This is what my blog does best. Talking about games and zombies at the same time. What's great about it is that there is no shortage of either games or zombies and having zombies in games or games about zombies. It just works that way. Developers know that zombies are extremely popular and hard working. OXM magazine had great coverage of our beloved walking dead in their latest issue. Even covered the types of zombies and what kind of work they were good for! Now that is what I call zombie appreciation.
So today I am posting about Plants vs. Zombies, an uber-popular tower defense type game from PopCap, and the recent announcement of it coming to Xbox Live for $15 on September 8th. I have played this game online and it was chock full of whimsy, fun, and zombies. It has a co-op mode that our friends at Co-Optimus have detailed, and Destructoid has posted a preview as well.
Now Capcom used a Japanese developer for the first Dead Rising game, but this time around they went with Blue Castle here on American soil and Shin Ohara from Capcom sat down with Gamasutra to discuss some of the tech behind the game. Co-Optimus has the full feature here. Most interesting to me was the part about displaying more zombies on the screen. Here is the excerpt:
[Gamasutra] You've got lots of zombies in the game now. How many zombies can you fit on screen?SO: Last year at Captivate we did a demo. We had a strip -- It was probably like 10 meters wide and 200 meters long. We filled it with about 7,000 zombies. After about 3,000, you can't really tell the difference because it fills up the screen anyway. Over 3,000, it ruins the experience. It's not a game anymore. We can show about 7,000 zombies if we wanted to, our technology is not limiting us. If the game only shows about 500 zombies or 1,000 zombies, that's not the game's limit. We have just enough so that people have fun with the zombies and the gameplay is rewarding.
Shin Ohara goes on to explain that the number of zombies in Dead Rising 2 is staggering, not overwhelming. They didn’t want players to feel like they were ever completely stuck, or the space too jam-packed that no one could move. You can deal with tight spaces by Zombie walking (over zombies' heads, as seen in the first game), attacking them, kicking them away, or there will be enough space to walk around them if you’re careful.
I will be interested to see how the game fares on the 360 with hundreds of zombies at once. I fully intend on taking on a horde of 100 at a time. Finally I have some webisode links to share with you. Remember the movie that was made based on this series? Well they released 3 episodes on Xbox Live that give us a sneak peak into the movie and its presentation. I will be watching them later tonight. I gotta see how this turned out!
GZ
No comments:
Post a Comment