The Worlds of Wreck-It Ralph 2

The new release Wreck-It Ralph is a movie that should appeal to anyone who loves CG animated adventures, but it has a special appeal for gamers. The movie is crammed with references and homages to video games of both the classic and modern era. Even the movie's two leads, Wreck-It Ralph and Fix-It Felix, are inspired by Donkey Kong and Mario, respectively.

As Ralph embarked on his quest for acceptance, the movie featured three game worlds inspired by real-world games and gaming genres. There was the Donkey Kong-esque Fix-It Felix Jr. arcade world. There was Hero's Duty, a hardcore sci-fi shooter inspired by games like Gears of War, Halo, and Metroid. And there was Sugar Rush, a world that was equal parts Mario Kart and Candy Land.

We were only disappointed that the movie didn't feature even more worlds. There are plenty of genres still ripe for Wreck-It Ralph's brand of spoofing. But with a sequel looking very likely at this point, the potential is still there. We've picked out a handful of worlds we hope to see appear in Ralph's next epic quest.

Fantasy World

As seen in: The Legend of Zelda, Fable, The Elder Scrolls

We're not expecting an actual movie based on the Legend of Zelda anytime soon, so the next best option might be to throw Ralph into a world inspired by Hyrule or Fable's Albion. Rather than the running and gunning of Hero's Duty, this world would force our heroes to navigate labyrinthine dungeons, contend with mind-bending traps and puzzles, and battle dragons, goblins, and the undead. Perhaps the movie could lampoon the endless, arbitrary fetch quests these games often saddle players with or the fact that action RPG heroes like Link so rarely speak.

Horror World

As seen in: Resident Evil, Silent Hill

Outside of Cyril the hatchet-wielding, emotionally supportive zombie, Wreck-It Ralph didn't pay much attention to the colorful legacy of horror gaming. To some degree that's understandable, as it can be difficult to maintain a family-friendly PG rating when dealing with nightmarish landscapes and zombies, vampires, and the like.

Still, we'd like to see more horror representation next time around. There has to be a way to put a more colorful and less scary spin on popular games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. What happens when Ralph's giant fists go up against a Pyramid Head or Tyrant? Is it possible to scare even the unflappable Sgt. Calhoun? Are all zombies as friendly as Cyril when they aren't on the clock? These are questions that need answering.

JRPG World

As seen in: Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest

If any gaming sub-genre could do with a little Wreck-It Ralph spoofing, it's the Japanese RPG. Games like Final Fantasy are known for their epic role-paying experience and creative worlds, but also for outlandish fashion design, androgynous male heroes, strange animal sidekicks, and intricate attack sequences that take entire minutes to play out in some cases.

Why not throw Ralph and the gang into a world that draws on these elements? In general, we'd like to see more of Japan's rich gaming culture reflected next time around. Cameo appearances from Nintendo characters and an “Aerith Lives” tag spray-painted on a wall aren't enough. And really, with Square-Enix's RPG characters already mingling with the Disney crowd on a regular basis in the Kingdom Hearts games, is it that much of a stretch?

Fighting Game World

As seen in: Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat

Zangief pretty much stole the show in the movie's early moments. But we never did get to see his talent for crushing a man's skull between his thighs in action. And while that might sound grotesque for a Disney movie, they did get away with allowing Kano to rip out someone's heart. Maybe Cyril can take another one for the team.

In any case, we'd love to see Ralph and his friends thrust into a world inspired by popular fighting games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. Imagine Ralph battling a character like Goro or setting a new high score in Street Fighter's car smashing mode. Even the 2D perspective of these games could offer the animators some fun new opportunities for CG storytelling.

Adventure World

As seen in: Uncharted, Tomb Raider, Pitfall

The recent announcement about Disney buying Lucasfilm has us hoping that Indiana Jones will be back in action before too much longer. Perhaps a Wreck-It Ralph sequel can allow Disney to dip their toes into the international pulp adventurer pool by including a world inspired by Indy-esque games such as Uncharted and Tomb Raider.

The first movie did a great job of taking the Halo/Gears of War shooter formula and delivering an epic action sequence built around it. We'd like to see the sequel do something similar for these titles. The movie could deliver epic dashes through tombs, ruins, and jungles that could put any previous live-action efforts to shame.

MMORPG World

As seen in: World of Warcraft, Second Life

One popular gaming genre that has a huge amount of potential for a Wreck-It Ralph sequel is the massively multiplayer online RPG. While World of Warcraft is still the most popular MMORPG, we're not focused on the fantasy elements this time. Instead, we're more interested in the social aspect of these games and the ways they connect players.

