E3 Day 2 Impressions: Next-Gen Edition*

-- May 12, 2006 by: Jake Rodkin

* May largely consist of current-gen coverage.

There are lots of weird trends in the world of gamemaking right now. My favorite one - possibly the front-runner for this E3's Most Popular Thing To Do In Your Game For Some Reason award - happens to be the "give everything in the game a tiny gleam of white light around the edge" trend. But, if there was an award for second trend, it would definitely be "make a zombie game starring some guy in a suit."

Am I full of shit? Do I make this stuff up? Stubbs the Zombie: 1940s traveling salesman resurrected as a brown suit-wearing zombie. Dead Rising: Well-dressed (read: slacks, suit jacket) photojournalist battles zombies in the local mall. Infected: Dunno, but there's totally a guy in a suit and a lot of zombies. The trend makes one more appearance in my writeup below, but unlike my impressions of Stubbs or Infected in recent years, I really enjoyed the demo for Dead Head Fred. Hopefully it's cool.

So, now: video games.

Indiana Jones
Developer: LucasArts; Publisher: LucasArts
PS3, Xbox 360

LucasArts had a lot to say in their presentation for the new Indiana Jones game, but very little in their talk was actually about what would be in the game. Currently titled simply "Indiana Jones" (the "something of something something" part hasn't been figured out yet), the game is targeted squarely at next generation consoles, though not in the usual ways people like to press at you in game expo presentations. While things look very crisp, and plenty of polygons and requisite gleaming white light edges are thrown around, the big thing LucasArts is selling with the new Indy game is the AI and physics simulation engine used for its characters.

The technology, which is called "Euphoria" and is developed by NaturalMotion, gives characters in the game the ability to react to their environment in presumably unexpected yet realistic ways including things like stumbling around moving objects, bracing for falls, and trying to hang on to ledges and edges to keep themselves from falling or getting pulled from moving objects.

The demo, which was clearly aimed more at showing their tech than their game, consisted almost entirely of Indy throwing various hoodlums against various surfaces to show how they would react. A man was thrown a handful of times into a car, and, because the animation was being generated on the fly, he never hit the car the same way, never got up off the ground the same way. The next scene involved nothing but Indy throwing a slightly different looking hoodlum-type against a wooden door, which slowly shattered into bits.

The final part of the demo was set on a cable car quickly soaring down a steep hill in San Francisco. Indy was being chased by a few old-timey cars loaded with guys who were intent on using Euphoria technology to leap from their automobiles onto the cable car, or maybe try to shoot at Indy from afar, or, if they were in the drivers seat, to dynamically steer the car away from obstacles. Euphoria isn't the best driver in the world (and neither are the mindless thugs in Indiana Jones films) so they crashed pretty frequently.

I have to admit it - it was actually more satisfying to watch a character who was allegedly steering its own car manage to crash it into an oncoming cable car than it would be to watch a scripted sequence featuring the same events. A small part of my brain was actually able to say "that guy was an idiot." After years of predictable scripted sequences and predetermined AI moments I've built up layers and layers of resistance to buying into that sort of crap. We all have. Watching that guy crash his car as his buddy was left hanging onto the edge of my moving cable car for dear life only to slip off and go rolling away down the road - and knowing that it happened because in some small way those characters on screen did it to themselves - actually managed to chip a tiny bit of that resistance away.

It was surprising, and honestly, pretty exciting.

Hopefully next time they have some semblance of an Indiana Jones game to go along with it.

The Witcher
Developer: CDProjekt; Publisher: CDProjekt
PC

Has anyone seen that movie Susperia? Or at least heard that one song in it by Goblin, where a guy just whispers "Witch. Witch." over and over in what he clearly thinks is an ominous voice? That's all I could think about on my way to CDProjekt's booth for my demo of their upcoming PC RPG the WItcher.

Honestly, the Witcher is not a game I've been following at all over its development, but Shack has covered the hell out of it. If you want Witcher information from Witcher-certified information sources, look no further than the last three years of Shack's Witcher coverage (and also apparently an article about an OpenGL Switcher). If you want to know what I thought after seeing CDProjekt's demo and the Witcher for the first time in my life, read on.

For those who know even less than I did about the Witcher, it's a realtime RPG for the PC, set in a standard looking (if slightly more nuanced) fantasy universe based on a series of novels of the same name by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski. The game is being developed by Polish developers CDProjekt, a studio whose roots lie in decades of localized Polish publishing and who were finally able to amass the means to branch out into game development with the Witcher in 2004. The game is based on Neverwinter Nights' Aurora engine, though according to CDProjekt most of the visual end has been rewritten.

