BitSnark

While Fable II and Gears Of War 2 were raking in the christmas gold for Microsoft, it wasn’t commercial cheer for all of their first party offerings. Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, has (at up until New Years Day), only sold 140,000 copies in the US (Worldwide figures have yet to come in but they are expected to be similarly meager) which is a disappointing figure to say the least.

Logic suggests that between the mainstream crowd who didn’t even know what Banjo Kazooie was in the first place, and die hard fans who abandoned the franchise when they saw what direction it was going in, such poor sales figures don’t come as a great surprise.

Innovation doesn’t quite translate into dosh it seems.

Echoing Capcom’s claim that 2009 would be the year of multiplatform releases across both PS3 and 360, comes the announcement that Lost Planet 2 and Dead Rising 2 are both due out this year for release on 360 AND PS3.

Great news for Sony fans for sure and also for Microsoft fans too, as Capcom production head honcho Kenji Inafune, also confirmed that the 360 versions would have ‘special bonuses’ exclusive to the platform.

Everybody wins 🙂

Following on from the success of the original Banjo-Kazooie rerelease on XBLA back in November, Rare and Microsoft have announced that the sequel to Banjo-Kazooie that was released back in the day, Banjo-Tooie, will be hopping and pecking it’s way to XBLA this April.

As a side note, Developer 4J Studios will also be including a feature that developer Rare originally excluded from the Banjo-Kazooie known as “Stop ‘n’ Swop”. This previously cut feature will allow players to take items that they collected in the previous Banjo rerelease for use in it’s sequel.

Roll on April methinks.

Upon loading up the F.E.A.R 2 demo, it becomes immediately apparent that Monolith are old hands with the horror FPS genre; competent though they may be at it, they are also seemingly stuck in 2005. Straight away the player finds themselves thrust into the post-apocalyptic landscape that was hinted at during the ending of the first F.E.A.R title (Monolith apparently seem keen to distance themselves canon-wise from the later released F.E.A.R Files expansion pack), stumbling around seeing fleeting ghostly images of Alma and more than a smattering of disturbing imagery.

When a gun is finally requisitioned (after some 5-10 minutes of hide and seek with spectral apparitions) the game finally starts properly, with the player encouraged to kill enemies using the slo-mo gameplay mechanic that has been a standard in the franchise since its inception.

Like so much of what the demo shows us, the mechanic just seems stale as seemingly every encounter results in a slowed down shoot fest that never truly makes the player feel they are in any kind of real peril, and more troublingly, is far too similar to previous F.E.A.R titles. The weapons themselves, while seemingly capable of abusing the enemy into physic defying spasms when they die, simply do not seem meaty enough and their resulting lack of effect on the surrounding environment serves to further detriment the meaty feeling that each weapon should possess.

For example, firing your SPAS-12 Combat Shotgun into an upright piece of wood should either shatter it completely, or (if the developers don’t want you getting past it) at least show some kind of visual degradation such as splinters flying etc.. But instead what we get is a generic bullet hole texture mapped onto whatever surface you happen to be firing at. Lame.

Other than this, graphically the title appears to more than hold its own with the various ghosts looking suitably creepy and the various particle effects all looking quite swish indeed. As well as these incidental effects, the game moves along at a smooth frame rate, and didn’t hitch once during any point in the demo.

The inescapable, nagging feeling that the demo gives you is that you have simply done all this before, you’ve done the slow-mo, you’ve done the jumping at ghosts and you’ve seen and killed the same faceless enemies a thousand times over.

Ultimately, it feels like more of a remake of the first title than a true sequel. Based on what I’ve seen in this demo, I would simply say to Monolith; go back to drawing board folks, as essentially reheating 2005’s leftover’s does not a good game make.

Why are you reading this?

Impressions as soon as.

(promise)

The next chapter in the sprawling crime saga epic that is GTA IV, is due for release on April 29th for 1600 of your Microsoft Points.

By all accounts the DLC appears to offer a lot of bang for your buck, with a whole new story, missions, weapons and of course, achievement points.

Now, for the love of all that is holy I just need to finish GTA IV…

Going on from the very well hidden footnote in Ubisoft’s financials that 2007 stealth hit Assassins Creed would be receiving a follow up, comes the official confirmation that Assassins Creed 2 would hit PS3, 360 and PC platforms in Q1 2010.

Obviously this is miles away and so details are non-existent at present.

But hey, at least we know it’s on the way.

More as and when folks (probably at E3).

What are you waiting for? Go get!

Impressions incoming shortly 🙂

DEAD LEAVES REVIEW

Production I.G.’s yearly anime experiment continues unabated with this newest work, Dead Leaves. Having been feverently promoted by Manga Entertainment as the next big thing since, well, the last big thing, Dead Leaves piqued my interest slightly, if only because the crux of it’s infamy appeared to be it’s wacky visuals and even wackier content. And after taking in a viewing of the show, when I say wacky, I mean wacky.

The story, such as it is, concerns a Retro, a guy who has a TV for a head and Pandy who has a funky birthmark. Still with me? Good. They basically go off on a wild one, shooting cops and blowing stuff up all in the pursuit of food, clothes and a set of wheels. Eventually, the authorities get the better of them and they are sent to Dead Leaves, a penal colony in outer space. It is there that they break out of prison, take a whole bunch of prisoners with them and go on a rampage against the prison and it’s guards. Zany? Oh yes.

That said, other zany anime shows have done well in the past, shows like Excel Saga and FLCL have all found their audiences and possess much that the average anime fan can relate to. Not so with Dead Leaves. The alienation begins with the visuals. When I first saw an advert for Dead Leaves on some obscure web page somewhere, I actually thought it wasn’t an anime at all, but rather one of those crazy MTV adult ‘powered’ animations that seem to be doing the rounds these days. And upon actually viewing the show, I can’t really say my initial impressions were that far off. Everything in the show is very angular and exaggerated, with random lines everywhere in the styling of American comics.

