PlayStation All Stars Battle Royale preview

Last week in California, Sony hosted an event to showcase some of its bigger games for 2012.  Among them was a title that’s been rumored for a long time; one that’s been leaked in several places and somewhat confirmed with the securing of several domain names — PlayStation All Stars Battle Royale.  The company gave us the opportunity to go hands on with the game and the initial six fighters it will include.

Now, before you go off on any sort of “hey, this looks like Smash Bros.!” tangent, yes, it’s true.  PlayStation All Stars Battle Royale is essentially Sony’s equivalent of Nintendo’s multiplayer fighting game.  However, the newly formed development team at Superbot has done a good job making it feel like its own little party, adding certain things to the engine and making familiar characters from the PlayStation universe fit right in to the battle.

The first six characters are an interesting bunch.  You’ve got Fat Princess, a character who’s a better melee fighter than you might expect; Sly Cooper, who’s good on both speed and quick attacks; Twisted Metal’s Sweet Tooth, a guy that’s handy with a hatchet and mines; Kratos from God of War, a character who kicks ass on the ground and in the air; Parappa the Rapper, who has a few good moves along with several great super attacks; and Killzone’s General Radec, who’s nasty from a distance with an assault rifle.  All six bring something to the game, and over the next few months, several additions will be announced, including rumored favorites like Ratchet and Clank, Sackboy and Nathan Drake.

As for the gameplay, it’s got a lot in common with Smash.  You’ve got your various attacks that you can use on opponents, and they can change up depending on which direction you’re holding the D-pad or analog stick, so you can easily juggle someone in the air or lay them out with a vicious ground attack.  Once you hit an opponent enough times, you’ll be able to hit them with a super technique.  You can build this up three times — level one through level three — and the higher the super, the more enemies you can take out.

For instance, level one attacks consist of a quick strike, like what Sweet Tooth or Kratos can do with their weapons.  Level two offers a better range for taking out enemies, like with Parappa jumping on a skateboard and running people over.  Level three attacks go all out, from Parappa’s slamming stage attack to Radec jumping behind the camera and mounting a gun in a first-person perspective, shooting everything that moves.  Sweet Tooth’s robotic transformation is awesome as well.

An interesting fact about PlayStation All Stars Battle Royale is that you can’t knock anyone out of the ring.  They can’t fall off a platform to their death (like in Smash), nor can they be knocked into the stratosphere for instant kills.  Here, you have to fight in order to win the match.  It’s an interesting perk, along with the ability to pick up weapons throughout each battle, such as Resistance’s spiky grenades and a laser spear.

The backgrounds mix up quite a bit throughout the game.  So far, we know of four — a LittleBigPlanet level, a Hades stage, Ratchet and Clank’s Metropolis, and Jak and Daxter’s village.  Each one changes quite vastly, with serpents popping up in Metropolis to give Captain Qwark a hard time, and the LBP stage suddenly converting into a Buzz! TV show, complete with questions in-between rounds.  (You need to stand on the right answers to avoid taking damage.)  These are splendid additions to the game and keeps things unpredictable enough so you’ll continue to move around.  Our favorite of the bunch so far is Hades, as he tries to pound enemies in the foreground before becoming surrounded by Patapon.  Yes, Patapon.

So far, Sony has only confirmed local multiplayer (up to four people) for All Stars, but come on.  They’re going to announce online play soon enough, as that’s one of Smash Bros.’ more popular features on the Wii.  Look for that confirmation around E3, along with a few more surprises.

Source : http://gamezone.com

Tera Review

In a proper and just world, Tera would've launched in 2004 and rewritten the MMO rulebook instead of WoW. I realize that I've just spewed outright blasphemy and am in extreme danger of being stricken down by a bolt of divine lightning, so let me explain. Traditional MMO combat – as popularized by Blizzard's genre-stomping behemoth – isn't exactly thrilling. While PvP and high-end PvE ratchet up the mobility factor a bit, leveling generally involves all the high-octane action that's typically associated with being a tree. That is to say, you root yourself in one spot and flip your brain switch firmly into the “Off” position. Tera, by contrast, requires skill-based swinging and fleet-footed acrobatics, leading to adrenaline-pumping last-second dodges against even the most mundane of foes. Also, which would you rather play as: an ugly old gnome or an adorable (and vaguely horrifying) dog person? I rest my case.

