QUINT HERE - For some reason the story went offline shortly after I posted it. I saw a flurry of frantic emails about pictures and code not working from Merrick, but I'd like the story to stay up, even if it means the majority of the pictures have to wait a bit for the new server goodness to work out. Here's the story, posted last night! As you'll see, some pics have made it, some are still broken links. Please bear with us while we fix the broken links...
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here, typing on some sidewalk somewhere in Barcelona, waiting for the shuttle that'll take me back to my hotel. The afterparty for the big presentation/opening for Microsoft's X06 is still swinging inside, but I have an early day tomorrow and my flight came in this morning. So, I really hit the ground running. Plus, I had my fill of delicious Spain cooking, what more do I need?
Inside I played a few upcoming games, but I'll get to that in a minute.
Let's start at the beginning. There was a big pre-party set up at a theater here in Barcelona. I do not know a soul here, so I spent most of it feeling out of my element and awkward, but as soon as they opened the doors to the theater itself I was in, getting a good seat for the presentation. I knew in advance that Peter Jackson was going to be there, announcing some partnership with Microsoft, but I didn't know what that partnership was. This happened at the end, but let me start with that.
Peter came out, shortly after the announcement of the HD-DVD drive that is being put together by Microsoft as an add-on to 360. That'll be $199 in the US and it starts bundled with a universal remote control and a copy of the HD KING KONG DVD.
That made a good segue to Peter. He came out... and the big news was...
WINGNUT INTERACTIVE
Which will be overseen by Peter, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens. If you remember my interview with Peter a week ago he talked about wanting to see games evolve to something that acted as a sort of amalgam of movies and video games.
They are going to kick off with whatever this hybrid is with HALO. Bungie will be working on it, but they were clear to say whatever this project is WON'T be HALO 3 or 4, which Bungie is deep into right now.
Even cooler is that Jackson said over the past 10 years he's had a lot of original ideas come up that he couldn't quite decide on bringing to film, so those projects and ideas will be put into this team-up with Microsoft. I just hope that means we'll see a BAD TASTE or BRAINDEAD video game. Here's a blurry pic:
MARVEL UNIVERSE ONLINE
I found out before the presentation that Cryptic Studios will be doing MARVEL UNIVERSE ONLINE. Not through any special means, mind you, just the fact that I was sitting behind IGN's Douglas Perry who was working on his story even before it began. I got to watch him chew out the poor geeky guy next to him who was reading over his shoulder.
Anyway, they did announce Cryptic as doing the big Marvel MMO and showed some really great looking models of the characters, including Spider-Man, Captain America, Dr. Doom and The Hulk, each frozen into a trademarked position, with The Hulk ending the clip by throwing his arms back and Hulk Smashing the camera.
BANJO-KAZOOIE
The whole presentation opened with these two as full on 360-fied graphics. They were trapped in a plane, white room with crude drawings for furniture and an angry pencil that would not let them see through a door marked TOP SECRET. Think Daffy Duck fighting the animator. These two do everything they can to get through and finally the bear pulls the bird's ripcord and turns his beak into a chainsaw, which they use to cut through the wall, finding the big secret behind the door being a new video game world, with their familiar music notes and green hills, but again... 360-fied.
TIDBITS
Here are some tidbits from the presentation:
-Regarding XBox Live's arcade, they've gone from 17 million downloads around the time of E3 to over 57 million.
-New really cool game trailer for KANE AND LYNCH is available right now via Live
-X-Box Live Arcade are getting some really badass additions, including DOOM which just went live. Here are some others: SENSIBLE WORLD OF SOCCER (available in its original graphics or a new updated version if you like), CONTRA and SYRUSS. Doom is up right now, apparently, and SENSIBLE WORLD OF SOCCER will hit early 2007.
-This holiday, the 360 will have 160 HD-quality games world wide.
- Nothing new regarding HALO 3, but we were told Bungie will have "something new to tell you by the end of the year."
- Rockstar Games is not only releasing GRAND THEFT AUTO 4 for 360, but they're also going to release 2 "chapters" to be released on X-Box Live within months of release. There are promised to be additional levels that translate into many more hours of gameplay, not just costumes and vehicles.
- Capcom is working on the DEAD RISING follow-up game, called LOST PLANET: EXTREME CONDITIONS. Note, this is not a sequel... completely different game. Played a little bit of it at the afterparty, will tell you folks my thoughts at the end.
-RESIDENT EVIL 5 is on its way to 360. Currently under development.
- Next TOM CLANCY'S SPLINTER CELL (called DOUBLE AGENT) is exclusive to the 360.
- Games For Windows, to be played with Window's Vista, include: HALO 2, ALAN WAKE, HELLGATE, AGE OF CONAN, LEGO STAR WARS , LOTR: THE SHADOW OF ANGMRA and more.
- And here's a picture of the DJ at the reception just because I think it's a cool pic:
HALO WARS
They showed this clip at the end that was this badass HALO-set thing. Wasn't exactly sure what the fuck it was, but it was really sweet. (I've now looked into it at halowars.com and found a FAQs sheet that tells me it's a Real Time Strategy game set in the Halo world. Not as big of a fan of RTSs, but this still looked sweet). The level of animation on the Helljumper's faces (you can see their eyes and brow area through their face shields) was almost FINAL FANTASY movie level of detail. It had a ton of marines/helljumpers scrambling as Elites run rampant in a city. It started with a pair of marines running, terrified, getting hit from behind by a blast from a Covenant weapon. Both fall, but one's still alive and looks up as an Elite decloaks. The energy sword is held, threateningly over the soldier and then it plunges in, killing him.
From here on out, there was crazy action of Phantoms taking out human ships and soldiers. One of the human ships explodes and we see it reflected in a Spartan visor. Camera pulls back to reveal a team of Spartans as the leader (Master Chief?) says something cool about going into the fight.
It's not HALO 3, but I hope the level of detail seen in that clip is what we're going to see with HALO 3.
BIOSHOCK
Another clip I saw was from a really cool looking game called BIOSHOCK, exclusive to the 360.
The clip starts out with a narration, pretty much the typical "you can choose your own destiny, good or evil" type thing as the camera travels through water.It comes to an underwater city. Not like Atlantis, but as if New York City or Basin City was built underwater. The camera pushed in through a window off a skyscraper and we see the inside is dry... Well, not dry. Water's leaking in everywhere, but it's like you were in a leaky crappy building, not flooded.
The camera rushes into a character's head and we see through his eyes. He sees a little girl hiding in a pipe. He violently pulls her out (keep in mind, this whole thing is all from this character's POV), sending her crashing to the floor. She cowers as he finds a wrench on the ground. He grabs it, raises it up to strike the terrified girl when a sound comes from behind him. He spins and it's a giant creature, kind of like a Hunter from HALO. Squat, strong, armored. This creature beats the hell out of this guy and then we see the creature has a drill for an arm and he goes to stab us. Our character puts his hand up, screaming as it drills into his flesh. We can see it come out the back of the hand, facing toward our point of view.
Our character shoots this thing, knocks it back and then jabs a needle into his hurt arm. I thought, "Okay, he's healing himself..." Nope. Our arm turns black and then little deformed, green-eyed flying bugs pop out of it and with a wave of a hand they go attack this creature. It struggles and we saunter up to it, blast it full on in the face with whatever gun we have and watch as it falls past a railing and down a few floors.
We look down at the body and all of a sudden our vision goes blurry as we jolt forward. We look down and see one of those drills piercing our chest. We're spun around and killed by another one of those creatures. When it finishes with our body, we look on as it turns towards the whimpering little girl. It approaches and she cowers more. A beat, then the creature extends a hand (not a drill) to the little girl. She thinks for a moment, then reaches out to take it. The trailer cut off with her hand out nearly touching the giant hand of the creature.
