StarDestroyer.Net BBS

LOS ANGELES--Fulfilling the desires of the community seems to be high on the agenda for film-sim expansion The Movies: Stunts & Effects. In a demonstration of the game at an Activision press conference on Monday, we were shown about 10 minutes of the game played through at various stages. According to developer Lionhead, several of the elements that have been added have apparently been asked for by fans of the original game.

Top of that list is a new freeform 3D camera that lets you shoot the action for your film from wherever you see fit. It's not clear just how much impact this functionality will have on how well your films play out, but it should add a level of control that will be welcome for those aesthetes that like to show off their creations online.

We were also shown some of the new sets that will be available in the game. First we saw a miniature set over which a giant UFO was suspended, and on a second miniset, a man dressed in a monster costume waded between head-high skyscrapers.

Another part of the game to get a major overhaul is, as the title implies, the stunt section. Whilst it's possible for your leading man to turn fall guy if need be, the risk of injury is far higher than if you employ a proper stuntman. We saw one actor jump from a burning building, only to end up getting an injury--which was then diagnosed in the new on-site hospital as a broken foot.

The stuntmen can improve their skills with three different training regimes, including fire suits and martial arts, and this option will further improve your odds of getting through a scene without having to dig out insurance papers--and cause costly delays to your production.

Of course humor still plays an important part in the game, and much of the new content was enough to raise a minor chuckle from the audience. Some of the special-effect techniques were particularly enlightening, as we were shown a figure falling from a tall building in close up. Zoomed out, the actor was merely standing on one foot pretending to fall whilst horizontal buildings scrolled past on a background.

It wasn't clear from this demo whether or not the business side of the game has become more integrated with the fun of film-making, but whilst most of the game looks the same as the original, there are some new particle effects introduced to add a little more excitement to your movie masterpieces.

The creature editor basically lets you create all kinds of wildly different creatures by easily dragging and dropping parts, stretching and twisting them, and so on. You can paint your creature however you wish, give it any sort of skin texture you can think of, and take for a little "test drive" by wandering around in a closed environment, testing its roar, and so forth. The game automatically knows how to animate your creature based on how you put it together. For example, if you give your creature four equine legs, you can logically expect it to gallop around like a horse, and indeed it will--we tested it out. Whether you give your creature two or four (or more) legs is up to you. You also add a mouth(s), eyes, arms, hands, tails, horns, and more.

This is all made simple using a fully 3D interface. Pieces logically stick together where you'd want joints to form, and depending on the types of parts you use to make your creature, its nature will be different. For example, you can create a docile plant-like creature with strong senses by means of its antennae, or you can create a brutish monstrosity with enormous apelike arms and pincers and spikes and things sticking out of it. We initially settled on something of a hybrid between the two of these. No matter how absurd we tried to make our creature, the results still looked at least vaguely interesting, if not a little disconcerting. Of course it's possible to save your creations, and one of the amazing things about Spore is that your creatures may populate other players' galaxies by means of its "pollinated content" system, which will automatically transfer player content to other players.

There's clearly a great deal of novelty to the creature editor, but how does it affect gameplay? Apparently all the different parts available will have different ratings and costs, and will only become unlocked as the player gradually advances through the creature game. So don't expect to be able to make a huge gorilla / T-rex hybrid right off the bat. In fact, it sounds like the creature editor itself may first need to be unlocked. Creatures are ultimately rated on what appear to be three primary stats: power, speed, and stealth. The different parts will affect these statistics, and will also have different costs, forcing the player to make some tough choices in balancing the creature out. Then, you can just plop your critters into an existing ecosystem and watch the fur (or scales, or...) fly.

The creature editor does appear to have a few limitations, such as how it doesn't seem possible to make flying creatures, and creatures' gender doesn't seem to be clearly defined--oh, don't you worry, the creatures do mate. But let's just say it isn't apparent as to which one wears the pants in the family.

During the demonstration, Will Wright noted that "pretty much everything that's in this game, there's an editor for." Today we just got a chance to dabble with the creature editor for an eye-opening 15 minutes or so, but knowing that the game will also let us have similar control over buildings, cities, trees, vehicles, and even planets makes us anxious to see even more of what this game has to offer. Spore is scheduled for release in 2007. Look for GameSpot's full coverage of it from the 2006 Electronic Entertainment Expo.

