Sega Zone: Is this the Start of a Comeback?

It has been a long time since Sega put an end to its hardware development endeavors. The last year the company supported a console platform was in 2001 with the Sega Dreamcast. Aftwards, Sega dropped out of creating and developing hardware and went completely with developing third party software for other systems headed by Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo.

Well apparently Sega is making some baby steps back into the Hardware focus of the game industry. According to some sources, Sega has offered its license to a lower end game system created by the Zone company which is associated with making family games. They also are known for making game playing devices that have many games built into the devices chip architecture. With Sega’s license the device is called the Sega Zone.

Judging from the design of the actual console and the controllers, it looks like a Nintendo Wii with a curvier design aesthetic. In fact, the controllers have motion sensing capability and console itself is the receiver. Beside that, it is unclear what the graphical limits of the system are.

However, it can be assumed that it is able to harness 16-Bit graphics since the system contains around 20 classic Sega Genesis games along with some other games that utilize the motion technology.

Is it a small glimpse of things to come from Sega as a hardware company, or is it just fan service? It is very difficult to know for sure at this point, but there are some comments or rumors floating around the industry about Sega and an arcade hardware called RingEdge. When more information about this comes forth then people will know for sure.

Changing Gears

Changing gears from Enemy Zero (SAT), I am starting to play through Earthbound for the Nintendo Entertainment System. Just to clarify, Earthbound is actually a game recognized as a Super Nintendo release, but that game is actually Mother 2 of the Mother franchise in Japan. Mother 1 was originally going to be Earthbound in North America, but was canceled. However, Rom images of this game have surfaced all over the Internet and reproduction cartridges have become popular. Hopefully I will finish the game soon enough so I can review it.

Game Review: Enemy Zero [SAT]

Title: Enemy Zero
Platform: Sega Saturn
Developer: Warp Inc. (Kenji Eno)
Publisher: Sega Japan

Survival horror is a very fascinating genre in the game industry and is one that takes on many forms. There are many franchises that have reached critical acclaim in this genre like the Resident Evil (Biohazard in Japan) series being a perfect example of this. Alone in the Dark and Silent Hill are also great examples of survival horror gaming. These series have seemed to have overshadowed some titles that take on the same mechanical and thematic formula and have done so to perhaps a higher degree. One such title is Enemy Zero and the D series from which it belongs to. This game is by far one of the most woefully underrated games in the genre. Solid storytelling, innovative mechanics and immensely challenging combat put Enemy Zero head and shoulders aboves its peers of the genre in the 32-Bit era of gaming.
Enemy Zero takes place in the future where space travel is commonplace. The universe of this game is easily comparable to that of the Alien films first envisioned by Ridley Scott. You play the role of Laura Louis, the co-pilot of the space exploratory vessel named ‘The Aki’. You are jolted prematurely from your cryogenic slumber when the ship goes into its emergency mode because of an unauthorized breach from an unknown organism. With this security threat it is up to Laura to locate all crew members and deal with the invisible alien threat and survive.
The game play of Enemy Zero is broken up into two core disciplines. the first is FMV (full motion video) based. Whenever Laura is in a specific room as opposed to being in hallways and corridors the game uses FMV to display these rooms from various perspectives. When in this mode Laura can move forward and can rotate left and right. Pressing the left or right shoulder buttons access Laura’s inventory which will fill with an assortment of items as the game progresses. The ‘A’ button is used to investigate certain things that the character can possibly interact with or acquire. Another feature that can be accessed only when exploring certain rooms is the save game function. Other uses of FMV include the cut scenes that are littered throughout the experience. All the full motion video graphics are done especially well for the time and all the environments are reminiscent of what anyone would expect the interior of a science fiction space vessel to look like.
The other core competency of Enemy Zero is traversing through the large mazes of hallways and corridors while trying to fend off the invisible enemy and find the remaining crew. As mentioned before, these areas are played in real time and not with pre-rendered full motion video. Most of these labyrinths are very dark and have many twists and turns. enemy aliens wander all about these areas trying to find any humans to kill. Since these creatures are completely invisible you cannot rely on vision to combat enemies. Instead, the player is forced to rely on a tracking system that only uses sound to indicate an organism’s whereabouts. depending on the pitch of and pauses between the tones signify what direction an enemy is coming from as well as how close it is to the player. during most of the game Laura has a gun she can use to kill enemies before they catch her.
It is very important to note that Enemy Zero is by no means an easy game. Even though you are able to combat these aliens it is a rather difficult undertaking. The first thing that makes this game unforgiving is the inability to see your enemy. what is worse is that getting caught by an enemy means instant death. Gun use is also a dicey proposition. Most of these weapons have three or four shots at the most and all guns take three seconds to charge in order to fire. If you charge them for too long they will fizzle out. The most unforgiving aspect of combat is that the guns fire at an extremely short range and require you to be just a few feet from the enemy in order to land a successful shot. A redeeming quality to this combat is that the enemies die with a single shot. If in any case you fall victim to an alien you can reload a saved game, but it comes at price. The device used to record game progress has limited battery power. saving and loading game data uses up some power. This means that a game can only be loaded so many times before the device dies. When it does you have to start the game from the beginning. This is a game that is challenging by design and is not difficult to a fault.
There are a couple of things in Enemy Zero that are irritating for all the wrong reasons. The first puzzle ever encountered in the game has no explanation as to how to solve it. The game simply expects you to guess the solution. While it is able to be solved, it will stump many because it has no explanation. This is not the best way to start any game and may be a turn off to game players. Another detracting area of the game is the sheer linearity of the story coupled with forced story progression. Just to clarify there is nothing terrible about the game’s story. However, the story only moves forward in certain areas or requires one particular action. Most of the time only one action can trigger the story’s progression and finding it may be confusingly difficult. Eventually, most will find these triggers to the story progression, but will have to eliminate every possibility just to do so which can be a waste of time and can take the player out of the game.
To push the game forward Enemy Zero uses cut scenes which occur at pivotal moments in the game or when the player makes important discoveries. While the CG and voice acting are both par for the course for the time, the characters are well animated. Laura is especially believable as a human being just because of how she reacts to important happenings during the course of the game’s story. This game has its fair share of shocking moments that will change what you initially understand about situation and the circumstances surrounding it. While the story is not anything particularly original it is expertly told. Another aesthetic element in this game that heightens the overall experience is the music. Composed by Micheal Nymen (of ‘The Piano’ and ‘Gattaca’), the soundtrack of Enemy zero has many memorable melodies that will stick in your mind well after playing. The sound design is superb and tends to complement the game design and helps to give the corridor traversing sections the sense of uneasiness and tension. Even though the graphics are quite good, the game unfortunately does not take full use of the entire television screen. Instead it crops roughly twenty percent of the video buffer in order to display both the FMV and real time 3-D sequences at a consistent frame rate. However, that is the only thing that detracts from the game and is really a minor blemish on an otherwise beautiful game.
It is hard to deny that Enemy Zero is a very unique piece of survival horror gaming. It is an interesting blend of real time action and FMV exploration that works surprisingly well. However, the sheer difficulty of the game makes it hard to recommend to everyone and it is probably for that reason that this game has fallen into obscurity. Even so, If you are a survival horror game veteran then you owe it to yourself to play Enemy Zero and take on this truly terrifying and tension filled experience.