It was very interesting. Really curious to see what this game is actually like to play. The graphics in the cut scene were phenomenal.
ASSASSIN'S CREED
They had a really, really cute lady by the name of Jade demo this game for us. She's one of the developers. Who says only flabby ugly geeks like me are into these things?
Anyway, again this was a great showcase for the new graphics. This game is much less frantic, at least the demonstration was, from the other stuff we've seen, relying heavily on stealth. Plus the demo was more to show us how they're utilizing the next gen graphics and potential, having our character interact with the peasants of a village (ie pushing them if they block your way, but if you do it in front of your target or do it too much, there will be consequences), climbing up any architectural surface, etc.
As you'd guess by the title you're the best of the best, an assassin with different jobs to do, different targets to hit. Made by the guys that did PRINCE OF PERSIA, this is set in period... something like 3rd Century. You dress all in white (at least in the clips I've seen) and look ninja-y as you take out your targets. You have the ability to focus (by pressing Y) and your intuition tells you who are threats, who are not and which of the people in the mob is your target.
You have many options. You can run in, hellbent for glory, and take the fucker out or you can slyly do it by hiding in plain site, doing average everyday things to blend in. If you get in a fight, you don't have a hit meter or that kind of thing. They want it to be as realistic as possible, so if you get hit in a crucial area, all it takes is one strike. You attack mainly by blocking until you see an opening.
Looked very cool. 3rd person... Don't know how long the stealth stuff can hold up without making it kind of tedious, but I really dug what I saw.
GEARS OF WAR
Coolest looking game so far. I played some of the multiplayer and it is great. They demo-ed it onstage and showed off the purty graphics. Like most games of this sort, you're a military looking dude and you're fighting big, brute-like mothers with big guns. The handling of the game was pretty great, which is a big plus for me. It's one of the reasons I love HALO so much is it's one of the few games since GOLDENEYE where I feel 100% in control of the character I'm playing. GEARS OF WAR isn't there, yet, but I've only spent about 10 minutes playing it.
The aiming was great and you have a little buzzsaw built right the fuck into your automatic rifle, so you can melee with a buzzing saw.
Don't know much more about the game, other than it was the coolest thing I played. It's released November 12th in the US and 5 days later in Europe.
LOST PLANET
Played a level of this and was a little lost. It's a 3rd person game and it starts in the snow. You're shooting these alien bug things that pop out of what look like infected sores in the earth. You gotta blow up the sores to stop them from flooding in. You can grab rocket launchers, machine guns and shotguns (in the level I played). The graphics were fine, but nothing that freaked me out. The gameplay felt a little laggy, but it was still fun to play. I'll have to spend a little more time playing this one before I make up my mind.
CALL OF DUTY 3
Played a couple levels of this and this title was by far the buggiest of what I played. But it felt totally like a CALL OF DUTY game. It could have been a direct continuation of CALL OF DUTY 2 for all I could tell, cut off the tail end of the first game and made it's own game. You still shoot at those Nazi bastards, get hit like you always do... The only thing different is there's an ability for hand to hand combat now. For instance, if you walk into a room and German is waiting for you, there's an extended sequence where he's trying to stab you. You have to hit the left and right trigger buttons really fast to keep him off of you and follow the buttons listed on the screen, to finally do him in. The one I fought (in some house in France), I had to keep him from stabbing me twice and hit Y to finally pull a pin on a grenade hanging from his belt, before pushing him through a window.
More of the same is fine by me. I love passing an afternoon shooting Nazis.
Tomorrow is a big day, my first day on the floor of this thing. I'm hoping to get more time in with GEARS OF WAR, play some single player on that. As for now, I'm back in my hotel room, about to enjoy a good 6 hours of much needed sleep. Be back with more info soon.
-Quint quint@aintitcool.com
