Tech.Wapline

After a prolific freshman season at Texas, Kevin Durant is getting acclimated to the level of competition in the NBA. Judging from Durant’s 20 points per game average through the first 18 games, he isn’t having problems adjusting. We had a chance to catch up with KD after practice and talk to him about his work on March Madness 08, his transition to the pros, and the mark he plans to leave on the sport.

GameSpot: How did you feel when you heard you were going to be on the cover of March Madness 08?

Kevin Durant: I was ecstatic, man. I’ve been playing this game for a long, long time and just to be in a great group of guys to be on the cover of the game was a blessing for me. And it’s going to be crazy seeing myself in the stores, on the shelves, with my face on the game.

GS: How was your experience with EA’s motion capture for the game?

KD: It was a great experience. I mean, it’s something that I had seen on TV before, growing up, and that’s something that I always wanted to do–making moves and seeing it being incorporated into the game right in front of your face is great. It was fun for the guys that were there with me and it’s something that I would like to do again. It was a very fun experience for myself.

GS: As far as gaming is concerned, do you prefer the college game a little bit more than the NBA?

KD: Oh, no, I think it’s all the same to me, to be honest with you. But both games are very fun and intense. I get very into the games when I’m playing, especially when I’m playing against my family members or my friends. So I try to play each game evenly, you know what I mean? Once March Madness comes out, I’ll play that for about a week straight then go to NBA Live and kind of switch it up like that.

GS: Oh, that’s cool. Do you guys get a chance to play a lot of games when you’re not on the court?

KD: Yeah, I try. We have a lot of free time to ourselves. So after practice or workouts or things like that I try to get some time in on the game, try to hone my skills a little bit.

GS: So who’s the biggest gamer in the Sonics locker room?

KD: Really, you don’t really hear too many people talking about the game. So I think myself, I’m a big gamer. I like to play a lot. That’s what I do in my free time just to get away from everything, just go out and play some games.

GS: Just a little unwind, huh?

KD: Yes, sir.

GS: Recently EA ranked you as the number two-ranked college basketball player of all time. What do you think about that rating?

KD: I think it’s a little too high, to be honest with you. I mean, there were some great college players. But it’s a blessing to be in this company with guys like Michael Jordan, Erving Johnson, Clyde, and Larry Bird and [guys] like that. But it will be cool just to play as myself on a college game as well. It’s a blessing for me.

GS: Coming into this, your rookie season, what was going on in your head just prior to your first game? Did you feel you shouldn’t push the issue too much or maybe you didn’t want to try to force shots?

KD: I just wanted to be aggressive and try to get that win the first game. And unfortunately we didn’t come out with the win but I think we played very well. After the fourth quarter–we kind of gave up in the fourth, kind of put our guard down and didn’t put pressure on Denver in the fourth. But I think we’re capitalizing on that and we’re getting better.

GS: So far, what’s the biggest adjustment you’ve had to make to the NBA, if anything?

KD: The one biggest thing is the travel and how we travel almost every day and then how we play games one day and practice that next morning and things like that. The NBA schedule is just so different from a college schedule. Right now, I’ve already played over half of a college season so far and this is only the first month. And I think in about two more weeks, I would have played a whole college season. So you just got to get used to that. And once you get used to that I think everything is like smooth sailing from there on in.

GS: Do you think fatigue is going to be a factor, as it is for a lot of rookies, as the season progresses?

KD: I wouldn’t say that. I just got to keep eating right and keep working out and keep getting better. I think that’s all that matters is that you’ve just got to tell yourself that you’re going to continue to get better, continue to grow as a team and as a player.

GS: What has it been like adjusting to the two-guard position?

KD: That’s something new for me. I’ve never played this position before. I just got to learn how to defend two-guards in this league and learn how to get the shot off against smaller, quicker, and stronger guys. But it’s been fun. I’m playing against the best players night in and night out, guarding the best players night in and night out. And that’s only going to make me better. I think that it’s an adjustment for me but I’m getting used to it and, with the help of my coaches and my teammates, I’m getting better.

Why exactly EA took the NFL Street series out behind the shed only to replace it with the upcoming NFL Tour is anybody’s guess. After all, as arcade football games go, the Street series had its charms (as well as its flaws). Regardless, the folks at EA Sports Big must have felt as if a change was needed for their fast and furious seven-on-seven series, given that NFL Tour is set to emerge early next year on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. High-definition visuals and a new presentation style make this very much arcade football circa 2007, but the gameplay is old-school…straight outta the Street, so to speak.

