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Gears of War Visual Exploration
Shacknews has images from a small product information piece about Gears of War. The scans show off a booklet full of beautiful imagery and some interesting insights into the game. From the booklet: "Since Emergence Day, the residents of Sera have been paying the price. Crumbled buildings and ruined monuments loom over the battlefield as somber reminders of what the Gears fight for. The glory of Sera and everything that mankind has struggled to achieve collapses in upon itself, yielding to an unstoppable force. A brutal and protracted war has dashed this planet's veneer to pieces, and left the shattered bits to be picked up by the most unlikely few. The Gears of War continue to turn."
Is this game will ship before Duke Nukem Foreever? Or Lonworn? (eee... the next windows, watever the name is.)
No sig for now.
I find myself exibiting an odd reaction to information about next generation videogames. It seems that as I am looking at pictures and videos I become instantly impressed at how far the graphical techonology has come; at the same time as I read about the game play dynamics and the story lines I become instantly disapointed at the little progress that has been made in these areas.
...
I may just becoming old and cynical but it seems to me that there are (almost) no companies that can merge interesting gameplay with impressive graphics. For the most part the interesting game ideas are usually less impressive visually.
Not to divert attention from this game but
It seems to me that ever since Iwata has become president of Nintendo there is a far greater focus on inovation in videogames. Games like Warioware, Nintendogs, and Kirby Canvas Curse are great examples of unconventional game ideas that are interesting. The thing that actually has me interested in the Revolution more than anything else is probably the Nintendo DS (although I don't own one yet). Even with it's small game list, and limited upcomming supply of games, it has far more unconventional (and interesting) games than any platform at this point in its lifespan. I think regardless of whether you will own an XBox 360, PS3 or High-End PC Nintendo may give you reason enough (through inovative games) to buy a Revolution.
As the conversation with my friend went:
Me - "Look at Gears of War."
He - "It's just another Doom."
Me - "It's supposed to be about story and 'cover'"
He - "Is it a single-player FPS?"
Me - "Yes"
He - "It's Doom."
It'll take a whole lot to make something other than a Doom clone. When you try, you mostly end up with a 'boring Doom clone.'
Best of luck.
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
If you think about it though, there are very few books and movies that also aren't frightfully full of hokey writing. The ratio of "great" literature to the amount of "okay" literature is very small. For every really good book published, you probably have a couple hundred or thousand trashy romance novels published. I wouldn't expect it to be any different with video games.
The OP was talking about a call to higher literature in video games. I'm really looking forward to there being classic-literature quality stories in the form of video games. It's been done with movies, it's been done with books, it's been done with radio drama -- why can't it be done with video games? Why are we so jaded into thinking that video games can't hold to higher standards? It's like saying "well we certainly can't hold movies to the same standards as books, because all moviegoers want to see are adventure, sex, and violence" but that certainly isn't true.
I dunno', perhaps it's just an unjustified soapbox of mine, but I really wonder if we could finally start seeing some good literature come out of interactive fiction in the form of video games.