Well I said it before. The Conduit was really just a tech demo formed into a game. It was more engine than substance. That's why the level design was retro 80's style FPS. As a technological piece of work it was fantastic. It did indeed display advance graphic techniques using the TEV.

The Grinders/their engine(can't think of the name at the moment) can render about the same number of baddies as does Left 4 Dead, maybe a few more since I don't recall ever seeing more than about 30 zombies at any given time and most tend to despawn quickly. Their Imposter engine for the Grinder runs about 60 enemies(this is likely offline number, who knows online). They are also revising their engines as they go. though already in development games don't gain such benefits.

So my concern isn't so much the capability of the game since TC had spot on gameplay that would work perfectly fine for L4d style, but in the effect that the Maps will be sucktastic. I don't recall any levels in TC that were well good. This could have been intended design, but it could also be just bad level design.


On the other topic. It is possible to turn out multiple quality games within descent time frames. It has to do with work distribution. Often the in question AA/A games from studios are dropped on a single studio who will do nothing else. This sometimes leaves various personal resources not doing much or just doing the same thing over and over in essence wasting money. How many times does a song or texture need to be made for a model. It's also not the case where it's the last day of development and the texture artists are just finishing. Reality wise you can have your textures and various personal resources finished and only come back to do touch up if things change. This is the benefit of smaller studios. When one personal resource has done the majority of work they can go on to work on a different project and only come back when needed. At EA, Nintendo, Capcom, SE.... they don't do that. One team one game. That's not to say there is some shifting of staff around, but don't expect it to be general practice with these companies.

They over 130+ employees and have track record of working on multiple titles at once abeit being liscensed games and have done that for years so it is certainly possible for them base on their history to make multiple concurrent games.So manpower is not issue it all execution...Example EA Studios have more artist per studio than most any one else but still make crap games every once a while.

Both Gladiator A.D. and The Grinder look good so far.

Character models in Gladiator A.D. are great, motion is fluid and realistic, the game is absolutely brutal (brutal enough to make me cringe), and everything works well, even the small details like the splatter of blood that drips down on the camera when you get hit to the look of fear on the loser's face when he's about to get his arms chopped off.  The art work on Gladiator A.D. is excellent.  I've been searching for fighting games on all conoles to see how it stacks up against them, but I can't find anything like it.  Typical fighters usually have over the top graphics that I can't relate to -- when a character has their spine ripped out, it simply looks fake and that ruins the effect.  In Gladiator A.D., you can practically feel their pain when their family jewels are stomped on or their arms are chopped off.  It does a great job at bringing hom the brutality that the gladiators of the time faced.  I'm not ready to say it's a great game obviously because I haven't played it, but the level and character designs are excellent.

The Grinder looks good too.  Some people call it a Left for Dead rip off, but it's obviously different.  Different setting that hasn't been done before in a game like this, different enemies, different weapons, different characters, etc.  The one level I've seen looks really good and the character design of the enemies are pretty good, though the humans in this game could use some work.

Both titles have tons of promise and look original.  We'll see what the final product looks like, but so far there's no reason to dismiss these games based on what has been shown so far.  I almost hope that they don't show too much though since I don't want to feel like I've already played the games before they are released.

They failed to produce even an A game (The Conduit - 69 meta), yet they hyped it insanely. I really don't think they can pull it off with Gladiator or Grinder either. They lack the talent, specialy their art director.

HVS is a smaller studio but you must remember they are re-using their graphics/physics/AI engines from the Conduit. If you watch the existing screens it looks like the Conduit with more enemies. Infact the hand looks almost identical and the only different is instead of shooting at Aliens your shooting at Vampires and Warewolves.

Will HVS wow me? I don't think so. Will I go out and buy Grinder? Possibly. I liked The Conduit it was a great game and with WiiSpeak its almost the same kind of experiance Halo offers. But at best Grinder will still fall short of Halo. Then again in Grinder the enemies don't have guns and the game appears to be trying to emulate games like LeftForDead!

Also look at the existing images. The enemies are generic. You make one Vampire and just duplicate him 100x. Also the game will probubly air on the short side (Like Conduit) so they do not have to waste resources building more levels. Lastly I think HVS is trying to capitalize on its ability to launch two titles nearby one another. To build up a better reputation.

Though as you said HVS is good at one thing. Hyping the heck out of everything they develope. Though I've got to say that backfires when you fail to deliver!

Why does it matter what Metacritic says?  I mean, after you buy a game, you don't need somebody else to tell you how good it is.  Personally, I don't play Metacritic and I find reviews are often misleading.  They rate Little King's Story highly so I go out and spend $50 on it, but I bring it home and find out that it puts me to sleep.  That game was repetitive, dumbed down, and boring.  The graphics were bad and It felt like it had been done before.  The Conduit wasn't the best game in the world, but it wasn't terrible.  We all knew what the art looked like before the game even came out.  You can see the work of the artists on both Gladiator A.D. and The Grinder right now -- and it doesn't look bad at all.

Another game that I'm enjoying is Valhalla Knights: Eldar Saga.  This game is averaging something like a 3, but I find it's much more fun then games like Little King's Story that scored really well.  I think reviewers are aften out of touch with reality.

Well maybe I'm spoiled, but I don't enjoy playing bad games. Also I don't have the time to waste it on bad games, I have to try and pick up the best. Metacritic is VERY important for everyone, if the game has under 70 %, it will most likely be inferior to game that has over 90%. It's the opinion of more than 70 professionals in the case of Conduit. And that says a LOT.

Ofcourse there are games that have high rating and might not be suited for you, due to their playstyle or something else. The same way you disliked LKS, I dislike No More Heroes, even though it is a pretty high rated game. But when the game recieve bad reviews universaly, I know I'm not in for a good treat, seriously... Maybe I'm hard to please, but HVS games don't spark even a little interest in me. They all seems so generic, without an idea.

If you devleop for Wii, you know that the graphic will suck, so you should use some smart gameplay ideas to make your game appeal to anyone. The Conduit sold any copies only because it was a multiplayer title on Wii, where there aren't any similar decent games. But you if you have PC or even other console, you'd be dumb to buy The Conduit, as that game is inferior even to the old Half-Life 1 mods (TF, CS, NS) - IN MY HONEST OPINION.

I don't like No More Heros either, but the point is sometimes there are decent games out there that are rated lowly just as there are bad games that are rated highly.  I can agree that The Conduit would not have survived on another console, but both Gladiator A.D. and The Grinder are fairly unique and if the games are solid enough, I think they would make it on other consoles (where you could tell The Conduit's only option was the Wii from the begining).  I'm not saying you should pre-order the games now, but keep an open mind and look at how they differ from The Conduit.

the conduit weren't great so i hope they do a much better job with The Grinder.

From what I've seen of their footage (mainly news and videos on IGN) I was quiete underwhelmed by both, Grinder looks like tunnel fps from the wild west featuring vampires and other crap (what's unique about that?) and Gladiator A.D. looks like rock-paper-scissors fighter with underwhelming visual presentation. I'd say that Conduit is looking best out of these 3...