Have you been walking around wearing a fedora, calling girls dames and pretending you’re in 1947 Los Angeles in anticipation for Rockstar’s L.A. Noire? I know I have. While the world waits for the chance to interrogate bad guys and drive around in a 40’s Caddy, Rockstar has thrown us a bone. After last Tuesday’s announcement of L.A. Noire: The Collected Stories, a series of original short fiction inspired by the game itself, Rockstar delivers with it’s first entry “What’s in a Name” by Jonathan Santlofer.
So head over to Rockstargames.com and check it out. The story is available to read on the site or as a downloadable PDF.
Last week Namco Bandai of Japan had some information leaked out that they were working on something called Dragon Ball Game Project Age 2011. Now it has become official as they have opened up a teaser website for the hopefully soon to be renamed game. You can view the website here but as the writing itself is in Japanese there isn’t much to see.
The translation from what is on the website shows that the game will promise to deliver action drama and scale the likes we have yet to see from a Dragon Ball game. Also it promises to be the most realistic Dragon Ball title ever aiming to make players feel like they have truly become the character they are playing. Now with a Fall release in Japan it will be very interesting to see how exactly they plan on making the Dragon Ball franchise realistic and as immersive as they are teasing.
Sometime in the third quarter of this year, between July and September the beta for Diablo III may be released for public beta testing. This news comes out of Activision Blizzard’s first quarter earnings call and Blizzard CEO Mike Morhaime spoke about the fact that the title has been making some great progress lately. Or more exactly he said:
“We began internal company-wide testing last week. The game looks great, and we’re currently targeting a Q3 launch for external beta testing.”
This means that at some point later this year all of the waiting for a taste of Diablo III will come to an end. At least that is the plan at the moment, but being as there is still no official release date given there is a good chance that the beta may not fall in this release window either. We’ll find out more as time goes by.
Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater 3D looks to be set for a November release according to Konami. In a recent talk with MCV Pete Stone, Manager of Konami UK, he mentions that the remake of Metal Gear Solid: Snake Eater on the PlayStation 2 will be getting a release in November.
This November release brings together the release date for Snake Eater 3D and Silent Hill: Downpour together. Although Downpour is being released on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 while Snake Eater 3D is being released on the 3DS. This means that fans of Konami’s games should have a busy month if no delays end up occurring between now and then. Also of course this means that fans of Snake will be able to get their hands on some 3D action.
Dragon’s Dogma is Capcom’s latest endeavor into the RPG world and it will allow players to make their characters and select which class they want to play as they enter the world. The first classes revealed by Capcom are the Fighter, Strider and Mage class. Alongside these reveals are a few screenshots for each class showing how they will look in combat as well as some character art.
Fighters are adept at close range combat and have extensive knowledge with their swords and weapons. Striders on the other hand are agile characters that keep their distance and use a bow as their main weapon, but are fast enough to run circles around enemies in close quarter combat. Mages are masters of the mystic arts and can use a variety of different spells to dispose of enemies infront of them.
For the most part these classics are all self explanatory and are your standard RPG class affair except with a name change from Archer to Strider. Dragon’s Dogma will be released early next year on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 and with more classes on the way hopefully there will be some new ground broken with DD.
Battlefield 3 is a title that is being hotly anticipated by fans of the series and with a beta for the title on the way, excitement is at a peak level. Some people are taking advantage of this excitement however because a website known as Bf3nation has been giving out beta keys in an attempt to phish consumer information. The website keys are indeed a scam and EA has been trying to shut down the site but has not been able to thus far.
The scam itself was exposed by the people at Battlefield 3 Online Forums which did the legwork to discover the scam itself. As you can see from their information the fact that the owner of the website has previously attempted these schemes before, it is bad news for those caught in the trap. Honestly if the Battlefield 3 beta had been about to begin we would have reported on it as it is something that will be highly publicized by EA as the Battlefield series is one of their most popular.
As a graphic artist it is probably a pretty decent notch in your belt to say that you have worked on a very widely marketed game. Such is the case with Althea Suarez Gata. On her LinkedIn profile resume it shows that work may have been performed on the in-game cinematic of an Alan Wake sequel. There has been no official word on the title ever since the first game was released back in 2010 but Alan Wake’s developer Remedy has always been eager to start up on a second title.
