Isaac has something to say. #DeadSpace pic.twitter.com/csOKT6ZCYVAugust 31, 2021

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Wright announced the news himself during today’s Dead Space community reveal stream. After joining the franchise in Dead Space 2, Wright will now reprise his role as Isaac for the upcoming remake, where the original game kept Isaac as a silent protagonist. 

Throughout the reveal stream, creative director Roman Campos-Oriola and senior producer Phillippe Ducharme reaffirmed that one of the goals with the remake was to add in improvements and context found in later Dead Space games as well as supporting media. Ducharme said that the decision to add voice acting for Isaac was made fairly early on, and with input from the “council” of Dead Space fans and community members it formed to get regular feedback on the remake.

“What was clear is that, if he’s back, it has to be Gunner,” Ducharme says. “Isaac is Gunner. We started having these discussions with casting and it became very, very clear that, for us, was the right angle.” 

Campos-Oriola clarified how Isaac’s new voice work will be folded into the original story. “One of the rules that we have is that Isaac is only going to talk when he’s being talked to,” he explains, though a presentation clarified that while Isaac will “primarily” only respond, he may also speak up “in a situation where it would feel weird if he remained silent.”

“He is going to respond. He’s going to engage with Hammond. He’s going to engage with Kendra. He’s going to be part of these discussions,” Campos-Oriola says. “But he’s alone. When you’re alone in that dark corridor, he’s not going to talk. He’s not going to break that immersion. He’s not going to break that feeling of isolation.”

In other words, while Isaac will be voiced in the remake, he won’t suddenly become a chatterbox. 

Speaking of narrative improvements: the Dead Space remake will be one long cut, not unlike God of War.

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Dino Ignacio, who worked as a User Experience Director on the original trilogy, put out a tweet (opens in new tab) following the reveal of the Dead Space remake yesterday which discussed his involvement in the project: “Back in January, I was invited to help guide the developers remaking a game I worked on 13 years ago.”

The tweet continues: “It’s been such a privilege to consult and advise the EA Motive team on a franchise I hold near and dear to my heart. Congrats to the whole team!” Ignacio also replied to fans who responded to his tweet and gave an insight into the process delving into EA Motive’s attitude towards the remake (opens in new tab) adding: “It’s been a joy to work with them. They have been amazingly respectful of the original.”

Back in January, I was invited to help guide the developers remaking a game I worked on 13 years ago. It’s been such a privilege to consult and advise the EA Motive team on a franchise I hold near and dear to my heart. Congrats to the whole team! https://t.co/Fdlmzt6aijJuly 22, 2021

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The now Principal Design Manager at Roblox also said that (opens in new tab): “The team has been very respectful of the franchise tropes while finding ways to innovate and surprise.” I

Similar to Capcom’s Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3 remakes, the Dead Space remake will be given a complete makeover for next-generation consoles:  PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and PC. The game is being developed by EA studio Motive, which previously released Star Wars Squadrons. EA has promised that the remake will also include some extras including: “an improved story, characters, gameplay mechanics and more.”

Although this announcement came as a surprise to many, there were inklings of something being done with the Dead Space series earlier this year. In June, EA was rumored to be announcing a new installment of an established IP this month, which caused many long-time fans to desperately hope that it was Dead Space EA was said to be working on. We now know however that instead of a new installment, the team was in fact working on a complete remake. 

Find out what other classic horror games you may have missed in our best horror games list. 

The post The Dead Space remake has original developer on board as a consultant appeared first on Game News.

In an interview with IGN (opens in new tab), senior producer Philippe Ducharme and creative director Roman Campos-Oriola discussed Motive’s plans for the remake. The remake has leveraged the capabilities of the Frostbite engine to enhance the game’s atmosphere through upgraded audio and visuals, and as part of that process, the team worked to remove barriers to immersion, including any sort of noticeable loading.

“[The faster SSDs of new consoles mean] there’s not going to be any loading,” Campos-Oriola said. “There’s not going to be any moment where we’re going to cut your experience, where we’re going to cut your camera. You can play it from the start screen to the end credits seamlessly.” 

The original Dead Space, like other games of its time, hid plenty of loading screens behind doors and other transitions, and it also had plenty of full-fat screens between levels (and respawns). I’ll kind of miss the brief safe space that the tram loading screens would provide, but a seamless Dead Space is too tempting to pass up. 

