the male to female ratio is dead on. With so little effort put into central characters, it would have been nice to see something interesting happen in terms of emotional development or relationships, but that too falls desperately short. Forgettable: Zombie movies have been done to death, recreating a 70s movie means that you’re starting out decades behind where horror movies have gone since. Unfortunately, The Crazies doesn’t seem to recognize that. The end result is a movie, that while not bad, is certainly forgettable. Maybe that’s worse. Too Safe: The scares, the themes, the gore are all very adult, but the terror of the movie feels watered down. It’s as if the team behind The Crazies were afraid to stray too far from the original, or push too hard against the conventions of zombie apocalypse movies. The Ending: If you’ve seen a zombie infestation movie, you know how this one ends. It’s unfortunate that a movie so smartly written manages to still fall back on the biggest zombie flick cliche of all, undermining all of that build up and subtext. The Crazies has its moments, it’s certainly a tense movie, but ultimately it doesn’t go far enough to deliver the scares or enough of the gore that fans of the genre will be expecting. I was expecting, hoping, for the sorts of moments that these movies are best at delivering: Frightening, unsettling tableaus of horror. The notion of a more meaningful theme in the movie also falls apart in the end with The Crazies ultimately falling back on a trite finale and half-baked conclusion. The Crazies was directed by Breck Eisner and distributed by Overture Films on Feb. 24. Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ .

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The Crazies Review: Left 4 Dead In a Small Town [Review]

Sega, You Are Once Again Making A Giant Mistake [Yakuza 3]

Yakuza 3, the crime drama from SEGA, is finally coming to the West after being released in Japan almost a year ago. The game will have subtitles. That’s not what SEGA is screwing up. This is. “The content between Yakuza 3 US/UK and Yakuza JP is a little different in that we took out certain bits in order to bring the game to the west in the time allotted for us to do so. The parts we ended up taking out were parts that we felt wouldn’t make sense (like a Japanese history quiz game) or wouldn’t resonate as much (such as the concept of a hostess club),” SEGA told website IGN . “We didn’t replace the parts we took out, but we made absolutely sure that the story continuity stayed intact so that the story experience was the same as the Japanese version and that it didn’t take away the human drama so inherent to the Yakuza series.” The entire appeal of yakuza for Japanese players is that the game is a peek into the criminal underworld. For Westerners, this appeal is compounded: the game is not only a tour of the Japanese underworld, but a tour of Japan as well. Japanese history quizzes might be difficult for players who do not understand Japanese history. But SEGA has unilaterally decided that a hostess club would not resonate with Western players. Hostess bars appear in Japanese movies, and in turn, some of those movies are released in the West, complete with hostess bar scenes intact. But it’s not just Japanese movies. Hollywood film Black Rain featured an American hostess character played by Kate Capshaw. And yet, SEGA doesn’t think hostesses or hostess bars would resonate with you, the foreign player. There are a wide variety of hostess bars in Japan, and they are very much part of business country. Deals are made at hostess bars. They are a place salarymen can unwind and bond. Some businessmen go simply because they do not want to drink alone. Not all Japanese businessmen go to hostess bars, so do not assume that they do. Depending on the bar, visitors will either pay an entrance fee or buy a bottle, which the bar will then keep for the next time they come. Some large hostess bars have the hostesses rotate all night long from customer to customer like a game of musical chairs. Smaller hostess bars often do not. At hostess bars, customers tend to talk about their job or flirt with the hostesses, who pour them drinks, light their cigarettes and sing karaoke songs. The girls are dressed to the nines in fancy evening wear (though, there are casual clubs, too!) and many even have their hair done at hair salons before their evening work starts at typically 8pm or 9pm. Girls enter hostessing for a variety of reasons: They want to save money for a trip abroad, they owe people money, they have a kid to support or they like the salary. Good hostesses in high end clubs are good at conversation. They’re knowledgeable and well-versed in many subjects so that they can talk to a wide variety of customers. However, there are hostesses that simply giggle and talk incessantly about sex. They may talk about sex, but that doesn’t mean they’re doing it. The goal for a clever hostess is to string a customer on as long as possible without actually having sex. It’s all about the pursuit. Drawing in the customer and keeping him interested as long as possible so he continues to visit the hostess bar and spends cashola. There may be dinner or movie dates as well. Keep in mind, everyone involved is an adult and everyone understands the dynamic. However, that does not mean customers do not fall in love with hostesses or vice-versa. It is not unheard of for a customer to marry a hostess. It’s not just men. Women also have the option to go to host bars, which are staffed by young males who serve the same purpose as hostesses: Hold a conversation, pour drinks, light cigarettes and sing karaoke. It’s more about getting good service, having fun, letting off steam. However, hostessing is considered mizu shobai (“the water trade”), which encompasses things like actual prostitution. (Prostitution is legal as long as it does not encompass vaginal sex. Everything else is fair play.) Hostessing has been called “psychological prostitution”. SEGA does not have the space to explain all of this in Yakuza 3. But it doesn’t have to. Playing a video game is an experience. Part of the experience for Yakuza 3 is visiting hostess bars — an experience that SEGA does not think has to resonate with Western players. The first Yakuza game SEGA released in 2006 was dubbed horribly in English as SEGA seemed to think players did not want to experience the title in its original language. Here we are almost four years later, and SEGA continues to underestimate its consumers. [ Pic , Pic , Pic , Pic , Pic ]

