Disaster Day of Crisis

November 16, 2007

For a game that includes city-decimating tsunamis and monster volcanoes spewing red hot lava at you, Disaster has remained remarkably low key. Still, these first in-gamescreenshots revealed by Nintendo this month suggest the game's on track to deliver a pulse-pounding adventure. Even if the hero is called Ray.

If you didn't know already, Ray's a member of an elite rescue unit, and that means he's a good guy to have around when the 0.0001% of survivors crawl out of the sewers after a tidal wave has ripped their metropolis a new one. He's a hardnut poster boy, with tats and great hair for the ladies, and big guns and fast cars to bring down the psychos who've used a spate of natural disasters as cover for some naughty atomic bomb swipage. Don't these people ever think of the kids?

Graphically, the game continues to look snazzy, the standout new shots being the ones where the killer tsunami absolutely belittles a Tokyo-like city. Others show off Ray's possible love interest (our bet: she's a scientist), and more of the game's driving sections, in which Ray'll be doing a Dante's Peak and out-running lava and earthquakes behind the wheel of his motor. A vague 2008 release date is all we've been given, but on this latest evidence, it could be worth the wait.