Rezzed PC and Indie Games: Part 1

Over a recent weekend, I was off to Brighton to check out the inaugural convention known as Rezzed, put on by our illustrious friends over at Rocks, Paper, and Shotguns (you know the one, “Buy nine shotguns, get the tenth one free”) and the fine chaps at Eurogamer.

Ah, Brighton, with your inchoate little Lanes, spilling with the remnants of last night’s revelry, and just across from the convention centre itself, a charming view of a pier razed by fire. Rezzed, if you didn’t already know, is the PC Game and Indie showcase for nerds “with a taste for the finer things in gaming”. And one, I might add, not bound by allegiances to crumbling old platforms, or shackled to a publisher with less sense than a bewildered gadfly.

My first impression of the show floor was that it, like a particular Bjork music video, was Shhh! Oh, so quiet! To be honest, I didn’t know what to expect exactly, and after the bombast that is E3, and the appropriately reserved pomp that is the Eurogamer Expo, would Rezzed be as big and as busy?

In fact, the comparison is apt here, as many of the booths looked like they were simply lifted from E3 or the aforementioned Eurogamer expo and dropped at the Brighton Centre. This is by no means a bad thing, it’s just if you ever wondered where all those magnificent booths from E3 disappear to, it’s probably to events like Rezzed. Despite it not being noisy, I still felt like a kid in a candy store, with all the titles I wanted to see or was hoping to get a closer look at.

The first game I got roped into playing, though, was Monsters Vs. Pirates. One of the developers from Dreamfire Games actually stopped me and said, “Hey, you wanna try my game?” Design-wise it is very much in the same vein as Plants vs. Zombies (perhaps it’s meant to pay homage to the Pop Cap title), but realised in the Unity 3D engine, although perhaps not as charming as its 2D counterpart.

The demo didn’t have all of the features on show, but it seemed like your typical tower defence title. Although instead of upgrading them the traditional way, you have one chef monster that makes pancakes to feed them. It was still early, but I could see this one doing okay on iOS, a platform they’re targeting for future release. You can check it out for yourself, as there’s a beta on Facebook.

I think one of the most popular games on the show floor was Hotline Miami from Devolver Digital. It seems appropriate then that it’s been announced as Eurogamer’s game of show for Rezzed. It was a top down pixel-violent game reminiscent of an era somewhere between 16 and 32-bit, where the player is trying to make his or her way through rooms filled with thugs and other hostiles, all clad in Crockett ‘n Tubbs style 80s garb. I don’t know if it was the pulse-pounding soundtrack, the apparently high level of challenge, but there was just something so charming about it and it generated quite a crowd.

Visually, it reminded me of something that Brian Provinciano (creator of Retro City Rampage) fame would have made, just with bigger character sprites (and perhaps fewer pop culture references).

I guess the violence was appropriately pixely enough to not force the game to be included in the “Over 18” section of the show floor, but at one point, I saw a young woman wheel up a toddler in a buggy and plop herself down to start playing, whilst her child looked on. As she figured out how to burst through the doorway, mount the poor white-suited sod in the room and pummel him to death, resulting in a spray of pixelated blood across the screen, I couldn’t help but grimace in discomfort. Still, it was a fun kind of discomfort, I guess.

I then rushed off to see the Developer session held by Dean “Rocket” Hall of Day Z fame. The room was packed, and filled with a sense that we were all on the same boat. Okay, so the boat smelled a little bit, but we were all part of a movement, man. We’re tired as hell of CoD and not going to take it anymore! So, given that 99% of the room seemed to already be familiar with the concept of Day Z (“authentic” survival experience… during a Zombie apocalypse– please go and play it if you haven’t already), Dean rushed through the presentation to get to the Q&A segment.

We were treated to some shots of what they hope to achieve with Day Z in the near future, the biggest of which is transitioning to a standalone product. Dean and his cohort are hoping to follow the Minecraft model, although they’re still investigating other avenues like the burgeoning Free-to-Play model. He showed off some screenshots of what the landing web page might look like, with statistics, a log of recent events, and the like. Given the game is currently running on the Arma 2 engine, lots of questions came up about “realism” in the game, and what constitutes that. Dean was quick to insert the term “authenticity” in place of “realism” however, as he felt that was what they were striving for in Day Z, hence the removal of karma systems that might obstruct emergent gameplay. Dean was extremely charismatic and at the end of the talk he invited people over to the Day Z booth to chat and ask more questions.