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Sega, You Are Once Again Making A Giant Mistake [Yakuza 3]

The Latest Prince of Persia Plays With Solid Water and Flexible Time [Prince Of Persia: Forgotten Sands]

Elemental powers, time manipulation and a story that fills in seven years of the Prince of Persia’s past are the hallmarks of the upcoming Prince of Persia game, The Forgotten Sands. “In this installment we are returning to the Sands of Time universe,” Michael McIntyre, the game’s level design director, told Kotaku during a meeting last week. Specifically, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands will take place during the seven year gap between the end of The Sands of Time and the beginning of the Warrior Within. “We only know he went on other adventures,” McIntyre said. “It was always this pocket of time that was interesting to us. Obviously the prince changed a bit from naive to dark and pessimistic” between the two games. The game opens up with the prince visiting his older brother Malik, but when he arrives he finds his brother’s city under attack. It turns out, McIntyre says, that Malik cut a deal with an ancient sand army to save his kingdom and now, as sand armies are wont to do, they’ve run amok turning his citizens into sand. Because the game opens up after Sands of Time, the prince already has the ability to rewind time. As he progresses through the game he befriends a Djinn named Razia who grants him a number of new powers loosely tied to the elements. McIntyre started playing for me to watch at the opening scene, showing the devastation of Malik’s kingdom. He points out that the prince is meant to look and handle a lot like the prince of the Sands of Time, a game he later referred to as the high point for the Prince of Persia franchise. “This game is very reminiscent of Sands of Time,” he said. “We tried to evoke that look and feel.” Combat too will be very familiar to those who have played Sands of Time, with the prince often having to face multiple enemies as they try to surround him. This time though, McIntyre said, the game has you fighting up to 50 people at once. It can do that because it’s built using the Anvil Engine, the same game engine used for Assassin’s Creed II. “The core of the fighting mechanic,”McIntyre said, “is doing crowd control. You don’t block in this game, you evade.” As he talks McIntyre runs the prince across a wall, over a gap, and then into a pile of enemies. “The big mechanic here is to do your combos,” he said. “But the combos don’t drive you in a straight line. It kind of feels like Sands of Time combat, but cranked up to 11.” On the screen the prince rolls through people, jumps over them and nearly crowd surfing, running across the foes’ heads and shoulders. While the increase in on-screen enemy head count is important, the most notable addition to the franchise are those elemental powers. How those powers interact with one another and the prince’s acrobatic skills, allows the developers to create impressive, moving, brain teasers. For instance, holding a trigger allows the prince to solidify water, not freeze it, but slow it down to a point in which it becomes solid. Then the prince can run up or along it, as if it were a wall. Later in the game, McIntyre walks the prince into a room with an assortment of fountains shooting water horizontally and vertically. Holding the trigger turns these fountains into columns that the prince can scale and swing from. There are a total of four core powers to earn, each of which is assigned to a different button or trigger. As you unlock these powers the game’s puzzles become more and more complex. For instance, in one area McIntyre had to manage the water power while flipping through a room on columns, sometimes solidifying it, sometimes letting it flow so he could jump through it. After unlocking the core power Dash, which was described as a mix between air and fire, McIntyre had to use both abilities and the prince’s acrobatics to get through areas. “It’s something you can quickly intuit as a player,” he said, “but it opens up a lot of of possibilities.” While my demonstration was very puzzle heavy, McIntyre assured me there would be plenty of combat too. “The balance is similar to Sands of Time,” he said. “We have exploration that includes trying to solve a room, then there is action, which includes combat and faster acrobatics. It ends up being about 50/50.” The game will also have a selection of smaller powers that can be purchased to customize the prince. Those powers include things like a shield that knocks people back or the ability to summon up small tornadoes. The game looks very familiar, and judging but what I saw, it appears the play will be familiar as well. And there were a lot of little things that look like they might add to the experience. For instance, the cities of Prince of Persia have often lacked a populous. That’s still true with Forgotten Sands, but this time they’ve used a plot point, that pesky sand army, to not only explain the populations absence, but include them in some way. Throughout the levels I saw there were sand statues of people posed to help you piece together what had happened before the prince’s arrival. These little vignettes add a bit more depth to the games’ typically singular stories. “They breath a lot into the world,” McIntyre said. “It has that real Pompei vibe.” The Forgotten Sands is due out this May for the PC, Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. A separate version of the game is coming to the Wii with a different storyline and powers.