“We’re also learning from mistakes such as microtransactions, which we will not have, for instance, in our game,” Ducharme added, indirectly hinting at the blowback to the premium items in Dead Space 3. Loading screens were never especially egregious in Dead Space, but the microtransactions in the later portion of the series definitely wrinkled some noses, so it’s good to see the remake avoiding that chapter in its history. 

The remake will integrate some other lessons from the rest of the franchise, too. Campos-Oriola said that while the story of the original Dead Space was the foundation for the remake, Motive is looking to integrate ideas from elsewhere in the series and layer in references or links to the wider Dead Space universe. It’s not just the narrative, too; Ducharme told IGN that “we’re also looking at it from a feature standpoint in the improvements and some of the content that evolved throughout the franchise.”

The original Dead Space earned a spot on our list of the best horror games, so we can’t wait to play through it with fresh eyes and better hardware.

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Thwack, thwack, thwack.

You round a corner and see a worker of the ship, banging his head on the steel wall. He’s bleeding, his skull is broken, and yet he carries on. It’s here you know that whatever’s got a hold of the USG Ishimura crew is unstoppable, insidious, and that Dead Space is going to be a really dark game.

Dead Space is one of the most highly-rated horror franchises of all time. That’s no mean feat when you’re sharing space with Resident Evil, Silent Hill and System Shock. Something about Dead Space resonated with players, however. It offered something different to the predictable, stock formula horror games were subscribing to by 2008 and drew in an absolutely incredible team of experts in every field to collaboratively make one of the strongest horror experiences gaming has ever seen.

The main draw of Dead Space was its combat: as previews started to go live, it was becoming clear this wasn’t playing by the usual rules. Press would go to preview events, see that industrial-gothic, sci-fi setting and try to play it like any other shooter – bodyshot, bodyshot, headshot – rinse and repeat. But something terrible happened to those early players, unprepared for Dead Space nifty twist, and the devs stood at the sidelines and grinned – their gamble had paid off.

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The 20 best horror games of all time (opens in new tab)

Dead Space relied on what the development team perfectly dubbed ‘tactical dismemberment’

Taking on one of the corpse-inhabiting, parasitic Necromorphs in Dead Space was quite unlike anything you’d have seen in a survival-horror game until that point. The enemies were so wholly different, so totally other, that your tried-and-tested techniques wouldn’t work. No, shooting a Necromorph in its warping, mutating head or chest would only aggravate it. In some cases, approaching your enemy in this way would accelerate the creature, bringing you to an even swifter death.

Dead Space relied on what the development team so perfectly dubbed ‘tactical dismemberment’. Game designer Glen Schofield (whose name you might recognise from his later ventures at Sledgehammer Studios, creating Call Of Duty games) stated during development that this was the “primary theme of Dead Space”. And you can tell – of the myriad different enemy types in the title, none of them feel repetitive to fight: taking off a limb from each enemy type has different effects.

Early on, the game teaches you that slicing off an opponent’s legs with your plasma cutter is the best tactic – it’ll slow them down and stunt their mobility. Later in the game more complex enemy types start to crawl out of Dead Space’s body horror-fuelled depths. You try the same thing again only to find the enemy is quicker, leaner, more agile. You find yourself on the business end of sharpened bits of its alien cartilage or bone or whatever awful thing it’s wielding as it barrels down the corridor to impale you and infest your warm, twitching body.

The Necromorphs were actually conceived relatively early in the game’s life, thanks to production designer Ben Wanat. Wanat wanted the alien enemies to feel relatable. The production team deeply believed that aliens in games often felt too ‘other’, away from humans, and that encountering them, therefore, lost any sense of real threat or weight.

By making the main enemies of the game come from humans they became repulsive, they became alarming, they became relatable

There’s a real sense of horror and pathos to the Necromorphs, though, and that came with this horrible foreshadowing, too: by making the main enemies of the game come from humans, by making them readable in that way, they became repulsive, they became alarming, they became relatable. They’re evocative in a way that some space bug just isn’t – if one of those things managed to get you, you could see what would become of you – as twisted and broken as the very ship you’re trying to save.

The setting of the game has also become remarkably iconic. The USG Ishimura managed to merge the gothic claustrophobia of traditional, almost medieval-inspired horror games with the grounded industrial sci-fi that gaming hadn’t really explored before. The design philosophy behind the USG Ishimura was both technical and artistic: EA had given Redwood Shores the freedom to heavily invest in ‘constantly alive lighting’ (something we were all very excited about last gen, and which has become almost a standard now).

