Tag: wii

tech

Wii Love the Simpsons

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Coming soon to a video console near you: The Simpsons Game! It is being created in partnership with Gracie Films and Twentieth Century Fox and is not based on the upcoming Simpsons movie. Rather, it is an original story from writers who create the TV program and it will feature the entire voice cast from the TV show. Basically, you just need to be prepared to never leave your couch as it seems that its going to be just plain awesome.
Techtree news said:

“Players must use exciting, all new powers to save the world from rising chaos, with Homer, Marge, Bart, Maggie, and Lisa being playable characters. Players will have to make a journey through all of Springfield, battle an array of villains, and fight their way through various parodies of multiple popular video games.”

The game has over 15 levels and each will take the form of an episode of the series, with a unique title animation, setting, and story. Within each episode, players will take control of two family members, or play one of them with a friend in a split-screen two-player mode.
It is scheduled for release at the end of this year for basically everything: PS3, PS2, PSP, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, and Nintendo DS.
After the jump, read the preview from Yahoo! News. I have just one thing to say: Aye Carumba!
Via Phyl
The Simpsons Game Preview: May 10, 2007 from Yahoo! News
Like Bart and Milhouse plotting in the Simpsons family tree house, EA was cooking up a little something-something on May 7, 2007. Outside, hundreds were celebrating a milestone 400th episode of The Simpsons. But inside the Fox Studios cafeteria, guarded by famed bartender Moe Szyslak, The Simpsons Game was being unveiled to a select group of press representatives.
Executive Producer Scot Amos set the scene: “We wanted to stay true to the fans, first and foremost. We wanted to make the ultimate video game for the Simpsons characters.” The first step was crafting a script worthy of the license. To do that, EA enlisted a trio of the show’s writers and producers, Matt Selman, Tim Long, and Matt Warburton.
The three spoke to us about the game’s focus, and earned massive gamer cred. “EA has been great to us,” said Selman. “They’re much better than the other monolithic video game companies.” The plot promises a plethora of surprises, poking fun at not only standard pop-culture, but also game-centric segments and parodies to appease even the most hardcore gamers. Unfortunately, the camp was keeping all of these secrets, well, top-secret.
They would tell us the game featured over an hour of new, TV-worthy material in cutscene form. All the actors reprise their roles for voiceovers, so it will be as authentic as possible. Tim Long quipped, “We’re not going for a hard ESRB rating here, but I will tell you some of the lines are so dirty, they made the cast cry.” Also, very early in the game, the Simpsons figure out that they’re actually inside a video game, which means all Springfield breaks loose.
Amos and Creative Director Jonathan Knight took us through one chunk of the game, however. It was an eating contest at the Duff Brewery, and the player controlled Homer. The perspective was free-roaming 3D, as Homer battled Barney, Krusty and other familiar characters to reach food. Surprisingly, after ingesting enough grub, Homer could turn into Homerball — ransacking the place as a gigantic sphere.
Being in a video game (and being aware of it), the family Simpson is not tied to the limitations of the show as much. Each one has a superpower to exploit: Homer has his ball form; Bart turns into Bartman; Marge can command hordes of characters; and Lisa can change the environment. Each of these has their own advantages, and the level design allows you to use them both to complete prime objectives and do a little exploring to find secrets and gather pick-ups.
Back to the eating contest: The stage is almost like Epcot Center, with various geographical locations. Homer trashes Germany, Mexico, and others — partially with the help of a spicy pepper (referencing the chili cook-off episode) to turn into a ball of lava. When it comes time to go through Scotland, Groundskeeper Willie closes the gate.
Now it’s time to switch to Bart, and use Bartman’s glide ability to scale the wall and take out Willie with some well-placed slingshot fire. This is a good time to mention the co-op gameplay. Each stage features two Simpsons family members, and you can switch between them during play. Much like LEGO Star Wars, a second player can jump in at any time. This turns everything split-screen, and the difficulty scales dynamically.
Online play will not be supported, but EA’s reasoning is sound. Knight says, “Our focus has been high-quality couch play. People are going to want to own the game because their friend will come over for a Homerball vs. Homerball match, or to play through the story with them. It’s going to bring the whole family together.” The prospect of multiplayer-centric minigames is definitely exciting.
Being a 3D game about a 2D family brings up some complications. You need to be faithful to the show, but expand the world to be more exciting. You need to have the Simpsons themselves be 3D, but still look hand-drawn. The team worked many months in research and development to solve this. Knight says, “We have a patent pending on this tech to real-time deform the mesh of faces as you move the camera around. It’s important that they stay looking like Bart or Homer from any angle.”
This addresses problems with past 3D Simpsons games, where something just didn’t look right — be it Lisa’s hair or Homer’s marshmallow-man physique. Knight says, “You want Lisa’s hair to look like a flat 2D billboard from any angle. There’s a lot of technology behind it, but it looks effortless in the game. But once you see it, you can never go back to another Simpsons game. It’s the first time we’re capturing the look and feel of the TV show.”
As we got to see the game in action (on Xbox 360), we can attest to the beautiful and faithful art style. It’s like you could pause it at any time, and it looks like an animation cel from the show. The Simpsons has simplistic visuals to be sure, but the game doesn’t skimp on details. Physics react realistically (for a cartoon, of course), and the animation is very solid. Also, things like flesh bunched up on the Homerball are nice — albeit disturbing — touches.
We’ve gotten relatively technical talking about graphics, but Simpsons creator Matt Groening popped in to put things into perspective: “This is the most ambitious Simpsons game ever. It rewards people that love games, while making fun of other games.” This isn’t just a video game starring The Simpsons; this is exactly how The Simpsons themselves would do video games. Due to release in late fall, we still have a long time to wait, but with reruns, the upcoming movie, and no shortage of DVDs, there are plenty of outlets to get your Simpsons fix in the meantime.

tech

Wee!

