Two handsome men and one bum on a couch

If you're reading this in a timely manner it is Wednesday now. This video is from Monday night (or, technically, 2AM Tuesday morning). It's ??about our (me, Brett, Zack) first day at GDC. We were so, so tired. We still are. I am, right now. This tiredness, this incredible busyness is why you're reading a post for our video that went up Monday night on Wednesday afternoon.

And I'm not here to woe is me covering the Game Developers Confe??rence and seeing pals even though it is tough. I drank my bottle of Pedialyte like a shitting infant this morning and I feel nearly alive after our 10 year anniversary party?? last night (it was packed!)

As a whole GDC has pumped the brakes on AAA announcements. There are just too many s??hows, international ones included, I imagine. So there's a lot of cool indie stuff here and of course a gauntlet of assholes who want to stick a VR helmet in your face and give you pink eye. That and talks, though a lot of them are inside baseball industry stu??ff or straight technical.

The expo floor opened today, too, which means more games to play and new ones to discover. The IGF and GDCA award shows are both tonight, too. My feet hurt, but I am going to eat curry later and get wasted sneaking 32 oz Foster's (it's Australian for "beer"??) cans and a bottle of vodka into an awards show after that, so life's not all that bad. Zack almost broke his thumb today jamming it in my bathroom, though. It was gross and bloody. #prayforzacksthumb.

I am holding a large, cheap bottle of sake?? because my pajama shirt (which is just a regula?r shirt that I decided to sleep in) has a logo on it and I rep no #brand. Well except that sake I guess. It's like $8.

The post We’re in our pajamas talking GDC appeared first on Destructoid.

Reporting from the Mad Catz V Cup

Wednesday and Thursday nights were host to the Mad Catz V Cup, a Street Fighter V tournament in San Francisco using a F.A.N.G-free build of the upcoming Capcom fighter. Premier Street Fighter players were in attendance, including PR Balro????g, Crackfiend, Tokido and everyone's favorite Justin Wong, who wasn't looking great against Ricki Ortiz's Karin.

I was also there, full of chicken burrito and jasmine boba-milk tea, because, well, I don't know, a ??friend suggested we go because there was no cover charge at the venue (it's usually?? $5) for the tournament.

After passing the clutch of Rock Banders holed up towards the entrance belting out shitty Paramore songs, I made it into the open, warehouse-style bar and made my way towards the back half stuffed with folks watching the Mad Catz V Cup. It was something. PR Balrog was there, sans Balrog (he's an impending DLC character), which reminded me of how much my friend kicked my ass with Dudley when we played a bunch of Street Fighter III: Third Strike last week.

A player named Filipino Champ squared off ?against ano??ther called PH LPN, and I was confused.

It was then I turned my attention to the sec??ond wall-hugging projector where attendees could #engage with the event using the hashtag #madcatzsfv. Unfortunately, the fucking fascists that run "SF Game Night" Wednesday-Thursday nights still have me blocked from?? when I last attended about a year ago, so my tweets wouldn't show up in the feed.

#madcatzsfv when's bushido blade? pic.twitter.com/vs26pAswvT

— your welcome (@dtoidsteven) January 22, 2016

But while I waited in vain?? for my messages to go through, I started noticing some interesting sentiments being expressed by fans in attendance.

I??t was some real, "Your ideas are intriguin?g to me and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter" stuff.

When we ran into two other friends we'd planned to meet there, we all decided to leave? to go to "a real bar." It had a very nice breakfast stout that was much better than both of the $10 specialty cocktails I tried at the tournament place.

The end.

The post Handsome Street Fighter V fans raise good points during Mad Catz tourn????ey appeared first on Destructoid.

It's pun-ishment time!

From the beginning, this murder (and I've seen a lot of them over the course of my career) struck me as too simple. Kyle Hebert -- a voice actor you may recognize as the voice of Ryu from Street Fighter -- was found dead in an elevator. According to a preliminary autopsy, he had been stabbed multiple times in the chest with a fountain pen. No signs of a struggle. The last people to see Mr. Hebert alive were four Danganronpa 2 characters -- Akane Owari, the Ultimate Gymnast; Kazuichi Soda, the Ultimate Mechanic; Ibuki Mioda, th??e Ultimate Musician; and Mikan Tsumiki, the Ultimate Nurse. The quirky quartet had dinner with Hebert before parting ways, mere hours before the murder.

Such is the setup for the Danganronpa Murder Mystery, an event put on by NIS America at the relatively young Anime Conji, locat?ed in beautiful San Diego. As promotional events go, an all-day murder investigation is certainly unique. It wasn't press-exclusive, either -- I believe the only two major gaming outlets covering the show were Destructoid and my new pal Steve from Hardcore Gamer. The rest of the participants were all convention attendees.

At 10 AM, interested guests shuffled into one of the panel rooms for an introduction video from series antagonist/mascot Monokuma & briefing from NISA's Tiffany Chin. There were six Truth Bullets (read: clues) scattered around the convention hall (one was fake & one was a secret). Attendees had until 5?? PM to collect five clues, at which point they would be given the opportunit??y to vote in the Class Trial.

For the most part, the Truth Bullets were easy to uncover. Within an hour, the location of almost ever?y clue had been uncovered by someone in the convention. All you needed to do to get your five clues was follow a large group of con attendees -- or, if you were less adventurous, find an otherwise innocuous corner utterly smothered by people. An hour and a half later, the culture had shifted. People could tell who was looking for clues, and would just give them the locations. Truth Bullets were even moved and stolen, so the NISA team spent a decent amount of time literally patching their real-life game.

Even though I was given access to the class trial, I still felt a deep need to solve the murder on my own. Like I said before, I've seen a lot of crimes and dastardly deeds in this line of work. And I've played both Danganronpa games! This'll be a cinch, right?

Here's what the six Truth Bullets told us. Before the Danganronpa cosplayers had dinner with Mr. Hebert, a container of pesticide went missing from the storage closet. During the dinner, a blackout occurred. When the lights went back up, there was a small splash of juice on the table. After dinner, Mikan went for a walk around the convention hall, eventually running into Akane being accosted by security. Ak?ane, still hungry after dinner, attempted to climb the elevator shaft in the hopes of finding more food elsewhere. Meanwhile, Kazuichi left dinner with a stomachache, heading immediately for the bathroom. When he left, Ibuki was waiting outside for him.

My theory was a tad more complex than what actually went down. I fi??gured Ibuki was the culprit. She poisoned both Kazuichi & Mr. Hebert; Kazuichi had gotten a lighter dose to weaken him so he?? would go to the bathroom, but Hebert got a stronger, lethal dose. Ibuki stayed outside the bathroom, establishing an alibi for herself, and stabbed Hebert's already-poisoned corpse to change everyone's assumptions about the crime. This turned out to not be the case.

Over the course of the class trial, it was revealed that Kazuichi had poisoned his own glass, and then swapped them when the lights went out. And then once that was revealed, the trial continued to hammer this point home. The class trial was over in twenty minutes. I can't say it lived up to my expectations, but it's also understandable. I figure from the perspective of NISA, if everyone feels like they solved the murder, they go home happy. But from the perspective of a crime enthusiast, I was hoping for more. Danganronpa fans seemed to really enjoy themselves, and with good reason! The cosplayers embodied their respective characters perfectly, and the giant Monokuma suit brought the hilarity inherent in that character design to the forefront. Hopefully future Danganronpa murder mysteries pull from the source? material in terms o??f complexity.

I did find the behind-the-scenes work interes?ting, though. For example: a simple photo of Monokuma looking dejected next to a "Please clean up after your pet" sign posted to the NISA Twitter account had to go through licensors. And you don't think about how much being a masc??ot sucks until you see the results; Tiffany emerged utterly drenched in sweat after a couple hours outside in the San Diego heat. According to a first-hand account from NISA's Jordan Vincent, the Prinny suit is worse. Penguins don't have hands, you know.

Themed press events usually have a real tackiness to them. They're either so expensive that they feel exceptionally skeevy or they're cheap and feel like a waste of everybody's time. NISA seems to have it figured out here; spend money on the fans first, press second. It doesn't make sense for most outlets to cover this, but if the amount of people I saw participating is any indication, it was quite popular with Anime Conji attendees. Danganronpa is something of a niche franchise, so giving back to the community in this way is a genuinely cool thing for a game company to do. Even though I was somewhat disappointed as a fan, there’s no denying the work involved, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't really enjoy myself. Hopefully the team at NIS America adds more of a "m??ystery" angle next time around!

The post Destructoid solves a murder: Danganronpa Edition appeared first on Destructoid.

The Buffalo Bills are the best team in the NFL

Earlier this week, rumors of Hideo Kojima leaving both Konami and the Metal Gear series surfaced, thanks to a report from GameSpot. Not to be undone by excellent reporting from The 2nd Street Je??rks (The 2nd Street Jerks is a wrestling stable consisting of GameSpot, IGN, and Giant Bomb that I just made up), I went down to Konami's office in Los Angeles, California in order to do some reporting of my own.

Un?fortunately, everyone there was understandably afraid of losing their jobs should they discuss company matters with a reporter. I didn't want my time in El Segundo to be wasted, so I ate some Chipotle & filmed myself rambling into a camera across the street from Konami.

You probably won't like this video, but if you do, you should check out Joe Pera's stuff. He's a really talented comedian and way funnier than I ever will be, but his brand of comedy isn't for everyone! If you do like him, though, get in touch so I can look over the top of m??y sunglasses and wink at you.

Thanks!

The post We tried to get Konami to comment on Kojima’s departure appeared first on Destructoid.

Are you still building your garden?

It's been a while since I've asked people about StreetPassing. Nintendo's feature was pretty innovative at launch, but given the low number of 3DS ??sales it was hard to find someone to do it with. Now it feels like everyone and their grandma has one, and if anything, there are too many opportunities to StreetPass in non-rural areas.

So are you guys still using the functionality? Whether it's for puzzle pi??eces, Find Mii, the DLC StreetPass games, or some specific in-game functionality -- let us know if you still get exci?ted to see that blinking green light.

Personally, I've kind of slowed down on it in recent months. When the StreetPass Plaza DLC games were out I was all about it -- but I've gotten pretty much all I could out of those, so even if I have the opportunity, I often don't bothe??r doing it.

The post How often do you use the 3DS’ StreetPass functionality? appeared first on Destructoid.

Interview with lead creator Rex Crowle

Earlier this month, I caught up with Media Molecule's Rex Crowle, lead creator on one of my favorite games of last year, Tearaway. My main goal was simple: to thank him for such a fantastic Vita game. But we ended up chatting about Tearaway's reception, as well as some of the challenges that Media Molecule had to work through to bring us the final r??elease.

I also repeatedly told him that they should make another Tearaway game.

After thanking Crowle for Tearaway, I asked him how he thought the game fared. The Vita platformer was well received, and made it onto many Game of the Year lists last year. We loved it.

"I've kind of been pleasa??ntly surprised how well it has connected with people," Crowle told Destructoid. "Kind of more than I thought it might. It was kind of a risk to rely on it pressi??ng the special feelings button on people. It's very hard to judge whether that is working until you're done."

"Obviously we're ??kind of known for making charming games that people make some c?onnection with. But with this one I really wanted to go a little bit deeper. It's not just whimsical, there's more of an arc in what happens with reuniting yourself with the in-game character, and with the ending and all of that stuff."

Tearaway garnered early attention from its distinctive visuals, which were built with Media Molecule's custom game engine. But this came engine only after trying other solutions; none of them worked for what they were trying to do with Tearaway's folded-paper look.

"It was difficult in the early period where so much of it hinges on the paper e??????????????????????????ngine. It was all custom built and there was no way we could use anything existing," said Crowle.

"We had a prototype engine to try out ideas, which was k??????????????????????????ind of an isometric ??thing. But it just pushed us in the wrong direction. It was just wasted time to try to make anything in that engine."

