Reseth wrote:

Encore une méga giga news : Rising Star Games (encore !) va éditer Fragile en Europe Sortie prévue au printemps 2010 mais on s'en fout, il arrive chez nous

source

Ma foi qu'est-ce qu'on deviendrait, nous pauvres joueurs Wii Européens, sans Rising Star Games ?

Last edited by madmonkey (01-07-2009, 21:00)

Paulo wrote:

Arc Rise Fantasia, Sin & Punishment 2 et Fragile sont eux aussi sur le stand Nintendo ;)

Last edited by Paulo (03-07-2009, 20:24)

Reseth wrote:

Hudson annonce Shadow Tower sur Wii. C'est original et ça a du style Vivement une vidéo !

madmonkey wrote:

Le trailer de Samurai Warriors 3:

"It's like taking a ****," says Goichi Suda, Grasshopper Manufacture CEO, as he relaxes on his (office) seat. We blink first. "A lot of things influenced No More Heroes - things I saw, or heard, and something that came from the inside. Something that needed to be eliminated from my body, like waste. That's why I created No More Heroes." Suda's colleagues are smirking as he deadpans through his explanation. "I realised I had a lot more that needed to be eliminated from my body. No More Heroes 2? New taking-a-****."

There's a moment's pause before he cracks up, intensely amused by his translator's hesitation. You can only imagine what Marvelous, Rising Star and Ubisoft's PR teams think of NMH2's spokesman comparing it to excrement, even if he does collapse in giggles afterwards. Laxatives and toilet rolls aside, there aren't many products to be successfully sold off the back of their association with a spell on the throne.

We're at Grasshopper Manufacture, the 'Video Game Band', to play No More Heroes 2. We wondered about that company description, too. "A band is about four people creating and playing music together," says Suda, "and it used to be the case that four people combined to deliver this experience that people call a videogame - one person responsible for each of game design, programming, audio and visual. Nowadays, it's more than four people, it's far more, but those four ideas are the basics of a videogame. I'm not interested in making something for a purely commercial purpose. I'm focused on creating something unique, almost artistic. In that sense, 'band' perfectly illustrates my philosophy."

If we run with that for a moment, it's clear that Suda's that lead singer, the star of the show. While we play NMH2 the man is clearly in his element, and having a whale of a time with his proxy microphone, a green lightsaber - sorry, beam katana. The kind of toy that gets grown men all excited, it's even more of an attention-grabber when Suda clears the floor, turns out the lights, and begins throwing mighty fine poses. It takes a little of the edge off No More Heroes' Travis, an otaku obsessed with porn, beam swords, wrestling and - yes - taking a ****, when you realise he's as much a mirror of his creator as his players. "In NMH2, there is a strong sense of Travis's story unfolding one mission after another," says Suda. "This is not a director's cut or just more volume added to the original game. This is the next step in the NMH fight." Travis strides on to the screen looking sharper than ever, his eyes wilder and his hair spikier. It's an intimidating makeover.

One he lives up to immediately, slicing an unfortunate goon from groin to eyes, already diving into the next group with blade unsheathed before relieving another thug of his arms. Travis has a new fighting style, each swipe given a little more flourish and the movement of his body much more dynamic - in full flow, he’s very deadly indeed. So it’s somewhat of a surprise when we get shot, and the enemies seize their chance to pile around and quickly end the fight. That didn’t happen in No More Heroes. Another try brings a few more kills before the same result. “You’ll find the AI very improved,” comments Suda. “There’s more variation in their styles, so more variation in their experience - they fight according to their type.”

This is mob warfare: the enemies come in packs and rush Travis. Depending on their weapon, they’ll stay at range or get in your face, a timeworn but highly effective combination that’s given a little pep by the attention paid to their dialogue. Unfortunately we can’t produce much of the latter, but suffice it to say that most of it questions Travis’ manhood or parentage. The new dual-beam katana is the ready-made response, of course, and it’s a tool with effortless style, even for a GHM game. Pirouetting through enemies, Travis leaves behind pink neon trails and severed limbs, punctuating every few swings with a decapitation and an insult. It’s a spectacle as much as a slaughter.

