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• One Real Man Runs Along the Mirror’s Edge

  Here’s the first example of what I hope will become an extremely dangerous fad: videos of parkour filmed in the style of Mirror’s Edge. You’ll want to stay for at least the first minute, when filmer AZO is most dedicated to the tribute—he even finds a properly color coordinated factory and makes a beeline for the red pipes. Some of the rest of it is pretty out of place, like the bike tricks and the, um, magic cup thing, and some of his other moves wouldn’t look impressive filmed any other way. They do look impressive this way, which reiterates two things: DICE really found something powerful with the combination of camera angle, camera motion, and animation in Mirror’s Edge, if someone else can use that same combination to make standing on a two-foot fence feel dramatic.  Doing athletic things while holding a camera is unfathomably awesome to the internet. The video, after the jump. Read More... Posted Apr 20 2009, 09:00 AM by Joe Keiser with | with no comments Filed under: parkour, mirror’s edge, joe keiser, life imitates games, first-person cameras

• What Faith of Mirror’s Edge Really Looks Likes

  Someone’s gone and created a third-person camera mod for Mirror’s Edge. Doesn’t that sound just awesome? Faith is after all a totally badass parkour superhero; certainly those smooth animations and perfectly chained motions would look great on the entirety of her lithe body, right? The video’s after the jump, but a word of warning—this will make you feel like that time you were shown a video of yourself and came to the horrifying realization that actually, you can’t dance at all: Read More... Posted Jan 29 2009, 01:00 PM by Joe Keiser with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: video, mirror’s edge, joe keiser, mods

• Games I Probably Should Have Played in 2008

  Since we've reached the point in January where last-year retrospectives have become completely lazy and tiresome, I figured I'd squeeze at least one more out because, hey, I've still got some 2008 baggage left. It was a super-busy year for me, full of new assignments, responsibilities, and that maelstrom of neverending crap known to most of you as "fall."  Since my free time was so limited, I had to make some serious decisions about what to play; and some choices, like spending over 60 hours on Grand Theft Auto IV, were clearly wrong. This poor planning left many games I wanted to play untouched and unloved in a GameFly distribution center as they sat in their paper sleeves and desperately waited for me to add them to my queue. Why must inanimate objects make me feel so guilty? Maybe you can tell me if I made the right decisions by looking at--and judging me by--the games I had no time to play. It's the only way I'll learn. Read More... Posted Jan 15 2009, 04:30 PM by Bob Mackey with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: fallout 3, tales of vesperia, bob mackey, mirror’s edge, persona 4, 2008, tomb raider underworld

• Trailer Review: Terrifying New Mirror’s Edge Content

  Ah, Mirror’s Edge. There’s so much to think about when talking about it. It is, without doubt, a flawed, frustrating experience, the kind of game experience that you hate just as much you love. It also just happens to be the most important, must-play AAA title of the year. And it’s beautiful, and also nauseating. It has dizzying production values, and cheap looking Flash-like cutscenes. For every positive point, DICE’s opus has an equally negative counter-point, save for the one negative that stands alone: Mirror’s Edge is pretty darn short. So of course there’s new DLC coming out for it, and it’s not just more of the same—for starters it’s called the Pure Time Trials pack, time trials being the one thing that everyone unequivocally loved about the original. And judging by the trailer, which I’ve just watched for the sixth time in a row, it is also in its way more beautiful than the rooftop playgrounds of the game’s story mode. If you thought that was a clinic in Swedish minimalism, you’ve seen nothing—these new levels are made entirely of blocks of solid color hovering in space. The camera twirls as the mind boggles, searching for the seemingly limitless paths of flow in this pristinely artificial landscape. Here is the game that design mechanic fetishists wanted the original to be, this trailer seems to say. I personally couldn’t be happier. Read More... Posted Dec 04 2008, 04:00 PM by Joe Keiser with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: trailer review, dlc, mirror’s edge, joe keiser, minimalism, time trials

• WTF EA?: Boom Blox Blueprint Studio “Closed”

  Had you told me a year ago that EA would publish not one but three of 2008’s best games, I would have called you a liar and then kindly asked you to stop letting your dog defecate on my perfectly kept lawn. Had you then told me that said three games would all be original IPs and that among them was one of Steven Spielberg’s gaming projects, I would have promptly put on my heaviest pair of boots and kicked you square in the groin for lying even more. And yet here we are. Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge, while not perfect, are far and away two of the most memorable things I’ve played in the past twelve months. Unfortunately, I still haven’t gotten to play Boom Blox but it’s sitting at the very top of a long list of games I need to play before January rolls around. Derrick’s been singing its praises since it came out and the promise of a quality original game for Wii with great single and multiplayer is just plain alluring. I do, after all, want to use my Wii for something. So it’s with a heavy heart that I tell you good readers that the unofficial EA studio known as Blueprint, the network of designers responsible for Boom Blox, has been dissolved. Read More... Posted Nov 19 2008, 07:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, boom blox, steven spielberg, ea, wii, metroid prime, retro studios, dead space, mirror’s edge, bomb lox 2, armature studios, lmno, blueprint studios

• F**k Your Future: Mirror’s Edge, Blade Runner, and the Future City

  The image above is a little bit of Deus Ex 3 concept art from Eidos Montreal, the crack design team who broadened our sexual horizons with Fear Effect and taught us that controlling sociopathic murders is boring as sin with Kane & Lynch. I can imagine the dialogue between the artists and producers when this image was submitted for approval: "What do you got for us today, concept artists?" "Check dis!" "This isn't Deus Ex! This is just a screencap from Blade Runner with the guy from Deus Ex 1 smoking in front of it!" "I'm fired aren't I?" "No! It's perfect! That’s all these nerds want anyway." I kid. There is no Deus Ex without Blade Runner, after all. While its influence isn’t quite on the level of Aliens, Blade Runner’s vision of a nightmare cityscape in the far-flung-but-familiar future is a close second. Read More... Posted Nov 18 2008, 02:00 PM by John Constantine with | with no comments Filed under: ea, dice, blade runner, contra, mass effect, deus ex, aliens, eidos, soul bubbles, mirror’s edge, abe’s odyssey, syd mead, abe’s exodus, flashback, deus ex 3, shadowrun, oddworld

