NYCC: Until Dawn Gives PS3 Gamers Something Different

When I stood and watched parts of a lengthy demo of the upcoming PlayStation 3 exclusive Until Dawn, I couldn’t help but think of the PSN game Datura. I pondered back on how amazing Datura looked, how fluid the experience seemed, how its purported mastery of the PlayStation Move would set adventure gaming and exploration forward. And I cringed as I remembered playing it for review, let down by an experience marred by its subpar controls and gameplay that didn’t nearly live up to its amazing ambiance and potential.

Will Until Dawn suffer the same fate? Maybe so. But watching the demo and speaking at length with Will Byles, the game’s director, put me at ease. His studio, Supermassive Games, has been toiling away on Until Dawn for nearly two years, attempting to construct a teen horror movie in video game form. The result, at least from what I saw, is something dynamic, visually pleasing and fun for those that may be watching.

As Byles explained, Until Dawn revolves around the conventions of the teen horror flicks we all know and love: an “isolated location” with “no phone,” occasionally accompanied by “inappropriate sex.” A killer stalks eight helpless teens out in a heavily wooded, snow-covered locale, and it’s up to the gamer to see the story through, no matter what twists and turns it happens to take.

These twists and turns rest at the heart of Until Dawn, because – heavily and admittedly influenced by Quantic Dream’s masterpiece Heavy Rain – Until Dawn doesn’t stop no matter what happens to any of the characters in the story. If someone dies, that person remains dead and the plot trucks along, altered but unabated. The result is an adventure that may take players only five or six hours to see through, but an adventure that happens to conclude with one of about 30 endings. Some of these endings are radically different from one another, and others are more about slight, subtle differences, but whatever you see at the end is a direct result of what happened in-game, from choices you made to those you let live and others you saw perish.

Byles admits that his studio’s approach to Until Dawn is “very filmy,” right on down to what can only be described as the kill cam (or perhaps the near death cam), representing the viewpoint of the murderer moving about the forest. He used words like “glib” and “cheesy” to describe the game, yet emphasized the story’s up-and-down arc that constantly puts players at ease, only to raise the tension to absurd heights. Supermassive Games is so serious about the cadence the game develops that it actually runs specialized tests on people playing Until Dawn or watching it in action to garner empirical data on how it’s received. They don’t want the game to be too scary or too mundane; they want to strike just the right balance, and they’ve adjusted the game as they’ve gone along, finding out that they were “overdoing it” with the frights at first.

I think you know where this is going.

Something else Byles discussed was the studio’s insistence on using American film writers with experience in the horror genre to pen the game’s dialogue. He laughed as he talked about how ridiculous the dialogue would have been if it was written by British guys like himself, noting that the horror genre is largely American in origin, and that they wanted their game to stay true to what people know and love about those kinds of movies.

Regardless of its true-to-form style, its plot and its rather stunningly dire setting (what’s scarier than nighttime in a wintery forest?), the one thing I wanted to press Byles on most is the game’s control scheme. He emphasized that it’s built for PlayStation Move, and for the time being, that’s what you need to play the game with. But this is where lingering fears of a Datura-like experience came into play. While the game seemed to control fluidly, I wasn’t allowed to play it for myself, so the promise of expertly crafted 1-to-1 Move controls only goes so far.

How exact will Move's controls be?

The good news for those wary of a motion-only experience, however, is that Supermassive Games is looking into the possibility of incorporating DualShock controls. Such a move didn’t save Datura, and Until Dawn might not need this option at all, but at the very least it will open it up to a much bigger audience of PS3 owners that don’t own the Move peripheral. The studio is currently testing how to best use the DualShock controller while staying true to the experience they crafted around motion. Hopefully, for those that like options, their experiments work out.

With Until Dawn’s potential etched in my mind, I’ll eagerly await its inexact 2013 release date. Built on the same engine used to create Killzone 2, Until Dawn is pretty. Its Heavy Rain-influenced narrative arcs promise non-linearity and replayability. And its teen horror movie premise is certainly something novel in the realm of gaming. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that when I play it for myself, it’s as good as it looks, and not another Datura-like, PlayStation Move-driven letdown.

Colin Moriarty is an IGN PlayStation editor. You can follow him on Twitter (@notaxation) and IGN (Moriarty-IGN) and learn just how sad the life of a New York Islanders and New York Jets fan can be.

Source : ign[dot]com

Symphony Review

Combining Tron-esque, wireframe graphics, a simplistic, arcade-shooter mechanic, and a soundtrack pulled directly from your own hard drive, Symphony is equal parts video game and screensaver. The concept here is that a “demon” has taken over your music, and you (represented by a sort of fighter-plane-type thingy) have to kill the infestation with a variety of weapons, song by individual song.

When you first start up Symphony, the game will search your hard drive for music files (although it does come with some sample music by default). It’ll then import the files you designate as wanting to play with (a time-consuming process, especially for those without powerful PCs and/or SSDs), and build game levels for each song. For all this loading, though, levels don’t seem to differ too much from each other, despite wildly different song types. Occasionally, you'll get different, or more powerful versions of the same enemies, but most of the time, levels are only distinguished from one another by the tempo at which the action happens and the background music.

Whether you go with one of Elgar’s Engima Variations or a cut from MF DOOM’s latest album, you’ll still get a top-down view of a monochrome (the single color shifts based on the “intensity” of the song at a given time) background. Wire frame enemies appear from the side and the top, generally in sync with the beat or if there's an "intensity" change in the song (i.e., there's more going on instrumentally at a given time), and they occasionally shoot at you. Depending on what difficulty level you’ve chosen – they go from “pianissimo” (easiest) to “fortissimo” – they’ll either shoot at you very rarely, or all the damn time.

Gameplay for the most part involves moving the mouse around to dodge enemies (your ship tracks your mouse move for move) and blowing up enemies. A few weapons, like missiles, are better held to mouse clicks, but for the most part you're just moving around. This makes the gameplay feel a little thin, which leads to it getting tiresome after multiple songs. After enough time it can get a little repetitive -- or at least that's how it might seem on paper. But something about Symphony’s gameplay is almost zen-like. You go into this zone as you play, where you experience the music and the gameplay as a single activity, and time just slides by.

Of course, some parts of Symphony's gameplay are genuinely repetitive, although not to a degree that it mars the overall impression much, given you play the game in short bursts. Enemies, for example, are pretty much all variations of a very few basic types. Your goal is to destroy them and collect the powerups and energy they drop to increase your score. You have to get to a certain score threshold to “beat” a level, which allows you to unlock a new weapon or power up for your ship. Then you can choose your ship’s loadout for the next song, mixing and matching weapons and powers to your liking, and even choosing whether you want them to auto-fire or to control when they go off. Since most levels are the same, it’s not really so much a question of choosing the right weapon for the job, but making sure you have a good balance of different kinds of weapons: missiles for the powerful enemies, auto-fire blasters for the low-end ones, and something in between for everything else.

One weird misstep is that Symphony seems to make the music itself quieter than the sound effects by default, requiring some tweaking to make sure you can actually hear your own personal soundtrack. Other than that, though, the game plays smooth and stable, and even allows you to log into an online leaderboard to compare your successes with others on a given song (yep, it tracks songs by artist and title from the ID3 tags).

Source : ign[dot]com