CES 2001Malice Hands-On Impressions
We get to play the actual game - here's what we thought.
Shortly after watching Microsoft's Bill Gates and Seamus Blackley demonstrate Argonaut's upcoming action game, Malice, earlier this morning, we dropped by one of the company's press suites to get some actual hands-on playtime with the visually-impressive game. The game was running on the same Xbox hardware that used during the keynote. Unfortunately, the controller that Microsoft let us play the game with wasn't the final one, so we weren't able to judge its comfort or button placement. Instead, Microsoft was using what liked a Hammerhead gamepad, which comes with six buttons, two analog sticks, and two triggers - much like the final Xbox controller design.
As we noted earlier, the most impressive part of Malice is easily its lighting and shadow effects. The demo starts with the camera facing Alice, the game's main character, who's standing underneath a swinging light. As the light moves back and forth across her face, Alice's shadow scurries and stretches across the floor in perfect unison with the lamp. Even Alice's hair, clothes, and arms are self-shadowed, thus creating an extremely immersive visual effect. And all this graphical splendor is accomplished with the game maintaining a healthy framerate. Also impressive is the fact that hardware per-pixel and vertex shading hasn't yet been implemented on the Xbox yet. These features require a significant amount of processing resources, and once they're "turned on," Malice should get a nice boost in performance.
From what we could tell, Alice has three major actions. The first is her standard hammer attack, wherein she bashes enemies with an overhead hit. Her second action is a wide swing that clears out enemies that stray too close to her hammer's range, and her third is a simple jump. The fourth button switches your view to Alice's first-person perspective. You can also pan the camera around Alice, and then zoom in or out for a better view of her surroundings.
Although the demonstration only takes place in a single and very small level, the depth of Malice can already be appreciated. Jez San, Argonaut CEO, says that the game will have 30 levels in all, and will be a single-player only game. San says that Argonaut would rather perfect the single-player portion of the game, than compromise it by fiddling with a multiplayer component. Of the game, San says: "Malice will have the depth of Zelda, but with a lot more action." For the time being, we'll have to take his word for it. Malice will be an Xbox launch title. We'll have more information regarding this game in the coming months.
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