Crush the Castle, a joint effort between myself and the great programming mind of Joey Betz, is OUT NOW over at ArmorGames. This was a throwback to my old commercial days where I was given the role of designer on the project and I have to say I enjoyed sticking to photoshop the whole time quite a bit.

The art side of things gave me a chance to do a few things I’ve been wanting to try for a while. The characters in particular I had a lot of fun with as I painted them from scratch, by hand, well….by mouse anyway. I’m really happy with the way they turned out, even though you can’t see them at full scale unless you’re using the editor.

The development went fairly quickly (for me anyway) and turned out a fun and addictive little game. I have to tip my hat to Joey for the great work he did, especially with the physics engine and the camera work.

Good to do something with a short dev time for once. Now back to that Warfare sequel…

Play Crush the Castle

Let it be stated from the outset that I love the UFC and MMA in general, so the following will be the most blatantly biased, glowing and sugar coated pile of cookie dough you’ll have ever read from me.

I’ve known about UFC Undisputed since it was first announced late last year. Earlier this year when the opportunity arose to pre-order it, I jumped on it right away. What I didn’t know, until it was already out was that the demo was available the day after I got back from Korea. In my half asleep state I just about fell sideways out of my usually secure high back leather chair. I’ve since played about 10 hours of this demo over the past few days. I’m resisting the urge to run back and play it right now.

The demo is relatively small on content, only two fighters were included in what was meant to be a preview of last weekend’s co-main event at UFC 97. Chuck Liddell and Mauricio Shogun Rua. The selection works out well as it gives you a chance to play with 4 of the 6 disciplines included in the final game. Chuck has Wrestling and Kickboxing, whereas Shogun specialises in BJJ and Muay Thai.

The striking aspect of the game feels fantastic. Face buttons control a limb each, LB and LT adjust those strikes between high and low. The range your fighter is at will determine what type of strike is thrown when you hit each of those, for example what would be a jab at mid range will be an elbow or uppercut in close. Much like the Fight Night series, stringing combinations of hands and feet is extremely satisfying.

Clinching and takedowns are all handled with the Right Stick by flicking it toward your opponent. Again the Left Button and Trigger come into play adjusting the height of the clinch. Takedowns seem pretty hard to achieve at times and I’m hoping that it’s due to the fighters included in the game. As Shogun, I’ve had to resort to just duking it out with Chuck on the higher difficulty settings as takedowns are hard to time unless you catch him mid combo.

Once you do manage to get things to the ground, the grappling system is brilliant. Small and large Right Stick movements determine minor and major transitions. Moving from on position to another, the animations are slick and each opens up unique striking and submission opportunities.

The amount of ways to finish a fight are astonishing. In stand-up, damage is all physics based so catching a fighter coming in, or at an odd angle can result in a flash KO (and often does). On the ground, submissions can be pulled from almost every position provided your opponent is tired enough. Over the hundreds of matches I’ve played my favourite so far has to be catching Shogun with a knee to the chin as he was shooting in for a takedown. Out. Cold.

So now I have a very very long wait until May 22nd when that wonderful brown box arrives. I wonder if I can freeze myself until then.

I spent a lot of time in the arcades as a kid. There were these Sunday sessions where you’d pay a whopping $12 and got about 4 hours of free play on all the machines in the building. It was an institution for my brother and friends. I toyed with the fancy light gun games of the time but I spent a large majority of my time on the two most crowded machines. Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat.

Fifteen or so years later and I’ve got Street Fighter IV to chew on. I went into it saying to myself “hey, you know SF, you’re not bad at it at all. Those hours in the arcades and the weekends of hiring Super Nintendos just to play it have given you a pretty damn good idea of what you’re doing”.  Turns out I was so so wrong.

After watching this video, I discovered there’s a whole other level to SF that I’ve missed completely. Apparently most of this stuff is somewhat applicable to SFIV as well. Cross ups, meaty attacks, two in ones, reversals; all in the list of this secretive underground level of play. I understand now what defines a “good” player more so than I did before.

So diving back into SFIV, demoralised and downtrodden over my discovery of this new higher level of ability, I expected to get my arse handed to me on many occassions and I did. I play Ryu a lot and it helps in that you spend 90% of your time holding the opponent off but I can’t tell you how much time I’ve spent with my neck bent at an odd angle, spread eagle with a large Russian wrestler’s sweaty mits wrapped around my midsection.

Seems practice might be the only way I’m going to get there, but for the moment online play is just a wash for this aged warrior. Any tips?

“You are now famous enough to use the kiss my arse expression”
- Fable 2

Heard just now for the first time (yes, I’m late to the party). Any favourites out there?

Apart from the brilliant writing, just got to say how much I’m enjoying the game. It’s a really nice mix of casual hack and slash with some reasonably deep social systems in place, a nicely thought out and interesting economy system. I’m actually finding myself more worried about the house I’ve just bought getting a new tenant after evicting someone I don’t like rather than fussing over silly things like…equipment.

The lack of defensive items in terms of clothing etc though has thrown me a little, not sure what the design decision was based in giving all clothing a purely aesthetic purpose. Guess it comes with the period setting.

Anyway, back to talking to my digital dog friend and killing bandits. Had to share.

Edit: Finished the main quest line. Great experience overall, will be diving straight into second play through and some co-op sooner rather than later.

I’ve been sick for the past week with a cold / throat thing so there hasn’t been a great deal of “work” going on. Spent most of it on the couch powering through some games and 3 series’ of Sopranos. Some thoughts on the games though:

Skate 2
The first installation of this game had me enamoured for months. Having skated for a number of years growing up it captured the feeling of skateboarding, the constant banging your head against a wall over and over to get that one trick right. The career mode was frustrating as hell, something I’d forgotten until I stuck Skate 2 in and started playing, the frustration came rushing back.

It’s small things that irk me about it, challenges that if you bail you’re forced through two dialogue boxes, then a 3 second countdown before you can try it again. Surely a play tester who on their 50th attempt at a “noseslide, gap, tailslide” who bails because a pedestrian walked in front of them would ask “Why do we have this 5 seconds of down time before I can try that again?” Seems strange that with so many eyes on these games that small annoyances like this slip through.

All will be well when I give up on career and just play Free Skate.

Kane & Lynch Dead Men
I avoided picking this up anywhere near release because of the negative press it recieved. I’m not sure it was warranted, I don’t know, I felt as though I’d been lied to though about 2 hours in. Under the obviously false pretense that I had purchased an urban heist action shooter, Kane & Lynch let me down slowly over the very short story line, eventually dumping me in a heap with a terrible ending.

The controls were a little clunky, the cover system was odd (a button for cover works fine, ask Gears of War and Rainbow Six Vegas), A.I for teammates was next to useless but overall in it’s early stages the game was fun. It has a very “european” feel to it, might’ve been why it didn’t sit well with some.

Resident Evil 5 Demo
Disappointment. With a capital D. Zombies on Valium, slow clunky controls, over animated actions, cut scenes dropping vertical sync all over the place, terrible (as always from Japanese games) interface / menus, poser characters that irritated me the second they were on screen. I’m biased against Japanese games, they just don’t sit right with me. Japanese food on the other hand, that’s another story.