Director Rich Moore has already talked about how a sequel “would bring the characters involved a bit more up to date.” An MMORPG would drag Ralph and friends out of the arcade and into the modern gaming landscape. A gaming landscape inspired by WoW or Second Life would allow the characters to actually interact with humans in a way they really can't when they're stuck inside of an arcade machine. The potential here is almost limitless, both in terms of the worlds it can allow and in exploring the poignant relationship between gamers and gaming heroes.

Jesse is a writer for various IGN channels. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter, or Kicksplode on MyIGN.

Source : ign[dot]com

Brickleberry: "Welcome to Brickleberry" Review

I won't go so far as to say I don't understand Family Guy's continued appeal with viewers, but I do sometimes resent that series for popularizing the offensive animated sitcom sub-genre, where the entire purpose of a series seems to be cramming as many pop culture references and shock humor as humanly possible into every episode. Plot and characterization are distant seconds in focus, if at all. Comedy Central added another entry into this sub-genre with the debut of Brickleberry. The best that can be said for this show is that it makes Family Guy look nuanced and refined by comparison.

Brickleberry, which debuted Tuesday night, was created by Waco O'Guin and Roger Black (who previously developed the MTV2 sketch comedy series Stankervision) and is executive produced by Daniel Tosh of Tosh.0 fame. Tosh has attracted a bit of controversy lately for his stand-up work, and this series seems like an attempt to roll with that momentum. The show follows the misadventures of a group of National Park Service rangers in the fictional Brickleberry National Forest. Steve (voiced by MadTV's David Herman) is the everyman of sorts, who consistently wins the "Ranger of the Month" award mainly by virtue of the fact that he actually attempts to do his job. In typical sitcom fashion, Steve's cozy little world is threatened when the attractive and reasonably competent Ethel (It's Always Sunny's Caitlin Olson) joins the team.

Steve and Ethel are wholly generic animated sitcom leads, with Steve being distinguished only by the fact that his tendency towards apathy and criminal negligence far exceeds the Homer Simpsons and Peter Griffins of the world. The rest of the cast are even more wooden poorly defined. Calling them characters would be giving the show too much credit, as they're really nothing more than a hollow series of caricatures and negative stereotypes. A black character who avoids work, obsessively pursues white women, and fears the wilderness? A lesbian character with perverted tendencies and the build and vocal timbre of a linebacker? They're both here. As with shows like Family Guy and American Dad, there's also the obligatory sarcastic, talking animal. In this case it's a bear cub named Malloy (voiced by Tosh himself) who craves junk food and abuses the hospitality of the mentally disturbed lead ranger, Woody (Tom Kenny).

With "Welcome to Brickleberry," the writers don't seem content to let more than a split second pass without pelting the viewer with some offensive gag or another. By the end of these 22 minutes, the show has lampooned Parkinson's Disease, quadriplegic children, AIDS, the Ku Klux Klan, abortion, and most often, rape. From my understanding, the rape jokes were actually toned down in the wake of Tosh's stand-up controversy. If that's the case, I'd hate to imagine what the original version of this episode was like. Sex is so often the focus of the various gags in this episode, from animal orgies to human-on-animal rape. Clearly the creators want viewers to be offended as much and as often as possible.

They may be disappointed, however. For all the effort to unnerve and upset, Brickleberry just comes across as desperate and impotent. Rather than be offended, most will probably just feel pity that a group of people labored for so long to produce something so unlikable. Why bother hating something so cold and passionless in its attempts to entertain viewers?

There's really nothing on display that can top what the South Park crew have churned out in terms of political incorrectness. I found myself chuckling a few times, but more in the sense of "Wow, that was really stupid," rather than genuine amusement. At least on South Park, the offensive gags tend to be presented in unique and clever ways and serve some larger sort of social commentary. And there's always an underlying sense of humanity to offset the humor. Brickleberry lacks that. The one-dimensional characters are either dull or downright despicable (often both at once). The setting and premise do little to make the show stand out from the pack. Even the animation quality is bland and forgettable. Brickleberry is easily the the most generic national park I've ever seen on television.

Comedy Central has enjoyed a long, successful history with animated fare, whether through original programming like South Park and Ugly Americans or syndication of older shows like The Critic and Undergrads. Brickleberry is like a slap to the face of that legacy. There's always hope that the creators will eventually choose to ditch the gross-out humor for a more genuine form of storytelling, but I can't imagine many viewers will stick around long enough to find out.

Jesse is a writer for IGN Comics and IGN Movies. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following Jesse on Twitter, or on IGN.

Source : ign[dot]com

TGS: How Dragon Ball Z for Kinect Misses the Point

The entire appeal of motion gaming is immersion -- ideally, Kinect would amplify player agency by more actively involving you in a given experience. Dance Central excels here, in particular. Using your body rather than thumb flicks and trigger pulls to control a character should make you feel as though you've become someone else.

The potential to empower players in Dragon Ball Z for Kinect is enormous, but actually playing it is a constant reminder of how much fun you should be having.

