Fall 2004 (Part 5) - More Xbox Exclusives
Deep Black 3
Deep Black 3 is the third game in the Xbox's exclusive FPS franchise, published by Microsoft. This is the first game in the series to be developed by an outside studio, but it maintains the familiar gameplay of the first two titles, with a heavy focus on stealth and the requirement that the player get a weapon off an enemy, keeping them sparsely armed otherwise. The graphics have seen a slight improvement from the previous two titles, but the gameplay has seen a big upgrade, with improved AI and the ability to talk to civilians in order to get them to do favors for your characters, such as killing or distracting enemies or stealing items needed to progress through the level. Civilians can be sweet talked or they can be threatened, depending on their temperament and what exactly your character wants to get out of them. The game features a new protagonist, a special forces soldier named Kenneth Vargo, who is tasked with going into an Eastern European country currently in the throes of civil war. Vargo's job isn't to favor any one side, he's tasked with evacuating an American diplomat safely from the country. The diplomat has been taken hostage by the rebels, and Vargo and a small squad of soldiers must find and extract the diplomat by any means necessary. There are also a number of students and tourists in the country that Vargo's team must help extract, and they must do this while causing a minimal amount of casualties, in order to avoid causing an international incident. There are friends and foes on all three sides: the rebels, the ruling government, and the Americans being evacuated all have people who will help or hinder Vargo's quest, and it's the player's job to figure out who they can trust. The game features a somewhat open-ended level system, where fulfilling certain objectives in different ways may cause the player's mission to take a different path. The game's approach to level progression is significantly more open-ended than other games of its day, and it's seen as somewhat of a breath of fresh air. The game features the most loaded voice cast of any game in the series to date, with Carlos Bernard starring as the voice of Vargo, Carmine Giovinazzo and Fred Savage playing two of Vargo's squadmates, and a few talented career voice actors such as John DiMaggio, Cat Taber, and Kevin Michael Richardson playing other minor characters like civilians or rebels.
Deep Black 3 is released exclusively for the Xbox on October 12, 2004. Though developed over a fairly short time, it's still considered an excellent game by many reviewers, with even better reviews than the second game of the series (which was itself lauded significantly more than the first). The civilian dialogue system is particularly highly praised, with some calling it an "RPG-like" system. One reviewer praises the game as "the best installment yet in what has come to be known as the thinking man's FPS". It sees stronger sales than the previous game in the series, and though many would call for Deep Black 4 to be released as soon as 2005, Microsoft decides to put the series on hold for now, making Deep Black 3 the final installment on the original Xbox. They would save the next game for the Xbox 2.
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Fallout: Van Buren
Fallout: Van Buren is the third mainline game in the Fallout series. Developed by Black Isle Studios, the game is quite similar to what was planned for OTL's original Fallout 3 (before the series was given to Bethesda). While Van Buren, like IOTL, was intended to just be a code name for the game, a number of Black Isle staffers including a high-level producer thought that the title sounded "cool", and ultimately, the game would be called Van Buren rather than Fallout 3, named after the "state" of Van Buren which was created out of the southern half of Colorado and the northern parts of Arizona and New Mexico after the nuclear devastation of the world in the late 21st Century. Fallout: Van Buren is a turn-based, tactical RPG, and has a lot of similarities with OTL's Knights Of The Old Republic (despite being developed by Black Isle and not by Bioware), with fully 3-D combat and cutscenes, but not in real time like OTL's Fallout 3. The player still has a great deal of freedom to roam about the wastelands of Van Buren, visiting towns, talking to people, and fighting mutated creatures, Super Mutants, and other denizens of the wastes. The game, like previous Fallout titles, utilizes the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system for character stats. Presper, from the OTL Van Buren concept, returns as the main villain of the game, but instead of being primarily a mad scientist, he's a preacher (but still also a mad scientist), who seeks to use his virus to "cleanse" the world of "inhuman filth". Presper is voiced by Christopher Lloyd, while the protagonist, known as the Prisoner (for being trapped in a prison cell at the start of the game) is unvoiced and can be either male or female. Ron Perlman, as always, serves as the game's narrator. The main quest is a rather short one, though there are lots of sidequests the player can do, with over 50 different settlements of various sizes scattered across Van Buren, each with their own NPCs and missions. The main quest follows the Prisoner as they evade capture by Presper's robots long enough to talk to Presper himself. The player can choose to join Presper's church and help him carry out his mission, or refuse and lead a rebellion. Ultimately, the player can choose whether or not to defy Presper and take over Van Buren (which can have various results depending on the Prisoner's moral alignment) or can choose to carry out Presper's mission, killing all non-humans in Van Buren. There are also variants of this path, including killing Presper but carrying out his mission anyway, or going even farther than Presper and killing most humans as well.
