Arkham Has Moved

Nabeel Burney 3 Comments

Batman: Arkham Asylum 2Batman: Arkham Asylum wowed us this year by being not merely a decent superhero game, as we were hoping, but an excellent game further enhanced by its license, and hence a contender for Game of the Year awards. With its critical and commercial success Rocksteady would be crazy not to start immediately on a sequel, and so it came as no surprise when a teaser trailer debuted today during the Spike Video Game Awards ’09. The brief teaser, embedded below, reveals the new setting for the game, which seems to be Arkham Aslyum again – only … not quite.

The Joker is back, looking a little worse for wear but up to his old tricks again. It’s unclear exactly what new location is being shown; the first thing we see are the gates of Arkham Asylum, but the buildings that rise behind them don’t resemble anything from the first game. Instead of an old private estate we see a dense cityscape, perhaps Gotham City? The camera pans through city streets, overcome with prison inmates running riot and beating people senseless. A glimpse of a recognisable location flashes by – Iceberg Lounge, the Penguin’s high-class nightclub that fronts for his underworld dealings. Another mythos reference is in the huge sign labelled ‘Sionis’, not doubt referring to Roman Sionis, otherwise known as Black Mask. The trailer ends centered on an aged Joker hooked up to an IV drip, his frail condition perhaps due to the Titan shenanigans in the first game.

With no spoken dialogue in the trailer and no information past the fleeting images, very little is known about the game at this point. A website has gone up, entitled Arkham Has Moved, with no content other than a subtle hint of Two Face and a form to sign up for updates. While it was a no-brainer for Rocksteady to be working on the game, it is still interesting to see how soon it is being announced. It would probably be too hopeful to expect a release in 2010, but other sequels have been fast-tracked to come out within a year, so who knows. What is certain is that Rocksteady has an incredible task ahead of them, of living up to their first effort, and I am excited to see how they tackle it.

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On the PC, Only the Maximum Settings Are Canon

Nabeel Burney 9 Comments

The eternal cycle that plagues us PC gamers is the constant need to upgrade our hardware, to keep up with the newest and shiniest games. It’s not just the fact that we need a rig that passes a new game’s minimum requirements and barely manages to run the game at all – we desire more than that. We want to play the game at its maximum possible visual settings, so that we can see it in its full glory. I’ve wondered, though, whether it really is just a craving for the best eye candy that drives that desire in me.

Maximum CrysisWhen I play a game at less than maximum settings, there is a nagging feeling I get that is separate from the disappointment in the reduction of graphical fidelity, or the dismay that my PC is getting long in the tooth. I find myself wondering if I’m really experiencing the game as it was intended by its creators. Developers speak more and more about wanting to deliver an experience to gamers, and wanting them to play it just how they envision 1)http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3162366. I think about the interpretation of what I see, and whether what I’m seeing is ‘canon’. If the object detail is down so low that I can’t tell what a character is wearing, am I missing a crucial point about that character? If I make a certain conclusion about a room that I wouldn’t have if I could only read the writing scrawled upon the walls, is my understanding of what happened ‘non-canon’? It’s a minor point but it’s something I keep thinking of in an age of games that are finally able to tell stories with every kind of narrative device available.

Of course, console gamers don’t face this dilemma at all. A console game plays the same on every unit of that console, and developers have a lot more control on how the game will look and perform without having to think about different hardware combinations and permutations. So I’m just restricting this thought experiment to PC games. There are a number of questions that follow this thought. Does it really matter if the graphics are not at the very max? Would you even be able to glean some higher level meaning or nuance from the details? Are we at the stage in game technology where this would matter, and developers can use this level of detail to add subtle enhancement to a games story and atmosphere? If so, in what games released today would it make a difference? A few games came to my mind immediately, and I’ll restrict my selection to just these few already installed on my hard drive so as not to belabour the hypothesis.

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The Fires Will Consume You In Igneous

Nabeel Burney Leave a comment

IgneousRichard linked me to a video of this today, and I felt compelled to pass it on. Igneous is short little game by a group of DigiPen Institute seniors calling themselves Going Down In Flames. Inadequately described as an “action platformer”, the game has you rolling a little stone totem guy through a vast underground cavern, with flowing lava bearing down on you all the way. There are four main areas – any of which you can pick from a chapter menu – and two difficulty settings. The graphics and physics are impressive considering it has all been done from scratch in 16 months; the game is definitely worth a look.

It may seem like there isn’t much more to the game than vaulting forward at top speed, but it isn’t as simple as that. Not only must you keep up the pace so as to stay ahead of the lava and crumbling floor, but you must jump over cracks and chasms – some of which may be created suddenly by falling rocks. Add to this a thumping soundtrack of tribal drums that brings a certain urgency, and you have a game with a real sense of speed not unlike that found in the Burnout games.

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The download clocks in at 114MB, and can be obtained here, but do have a look at the hefty system requirements first. The video trailer that enticed me is embedded after the jump.

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Kane & Lynch 2

Martyn Zachary 2 Comments

#@$%! Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days was announced a while ago, so here we go:

Kane & Lynch 2 Logo

Kane & Lynch 2™: Dog Days is inspired by documentary filmmakers and the user-generated era. Every aspect of the game has been designed to deliver a fresh perspective to the words ‘intensity’ and ‘realism’ in video games.

While Kane & Lynch may have become a suitable pariah for the gaming community (check this GameBomb review out) by exemplifying underhanded press tactics and poor decision-making – something that we also briefly discussed in an early story of ours, Kaned & Lynched – the game is not without merit, and I am one to think a sequel could redeem many of the failings of the first title. (more…)

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