Red Steel: Halo Killer?

[Smoke]

After seeing a few grainy screenshots and knowning hardly anything about the game, I say yes.

Also can you imagine how hard it's going to be going back to classic style games after playing Revolution, the only "True Next-Gen System™"?

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, it'll be like going from PC to console FPSes, but even worse...

Of course, that also means that some people will, for no reason I will ever understand, defend traditional console controllers' use in FPSes and say 'Revolution controller is worse", but... SOMEbody is always going to defend every opinion, no matter how foolish...

[Smoke]

Well those people are clearly barbarians.

But you just made me think of something. If Revolution is popular enough I wonder if anyone will come out with a Revmote style controller for PC games? It would be nice to at least have the option in FPS games.

[A Black Falcon]

But you just made me think of something. If Revolution is popular enough I wonder if anyone will come out with a Revmote style controller for PC games? It would be nice to at least have the option in FPS games.

I think there already are wireless gyroscopic mice, which are at least similar to the Revolution controller, so it's not too unrealistic to expect them to get more popular...

[lazyfatbum]

Definitely going after the same market as Halo but its gameplay remains to be seen. of course, Halo itself is actually a pretty generic FPS wiith a good story, so it wouldn't take much to kill Halo; just a solid FPS that's fun to play with a good story and of course online multiplayer.

On top of that you have the revcon that will offer unparalleled accuracy and game mechanics, even with what little we know it's easy to see that Red Steel is going to be very new annd very different.

[Paco]

lol, no.

Just like there's never been a Mario killer, or a Zelda killer, or a Grand Theft Auto killer, or a Final Fantasy killer...why do people want a [insert popular game here] killer? pathetic.

[Great Rumbler]

I just want it to be GOOD.

[lazyfatbum]

Paco/ 'insert game' killer just means a game that is going after the same market/genre etc from a competing system that will either alter it so much that it becomes the norm or become more popular. People will call Sly Cooper or Ratchet and Clank 'Mario killer' for example just because it's Sony's platformer/mascot. It doesn't mean it will actually wipe out the other game, just offer the same genre/experience for a competing system.

I have a feeling though, that Metroid Prime 3 with a deep multiplayer option will be the actual 'halo killer' more than Red Steel.

On a side note, i have a feeling that the use of 'RS' in the title is going to be used alot like how the 64 was tacked to everything.

[Smoke]

In the case of Halo there really isn't anything to kill. It's just not as great of a game as so many people make it out to be. There are so many PC FPS games that blow it away. The Half-Life series comes to mind.

[Great Rumbler]

Metroid Prime was way better than Halo.

[A Black Falcon]

In the case of Halo there really isn't anything to kill. It's just not as great of a game as so many people make it out to be. There are so many PC FPS games that blow it away. The Half-Life series comes to mind.

Why did Halo not exactly blow away PC gamers once the port was released? Yeah, because of that fact...

[lazyfatbum]

Halo 1 was basically a first close PC FPS experience on a console with its online multiplayer but it and Halo 2 are both slow in gameplay. I hope that one day when I have a 360 and PDZ that its multiplayer is just as fast and crazy as the original and not the slow halo-like gameplay that drove me bananas. In a five minute match in Halo 2 I only had like 20 kills with 2 other human players and some bots (i think 2) and i didn't die once. In PD, in a 5 minute margin, i can rank up around 150 to 200 kills with the same amount of people and bots; with one hit kills i can score about 100 a minute and that's of course without shields :D FUCK *goes to play PD*

[Smoke]

I don't hate the Halo series. I just don't get why so many people think it's the greatest FPS series of all time. Ignorance?

[Great Rumbler]

I hope that one day when I have a 360 and PDZ that its multiplayer is just as fast and crazy as the original and not the slow halo-like gameplay that drove me bananas.

