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Sunday Comics: Dead Island Martin Binfield, a former artist at Sony Cambridge Studio, has recently posted a showreel of his work, and contained within are glimpses of some games we never actually got to see. Games like binned PS3 exclusives Heavenly Sword 2, and Eight Days.
Alex Garland made a name for himself as the writer of the novel The Beach. Then he wrote the script for horror flick 28 Days Later and the one for sci-fi film Sunshine. Now?
Ah, LittleBigPlanet. Now you’re learning! Cross-promotion is where it’s at (“it” being cash money), not peculiar regional holidays. So it’s heartening to see new Killzone & Heavenly Sword sackboys on the way.
There’s a good chance many Playstation 3 owners will have an odd sense of familiarity with Anna Torv, star of new J.J. Abrams show The Fringe. And many have probably already worked out the secret. For those who are still wishing she’s a woman they made eyes with in a Melbourne bar, think again. Torv was the face behind the face of Nariko in Heavenly Sword, joining Andy Serkis and his merry team of motion capture artists. So when you were gasping at the beauty of Nariko, a lot of that magic was thanks to Torv. However it’s unlikely she will be seen in real life wearing Nariko’s outfits. Maybe a write in campaign could get them worked into The Fringe?
And if you are really lucky, maybe you did make eyes in Melbourne. Torv is a Victorian, so you just never know your luck. If you haven’t already checked it out “by other means”, The Fringe starts tomorrow night locally on Channel Nine.
Film Beowulf was sure expensive to make! The CG-laden flick was budgeted around $AU 158.08 million — not exactly chump change. Heavenly Sword developer Ninja Theory thinks it could have done the flick cheaper. Twenty percent of the cost, actually! Oh ho ho ho. Let’s hear what Ninja Theory’s Tameem Antoniades has to say:
We see an entirely different area of progress: a form of independent production based on real-time game engine technology. We reckon you could do something like Beowulf for 15-20 per cent of the cost… If you are already creating hi-res assets for a game, then sharing these can bring that cost down even further… We have a lot of experience in performance capture, animation, rendering and so on. We can compete in the same way that indie films can live alongside blockbusters.
20 percent of the cost is dandy and all, Ninja Theory, but would your film have Angelina Jolie? Well.
Make Beowulf [Games Industry]
Being an independent developer is brutal. Just ask independent developer and Heavenly Sword dev Ninja Theory, and it’ll tell you that being an independent developer is brutal. Says co-founder and chief developer Nina Kristensen. It’s a brutal environment out there for an independent, particularly considering the size of the games that we’re developing… But we’ve now signed up the new game and the future looks pretty rosy for us… our new game is going to be PS3 and Xbox 360.
Lesson learned: Being an independent developer is brutal for every independent developer except for Ninja Theory. Ninja Theory Hard At Work [GamesIndustry]
The creators of PlayStation 3 exclusive Heavenly Sword won’t be working on a sequel anytime soon, according to a report from GamesIndustry.biz. The UK dev has moved on, focusing on an original “triple-A blockbuster” concept that it plans to ship for both the PS3 and the Xbox 360. Since Sony owns the Heavenly Sword IP, they could hand it off to someone else, but Ninja Theory’s going platform agnostic. But that’s not all it’s working on.
