By Jim Rossignol on January 21st, 2010 at 9:24 pm.
Ooh, this is like Where’s Wally with Actual Game Footage. I think there might actually be a fraction of a second of game footage in this latest Front Mission Evolved trailer, somewhere between all the full-motion video stuff. See if you can spot it! In case you’ve no idea what is going on here, well, this is the latest part of Square Enix’s tactical RPG series, Front Mission, which has only gone and turned into a mech-based third-person action game. Quite a peculiar evolution, I must say. Still, it might be fun for a few minutes, and it’s out some time this spring. Mmm.
*Hooooooonk!!*
I love me some Front Mission. I’m not sure about the new direction, but I am still interested.
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Square, you say? So the trailer’s representative of the full game then.
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Actually, this is not the first title of the series to turn into an action game. “Gun hazard” was a 2D platform action game for the SNES that came along with the strategy titles.
Yes, I am a geek.
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I actually prefered Gun Hazard over a good number of the TB Front Mission games <3
Geek +1
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Honking for anything that involves mechs.
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Dear god that was an uninteresting trailer.
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El generico?
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Mech Warrior: The Return?
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FOOLS!!.. destroying a space elevator is a serious dissaster. The monocarboon will fail with the power hundreds nuclear explosions and cut everything in pieces like is made of air. >:-/
Imagine a meteorite hitting the ground… one every second for 4 hours.
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Carboon is fun to say out loud.
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Actually, if it was cut that low it’s far more likely to float away into space; any sensible orbital elevator needs to be under tension to keep it straight, and be in balance between the force of gravity downwards and centrifugal force upwards. That massive weight at the space end will be actually trying to escape Earth’s pull. Even so, it’d probably do some damage going up (not to mention the bit under the cut falling over).
Apologies for science, was my A-level physics dissertation :)
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Wurzel its a shame english wasnt
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So we know the lift gets blown up then. That could be a MAJOR PLOT POINT. This is exactly the reason I have avoided all the mass effect 2 trailers like the plague.
Stupid trailers.
Why can’t they be like the Sup COm 2 ones that show off the game without runining anything.
Ah well… I doubt the lift was a good character anyway
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OT Thread Hijack – *The* Wurzel? Of Motorhead fame?
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Earth gravity well is 5478km deep.
http://xkcd.com/681_large/
It could be under tension to keep it straight… still without enough “energy” once cut to abandon the earth gravity well, hence… will return to ground where will become a massive disaster.
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Totally pointless, possibly flamebait, but I must ask –
“Wurzel its a shame english wasnt”
What did he get wrong?
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I do loves me some front mission. And I did love me some gun hazard, back in the day.
@Tei: Have I told you that I love you yet? I don’t think I have. I love you.
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This reminds me, whatever happened to Zone of the Enders?
That game was pretty awesome.
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The problem with Zone of the Enders was that it didn’t have “Metal Gear Solid” in its title.
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Zone of the Metal Gear Solid Enders would definitely be a pretty awesome title, if a bit long-winded.
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Did Michael Bay make this trailer?
Also, Tei you are my hero.
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Mech action games are nice and all, but WTB Front Mission SRPG plz
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Meanwhile, we’ll just have to settle for the DS port of the PSX port of the SNES version of the first title.
Oh, wait. You can but we can’t since it still hasn’t been released outside the US!
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This trailer gets extra points for the space elevators. Other than that, I am decidedly ‘meh’ about it.
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Front Mission Evolved looks horrible. Word from those who got to play it at the Tokyo Game Show say it actually plays worse than it looks. About par for the course for the studio – the last two games Double Helix made (Square outsourced this to an American studio for some reason) were the generally bad Silent Hill: Homecoming, and the abominably terrible G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra.
Which is sad, as the Front Mission series are really good tactical mech strategy games with (aside from FM3, which is the odd one out of the series) quite down-to-earth military stories.
On the bright side, a fan-translation patch was just recently released for Front Mission 5, apparently the best in the series, but never released outside of Japan.
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I’d heard about that, but I have absolutely no clue how to make it work – presumably one has to do several illegal things with a rom, a PS2 emulator and some sort of patcher software?
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Hey, as long as I can operate the Mechs from inside, I’m happy. Lets see a cockpit
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World without borders…
Anyone else got Ace Combat 0 vibes?
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THIS IS WAR!
THIS IS REAL!
WE’LL MAKE THEM PAY!
OH NO MY SHOES ARE ON FIRE!
The rollerskating mecha feel a bit Code Geass. It ‘might’ be fun.
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Front Mission will always have a warm place in my heart for taking tonfas, a cool weapon woefully underused in games, and then slapping it on a giant mecha.
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Oh my GOD! I love Front Mission but they are just DUMBING IT DOWN for the PC-tard audience.
FFS Square, give us console gamers the deep complex strategy games we love, don’t sell out for a multi-platform release by making an action game. I bet there’s only one type of ammo too.
