By Alec Meer on October 15th, 2009 at 5:36 pm.
I’ve just returned from a trip to see Pandemic’s just-around-the-corner open world alterna-World War II game for another publication (I do so like to dance with the devil in the pale moonlighting), and was faintly surprised to realise whilst there that it was due on PC. This is because I never read any of John Walker’s earlier posts about the game, due to a dark, ancient prophecy that states existence as we know it will meet a horrific end should I ever read anything written by him.
I’m embargoed up the wazoo for a little and must honour my commissioning editors by saving my current word-thunks on the game for them, but what I can do is show you some recent footage to hint at what you’re in for come the unorthodox release date of December 8th (for, as I double-checked, this is one PC version that isn’t being released after the console ones).
Here is an Oirish man, boobs and explosions:
And here’s some footage showing how the intruiging Will To Fight (WTF?) mechanic works, and how it changes the game’s very appearance:
Despite that pre-dating Walker’s Saboteur posts, a quick scan reveals that for some reason he didn’t include it so… so… Uh-oh.
OH CHRIST I’VE READ ONE OF HIS POSTS! Christ! Jesus Christ! JESUS Christ! CHRIST! Oh Jesus! Jesus CHRIST! JESUS! CHRIST! OH JESUS! OH CHRIST! JESUS CHRIST!
[Kablooey]
15/10/2009 at 17:46 Dinger says:
Wow. The voice acting reminds me of TF2
15/10/2009 at 17:54 Sulkdodds says:
Drinkin’, fightin’ irishman!
I can’t decide if the voice acting is godawful or super fun. Possibly both.
15/10/2009 at 17:58 Vinraith says:
I’m still angry at Pandemic for screwing up Mercenaries 2, here’s hoping this turns out better. The original Mercenaries was absolutely brilliant, probably the most fun I’ve ever had with a console shooter.
15/10/2009 at 18:01 Hmm-Hmm. says:
Now, now. Calm down. No need to swear.
15/10/2009 at 18:02 TariqOne says:
Without being overly pedantic, I think the proper locution is: “listen alla y’all.” As in, “all of you all.”
15/10/2009 at 18:08 Torgen says:
Yes. “Y’all Y’all” makes no sense. As an authentic Southerner, I can attest that the phrase is “all y’all”.
15/10/2009 at 18:12 Vinraith says:
It’s “all of y’all,” which as Tariq says comes out sounding like “alla y’all.”
15/10/2009 at 18:31 scoopsy says:
Finally, we’re speaking my language! Yes, it should be “all y’all”, not “alla y’all” or “y’all y’all”. As in
“All y’all need to shut up about my truck.”
If you don’t believe me, type in “listen all ” into Google Suggest and see what comes up.
After years of deciphering strange Brit-words like “Wot,” “Cor,” and “secular,” I can not describe in words how pleasurable this is.
15/10/2009 at 18:34 Vinraith says:
There are about a million lyrics web sites on the internet, how is this even a debate? It’s written out “all of y’all” and pronounced “alla y’all.” It doesn’t matter what the appropriate southernism is, especially considering the Beastie Boys aren’t southerners.
15/10/2009 at 19:13 seras says:
most importantly, the original quote is “all y’all”
as in:
“Listen all y’all, it’s a sabotage” =)
15/10/2009 at 20:12 neems says:
‘Secular’?
When did that become British slang, as opposed to an actual word?
“That… would be… an ecumenical matter.”
15/10/2009 at 20:25 DarkNoghri says:
@scoopsy
Cor is a word?
15/10/2009 at 21:31 Psychopomp says:
I approve of this debate
15/10/2009 at 22:18 mrrobsa says:
Sure, as in Cor Blimey!
16/10/2009 at 01:49 mpk says:
“That… would be… an ecumenical matter.”
DRINK! GURRLS! ARSE!
16/10/2009 at 13:39 TariqOne says:
Southerners! I’m a NYC kid growsed up. And a child of the 80s. And I went to Stuyvesant High School (of the t-shirt fame). And I even know a Beastie Boy. And damnit, it’s “alla y’all.”
I appreciate we jacked your Southernisms by way of the African-American northwards diaspora. But this is now a pure question of Northeastern urban locution. And again, it’s “alla y’all.” That is all. I will broach no further debate on this matter.