Combat works entirely in real-time, though CDProjekt has gone to great effort to avoid it turning into a hack and slash click-fest. What they demonstrated still had quite a lot of clicking, and plenty of hacking, but it was very customizible, upgradable clicking and surprisingly well-animated hacking and slashing. Watching the developers run through a few fights, it seemed like they were trying hard to make your position relative to the guy you were fighting actually relevant - something I've rarely seen in my admittedly miniscule RPG history.

Movement in combat (and in most of the game) was done largely via the mouse (though WASD and other customizable keyboard and keyboard/mouse configurations are supported). Movement was directed either by holding a button down to make a character walk forward (ala most 3D MMOs), or by pointing and clicking to a location to direct the character to move there. In combat situations the developers would frequently click all around their intended target, sending their character into duck-rolls and parries, dodging attacks or moving to higher ground. My limited expectations for this sort of game were pretty much fixated on "I bet the combat will be nothing but him clicking on that monster with the mouse cursor over and over until he's swung a sword at him enough to kill him," so it was surprising and extremely refreshing to see movement and the positions of the characters in the fight seem to matter so much moment to moment.

Granted, actual attacking was still done largely by clicking on the intended target a few times in a row between dodges, but the developers were very excited to point to a large upgradable and customizable combo-manager in which players can set up what moves come when in large attack click-chains. The manager allowed chains to be configured for three fighting styles - for fighting "strong" against a single enemy, for fighting "fast," and for fighting against large groups. New moves could be learned or purchased and positioned in the chain, allowing players to set up what move will happen on their standard first, second, third, etc, chained attack on an enemy.

Another thing that excited the CDProjekt guys a lot were the micro-branches built into the Witcher's story system. It seems like they're pretty intent on telling a specific story with their game, but they deliberately left parts in the middle open to your whims as you play with events open to a few predetermined outcomes which will divert and re-route the courses of various subplots. The example they gave centered around an informant captured during a recent battle. The player was given the option of killing the informant outright, letting him go, or torturing him to varying degrees (one extreme resulted in driving him insane and the other presumably ended in a drawn out death). CDProjekt pointed out that the game would never outright give the player the option to choose between good and evil, but - because everything has positive and negative consequences - would always have the player choose between lesser evils. They emphasized the idea that every decision the player made, part of them would be pleased with the result but part of them wold regret it - nothing is neat and clean.

How well the idea of regret and choosing lesser evil in the interactive narrative will carry in the real game is totally yet to be seen, and the demo didn't present the strongest example for what clearly is an ambitious storytelling/emotional goal. For instance, sparing the informants life's two major outcomes resulted in a friend and potential love interest dying later in the game (because the still-alive informant squeeled on her) but also resulted in another one of your friends' life being spared (because the informant passed some information to you before leaving). Alternatively, if you were to kill the informant, your female friend's life would be spared down the line in the game, but your male friend would end up biting the big one because the informant was never able to tell you he was going to die.

Technologically the Witcher is on fairly solid footing. My eye for pure technical muscle is pretty poor - I can't tell you if a game looks "good" or "bad" simply by the number of polygons or what version of a crazy DirectX trick is being employed - but I can say that the Witcher is really visually cohesive, with interesting architecture, varied landscapes, and well-realized lighting. When I first heard it was using the engine from Neverwinter Nights I was a little concerned, but CDProjekt's work on the renderer is extremely impressive. Dynamic weather effects, soft focus, full screen distortion stuff (including an entertaining "drunk" effect), day and night cycles and gorgeous water all came as a shock to me given what I was expecting to see from an engine of that vintage.

Honestly I didn't care about the Witcher at all before checking it out - this kind of game just rarely appeals to me at all - but after seeing it in action I'll definitely be following it pretty closely to see how it turns out.

Dead Head Fred
Developer: Vicious Cycle; Publisher: D3Publisher
PSP

Dead Head Fred is D3Publisher's flagship original game at this year's show (for the curious, I was told that neither the anticipated Dark Sector, or their newly-announced 100 Bullets game will be shown until next year's E3), and while the game does have a bit of the Zombie in a Suit syndrome as outlined earlier, you won't hear me complaining. Zombies in suits might be the totally hip thing with the kids these days, but I'm a sucker for crazy platformer concepts and hard-boiled detective/noir settings, and this game's got both in spades. Or at least it hopes to when it's finished.

In Dead Head Fred you play as Fred Newman, a private investigator who got in too deep with a local mob boss, and woke up one day to find his head replaced with a glass jar containing nothing but his floating eyes and brain. Fred's jar-head isn't permanently affixed to his head, though. It can be stowed in a bag, leaving his neck available to support eight other heads available in the game. Though it seems obvious in hindsight, new heads are obtained by tearing them off of various enemies you encounter in the game.

