Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Well I’ll say this for the Kane & Lynch 2 trailers: they’re damned weird. They also make the game look about as appealing as spending a weekend in a rat infested opium den on the lip of a volcano. But they sure are weird. It raises an interesting point – the grimmest of films can appeal through dingy, murky trailers designed to unnerve the audience. But when you’re playing a game, it’s a simulacrum of you stuck in those conditions. Do I want to spend too much time pretending to be a thoroughly miserable 50-something criminal in a bleak, blue-grey world of poverty and misery? You know what, and I mean this quite sincerely, maybe that would be brilliant. I can’t think of any game that’s perpetually bleak. If it can manage to be more than just another third-person shooter underneath the bad times vibe, this could be properly interesting.

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Games Radar have thrown up an agreeably frank interview with IO Interactive’s Jens Peter Kurup, the director on the now infamous Kane & Lynch. It focuses specifically on the game’s critical drubbing – or, at least, perceived critical drubbing – and features some discussion of the Jeff Gertsmann firing over his Gamespot review of K&L. A “conspiracy theory”, to Kurup’s mind.

“It was surreal to sit in Copenhagen and watch the game get shredded in forums for reasons and feelings that didn’t all seem entirely based on the game itself. I know this might sound like a sissy song of “Boo-hoo! This isn’t fair” and other unproductive thoughts, but you asked me how I felt and I did feel like that for a couple of weeks after the GameSpot review. Pathetic I know, but in glimpses I still feel it, because when I meet somebody who hasn’t played the game, I can be fairly sure that his or her opinion is based on the GameSpot review. It just won’t go away.”

Worth a read, especially now we all (hopefully) have enough distance from the Gamespot fustercluck to think about it, and the game involved, calmly. I do keep meaning to give K&L a play, as it’s honestly very difficult to believe the guys behind the excellent Hitman: Blood Money could mess up quite as badly as popular opinion seems to have it.

Oh – notably, Kurup refers to the game as ‘Kane & Lynch 1′. They wouldn’t – would they?

Kane & Lynch: Dead Men didn’t appear on many Best of 2007 round-ups, but it’s nevertheless a game that no-one’s going to forget in a hurry. We still don’t know the full story behind the Jeff Gerstmann sacking saga, but whatever it was, it’s hard not to think of Eidos’ sweary shooter without a certain distate.

(Coincidental aside – rare brain disease Gerstmann’s Syndrome has as one of its symptoms “a lack of understanding of the rules for calculation or arithmetic”. In a crazy alternate world where Gerstmann suffered from Gerstmann’s, at least he’d have a good reason for awarding 6/10 to a game he kicked the hell out of…)
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Gamespot may have fired their veteran writer, Jeff Gerstmann, over his Kane & Lynch review.

EDIT: See below the cut for more details, and the pulled Gamespot video.

Many sources have posted the rumour that Gerstmann was fired from Gamespot in response to his 6/10 review of Kane & Lynch, which coindicided with some big-budget advertising from publishers Eidos.

We have a reliable source who tells us that while Gerstmann wasn’t the most popular man with the CNET owners, it was his Kane & Lynch review alone that allegedly saw him lose his job. We’d like to stress for reasons of balance, clarity, and fear, that this may be completely wrong. Certainly neither Gamespot nor Gerstmann have said either way, while Gerstmann has confirmed to Joystiq that the firing did happen. Eidos had secured massive advertising across the site, skinning the entire front page with K&L commercials, along with running gimmick adverts allowing readers to cut their own K&L trailers. This can make a below-average review a little awkward.

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Eidos have marched in, thinking Orangeboxday is an appropriate time for announcing a new multiplayer element for their forthcoming Kane & Lynch.

And it sounds potentially rather fun. Because you get to stab your friends in the back.

It’s to begin as a co-op scenario, with up to eight of you teamed up against the cops, performing heists. Which already sounds a decent amount of fun, but gets more interesting. Your group objective is to steal whatever you’re stealing, and make it to your getaway point. Except, there are winners and losers here, and the winner is the one who escapes with the most. I.e. the one who turns on the others most effectively. As their exciteable press release says, “How and when you make your move is up to you.”

Lead Game Designer Kim Krogh puts it like this,

“Fragile Alliance is a new way to use co-op in multiplayer. Play it like a soldier and you’ll lose, play it like a criminal and you’ll win”.

So it’s essentially a multiplayer game based around everyone preparing to backstab everyone else. If the dynamics are right, and it forces you to work together just enough before hell breaks loose, it could be huge amounts of fun.

I’ve not been paying a great deal of attention to IO Interactive‘s two-man shooter, Kane & Lynch, but there’s every reason to think this might actually be pretty interesting. Hitman: Blood Money ate a load of my spare time this year, so I’m eager to see what IO can manage to come up with next. I’m also keen to see how this new fad for co-op gaming plays out. Five years ago there was barely a dozen co-op shooters in existence, now they’re clambering out of every marketing spreadsheet. This has to be a good thing, and the ideas that developers come up with for making players work together are going to change the way we play – subtly perhaps, but we’re already seeing the ideas build up. (Pulling buddies to their feet in Gears Of War, for example.)

Thanks, Game Trailers.

And what do you think, readers?

EDIT: 20th November release date – it’s going to be a busy November.