Warren Spector: “We’re Not Curing Cancer Here, We’re Making Games”

Warren Spector, gaming industry veteran behind Deus Ex and Epic Mickey (among others), is relaxed. Reclined in a bar overlooking Sydney’s Circular Quay, the Opera House looming large in the background, Spector shows no sign of fatigue from his long-haul flight the previous day, and any weariness he may have felt post-E3 is clearly long gone.

It’s quite the opposite, really; he’s a veritable packet of enthusiasm. Epic Mickey 2, coming to Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360, is his latest project and he’s very keen to talk about it.

He’s quick to explain just how he’d pitch Epic Mickey 2 to a PS3 or 360 owner understandably unfamiliar with the first.

“Well, what I’d say is, ‘Don’t worry about the fact that there’s a ‘2’ in the name’,” says Spector. “Since we were going for an audience that hadn’t played the first one we tried to make sure that it’s a standalone experience. So don’t worry about that, it tells its own story.”


“ You’re fine being a blue hedgehog, you’re fine being a fat little plumber.



“And then I’d say... ‘Okay, relax. Yes. It’s Mickey Mouse. Okay? You’re fine being a blue hedgehog, you’re fine being a fat little plumber, you’re fine being whatever that orange cat-like thing is that has a robot buddy. You’re really okay with all that stuff. Try being a mouse for a little while. It won’t hurt you.’

“And then I’d say, ‘Look I’ve made – I really have lost track, I’ve gotta go back and count, this is either my twenty-second or my twenty-third game, I really can’t remember which – and every one of them has been about the same thing at its heart, right? It’s about players making choices as they play, and then dealing with the consequences of those choices. It’s about you telling your story, not me telling mine. It’s about you. And, in that way, it’s just like Deus Ex. The content is a little different, I don’t deny that. The tone is a little different, I don’t deny that. But the heart of the gameplay is still about choice and consequence, which is what I’ve been doing since the 80s. So give it a shot; what’s the worst that could happen? We’re not curing cancer here; we’re making games, right? See if it’s fun for you.”

So has the Disney foundation been some kind of hurdle for more cynical gamers, or is it just something they anticipate to be a hurdle? Spector explains.

“I honestly never anticipated it to be a hurdle, and it wasn’t one, because I always just make the game I wanna play,” he says. “I never – I’m not kidding, nobody believes me when I say this – I’ve never been assigned a game, never been told to make a game. I’ve never made a change in a game based on focus testing except once and it was a mistake, I shouldn’t have done it.”


“ I’ve never been assigned a game, never been told to make a game.

“It was Deus Ex Invisible War, actually, we focus tested concepts and I was told, ‘Set the game further in the future and put the guy or the girl in a purple jumpsuit; people like purple jumpsuit. Why did I listen?”

Spector buries his face in his hands with a grin before continuing.

“But I’ve always made games that appealed to older audience and I didn’t see anything different here. I just made a game that I found interesting. I like Disney stuff. No-one looks at Toy Story and says,’ Oh, that’s just for kids.’ Why is it that games can only appeal to a certain audience, but movies and books – I mean, how many adults read Harry Potter?

“And so what we found, that didn’t surprise me in the least, was that – it’s such a precise number I feel almost silly saying it, but it’s true – 54 per cent of our buyers, of our players, on Mickey 1 were over 18. 39 per cent were under the age of 13.

So you’ve got the whole spread?

“Well, except for the seven per cent 13 to 17, but it’s like, no 13 to 17-year-old is going to admit that they like Mickey Mouse. It’s not gonna happen. I don’t even worry about that. We have a little hole in the middle of our audience but at the end of the day we made a game for everyone, in the same way that Pixar makes movies for everyone.”

Spector is a passionate Disney fan, but don’t assume this means he’s already used all his favourite content in the original Epic Mickey. Not by a longshot.

“Dude, let me just explain something,” he laughs, shifting backwards in his seat. “The first time I went into the Disney archives – I’m sorry, not the Disney Archives, just the Imagineering part; there are seven, actually there are eight, I found the eighth mysterious archive about six months ago. I went into the Imagineering Archives and the guy I was working with there apologised to me that they had only scanned 90,000 images so far.”