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The Latest Prince of Persia Plays With Solid Water and Flexible Time [Prince Of Persia: Forgotten Sands]

Alan Wake Preview: The First Full Episode [Preview]

The first two words of Alan Wake are “Stephen King.” The next big Xbox 360 exclusive game is an interactive thriller played in the shadows of America’s Pacific Northwest. I recently played the game’s impressive first full “episode.” Remedy Entertainment’s May-dated game comes on a disc but is divided into episodes. These chapters are sometimes narrated in the past tense and they are designed to end in cliffhangers. To describe the first one, as I’m about to, involves spoilers, though we’re talking spoilers of a pilot episode designed to set up mysteries and tone and answer just about nothing — that’s what the rest of the episodes are for. So reading this will allow you to remain as much in the dark as I was at the end of the first episode or even as was Alan himself. The first episode is called Nightmare. It opens with the “Stephen King” reference and some narration by Alan, setting himself up as “a writer.” He’s a King-style writer, an author of thrillers, visiting a Twin-Peaks-style town, Bright Falls in the Pacific Northwest. Nightmare begins in the middle of things. Alan Wake is driving down a dark highway. It’s late. He drives smack into a hitchhiker. Alan has a flashlight, wielded in his left hand in this third-person game. Pulling the Xbox 360’s left trigger focuses the beam. Seconds after he is out of his car, Alan is creeping down a path that descends near the highway’s cliffs. He’s being pursued by a shadowy figure, possibly the hitchhiker, who is maybe a character from one of Alan’s books. As would be the prevailing gameplay theme of most of Nightmare’s action sequences, Alan was being pursued, hounded, by one and then by multiple shadowy axe-men. The gameplay was mostly panicked escape in this first section of Nightmare. I had to rush Alan down outdoor paths and into a house. A couple of times, a mysterious voice offered advice and point out a pistol that Alan could wield and a player could fire with a squeeze of the right trigger. When confronting a shadowy enemy in Alan Wake, the main mechanic requires using the L trigger to burn off the shadows covering the enemies and then shooting them with the R trigger. A well-timed press of the game’s dodge button triggers a slow-motion effect, shades of Remedy’s Max Payne games, which allows the player more time to roll Alan out of the way, turn and fire a good shot. Alan Wake is a thriller that appears to be the exception to two gaming genre rules. Games that are scary often have two deficiencies: controls and graphics. The former can frustrate in a Silent Hill or a Resident Evil, forcing the player to deal with clunky or muddy controls. The inability to move a character with swiftness and finesse is arguably an essential element of the games’ creators’ intent to make the player feel overpowered and afraid. Recent, more dynamic controls, such as in Resident Evil 5, seemed to help make the game more of an action movie and less of a horror flick. Better controls produce fewer scares? Alan Wake’s scheme denies that better controls necessarily alleviate fear and tension. Alan may have controlled pleasantly, like a man and not a tank, but the need to illuminate enemies and then shoot them — and to do so while batteries swiftly drained and then needed to be recharged or be replaced in the flashlight — provided just enough enjoyable trouble to make skirmishes a fright, without being a frustration. As for graphics, well, it’s hard to say if the darkness enshrouding many of the games in the genre excused less than industry-leading graphics or if it is smaller development teams, not armed with the resources to make industry-leading graphics that turned to the horror genre. Whatever the case, it is rare to see a game in the dark-and-creepy category that could be a Best Graphics candidate, but Alan Wake, like EA’s Dead Space before it, represents a pleasant exception. The Pacific Northwest is a rare and magnificent sight in video games, rendered in real and spooky detail in the episode I played. The forests were tall, dark and dense, light playing through branches. As Alan ran into