April 2010
Monthly Archive
Tue 27 Apr 2010
“I joined Capcom 17 years ago with just one ambition: to be involved with Street Fighter in whatever way I possibly could.” Yoshinori Ono has the incredulous smirk of a boy given the keys to his very own sweet shop. “My love of the game was my entire reason for taking the job.
“Eventually I managed to work my way onto the team making the Alpha games, then I helped out with Street Fighter III. But to think that I would have the entire franchise resting on my shoulders… I never dreamt something like that might happen. Sometimes it’s a burden and sometimes it’s a joy. But either way, it’s always a constant surprise to me.”
Ono stands at the helm of the most treasured fighting game series, producer of the defining entry to the genre this generation, Street Fighter IV. The game’s success defied not only Ono’s expectations, but also Capcom’s, who almost didn’t green-light the project when he first pitched his vision for it in 2007. The company certainly had no plans for a sequel at that point.
Now, a year after Street Fighter IV breathed new life into the world of fighting games, rekindling the passions of many 20 and 30-something players and introducing an a new generation to its iconic characters, I sit with Ono in a darkened London club. It’s here a few writers and a slew of top British players – including European Champion Ryan Hart – have gathered to try out what he describes as the “definitive” version of his game.
It’s a rare sight: a private preview event where everyone in attendance is here for the game alone, as oppose to the paid bar, the opportunity to network or the scavenger promise of freebie merchandise. I overhear one young attendee ask a passing waitress bearing a silver tray of snacks how much a slice of pizza costs. Twitch competition is hungry work. He grins ear to ear when she hands him two of the complimentary canapés, her detached professionalism only just masking a quizzical skew of the head. Another player sits down next to him, asking: “Er, how much did that cost?” “Two pounds,” the first player replies, deadpan.
The event starts at 10:30 in the morning, a queue of players clutching bespoke fighting sticks winding their way around the block long before the doors open. By the time the venue closes, most of those in attendance (including the European and British Championship-title holders) will have been glued to one of the 20 or so game set-ups for close to 11 hours.
Here Ono is a god and these are his followers. There are few other games that inspire this kind of unflinching devotion today. As he shifts in his seat with a barely-contained enthusiasm that doesn’t wane throughout the long day, I ask him where he could possibly go next.
You can read the rest of this feature over at Eurogamer here
Mon 26 Apr 2010
This is not the comeback story. No, we had that last year: the old champion brought out of retirement for one last, historic bout, fighting against the odds to a victory so glorious it revitalised the sport itself. And Street Fighter IV soared along that narrative arc like no other game before it, confounding even Capcom’s expectations to rekindle the dulled passions of fighting fans and introduce an entire new generation to the old ways of pixel pugilism.
The game may not have taken the arcades by storm, particularly, but it was precisely the fact that it wasn’t interested in taking the arcades that led to its success. Street Fighter IV went where the players are: to the consoles.
Then, in combining some of gaming’s richest iconography with a rediscovery of that precious DNA that made Street Fighter II appeal to such a broad range of players, it delivered the entire genre a shot in the arm. It had its detractors, as any champ does. But none could deny the game’s significance or the mainstream, Rocky-esque comeback it spearheaded, not just for its series, but for fighting games in general. Street Fighter IV: the comeback kid.
So how to bill Super Street Fighter IV, then? Bright hero turned cash cow, merchandising and endless appearances diluting his vim and appeal with each outing? Or a fighter who, having found rare form, is now moving from strength to strength? 10 minutes in to what will almost certainly be known as Capcom’s defining work of the generation, there can be no doubt: Super Street Fighter IV, allegedly the final update for the series’ fourth installment, goes down in a blaze of glory.
In the 11 months since work began on the update, all of the data pulled from a million battles across the world has been distilled into a generous clutch of changes that improve the original in almost every tangible way. If Street Fighter IV reinterpreted the successes of the past for a modern audience, then Super Street Fighter IV lives up to its name, making that reinterpretation superlative.
You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.
Sun 25 Apr 2010
Tue 20 Apr 2010
After Burner Climax is a hyper-realistic recreation of how it feels to fly a jet fighter plane in every eight-year-old boy’s imagination. Forget the multitudinous dials, switches and levers that clutter studious flight simulators; SEGA AM2′s latest is a celebration of the economical. You have a machine gun, an unlimited supply of missiles and a plane that barrel rolls in perfect, elegant tumbles at the snap of a single analogue stick.
Wherever realism presents a barrier to joy it has been discarded without second thought, in the way that only a developer who makes arcade games that must grab a player’s attention within 10 seconds of an attract mode sequence can truly subscribe to. You may not have a bleached-blonde girlfriend fist-pumping the clouds at every fiery enemy takedown, and the high-speed detail of the open road has been swapped for the blemish-less sweep of the stratosphere, but in spirit and colouring, this is OutRun in the sky.
