Introversion’s Chris Delay confesses that Subversion, their high-tech heist game, is on hiatus.
…the first thing I plan to do is gut the thing from top to bottom of all the tech fluff that we forced in over the years. Without a core game it’s all a worthless distraction, and I will NEVER again spend so long making tech for a game without having a solid core game in place first. Subversion needs a total rethink from top to bottom, and some long standing sacred cows need slaughtering.
…somewhere along the 6 years of part-time development, we had lost our way. We couldn’t even remember what sort of game it was supposed to be anymore. We’d ended up with a game that looked and sounded brilliant, classic Introversion with its blue wireframe and sinister faceless characters. But there was a massive gaping hole where you would normally see a “core game”. We’d tried and tried to fill that hole with ambitious tech and experimental systems, but you couldn’t escape it.
In the end, after all that development and years of work, you still completed the bank heist by walking up to the first door, cracking it with a pin cracker tool, then walking into the vault and stealing the money. There was no other way to complete that level. And this would be the essential method by which you would complete every level after that. Technology 1, Gameplay 0 – we’ve made the fatal mistake of having more fun making the game than gamers would ever have playing it.
I deeply admire any developer who can say and do what Delay has just said and done. Most companies would throw a few more years of development into the game and then release it to recoup their expenses. Developers should learn to slaughter sacred cows more often.
(Thanks Blues News!)
Now that I’m a bit further into Dead Rising 2: Off the Record, I think I understand what Capcom is doing. This is an alternate Dead Rising 2 timeline, in which Frank West shows up where Chuck Green was originally. I didn’t quite understand this until I met Chuck, which is one of the highlights of Off the Record. And while I appreciate this sort of narrative shuffle in a game where the narrative is so unimportant that you can entirely ignore it if you want, is it enough for a standalone product? Certainly not, which explains the new sci-fi-themed area of Fortune City and the (slightly disappointing) sandbox mode. Overall, I can’t help but shake the feeling that this should have been downloadable content.
Consider Rockstar. The Undead Nightmare add-on for Red Dead Redemption, the South Central add-on for Midnight Club: Los Angeles, and the Ballad of Gay Tony add-on for Grand Theft Auto IV were about the same amount of new content and re-used content as what you’re getting in Dead Rising 2: Off the Record. And while it’s not my place to guess how readily you’ll spend $10 instead of $40, I can’t help but notice the dramatically different asking prices.
Not to mention that I had to deal with Gamestop to get Dead Rising 2: Off the Record. The store had three disks, but none of the salesfolk could find a box. They offered to sell me just the disk.
“I’m not paying full price for the game without the box or manual,” I had told them.
“Sometimes the boxes get stolen,” one of them confided. As if Dead Rising 2: Off the Record boxes were so in demand among shoplifters that three of them had been filched within a week of the game’s release.
“Sir, I can give you 15% off,” another salesperson said in a hushed tone, as if he didn’t want the guy in line behind me to hear. I ended up going elsewhere to buy my copy. If Off the Record had been DLC, it would have saved me both trips.
Of course, the separate DLC for Off the Record was announced today. Next week, for $2, Frank West can don a Terminator skin and do extra lightning damage when he attacks. While I really appreicate what Capcom has been doing creatively, I hate how they’ve been packaging it. And I hate even more that I just spent $40 to support their business practices.
Far be it for me to rain on someone’s parade, but protesting Wall Street in Second Life? Really?
Bobbi Sue Luther should have been the typical acting-challenged slasher heroine/victim, but Laid to Rest does something cute with the usual amnesia gimmick. After Luther makes a 911 call, it’s kind of adorable the way she wants to take shelter at the “police lady’s house”, because she can’t remember the name of a police station. Sometimes you forget more than just your name. Kudos to writer/director/husband Robert Hall for giving her something to do in addition to running away, looking scared, and filling out a tank top.
Also, she’s not alone. For much of the movie, Kevin Gage and Sean Whalen are along for the ride. Laid to Rest imagines an ensemble cast where the final survivor is instead a group of three people who mostly do what you’d expect actual people to do. Gage is immensely appealing as a gruff good-old-boy who knows enough to get his gun and cares enough to be affected by the deaths around him. Whalen is the more traditional comic relief geek whose solution to contacting the police when the phones are out is to email them. Unlike most movies where the phones don’t work, Laid to Rest is well aware of how dumb this sounds.
And what a lovely Lena Headey appearance. Headey is probably best known for 300 and Game of Thrones, but she should be known for a road movie called Aberdeen with Stellan Skarsgard. Road movies tend to be uniquely American. But Aberdeen considers what a road movie would be like in Europe. I’m not sure what Headey is doing slumming it in a low-budget old-school gore-fest about a killer who wears a ridiculous chrome skull mask, but she and Kevin Gage lend the whole thing a touch of class. As much as that’s possible with all this latex and fake blood.
Laid to Rest is available on Netflix here. Warning: don’t bother with the sequel, which is enitrely missing the clever touches that make the first one worth watching.