Sorry, the multiplayer in PDZ is almost EXACTLY like the multiplayer in Halo. It takes millions of shots to kill somebody and all the weapons have about equal power. You can shoot someone in the face with a rocket and they'll still be alive. If you want online multiplayer on the 360 that's really AWESOME, get Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter.

[lazyfatbum]

Rocket to the face and not die?? did the shield tech improve in the past before it barely gave you an extra milisecond of life against a rocket or something?

So the head shot = instant kill is gone too?

[A Black Falcon]

I don't hate the Halo series. I just don't get why so many people think it's the greatest FPS series of all time. Ignorance?

Console fanboyism. No question.

Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter.

Which is mostly described as 'great', but alternatively as 'overly complex'... which of course it's supposed to be, but as a fast-action title? Is the multiplayer THAT different from the single?

[Smoke]

Wait I thought you could change the settings in PDZ so that it doesn't take so much damage to kill someone?

[lazyfatbum]

That's an odd option... :D

*sets it to zero*

*teh win*

[Great Rumbler]

Which is mostly described as 'great', but alternatively as 'overly complex'... which of course it's supposed to be, but as a fast-action title? Is the multiplayer THAT different from the single?

If by "over complex" they mean "insanely awesome and fun". Because that what it is really. Unlike in PDZ, GRAW is all about strategy. You have to plan your next move carefully, because two or three shots and you're gone. If you run around shooting wildly you won't last two seconds. It's all about getting together as a team and use the terrain to your advantage: Keep hidden and use cover where available. It's different from PDZ definitely, but in a good way as far as I'm concerned. Plus, it has a lot of really good modes: Team elimination, co-op elimation [several humans versus about 40 bots], capture the base, and so on.

One match in particular stood our for me: I was on a team with three other people against a team of four. We would scope out the surrounding area and find a good place to wait. One guy would send the UAV around to find the enemy. Once we found them, we'd carefully make our way through the empty city streets, always on the look out for movement. If you got to close together a stray grenade would end it all, so you had to stay loose. Suddenly, a hail of bullets coming from a side alley. One guy's down and the enemy's right on top of us! But then, one guy that had hung back fires off a shot through his scope and takes on down. A blast of machine gun fire from the guy on my right takes down another. I bring up my rifle and prepare to fire, but it's too late. I take a couple of shots and go down. Luckily we win the day however. And that's how it all happened...

In PDZ, it's pretty much just everyone running around like crazy and blasting each other in the face until somebody finally dies. Bleh.

Wait I thought you could change the settings in PDZ so that it doesn't take so much damage to kill someone?

I've never heard of such and option before. Not to metion, I pored through the menus looking for ways to fix that very problem.

[A Black Falcon]

Better scans.

http://www.jeux-france.com/blog82196_Mariods

It looks good, but there's no way this competes with the graphics of better-looking X360 games, I think... not that we should expect it to...

[Dark Jaguar]

Here's the one issue with the Revolution being noticably weaker (though it's hard to say what those are scans of and no real idea as to whether or not that's what the final product will look like). Sony and MS are eventually going to make their own versions of the tech, and Sony is partway there if they can get some good gesture recognition software going with the eyetoy (a stereo eyetoy with the right software would actually kick the arse of the revolution controller... with the right software being the key phrase). They will also eventually drop the price. At that point, the competition will be between two really powerful systems and one weaker system. If the PS3 is as powerful as Sony says it will be, it'll really just be all about ONE system if they truly "have it alls".

Of course, that's just hardware. I'll have Nintendo's system for as long as Nintendo is only making their games for their own hardware.

[Great Rumbler]

The Revolution is made with that type of interface in mind, while the Xbox360 and the PS3 are not. Even if Sony and MS did release something like that eventually [which they may very well do], it'll still be just an add-on with little developer support, not to mention a fractured base.

[Dark Jaguar]

Which is why I pointed out the software issue.

I suppose they'd end up in the same situation Nintendo would if they only released a hard drive as a seperate add-on.

