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Seems like every year, every event, we have an obligatory Sammy report. Well, they’re taking over the whole damn world, can you blame us?? This is why we’ve got to be hard on them, even though they’re all a group of very nice guys. When ic’s own Josh Hsieh showed up to check out the area, a warning was given by the public relations crew before he was given a booth crawl – “watch out for these guys, they’re ruthless.”
The less ruth the better, I say.
Sammy’s booth was a little more hyped-up this year, with big ole plasma screen TVs, a line for trailer screening, and a whole lot more T-shirts. Naturally the first thing we gravitated towards was Guilty Gear Isuka. And when I say ‘we’, I mean Vincent Diamante and myself. We’d just witnessed an ‘exhibits only’ passholder hand 5/6 of an ass to the Sammy employee in charge of demonstrating the game, so…we figured we’d fare alright.
We did not. Turns out that guy was just really good, and by my standards, so was the Sammy guy. So…maybe Mr. exhibits only was really really good. We were playing the four-player free-for-all. Here’s how it works: there are two planes of action; foreground and background. You switch between these by hitting two attack buttons at once. You sort of shrink a bit, and get slightly shadowy when you’re in the back. Truth be told, I found it a bit difficult to tell where I was, at times. Otherwise it played like Guilty Gear – except for one detail: no auto-face.
It was really hard. You have to press a shoulder button every time you want to change direction – the computer will *never* do it for you, not even when only two characters are left. Meelad, head of PR, said that it was even harder in the arcade; here it’s just a shoulder button. Be that as it may, other games have used auto-face in 4-player with pretty decent success. Sure it gives you total control, but it’s kind of unwieldy. And you can’t change direction in the air either.
So we played the game, to the best of our abilities. In a change of fortunes, I fared better than Vince (hey, come to think of it, I beat him at KOF: MI too. Hmmm), but both times we played, it wound up with me face-to-face against the Sammy employee. It was always a slaughter, with me doing my lame combos off into the wrong edge of the screen (I really had a hard time remembering that shoulder button), and him smacking me in the back while staring off at the line next to the TV, or a booth babe or something. Rough.
Every once in a while I’d get three or four hits in on him and he’d say ‘oooh, nice combo!’ Clearly he was trained to stroke the egos of poor players like myself. But I digress. The game looks very nice – the graphics are sharp, and the sound is solid. As for how it’ll hold up when I play the thing, time will tell. That direction switching is going to take some getting used to. In my embarrassment, I neglected to ask for a demo of the side-scrolling mode. Ugh.
I decided to wait in line for whatever the line was for. Turned out to be a live demo of their new first person shooter Darkwatch. Meelad spotted me in line, and said “what are you doing back here?? GET TO THE FRONT.” Then he smacked me on the back. When people yell and hit me, I do as I’m told.
Darkwatch was interesting. It’s a story of a vampiric ghoul hunter, part of a government ghoul-hunting agency. Seems you hunt ghouls. But! It’s actually rather clever, in that it’s set in the wild west. This makes the scenery rather gothicly charming, like Vampire Hunter D, perhaps. In fact, they really could have purchased that license, slapped it on here and made the best Vampire Hunter D game ever. Those that came before were not so good.
So far, there are two types of action scenarios – mounted on your dark steed, or on foot. On horseback, you control the movement of the horse, but the gun sites are not independent. Hopefully this will change before final release…it looked a bit unwieldy, but I could see it improving. Running into enemies with your horse causes them to burst into flames, which seems logical.
On foot, it gets more interesting. You have various vampiric powers at your disposal, blood vision for instance. It allows you to distinguish friend from foe, and see enemies through various things. Blood also has a role as lifegiver for you, naturally. But very curiously, it’s not the ghouls from which you get blood, but downed villagers being fed on by ghouls. So you’re something of a scavenger, which is an interestingly morbid position to be in.
You can also fly – your jumps are kind of moon-ish, which doesn’t look too difficult to handle (not unlike space levels of various extant FPS). A nice feature, totally unrelated to vampirism, is the ‘lean-out’. It allows you to, yes, lean out from behind objects, and the camera kind of tilts with you. It sort of helps you get into it a bit more, little details like that.
Speaking of details, a good deal of the environment is destructible. Hanged men can be shot, buildings set on fire, walls blown up with dynamite, it feels pretty organic, and gives a nice palpable feeling of the degeneration of the world around you.
And you’re not alone in the world either, which I always enjoy. There are other Darkwatch operatives around, who you will occasionally have to aid, or who will assist you. They’re not too smart, but it’s interesting to be part of a team, rather than the traditional ‘lone rogue’.