Overall Rating: [4/5]

Critical Update: Duke Nukem Forever back from development purgitory

When it seemed that all hope was lost for the latest installment in the Duke Nukem franchise called Duke Nukem Forever, a miracle occurred earlier this month for this All-American one liner dropping though guy. As of September 3rd, Gearbox Software (creators of the Brothers in Arms series and Borderlands) has procured the rights and assets to Duke Nukem and Duke Nukem Forever. This is truly an amazing turn of events for this game especially when considering just how convoluted its development history is.
Duke Nukem Forever has been in development since the year 1997; a whopping twelve year long development period. The game originally used the Quake II engine created by ID Software, crossed over to the first Unreal engine, and has trailed its way to the Unreal III engine. In terms of the business backend, Take Two Interactive held the publishing rights to the game and had provided funding for it. In 2009, Take Two cut funding for the project and filed suit against the developer 3D Realms. In April of this year the developer closed its doors, laid off most of the staff, and announced that Duke Nukem Forever was put on hiatus indefinitely. However, Gearbox somehow acquired the rights to the game and the franchise.
On top of this, Gearbox has also stated that the game will be done and released sometime in 2011. During this announcement the company presented a two level playable demo of Duke Nukem Forever in action and it shows promise. Instead of just being a PC game exclusive it will go multiplatform over the XBOX 360 and the Playstation 3 systems. According to other members of the press who have played it, the game feels very much like most first person shooters nowadays in terms of controls and mechanics. All the weapons that made an appearance in Duke Nukem 3D will return in this installment. Also, there will be multiplayer as it is expected in any first person shooter coming out these days. One thing the DNF has on other FPS games is what it does with environment interaction.
Needless to say, it seems that miracles can happen even in the games industry. Even if 3D Realms is no more at least Duke Nukem, one of the most iconic video game franchises, will live on in this generation of gaming. Whether it is considered by many as an industry joke or not, no one can deny that this recent event is nothing short of incredible.

