I met with Majesco last week and we went over their holiday and spring lineup. Most of it looks pretty good. I’m really excited about Infected.
Teen Titans is due to ship in February 2006 for gamecube, ps2, and xbox. It is up to 4 player story mode coop or arena. In coop mode you can switch between titans at any time to make use of their special attacks. The game has the look and feel of the cartoon with locations from the shows and more than 12 voice actors involved. Each character gets upgrades to his/her special attacks and can pull off combo moves. There are 24 characters to choose from in arena mode, which is an up to 4 player free for all. There are also some puzzle levels that are like retro games, ie pong and invaders.
Jaws Unleashed is due to ship in February 2006 for PC, ps2, and xbox. Built on the Echo the Dolphin engine, this is a story where you play as Jaws and attack and destroy everything. If you’re really careful you can disembody your prey before consuming it. They are adding cinematic fatalities to the game. There are more than 12 kinds of boats and different ocean and land areas (mainly harbors and docks) to be explored. The night levels were pretty cool – the moon reflects off the ocean’s surface and down below it is murkier than during daylight.
Age of Empires is due to ship for Nintendo DS in January 2006. Built on the success of earlier Age of Empires games this brings a solid foundation to wifi enabled 4 player battles. User profiles track scoring and bonuses so you can compare yourself to friends and enemies. They’re currently working on adding more artwork, streamlining game play, and tweaking the battle system to show more graphics in the results. You can use the stylus or the d-pad to control troops. There are 28 missions total, 5-6 per campaign.
A few weeks ago I got to play Call of Duty 2: Big Red One while meeting with the good people at Activision. The game is entirely new, meaning a new core engine for GameCube, PS2, and Xbox. They also improved the enemy AI. I could tell. The Nazis don’t just stand there and shoot back. They drop back, regroup, even try to flank you. In addition your comrades’ AI improves over the course of the game as they become experienced.
You play as a member of America’s most decorated and heroic fighting unit, The Big Red One. You’ll have to work with your squad to accomplish a variety of land, sea, and air combat missions spanning North Africa, Italy, and Nazi-occupied Western Europe. The goal of the development team was to “create an epic war movie” and they did. And then they threw you right into the middle of it.
Get ready to enter a Robert Rodriguez film. BTW, if you haven’t seen El Mariachi go rent it. You play as a criminal released from prison to take the place of your DEA Agent brother in the hunt for your father’s killers. The whole thing involves shooting your way through the Mexican drug world. You get missions and drive around to them, or you can go directly to the mission and skip the exploration. I’d recommend the exploration because it is not only fun but also the best place for finding pick-ups, some of which like Day of the Dead in which you kill as many people as you can, end up being great bonus opportunities. Driving around or running around you can find a lot of stuff that you can use to improve your character’s skills.
It’s a fun game. The heart of it is shooting the crap out of everyone and everything. You use the left trigger (L1) to pull off all the dodges and shooting moves, such as walking up a wall, diving left, reversing and diving backwards, all while shooting. You can use vehicles as weapons, ramming into enemies or driving at them and then jumping out of the car before it smashes into them and explodes. Every battle is a guns blazing battle where charging forward using special moves is the way to go. There’s no drop back and pick off the enemy like a sniper here; it’s all bull forward laying down the lead. It’s set against a surreal Mexican background so there are a lot of opportunities for humor. A dark humor pervades this game. I actually found myself laughing aloud at times.
The bad news is that the load times are just ridiculous. It’s not that the load times take a long time, but rather that there are so many of them. It seemed like every 2 minutes I had to take a break and watch the game load. It completely ruins the atmosphere to have that many loads. My only other gripe is that vehicle control is not so good. Everything handles like a sled. It is good that there’s a way to skip the driving and go right to an objective.
Total Overdose is a fun shoot-em-up set in a stylistic Mexican drug world. It’s not for the faint-hearted or little kids. It’s a lot of fun to play it.
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The Lector has been decoded and the message reads: From Russia With Love™, starring Academy Award®-winner, Sir Sean Connery has gone gold on the PS2 and Xbox and will be shipping on Tuesday Nov. 1, 2005! A version for the Nintendo GameCube™ will be released shortly after in mid- November.
From Russia With Love, the game, is based on the classic Bond film from 1963 but features new plot twists, gadgets, weapons and characters. Sir Sean Connery, appearing in his first-ever videogame, lent his voice and likeness to the project. Also making their videogame debuts as original Bond girls are movie and TV star Maria Menounos and multi-platinum UK pop star Natasha Bedingfield.
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