[lazyfatbum]

Not really, look at 360. They have HDD required games on the release forecast. Besides, you dont have to spend extra R&D, develop new types of game engines, make use of multiple peripherals etc just to make use of a HDD.

ABF/ Red Steel definitely looks like a standard def 360 game... running in progressive scan. It also has alot of polish being used in the filters and particle effects, I'd like to see if Red Steel has some 'outside' or 'daylight' areas, something to break the action inbetween 'japanese Blade Runner inspired office buildings' :D but also to show off more natural surroundings.

[A Black Falcon]

That old new images source has died, these work. The better scans...

http://www.pro-gamers.fr/images/Revo/RedSteel/

[A Black Falcon]

Stealth's comparison, but it's apt, just as far as graphics go (I'm not even going to touch the rest of the stuff he says...)...

are the images working?





One of these looks significantly better than the other, and it's not the Revolution game.

[Great Rumbler]

One of those pictures was also not a scan from a magazine and it was taken at an incredibly high resolution unlikely to be possible on even the best HDTV. But, that probably wasn't his point.

Hey, what do you know? I logged onto MSN and as soon as I did someone named "Revolution Sucks :(" started talking to me. I wonder who it is? Note: I have not yet replied back and am unlikely to do so.

[A Black Falcon]

Note that I said I wasn't even going to touch anything he said about anything...

There is one thing you should remember about Stealth, though. Well, two.

1) HE WANTS ATTENTION

2) To get that, he'll say all kinds of things -- ie don't take everything he says seriously... and once in a while he'll admit that he doesn't mean it all... (ie as opposed to the usual Nintendo-bashing rhetoric he uses on me -- he sometimes says that he just does that because I'm a Nintendo fan, while with some other people who hate Nintendo he defends them to some degree...) oh, it doesn't make him not annoying, but it's better than going in to a discussion with him under the mistaken impression that he really means everything he is saying. And he actually talks (on MSN, reguarly), unlike most people from TC...

Anyway...

One of those pictures was also not a scan from a magazine and it was taken at an incredibly high resolution unlikely to be possible on even the best HDTV. But, that probably wasn't his point.

Hey, what do you know? I logged onto MSN and as soon as I did someone named "Revolution Sucks " started talking to me. I wonder who it is? Note: I have not yet replied back and am unlikely to do so.

1280x720 is a perfectly normal image size... but yes, it does have much better image quality than Red Steel, but the difference is big enough that it's easy enough to tell that even if Red Steel had images of that quality, they wouldn't look that good. But he talks all the time about how horrible it is that Revolution won't support Unreal Engine 3 games (like Gears of War there) that it's obvious what he thinks of that engine... me? It's nice, but on the other hand, it's an FPS...

[Dark Jaguar]

Calling someone a nobody seems to have a powerful effect.

[Smoke]

Pictures of the GI crew playing around with the Revolution controller. The controller has definitely changed. If anything it's gotten smaller. The nunchuk is tiny.

Here's an interview with Broken Saints' Brooke Burgess.

As for Nintendo? Well…I’ve heard it from both sides, really. A couple of tech director peers have certainly whined that the Rev architecture is exactly as stated – merely twice as powerful as the ‘Cube – and that Nintendo’s out of touch with this generation, and will join Sega in the software-only game in the NEXT next-gen. Of course, I’m of the camp that it’s all about DESIGN…you know, like that old story of Miyamoto and the EAD teams playing around with game mechanics using a dot on a screen, and if it’s fun with a dot, then it’ll be fun with snazzy visuals? Remember that wacky old philosophy…the diametric opposite to American publishers, who cram as many A/V distractions and ‘back of the box’ features into a build between Alpha and Beta…and then struggle during the final months, desperately trying to figure out how to make the damn thing ‘fun’?

