Posted by Kieron Gillen on September 29th, 2009.
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Ah, yes. I return from a day of adventuring. Alec’s doing a post about Gameswipe, bless him. In which case, I’ll draw your attention to something which emerged over the weekend. Tim Schafer was hired 20 (count ‘em!) years ago as a designer. He does a post including some splendid rejection letters, as well as reciting the awesome Ballblazer Story. I said the word “ball”. You have to go and read that, yes? No, yes. Yes.
Posted by Jim Rossignol on September 15th, 2007.
Share ·The Stranglehold PC demo has finally struggled its way onto the internet. It’s a big old beast, weighing in at a portly 2gb. You can get it from here.
Right, so Stranglehold is the game of John Woo’s style of movie making. It’s a kind of gaming sequel to Woo’s Hard-Boiled, delivered in a third-person action sort of way. It’s not exactly Max Payne, but you can see the connections – especially since Max Payne was pretty much an open homage to Woo’s slow-mo-diving-through-stuff manner of filming shooty sequences. Woo even has a cameo in the game, just as he does in a bunch of his films. The show off.
Bullet time comes on pretty much every time you dive or leap over something – and you leap over things automatically, often in unintentionally comedic fashion. For some reason this is called ‘Tequila Time’ and it’s a rather different Tequila time to the one you might be familiar with.
Is it any good? Well, it’s pretty – Unreal Engine 3 pretty – and there’s plenty of destructible objects in the environment. Diving around shooting people in the face as you plunge fearlessly through a shower of debris is pretty satisfying – it never goes goes like this when I try it at home. Yeah, there’s nothing realistic or measured about Stranglehold, it’s a barrage of unadulterated gun-wankery, with non-stop cinematic frippery to dress up the repetition. Death, death, wads of gore, and great clods of ultraviolence – and hardly sophisticated with it. I’ve seen a few people moaning that the full game isn’t long enough, but judging by this I don’t suppose there’s much reason to care: it’s a concentrated dose, and you won’t need much to get your fix. John reports that the game gets a bit arse once you hit the Chicago levels, so maybe the demo will be all you need…
An absurdly high body count, ludicrous bullet-dodging nonsense, and a moderate amount of fun.