My starting statement is, however, a double-edged sword. On one hand, Tera would've made for an excellent neanderthal to kick off modern MMOs' evolutionary cycle. Matched against said modern MMOs, however, Tera's non-combat elements (quest structure, crafting, story, PvP, etc.) feel woefully behind the times – like vanilla WoW as opposed to post-Cataclysm WoW. It is, to be frank, the Big Foot of massively multiplayer role-playing games. Sure, it'll put up a hell of a fight if backed into a corner, but at the end of the day, it feels like an out-of-place missing link – not entirely stuck in the past, but definitely not ahead of the curve.

So then, let's start with the good: the combat – as I noted in my first week impressions – is largely sublime. Climbing into my warrior's upper 30s, though, taught me to appreciate it even more. Put simply, standing still is suicide – especially once Tera starts tossing larger groups of enemies into the fray. Fortunately, my red-skinned Medieval Darth Maul had a whole host of equally potent single and multiple target skills by the time I hit level 30, and I couldn't help but feel this incredible sense of control.

If a bad situation sprang up, I felt confident that I could switch gears and tackle it head-on. One Big Ass Monster (Tera's world-roaming boss equivalent – and yes, they're actually called that) vs one small ass me? Sure, it'd take upwards of ten minutes, but – even against a BAM's (sometimes literally) earth-shaking attacks – my carefully timed dodges and pitter-patter strikes could win out in the end. As for a crowd of weaker enemies? Please. They bunch up in their neat little groups, and I mow them down. The buddy system, as it turns out, isn't exactly an efficient combat formation.

This is the first MMO where I can say position – not maximizing DPS – drove my skill choices from moment-to-moment. If a dodge landed me just outside attack range, I'd whirl around with a rangy Legend-of-Zelda-style area of effect strike and then charge back into combo position with a skewering shishkabob strike. Regardless of where I was, I always felt like I could be where I needed to be in mere seconds. It may not sound like much on paper, but in practice, it made me feel like I – not some series of background dice rolls – decided my fate. With proper play style adjustment, my dual-wielding, incredibly rogue-like warrior even made a serviceable tank.

And it's all impressively varied from class-to-class, too. My Slayer alt, for instance, moved with all the grace and agility you'd expect from someone wielding Cloud's buster sword the way it'd actually work, which necessitated a complete shift in timing. As a result, strikes were far harder to land, but oh so deliciously satisfying – with craterous knockdowns befitting of a cleaver big enough to give other cleavers wedgies and then hang them from flagpoles. Even healers and spellcasters require far more mobility and manual targeting than their comparatively snooze-worthy meter-monitoring cousins in other MMOs.

Problem is, many of those class-defining details hardly even matter outside of BAM battles and dungeons. Quests shamelessly recycle slight variations on the same enemies until leveling's just a giant blur of Big Things, their accompanying legions of Small Things, and the occasional Thing You Feel Terrible About Killing. So one quest might ask me to hunt crowds of tiny rock creatures, and then – a single level later – I'm busting them into even tinier rocks again, only now they're called “scoundrels” instead of “minions” or something along those lines. I was also, at varying points, forced to kill fairies and unicorns. Given that you can play as a little bunny girl race (which, in itself, is already disturbing enough), this means you can use a little girl to kill some of the things little girls are allegedly made of. There is nothing right about that sentence.

The end result, however, is that PvE combat strategies rarely ever change, and questing – which consists almost entirely of “kill 10 of these, 25 of these, etc” missions tied loosely together by an extremely generic, badly told “storyline” – quickly descends into eyelid-tugging slog territory. As Bon Jovi once said: “It's all the same. Only the names have changed.” Granted, he was talking about cowboys, steel horses, and comparing guitars to revolvers, but even with that holy trifecta of intrigue, I doubt Tera's tired quest structure could manage to be of any real interest.

Group play, then, really and truly saves this one – at least, initially. In almost complete contrast to solo questing's thinly veiled level treadmill, it's fast, frantic, and rewards tactical complacency with a hulking monster claw to the clavicle. A basilisk BAM, for instance, might charge, pounce, spin abruptly, or leap sky-high and come crashing down, potentially crushing the whole party. Meanwhile, the vampire (sorry, “vampir”) centric Sinestral Manor's final boss – which could best be described as the result of a radioactive spider being bitten by a radioactive copy of Gears of War – is generally less agile, but prone to launching fiery ranged projectiles while you're distracted by its smaller (still disgusting) offspring.

