Sam is changing gears. In Conviction, he’s not hiding the shadows anymore. Now, he’s blending in with the crowd.
His daughter is dead. His status as a nonofficial cover operative for the CIA has disintegrated. And now, Sam Fisher is on the run from the NSA. Double Agent’s final “To Be Continued” message was one hell of an understatement.
Last September, Ubisoft made a widely-publicized oopsie when it posted two gigabytes of promotional material (regarding games both announced and unrevealed) on its public FTP. Double Agent hadn’t even been released, but the first hints of its sequel spread across the internet in a feverish blaze. Images of a bearded Sam Fisher, sporting long hair and civilian clothes, sparked rumor and debate overshadowed only by Double Agent’s long-awaited release the following month.
Until recently, talk of the fifth Sam Fisher game was the stuff of wonder and speculation. Now, with facts in hand, Splinter Cell: Conviction is preparing a debut under the revealing rays of the noonday sun. And we do mean revealing-Sam will be stepping into daylight this time around for what looks to be, for him, a very different take on stealth combat.
Like Assassin’s Creed, Ubisoft’s other stealth game currently under development, Conviction will find Sam using crowds as a form of dynamically-shifting cover. In place of a ’shadow’ gauge, the game will sport a ‘danger’ gauge, serving as a visual cue to relate to the player just how much hot water they’re in at any given moment, no matter the time of day. The trick to keeping that gauge low will be to follow the ebb and flow of the crowds, moving at the same pace and in the same manner as the commoners.
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If TOMY’s licensed games have taught us nothing else, it’s that they are very good at catering to the fans, and Naruto Shippuden: Clash of Ninja 3 is an excellent case in point. TOMY has once again created a fighting game that is not so much notable for its actual mechanics as the way in which it evokes the spirit of the series with its solid presentation and unobtrusive gameplay mechanics.
Released a little over a year ago in Japan, Clash of Ninja 3 shifts the original Clash of Ninja’s focus to Naruto’s sequel series, Naruto Shippuden, but retains the overall look and feel of the previous games. As usual, Tomy has done a great job with the cel-shaded graphics, and the presentation is clean and appropriate to the style of the series. Being a fighting game, much of the focus is on the online and versus modes, so the story is relatively short, primarily serving as an excuse to unlock more characters.
The story roughly traces the Rescue Gaara arc that comprises Naruto Shippuden’s first 35 episodes. Being a relatively popular arc with the fandom, this is not the first time that this arc has been depicted in a Naruto video game, and it will likely not be the last. However, Clash of Ninja does a reasonable job of distilling the events of the story down to a series of battles featuring a wide variety of familiar characters.
Where it suffers is in the battle conditions, which tend to be fairly simple and repetitive. Victory is almost always a matter of beating a foe with a special attack, which can be frustratingly tricky at times. The attack meter charges quickly, but your foe’s health needs to be low enough that they go down when the strike is unleashed. Otherwise they are apt to recover and pound you into paste. Further complicating matters are the occasionally imbalanced 2-on-1 battles, which can lead to some serious frustration.
However, the story only lasts around 17 fights, and is more an afterthought than anything else. It’s there to diversify the content beyond the obligatory versus modes while giving fans a familiar vehicle by which to unlock new characters. In other words, it’s mostly just a nice bit of comfort food.
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MAG is only a month away from release, and based on reactions from closed beta players it appears that the massive multiplayer shooter will make a big splash when it hits in January. We recently got a chance to talk to Zipper lead designer Ben Jones about how his team managed to handle the tribulations of such a huge shooter experience.
GamePro: Why is 256 the magic number? Did the team decide on this number based on what was feasible on the PS3, or was it more based around what Zipper wanted to do with the armies in the game?
Ben Jones: Once we discovered that networking an unprecedented amount of players was possible on the PS3 we were determined to organize them in a practical manner. Forming eight player squads was always our goal, but we arrived at 256 by using traditional military structure to form players into platoons or 32 and companies of 128.
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There’s an old adage about the first impression being the most important one and unfortunately, my first encounter with Bayonetta wasn’t positive: it was when the game was first announced and the very first image of the titular witch was released. I glanced at the main character’s sexy pose and ridiculous outfit, thought “Did they really attach guns to the back of her legs?” and wrote it off as yet another ham-fisted action title that would ultimately offer nothing more than a few moments of titillation. But as it turns out, Bayonetta is surprisingly good and it’s better than I could have ever anticipated.