Art director Ian Milham therefore opted for this gothic look – it turns out that ‘ribs’ in architecture really show off the shadows and lighting that the studio wanted, and with this in mind, Milham began to craft the masterpiece that is the Ishimura. The result was this gothic, rusted leviathan of a ship that sat dark and still in the orbit of a distant planet, silent and brooding, brimming with threat and malice. It was sci-fi that felt real and readable – far more grounded than some of the more ethereal space shooters out there.

It’s amazing to think Dead Space ran on the same engine as Redwood Shores’ engine from the Godfather game – the two couldn’t look more dissimilar. But turning up the contrast in the engine gave Dead Space its now-iconic visual flavour: dark, deep, and illuminated by scanning flashes of light that have the player inventing new terrors for themselves thanks to the uncertainty these flashes of light create. It’s a technique that’d later be used by Creative Assembly on Alien: Isolation (opens in new tab) to equally unsettling effect.

Want more Dead Space?

Dead Space is the best damn horror game Capcom never made (opens in new tab)

The development team’s construction of the Ishimura went deeper than just making it visually imposing. If you play the game again, you’ll notice just how little room you’re given to manoeuvre when you’re exploring the bowels of the ship. This was intentional – the developers wanted you to really feel the pressure every time a new enemy was introduced, every time you were foolish enough to disturb one of their ‘nests’.

Unlike most horror games, where enemies are made ostensibly readable to prevent player frustration, Dead Space wanted to trick you. Milham has stated that he wanted players to see something and not know what kind of range it had straight away. It was this focus on what makes horror actually horrible over sticking to the tropes that made Dead Space feel so fresh.

Isaac Clarke – your surly, objective-driven protagonist – was another way Redwood Shores flew in the face of convention. He wasn’t some noisy, cocksure young lad hired as part of a counter-zombie unit or some nonsense like that, no, he was just an engineer. And the game really didn’t let you forget that.

Every weapon Clarke could equip wasn’t really built for combat – you equipped tools typically found in engineering garages, surgical chambers, workshop floors. It gave the feeling of rooting around for scrap a real, in-world feeling of authenticity: you weren’t just scavenging resources, you weren’t just collecting ammo in boxes in bedrooms for no reason… you were finding tools and weapons that fit the world. Thinking back on it, Dead Space was one of the most immersive games of the last generation, simply because the mechanics and fiction of its lonely universe worked so incredibly well together.

It also helps that the game’s UI was so unintrusive, too: Dead Space introduced the genius idea of giving you all the vital on-screen information you needed without resorting to a HUD. Your health was shown as a series of lights tracing your spine, your inventory was projected from a projector in your mask (in real-time, no less) and your objective marker could be seen by a light that emitted from your palm at the press of a button. No messy systems, no over-wrought menu design. It’s like the clean, easily navigable UI was designed to contrast directly the enemies you were fighting and the design of the Ishimura itself.

Dead Space was the first game from the studio that would go on to become Visceral Games. Previously, it had been a runner of EA’s licensed catalogue – James Bond, The Lord Of The Rings, Tiger Woods, The Godfather and more made up its portfolio until then. By the time the studio had managed to prove itself worthy of creating its own IP, it had already become masterful at game design from practically every angle, and that artisanal craft was shown off sublimely in Dead Space.

The series arguably peaked with its Dead Space 2 (opens in new tab) – it just perfected the experimental formula Dead Space set out – but unfortunately dipped with Dead Space 3 (opens in new tab). The games never lost their core focus, though: they always played around with the inherent darkness of man, always pushed industrial weaponry to its core, always gave you enemies that surprised and challenged you, no matter how many times you faced them.

None of this would have existed without Dead Space. The game came out of nowhere and was offered as a fantastic one-two punch from EA in the winter of 2008 along with Mirror’s Edge, almost making a statement for the publisher: “this is what we can do”, it proclaimed, “and this is what we can do with single-player games”. It set the precedent for one of the most well-rounded and satisfying generations in gaming, and as such Dead Space should be remembered as a game that celebrates how personal, how masterful, how terrifying a good horror game should be.

This article originally appeared in Xbox: The Official Magazine. For more great Xbox coverage, you can subscribe to OXM here (opens in new tab).

