Posts Tagged ‘too human’
Fracture Game Review–And The Stupid Idea Trophy Goes To….
And so, the flood of first person shooter video games that attempt to differentiate themselves in the dumbest possible fashion continues with recent release Fracture, now available for the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. First, the plot rundown:
In the fairly distant future of 2161, turns out Al Gore was right and a lot sooner than anyone expected—global warming has taken hold and flooded out a lot of the planet, including major chunks of the Midwest for some reason and the coasts. In order to prevent the total destruction of the coastal states, new technologies emerge that can reshape the landscape with the press of a button, forming valleys where there were cliffs and cliffs where there were valleys, allowing threatened areas to easily build bulwarks of land against the oncoming floodwaters.
The United States has been split in two at about the Mississippi River, with the United States operating out of Washington D.C. and the new offshoot, the Republic of Pacifica, functioning out of its new capitol of San Francisco, which probably should’ve been flooded right along with most of California if the Pacific goes up as much as expected. Anyway, Pacifica’s embraced genetic modification as a way of life—those crazy Californians!—and they’re now at odds with what’s left of the United States, who thinks that genetic modification on a grand scale is so immoral that they’ve declared it illegal, choosing instead to focus on the technological prowess of man. And thus, the two republics find themselves at war in the future.
When I said that it was going to try and differentiate itself using some pretty weak methods, I meant it. First, it’s not a hundred percent accurate to call Fracture a first person shooter, because you are not merely behind the gun—you are behind the entire CHARACTER. As far as I’m concerned this is a toe-MAY-toe / toe-MAH-toe sort of difference, but that’s just me, and really does little overall to separate this from the slew of first person shooters already out on the market.
Second, there’s been a lot of fuss about the “entrencher” gun, quite possibly the single unique feature about this game. With it, you can raise and lower portions of ground, probably based on the same technology that I described in the plot synopsis above. It’s nice to be able to make cover wherever you go, but would I play an entire game because it exists? No, not a chance. It’s a nifty feature, a sweet addition to the list of bells and whistles, but frankly, I wouldn’t ever play this game again.
Why? Because it’s almost EXACTLY the same game as Too Human and Gears of War and Gears of War 2 and all those other games that we’ve been playing over and over and over again with virtually no distinguishing features except those in character and story and bells and whistles.
And while I’m at it, whose brain-damaged idea was it to name the game’s lead character “Jet Brody”? I mean, come on—did you have a CONTEST and bring in some fourth graders, get them loaded on Pixy Stix and Red Bull and tell them to come up with the coolest action hero name EVER? Did you pass on “Max Power” just because The Simpsons already did it? Even Matt Hazard made a little more sense and that was a DELIBERATE parody. Please stop insulting my intelligence by coming up with this crap. Seriously.
Basically, there’s no real reason to play this game unless you’re absolutely desperate to start reshaping landscapes in video games to suit your own desires because you’ve already played this game about a dozen times over. Fracture is yet another in a long string of miserable retreads that aren’t even worth a rental unless you can’t get enough first person shooter action.
Too Human Review–A Bit Too Clunky
Being of Scandinavian descent myself–specifically Danish–I’m always caught by surprise when I see Norse mythology hit the pop culture circuit. Throw out a Loki or an Odin or a badly overused Thor or even a Yggdrasil or some such and you’ve got my attention.
Which is one of the biggest reasons that I was interested in finally getting my hands on a copy of Too Human, the game that shows you that it’s true–any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Here, “Norse gods” are just cybernetically enhanced humans getting a kind of carefully regulated technology from the Aesir Corporation. One such “god”, Baldur, has received the mission of protecting the human race from the encroaching machine armies of fellow “god” Loki.
There’s an interesting dichotomy at work here–the “gods” use machine parts to give them new abilities and thus become more machinelike with each new enhancement, but Loki’s machine armies harvest human blood and limbs and graft them onto their own superstructures, in an effort to become more human. It’s as though the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, and neither man nor machine wants to stay that way for long.
The part that’ll really kill you about Too Human is that it spent fully TEN YEARS in development hell, starting life as a four-disc adventure game for the original Playstation. Yes, I mean Playstation ONE. So what you’re seeing here is the result of ten years’ worth of work and refinement.
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Molyneaux Doesn’t Like Too Human
Always a vocal person, Peter Molyneaux recently talked about the games he is looking forward to this year, noting, in particular, Too Human, which he felt to be “slightly off”, noting that he would have done things differently if he were in charge.
“It has some gems in there, but they’re hard to find,” he said. “I quite like the combat and felt it was accessible, but I just… If I got my hands on the game, I’d rip out a few of the things they did and just concentrate on the core.”
“It just slightly forgot about what it was trying to be,” Molyneaux continued. “In a way, it tried to be something it was not. It felt – and again, I thought it did some things really well – that there was something slightly off about it. I’m sure that Dennis Dyack is going to come and kill me now!”
He also talked about GTA 4, which he noted was a “high spot” this year despite it having flaws. Braid, LittleBigPlanet and Spore were also mentioned, with the latter turning out better than expected by Molyneaux.
The famed developer recently oversaw the development of Fable 2, which is due out exclusively on Xbox 360 on October 24.
Dyack on Epic Fight
With the release of Too Human this week, Silicon Knights president and founder Denis Dyack commented on the studio’s legal battle with Epic Games, the creator of the Unreal Engine which the studio used to power their latest project.
“The trial is proceeding,” Dyack said. “We feel really good about our claims, and we’re hopeful that justice will be done. We all feel really strongly that they have defrauded us, and a major portion of the industry.”
The dispute is centered around the studio’s claim that Epic did not deliver promised features in Unreal Engine 3 in order to focus on its own UE3 project – Gears of War.
“The Too Human you see today only really started development when [Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes] was completed,” noted Dyack. “So it’s been a four-year development cycle and it would have been out even quicker, but we had to re-write the engine because of all the Epic stuff.”
Too Human “Epic” Trailer
After many, many, delays, three console changes, and an entire game engine change, Silicon Knight’s Too Human still looks promising if this trailer is any indication. Naturally, the trailer is not as good an indicator as good as the demo will be. That said, the trailer is still put together well enough, even if the dialog sounds a bit on the generic side.
New Too Human Video
It’s been a while since we’ve had any substantial news of Silicon Knights’ upcoming title Too Human. Rest assured though, if this video is any indication, Silicon Knights has everything under control. The video below is a lengthy demonstration of the game’s two different style of play: action and RPG, and how seamlessly they’ve been integrated together. Then the team goes into a brief discussion of the gameplay differences between playing Human or playing Cyber, as well as armor types, and how the team approached balancing the risk of dying. Also, I have to commend the work that the development team has done switching engines. The game looks really good and, from what the video shows, there’s no detriment to the frame rate. Hey Bioware, are you taking notes?