“ I went into the Imagineering Archives and the guy I was working with there apologised to me that they had only scanned 90,000 images so far.

“The first time I went into the Animation Archive they said, ‘Well, what would you like to see?’ And I said, ‘Well, why don’t you just show me everything you’ve got on Alice in Wonderland’ – because at the time I was thinking about putting an Alice in Wonderland world in the game, which we eventually ended up cutting for a bunch of reasons.

“They just laughed at me: ‘You’re gonna have to narrow it down a little bit.’ Because the Disney archives, it’s 84 years of history. The one way in which I feel I’m a kindred spirit with Walt Disney is that neither one of us ever throws anything away. He never threw anything away. We could tell stories set in Wasteland right outta the Disney archives for the next 100 years and never run out of material. There’s no shortage of material, trust me.”



Source : ign[dot]com

Apple Jack 2 Review

Let's forget about the plight of Xbox Live Indie games for a minute. Let's forget about how Microsoft has buried the channel so deep under successive layers of unwelcome dashboard updates that you can only get to it with a shovel and helmet-mounted lamp. Let's try not to think too hard about Xbox Live Arcade, which seems to be heading down a dispiritingly similar route Let's forget about all of that, briefly, and just enjoy this sequel to one of the service's most likeable independent games, 2010's Apple Jack.

Apple Jack 2 is a 2D puzzle platformer starring a little chap with an apple for a head who gets tired of his office job, whips off his trousers and shirt and runs naked into the forest in just his tie, socks and wee shoes, ready for fresh adventures. It borrows recognisably from the grab-and-throw gameplay of Super Mario Bros 2, to which its digital box art plays homage. It has over 60 varied levels spread across three worlds, in which you will be doing things like picking up washing machines and throwing them at roaming wildlife, running away from giant pandas, and floating across chasms on giant, hovering eyeballs. Purge a level of bad guys by chucking them at each other, and they explode into showers of fruit, building to massive multipliers.

It's soundtracked by gentle, folkish guitar melodies, plucked by band This Eden - though the challenge is far from gentle. Creator Tim Sycamore has imbued Apple Jack 2 with a ferocious learning curve, seeing you progress very quickly from simpler grab-and-throw puzzles to time-limited face-offs with giant apple-smooshing buzzsaws chasing you through complicated levels as you try to rid them of enemies. On either of the lower two difficulty settings, you can hold Y to briefly rewind time once per checkpoint to give you a second chance, but the challenge is still fierce. There's a lot of gameplay here for your 80MSP.

Apple Jack 2 is flawed in that enjoyable indie game way: it's imperfect, and you love it regardless of those imperfections. You'll smile widely as cascades of fruit envelop the screen when you get an x64 multiplier, simultaneously hoping that it doesn't crash the Xbox. You'll swear at a control quirk one second and laugh at an unexpected panda or sweetly-written joke the next. Apple Jack 2 is lovely because it feels hand-made; it's been put together by one guy, and you can see his personality in every piece of artwork or puzzle setpiece.



Source : ign[dot]com

Final Fantasy VII is Coming to PC

An official website for a new PC version of Final Fantasy VII has surfaced, confirming that Square-Enix's classic will be available from the publisher's online store in the near future.

The new version will feature 36 new achievements that you can compare with friends online, the site states. Cloud saves are also part of the online feature package. Another addition, "Character Booster", will apparently allow you to increase your HP, MP and Gil levels to maximum, which seems to be intended to soften the difficulty.

Minimum PC specs are also listed. If you want to run the game, you'll need: Microsoft Windows XP/Vista/7 (32/64-bit), a 2GHz Processor or faster, 1GB RAM and a DirectX 9-compatible graphic card.

We first reported this as a rumour a few weeks ago - additional information gleaned at the time suggested that the game would retail for around £7.99 (about $12) on Steam.

The announcement trailer, below, suggests that this is a straight re-release, not an HD remake.

No specific release date is mentioned; it's simply listed as 'Coming Soon'. You can take a look at artwork and character profiles on the official site here, if you like.