This goes for the game as a whole: every moment has been sylised to death, from the fluorescent textures and popping symbols that freeze the screen during loading times to the remarkable reinvention of Travis’ bike. To be a fly on the wall during that planning meeting: “Boss, people complained that the Schpeltiger bike was a bit unwieldy - should we change it?” Pause. “Yes, make the bike twice as long.”

“It is mainly for transportation,” says Suda, before breaking into a grin. “For cool transportation! Travis’s style is similar but we’ve redesigned his clothes to show their own motion; everything is adding to the general cool factor of the character.” The highlights of the first game were arguably his supporting cast, though, from Sylvia and Henry to the boss assassins, and on this topic there’s very good news.

“It’s still too early to tell you everything about the game,” says Suda, “but firstly, we’re going to have more than one playable character - as the scenario unfolds, Shinobu and Henry will become playable and bring their own gameplay styles and cool factor.” Will Travis be overshadowed? Hardly. “He gets to pilot a giant robot! This lets you fight on a large scale - there will be plenty more variety as well.”

As for the bosses, some old favorites return, like Destroyman: in a tribute to Dragon Ball Z’s Tao Pai Pai, the swaggering superhero survived the last encounter to get his revenge as a cyborg. Another has a boom box and echoes Death Metal’s surroundings and style. New characters show similar debts to anime and sci-fi with the presiding spirit, Suda insists, being Spaceballs rather than Star Wars. Their scale and frequency shows that GHM has quite clearly mastered the Wii hardware. “Most of the old bosses are things of the past,” Suda clarifies, “but this game will be something like one-and-a-half times the size of the original - this is mainly down to the fact we’ve got so many new and cool bosses.”

You can probably guess how many. “Travis ended NMH as first in the rankings,” says Suda. “He decided to go elsewhere and when he returns three years later after Santa Destroy has changed - a big company is trying to redesign the place entirely. From that concept, we start the story and Travis has a new ranking as position 51. I love this number, I don’t know why, I just get positive feelings from it! Travis wants revenge for himself, and he’s not necessarily under anyone’s influence - he fights for himself.” It’s not all grim, though: in one of NMH2’s many delicious touches, defeating a boss plays a short Super Mario Bros-aping sequence in which a 2D Travis walks away and on to his bike.

Driving through Santa Destroy is a less lonely experience this time around: there are more cars and people moving around on the streets, both of which are careful to stay out of the way of the new bike. It’s a reinvigorated and tighter town that’s splashed with colour from the construction works: oranges, fuchsia pinks and purples, and lots of blood-red. “There’s a very important difference in terms of how the game looks,” says Suda. “We’ve introduced high-dynamic -range rendering as well as effects like motion-blur - the game has improved, shifted closer to the vision I really wanted to deliver. In terms of the world we use a smaller portion of the town, because players told us it was too big in the first game and, as this sequel is very much focused on Travis, I wanted the world more centered on his everyday life.”

As in NMH, there are plenty of ‘jobs’ sprinkled around the map for Travis to earn money - the mundane is something of a Suda trademark. Strange moments pop up in titles like Flower, Sun and Rain, where your character has to walk along an empty street for literally ten minutes while the game taunts you about how it could warp you to your destination if it wanted to. No More Heroes never quite goes to those lengths, but the return of the coconut-collecting job (with a new basket strapped to Travis’ back) and a Pipemania-inspired plumbing task once again makes working to live a reality in Santa Destroy. “The reason I put these elements in is that it’s a challenge to make a game,” says Suda, “and so I want to make the player feel challenged to even play the game. Travis has these part-time jobs, collecting coconuts and so on. Travis has to work. It’s not the easy way, and I want the player to feel like there isn’t an easy way to live that life. That’s the punk.” It’s a principle that, according to Suda, permeates his games. “In life, you have good times and bad times, and I want players to feel the same way. If players just have fun in the game and they come back to their real lives, there’s a disconnection. And I dislike that. My ideal is to create something in a game that informs and helps players in their real life.” It should be said, however, that while No More Heroes, and NMH2, do an excellent job of impersonating drudgery, the minigame jobs are shot through with greasy humor and are always neatly cocked mechanically. Despite Suda’s theory, his games never feel like they’re set in Grimsby.