The game is set sometime in the 1940s in a city run by the mob, who also happen to own a chemical plant which recently started malfunctioning and mutating the locals into zombies, weird floppy monsters and more-run-of-the-mill oddly-shaped-extra-leg mutants. The setting was laid out far more elegantly than that in the game demo's opening cutscene, which was presented in the classic style of old detective films, with Fred delivering a regretful monologue explaining how he ended up in this mess as the camera slowly pans over old news clippings and photos on his desk.

The game has nine kinds of collectible heads. When Fred wears the different heads he gets different abilities which are used both for combat and for navigating the various environment puzzles laid out in the world. For instance, an all-stone head allows him to swing around and crush things like Bonk on the TurboGrafx; a floppy gross old zombie head can be filled with air and slowly deflated, allowing Fred to float around like Mario from Mario Sunshine (or it can be filled with water like a balloon and slowly spat back out to put out fires and such... like Mario from Mario Sunshine); a voodooized shrunken head will reduce Fred in size, allowing him to fit in small places and walk along telephone lines, etc. I was also told that the collectible heads were in fact upgradable, which as a concept disturbed me far more than the fact that the main character was able to remove his head and replace it with a head torn from someone else's body.

I was told that one of Vicious Cycle's main goals with Dead Head Fred was making the world feel cohesive and real. To that end they have very ambitious plans for delivering that to the player both in terms of more standard goals like consistent visuals, large environments and a running story, but also things drifting off into less-expected territory. One example was with their efforts to tie minigames back into the main game world. One game described briefly was a musical minigame (called "Consentual Sax") in which the player would learn how to play the minigame version of a saxophone in a local club, but could then take the sax with them for the rest of the game, and break it out on the city street at will, performing for anyone passing by. Appreciative pedestrians would drop some money in your zombified sax case, which you could then put towards the still-unsettling concept of upgrading your head.

I have to admit that while I enjoyed every moment I saw of the demo, there was a voice in the back of my head which kept reminding me that I have played a lot of high-concept comedy Western-developed action/platformers, and very few of them are actually good. An intriguing (even ingenius) premise and handful of primary gameplay concepts can take a game a long way when it comes to getting my interest, but sustaining it past the initial burst of cleverness is always tough, especially with games that hinge so much on the fact that their core concept is a joke. Dead Head Fred has the potential to transcend that, but it will be a long and careful climb.

Metal Slug Anthology
Developer: SNK; Publisher: SNK Playmore
PSP, Wii

SNK has a few Metal Slug titles at the show: Metal Slug Anthology for PSP, and a port of the first Metal Slug to GameBoy Advance... and they have one Metal Slug title depressingly absent from the show: the remote-enabled, throw-grenades-by-waving-the-controller Wii edition of the Anthology pack. While I was saddened to hear the Wii version wasn't anywhere to be seen ("It's really fun, we play it all the time in the office!" said the SNK rep), I gave a quick look to the other offerings on display.

Metal Slug Anthology for PSP is exactly what it sounds like: a nice one-disc compilation of all the past Metal Slug games (Metal Slug 1, 2, X, 3, 4, and 5) with support for two-player gaming over local wifi. Three video modes are supported: the pixel-purists can play the game in it's original resolution with no scaling or filtering (it's very small on the PSP screen, though), the slightly more sane can play the game scaled up to fill the height of the screen 4:3 with letterbox bars on the left and right, and anal retentive video enthusiasts can be irked to no end with the "stretch" mode, which widens the game's image to fill the whole screen. The display modes can be cycled between at any time during play.

The build on display at SNK's booth was very accurate to the originals - possibly too accurate, as I had to ask the SNK rep which button would get the "Insert Coin" message to go away and let me start playing. Awkward. I was slightly disappointed to hear that the Insert Coin messages would be replaced in the final build, but hey. It's the Metal Slug Anthology.

The rep also confirmed that the Wii build would in fact not rely on the system's retro controller or legacy GameCube controller support, but would map some moves to the Wii's remote. The one example he gave (which was followed up by the quip about how fun it was to play) was using the remote to lob grenades, though it was implied that the remote played a large role in shooting things and causing things to blow up.

Metal Slug
Developer: SNK; Publisher: SNK Playmore
GBA

Metal Slug 1 for the GBA needs no introduction, because it's pretty self-explanatory. If you're still wondering: it's Metal Slug 1, it's a port for the GBA.

WTF: Work Time Fun
Developer: SCEI; Publisher: S3Publisher
PSP

The D3Publisher rep told me that WTF's subtitle "Work Time Fun" was put there to placate worriers, and that the game's real name was just WTF.