15/10/2009 at 18:07 Kanamit says:
This looks really neat. Are the system requirements out?
The Iron Cross Nazi flags always looks really stupid to me though. I understand the need to keep a lid on neo-nazism, Germany, but the fear that people are going to join the SS because they saw a swastika in a game is unfounded.
15/10/2009 at 18:12 Kanamit says:
I just noticed that there are swastikas in the second trailer. I am confused.
15/10/2009 at 18:14 Alec Meer says:
Swastika inclusion varies depending on territory, apparently. Specifically, Germany and France don’t have ‘em – not sure if that applies to any others or not.
15/10/2009 at 21:33 Shalrath says:
Little know fact: iconographers world-wide are irresistibly drawn to the schutzstaffel whenever a Swastika is seen.
Maybe if we refuse to ever think/see/show those icons again, people will just forget!
15/10/2009 at 21:35 Vinraith says:
Yup, and as someone famous might have said, “those that forget history definitely won’t repeat it.”
15/10/2009 at 18:11 Sulkdodds says:
“Wow being a nazi looks really fun I sure would like to get punched in the gut and then blown up by an irishman”
15/10/2009 at 18:14 Prospero says:
Any game that uses Flogging Molly for its trailer is OK in my book.
16/10/2009 at 08:08 Optimaximal says:
agreed!
17/10/2009 at 15:04 Aldaris says:
My first thoughts when hearing that: ‘Hey, I thought I turned winamp off for thi- oh, wait, what? Awesome!’
15/10/2009 at 18:14 Darkelp says:
Well thanks Alec! Doesn’t matter how good this game may be, you’ve just destroyed everything.
But I am interested in whether this is good enough to pre-order, christmas list it, or bargain bucket it.
15/10/2009 at 18:23 ZIGS says:
(for, as I double-checked, this is one PC version that isn’t being released after the console ones).
Don’t worry, they’ll announce the PC-version delay soon enough
15/10/2009 at 18:27 TCM says:
Looks ridiculous, in a good way.
15/10/2009 at 18:27 Post-It says:
As another American Southerner, the above posts are correct in terms of use and pronunciation. Don’t worry though, I don’t expect for other people to get it upon hearing it initially as everyone outside the South speaks with a strange accent. Especially those British guys. You need to come down South and git yur self some propa learnin’!
15/10/2009 at 18:32 Schadenfreude says:
That is one ropey Irish accent. Hopefully the game is stupid enough to get away with it.
15/10/2009 at 18:34 westyfield says:
That’s the craic.
15/10/2009 at 18:38 Jacques says:
Dear god the accents are bad.
15/10/2009 at 18:39 Inigo says:
I like how he says it’s “better for the player to go in quietly” as he’s mowing hordes of soldiers down with very little effort.
15/10/2009 at 18:42 Sulkdodds says:
He didn’t seem to pay much attention to what’s going on. What kind of weapons are there? “Well, there are rifles…” (as he picks up a rocket launcher)
15/10/2009 at 18:40 Kazz says:
Wow, judging by the first trailer, that looks…..aweful. Then again it has guns, a bulletproof bloke, explosiions and boobs so i guess it will still sell well to its 9-18year old target audience :)
15/10/2009 at 18:49 Radiant says:
It’s like Batman in that do the Nazi’s not connect the random explosions and death to the big fuck off car?
I mean I’m sure when Batman rocks up in his neon and fish inspired beast and parks it in a ne’er do well area of Gotham the criminals either:
A) Run.
B) Kill him as he gets out the car.
Will the Nazi’s not put two and two together and skip straight to B) ?
15/10/2009 at 18:52 Radiant says:
Also Meer I know you can’t break the embargo and go into specifics [7 out of 10?] but answer this question:
What’s better this or Freedom Fighters?
15/10/2009 at 18:55 Keith says:
So they couldn’t find some Irish voice acting? I mean there’s no great shortage of us and we’re cheap to hire. I can forgive the drinkin’ and fornicatin’ cliches but the oirish accent would really grate after about 10s. I’ve always been glad that they dropped the rubbish acccent after the first episode of Burn Notice and I could never understand why they couldn’t hire and Irish person for Heroes.
15/10/2009 at 18:58 Vinraith says:
If a part calls for an accent, I’ve never understood why they don’t just cast someone with that accent. 99% of the time, they’d be better off.
