Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Lego Pirates Of The Caribbean came out last week. A bit. I’m most of the way through what’s a very big game, and am ready to sit on the lounge floor amidst piles of plastic bricks, and tell you Wot I Think.

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Amongst the PAX footage collated by VG247 is another gameplay clip from the apparently-out-on-Dec 7th Tron Evolution. It’s looking… well, a little like what I’d imagine the early 10s equivalent of late 80s Ocean would have done if given a Tron licence. Sections of action which hark to the key elements of the film’s iconic resonance (Pardon? – Ed) with a bit of platforming thrown in the side. Footage follows…
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You may wonder why we haven’t written anything about Tron: Evolution yet, considering it was announced late last year. Why, because we’re incredibly lazy, of course. Like, obv. But the sudden onrushing on E3-malarkies have raised me from my lethargy. The full game’s out by Christmas, apparently. It’s about living programs in a OHYOUALLKNOWWHATTRONIS! Anyway, the trailer follows, plus 3 enormous videos courtesy of the Ant to our Grasshopper, Gametrailers…
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It’s been a while since we’ve heard from the slightly slipped Disney racer, Split/Second. But it’s reappeared at GDC ahead of what’s now a May release. It’s a trailer that asks that all-important question one should always raise at the car dealership: can it outrun a building?

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Variety have been interviewing Warren Spector about the Wii-Epic Mickey game and amongst the information that’s irrelevant to THE WORLD’S MIGHTIEST PC GAMING BLOG a couple of facts came to light. Specifically, some more details of the two games which Junction Point were working on before they were acquired. One was a fantasy game, but the other was basically Deus Ex with the serial numbers filed off because Eidos wouldn’t sell the IP to him. “There were and still are ‘Deus Ex’ stories I would like to tell. That story is not done for me,” he says in the interview. Most crucially, the rights to the two games went to Disney with Junction point and aren’t dead. In other words, we could still see Spector’s Bioshock, if you follow my metaphor. As he said to me a few years ago, it’s possible he’ll only work on three more games before he retires. Epic Mickey, Not Deus Ex and incarnating a Fantasy World his wife and he have wanted to do for fifteen years would be a fine way to round off his ludography.

VG247 seem rather excited about Black Rock racer Split/Second, and they’ve supplied a video from the demo of the game at the Eurogamer Expo in Leeds, UK, which I’ve posted below. It shows of some of the track-exploding special powers, things destroyed and burning on the track, and a glimpse of the other craziness that the full game will feature. The car having its own HUD readouts attached is an intriguing touch. I can’t say I’m massively excited about this one, but it’s promising. Apparently it’s out early next year on PC, published by Disney. Bizarrely, the official site seems to be the game’s Facebook page.
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A darkly grown-up Alice In Wonderland game? There’s an original idea for a videogame, right? Okay, so we’ve been here before, but this time around it’s the interactive accompaniment to Tim Burton’s Johnny Depp vehicle, Alice In Wonderland, which sees an older Alice return to the scene of her original surrealist romp. The Disney Interactive Studios announcement explains that: “With an upgradeable combat system, players collect “impossible ideas” to replay levels and unlock Underland’s secrets. Players must carefully select the supporting characters and their abilities to defeat the numerous enemies set forth by the Red Queen and her army of cards, destroy the Jabberwocky and restore Underland back into Wonderland.” We do like impossible ideas round here: strafe jumping, portable holes…

Alice will apparently arrive along with the film in “early 2010″, and it’s being developed by Etranges Libellules, or “Strange Dragonflies”, who have developed a number of uninspired third-person games over the last decade, including the last (and not too awful) Asterix game on PC.

I would rather have a bleak, ugly DOSian text list than an animated menu screen that takes two agonising minutes to load each and every time just because it’s got a pretty 3D effect in the background (and that’s before a second, longer loading screen for the game itself). Pure, I’m looking at you – a game in which I’ve spent roughly twice the time staring at loading screens that I have actually playing the thing. Christ, how does this kind of glaring annoyance not come up in playtesting and QA? This SSX-with-ATVs console port is a big old fun time otherwise. More on it soon, I suspect.

Interesting timing, this. I was chatting to a journo-chum yesterday about how disappointingly tedious the Wall-E game was, and how odd and sad it was that a film studio as accomplished as Pixar would be happy to let such turgid nonsense be officially associated with them. Why do Pixar not start an in-house development studio of their own for these titles? Surely shared in-house digital assets would make the art and graphics a bit easier, and they’d be able to ensure these were proud counterparts to their celluloid output rather than let themselves undermined with shoddy cash-ins. The phrase I used was, I believe, “Pixar could be the Blizzard of kids’ games if they wanted.”

Suddenly, it sounds like this very particular dream may come true. WARR-EN to the rescue…
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Disney’s proto-MMO, Virtual Magic Kingdom, is closing down. The resulting coverage is remarkably difficult to read.

If nothing above moves you to feel that this human interest story is anything more than the closing of yet another online game, allow me to leave you with a direct quote of an entry from the online journal of an 11 year old VMK player has Spinal Muscular Atrophy which controls voluntary movements, such as crawling, walking, swallowing and breathing:

“My favorite web site, Virtual Magic Kingdom (VMK) is closing May 21st. I’m sad and MAD! I can’t live without my friends on VMK. PLEASE sign my guestbook like a petition to SAVE VMK for me and my friends. Pass my site on to everyone you know so they can help too. I love VMK cause I can WALK, TALK, EAT, DANCE, SHOP and play checkers all by myself.

PLEASE HELP ME!

Love,
Madison
p.s. VMK is GERM FREE too!
p.s.s. and no one stares at me there.”

[Via Raph Koster.]

Update – Thread’s now closed to deter further bad eggs. As a general rule – if you can’t say something nice about an eleven year old who’s upset, you probably shouldn’t say anything.

Just before Christmas, Eurogamer got me to travel up to Disney’s London headquarters to interview Warren Spector. The resulting piece covered all the big matters of the day - Deus Ex 3, Portal’s awesomeness and how when his new game is finally announced he’d be “vilified”. But there was a hell of a lot more. Starting with polite small-talk, and extend outwards to take in his admiration and identification with Walt Disney, being “Tech’s Bad Boy”, how best to approach The Icons, putting his money where his mouth is, Being In a videogame, the importance of teaching videogames, creating an oral history of games, what it’s like to be a 52-year old designer and JRPGs about Chopin.

The one thing we didn’t ask him why he decided to hook up with this Mickey-Mouse outfit…
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