I await the post-apocalyptic day in which roving bands of video game hippies tour the country just to fight one boss — just to play one level — on antiquated Xbox 360s and PlayStations. People watching the gamers will shout out the quotes as if it was the Rocky Horror Picture Show.
“It was not by my hand that I am once again given flesh. I was brought here by humans who wish to pay ME tribute.”
The demo for this game is fantastic. It has some of the best graphics I’ve ever seen on the PS2. I really like how the boss battle is intertwined with the entire level. It will be interesting to see how the story pans out in the full game. The art direction in the original game was superb, but the style and colors in the new game are even better. If you haven’t seen it, the opening animation is straight out of movies like Jason and the Argonauts or Clash of the Titans.
I forgot to mention GameZombie.tv! Spencer Striker, a fellow MIME student, was able to get some great interviews this past week from industry icons like Harvey Smith, David Jaffe, and Raph Koster. Look forward to seeing these clips on the website!
300 is great. Just got back from the Metreon in downtown San Francisco. If you’ve read and enjoyed the graphic novel, you should definitely go see the movie. There were a few things left out of the movie that would have liked to see, but it’s still good. See it in IMAX if you can.
This is a low-res version of the GDC trailer that was put together by Marc Carlton, Aaron Sarazan and Jim Cummings. It contains some in-game footage of the game along with some of Charlie Hoyt’s music. If you’re at the GDC, stop by booth 560 in the West Hall and say hi!
Crackdown is what I always wanted GTA to be: a futuristic sci-fi beat-’em-up where you are constantly under attack by evil gangs and you can pick up cars and throw them. Realtime Worlds conveniently named the game Crackdown so we didn’t have to replace part of the title with the word “crack” like we already do with EverCrack, World of Warcrack, Civilicracknation, SimCrack, CrackerStrike, and Crack and Field. Okay, the last few I made up, but they make sense anyway. There are these orbs (500 of them!) that are scattered all over the game world that increase your agility — very similar to the white packages in the most recent GTA games. These orbs, however, are mostly found on rooftops in very hard to reach places. It’s sort of like a video game version of Parkour. They have these rooftop races where you have to jump from building to building and hit checkpoints. These are really fun and once you run the route a couple of times you can get decent scores and increase your agility points. You can also become more adept and blowing stuff up and shooting things. Who doesn’t want to do that? Kudos to Realtime Worlds for making Prince of Persia meets Spiderman meets Grand Theft Auto. It’s sweet.
I think the best summary of 2006 would be a tribute to Time’s “Person of the Year”. That’s right, I’m talking about YouTube star David Thompson. Thompson bravely ventured to a town hall meeting despite a terrorist threat in the form of a rogue helicopter pilot — a pilot, mind you, that is not only loose in our airspace, but also in our country. I believe a close second in this year’s race was the BlendTec blender, which boldly blended things once thought to be unblendable.