Crowle continued: "If you're making a game out of paper it just looks like cubes. It was only when we actually had managed to get it far enough along that we were all given our sheets of virtual paper and could all start cutting and folding, that's when it really... well, the first fold was a revelation." [head explosion hand gestures]

I told Crowle that I think the game's box art didn't seem to serve the game; it didn't reflect how unique Tearaway real??ly is. The artwork is nice, but any static screenshot of the game as a cover would probably have served the game better.

Crowle whispered, "I didn't like the cover."

"I think what's fun?? is seeing how we gradually subverted what someone might think they're getting. I think a lot of people have been surprised, thinking it's the kind of you know, the old THQ or Disney tie-in. It's got kind of a young appeal to it. And actually, when they start playing, they're like whoa. Straight off, you're being asked how you want to be identified, not just the sort of pink and blue boy/girl buttons or things like that."

One of the neatest aspects of Tearaway is that you can earn papercraft projects as in-game rewards. You're able to print these and assemble them, adding your own? touches along the way. Crowle recalled what they were going for with this choice.

"We try to create these loo?ps in game design, feeding into another thing. But, ultimately, they are all just digital things, and they don't mean anything really," Crowle said.

"I think it's also not just that you get it out, but you've got to make it yourself. So it's going to look a bit different. When we were experimenting earlier on, and the game wasn't looking as good as it could, it was a really good moment to just get everyone to make squirrels. And although everyone was making the same plan, everyone had put the eyes slightly different. Some people had used too much glue, and others not enough. Even though we all started with exactly the same tem??plate, they all looked subtly different. And that really helped us get the look."

I asked Crowle if they considered other external interactions for Tearaway, suggesting that some kind of musical tie-in would have b?een great. This had him recalling something he wanted to do, but ultimately couldn't implement.

"Something I really wanted to put in the lab section was the idea of the way you could encode information into paper," he explained. "Not by writing on it, but with the old hole punches. And also the player piano rings. I really wanted to be able to punch holes in paper and then print them out and make music with them. That was pre?tty out there as an idea to try to tell everyone to go spend an extra six months on that."

With as well as Tearaway was received, I asked if Media Molecule wo??uld consider making another game along these lines. He seemed to want to keep as vague as possible in his answer.

"We put a lot of work into it. I think what we've made is a complete thing it's not like it's a to-be-continued kind of thing. But, obviously, we wa?nt people to see it."

As we ended our talk, Crowle said that Media Molecule is really pleased at how well Tearaway was received, and mentioned how much they enjoy seeing mes?sages from f?ans online. 

"It has been interesting going online in a weird, stalkerish way, reading everything that everyone has b??een say??ing."

"It's really cool to see the love."

The post M?edia Molecule on the challenges of making Teara?way appeared first on Destructoid.

Studio behind Assassin's Creed IV and more

The sweltering, tropical city-state of Singapore is home to one of Ubisoft's branch studios, Ubisoft Singapore. This is the studio behind the naval combat segments of Assassin's Creed III, and those went over so well that they're now working on several aspects of Assassin's Creed IV's open-world gameplay, including the water tech, underwater exploration, naval battles, and awesome shark harpooning. 

We had the pleasure of visiting Singapore to learn more about this studio, its staff, and the fascinating city itself. I enjoyed the visit ?so much that I wanted to share a bit more about the studio and city.

Singapore is still relatively young, striking out on its own in 1965, following a breakaway from Malaysia. Although a tiny city-state , Singapore has grown to be a world power, sitting at number four in the list of the?? world's financial centers, and now sporting the world's third-largest per capita income. One of the studio's own told me that one out of every four Singaporeans are millionaires. I don't know if that statistic is true, but to say that Singapore is doing well would be an understatem??ent either way.

Singapore is also a stunningly beautiful city. They call it the Garden City, and you'll understand why when visiting. Strange and colorful trees and flowers line every street and yard. The city's botanical garden is so full of varied tropical plant life that it look?s more like a movie set than a city park. Singapore prides itself on its striking skyline and bold architecture, but below sits acres of the most lush green parks and clearings I've ever seen. Singapore was originally planted directly into a tropical jungle, and while over 5 million people live there now, it's still not uncommon to see wildlife like monkeys and exotic birds running around the downtown area. 

So you can understand why Ubisoft wanted to set up ?shop here. Back in 2008, Ubisoft were looking to expand. With studios in most major territories already, it seemed that Southeast Asia was the only untapped area. And looking into the area, they liked what they saw. Singapore has a great infrastructure, an excellent education system, a large talent pool of English speaking citizens, and a cultural diversity that can't be found elsewhere. The city quickly became a technical powerhouse for this side of the world, and the potential for game development there could be huge.

Beyond this, the blend of mostly Chinese, Malay and Indian peop??le, along with smaller numbers of people from the rest of Asia, makes for a unique living and w?orking experience. Oh, and that same cultural blend makes for some fantastic food. 

Singapore's government runs such a tight ship and has such strict anti-drug laws that crime and illegal substance abuse are practically nonexistent. Being a world financial leader, it's a pretty expensive place to live, but it's stunningly clean and modern, which more than makes?? up for the cost. It's also a bustling city with a very high population density, but Singaporeans seem to lead a more relaxed way of life than some of their Asian neighbors do. All of the locals I met during my visit were kind and welcom?ing. 

Tempted by all the positives listed here as well as several others, like the&nbs?p;financial perks ??the Singaporean government provides larger companies setting up shop, Ubisoft took the challenge head on. They set up Ubisoft Singapore in 2008, and in five short years it has grown to employ a staff of 270, making it the largest studio in Southeast As??ia.

Studio Managing Director Olivier de Rotalier told me that they started from scratch, from him initially setting up shop to putting together a team. Though centered around some of Ubisoft's seasoned vets, this new team had never worked together before, so they started out small, working on games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network. They went on to work on Assassin's Creed II, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood, Assassin's Creed: Revelations, and Assassin's Creed III, working up from contributing a few maps to now playing a major part in ??a top franchise game??'s production. 

Alongside Assassin's Creed IV, online first-person shooter Ghost Recon Online is still in productio??n at Ubisoft Singapore, and is in beta now, set to launch in full soon.

Singapore itself has proved to be inspiring for the team. As one of the top five busiest ports in the world, Singapore served as idea fuel for the naval elements of both Assassin's Creed III and Assassin's Creed IV. Singapore's aquarium, which features the largest aquarium tank in the world, had the team visiting for inspiration for the sea life of ACIV. Beyond this, the tropical setting of the city itself is beautiful and can be quite ins?piring on its own. Combine this with the outlandish architecture and the unique attractions on Singapore's ba?y and you can see why Ubisoft Singapore's team is full of good ideas. 

I totally understand. Singapore is somehow both exciting and relaxing. It's packed full of attractions for visitors, too. Taking a boat ride along the Singapore river to get a different view of historical Clarke Quay or the i??mpressive triple towers of the Marina Sands resort captured both feelings equally. Visit highlights included snacking on food in Chinatown, shopping on the glitzy Orchard Road, touristing out on the resort-y Sentosa Island, scoping the lively nightlife, getting lost in city cabs, and?? gagging on durian. 

All of the team members I talked to at Ubisoft Singapore love their home. They all say that you get used to the high heat and the insane humidity, and that other than the high cost of l??iving, there are no other detractors. These are hot?? but happy people.

Hopefully they can keep cool enough to have Assassin's Creed IV wrapped up in time for its October release.

The post Ubisoft’s Southeast Asian outpost, Ubisoft Singapore appeared first on Destructoid.

What exactly is an Innovation Center, anyway?

Last week, I mysteriously vanished from the web. And when I resurfaced, I was at Logitech's Daniel Borel Innovation Center in Lausanne, Switzerland, of all places. There's something?? I never thought I'd be able to say. With around 30 other writers and video personalities who cover games, tech, and everything in between, we toured some of the company's R&D labs.

Going in, I -- and most everyone else I chatted with, as it turned out -- didn't entirely know what to expect. I vaguely recall joking that based on Logitech's "Science Wins" branding for its gaming products, we could be in for some Willy Wonka-esque hijinks, but that? was mostly the jetlag speaking. Although, truth be told, some of what we saw was pretty out there.

[Full disclosure: Logitech covered travel and meal expenses for the trip to Switzerland and also gave out a G700s mouse as a parting gift.]

Take a closer look at that mouse in your hand

For the attending European press especially, a major part of the trip was getting hands-on time with the company's new-to-them G line of gaming peripherals that's being rolled out. North America gamers, however, should be familiar with the series -- it's been available here for a while now. As much as I would've liked to hear about Logitech's place in a future where next-generation consoles are newly released and gamers can readily purchase virtual-reality headsets like the Ocu?lus Rift, those are conversations for another day.

For me, the visit was more about gaining behind-of-scenes insight; the kind I imagine most of us don't tend to think about. With as much time as I spend plopped down in front of a computer, I ge??nerally don't give my mouse and keyboard much thought -- certainly not about where they were originally conceived and how they're made better over the years.

To give an example, how does a company go about testing, say, a mouse to make sure it will remain functional after years of regular use? That's the exact type of question I don't typically ponder, but seeing the answer in person was a sight to behold. At Logitech, machines quite literally hammer away at mice for months straight. Them, and similar setups that continuously tap on keyboards, were hypnotic; there was a distinct lack of blinking going on in the noisy room which houses these contraptions. In fact, I think I just zoned out aga??in while reminiscing.

An all-too-fitting home

As cool as the sights and sounds of these labs were, the surrounding area was also fairly remarkable. The Innovation Center is located right in the heart of the École polytechnique fédérale (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) which is, as you can probably imagine, the kind of environment and ensuing pool of ?talent Logitech would want to be situated near.

The campus provides the company with easy access to profess?ors and students. When it comes time to test out a product, the latter group is especially useful as there are lots of gamers in close proximity. The term innovation often gets thrown around frequently in gaming and, no surprise, the word came up repeatedly here too. In fairness, this was an honest-to-goodness "Innovation Center" we were visiting. I'll cut them some slack.

"Th?e visio??n of course is to create a special environment here where ideas get generated," project manager Vilasinh Vilaylack said of the building. "Good ideas can come from everywhere -- from the top, from the vision -- or from the bottom." These ideas are then submitted to a database and can ultimately lead to prototyping and beyond.

And in an industry like Logitech's, constant idea generation is mandatory. "We have to react," Vilaylack said when contextualizing the company'??s quarterly portfolio. "You can have something that is really beautiful on paper and then all of a sudden Steam is releasing the Steam Box and you have six months to react. Or you just decide 'No, we will wait and see.'" But with a yearly portfolio, "you're dead" by the end of the year.

Change for the sake of?? change, however, is not much help either. In the experience of global product marketing manager Chris Pate, who's been with the company for more than a decade, gamers are largely conservative. It's nice to think we're all willing to try out groundbreaking games and technology, but when it comes?? right down to what we spend money on, the majority of us simply are not. Steady iteration is key, and true innovation, Pate says, necessitates real support from gamers and developers alike.

What the future holds

The main part o?f our tour was spread across three labs: one for optics, another for tracking, and a third for radio frequency. W??hile I'll admit to having limited experience with high-tech laboratories, Logitech's were admittedly much more intimate than expected.

The work that goes on here and in similar labs at o?ther companies is important not just for gamers, but for anyone who uses an optical mouse. The smaller mice sensors are, the greater the opportunity for alternative form factors, extra buttons and fu??nctionality -- you name it.

When asked about what meaningful progress there is left to make -- mice have come a long way, after all -- expert optical engineer Christophe Constantin (w??hat a title!) said that even as good as gaming mice typically are today, there's always room for improvement.

"Even in terms of speed and reactivity, they are still w??orking on it ... in terms of battery life, three years is pretty good, but now you can open up new stories where the goal is not to have more years, but to have a different proposition for the customers," he explained. "In keyboards, it's solar -- you don't worry about batteries forever."