E3: General thoughts on Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo

Just to preface this entry, it has been a while since I have posted anything on this site. This is due to getting ready for my next year of college and moving to a new location. I sincerely apologize for this long hiatus, but it was necessary.

I would like to take this space to talk about my overall impressions of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (or E3 for short) for this year and cover the press conferences of the major three hardware manufacturers. I will give my impressions of the Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony media briefings and ultimately rank them on a certain criteria. This ranking will be done after analyzing aspects like showmanship, the list of new games in development, how fresh the game ideas are, presentation of hand-on demonstrations, and completeness of information concerning new brands and products.

Let us begin with the first press conference by Microsoft of the XBOX 360. In terms of the titles shown there were some heavy hitters in the lineup. Microsoft definitely suffered from a lack of good representation. The media briefing was facilitated by the CEO of the XBOX brand Don Mattrick, who is not a great showman in speech and manner. He is simply an awkward fellow to listen to. John Shappert would have been a better choice and he did a fantastic job last year, but he left Microsoft for Electronic Arts shortly after E3 of the last year.

The press conference opened up with a hands-on look at the latest installment in the Call of Duty franchise subtitled Black Ops. It looks like it keeps up with the innovation that the lead development house Infinity Ward is known for. However, it also seems like they have moved on from offering a realistic war experience to offer an action movie style joyride on a game disc. Metal Gear Rising, the upcoming exclusive chapter in the convoluted Metal Gear saga and franchise, was shown in a hands-on demo and touted a new feature using the 360’s latest video/audio recognition device called Kinect. The new feature is called Zan-Datsu or “cut and take”. This means that when you make a cut with your sword it precisely severs anything at that particular angle. It looks fantastic and it is a great testament to how far game technology has come. Cliff Bleizinski of Epic Games presented a bit of Gears of War 3, which is looking like it will simply be par for the course of a video game trilogy. It seems to have a well designed offline cooperative multiplayer mode with up to four unique characters. It looks great, but there could be issues with the narrative in this final chapter.

Fable 3 was hyped up quite a bit by Peter Molyneux of Lionhead Studios. However, there was no hands-on look into the game. Instead, they opted for just a teaser trailer showing the scope and overall premise of the game. It appears to be very much like Fable 2 which is not bad. It still has the British humor, dark/dire comedy, and the makings of an intuitive action role playing game experience. Bungie presented Halo: Reach, yet another Halo game that is milking the franchise like Halo 3: ODST. Forza Motorsport 3 also made an appearance sporting some new Kinect features like head tracking in the car and a car preview and interaction feature in which you can actually inspect every of any vehicle in your portfolio. This game is essentially the Pepsi to Gran Turismo’s Coca Cola. For the most part Microsoft’s catalog was acceptable and it does offer some newer ideas. They are not overall terribly new, but it is not entirely rehashed ideas.

Lastly, Microsoft really pushed their Kinect hardware with an upcoming dashboard update that offers a new interface exclusively for Kinect. Microsoft also dropped a bombshell in the form of an exclusive deal with ESPN to make a service on the system which also utilizes Kinect. There were some simple short-form games geared more toward the crowd of gamers who are just getting into gaming. However, they were not of the same caliber of the previously mentioned games. One game that looks promising is a Kinect game developed by the creators of both Guitar Hero and Rock Band. It is called Dance Central and it is a dancing rhythm game that registers many dance moves and routines.

Kinect was fascinating enough for a new hardware announcement and shows some promise. The only concern is that of presicion. Like Nintendo’s motion control, Kinect shows a significant latency between the player’s physical action and the game play translated on screen. However, this new hardware was almost overshadowed by the announcement of the new XBOX 360 system, which sports internal WiFi, a 250 GB hard drive as well as a sleeker and smaller physical design. The best part about this new hardware is that it is retailing at the same price point as the XBOX 360 Pro model currently in stores now.

Nintendo’s media briefing was facilitated by Nintendo of America’s current president Reggie Filsaime. Like with Microsoft, Filsaime is not a particularly good showman for his company. This is slightly worse than Microsoft’s situation because he feels the need to dwell on reassuring the members of the industry (individuals who are not the mainstream public) that Nintendo is still on top and goes on to twist information and put profuse amounts of spin on facts that reflect badly on the company. He does this and feeds it to everyone in the trade like it is state run press.