The first-person combat works like you'd expect: Punching the air fires projectiles or smacks your up-close enemy, crouching dodges incoming attacks and powers up your hero, and familiar poses unleash special attacks when you've filled your power meter. That's pretty much the extent of how Dragon Ball Z for Kinect functions, and that simplicity in itself would be a considerable issue, never mind that it doesn't work well.

Gestures are so similar, and player input is so frantic, that Kinect can't actually register the moves properly. I tried to boost my power, but it misread the crouched position as a dodge. In putting my fingers on my forehead to let loose Picollo's Beam Cannon, the game thought I was trying to punch. Arm movements are sensitive and the speed of the fight is chaotic, which is a disastrous recipe. I watched multiple players fail a fight because their Kamehamehas weren't getting picked up, or their dodges registered as power charging, before becoming a victim of the incompetence myself.

The other problem is that it's just not terribly entertaining to play. Your actions don't really interact with the world or characters, so you spend a lot of time watching. Did you punch the air fast enough to trigger the win or lose animation? Great job, take a break and watch Goku throw Vegeta through a mountain for the next 20 seconds. Repeat. What could possibly be interesting about this as someone putting their entire body into the equation?

It's difficult to get excited, or remain optimistic, about a game in such poor shape as Dragon Ball Z for Kinect. It's a conceptual misfire with the kind of poor execution that's become unfortunately commonplace in Kinect games. And if it's no fun to play in the first 10 minutes, why should you pay $60 to experience it for hours longer?

Use caution with this one.

Mitch Dyer is an Associate Editor for IGN's Xbox 360 team. He’s also quite Canadian. Read his ramblings on Twitter and follow him on IGN.

Source : ign[dot]com

Tekken Tag Tournament 2: Bringing the Fight Home

Tekken Tag Tournament 2 is kind of a big deal. Initially appearing in Japanese arcades late last year, the game has been very popular in that scene, due to its appeal to both old and new fans of the series. “Veterans of the series who had been around for a long time and played all the Tekkens really seemed to enjoy it,” says Katsuhiro Harada, Game Director of the Tekken Project, and a member of the Tekken project for 17 years now. “And then on the other end of the spectrum there were the very new players who were good at memorising things and learning quickly and they seemed to really enjoy the game system as well.”

The initial arcade release is just the first step, of course. Letting it loose in the arcade wild gives the team valuable insight into how people are playing the game, any potential balance issues and what the fans would like to see. In the case of Tekken Tag Tournament 2 (TTT2), the game has already seen an arcade upgrade, subtitled ‘Unlimited’. This, according to Harada, was designed to cater to “the more casual group who started with Tekken 5 or 6. A lot of these players said they could only really use one character, say Lili or a character like that, and there wasn’t a second character that was easily learnt. So we added the 'Solo' gameplay system; one-on-one. You could still pick two-on-two like before, or also you could do one-on-two. Since we implemented that we noticed that a lot more people across a variety of different player groups and styles really seemed to be enjoying the game a lot more.”

Tekken Tag: New Moon.

It’s this ‘Unlimited’ version of Tekken Tag Tournament 2 that’s coming to homes around the world in September. TTT2 is still very much a Tekken 6 sibling, and if you have any experience with that game you’ll find plenty of familiar faces, and that most of your strategies translate well. However, the addition of the tag system brings so much more to the table, much like the original Tekken Tag Tournament did after Tekken 3, that this is indeed a deep game with longevity for both casual and long-time fans alike. Strategy-wise it’s a far cry from any other solo or team-based fighting game, as players really have to manage their resources. If one character dies, the team dies, which makes safe tagging a premium skill. Whilst the old-school ‘Tag Cancel’ is gone, TTT2 gives us a more strategic ‘Tag Crash’ – it costs you your recoverable life and your ‘Netsu’ (time-limited damage increase), but it gives you a near-invulnerable tag in.

In terms of damage, the more power to hurt you have, the more chance you have of stopping another player bringing in their other character. Juggles are as insane as ever, with tag-buffered launchers returning from Tag Classic. On top of this, players also have ‘Tag Assault’, which is a combination of the Bound system in Tekken 6 (slam an opponent into the ground during a juggle and they’ll bounce up and you can keep juggling) and the Tag Launch (your team member can come in and get in a string after the Bound). Sounds pretty complex, but it’s all pretty intuitive once you get going, and it won’t take long before you start doing juggles that include multiple tags, bounds, walls, wall breaks and any combination thereof.

The battle arenas in Tekken Tag Tournament 2 are similar to Tekken 6, with walled stages of various sizes and shapes – some with breakable walls – and a few infinite stages as well. TTT2 also sees the addition of tiered stages: smash your opponent over a balcony, and your team-mate is waiting at the bottom to continue the carnage. Damage scaling does kick in, but the possibility for insane juggles is virtually endless with all these variables. Players can look forward to new stages as well – there’s a Snoop Dogg one as part of the pre-order bonus content, and the team has promised more to come.