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Six years ago, I became obsessed during the holiday season about getting a PS2. This obsession was due to a number of reasons. The first was a very practical one: I needed a DVD player and among other things, the PS2 was a DVD player. The second was that I had been laid off from my dot com job and not only had plenty of time to try and get one, but tons of time to actually play it once I got it. The third and most important reason was that other than my Atari 2600, I had never owned a video game system and I had become convinced that the time was finally right.
For years, I religiously went over my friend’s houses to play Baseball Stars, Super Tecmo Bowl or Bonk’s Adventure but never owned those games or the system they were played on (Full disclosure: my father during a misguided Atari loving phase bought a Jaguar but that sucked and I try to forget about it). I was at that time when I started to develop a love hate relationship with video games, something which would only get stronger over time, moving away from loving and towards hating as I started to see my friends getting totally sucked into games like “Bond” where they would sit inside all day, playing endless tournaments, never getting up off of their asses except to maybe get a drink of something. I took a perverse joy out of being the “other guy” – who hoped on his bike and went for a ride or who went for a walk instead of playing all day – and let everyone know it too.
This love/hate relationship came to a head when I lived my senior year of college with Bryan who not only had a Playstation but spent an enormous amount of time “lost” to it. I would berate him on a daily basis to put the controller down and get outside to the point where I felt like his mom. Then, towards the end of the year when senioritis was truly setting in, I picked up “Metal Gear Solid” and sure enough was absolutely hooked, to the point where I was soon coming home from my internship during lunch to squeeze in a few minutes of gameplay.
Hate had become love – the siren song of the pixels was too much! About a year and a half later post-graduation, I heard tons of hype about PS2 and decided that I must have one and sure enough, using much gile and cunning (and setting my web brower to automatically refresh every 5 seconds on a day that I had been told Amazon would be getting them in stock) I was able to procure one and have never looked back since.
That is, until a few weeks ago when I heard that the new PS3 would cost over $500. I started to look back on how much I’ve used the PS2 the past few years and sure enough, its pure gaming usage has fallen dramatically since I moved out of my 2 br converted to 3 bachelor pad and moved in with my then girlfriend/now wife. Gone are the Fins/Jets Madden battles that would rage into the early morning. Gone forever is the kind of life where for one magical day I could sit and play “Metal Gear Solid 2” for 15 hours straight. During that day, my roommate got up, found me sitting Indian style in front of the TV playing, went to the gym, came back, went out to get breakfast, came back, went out to get lunch and run errands, came back, went out on a date, came back and I NEVER MOVED! Over the past few years, aside from bursts of Grand Theft Auto action, the game system really didn’t get played. In fact, MGS 3 (Snake Eater) stayed in its box for a solid year because I knew it needed about 40 hours of my time to beat it and these days, I don’t even have 3.5 hours to get to the movie theatre, sit through the Bond flick and get home, let alone 40 hours for a silly video game.
With this mindset of “not having enough time” – a reason I never joined the WoW (Worlds of Warcraft) universe – I started to read about the Wii and its strategy of going after the “casual” gamer. After a lot of thought, I realized why I wasn’t playing anymore: I just didn’t have time and had become a “casual” gamer myself. My wife is getting ready to go out for the evening? 20 minutes of game play coming up! Everything that I read and/or saw about the Wii made me want to get one even more – hell, one of my favorite video game accessories of all time was the Nintendo light gun that was needed to play “Duck Hunt.”
Now, having stood outside the Times Square Toys R Us for over 3 hours on a Saturday morning in December, having had a Wii for about a month, having not only brought it to my sister-in-law and brother-in-laws house but brought it into work to demo it for co-workers but having so everyone I know can see it, I have to say that it was one of the best moves I’ve made in the past decade. That is maybe a bit of hyperbole but you get the idea.
The reason why I love it so much is because the Wii is a machine that is just plain fun – you really want to yell “wee!” when playing it. The games, while very simple, are lots of fun and you really work up a sweat while playing Tennis or Baseball, so much so that Nintendo has already issued a recall for the wrist straps to make them stronger as people have been losing control of their remotes and destroying their TVs and windows. There is a feature called “Wii Fitness” where each day, you are run through 3 out of 15 different training exercises and at the end, you get your “Wii Age” which is supposed to show you how in shape you are. I started at 60 (oy!) and now I’m down to my actual age (29). I’m hoping to get under 25 sooner or later – I got to 26 before going away and like real life, if you don’t train everyday, you lose a step and sure enough, my first day back pushed me into the 30’s.
There are also other fun features besides the games. One is the ability to show pics on your TV if you use an SD flash card as your camera memory (which I do). When my mom, sister and in-laws came over my apartment recently, I was able to show off my trip photos right on my TV instead of having everyone crowd around the computer screen. Another is the Wii Message board, where others who have Wii’s can write you notes (my friend Jay used it to talk trash when we faced each other in fantasy football playoffs – yeah, phone calls, SMS messages and emails were not enough…) and as the Wii has built in Wi-Fi, there are channels like the Forecast Channel where you can always get an up-to-date weather report.
As time goes on, I’ll post more about it. Right now, I’m ready to leave and head home to see if my age today is going to go up or go down. Maybe I’ll also play my wife in golf or hit a few balls either at the golf range or in the batting cage. Each should take only a few minutes – the kind of game play my life wants and needs right now!