The game is released on both the Xbox and the PC on October 19, 2004. Because Microsoft kicked in some of the funding for the game, it (and the port of the Wasteland Simulator spinoff, which came to the PC in 2003 but won't make it to Xbox until 2006) is released exclusively on the Xbox as far as consoles are concerned. The game is considered to be quite good, with the transition to fully 3-D graphics getting a decent reception from critics and fans (the graphics are considered fairly mediocre on both platforms, though given the size of the game's world, that's to be expected, and it certainly looks better than the first two games). The PC version is considered superior, achieving mostly high 8/low 9 ratings, while the Xbox version averages in the mid to high 7s due to the lesser graphics. While Van Buren is the best selling Fallout title to date on consoles, it's still largely overshadowed by other titles coming out around the same time, such as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and so it's only considered a mediocre seller on the system. It's a hit on PC, though it doesn't quite reach the "classic" status in its genre that the previous two games did. Van Buren leaves Black Isle Studios at somewhat of a crossroads with the series. They're being pushed to take the series in a more "modern" direction, but want to keep to the original style of the games, with turn-based combat and tactical gameplay. They would ultimately take a third option: keep the original series true to its roots, with a Fallout 3 that plays like the original games, and create a spinoff series to try more experimental styles of gameplay, such as they did with Fallout Tactics and Fallout: Wasteland Simulator. Ultimately, that new spinoff series would begin with 2008's Fallout: The Boneyard, which is the first Fallout game that could be properly compared to OTL's Fallout 3.
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Eternal Warriors
Eternal Warriors is a game developed and published by Acclaim, based on the Valiant-created and Acclaim-owned comic Eternal Warrior. The game is a beat-em-up that allows players to choose between three characters: the main character, Gilad Anni-Padda, his brother Armstrong, and the futuristic warrior Magnus, Robot Fighter. The three are masters of battle tactics and of all kinds of weapons, skills honed over thousands of years of fighting. The game can be considered to play somewhat like OTL's God Of War, but unfortunately it's not as polished and somewhat more repetitive: fights are brutal and fierce, and conducted against lots of enemies, but the three characters don't have a huge repertoire of moves. They somewhat make up for this by being able to fight with a large selection of melee weapons (and a few ranged weapons later on). It continues the Turok tradition of giving players a lot of weapons to choose from, but the strategies with most weapons are the same: just keep swinging as much and as hard as you can. Typically, the fastest and longest weapons will give players the easiest time in combat, allowing them to hit many enemies at once. Bosses usually take the form of large, hulked-up generals for players to fight. The game features seventeen different levels, fought across eight time periods: Ancient Egypt, Ancient Rome, the Three Kingdoms Era, The Crusades, the Napoleonic Era, World War II, the present day, and the future, with the final stage actually taking place in the present day (after Gilad stops a robot apocalypse in the future, he finds a time machine that takes him back to the present). The game's main villain is Nergal, an evil death god who infects the minds of various people during the eras that Gilad and his allies go to. Nergal seeks to wipe out humanity, and the heroes have to stop him. It's a fairly basic plot, and while the game tries to explore some of the deeper parts of Gilad's story, the plot is mostly just window dressing for the fighting, of which there's a lot of it. The game does have some fairly cool moments, including a scene where Gilad helps to protect the evacuation of Dunkirk by fighting thousands of Nazis with his bare hands and a scene where Gilad and Magnus are fighting a gigantic mech with laser swords, but these are mostly set pieces and don't add much to the main plot of the game.
Eternal Warriors is released on November 23, 2004, two weeks after The Covenant 2. Despite being somewhat overshadowed by the much, MUCH bigger game, this one still gets a lot of hype and manages to quite easily be the second biggest new Xbox game of the month, falling far short of #1 but performing about on par with its own high expectations. Critics are rather lukewarm toward the game. Its graphics and weapon selection get a lot of praise, but many elements of the game leave a lot to be desired, and review scores settle in the mid 7s. It's one of those games that's a bigger hit with players than critics, and it ends up being one of the year's most popular new Xbox games, pleasing Acclaim and leading it to consider its second Valiant spinoff game after Turok to be a resounding success. The success of Eternal Warriors puts Microsoft back in the lead in the negotiations to acquire the company, but ongoing developments in the comic book world are currently boosting Valiant at the expense of Marvel, potentially making Acclaim too rich for either Microsoft or Apple's blood...