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The humble save point is an endangered species in this day and age. Modern games, not wanting to interrupt or burden players with a need to remember to slide a digital bookmark into their progress, either save your game automatically or let you save whenever you please. The little glowing ports in a storm, where no enemy will attack you, where you can catch a breath before a boss, or you can make some badly needed progress are eternally memorable if done right. These ten are the best and strangest in PlayStation history.

Dead Rising 2

Even in zombie infest Las Vegas, the bathroom is a safe space to collect your thoughts, to mark a moment in time to return to again and again, to consider: how many times have I duct-taped a baseball bat and a weed-whacker together now? Dead Rising 2’s lavatory save points are not only more convenient than the lonely security office couch Frank West had to use in original, they’re also apparently magical, hiding secret shortcuts within. 

Alien: Isolation

Beeping sounds are not comforting in the world of Alien. If you hear an insistent electronic tone, it’s usually coming from a motion tracker indicating precisely close you are to having your face eaten by a hulking two-mouthed bug monster. In Alien: Isolation, though, beeping can also indicate the presence of a blessed save point, a taupe colored electrical panel that represents a few more minutes of survival. Only problem: it seems to take a billion years for for Isolation’s save stations to register Ripley’s key card. Not that there’s any hurry because of face eating bug monsters.

Metal Gear Solid

Snake’s Codec is not a comforting piece of technology. Is it convenient to have a communication device that interacts directly with your ear’s delicate bones? Sure but what if it malfunctions! That’s stressful. It’s also not particularly convenient to have to use it to call a separate person just to save your game. Sure, Mei Ling is a personable and intelligent individual always willing to cough up some philosophical bonmot to ease the pain of extreme espionage, but isn’t there a better way to mark your time at Shadow Moses? Apparently not, because that’s how you have to save there.

Resident Evil

The Umbrella corporation’s boundless capacity for horrifying technological advancement is matched only by its adoration of technological anachronism. If you can build massive, secret underground base’s for developing futuristic, biological military ordinance, why do you need typewriters to save everyone’s progress? They’re not even electric typewriters! You need old fashioned, messy ass ink ribbons to use them. There will be hell to pay if that ink gets all over the jewels and bizarre keys in this inventory full of stuff needed to get through Umbrellas various mansions. At least the music playing in every save room near the typewriters is beautiful.

God of War 3

Kratos is not the kind of guy you’d expect to regularly genuflect. Indeed Kratos’ whole thing is hating gods, killing gods, and yelling about how he’s going to kill all those gods he hates so much. And yet every time he wants to save his progress during some gluttonous revenge rampage, he steps into an altar, gifts from Zeus’ daughter Athena  in God Of War III. Zeus himself is the one who granted the Spartan his progress-stashing ability in the first game. I’m not calling you a sellout or anything Kratos, but if you were for real you wouldn’t need to save your game at all! Just kidding. Your new Viking beard frightens me.

GTA: Vice City

Over the past decade, saving your game in Grand Theft Auto has always been a homey experience. Returning to your base of operations is part of it, but it’s all about where you rest your head permanently. Niko Bellic’s apartments, Michael de Santa’s house of Hollywood strife, etc. Back in Grand Theft Auto Vice City, though,  Tommy Vercetti saved his progress in a seedier, more transient locale. The Ocean View Hotel, with its gaudily decorated bed and a floating cassette icon, is where he needed to save his game. It is simultaneously the least comfortable and the most in GTA history. No one likes to live in a hotel, but at least you can trash the place and someone else will clean it up.

No More Heroes: Heroes’ Paradise

Old Chuck Greene saves his game in the bathroom, but we don’t know that he’s actively relieving himself in there. Guy could just be washing his hands. Tucking his shirt back in. Wiping off a bloodstain or something. Travis Touchdown in No More Heroes? There are no illusions about what this assassin nerd is doing when he saves his game. He walks right into his WC, drops trou, and goes to town to mark down precisely where he is on his journey to becoming the number one hired killer with a lightsaber. It’s ridiculous but I have to admit that I admire his comfort level. You do you, Travis.