WTF is a game that first appeared in Japan, under the name "Baito Hell 2000." The premise is simple, if a bit insane: you play a low level employee at a bizarre temp agency which farms you out to do a bunch of simple tasks for which you get paid menial pay. What makes the game enjoyable is the fact that these menial tasks are really fun, repetitive minigames in the tradition of WarioWare, only without that game's rapid-fire nature. As you complete more tasks and receive your paychecks (in my limited experience usually for a few cents to a couple dollars), you can purchase and unlock new minigames and continue to progress.

The games are simple, but strangely satisfying. Unlike WarioWare's freakish and stress-inducing pace, the games in WTF reminded me of the best days at my worst jobs - calm, well paced, with just enough going on to keep me interested. One of the tasks - the one most reminiscent of an old summer job of mine which actually involved counting cars that drove past on the freeway - was a minigame about counting pedestrian traffic. Groups of people, animals, vehicles, and crazy Japanese illustrations would cross the street in waves, and you have to click a traffic counter for every actual human being who crossed by. If you miscounted (say by thinking the weird floppy-legged baby was in fact some sort of odd sea creature), you'd have to start over. The more rounds you survived with an accurate count, the higher your paycheck. As a crazy bonus aside, the interface to this particular minigame (for some reason called "TrafficWatch 2") featured a HUD at the bottom of the screen with what appeared to be a parody of the bottom-of-the-screen Doom marine from Doom 1 and 2 - a square jawed clean-cut pixely face who mostly stared forward but occasionally glanced around for no reason. In another task I was sorting a box of baby chickens by gender: boy, girl, or ghost. The ghosts I was instructed to place in a box labeled "heaven."

New games are unlocked via a gumball machine interface where you put money in and the game will decide what to spit out. While this might frustrate people looking to obtain a particular item, it has the side benefit of occasionally spitting out something totally unexpected, including simple digital toys that have no bearing on the main game. In my playthrough of the demo I was given a toy that would fill the entire PSP's screen with a pair of eyes and the bridge of a nose, which was designed to be held up to your face like a mask. The face was selectable - various boys, girls and animals came up as I shuffled through. The analog stick moved the eyeballs around so I could annoy people by pretending to look from side to side, and to protect my false identity, one of the 4 main buttons on the PSP drew a black censor lines over my fake eyes. I was also given a ramen timer to let me know when my ramen noodles were done cooking and distract me in the meantime with Japanese weirdness.

I'm glad the game is just called WTF.

Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy
Developer: Traveller's Tales; Publisher: LucasArts
GameCube, sXbox, PS2, Xbox 360, PSP

In the last ten years it's been hard to find a Star Wars game that's as focused on pure fun as the actual Star Wars films are. Flying your X-Wing through crazy situations, commanding squads of troops, or steathily jediing your way around a bunch of corridors is enjoyable, but if you wanted a light, non-stop action/adventure romp in the Star Wars universe, there really wasn't any place to turn... until Lego Star Wars showed up. Developed by Traveller's Tales, the first Lego Star Wars game took all the good (or at least interesting looking) bits from the prequel trilogy and wrapped them together into one homemade feeling, self-effacing, nostalgia-filled experience that wasn't necessarily challenging, but was at least for me really fun.

Traveller's Tales is back on board for the second game, and - fortunately for everyone involved - Lego Star Wars 2 looks to be more or less exactly like the first one, only set in the universe of the original 70s Star Wars films which people actually like. The full co-op support is still there from the first game, as are all the little innocent but well-done joke moments, and of course when you kill guys or blow things up they still flop onto the ground as a pile of plastic bricks.

Talking with a representative from LucasArts, it sounds like the main improvements from Lego Star Wars 1 to 2 (aside from the setting) are the ability to get in and out of driveable vehicles at any time (in Lego Star Wars 1 vehicle and on foot levels were separated out), and the game's brick building system has been simplified and opened up to all characters (in the first game only Jedi could construct objects out of found brick piles). To demonstrate the handful of new features, the LucasArts rep running the demo used the force to open a few containers of bricks, directed C-3PO to unlock a particular door containing more bricks, and threw them together to have the game build an AT-ST walker, which he then jumped inside and walked around in, eventually blowing up some stormtroopers. Of course, the building stuff isn't a real Lego simulator free-for-all, but it's good fun just watching your little Lego man throw bricks from the pile onto whatever he's building at about 20 times a real human speed.

Basically, if you like Lego, you like Star Wars, and you like lighthearted games (or if you happen to dislike one or two of those things but still for some reason liked the first Lego Star Wars game itself), picking this up will likely be a no-brainer.

That's it for my E3 writeups for today, but, in closing: