The skateboarding legend discusses new skating peripheral
Tony Hawk is a skateboarding legend, who created the skating game in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater when it released a decade ago. The franchise has since boomed and created eight more titles. Tony Hawk sat down in an interview with Digg, and while discussing skating in general, the new Tony Hawk game, the tenth of the series, worked its way into the conversation.
Tony Hawk’s interview was based on questions that were submitted by the Digg community and were voted the best. While most of the questions were mostly related to Tony Hawk’s skating career, one question asked by the Digg community asked Tony Hawk if he ever played EA’s Skate, one of Tony Hawk’s only competitors. This spawned a conversation with Tony Hawk, where he began to talk about how Tony Hawk: Ride is going to take skating games to the next level.
For those unfamiliar, Tony Hawk: Ride will ditch the controller, and use the new board peripheral (pictured above) for an even more immersing experience. Players will skate in-game by actually performing forms of the tricks on the board peripheral itself.
Tony Hawk went on to elaborate on the intricacies of the board itself, talking about how it was built for more than one game. “I think that what we’ve created now with Ride and the board peripheral, it’s got so much technology packed in that it’s not going to become passé anytime soon. I feel like that’s a flagship for more skate games, and possibly other types of games.” What other types of games does Tony Hawk have in mind exactly? Possibly snowboarding, surfing, and other board sports, but also something more surprising, Wii Fit.
Tony Hawk is quite set on the idea of stepping into the exergaming world. So much so in fact, that Tony Hawk commented on the potential saying “It’s [the Ride board] way more advanced than the Wii Balance Board, and so, there’s so many other uses for it.” Them’s fightin’ words to me. Sounds like Tony Hawk has just thrown down the gauntlet and announced his launch into Nintendo’s territory.
To see more of the interesting interview, click here.
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In addition to their announcement that they’ll be cutting a staggering 1,500 jobs as part of a cost-restructuring plan, Electronic Arts has also announced that they’ll be releasing almost 50% fewer games in the next fiscal year compared to the last, with a reemphasis on established, “high profit” contributing titles.
EA CEO John Riccitiello explained the new strategy during an investors conference call (MCV, via Joystiq), in which he stated EA plans to release around 30 boxed titles in the next fiscal year spanning April 2010 to March 2011, nearly half the amount the released in the 2009 fiscal year (April 08 to March 09). “In rough numbers, mid-60s would have been the way to think about last year [FY2009]. [We'll release] approximately 50 this year and something in the high 30s next year. So when you consolidate this thing, it’s about a 50 percent cut over two years.”
And the reduced lineup, Riccitiello made clear, will focus extensively on “iterating” in established and dependable franchises. “Electronic Arts has a core slate of games label and sports franchises that we will iterate on an either annual or bi-annual basis,” Riccitiello said (via Develop). “And I think you know what those major titles are — all of them are selling or have sold in their most recent edition 2 million units or more. After that, we’ve got The Sims and Hasbro, and frankly anything that doesn’t measure up to looking like it can pencil out to be [a] very high profit contributor and high unit seller got cut from our title slate from this point going forward.”
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Being an arcade racer on a Nintendo console is a less-than-enviable situation, given that you’re eventually going to be compared with the venerable Mario Kart Wii at some point. Fortunately, Need for Speed Nitro manages to hold its own against its heavyweight competitors. Nitro is EA Montreal’s re-envisioning of the Need For Speed franchise, and represents their first attempt at tailoring it specifically for the Wii, instead of adapting the usual multiplatform versions.
The effort definitely shines through, as most of the numerous control schemes (including Wii Wheel, Wii Remote and Nunchuk, GameCube and Classic Controller) work very well, and the squished-looking stylized cars and colorful graphics play to the Wii’s strong points. Instead of half-heartedly attempting a realistic look, all the game’s cars feature drastically chopped and slammed looks with huge wheels; most of the cars look like Rat Fink should be hanging out of them. The bright colors, loud engine noises and generally over-the-top aesthetic will make any old-school Burnout or OutRun fans feel right at home.
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The “30+ Food Network Recipes” touted on the cover of Food Network Cook or Be Cooked is a little deceiving. You actually have 12 dishes to create, but they’re all made of those 30 individual recipes. For example, the directions for guacamole count as one recipe, even though it’s also used as part of a quesadilla dish. Hooray for semantics! The recipes in this game come from Food Network’s own book, How to Boil Water, and features Food Network executives as in-game characters that offer cooking tips and judge your final plates; despite all its branding, however, this game lacks the fun and personality of the network.
So what’s not fun? The dishes in Cook or Be Cooked are made in real time; if a recipe calls for you to boil pasta for three minutes, the pasta will absolutely boil for three minutes.You are able to fast-forward through this slow period by holding down the Z button to speed up the cooking timer, and I found myself doing exactly that throughout the game. The other controls consist of waving your Wii Remote and Nunchuk around to perform tasks like egg cracking, oil swirling, pouring, peeling, etc., but it feels like you spend most of the game fast-forwarding through all the boiling and baking that takes place. I can’t imagine any player waiting, in real time, for 15 minutes as a marinara sauce simmers. You’d think speeding up the clock would help, but fast-forwarding through a minute still feels like, well, a minute.
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If you’re not too distracted with other multiplayer games, Naughty Dog is looking for your opinion on what should come next for Uncharted 2. The company site is hosting a poll asking what Multiplayer playlist the fans would like to see next. Naughty Dog’s Arne Meyer describes each choice on the PlayStation.Blog for those who want to make an informed decision.
Plunder Only would restrict the games to plunder game types. The two Crushing modes (All Game Types and Deathmatch Only) would set rules to the harder difficulty for those two playlists. Skilled Objectives would reset skill levels specific to each objective-based playlist. Finally, Deathmatch Varients Only would restrict games to include sniper/pistole, pistole/grenades, RPGs, and Crushing difficulty.
“We can’t guarantee that we’ll be releasing the most popular playlist,” the post by Meyer states, “but we really want to know what you’d like to see, so let us know what you want.” So far Plunder Only is running away with the vote at almost 42%, far surpassing Crushing: All Competitive at 21%. If you want to ensure Plunder’s victory, or try to change the outcome, head over and cast your own vote in the digital ballot box.
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Guild Wars 2 won’t be out for a while yet, but anxious fans may still be able to try it out next year. Eurogamer (via VE3D) is reporting that NCSoft isn’t expecting any major launches in 2010, but that fans can expect at least two big games the year after.
“I believe there will be certain public events in the year 2010… at least a closed beta test for those titles. Commercialization will be expected, at this point, probably some time in the year 2011,” chief financial officer Jaeho Lee said during a recent conference call.
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One of the biggest fallacies about “gaming journalists” is that we’re supposed to, somehow, approach games from an “unbiased” perspective. Well, we’ve all got our biases, and so I’ll admit it: Magna Carta 2 raised several red flags in my eyes. For one, the original game was probably the worst pile of dreck that the otherwise reliable Atlus has published in the last five years. And a Korean-developed action-RPG? I’ll trust Koreans when it comes to real-time strategy, but after the wretched Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom and other assorted failures, there’s not too much rely on when it comes to emulating Japanese RPGs.
So, yeah, I definitely approached Magna Carta 2 with a healthy dose of skepticism — and that was before I even turned it on! But still, I wanted to give the game as fair a shot as I could. After all, a sequel like Dark Cloud 2 turned out to be an incredible breakthrough for then-unknown Level-5, so I decided to approach developer Softmax’s latest effort with an open mind. And then, within the first few moments of the game, I discovered that most terrifying of RPG tropes: the amnesiac hero. Ugh! Way to destroy my goodwill right from the start, guys.
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Here’s some more info from Nintendo Power:
- when sneaking Zelda out of the castle, you can have her follow you, wait behind, or draw a direct path for her to follow
- you can distract guards by throwing rocks at them
- the evil ‘thing’ that needs Zelda’s body is not Ganon
- Anjean “claims to have known Zelda’s ancestors.”
- you don’t have to replay floors of the Spirit Tower, but you might be able to get new secrets if you do
- The Phantoms”who are supposed to protect the tower from evil, have gone haywire”.
- Zelda can’t take over a phantom until you (a) get the three Tears of Light in an area, and (b) strike it from behind with your sword
- Zelda can transfer her spirit from one phantom to another later on
- you can switch train track routes to avoid enemy trains
- 4 temples connect to the Spirit Temple, but the first doesn’t involve phantoms
- you have to visit other locations before visiting the forest temple
- six slots for items in Link’s inventory.
- sidequests that involve wooden hearts and dragon scales
- you must walk the Forest Temple’s Master Key down a safe route to avoid being grabbed by wallmasters
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