• Ceci N'Est Pas Une 1-Up: The Surrealist Future of Postpunk Gaming

  While reading Rip It Up and Start Again, Simon Reynolds’ sharp history of postpunk, I started thinking about videogames. I’m nothing if not predictable, I know. There’s a slight corollary between the gaming zeitgeist and punk rock. Not politically, of course. Videogames are, at least popularly, more conservative today than they’ve ever been. Just look at Bobby Kotick’s reasoning for dropping Brutal Legend and Ghostbusters from Activision’s release schedule: "[Those games] don't have the potential to be exploited every year on every platform with clear sequel potential and have the potential to become $100 million dollar franchises.” I realize that Activision is in the business of making money and not artifacts to inspire the human soul, but publicly stating that your publishing ethos is assembly-line-production makes it difficult to assess the creative merits of Guitar Hero: Buy This One Too, Just ‘Cause. No, videogames in 2008 are, like punk rock in 1974, taking a medium that’s become marked by excess and stripping it back to its most basic. Even beyond Capcom’s retro efforts and traditional two-dimensional, genre exercises (Braid, Castle Crashers) on Xbox Live, designers like DICE are trying to keep games simple and raw. Mirror’s Edge, for all of its visual polish, uses only three buttons for the bulk of its action and the game’s goals are uncomplicated (run to, run away.) Games are also trying to put the power of creation back into the audience’s hands. Halo 3’s Forge, LittleBigPlanet, and Maxis’ Spore might not be putting players into the guts of design, but they are inlets for everyone to make their own games. You don’t need to know how to play guitar to rock, and you don’t need to know C++, or draw, or write to make a game. Add these mainstream juggernauts to the booming independent dev scene, the confrontational tedium of games like No More Heroes (as Goichi Suda says, punk’s not dead,) and we may look back on the 2010s as gaming’s punk rock era. But how does punk lead to postpunk, the rebellion of aestheticism through the surreal and the futurist against the simplistic and traditional? What would that game even look like? Read More... Posted Nov 13 2008, 04:30 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, little big planet, dice, no more heroes, halo 3, guitar hero, Ghostbusters, spore, activision, super mario galaxy, spectrum zx, mirror’s edge, goichi suda, bobby kotick, dues ex machine, maxis, simon Reynolds, punk, rip it up and start again, postpunk, brutal legend, best of 2008

• The Eternal Question: Why Is Super Mario Bros. Fun?

  No, seriously, take a minute to think about it. Pour yourself a stiff drink or brew up a nice cuppa tea, put on your thinking cap and try to summarize your conclusion in a single sentence. It’s a peculiar question, really. I found myself trying to answer it late last night after spending some time with Mirror’s Edge. DICE’s platformer shares a lot of the same fundamentals as good ol’ SMB and, concerning the question at hand, both are fun for similar reasons. Super Mario Bros. lets you go wild on a playground where the laws of gravity are paying only loose attention and injury is not a threat. You can run and jump to your heart’s content, and if you see something, like a shiny coin or glowing box that might hide unknown treats, you can hit it with your fist and never worry about bloodied knuckles. Super Mario Bros. is fun because running and jumping, whether in real life or on a screen, is fun, and it’s this maxim that’s fueled platforming as a genre for twenty-five years. But the greatest platformers, the Marios and the Mega Mans, owe their success to more than just running and jumping. They also let you change their world. In Mario, especially in later series entries that allowed flight, crushing bricks opens new ways to move through the Mushroom Kingdom’s surreal landscapes. Mega Man has to destroy robots to ensure safe landings after a jump. If jumping and running was all you did in Jon Blow’s Braid, it could barely be called a game at all. When you settle into Mirror’s Edge, when you trust yourself to move through the level properly and let DICE’s carefully laid out obstacle courses subtly guide you, it manages to transcend the natural abstraction that comes from making things on TV move. It is physically and mentally affecting. It is fun. But, and mind you I’ve only played the first three levels of the game, all you do is run, jump, and climb. Read More... Posted Nov 11 2008, 12:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, nintendo, ea, dice, super mario bros 3, mario, mega man, super mario bros, super mario world, braid, mirror’s edge, what are you looking at, buddy?, jon blow, fun?

• Mirror’s Edge: Everything You’ve Heard Is True

  Since the beginning of 2008, I’ve been watching Mirror’s Edge from a distance, pining away for its delicious cityscape, smitten with its sterile and pristine blues, whites, reds, and yellows. It was, and is, a visual panacea to cure the over-bloom-lit, over-brown, over-textured HD gaming landscape. When the first gameplay videos started hitting the net at the beginning of May, Edge’s smooth parkour action and emphasis on non-violent flight transformed my infatuation into full-on love. I needed this game to be as good as it looked, to deliver on its proposed fluid play. I’ve been dreaming about a game based on momentum and escape for years now, and here it was in action. But the proof, as always, is in the play. After playing Mirror’s Edge at EA’s fall preview event today, my first impression is it’s exactly what developer DICE has been promising. Everything you’ve heard is true. Read More... Posted Oct 15 2008, 08:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, ea, dice, xbox 360, e3, ps3, parkour, mirror’s edge, daivd belle