I’ve got friends working on using the Rev’ controller for all sorts of things. Flying/navigation (oh…and you can bet we’ll see the new Pilotwings in limited playable form at E3). Music titles (Taiko drums, anyone?). Unconventional sports (remember that Rockstar table tennis announcement? That’s something I proposed back in the EA days!). Shooters (DUCK HUNT 2006!!!) Even survival horror using the controller as a flashlight/knife combo! I think a lot of you are going to be VERY surprised at what is shown for Rev’ in a few weeks…and that’s on TOP of the Zelda: Twilight Princess sword and magic mechanics.

[lazyfatbum]

Gears of War looks very nice, so let me reiterate: RS looks like a FIRST GEN SD 360 game. :D

I dunno who that brook person is, but dammit I like him. And yunno, art direction is goinng to be more important this generation than anything we've ever seen. I mean look at Gears of War; spectacular graphics... but imagine if that was a screen shot of an upcoming movie, it suddenly looks rediculous... almost comedic. The soldier is oversized and looks like a homosexual's wetdream while the monster he's fighting somehow manages to look like a guy in a rubber suit (despite the fact that's a computer generated model). RS on the other hand looks like actual images from a graphic novel with realistic backgrounds and stylized humans in a neo-asia setting. if you looked at the Gears and RS shots and wre told that those are two movies coming out, which would you be more interested in?

[Smoke]

Yeah, the monster design in the Gears of War shot is really bad isn't it? A lot of FPS seem to have bad art when it comes to the characters.

[Great Rumbler]

Upside-down zombie heads with spider legs! Skeletons with rocket launchers strapped to their backs! Flying skulls that shoot fire at you!

[Smoke]

I think most FPS character designers have looked at too many heavy metal album covers.

[A Black Falcon]

Gears of War looks very nice, so let me reiterate: RS looks like a FIRST GEN SD 360 game.

This I can perhaps agree with, yes.

I dunno who that brook person is, but dammit I like him.

You would, remember this?

Having your ear to the ground, have you heard any interesting rumblings related to the videogame Industry recently, especially on the Nintendo side? Perhaps from any of your ex-Electronic Arts colleagues?

BB: You mean the whole Stereoscopic Revolution speculation wasn’t enough for you?!?!

http://brokensaints.com/blog/?p=48

When I posted this almost a year ago, based purely on personal speculation and some industry detective work and whisperings, the reaction was overwhelming…and not all in a good way. Our server was slammed. The site crashed several times. A malicious code-kid hacked our PHP forums – with over 100,000 personal and poetic posts from the previous four years – and wiped them out. And when Nintendo failed to tip their hand at 2005’s E3 with confirmation either way? Well…I was more than a little vilified by the hardcore loyalists, and was accused of making the post for a short-term boost in traffic, and teaming with an anonymous wanker named ‘Aries’ to stir the pot and stretch our ‘15 minutes’. So let me state unequivocally – all of it’s bullshit. No-one can be held responsible for being linked by major game and news sites because of a relatively innocuous blog post. I certainly did the best digging I could with respect to my journalistic background. The connections between the graphics, film, and display industries were all there…and it doesn’t take a time machine to jump back ten years and remember that stereoscopic 3D has been something the Big N has been playing with seriously for a LONG time (Virtual Boy, anyone?).

And seriously, kids - if the happiness of your collective futures hinge on the nature of ANYTHING in the entertainment industry – a movie, a band, a comic, a game, porn, Broadway musicals, etc - well, you really need to pause and reflect on the emotional and spiritual ramifications of such a focus. Dangerous and frightening stuff…because you are destined to be disappointed.

:)

Upside-down zombie heads with spider legs! Skeletons with rocket launchers strapped to their backs! Flying skulls that shoot fire at you!

At least they're unique...

[Dark Jaguar]

No they aren't! That's the problem! It's every doodle in every high school text book!

[A Black Falcon]

I haven't played Doom 3 or Gears of War, but based on screenshots they look like fine monsters... sure it's flaming demon skulls with rocket launchers, but oh well, why is that so horrible?

