Esta semana se celebró la Gamescom 2010 en Colonia, y ha resultado ser mi primera experiencia en una feria del sector de los Videojuegos. Fue una visita relámpago, en plan “Blitzkrieg”. Tan solo permanecí en el recinto unas 5 horas y media, pero me dió tiempo a ver todo lo que tenía ganas de ver. Incluso atendí un par de presentaciones y conseguí algo de merchandising (La camiseta del Portal 2 me la llevo a la tumba…). En el siguiente vídeo veréis como fueron dichas 5 horas y media para mi: cómo las viví, cómo las disfruté y qué opiniones me crearon. ¡Disfrutadlo!

ENGLISH: For my non-spanish followers: the following video sums up my experience at Gamescom 2010. Unfortunately, it is in Spanish only, but if I get at least 10 requests, I will gladly subtitle it into English. Promised.

Today is one of those important milestones for Yager Development. Our game makes its first contact with the gaming community. Spec Ops: The Line Exclusive Multiplayer Beta is already OUT and you could be one of the lucky gamers that can play our Multiplayer mode many months before the game will be released!  Just SIGN UP HERE and wait for the answer. If you are selected, your feedback will contribute in the improvement of our MP experience. You can be part of the game!  I have my key already. See you in the battlefield! ;D

More information about Spec Ops: The Line provided by GameTrailers! This time, a brief  but illustrative interview to Cory Davis, Lead Designer of Spec Ops: The Line and an old friend of mine, featuring some in-game scenes never seen before. Enjoy!

As one of the devs involved in the “Spec Ops: The Line” production, I’m proud to share with you the newest trailer of our awesome game. Do not hesitate of giving us your opinion and expectations about our game. You can join Yager’s Facebook Group or write a comment here to do so. Enjoy!

If the video is not displayed correctly, you can use the following LINK.

You can also download it from HERE.

I’ve been waiting for this moment for a looong time, guys. SPEC OPS: The Line has been finally revealed in the SPIKE TV VGA 2009 as a World Premiere, and gamers from all around the world are receiving the new teaser very positively! Enjoy with the new footage!

As you may know, I’m working here at Yager Development as Level Designer… and now I can proudly say, IN THIS AWESOME GAME!

Last week I got Borderlands for XBOX360, one of those games I heard about but I wasn’t really interested on playing. I don’t know how it managed to slip into my collection, and what a nice surprise, it’s a good game! I have to admit that I have some kind of fetishism in games with numbers coming out from thing’s heads since Final Fantasy VII, and I enjoyed this game mostly because of that. Mixing the RPG factor with a FPS game was pretty clever, and I enjoyed every single second I played it, although this game suffers from the same dependency than Left 4 Dead. If you play alone, you will get bored pretty soon, but playing with company… oh, God, it’s just awesome.

LIKED:

Partying together: As in Left 4 Dead, Borderlands improves when playing it with friends, specially if these friends are using characters with different abilities or skills. Each character provides an unique advantage for every combat and sometimes you find yourself applying an improvised strategy without even noticing it.

Living in a dumpster: Pandora is a fucked up planet, where living equals surviving. That was brilliantly represented along the game, with arid lands, gigantic scrapyards, dirty rivers and improvised towns built of trash and metal sheets. The art side is very neat and simple and the neo-western music is not intrusive and neither boring. It just woks perfectly.

Customization in the right amount: This part always scares me in games like this. Too many possibilities is annoying and not many is disappointing, but Borderlands has a good balance in this aspect. Lots of weapons, lots of grenade types, class modifiers, shields and skills, with no co-relation between each other, which simplifies the whole thing.

A nice looking post-apocalyptic land: Cell-Shading saved this game, in my opinion. Otherwise the visual aspect of Borderlands would be boring, bland and everything else but special. Kudos for whoever decided to make such a drastic and risky move in the last moment.

DISLIKED:

Please wait while we load the world: Pandora is an open world, or at least that’s the feeling that you have when you start the game. It’s just a pity that they couldn’t get rid of those annoying “loading” screens when travelling to new areas. I understand the reasons why they are there but, as I said, it’s a pity.

One car’s land: Vehicles are an important key in this game, without them, moving around Pandora would be a pain in the ass. It would be nice if they would include more vehicles or upgrades for the car that you’re driving all the time. It’s nice that you can change the color of the vehicle or choose between a machine gun or rocket launcher for the co-pilot, but the possibilities concerning vehicles could be much wider in my opinion.

What the hell is all about?: I can sum up Borderlands plot in 3 steps…

• Collect 10 diaries and hear something about a key.
• Meet all the factions and watch them fighting each other.
• Kill a giant vagina for no reason. The end.

As a player, I was playing the game just for the fun of it. The plot didn’t interest me a bit at any moment because they didn’t make the minimum effort to make it look as interesting as the Universe the plot is based on. Halo 3 effect.

Beyond the simplicity: I mentioned before that I liked Borderland’s simplicity concerning customization, but there is only one “complex” thing I was begging to find at some point of the game: weapons customization. I know that having this feature is kind of pointless knowing the insane amount of weapons that you can find in the game, but still, it would be helpful.

In conclusion, Borderlands will not disappoint you. If rumors are true, a sequel must be in pre-production already, and taking the first one as a foundation for its sequel only means that the second one is going to be as good as its prequel, with some very necessary additions.

My veredict: 8/10

Before coming to Germany and joining Yager Development, I worked for 1 year and 3 months at Pyro Studios, in Madrid. We worked in a next-gen project titled COPS: The Police Experience, which supposed to be the next Holy Grail in Spanish videogame history. Sadly, and after 5 years of development, the project was cancelled one week before  last year’s Christmas. However, by the time that happened, I was already freezing my balls in Berlin (And happy about that, I must say…)

Since then, this project was abandoned and forgotten in time… until this week, because a website called Unseen64 has leaked some info and media about the game. Of course, I already had all this stuff at home, but I couldn’t publish it due to a Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA) which forbids me to do it so. Probably some pissed-off ex-employee from Pyro Studio leaked this media, and I’m glad he did it. Now I can talk freely about it!

So, this was the first project I worked on when I joined the industry 2 years ago. I must say that the idea behind was pretty cool, although the execution was bland and boring. This could have been a big hit, and it looked amazing from outside, but inside, the team was rotten, tired, pissed and skeptical. Most of us felt relieved when we heard that the project was finally cancelled, although I felt sorry for many of my ex-colleagues being fired in Christmas season.

Anyway, watch the video and comment what do you think about it. Some bits of the video shows a few of my ideas, like the shootout in the catwalk, the player shooting the glass to find a better sheltered path to progress, the robber shooting with an Uzi through the window and then falling through it and the shooting range (Yep, shoot-shoot-shoot). Enjoy!

More media at Unseen64

Well, I’m disappointed with this one, not only because I was expecting a better game, but also I kinda feel like this franchise is going in the wrong direction. Of course looked like a good idea replacing tracks and using a huge environment instead, where you can move freely without restrictions… but in my opinion, this was not a good idea, or was not perfectly translated into the Burnout Universe.

First of all, driving is all you do, all the time… you drive to the next challenge, you drive the challenge, you win the challenge, you drive to the next one, you drive again, etc… my point is: when driving becomes something special? Of course is spectacular most of the times, but this feels like a fighting game where all the characters are looking the same, but the fights are insanely spectacular. It has several gamemodes like marked man (chase), stunt race (stunts), race and road rage (the real deal)… and yep, that’s all. Basically 4 gamemodes (I’m not counting Burning Route because is just another plain race) for a HUGE environment. Feels kinda disappointing, indeed. Is like the Assassin’s Creed of the racing games. An optional game mode called ShowTime (previously called Crash Time) can be activated at any time and gives the player the ability to start a massive accident in any of the Paradise City roads. The result is spectacular, but it’s completely unrealistic compared with the rest of the game, and also has nothing to do with the old Crash Time game mode.

I don’t dislike everything in Burnout: Paradise. The environment is highly detailed, watching the cars crashing never gets boring, the music selection is good (I loved the classical selection!) and it is, without any doubt, the fastest racing game I’ve ever played, together with F-Zero GX.