At this time the existence of Alan Wake 2 is at best pure speculation and rumor though with E3 approaching in under a month and this artist profile showing the possible existence of the sequel, maybe fans should be getting their hopes up just a tiny little bit for an announcement at E3.
If you have been hiding under a rock then maybe you don’t know that Brink will be released tomorrow in the United States for the PC, PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360. Also you should know that there has been quite a large media campaign going to teach prospective players the ropes of Brink’s SMART system.
Brink looks to be a game featuring plenty of shooting and free running around the environment as you shoot even more. The game focuses on a civil war premise where one force is trying to escape The Ark while the other is trying to make everything nice and secure. With combat focusing heavily on the multiplayer aspect of things it will be interesting to see the sale differential between the PC and 360 versions of the game compared to that of the PS3, considering the PS3’s lack of online play at the moment.
If you have been browsing the internet today then you may have seen the story that The PlayStation Network would be available on May 31st. This is not the case however as many of these reports are saying that the PlayStation Network would be down fully until the 31st but that is not the case. Apparently, Bloomberg, the original source of the information quoted Sony spokesman Shigenori Yoshida supposedly saying that their plan is “to restart services fully by May 31.”
However, after contacting Sony and receiving an answer back to the inquiry, it seems that is not the case. Patrick Seybold from Sony stated that there is no current date for the service to be back up and that there is no new information at this time regarding the services. Sony originally stated that the PSN would be up by the end of last week but as you can see, that is not the case. At the moment Sony is attempting to clarify all of these rumors, especially considering that if the May 31st date was accurate that would mean the PSN would be down for a total of 41 days, a very terrible number all Sony consumers.
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing a few of the folks over at Red Fly Studio of Austin, Texas about their work on franchises like Ghostbusters, Star Wars, Thor, and especially the team’s original IP: Mushroom Men. The following is the exchange between myself (CC), Chad Barron (CB), and James Clarendon (JC).
Chris Cerami: I’d like to thank you guys for taking the time to answer some questions for us. I think Red Fly is an excellent developer and I’m sure folks would like to know more about you. Why don’t we start by finding out a little about the studio’s history? When did Red Fly start and what were some of your earlier projects? How big is the team and who are the head honchos.
Chad Barron: Dan Borth and Kris Taylor started Red Fly back in 2005 outsourcing their art talents (they did the facial animations for Gears of War). During that time, Mushroom Men was being turned from an idea to an actual pitch document for publishers. In November 2006, Gamecock Media gave us the green light to create Mushroom Men, so Red Fly as a studio actually began in January 2007.
CC: Mushroom Men had a very unique feel to it, especially among Wii games. Between the soundtrack by Les Claypool, the use of anthropomorphic fungi, and its weapon crafting and salvage system it had a lot of creative features for a 3D platformer. Were there any games, past or present, that really inspired you in creating Mushroom Men?
CB: The idea of a “smaller than life scale” came about from a level in the original SiN game from Ritual Entertainment. One idea led to another and we thought “Hey! What about this meteor crashing and mutating things in the environment around the crash site?” Then we started looking at some of the Army Men series for some added inspiration as well.
CC: Likewise, were there any games or franchises your team saw that were clearly doing something wrong that you wanted to steer away from? In other words, did you see any other games and think, “Ok, that’s not very good, let’s make sure we don’t do that”?
CB: Not really. At this point, we were looking at the Wii system and figuring out the best way to utilize this new control mechanism. So that was our biggest hurdle at the time.
CC: How on Earth did someone come up with the idea of a civil war between 3-inch tall mushrooms? Did the idea to use the more edible Boletes and Morels as the good guys with the toxic Amanita and Lepiota as antagonists just arise naturally?
CB: We thought fungi would be great because of the cool character’s we could create. And we made it easy on ourselves – edible mushrooms = good guys, poisonous mushrooms = bad guys. 🙂
CC: When I was playing Mushroom Men: The Spore Wars, I definitely felt some classic sci-fi vibes, like a movie you might have seen at a drive-in during the 50s. Was MM intentionally given a sort of B movie style or was this just an unintentional side effect of mushrooms plus Claypool? If it was intentional, are there any particular films to which you would compare MM?
CB: We definitely set out to capture that vibe, so we were glad to see people catch onto the quirkiness of it. I don’t think there were any actual films we could point to besides just the genre in general.
