Reverge Labs and Scott Pilgrim artist Alex Ahad are aiming to hit 2D fighting with something completely fresh in Skullgirls. Sam Clay sits down with UK PR Ian Dickson to deliver over 25 minutes of exclusive gameplay.
Reverge Labs fighter Skullgirls is out next week on Live, and from the look of this it’s going to be an essential purchase for the experimental fight crowd. Here, Sam Clay and UK PR Ian Dickson give a broad overview of what to expect. We’re going to have more from the game in the next few days.
Devil May Cry 3 HD has landed and the demon-hunters at Game Front are here to lead you to victory. A mysterious tower has raised in the center of Dante’s city, while a weird cultist leader and Dante’s own brother Vergil scheme to destroy the human race. Take up your sword and a set of double pistols to fight through the minions of evil and save Earth.
Bringing it’s own sense of ridiculous flare, Devil May Cry 3 was an instant classic back when it was released. The painful difficulty hasn’t diminished in the intervening years, so join Mitchell and the Game Front Video Team as they make devils cry.
For more Devil May Cry HD, check our videowalkthrough for the first in the series. For a full list of our extra content, take a trip to the cheats page.
Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion, the standalone expansion to the original 2008 space strategy game, will released June 12th, and preorders are now available at the Stardock store, Steam and Impulse. Anyone who preorders will get instant access into the 2nd beta, which went live last night.
You can preorder the game for $ 39.99, and if you already own the previous Sins game, you’ll receive a discount if you preorder from the Stardock store.
Check out this trailer:
I’m loving the ship design — iconic.
If you’ve never played Sins, now’s a great time to start. What I love most is the community, which continues to pump out great mods for the game.
What are you looking forward to more; this expansion, or Sins of a Dark Age?
In case that has you wondering whether you play a hero or a villain, this newly-revealed trailer should clear things up. Check it out:
The video is chock-full of action movie trailer clichés, but I’m a sucker for that kind of stuff, so yippee-kay-aye! Clichéd or not, that’s a well-made trailer that knows exactly how to draw in its target audience. Oh, and John Conrad — really? Could they pick a name any more similar to John Connor?
Here you have seven minutes of new Borderlands 2 gameplay in HD, a hands-on with multiplayer and a chat with Gearbox about quirky visuals and RoboCop. Ever seen a siren in action? Here’s your chance.
Borderlands 2
Features online and split-screen drop-in co-op.
Mission structure has been overhauled to eliminate the original game’s mandatory “checking-in” of missions, reducing back-tracking.
The ineligibility problem of Borderlands multiplayer that meant players that had completed missions couldn’t play co-op with those that hadn’t, has been fixed. Now, players further along in the story can reset their mission status to enable them to hook up with friends that are lagging behind.
Gearbox describes Borderlands as one of the most successful new IPs of this console generation, having sold over 4m of the original game.
Gearbox Easter Egg: Whilst acknowledging the difficulty of taking on development of last year’s Duke Nukem Forever part way through its gestation, a Gearbox rep suggested that the team are now in a position to make any future games in the series “much more our own”. Watch this space.
It’s a curio of game design that, for much its development, Borderlands looked nothing like Borderlands. As the story goes, a handful artists and coders were at a loose end a couple of years into the development of Gearbox’s new IP and so took it upon themselves to prototype an entirely different visual style for the multi-million-pound project; one that moved away from the photo-real and toward the realm of comic-books.
The results speak for themselves and the fact that Borderlands is recognisable from almost any screenshot is a testament to this experimentation and creative vision. It’s also to the credit of both Gearbox and 2K that so fundamental a change, made so late in development, was embraced wholeheartedly.
But if there’s one disappointment that arose from this eleventh-hour change of visual identity it’s that there was little time for the new art style to do much to inform game design. Whilst a few incidental flourishes appear here and there, it’s very easy to imagine a Borderlands whose vaults, caverns and rocky outcrops look photo-real.
However, with the distinct art style already in place this time around, Gearbox has been able to pick and choose how it incorporates it into every facet of Borderlands 2. Game and level designers have been in sync with concept and environmental artists from the off, resulting in a marriage of the exaggerated art style with more outlandish environments and offbeat character design.
“We wanted to keep that original art style and examine it to find out why it was successful,” explains Kevin Duc, lead concept artist at Gearbox Software. “We found this neat connection between the photo-real and comic-book-style cel-shaded which comes from keeping the inks loose but maintaining the grit of photorealism underneath.
“With loose art comes a vitality that allows story to be more free and level design to become a little more extreme. There’s a nice back and forth that develops with [the art team] expressing the ideas that [the story writers] have created and realising the crazy and dark characters.
“This means we can be a bit wacky with proportions but at the same time we keep this idea that we refer to as the Verhoeven effect. It’s the RoboCop concept; that there’s this extreme violence going on but with a touch of comedy which is making your laugh even when you’re being ripped in half. The art style definitely plays to that.”
Certainly, it would difficult to imagine a mid-level boss with a midget strapped to his shield being portrayed as anything other than darkly comic and, therefore, in any way other than with Borderlands comic-style visuals.