Speaking more generally about the future, Constantin says they are exploring "touch, gestures in free space, voice, ea??rs -- new ways of interacting with computers ... all of these things are ongoing, really." He quickly looped back around to remind us that the day was about gaming first and foremost, noting that "we are really pushing for wireless for gamers" but, again, couldn't specifically comment on future products.

Enough talk! Let's see the pictures

Considering how much seeing is believing, I did my best to capture what the tour was like with photographs. My best, however, is an outdated iPhone wiel??ded by shaky blogger hands -- so apologies for that. T?o accompany the full gallery, here's context for some of the notable images:

_{The École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) had what looked like a space peanut. Sure enough, that's literally what it was referred to as on the institute's website.}

_{If there was one thing I HAD to see from this trip, it was a look at prototype mice. Some of them were bizarre.}

_{The room with all of the foam was an enclosed space within the RF lab used for testing the sensitivity of emitters and receivers. Some $700k went into outfitting this lab which allows engineers to "simulate, measure, modify, and remeasure until we get a level of performance that is really indisputable."}

_{This machine is used to test tracking capabilities over multiple surface types that can be swapped in and are said to cover "mainly 95% of every surface in the world."}

_{Another tracking machine. This one spins absurdly fast in order to find the mouse sensor's breaking point. "[It's] so useful for gaming that we could even surprise our suppliers" by detecting issues they weren't aware of.}

_{That key-tapping, mouse-clicking machine I could not take my eyes off of.}

_{Something was being printed, but I haven't the slightest idea what. Logitech wouldn't say.}

_{The folks at Logitech love them some Gran Turismo, apparently. I was rooting for the lone GTR.}

The post The joy of science: Touring Logitech’s Swiss R&D labs appeared first on Destructoid.

Technological convergence!

Microsoft and Pizza Hut have teamed up to provide a service which allows people to order food through the?ir Xbox 360 console and have it delivered to their homes. It's either the innovation truly lazy gamers have been waiting their entire lives for or one of the silliest things we've ever seen on the system. Either way, we needed to have Hamza place an order. Check out the video of his experience!

The post How to order a pizza from Xbox Live appeared first on Destructoid.

Tecmo Koei's upcoming myth-based hack-n-slash action title, Warriors Orochi 3, will be launching for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 next month, in North America on March 20 and in Europe on March 30. The game will be a full-price retail title on 360, but thanks to a little-known quirk in Sony's localization regulations, it will only ??be available on the PlayStation Network -- not on a Blu-ray Disc.

The voice acting in Warriors Orochi 3 hasn't been localized into English: the audio for the entire game is in Japanese, with English subtitles. Sean Corcoran, Marketing Manager for Tecmo Koei America, told me last week that Sony doesn't allow games without English voice acting to be released in the West on retail discs. So PS3 owners will have to buy the game on the PlayStation Store; Corcoran said that the download will cost less than $59.99, but Tecmo Koe?i hasn't yet decided how much less.

This all seemed rather strange to me, especially since PS3 games are region-free, and 360 games are region-locked. I guess one thing you can say for Microsoft is that if a game releases in your neck of the woods, you'll be able to understand everything in it. Except, perhaps, for? men battling alongside tigers.

The post Warriors Orochi 3 coming to PSN ??due to Japanese voiceover appeared first on Destructoid.

The end of the NFL lockout in late July kicked off the league's usual flurry of offseason personnel moves (trades, signings, etc.)??, except this time, the lockout caused the free-agency period to be compressed into the space of a few weeks. Come September, many familiar faces will be suiting up in new places, including cornerbac??k Nnamdi Asomugha (formerly of the Oakland Raiders, now of the Philadelphia Eagles).

The Madden NFL 12 demo came out on Monday, so by this point, EA Tiburon has almost certainly finalized the on-disc rosters. I spoke with Madden ratings czar Donny Moore at a recent press? event in New York City, and asked him what the development? team is doing about the numerous roster moves so close to the game's release.

Moore told me that Tiburon is tracking every roster change, and will issue a day-one roster update to bring the game cu??rrent. The cut-off for changes will be pretty damn close to launch day, too -- according to Moore, the team needs only a few days to ensure that there aren't any kinks with the update. (Of course, Tiburon will also provide regular post-releas??e roster updates.)

Madden NFL 12 is launching in just un??der three weeks, on August 30th, for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Wii, PSP, ??3DS and PlayStation 2.

The post Madden NFL 12 keepi??ng up with free-agency roster changes appeared first on Destructoid.

The March release of 2K Sports’ Major League Baseball 2K11 came with the fanfare of the publisher’s second annual competition to throw an in-game perfect game for a $1 million cash prize. This time around, 2K tweaked the parameters of the contest in an effort to give more gamers a chance, pushing back the start date past baseball’s Opening Day and lowering the minimum ??age to 13. With an extra three weeks’ worth of practice, it certainly seemed possible that a less experienced player ??would have a shot.

“I didn’t know much about baseball goin??g in,” said Brian Kingrey, the winne?r of this year’s contest, at a press event in a Citi Field suite during a Phillies-Mets game last week. “I knew about as much as, hey, you’ve got to hit the ball and then get home runs, you know?”

But the 25-year-old from Hammond, LA, a first-year high-school music teacher -- guitar, piano, ban?d, and choir -- is much savvier than he might sound. Kingrey wasn’t a sports fan before this contest, but he drew on his love for e-sports to bone up on baseball and give himself the best chance at the million-dollar bounty.

As a novice to both baseball and baseball videogames -- he had never played a baseball game before -- Kingrey knew that he was going to have to do his homework. Two weeks before the competition began, he traded in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 for MLB 2K11 and “started practicing like crazy,” about four to five hours a day. In addition, he went to MLB.com in order to gain a basic understanding of the rules of baseball. (Some of the intricacies escaped him: in a game of MLB 2K11, I watched him bunt a ball foul with two strikes ?-- he didn’t know he would b?e called out.)

Kingrey’s research didn’t end there. He often watches competitive gaming live-streams, and his preparation for the competition was just as in-depth. He looked up batting averages and pitchers, and decided to play the Opening Day matchup of the Astros and Phillies, using MLB 2K11 cover athlete Roy Halladay. Kingrey’s research told him that the Astros were the best target for the right-handed Halladay because of their free-swinging lineup, which features only two left-handed hitters. His strategy during the game was to sti?ck almost exclusively with Halladay’s deadly cut fastball, which moves away from righties and toward lefties; before each pitch, he shifted his fielders to the right so that even if a batter made contact, his ch?ances of getting a hit would be very low.

Like last year’s winner, Wade McGilberry, Kingrey achieved perfection on the first day of the competition; it only took him three tries in two hours. As it turned out, he was playing his current favorite game, League of Legends, when 2K Sports called with the news; he actually kept playing while on the phone because he didn’t want to lose his rating in the game. But 2K didn’t initially let on that he had ??won outright; they flew him to California under the pretense of being one of a few potential winners, and then revealed the truth on?ce he got there.

Brian and his wife, Karyn, got married in October, and recently moved into a new house. To this point, the space in their kitchen that a refrigerator would usually take up has been occupied by a “little mini dorm fridge,” so a full-size fridge is first up on the Kingreys’ list of things to do with their newfound wealth. They don’t have any extravagant plans for the money, but it has already allowed them to help out a friend in need: Kingrey told me that he gave his current car, a ?Toyota Corolla, to a friend who can really use it; he’s planning to replace it with a Nissan Leaf.

Once again, 2K flew the winner to New York City and put him and his wife up in a Manhattan hotel for a few days. In addition to meeting his million-dollar ticket, Roy Halladay himself, Kingrey took on a few journalists in MLB 2K11 to see if they could get a hit off of him. Last year, I was the only person who managed to break up McGilberry’s perfect game; I won a Mets jersey autographed by shortstop Jose Reyes for that feat. This time, Kingrey got ?two quick outs before giving up a walk and a single to me; when another contestant scored a double, I figured I was done.

But 2K was counting total bases, so technically, we were tied at two. In the next round, I picked up a single after Kingrey’s 1-2-3 inning against my opponent, and with that, certified myself as the reigning champion for two years running of breaking up million-dollar winners’ perfect games. (I’m ?actually not that good at videogames, I swear.) This year, 2K gave me a Halladay-signed baseball, quite the prize indeed.

To top it all off, the Phillies-Mets game that we all watched was a good one. The teams were tied 3-3 going into the 9th inning, where Mets closer Francisco Rodriguez allowed three runs, to my delight. The Mets mounted a rally in the bottom of the fr?ame, closing the gap to 6-4 before Daniel Murphy grounded into a game-ending double play with runners at th??e corners.

It was the kind of game that even non-fans of baseball might find exciting. But don’t count Kingrey among them anymore -- winning this contest has clearly instilled a budding love for baseball in him. Getting to know the Phillies players in MLB 2K11 has made him a Phillies fan, even though he’s from Louisiana. “Now that I know Rollins, Polanco, and Chase Utley, and all of [the Phillies], I really root for them.” Thanks to MLB 2K11, he told me, &ldquo??;I got a new appreciation for baseball. It’s really an amazing sport?.”

[Thanks to everyone at 2K Sports and Access Communications for their hospitality!]

The post MLB 2K11 $1M winner knew ‘zero at all’ about baseball appeared first on Destructoid.

"This game is the reason I joined Ignition three years ago," said Shane Bettenhausen, the publisher's director of business development, at a recent demo of El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron in New York. "I hate gam?es that are [birthed] in a conference room by a focus group and a bunch of people who try to make what they think people want."

El Shaddai can be described as the antithesis of that kind of videogame. The London arm of Ignition came up with the outlandish concept for the title: it's a third-person character action game based on the Book of Enoch, an apocryphal Jewish text found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. As if that weren't strange enough, Ignition decided to have the game developed in Japan, mostly be??cause, according to Bettenhausen, "they thought that would be interesting."

"Interesting" isn't even the half of it.

El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 [previewed])
Developer: Ignition Entertainment
Publisher: Ignition Entertainment
Released: April 28, 2011 (JP)
To be released: July 26, 2011 (NA) / September 9, 2011 (EU)

The director of development on El Shaddai, Takeyasu Sawaki, served as a character designer on Devil May Cry and Okami, and Ignition tapped him for El Shaddai because of his experience on both of those games. One of the goals was to design a title that, like Okami, would have immediately arresting non-photorealistic graphics. Bettenhausen said that "Capcom gave [Sawaki] a lot of freedom, but they told him he couldn't go as far as he wanted" with the abstraction and surrealism in Okami's design. Ignition allowed him to unleash his full artistic creativity on El Shaddai, letting him build a t?eam in Tokyo of about ??65 people, many of whom had previously worked for companies such as Clover Studio, Konami, and Square Enix.

The result is a striking visu??al style that draws from a diverse array of inspirations, including ancient Japanese art, African tribal art, and Native American art; each of the game's twelve acts features a unique art direction that sets it apart from the others. Of course, with a game based on mythology, the artists were free to interpret the text as they pleased -- Bettenhausen pointe?d out that no one can definitively say what the Tower of Babel, for example, would have looked like. (The narrative from the Book of Enoch was left essentially intact, though.)

Key to El Shaddai's art direction is its utter lack of HUD elements. Visual cues convey vital information to you, whether they're letting you know that you're approaching death (Enoch's armor breaks away during combat) or that your weapon's effectiveness has been reduced (its color changes). Like God of War?, the game manages the camera for you, providing some jaw-dropping angles of the action.

Ignition also wanted El Shaddai to be a more accessible Devil May Cry-like title. "We felt like a lot of [third-person character action] games had become too complicated, [with] too many buttons [and] too much memorization. Whereas fans of the genre were playing them, nobody else was starting to play these games," Bettenhausen explained. Along with the analog sticks, you will only ever use four buttons in El Shaddai: jump/double-jump (A on Xbox 360/X on PlayStation 3), attack (X/square), block (RB/R1), and disarm/purify (LB/L1). Integratin??g jumping, blocking, and parrying still allows for a significant variety in combat -- the game's first weapon, the Arch, offers 26 different combos.