15/10/2009 at 19:01 Jacques says:
Irish or French, both accents sucked.
15/10/2009 at 19:23 TCM says:
@Vinraith:
(A) Sometimes the way people think an accent sounds isn’t always the way it sounds, and people with accents aren’t necessarily professional voice actors.
(B) Sometimes the fake accent just sounds more hilariously ridiculous.
15/10/2009 at 19:29 Alexander Norris says:
There are obviously no professional Irish or French voice actors in the entire world.
15/10/2009 at 19:43 Schadenfreude says:
I seem to recall that the guy who voiced Atlas in Bioshock wasn’t too bad, even though I’ve never actually encountered his accent in the wilds of Ireland either. It’s that Hollywood thing; their idea of an Irish accent is more like Louisiana by way of Newfoundland. It’s not that they’re doing an accent badly, but that they’re doing an accent that doesn’t actually exist.
15/10/2009 at 19:45 Vinraith says:
**** **** **** **BIOSHOCK SPOILER** **** ***** ****
In fairness, it’s not as though Atlas was actually Irish.
15/10/2009 at 21:05 Schadenfreude says:
Yup. So I was extra confounded when I heard his “real” voice and it was just awful.
15/10/2009 at 21:07 Vinraith says:
Very true. I always thought he should have just fluidly switched to no accent, it would have been considerably more disturbing I suspect.
15/10/2009 at 23:21 Mark O'Brien says:
I’m playing through Bioshock at the moment, and I think Atlas’s accent is pretty perfect to be honest (I’m Irish). It sounds like a Dublin accent to me.
From what I can make out, the actor, Karl Hanover, was Irish born but has lived in America for some time.
I also think the voice acting in The Saboteur is painful. Surely they could find an Irish actor? It’s not like we’re short of them.
16/10/2009 at 19:11 Geoff says:
@Vinraith
Two reasons:
1. Most of the audience doesn’t have the accent called for, and they’ll spot bad acting on a proper Irishman way before they spot bad accent on a good actor. So better to prioritize the quality of the voice acting, then hopefully get the accent right as well.
2. In movies there’s a constant fidelity problem – reality is unrealistic. Or to put it less absurdly, people find fake things more believable than real things. In early movies (and probably some early video games), they used real guns to record real gunshots, but the audience didn’t think the guns “sounded realistic.” So they mocked up some fake gunshots, and the audience found those more believable. For an example of this at work and on the topic at hand, skim down this page to where Sparvy complains about how the lead singer of Flogging Molly is laughably awful at sounding Irish.
15/10/2009 at 19:05 ZIGS says:
I’d also like to point out this game is gonna suck. Mark my words
15/10/2009 at 19:06 Alexander Norris says:
+5 for Flogging Molly, -∞ for horrible, horrible Irish accent and yet another game with indiscriminately evil Germans and horribly stupid things that break my suspension of disbelief.
15/10/2009 at 19:23 Duckmeister says:
LISTEN ALL YALL THIS IS SABOTAGE!
15/10/2009 at 19:29 Tei says:
The Eiffel tower is a robot, I think. It will transform into one and destroy all these nazi guys once and for all.
15/10/2009 at 19:32 Sulkdodds says:
But what if it’s a collaborator robot D:
15/10/2009 at 19:36 ulix says:
“Hydraulik System auf maximum Kapazität!”
Oh my f*ckin god, please NO!
I already hate it when they don’t use real German voice-actors in these WW2 games. But even worse is if they don’t even bother to have the sentences translated into correct and proper German.
I don’t want the illusion destroyed that I might be killing my own grandfather…
You can’t just translate stuff literally, from one language into the other. And Google Translate isn’t an option either… the funny thing being, that Google would have provided a better translation…
One thing I’m interested in:
How large is the world in this game. Paris itself seems quite huge. And if you can seemlessly travel from Germany to the French coast the world must be massive (I hope it is).
WHAT ARE THEY THINKING?
15/10/2009 at 19:42 Hmm says:
That looks like a lot of fun. I just hope the game won’t suffer from repetitiveness.
15/10/2009 at 20:08 Obdicut says:
Agreed. What’s fun once is not necessarily fun 200 times in a row. If they manage to pull of this semi-impressionistic view of the world, it’ll be very exciting, though. I like games where you transform the world by your passage through it; I like visible results of my efforts.
