From the screenshots, Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure seems confusing. The puzzle-platformer appears to be two games at once. On the top screen, there’s a platformer. At the bottom, there’s a match-three puzzle game similar to Bejeweled.
But somehow designer Kyle Gray manages to fuse the two genres together. In Henry Hatsworth, players control the titular character. The controls are fairly standard. He moves with the directional pad. He can strike enemies in different directions using the Y button. He can shoot them from a far by pressing the A button. Players jump across chasms and onto platforms with the B button.
Where the game becomes interesting is when players hit the X button. This freezes the top screen and moves the action below. The game becomes a puzzle as players have to match three blocks by moving them horizontally.
Players can use the buttons or they can fiddle with the stylus. Gray, the developer, was an expert and his fingers moved so fast that the puzzle-solving seemed instant. But speed is necessary in this part of the game because the blocks are actually Hatsworth’s fallen foes.
In the game, whenever Hatsworth defeats an enemy he falls into the puzzle as a piece. The screen inches up from the bottom, and if the blocks reach high enough, these enemies are resurrected and come back to haunt Hatsworth.
Like Danny and a lot of folks, I was stunned to hear that Electronic Arts was making Celebrity Sports Showdown. I mean, really, how can a game like this exist? Why would it exist? What would possess Fergie and Nelly Furtado, pictured above, to lend their likeness to a game like this?
I swear they must have gotten a sweet deal. EA must have tossed around a lot of money. But after playing the title at the EA Studio Showcase. I can see the reason for the celebrities though I remain skeptical of the game.
Sports Showdown is a Wii party title in the best sense of the word. It pits rocks vs. jocks (and some other EA alumni) in 12 events that are easy to play with simple motions. The style is simple and fun, but it’s nothing revolutionary for the genre.
Last year, skate. was a revelation. It brought a new control scheme that made the skateboarding genre accessible to newbies while being deep enough to give hardcore fans a challenge. Instead of mashing buttons, players had to flick the right analog stick to ollie, nollie and perform other tricks.
Other than the analog stick, players used only one other button — which was for pushing off the ground and gaining speed.
With the sequel, Skate 2 adds three more inputs that give a new set of moves to the franchise, but unfortunately, it also slightly complicates the controls. The hardcore will love being able to do things like jump off their skateboards and move pipes and picnic tables around a skatepark.
But fans used to the old layout may not be too keen on learning a new set of motions and button presses. Things can get a little confusing when players sky and perform grab tricks. And they may spend hours adjusting to the new moves.
The gap betweenNBA Live and NBA 2K franchises is closing. In past years, the 2K Sports games had the edge in terms of control and gameplay, but with the team DNA and Dynamic DNA feature, NBA Live 09 could turn that around.
I had a chance to play the game with my dominant Los Angeles Lakers (or at least they will be next season with Andrew Bynum back). I was up against Matt Lafreniere, an associate producer at EA Canada, who chose the Boston Celtics. As seen above, the Oklahoma City team formerly known as the Seattle Sonics don’t have a name yet, but we’ve heard it’s Thunder.
The most obvious change is that the game is focused around the concept of player DNA. Working with Synergy Sports Technologies, the game updates every day and changes player stats based on how he’s doing in real life.
For example, if Pau Gasol develops a 3-point shot, then it’ll be reflected next season and he’ll be more likely to nail those treys. If Kobe gets hot and has a string of 40 point games as he did in January 2006, then he’ll be that unstoppable in NBA Live 09.
On the other hand, when dealing with rookies who have no statistical NBA history, the team at EA Canada is adding in player DNA states based on position. So Michael Beasley will be treated just like forward with no discernable tendencies when players get a crack at the game later this year.
From what I saw, The Godfather II is going to be an ambitious game. Any time you’re talking about a title of this scale, it’s hard not to see.
But surprisingly the mob artificial intelligence is being created with a low-tech device. The rival families will be driven by a card game that senior designer James Agay created.
“It’s how we get the AI to play like real people,” he said. The whole idea started a year ago and it morphed from a prototype tool to a demo tool to something that everyone at the studio plays. But at first, the card game took a while to develop.