Dead Space

When you’ve been trundling through the darkened halls of a crumbling space station infested by monsters made up of the ripped up limbs of the terrible warped crew that used to live there, a little light goes a long way. The welcoming glow of a USG Ishimura save terminal goes the longest in Dead Space. Warm, reassuring and a temporary salvation from all that getting your brains sucked out through your eye socket by some gasping monstrosity. That said it doesn’t quite make sense that there are terminals everywhere for the crew to just randomly record their thoughts on. Is the Ishimura like a giant sci-fi episode of the Real World with confessionals everywhere? Weird, Dead Space. Weird.

Ico

So this creepy, vaguely medieval society is terrified of boys born with horns, right? So they lock them up in a rotting castle ruled over by some inky witch with blue electric magic powers and a legion of living shadows at her command. If everyone doesn’t want the boy to escape with the ghostly magical young girl he just met in the castle, why are there inexplicably comfortable couches all over the place for the two of them to take naps on, thus saving their game? One second, you’re in a crumbling hallway of death. The next, you’re on a windswept terrace with a couch ready for popcorn and binge watching John Hughes movies. This castle and its save points make no sense, Ico.

Tomb Raider (1996)

We’re not saying Lara Croft doesn’t run a high probability of finding precious jewels during her grave robbing adventures in the original Tomb Raider. In fact, it’s all but guaranteed that at some point after she’s shot a T-rex in the face and solved the instant death puzzles of an evil statue with the midas touch, Lara’s going to find some shiny, valuable rocks. But why do all the jewels in Tomb Raider let her save her game? And why are there only a few of them inexplicably scattered around the tombs all over the world? MAGIC JEWELS DON’T SAVE GAMES IN REAL LIFE, TOMB RAIDER!

The post The 10 weirdest save points in video game history appeared first on Game News.

Games can go through vast transformations between the time they’re conceived and released. Usually, though, the game that arrives on store shelves is more or less the one the developers sought out to make when they first came up with the idea. This Top 7 is not about those games.

Instead, we’re celebrating the titles that had more tumultuous development cycles–the ones that ended up totally different from what they started out as. We’re looking at licensed games that became AAA blockbusters, cancelled sequels that were reworked into original IPs, and cancelled original IPs that were reworked into amazing sequels. Your favorite game might’ve started off as an entirely different project, and it’s time we pull back the curtain on gaming’s forgotten history.

7. ZombiU was first Killer Freaks from Outer Space

Nintendo first unveiled the Wii U at E3 2011, showing the world its entry into the next generation of consoles. Though few titles were actually shown off, one notable exception was Killer Freaks from Outer Space, an Ubisoft-published first-person shooter about an alien invasion of Earth. Made by Ubisoft Montpellier (who originally pitched it as an FPS where players kill Rabbids–presumably because everyone, including the developers, was tired of Rabbids), the game pit human survivors against creepy, green alien monsters. And yet, one year later, Killer Freaks was nowhere to be found at Ubisoft’s booth. So what happened?

ZombiU happened, apparently. After the lukewarm reception at E3 2011, Ubisoft went back to the drawing board. The titular Killer Freaks were removed from the shooter and replaced with zombies, creating a much more serious, survival-based game. And so, the originally Rabbids-starring, then alien-starring Killer Freaks from Outer Space was mutated into one of the better, more ambitious Wii U launch titles.

6. Star Fox Adventures was Fox-less as Dinosaur Planet

From Battletoads to Banjo Kazooie, British developer Rare was responsible for some of the biggest games of the ’90s. Some of its most popular titles, though, were the ones it made with Nintendo characters–Rare was one of the very few western developers that Nintendo allowed access to its coveted roster of icons. Despite this, the GameCube release of Star Fox Adventures was not originally a Star Fox game at all–in fact, it was originally a Nintendo 64 game by the name of Dinosaur Planet that had absolutely nothing to do with Fox McCloud.

Dinosaur Planet starred Sabre, a fox that, while looking a lot like Nintendo’s Fox, was actually meant to be a totally unconnected fox. Nintendo’s Shigeru Miyamoto met with Rare and noted the similarities between the two franchises’ characters, and suggested reaching a middle ground. It was decided that the two IPs would be smushed together, creating Star Fox Adventures: Dinosaur Planet, a GameCube game that would ultimately serve as the last one Rare would develop under Nintendo’s wing.

5. Halo was a third-person shooter and an RTS (On Mac)

Halo is to Microsoft as Mario is to Nintendo as Mickey Mouse is to Disney–that’s how it has been since Halo: Combat Evolved released on the original Xbox in 2001. The innovative shooter was immensely popular, and arguably responsible for the success of the Xbox in America, as well as the future success of the first-person shooter genre on consoles. But there was a time, only two years prior to the game’s release, when Halo was a far different game on a totally different system.

