What is Icarus?

Nabeel Burney Leave a comment

Irrational Games New LogoThe past week has seen some irrational behaviour on a strange teaser site, whatisicarus.com. Initially there was nothing to see but a smoky background and a single grey spot, not much of a tease. But sharp visitors noticed that the white spot changed position every day, making a slow but deliberate migration around the page. It was a few days before the overall shape was discerned: a figure 8 or vertically-oriented infinity symbol, and the spots looked instead like holes cut out in the black, revealing something underneath. The site has now started to update much faster, and so with a little bit of obsessive refreshing a complete image can be recreated. What is that thing, exactly? A logo? An obscure literary reference?

Internet detectives have traced the site’s domain registry info back to Take Two games, and a rumour some months ago connected the project codename ‘Project Icarus’ to Irrational Games 1)http://defaultprime.com/2010/01/13/project-icarus-being-worked-on-by-irrational-games-wait-what/, so it wasn’t difficult to put two and two together. However the company made no acknowledgement of it until yesterday in a tweet.

Things have been building up to this for a while now. Irrational came out of hiding in the beginning of the year with a shiny new site and a focus on community and company culture. Since then they have stuck to a regular schedule of updates that includes podcasts, employee spotlights and a look into the company’s back catalogue with previously unreleased material. Earlier this month fans were invited to call in and try and guess what the new game was going to be 2)http://twitter.com/IrrationalGames/status/17896309739, and the clips were featured this week in the latest episode of the Irrational Behaviour podcast.

At long last they have addressed the pressing question of what they’ve been working on since their seminal BioShock three years ago. We thought it was an X-COM remake, but it turns out that that’s someone else’s project. Rumours point to it being a brand new IP in the form of an “ambitious” FPS 3)http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ct-taketwo13-2010apr13,0,2531760.story. So what is it and when will we know? Invitations have been sent out to a press event in New York on August 11, where they will unveil a demo to journalists. The next day will bring us a CG trailer and more information in the next podcast.

It’s been a long wait for fans, but finally we’ll get a chance to see the highly anticipated mystery game; the 12th can’t come quickly enough. I want to know just what the heck Icarus is.

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Alien Swarm

Martyn Zachary Leave a comment

More often than not, letting go is unfortunately the name of the game in the modding community. Most of us probably did just that in 2007, albeit begrudgingly, after Black Cat Games’ blog completely ceased to receive news updates on their forthcoming commercial game, Alien Swarm: Infested.

Though their previous project, the original Unreal Tournament 2004 mod version of the game (that you can still try out and play, by the way; its unrelenting difficulty level and gritty gameplay is something to behold), illustrated in the screenshots below, had laid down a steel-solid foundation for future games to build on, their PR unfortunately started mirroring Black Widow Games’ They Hunger: Lost Souls on the other side of the fence.

This is why I am all the more happy to report that more than three years later and completely out of the blue, Valve have just released Alien Swarm, a Source-based top-down co-op corridor shooter, completely free of charge.

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E3 2010: Microsoft Press Conference

Martyn Zachary Leave a comment

Microsoft had the unenviable task of beginning E3’s series of press conferences, especially since the major trend for many spectators this year seemed to be the hope and the wish to be, simply put, surprised: Here at the Slowdown, we were above all looking forward to non-sequels and all-new IP.

Unfortunately, the one major announcement from Microsoft – the seemingly abrupt re-branding of “Project Natal,” a move that G4TV speculate was an extremely recent decision – had been spoiled only days before much in the same vein as Sony’s PSP Go last year. Nonentheless, the Microsoft hype train steamed forth as planned, with Senior Vice President Don Mattrick (on the left) opening up the show.

Despite first airing footage from the decidedly nondescript Call of Duty: BLOPS, the behemoth got off to a great start once Kojima Productions founder Hideo Kojima and producer Shigenobu Matsuyama (on the right) waltzed on stage to show off Metal Gear Solid: Rising in what ultimately turned out to be the most notable announcement of the whole conference.

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E3 2010 Ubisoft Press Conference

Martyn Zachary Leave a comment

What decade is it again – the 1970s? I ask this for what just went on during Ubisoft’s press conference was totally psychedelic, dude, even discounting the fact that the host, Joel McHale of “The Soup,” apparently took his part in the proceedings very, very seriously and quite possibly ingested beforehand a wide assortment of magic mushrooms.

In any case, let us just linger on for a moment on these fantastic quotes I pulled from the show – a veritable checklist of games marketing bullshit:

“Games you can feel.”
“Full body experience.”
“A magic inner journey.”
“The mind and body are controllers.”
“The player is a design pillar.”
“Playing in the real world.”
“Feel the magic of my environment.”

McHale’s off-kilter performance equally reminded me of a story from CVG’s Vernon Kay, called “How NOT to host a games event” (Kay’s list delightfully also includes what can be classified as the Pong Trap.)

The host’s constant barrage of sarcastic interjections and one-liners came relatively close to Jamie Kennedy’s classic E3 2007 Activision press conference, which he started off with “This is exciting. We’re at E3 and… I just wanna say… this place is the only place… that makes the guys at ComicCon… look like Ocean’s 13.” 1)http://www.gametrailers.com/video/e3-2007-activision/22401, instantly breaking Kay’s final rule of “Assume your audience are a bunch of closeted shut-ins.”

Another example of game-changing hosts is Jay Mohr, who single-handedly soured the 13th Annual Interactive Achievement Awards. You can watch his potty-mouthed performance at Joystiq – this was a show after which 3D Realms’ George Broussard asked for his contract terminated “so he *never* does another AIAS awards show.” 2)http://twitter.com/georgeb3dr/status/9321107453

The difference between McHale on the one hand and Kennedy and Mohr on the other, though, is that McHale actually focused on the relative ludicrousness of Ubisoft’s line-up instead of lingering on the apparent deficiencies of the crowd and the industry overall.

This minor detail made for vastly more amusing a show!

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EEEk!

Martyn Zachary Leave a comment

The Electronic Entertainment Expo has crept upon us once again!

On this website, we will be following up, at the very least, on four of the major press conferences: Microsoft and Electronic Arts today, and the Nintendo and Sony on Tuesday.

We probably won’t be parroting the more generic announcements – don’t know about you, but my fingers are already worn out from scrolling thru the sudden flood of Kinect news – but anything we think is worth mentioning will certainly find its way on to the blog with some commentary to boot.

Finally, if you’re interested in watching the conferences yourself, the Gamespot live feed has been pretty reliable in the past.

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