a house for refuge, I noticed it was full of details, chairs and TVs and wall-hangings, meeting my newfound Uncharted 2 standard of amount of stuff I think a developer can render in a realistic indoors space. As some dark presence shook the house apart, I felt not that I was in a primitive diorama but that I was in a big-budget blockbuster. Even in the dark it felt I could see far across the valley, that this was a detailed world so well-rendered I could almost smell the sawed logs. I’ve barely described the events of Nightmare so far. Alan’s shelter is wrecked. He is told, by that voice, to go to a lighthouse that beams in the night. Light is refuge in this game. As he runs, the shadowy figures pursue him. And just as he’s getting there, this first little bit of the episode ends. Time turns back. It’s sunny. Alan and his wife, Alice, are driving to Bright Falls, ready to start a vacation. They park their product-placed car on a ferry, where Alan is immediately recognized by a local disc jockey. Alan takes a call from his agent. The ferry rides us into town, setting that Twin Peaks scene of a remote and quaint corner of American civilization full of folks who know each other maybe too well. There’s some sort of festival called Deerfest starting in two weeks. The couple goes to a diner to pick up keys to the house where they’re going to stay. They want to meet a man named Carl Stuckey. Alan is recognized again in the diner by a waitress gets an earful from two old codgers, one of whom wants him to put a song on the jukebox — I don’t know if it matters if the player does it — and then heads to the back where a creepy lady in a black veil hands Alan the keys she says he’s looking for. Alan and Alice drive away. Carl Stuckey stumbles after them yelling that he needs to give them keys. That’s the first sign of trouble for Alan and Alice. The cabin they drive to is nice. It’s set on a small island at the end of a dock, nestled into a cove at the foot of wooded hills. This house also is highly-detailed, with rugs and a radio (the disc jockey is blabbing that Alan is in town), paintings and furniture and an odd framed photo of what looks like someone in a diving suit. I had control of Alan on the island. I walked him around to explore and picked up the details about Alan and Alice’s struggles. Their marriage isn’t perfect. His writer’s block is a struggle. He wanted the trip to be a vacation from the stress and is not pleased when he sees the surprise Alice has set up for him: A typewriter in a room of his own. She’s even found a local doctor who she thinks can help him surmount any mental blocks. Alan’s angry. The next events happened fast. Alan is back outside. It’s getting dark. Alice is suddenly calling for help, as if she’s drowning. Alan dives into the water for her. And then a scene change. Alan wakes up in a crashed car. He’s outside of town. What follows are some dark and lovely scenes of chase and combat. Putting them in words wouldn’t do them justice. Alan winds up chased by shadowy figures in a logging camp. The big trucks that haul and cut tall evergreens create their own frightful shadows and set up new dangers: rolling logs, falling logs, blind corners hiding another enemy. Alan sees a service station in the distance. Its bright lights are his his goal. The first half of the episode, which would last about an hour, was easy. The second half was tough. Enemies are numerous and relentless. On some walls my flashlight revealed arrows which pointed to hidden caches of weapons or batteries (also product-placed, Energizer brand). There are pages of a novel seemingly written by Alan scattered in the level. Collecting them tells a story. Everything, including the arrows, has a narrative explanation, if players dig for it, the developers told me. But I was busy trying to survive. I fared better with a shotgun and then with a flare gun which can flash-shock a cluster of enemies. I made it to the service station after a few more tough fights and called for the police. A sheriff showed up. She drove Alan to where he said his wife had fallen into the water, outside that house on that island in that cove. The sheriff drove him there and made him look. There was no house there. Just a dock leading to nowhere. Just a cove. End of episode.