Admittedly, these boss tactics don't sound tremendously different from those in other MMOs, but constant movement and skill-based combat make BAM battles feel less like traditional tank-and-spanks and more like Monster Hunter's intimate encounters with Godzilla's kind. That said, there's still not enough variety – especially given Tera's timesink nature – and even BAMs grow tedious in the game's upper levels.

Unfortunately, the rest of Tera ends up feeling like a flavorless outer shell you have to crush your teeth on to reach its BAM kabiff-pow-thwacking core. The game's opening area – which will eat up five or so hours of your time – varies from mediocre to out-and-out awful, and even an inventive (though brief) prologue that lets you try out your class at level 20 squanders its potential on a confusing, awkwardly paced execution. And while things finally pick up at around level 20, questing actually gets more mundane as you progress, with meaningful skill gain perplexingly cutting off at around level 40.

Beyond that, gathering – while cleverly paired with mini-buffs to better tie it into the flow of combat – feeds into a tedious crafting system that's also borderline useless thanks to the ready availability of better items via loot. And while there is PVP, it's limited to random open world skirmishes at the moment, as previously promised PVP battlegrounds won't be implemented until the end of summer.

I will, however, make special note of Tera's election system. Basically, its purpose is to elect a series of “Vanarchs,” who – according to Tera's official website – are responsible for “setting and collecting taxes from vendors” and “activating special shops and skill trainers in settlements, opening new teleport routes, and more” in Tera's various provinces. Unfortunately, I can't really evaluate it yet, as it only kicked off at the start of the week, with the first batch of elections set to wrap on June 1. Given its strict level requirement (50) and competitive nature, however, it's the closest thing Tera has to a unique endgame right now. No, the political system probably won't be quite as chaotically player-driven as, say, EVE Online, but I'm extremely excited to see where these monthly bursts of democracy go. If it lives up to all that promise, we'll definitely tell you about it.

I am, however, rendering a verdict on what Tera is right now – not what it will be in a number of months. And while its combat system is a bonafide cannon ball into an otherwise stock-still (Vindictus excluded) sea of fantasy MMOs, a heavy anchor of mediocrity nearly sinks the whole production. There's nothing damningly egregious about, say, Tera's same-y quests or generic swords 'n' sorcery 'n' giant apocalyptic robot tale, but it all comes together to suck away any sense of vibrancy or moment-to-moment fun. Bluehole's MMO debut occasionally makes desperate, clawing grasps at greatness (see: BAMs, dungeons, combat's rarely applied nuances), but seems mostly content to trudge along nonchalantly without ever really applying itself. I'd hand this one an “A for effort,” but most of Tera – beyond its combat – is out-and-out lazily designed. No doubt there's a wealth of promise here, but as is, I can only recommend a subscription to avid players who've completely exhausted other, more robust options like WoW or Rift, or absolutely cannot wait any longer for Guild Wars 2 or The Secret World.

But hey, at least you can play as a dog person.



Source : http://www.ign.com

Dragon's Lair Review

Considering that the Xbox 360 has been around for over six years, it's a little surprising that we haven't seen a port of the 1983 classic Dragon's Lair until now. Not only is it one of only three games accorded permanent exhibition status at the Smithsonian Institution (along with Pac-Man and Pong), but it has also managed to worm its way onto everything from the Commodore 64 and NES to the iPhone in the intervening 29 years. Most of these were uninspired rehashes that brought almost nothing new to the experience, but this latest incarnation's leaderboards and Kinect support at least mark a step toward variety. Unfortunately, that's still not enough to make it worth your time.

Get used to seeing this shot. A lot.

Dragon's Lair was a colossal hit back in the days when visuals in video games were first evolving from wads of pixels to recognizable and iconic sprites such as Mario. Its appeal lay in its novelty. Harnessing the talents of celebrated animator Don Bluth, Dragon's Lair marked an ambitious attempt to jump over 10 years into the future, chucking the standard digital conventions of the day and being based entirely on animation.

At the time, it worked. In an age when Mario still wasn't "super," arcade goers could laugh at the antics of the goofy knight named Dirk the Daring on his quest to rescue the sultry Princess Daphne from the clutches of the dragon Singe. Instead of deaths that just knocked the hero offscreen, you saw poor Dirk subjected to snake strangulations and rib-cracking impacts. And instead of saving some generic princess, you won the hand of Princess Daphne, whose Playboy-inspired model turns heads as easily now as it did back then.

