Five Fantastic Video Game Developments for People to Get Excited About
Five emerging games and technologies that promise to change the way we view our games.
We live in exciting times. There’s a lot of interesting stuff and new ideas just arrived on the videogame market, and some more things just starting to appear on the horizon. Here are some things that I, (And I think many others) are looking forwards to in the immediate, or very near future.
Head Tracking
Johnny Lee is a genius. Let no man say otherwise. Taking one Wiimote, and a few dollars worth of equipment from a radio shack, then combining them in a way a five year old could do (unscrupulous employers take note), he’s managed to achieve possibly the greatest 3D special effects I’ve yet seen. Such a simple idea Here, have a butchers:
Given the fact Nintendo seem to want to try and create an immersive console with the Wii (Motion sensing, the Wii fit, the Wii me and so on), I’m amazed no one in their company came up with this idea! Think of it, one spare Wiimote for the head tracking, and one to play. Anyone who was moving their head to try and get a better look around when 3D games first came out (God I feel old), will be able to appreciate just how interesting this technology could be.
And that’s not all, here’s Johnny (hehehe) at the TED conference, showing off another one of his uses for the Wiimote. Without a doubt, the most well earned applause in recent times:
Interested?
- Sony jumps on the bandwagon.
- Johnny s Wiimote developments.
- Technical details on head tracking (for techies)
Spore
UPDATE: Spore has been released! For my review, click here.
It seems to me in recent years that new ideas have become something of an endangered species in the videogames industry. Stroll down to your local videogame store and see how many sequels, prequels franchises, re releases and ports you can spot. So when a new idea comes out, I always pay rapt attention. A couple of years back, I was attending a massive LAN party (the insomnia series if you’ve heard of it), and while I was
wondering past a magazine stand in Newbury, I noticed a headline that for some reason grabbed my attention. Spore. Curious, I picked up the magazine and leafed through a few pages, then like a diligent little consumer I bought the magazine and read the article. I knew right away I was hooked. And it seems I was not alone.
Spore, is quite simply the concept behind the Sid Meir’s Civilization series taken to a whole new level. You start the game as a single celled organism, and finish it with a sprawling space empire of highly evolved aliens. Evolution plays an important part as your creature evolves with each generation. Also, rival creatures, various tools and buildings are imported from other players, and the program learns the “style” of your race. A fantastic idea if there ever was one. My spirit was slightly dampened by the fact EA will be publishing it, but I still look forwards to the release date with baited breath.
Will Wright delivers a talk on spore while he plays an early version of the game. This video shows some amazing feats of programming, such as social dynamics, and how the program recognizes different skeletal structures and different creatures to create realistic movement, as well as the sheer epic scale of the game:
The creature creator was recently released, a tool you can use in the full game to customize and create your own race of freaks. Given how interesting ten minutes of playing with this was, my passion for this game is still growing. After the release of the creature creator, interest online skyrocketed to brand new heights, and now there are many, many spore sites all looking at this game. Even the big sites like IGN and Gamespot are looking seriously at this game now, most of them eager to snatch any scrap of information released about it.
Playing God has never looked so good.
Interested?
Videogame To Film Adaptations- That Might Not Suck!
If I was going to be polite I’d say that the videogame to film concept has been “flawed” over the years. But since I’m not always polite, videogame to movie adaptations have, for the most part, been a pile of festering junk. But, for every few Doom and Dead or Alive movie, we’ve had the occasional Tomb Raider. However for the most part they’ve been God awful.
Two upcoming movies however, show some promise. A Gears of war film, and a God of war film.
The former is being directed by Len Wiseman, the guy behind Underworld: Evolution. Not as good as the original Underworld, but still a solid film. As for directing God of war, all eyes are currently on Brett Ratner, the director of X-men: the last stand and Red Dragon. Both have also been picked up by Legendary pictures, who where behind such films as Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and 300.
We even have a teaser trailer for the God of war Movie:
The question is can they avoid falling into the trap of doing what so many production teams have done and change the idea of the game so completely it doesn’t work anymore? They’ve got the talent, and the history to back it up, so these films could be ones to watch out for. I know I will be, even if it’s only for the possibility of breaking a cycle that seems to have been perpetuating since the Super Mario Brothers film, which was only good because it was so awful. You know the kind of film I mean.
