Archive for category R

Last night I had my friend Steve over to play some videogames, and before we started in earnest (we finally finished Baldur’s Gate II) we gave the new Rocketmen: Axis of Evil demo a whirl.

While not exactly the worst top-down shooter I’ve played, it’s far from the best. Which is really a shame because this game could have been so much better. It has a fun cartoony look to it and some interesting characters, but this game falls down in several areas:

1. The cutscenes are too often and too long.
   The cutscenes were fun at first. But after a while we just starting skipping them. They just kept us away from the action, and it was quite annoying. It wouldn’t be so bad if the developers made fewer of them and kept them a lot shorter.
2. Did I mention the stupid camera?
   Say you and your buddy go left. Both of your characters will end up on the far left of the screen, desperately trying to get the screen to follow. So that when you encounter some baddies, you and the baddies are on the far left of the screen with a large swath of unused real-estate to the right. Quite stupid, and this totally wrecks the game.
3. Bad graphics.
   I know that this is a budget title and I shouldn’t expect too much, but man, this game looks literally like it could have been on the PS2. Literally.

Ah well, better luck next time.

Rocketmen: Axis of Evil

Capcom is releasing an arcade game Rocketmen: Axis of Evil onto PSN today. How come I never heard of it? It has 4 player co-op action, so I hope there’s a demo. Co-Optimus had this to say:

Capcom’s newest addition to their arcade lineup is called Rocketmen: Axis of Evil. The game is based on a popular WizKids product line. The game is a dual analog shooter with RPG elements. Think of an RPG version of Smash TV. You can create and customize a male or female character based on one of three classes (Fighter, Engineer, Outcast), as well as one of three races (Human, Mercurian or Venusian).

The game launches today on PSN for $9.99. (It’s on XLA too, BTW.)

Rocketmen: Axis of Evil Now Live

I’m all for racing games, and my friends and I have had a lot of fun racing each other over the years. But now that I own a PS3, my enthusiasm has been quite tempered by the fact that nobody wants to release a next-gen (current-gen?) four-player splitscreen game. Will the new Race Driver: GRID be the one to fulfill that hope? Unfortunately, I don’t know yet. (Sorry for the build up!)

But we do know other things. Like the fact that CodeMasters is moving away from the more sim-style racing game like TOCA and moving towards a more arcadey experience like PGR. “We wanted to make a break away from our perception as a simulation game”, says Ralph Fulton, chief game designer on Race Driver: GRID. [...] We felt that there was more that we could be doing to package the things that we were brilliant at – AI, damage, physics – in such a way that it appeals to a much broader market.”

For some strange stupid reason, drifting is in style these days, and GRID will partake heavily. They plan to make the game world-spanning, and the Japanese events will be heavily into drifting. Yuck. That’s a mistake that I wish could be rectified with something like GRID’s new rewind feature, which lets you skip backwards in time over a crash or bad decision and gives you a do-over.

The game will only include 45 cars, but I don’t really care how many they have as long as they’re fun. I care more for a good variety of tracks to race on.

And splitscreen? Well, we can only hope…

Race Driver: Grid Preview

Other GRID Resources:

Eurogamer: GRID First Impressions
Eurogamer: GRID Screenshots
Eurogamer: GRID Designed to Break America