Even so, its animated focus demands simple gameplay even by the standards of its era. Indeed, little more than an interactive movie at heart, it's best understood in modern terms as the direct ancestor of the quick-time events (or QTEs) sprinkled throughout countless modern action games. Then as now, the entire game revolves around knowing when to press one of the four directions on a D-pad to move Dirk out of the way of danger, and using a button to slash your sword. Miss one of the lightning-fast prompts, and you find that death comes easy and often in Singe's domain. Unfortunately, such a setup means that success relies far more on memorization than true skill. The resulting trail and error is even more disappointing upon the realization that some of Dragon's Lair's 29 scenes repeat throughout Dirk's brief journey.

This sequence is anything but better with Kinect.

In theory, at least, Dragon's Lair seems like a perfect match for the Kinect. Freed of the constraints of a gamepad, you can act out Dirk's simple movements for yourself, jumping left as he dodges a snake to the right, or moving forward as he tries to wiggle through a hole in a rapidly closing wall. When it's time to stab at Singe, you battle him with a slashing motion of your arm. Unfortunately, it's those very moments that give Dragon's Lair so much trouble. Since so much of the game hinges on the speed of your responses, the time it takes to get back into place after a strafe to the left often leaves you in a bad spot when you need to strafe back to the right.

The slashing motions fare even worse because they don't always register. This Kinect mode compensates for such troubles by introducing optional directional indicators and allowing for occasional slips, but all in all it only adds to the frustration of an already unforgiving game. Gameplay gets even more frustrating in the local cooperative mode, which requires you to switch players every time the other player dies. And since Dirk has a nasty habit of dying every 10 seconds or so, the experience is more of a hassle than it's worth.

You might find some additional replay value in the multiple difficulty modes that strip the gameplay of its prompts or limit how many continues Dirk has after dying (in other words, making it closer to the 1983 arcade gameplay), but even then you'll probably master each within an hour. Leaderboards for the Kinect and gamepad modes foster some sense of competition, but Dragon's Lair is not the type of game that you'll set aside days or weeks for in an attempt to dominate the lists.

As a small bonus, this version lets you sit back and watch Dirk's adventures as an animated short if you're tired of tripping over yourself with the Kinect or missing cues on the gamepad. It's a welcome addition, since focusing on the necessary moves often means you can't fully appreciate the animation for itself unless you're watching someone else play. At the very least, it's useful as a walkthrough if you're having trouble on the promptless hard mode. Bluth's animation is as impressive as ever, although seeing it stripped of the gameplay only highlights the limits of the sound design. Aside from Dirk's shrieks of terror and some musical cues signaling a successful execution of a room, the only noteworthy sound file is the ditzy voice of Daphne explaining how to vanquish Singe.

Dirk's expression makes much more sense once you see what Daphne looks like.

Today, Dragon's Lair is little more than a historical curio. It takes barely more than half an hour to complete the game on its hardest modes, and a dedicated player could probably complete each achievement inside of five hours. The Kinect support is novel but ultimately more frustrating than the standard gamepad gameplay. In the end, you're better off finding a modern game with occasional QTEs scattered throughout its levels and smirking at your awareness of where such sequences evolved from.



Source : http://www.gamespot.com

Diablo Shrugged

Some time between the great Kubrickian monolith arriving on the African savannah with its double-edged gift of individualism, and the NES, wild tribes and civilisations covered the planet, each with their own colourfully intricate mythologies, featuring a comic book array of splendid gods. This was the time of polytheism – the time of many gods.

Some time after this...

Polytheism offered a marketplace approach to deities, allowing villagers to worship gods at their leisure, in exchange for a little supernatural help (at the god’s whim, of course): with fertility, perhaps, farming, or war. During the decline of the Roman Empire, however, an alternative movement gained momentum: monotheism – the Walmart approach to heavenly assistance; a one stop shop.

Monotheism differed greatly from its precursor, as a vague and casual array of relationships between people and a variety of gods was transformed into an all-encompassing and intimate relationship with god, governing all aspects of mortal life and the distinct fork in the road beyond it – branching out to either heaven or hell.

While polytheism promoted individual liberty, monotheism demanded strict adherence to a highly codified set of practices. It was a system designed to permit large groups of people to live fruitfully together (to avoid ending up like the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans), and to convince people to give up their liberty in exchange for community benefit, monotheistic dogma played on their fears. In contrast to the ultimate reward of heaven, a dire pit of untold suffering was created – Hell. As an opponent to the great shepherd, a merchant of chaos and suffering was devised. He goes by many names. Gamers know him as Diablo.

