Hacking Fatal Frame IV
NGamer talks to the group who region-freed Fatal Frame IV.
With no official localisation of Japanese horror delight Fatal Frame IV in sight, a team of valiant hackers did the job themselves. And what an incredible job it is, making the game region-free to boot. We caught up with project lead Colin ‘Tempus’ Noga, tool developer Clayton ‘Mr Mongoose’ Ramsey and patching whiz Aaron ‘AerialX’ to talk ghosts in the machine…
Click here to read the full article
Hacking Fatal Frame IV
NGamer talks to the group who region-freed Fatal Frame IV.
With no official localisation of Japanese horror delight Fatal Frame IV in sight, a team of valiant hackers did the job themselves. And what an incredible job it is, making the game region-free to boot. We caught up with project lead Colin ‘Tempus’ Noga, tool developer Clayton ‘Mr Mongoose’ Ramsey and patching whiz Aaron ‘AerialX’ to talk ghosts in the machine…
Click here to read the full article
Supreme Commander 2 Interview
Recently, I had the chance to speak with Chris Taylor about the upcoming Supreme Commander 2, which is poised to take real-time strategy gaming to a new level. I want to thank Chris for taking the time to answer my questions and for Barandon, at Mav PR, for arranging the interview.
Questions from Gareth Von Kallenbach
Skewed and Reviewed
1. What is the background and setting for the game?
The game takes place thousands of years in the future. The old Earth Empire that has ruled for so long became split into three factions, fought the Infinite War and then joined forces to fight the Seraphim. But this peace didn’t last, the Coalition leader is assassinated, and hostilities are renewed. You take turns playing one of three Commanders, each one, old friends, and how this friendship impacts the decisions they make while fighting on the battlefield.
2. In games of this type, A.I. is often critical for the success of a game. How has the A.I. for the game been setup and what features will it include?
Each game we do, we advance our AI, the way it works, etc. This time we’ve introduced Neural nets, which adds a little extra spice to the game. What we provide is a wide array of AI: Easy, Normal, Hard and an extra hard AI we call Cheating AI. If you beat Easy, you an work your way up to Cheating AI, but then, you can take on multiple opponents, so there’s no limit to how far you can test your l33t skilz.
3. What are some of the units featured?
Oh boy, that’s a gigantic question. We have more than 25 Experimental Units in the game, and they cover a wide array of specialties. We have the Proto Brain Complex, the Space Temple, and the Cybranasaurus Rex, to name a few. Each Experimental unit is very unique and has a very special use.
However, the player’s own ACU is decked out this time around, with upgrades available like the jump jets (teleport if you are Illuminate), anti-air weapons, torpedoes, overcharge gun, and artillery.
4. The scope of the game sounds amazing. What are some of the biggest obstacles you see in creating the game for a console and what are your biggest goals for the game?
Easily the biggest challenge we faced on the console was making the UI really intuitive to use, and making sure we gave the player a fully functional, large scale RTS experience. I am very happy to say we’ve done it, and the game plays beautifully. For Supreme Commander 2 we want to really widen the audience, allowing more people than ever to jump in and enjoy the full glory of RTS gameplay.
5. Are there mega weapons and if so, how do you balance giving players the destructive power they want, yet maintaining a balance in the game?
This is key to the tuning and balancing part of game design. If you want the player to have nukes (which we do), then you have to make sure you balance that by providing a defense (in our case, you build anti-nukes). You also have to tune the units to make sure the cost is in line with the power. If you want to build nukes, you will have to first research them, then you build an expensive structure, and then you build the nuke itself.
6. How is resource gathering handled for the game?
The player must locate special Mass locations or sites that are scattered around the map. The player will also need Energy to combine with Mass to form units. Energy can be produced with special Energy production facilities.
7. What forms of multiplayer will be featured?
Multiplayer can be played in many configurations. You can play against a friend, 1v1, or you and a friend could play two others, 2v2. You can play against AI opponents cooperatively, or in pretty much any configuration you like. On the PC you can have up to 8 players, and on the 360, up to 4. We also support observer mode so that you can study someone while they play. And you can save out the replay file and watch it again to learn new strategies.