"More accessible" doesn't necessarily mean "easier," though. On the Normal difficulty, said Bettenhausen, the game is "actually pretty hard. [...] By level 5, it was almost Ninja Gaiden, that a regular enemy was killing me." (Good luck with Hard and Extra Hard, which are unlocked upon completion -- only one of the developers has managed to complete the game ??on the latter difficulty level.)

El Shaddai is designed with strategic elements to its combat setup that keep you on your toes. You can carry only one weapon at a time, and after you have sufficiently weakened an enemy, you can disarm it and take its weapon. But the weapons have different levels of effectiveness against particular enemies, so you have to continuously manage your battles in a way that allows you to d?efeat your opponents with minimal effort. I watched Bettenhausen take on a group of attackers, and aft??er inadvertently disarming someone, he explained that the weapon he stole was going to make the next phase of the battle more difficult because it wasn't ideal for the remaining enemies.

But you'll have to either disarm enemies or leave yourself momentarily vulnerable if you want to make short work of them. Weapon become "defiled" over time -- that is, their strength drops -- and in o??rder to restore their vitality, Enoch must periodically "purify" them. The animation takes a few seconds, depending on the weapon equipped, and you're defenseless during it. However, Enoch will automatically purify a s??tolen weapon during the disarm animation, so it's a very useful combat tactic.

Weapons in El Shaddai also affect the way Enoch controls altogether -- his running, jumping, dodging, and inertia. One weapon, the Gale, gives Enoch a dash move that serves him very well in the game's numerous platforming sections. El Shaddai includes jumping puzzles that can get rather compl?icated, but many of its platforming segments ??are actually in 2D. According to Bettenhausen, about 40% of the game -- including entire acts, at points -- consists of 2D side-scrolling sequences (they're more plentiful toward the end). Some of these segments offer multiple paths to explore; all the game's secrets must be found in order to achieve the "good" ending.

Bettenhausen loved the first 2D level that Sawaki showed him, but the designer expressed trepidations about its viability. "Will Americans and Europeans like this?" he asked Bettenhausen, who had to assure Sawaki that the idea was worth exploring. "Yes! We also love Mario!" The 2D sections vary the pace, and they have a greater focus on platforming. "We felt like the character-action games that came out over the last ten years were more about brawling [and] less about jumping," said Bettenhausen, and Ignition wanted to change that with El Shaddai.

As the story goe?s, in the beginning, God created the Earth. He sent down seven angels to watch over it, known (appropriately enough) as the Watchers, and he entrusted them with an immense amount of power. This power, as it often does, corrupted the Watchers; they and humanity fell in love with each other, and their offspring were known as the Nephilim. (In the Book of Enoch, they're grotesque semi-human monsters, but Sawaki rendered them as "Studio Ghibli, slimy, cute Totoro thing[s].") The Watchers instructed humans to build the Tower of Babel, and each floor was its own utopia. Understandably, this angered God, who decided to unleash an apocalyptic flood on the Earth to wipe everything out for a do-over. As Enoch, you are taske?d with finding seven fallen angels in order to prevent that flood of Biblical proportions.

The art isn't the only surreal facet of El Shaddai -- its tale is told in the typically over-the-top anime ?style. Lucifer (known as "Lucifel" here, since the game takes place before his fall from Heaven) serves as a narrator and guide of sorts; because he has traveled through time and taken a shine to modern fashion, he wears a suit, and he t?alks to God on his cell phone in order to save your game. Yep. Lucifel's time travel plays an important role in the story, since, well, he knows what's going to happen.

It takes Enoch 300 years to find the Tower of Babel, and one of the sections I saw and played took place in the City of the Martys, just outside the Tower. Picture the city of Zion from The Matrix Reloaded meeting Mario Kart's Rainbow Road track, and give it a Tron-like look, and you'll have some idea of the art direction of the level. El Shaddai definitely doesn't hold your hand; much of the level consisted of narrow bridges and platforms that you can fall off of, or be knocked by an enemy off of, to your death. A later? section of the same level threw airborne enemies with projectile weapons at ?Enoch; you could either run past them, fight them, or try to time your jumps so that their attacks broke open item containers sprinkled along the path.

With its stunning and fantastical art direction, classic "simplicity belies depth" controls, challenging combat and platforming, and unconventional take on Judeo-Christian mythology, El Shaddai is shaping up to be a strong title that may fly under most gamers' radar. "Luckily," said Bettenhausen, "this game doesn't have to sell like a God of War in order to be a success??." It likely won't, but perhaps it should.

The post Preview: El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron appeared first on Destructoid.

Holy sh*tballs, this game is crazy.

How do I even begin to describe how insanely complicated, yet ridiculously awesome Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten appears to be? Explosions, demo??ns, monsters, penguins, pirates, ??massive parties, combo attacks, micro-customization, level grinding, random battles -- does it ever end?! The answer is no!

If you can dream it, it is possible. Probably. That’s Disgaea 4, dood!

Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten (PlayStation 3)
Developer: NIS
Publisher: NIS
To be released: September 2011

To be honest, I know absolutely no?thing about the ser?ies aside from what I picked up at the NIS Spring Event. It has something to do with hell, right? And cute anime characters with wings or something?

Luckily, Steve Carlton, Localization Coordinator at NIS, was able to clear up the plotline for us while schooling me on what’s up with the finer details of the game (and trust me, there are plenty). According to Carlton, the Disgaea games typically in??volve the crazy hijinks of the Netherworld?? (or Hell) and the goings on within.

This tim??e around, you begin the game as Valvatorez, previously a powerful tyrant overlord who gains his vampirish powers by ingesting human blood. However, after making a promise with a human girl to never to drink the blood of humans again, he loses his powers and drops to the lowest level of Hades, the Netherworld Prison.

There, Valvatorez is in charge of training and disciplini??ng Prinnies (the human souls of corrupt criminals and thieves who, after being transformed into comical penguin-like characters, must be trained to both act and speak a certain way in order to atone for their sins).

Suddenly, problems! The demons in charge of scaring humans into being good aren’t doing their job. The Netherworld, affected by their slacking, is churning out far too many Prinnies, and Hell just can’t handle the overpopulated upkeep. Oh no! The President of Hell, in an attempt to keep the peace, decides to exterminate all of t??he Prinnies in one fell swoop.

This prompts Valvatorez -- who has promised to keep the Pr??innies safe -- to launch an anti-government campaign going against the laws of t??he Netherworld in order to overthrow the President and discipline everyone on the proper ways to run Hell. Mischief ensues!

After getting a chance to test out the game myself, the first thing I noticed was the wacky and over-enthusiastic voice acting (think DeathSpank or a silly infomercial). It’s interesting t?hat they chose a comedic tone for a game that definitely could have been a bit on the darker side.

While taking my sweet time enjoying the introduction and studying the cute anime character sprites, some huffy journalist from some media site that’s not Destructoid tapped me on the shoulder and, in an irritated tone, asked if I was playing the game or not. Uhm, obviously, lady. Do you not see the PS3 controller in my hand? I politely told her that, yes, I am playing the game, and I also happen to be taking not??es (with a wave of my iPhone in her face). She backed off (das wut I thought, son!) and left me to my gaming.

Feeli?ng a bit flustered (dang, people be pushy up in this bizz), I attempted to skip through the rest of the intro dialogue and found that it was fairly slow going. For one, you can’t really just mash X and fly through the script. Pressing start over and over also doesn’t seem to do much in ?the way of speeding things along.

Glancing behind me, I could see the line growing and the amount of people watching my screen filling up. Oh, the ??pressure! Fortunately, Hamza “CTZ” Aziz was there to pat me on the shoulder and kindly ??say, “Screw them. They can wait their turn. You’re fine.” Destructoid FTW.

After I finally reached a playable part of the game (they start Valvatorez off in his base of operations, sort of like a camp site), I was pleased with how quickly and smoothly I could navigate the map. Swiveling the left analog stick allowed me to stee??r Valvatorez through the base camp, while tapping L1 or R1 rotated my view by 90 degrees in whatever direction I chose. I could also zoom in or out to three different angles by holding square and again tapping the front left or ??right trigger buttons.

Confusion followed when I realized I had no idea what I was doing or where I was supposed to go. There weren’t exactly any indicators saying, “S’cuse me, dumbass. Yer s’pose ta do this or tal??k ta this person right hurr.” Maybe this is due to me hurriedly skipping through the dialogue? Though I am something of a speed-reader anyways, so that probably wasn’t it??????????????????????????.

It took me a bit of talking to random NPCs littered throughout my base (who, according to Carlton, merely serv?e to supplement the storyline) before I managed to? discover a glowing character with pigtails who apparently launches strategy battles for me.

I first played through a tutorial that discussed the basic controls of battling. Then, feeling like a smarty-pants, I attempted to execute the button commands I had just learned. But wait, what was happening? Why isn’t X doing w??hat it’s supposed to do, and why isn’t Circle behaving?!

Again, maybe this is due to me rushing through the tutorial (though I swear I was paying attention to what does what), or perhaps due to the fact that this is a Japan??ese-to-English port, and they are still working on the translations for correct button mapping. Either way, it was simple enough to ??figure out with a little trial and error.

The battle configuration was easy to understand and is fairly? similar to every other strategy game I’ve played. I deployed fighters, clerics, etc by selecting my base panel (this glowing blue tile on the floor) and deciding on which characters I wanted to send into battle, then positioning them across the grid within their range of movement. A maximum of ten characters from your party can be on the field at any time, while your base panel holds the rest of your deployable stock.

Eager to see my army in action, I quickly stationed my characters and executed their attacks, surprised when other minions I happened to place nearby joined in on the attacks for massive collaborative combos! The animations were so nuts that I can’t even really describe to you what it was that I saw (view the trailer for an idea),?? but I did get a chance to ask Steve Carlton for?? more details.

“The multi-character attacks are random, but there are ways to increase the percentage of them occurring. The way you set up your government across the field affects how each person teams up with one another,” Carlton states. Massive character combo attacks with a huge personal army of minions to de??ploy? Color me intrigued.

Unfortunately I didn’t have time to play through as much of the game as I would have liked, and from a follow-up interview with Steve Carlton, it turns out that I’ve only barely scratched the surface of Disgaea 4. The official trailer, for ex?ample, only touches on a few of the awesome features in the game -- like fully customizable maps, monsters that transform into weapons, the ability to log onto the Network and pirate characters from your friends and then discipline them into obedience, etc.

Carlton estimates that the game will take maybe? 40 hours to wrap up if the player just sticks to the ma?in storyline with a dry run. As is the case with most complicated JRPGs, all of the side quests, mini games, and micro-customization features could possibly log you at anywhere from 200 - 300 hours to fully complete.

A few more cool things you can expect from Disgaea 4 include: Weapon Mastery on anything from knuckles to swords (leveling up your weapons reveals unlockable skills and ultimate attacks which you can then also level up in order to become as powerful as possible -- holy crap); tons of monsters to both defeat, ca?pture, and train into recruits for your already massive army; ways to level up your items or characters that involve battling down through different layers of maps within those characters or items; and defeating matches taking pla?ce inside of your minions or weapons themselves. PHEW!

I’m sure I could go on forever about the incredible depth of Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten and the overwhelming strategy nuances it boasts, but ultimately, it comes down to the players to explor?e these features themselves.

With a release date set for September 2011 and a price point at $49.99 ($59.99 for the Premium Edition), it sounds? like NIS has plenty of time to fine tune the otherwise tongue-tying features of the game for its American audiences.

Sherilynn "Cheri" Macale is a freelance journalist and illustrator who can't exactly decide what she wants to do with the rest of her life and so does absolutely everything. Harass and prod her via Twitter, check out the badassery on her Website, and leave a friendly message on her Facebook.