You may remember him from such films as Little Nicky.

So, over a few hundred years, a distinct cultural shift occurred. The focus upon mortal life was shifted to immortal life. What did forty or fifty years on the planet mean when placed against eternity? And with such a focus, notions of good and evil became crucial to the governance of mortal life. In essence, a binary mode of thinking about life was instituted: behaviour was either approved by The Lord, or in the aid of Satan.

This way of thinking began to infiltrate Western culture at its roots, providing the dominant architecture to storytelling for the past two thousand years. From to , to , pitting the forces of good against the forces of evil is the most fundamental narrative structure of them all – a popularity that can be explained by the cultural architecture which preceded it; the binary structure; God vs Satan; good vs evil; the success of Good equalling Heaven, its defeat or corruption, Hell. No grey areas. No in between.

Video games are no exception. Due to a low technical ceiling, it was only natural that the Old School should turn to a simple story for its architecture, and unsurprising that Good vs Evil should inspire the new : a series of escalating challenges building towards a final showdown with the Devil incarnate – Bowser, Ganon, Red Falcon, Death Adder – whichever guise The Beast had assumed this time around. The objective, and one’s motivation for playing, was always clear. Strike the lethal blow. Watch the credits roll. Slump in satisfaction, happy to have banished evil from the land. It was very much a case of same Satan, different day.

We live, now, in a different age. Science rules, superstition is in its death throes. As a consequence, culture has changed course once again, into the realm of post-modernism – a time of uncertainty. No more binary black and white, no more good or evil. As a consequence, recent advances in gaming technology have attracted a new breed of game designer – a storyteller wishing to plumb the recesses of all the vexing new grey areas which have opened up.

My surprise at emergence has its basis in the fact that Good vs Evil has been wheeled out once more, despite having toppled from its perch. Surely, this is its curtain call, though. After all, we’ve come so far. Full circle, one could say. Seldom, now, do games present hierarchic plots entirely resolved by a single act. With multiple endings, moral choice, and sandbox randomness, gaming has acknowledged that when it comes to a zero-sum game of Heaven or Hell, success or failure, the well has run dry.

Contemporary stories reflect the complex, often contradictory, and occasionally futile struggles we face. Rather than coddle us with the notion that paradise awaits so long as we play by the rules, they portray life as a series of frustrations and satisfactions divorced from a cut and dried conclusion. Thus, the brutal threefold self-destruction of conclusion; anticlimax; and the irony of providing Capital Wastelanders with hope through a campaign of tyranny and murder.

A reflection of a shift from monotheism to post-modern polytheism? I always thought it was about huge dudes with drills for arms.

As the grip of monotheism has slipped, the creative spirit of polytheism has returned. Rather than living our lives in pursuit of a singular goal (Heaven), allied to a singular movement (against evil), our desires have become freed. We acknowledge that intellectual/emotional judgements, rather than spiritual/moral rules, are the only authentic tools we have with which to forge meaningful lives.

Definitions of good and evil lie in a state of constant flux, and paradise will forever elude us – a fact that informs the kinds of games we wish to play; stories that make sense, and that we want to engage with. I’m certainly glad, therefore, that is a wonderful game; and that it inspires a fitting ovation to one of the grand figures of storytelling, and touchstone narratives of a civilisation. And then we move on, with great trepidation, to an uncertain future.



Source : http://www.ign.com

Max Payne vs. Mazda and the Sounds of Violence

The video game arms race is a visual one. It always has been and it doesn’t appear to be changing. But there’s a lot more to a video game than just how good it looks.

The effect sound has on a video game, and on players themselves, cannot be understated. Play your favourite game with your television muted. It’s empty, isn’t it?

Given how crucial audio is to a truly great game, it’s interesting the bulk of mainstream video game discourse tends to gravitate towards graphics and visuals. Is audio underappreciated?

“I think that the depth of the immersion in a game is what players are looking for,” says Nick Warseck, audio lead at Rockstar New England. “People play games to take a dip in another reality because it's fun to escape for a bit.”

