Sega has a page up now touting “Night of the Werehog,” an animated short that should release sometime soon to build hype for Sonic Unleashed, which hits Europe Nov. 14 and North America Nov. 18. Not sure if the story will be part of the game’s canon or what, or if it will tease in-game cutscenes but visually it’s some first-rate CGI, and here you can enjoy watching Sonic beat arse as his werehog self.
Sonic Set to Star in Animated Short: Night of the Werehog [The BBPS]
Not rock-the-foundations-of-gaming stuff, but Naruto fans might be interested to know that the demo of Naruto: The Broken Bond, is up on Xbox Live. I think Major Nelson forgot to mention this. Anyway, it clocks in at 765 MB and lets you take a peek at the latest installment of the anime action adventure game, which drops Nov. 18 in North America and Nov. 21 in Europe. Fahey took a look at a video and weighed in with his impressions back around E3 timeish.
No one is suggesting a future iteration of Half-Life’s protagonist will suddenly start talking, like Chief Bromden savouring Juicy Fruit, but Matt Smith, writing at Thunderbolt Games, has an eloquent defence of Gordon Freeman’s muteness, why it works so well in this series, and why Freeman is such a beloved character despite saying nary a word.
L.B. Jeffries has a nice piece up arguing for more relevant and provocative settings in games in order to raise awareness and perhaps do something a little greater for disastrous (real world) situations. He points out that violence isn’t incompatible with this, thus many classic genres would probably be quite at home dealing with nasty current day situations (as he points out, film has already done this — though not always through violent means — though Jeffries uses Rambo 4 as a cinematic touchstone). Of course, this comes with some problems:
Kotakuite Daniel Novais sent me an email this past week, asking me to take a look at his “little short artsy game” called Estamos Pensando (Portuguese for ‘We Are Thinking’). Inspired in part by Jason Rohrer’s Passage, Estamos Pensando is a sweet, sad, and polished little game. Daniel said that he’s now trying to work on something a little happier, since one comment on Rohrer’s Gravitation noted that these ‘artsy’ games are usually depressing. There are Portuguese and English versions of the game, and gameplay is quite simple. The game has apparently gotten some nice initial reviews since its submission to the Brazilian symposium SBGames 2008 festival, and it’s worth a little bit of your time.
So Variety reported that the terms of the deal between Apple Corps and MTV gives Harmonix access to 45 songs from the albums spanning 1962 to 1969 — the prime cut of the Beatles’ catalog — for a Beatles music game. That tidbit’s useful information, because knowing the maximum size of the set list helps in guessing what will make it into the game. Team Teabag just took a swing at it, looking at the 45 most popular songs for The Beatles in that timespan. IT IS NOT AN OFFICIAL SET LIST, LEAKED OR OTHERWISE. It’s just a good guess at what we might see in a Fab Four game.
Michael Abbott of the Brainy Gamer has a nice reminder of why we play RPGs (well, those of us who play RPGs), based on some of his undergraduates’ writings on their experiences in Fallout 1 and 2. Michael notes that the exercise — writing autobiographies of their characters — is often used in theatre, but it never occurred to him that it would be useful for his students in his RPG seminar, until “we began discussing the characters they had created …. The sense of ownership they clearly felt, and their remarkably vivid descriptions of their experiences in the games, made the assignment a no-brainer.” Which goes to one of the reasons why people make the investment in RPGs:
This is the opening 5 minutes of Left 4 Dead and what can I say? You should watch it, it’s very entertaining, very well acted, and would do the zombie genre proud if it were a film. Lots of guns blazing and some NSFW language if you’re watching around others.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun has published a developers diary from senior game designer Bruce Harlick, one of the minds behind NCSoft’s City of Heroes; it’s an interesting look at the development process for the forthcoming Issue 13 update. It’s a bottom-up glimpse into what’s gone into designing the new Cimerora and Midnight Squad story arcs, and as Harlick explains, even updates aren’t an easy design process:
