Exploring Stuff That Makes Life Great
Be warned that if you buy the $170 game, you’re most likely going to have to return the guitar! Reports are flooding the internet saying the guitar’s are breaking left and right. I actually know someone with the game that has had this issue after only 3 hours of playing! This is a catastrophe, please send aid to StuffWeLike asap!
I’ve always maintained that Deus Ex is the greatest game ever made by man, and with good reason. It was thought-provoking, immersive, intelligent and its unique game mechanics were plain perfect. While its sequel never lived up to its predecessor’s timeless glory, I still liked it for just being. I’m in need of underwear right now, because Eidos has just announced Deus Ex 3. That’s right, folks – Deus Ex is back with a vengeance!
Of course, Ion Storm saddeningly dissolved a long time ago, so this is Eidos’ Montreal studio’s first game, and that’s a blazing inauguration. Gamasutra reports the company’s structure, their goals and other details not concerning Deus Ex. What I found to be interesting was that Eidos mentions that the new studio will have tightly-knit, multi-discipline groups (at the most 80 people) working on a single project. Also, their development cycles will reportedly last 24 months, as opposed to the much lesser numbers of their competitors.
Eidos also released the teaser for Deus Ex 3, which you can find below. It’s as ambiguous as you’d expect from a teaser, and depicts a bio-augmented foetus, along with some mysterious words from a narrator. There are also a series of pictures that run damn fast. There’s a list of what they are at Wikipedia, if you’re that interested. (UPDATE: We have just learned that the guys at Shacknews have spent a good portion of their lives taking screenshots from the series of images. They have 20 images here right now, and I have no idea if those are all the images or not.)
While this is all excellent news, I have a strange fear in the back of my mind that this may get “consolized” as well, just like (*shudder*) Invisible War. Also, the fact that Montreal is facing a development cycle, no matter how long, hints at the same. Deus Ex, the beautiful game, in its unadulterated form is one that can only be reasonably played on the PC in its entirety. I hope that Montreal tries to recreate that, rather than tossing this legendary franchise into the unwashed masses of multi-console video games.
[Update] – Crytek has updated the status of their latest patch.
inCrysis, a Crysis fansite recently hosted an IRC interview with Cevat Yerli, CEO of Crytek and Roy Taylor, Vice President of Content Relations at NVIDIA. They’ve posted the transcript of the event at their site, which can be found here. While most of the stuff is technobabble, I did extract the following information from it:
Some other things worth pointing out:
Thanks, Crownest!
Check out the StuffWeLike.com review of Crysis.
Atari is a company that pisses me off sometimes. It’s pathetic that they can’t get themselves straightened up and solve their financial issues.
When I began writing this post, I originally wrote it as if Atari should be saved. Go buy their games, buy their stock – we need Atari. But honestly, do we Atari? What has Atari recently contributed to the video game industry other than its brand name?
Sure Atari was THE game development studio back in the 70s/80s but they’ve lost their monopoly on the industry years ago for the same reason that they’re losing it today: they simply don’t understand what gamers want anymore.
Looking at Atari’s future lineup, there’s only one game that I want and the release date is still listed as To Be Determined! If you can’t guess the game I’m talking about it’s Alone in the Dark 4. It is possible that this single title could save Atari from its doomsday, but the likelihood of that is slim. If Alone in the Dark 4 isn’t scary enough and isn’t entertaining enough (aka PERFECT AAA TITLE) Atari will die. What is even more said is that Atari’s actually more likely to go bankrupt before the game is ever released.
Atari is a company that grew into a brand which will always live on in the game world. It’s an example of why you should never put all your eggs in one basket – I’m looking at you Dragon Ball Z. It’s probably better to let Atari become a figment of gamer’s imaginations than a on-going embarrassment to the video game industry.
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Ah, classic LucasArts adventure games. They’re a memory I cherish, and they’re something you ought to play if you were under the belief that games cannot be funny or have decent storylines. While the adventure gaming scene was dominated by giants like the Monkey Island games, the Indiana Jones games and the later released masterpiece, Grim Fandango, one of the forefathers of the LucasArts adventure games brand was Maniac Mansion.
The satirical game was one example of how games back then were art, not some stupid high-graphics shooting trash. Apparently, Nintendo didn’t like free, liberal art a lot, and opted for more nerfed games. This article from Douglas Crawford exposes Nintendo’s hypocrisy quite well. Nintendo wanted LA’s masterpiece on their NES, but they didn’t want any of the bad words and suggestive things. Of course, they’d rather that you kill creatures and people, but it’s bad to say the word kill or suck.
Some of the edits Nintendo required included the ones like the line
“getting your brains sucked out” being cut, or “For a good time EDNA 3444” replaced by “Call Edna 3444”. Their anti-nudity clause involved cutting out a humorous poster of a mummy, wrapped head-to-toe in bandages striking a Playboy pose.
The most ridiculous one is the removal of the term “NES SCUMM system”, which the engine on which the game ran. Nintendo’s reaction? “Yeah, but it says NES SCUMM. What will people think?” Grow up, Nintendo.
One of the most interesting points in the rather well-written article is this:
The standards go on to prohibit
depictions of excessive and gratuitous violence,
which would seem to ban any game in which your character met people, killed them, took their money, and then bought more weapons. But in fact most Nintendo games are still faithful to that theme, so we were unclear as to how to interpret Nintendo’s policy. In the Super Mario Bros games, which are considered clean and wholesome, kids routinely kill creatures, and the only motivation is that they are there.
At least most other games give you a reason to kill enemies. Nintendo screwed up Maniac Mansion on several reasons, and will probably not admit it, since screwed up is a sexually suggestive term and against Nintendo policy. If you, for any reason at all, played the NES port of Maniac Mansion, you’ve played a stunted, nerfed version of it and I ask of you to play the PC version ASAP.
Two days ago, LucasArts and Bioware released a press release announcing their newly-forged alliance and made a fancy domain address at www.lucasartsbioware.com as well. This has put all the internets on red alert, especially considering the recent rumour that Bioware’s top-secret MMORPG is based on Knights of the Old Republic. I, being the KotOR fanboy that I am, could not resist it.
Below, we have dissected the press release to try and guess its meaning, and build up some more hype for this unannounced game in hopes of being hired by the LucasArts marketing team. For the full press release in its unadulterated form, use the LA-Bioware link above. Hit the jump to read the analysis in all its glory.
Continue reading “A KotOR-fanboy-ish analysis of the LucasArts-Bioware press release”
