[XBLA/PSN] The War of the Worlds

[Ruka-san]

Exclusive first look: The War of the Worlds (XBLA, PSN)

1:00 PM on 06.01.2011 | Max Scoville

29 comments

#Destructoid Original #Previews #ps3 #PSN #top stories #xbox 360 #Xbox Live Arcade

A couple days ago, I received an email asking me if I wanted to check out Other Ocean’s studios, where they’re currently working on a game based on The War of the Worlds. The email noted two very specific things: first, this game has nothing to do with the Tom Cruise movie of the same name, other than being based on the same source material. I’m pretty sure everyone’s sick of Tom Cruise these days, so that’s good.
Second, this game was described as an homage to old rotoscoped evasion-based platformers like Out Of This World and Flashback. I’m always game for an alien invasion, but this is the part that really caught my attention.

The War of The Worlds (PSN, XBLA [Previewed])
Developer: Other Ocean Interactive
Publisher: Paramount Digital Entertainment
To Be Released: 2011

At the studio, I sat down with Other Ocean’s head of development Mike Mika. He gave me the rundown of his career history, as well as that of Other Ocean. Other Ocean’s most recent work includes the Xbox Live Arcade version of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Dark Void Zero, and all the iOS incarnations of Super Monkey Ball. If that’s not recent enough for you, they were also the guys behind that ridiculous Bulletstorm promotional game, The Duty Calls: The Calm Before The Storm. As much as I wasn’t feeling Bulletstorm, I’ve gotta admit that was really well done.
Mike compared the studio to The A-Team, in the sense that they’re a group of industry veterans who have no problem tackling really weird projects. Most of their work up until this point has been been tied in with larger releases, or updates of older games for current platforms. With The War of the Worlds, though, they basically made some phone calls and said “we want to make this game.”
HG Wells’ novel The War of The Worlds was first published in 1898, and has seen a number of adaptations, including the 2005 Spielberg film where Dakota Fanning is annoying, and Orson Welles’ notorious 1938 radio drama. The videogame, however, is based on the original novel with some inspiration drawn from the 1953 movie. If, for some reason, you’re unfamiliar with the plot, it’s pretty straightforward: Martians land on earth and start killing people.

Official concept art of the Martian tripod from the game.
In the game, players control the hero -- whose name is still a secret -- as he makes his way through London during the alien invasion.
Technically speaking, the game is a two-dimensional side scroller that focuses on puzzle-solving and evasion instead of shooting guns or swinging swords. The controls aren’t final yet, but the build I played had a very simple two-button configuration. One button was jump, and another was the climb button. The climb button could also be held down while moving to run. The part of the game I played involved a bit of crawling into pipes.
I feel like an idiot trying to describe the control setup, because it’s pretty old school. Visually, on the other hand, The War of the Worlds is a delightful punch in the face. As I mentioned, this game is a throwback to old rotoscoped titles like Flashback. For those unfamiliar with the term, rotoscoping is the act of animating over live action video, frame by frame. It’s sort of a precursor to motion capture.
The rotoscoping effect by itself gives the The War of The Worlds a unique appearance, since the technique doesn’t get used much nowadays. Unlike the old Genesis-era rotoscope titles, this game is gritty and dark. It’s got touches of color, but for the most part, the palette is muted. Mud and shadows are inherently dark and gritty, but the use of color in this game seems to imply sepia-tone film more than war-torn London. Of course, the Martians are all chrome and floodlights, and they add a lot of color. I’ll get back to that.

How the Martian tripods looked in the 2005 War of the Worlds
The game's logo, which I saw on the loading screen, is very distinct. It simply says The War of The Worlds in handwritten cursive, very similar to the 1953 movie poster. Stylistically, I haven’t seen a lot of handwritten in game logos. This might seem like a stupid observation, but it very much sets a tone for the rest of the game’s design.
I got to play part of the third level, which takes place in Hyde Park. The area has been turned into a makeshift base for the [human] military and by the time the hero reaches the area, it’s been mostly destroyed. Mud, smoldering craters, and overturned tanks are all over. There are NPCs running around, behaving as panicked as humans would during an alien invasion. In the distant background, tanks and Martian tripod walkers are in the middle of battle. At one point, a tank passes in the foreground. In spite of the overwhelming sense of scale and chaos, the game mechanic here is strictly two-dimensional.
Both in gameplay and aesthetic, The War of The Worlds is reminiscent of Limbo. The controls remind me a bit of Prince of Persia Classic on XBLA, but with less jumpin’ around like a dang spider-monkey. The color scheme is something else entirely, somewhere between Limbo and Fallout 3.

The game is considerably less colorful than the 1953 movie's poster.
Throughout the Hyde Park level, alien drones fly around terrorizing humans. They follow the hero with bright white floodlights, and if he’s not quick enough to evade, the beams focus into a ray that turns him into a charred, flaming skeleton.
Most of the game looks somewhere between old gritty war footage and a current-gen videogame, but the alien death rays and the accompanying flaming skeleton look as though they were pulled from an old science fiction movie. Coupled with the game’s mostly realistic look, this effect could easily be hideous and inappropriate, but it totally works here.
The build I played didn’t have any audio, but I’m told The War of The Worlds has a script written by someone reputable, a score composed by a very talented somebody, and that it’s narrated by a recognizable Hollywood actor. I’m sworn to secrecy beyond that, but I will say this much about the narrator: we are in for a treat. You’re probably gonna get the fanboy gigglesweats over this one.