What if you had a shot to make it? To hook up with your favorite NFL team, and go on tour with them? To play against the league’s best and prove your skills on the field of play? To earn a shot at a real NFL contract? No, this isn’t some Disneyfied Mark Wahlberg movie; it’s the fun, if sort of silly, premise to NFL Tour’s core single-player mode. Here, you create a player from scratch and go on tour with your favorite team, playing seven-on-seven ball against every team in the NFL on your quest to become the best of the bunch.

Creating your player is straightforward in NFL Tour. You simply choose a head and body style, as well as some basic gear for him to wear, and then it’s off to pick your assignment on the field. You can play almost any position on the field: on offense, quarterback, running back, and wide receiver; on defense, defensive end, tackle, linebacker, cornerback, and strong safety. Each of these positions automatically assigns points to various attributes such as speed, catching, and so forth. Offense and defense have their own unique attributes (for example, passing on offense, or tackling on defense), and you’ll have eight points to spend as you see fit on any of these attributes before you set out.

With your attributes set, it’s time to take off and begin playing your way through the tour. Your first stop will be in the AFC West division, home to such “powerhouses” as the Oakland Raiders and, well, every other team in the AFC West. We dove right into the tour with our created player–the awesomely hirsute and ponytailed quarterback Doug Bonafide–on the Indianapolis Colts, and began to leave a path of Raiders, Chiefs, Broncos, and Chargers in our wake. If you’ve been spending most of your football-gaming time with Madden, getting into the NFL Tour swing of things will take you about, oh, two plays. First there’s those simplified playbooks to adjust to, reminiscent of NFL Street’s pared-down lists. On offense, you’ve got short and long pass, and run plays; on defense, it’s man and zone coverage, and then blitz plays.

Considering that our created player was a quarterback, the other adjustment we had to make was to the “so old it’s new” scrolling-style passing found in Tour. Instead of passing to receivers using assigned buttons, you have one highlighted receiver that you can hit with the A button. To move to the next receiver in your progression, you press the B button, then tap the A button to toss the ball to him.

With the rock in the hands of your ball carrier, you can check out the reversal system. On offense, you can elude tackles or perform wall moves with the B button, or shed tackles by pressing the A button at the right time; with correct timing, you can pull this move off multiple times to gain a few extra yards, or even break free of defenders altogether. For other tackles, you can get into button-mashing battles in which you’re supposed to press the A button repeatedly; press it fast enough and you can put a defender on his back. Similarly, on defense you can attempt to reverse a player’s dodge by pressing the X button at the correct time. Pull it off successfully and you’ll be able to drag the player down–assuming he doesn’t get a shot at reversing the reversal.

Although these reversals and button battles can result in big breakouts, the animations involved in these reversals can often drop you back a few yards from the point of contact, which means that you’ll have to make up that yardage even if you break free from the original tackle. In fact, throughout there seems to be work left to be done on the gameplay. For example, all too often on the option play we were able to interrupt the toss from the QB and the HB, but we were rarely able to scramble back with a defender quickly enough to pick up the ball and get the turnover. Passes weren’t as lofty as in the previous build of the game we played, but it sure would have been great to see streaking bullet passes every once in a while, especially when we really needed to nail a receiver in the numbers.

All of the games in Tour mode seem to go quickly, but the rules for the different games differ depending on the division you’re playing. For example, in the first group you’re playing two-minute halves, with the highest score winning the game. In the next set of games, the first team to score 24 points is declared the winner. There are other game types to be found in NFL Tour: Big D, where you earn points for big defensive plays, and in which offense takes points from the opposition; as well as Make It Take It, where if you score you keep the ball; and others. There are also custom rule sets you can configure however you like.

Earlier today, during a meeting with representatives from Blazing Lizard and Gamecock, we had an opportunity to get our hands on Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodgeball for the first time. Currently scheduled for release via Xbox Live Arcade early in 2008, the game pits two teams of up to four players against each other on battlefields where the deadliest weapon is a brightly colored ball with a smiley face on it. You already know about the pirate and ninja teams. While theirs is certainly a battle that could rage for all eternity, extra variety will come courtesy of zombie and robot teams.

Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodgeball’s single-player game will purportedly be story driven, and we’re told that each of the four playable teams will have its own version of said story. But we’re not sure this is a game that you’ll be playing for its storyline. While you’ll need to spend some time playing solo or in co-op mode to unlock a couple of the teams, we suspect most of the fun will be had with the competitive multiplayer matches. Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodgeball will support up to four players on a single console, and that number holds true in online matches where up to eight players can do battle simultaneously.

Regardless of which teams you’re playing as, every player in the match will have a different special ability. For example, one of the pirates has a wooden leg that he can pound into the ground to stun nearby opponents, while another has a pet parrot that will retrieve the ball for him at any time. Ninja skills that we got to see in action included teleporting the ball into a player’s hands and a “cloak” ability that made one of the players almost invisible. At first glance, almost all of the character-specific powers might appear to be a little overpowered, but you need a full stamina meter to activate them. You also use stamina every time you jump, throw a ball, or perform a regular attack, so you won’t get to use the specials very often. Incidentally, none of your attacks can actually harm other players–only the ball can do that. Your attacks are simply used to incapacitate opponents and gain possession of the ball.

When you’ve got the ball, your goal is obviously to throw it at one of your opponents. But it’s not quite that simple because there are a number of different ways you can go about doing so. For example, if you try to throw the ball while you’re running, it’ll just go in whichever direction you’re facing, but if you remain stationary, your shot will hone in on an opponent. Furthermore, if you throw the ball at the apex of a jump, you’ll do so with much more power–making it much harder to defend against. You can defend against incoming balls either by hitting them back at the thrower or by catching them, which replenishes some of your health.

The matches that we played today took place on a beach and in a snow-covered forest, which are the home arenas for the pirates and ninjas, respectively. Environmental objects, such as the trees in the forest, promise to make every arena play a little differently and should make the headstone-filled graveyard of the zombie team especially challenging. The robot team’s home arena, which we’ve yet to see, will have the appearance of a futuristic factory. We’re told that at least two additional arenas will be made available for download after Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodgeball’s release, along with a fifth playable team.

We’ll bring you more information on Pirates vs. Ninjas Dodgeball as soon as it becomes available.

Playing a lot of point-and-click adventures could prepare you for the afterlife if the premise of Next Life is accurate. However, let’s hope that it isn’t because this traditional adventure from Future Games wimps out when it comes to dealing with the “What happens after we die?” premise and also manages to almost bore you to death in the process. While you start off fascinated with the weird island on which you are marooned after the fiery death sequence that opens the proceedings, you soon find yourself trudging through a very slow, very unoriginal adventure-game scavenger hunt.

It’s a shame that more isn’t done with the story, a surreal tale about what happens to Adam Raichl after his SUV apparently plows into a tanker truck and goes boom one dark night. The young man from Prague doesn’t wake up in a hospital or beside the pearly gates, however, but in a metal hut on a bleak island, imprisoned there with other recently deceased people who have lived all over the globe during different time periods. You’re pretty much beaten over the head with the strangeness of it all as the people you meet immediately launch into talk about how much trouble Nixon is going to get into for Watergate, what it’s like living under Brezhnev, and how work has been going lately at the World Trade Center. But the visuals are fantastic at conveying the loneliness of the setting and the grim facial features of your fellow castaways (you won’t find much better character art in an adventure game), so the look of everything is more than enough to creep you out. Only the voice acting is a little flat, and it’s off just enough to deepen the sense of strangeness. Thick European accents abound, giving the game an art-house ambiance that increases the dreamlike character of your surroundings.

Weirdness slowly fades as you get immersed in playing Next Life, though, and you quickly find yourself in just another adventure game. Traditional structure is the focus here, so you have to guide Adam on a walking tour where you engage in linear conversations, collect random scraps of garbage, and solve esoteric logic puzzles. Not that there’s anything particularly wrong with all of this, as fill-in-the-blanks chats, scavenger hunts, and logic puzzles have been the foundation of adventures for a couple of decades now. But you can’t help feeling let down here because the game trumpets a philosophical examination of life after death in the beginning but then collapses into gathering broken glass and wire like you’re Sherlock Holmes in a junkyard.