The post Hands-on: Disgaea 4: A Promise Unforgotten appeared first on Destructoid.

“I love these things, but I ?also know that there’s something weird, and kind of bizarre, and strange about them -- like, there&rsq??uo;s something really dumb about them. [...] We love them, and, kind of, hate them at the same time.”

That was the way that Frank Lantz, Interim Director of the Game Center at New York University, characterized the attitude toward videogames displayed on Old Man Murray, the videogame criticism website that Valve Software writers Erik Wolpaw and Chet Faliszek once ran. The setting was a cozy theater in the basement of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where, last Thursday evening, Wolpaw mused for nearly ninety minutes on a wide-ranging variety of topics -- including the design of Portal and Portal 2, the development process at Valve, and the nature of story i??n videogames -- without getting pretentious.

Well, maybe just once.

I encourage you to check out the full lecture, which can be viewed in its entirety here. But if you can’t spare the time, I’ve broken out the salie??nt points for you below. (I mean, the recap is still pretty long, but even then, it probably won’t take you an hour and a half to read.)

[Editor’s note: Regrettably, I have yet to play Portal 2 myself. However, that’s good news for you if you’re in the same boat, since it means that this article is spoiler-free! -Samit]

Symbolic suspended animation: Wolpaw began by playing through the opening of Portal 2. The game begins in what appears to be a small hotel room; after a brief interaction with a (non-GLaDOS) computerized voice, you go back to sleep -- or rather, re-enter suspended animation. Valve originally thought of providing a gameplay sequence representing the state itself: “Aperture makes this [relaxation chamber] that’s supposed to store you forever, but it’s actually this, just, real-time simulation of you pacing back and forth in a shitty hotel room. It was just going to be the worst thing ever.” The segment didn’t work out, so the developers merely stuck Chell in a container that was l??iterally a hotel room.

Bringing on Stephen Merchant to play Wheatley, the Personality Sphere: Wolpaw and his co-writer, Jay Pinkerton, had been watching a lot of British comedy shows when they began working on the Portal 2 script. The list of shows included Extras, which was co-created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. But Merchant actually wasn’t Valve’s first choice for Wheatley; the writers initially went after Richard Ayoade, perhaps best known for his role in The IT Crowd, because of his “nas?ally” and “annoying” voice. “This was w?hen we were kind of imagining Wheatley as being a little more hectoring,” explained Wolpaw.

But Ayoade’s involvement fell through due to scheduling conflicts, and at that point, “We kinda started writing in Stephen Merchant’s voice,” without any real hope that he would be interested in coming on, since Wolpaw “just assumed he was rich” from co-creating the original British version of The Office. To Wolpaw’s delight, Merchant said yes: “I’m really, really happy with the way this turned out in the sense that it’s a very natural-sounding performance.” Wolpaw cited, among other qua??lities, Merchant’s “awesome ability to, kind of, make things that are written down sound like they’re just, sort of, off-th?e-cuff.”

The Portal sequel that might have been: For the first six months of its development, Portal 2 didn’t even have portals in it. Valve had devised a different puzzle mechanic, dubbed “F-Stop,” that was “pretty promising.” (Wolpaw wouldn’t go into any detail on F-Stop, since the studio may use it in a future game.) Not only was the game’s core mechanic different, but it had a separate story altogether. The F-Stop version of Portal 2 “took place in the ’50s -- GLaDOS wasn&rsquo?;t in it, Chell wasn’t in it. It was [Aperture Science founder] Cave Johnson, and it was the story of him getting put into a computer and then realizing he&r?squo;s made a huge mistake.”

As it turned out, the game’s playtesters kept asking about GLaDOS and the portal gun. “People may have enj??oyed the puzzles to varying degrees, but [essentially] to a person, they didn’t want a clean slate,” said Wolpaw. So the team decided to bring Chell and portals back, but set the sequel in the future.

Just how do you go about making a sequel to Portal, anyway?: The original Portal was “pretty much one long training arc getting you to understand how portals worked,” and every bit of the game was designed with that goal in mind. But Valve refused to discard the training aspect of the game for its sequel, since, “If you made a list of things going in -- constraints -- [one] is that we didn’t want to just sell this, or design it, for people who had played Portal 1.” That might be why some folks are feeling that Portal 2 is easier than Portal, but Wolpaw also pointed out that with perfect hindsight, the team was able to refine elements of the original game and ??improve the overall puzzle design.

If Aperture Science is decrepit, why are the elevators in better shape?: There was “no story reason” for the “cooler-looking” elevators in Portal 2 -- they’re just a product of a bigger team,?? said Wolpaw.

Science-fiction influences: When pressed about the science-fiction works that influence his writing, Wolpaw said that his father had been a “huge science-fiction fan” -- his home contained bookshelves filled with issues of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Galaxy Science Fiction. He admitted that he didn’t do as much reading of them as he did browsing -- “I looked at the covers a lot,” he told us -- but mentioned Ray Bradbury, Fredric Brown, and Robert Sheckley (who has a Half-Life 2: Episode Two character named after him) a?s authors whose writing he enjoyed.

Who looks at those testchamber signs?: One of the keys to Valve’s iterative design process is the extensive playtesting that the company undertakes for each of its games. It reveals a lot about player tendencies, and Wolpaw shared an interesting tidbit with us regarding the signs at the start of each testchamber. Valve brings in gamers as well as non-gamers for playtesting, and noticed that people who are well-ve?rsed in the language of videogames “tend to just dive in,” breezing right by the signs, because they “have this intuitive sense that the designer is going to make it so that you don’t have to r?ead that sign [...] as anything but flavor text.”

On the other hand, “People who don’t play games, almost to a perso?n, would come and look at every sign to try and extract [information] -- like you would in real life. You expect that ‘there’s going to be information I need on this sign.’” The diagrams and symbols don’t necessarily help me to figure out ??the puzzles, but I glance at them anyway, just because they’re fun to look at. That’s just me, though.

The “Valve Cabal”: The folks at Valve succeed in spite of, or perhaps because of, their unorthodox studio organization. Rather, there isn’t a typical organizational arrangement at all. “It’s this weird, sort of, flat management structure; kinda communal; there’s no real hierarchy,” Wolpaw began. When asked to discuss it, he spoke haltingly, saying he was stammering because “I’ve tri??ed to explain to my wife how? it works, and I haven’t been able to, and she doesn’t believe that it should work.”

He finally found some words, saying that “everybody, kind of, pitches in, and order sort of emerges from that chaos.” Here, he reiterated the importance of playtesting, explaining that the process is tremendously humbling. “It’s hard to keep defending some idea when you see it fail repeatedly,” he said, noting that “it’s sort of liberating” because “people just get very used to not feeling like, ‘I’ve got to cling to this idea because this idea is my id??ea and I’m worthless if this doesn’t go.’ Most of the ideas don’t pan out.” Of course, if you can force yourself to discard everything but the very best, and you have extremely high standards for yourself, you’re probably going to do pretty well.

Another tough test for the team is a body at the studio called “Overwatch.” It’s not an Orwellian overseer, per se; Wolpaw explained it as “people who aren’t working on the product, but who are, sort of, trusted people in terms of just their product focus -- l??ike, what does a Valve game look like?” The Overwatch folks play the game and provide “brutally honest” feedback. They only mention issues, not solutions, and there’s no skating by them. Often, Overwatch will point out something that you “kind of had in the back of your head, that you think this might be a problem, but, ‘Maybe we’ll sneak it by Overwatch,’ and then it doesn’t really work that way.”

Cutscenes are a cop-out, in most cases: Valve is renowned for making games that rarely, if ever, take you out of the first-person perspective. “We have this feeling, I think, internally -- I don’t know that we say it that much -- that doing the cutscenes is kinda like admitting defeat,” said Wolpaw. He quickly acknowledged that he plays and enjoys “a million games” that have cutscenes, such as Red Dead Redemption, Saints Row (“great”), and God Hand (“best game ever”). Portal 2 its??elf?? ends with a cutscene, but only because “it wasn’t going to look as good if we did it live, and it was going to require a level load.” Sometimes, said Wolpaw, it’s okay to sacrifice the narrative in the interest of “[making] it look really good.”

“So here’s something pretentious” about adventure games: Wolpaw isn’t a big fan of traditional adventure games. After playing many of them in his youth, he realized that he “liked the writing -- they tend to be funny -- but the puzzles were never very good, and there was a huge disconnect, just mechanically [between the gameplay and writing].” (He then joked that he “liked to tell Tim [Schafer] that all the time” during his?? tenure at Schafer’s studio, Double Fine, “with all the crappy games he made.”)

But Wolpaw’s sole pretentious comment, in his view, came when he characterized Portal as something that “seems like [...] kind of an adventure game: you’re not shooting people in the face; it requires thinking, but the puzzles are very logical; and it’s got a storyline through it.” In fact, Valve was surprised that more developers didn’t try to ape Portal after it became a runaway critical and commercial hit in 2007. “We thought, ‘This is it -- floodgates are open. Man, when Portal 2 comes out, we’re going to be competing against 17,000 other games that are like it.’ And then nothing really happened.” Even in the context of the recent renaissance of old-school adventure games, Wolpaw sug?gested that “maybe something along these lines” is the way to go for adventure-game developers who want to?? grow their audience.

Choose Your Own Adventure books -- in a game: Wolpaw may not enjoy adventure games, but he does think that Choose Your Own Adventure books are “cool.” After mentioning the “like, five thousand books in [The Elder Scrolls IV] Oblivion,” he bestowed his “big idea” upon us: “What if they were Choose Your Own Adventure books? Like, you’d open it, and it was a Choose Your Own Adventure book? And it’d be fun -- it’d be, like, a fun 15-minute break from adventuring.” That might just get me to play an Elder Scrolls game.

Which came first, the puzzle or the space?: The world of Portal is purposefully abstract, Wolpaw explained, since Valve’s designers come up wi??th a batch of puzzles that are then inserted into the game. “??You can design the space almost exactly like you want for the puzzle; [the space] doesn’t have to represent anything real. So [...] usually the puzzle will come first, and you can conform the space to it.”

On Chell, and silent protagonists in general: “I don’t know that it’s specifically a Valve thing, but it’s a thing,” said Wolpaw of silent protagonists in videogames. Chell remains silent for a number of reasons. “I mean, for all you know, Chell [...] might actually have brain damage,” Wolpaw began, as the audience broke out into laughter. Indeed, comedy was a major impetus for having a silent protagonist in Portal. After explaining the two major types of comedy -- the straight man in a crazy world, and the crazy man in a straight world -- Wolpaw described Portal as the quintessential “world gone mad with the straight?? man, and the straight man is you.”

In addition, it just saves time if Chell doesn’t speak, and it also serves the comedic timing better, according to Wolpaw. “I think you may want to know her backstory; you may want to hear her say things; but I guarantee, if she had to say her straight-man lines at the expense of half of the other dialogue, it would suck. And Jay and I would be miserable, and everybody’d be miserable.” Finally, Wolpaw doesn’t believe that people are particularly invested in Chell’s character, because she doesn’t have much of a personality. Instead, “We always assume she could talk and s?he simply just chooses not to, because the robots are all being dicks, and why give them the satisfaction of saying anything to them?”

For GLaDOS, how cruel is too cruel?: GLaDOS spends a lot of time cracking wise at Chell’s expense, and Wolpaw explained that because Chell is essentially a cipher for the player, the jokes only work if they’re “relatively absurd.” That’s why she taunts Chell about being adopted -- “I mean, nobody really thinks that adopted people are lesser than anybody else” -- and about her weight, “because clearly, Chell is not fat; I think [GLaDOS] even admits that at some point, later in the game.” ?An audience member suggested that GLaDOS belittles Chell like an overbearing mother would criticize her child, and that’s something that Wolpaw has experience with. “I wa??s a fat kid my whole life,” said the now-svelte writer, “and I had this kind of passive-aggressive grandmother who was always needling me about it.”