The exaggerated visuals also play a major part in the design of the multitude of guns and loot; while Borderlands primary reward system was based on the collection of new weapons, it was often necessary to compare and contrast every weapon-drop with those in your inventory to ascertain whether it was worth collecting.
“We wanted to keep that original art style and examine it to find out why it was successful. We found this neat connection between the photo-real and comic-book-style cel-shaded which comes from keeping the inks loose but maintaining the grit of photorealism underneath.”
Now, each weapon manufacturer has more distinct gameplay properties, such as those that explode when thrown or that are less powerful but far more likely to inflict status effects. The more clearly defined visual personality of these weapons allows for at-a-glace identification of their manufacturer, which in-turn enables you to determine whether it’s a class of weapon that suits your play style.
“When we created the Bandit-class we wanted to make it look like it’d been assembled up in the hills, all sharp edges and quarter-inch steel,” illustrates Duc. “With Torgue, a big beefy American 1980’s style manufacturer, we looked not just at guns of that time period for inspiration, but at other sources too, like motorcycles and chunky engine blocks.
“When we passed that back to the game designers they interpreted the visual design as a gun that should be throwing out these huge explosions all the time, so they come up with an accelerating bullet that explodes. That then came back to us in the art team and it was up to us to figure out how that projectile would look, and so it goes back and forth.”
The result is a set of weapons that follow real-world brand identity principles with the exaggerated and entertaining attributes expected of Borderlands.
Highly skilled
Personal preference of weapons combined with varied skill trees allows for some flexible class-customisation, as illustrated by our multiplayer session. A foray into a very wild, wildlife reserve begins me and my co-op partner allocating 20 skill points to customise our characters and despite both choosing to play as the Siren class, it results in two very different character builds. One is more support-based, with a nifty ability that converts the typically negative effect of friendly fire into positive healing, while the other has a more a powerful phaselock – the Siren’s new, combat orientated class power – that inflicts status effects in addition to freezing the enemy in place.
What follows is an entertaining co-op experience, but one that is not without niggles; the most fundamental of which is check-pointing, which is a concept that developers should have well and truly licked by this point.
Being granted a second wind for killing any enemy while bleeding-out is useful, as is the ability to revive a teammate, but when swarmed by assailants in an arena-style environment or facing a mid-level boss, these options become less viable – especially if playing with fewer than three teammates. Unfortunately, the checkpoint spacing then necessitates a long jog back to rejoin the fight – during which time your partner may also have been killed – which becomes tiresome.
A greater emphasis on co-op objectives would also be welcome; certainly the section that we played featured little that needed to be achieved as a team and so it became two, single players inhabiting the same space, rather than genuinely co-operating.
However, there’s over five months until the game’s launch which is plenty of time for minor check-pointing niggles to be addressed and for Gearbox to ensure that Borderlands 2 is as arresting to play as it is to ogle.
Borderlands 2 launches on PC, 360 and PS3 on September 18 in the US and September 21 in PAL territories.
Kinect Star Wars is out tomorrow, but a few superfans have managed to find and snag the game a few days early — and that has given rise to videos on YouTube of the game’s dance-based minigame, which apparently no one saw coming, despite the fact that the Kinect’s primary function is to facilitate dancing for the rhythmically challenged.
But Star Wars fans across the Internet are angry and sad because of the video below and more like it. That’s right — Han Solo dances. And yeah, for a minute there, I was mad about it too. But then I realized that Han Solo and Lando Calrissian were having a Galactic Dance-Off on Bespin, and they were dancing to a clean, fairly uplifting version of MC Chris’ parody song “I’m Han Solo.” And to be honest, this video is full of delicious, hilarious, giggle-spreading happiness.
Look at it. Let it wash over you. Chill for a sec, push down the Star Wars fan bile that’s bubbling up inside you, and realize just how hilariously fun this noise is. There’s a song in which stormtroopers sing a version of “YMCA” about being conscripted into the Internet. And holy crap, kids, look at Calrissian tear it up out there.
George Lucas has been steadily ruining Star Wars for, really, the majority of my entire life. It’s about time we stop worrying and love the bomb, here, folks, and enjoy the simple things while we can. Greedo shot first, Darth Vader was a whiner, and Han Solo dances. It’s over. It’s no longer worth it to be angry.
Ridge Racer Unbounded released in Europe yesterday and fell into the hands of video editor Sam Clay. Head in for a giant HD look at the final game.
It’s like Burnout and Split/Second and some other stuff. It has a drift button. It has a track editor. It’s got an 8/10 from Eurogamer and a 9/10 from Edge. Get all the reviews here.
There’s nearly 30 minutes of drift-related gameplay there. Watch. Then buy.
Have you been wondering how Rockstar Studios is going to handle bringing all of Max Payne’s signature weirdness — specifically, bullet time — to Max Payne 3‘s multiplayer? So have we, and in fact, Rockstar isn’t ignoring the gaming community’s confusion.
The video below, the first of two, shows off a few new pieces of info about how multiplayer works, what players can expect, and how it’s going to feel like Max Payne and not just another generic third-person shooter. Bullet time is covered, as are a few other multiplayer modes and the cinematic feel of the game in general. Stay tuned for the second video when Rockstar drops it.