The demonstration began with a cursory view of what we assume is a temporary game interface: one with six primary icons to represent the different evolutionary stages of your created critters: cellular, creature, tribal, city, global, and finally, space. Presumably, most players will want to begin at the beginning by creating an all-new critter from scratch. We skipped the cellular stage of development this time around and jumped right to the creature editor, which started us out with a mostly formless torso that contained a backbone with a few connected vertebrae. Wright demonstrated that shaping the creature's trunk was simply a matter of clicking and dragging the edge of the torso; he pulled the torso's spine upward and around to create a curved, slender neck, reminiscent of a swan's. Wright then slapped on a pair of legs with adjustable clawed toes--the designer explained that all appendages will have "morph channels" that will let you tweak the size and width of hands and feet, which will help govern their function. The designer then added a beaklike mouth to the front of the creature's body; apparently, the type, size, and shape of a critter's mouth will determine its diet (whether it's an herbivore, carnivore, or omnivore), as well as the sound of its voice (in our case, a birdlike squawk).

Wright finished off his creature, then jumped to the world view, where various other bizarre-looking beasties prowled through grasslands and forests. Wright affirmed that the flora in the game will be created procedurally (that is, automatically created by the game's AI systems) or custom-created by other players, while other creatures will also mostly be generated by other players and uploaded by Spore's online world server. We then took control of a specific critter, a comically scrawny, bug-eyed, six-legged critter with red-stripped yellow skin that might've been an evolutionary predecessor to Sesame Street's Big Bird. Wright took direct control of the creature and immediately began the all-important quest for food, first by attacking a flock of smaller, weaker critters. At this stage in your creature's evolution, combat seems to take place mainly by hammering on an attack key, which causes you to manually attack your targets until their health depletes to nothing from a vertical meter that floats over their heads (a meter that looks oddly similar to the motive bars from The Sims). Unfortunately, these little guys were too strong for us, so we fled in search of other creatures' eggs, and were chased off by a protective couple of warthog-like creatures, but we were successfully able to take advantage of the gentle nature of a herd of zebra-like herbivores to sneak past them quickly and gobble up their unborn offspring.

Wright explained that successfully eating earns you "DNA points," which then lets your creature mate and create offspring which can, in turn, be edited again with the creature editor. Wright's creature sent out a mating call (indicated by a high-pitched squawking as well as visible "rings" of sound emanating from the creature), which another critter of our species answered (with little Valentine hearts floating above its head, no less). The game's ambient music then switched to a romantic instrumental tune as the two critters bumped and ground against each other in a ritual that Wright described as "procedural mating." About two seconds later, the female was done and caused a pair of small nests to appear out of thin air, full of eggs. Wright then click on an egg and jumped into the creature creator to redesign his next generation to look tougher and meaner, and to have an extra pair of claws to fight with.

Apparently, once you hatch a new creature from an egg, you must begin life as a "baby" version of that critter. Wright navigated the tiny little monstrosity about the world, "annoying the neighbors" by encroaching on the territory of the same protective herbivores, then using another kind of "call" to gather other creatures of the same species to itself, thereby creating a herd. Herds eventually form the basis of the game's primitive societies at the game's "tribal" level of evolution--apparently, once you go tribal, you'll be able to use a "hut editor" to design the look of your creatures' dwellings, and once you advance to the city stage, you'll be able design more-modern buildings and even ambient flora.

We then skipped ahead to the very end of the city stage, at which your advanced civilization can research space travel. Wright clicked on his original town's "city hall" building and, with much fanfare (that is, tiny clusters of fireworks that seemed to greatly amuse our citizens), launched his civilization's first UFO. Apparently, once you launch your first UFO, you can then directly control the little spacecraft, flying along your planet's surface and using an "abduction ray" to pick up any other living creatures you wish, either to kidnap them (to later try colonizing another planet), or simply to give them a little flick of your wrist while you've got them hovering in midair, which flings them off into the distance. But we're sure no one would ever misuse the awesome power of space-traveling technology for something so trivial as repeatedly picking up and hurling little creatures off into the horizon.

We then zoomed out our view past our planet to the solar system, and later, to the universe view. Wright claimed that the universe we were seeing in action contained about half a million different stars, each with about four different planets, which means literally millions of different worlds to explore, colonize, treat with, and/or conquer. The habitability of different planets can be gauged at a glance by checking a series of "slider" gauges that presumably indicate criteria like temperature, atmosphere, and other things, as well as whether intelligent life already exists on that planet. We zipped past a more-bizarre-looking world with green oceans and purple landmasses, and attempted to colonize it by dropping one of the creatures we had abducted from our home planet among a colony of indigenous creatures. That didn't work out so well, since our gentle home-planet creature was torn limb from limb by the distrustful inhabitants of this new planet. Apparently, all creatures in the game are catalogued in an in-game reference known as the "Sporepedia," which catalogues the power, speed, senses, stealth, and social abilities of different critters with numerical values on what appear to be trading cards (and may possibly open the door for some kind of collectible card game).