Interested?
Digital Molecular Matter And Euphoria.
No, these are not new street names for drugs. These are two innovations in Lucas art’s latest attempt to milk the Starwars franchise for all it’s worth. Sorry if I sound cynical, but I’d much rather see new ideas applied to new games instead of rehashes of the same old tried and tired formulas… Anyway, enough of my whining and lets get to business.
Anyone here remember Red Faction? Digital Molecular Matter (DMM) is basically the GeoMod technology that made that game so interested taken to the next step. In theory, as with Red Faction, environments in Star Wars: The force unleashed, will be fully interactive and behave as you would expect. Metal dents when you belt it, stone cracks and shatters when you blast it and the dead horse should twitch a little if you keep flogging it… I mean uh, served cables will fall realistically to the ground.
To be fair, the idea of a fully interactive environment has been around for some time (Hell, Red Faction was a 2001 release). But no one ever picked it up. The PhysEx engine by Ageia a few years back promised us a whole new dimension on physics in computer games, but for some reason never caught on. Personally I feel this was not due to technical limitations or expense, but simply the amount of extra work developers would have to put into their games to make use of the technology. Plus it changes how the games play in a big way. You can’t just duck down behind the same rock every time you need to reload if the rock isn’t going to be there after a few more minutes of laser fire. Plus, if someone’s got a rocket launcher, the only real defense now is to run.
The other thing of course is Euphoria, a strange name considering what it does. Euphoria basically acts like a combined physics engine and A.I for your enemies. For example, most of the time if you shoot an enemy in game, the game processes it thus: Character Hit. Character dead. Activate Kill animation (X). Done. The X represents the various
ways the character dies depending on how and where he’s been hit. You might get some rag doll physics thrown in too (and lets face it, they’re not exactly realistic). Nowadays, the animations are quite realistic. But if you say, push the character of a cliff, then half the time they do nothing. Maybe a little scripted flailing.
Not so With Euphoria. If the character is shot, then they fall back exactly how they should. If they survive, the force of the impact may or may not knock them over or have other effects. If pushed off a cliff, the character will not just flail in a scripted manner, but try to grab a handhold and cling on for dear life. Plus as you are pushing them off, they will realistically interact with their environment, slipping feet and so forth.
Here’s an example of these two new technologies in action:
I like these ideas it will make games a lot more interesting. I hope other developers also try to tag along with this technology as they would help make videogames so much more immersive.
Interested?
Halo Wars And Halo 4.
- Halo 1: A solid game, nothing great nothing wrong. A nice introduction to the future of the FPS.
- Halo 2: Balls. I can’t believe I paid £40 for what was basically an expansion pack.
- Halo 3: This is more like it. Still not exactly the greatest game ever made, but solid.
- Halo 4: Given halo 3’s ending, they could do some VERY interesting stuff with this
Rumors abound on the internet about Halo 4. Will the covenant still be the main antagonists? Will it be a game of the Halo movie? Will it still be a 360 exclusive? Does it even exist at all?
Given how much money Bungie has made from the Halo franchise over the years I’d say it’s a dead cert than they at least have plans to carry on the tradition.
What we do have coming up for certain is a new RTS title set just before the first Halo game. Halo wars, as it’s being called promises to at least be very interesting. Developers claim to have done away with the usual side bar menu, and taken the emphases of resource management (though that apparently still plays a part) and placed the emphasis on combat. So, a little bit from dawn of war, and a little bit from ground control. In my opinion, it sounds like they’re trying to plug it to fans of the FPS.
Here’s a teaser trailer to give you something to think about:
I’ve never been a massive fan of the Halo games, but given how many Chinese whispers are bouncing around the internet concerning these developments at the moment; it seems a lot of other people are. Another interesting point is that at the moment it looks like halo wars won’t be getting released on the PC, which is the premier platform for the RTS genre. Guess we’ll just need to watch this space to find out.
Interested?
Liked it
I love civilisation, so the SPore game is an excellent idea! Cheers, Evis!