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Gears of War's Epic History
GameDaily has up a piece looking at the history of Gears of War , which was released this past Tuesday. The game's history is also the tale of developer Epic Games, which grew from a garage group to one of the biggest names in FPS titles. Beyond that, though, "'Gears has a sordid history,' said [Epic Founder Tim] Sweeney. 'Initially, we planned to take the Unreal franchise in a more large-scale combat direction, more like Battlefield 1942. So we began this project called Unreal Warfare and spent a few years developing that. We realized we wanted the real focus to be on a single-player game with realistic combat. Around the same time, we were developing Unreal Tournament 2003 with Digital Extremes. We took the efforts from Unreal Warfare — it had a lot of the early ideas of Gears of War — and merged that into the Unreal 2003 project. From that you saw the Unreal game take on the large-scale combat — the Onslaught style of game.'"
Let me know when the Nintendo Wii version is coming out.
Wheelbarrow of Warfare
Spanner of Shame
Cogs of Despair
Machete of Manslaughter
Tweezers of Terror
A Clockwork Horror
Super Game 22
The first couple paragraphs reminded me of all the great games that I used to play from epic and the other companies like them.
we need more games like that.
GameHippo is currently where I (LEGALY) get my fix for those types of games for anyone else getting the craving.
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
Seams like this game had some serious distribution difficulties. Anyone know if it made if out of Memphis yet?
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
I think it's very short-sighted to be a platform fanboi, who thinks that the only good games are on their platform. So you've never had fun on an older platform before? Or that good games don't exist because they're on an MS/Sony/Nintendo/Sega console?
The Wii isn't even out yet, and still many Nintendo fanbois are hyping it to death, as if games will only ever be good on the Wii.
The truth is, there are great, fun games on all the major platforms. Honestly, anyone who is a platform fanboi is a gaming "noob". Personally, I follow the games, and I don't hold allegiances. I find that FFXII and Gears of War are both excellent games, despite one being on a Sony console, and the other on an MS one. I will likely purchase a Wii, if it turns out that Zelda: Twilight Princess is also a great game.
Gamers shouldn't buy based on hype or brand name, but on what provides the best entertainment.
-- jchenx
Not quite true; although Apogee published Wolfenstein 3D and Commander Keen, id was the company that created those titles. Also from Apogee in the early days were: Supernova, Crystal Caves, Paganitsu, Secret Agent, Monster Bash, Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure, and of course, the original Duke Nukem.
Their old collection of shareware titles is still available for download here and purchase here
I'm certainly going to get a Wii - it's cheap and the controler has high novelty value - but I would want to play a game like Gears of War on it (at any price point). Given it's not able to do high definition (and the graphics appear to be better than but not all that far off GC quality), a game with a much detail as GoW is going to look nasty on my 50" HDTV Plasma, in just the same way that quite a few old origional X-Box games do. They would have to really take the polygon count down right down too, to the point it would be hard to tell if your hiding behind a rock or something that's supposed to be a burnt out car. The game would be a mess (unless they changed it almost beyond recognition).
When you have graphics with lots of bright colours and cartoonish graphics (e.g. Super Mario Sunshine) it's a lot easier to get away with a lower resoltion, lower polygon count and less video memory than if your trying to depict something that looks gritty and realistic (though RE4 did very well on the GC of course, but it did have the rare advantage of a fixed camera angle).
It's not just about graphics though - as much as I'm looking forward to the Wii's controller, I don't belive for minute it's going to be as comfortable as the Dreamcast-inspired X-Box controller for extended play or games like this (and GRAW, Rainbow 6 and certain racing titles). I've loved that controller style on the DC, origional X-Box and 360 - quite liked the not disimilar GC one (a evolution of the N64 controller) but found it too small for extended play. The vaguely NES inspired controller for Wii looks alright - and perfect for retro SNES titles - but SNES style controllers arn't as comfortable as more recent designs, and having to plug it into the remote is just going to be alkward (I don't see why it's not wireless in it's own right).
With regard to both the controller issue (which they can at least do something about - and I'm sure 3rd parties will if they don't) and the graphical limitations, as much as there are some games that will really only be suited to the Wii, there are some game types that just won't be - and 'gritty' FPS/over-the-shoulder-shooter titles like GoW, GRAW and Rainbox 6 are games that just won't work well on a limited platform.
Even though there are bound to be fanboys that will claim otherwise Nindendo and developers know some game styles will work on the Wii and some won't and it's not a market they are going after, which I think is a good move for them and for consumers, as it gives us more choice. I'm sure someone will try to do a more realistic FPS title on the Wii (probably another "Golden Eye", and someone is bound to do a WWII shooter god help us) and while it's bound to please some, it's going to look pretty nasty to anyone who's been exposed to similar titles on PC's or other current consoles. Ubisoft's Red Steel looks like it's going that way, though I am keen to slice and dice with the controller so I might be able to see past that if reviews are good enough.
(By way of pre-empting some replies, I don't subscribe to the cult of "worse graphics makes for games that are more enjoyable" that's quite popular or even the more widely accepted belief "gameplay > graphics" because I think they are both vital to a good game. In modern 3D games in particular, if you know the target platform can't handle rending something then you simply can't put that into your game, even if you think it would be really fun to have it in. If you're on a more limited hardware platform, it doesn't mean the games on it are going to be more fun, it just means designers have to work harder so that any platform limitations are not noticeable or distracting - I fully expect the Wii's controller will help in that regard and I should think that's a good part of the reason they've come up with it, because Nindendo's executives knew they needed an edge.)
It'll be five minutes until somebody writes an alternative Gears of War name generator.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Storied history. Unless there are some incriminating pictures of CliffyB involved somewhere.
Rob
Can you ban this chap, you know, for hogging much needed bandwidth? 95% of the stuff he posts is trash.
-1 score? nah