I just wish it didn’t take two hours of actually playing the game before you are given an opportunity to fully realize that. The game’s introductory levels move at such a chaotic pace that you barely have time to breathe, let alone take in the basic gameplay concepts and narrative linchpins that are thrown your way. It’s a hectic and confusing primer but it’s not particularly surprising: Bayonetta’s director, Hideki Kamiya, knows how to build memorable worlds but he’s not so great at introducing you to them. He should take a cue from the fictional Willy Wonka who didn’t rush his lucky contest winners through his wondrous factory (as Kamiya does in Bayonetta) nor did he force them to stand outside the gates while he lectured them for twenty minutes on the hidden wonders that lay inside (as Kamiya did with Okami). Instead, the madcap chocolatier ushered his guests in and started them off slowly, showing them a few minor miracles so that they could acclimate themselves, and only after they started to feel comfortable did he unveil the real magic.
And there is a terrific sense of magic to Bayonetta — it’s just unfortunate that it’s so completely and utterly obfuscated by the main character’s overt sexuality and frantic anime-inspired shenanigans. Those two aspects may garner Bayonetta plenty of attention but it actively detracts from the game’s true strengths: A refined combat system and a ridiculously inspired menagerie of enemies on which to use it. The titular witch is like a skilled magician who is terrific at sleight of hand — a very subtle and intimate form of magic — but rather than rely on her natural skill to wow the audience, she leans on a heavily overproduced stage show complete with burlesque dancers and a rocking soundtrack. As a character and heroine, she falls incredibly flat and it’s only when she lets her fists and feet do the talking that she starts to become palatable. Many gamers will be seduced by her looks and her vampish ways but I actually would have preferred it if she had cut down on the come-hither theatrics and focused more on kicking ass.
Bayonetta is often compared to Devil May Cry, and while the two games do share a lot of similarities — no surprise considering Kamiya directed both — the game that serves as a better point of reference is Sony’s God of War. Both have epic stories, memorable protagonists and refined combat; of course, God of War’s story and hero are handled with far more expertise and skill, but I actually give the edge to Bayonetta when it comes to the controls and battle system. The combat is a mind-blowingly ludicrous affair, and while it starts off as an over-the-top mess, it eventually settles down to become a taut technical challenge. The later levels, especially, require a deep commitment to precision and timing, but you always feel like you’re in command of the action. It’s far more surgical and deliberate than God of War — Bayonetta is the scalpel to Kratos’ meat cleaver — and the number of available combos is utterly ridiculous. Even better, most attacks end with an incredibly satisfying finish in the form of an earth-shattering Weave Attack: this is where Bayonetta’s suit, made of her hair, natch, comes alive to form a magic fist or high-heel adorned foot and put the exclamation point on your attack. You can also build up a magic meter to activate a deviously designed Torture Attack that reminded me a lot of Mortal Kombat’s Fatalities. Then there are the boss fights which get progressively weirder and better, and while they all boil down to an exercise in pattern recognition and timing, the payoff is enormous. The game also does an incredible job of never giving boredom an opportunity to set in. It’s like a perfectly designed roller coaster whose peaks and valleys are perfectly meted out to deliver the best possible thrill. The sheer variety of things you do is also fantastic, with new enemies appearing just as you start getting over the awe of the ones you’ve already encountered, and the action is broken up by some unexpected sequences that never fail to revive your flagging interest.
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The latest Final Fantasy game has sold more than 1.8 million copies in the four days since it’s 12/17 release, but Yoichi Wada hopes to break 2 million (more than half of all Japanese PS3 owners) by 2010.
Square Enix’s roleplaying spectacle-spinner Final Fantasy XIII sold over 1.5 million units in its first four days on store shelves, reports Japanese tracker Enterbrain. Not bad at all, considering the game’s only available for the PlayStation 3 in Japan (the English-language version for both PS3 and Xbox 360 doesn’t ship until next March). Square Enix president Yoichi Wada revealed the company has already shipped 1.8 million copies, and expressed hope sales would reach the 2 million mark shortly.
Some perspective: Sony’s Japanese PS3 install base stands at around 4 million units. Plug the 1.5 million figure in and you get 38 percent of that base holding a copy of Final Fantasy XIII. What’s more, if Wada’s forecast is accurate, we’ll see that number soar to roughly half of all Japanese PS3 owners in the coming weeks.
According to Enterbrain, the next bestselling PS3 game in Japan is Konami’s action-sneaker Metal Gear Solid 4, with just under 700,000 copies sold to date. Final Fantasy XIII just doubled that in its first four days on sale. By comparison, Metal Gear Solid 4 moved some 476,000 copies during its preliminary four-day sales window.
Major franchises always drive hardware sales. PS3 sales surged nearly 70,000 units, for instance, during Metal Gear Solid 4’s introductory sales week in Japan. No surprise then that PS3 sales are up dramatically around Final Fantasy XIII’s release, topping nearly 250,000 according to Enterbrain, or roughly 100,000 more than the system’s prior high point when Sony release its slim-line PS3 in September.
Final Fantasy as a franchise can claim some 92 million units sold worldwide. The last in series, Final Fantasy XII for the PlayStation 2, sold over 2 million copies in Japan.
