Appetite for Destruction!
May 27th
Destructible environments or terrain deformation! It seems like this kind of eye candy has only come into play in the last few years with Crysis, Battlefield: Bad Company 1 and 2, Red Faction: Guerrilla and Just Cause 2 to a degree offering some stunning “Blow the hell out of it!” moments. With each new development comes more smoke, more debris, more everything which eventually becomes less if you shoot enough bullets at it. Watch the Mafia II PhysX trailer and you’ll catch my drift.
But long before DICE invented the Frostbite engine, Crytek the CryEngine, Volition Geo-Mod and Nvidia with their almighty ass-kicking graphic proscessing units that ultimately made the devilish acquision of PhysX from the now defunct Ageia there where games that in a rather simple way demonstrated destructible environments or terrain deformation. An early example can be found in Dig Dug way back in 1982, the year Duran Duran released the amazing Rio album… Hungry like the Wolf. “Dark in the city night is a wire, steam in the subway earth is afire! Do do do do do do do dodo dododo dodo.”
The whole of Dig Dug’s levels are destructible, not bad for a game that is 28 years More >
Insomniac comes to Xbox 360!
May 25th
Who would of thought it? Insomniac Games developing for Microsoft and the Xbox 360. Well it’s happening! Just this afternoon the developer released a statment saying. “We are excited and eager to introduce Insomniac to a new group of gamers while reinforcing to our loyal fans what makes our games special.”
Ouch! That must be a kick in the teeth for Sony. Working alongside EA Partners, Insomniac Games will develop a brand new IP that is multi platform. With such titles as Spyro the Dragon, Resistance: Fall of Man and Resistance 2 under their belts, I’m sure whatever project Insomniac undertakes it will ooze copious amounts of class.
[Source] //
DeathSpank!
May 25th
DeathSpank, it sounds very much like a Quentin Tarantino project, the latterday auteur has ditched his trademark gratuitous mix of ultra violence and cumbersome storytelling to star in and direct a predictive pornographic thriller! Something which resembles Body of Evidence and Basic Instinct. But Deathspank is neither; and thankfully. It’s an upcoming Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network title from Vancouver based studio Hothead Games.
This quirky game which has the graphic style of something akin of Diablo and the humour that is a page straight out of Insomniac’s Captain Qwark’s galactic spiel. “Space, it’s huge, so huge that if you lost your car keys in it, they would be almost impossible to find!”
It’s due out later this year, with a drunken leprechaun, several unicorns and an army of chickens… DeathSpank, the vanquisher of evil looks fantastic!
Official DeathSpank website.
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Enslaved!
May 24th
Ninja Theory, the UK based developer’s first game since the highly successful PlayStation 3 exclusive, Heavenly Sword is Enslaved! It’s a futuristic story, a story set one hundred and fifty years into the future where a global war has decimated the Earth.
***Wikipedia extract***
Enslaved is a story set one hundred and fifty years into the future where a global war has decimated the Earth. In this future, nearly the entire human race has been eradicated, but robots still plague the land. Although they are from a bygone era, they are still following their orders to eradicate the humans. The storyline is being written by Alex Garland (who wrote the script for the movie 28 Days Later) and is loosely based on the ancient Chinese novel “Journey to the West”.
The main character in the game is called simply “Monkey”. He has spent his entire life running from the machines and is your typical loner sort, a solitary man. Eventually Monkey is captured by the death machines, where he is placed on an airship. It is there that he meets a technologically adept woman named Trip. Although they escape the airship working as a team, Monkey gets knocked unconscious at one point. When More >
