The gaming industry enjoyed one of its best years ever in 2004. Every platform featured a great number of memorable, high-quality games. With 2005 upon us, however, we at GameSpot look to the near future with anticipation while wondering if and how the industry might trump the smashing success of last year. Though the release slate may lack some of the sizzling franchises that were refreshed just months ago, it's quite clear that there's no lack of promising or exciting games on the horizon. It's perhaps a more encouraging sign that many of the games we're looking forward to are original properties and are not new iterations of existing series.
Each of the editors in this feature has picked two upcoming games that he or she is anxious to play. While you might still be catching your breath from 2004 or working on playing through a large backlog of games, take some time with us to explore what's in store for gaming in this feature: GameSpot's Most Anticipated Games: 2005.
Destroy All Humans!
One of my favorite aspects of gaming, or really even entertainment in general, is the medium's ability to give me a chance to view things from an alternate perspective. Whether it's an opportunity to experience a life of crime or live the life of a plucky robot, there's always a new perspective to be found. However, there's one that has eluded me up to this point...and that's the perspective of a marginally homicidal alien invader who's hell-bent on humanity's destruction. Well, the good news is that a game that offers just this point of view comes out in April. I'll soon have to wait no longer thanks to THQ and Pandemic's action adventure game Destroy All Humans!
Seriously, how great a concept is this? You're one of the last of a race of aliens that has survived solely through cloning. Since too much cloning can muck up the gene pool, especially with regard to your character Crypto 137 (who's the 137th clone in his gene line), you're off on a mission to Earth to extract fresh DNA from the human race, which just happens to descend from your own race. To do so, you'll be sneaking around the planet using mental powers to both mess with and enslave the population, and then you'll inevitably just blow the hell out of everything with your array of extraterrestrial weaponry and your big honking flying saucer. If this doesn't sound like the makings of a bizarre and hysterical action game, I don't know what does.
What gets me most about this game, though, is its sense of style. Pandemic is really going for that retro sci-fi feel, but with a kind of self-aware ironic appeal, much like Tim Burton's Mars Attacks!...only better. From Crypto 137's mildly monstrous, bigheaded look to the goofy-looking flying saucer you'll find yourself flying around in, it's obvious that Pandemic has some affection for the 1950s-era cheeseball sci-fi genre. The fact that Pandemic actually went out and licensed a bunch of music from famed film composer Bernard Herrmann, who wrote scores for everything from Citizen Kane to Psycho to The Day the Earth Stood Still, and then had the songs remixed by LA DJ Jason Bentley, gives the whole game even more of a quirky feel. Sounds rad to me.
The Punisher
So, yeah, The Punisher movie sucked. We all know this. So why should anyone give a toss about the game? Well, for one, it has nothing to do with the movie, save for film lead Thomas Jane providing the voice for The Punisher. This game seems to be primarily modeled after the Marvel comic book Punisher, complete with a totally over-the-top sense of violence and several of Frank Castle's most deadly archenemies. In fact, this might just about be the most crazily violent game I've seen in a long time. This is the kind of game that will give senators heart attacks.
So what makes The Punisher so crazy? It's not immediately apparent what makes the game so violent from the first time you play it. At first, it seems like you're just running around shooting bad guys, while occasionally shanking them. Then, all of a sudden, you're not just shanking them, you're actually shoving knives through their skulls. Ouch! Then you realize you can use bad guys as human shields. Way cool. Then you'll start interrogating guys for information. But then, this wouldn't be The Punisher if you were just asking people nicely to tell you what's going on. Nah, you'll have to press the butt of your gun against a guy's forehead or start throttling him violently to get something from him. And in some cases, you can even use environments for specialized interrogations, which leads to such wonderful things as dangling a guy off the roof of a five-story building, shoving a guy closer and closer to the death end of a wood chipper, and even holding a bad guy's head just above a pool of deadly flesh-eating piranhas. And, of course, once you're done with an enemy, you can either just let him go or you can send him to a gruesome doom. We think the choice here is obvious.
OK. So by now you get the point. This game is overflowing with crazy ultraviolence, and it's is all the more entertaining for it. With that said, there are parts that seem a little too Max Payne-esque for their own good. Admittedly, I've only played this game in short spurts, so for all I know, it could turn out to be a one-trick pony. But, hey, what I've seen has offered more than enough to pique my interest, so I'm greatly looking forward to seeing how it turns out in the end.
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Punisher was still a good game.
CdnKou 4 years ago 11
no, the violence doesnt make you a bad person
tangerine734 4 years ago 10