Originally, Portal 2’s script called for an even harsher GLaDOS. According to the feedback from playtesters, she “was just too vicious and mean, and people were kind of getting ground down by just how awful she was be??ing to you.” Even Ellen McLain, the computer’s voice, expressed reservations in the voice-over studio about some of the content. “I don’t know what we were thinking,” said Wolpaw.

A missed opportunity: Someone asked if Valve had cut anything particularly good from Portal 2, and after racking his brain, Wolpaw recalled that they had come up with a “Morgan Freeman, kind of, sphere,” but ended up not using it. No, seriously. “Like, you find him in this little ten-by-ten room,?? and he’s, like, the wisest guy about this ten-by-ten space. Doesn’t know anything about anything [else] -- is just blown away by the shit that’s five feet outside the ten-by-ten space -- but has a lot of advice that al?l, kind of, relates to things that were in the ten-by-ten space.” I wish I’d thought to ask if they had actually gotten Freeman to lend his voice to the sphere.

Did Portal really need a story?: You’d think that the brilliantly designed puzzles alone would be enough to keep people enthralled, but Valve’s rigorous playtesting revealed otherwise. At some point, the players became “fatigued” during the original Portal -- “they were ??enjoying it, but even at the length it was, a quarter of the way through, they were like, ‘There’s nothing pulling me through this. It’s kind of fun, but it’s sterile and it’s sort of dry, and I’m just sort of done.’” So the story -- as sparse as it was -- was key in keeping players engaged. “Just having the voice [of GLaDOS], kind of, just sayin??g something mildly amusing at the end and beginning of the levels was enough,” said Wolpaw.

--------

Again, if you’re interested in hearing more about this stuff, a video of the full session is available online.

The post Recap: Valve’s Erik Wolpaw speaks at NYU Game Center appeared first on Destructoid.

The latest game in the Warhammer 40,000 series is taking players in a new direction with Space Marine, a third-person action-adventure title. You play as Captain Titus of the Ultramarines chapter, a genetically modified superhuman s??oldier equipped with powerful armor, badass weapons and a chainsaw sword.

Your task is to defend a vital Imperial Forge World home to powerful weapons of war, including the devastating Titan superweapons. Orks have invaded the planet, and you're all that stands in the way of total annihilation. Think Gears of War but with less hiding and m??ore action. A lot more action, in fact. You're a super soldier who isn't afraid of getting right into the thick of it.

As promising as an action-adventure game where you use a freaking chainsaw sword sounds, I'm sad to say that Space Marine didn't really wow me.

Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine (PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 [previewed], PC)
Developer: Relic Entertainment
Publisher: THQ
To be released: 2011

THQ wasn't really letting us get into the story beyond the basic plot outline that I described above, which was a real shame. To me, story is key when it comes to these types of shooters, especially since the market is flooded with them. I need to be engaged by the story -- otherwise, what's the point of investing my time and money into a game? And of the snippets I did get of the story, none really impressed me. I did, however, really like the voice acting. The soldiers all speak Old English, like Thor from Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes.

Moving on to the combat, it's a seamless mix of melee and shooting. You'll find yourself engaging anywhere from 15 to 30 Orks at a t??ime, and the fearless creatures will run right up to you. There were multiple choke points where I shot enemies in the distance while switching fluidly to my chainsaw sword against enemies that came straight at me.

You have a normal and strong attack with the chainsaw sword, and you also have a Fury meter, which, once filled up, will allow you to unl??eash a powerful melee attack or slow things down bullet-time-style for your guns. Honestly, I found myself having more fun swinging around the chainsaw sword than shooting. I think it had something to do with the fact that I was using a sword that is also a chainsaw.

Additionally, you have an evade move as well as sprint and tackle abilities. You'll also be ?able to perform brutal execution moves. Your hero has a shield on top of regular health, both of which regenerate over time.

The only thing holding back the combat is the camera. The camera pulls in really close to Titus, which would be fine if this was just a shooter. A?s melee is a big factor in the c?ombat, I often found myself lost in the confusion of battle due to the camera pulling in too close; I was sometimes unable to see my character.

The visuals are hit-and-miss, too. I loved the character designs for all the races. The Space Marines look as badass as they should, the Chaos class definitely looked fearsome with their devish looks and lightning-like reflexes, and all the various Orks all looked distinctive. The Gothic architecture seen in the majority of the environments off in the background was well designed, too. It was areas that saw me in buildings/close quarters that felt very generic. Only one of the four levels felt like it had some life and attention to d?etail.

Note that what I saw was all pre-alpha gameplay; a majority of my complaints, such as the combat and environmental design, can be addressed between now and launch. I just hope there's a lot more to the story that will bring people in. I'm sure Warhammer 40K fans will eat the game up.

For the general consumer who's not familiar with the Warhammer 40K series (like myself), we're in a year where we're seeing a number of established shooters such as Gears of War 3, Uncharted 3, Battlefield 3 and more coming out -- there's just not much to entice Warhammer 40K newbies and draw them away from those heavy hitters. I'm defin?itely not r??eady to write this game off completely, though, and want to see if anything is improved come this June at E3. Plus, we haven't even seen anything of the multiplayer yet. 

The post Hands-on: Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine appeared first on Destructoid.

You know what we don't have enough of anymore? Metroid-vania style a?dventure games. This style of adventure games is few and far between nowadays but luckily for us there are some developers out there who haven't totally forgotten this genre.

Not only is Outland reminiscent of games like Metroid, but there's also a puzzle-like element in the style of Ikaruga. Yes, this does sound like a marriage made of aw??esome.

Outland (PlayStation Network, Xbox Live Arcade [Previewed])
Developer: Housemarque
Publisher: Ubisoft
To be released: April 26 (PSN) / April 27 (XBLA)
MSRP: $9.99 / 800 MS Points

Outland sees you on a quest in o?rder to stop two powerful goddesses from escaping their imprisonment. In order to ?do that, you'll need to defeat the goddess's henchmen bosses and take their powers in order to become stronger.

I played about the first 15 minutes of the story mode which sees you learning the basics in combat, including how to handle your sword -- the main weapon of Outland. You're able to do combos with your sw?ord and you can juggle enemies too. You'll also be able to do a slide attack which stuns enemi??es.

It's not going to be a simple matter of just attacking enemies however. You'll be able to switch your light alignment (Ikaruga's polarity system basic??ally) which works in two ways. When you're attacking enemies, you must?? be the opposite color alignment of them. There are also lasers going off throughout levels that will hurt you unless you're the same light alignment of the laser attack.

It sounds simple enough but a lot of the times you'll find yourself quickly running through laser fields only to come head-to-head against an enemy. You need to have some sharp reflexes in a lot of the scenarios you come across. Check out the video demo by Jonathan Holmes to get a real good idea at what to expect.

You don't have to worry about any sort of game over though, as you'll simply respawn back at your last checkpoint if you do die. Plus there's an upgrade system so you can increase your health and energy with all the coins you find throughout Outland.

Outland also sports online co-op across all three game modes on offer. So you can work with a friend through the main story, the Arcade time-based challenge mode, and the co-op only challenge rooms. There is ??no local co-op as the smaller scree?n ratio ends up hurting the game according to the majority of the feedback Ubisoft and developer Housemarque received.

I got to try out a couple of the co-op challenge modes and absolutely enjoyed my experience with the "Keeper of the Light" game. Two players are going through a stage and only one person can change the light orientation for both players. Thi?s mode definitely requires a lot of commun??ication as both players really need to work together in order to make it through all of the different lasers and platforms that require specific light orientation.

The second challenge room sees players taking on the second boss fight of the game. It's a three stage battle that sees you jumping from platform to platform in order to avoid falling to your death. It's a tough fight and I died a lot. Thankfully players can revive a fallen buddy an infinite amount of times. So one person just needs to st?ay alive until the boss is ki??lled.

Lastly I was shown the bomb juggling challenge room which sees players having to throw bombs at e?ach other in order to get through the level. It's like hot potato, except the bomb can kill you if? you mess up.

Sadly there's only five challenge rooms but Ubisoft is open to adding more ??if the fans demand it. The plan for DLC right now is actually centered around what fans really want. So if players want another chapter for the story mode, then Ubisoft will make it happen.

The same goes for a PC version of the game. There's only ??plans for console release, but if there's enough demand and the game sells well, then they'll work on a PC po?rt.

All in all, Outland is going to be well worth the purchase. Yo?u'?re getting a game that will take you about six to eight hours to complete, and that's not even including the challenge rooms, arcade mode and the replayability of the single-player campaign. You're getting a solid game all for just $9.99/800 MS Points.

The post Hands-on: Outland’s co-op mode appeared first on Destructoid.

F.E.A.R 3 is the latest in the spooky first-person shooter franchise where you and your dead ghost brother have to save the world from your pregnant ghost mom. Or something. Honestly, it's hard to pay attention to the story when all I can ever focus on is that you get (SPOILER) ghost raped by Alma in the previous game.

So it's a good thing I only had to play the four multiplayer modes during my hands-on session with F.E.A.R 3. One mode is awesome, two? of the modes are good and the fourth mode was pretty forgettable.

F.3.A.R. (PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 [Previewed]
Developer: Day 1 Studios
Publisher: Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment
To be released: May 2011

Let's start with my least favorite of the mo?des and work our way t??o my favorite. In "Soul King," all players start off as the Spectre, a ghost who can posses humans and other monsters. Spectres only have one simple projectile attack, meaning players will want to find and possess humans that make use of assault rifles, shotguns and more.

The overall goal is to kill enemies, collect their soul and be the player with the most collected souls at the end. Getting? killed will see you? losing half of your cache of souls.

My main reason why I didn't like this mode is that there's too much going on. On top of worrying about the three human players, there's a continuous funnel of AI characters coming in from all over the map. There's a never-ending stock ??of humans to possess, but the draw back of that is you'll be getting shot up from all over the map too. I was getting killed more than I was actually killing.

Next up, we have "Soul Survivor."? Four players will start off in a room and Alma will randomly corrupt one of the players, turning them to the ghost side. The corrupted player now has a limited amount of time to corrup??t the remaining humans while the human players must defend themselves against waves of Armacham soldiers.

This mode was pretty fun in that the three human players really have to work together while the corrupted player needs to strike at the right moment?, such as when the players are separated. Human players can't be killed -- only downed -- which sees them crawling around on the floor and only able to wield a pistol. It's in this state that they can either be healed by a buddy or corrupted by a ghost. Once a person has been corrupted, they'll join o??ver to the ghost side and have to corrupt the remaining humans.

"Contractions" mode is very similar to the zombie mode in Call of Duty: Black Ops. Waves of enemies attack and you have to defend your base. You'll even board up your base, Black Ops style. In between each wave, players can secure treasure chests from the map and use them to purchase new weapons before the ??following stronger wave attacks.

So why is this mode called "Contractions"? Because each wave of enemies are spawned during one of Alma's contractions. Remember, she's pregnant because she's a rapist. Th?e environment shakes and you see a shock wave hit the stage with each contr??action.

If that's not enough, Alma actual appears on the map and will punish players that shoot at her or look her in the eyes. Alma's punishments are random, but expect to either be slowed down, have vision distorted, be teleport??ed somewhere far away from your team and more??.

The maps featured in "Contraction" also get hit with fog that becomes thicker with each passing wave. Some reps from developer Day 1 Studios laughed at?? the idea of anyone being able to ge?t past wave 10 that night. Not only do the enemies get harder, but you'll also be barely able to see the enemies until it's too late.

Last, and my favorite of the modes, is "Fucking Run!" Seriously, it's called "Fucking Run!" Four players must run from checkpoint to checkpoint all while shooting enemies and trying to avoid Alma's "Wall?????????????????????????? of Death," whic??h is a giant, all-consuming fog that will end the mode for everyone if even just one player gets hit.

