Gray Matter

I remember reading about Gray Matter, the next graphic adventure from Gabriel Knight creator Jane Jensen, many years ago when it was first announced (in 2003, I believe), but after hearing nothing for so long, I assumed it had slipped into development hell, never to return.

It seems, however, that if Duke Nukem Forever will actually be released, then nothing is impossible, and Gray Matter is on track to release on February 2011, on the PC and Xbox 360 (it is interesting to note that the 360 seems to be receiving a lot of games from small European publishers in the same way the PS2 benefited from the then-prolific Japanese industry). What's more, there is a demo available now on Live (in the European region).


I downloaded the demo and played through it, and the most striking thing is just how much it feels like an old school graphic adventure. I was worried about how modern shiny 3D graphics would suit a game like this, but it uses 3D characters on hand-drawn backgrounds (necessitating fixed camera angles), which really works well on a large, high definition display.

The game design also feels more like that of a past era. The Telltale adventure games, while amusing, were not particularly challenging and for the vast majority of the game you knew exactly what you had to do next, where you would get the required object and what you would do with it. In the demo for Gray Matter, there was a more inference and less outright instruction, which makes you feel more like you're solving the mystery yourself, but would open up the risk of being stuck not knowing what to do next. I guess you can't have it both ways, but I managed to get through the demo without having to resort to online assistance.


Of course, nobody played graphic adventures for the item combination puzzles or the wondering as to who they need to talk to next, they play them for the plot (or the jokes, depending on the game), and Gray Matter definitely has a similar feel to a Gabriel Knight game, with the demo showing signs of Jane Jensen's trademark blending of fact and fiction. Despite a male lead who doesn't have even a fraction of the charisma of the schattenjäger from New Orleans I was left wanting to know more when the demo ended.

It's not awful on the 360, either. The radial highlight menu all but eliminates pixel hunting (although you still need to do a bit of it when inspecting items close up), and the load times between screens are negligible (the demo runs off the console hard drive, but the full game can be installed). It's a testament to the convergence of the modern console and PC that a game like this doesn't really suffer with a gamepad. I can't see a lot of people dropping full AAA console price for a game like this, but it probably will be released at a lower price point and I hope it does well.


Gray Matter will be released on PC and Xbox 360 in February 2011.

Demo Round-up: Ninety Nine Nights 2

What to call the sequel to Ninety Nine Nights? One Hundred Nights? N3-2? Ninety Nine Nights Two doesn't seem like the most flowing title, but at least it's better than Two Worlds Two.

I have a confession to make: I actually really enjoyed the original N3. One of the earliest games released for the Xbox 360 in 2006, it was visually impressive, it let you smash entire legions of enemies, and I even liked the Japanese-Tolkienesque setting, even if two of the seven playable characters were pretty awful. It was a simple sort of game, though, and I wasn't really anticipating a sequel.

Ninety Nine Nights 2: Now with Extra Grey

I spotted the demo a month or so ago and thought I'd download it out of curiosity. The demo gives you a single mission with no real exposition (I think it had some fluff on the loading screen, but it didn't really provide much context), with a character who wasn't in the first game. It drops you onto a grey battlefield with a few grey enemies to fight your way through on your way to some grey objectives on your mini-map. It's immediately striking how monotone the demo mission seems; it is probably to try and invoke a smoky, harrowing battlefield, but it just looks dull. The vivid colour palette was one of the defining aspects of the first game's visuals, it seems a shame to have moved away from it.

Repeated presses on the attack buttons see enemies sliced in two around you, but the combat is simplistic and there aren't enough enemies about to distract you with the scale of the battle. Some basic hack 'n slash gets you through to an uninteresting boss creature, which is so busy beating away at the disposable AI allies that you barely have to dodge any attacks as you wear it down. After the boss falls, the demo ends, and I was left with absolutely no desire to have had it go on for any longer. It just seemed so pointless, even if my gaming time wasn't as constrained as it is I couldn't see the point of slogging through something like this. It almost makes you wonder why developers release demos for games like this - I can't imagine anyone playing it and thinking "I've got to get me some more of this", they'd be better off hoping some people who may have enjoyed the first game would pick it up on a whim. This demo is probably only losing them sales.

Maybe I'm being a little harsh, maybe the actual game is more interesting than the demo suggests. Sadly for Konami and Phantagram, a metascore of 45 implies otherwise.

