Apocalypse POW! is still technically in a holding pattern, but in the meantime, I wanted to post a handful of things I've been sitting on lately, starting with this. Announced last week, here is the teaser trailer for the upcoming high-definition remake of the classic NES game DuckTales, out sometime this summer. The remastered edition will be available through the Wii U eShop, XBLA and PSN, with a very good chance it'll be coming to Steam at some point as well.
I can't tell you how excited I am about this. There were a lot of games that I loved as a kid, but DuckTales was - for a while at least - my absolute favorite. It was pretty tough, I'll give it that, but that just made it all the more satisfying when I beat it.
I guess I was about eleven when DuckTales first aired, and the Nintendo game came out a year later. Even at that young age, I was well aware that videogame tie-ins to established properties were generally not good, but for some reason Disney's Nintendo games, probably thanks to Capcom's involvement, were always top-notch. I played the hell out of DuckTales and despite the occasionally wonky controls, it was my go-to game for at least a year.
It seems like remastering and re-releasing games is a thing lately: Kingdom Hearts 1.5 HD Remix and Final Fantasy X \ X-2 HD Remaster are both in the pipeline for the PS3 and are due to be released the near future, and I'm sure there are other games due for HD treatment as well. Which makes it all the more awesome that Capcom is digging into the vaults for a gem like DuckTales to polish up and release.
I'm gonna get my nostalgia on SO HARD when this finally hits.
Tad Williams' 1996-2001 Otherland quadrilogy is a remarkable, under-the-radar series that absolutely blew me away when I discovered it a few years ago. The breadth of the series is epic and incredibly expansive, and is a narrative that should by all rights be mentioned in the same breath as The Lord of the Rings or Dune; it's a contemporary, technological Hero's Journey that touches on everything from how identity is informed to the role of social stratification in online interaction to the flexibility of the concept of mortality. It's an adventure story, first and foremost, and one that is relevant and recognizable to a post-millenium audience, but at heart deals with our changing construct of reality thanks to the implementation of technology in our lives, just as succinctly as The Lord of the Rings dealt with the role of technology in world war, or Dune addressed the intersection of technology and ecology.
Unlike The Lord of the Rings, Otherland is not so much metaphorical as it is reflective; unlike Dune, the technology and society presented are conceivable, identifiable extrapolations of their modern day equivalent. I say that Otherland should be mentioned alongside those two series; strangely, however, it is not, and in fact most people haven't even heard of it. Hell, I hadn't heard a thing about it until I happened to pick up the first volume of the series in a used bookstore on a whim. Now that I've read it, I'm astonished that it hasn't gained more of a foothold in people's awareness, but sadly it seems to have been relegated instead to that gigantic slush heap known as "mediocre genre fiction". Believe me when I say that there's nothing mediocre about Otherland.
The quick-and-dirty byline is this: Otherland is an epic adventure about videogames. In Otherland, the Net has become a sort of Ur-game, the ultimate Massively Multiplayer Online game that acts as a container and jumping-off hub for all other games, from medieval fantasy (think World of Warcraft) to cyberpunk (think Shadowrun, or Deus Ex) to historical adventure (think Assassin's Creed) and all points in between. There are game-worlds based on literature (Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, War of the Worlds) and on existing MMO archetypes (Middle Country, the most popular game on the Net, bears a strong resemblance to WoW). There are science-lab gameworlds and private, PSN Home-style gameworlds and illegal hacker gameworlds. The vastness of the Net is made immediately apparent, and as the story progresses, it becomes clear that with a world this large, there are naturally going to be a lot of dimly-lit corners and a gargantuan, subterranean mechanism keeping things running smoothly. It's this exploration of what's behind the walls and beneath the floorboards that makes Otherland such a fascinating tale.
At any rate, I bring all of this up not only because Otherland is a series of books about videogames and that's the sort of thing I like to talk about here, but because it was recently announced that Otherland is being developed into a real, honest-to-God MMO game, as evidenced by the trailer above. And while we're a few decades away from being able to fully immerse ourselves in a realistic gameworld, this version of Otherland takes a unique approach to the MMO mechanic by introducing a metatextual element: players can travel from gameworld to gameworld (there are three unique worlds at launch - the Mars Market, the medieval-themed Eight Squared, and the heavy sci-fi, matrix-like Lambda Mall - but I'm certain more will be added as time goes by) and there seems to be a focus not only on your standard PvP and combat gameplay but also on creating your own gameworld by collecting and using 'eDNA'. To this end, it seems like a cross between EVE Online, Everquest and Second Life.