[lazyfatbum]

There's only two series of FPS I can think of that have incredible 'film quality' realistic monsters and enemies and that's the Turok series and of course Metroid Prime. Those robots in the Sanctuary (i forget their name, but they have a wreckingball on their hands) still freak me out.

at E3 Nintendo will unveil the 3-D holographic projectors. Believe!

[Dark Jaguar]

I actually found those ball flinging bots to be not the most inspired monsters in the game. Don't get me wrong, they looked nice, but as a general rule I feared anything that looked like it could cut my entire body off. With it being the whole body I'm not sure what they would cut it off OF, but they could so do it. The most fearsome enviroments in the Metroid series, to sort of take it in another direction, were rarely the techy places, but rather places of "biology totally dominating the very land itself" where it is a totally alien jungle and you will DIE to death the second one of them realizes you are made of certain materials it could use to continue to live. Brinstar comes to mind as a place that would probably infest my nervous system with some sort of mold that kept me alive but constantly regenerated my organs to feed some bug things that crawled all over me, and a side effect of that mold's particular adaptation is the creature infected with it is in constant agonizing pain and kept awake at the same time. Ah evolution, "survival of the just good enough".

[Smoke]

While I love Doom and it's sequels I still have to admit the moster designs aren't the best. id are great at creating 3D engines and great at making fun fast fragfests but they're not that great when it comes to art.

Half-Life 2 on the other hand has some really great monster designs.

[A Black Falcon]

but Epic isn't id...

They just really, really wish they were, and have since somewhere around 1992. :D Of course they've never been as good, not since day one, but they wish they were... perhaps the closest they got was Unreal Tournament vs. Quake III, though. Their 2d stuff was no competition for Apogee's... oh, they published some good games, but they just didn't quite match up.

[Smoke]

The original UT was a really great game.

[A Black Falcon]

True, but an opinion built over a course of years (Epic and Apogee's PC shareware lineups) doesn't change easily, and given that I don't play FPSes that much (I do have Return to Castle Wolfenstein, but it's the only Epic or id FPS I own... though if Apogee is also included, I do also have Duke Nukem 3D.), I can't really compare them. :)

Of course, perhaps the trickiest thing about this comparison is that so many of the games both Epic and Apogee published were just published, not developed, by them, and the same continues now (Epic didn't make Unreal 4, and id didn't make Quake 4, for instance...), making direct comparisons hard... though it is true that both companies have been accused since their early days of making 3D games of being better at making engines than actually making the games the engines run, perhaps making it more obvious why they outsource so many of them... :)

But it is interesting that the two top FPS engine developers have been the exact same companies for a decade now.

[lazyfatbum]

DJ/ The big robots that activate when you get close and then charge at you and do that 'i have become dark energy' stance and then walk after you, taking 3 energy tanks when they hit you in hard mode, didnt freak you out? :D I agree that the 'abandoned' locations are top notch freakishness and its surprising that the Metroid Prime games dont have a Jungle Gonna Get You location yet like the 'green' areas of Brinstar. Hopefully they'll make it similar to the sets in urassic Park 2 that wre covered in algea and spore and you can just barely make out how it used to look when people worked there.

[Dark Jaguar]

Oh, scary because they would kill you hard? Yeah I can see that :D.

Yeah, they hunch all up on themselves and make like they are holding a mystical orb in each hand and then they just let the evil flow forth. *deep low pitch steady beat in background* Denero! *dun dun duh dun* Deluise! *dun dun dun* Dan Acro! Creeping, rusty, meat. The very essence of death metal, and also Silent Hill, with stop motion of a pork chop running around some abandoned factory and suddenly it bursts and ants crawl out of it or something.