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Alan Wake Preview: The First Full Episode [Preview]

Halo Reach, Reaches For the Stars [X10]

We see a desert plain, distant mountains and a sky so light blue it’s almost white. The ground too fades to white, from a dusty light brown. In the distance there are mountains and what appears to be mining equipment. Everything we see is real terrain. That means if you drive, walk or fly long enough you’ll actually get there. No painted backdrops here. The camera swivels to reveal a ramshackle base tucked into the scrub and twisted trees of the mountains. Absent are the blues and purples that came to be as much a crutch as an identifying color for the Halo trilogy. But this isn’t meant to be part of that trilogy, this is Bungie’s Halo swan song, a way for the developer that created and nurtured the Halo franchise for nearly ten years to go out with a bang. Or that’s what Brian Jarrard, Bungie’s community director tells me a few hours after I sit in on one of their demonstrations for the upcoming Xbox 360 shooter Halo Reach. Their goal is fairly straight forward, he says. “Let’s end it with an exclamation point,” he said, speaking of Bungie’s involvement with Halo. “Let’s leave our mark on this game. “This is our last installment, where it goes from here it won’t be up to us, but we will be really proud where we left it.” And, visually at least, it looks like Bungie is headed in the right direction. Marcus Lehto, Bungie’s creative director, tells me that the team started work on Reach as soon as they finished Halo 3, leaving a small team to work on Halo ODST. The larger team went back and examined the trilogy, pulled out all of the things that made it good and then worked on making them better for Reach. They started by gutting the engine that drives the game’s graphics. “We used the Halo 3 engine as a spring board,” Lehto says. “We essentially gutted the engine to rebuild every facet of it in order to accommodate this crazy huge vision we had for Reach.” My first real-time glimpse of Reach is impressive. Those distant, but reachable mountains. An attention to detail that gives the game more of a real world heft than the cartoonish quality of so much Sci-Fi fare. The section of the map we are viewing is called Powerhouse, it’s a multiplayer map, but as with all of Reach’s multiplayer maps, it will fit contextually in with the single player campaign. When you run through this map on your own, in the game, it will be night. That’s unfortunate, because you’ll probably miss all of those desert flowers, and maybe you won’t notice the quality of the water running through the camp or the dam that checks its flow. “Water features take a prominent role in many of the campaign spaces as well as much of the multiplayer,” Lehto says. “We’re definitely playing a lot with water, making that behave physically, realistically within each one of the maps.” That also means atmosphere and dynamic weather, he said. Reach won’t have a Master Chief, this isn’t his game, but it will have Spartans. Which only makes sense, since in the mythology of Halo, the Spartan program started on the planet Reach. In the game, which Jarrard says will feature the dark story of “heroism, honor and sacrifice” that surrounds the fall of the planet to the Covenant aliens, gamers will play as the most recent addition to Noble Team, a group of five Spartans. You will be the sixth. The Spartan shown in Powerhouse wears dented and scratched armor. The weapon in the Spartan’s hands is minutely detailed with textures and moving pieces. The name of the weapon is spelled out across the gun in tiny letters. A second weapon is strapped to the Spartan’s leg. The sound of the weapons, when finally fired, is also greatly improved, they thump with each trigger pull, projectiles whining and ricocheting. Dirt pops into the air in tiny clouds as the weapon fires into the ground. There are health packs again, which the Spartan finds attached to a wall, to encourage more exploration. This time around some of the equipment found by Spartans can be reused, Jarrard says. He shows us one that allows you to sprint, depleting a sprint meter as you run. While the live demonstration doesn’t give us a chance to see the enemy Covenant in action, Jarrard says they too have gotten an overhaul. “We wanted to give them a fresh new look,” he says. “Make them feel like they are something we’ve never seen before.” The idea is to make the aliens more alien. No more talking English or sometimes providing almost comic relief in engagements. Facial animations, we’re told, are being captured for the first time in the franchise’s history. The result is a face with a couple million polygons. Last week’s short presentation, taken up mostly by a canned video released later that week on Bungie’s site , was meant to be a sort of gaming bouche amuse. There wasn’t really any substance, but the folks at Bungie seem to think that what they’re holding back will blow us all away. “Reach, it is a three year project for us, it’s Bungie’s most ambitious game,” Jarrard said. “I think it’s going to be a big deal. I think fans are ready for the next big true Halo experience… I expect Reach will be back to that phenomenon level we saw with Halo 3, hopefully more so.”

