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High Scores And Egos: There's Always A Bigger Doodle Wired has a nice feature up on Ultima Richard Garriott and his cosmonaut training in Russia’s Star City. Written by Masters of Doom author David Krushner, here’s a sample:
It’s one thing to adjust to life in Star City–but quite another to endure the confounding, confining, and sometimes just plain goofy training regimen. The first challenge is the language. Garriott is an autodidact wunderkind who persuaded his high school teachers that learning Basic code counted as fulfiling his foreign-language requirement. He won’t be as fortunate at Star City. All of the instructions, instrumentation, and communications in space will be in Russian. So, for four hours a day, Garriott and Halik slave over fat, dusty language books in class, then tote them back to the Prophy to study more at night.
Great stuff. Click below to check out the full piece.
Going to Space? [Wired]
Sony’s PS3 SingStore hasn’t exactly set our great balls on fire (yet!). It functions superbly, but the majority of updates are old songs we’ve already seen on PS2, and even then, are usually the crummy PS2 songs. But anyway. Maybe we’re just mean, bitter old cynics, because Sony announced yesterday that for all its flaws, the PS3′s SingStore has still sold 2.2 million tracks since it launched late last year. Which is nothing but money in the bank for SCEE.
CyberConnect2 president Hiroshi Matsuyama is now the number one reason I want to learn to speak Japanese. He has this quick-talking, sly sort of accent that reminds me a bit of a stereotypical used car salesman that is completely compelling to listen to. I almost wish that his translator would stop interrupting at the Atari press conference at the Games Convention today, though that would have meant me missing him announcing that Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm will be hitting the PlayStation 3 with downloadable content available from day one. What kind of downloadable content? Unfortunately he couldn’t say, but either way, it’s good to see an anime fighting game – traditionally fire and forget deals – with post-release support already in the works.
And yes, Matsuyama, who considers himself the ultimate Naruto fan, ended his presentation with a joyful shout – “Believe it!” Sounds so much better coming from a Japanese used car salesman.
Last week, I went to the stronghold of George Lucas LucasArts in the posh Presidio of San Francisco for some hands-on with the multiplayer mode of Fracture. Too bad I can’t tell you about it, because the embargo expires tomorrow.
But! I can tell you about the single player mode that I snuck back in to see today…
After being plied with sushi and diet coke, I sat down with Fracture big wigs Chris Norris and Paul Armatta to play through a few levels of the campaign. I won’t lie – I suck at shooters, so I was anxious about embarrassing myself, even on the lowest difficulty setting.
When I told this to Chris, he replied: “[Former LucasArts president]Jim Ward always said easy needs to be easy.”
And so it was. It was so easy, I was able to run up and punch three guys in a row, unlocking the “pugilist” Achievement.
Still, melee is melee for any shooter – much like a shotgun to the face never gets old. The big question, then, is: How is this different than Halo? Pretty much everyone asks this question whenever a shooter comes out; and you can bet your arse developers ask themselves the same question whenever they make a shooter in this post-Halo world.
When I saw the trailers for Speed Racer, I thought “hey, that looks kind of neat”. Then, the reviews came out. A rating of 37? That’s got to hurt. NZ dev Sidhe Interactive, which was responsible for the game tie-in, thinks the movie took a giant dump on its chances of success. Here’s what Jos Ruffel, the company’s business development manager, had to say at this year’s GC Developers Conference:
“When we were first asked to do Speed Racer the property it was incredible, it was very exciting. It was a film by the Wachowski brothers and it was about car racing – awesome that’s going to make a great game”.
The Wachowski brothers? I mean, other than the first Matrix film, have they done anything good? Did you see Invasion? No, neither did I.
It can’t be easy balancing demands and expectations from a studio with the desire to make a solid game. To be honest, I don’t think the sort of people who buy games based on a movie like Speed Racer are expecting the next Gran Turismo. Stick to the basics and add a bit of jazz, that’s what I say.
Poor Speed Racer movie hindered our game, says Sidhe Interactive [GamesIndustry.biz, via Tsumea]
Not to be confused with the newly-edited cinematic clip, this trailer is all gameplay, and shows naught but the new Tyranid units doing unspeakable things to those poor, innocent Space Marines.