Running from checkpoint to checkpoint sounds simple enough, but more enemies populate the path the further you go. Plus, the "Wall of De??ath" gains speed with each passing moment. It was honestly thrilling to run through the city streets with the fear of being consumed by Alma's dangerous powers.

The map is pre??tty linear but you'll find some areas where you can swap out for stronger weapons. The catch is that you'll lose time going for these better weapons, thus allowing?? the doom cloud to get closer.

Each mode offers only two three map??s each and are all up to four players. I asked if we'd see any competitive versus modes at all, but WB wasn't talking. They didn't outright deny my question so we may see something, hopefully.

Controls are pretty much your standard first-person shooter affair. The overall package is good, but it's hard to judge if all the modes will be able to hold people's at?tention after a few months. One final note as a first-person shooter lover: You can actually reload while you're running. I don't know about you, but I've always hated the fact you can't reload and run in most FPS games.

[Editor's note: The game is still officially called F.3.A.R. Yup, it's stupid, I know.]

The post Preview: F.E.A.R. 3’s four multiplayer modes appeared first on Destructoid.

Afraid of heights? Can’t climb down a ladder to save your life? Would you rather eat dirt than step one foot into a roller coaster? Well suck it up, buddy. This game isn’t for the weak of hear??t.

In Higher Flyer Death Defyer (HFDD), Game Mechanic Studios sends you plummeting down from enormous heights and through a tre?acherous comic book art style sky-world filled with floating cities and perilous obstacles in this action packed sky diving? game.

When I met with the HFDD team at WonderCon 2011, they seemed excited but ?nervous to hand over their iPad in order to give me a taste of their game, stressing that it is in an “extremely alpha, alpha, alpha” stage. 

High Flyer Death Defyer (iPhone, iPod Touch, Android, iPad [Previewed])
Developer: Game Mechanic Studios
Publisher: Game Mechanic Studios
To Be Released: Summer 2011

HFDD is a primarily tilt-based mobile game that relies on the sensitivity of your device to steer you left or right, send you nose-diving through the environment, or slow you down for more maneuverability in order to avoid obstacles. A simple tap to the screen deploys your jetpack and will allow you to fly safely upon floating platforms. Activate your jetpack too late and it will overheat and explode! But for those of you lucky enough to land healthy and whole, these platforms will act as checkpoints while you progress through the highly explorative world of HFDD.

But why do you need checkpoints? HFDD isn’t some bubblegum candy game where you’re happily prancing through the air while tra-la-la-ing through one level to the next.? You’re probably going to die! ?? While thorough details concerning the storyline are pending announcement closer to the predicted release date (sometime in Summer 2011), President and Creative Director, Jason Alejandre, was still able to let this little tidbit slip.

“We can’t tell you much about the plot of the game at this point, as we’ll be revealing more about the plot, characters, and world of HFDD over the coming months. All I can really say is that our protagonist -- a treasure hunting member of the De?ath Defyer squad -- starts out as a bit of an anti-hero looking for fortune, sort of like Han Solo, but ends up d??iscovering something much larger and far more sinister. The details of the plot -- and the sinister force -- will be unveiled soon.”

Alejandre mentioned three different worlds in HFDD, each containing 10 different levels. In the level I was able to explore during WonderCon, I found myself barrel rolling past menacing red propellers that threatened to chop me into delicious little pie?ces of man-flesh (though a simple swipe across the screen was enough to twirl me out of harm’s reach.) I also steered myself through blue stealth rings which, at the time, I mistook for &ldq??uo;power ups”, but was later able to clear up with Alejandre.

“The stealth rings are really there to protect you from detection by the bad guys and, from a gameplay perspective, to get players to fully explore each level, instead of just nose diving straight to the bottom. So they aren’t exactly power ups, per say. But, in addition to the O-shaped stealth rings you saw, there are harder-to-find ??D-shaped rings that take players down an alternate path for extra treasures, challenges, and replayability.”

Being the sort of player who enjoys exploring and searching out those little hidden Easter eggs or glitches that you can only find by veering off the predicted path, it was cool to hear that Game Mechanic Studious had sorted out this? little detail and catered to my particular audience.

Aft?er getting a taste of the game for myself, Alejandre showed me a quick animated preview of a mechanical beast perched atop a floating rock, amused when I immediately began firing off questions about the monster, asking about its origins, how he plans to incorporate it into the game, and what its purpose within the story w??ould be.

Is it there to help us in the game? Are there more of them? Alejandre replied with, “The mechanically-augmented beast is indeed your ally, and he’ll help your hero in navigating the world, escaping bad guys and advancing the plot, but I can’t reveal any more than that for now. We’ll have more announcements about the ally beast -- as well as other huge monsters and the roles they will ??play -- closer to launch.”

Navigation in HFDD is incredibly simple and responsive, and the controls are easy enough to pick up and execute. Meaning your grandma will probably even get a kick out of it. Speaking of sharing, I did inquire for us social game types about whether or not we’d be able to compete with frie?nds via leaderboards or social media networks, etc. To which Alejandre replied, “We’re exploring every possible option for scores and leaderboard tracking and will integrate those wherever appropriate. We really want to encourage players to challenge their friends and other Death Defyers through the social channels, so you can post your fastest time and be like, “Beat that!” Or if you earn a really tough trophy, be all, “Can you do it?!” We like that community feel, and want it to be more present in mobile gaming.”

After only two months of development (including art direction, level design, controls, and engineering), High Flyer Death Defyer is already shaping up to be something uniquely special. While certain parts of the game definitely remind me of flight navigation favorites like Star Fox or Jak & Daxter, there’s just enough originality to make this title distinct. I was surprised by the level of detail they had put into the smallest of animations. For example, I was fortunate enough to be able to view one of the supposed many death animations when HFDD glitched for a moment (something I’m sure they’ll ??be wo?rking the kinks out of during further development).

I’m looking forward to seeing how they integrate social media into the game (as this is definitely a huge part of mobile gaming nowadays.) I'm also looking forward to discovering more about who our protagonist is running from, what sort of cool treasures he might collect, and what other awesome equipment and allies he might run into during his adventures (if any).

High Flyer Death Defyer should be available via iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, and Android, with a re??lease date aimed for Summer 2011. There’s no announcement on a final price point yet, but it will be competitively priced as they are eager to get the game?? into as many hands as possible. With that said, does HFDD look like your cup of tea? What do you hope to see out of this game?

_{Sherilynn "Cheri" Macale is a freelance journalist and illustrator who can't exactly decide what she wants to do with the rest of her life and so does absolutely everything. Harass and prod her via Twitter, check out the badassery on her Website, and leave a friendly message on her Facebook.}

The post Hands-on: High Flyer Death Defyer appeared first on Destructoid.

I don't follow sports, but I know there's some kind of most improved award that they give players. From what I've seen so far, the gaming equivalent of this award would have to go to inFAMOUS 2. I thoroughly enjoyed the first game, but it needed some polish and attention. Judging from what I saw at a press event last night, Sucker Punch went above and beyond for inFamous 2.

This is how you do sequels, folks.

inFAMOUS 2 (PlayStation 3)
Developer: Sucker Punch Productions
Publisher: Sony
To be released: June 7, 2011

Overall improvements

It's hard to pinpoint what exactly has changed from the first inFamous game when talking about the "feel" of the game, but I can say that it feels better as Cole seems to get around better in inFAMOUS 2. Movements seem a bit more fluid and smooth, and it seems easier to determine how you'll latch onto poles, buildings and oth??er interactive areas.

The camera sh?ows marked improvement too. No longer does it feel like the camera is fixed on Cole's back in a limited view that requires a lot of panning, meaningless frantic spinning of the view when you feel like something is on your tail. When the game introduces something larger than Cole, like a huge boss, the camera pans out and works the scale a bit so that you can get everything important in one field of view.

With the visuals, again, it's hard to pinpoint what has improved, but you can definitely tell they've worked on it. This sequel is definitely more colorful, and there's a lot more visual appeal in the settings. inFAMOUS 2's world looks a bit more lively? and animated, whic??h makes it a bit more exciting to explore.

Forced Conduits

There was not a lot of story background in the single-player demo mission called Forced Conduits, but I was having too much fun blowing shit up to care. The mission has Cole out turning warehouses upside down looking for hidden safes that might contain blast cores before the enemy did. This took me to a few dead ends, but it gave me plenty of opportunity to try out n?ew attacks. Cole's melee attack uses a new weapon called the Amp, which adds a shock to the impact. I was also able to pull off flashy combos using cued button presses. Of course, there's new electrical attacks, which I used to blow up anything destructible in these warehouses to find the safes.

The demo ended with a sub-boss fight against an ice-wielding beast called Titan. It was about three times taller than Cole or other enemies, and likely that much stronger, so I threw electrical attacks at it from a distance to wear it down. Up close, after taking its strength d?own a bit, I was able to mash a button to expose its weak poi??nt and take it down for good. This was a short but satisfying demo that showed that Cole moves better than ever.

Like a Boss:

One of the inFAMOUS 2 demos I played tonight was designed to show the improved scope and scale of boss fights. Going up against a building-tall Behemoth did a? great job of showing how Sucker Punch has focused their energies into bringing this franchise to a higher level. So how big is this boss? Cole himself said it best in the cinematic leading up to this boss battle: "No. Way." This boss was so big that I had to run forward down the street, turn around, and look upward to even see it all.

Being several stories tall, the Behemoth easily plowed through buildings and and other structures in this city as it made its way down streets. You'd think its ma?ssive size would make for an easy target, but it proved to be strong against any attacks other tha?n ones that directly connected with its weak points, which were hidden during most of its attacks. Cole's normal attacks did a fair amount of damage to these exposed weak points, but hurling vehicles at it using his kinetic ability really did the trick.

They could have just touched up inFamous' electrically charged sandbox gameplay for a sequel, but Sucker Punch decided on a full elevation of every game concept within. They say that they went into this game with the philosophy of leaving no game aspect unturned. This definitely shows. The ante has definitely been upped with inFAMOUS 2 and I can't wait to play more of this game.

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Until last year, Team Bondi’s L.A. Noire had been something of an enigma. Since it bears the Rockstar name, many assumed that it would simply be a Grand Theft Auto-style adventure set in 1940s Los Angeles instead of the ’80s, ’90s, or the present. After watching a half-hour demo of the game at PAX East, I can say that while it shares some eleme?nts with Rockstar’s previous crime thrillers, I’ve never seen a game q??uite like this before.

Will you be driving around an open-world city and shooting people in L.A. Noire? Yes, but that’s not the focus. I used the word “adventure” earlier, and in fact, that’s what stood out to me in the demo. This game retains some of the familiar trappings of GTA, but at its hear??t, it can perhaps be best described as a?n evolution of the classic point-and-click adventure game.

L.A. Noire (PlayStation 3 [previewed], Xbox 360)
Developers: Team Bondi / Rockstar Games
Publisher: Rockstar Games
To be released: May 17, 2011 (NA) / May 20, 2011 (EU)

“We want to give players the opportunity to experience what it’s like to be a detective,” explained the Rockstar PR representative who showed off the game. In L.A. Noire, you are not an agent of chaos; you are Cole Phelps, a Los Angeles Police Department of?ficer, and you have to act the part. Should you attempt to go on a vehicular killing spree, pedestrians will do their best to get out of the way of your car, and if you manage to mow enough of them down anyway -- or wreak havoc in other ways that would be considered unbecoming of an officer of the law -- the game will eventually stop you in your trac??ks and force you to return to an earlier save game.

Phelps is a war hero, having earned a Silver Star at the Battle of Okinawa, but he’s not entirely proud of his service in World War II, and he decides to join the LAPD in 1947 to try and a??tone for some of his past. You begin the game as a beat cop, and the department eventually promotes you to detective, which is when you start to investigate some headline-making cases. I saw one such case, “The Red Lipstick Murder,” which is the first one that you work upon being brought to the homicide desk. (Cases are assigned from one of four desks: traffic, vice, homicide, and arson.) You’ll play through more than 20 cases that range in length from 45 to 90 minutes; while each one is a self-contained story, the four desks also have their own arcs, and the game offers an over??arching narrative for Phelps as well.