Another curious bit is the impromptu ‘life’ system. If you’re killed, you get staked, either by villagers when you fail a mission (as the demonstrator accidentally did) or ghouls. But earlier on, he had saved a villager from some ghouls, and the fellow said he’d come back to help if ever it was needed. When the demonstrator got staked, the villager came back to remove it, and revive the vampire. Sort of an interesting way to go about getting ‘extra lives’.
Even more interesting – you then have the option of killing the guy that just brought you back to life. Sammy, I was soon to learn, is a bit hardcore with their blurring of moral lines in games.
I say this, because the next game they showed us was “The Shield”. My god, it’s brutal.
But before we go on, I’ve got to make a pit-stop. I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture of Darkwatch. It looks like it has great potential, but at present it doesn’t quite hold together as a convincing universe. There are a few problems – one, there’s a ridiculously-breasted sexy/evil girl with poor voice-acting who seems to be driving the story. That drops your ability to have an interesting narrative by quite a lot. Next, the ghouls constantly respawn. It’s hard to feel like I’m saving a town if the enemies keep coming back. I’m hoping that this is just for the demo version, so that they’d have lots of enemies to kill. Because if they keep returning, what’s the point of shooting them in the first place? There’s no satisfaction in it; you could easily get through the level without gunning them down. Change these things, polish it up and sharpen the sound design, and this could really be an interesting, dark game.
Back to The Shield. We were led to a room in the back of the booth for a private demo. This is another game with attention to detail. Not so much in the character models and environments, but how those environments break the hell apart. I have to say, at this point in the development (and this will likely change) the textures are few and far between. There’s not a lot of visual variety. But there’s a lot of stuff to smash.
The brutality comes from the way you do it. You’re playing as the bald cop-guy from The Shield, a show I never watch because it stars just the kind of guy I never want to meet. In this scenario, you’re in a porn shop. Sure enough, there’s porn on the walls, and actual live-action porn playing on the screens in the ‘video arcades’. That was…somewhat impressive in some way.
There’s supposedly some illegal stuff going on in the back, so you’ve got to get the key to the back door from the owner. To do this, the guy demoing the game grabbed him and slammed his head against the wall three times, while the shop owner cried out in pain. It was kind of awful. Then he smashed his head against a rack of DVDs. I was impressed with how they scattered, but still not impressed with the brutality. Then a glass case was smashed. Good smashing physics. But yeah…seemed excessive for a cop. I’m glad I don’t watch that show.
There’s nice lighting in it though. The game’s got projected lighting – a lamp behind some bars casts a pinstripe shadow across anything that moves beneath it. Mr. demo guy says he thinks it’s the first time it’s been done on the PS2, and I can’t argue with it. Might be true.
Then he shot some guys, which seemed a bit unwieldy. Bad guys will shoot you through doors by the way. The whole ‘jump out and shoot’ bit felt rather awkward in presentation, I think a simple GTA run ‘n gun model would’ve worked nicely.
He made his way to the back of the shop, wherein the best part of the game laid in wait. Sammy’s head of PR in the US and UK Meelad Sadat was a character. Would he be in the final version? Yes he would. That kind of rocks, but pretty much only if you know Meelad. Mr. demo cuffed him and slammed him against the wall until blood came out, then put his face directly in the crotch of a woman being projected onto the wall.
Ultimately, I left with this: cops are power-tripping assholes. I would fear anyone that enjoyed playing this game for the brutality of it. There are plenty of other reasons to potentially enjoy The Shield, but if you take that route, I don’t want to meet you in an alley.
If Lieberman is looking for his new “game of evil” to target, this might be a fine candidate.
Then we saw Spy fiction. It was pretty much the same as it was when released in Japan – an action-spy game with lots of nifty costume changes, shiny graphics, decent combat and a slightly-wacky camera. But in English! Not a bad game by any stretch.
I left the booth sans Vince, who had taken off to another engagement. Meelad promised me a Guilty Gear Isuka shirt. No mediums, only XL. Seriously guys, bring shirts for those of us that didn’t eat an entire department store on the way to the expo. But I kid!!
To answer your next question, no - there was no KOF Neowave to be found. It is a bit odd, since the game is scheduled for a July release, as far as I’ve been told. Them’s the breaks. Iron Phoenix was there too, but I believe Josh will be talking about that in the second half of his Taiwan report.
All in all: Darkwatch gets my vote for Sammy’s most ambitious new IP. They’re really trying with it, it could be something. The Shield gets my “fuck the police” vote. Guilty Gear Isuka gets a big ole question mark from me. I hope with time to turn it into an exclamation point, rather than a colon and a backslash.
brandon sheffield swears he didn't use bridget too much.
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