E3 2008: Microsoft’s Horror Parade
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As we had hoped, during yesterday’s Microsoft E3 press conference a number of titles interesting to us horror fans were rolled out and put center stage. We already talked about Resident Evil 5 yesterday, but also demonstrated on stage were Gears of War 2 and Fallout 3.
Fallout 3 had a new trailer shown (similar to the one posted yesterday, but featuring actual gameplay this time), and then the game was demoed live on stage. The game is an RPG, which means you have skills and stats and so on and so forth, and usually I find them pretty stuffy to be honest. However, the main skill (or “trait” as they’re called in the game) on display yesterday was something called “Bloody Mess”. Bloody Mess doesn’t make you run faster or be more powerful or make you better at lock picking; Bloody Mess makes your enemies die in spectacularly gory fashion.
You can play it as a straight-up first person shooter from the looks of it, or you can use something called the “Pip-Boy” to pause the game and specify what you want to happen. So, rather than manually aiming at a zombie’s head, you can use the Pip Boy, which pauses time, to say you want to shoot the zombie in the head, and then when you unpause time, you’ll see cinematic camera angles of how that move turns out.
These play out rather stylishly, often in slow motion, and combined with Bloody Mess it makes for some beautiful looking carnage. Gametrailers has the stage demonstration and the new trailer.
Gears of War 2 also had a new trailer debut to go with lead designer Cliff Bleszinski’s stage demonstration of one impressive looking section of the sequel’s single player. Gears maybe not have been wall-to-wall frights, but it was certainly dark and scary at points and the rest of the time just brutally fun. It remains to be seen whether or not Gears 2 will slant as much towards horror as the first title did at times; it’s already looking like a worthy successor to the original in every other regard.
The new level was so much more open looking and dynamic. The locust horde were trying to sink an entire city into the ground. The sky was thick with red smoke. Buildings were coming crashing down around Marcus and Dom. And the new flamethrower is looking very impressive, as are the new executions.
It’s just what you’d expect from a Gears 2. Bigger and badder. Here’s hoping the dark, intimate in-your-face moments with some of the scarier enemies aren’t completely missing. I’ll be seeing if I can raise Cliff Bleszinski on that, but I’m not expecting him to be replying to many e-mails over the next few days.
There’s a ton of other stuff for me to wade through, as well as a bunch of other announcements happening today, so keep your eyes here for a lot of new footage and previews for dozens of horror titles coming our way later this year and into 2009.
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