Muffin Top Merkley
Be a man!
With the amount of games scheduled to be released in the next couple of years, it is very possible that the gaming community can easily overlook or even completely dismiss a certain game that might be a hit once released.
The purpose of this thread is to promote and discuss games that might go unnoticed to the average gamer.
Two games that I will keep an eye out for are Homefront & L.A. Noire.
Homefront is a first person shooter, takes place in Denver, Colorado in 2027 where the United States is at war with North Korea after the Koreans have seemingly contoured much of the world.
What makes this shooter different is that the developing studio, wanted to take a different approach for super-soldier stories like Halo and Call of Duty and they primarily did so in two ways. The first is the games setting; rather than take place in familiar areas like the White House or Empire State Building, where most gamers will have no emotional connection with, Homefront’s setting is one that anyone playing might be able to relate to - your regular suburbia neighborhood.
The second thing that separates Homefront from the collection of other shooters, both already on shelves and soon to be released is the main character development. Unlike most shooters where you play as an experienced soldier, in Homefront you are expected to feel the overwhelming uncertainty of a regular person who is not trained in military tactics or accustomed to holding a gun, nonetheless shooting one.
To add to the sense of panic of not being an experienced military combat machine forced to fight of the world’s largest and most powerful army in your backyard, the developers have added a sense of desperation to survive by choosing to give the player a constant lack of resources such as ammo.
Homefront is attempting to bring some humanity into a gaming genre that is seemingly overflowing with emotionless single player campaigns based on someone’s war fantasy.
Homefront is developed by Kaos Studios and published by THQ and is scheduled to be released in March 2011 for Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC.
L.A Noire is the next project by Rockstar Games, the makers of the Grand Theft Auto series and Red Dead Demption. Though L.A. Noire is an open-world game where you can explore Los Angeles and see the sights, admire the pedestrians, there are no mini-games to be played or side quests to complete. L.A. Noire is a far more linear game, that focuses more on the journey, than the destination.
In L.A. Noire, you play the young and seemingly incorruptible LA police officer Cole Phelps in the 1940s. Phelps is a decorated war hero from World War II hero who harbors a dark secret certain to come out during the course of L.A. Noire. Though young in his career as a cop, Phelps is the kind of media darling the LAPD can latch onto to improve its tainted image.
Phelps begins the game working as a cop on the beat but quickly rises through the ranks of the police department to traffic (investigating all cases involving cars. For example: when a woman mysteriously runs her car off an embankment. The case begins appearing like a normal accident, but it grows into a case about Hollywood corruption, rape and pornography.) Eventually you work your way up to homicide by solving a number of specific cases that are all based on real cases from the ‘40s.
Crime investigations begin at the crime scene where you search the scene for clues/evident. You aren’t required to collect every bit of evident, but the more you gather, the easier it will be to narrow your suspect list. Accusing someone isn’t as easy as just pointing a finger, you will have to back you’re your accusation by linking it to a piece of evidence.
Your next step in the investigation is what separates L.A. Noire from not only Rockstar Games of the past, but every other game on the market today. When you start talking to witnesses and suspect, L.A. Noire takes advantage of amazingly new motion-scanning technology. Every face in the game is the actual actor with zero touch-ups or animations added. If you talk to a woman with bruises on her face, then she had to have makeup applied before the shoot.
By using this technology, Rockstar has managed to capture every shift of the actor’s eye, the furrowing of a brow, the slight downturn of the mouth. What you see in the game is exactly how you would see it if watching a detective drama on television. The actors in the game, over 300 total, are conveying the reliability (or lack thereof) in the smallest facial gestures, with their posture, and the inflection of their voices.
Why does this matter to the game? In L.A. Noire, it is up to the player to pay attention to not only what people say, but their eyes, mouth, and body language and judge everyone you speak with to determine if they are telling the truth, hiding something or lying. How you judge the truth from the questions that you ask has an impact on the information you are given and how difficult it is to solve crimes.
L.A. Noire isn’t all talk and detective work, there will be plenty of action as you tail unreliable witnesses, chase down suspects, and get into GTA-like shootouts where you kill an inexplicably high number of enemies
L.A. Noire is set to be released during the second quarter of 2011 for both Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.
