Penguin has a repack of The Foreigners and it needed a new cover. Canadian designer David Gee was assigned the task and some insight in to his creative process is up on FaceOut Books. Its interesting to see the process behind how a cover is arrived at, particularly a somewhat abstract one for a book like the Foreigners. It might be interesting to see some of these other iterations published too though. Why settle on just one, after all? FaceOut Books turns out to be an interesting site with further insight on book cover creation.
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Once again the Prince of Persia series has received a makeover, Starting from scratch for a third time. This incarnation of the franchise seems to be the antithesis of the much celebrated original. Forget everything you know about any Prince of Persia game you’ve played in the past before delving in to this one.The Ubisoft Montreal team with Senior Producer Bertrand Heias has set us up with a new protagonist in a new fiction. The first Prince of Persia game has been an all time favorite game since we first played it in 1989. It was highly influential and broke new ground with it’s frustrating and addictive gameplay as well as it’s superb rotoscoped animations.
Years later we saw the Prince of Persia franchise get a full makeover with the Sands of Time series. This revisit was hugely successful across multiple platforms, with a new prince, new story, and exciting new gameplay. It was a very different experience than the original yet a welcome transition. After a few sequels to that it started getting a little stale though. As a result, we’ve once again wiped the slate clean with a new Prince of Persia, though this time without subtitle or any real indications to the casual observer that this is something new. Perhaps it’s time for a new title too. Lets look beyond marketing semantics though. continue…
Shaun White Snowboarding has just dropped in a shelf-filling seven flavors (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, DS, PSP, PS2 and PC.) With home video game consoles the Wii is in many ways the runt of the pack, lacking the raw horsepower of the Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 (both powered by the award-winning Assassin’s Creed engine). Usually with large multiplatform games like this, the Wii version ends up being a crippled and relatively neglected cousin of the other larger versions.
With this title the Canadian developers at Ubisoft Montreal rethought that typical move and instead made a custom game variant for the Wii, compensating for the shortcomings of the console by capitalizing on the unique possibilities the hardware has to offer. Shaun White Snowboarding – Road Trip is not just an attempt to cram a large power-hungry game in to a small and relatively weak console but instead a differentiated stylized experience which shows both consumers and other developers that with a little creativity you can make multiplatform games which take advantage of what each platform uniquely has to offer. continue…
Far Cry was an interesting game years ago. It was a first person shooter with a difference. It really shook things up in the genre with its tight AI and amazingly far draw distances in a seemingly open world. It also has a significant problem where the game fell apart in the second half with an unfortunate plot and gameplay twist which was seen to many as being three steps back. Its first official sequel is here now: Far Cry 2 and many are watching it to see if it repeats the accomplishments or the problems of its namesake. On top of that, the Canadian developers at Ubisoft Montreal have tried to push the envelope once more and give players an ambitious experience.
To make a point: Far Cry 2 by Clint Hocking has almost nothing to do with the original. It does not continue or have any significant ties to the original narrative and is intentionally divorced from Far Cry. That gesture seems to be an admission of guilt for letting the first game devolve so rapidly in to a horrible mess. Consider Far Cry 2 an apology to fans as they make amends this time to turn Far Cry 2 in to what we all wanted the first Far Cry to be. continue…
If you’re in Toronto next weekend you should go check out the Art Gallery of Ontario. Aside from just art, they’re now ready to show off their newly ‘finished’ Frank GehryTM renovations. The public opening takes place from the 14th to the 16th with free admission and you’re invited.