Otherland is going to be free-to-play, and I can guarantee you that once it's released, I'll be giving it a more-than-cursory playthrough. Familiarity with the novels on which it's based doesn't seem to be a requirement, but I recommend that you read them anyway. It's a colossal, epic story, so if that's your thing, you won't be disappointed.
I've posted about Wreck-It Ralph before, but now a trailer's out and it would behoove you all to watch it. There are a lot of movies coming out before the end of the year that I'm looking forward to - The Dark Knight Rises in July, Looper in September, The Hobbit in December - but Wreck-It Ralph comes in near the top of the list, in large part because it seems to be aimed directly at me. Honestly, a movie about classic video games featuring tons of cameos? I'm sold.
Somewhat unrelated to the usual fare here at Apocalypse POW!, but I recently read Jason Pargin (A.K.A. David Wong)'s novel "John Dies At The End", and it was phenomenal. Sort of a cross between Lovecraft and Hunter S. Thompson with a dollop of Bret Easton Ellis thrown in for good measure, it's violent and trippy and altogether hilarious, and I can't recommend it enough.
Well, it turns out that it's being adapted into a film by Don Coscarelli, the man behind Bubba Ho-Tep and the Phantasm series, featuring Paul Giamatti as skeptical reporter Arnie Blondestone and Clancy Brown as (an apparently very badass) Dr. Marconi. There's no release date lined up just yet, but I can assure you that I'm pretty excited for it. Based on the trailer, it looks like it will hew pretty close to the source material, and while it has a kind of B-Horror movie vibe to it, that's sort of Coscarelli's wheelhouse and I expect he'll manage to do great things with it.
Anyway, just wanted to share that. Back to our regular programming.
A trio of indie games I've been meaning to post about for a few weeks: Stealth Bastard and Gunpoint are stealth-based 2D platformers, while Retro City Rampage is kind of a satirical 8-bit GTA demake.
Stealth Bastard: Tactical Espionage Arsehole has been described as the unholy spawn of Super Meat Boy, Portal and Splinter Cell. I'm not 100% certain what makes the protagonist such a bastard\arsehole, but robots and lasers definitely seem to think he's kind of a dick, and wish all sorts of ill upon him. Stealth Bastard offers 28 levels, a level editor, and is completely and unreservedly free.
Gunpoint reminds me a lot of an updated Elevator Action, if that game was a lot more violent and had Batman's detective mode from Batman: Arkham Asylum (called 'rewiring mode' here). The game's not out yet so I haven't had a chance to try it out, but it looks fantastic and seems to have a pretty unique gameplay mechanism. The video below is a talk\playthrough of an early, very rough version of Gunpoint which nevertheless contains all of the basic elements of the more polished upcoming version.
Retro City Rampage is insane. Lots of carjacking and criminal activity and random acts of violence, all in glorious 8-bit. It also looks highly referential, and packed full of classic videogame in-jokes and sight gags: everything from the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles NES game to Metal Gear to The Legend of Zelda II get satirised. The game world is huge, and the designers promise over 20 available weapons and 30 available vehicles (including but not limited to the TMNT van, the A-Team's van, and Doc Brown's DeLorean). I'm looking forward to this finally getting released.
The original American McGee's Alice was, in my opinion, an underrated cult classic, a dark revisionist take on Lewis Carroll's Wonderland novels with phenomenal character design and a grim and clever sense of humour. Although it received a fair amount of criticism for its poor controls, the outdated (though striking) graphics, and the fairly straightforward game structure, it had a kind of indie dark-horse charm to it, featured an absolutely haunting soundtrack by Chris Vrenna (of Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson), a well-thought-out world map, and one of the best weapons rosters of all time, including a Blunderbuss, a Croquet Mallet, and Jacks. I played the hell out of it, and loved every second of it.
It looks like American McGee is at it again with the forthcoming sequel, Alice: Madness Returns, slated for a June 14th, 2011 release, and based on the below gameplay trailer, it looks like a return to form. I couldn't be more excited about this game if I tried. Previously, I'd been a bit wary, as everything McGee's done in the interim has been - to put it kindly - underdeveloped at best, but the video highlights what looks to be a definite improvement in both visuals and controls, and I'm now counting down the days until June 14th.
Of course, I got this unreasonably excited about Epic Mickey too, and look how that turned out. Oh well. Fingers crossed!