The idea was initially a board game, Agay said, but the rules were too complicated and they threw that idea out the window. The second time around, he created a simplified game using index cards, and it eventually caught on and he made new rules.
Blame the sequels but video game characters can’t handle success. They’re worse than Britney Spears who self-imploded after making a gazillion dollars. They’re more awful than Mike Tyson who apparently went bankrupt after once being one of the most feared and richest men in the world. The dude could afford pet tigers.
When video game characters defeat their enemies and gain new powers, they inevitably find a way to mess things up and start over from scratch in a sequel. It happened to Samus Aran of Metroid. In God of War II, Kratos happens to lose all his abilities and is sent to the underworld.
With this in mind, it makes one wonder what happens when players became the Don in The Godfather: The Game. In the sequel, do players start with nothing and work their way up? Do they get jacked a la Scarface: The World is Yours and get revenge?
Thankfully, Electronic Arts didn’t go that way, and instead, it took its Grand Theft Auto-style game in a new direction. As creative director Mike Olsen put it, “If Godfather showed you working up to be the don, then The Godfather 2 has you taking on the role of a don.”
This is an open world game where players take on the role of Dominic Corleone and battle other families for control of monopolies and business in New York, Florida and Cuba. The game has what you would expect from the genre. Players can drive cars, beat up passers-by, shoot and go on missions.
But what separates Godfather 2 from its peers is its real-time strategy element. As the new don, players will have to manage underbosses, bosses, capos and soldiers in the family. They’ll have to look for new businesses, guard the ones they have and think of ways to divide and conquer the rival families.
It’s not often a trailer with no gameplay whatsoever answers all my major questions about a game but this is one of the rare ones.
I know a Telltale game is going to be faithful to the source material and I know it’s going to be fun and challenging, what I worried about was the look. And the look is good, this is definitely Wallace and Gromit. It maintains the claymation look and even the animations. I’m officially impressed.
Maybe I’m just falling victim to some skillful PR hype-building, but Spider-Man: Web of Shadows is looking better and better with each new teaser video. I thought the acrobatic, web-based aerial combat topped out my Coolometer (patent pending) but then they go and throw symbiote-infected Wolverine at me.
It’s like Venom and Wolverine at the same time!
The question now becomes how they’re going to top this. You set the bar high, Web of Shadows, now let’s see you clear it.
Over the past three years, I’ve managed to avoid the whole brouhaha over Killzone 2. I’m blissfully unaware of the whole controversy over the 2005 E3 footage. I’ve never bothered to see the video.
And the only footage I’ve seen was of a mission where the player had to take down a weird super gun. But other than that, I went into the Killzone 2 demo as a blank slate not swayed one way or another of the title’s past.
Kyle Shubel, the manager producer for the game, gave me a tour of the game before handing over the controller. The game is divided up into eight levels with about six subchapters in the level. Overall, he said there’s about 12 hours of gameplay.
Right off the bat, I’m thrust into the gameplay. I’m in a war zone that reminds me of World War II except there’s a bit of a sci-fi twist. The soldiers look like Karl Ruprecht Kroenen from Hellboy.
It’s hard to belive this is a PlayStation Portable game. When Sony introduced Resistance: Retribution at its media briefing, I was skeptical.
How would a PlayStation 3 title translate on a lesser-powered portable? More importantly, how would a shooter translate on a hand-held that has no second analog stick?
But when I get my hands on the game at E3, my questions were answered and fears were assuaged. Retribution, a third-person shooter, is made by Sony Bend, the team that brought Syphon Filter on the PSP. The studio is adept at third-person shooters and that works shows.
To solve the dual analog problem, Bend let players move the protagonist James Grayson the analog nub and they used the faced buttons as the look buttons. It works for the most part. To help players out, the look buttons have an autolock and Grayson automatically takes cover behind ramparts and walls.
It’s an accessible control schem that lets the PSP do most of the work while players can concentrate on the action, which is mostly firing on Chimerans and tossing grenades.
From the screenshots, Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure seems confusing. The puzzle-platformer appears to be two games at once. On the top screen, there’s a platformer. At the bottom, there’s a match-three puzzle game similar to Bejeweled.