CC: As much as I would love to ask Mushroom Men questions all day, let’s talk about some of your other projects. You’ve worked on some pretty prestigious licenses in the last couple of years, including Star Wars and Ghostbusters. I would imagine that this had to have been a moment of awe for some of the people at Red Fly. There were probably millions of kids in the 80s thinking, “Man, one day I’m gunna make the most radical Ghostbusters game ever!” (excuse obligatory 80s-ness of that quote). How did it feel getting to contribute something to such huge franchises that are so beloved?
James Clarendon: Of course it was a dream come true…these were franchises that we grew up with and wanted to do them justice. Then the reality hit: we had to live up to those childhood fantasies! It was a huge challenge finding that right balance between ensuring we were providing a great game experience and still delivering the core fantasies of both Ghostbusters and Star Wars. In the end, it was one of those “try everything from left field and see what can work.” The teams were always agile, insanely creative, and willing to dedicate the time it took to get to the point where we were happy with what we were delivering.
CC: Were there any challenges Red Fly faced in working on some of your licensed titles? I would imagine there was some external and internal pressure to maintain the integrity of a license, but there is also sometimes a lack of respect among more jaded gamers for many licensed games (we all do it sometimes). Have you experienced any of that cynicism? Has it helped that Ghostbusters and The Force Unleashed, for example, weren’t just movie tie-ins but were instead more unique creations?
JC: Of course there were challenges, but we were lucky to strike up good relationships with our publishers: they were happy to see that we have flexible teams willing to give anything a shot, and from our point of view, we were happy to have people that supported us and went out of their way to support us as much as possible. We looked to find the game first, instead of making the license dictate what we could and couldn’t do. Once we had a vision and things were feeling right, we pushed the game design as much as possible to embrace the license and really make it shine. There were a lot of long nights, but ultimately we ended up in bringing some fun and inventiveness that set us apart from our 360 & PS3 cousins. 🙂 These are titles that stand on their own, with their own take on the licenses. We often looked at it as two completely different directors getting the same script: how would Werner Herzog and Steven Spielburg approach that?
CC: Red Fly recently released Thor: God of Thunder for the Wii. Since your team has created quite a few titles for the Wii now, is there something that instinctively draws you toward the system?
CB: At this point, Red Fly had pretty much made a name for itself in the Wii market, so that is what we were approached with. Our main goal was to prove that you didn’t need to be a 1st party studio to create a good Wii game. Red Fly is actually in the process of working on its first PS3/360 game now, so we are moving into being a multi-platform studio. (CC: That’s damn exciting!)
CC: With Thor, gameplay seems to be pretty fast-paced and heavy hitting, but there are also some features that aren’t in the PS3/360 version of the game. Can you tell us a little bit about some of the exclusives for the Wii version?
CB: The only thing we really share with the next gen systems are some story and character similarities. Everything else is pretty much unique. The Wii version has flight levels, Midgard (Earth) levels, Rune collection to enhance combat, Motion Comics and even the 30 minute episode of Thor from the new Mighty Avengers cartoon on TV.
CC: Is there a particular part of Thor that your team enjoys playing the most (like an office-wide favorite level), or does everyone have their own opinions? And if so, whose opinion is right?
CB: I think with Thor on the Wii, it’s all about play style. I am a fan of the Cyclone powers, so you will see me equip those types of Runes and upgrades. Other people like the Lightning or Mjolnir upgrades, so at any time you would see all these different types of play-styles all over the office. As for whose opinion is right, it is the person worthy enough to wield the power of Mjolnir! <sorry, couldn’t pass that up>
CC: I think it would be appropriate to finish this up by returning to Mushroom Men (I told you I could ask questions all day). Will we ever see more of Pax and the other fungi folk or would you guys rather work on something new rather than revisit the franchise?
CB: We would love to reboot that franchise! Even though MM was well received, there was no marketing behind the title before its release, so a lot of people didn’t know about it. But we have a ton of ideas to keep Pax in play, so hopefully we can be given another chance to bring Pax back. Maybe we should start a campaign? 🙂
CC: I’d be all for it. That’s it for my time with Red Fly. I’d like to thank Chad and James for taking the time to answer all of my questions and Red Fly Studio for creating some excellent experiences on the Wii. Thor is out now for the Wii for anyone with a taste for brawling and Norse mythology (or at least Marvel’s version of it). We’ll all be looking forward to news on Red Fly’s next projects and we’ll be sure to fill you all in when that time comes.
