Just Cause should be an easy game to dislike. It’s a pretty clear attempt to cash in on the popularity of A
David Tolin
Lara Croft is a bona fide superstar. She really, really is. Since the release of her flagship game in 1996, she has survived lions, tigers, gangsters, spirits and evil deities. Perhaps more impressive, though, she has survived five increasingly poor videogame sequels and two horrid cinematic forays. Any other icon would surely have collapsed under the weight of such high profile failures, but Ms. Croft continues to excite the gaming populace in spite of her rocky road to celebrity. Tomb Raider: LegendA
It’s not an uncommon occurrence in the game industry for a title to be rushed out the door to meet a big deadline, only to suffer from a poor reception as a result. Tons of companies have been known to push games for a high-profile release date and then face fan backlash due to unforeseen bugs, technical issues or lackluster gameplay. That’s why it’s so surprisingA
The prospect of taking one subject matter that is intrinsic to a certain medium, say comic books, and transplanting it into a decidedly different medium is both an exciting and trepidacious proposition. All of us have seen those things close to our heart taken and watered down for the sake of banking in on their popularity and making a few quick dollars. This shameful truth has never been the sole ownership of the videogame industry, but its presence has always seemed to be felt more acutely by gamers and followers of the medium. How many games since the age of sprites and sixteen colors have been suckered into dropping their hard-earned money in exchange for a box pushing their favorite moniker, only to find the game within the box to significantly lacking? Total Recall, Superman and even the infamous E.T. have all been positioned in such a way as to appeal to an existing fan base, despite sporting an underdeveloped end product.
So why do we still follow these games that try to ride upon the coattails of popular properties? Well, morbid curiosity has something to do with it, for sure, but recent years have shown that a talented team and a passion for creating a genuinely memorable experience can turn what should have been a train wreck into something special. Granted these successes are still more the exception than the rule, but it is encouraging to know that the simple prospect of having a game being made about a popular movie, comic book, or whatever else is far from a predestined death sentence.
This is why when we first heard that the team at TellTale Games, a company that has existed well below most gamers’ radars up until now, was working to bring Jeff Smith’s venerable Bone comic to the PC in the form of a new adventure game, we kept our chins up and our hopes high. On the one hand, a failure would mean lots of subsequent therapy and nights spent sleeping in the closet crying over the latest graphic novel. Then again, the property has such potential, and a success by TellTale could mean something substantial for both casual and devoted fans.
Those of us at eToychest felt it was our civic duty to get down to the truth of the matter, and find out just where the loyalties of these folks at TellTale Games lied. To that end, we struck out on an epic quest that led us to sitting down and speaking with programmer Randy Tudor at TellTale. Randy is currently hard at work on the Bone game, but he was gracious enough to turn away from his computer screen long enough to put our fears to rest regarding the game, and to tell us a bit about where the team is planning on taking players with the title.
First of all, before we begin, let me thank you for speaking to us regarding Bone. It’s a game we are very excited about. What has your role been on the project?
I’m the gameplay programmer. I get to take all the assets produced by the other members of the team, both programmers and artists, put it all together and make it go. There’s a lot of pressure, of course, but I think it’s the best job in the business.
What other games have you worked on prior to Bone?
The first game I ever worked on was Indiana Jones’ Desktop Adventures, the last LucasArts game to ship on a floppy disc. I also worked on Afterlife, Yoda Stories, Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, ToeJam and Earl III, the ill-fated Full Throttle 2 and Sam and Max: Freelance Police, and some other Star Wars games.
Bone is a very long series that is essentially divided into smaller chunks. Will Bone follow the same storyline as the series? If so, at what point in the series does the game take place?
Essentially, yes. The first episode parallels Out From Boneville.
How is the story of the Bone game broken up? Is it told as one long story, or it broken up into smaller acts?
It’s a serial adventure, broken up into episodes. Out From Boneville is also the first book published by Scholastic as part of their new graphic novel imprint, Graphix. It happened to have great content for the first game. We will see if the next book, The Great Cow Race, works as well.
How many and which characters will be playable?
