As I eagerly/anxiously await next month’s upcoming release of Red Steel 2, I can’t help but become entranced not simply by the game’s amazing graphic style and promising Motion Plus utilization, but by the charisma and character of the game’s creative director, Jason Vandenberghe.
Every time I catch an interview of Vandenberghe, especially on video, I feel compelled to read it/watch it. Good – no, really great – game designers have a lot in common with great teachers. They intrigue you, they have personality, they are quite humorous, and they never quite answer questions they way you expect them to. I do not know yet if Vandenberghe is a great game designer or not, but like Miyamoto, he has a certain charm to his personality that leads me to believe he may possess such talent.
Though Vandenberghe was not involved in the creation of Red Steel 1, he did play it extensively, and he has openly stated that the game didn’t quite live up to gamers’ expectations. To me, making such an acknowledging remark is commendable as these days we are constantly being told that if a game didn’t sell well it was because the consumer “didn’t get it” or some other lame pass-the-buck excuse. It never seems to be the developer’s fault that a game doesn’t sell well.
In the video above, Vandenberghe offers some rather wise comments on gaming these days and the strange viewpoints people come up. As we all know, there is a large, noticeable debate occurring that Vandenberghe calls the “Is there a hardcore audience on the Wii” topic. Now, I have already offered my thoughts on this topic once before, but rather than repeatedly beat readers over the head with my opinion on the subject, I’ll just let Vandenberghe speak on the topic.
Vandenberghe astutely describes the entire debate as a religious war and says that he doesn’t take part in religious wars – it’s not really his thing. I couldn’t agree more. Vandenberghe states that games can sell on the Wii if they are good and offer experiences not available elsewhere. Of course, he also acknowledges that he may end up eating his own words a month from now if Red Steel 2 doesn’t sell well. But at least such a statement concedes that the success/failure of the game will be based largely on the developer – not the consumer.
You can catch the first part of this two-part interview here. I’ll be keeping my eye on all the Red Steel 2/Vandenberghe info I can get during the next month before the game’s release.
I just suffered through one of the worst movies I have seen in a long time. I wasn’t planning on writing anything about it; I was just going to let it pass and hide my shame for even having voluntarily seen the film because I should have known better. However the filmmakers appear to have a huge marketing budget that they’re using to push the damn movie relentlessly through posters at every bus stop and an ad during every commercial break. The movie is “Gamer,” and being one myself, it got me thinking about what the film says about this very unique and diverse classification of people.
Before “Gamer” I had never seen any other films by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor who’d both written and directed it and I had no idea that they already had a reputation, of sorts. Their previous movies are Crank, and Crank: High Voltage which I’ve heard many describe simply as “hectic.” (They are also currently working on Crank 3, said to be in 3D, and finishing up Jonah Hex, which IMDb has explained like this: “In the Wild West, a scarred bounty hunter tracks a voodoo practitioner bent on liberating the South by raising an army of the undead.”)
In the special features of the “Gamer” DVD they themselves said, “Watching [our movies] is like audience torture. We were talking about this the other day, like, not only do we torture our characters [...] but we torture our audience. It’s like hitting them over the head with a ball pein hammer for 90 minutes.”
Ubisoft has released some additional information about its ambitious Motion Plus-based sequel to the sword fighting launch title for the Wii. This info comes by way of an internal interview with Jason Vandenberghe, the creative director for the game.
From the Ubisoft press release:
“Is Caldera the whole land and not just the city?
Let’s talk about the world of Red Steel 2 a little.
Caldera is a city in what is generally known as the “Nevada Territories”. It’s kinda northwest of Las Vegas, off the beaten path a bit, in what’s affectionately known as the “High Desert” (a.k.a. the Mojave Desert) – an elevated, hot, flat, chunk of the Rocky Mountains.
The land surrounding Caldera is named “Caldera County” as well, and one big crater was the most interesting landmark (a “caldera”, for the curious, is another word for a big sinkhole or crater).
So, no, Caldera isn’t the whole land. The “world” of Red Steel 2 is the Red West.
In fact, “the Red West” is a phrase used to describe the whole western part of North America.
Will there be other places than desert in the game?
But of course. The whole story takes place in and around the city of Caldera, and there’s a lot of different kinds of environments in that place. Ancient temples, ramshackle slums, desert, huge modern freight-moving systems… it’s a real city. Then you’ll roll on out into surrounding canyons, where you’ll find a pueblo-style mining town, a huge semi-automated strip mine, old, abandoned underground tunnels, an ancient ancestral monastery / temple clinging to the side of a cliff…
But if you mean “do you go anywhere cold, like the moon or something” the answer is no.
Will there be weather effects in Caldera (rain, sandstorms, etc.)?
Yes. When we were conceiving the ‘mood’ for each level, we tried to give the weather, time of day, and general atmosphere for each space a unique feeling, one that would fit the gameplay for that location. Honestly, there were a few times where our ambience people (lighting, VFX, audio, etc) showed us some stuff that we were convinced wasn’t possible on the Wii… but they did it.
Will there be night, dusk and dawn in the game?
The gameplay takes place over several days, and the Sun in the Red West rises and sets just like it does in the real world. What I mean to say is that there will be a few night levels, yes.
Are there living people anywhere? I know the inhabitants left but are there any remaining?
Yes! Yes indeed! Crucial, key, power-granting inhabitants! You should be discovering that in the near future, in fact what I can tell you is there are four inhabitants of great importance the player that you will encounter repeatedly, get missions from, buy cool powers from, and who, in general, will help convey to you the Story. That is, assuming you don’t skip the cutscenes.
(By the way, every time you skip a cutscene, a fairy dies somewhere. I’m watching you.)”
Nintendo is apparently feeling the heat of both Sony and Microsoft preparing to release their own motion-controller technology, chipping away at the only feature that makes the Wii unique (that and a butt-load of crappy 3rd-party games). Shigeru Miyamoto was asked if the Nintendo was on the brink of losing its uniqueness in the face of competition.
His response:
“Well, I should say that it could be taken as a compliment if others are following suit, by saying Nintendo was right in choosing a certain direction. But if you ask me if that is going to be good for the entire business, I really don’t know.”
“If everyone else is going to do exactly the same thing, unfortunately in this entertainment business that means less uniqueness, and uniqueness is what Nintendo has tried to realize.”
“We don’t look to the future in one direction only,” he said. “When you say that one element of our uniqueness might have been lost, you don’t really have to be concerned about that, because Nintendo always tries to find something new. I hope you are looking forward to our challenge to discover this new uniqueness!”
APB is the latest game under construction at Realtime Worlds, best known for Crackdown and its ruler, Dave Jones, who once made a little game you may have heard of called Grand Theft Auto. APB is a massively-multiplayer action game, though the word ‘massively’ may be pushing it, as APB is definitely a smaller scale than something like World of Warcraft.
Details on what we can expect in APB have been frustratingly meager, though this 20 minute video explains several dynamics of the game, complete with actual in-game footage.
Xenon was a great pinball table, offering a sizable challenge, brilliant design…and, for the time, cutting-edge synthesizer music. This video documents the creation of the music by composer Suzanne Ciani.
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What I mean to say is that there will be a few night levels, yes.
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