Source : ign[dot]com

Batman: Earth One Review

It’s hard to believe that it has been two and a half years since DC Comics announced the Earth One line of graphic novels, which included the reveal of Batman: Earth One. After the massive success of Superman: Earth One (though a critical disappointment), fans waited eagerly for the Dark Knight incarnation. Whether it was a creative delay or simply a marketing effort to wait for the next Batman movie, Geoff Johns and Gary Frank’s Batman: Earth One is here, and best of all, has been worth the wait.

I won’t lie; during the initial portions of this book I was taken aback by some of the liberties Johns takes with the Batman mythology. Characters feel wholly new and their dynamic with one another is, in many cases, entirely different. However, the masterstroke is how Johns brings the entire story full circle to put these characters in their place in something of a series of "ooooooh" moments. There’s still a huge degree of freshness to it – like one major character in particular reaching a grim end – but by the time you close this book, you’ll have experienced an enlightening new approach to the classic Batman origin. I dare say that not since the seminal Batman: Year One have we gotten such a thoroughly fresh take on this story.

Johns doesn’t change the circumstances so much as he does the characters themselves. Most significantly altered is the Bruce/Alfred dynamic (and Alfred in general, who is now a total gun-toting badass), but the beauty comes as Johns is able to mold the characters’ tense dynamic into the one that we’ve come to know and love. In a similar fashion, the Batman/Gordon partnership is essentially non-existent, while usual “year one” story regulars like Harvey Dent take a back seat (though there is a humorous wink-and-nod to Dent’s destiny at one point). But again, Johns disassembles these familiar pieces with a purpose. Thankfully, when he reconstructs them in a whole new way, he manages to provide a new view of the Dark Knight that actually feels like what the Earth One books are supposed to be: a modern take on classic characters.

While the Batman, Alfred, and Gordon stuff in Earth One is all great, it’s the rest of the book’s supporting cast that I really latched onto. Among them you’ll find Harvey Bullock – reimagined as a hot-shot Hollywood detective trying to make big headlines by cracking the long-closed Wayne murder case – and Barbara Gordon, the whip-smart daughter of Jim. And it turns out that 2012 just might be the year of the Penguin, as ol’ Oswald Cobblepot gets another fantastic turn here hot off the heels of the great Penguin: Pain and Prejudice mini-series. Johns juggles a ton of pieces but manages to allot enough time to each of these elements to give Earth One a well-paced, rounded story, with every character being left in a very different place than where they started. The only place the narrative falls short is in building the foundation between Batman and Gordon, but I imagine that could be left for the inevitable Volume 2 as Batman realizes he’s going to need help in this war on crime. And, if the goosebump-inducing final scene is any indication, there will indeed be a Volume 2.

It’s nice to see Gary Frank move into a darker realm of DC than we’ve seen him in as of late. While the action sequences look stellar, it’s in the character work and the more subtle conversational scenes that Frank’s artwork really makes strides. While many of his characters, both male and female, suffer from having extremely similar features, the subtleties he is able to pull off with those features are most impressive. Particularly in the scenes between Alfred and Bruce, Frank is able to use the slightest adjustment of an eyebrow or the furrow of Alfred’s wrinkles to effectively underline Johns’ script.

By that same token – as writer Brad Meltzer actually points out in a quote on the back of the book – Frank’s Batman costume lets us see Batman’s eyes through the cowl. There are no white slits here. What this does is bring an added humanity to the character as Batman, which reflects the fallible way that Johns writes him. When we first see Batman on the scene, it begins as a situation we’ve seen countless times: the Dark Knight stalking a criminal over the rooftops of Gotham. Until his grapple gun malfunctions and he makes an ass out of himself. In this way, seeing Batman’s eyes remind us that he’s 100% human behind all of that spectacle. It’s a nice touch.

Even greater subtleties in both writing and artwork can be found through Bullock’s character, whose journey is perhaps the most profoundly jarring throughout the course of the book. Even better is the way that Johns and Frank work together to sell this bold new take on the old, disgruntled detective – gaining the reader’s confidence only pages after his debut.

Batman: Earth One is a resounding success. There’s no supplemental material to speak of, but the beautiful characterization, interesting new direction, and stunning artwork makes it an easy recommendation. When Superman: Earth One disappointed it left me cold on these books completely, but Johns and Frank have rejuvenated this line tenfold and made sure that Batman fans have a great new graphic novel to rave about.



Source : ign[dot]com