Well, I’m done with Max Payne 2. Which is not to say I finished it, because I did not. I got a little over a third of the way through it, as best I can figure (to where you control Mona Sax for the first time, if you’ve played the game).

I really enjoyed the gunplay, but something about the graphics engine just triggered massive motion sickness in me. Playing on a 50″ screen probably just made it worse. Motion sickness is a bit of a mystery to me…I’m not sure why one game will trigger it and another will not. For instance, I can play 007: Everything or Nothing with no trouble at all. Both 3rd person shooters, but one sends me to bed with a cool damp rag on my forehead until the sweats pass, and the other I can play with no discomfort at all.

Anyway, back to Payne…

I was also disappointed in the level design, which I found monotonous overall. There were some high points, to be sure, like getting to Mona’s hideout, but otherwise it was just one dirty dingy building after another. The stairwells really made my stomach lurch and there were a TON of them. And so many narrow ledges and jumping puzzles, which the controls on the XBox were just not up to. They just weren’t precise enough.

I think a lot of my issues can be put down to ‘bad port from the PC’ though the game (in 480p widescreen) was absolutely gorgeous to look at and the Dolby 5.1 sound was incredible. But the controls — as is so often the case in this kind of a game — they just weren’t good.

Which was a shame since the cheesy noir story had me hooked and blasting bad guys was a total hoot. I’m thinking this would be a great game on the PC…maybe I’ll pick it up when it hits the bargain bin (its way too short to spend full price on. I borrowed the XBox copy I was playing from a friend).

I just got a press release announcing that Mike Hutchins has joined Sigil Games as a Senior Designer. Hutchins was a level/zone builder on the original version of Everquest.

Sigil Games, you’ll recall, is Brad “The Vision” McQuaid’s start-up and is getting packed full of ex-Verant people.

Press release ends with this snippet:

About Sigil Games Online, Inc.
Sigil Games Online, Inc. is a game studio dedicated to the development of massively multiplayer games. … Sigil Games plans to play a key role in taking MMOGs into their third generation and beyond.

Color me skeptical. EverQuest was the first 3D MMRPG and so it was mighty popular, but the game demands you devote your life to it. After McQuaid left, things lightened up a bit but still EQ is an incredible time sink. I just think if he builds a new game that puts such intense time demands on potential customers in today’s MMRPG climate, he’s going to be very surprised indeed.

This weeks Pulse reported that the first XBox 2 (XBox Next?) dev kits have gone out. They sport dual G5 processors and ATI Radeon 9800 Pro video cards. Pulse was quick to add that these are prelimnary kits and don’t reflect the exact end hardware, but I thought it was pretty nice that the closest thing they could get to the graphic capacity of XBox 2 is a Radeon 9800 Pro. Not too shabby.

The only confirmation I’ve found so far seems to come from The Inquirer which I’m not familiar with, so I don’t know how much credit to attribute to them. But read it for yourself and decide:
Xbox 2 SDK released on cool Apple Power Mac G5s and a bit more at Microsoft ships first Xbox 2 development kits using Apple G5 hardware

CNNMoney today published an article on the upcoming Nintendo DS handheld system (Nintendo DS details begin to emerge – Mar. 3, 2004). You’ll recall this is the handheld with two 3 inch LCD screens.

According to an analyst’s report, they’ve managed to cram a 2 hour movie onto a 128 meg flash cartridge and played it back on the DS. The speculation is that Nintendo is going to broaden the range of applications for the gizmo beyond gaming and into multimedia entertainment and…well why am I yammering? It’s all in the article.

This is a neat battle shaping up though, with the recently delayed Sony PSP in one corner, and the Nintendo DS in the other. Wouldn’t it be great if MS surprised us with a handheld at E3? It could be a modified PDA in the same way the XBox is basically a modified PC.

So I’m watching this week’s Pulse and they have a bit on the new James Bond game (James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing). And I’d heard they got the stars to do the voices and all that, but it never really clicked with me until I saw them in action.

I mean, its quite a cast!
Pierce Brosnan as Bond
John Cleese as Q
Dame Judi Dench as M
Wilem Dafoe as Nikolai Diavolo

Plus people I’ve never heard of, but I guess are Somebody
Heidi Klum as Dr. Katya Nadanova (a definite Bond Girl)
Shannon Elizabeth as Serena St. Germaine (ditto)
Mya as Agent Mya Sterling (ditto again, and she also sings the theme song)

Not shown in the piece but listed on the website are:
Misato Ito as Miss Nagai (what? Another Bond Girl?)
and of course,
Richard Kiel, as Jaws (does he talk? I thought he just bit)

Suddenly I really want to play this game!

OK, I totally dropped the ball on this one…this is news from last week.

Electronic Arts, the Evil Empire of the videogame world, has shut down Origin Studios. The end of yet another era, thanks to EA. Word is that they gave employees a choice of being relocated to California, or a severance package, so maybe they handled this situation with a bit more tact than, say, the closing of Westwood Studios.

Anyway, apparently this won’t have any impact on UO:X or the next expansion pack for Ultima Online.

Sony delays launch of PSP

Sony has informed publishers, developers and retailers that while it still plans to launch its handheld gaming and entertainment device in Japan this holiday season, the PSP will not hit shelves in North America or Europe until calendar year 2005.

More specifically, it should be out by March 2005.

This changes things a bit…the Nintendo DS handheld will be the only new hardware on the market for the Christmas ’04 season (unless Phantom actually ships, of course).

Brian Fargo visited G4TV.Com (G4’s weekly gaming ‘talk show’) to talk about his new company, inXile (warning for folks at work: the site makes noise), and more specifically their upcoming remake of The Bard’s Tale. Since I had the ep Tivo’d I thought I’d transcribe a couple of Q&A’s for you folk.

G4: What is the storyline, and what genre is the game?

BF: Well, its a role playing game, and certainly thats a genre that I’m well known for, and its an action-rpg, so anybody familiar with say, Dark Alliance or Champions of Norrath would know the style of gameplay, but at the same time its more like my old PC games and I’m bringing a deep, non-linear PC mentality to the console world.

G4: What characters are we going to be playing as?

BF: Well you’ll be playing as The Bard, which is not your typical RPG hero. In fact he’s not a hero at all, he’s more like Han Solo in the fact that he’s really not interested in saving the world. He’s interested in ‘coin and cleavage’ as we say and that’s about it. If there’s not something in it for him…tch, no interest.

G4: What makes this a new adventure, what kinds of things from the original game are in there, and what kinds of things are completely different?

BF: Really most of it is completely different. The thing that made the original Bard’s Tale work back in the 80’s…what made that work has nothing to do with today. I’ve been playing and making role playing games now for 20 years and so, I sorta looked at the genre and I thought “We gotta do something completely different.” And so, for us, I’m just tired of breaking open barrels to find the skeleton key. We can’t stand that stuff anymore. So we came at it with a very mature sortof perspective on it. It parodies, in fact, many of the old rpg… some of the conventions that we actually helped create.

G4: Tell me a little bit about the RPG genre. Obviously there are millions of RPG gamers out there. You’ve obviously made some of the best. What is it that sets RPG gamers apart from the regular kind of shoot-em-up crowd?

BF: Hmm. Well, I think they’re looking for a deeper experience, really, for the most part, you know?. More of a narrative experience. Action games are just purely a function of beating it and getting to the next level, and there’s a certain amount of that with RPGs but you know we focus on looking at the human side of things. And on sortof good and evil, and in our case humor, and human motivations. And so I just think they’re looking for a deeper experience.

I have to say that the idea of combining the fun and fast gameplay of action-rpgs with a storyline with some meat is pretty intriguing to me. I’m looking forward to this one!