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You made me smile :)
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Still dissapointed this isn’t a proper turn based strategy game entry in the series. I’m hoping that the massive amounts of mech customisation at least remain intact.
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Just repeating in case you all missed it – the developers of this game are the same clowns who gave us this unbelievable trainwreck:
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/review-g-i-joe/53865
Also, here is an OFFICIAL promotional screenshot of AC Evolved. I kid you not – this imagine is apparently meant to make us want the game:
http://www.qj.net/images/stories/PS3/Front_Mission_Evolved/012010/FM_Screenshot02.jpg
And before anyone asks, I have NO idea what is wrong with that mechs leg. They don’t look anything like that in the earlier games!
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I know ‘suspension of disbelief’ and everything, but I can NEVER get over the idea of mechs using guns with magazines. It just looks hilarious, and I always want to know A) why they would do that and B) how they’d reload.
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@Shalrath
I was thinking the same thing. Why bother making the robots hold guns with articulating hands when you could simply bolt weapons directly onto their limbs.
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Actually, they DO have bolted limb weapons in Front Mission. The problem with those is that you can’t switch weapons without switching the entire arm. Not to mention, you couldn’t hold a giant tonfa without a hand =P
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Why put legs on a tank in the first place? Anyway, quite a few of the mechs in the Battletech series have articulated hands, and some even use them to hold guns. Others just use them to either punch stuff or pick up objects to use as weapons, but you don’t see them in the Mechwarrior games because they just treat them as oversized tanks.
Which makes actually driving a tank in Mechwarrior: Living Legends all the more fun, as you’re often smaller and more agile than a mech, and almost as well armed.
The units in the Front Mission series are pretty small and agile as far as giant robots go. They’re modular (you can swap in/out limbs and guns inbetween missions) and flexible. If you’re going to have humanoid weapons, you might as well let them do interesting things now and then.
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I used to play BattleTech with some ground-pounders from our armed forced. They always liked to say that giant walking tanks were universally stupid. Even if they were somehow more agile/armoured/armed they still had a fatal disadvantage: silhouette. Enjoying mechs has more to do with the one-man-one-machine sort of philosophy. It’s like tank-drivers wishing they were fighter pilots basically.
That being said:
Other than very early editions, all mechs in battletech do NOT use seperate weapon systems in the hand. There used to be rules for this, but ever since those early editions all weapons on the limbs have been mounted on the forearm. Hands are optional and from a atmosphere perspective used for things that require a grip. From a game rules perspective I think punching is easier.
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Huh. Could be interesting. I failed at spotting any actual gameplay footage, though. Could be the game actually lives up to the cinematic, but I find this unlikely. Still, looks worth paying attention to.
In America we call it Where’s Waldo for some reason.
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I hate to be pessimistic about this, because I love the series, but I think this will be the series downfall in the West.
Why? Because the world does not need an Armored Core clone. Because the people that know the name Front Mission want a particular kind of game. This is more of an attempt to build a franchise from nothing while completely ignoring the player base. Unless this brings in oodles of new players I suspect that Square will never again give us an FM game.
Meanwhile those of us who actually love the series have to wait for a fan translation for FM5. Sqeenix (or is it Squidos?) are idiots.
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I’d make the comparison to MechWarrior/ItThatShallNotBeNamedButIsKnownAsMechAssaultNonetheless, but there’s no long-established series of really good games to ruin for us since Front Mission 3 and 4 were the only ones released outside Japan (apart from the DS port of FM1) and the only one to ever release in Europe was FM3.
The Japanese can now feel the pain of MechWarrior fans, though.
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http://www.eurogamer.net/videos/front-mission-evolved-gameplay
it doesnt look particularly great
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@ Darthey
Mechs on wheels (meals on wheels?) are also found in the Heavy Gear games. The mecha designs share a few similarities also.
@Everyone else
Even if this does prove to be crap it’s nice to see Square/Enix or whatever they are called now releasing stuff on the PC. There was Last Remnant which was decent enough, and apparently much better on the PC too. Wonder if FFXIII will come out on the PC?
Edit: Reply fail ugh
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The Last Remnant was by a very long-running internal team at Square who have been doing weird and experimental JRPGs for decades now. 90% of its problems stemmed from lack of experience with working with the 360 and Unreal 3 engine, both of which were rectified in the later PC version.
This, here, is a Front Mission game outsourced to the people who just recently gave us GI Joe: Rise of Cobra. Think about that.
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“Wanzer” actually sounds like a Mechanized Wanker Assault Unit to me. Being German, I could also go for misunderstanding it as a combination of Wanze (bug/heteroptera) and Panzer, but wankers in a superpowered exoskeleton are a bit more in tune with what I’ve come to expect from Japanese games.
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It’s actually supposed to stand for wanderung Panzer which I am told means walking tank.
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Literally translated, I recall it comes out as more like ‘Hiking armor/tank’, but as it’s a contraction it’s probably not worth thinking overmuch about.
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