After a bit of silence, we are starting to get some good stuff for Xbox Live Arcade. Today Microsoft confirmed that Team 17’s Worms will debut on the online service on Wednesday, March 7 for 800 Microsoft Points. The game had been expected well before now, but was delayed on two separate occasions due to quality control. But all that is behind us, and we’re not holding a grudge. Next week, it’s ninja ropes at dawn.
Chris Chester
Officials from German developer 10tacle Studios have announced plans for the third title in the Ready 2 Rumble arcade style satirical boxing series. Through the company’s Singapore subsidiary, along with licensor The Buffer Partnership and executive producer Stereo Mode, the game will be developed for unspecified video game platforms by AKI Corporation (Def Jam, WWF Wrestlemania series).
Though little is known about the sequel currently, early information seems to indicate that the earlier games’ cast of original fighters may be replaced by “caricatures of numerous celebrities” who take it to the ring.
10tacle adds that the company expects turnover through distribution of the game to exceed $20 million by 2010, suggesting that the game may still be quite a ways from seeing the light of retail.
Well isn’t this a strange turn of events. After seemingly endless court battles and ongoing patent litigation between Immersion and Sony over rumble technology, the two companies have finally agreed to put their disagreements aside and entertain the possibility of bringing Immersion’s force feedback technology to future PlayStation products.
You may recall that despite Sony’s company line to the contrary, Immersions complaint against the company was the chief reason PlayStation 3 consumers were left without rumble in their Sixaxis controllers. This latest news could conceivably spell a future filled with vibrating wireless first party controllers for Sony’s latest console, though nothing official has been chiseled into stone just yet.
In a statement released today, Immersion officials revealed that the company will receive the amount of the judgment entered by the District Court, which includes damages, pre-judgment interest, costs, and interest, in addition to retaining compulsory license fees ordered by the District Court which were already paid.
Terms of the business agreement between the parties provide SCE with certain new rights with respect to Immersion’s patent portfolio. Additional financial terms are not being disclosed.
“We look forward to exploring with Immersion exciting new ways to bring the largest and best range of gameplay experiences to our customers,” said Kazuo Hirai, President and Group Chief Operating Officer, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. “We are very excited about our new partnership with Immersion and the potential for new and innovative products incorporating their technologies.”
Immersion CEO Victor Viegas added: “We are pleased to have put this litigation behind us. Our new business agreement with Sony Computer Entertainment is specifically intended to enable advanced vibration capability for the benefit of the PlayStation gaming community. We are happy to provide our technology in this regard and hope to make technical proposals very soon with respect to use of our technology in the PlayStation products.”
As gamers, many of us have gone through periods where we lost sight of the reasons we first got into our hobby. Being a devotee to a specific form of media certainly has its merits, but it also comes with a number of downsides, not the least of which is that keeping up with the latest and greatest games can sometimes feel like a job. Games like World of Warcraft force you to endure a never-ending cycle of repetitive tasks that have a way of straying away from what most would consider a relaxing good time. Then along comes a title like Crackdown, which, while far from flawless in its execution, affirms the deeply held belief that we’re supposed to be playing games to have fun.
Crackdown puts you in the role of a superhuman cop tasked with cleaning up Pacific City by any means necessary. Gangs have overrun nearly every corner of the small island metropolis, and the city’s meager police force is ill equipped to take on the crime bosses in a direct confrontation. And neither are you, for that matter. While your abilities as a supercop are indeed quite super, you’ll need to level up your core attributes through constant use before you can hope to make a move on each of the city’s three kingpins. What’s more, each kingpin has a veritable army at his disposal, and direct confrontation can and will lead to a bloody and bullet-ridden end for your renegade hero. That is, unless you take on the lieutenants first, crippling the support networks that keep them in power.
While Crackdown has drawn numerous comparisons to Grand Theft Auto due to its sandbox nature, it is here where you can see the big difference between the two. The Grand Theft Auto games are traditional linear third-person action games put in the sandbox setting, Crackdown is a sandbox. Once you understand the task set out before you, the game leaves you well enough alone. Outside of periodic intelligence updates on the various lieutenants (including a nifty probability of success calculation), the game leaves things up to you. The sandbox element isn’t separated from the narrative itself. You’re genuinely encouraged to do things as you please. If you want to go for the kingpins and end the story straight out of the gate, the game leaves it open for you to try. For some, this sort of freedom might be a little too much, but for most, the ability to take complete control of your superhero is really a dream come true.
