US, March 11, 2010 - You may recall last year we ran a little preview of a game called The Grinder, a first-person shooter made for Wii by High Voltage Software, the team that brought The Conduit to life on the Nintendo console. This game was to be a first-person shooter follow-up to The Conduit that featured four player co-op gameplay in a horror setting, similar to Valve's Left 4 Dead series.
You may also recall our story we ran just a few short weeks ago that revealed that High Voltage Software was making The Grinder as a multi-console game, versions for the Wii and Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, for release in late 2011.
There's another chapter to this tale, and it's unfolded at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week. Behind closed doors, High Voltage Software revealed to us the first playable of The Grinder on the Xbox 360. And it was not a first-person shooter. At all.
Instead, it's a top-down shooter in similar vein to Robotron or Gauntlet, with all four players sharing the same screen and controlling their characters with dual-analog control: left stick for movement, right stick for shooting.
Shot of the Xbox 360 version. Check out more by clicking it.
The theme of the game is still the same: a wild west setting with towns overrun with vampires, imps, werewolves and other crazy killers. The idea is to blast your way through the environments with the variety of weapons at your disposal, all the while picking up health, ammunition and other items that'll increase your weapons' power.
The game looked sharp on the Xbox 360 console but it definitely has a ways to go – a year and a half is a good amount of time to get all the bells and whistles into a game and tweak the controls and optimize the framerate.
The reason for the change: while The Grinder would have been one of very few first person shooters on the Wii, it'd be among several on the higher def consoles and the team decided to not enter that genre glut with a "me too" product.
No final decision has been made about the Wii version, however – it could end up the first-person design that it was always originally intended to be, or it could end up a version of the game that's being created for the 360 and PlayStation 3.
- Other pics here - http://au.media.xbox360.ign.com/media/060/060493/imgs_1.html
- Source article - http://au.wii.ign.com/articles/107/1076977p1.html
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High Voltage Software have turned to shit in my view. Two games have now been completely changed, for the worse (in terms of my Wii tastes), if and when they come to the Wii.
“When we make some new announcement and if there is no positive initial reaction from the market, I try to think of it as a good sign because that can be interpreted as people reacting to something groundbreaking. ...if the employees were always minding themselves to do whatever the market is requiring at any moment, and if they were always focusing on something we can sell right now for the short term, it would be very limiting. We are trying to think outside the box.” - Satoru Iwata - This is why corporate multinationals will never truly understand, or risk doing, what Nintendo does.
Pixel Art can be fun.
