As most of you know by now, Valve announced the Left 4 Dead Crash Course DLC on the Steam news blog. I apologize for being this late, but we decided against posting the announcement due to the ghastly, nasty genericalness of the PR available:
[Crash Course] delivers new single-player, multiplayer and co-operative gameplay to both platforms. … While containing both Survival maps and a Co-operative Campaign, the primary goal of “Crash” is to deliver a complete Versus mode experience in just 30 minutes…
Left 4 Dead Crash Course Poster
All this changed earlier today, though, when we had Destructoid jump to the aid in the form of an exclusive preview of the new levels. There are good news and bad news.
We have a great affinity here for the Source engine. Now that Arkane’s The Crossing is indefinitely off everyone’s waiting list, now’s as good a time as any to bring up another project that inhabits the same register: Salvation from Black Wing Foundation.
Where the Knights Templar seize control of the French crown in The Crossing, in Salvation, a secret society forces its members to take part in a penal cyberspace split into two separate realms: Heaven and Hell. In the former, users are uploaded torment and pain, and in the latter, otherworldly bliss; In both, the prisoners die:
In a world of ashes, where angels are walking among people. There’s only one god, one reason… one truth. In a world of future, where heaven and hell are so real… there’s no doubt, no sin… and no escape. 1)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_mn5_BWFt0
After the jump, a teaser trailer and screenshots bundled with more information on the game.
“Mata Hari makes [gamers] masters in seduction. … [PC gamers] will also perform dances on stage to earn money. … Stylized notes float in and over the screen. Players try to catch them by following the beat at the right time and place by using their mouse cursor.” 1)http://www.matahari-game.com/
Destructoid recently hooked up with esteemed Quest for Glory developers Lori and Corey Cole for an update in response to the recent announcement of the Special Edition version of Monkey Island. The interview mostly touches upon Sierra’s past reluctance to commit to remakes – past quite an admirable amount of EGA-VGA revisions, anyhow. However, as is evident from just a few straightforwarded questions, it also becomes clear that the Sierra we used to know has not existed for a long, long time.
Quest for Glory 3
Let’s look at the current state of the Sierra alumni: Al Lowe is forcibly retired, the Two Guys from Andromeda bitter and battered, the Williamses have not created a game in 10 years and the Coles have zero interest in the genre. Jim Walls worked on a game as recently as 2002, so this only leaves us with Jane Jensen, who is actually and really working on a game.
When an adventure game designer manage to bring up both Lord of the Rings and WoW over the span of a three-question interview, it’s obvious that the Coles – much like the Williamses – have intentionally and very purposely lost their touch with the adventure genre as well as game development overall. While this is a hard fact for an adventure fan to swallow, then again, it’s also utterly impossible to fault developers for doing what they want with their lives; we must remember that one person’s exciting childhood was effectively another’s daily chore.
To get back to the Destructoid interview, when the Coles are asked about playing adventure games, the answer is:
All the aforementioned developers seem to believe times have changed for good, with the last train finally departed. No going back, is there? :D To me, the last few years have felt like quite a bit of an adventure gaming renaissance, especially with great indie titiles coming out. What do you think?
Since it looks like most of us are still reeling from the potentially lethal after-effects of E3, there is thus very little new press out there right now – other than the ostensibly amaranthine recaps and bullet point lists – so I thought I would just as well direct our attention to something completely different.
To cut to the chase, he has recently débuted an all-new interactive website called Narrative Flood, under the fantastic subtitle “Because Story Matters”; the right words indeed, in the correct order no less. I would like to be so bold as to highlight just a few intriguing topics that have already been tackled on the website, types of themes that I would hope to ultimately discuss here at the Slowdown as well:
A straightman take on Al Lowe’s often-disrespected but ultimately oft-reminisced and …yes, even beloved Leisure Suit Larry series and Larry’s romantic search for Real Love ™. Cobbett argues, like Lowe himself, that the “packaging … always promised much more sex than was actually in the games” 2)http://www.noisetosignal.org/2008/10/the-nts-interview-al-lowe
Sexy vs. Sexy, a discussion of the dangerous high-wire tap-dance that is the use and abuse of sex appeal in games.
Arachnophobia vs. Altruism, in which Your Hero laments the monstrous throng of spiders in games. I can’t help but mention I’ve only recently bested my own arachnophobia in video games; For instance – to keep on bringing up Sin any way I can – some years back, I simply could not envision myself playing Wages of Sin, the expansion pack, because the very first enemies in the game so happened to be spiders. I do have to add that I did ultimately conquer most of my fear during my relatively recent play-through of Dark Messiah.
A refreshing new website with a focus I can full well get behind – please do take a look!
