Full Auto
Full Auto for the 360 was one of my top 3 games of the show. This was the only 360 game (I believe) we were able to play ourselves over at the SEGA booth as they are the publisher. Now over at MS's 360 area is where they are doing live demos, this is where I was approached by Lead Programmer, Guillaume Provost of Pseudo Interactive out of Toronto Canada. After talking for a bit I told him that my legs were so tired that I had to sit down so he said no problem and we collapsed over to the side as to not get walked on by my fellow gamer geeks. Funny thing is I spoke with him for the longer than anyone else, but have few notes. Reasons being there was not a lot of info on the game and so we talked about development in general. I asked about his thoughts on dev disabling V-sync to fee up processing power, I also asked him about his experience with dealing with MS etc. This is where all the 'don't quote me' or 'off the record' came in.
Ok, back to the game. Vehicular Combat at its best. This game looks so awesome, truly jaw dropping when seen in action. It was like you were playing some sort of tech demo rather than Alpha code running on 1 core. The game takes place in one large city which is divided into districts where point to point or circuit races are held. In this version the cars had machine guns and missiles. You steer with the left stick and can aim separately if you wish with the right. 'A' button for machine guns, right stick button for missiles. Sounds like nothing special but the graphics are so detailed and everything, and I mean everything, is destructible and remains destructed lap after lap. Bits of debris fly out the hellacious flames and smoke after you lay waste to a train passing over head. Now the game encourages you to take chances and gives you a 'UN-WREK' feature that allows you to rewind that last crash you took into that 8 pump gas station where your car was blown to smithereens. This rewind effect is very original and is hard to describe but trust me, this game will please the graphic whore in all of us.
Now as you drive and blast you way through the course you can fly up ramps to reach tops of buildings to find the short cuts sprinkled about. LIVE play will hold 8 and feature a 'Highlight Reel' of your last race that you can save to your HD. When I asked Guillaume why only 8 players, he said with the massive amount of destruction the 8 players will bring to everyone's screen that this was quite taxing on the processors. If they want more cars they would have to tune down the destruction.
| 6/8/2005 Eric 'Jetson' Pfoutz |