Deep Black 3 is the third game in the Xbox's exclusive FPS franchise, published by Microsoft. This is the first game in the series to be developed by an outside studio, but it maintains the familiar gameplay of the first two titles, with a heavy focus on stealth and the requirement that the player get a weapon off an enemy, keeping them sparsely armed otherwise. The graphics have seen a slight improvement from the previous two titles, but the gameplay has seen a big upgrade, with improved AI and the ability to talk to civilians in order to get them to do favors for your characters, such as killing or distracting enemies or stealing items needed to progress through the level. Civilians can be sweet talked or they can be threatened, depending on their temperament and what exactly your character wants to get out of them. The game features a new protagonist, a special forces soldier named Kenneth Vargo, who is tasked with going into an Eastern European country currently in the throes of civil war. Vargo's job isn't to favor any one side, he's tasked with evacuating an American diplomat safely from the country. The diplomat has been taken hostage by the rebels, and Vargo and a small squad of soldiers must find and extract the diplomat by any means necessary. There are also a number of students and tourists in the country that Vargo's team must help extract, and they must do this while causing a minimal amount of casualties, in order to avoid causing an international incident. There are friends and foes on all three sides: the rebels, the ruling government, and the Americans being evacuated all have people who will help or hinder Vargo's quest, and it's the player's job to figure out who they can trust. The game features a somewhat open-ended level system, where fulfilling certain objectives in different ways may cause the player's mission to take a different path. The game's approach to level progression is significantly more open-ended than other games of its day, and it's seen as somewhat of a breath of fresh air. The game features the most loaded voice cast of any game in the series to date, with Carlos Bernard starring as the voice of Vargo, Carmine Giovinazzo and Fred Savage playing two of Vargo's squadmates, and a few talented career voice actors such as John DiMaggio, Cat Taber, and Kevin Michael Richardson playing other minor characters like civilians or rebels.
Deep Black 3 is released exclusively for the Xbox on October 12, 2004. Though developed over a fairly short time, it's still considered an excellent game by many reviewers, with even better reviews than the second game of the series (which was itself lauded significantly more than the first). The civilian dialogue system is particularly highly praised, with some calling it an "RPG-like" system. One reviewer praises the game as "the best installment yet in what has come to be known as the thinking man's FPS". It sees stronger sales than the previous game in the series, and though many would call for Deep Black 4 to be released as soon as 2005, Microsoft decides to put the series on hold for now, making Deep Black 3 the final installment on the original Xbox. They would save the next game for the Xbox 2.
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Fallout: Van Buren
Fallout: Van Buren is the third mainline game in the Fallout series. Developed by Black Isle Studios, the game is quite similar to what was planned for OTL's original Fallout 3 (before the series was given to Bethesda). While Van Buren, like IOTL, was intended to just be a code name for the game, a number of Black Isle staffers including a high-level producer thought that the title sounded "cool", and ultimately, the game would be called Van Buren rather than Fallout 3, named after the "state" of Van Buren which was created out of the southern half of Colorado and the northern parts of Arizona and New Mexico after the nuclear devastation of the world in the late 21st Century. Fallout: Van Buren is a turn-based, tactical RPG, and has a lot of similarities with OTL's Knights Of The Old Republic (despite being developed by Black Isle and not by Bioware), with fully 3-D combat and cutscenes, but not in real time like OTL's Fallout 3. The player still has a great deal of freedom to roam about the wastelands of Van Buren, visiting towns, talking to people, and fighting mutated creatures, Super Mutants, and other denizens of the wastes. The game, like previous Fallout titles, utilizes the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system for character stats. Presper, from the OTL Van Buren concept, returns as the main villain of the game, but instead of being primarily a mad scientist, he's a preacher (but still also a mad scientist), who seeks to use his virus to "cleanse" the world of "inhuman filth". Presper is voiced by Christopher Lloyd, while the protagonist, known as the Prisoner (for being trapped in a prison cell at the start of the game) is unvoiced and can be either male or female. Ron Perlman, as always, serves as the game's narrator. The main quest is a rather short one, though there are lots of sidequests the player can do, with over 50 different settlements of various sizes scattered across Van Buren, each with their own NPCs and missions. The main quest follows the Prisoner as they evade capture by Presper's robots long enough to talk to Presper himself. The player can choose to join Presper's church and help him carry out his mission, or refuse and lead a rebellion. Ultimately, the player can choose whether or not to defy Presper and take over Van Buren (which can have various results depending on the Prisoner's moral alignment) or can choose to carry out Presper's mission, killing all non-humans in Van Buren. There are also variants of this path, including killing Presper but carrying out his mission anyway, or going even farther than Presper and killing most humans as well.