“I think that graphics and visuals are the talked about the most because people are much better attuned to seeing if something in the game world is correct or not than hearing if something sounds off. If you look in a mirror or in a puddle and there's no reflection, it's a lot more jarring than if a sound doesn't have quite the right reverb on it, or a low-res texture versus a highly compressed audio asset. So when you're creating the most immersive experience possible, the most important thing is that it looks as close to reality, or what reality would be if you were in a spaceship, because if it doesn't look right it's not going to suck you in.”

But while a game’s visuals provide you a window into the world, it’s the audio allows you to open it.

“Audio is obviously important to that overall experience, it's pretty apparent if you play a game with no sound how flat it feels,” Warseck continues. “I think audio supplies more of a support role, as it basically gives weight and truth to the art.”

“I think audio supplies more of a support role, as it basically gives weight and truth to the art.

“As each sound is added, even something as simple as hooking up audio for an air conditioner, the world becomes that much more real. That air conditioner serves a purpose in that world. If it's loud and gritty sounding it gives you a feeling of how hard it must be working. It makes it feel hotter outside, and adds the overall feeling of dinginess of a building that hasn't had any maintenance and is old. The audio brings out a lot of the unsaid feel of the world, which increases the immersion.

“So intrinsically the audio is felt more at a subconscious level, it's not something that dazzles you visually like a massive explosion, but reinforces how dangerous the explosion feels. I think it will always be in that unknown space as well, I mean, film sound design still isn't something that's as high profile as the cinematography or music, despite there being a lot of really creative and brilliant things happening that really steer the overall tone of the film.”

Max Payne 3 is an incredible example of audio done right. For such an atmospheric game, packed with ballistic sounds and iconic music cues and steeped in noir tropes like Max’s regular narration, the audio in Max Payne 3 was obviously a hugely important part of the equation.

The team initially spent extensive time playing the original Max Payne, and Max Payne 2, as they wanted to keep the spirit of these games intact while adding a modern layer of quality.

“We wrote notes on the things we felt they did really well, and the things that we felt were iconic sounds that we would like to expand upon and bring over to the new game,” says Steve Donohoe, lead audio designer at Rockstar Toronto. “Those early games were quite groundbreaking in their cinematic approach, had excellent sound design and had a very unique style to them, so we had a really great starting point.”

“We also set the bar really high for ourselves with some of the other ideas we had, listing out a bunch of things we wanted to take to the next level and checking stuff off as the project progressed. There are a lot of details in the ambient audio that are not really obvious unless you are listening closely for them, but we spent a ton of time making sure the world felt alive and responsive to your actions. Dogs bark and babies cry from inside houses when you start shooting, while birds and insects shut up.

“There are a lot of details in the ambient audio that are not really obvious unless you are listening closely for them.

“It was not easy by any means but we are really happy with the end result. Getting it to all fit into memory, and convincing the audio programmers to write the many thousands of lines of code, was our biggest challenge, but we feel we succeeded in achieving all the major things we set out to do.”

One of Max Payne 3’s key drawcards is its use of BulletTime. It’s been a part of the very foundations of the series since the beginning, but tackling an audio system that sounds as good in real-time as it does in BulletTime (and one that users can trigger a shift between at any second) is not as straightforward as simply dialling down the pitch speed. The team decided early on in the project that just allowing all the sounds to pitch with the game’s timewarp speed was not going to sound the way they had envisioned. The team created a custom mixer that allowed them to manually craft the sound to suit.

“This gave us the ability to send certain sounds down different ‘paths’ depending upon what game state we are in,” says Donohoe. “Some paths mute sounds in slowmo, others pitch slightly, while others pitch with the game speed or get even lower.”

“We decided some sounds were never going to be as big or cinematic as we wanted them by just slowing them down, so we created unique crossfading sounds that blend in and out between the real-time and bullet-time versions of certain sounds. There were some significant technical issues to overcome... but we eventually found ways to make it work. A ton of credit goes to the programmers for coming up with creative solutions to very complex problems.”

Donohoe tells us part of the challenge of BulletTime was decided what it represented in an audio capacity.

“We felt it was not a magic power Max has, but rather an ability to be insanely focused and intense. This helped us decide what we wanted to hear in BulletTime,” he says. “A lot of the sounds we use are actually slowed down breath sounds or pitched, filtered, and compressed heartbeats. We wanted to keep it very organic, but with an abstract quality to it that would keep it from being too ‘in your face’.”

But where does all this sound come from? Is the team out on fire escapes tossing bullet casings through the metal grates and at ranges spraying objects with bullets, or are things kept in a more controlled environment? Or is it a bit of both? Warseck explains.