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Halo Reach, Reaches For the Stars [X10]

Halo Reach, Reaches For the Stars [X10]

We see a desert plain, distant mountains and a sky so light blue it’s almost white. The ground too fades to white, from a dusty light brown. In the distance there are mountains and what appears to be mining equipment. Everything we see is real terrain. That means if you drive, walk or fly long enough you’ll actually get there. No painted backdrops here. The camera swivels to reveal a ramshackle base tucked into the scrub and twisted trees of the mountains. Absent are the blues and purples that came to be as much a crutch as an identifying color for the Halo trilogy. But this isn’t meant to be part of that trilogy, this is Bungie’s Halo swan song, a way for the developer that created and nurtured the Halo franchise for nearly ten years to go out with a bang. Or that’s what Brian Jarrard, Bungie’s community director tells me a few hours after I sit in on one of their demonstrations for the upcoming Xbox 360 shooter Halo Reach. Their goal is fairly straight forward, he says. “Let’s end it with an exclamation point,” he said, speaking of Bungie’s involvement with Halo. “Let’s leave our mark on this game. “This is our last installment, where it goes from here it won’t be up to us, but we will be really proud where we left it.” And, visually at least, it looks like Bungie is headed in the right direction. Marcus Lehto, Bungie’s creative director, tells me that the team started work on Reach as soon as they finished Halo 3, leaving a small team to work on Halo ODST. The larger team went back and examined the trilogy, pulled out all of the things that made it good and then worked on making them better for Reach. They started by gutting the engine that drives the game’s graphics. “We used the Halo 3 engine as a spring board,” Lehto says. “We essentially gutted the engine to rebuild every facet of it in order to accommodate this crazy huge vision we had for Reach.” My first real-time glimpse of Reach is impressive. Those distant, but reachable mountains. An attention to detail that gives the game more of a real world heft than the cartoonish quality of so much Sci-Fi fare. The section of the map we are viewing is called Powerhouse, it’s a multiplayer map, but as with all of Reach’s multiplayer maps, it will fit contextually in with the single player campaign. When you run through this map on your own, in the game, it will be night. That’s unfortunate, because you’ll probably miss all of those desert flowers, and maybe you won’t notice the quality of the water running through the camp or the dam that checks its flow. “Water features take a prominent role in many of the campaign spaces as well as much of the multiplayer,” Lehto says. “We’re definitely playing a lot with water, making that behave physically, realistically within each one of the maps.” That also means atmosphere and dynamic weather, he said. Reach won’t have a Master Chief, this isn’t his game, but it will have Spartans. Which only makes sense, since in the mythology of Halo, the Spartan program started on the planet Reach. In the game, which Jarrard says will feature the dark story of “heroism, honor and sacrifice” that surrounds the fall of the planet to the Covenant aliens, gamers will play as the most recent addition to Noble Team, a group of five Spartans. You will be the sixth. The Spartan shown in Powerhouse wears dented and scratched armor. The weapon in the Spartan’s hands is minutely detailed with textures and moving pieces. The name of the weapon is spelled out across the gun in tiny letters. A second weapon is strapped to the Spartan’s leg. The sound of the weapons, when finally fired, is also greatly improved, they thump with each trigger pull, projectiles whining and ricocheting. Dirt pops into the air in tiny clouds as the weapon fires into the ground. There are health packs again, which the Spartan finds attached to a wall, to encourage more exploration. This time around some of the equipment found by Spartans can be reused, Jarrard says. He shows us one that allows you to sprint, depleting a sprint meter as you run. While the live demonstration doesn’t give us a chance to see the enemy Covenant in action, Jarrard says they too have gotten an overhaul. “We wanted to give them a fresh new look,” he says. “Make them feel like they are something we’ve never seen before.” The idea is to make the aliens more alien. No more talking English or sometimes providing almost comic relief in engagements. Facial animations, we’re told, are being captured for the first time in the franchise’s history. The result is a face with a couple million polygons. Last week’s short presentation, taken up mostly by a canned video released later that week on Bungie’s site , was meant to be a sort of gaming bouche amuse. There wasn’t really any substance, but the folks at Bungie seem to think that what they’re holding back will blow us all away. “Reach, it is a three year project for us, it’s Bungie’s most ambitious game,” Jarrard said. “I think it’s going to be a big deal. I think fans are ready for the next big true Halo experience… I expect Reach will be back to that phenomenon level we saw with Halo 3, hopefully more so.”