The game is released on both the Xbox and the PC on October 19, 2004. Because Microsoft kicked in some of the funding for the game, it (and the port of the Wasteland Simulator spinoff, which came to the PC in 2003 but won't make it to Xbox until 2006) is released exclusively on the Xbox as far as consoles are concerned. The game is considered to be quite good, with the transition to fully 3-D graphics getting a decent reception from critics and fans (the graphics are considered fairly mediocre on both platforms, though given the size of the game's world, that's to be expected, and it certainly looks better than the first two games). The PC version is considered superior, achieving mostly high 8/low 9 ratings, while the Xbox version averages in the mid to high 7s due to the lesser graphics. While Van Buren is the best selling Fallout title to date on consoles, it's still largely overshadowed by other titles coming out around the same time, such as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and so it's only considered a mediocre seller on the system. It's a hit on PC, though it doesn't quite reach the "classic" status in its genre that the previous two games did. Van Buren leaves Black Isle Studios at somewhat of a crossroads with the series. They're being pushed to take the series in a more "modern" direction, but want to keep to the original style of the games, with turn-based combat and tactical gameplay. They would ultimately take a third option: keep the original series true to its roots, with a Fallout 3 that plays like the original games, and create a spinoff series to try more experimental styles of gameplay, such as they did with Fallout Tactics and Fallout: Wasteland Simulator. Ultimately, that new spinoff series would begin with 2008's Fallout: The Boneyard, which is the first Fallout game that could be properly compared to OTL's Fallout 3.
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Eternal Warriors
Eternal Warriors is a game developed and published by Acclaim, based on the Valiant-created and Acclaim-owned comic Eternal Warrior. The game is a beat-em-up that allows players to choose between three characters: the main character, Gilad Anni-Padda, his brother Armstrong, and the futuristic warrior Magnus, Robot Fighter. The three are masters of battle tactics and of all kinds of weapons, skills honed over thousands of years of fighting. The game can be considered to play somewhat like OTL's God Of War, but unfortunately it's not as polished and somewhat more repetitive: fights are brutal and fierce, and conducted against lots of enemies, but the three characters don't have a huge repertoire of moves. They somewhat make up for this by being able to fight with a large selection of melee weapons (and a few ranged weapons later on). It continues the Turok tradition of giving players a lot of weapons to choose from, but the strategies with most weapons are the same: just keep swinging as much and as hard as you can. Typically, the fastest and longest weapons will give players the easiest time in combat, allowing them to hit many enemies at once. Bosses usually take the form of large, hulked-up generals for players to fight. The game features seventeen different levels, fought across eight time periods: Ancient Egypt, Ancient Rome, the Three Kingdoms Era, The Crusades, the Napoleonic Era, World War II, the present day, and the future, with the final stage actually taking place in the present day (after Gilad stops a robot apocalypse in the future, he finds a time machine that takes him back to the present). The game's main villain is Nergal, an evil death god who infects the minds of various people during the eras that Gilad and his allies go to. Nergal seeks to wipe out humanity, and the heroes have to stop him. It's a fairly basic plot, and while the game tries to explore some of the deeper parts of Gilad's story, the plot is mostly just window dressing for the fighting, of which there's a lot of it. The game does have some fairly cool moments, including a scene where Gilad helps to protect the evacuation of Dunkirk by fighting thousands of Nazis with his bare hands and a scene where Gilad and Magnus are fighting a gigantic mech with laser swords, but these are mostly set pieces and don't add much to the main plot of the game.
Eternal Warriors is released on November 23, 2004, two weeks after The Covenant 2. Despite being somewhat overshadowed by the much, MUCH bigger game, this one still gets a lot of hype and manages to quite easily be the second biggest new Xbox game of the month, falling far short of #1 but performing about on par with its own high expectations. Critics are rather lukewarm toward the game. Its graphics and weapon selection get a lot of praise, but many elements of the game leave a lot to be desired, and review scores settle in the mid 7s. It's one of those games that's a bigger hit with players than critics, and it ends up being one of the year's most popular new Xbox games, pleasing Acclaim and leading it to consider its second Valiant spinoff game after Turok to be a resounding success. The success of Eternal Warriors puts Microsoft back in the lead in the negotiations to acquire the company, but ongoing developments in the comic book world are currently boosting Valiant at the expense of Marvel, potentially making Acclaim too rich for either Microsoft or Apple's blood...