Bungie originally hitched its wagon not to Microsoft, but to Apple, and was planning on releasing Halo as a third-person shooter for the Mac. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But it’s true–you can even watch Steve Jobs introduce Bungie co-founder Jason Jones at 1999’s Macworld. And before it was a third-person shooter, Halo was even more removed from the game that dazzled Xbox owners; Bungie had originally planned for it to be a real-time strategy title (as seen in this early video).

4. Doom was conceived as a licensed Aliens game

Though Wolfenstein 3D was big, it wasn’t until id Software released Doom that the FPS had truly arrived. It was a huge hit, thanks in no small part to its incredible graphics and original, unique setting. Fighting demons on Mars? Who would’ve thought of that? What a weird, weird idea.

But it isn’t nearly as strange when you consider what Doom was before it was Doom. Early in the game’s development, id was in talks with 20th Century Fox to make a shooter based on the team’s favorite sci-fi film: Aliens. Suddenly, the concept of fighting weird creatures on a foreign planet doesn’t seem so strange–in fact, that’s literally the plot of the entire franchise. That deal eventually fell through, so Doom went back to the drawing board… and ended up being pretty much the same game, except, you know, more red.

3. Dead Space was original a System Shock sequel

Far, far away there exists an enigmatic mausoleum filled with monsters, and the only evidence of what happened is in audio logs scattered around the world. This narrative could, realistically, describe three different games: System Shock, BioShock, or Dead Space. While it’s well-established that BioShock was made as a spiritual successor to System Shock, a lesser-known fact is that Dead Space was, at one point, supposed to be an actual sequel to Looking Glass Games’ 1999 sci-fi shooter.

In 2006, EAs Redwood Shores studio was rumored to be working on System Shock 3, but after the publisher found that it couldn’t legally publish the game (they owned the name, not the development rights), the team was forced to make an original IP instead. So they went back to work and made Dead Space, a game that takes place far, far away, in an enigmatic mausoleum filled with monsters. Oh, wait.

2. Devil May Cry started off as Resident Evil 4

Resident Evil was shambling towards stagnation in the late ’90s. Though sales of it were strong, Capcom wanted to create something more original for the fourth installment of the incredibly popular franchise. So director Hideki Kamiya set out to turn RE into a stylish action game, ditching the slow, plodding pace of the previous games in favor of a new, superhuman hero. Eventually, however, it was decided that this simply didn’t fit within the RE universe. Kamiya’s action game was just too cool for Resident Evil.

But know what it was cool enough for? The mother-freaking son of Sparda. Kamiya’s team rewrote the story, taking out all of the Resident Evil ties and refocusing it in a new universe. Here, a white-haired monster killer named Dante slashed apart hordes of demons and occasionally stopped for a slice of pizza. From the ashes of Resident Evil 4, Devil May Cry was born–turns out, people enjoyed the freedom that came from ditching traditional tank controls.

1. Donkey Kong was supposed to be a Popeye game

Master Chief is pretty popular. Kratos? Sure–people love that guy. And even at his worst, Sonic the Hedgehog has legions of fans. But none of these icons have anything on Mario. From his humble beginnings as “Jumpman” in Nintendo’s Donkey Kong, the plumber has billions in game sales under his belt. He’s had his own television show, his own cereal, and even his own Hollywood movie. And guess what? He almost didn’t exist.

If young game designer Shigeru Miyamoto had gotten his way, Donkey Kong would’ve been Bluto, Pauline would’ve been Olive Oyl, and Mario would’ve been Popeye. Yup, Donkey Kong–one of the most important video games ever made–was almost a licensed Popeye game. That deal fell through, and Miyamoto had to create his own characters. In other words, gaming’s greatest mascot is essentially a Popeye stand-in. There’s a happy ending to this story, though, besides the advent of an industry icon: Miyamoto was able to eventually make his Popeye game. Dreams do come true, people. Dreams do come true.

Bonus: Sleeping Dogs was Black Lotus, and then True Crime

According to the developers, Sleeping Dogs didn’t change much over the course of its lengthy development cycle, but the story behind the game is too good to ignore. Soon after developer United Front Games was formed, it began work on a new, original IP. Black Lotus, as it was called, was set in Hong Kong, and starred an undercover female cop (reportedly modeled after Lucy Liu). Activision wasn’t comfortable with spending so much on an original IP starring a woman, though, so it had the developer affix a penis onto the star and position it as True Crime: Hong Kong, a reboot of the True Crime series.