8. Do you have a favorite unit and strategy when playing, and if so, what is it?
I love all the factions for all their unique qualities, but for the sake of an example, let’s talk about a strategy I have been enjoying lately with the UEF. Just when my opponent has built up a lot of shields to protect against all my incoming artillery, I switch to the Noah Unit Cannon, and I bombard them with actual units. This strategy usually includes building four at once, and the visuals of these units flying across the map is nothing short of fantastic. you’ve never seen anything like that before. And I always remember to build some nuke defense!!
9. What sort of missions and campaigns will players face?
We include a big SP campaign, which can be broken down into three separate parts, each part tells a chapter of the story. Each chapter has six “operations”. As the player works through the overall campaign and story, new units are revealed and the player has a chance to try them out. By the end of the SP game, most players will have chosen a favorite that they will likely master in Skirmish and MP games.
10. What sort of musical score will the game have?
Our in-house composer, Howard Mostrom, has done a fantastic job creating a nice mix for each faction. To quote Howard, “the Cybran are more Avant-garde and the Illuminate are classical, almost renaissance, with some choir in the background. The UEF are more traditional military with orchestral elements and driven by percussion”.
Assassin’s Creed II Interview
Ubisoft reflects on making Ezio…
PSM3 Magazine recently interviewed the Ubisoft Montreal development team to reflect on Assassin’s Creed II. Here’s how the discussion went…
Click here to read the full article
Assassin’s Creed II Interview
Ubisoft reflects on making Ezio…
PSM3 Magazine recently interviewed the Ubisoft Montreal development team to reflect on Assassin’s Creed II. Here’s how the discussion went…
Click here to read the full article
Red Steel 2 Interview
Ubisoft talks frankly about the next big core Wii game.
Red Steel 2 is the next big ‘core’ Wii game to arrive in the shops. As a Wii MotionPlus exclusive, it’s also one of the few third-party games taking advantage of the console’s full motion capabilities. But will it succeed where so many other big-boy Wii titles have failed to make a dent?
Click here to read the full article
Red Steel 2 Interview
Ubisoft talks frankly about the next big core Wii game.
Red Steel 2 is the next big ‘core’ Wii game to arrive in the shops. As a Wii MotionPlus exclusive, it’s also one of the few third-party games taking advantage of the console’s full motion capabilities. But will it succeed where so many other big-boy Wii titles have failed to make a dent?
Click here to read the full article
Jason Vandenberghe Lays Down the Law
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.
Jason Vandenberghe Lays Down the Law
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.
Are We Really the Idiots They Say We Are?
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 they 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.”
It sounds like they are both very committed artists of the cinema. Intellectually, I am guessing they must be real geniuses too. Taylor and Neveldine, again from the “Gamer” DVD’s special features:
“I think, at times, they wanted us to pull a lot of the creepy, weird, wild stuff that we do out of that -”
“- and we battled and we kept as much as we could in.”
“And that, at the end of the day, is the big difference between making a cheap movie and an expensive movie. …Is the kind of, like, how far can you push it? How far can you go? You want it to be more accessible, for a bigger audience.”
Of course while they say this the “making of” featurette editor cuts to some behind-the-scenes footage from one of the film’s sets. In the footage you see an actor asking the camera and production crew for some direction, all while he’s wearing skin-tight white spandex from head-to-toe and doing pelvic thrusts into another guy suspended from the ceiling in a harness.
So just to make sure I have this straight you two – you’re saying the difference between a cheap movie and an expensive one is how much money you spend on it, and on how great of a job you do in making it creepy, weird, and wild? And further, loading it up with that kind of stuff and pushing cultural boundaries also just happens to be how you make a film more accessible and appeal to a bigger audience?
Golly, that’s so difficult to wrap my mind around that it just has to be smart!