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Halo Reach, Reaches For the Stars [X10]

Review: BioShock 2

Water of discontent. How do you make a sequel to the illusion of choice? However the developers of BioShock 2 chose to approach the production of their watery follow-up, they were destined to begin just as trapped within the framework of its narrative inheritance as the former citizens of Rapture are within their rusting cage at the bottom of the Atlantic. Such was the power and significance of that defining encounter with Andrew Ryan two thirds of the way through the original BioShock. BioShock was very much about Ryan – a philosophical idealist who built a city at the bottom of the ocean to house people “for whom work is our wage”, where no god or government could find or tax or spite them. BioShock 2 shifts from one extreme to another, exploring the circumstances that drew psychiatrist Sofia Lamb to the city and the role she then played in Ryan’s downfall. The two ideologues don’t have much in common, but they do both act as catalysts for the events that befall the rest of the cast, of whom you are one, while another is a little girl named Eleanor. Once upon a time, as Ryan’s Rapture fell apart in the hands of mere men and women, opportunists like the first game’s Frank Fontaine rose to prominence in search of power. Through their endeavours the population became addicted to genetic modifiers called plasmids, developed with help from a substance called ADAM. As the people needed more ADAM to keep on splicing, so the city gave birth to Little Sisters, fever-dreaming girls escorted by lobotomised bodyguards called Big Daddies, who stalked the corridors of the city collecting the drug from those who perished under its influence. Read more…

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Review: BioShock 2

Rumor: LA Noire’s Development More Of A Mess Than We’d Imagined [Rockstar]