There are 3 player characters in the first episode. The first half of the game is mostly Fone Bone’s, and the second half more heavily Phoney’s. The third character? Well, I will tell you it’s not Smiley.
What kind of adventure game will Bone be? Is it point and click, more action oriented, or rather more focused on puzzle solving?
We tried to achieve a balance between narrative and puzzle solving, with a bit of action thrown in to spice things up. The first episode has dialog puzzles, traditional inventory puzzles, and a few actions sequences.
Outside of playable characters, what of non-playable personalities? What others from the comic can players expect to see?
Well, just about everybody. The Bone cousins, Thorn, Gran’ma Ben, Ted and his big brother, the dragon, Kingdok, and of course the rat creatures, all figure prominently in the first episode.
How stupid will the rat creatures be?
Stupid stupid. The Rat Creatures are just great villains, they have so much personality.
How much involvement and creative input does Jeff Smith have on the project?
Well, he hasn’t asked to look at any of my code yet, but we’ve consulted with Jeff on just about everything: the look of the characters and environments, character animation, voice casting and game design. Jeff is a great storyteller and has offered much to the team in terms of bringing out personality. He is also a trained animator, which explains the great sense of movement he achieves in the comic book.
As fans of the comic, you no doubt are aware that much of the comic’s humor is dependent on the panel-to-panel style inherent to the comic structure. How has this translated to an animated medium without panels?
I think we’ve done a good job of capturing the essence of the comic. We can use the camera to achieve much the same kind of panel-to-panel affect. I can’t say yet what the final result will be, but we’re definitely headed in the right direction.
Will the game feature voices, or is it pure text? If there are voices, have you begun looking for voice actors yet?
The voice actors have already been cast and recorded. Jeff was involved in the selection process which was cool, he pointed us in a general direction and we tracked down the actors. We are really excited with the performances!
When compared to other arguably more mainstream comics, Bone is not as well known. How are you planning on overcoming this niche nature of the comic in order to appeal of a more mainstream audience for the game?
Scholastic recently published the complete Bone series in a single volume, and is doing a great job of bringing Bone to a larger audience, so that will help. Bone has developed a strong following over the years because it is high quality, it is just now getting mainstream notice it may be on the cusp of being huge. As a developer, I want to make games that I would like to play myself; if we sell a million copies in the process, that’s great, but I’m happy just going to sleep at night (sometimes they let me go home) knowing that I’m working on a game I can be proud of.
How far along is the game currently, and what facet of the game is the team currently working on?
We’re quite far along when you consider we’ve only been in production about 5 months. At the moment I’m working on the Dragon’s Stair scene. I’m not sure what everyone else is doing because I’m working from home right now, but I know Kevin Bruner is working on a top secret action level in the desert because he keeps bothering me with email about locust, jumping Bones, and rampant subtitles. Graham McDermott is probably eating and working on our dialog tool. Heather Logas is likely working on dialog logic and monitoring the number of days since our last power failure. Graham Annable and Kim Lyons are no doubt making the game look even more beautiful. Jon Sgro is probably making up a more stringent file naming convention while rigging Smiley, light mapping 3 different environments, and worrying about being a new father very soon. I’ll bet Dave Grossman is thinking of something very witty. And Dan Connors is probably worrying.
What are you, as a single person on this project, most proud of thus far in the game’s development?
All of it, but especially the Bone lunch box Jeff gave us. It kicks ass. Dan got a Phoney t-shirt. I’m jealous.
Again, thank you for taking the time to talk to us about Bone. Is there anything else you would like to add that we have not yet touched on?
Just that they made me say all that about not wanting to make a lot of money. Buy Bone! I gotta put three kids through college!
Considering the popularity of Konami’s Karaoke Revolution series on the PS2, it was only a matter of time before the franchise made its debut on other systems. Roughly one year after the release of the original game on the PS2, Karaoke Revolution is now available for Xbox users across the country. This is cause for a reasonable amount of celebration for Xbox users, of course, because the series is still the best implementation of karaoke on any console. However, this Revolution is arriving as little more than a direct port of PS2’s first volume, and many of the improvements and additions made to the series over the past year (in two sequels) are conspicuously absent from this version. Konami can’t really be faulted for sticking with a winning formula, but some of the omissions just don’t make any sense, and it makes this debut package on the Xbox less desirable as a result.