The purpose of this thread is to promote and discuss games that might go unnoticed to the average gamer.
Two games that I will keep an eye out for are Homefront & L.A. Noire.
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Homefront
Homefront
Homefront is a first person shooter, takes place in Denver, Colorado in 2027 where the United States is at war with North Korea after the Koreans have seemingly contoured much of the world.
What makes this shooter different is that the developing studio, wanted to take a different approach for super-soldier stories like Halo and Call of Duty and they primarily did so in two ways. The first is the games setting; rather than take place in familiar areas like the White House or Empire State Building, where most gamers will have no emotional connection with, Homefront’s setting is one that anyone playing might be able to relate to - your regular suburbia neighborhood.
The second thing that separates Homefront from the collection of other shooters, both already on shelves and soon to be released is the main character development. Unlike most shooters where you play as an experienced soldier, in Homefront you are expected to feel the overwhelming uncertainty of a regular person who is not trained in military tactics or accustomed to holding a gun, nonetheless shooting one.
To add to the sense of panic of not being an experienced military combat machine forced to fight of the world’s largest and most powerful army in your backyard, the developers have added a sense of desperation to survive by choosing to give the player a constant lack of resources such as ammo.
Homefront is attempting to bring some humanity into a gaming genre that is seemingly overflowing with emotionless single player campaigns based on someone’s war fantasy.
Homefront is developed by Kaos Studios and published by THQ and is scheduled to be released in March 2011 for Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and PC.
[youtube]FgUknbTFDO4[/youtube]
L.A. Noire
L.A. Noire
L.A Noire is the next project by Rockstar Games, the makers of the Grand Theft Auto series and Red Dead Demption. Though L.A. Noire is an open-world game where you can explore Los Angeles and see the sights, admire the pedestrians, there are no mini-games to be played or side quests to complete. L.A. Noire is a far more linear game, that focuses more on the journey, than the destination.
In L.A. Noire, you play the young and seemingly incorruptible LA police officer Cole Phelps in the 1940s. Phelps is a decorated war hero from World War II hero who harbors a dark secret certain to come out during the course of L.A. Noire. Though young in his career as a cop, Phelps is the kind of media darling the LAPD can latch onto to improve its tainted image.
Phelps begins the game working as a cop on the beat but quickly rises through the ranks of the police department to traffic (investigating all cases involving cars. For example: when a woman mysteriously runs her car off an embankment. The case begins appearing like a normal accident, but it grows into a case about Hollywood corruption, rape and pornography.) Eventually you work your way up to homicide by solving a number of specific cases that are all based on real cases from the ‘40s.
Crime investigations begin at the crime scene where you search the scene for clues/evident. You aren’t required to collect every bit of evident, but the more you gather, the easier it will be to narrow your suspect list. Accusing someone isn’t as easy as just pointing a finger, you will have to back you’re your accusation by linking it to a piece of evidence.
Your next step in the investigation is what separates L.A. Noire from not only Rockstar Games of the past, but every other game on the market today. When you start talking to witnesses and suspect, L.A. Noire takes advantage of amazingly new motion-scanning technology. Every face in the game is the actual actor with zero touch-ups or animations added. If you talk to a woman with bruises on her face, then she had to have makeup applied before the shoot.
By using this technology, Rockstar has managed to capture every shift of the actor’s eye, the furrowing of a brow, the slight downturn of the mouth. What you see in the game is exactly how you would see it if watching a detective drama on television. The actors in the game, over 300 total, are conveying the reliability (or lack thereof) in the smallest facial gestures, with their posture, and the inflection of their voices.
Why does this matter to the game? In L.A. Noire, it is up to the player to pay attention to not only what people say, but their eyes, mouth, and body language and judge everyone you speak with to determine if they are telling the truth, hiding something or lying. How you judge the truth from the questions that you ask has an impact on the information you are given and how difficult it is to solve crimes.
L.A. Noire isn’t all talk and detective work, there will be plenty of action as you tail unreliable witnesses, chase down suspects, and get into GTA-like shootouts where you kill an inexplicably high number of enemies
L.A. Noire is set to be released during the second quarter of 2011 for both Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.