We then tried our luck at communicating with a new planet inhabited by intelligent life forms. These green humanoids came out of their homes as we hovered our UFO over their city, waiting and muttering to themselves in wonder. Wright first attempted to be diplomatic by setting off some fireworks from his UFO, which the inhabitants seemed to love. With enough fireworks, Wright apparently impressed the indigenous population so much that the people of that world began to bow down and worship his mighty UFO. Wright then decided to press his luck by abducting one of the planet's citizens, which the once-adoring inhabitants interpreted as a hostile act. Immediately, these folk ran to their planetary armaments, blasting at the UFO with laser beams that Wright was able to subdue with the advanced laser weapons on his own ship. This caused the remaining citizens to flee in panic through the streets as though they were being invaded by hostile aliens--because, in fact, that's exactly what was happening.

Wright then decided to pull out of the fight, claiming he prefered to keep things diplomatic between his race and that race of inhabitants. However, he quickly received an interstellar transmission from that population that demanded an explanation--the transmission then offered a few dialogue options, including an apology and a declaration of war. Wright attempted to apologize, but the damage had apparently already been done; the critters he had attacked were so incensed that they immediately launched a counterattack against Wright's home planet, which send his ship another transmission, this time a call for help from invading forces. Rather than helping his home planet, however, Wright retreated to deep space to explore more celestial bodies, including a deserted lava planet not capable of sustaining life (but housing hidden items that could upgrade his ship). He also flew past a black hole which, with a more advanced starship, can actually be used as instantaneous interstellar transportation across different ends of the universe.

Ace Pace wrote:Bioware is making a new RPG, Mass effect

Arrow wrote:

Ace Pace wrote:Bioware is making a new RPG, Mass effect

Old news. Let me know when they release something about Dragon Age!

Ace Pace wrote:

Arrow wrote:

Ace Pace wrote:Bioware is making a new RPG, Mass effect

Old news. Let me know when they release something about Dragon Age!

I'll post something as soon as it comes up.

Off topic: Am I posting too much here? Or do people appreciate a small news ticker of posts?

MRDOD wrote: Characters include:
...
and Solid Snake.

Yes. That Solid Snake.

MRDOD wrote:Characters include:
Pit
Metaknight
Wario
Suitless Samus (Hard to tell in the screenshots, but I can make her out in the background of the third one and that's definately her ass taking center stage in one shot near the end)

and Solid Snake.

Stark wrote:The DOG? Kirby is one thing, and Pokemon is pushing it... but a DOG?

The flight game, one of a series of small sports minigames designed to show the possibilities of the Wii controller, was as straightforward as could be: you simply flew across a bright cartoonish world, guiding your plane through a series of suspended hoops and earning points all the while.

Though the goal of the demo was simplistic, the controls were the focus of the game. Practically every move you could pull off in the plane was executed with a twist, turn, or shift of the Wii remote. To turn left or right, you simply moved the controller in that direction; to pull up or make a nose dive, you gently moved the controller forward or back. Some more advanced moves were possible as well--we pulled off a pretty cool looking barrel roll at one point through a combination of turning and twisting. Honestly though, it was more of a happy accident than a conscious decision, though we suspect with a bit more practice we could do it again. Finally, by sharply jerking the controller backwards or forwards you could decelerate or accelerate the plane; the game camera would zoom in or out depending on your speed as well.

Graphically, the game's cartoon environment ranged from grassy hills to rocky cliffs that had a simplistic, whimsical feel that felt right in line with a Nintendo game. One charming effect was the small band of seagulls that joined us in the air as we flew across a stretch of ocean. Like the rest of the Wii Sports lineup (which includes baseball, tennis, and golf), we're not sure if what we saw today was the actual final product or if the final game will be more full-featured. Regardless, as a proof of concept of the Wii remote's capabilities, Wii Sports: Airplane's mission is accomplished.

Any time you approach an object you can mess with (which is often), a hand will pop up, letting you manipulate everything from soap dispensers to toilets to juke boxes.

Speaking of alien technology, it won't be long before you run into your first portal, which works exactly like you'd expect: walk through, and you'll come out in an entirely new area. Shoot a gun through, you'll fire all the way to the other side. The level geometry is fully rendered on the opposite side of the portal, which makes it all feel totally seamless. The designers have even used the portal tech to devise some devilish puzzles, such as a portal maze where you'll see yourself running ahead of your perspective if you're going the wrong way.