The pace and overall fussiness of Next Life is also seriously aggravating. Much of the time you’re not allowed to figure out what you need to do by checking out the landscape and the tools at hand. In the very beginning, for instance, it’s elementary to deduce that the rocks, sticks, and dry grass you pick up should be used to make a fire to burn away a log wedging a rock in a cave opening. But you’re not allowed to combine the objects in question unless you go back to your purgatory pals and get tips about starting a fire. You endure this sort of unnecessary backtracking throughout the entire game. One trip to a location is never good enough, and you often have to pick up numerous types of certain objects. Don’t stop at picking up just one stick when Adam can carry three! The nightmare sections of the game also rely on confusing trial-and-error experimentation that can see you die dozens of times. The construction site and car-accident sequences are particularly crammed with tough problems that seem impossible to solve without fleeing to an online walkthrough.

Since Digital Extremes and publisher D3 last showed off their upcoming third-person action game Dark Sector back at E3 and the Leipzig Games Convention, some aspects of the game’s design have changed significantly. Even though Dark Sector is slated for release in the first quarter of next year, the designers have continued to stress-test the core gameplay mechanics, and have replaced several basic capabilities with modified or entirely different ones in order to make the game play more smoothly. We had a chance to try out some of their recent modifications by playing the game’s first two levels, as they currently stand.

If you haven’t kept up with Dark Sector so far, the game draws heavily from Gears of War and Resident Evil 4 in gameplay terms, though its whole fictional-Soviet-state-overrun-by-hideous-genetic-plague thing is fairly unique. Main character Hayden Tenno can alternate between various firearms and his glaive, a bladed throwing weapon that pops right out of his arm (again, thanks to that pesky virus). The primary changes to the gameplay so far relate to your use of the glaive. In past versions of the game, you have to manually equip the glaive before you could throw it, and then manually stow it to go back to your gun. That was problematic because Dark Sector uses an over-the-shoulder zoomed aiming mode similar to Gears, so you had to drop out of the aim view just to toggle from glaive to gun and back. Now Tenno holds his gun in his left hand and always keeps the glaive ready on the right, which lets you use both interchangeably while aiming. (It makes him look more stylish, too.)

The game also previously had a multi-target lock-on system, similar to something like Panzer Dragoon, where you could paint several enemies with the glaive target and then unleash it to kill all of them in one swoop. That feature has been removed for unspecified reasons and replaced with an “aftertouch” feature, similar to the one in Heavenly Sword. When you throw the glaive, you can have the camera chase closely after it as it flies in slow motion, and you can subtly guide its course toward a particular enemy. This can be done on the PlayStation 3 with tilting controls, but luckily you can use the analog sticks to do it as well (on both platforms, natch).

Dark Sector starts out with “a riff on The Wizard of Oz,” in the words of project lead Steve Sinclair. In simpler terms, that means the first level of the game is in black and white. It’s a method of indicating the before-and-after effect of the virus on Hayden’s physiology, and we were surprised to find that it’s actually kind of cool to play an action game without any color to it (aside from the occasional red). The story goes that a former secret-agent-gone-rogue named Mezner has defected to the nation of Lasria and taken control of the horrible virus that Hayden will encounter a little too close-up at the end of the first level. Prior to that, he’s just a secret agent trading bullets with a bunch of bad guys.

The gameplay opens up after you get infected, allowing you to start hurling the glaive. At first, you’ll only do minimal damage with the weapon, but at regular intervals throughout the story you’ll begin to receive improved powers. The contextual justification for this is that Hayden’s infection is spreading over time, so you’ll see the grotesquerie of his right arm intensifying as the game progresses. One of the first abilities you’ll get is the power throw, which works exactly like it sounds. A regular throw will simply cut dudes, but the power throw can easily take off an arm, leg, or head with precise aim.

At the outset, you’ll mostly be fighting armed mercenaries, as we mentioned, but as you progress, you’ll start to encounter rather more mutated and unpleasant enemies, such as an enormous creature that we encountered in a courtyard laying waste to some of those very same mercs before it came after us. You’ll get a chance to take out those mutants more creatively given the glaive’s ability to temporarily take on elements like fire and electricity–we saw one section where Hayden could hurl an electrified glaive into a pool of water to zap several approaching zombie-like mutants, for instance.

Dark Sector’s design team seems committed to refining the gameplay, given its willingness to swap in new mechanics so late in the development cycle. With release just a handful of months away now, we’ll be able to bring you a final verdict on their efforts soon.