N'Gai Croal
|
Jul 12, 2007 06:28 AM
Has any young franchise ever labored under so many
freighted
expectations? Long before Guerrilla Games' completed Killzone in 2004,
back
when word was slowly was starting to leak about a mysterious
first-person shooter from Sony Computer Entertainment Europe named Kin,
that same grapevine carried word that Sony was calling this shooter its
"Halo killer." Sony credibly denied this, saying that the frenzy was
being whipped up instead by gossipy game journalists, yet the
damn-near-impossible-to-live-up-to label
stuck, as much from the desires of shooter-bereft PlayStation 2 owners
as from the derision of Halo fanatics. And while the end result had
several compelling attributes--its riveting opening movie; its muted, blown out color palette; its painterly art direction;
and its deliberate evocation of major wars and conflicts of the
twentieth century within a futuristic setting--the first Killzone was
ultimately much too ambitious for the PS2 to handle, resulting in one
of the best mediocre games we've ever had fun playing.Next,
when Killzone 2's mind-blowing E3 2005 trailer turned out to be a
computer-generated movie, the hearts of all but the stoutest of Sony
fanboys hardened, with many predicting that Guerrilla would never be
able to live up to its own hype. In the wake of that perceived
betrayal, neither 2006's well-received PSP installment (Killzone:
Liberation) nor an intriguingly promising but not-quite-there-yet
technical demonstration of Killzone 2 multiplayer's physics system did
much to sway journalists' opinion. But through it all, SCE and
Guerrilla kept pushing for what they firmly believed they were capable
of achieving. And when the "Killzone 2: Mission Accomplished" slide
came up at the end of the 20-minute demo, followed by loud, sustained
applause from the skeptical crowd of journalists, the gesture
transformed itself from a "F--- you" to a statement of fact: for the
moment, Guerrilla's promise had been realized.
When we arrived at SCE's Santa Monica studios for our world exclusive first hands-on session (see here for our report), we were escorted into a conference room to sit down with Guerrilla managing director
Hermen Hulst, producer Steven ter Heide, and game director Mathijs de
Jonge. We began with another playthrough of the level with de Jonge at
the controls and ter Heide manning a keyboard plugged into the PS3
development kit, periodically slowing down or pausing the action so
that we could discuss a particular detail.
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