Split/Second

I had a bit of room left in my cap for the month (okay, those of you in first world countries can stop laughing now), and I saw that a demo for Split/Second had been released onto Xbox Live. I mentioned Split/Second in my entry on how I was pretty unexcited about most of the releases due for the rest of the year, but I thought it was worth checking out.

Developed by Blackrock Studios, the company behind quad-bike racer Pure, the premise of Split/Second is that you compete in a futuristic television show, where contestants race around a track rigged with explosives. Filling your power bar by drifting, jumping or slipstreaming other cars allows you to trigger explosive power-plays, which can be range from small explosions to take out opponents to massive events which reshape an entire portion of the track.

The HUD is attached to the back of the car, so you can still see it when the speed blur gives you tunnel vision

One of the things which got me interested in the game in the first place was that it seemed to capture some of the spirit of the early Burnout games, and that spirit is very evident in the demo. It has the same manic energy to it, the screen almost constantly in speed-blur, bits of debris flying at the camera as you hurtle around the track. Most importantly, the "holy crap" factor is very high, as you dodge explosions and wreckage, and some of the power plays are enough to make you duck or lean on the couch to try and avoid them (notable ones on the demo's airport terminal track involve an air-traffic control tower falling into the track, and a plane crash-landing onto a runway which you are racing down at the time).

With only one car, one track and three laps, the demo seems quite light, and without upgrades or even needing to brake for corners, the full game might lack depth compared to, say, the heavyweight auto fetishism of Forza 3, but I don't really mind. In some ways it is not-unwelcome throwback to the days when games were just about the thrill of the action, before RPG progression wormed its way into every genre. Besides, longevity is hardly the top of my list of attributes I want a game to have nowadays.

So I'm definitely going to buy the game... when I can import it for £20. That seems quite harsh on a game which I think looks pretty good, but it seems like it will discount fairly quickly, and I'm currently not seeing the point of paying full price for a game I probably won't even get to play before the price drops anyway. Split/Second is out on the 21st of May.

Go To Hell

Warning: Very minor spoilers

I downloaded the Dante's Inferno demo that was released on Christmas Eve, but I only had the chance to play it a few days ago. I mentioned Dante's Inferno in my stylish hard action roundup a few weeks back, noting that it could be interpreted as a fairly cynical attempt to cash in God of War 3's PS3 exclusivity. Well, my overriding impression from the demo is how blatant a clone of God of War the game is, and I can't help but think this is a bit of a mistake on the part of developers Visceral Games.


The demo opens with a tutorial battle against some basic human foes, while Dante is still on one of the Crusades. The light/heavy attack combinations, and the right stick evasion in particular, feel exactly like God of War (you could argue that all games of this sort will have a somewhat similar control scheme, but I think it is telling that I was immediately reminded of God of War, rather than the last game of this genre I had played, which would be Ninja Gaiden 2). After completing this battle Dante is stabbed in the back, and as he is dying Death arrives to claim him, saying how his actions have damned him and his family. Dante refuses to accept this, and ends up fighting and killing Death with his own scythe, which then becomes Dante's standard weapon. It's exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to see Kratos doing, but the problem is that Dante's Inferno's fallen crusader doesn't radiate the sort of violence that God of War's ghost of Sparta does. Maybe it's unfair to accuse the game of a lack of character based on a short demo, but even the opening scene of God of War was enough to establish that Kratos was a very bad man, and Dante's Inferno doesn't do that. God of War comparisons are again unavoidable when Dante arrives back at his villa to find his wife murdered (although it looks far more like the scene from the movie Gladiator). From then on, all Hell breaks loose (literally) as Dante attempts to follow his wife into Hell to free her.

The game certainly looks good, the graphics looking much sharper than what I remember of God of War 1 and 2 (which is to be expected given the hardware the games are running on), and it apparently all moves along at a constant 60 frames per second. It has some suitably epic moments, such as when the front wall of Dante's chapel falls away to reveal Hell burning beneath him. The demo only takes Dante as far as the gates of Hell, with the only boss battle being the early one against Death, and I have no doubt there is more shock and awe to come (I recall reading previews stating how gruesome the ends that some of the bosses meet are). The teaser images for the full game at the end of the demo show several scenes of Hell, all mangled bodies and twisted flesh and rivers of blood. It appears to be unrelentingly unpleasant stuff (which, I suppose, you would expect given the nature of the game). Perhaps there will be more variety across the nine levels of Hell in the final game, but I feel that this is an area where Christian mythology lacks the breadth of the Greek mythology that God of War draws upon. Visceral Games are probably determined to be more hardcore than God of War, and they probably feel that all the unpleasant imagery is achieving this, but I'm not so sure of it as a design decision. Another example of this would be all the gratuitous nipple shots of Beatrice, Dante's wife, which aren't really necessary, but it really seems like the developers thought "well, God of War had breasts in it, we'd better have some in our game, too".