First is the death walk ability, which replaces the traditional quick save/quick load routine employed by most first-person shooter gamers. When you die, you'll be transported to a quick spirit-world minigame where you have to shoot down flying spirits to regain access to the physical world. This only takes a few seconds and requires no load time, so we found this vastly preferable to watching a progress bar reloading the level after dying. Prey will have no initial difficulty selection; instead, the game will track your combat stats as part of an adaptive difficulty system, which will modify everything from enemy behaviors to ammo pickups based on how well you're doing.

A quick glance at Assassin's Creed quickly brings to mind a number of other recent outstanding games. It boasts very fluid animation and an incredibly maneuverable main character, much like in Prince of Persia. It's got a medieval setting and emergent, open-ended gameplay similar to Oblivion. It has huge, lifelike cityscapes not unlike the recent Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, albeit a thousand years in the past. And it's reminiscent of the Thief series, if only because of its inconspicuous, independent, and resourceful main character and the anti-medieval-establishment premise. Finally, the open-ended "sandbox" world of the game is easy to compare to Grand Theft Auto. However, this is clearly no cookie-cutter clone of a game. Its distinctive, beautifully crafted visual style and surprising twists give it an identity all its own.

"Nothing is true. Everything is permitted." That is the assassins' creed, suggesting that anything is possible given the proper frame of mind. This game seemingly takes place during the Third Crusade under Richard the Lionheart, sometime in the late 12th century. You play as a character named Altair--an assassin by trade, armed with a deadly wrist blade, an unconcealed sword at his side, and a quiver of arrows at his back. He's clearly a powerful fighter. Faced with aggressive threats from all sides, Altair can slice them up in a flash, using flashy and devastating counterattacks to strike the enemies when they least expect it. However, even he can't necessarily withstand a city full of violent guards, not to mention mobs of civilians. So it pays for Altair to keep it cool.

To that end, he can find his mark by working his way through the crowds. It's difficult to explain why this appears so remarkable, but essentially, the way in which Altair moves through the crowds demonstrates two things about gaming: One, that very few games )(before this one) have successfully presented what seems like a bustling city environment, filled with a sufficient number of different-looking people. And two, that very few games (before this one) have done a halfway decent job of making the player's character interact realistically with other characters and objects. In Assassin's Creed, when you brush up near other characters wandering the streets, Altair uses his hands to move the individuals out of his path nonchalantly, as you might trying to wade through the masses at a concert or at a huge video game convention (the game's creative director cited this concert scenario specifically). But you don't need to keep it cool if you don't want to. Altair can draw attention to himself by shoving civilians out of his way forcefully, or by acting in any other aggressive of suspicious manner. Whether you want to blend into the background or act all macho, Assassin's Creed seems to let you.

Watching the populace's reactions to the main character was really special. Characters would visibly frown or raise their eyebrows as we jumped around and like a madman in their vicinity. And when we took a swing at a random civilian, genuine panic ensued. The victim fell to the ground in pain as nearby villagers stood in shock or ran off screaming. We pressed the attack, and seemingly as the civilians realized the threat they were facing, some of them rallied, encircling Altair and making it difficult to escape. This is where the momentum-based movement comes into play. The quicker you move, the easier it is to lose footing. In practice, this already felt quite believable.

Incidentally, the name Altair is Arabic for "the flying eagle," and indeed, the creative director of the game confirmed that the eagle was the inspiration for the character. You need to see Altair in motion to appreciate how cool he is. Remarkably, all of the animation was done by hand, which doesn't explain why it's able to look so real, but does explain why it's able to look so good. Altair has a move for every situation. It's hard to describe in specific detail, except to say that Altair simply looks much more real in motion than most any other video game character we've ever seen.

The three cities in Assassin's Creed will be his playground. According to the designers, any surface that extends out more than two inches from a wall can be latched onto by Altair, who'd make for a champion rock climber. He can scale many surfaces and mantle up onto anything he can grab. Yet the city itself looks incredibly real. (We even got to see the whole thing from a high vantagepoint after climbing to a very tall building, though the frame rate dropped...we're confident that visual blemishes like these will all be fixed.) The game gives a strangely liberating feeling--Altair is like a superhero but his abilities don't seem superhuman, for the most part. The creative director for the game noted that many of his moves were inspired by the sport of free-running, sort of like skateboarding without the skateboard. We saw this in action as Altair deftly skipped his way across rafters high up above a civilian populace obliviously wandering below.

Here Altair finally found his mark, revealed to him through his eagle vision, which highlights the would-be victim with a faint glow. By blending in with a group of clergymen, Altair was able to approach a haughty guardsman apparently in charge of executing civilians ostracized under King Richard's reign. In a flash, the guardsman is slain, and thus begins Altair's escape as an entire town erupts into bitter chaos.

