By
NGC_
posted November 4, 2004
The sharpest, oddest death-fest on any Nintendo system ever is starting to make a little more sense now. Harman Smith's the wheelchair-bound man who holds the key to defeating evil Kun Lan and his army of suicidal Heaven's Smile bomb squad. It's his seven different personalities - all hardened assassins - that you get to play in the game, as well as
Harman himself.You can switch between these personalities at key points throughout the game - only if you feel it's necessary (and you will). Each
From the moment we saw the first batch of Killer 7 shots we were instinctively drawn towards it with magnet attraction. The arresting visual style held promise of a game resisting the flow of mainstream convention.Almost two-and-a-half years later - and in the company of Killer 7 producer - we finally enjoyed our first hands-on experience of the game that defies explanation.And within five seconds we were perplexed. Following usual gaming conventions we assumed our avatar would be controlled
By
NGC_
posted April 7, 2004
As befits a game starring the seven murderous personalities who live inside a professional assassin's head, Killer 7 is not entirely 'normal'.'Deranged', 'unhinged', and 'utterly mental' are three of the more printable comments we heard at Capcom's recent hands-on Killer 7 demonstration in Las Vegas, an event that left us with almost as many questions as we had before it started.So how does the actual gameplay work, then? Well, it's a combination of third-person exploration, first-person combat
Tuesday 23 May 2006
It's no secret that first-person shooters are tough to do properly on PSP, thanks to a rather limited control scheme. So we're not surprised that developer Guerrilla thought long and hard about how best to recreate its FPS hit Killzone - originally a PS2 title - for PSP.
What did surprise us, in a very pleasant way, was the solution Guerrilla came up with - switching to an isometric, third-person view - and how well the resulting game plays after such a drastic
Turning first-person shooters into overhead-perspective action games for handhelds is hardly a new idea, but Killzone: Liberation might be the first game to really nail it. A spinoff of 2004's futuristic FPS Killzone, Liberation casts players as one of that game's characters - a commando named Templar - and runs them through blasted trenches and colossal industrial complexes in a campaign to rescue hostages from the Nazi-like Helghast army.
We recently got our hands on a near-complete version
Dead or Alive? Bah. Keep your Virtua Fighter, too. For a lot of fans out there, 2D fighting games are alive and well, thanks in no small part to SNK Playmore. The company has delivered a seemingly endless stream of King of Fighters games over the last two years, and it's not done yet: here comes Neowave.
For the last decade or so, the KoF series has pioneered the idea of 3-on-3 team fighting; when one character gets taken out, another steps in to pick up where the fight left off. They were
Korean developer Phantagram returns this autumn with a second helping of its fantasy flavoured action/strategy title and from the demo we've been playing this month, it very much appears to be a case of more. More playable characters, more varied attacks, more enemies on screen at any time, more online modes and, ultimately, more of the same: which is No Bad Thing. The first title, KUF: The Crusaders, was a peach and if you overlook Koei's Dynasty Warriors, at the very least brought something
Never mind the crusades, the last two years have been a case of Developer Under Fire for Korean studio Phantagram. Production of its three PC/Xbox games - acrobatic action title Strident, cyberpunk RPG Duality and KUF: The Crusaders - ran afoul of strained relations with its publisher and part-owner, Korean MMORPG giant NCsoft. But after buying back its independence in time for Christmas 2003, Phantagram has concentrated on completing The Crusaders, a move that has encouraged Microsoft to