I haven't even touched on the matter of the source material; I haven't read the Divine Comedy, so I can't provide examples of how the game is not true to it, but I highly doubt that Dante, accompanied by the ghost of the poet Vergil, hacks his way through the nine levels of Hell, eviscerating everything that he crosses paths with. It seems like EA and Visceral are stretching the license a bit too far, essentially just using it for name recognition.

As of writing, there are no early reviews for the game on Metacritic, so my only idea of the critical opinion of the game comes from a few previews, which were pretty positive, but previews always are. My impression from the demo is not that it will be bad game, in fact I think it will be quite a polished action game with some impressive set pieces and brutal action, but I do feel that it would probably have been better if the developers had tried to make their own game, rather than shoehorning their version of God of War into a license that is only tangentially suitable for it.

Dante's Inferno is out on 12 February 2010. I may well end up playing it, but I won't be rushing out to buy a copy at launch.

Forza Motorsport 3 Demo

Turn 10 have released a demo for their upcoming racing opus, Forza Motorsport 3, which is due out on 23 October 2009. Forza 2 is without a doubt the best racing game I have ever played, so Forza 3 has to be one of my most wanted games this year, and I thought I'd better check the demo out.


It doesn't take long for the demo to make a car enthusiast smile. In fact, even the car colour selection process does the trick; in Forza 2 you had the in-game model rotate in the upper half of your screen, in the Forza 3 demo it cuts away to a full screen rendition (still using the in-game model), which it lovingly sweeps across, fading in and out of different views. It really is car porn, and it is indicative of the kind of full-on automotive fetishism that Turn 10 have brought to their games. Another example of this is the pre-race routine, which focuses on your car's front wheel as it rolls to a stop on the starting grid, before switching to the usual three-quarters view as the car blips its engine. It doesn't always work, for example the screen shake accompanying the engine rev is the same whether the car is a Mini Cooper JCW or a Porsche 911 GT3-RSR, which seems a little silly.

The demo includes 5 cars in different classes, and one track, Camino Viejo, Montserrat, a short winding strip of road that works its way around a mountainous region. Despite being a circuit, it feels very much like a point to point race compared to the wide open, structured race tracks that made up almost all of Forza 2's tracks. It looks stunning, even if you do get the impression that Turn 10 are doing the Gran Turismo trick of sticking a photograph behind the engine-rendered foreground. The good news is that the handling model instantly feels every bit as right as it did before, you get a definite sense of the weight and balance of the car and the tyres' interaction with the road surface. You still have to drive properly, you can't brake and turn at the same time, but even with almost all the assists off (I still can't cadence brake efficiently enough on a controller trigger, so I need ABS on) the cars are satisfying to race, the faster cars being scary enough to stop you from just flattening the throttle out of every corner, but not so scary that they become a chore to drive.


It's not all choirs of angels, though. The car models are still quite flat and shiny compared to other racing games, they don't look anywhere near as good in game as they do in the screenshots, which are no doubt taken with the game's photo mode. On the bright side, despite far better background detail, the game is still rock-solid at 60fps, which I'll happily take over slightly flashier car models. I'm also a little concerned about the game's rewind feature, which is a great idea, especially for people like me who seem to have an uncontrollable tendency to throw the car off the road on the final lap of a race. The problem is that (in the demo, at least) there are no limits to the rewind facility, you can just hit it and redo any part of the race as often as you would like to, which means you should probably win every race on the first attempt. I'm no fan of having to redo entire races because I lost control or overshot my braking point on the last lap, but many of my best memories of racing games have come from the tension of knowing the whole race was at stake. Rewind worked fantastically in GRiD (dubbed Flashback in that game), but you were limited to about 4 usages per race, so you could only use it to correct major errors, not just every time you missed an apex. Maybe they will change the number of uses in the full game.

Regardless of any tweaks Turn 10 do or don't make to the final game, the demo has got me even more fired up for it. 23 October can't come soon enough.