Next up was a half-hourly presentation for X-COM: Enemy Unknown, a title that I personally am very looking forward to actually playing. It was a hands-off demo, and the poor chap from Baltimore who was narrating had obviously had his mojo sapped by the long journey coupled with the repetition of going through the same footage and segments over and over.

I hadn’t seen this particular slice of gameplay before, however, so when I saw that one of the characters (an X-COM version of a Warhammer 40K Psyker) had had his head replaced by one that looked like Sid Meier, I couldn’t help but chuckle. The game’s looking great, though, and what little we actually saw of the gameplay really communicated that this team seems to get the source material and perhaps what made the original game great (and to avoid what made it not so great).

The kickstarter funded Xenonauts was also on display and to me it looked like a remake of the original XCom, with tense turn-based gameply against an alien threat (and lest we forget, soldiers with “Guile hair”). But seriously, I love this kind of game and even though I’m excited about Firaxis’ modern remake, there’s still something compelling about a strategic turn-based game. You know, ones with action points, movement grids, experience points so you can level up your troops, wind, fire, all that of thing! Okay, so maybe there isn’t a six-demon bag in there, but from what I saw of the game, it looks and plays like a faithful homage to the original XCOM should, with the same great tastes going together: base building, squad selection and an isometric perspective, just this time with higher res sprites and a more refined art style. For the uninitiated, the tagline may as well be: “You’re fighting off an alien invasion using nothing but your wits and 150 million dollar apiece fighter jets. Go nuts!”

As I was wandering around, a nice man with a French accent asked me if I wanted to try Far Cry 3 as I was passing by their booth in the “over 18 only” section. I sat down, picked up the 360 controller and was treated to the same titillating (quite literally) intro we saw at E3, with a topless Citra writhing about, then some tattooed Mauri-esque warriors rallying to your character’s speech.

The game engine is looking fantastic. It’s not built upon CryEngine 3 as I had originally assumed, but a modified version of the Dunia engine which powered the last game. Aside from the asinine inverted Y-Axis controls (which couldn’t be changed in the demo), I had a good time with it. The tigers and procedurally generated fire did look fantastic.

I checked out Introversion software’s Prison Architect, which was born out of the ruins of their now-defunct title Subversion. I loved the colourful “scribbly” art style that’s one part blueprint and two parts “Oz”, if it had been drawn by Matt Stone and Trey Parker. I only got to spend a couple of minutes with it, but it seemed to me there were some addictive mechanics here; it was very easy to “draw” in new rooms and watch them be assembled. There were lots of great lighting cues and sound effects as your schematic was built by the cute little diagrammatic figures.

I was already aware of the game, but Unknown World’s Natural Selection 2 was looking fantastic in the build they had on show. If you’re not familiar with the game, which started out originally as a mod for Half-Life, it seamlessly combines RTS and FPS in a compelling tug of war style game with resource management, a commander on both sides, waypoints and a tech tree. It’s taken the developers absolutely ages to get this version going, but the game is showing a lot of polish, particularly at full res (I’m stuck with 720P at home as essentially my iMac is my monitor). I’m still waiting for the powered armour of the “Heavy” class to be implemented in NS2, but I’m sure it will eventually come in a later update.

I didn’t get to play it myself as the queue was inordinately long, but Aliens: Colonial Marines was on show, and I stopped to watch some other people play a multiplayer map against the Sega-shirted staff. As with most of the other uses of the Alien series IP, the iconic bleeping of the motion tracker and the staccato hiss of the pulse rifle go a long way toward immersing the player into the world of Aliens.

I can’t really corroborate this first hand unfortunately, but from what I could tell, the game didn’t look like a tremendous amount of fun to actually play, at least not with strangers at a convention. It seemed important, like in the aforementioned Natural Selection 2, for the marines to stick together and work as a team, but was nigh impossible given the circumstances.

I saw many marines firing into their own fellow humans, and detonating explosives from the underslung grenade launcher, with little or no effect on either aliens or marines. Average Gamer editor Debbie had a good experience with Colonial Marines during the MCM Expo but, to be honest, it looked kind of disappointing. But the UI and other menu graphics seemed superb, if that tells you anything… I seem to mention that a lot; either it’s a commentary on the state of game technology, or I just love user experience. You decide.

Being “The PC and Indie games show”, I’ll be back with Part 2 of Rezzed tomorrow, talking about more of the independent games I saw.

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