For those unfamiliar with the series, here are the basics: Like traditional karaoke programs, Karaoke Revolution offers sing-along fun for up to eight players. However, where Karaoke Revolution breaks away from the pack is the fact that the game is built around a central gameplay mode in which a singer’s pitch is monitored and scored by the game itself. All songs included with the game have been broken down into a string of measures – think verse partitions – that scroll across the bottom of the screen with the lyrics. A pitch bar scrolls along with the words and vocal input from the player is matched against this bar as the song plays out. An arrow on the left side of the screen goes up and down with the voice pitch of the player, and matching one’s often flat or sharp inclinations against the preset requirements of each song is necessary to avoid failing the task. Players are represented onscreen by an animated avatar of sorts (everything from a Cyndi Lauper wannabe to a guy in a teddy bear costume) and a virtual audience cheers (or jeers) along in a variety of locations. Sing badly and it’s a one-way ticket to getting kicked off the stage, but a successful rendition of the song in question results in some nice particle effects and admiration from the crowd. Additional gameplay modes exist – most notably a straight karaoke mode and a mode in which the players judge each other’s performances – but the main meat of is the standard game mode. The game ships with a nice handheld microphone from Logitech, so all the materials necessary for a good time are right at hand.
This basic gameplay model has remained consistent across all of the PS2 sequels, while offering additional songs with each new iteration. The Xbox version includes the complete song list from the PS2’s first volume, and this isn’t very surprising. A complete collection of all the songs in the first two volumes would have been nice (especially considering the fact that the expansion pack business model made popular in Japan seems destined to remain on those shores), but that’s just wishful thinking. Konami clearly wants to extend the franchise across another platform, and the publisher can’t really be blamed for not laying out all of its songs at the outset. To its credit, developer Harmonix has included some new song content in the form of ten Motown hits that have not been available in any PS2 version. Also, the title boasts Live support for downloading new content, and if this feature materializes it will be a huge incentive for Revolution fans. Otherwise, there’s really no reason for fans of the original game to pick up this version, especially since some of the franchise’s more gameplay oriented improvements have not been implemented here. The ability to choose between short and long versions of each song was introduced with Volume 2 on the PS2, and there is no good reason it should not have been included for this Xbox version. Also, the medley mode from Volume 2 seems like a no-brainer for inclusion, as does the duet mode from Volume 3. Again, Konami clearly intends to follow a similar life cycle for this series on the Xbox as it did on the PS2, but why should the series intentionally be dumbed back down to its roots just because it’s shifting platforms? It would have been a far better move to bring a full-featured version to the Xbox now, coinciding with the release of Volume 3 on the PS2, and then proceed with new content on both platforms from there. Again, it may not be surprising that this is not the case, but it still hurts when a company makes a decision that is purely financial over the best interests of gamers.
A visual overhaul might have gone a long way toward assuaging this pain, but that apparently wasn’t in the cards, either. Revolution for the Xbox comes packed with the same characters and venues from the original PS2 game and not much more. A few unlockable costumes seem to have made the trip from the sequels to this version, but nothing else has been improved over the PS2 version. The visuals are nearly identical, which is very surprising considering their simplistic nature to begin with. The only saving grace is the audio, which has improved tenfold. For starters, the exclusive Motown hits are rendered by the original artists, which breaks with a long-standing tradition of the series. The cover artists have always been more than acceptable, but hearing this many songs sung by the original artists is a real eye-opener. Here’s hoping Harmonix can pull off more fully licensed songs in the future. Also, the addition of Dolby Digital support improves the title considerably. Vocals from the microphone are now clearly distributed from the center channel and are much easier to hear, while the music and audience noise have been distributed appropriately across the surrounds. The impact this makes is incredible and stands as the single most convincing argument for moving the series to the Xbox (until the Live support takes shape, that is).
In fairness, Karaoke Revolution on the Xbox is still a great gameA