Many of the cases in L.A. Noire take inspiration from real-life crimes committed in Los Angeles during the ’40s, such as the infamous Black Dahlia murder, which gets mentioned in the game and serves as a backstory of sorts for the homicide desk. Before each case begins, you’re treated to a short vignette of the crime itself, in the vein of Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Your superior officer at homicide is an Irishman who isn’t named Captain Dudley Smith, but might as well be; he notes that the murder in the Red Lipstick case bears the hallmarks of a serial killer called ??“The Werewolf.” It’s up to you to solve the case, figuring out whether it’s indeed the handiwork of The Werewolf or just a copycat. You’re assigned a partner, Rusty Galloway, a gruff, middle-aged detective, and the two of you h?ead off to the crime scene.

Eight square miles of postwar L.A. have been recreated in L.A. Noire, but I didn’t get to see much of it, since Rockstar skipped the driving in my demo. The rep mentioned that among the gameplay e??lements you’ll come across in the city are unassigned cases. These mini-cases will “pause” your main case, since you can only concentrate on one mission at a time; the side missions take five to ten minutes to complete.

A gruesome scene awaits you at the site of the murder. After Galloway tells the vulture-like reporters to “scram,” and you talk to the cop who found the body on his lovers’-lane beat, you walk over to the crime scene. A woman is lying on her back, stark naked, on the grass; a few phrases scrawled on her body with crimson lipstick? catch your eye immediately. Clearly, this is a game for mature audiences -- there’s nothing “hot” about this sequence, unless you’re a necrophiliac.

Here, you can examine parts of the body more closely -- apparently, cops in the ’40s hadn’t yet started to use gloves in their investigations. Turning the head reveals that it’s basically been caved in; the medical examiner notes that the blunt force trauma was likely the cause of death. Looking at the hand, you notice a bruise on the victim’s finger; it appears that something was taken from it, probably a ring. After completing your examination, you begin to explore the immediate vicinity of the body. As in Heavy Rain&rsqu??o;s crime-scene sequences, many of the items you’ll come across have no relevance to the case, while others a??re clues.

You find some lipstick, but the tube is new, so it couldn’t have been used on the victim. Then there’s a small brass globe. It require?s some manipulation in a puzzle to unlock its secret: the item is a lighter from the Bamba Club. All of the clues you find, along with locations you visit and people you speak with, are catalogued in your notebook. Since this is your first homicide case, everything is relatively easy to find at the crime scene, but if you get stumped later on, your partner will point things out to you.

Once you’re done, you head to the Bamba Club with Galloway, where you question the bartender and owner. The barkeep identifies the victim as Celine Henry, and McColl, the owner, knew her. The interrogation sequences are where the game’s vaunted MotionScan technology really shines. The face of every single character -- over 400 in total, including random pedestrians -- was put in the game with MotionScan, and it’s hard to hold back hyperbole in discussing the results. You’ll need to read people’s faces in order to ascertain whether they’re telling the truth, and you can actually do that. It&rsq??uo;s uncanny.

After eac??h line from a person you’re talking with, the game presents you with three options. If they stare unflinchingly into your eyes, you can choose to take the individual at their word (“truth”). If their body language suggests that they’re withholding some information -- perhaps with shifting eyes -- but you don’t have any proof to contradict them, you can challenge their statement with “doubt.” And if you have evidence in your notebook that invalidates what they’re telling you, then “lie” is the way to go.

The questions that you can ask will vary, depending on the evidence you’ve collected so f??ar. There’s no way to “fail” an investigation -- unless you die, the game will always move forward, even if you’re not making the “correct” choices in an interrogation (doing that will just open up different lines of questioning). Each case has a “highest efficiency” solution, but if you don’t obtain certain clues, y?ou’ll just have to solve the case in a more roundabout way, talking to more people or going to new locations.

When you ask McColl if he thinks that Mrs. Henry’s husband, Jacob, killed her, he says no in an offhand manner. But he sits with a furrowed brow, biting his lip; you get the idea that he’s not bei??ng entirely straight with you. So you doubt his words, and he gives you some important information by the end of your discussion. Before leaving the club, you call in to the station, asking the secretary to look up the license plate that McColl mentioned. Then you and Galloway leave for the Henry residence.

After discovering that someone broke into the house, you head inside and look around. There’s an “investigation theme” that pl??ays during these sequences; piano chimes hint at items to explore, and the music ends once you’ve found everything. You then decide to speak with a neighbor, Jennifer, who is stunned to hear of Celine’s death and recounts some of the e?vents of the previous night. Apparently, Jacob and Celine fought; he hit her in the face and left, and she then got soused before driving off to the Bamba.

From here, you drive over to Jacob’s apartment, where you pull out your guns before kicking in the door. Jacob appears astonished when accused of Celine’s murder. The rep pointed out that some characters are better liars than others, so if you’re having a tough time figuring things out, you can use Intuition Points (earned as you rank up in the game) to remove one of the three choices, or try the Rockstar Social Club to see which answers other gamers have chosen. Jacob claims not to know some things that you know he knows -- thanks to your handy little notebook?? -- so you call him out on his lies.

Galloway taunts Jacob, which leads to a fistfight between you and the suspect after he slugs your partner. Since everything from the neck down in L.A. Noire relies on standard motion-capture techniques, there’s a jarring disconnect between the utterly realistic facial animation and the comparatively ordinary body movement. The fight looked like hand-to-hand combat from an average videogame, but I did like the fact that Phelps’ fedora ?popped off when Jacob punched him.

The demo ended after Phelps subdued Jacob. The fight, which lasted less than thirty seconds, was the only true bit of videogame “action” in the entire demo. The PR rep said that Team Bondi is trying to provide a realistic experience, and L.A. Noire seems to be a true detective simulator. It doesn’t try to gussy up the job with unnecessary action sequ??ences; since usi??ng his gun is always the last resort for a real cop, Team Bondi wants those moments to be rare and special for you.

Instead, L.A. Noire trots along at a very deliberate pace, with few “gamey” conceits. A real detective needs a keen eye and a meticulousness about?? him; you’ll have to take your time exploring crime scenes and use your brain -- along with the evidence at hand -- to solve cases. As Phelps, you have to be a good guy, but between the variety in crime-scene investigations and witness/suspect interrogations, this game may turn out to be more legitimately open-ended than any Rockstar game before it.

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Grasshopper Manufacture’s Suda51 is renowned for quirky, out-there games that often have something to say, even if it’s through juvenile humor. As the creator of Capcom’s seminal Resident Evil franchise, Shinji Mikami knows a thing or two about action-horror games. And as evinced by his work on the Silent Hill series, composer Akira Yamaoka is a master of creating a chilling atmosphere.

Those three creative minds have joined to bring you Shadows of the Damned, a third-person action game that offers familiar demon-killing gamepla?y, yet is a uniquely Suda51-style experience. In mid-February, I was treated to a twenty-minute demo of an early section of the game,? and what I saw was a game with Japanese design and Western trappings.

[See the GDC trailer here.]

Shadows of the Damned (PlayStation 3 [previewed], Xbox 360)
Developer: Grasshopper Manufacture
Publisher: Electronic Arts
To be released: June 7, 2011

Garcia Hotspur is “a demon hunter who has killed one too many demons,” explained the EA rep who demoed the game to me. By doing that, Hotspur has incurred the wrath of the Lord of the Underworld, who has a decidedly un-hellish name, Fleming. He decides to teach Hotspur a lesson by absconding with the demon hunter’s true love, Paula, down into hell. Lucky for Hotspur, he has a buddy named Johnson who is a former demon who escaped from hell. Johnson also happens to be a flaming skull on a stick, which is why he’s so useful to Hotspur: Garcia needs to use the power of light to defeat the forces of darkness. Johnson serves as a &ld?quo;torchgun,” and as Hotspur’s obligatory wise-cracking British sidekick. This is Suda’s kind of love story, explained the rep -- this is his version of “rescuing the princess.”

As a former demon, Johnson is Hotspur’s way into hell -- he transforms into a motorcycle and drives straight in. In this game, the outskirts of hell comprise an Old-World town, replete with cobblestone streets. Fleming has thrown some of his minions to impede Hotspur’s progress -- just your typical blood-oozing demon spawn. The basic shooting action, with its over-the-shoulder camera, is very reminiscent of Resident Evil, but it’s not as plodding as that series (although it’s not exactly Devil May Cry, either).

A key mechanic that ratchets up the tension is “darkness.” A dark blue haze envelops Hotspur, making it difficult to see and draining his health. The best way to get rid of d?arkness is to listen for the bleating of a goat, which will lead to a goat head that Hotspur can shoot, “because goats eat everything -- even darkness.” Enemies remain coated in an inky goop that Hotspur must remove with light -- either by hitting them with his Johnson, blowing up light barrels, or using his light gun -- before he can use his regular weapons on them. Johnson can be used as a melee weapon, but he can also turn into a pistol (called “Boner,” because it fires bones, and I wonder why else), a shotgun, and a machine gun. Demons drop red gems that can be used to improve the guns’ attributes (such as clip size and rate of fire), and blue gems will allow Hotspur to upgrade his weapons entirely.

According to the EA rep, Suda wanted to bring a B-movie “grindhouse” feel to the proceedings, which is why Shadows features awful accents; cheesy, puerile humor; and visual filters such as film grain and vignetting. The rep mentioned influences such as Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado and Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead series. Hotspur sports a leather jacket and spouts gloriously ridiculous lines like, “My wrath is your hell!” There’s also Suda’s own peculiar humor; one segment of the demo featured a gate covered in glowing purple bramble -- demon pubes. Charming! Suda’s vision of hell, like No More Heroes, is very over-the-top: the gate to hell is a large structure with a massive, ??carnival-esque “Welcome to Hell” sign sitting on its roof.

The darkness in Shadows will also introduce puzzle elements -- in the demon-pubes section, a large hand sat on a platform spewing darkness into the area, and the gates were adorned with ba??bies’ heads that required sustenance (in the form of eyeballs and brains) before they would open. The gradually approaching wall of darkness forced Hotspur to be quick, and it included the additional concern of more demons. Enemies will hang out within the darkness, since they’re much stronger there, and in this case, Hotspur had to tem?porarily endure the darkness to solve the puzzle. He fed the babies in order to open the gates and gain access to a goat head and the staircase that led up to the hand. Once there, he merely shoved his Johnson into its palm in order to stop the darkness from coming out.

After this segment, I saw the loading screen before the next area; in what the rep described as a “Suda touch,” the screen features a creepy two-dimensional animated map of hell, tracking your progress through the game. Once the chapter loaded, the rep explained that the boss in this section is George, a gluttonous beast with a harmonica lodged in his throat. Each boss has a particular backstory that will be logged in the game’s “Johnsonp??edia,” a chronicle of Hotspur’s journey. One of Fleming’s favorite things to do is mess with Hotspur’s head by showing him visions of Paula in a white corset -- this particular one was darting around an open-air meat market, and at one point, her head fell right off befor??e she calmly screwed it back on. Right then, she began convulsing, and ripped herself in half to reveal George. That was where my demo ended; the rep teased a “kick-ass” boss battle.

So far, Shadows appears to be a fairly conventional third-person shooter with some interesting gameplay conceits (the darkness, Johnson) and a hell of a lot of style. (This is Suda’s first game on the HD platforms, and the Unreal Engine really lets his artistic vision shine through.) I’m curious to see more of its psychological horror elements, like the stuff with Paula, as well as to find out more about the story in general. I can’t comment much on the score, since the noise level at the press event covered up the game’s sound, but I’m sure Yamaoka’s orchestration will bring a lot to the table. The sum of the parts of Shadows of the Damned sounds appealing enough, but I’m ??hoping the final p?roduct will offer more.

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