GDC 2011: Tim Schafer’s studio bringing third-person shooter, tower-defense hybrid featuring mechs to Microsoft’s downloadable platform.
Handing out accolades to last year’s top titles was the name of the game at last night’s Game Developers Choice Awards, and Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption rode off with another saddlebag of statues.
However, the night also had a future-looking element, as host Tim Schafer capitalized on the opportunity to announce Double Fine’s latest downloadable title, Trenched.
As seen in the game’s first trailer (below), Trenched presents the plight of the Mobile Trench Brigade, which has been charged with protecting earth from an evil invading alien force known as Monovision.
A hybridization of the third-person shooter and tower-defense genres, Trenched sees players erecting both stationary defensive constructions and lurching about in a highly customizable mech warfare suit. According to Double Fine, players will be afforded thousands of differnt options to customize their mechs.
Trenched will also feature an online co-op mode, where players can join up with other players throughout the world to battle the invading force. Double Fine has yet to offer word on whether the game will have a competitive component.
As with the Double Fine’s recently announced Sesame Street:Cookie’s Counting Carnival, Trenched has thus far only been announced for the Xbox 360. Double Fine’s other recent downloadable efforts, Costume Quest and Stacking, both enjoyed multiplatform releases through Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network.
We traverse back to Three Kingdoms-era China and find a few surprises in the latest of this long-running series.
You may think that after six Dynasty Warriors games, there’s little new to discover in this sprawling hack-and-slash series. Tecmo Koei is hoping to pleasantly surprise cynics with the newest addition–Dynasty Warriors 7–by adding in a considerable amount of new content, particularly in the form of a brand new faction that comes with its own set of new characters and battles.
Dynasty Warriors games have long focused on the three warring clans of Shu, Wu, and Wei, but Dynasty Warriors 7 will for the first time include the Jin clan. For those of you up-to-speed on the original historical Chinese novels the Dynasty Warriors game are based on–Romance of the Three Kingdoms–the Jin was (spoiler alert) actually the clan that ended up ruling China after this tumultuous period.
As such, Dynasty Warriors 7 will include new battles in which to fight in, as well as including several new Jin generals for players to take control of. With dozens of playable generals already available in Wu, Shu, and Wei, there won’t be any shortage of characters to take on the massive hordes of soldiers you’ll be up against in this game.
The story, too, is supposedly taking a more realistic turn. In previous games, any clan was able to “win” power over China, but history clearly shows that there was only one winner amidst many losers. Dynasty Warrior 7′s narrative will now more closely resemble those events.
Game play, too, has been enhanced, both in minor and major ways. The biggest addition is the ability to wield different weapons for each character, as opposed to having one weapon which you can find upgraded versions of as in previous Dynasty Warriors titles.
We slip and slide all over the place in this eccentric platformer.
The Fancy Pants Adventure is a game about pants. More specifically, fancy pants. Well, at least that’s the goal. You don’t start out the game with fancy pants. In fact, the pants you begin the game with are downright plain. All solid colors and whatnot.
But the more time you spend with this eccentric 2D platformer, the more pants you unlock. We’re talking plaid pants, striped pants…you name it. All the pants you can imagine!
Yes, The Fancy Pants Adventure is an extremely silly game. If you dig below the surface, however, what you’ve got is a fairly straightforward core: It’s a 2D side-scrolling platformer in which you attempt to run and jump in a generally left-to-right direction across a variety of treacherous levels. But layered on top of all of that is a thick smattering of ridiculousness.
Fancy Pants, based on a free Flash game by then-college student Brad Borne, is presented in a hand-drawn stick-figure art style that feels more than a little bit like you’re peering at someone’s notebook doodles. The controls are also quite different from most platformers because building momentum speed plays a huge role in how you move about the levels–you’re basically sliding all over the place as though running on ice.
GDC 2011: Rockstar San Diego’s Western triumphs at Game Developers Conference’s annual ceremony; Mass Effect 2, Limbo, Minecraft, also honored.
Each year, the Game Developers Conference‘s crowning event is the Game Developers Choice Awards, one of the most prestigious ceremonies in gaming. Hosted once again by the comically gifted head of Double Fine Productions, Tim Schafer, the evening wasted no time in getting started, awarding the Best Audio trophy to Red Dead Redemption.