“Rockstar has a wonderful gun library that was recorded by the San Diego team and John Fasal,” he says. “We also had a lot of material from other projects that were used on Payne.”

Still, the team does as much field recording as possible.

“There are certain sounds that will never work quite right unless you go out and get them yourself,” says Warseck.

“There are certain sounds that will never work quite right unless you go out and get them yourself.

“When we do go into the field, I find that Google maps is a great tool for finding recording locations. I've found dumpsters full of old lawnmowers, canoes, and intact windows in abandoned parking lots, highway I-beams and guardrails out in the middle of the woods, and old factories from World War II out in the middle of nowhere that nobody seems to know about that are just brilliant places to record.

“They also don't seem to have a lot of people around that mind if you're running around with a sledgehammer, an axe, and a duffle bag full of unknown objects, which on second thought is a bit of a double-edged sword.”

Forza Motorsport 4 and Max Payne 3 may be a world away from each other in terms of the spaces they each occupy, but incredible sound design is something they both share. Max Payne 3 weaves a symphony of lead but the howling engines of Forza Motorsport 4 assault your ears with just as much force, trading hollow points for Hemis. It’s why opening the taps on a Dodge Dart Super Stock sounds like God gargling a squadron of WWII fighter planes and why giving a Mazda 787b the beans sounds like Satan blending the remaining two-thirds of the world’s bee population.

“It’s interesting that you mention the engines as, at the underlying sample level, many of the engine sounds in the game were not changed between Forza Motorsport 3 and Forza Motorsport 4,” says Nick Wiswell, audio director at Turn 10. “But the implementation of those samples into the game engine and the additional real-time processing we applied made them sound very different.”

Recording real cars is a hugely important step for getting the sound in a game like Forza 4 right, but it’s not quite as simple as popping a car on a dyno and pointing a handful of microphones at it.

“Once we get those recordings back into the studio, the real fun of processing and modifying those recordings can begin,” says Adam Wilson, vehicle audio lead at Turn 10. “It can take 30 or 40 hours for a single recording to make its way from raw audio to tuned, usable, in-game assets.”

“It can take 30 or 40 hours for a single recording to make its way from raw audio to tuned, usable, in-game assets.

Of course, working with cars with price tags that’d have Scrooge McDuck nervously checking his wallet comes with the odd scare.

“We are pretty cautious these days about the kind of cars we will put under load and we’ve developed a routine that puts as little stress on the car as possible while we gather our source,” says Wilson. “But, as with any process, there are always lessons be learned along the way.”

“The most nerve-racking moment though had to be an almost brand new, but post-break-in mileage, Lamborghini Murcielago LP640 that, at the end of the session, started to spit smoke from the exhaust. A trip to the dealer and it was a death sentence for the motor. In that case however, Lamborghini owned up to a factory fault and bought the car back from the owner and he was more than pleased to be given the chance to upgrade to an LP670-SV. He’s a good friend of the studio now.”

A passion for sound is something Wiswell looks for when hiring, not just creativity and technical skills.

“Making sounds for games is very similar to other forms of media, but in games the implementation of the sounds is sometimes more important than the sound itself,” he says. “In TV and film the content is always the same, so the sound can be designed to fit the picture. In games, a sound can be heard in many different ways, and it has to adapt to changes in distance, perspective and location in a natural way in order for it to sound believable. This is a specific skill for interactive audio and one anyone looking to work in games needs to learn.

“I remember being on a panel a few years ago with a couple of guys who worked on film sounds. They were both very interested in game audio as the movie sound rulebook was already written, and almost everybody in the industry worked in a very similar way. They said that games are exciting as we still haven’t completed the rulebook, and new exciting ways of doing things are constantly being developed. My goal is to keep Turn 10 at the cutting edge of racing game audio development on every game we release.”

So, given how crucial audio is, especially to something like a racing game where the sound of a car is part of its very character, does it bug sound boffins that gamers tend to focus on graphics and visuals?

“Many moons ago when I started in game audio it did,” says Wiswell, “but over time I’ve come to realise that when people don’t mention the sound when talking about a game, it’s usually because you have done a good job and they didn’t find anything wrong.”

“When sound is done well in any form of media it becomes part of the experience, and that is key thing to remember. If the sound does not support the bigger game experience, it doesn’t matter how well it was done, it will always sound out of place.”



Source : http://www.ign.com