The visuals are completely insane with barely a moments rest given to onlooking eyes, there are explosions that fill the screen, massive random close ups of characters faces, masses of blood, huge gun fights, chases, you name it and the visual style does a great job of carrying these sequences along. It’s just a shame that it all looks so darn ugly, with foul looking characters and lacklustre backgrounds. Still, I do respect the work that has gone into the visuals as apparently no computer aided animation was used and some 18,000 colours were used in the creation of the show. Bravo, but if you prefer your anime more, well, anime looking, the visuals will be a huge turn off.

By association the characters are just as crazy, besides the aforementioned leads, we have a randy guy who has a drill where his genitals should be and *dribbles* a lot, monster mecha, cloned policeman, basically naked prison wardens and much more besides.

While the action in the show is pretty intense and just as wild as the visuals, I felt strangely empty and disaffected about ten or so minutes in. After a little while because it’s all so absurd and stupid, you just get numb to the craziness of it all, but your left with no solace since the meandering plot is banal to say the least and fails to leave you with a single iota of care for either the characters or the plight that they find themselves in.

As an experiment, Dead Leaves remains different but not refreshingly so. It left a bad taste in my mouth because ultimately, under all that craziness and American styling, there really isn’t much to enjoy. Watch it if you’re completely, and I do mean completely burnt on anime right now and crave for something different. If not, don’t give it a second thought.

Overall Rating: C-

E3 2005 is when it happened, the unveiling of the Playstation 3. Keen to make an impression on the press and joe-punter/fanboy sitting at home, Sony commissioned two pre-rendered CG trailers to be displayed, whilst saying a little white lie, telling their audiences that what they are seeing is being processed in real-time on a PS3 console.

One of those games was Motorstorm, a game which although turned out to be one of the best (at least IMHO) racers on the system and a looker to boot, failed by a somewhat wide margin to match the kinetic intensity of the pre-rendered footage that was shown previously.

The other, was Killzone 2, the proposed sequel to Sony’s FPS mascot from the PS2 era that many originally decried as being slow, clunky, grey and just.. well, uninspiringly dull in the face of Halo 2 and Half-Life 2, the other big FPS releases of the day. The footage began and the collective echo of jaws hitting the ground, made its way steadily across the auditorium.

Instantly many people had forgotten about the new XBOX 360 and the Nintendo Revolution-thingy (at this point a Nintendo home system was a joke to the gaming community, later on, the joke would take on a different connotation), in the face of the blistering gunfights, perfect physics, ultra detailed models and liquid frame rate.

People simply couldn’t believe what they were seeing, however slowly but surely, those who had been exposed to such smoke and mirror tricks previously, began to question to real-time authenticity of the footage; pointing out that even with the PS3’s specification, such action would simply not be possible to reproduce in real time at such a plainly insane level of detail.

Eventually after a number of occasions whereupon Sony continued to insist that the footage was real-time, it all began to get a bit Chinese-whispery, with the previously dubbed ‘real-time’ footage now being spun as ‘CG footage using in-game assets’. In any event, it was the developer Guerilla Games, who said that the footage shown was all-CG and merely represented development target footage.

And so, with the memory of those incredible visuals burned into gamers minds some three and a half years later, the impossible benchmark that Sony had created to hype their machine all that time ago remains one that Guerilla have to match, and on paper it didn’t look like it was possible at all.

Guerilla Games has had a somewhat chequered history when it comes to developement. Besides, the mediocre original Killzone, Guerilla were also behind the abysmal Vietnam third-person shooter Shellshock Nam 67′. A title which was met with virtually universal critical panning.

So i’ll admit, I had my doubts that ANY dev team could produce those visuals in real-time, let alone Guerilla. Just over twelve months ago, the first real-time footage and pictures of Killzone 2 appeared, and somewhat predictably, it didn’t hold a candle to the CG footage that Sony tried to hoodwink us all with. Yet, curiously, it *did* look similar and had the appearance of a very early version of the CG demo that was shown, with much lower resolution textures, lower particle effect intensity and much lower poly models and environments.

Instantly, it was decried by many (myself included) that Guerilla had failed, and that Sony would not have an FPS white hope for their next-generation console. As months begin to go by, little by little, the game appeared to change in front of our very eyes. Models became more detailed, environments began to flourish with lots of incidental details, decent rag doll physics had now been implemented and it was all moving along at a smooth clip.

Visually, the game kept improving with each month that went by, creeping ever close to the CG footage that was originally shown. And now today, a final review build is in the hands of many games websites (a journalistic embargo currently exists on reviews until February) and from the media that has been released, the game looks as damned close to that footage as it could have possibly been. Seriously. Guerilla Games have excelled here with what they have produced in regards to the aesthetics and the gameplay by all accounts, looks to deliver the sci-fi theatre of war with the epic aplomb echoed so long ago in that pre-rendered footage.

However epic the game appears, it is still very much Killzone. The stark, post-apocalyptic palette of ruination grey returns, along with the excessively OTT reload animations and red eyed, combat suited opponents. This, by all accounts, is how Killzone should have been done, it’s Guerilla Games’ original vision for the game finally realised as well as their own considerable talent as a development team.

I’ll leave out the gameplay specifics for when I review the title, but being on both sides of the Killzone 2 hype wagon I can now fully say, that this is one Sony FPS that is actually on my radar. Ultimately then, Killzone 2 will hopefully not just validate the existence of Guerilla Games as a worthwhile developmental investment for Sony, but also the presence of the very sleek (yet underused) next-gen Sony console that sits under my TV.