It is, then, something of an anachronism: the sort of primary-colour explosion of joyful simplicity that SEGA has left behind for Sumo Digital to lovingly reclaim for those who remember the Japanese giant’s brightest creative period. After Burner Climax – released this week on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network – is, after all, a four-year-old game, the fourth in the dog-fighting series, and one that originally came bundled with a servo-equipped chair in arcades.
At home, stripped of this prohibitively expensive hardware, some of the attention-grabbing appeal of the package is lost. But as with all AM2 games, there’s enough here to sustain you beyond the gimmicks, and while it may not be the division’s best work, the bold aesthetic and strong underlying systems make its journey from arcade to home a welcome one.
As with OutRun, you have the choice of a handful of vehicles to pilot – the F/A-18E, F14D Super Tomcat and the F-15E, each of which come with four paint options. The game is then broken into short, sucker-punch stages which run into one another, each themed around different skyscapes whose hues are varied by time of day and proximity to the equator. Lure of the Sky is a twilight dash under the Northern lights, while Vertical Hot Air has you tearing over mustard sand dunes. Innocent Land, by contrast, takes place over patchwork fields framed by an ebullient rainbow, each area as distinct as the next.
There’s little rhyme or reason to the geographical progression of stages: volcano follows jungle follows ice cap. The point is less to recreate a logical flight path than to allow you to fly through a sequence of picture-postcard vistas, a National Geographic flick-book of locations.
You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here
Fri 16 Apr 2010
The irony in calling the reinvention of a long-established series Conviction, only to flip-flop on what exactly that reinvention should look like, is writ large across Splinter Cell’s recent history. We’re now three years on from Ubisoft’s original release date for Sam Fisher’s fifth outing, a development hell seemingly spent groping in the dark for exactly what a stealth game should look and play like, post-Kojima.
The answer, it appears, is nothing much like a stealth game at all. Fisher has found alacrity in his middle age, his sneaking now less about cowering from torch beams than dashing, Dark Knight-like, from silent takedown to takedown. There are still echoes of the series’ tradition of planning and executing skulk attacks, but new-found pace and accessibility makes this more of an action game than ever before.
Where once Splinter Cell was the primary preserve of the patiently cruel – those players happy to memorise enemy patrol patterns, lay elaborate traps and find thrill in the crumple of a single adversary – Conviction invites Jack Bauer into its lead role, then dresses him up like a ninja.
Now on the run, Fisher has no access to the raft of gadgetry once provided by former employer Third Echelon, the lack of night vision goggles placing new emphasis on movement and blunt power (and eliminating the dull green wash that characterised the visuals of the earlier games). No longer is the game about laying traps in the dark and hiding in wait. Rather, darkness acts as a superhero cape, empowering as it gives you, the unseen, deadly power over them, the seen.
Is it really possible to reconcile creeping stealth with fireworks and fury? Even within the last two months, release dates publicised in magazine advertisements have passed Splinter Cell: Conviction by, reconfirming the impression that this is a game more often defined by uncertainty than the confidence of its assured name. Why mention the difficult gestation here? Because, despite the classy visuals and the neat set-piece mechanics, the conflict around the game occasionally spills inside the game, and while the developer has done its best to paper over the cracks, your eyes soon adjust to perceive the fault lines, particularly in the single-player storyline.
You ca read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here
Sat 3 Apr 2010
What’s in a name? Infinity Ward’s choice of title for Modern Warfare 2′s first map pack is telling. It implies an injection of content designed to revitalise an ailing economy of players, stirring up dulling passions and reversing waning success. Despite what community manager Rob Bowling may say, Activision must be concerned by the speed at which rival Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has been closing the gap between the two games in recent weeks, both in terms of sales and online engagement. So is this a stimulus package to overwhelm the competition? Perhaps it wasn’t originally planned that way, but today, the hope must be there.
Then, of course, there are the financial undertones: the implication that a Stimulus Package is somehow a gesture of generosity for the Modern Warfare faithful in lean times. But many players would contend that at 1200 Microsoft Points (£10.20 / €14.40) – a quarter of the price of the full game itself – this pack of five maps (only three of which are new to the series) represents anything but value for the penny-pinched.
And what of the wider context to this add-on? Infinity Ward is now a headless goliath, its two founders and studio bosses fired by parent company and arch-villain-du-jour Activision in a messy, public manner last month. What of the staff left behind to craft and polish these environments, those men and women who no doubt feel split loyalties under their new, and probably unwelcome, management? They will be unsure of their futures, made insecure by the way their leaders were taken out back and shot, and at the same time prevented from expressing discontent in public by enough legal threats to sink a Langdell.
It’s enough to make you wonder if the severe technical hiccup in getting the map pack out to players on Tuesday afternoon was deliberate sabotage – or, at the very least, someone’s punchline to the map pack’s choice of name, a gift to gleeful headline writers: the Stimulus Package didn’t work! The Stimulus Package didn’t work!
You can read the rest of this review over here