@Vinraith:
Gaming seems to upset you a lot.
15/10/2009 at 20:13 Vinraith says:
@Obdicut
Not really, what makes you say that?
15/10/2009 at 20:36 Obdicut says:
I’m guessing it’s the number of times you post about being upset about gaming, game companies, and games.
Please note I said “seem”. I’m also not saying that gaming shouldn’t make you angry or upset; I think the years from 2002-2007 made me angry and upset at gaming very often as well.
It was meant lightly, not as a slam.
15/10/2009 at 20:40 Vinraith says:
OK :)
“Angry” is hyperbole in my post above, if that wasn’t clear. What I meant to convey is that Mercs 1 was awesome, Mercs 2 was a disappointment, Pandemic never patching Mercs 2 on PC (and excluding our platform from the bonus content, to boot) was an even greater disappointment, so I don’t necessarily trust them not to screw this up.
I think perhaps I overstate things too often.
15/10/2009 at 20:45 Obdicut says:
I think the interwebs should be powered by hyperbole. That’d be a perpetual motion machine at work.
15/10/2009 at 20:48 Vinraith says:
Good idea, I know I’ll certainly do my part, whether intentionally or not.
15/10/2009 at 19:57 Flappybat says:
The gameplay video with the bridge left me cold. It looks like a clunky third person action game, something from five years ago.
15/10/2009 at 20:43 Mundus says:
Yeah, I’m really getting a mercenaries 2 set-in-1930′s vibe from this.
15/10/2009 at 20:48 Mister Yuck says:
It looks like the gameplay from Mercenaries 2 with a new backdrop. I’m sick of people remaking GTA 3 with new backdrops.
15/10/2009 at 20:49 Vinraith says:
Mercenaries (the original, not the broken sequel) was considerably better than any of the GTA 3 games.
*ducks*
15/10/2009 at 21:05 OJ287 says:
I know Dara Ó Briain is a gamer. Id love to hear what he makes of this game.
15/10/2009 at 22:19 Sparvy says:
American band trying to sound Irish with an american vaoice guy trying to sound Irish, in a game taking place in Europe… Laughably awful or shockingly good?
16/10/2009 at 00:07 Psychopomp says:
>>Implying Dave King isn’t irish
16/10/2009 at 19:48 Sparvy says:
To be fair I didnt say the singer was amrican, but as far as I know the majority of the band is american and they are trying to make their music sound as Irish as possible. They pretty much go for the stereotype.
15/10/2009 at 22:57 Guy says:
Must resist. Need to hate. So strong. That accent. Oh God.
(And everytime I see those ridiculous prostitutes something inside me dies a little).
15/10/2009 at 23:43 Player2 says:
And your reasons for this? As of now, it looks quite pretty and over the top. The only thing that’s slightly bothersome to me is the accents and how the zeppelin simply insta-exploded rather than a nice flaming ripple like effect outwards from the point of impact.
15/10/2009 at 23:44 Player2 says:
^ That was at ZIGS.
15/10/2009 at 23:52 Da'Jobat says:
Ahhh, flogging molly. Salty dog is a lovely single.
15/10/2009 at 23:56 Da'Jobat says:
eugh, seven deadly sins rather. salty dog is awesome too though.
16/10/2009 at 00:03 invisiblejesus says:
In fer a penneh… IN FER A FOOKIN’ POUWND! Looks like it has potential for stupid goodness, but my budget for stupid is limited these days. Thinking this is maybe a bargain bucket purchase.
16/10/2009 at 00:09 Psychopomp says:
BLAGGARDS
TO DAH BONE
16/10/2009 at 00:32 Jesucristo says:
I prefer the Saboteur from Sinclair Spectrum.
16/10/2009 at 01:44 Junch says:
I want to know if it’s like GTA IV, just in WW2-occupied France
16/10/2009 at 12:21 Bobsy says:
“Top of the morning”? Oh man.
17/10/2009 at 18:04 Fumarole says:
Nice Beastie pun.
18/10/2009 at 01:11 SheffieldSteel says:
Two reasons this is going to be interesting to watch…
(1) Irishman plants bombs and then shoots people while they run around like headless chickens. Perhaps people *are* forgetting history.
(2) Boobies.