My veredict: 6/10

I’m trying to be up to date with all these games that I always wanted to play, and this week it’s turn for Heart of Darkness and Skate 2:

Yes, we’re talking about the Heart of Darkness for Playstation that we all (suppose to) know. From the creators of Another World, this game tried to be a revolution which only could bring half of what it firstly intended. Which makes this game so special is the outstanding visuals, the beautiful soundtrack (Being the first game with a real orchestrated OST ever) and the story that it delivers. It feels like a movie, with all its advantages and disadvantages: the game is too short (I finished it in 4 hours), the controls feel stiff and it’s just impossible to know when your character is going to jump when he’s running. The combats are mostly unfair for the player and sometimes is not very clear when running or facing the enemies is the required action to advance in the level. Another thing that mystified me is this secondary character called “Amigo”. When the action is set in another different Universe, is just way too weird to find a native tribe from God knows which planet speaking… yes, spanish. Well, something which supposed to be spanish, but spanish after all. This is just anecdotic, not annoying or offensive (Actually, I kinda like it). The final level was totally anticlimatic and hard as hell, and deserves so many insults that I just prefer to forget about it. Overall, not bad, not good. Worth checking if you have the chance.

My veredict: 6/10

I’ve been always a huge Tony Hawk Pro Skate fan… until the third game was released. Then, I just lost track. But THPS2 meant so much for me that I cannot express with words how AWESOME that game was. Since then, I’ve been looking for something similar with no success… until now. Skate 2 delivers what a skating game should be. I missed the first Skate game, but after checking how BIG and complete is the list of features that this game brought compared with its prequel, I don’t think I’m missing much. The whole experience feels right, the tricks are easy to perform, the city is huge and very nicely detailed, with thousands of possibilities and claiming to be explored. The game modes are fun and the story mode gets trickier and challenging. Overall, it’s a very well done game. Some flaws? Yepp: the music is repetitive, landing after a jump is usually your worst enemy in the game, annoying pedestrians/skaters destroying the awesome score that you were about to achieve and unexpected blackouts in your skater when he’s about to land safely. These problems really grind my gears. However, the online modes are fucking sweet and the Hall of Meat mode is just hilarious. Something that I really loved is the Skate Reel thingy (Check some of my media HERE). It offers so many interesting and fun stuff in this game that is just impossible avoid the fact that this game is übergreat.

My veredict: 9/10

Now playing:

• Playstation 2: ICO
• Nintendo DS: Rhythm Heaven
• XBOX 360: Burnout Paradise
• PC: RotorScope – The Secret of the Endless Energy

Last week I’ve been playing two games highly recommended by some of my colleagues. The first one is Shadow Complex, recently published for XBLA and available for 1200MS, and the second one is the well-known Assasin’s Creed. I must say that both of them were surprisingly good, even when I was expecting exactly the opposite thing.

I’m usually pretty cautious when a game gets highly popular among the gamers. If something is popular should be either a sign of good quality or fun experience… but then I remember Halo 3 and I’m right back into the cautious thingy. Fortunately, Shadow Complex was a nice surprise, an enjoyable and fun experience which has brought back a genre that was almost lost in the past: 2D Adventure games. It’s hard to hide the close relation that this game has with one of my favourite games of all times, Castlevania Symphony of the Night, because it’s basically the same game, with a modern setting and different mechanics. But hey! This is not bad at all! Shadow Complex is good enough to survive to that comparison. Apparently the plot is somehow related to a novel written by an homophobic dude that gave some bad reputation to the game before it was released, but just forget about that shit and focus on the game! It’s good. Damn good! Probably it would be better if you wait a couple of months until it drops the price, but if you cannot wait, I can asure you that this game is worth those 1200MS. Oh! Did I mention it was developed using Unreal Engine 3.0?

My veredict: 8/10

Yeah, I know… Assassin’s Creed is already old. I had the game since last year, but until last week I didn’t finished it, and I did it in one long sitting session. First I will talk about its flaws: it’s repetitive, it’s repetitive, it’s repetitive and it’s damn repetitive. YES, everybody knows that already. The gameplay is basically a sandbox game split in 6 challenges: climbing towers (In order to unlock more challenges),  sword fights, thievery, interrogatories, races and assassinations. You will have to repeat them like hundreds of times along the game, and I have to admit that I enjoyed playing them (Specially the sword fights), but of course, this is only my opinion. Many people felt tired and abandoned the game after a couple of hours, and I cannot blame them, because I did the same long ago. Everybody missed some variety in the missions, specially the main ones  had no difference with the secondary ones at all. In the other hand, the game is very well polished, looks solid and the ambience is just perfect. Also, the plot was deeper than I thought in the first place (which really caught me by surprise) and opened a lots of questions that hopefully will be answered in the second game that is about to be released. Let’s hope that many of the problems this game had will be fixed in the upcoming sequel (Specially about the variety!).

My veredict: 7/10