We were this morning pointed towards the Twitter account of a certain “veracious_shit”, who says they are a source close to Team Bondi ’s long-in-development LA Noire . And veracious has some interesting things to say. Cataloguing the long, drawn-out history of one of the most mysterious games of this hardware generation, veracious claims to reveal a number of issues affecting the game, from developer strife to typos to a 2006 trailer that wasn’t really a trailer at all . You can catch up on the full litany of claims at the Twitter account in question, but here are the highlights (I’ve grouped them together in places to tell a more coherent tale) to wet your gossipy little whistle. Note that some of this is already known, but we’ll run it again to keep the story flowing. And for what it’s worth, while we’ve never heard some of these other claims in such detail, they certainly match – at least in sentiment – with things you hear lingering on the grapevine from time to time. To McNamara [ note: Brendan McNamara, creator of The Getaway and Team Bondi founder ], The Getaway was a tainted brand by Sony’s doing, and he cannot create a masterpiece with a tainted brand…The pressure led McNamara to eventually sign a deal with Sony for his new development studio, but he wouldn’t have to deal with SCEE…McNamara had an idea that would fucking blow Rockstar out of the water; an interactive 3D noir. Stuff that actually isn’t like other stuff…And McNamara would get a chance to create the launch title that completely defined a platform for its entire lifespan. Work on this launch title began in 2003, and a lengthy three-year development plan would allow the game to be complete by his standards…By the next year, the game was well into development; the team grew into the dozens. Things were seemingly well…Then McNamara saw GTA: San Andreas; it was absolutely epic and went beyond the action basis. The present game plan would no longer suffice. It became obvious that year that McNamara had little clue what he was doing and was just following his arbitrary whims…He had no clue how to manage a work environment—creating a horrible standard for quality of life with an ineffective human resources team…SCE’s development structure changed that year, and McNamara found himself again under the more keen eye of his old SCEE superiors….The new bosses found that Team Bondi had little to show 2+ years of development, except an unplayable game filled with superfluous content…However, the project had already cost Sony USD 20 million+; a cost high enough that they attempted to spend the few months salvaging LAN. The game was now titled L.A. Noire—the “e” came from a programmers typo of “noir.” After those few months, Sony dropped the game—a situation that threw the studio into disarray…Strangely, McNamara quickly found hospice in his former rivals—the Houser brothers—and L.A. Noire was picked up by Rockstar in spring 2006…Sony and Take-Two came to agreement that the former wouldn’t pursue the costs incurred for development in exchange for a franchise exclusive…Obviously, Sony wrote off the costs associated with the development of L.A. Noire. The 2006 LAN teaser was a target render done by an art outsourcing firm in Sydney…Since then, the game has been revamped, ported, and delayed four times. Rockstar spent more Sony in their efforts to make it not suck…Also, if you want to go to that Rockstar SD Spouse post and replace studio names and games, you have a good idea of Team Bondi as of present. Juicy, no? Of course, we must remember, it’s just one person’s side of a long, sad story, so don’t take it all as gospel. Take it as…a hint that when you think there’s “problems” on a game that’s been in development since 2003, these are the kind of details that lead to said problems. We’ve reached out to both Team Bondi and Rockstar for comment, and will update if we hear back from either. [ veracious_shit @ Twitter ] [Sponsored] NEC

New Year’s Football [Night Note]

To: Luke From: Owen Re: Happy Happy This was left unsaid in the sports column I wrote Saturday , but I wanted to make a record of it here. Dad’s method of arranging football pictures is far easier in real life. Doing it on a video game was tough . First I needed to recreate my high school and one of its rivals’ 1970s-era uniforms in NCAA Football’s teambuilder. They’re still wearing non-period helmets, something I couldn’t control unless I started a dynasty with these teams, and then I couldn’t control the start time of their game. This one needed to be at night. Then I had to run a series of toss sweeps and stretch plays just to illustrate the point of the story. This was a lot harder than it sounds. NCAA Football is tougher on the run than Madden is this year, especially on slow-to-develop runs to the outside. Getting a halfback to the corner in stiffarm pose was a chore, especially because the first time you hit A it doesn’t put up the stiffarm, just switches the ball to your back’s other arm. And you can see in that bottom picture just how long the wide receiver held his block, which was about nine nanoseconds. I’ve shot actual high school football, and spent less time on real games than I did on that one on New Year’s Eve. Still, I’m surprised at how the pictures turned out. Then again, black-and-white does give you a bit of an artistic advantage. Some highlights: Left 4 Dead 2’s Frying Pans Kill a Tank 3 Times Faster than Shotguns Zelda Fan Movie Taken Down on Nintendo’s Request What the Hell is in the Water in Barrie, Ont.? Explaining the Commitment to Duke Nukem – Forever Stick Jockey: A Picture Worth More Than Words Confused about commenting on Kotaku? Read our FAQ .

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New Year’s Football [Night Note]

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