Moving on to Best Game Design, Red Dead Redemption rode off with the trophy, putting another notch in developer Rockstar San Diego’s belt. Minecraft got another trophy for Best Downloadable Game, as well as the Innovation Award, leaving game co-creator Markus Persson virtually speechless.
Best Visual Arts went to Playdead’s Xbox Live game Limbo, which was also the subject of one of the night’s various skits by nerd-comedy troupe Mega64. Best Handheld Game was won by ZeptoLab’s Cut the Rope.
GDC 2011: Creative director behind EA’s 2010 multiplatform hoops game explains how the team decided what was kept and what was tossed for a new console take on the hit arcade franchise.
Who was there: EA Sports creative director Trey Smith was on hand for a presentation titled “Bringing back the ‘BOOMSHAKALAKA!’”
What they talked about: Smith opened his talk by explaining the origin of the new NBA Jam, which wasn’t an NBA Jam at all. At first, Smith was told to make a Wii basketball game for kids where the only thing players had to worry about was dribbling the ball virtually with the Wii Remote. The game became Bounce, which was an original intellectual property that was essentially inspired by NBA Jam. When they nabbed the NBA Jam license, Smith said the team partied like rock stars that night.
However, they woke up the next day and realized the enormity of the task ahead of them. In 1993, the original NBA Jam brought in billion in arcades, Smith said. That’s more than three times the highest grossing film of the year, Jurassic Park.
To start with, Smith said the team invoked “The Sequel Rule of Thirds.” One-third of the game had to be the same as before, to “take players back to their Happy Place.” The next third of the game had to be improved over the original. Enhance the recipe, but don’t change it so much that the audience doesn’t like the taste anymore. The final third had to be all new, taking the franchise places it had never been before. But above all, Smith emphasized the need to be true to the source material.
As for what to keep the same to appeal to the hardcore fanbase, Smith pointed to the arcade-style features of the original NBA Jam. It had to have over-the-top dunks, Big Head mode, players catching on fire, backboard shattering dunks, and a strong multiplayer component. (He remembered it being a vary rare sight to have just one person at the old four-player Jam arcade cabinets.) Finally, there was the amped-up play-by-play announcer yelling “BOOMSHAKALAKA!”
That announcer, Chicago actor Tim Kitzrow, wound up being part of the one-third of the game Smith said was kept the same. Mark Turmell was another returning face from the original NBA Jam development team. Turmell, who Smith described as “the godfather of arcade sports,” was enlisted to work on the NBA Jam revamp a few months after development began.
We take our first look at Piranha Bytes’ sequel to Risen and the spiritual successor to the Gothic series.
If there’s a better reason to attend the 2011 Game Developer Conference than the opportunity to take a first look at Gothic developer Piranha Bytes’ role-playing sequel Risen 2: Dark Waters, we don’t want to hear it. This sequel takes the high-fantasy world of Risen, which took place on a besieged island, and will become a full-on, full-fledged, full-featured, full-monty pirate role-playing game, where you play not only as Piranha Bytes’ established “Hero” character, but also as a seafaring adventurer in a fantastic age of sail.
Risen 2 takes place some in-game years after the events in the first game. Specifically, the Hero has vanquished the threat of the powerful titan monster that threatened his island home after first defeating the evil inquisitor and claiming the villain’s magical eyepatch–an artifact that let the Hero identify the titan for what it was–a malevolent creature disguised as a natural disaster. Unfortunately, bigger problems are afoot–other titans are awakening near other islands in the area, and worse yet, hideous sea monsters have emerged from the deep, completely disrupting trade routes and generally causing the few survivors who exist in the world to be very, very grumpy.
And as it turns out, the Hero is the grumpiest of all. In a first for a Piranha Bytes game, the Hero does not suffer from amnesia and does remember his hard-fought battles and narrow escapes perfectly well, thank you very much. However, his cool reception by an unappreciative populace has made him bitter and frustrated, though he still seeks to save the world by finding some means to rescue the other islands from their impending doom.