The Nintendo press conference started with what should have been a grand exposition because it started with a demonstration of the latest Legend of Zelda game subtitled The Skyward Sword. The hands-on demo was a train wreck of painful proportions. It started out fine enough, but as the demo went on the game slowly fell apart technically. The precision with the sword and other items like ranged weapons did not work well and the control looked to be extremely awkward to handle. On top of this the game simply looked terrible graphically. All the textures looked muddy and even all the character models suffered from a significant lack of polish. The Skyward Sword overall looks like a first generation Game Cube game which is unacceptable for a game in development in the year 2010.

Other games shown were Mario’s Sports Mix which is yet another collection of different sports games starring characters from the Mario franchise. Another Golden Sun game for the Nintendo DS was shown and a Golden Eye remake is also in order. Disney’s Epic Mickey Looks like it could be of the better licensed Disney titles like the ones created by Capcom during the 1980’s. Kirby’s Epic Yarn looks fresh and inventive with a cloth like aesthetic and new game mechanics. Dragon Quest IX was also given some time in the spotlight. It is apparently going to be a massive multiplayer RPG experience for the Nintendo DS.

Metroid Other M, being developed by Tecmo, Still looks great with its multiple game play perspectives and still gives off the feeling of isolation and discovery. Nintendo surprised many with the announcement of Donkey Kong Returns, which looks alright from the outset and has a sense of retro revival style to it like the game Bionic Commando Rearmed. The one oddball out of this software lineup is Kid Icarus Uprising. This franchise revival is a bit baffling merely because of the fact that the only two games in the franchise were of poor to mediocre quality. Hopefully this game will rectify the flaws of the first two entries.

On the hardware side of things, Nintendo unveiled the Nintendo 3DS which has the capability of displaying in full 3D depth without the necessity of glasses or other forms of augmented aid making this a large leap forward in technology. The new device also houses an analogue nub much like the one on the Sony Playstation Portable system.

The Sony press conference stole the show at E3 this year. Jack Tretton was a fantastic host and he, not was entertaining and engaging, but was also very informative. The other members of the conference like Kaz Hirai were also moderate engaging. While there were some rough spots one of Sony’s big marketing personalities, Kevin Butler, also made an appearance to entertain and inform and helped to keep the presentation feeling organic.

Sony really pushed two things: 3D gaming and Playstation Move. They did this trough their software lineup. Herman Holdst of Guerilla Games showed a two part demonstration of Killzone 3 in full 3D. It has such a high level of polish that it looks like it was ready to hit retailers when it was shown. Sony announced a lineup of several titles that utilize both 3D and Playstation Move. Motorstorm Apocalypse, Gran Tarismo 5, Mortal Kombat, and Crisis 2 are a few of this lineup that will utilize both.

Sony showed some games that exclusively use Playstation Move. Creative Workshop presented a hands-on demonstration of Sorcery which has a generic fantasy world premise, but shows very intuitive controls and interesting ideas like combining spells of various elements. Tiger Woods PGA ’11 demoed very well using Move. The game could use some more polish, but it looks like this title will be promising for fans of the sport. Another game announced is Heroes on the Move which is a mascot adventure game that involves major characters from the Ratchet and Clank, Sly Cooper, and Jak and Daxter franchises that uses motion controls for throwing and swinging gadget items.

Sony also announced price points for Playstation Move packages and bundles for individual components and full outfitting sets. Media Molecule came out and showed some breakthrough ideas in LittleBigPlanet 2 with new features that enable console users to create their own styles of game that are not just platformers. Some genres of gaming that are capable with using this game include racing, real time strategy, and shooter games. It was impressive to see this play-create-share genre evolve from what it was in the first game. Sony is pushing hard to support the PSP platform with exclusive products and some franchise games first put out on the PS3. New games like God of War: Ghost of Sparta, and Patapon 3 were shown.

Other parts of the media briefing included a section devoted to Electronic Arts’ exclusivity deal with Sony to put out timed exclusives like Medal of Honor including a special edition package that contains a high definition version of Medal of Honor: Frontline. Also shown was Dead Space 2 being made by Visceral Games and Redwood Shores that also has an exclusive package containing both Dead Space 2 and Dead Space Extraction now with Move support. The bombshell of this press conference was when Gabe Newell of Valve, in a stark reversal of opinion, announced Portal 2 exclusively to the PS3. Another exclusive is Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood which sports a never before seen multiplayer mode with assassins from various regions of Europe.

Out of all three press conferences, Sony definitely took the crown. From the games it showed to the freshness of these ideas put the company on top in terms of its presence at E3 this year. Microsoft was behind but not by much. There was a healthy showing of product at that press conference both on the game front and the online experience side of things. Nintendo ranks on the lowest of the scale. Nearly all of the new games announced were of previously established franchises. Where are the next original Nintendo games at? The nostalgia grab is wearing thin to say the least.