As far as the port from the arcade game is concerned, the gameplay is clean and true though the presentation may be a shade clunkier. There were definite moments of slowdown during hectic action in the code we played, but it didn’t inhibit gameplay and will hopefully be polished out of the final release. Playing through the game in Arcade mode it’s clear that this is a true representation of the game so many Tekken fans have been pouring money into at the arcades.

Of course, outside the gameplay systems, Tekken Tag Tournament 2 for PS3 and 360 isn’t a simple arcade port – there are quite a few extras thrown in. DLC characters and stages have already been announced, with the novel addition of them all being free.

“We haven’t announced all of the DLC characters yet,” Harada tells us. “Regarding the characters we have announced so far, some of them are similar to existing characters, for example Jaycee and Michelle. This was actually done on purpose because obviously you can play solo with Jaycee, but if you were going to take her and try to find a partner, well you would have to re-learn strategy and techniques and such and it’d be very difficult. You couldn’t just pick Kuma and use him right away. Although on the other hand if you played Kuma, Panda is available; or if you use the Capoeira fighters you have them easily available, so we wanted to have similar pairings for other characters as well. They do have unique moves themselves, but their overall strategy - you don’t have to relearn how to use the character.”

The ultimate tag pair?

“There is some fan service obviously - bringing back some of these characters that people have been asking for,” Harada continues, “but we really wanted to get more people enjoying the tag system by providing easy-to-learn pairings. But that’s not all of it - it’s not that you just buy the game and play through it and you get the endings and it’s finished. We want people to enjoy the game for a long time. So after release if three or four weeks later a new character appears or something, that’s something to look forward to and everyone can enjoy it for quite a while and people will want to draw their friends in as well. It’s another tool to help people enjoy the game and stay excited about it for longer.”

The DLC bonuses don’t stop there though, with assurances that there is plenty still to come. “There are some characters that we haven’t announced that are quite unique," Harada says. "There are even some that I’m very confident people won’t guess, so there are definitely some surprises left. There are also stages, a few new ones that we’ve been announcing that have been geared towards pleasing various fan groups in different countries by giving them a stage in their country. But again, there are still some that we haven’t announced yet.”

This is all great news for the casual Tekken player – the player who wants to enjoy the game and learn their own character, but isn’t too keen to obsess about frame data and memorising duckable strings of other characters. In fact, ‘Rage’, the damage-increasing power-up from Tekken 6 was often seen in highly competitive circles as something of a ‘scrub clutch’ – an unfair equaliser that could hurt the more attacking, talented player more than it could ever help him. Harada-san holds a very different view on this.

“So actually Rage was quite popular if you look at the Tekken audience overall,” he tells us. “Some said maybe they felt they would lose to an opponent of lesser skill. But when you look at it overall, that just means that because of Rage sometimes accidents will occur if the player isn’t careful enough... Most of the people who play Tekken, say 70%, are part of that intermediate group – they know how to play the game a bit but not necessarily at tournament level. They enjoy it because they feel if they play enough, they’ll still have a chance of beating someone who’s better than them occasionally. And that really leads to them sticking with the game much longer. It’s funny that people who are big fans of the series and have been with it for a long time have that opinion because if they remember back to Tekkens 1, 2 and 3 the game was much more rough in that aspect. And that’s kind of what makes Tekken Tekken.”

One final question mark that remains is online. Not everyone has an arcade nearby or can drag friends over for competition in person. Online play is obviously the solution for those looking for competition. Tekken 6 was disappointing in this area, even though Tekken 5 had been more than passable.

“It’s funny you mention that because we just got back from an event in San Diego where we showed off the online code for the first time,” Harada says. “We had some of the more well-known players in the community come and check it out and they were all very positive about what they experienced. We took the code from Soulcalibur V and improved on that. We haven’t really announced much about the online modes but I guess we could say that most of what you were able to do in Soulcalibur V, which was very well received, was taken and implemented for Tag 2. And then on top of that we have the team function as in Tekken-Net on arcade, which we’ve kind of taken and adapted to consoles. We are still working on that and implementing it in the game, and we will have more details shortly.”

All told, Tekken Tag Tournament 2 is shaping up to be a more than worthy new addition to the series. It looks to present compelling gameplay for both new and existing fans, has a roster of more than 50 fighters, throws in a healthy wad of additional content to be delivered free, and promises quality online play.

Are you looking forward to Tekken Tag Tournament 2? Tell us why in the comments.

Bryce McDonough is an Australian freelance writer and hardcore Tekken fan. You can follow the antics of IGN AU on Facebook and Twitter.

Source : ign[dot]com