The mob proves to be too much even for this capable killer. Altair fights bravely but is knocked from his feet as he attempts to flee (the faster you move, the more you stand to lose balance). Strangely, as he takes damage, the screen starts to distort. And when he finally dies, the screen fades out entirely, to reveal...a futuristic heads-up display. System offline. What...the...

The futuristic twist to Assassin's Creed is a mind-boggling highlight to an amazing first showing. While we had much of the game demonstrated to us, we were able to get plenty of hands-on time as well, getting a feel for the controls and mechanics, and exploring some of the nuances like the horseback riding and the combat counters.

Ubisoft promises that Assassin's Creed will be an open-ended action game that lets players act however they wish. This isn't a stealth game--if you want to fight your way to your victim, you can try. There will be subquests to undertake, alliances to form, secrets to discover, and, hopefully, all the other aspects of a free-roaming world that we've come to enjoy. But it's truly just the level of detail on display in Assassin's Creed that has us so impressed, in addition to the art direction as a whole. We can't wait to see more of this game, but we'll patiently wait for it to come together so that it might live up to all of its potential. The game is slated to release next year. Stay tuned to GameSpot for more coverage in the intervening months.

Taylor also demonstrated again for us the ability for players to give global "waypoint" orders to different contingents of units, such as naval, land, and air groups, to converge on a flashpoint at approximately the same time. We were also shown how the game will apparently follow the pathfinding course of individual units, with approximately traced-out waypoint paths (so, if you're the sort of obsessive player who must know whether your soldiers will go around the forest or through it, you'll be able to tell with this new system). Taylor reiterated, however, that Supreme Commander isn't a game about micromanaging individual units or focusing solely on tactical battles. To drive home this point, we were again shown a comparison of an incredibly huge battleship to a small squadron of medium tanks. The battleship had to have been at least 20 to 30 times the size of an individual tank, and as Taylor explained, the battleship's greatest strength is the incredible range of its main cannons (rather than simply being able to sustain more damage, as it might have been designed in a different modern strategy game), which would reduce the tanks to ash before they got into range. As Taylor put it, other modern strategy games tend to focus primarily on making games look nice, and on starting the action early; while those games might be about battles, he says, "Supreme Commander is about war."

Perhaps the most striking example of what the studio CEO was talking about was the land/sea battle we then witnessed between two armies, as one invaded from the water while the other charged through a forest, knocking over nearby trees and setting the rest alight with weapon fire. Yes, individual units can be huge, but actual battles will take place between hundreds of different units that can be custom designed by "the one kid sitting in his basement in Utah who discovers something no one else has," as Taylor puts it. Apparently, the game has been designed from the ground up not only to take advantage of modern PC hardware, but also to scale well against differing hardware configurations. Taylor suggests that the game's largest maps will be on the order of about 6,400 square kilometers in size, though they can scale down for smaller skirmishes.

However, if you, like Taylor, want to keep things big, you'll be able to take advantage of some of Supreme Commander's other unique features--dual monitor support, which lets you keep one eye zoomed in on one of the game's huge battles, and the other on a zoomed-out view of the world to keep track of larger developments in the war. And if you have a widescreen monitor and don't care to have the game's interface sitting at the bottom of the screen, completely stretched out, you can instantaneously reconfigure the interface elements to appear on the left side of the screen. Taylor expects that the inquisitive fan community will probably end up monkeying with the interface, among other aspects of the game, because, as the CEO hints, the game may ship with support for editing and modifying its content.

The trailer kicks off with a view of the paradise island on which our pixellated lovelies reside, and it’s clear from the first minute or so of the video that they don’t seem to have a great deal to keep them occupied. What’s worse, they seem to have been visited by a plague of clothes-eating locusts, though thankfully all bikinis were spared.

The less than gruelling pace of life on the island luckily hasn’t prevented the ladies from keeping their shape, and they’re seen stretching out on the beach, splashing around on jetskis and messing about in the pool. If we were in any doubt that they weren’t in tip-top condition, a number of close-ups and general chest wobbles can thankfully allay our fears.

The trailer continues on for a little while in this vein before the girls play a little volleyball, and then we revert back to a little more playful friskiness.

Briefly--the plot of the original game saw Zack, the winner of Dead or Alive 3, buy a tropical island and proceed to lure all of the female characters from the game there. You then took control of one of those females, with the nominal aim of winning volleyball matches against the other ladies on the island.

Master of Ossus wrote:

Stark wrote:The DOG? Kirby is one thing, and Pokemon is pushing it... but a DOG?

It's sniffing around at the screen on one of those shots. I can't really tell if it's a character or not.