A "jungle gonna get you" location would rock. Jurrasic Park is a good idea, but of course they'd have to take it further and give you the impression that if you take a SINGLE breath outside your suit, you ARE mold. Hopefully the Revolution can allow for truly "open" areas, which I think will be an important part of making a massive organics gone mad region.

[lazyfatbum]

hahaha like after walking around for a bit, mold grows on your gun and visor :D Ohh, it could even lock up some oof your gears so when you try to fir a missle you get a jamming sound so you have to fire a few normal shots to clear it up..

I was thinking about Prime 3 and a side from story, I keep thinking of what direction thy'll go for the beam weapons. I really, really hope that Prime 3 brings back the pick and choose system of Super Metroid where you could turn certain things off or on and mix powerups and beams. Back in the day, Samus would get a plethora of beam types and they had nothing to do with elements, they didn't even make sense logically because they were each different and belong in a group like elementals or dark and light energy, plus I hope Prime 3 moves away from having 4 beam types.

The other important factor from Metroid 1, 2 Return of Samus, Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion is the ability to freeze enemies and use them as stairs. But let's remember that Retro is composed out of Turok and Iguana team members you KNOW they want to experiment with different weapon types. I say give Samus an ice beam, as quick as the power beam, and then give her an actual grapple beam switch. Imagine you ice up a baddie, throw the grapple beam on them and you could A. Swing from them, or B. Once grappled on, charge it up to to use the body of the baddie as a mace. this would work great in areas that are dark and you could grab a baddie who has a biolumenecent quality to use as a flashlight or a baddie who explodes when killed to open a new passageway. Just grab him and throw him on the wall that needs to be a sploded.

Also I say I say lets get rid of the bastardization of the space jump and either remove it all together or, when you get the power up it gives you the infinite jumping ability from Super and Fusion, bring the screw attack back but use it as a weapon that activates when you jump, allowing you to kill things just by jumping in to them (instead of as a tool primarily used to cross large gaps, that's what the grapple beam is for). So lets bring a new mechanic in to play: You see a platform to high to jumpp to, there's nothing to grapple on to but you need to be here. You take a running a jump, and at the hight of the jump you grapple beam straight down and pole vault to the platform, you could even have entire areas where you cant touch the ground directly and have to traverse the area entirely by pole vaulting.

since we're playing with the grapple beam, lets take the way we killed the Meridia boss in Super and make it a main stay. You fire the grapple beam at an enemy, press a button, and you electrocute it. You'll take a small amount of damage too, but of course there will be some enemies who can only be damaged this way. But combine the above with this, and you can grab a baddie, electrocute him, and touch him to other baddies to electrocute them as well.

3-D movement is going to be a big mechanicc in the next Prime, so things like this will really add to the immersion/ let's take another main stay, the spiderball. It first appeared in Metroid II Return of Samus and allowed to become a sticky glob and move up walls, on the cieling etc. In the prime series it required the use of magnetic rails which allowed for some awesome puzzles. I saw we combine the best of both worls and create a spiderball that can use magnetic rails bbut also use the gooey mode to latch on to anything, the difference being that is that gooey mode doesnt last long and you cant bomb jump or boost jump while in this form, this would allow for even more complex puzzles as well as crazy 3-D fields of play that require the player to think outside the box in order to reach certain areas, or very much like Quadrasix in Echoes, make large enemies that require the player to actually latch on to them in spiderball to either travel on them or hit weak points.

Boosting and shinesparking, two things that should have been in the earlier prime games but have been absent. I think the only way these mechanics are going to work is if they're from a third person. shinesparking requires forethought of the entire level and if you get confused which direction you need to go, it gets frustrating quickly. Boosting can be first person, no issue there, but when at full speed, you press a button and enter shinespark, at which point it becomes third person. When you jump, you get a second to choose a direction in full 3-D around you and then take off in a straight line in that direction, but lets give the player a little play to compensate movement. When you land and kill the shinespark, it re-enters first person.

God....... fucking E3 is still like 20 days away!