The everyday is just part of a game world in which anything goes - whether that’s overdue porn rentals, buying T-shirts or killing thousands of goons. But as No More Heroes 2, a game that wears its otaku credentials proudly on its sleeve, aims to hit a wider market than its predecessor, it runs the danger of being either compromised or playing it too niche. “It’s good to aim for a wider audience,” says Suda, “but I want to keep hold of those core ideas that inspired me to make the game. That won’t change even if I’m playing to a larger audience - I don’t really understand what the wider audience expects of me.” It is fair to say, though, that is probably isn’t suicide, torture or incest. Suda has grapples with these themes in the past, and the question of their presentation. Asked about the difficulty of including somewhat taboo topics, he specifically references the ending of NMH, where Travis’ half-sister reveals she was sexually abused by their father and killed him in revenge - during a cutscene that’s fast-forwarded because, according to his sibling, ‘it alone would jack up the age rating of this game even further’. “That’s why the scene was fast-forwarded, so players don’t really understand what’s happening,” says Suda. “But actually people discussed it a lot on YouTube.” But how do such things find their way into the cartoonish world of No More Heroes? “When I write the story, I sometimes write consciously and sometimes unconsciously,” says Suda. “Sometimes I’ll try and finish the story in one direction, and end up in another entirely, because I’m thinking unconsciously and being led by the characters, each of whom has their own story. And when I write a character, I don’t want to hide what or who the character is.”

Whatever its dark underbelly, however, for No More Heroes this time around is all about striking it big. “I really want to make NMH a big franchise,” says Suda, “and with this second episode have bigger success. I’m putting a lot of care into developing this IP, as I feel there’s a lot of potential.” Does that potential exist on Wii, however, as more and more thirdparty efforts fall by the wayside? “I think this is the last NMH that is going to be developed on Wii. To expand NMH to new possibilities, we need a new platform. Wii is a great platform, but we’ve done everything we can do with it now.”

They’re bold words, but ones that Suda and Grasshopper Manufacture have earned the right to speak: No More Heroes 2 is better-looking, bigger, and has even more balls-out attitude than its predecessor. Can otaku Travis Touchdown seduce the mainstream this time around? Who knows? But if he does, success won’t change him. He’ll still be renting porn, picking up coconuts, filleting thugs, and then riding off astride a ridiculous bike - all in the greatest piece of **** you’ll ever play. And you can quote us on that.

Suda spent time considering other weapons for Travis, including beam whips, nunchuku and even a projectile weapon. “But the image of Travis with the beam katana was so strong, I couldn’t risk changing it. The sword is Travis’ true identity; he’s in many ways a modern samurai.”

Suda on his role: “It’s very different from the first No More Heroes as I’m more of a creative or executing producer. It’s being made by one of my teams, young people who not only understand my style but also can put a lot of their own creativity into the mix.”

ONE OTAKU. TWO OTAKU. THREE OTAKU, FOUR… Referring to an obsessive collector, specifically of Japanese anime and videogames, otaku is a popular word these days, to the extend it’s arguable lost it’s once-derogatory taint. “Otaku culture actually has a lot of power,” says Suda. “My definition of an otaku is that it’s a person who has a lot of power - and pours that into something they are really into along with other people.” And is Goichi Suda an otaku? “Yes! (Laughs.) I’m an otaku. I’ve been an otaku since I was in kindergarten.”

New character Kimmy (above) has a recorder which she plays ever so sweetly before it turns into a double-beam katana. The dialogue suggests she’s a bit of a Travis groupie, so perhaps our favourite otaku is a little more notorious in Santa Destroy this time around.

Last edited by madmonkey (10-08-2009, 20:06)