What elevates the game out of the realm of a short diversion or curiosity into A
Wrestling games have been in a serious slump for the past few years. Unsure of what to do with all the new hardware at their disposal, developers have floundered, letting the fantastic precedents set by the 32-bit and 64-bit eras fall by the wayside, as they tried to get the presentation of the games to mirror the television broadcasts as closely as they could. While they made a lot of progress in terms of the flashy graphics and life-like characters, the core mechanics that really make up the meat of gameplay were loose and confusing. If THQ and company had any hope of putting together a meaningful WWE experience for the next generation of consoles, they had to put a lot of stock in doing their inaugural effort correctly this time.
And for an inaugural run, Smackdown vs. Raw 2007 is a fine example of what happens when one takes a pretty good game and just keeps adding layers of polish. The skeleton of the game is a fairly complicated grapple system coupled with area-specific damage and a momentum meter. Essentially, you use the right stick to get your opponent into one of four different types of grapples, and from there you can choose one of eight moves by pushing the stick in a direction or an interactive move by clicking the stick. There are also various kinds of strikes, Irish whip moves, turnbuckle attacks, context-sensitive attacks, double-team attacks, grapple reversals, strike reversals, ground moves, weapons, and so on. It can be a bit overwhelming, and it’s going to take even the most seasoned veteran a little time to get acclimated to the controls, which require an astute memory and intimate familiarity with the controller.
The end result, for those willing to slog through their first dozen or so matches to get familiar with the controls, is a game that comes as close to replicating a televised wrestling match as I have ever seen- not just in presentation, but in the way the game plays out as well. You can be losing a match soundly for ten minutes before, just like in the real thing, you swing the momentum in your favor, get the crowd behind you, and deliver a punishing blow to end the match. Everything from the referee interactions, to the managers, to the interferences is done exactly like you’ll see on TV, and for fans of the WWE, it’s pure magic.
The game itself is bolstered by the most comprehensive and engrossing story mechanic I’ve ever seen in a wrestling game of this sort. You take the roll of a WWE superstar and get to participate in all the backstage hoopla that makes wrestling so much fun to watch in the first place. You challenge people to matches, make alliances, and even attack people every now and again. All of this directly affects which matches you take part in and how the crowd reacts to you. Your character isn’t a face or a heel by default; it’s up to you to make decisions either according to what you would do yourself or what you imagine your character would do. The story will change and adapt to reflect that.
The graphics and the voice-overs also go a long way towards engrossing you in the story. The character models are nearly picture perfect and are animated in such a way that you may have a hard time believing that you’re not watching television. The entire cast delivers convincing performances (well, convincing for wrestling anyway), and you can tell that THQ is getting some really high-level support for this game from within the WWE. The two sets of commentators can be a bit repetitive at times, but they always have something to say for all the crazy new situations you get your superstar into, so in that respect it’s fairly forgivable.
Rounding out the Smackdown vs. Raw package is a fairly robust multiplayer mode that fully supports player-created stables and championships. As an aside, most of the achievements are in the multiplayer arena, so it’s clear Yukes is keen on getting players to jump into the Live arena. I think that player-created federations still require a bit too much work outside of the confines of the game to be put together correctly, but the pieces are essentially there for those willing to go to the effort of putting them together.
At the end of the day, while Smackdown vs. Raw 2007 is probably the most robust and complete wrestling game I’ve ever seen for this generation of consoles or any generation of consoles for that matter, I can’t help but feel that its audience won’t reach far beyond those already heavily invested in the WWE. The controls are simply too complicated for anybody without a vested interest in the material to really get excited about it. Where the No Mercy series on the N64 managed to woo casual players with its simplicity and creativity, Smackdown vs. Raw is really only for the fans. If you’re a fan, it’s a must-buy. For the rest of us? Give it a rent.
