The game itself plays like a first-person, but old-school Resident Evil, only darker; awesome! In the few minutes I played through, I managed to pick up a few items, wave a flashlight ineffectively and scare myself shitless when a zombie ... thing ... came up from behind me in the dark. Adding to the creepy visuals is, like any good horror movie, great ambient sounds - dripping, footsteps echoing - mixed with a believable soundtrack. The whole experience was gripping enough for at least one other reporter to forsake the next stop on the Gamecock tour in order to confront the demo's final boss.
And this is on a Nintendo platform, which after Resident Evil 4 shouldn't be surprising anymore. However, Dementium is just another step toward Nintendo's realization that people over the age of 13 play games on their consoles, something they were very aggressively trying to ignore when I spoke to them just two years ago at CES.
Legendary: The Box
"I want to show you the moment of the apocalypse," John Garcia-Shelton, Producer of Legendary: The Box. And with a push of a button, he did just that.
Garcia-Shelton took on the role of Charles Deckard, a high-dollar thief conned into stealing Pandora's Box, which he of course opens and exposes the world to an ancient evil not experienced for thousands of years, and it's Old-Testament impressive.
In an outdoor scene, hundreds of griffons swoop through the air, snatching up people as fissures open in the ground. Cars go flying as werewolves smack them out of the way and climb along walls, avoiding gunfire from the army. And then, a six-story golem pieced together with asphalt, 18 wheelers and cement medians lumbers its way toward Deckard, swiping aside tanks and automobiles, finally stomping Deckard out of existence. "We love killing Deckard in the demos," Garcia-Shelton says with an impish smile.
The game itself is scheduled to be episodic, though the first episode will release in brick-and-mortar shops and looks to be a full-length game. You play as Deckard, who in addition to being a thief is pretty crafty with a gun; lucky for you, since the game is a first-person shooter with AI that prefers to flank and avoid fire, rather than running straight into it.
Spark Unlimited, Legendary's developer, is particularly proud of their "dynamic spawning," which takes camera control from the player to introduce certain monsters cinematically. In Garcia-Shelton's demo, two werewolves burst through a stained-glass window inside a church and made their way toward a group of human soldiers. Then they jumped onto the walls and climbed up the ceiling to avoid an SUV-sized griffon making a similar entrance. It's pandemonium, just like the apocalypse should be.
EIEIO
Before checking out EIEIO, the question kicking around in the back of my head was how any developer could take a shop like Gamecock seriously. From my side of the press release, their irreverence seems at times infantile, occasionally dated. But the responses I got from all the developers I asked was overwhelmingly positive. Of course, most of the answers started with "Yeah, but," but they all ended the same way: Gamecock gets what we're doing, and they leave us alone. In an era where small developers routinely have to choose between acquisition and death, Gamecock's laissez-faire, goofy-if-charming approach to game development may not be so irreverent after all.
