Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I found myself chatting to Rhianna Pratchett yesterday about her just released comics spin-off of Mirror’s Edge. Well – the first part of six anyway (First pages here). It’s been interesting for her. As she tells to CBR, it’s her first work in the medium, and she had to do some serious thinking about its strengths and limitations before doing so. Which got me casually thinking a little more on the topic, but from the other way around – as in, what’s the specific strengths and weaknesses of bringing a game to a comic. And while there’s been a deluge of games-to-comics work in the last few years, what games would I pursue were I a comics editor interested in putting out entertaining comics. Which is, of course, a different thing from a comic that does the business.
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More Mirror’s Edge exposition has turned up in the form of another animated trailer. Quite stylish once again, but discussing something that we kind of understood already about the game world: that the point of Faith’s job is not to get caught.
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I loves me some Mirror’s Edge trailers, even if every time I post one I later find it’s over 3000 years old, recently dug from an archaeological dig. Anyway, look, if it turns out there was some special meeting to which everyone was invited but me, where they showed these trailers to you and you all had an excellent time, and there was probably cake, and free balloons, and I imagine everyone got to do kissing, then you know what? Screw you. Screw you and your stupid private Mirror’s Edge trailer screening parties. I’ve got other, better, more imaginary friends. Trailers below.

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Sorry to get into this again, but as much as I want to ignore it, this one’s significant. Ubisoft have stated that they’re artificially delaying the launch of EndWar on PC because of, you guessed it, piracy.

Talking to VideoGaming247, Ubisoft Shanghai director and former Total War “Evangelist”, Michael de Plater said,

“To be honest, if PC wasn’t pirated to hell and back, there’d probably be a PC version coming out the same day as the other two.”

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Super-sexy new Mirror’s Edge trailer, showing off the time-trial gaming, down below. It really is looking rather tremendous. Curse the PC delay. CURSE THE SKIES!

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Overkill, perhaps, but it’s a fairly intense piece of in game footage. Watching this one kind of suggests that you’re immune from bullets as long as you keep moving. I wonder how that will stand up to prolonged play, and whether the sense of flow/danger will be sustained. I hope so!

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EA have released another snippet of animated backstory for highly-anticipated urban gymnastics simulator Mirror’s Edge. It illustrates a little more about the dystopian utopia, the surveillance society, and the attractive protagonist’s personal battle against the regime. It’s brief, but it bodes well.
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Edit – attributed this to the wrong source, because I’m a great big idiot. The original story’s actually here, and is replete with further details on Mirror’s Edge’s likely requirements, so well worth a read.

Are game system requirements a valid post? Ooh, it’s a toughie. There’s nothing more PC than specs – witness the number of Forum-men who display their PCs’ fact-innards in their sigs- but they’re hardly a mine of wonder to write about. For instance, apparently Mirror’s Edge needs a PC something like this:

# CPU: Pentium 4 at 2.4 GHz / Athlon 64 2800+
# RAM: 1GB
# Gfx card: GeForce 6 Series with 256MB VRAM or higher, or ATI X1650 (or HD2400)

Is that interesting? I honestly don’t know. Possibly interesting is that my immediate reaction is “oh, that’s a fairly low-end system”, which either means that I’m a monstrous hardware fascist (more than likely) or that the concept of what a modern gaming PC is has changed somewhat over the last year or so. Read the rest of this entry »

This latest piece of Mirror’s Edge footage is probably the most interesting so far, showing as it does the ways the game opens up to allow you to take different routes through the bright urban environments. There’s some areas we’ve seen before, but also some we haven’t – and the scenes in which the player is being chased by cops is particularly cool looking. (I love how doors are kicked open on the fly). This game just looks prettier and prettier. I think it’s going to be one of those titles that hits a reboot button for action games, just as Max Payne did back in 2001.
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Are we over-exposed yet? The Leipzig trailer shows the “dodge the snipers” tunnel section that we’ve already had a couple of looks at. Still, it’s more Mirror’s Edge, and tantalising for it.
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Via the big K, Mirror’s Edge, as recreated in Portal.