Author: Martyn Zachary

Resonance Cascade

Martyn Zachary 8 Comments

XII Games’ Vince Twelve has just announced a pledge-based donation drive for his forthcoming indie adventure game, Resonance, which according to Twelve, is a game of “Speculative Near-Future Hard-ish Science Fiction!” The developer has even promised to put this astonishing, genre-bending tag-line on the game’s retail box if certain requirements are met. Here’s the bottom line on the deal, straight from the source:

I’ve set up a Kickstarter project for the game. Kickstarter collects pledges from kind individuals like yourself and, if the project meets it’s fundraising goals by the deadline, delivers your pledges to the creative endeavor that you’ve pledged your support to (in this case, Resonance!) In return, supporters get gifts or rewards for their pledge amounts! If the goal is not met, then no money or gifts change hands.

Twitter-toting tomfoolery aside, players of Resonance will get to control four unique characters, each of whom are searching for the secret vault of a spectacularly murdered particle physicist, and must work together to keep the scientist’s horrifying discovery from reaching the clutches of a dangerous organization looming in the background.

My two plus two cents, a trailer, more images and the various types of pledge after the jump!

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Fly, Gabe, Fly!!

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Though we’re slightly behind the actual bandwagon, there is no way I can not touch upon a wildly imaginative exchange between a Left 4 Dead modder and Valve, something that has got to be the flat-out funniest occurrence within the Valve community this year.

The seeds were sown last week, when it came to our attention that Valve had flown the Left 4 Dead 2 boycott group leaders over to their headquarters for a tour of the forthcoming game – something only the Valve masterminds, wearing their best pair of silk gloves and armed with a jar of lube, would have been able to think up; To add insult to the injury, the boycotters came out of the experience feeling positive.

Meanwhile, a relatively unknown Left 4 Dead modder, Joe W-A, jokingly sends an e-mail to Gabe Newell, asking:

Why the hell haven’t I been flown to Valve?
I mean, you guys need to preview my campaign.

Gabe, jovial as always, retorts:

We are boycotting your campaign.

Not one to shy away from a verbal fracas, ripostes Joe, “Does that mean I have to fly you here?”, to which Gabe counter-ripostes, “Me and Erik [Wolpaw]”. Only moments later, a blog collecting donations for flying the Valve duo over to Australia, Brisbane appears, and a mere few days’ worth of gathering, the undertaking has already broken the rather amazing 3000 dollar barrier required for the plane tickets. Joe additionally promises the surplus will go to the Penny Arcade charity venture, Child’s Play.

The hilarity of this inconceivable succession of events aside, I’m not sure what it will mean for the overall complexion of interaction between Valve and its fans, but as far as the actual realities of this meeting go, it is either going to be an awkward trainwreck or a fantastic fête of funk: Plans are being made for capturing the occasion on video, too, so we’ll be privy to the plot! Either way, I do commend both parties for their geniality and their willingness to engage, something which Valve has built their reputation on from the very beginning.

Lastly, Rock, Paper, Shotgun make a great point in their latest coverage on the story:

If we were a multi-million dollar company who could afford a billion plane flights, we’d certainly make sure most of the money raised went in that direction and still go on the trip.

I second this notion! Don’t forget to take your sleeping bags, Gabe and Erik!

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Super Jazz Man Review

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Nostalgia is to memory as kitsch is to art –Charles Maier

Stevie Jack, I’m sorry to say, but we just didn’t get you. Or more importantly, we didn’t expect you, at least not to come waltzing down the street, dropping Barthes and Foucault, least of all, amidst all that jazz. We received you expectant of two things only: A sequel to The Apprentice, and colourful, fantastical artwork and animation.

Strictly speaking, we got neither.

Only now, three years later, am I prepared to face the fact that I was not ready, Stevie Jack. After all, in ‘06, the commercial AGS scene was still very much in its infancy, with very little on the market beyond The Adventures of Fatman. We had yet to accustom ourselves to the idea of rewarding indie game designers for their time, with the scene additionally still steadfastly shackled to the gaming heritage of the early 90s. All this despite the flavours and flairs of contemporary retro adventuring having already largely reached the plateau of its predecessors: The freeware version of The Shivah, for instance, had been released in June of the same year, and free games like Reactor 09 continued to push the content envelope.

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Where’s the Joy in Pad Demos?

Martyn Zachary 3 Comments

Those with a firmer, stronger grip on their joysticks might not have even noticed this development, but personally, I would rather like to know whatever happened to old-fashioned, mouse-powered gameplay demonstrations for first-person shooters? Over the past few years, I’ve found myself increasingly irritated with various PR departments’ keen intent on demonstrating their games on consoles and/or with gamepads only.

The key to successful gameplay exhibition, after all, is authentic exposition. While the generic idea of the trailer is to lure the player in, convince him or her of the game’s meritorious mechanisms, gameplay trailers are not as disconnected from actual gameplay as it would seem on the outset; Think of competitive play, for example, wherein even the most infinitesimal intricacies matter: DPI, polling rate, sensitivity, inversion, crosshairs, macros, bindings, et cetera et cetera. My primary question is, then, why are we not seeing these features in trailers?

A very recent example – one I’m sure most of you have seen by now – can be found in the form of the latest BioShock 2 multiplayer trailer, found below:

The footage above has been clearly recorded with the questionable aid of the gamepad: The first-person camera movement looks imprecise and tardy; most of the third-person action on display, then, consists of arrow-straight movement, sluggish posturing and general standing-about. Two more gameplay video analyses, of Resistance 2 and Singularity, after the jump.

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bitComposer Publishing S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat

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German publisher bitComposer Games report they are to publish GSC Game World’s latest game, S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat in the fall:

bitComposer Games has secured the worldwide rights to S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat, the next first-person shooter from Ukrainian developer GSC Game World and follow-up to the highly successful S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: … the newest episode seamlessly connects to Shadow of Chernobyl. The release of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat for Windows PC is scheduled for Fall 2009.

This turn of events was largely presaged in GSC Game World utilizing a different publisher for each game in the franchise so far: With Shadow of Chernobyl, they utilized THQ, and Clear Sky was published by Deep Silver respectively. Looking from the outside in, I would personally wager that GSC Game World’s relationship with Deep Silver was marred somewhat by the publisher’s odd insistence on prematurely publishing untested patches for the game – not once but twice – first with 1.5.06 and again with version 1.5.09, further contributing to the pre-existing stigma of the game series’ assumed instabilities.

Though there’s a decided dearth of footage – some twelve screenshots in all – available for this forthcoming prequel at the moment, you can nevertheless take a gander at the game’s official website. bitComposer Games, then, are an all-new company, founded only last March, and are planning to come out with a slew of titles all to be published Q3 2009, including “RACE On“, the obscure “Scorpion: Disfigured” and “The Void”.

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