The end? Not by a long shot. Activision cancelled the game in 2011, arguing that “only top-tier games can be competitive in today’s market.” But True Cri–erm, Black Lotus wasn’t dead yet. Square Enix saw potential, and published it a year later as Sleeping Dogs. Weirdest part? United Front Games says little was modified during this flip-flopping development cycle–well, besides the hero getting a sex change, that is.

The games, they are a-changin’

There are many, many other examples of games going through crazy transformations before their launch. It’s Mr. Pants was supposed to be a Donkey Kong game, and there’s even some rumblings that 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand wasn’t originally going to star rapper 50 Cent. Crazy, right? And these are just the ones we know of; surely there are plenty of other tales that have yet to reach the light of day. One day, maybe we’ll know the truth.

And if you’re looking for more, check out top 7 cancelled games we wish we could play and the top 7 games we really hope aren’t cancelled.

The post Top 7… Games that were originally totally different games appeared first on Game News.

Look – a scientific diagram:

Here’s a list consisting of seven enemies that scuttle and jump at your face. (But deliberately not including Facehuggers because they were made in movie land. Not game land).

7. Pregnators | Duke Nukem Forever

For all of Duke Nukem Forever’s multiple faults, for all of its titular character’s lumpen-headed galootishness, there’s only one area in the game that’s really downright unpleasant. Crudeness, you see, cannot possibly be truly offensive if it’s executed with knowing intent. Things with an ‘offensive’ tone only really become a problem if they’re done callously or without self-awareness. Most of Duke Nukem Forever is a case of the former. During ‘The Hive’ however, it sadly becomes very much the latter. And that’s mostly down to these little f*ckers.

Where Alien’s Facehuggers, much like a lot of H.R. Giger designs, are creepy because of the subtly sexual connotations of their form and functionality, DNF’s Pregnators miss the point completely and go full-on genital-o-rama without a shadow of a hint of a soupcon of subtlety. Basically, they’re a cock-and-balls on legs. They even spit white goo at you as a missile attack. You know, just generic white goo. Could be anything.

Could be, but it’s probably spunk.

Above: Yeah, it’s an achievement of sorts, though one normally celebrated in the porn industry

Their narrative function? Filling Earth women with alien baby. Where Facehuggers hint at unpleasant sexual practices via allusion, Pregnators just get on with them. The actual impregnating process is never shown in the game, mercifully, but this concept art (opens in new tab) (which we’re not going to post on the site) makes it very clear what these fellas are all about.

Makes the tentacle-cock face-thrashing they sometimes give Duke seem rather tame in comparison, doesn’t it?

6. Leapers | Resistance

Man alive these things are ugly. We mean, generally speaking, collectively, as a species, the Chimera aren’t going to win any beauty contests. At least not in our Solar System. And Leapers are possibly the most butt-ugly of all the multi-eyed Chimerians. We doubt that even Disney with all its mastery in the arts of sugary cutefication could make a Leaper look lovable. Here’s what a Leaper might look like before and after being Disneyfied:

Above: It’s even singing a song. Regardless, it’s still less appealing than a Styrofoam cup full of day old tramp mucus

In addition to being scuttly and possessing a tendency to jump at your face, Leapers also have the dubious honour of being one of the few video game ‘characters’ that have officially offended God. When the big man in the clouds found out that Manchester Cathedral was used as a shooting gallery in the first Resistance, lo he was pissed and sent a memo to his underlings, who subsequently cast fire and brimstone and claims of copyright infringement in the direction of Sony. The following video shows Leapers desecrating Manchester Cathedral. Ugly and sacrilegious.

And there’s even more ungodliness. If a Leaper has a nibble on someone that hasn’t had the necessary vaccination, there’s a good chance they’ll turn into a Chimera. Just like vampires. Not soppy good-looking vampires for little girls to cry about. But proper evil vampires that want to eat your entire face off. Apparently, if you feel hot and have a craving for raw meat, you’re infected and will be imminently turning into a Chimera. Either that or you’re Jeffrey Dahmer burning in Hell.

Next page: Even more enemies that scuttle and jump at your face!

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