FPS

In Deep Shadows

Martyn Zachary 2 Comments

Remember Boiling Point: Road to Hell? The ambitious, sprawling “high-maintenance” 2005 PC FPS title that in many ways beat Far Cry 2 to the punch and was, erm, sternly chastised for being released in unfinished state, but ultimately got patched up with several then-massive patches and in the process became a minor cult hit among the PC shooter crowd. Despite the proven updates, the game nevertheless became a bit of a poster boy for bad launches.

But did you know a sequel for the game exists and has been out for years? Running on the 3rd version of Deep Shadows’ Vital Engine, White Gold: War in Paradise was released in October 2008. The sequel, set on the Caribbean islands in the year 2010, very much structurally mirrors the first entry to the series: Like in the first game (which is called Xenus I in its motherland; the sequel is therefore titled Xenus II), the player is sandwiched in the power struggle between a government military, drug cartels, local natives and other islanders.

But that’s not nearly all; Deep Shadows have also published, in-between then and now, their other project, Precursors, which was released in Russia this previous December.

Precursors is characterized by the studio as a freeplay RPG/FPS/space combat mash-up with an economical component. This rather Outcast-looking game also contains vehicles, space shuttles for travelling in a seamless universe  as well as organic weapons that you have to feed and care for.

As influences, the developers have name-dropped David Braben’s classic Elite and Andre Norton’s science fiction novels; a presentation for the game wonders why the three aforementioned gameplay styles have never been combined before, perfectly illustrating the ambitious derring-do of the Russian studio.

Why have we not heard anything of these projects, then? Neither game is currently distributed in the English-speaking world, that’s why. While the developers worked with Atari on distributing Boiling Point, no suitable publisher has apparently been found for these two games. While there might still be some small hope left for Precursors, with more than a year having already passed with White Gold, I’m afraid there is relatively little hope of seeing an official English language release materialize for the game.

Therefore, the only concrete hope of playing either game in English are fan translations! In the Deep Shadows forums, dedicated Russian-to-English translation threads can be found both for White Gold and Precursors. While neither translation is close to being ready, some success has already been displayed, and since both games have been released on the same version of the Vital Engine, translators seem to have a good grasp of the situation (there are traces of unfinished English translations left in the Russian versions of the game) as well as access to a working SDK.

Here’s to hoping these two games will be playable sooner or later!

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Lights, Camera, Distr-Action!

Martyn Zachary 1 Comment

For many FPS players, their first-ever contact with modifications came to be Counter-Strike. A great portion will have come through a game of Team Fortress; yet there also exists a group of players who were educated by Action Quake 2. “Action,” Counter-Strike author Minh Le’s second project, had considerable influence especially on the development side of the modification landscape, pushing many hopeful groups and teams to incorporate more “action film” gameplay into FPS games (Gooseman is now working on Tactical Intervention).

Half-Life 1, for instance, had an excellent breadth of the aforementioned – The Specialists, Action Half-Life and The Opera to name a few. The sequel, nevertheless, has seen far fewer successful applications of the topos: The Specialists swear never to do a Source update, The Opera is long since dead. Therefore, it’s more than topical to mention two fresh Half-Life 2 –based projects that could help alleviate the situation on the platform.

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Shattered Horizon

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“Shattered Horizon sees players fight in the aftermath of a catastrophic Moon mining accident that throws billions of tons of rocky debris into near-Earth space.”

The very aptly titled Shattered Horizon is Futuremark’s first proper foray into the gaming space. While the company has dabbled in gaming software before – including having once effectively been a part of Remedy Entertainment, and later with the release of a 2007 Intel-only multicore demonstration, the company is ultimately known to us for their ubiquitous benchmarking software, 3DMark and PCMark (we’ve also seen members of the company as Mature Furk, among other crews, in the demo scene – in this sense the game is a return to form).

This ‘specially spatial shooter, then, is all PhysX’d up, optimized for multi-core machines and comes, in a slight conflict of interests, packaged with the NVIDIA seal. Some more elaboration about the game’s themes and features coupled with the most recent promotional trailer for the game – all this after the jump!

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Lost in Trans-Civilization

Martyn Zachary 1 Comment

Scivelation Logo

A few months back, we brandished our interest towards BWF Game’s little-known upcoming Source engine project, Salvation. Just goes to show how swift the turnover rate is in the gaming business these days: Over the course of mere months, the game has now been rebranded as Scivelation, and instead of the previously utilized Valve tools, is now built on Epic Games’ Unreal III Engine.

“Set in the distant future, Scivelation’s universe is a world born out of the ashes of conflict and misery. An oppressive global dictatorship, known as the Regime, has risen to power after the aftermath of the Apocalypse; aggressively seeking out and eliminating any opposition to their tyrannical government.” 1)http://ve3tro.com/6213/scivelation-announced/

Scivelation_01_wallpaperFor me, the rather obscure mash-up title – Griffin McElroy already lamented the lack of a proper pronunciation guide 2)http://www.joystiq.com/2009/10/11/scivelation-announced-but-poorly-pronounced/ – recalls the word skive (also rarely spelled as scive, according to the OED), which means “To evade a duty, to shirk; to avoid work by absenting oneself, to play truant.” Whether this is BWF Game’s intended meaning remains to be seen, of course, but with the player character taking “his or her place amongst the ranks of the resistance” 3)http://ve3tro.com/6213/scivelation-announced/ in the narrative, this interpretation of the title does not seem an immense stretch of imagination for me.

After the jump, I have set up a modest comparison of screenshots between the two versions (Source and Unreal), and some more analysis about the game.

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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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