I have absolutely no idea what is going on here.
When he was telling me about Other Ocean’s foundation and history, Mike really stressed how much this was a game that he and his colleagues wanted to make, and that's the main reason I have a lot of faith in it. The War of The Worlds was hand-picked from a pile of subject matter that a bunch of guys thought would make for a cool video game, and the gameplay isn’t trying to compete with what another studio is doing.
Most of the outside talent that’s gotten involved with the game has done so because it sounded cool, not because of the paycheck, and that's usually a good sign. I don’t think anyone will argue with me when I say that the best popular media (games, movies, comics, music) is the kind that’s created out of passion, and not for the sake of creating a product.
A week ago, The War of The Worlds wasn’t even on my radar... I didn't know it even existed. But after what I got to see, it’s planted firmly on my "want" list.

ok ma un trailer??

[NEO-GEO]

ma si impersoneranno i germi che infettano gli alieni?

[Ruka-san]

spoileeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

[Orologio]

Se me lo fanno come l'originale (libro) e cioè ambientato nei primissimi del 900, quando londra era la città più importante del mondo....coi tizi che si spostano in bicicletta col vestito della domenica... e l'esercito utilizza le mitragliere e i cannoni, potrebbe essere interessante.

[Bourbon]

Senza contare che il design dei tripodi più figo di sempre (imho) è quello originale del secolo scorso. Non ci posso fare niente, ha un che di troppo affascinante e inquietante allo stesso tempo (e riflettendoci è esattamente la sensazione che un'astronave aliena dovrebbe incutere)

[squall811]

Mio al day one, anche se fosse una ciofeca!

[Ruka-san]

impressions

The War of the Worlds Takes a Novel’s Approach to a Game


Owen Good — If there's a star of The War of the Worlds, the upcoming downloadable title for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, it's someone working behind the scenes or above the action. It's the score by Chris Hülsbeck, or the writing by Chris Fowler or, not least, the narration by Patrick Stewart.
As a game, however, what I saw of The War of the Worlds is a bit too much of an homage to side-scrolling platforms and puzzles to take it far beyond the interactive retelling of a science-fiction classic, albeit one carrying a lot of polish.
Arriving this fall from Paramount Digital and Other Ocean, The War of the Worlds is conceived as a love note to longtime sci-fi fans, partly because it's made by ones themselves. The game is done in the style of the 1953 film (not the 2005 remake), making use of black-and-white visuals and an orchestral score to give it a classic tone. Other Ocean, which built the surprise DSiWare hit Dark Void Zero, was said to have been given its pick of Paramount properties when they visited to discuss a game and, The War of the Worlds was something both sides had atop their lists for an adaptation for a very long time. (Although Other Ocean said it was, jokingly, interested in doing Barbarella too.)
In the level we saw demonstrated at E3, the protagonist (named Arthur Clarke and dressed to resemble Carl Sagan) was trying to traverse Hyde Park, blasted through with craters by the invading Martians. The only color shown was applied to Martian technology; anything of Earth was desaturated. Yellow death rays strobe-lit the background, heaving up enormous silhouetted chunks of dirt and debris.
The foreground path was one of giant pits, overturned tanks and weaponry, and exposed pipes. This created hiding spaces for the player to avoid the searchlights on the floating Martian drones, whose ray weapons incinerated the panicked soldiers about the scene. The pause between a drone recognizing you and activating its ray seemed slow enough that, running across the screen, you could cross their light without being incinerated instantly. Many of the sequences required a vertical escape, though, but success there was simply a matter of timing the drone's passes.
Save points would be spaced out roughly every 20 seconds, we were told, which is sensible for a game with such a heavy narrative component. Who wants to hear whole pages of text repeatedly as they try to master a jumping puzzle, after all. The climactic sequence was another timed-movement challenge, set on a huge Martian apparatus at the park's center. The hero had to scale it, essentially a giant wheel, and plant explosives at several key points while passing through moving rings whose force fields, when activated, would vaporize him.
We saw the mission succeed and the chapter end. Clarke, we're told, is on a mission to find his fiancée and brother. Later in the game he will be able to turn the Martians' technology on them, so the 11 levels will not all be evasion and defense. The more famous alien threats, such as the black smoke, red weeds, and the fearsome tripods, will all make appearances,m though we weren't shown them. The course Clarke takes through London will be actually walkable in sequence, drawing from Fowler's stature as an expert writer of that city.
In gameplay alone, what I saw of The War of the Worlds appeared intriguing but not necessarily exciting, even accounting for its deliberate homage to 8-bit platformers. It struck me as an interactive graphic novel, although one buttressed by some real writing and acting heft. Originally conceived in a 16-bit throwback style, Other Ocean moved to rotoscoped models and animations when they realized how much the consoles could handle. An information sheet extolls the fact each level "contains over 40 layers of 2D parallax."
When it arrives, the real point for acquiring War of the Worlds may be Patrick Stewart, a figure of profound eminence among the science fiction community. The man could read a Chinese take-out menu and give gravitas to the cashew chicken and potstickers. Here he works with a writer both natively familiar with London and period-perfect in his style. Stewart read 23 pages of dialogue, written by Fowler, so even though he isn't acting a playable character, per se, this isn't a cameo.
The gameplay I saw may not recommend The War of the Worlds on its own, but the storytelling, in the hands of this studio, delivered in a downloadable game, wins it some benefit of the doubt.

sembra interessante infine

barbarella

[Ruka-san]

riuppo perchè esce il 26/10

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oePhy0zo7dw

[Orologio]

Se me lo fanno come l'originale (libro) e cioè ambientato nei primissimi del 900, quando londra era la città più importante del mondo....coi tizi che si spostano in bicicletta col vestito della domenica... e l'esercito utilizza le mitragliere e i cannoni, potrebbe essere interessante.

Caxxo...visto che sono di parola e hanno proprio fatto quello che ho scritto...non posso non prenderlo