As you probably already know, Heavy Rain ships on February 23rd. If you haven’t pre-ordered the game yet, here are a few great places to guarantee yourself a copy of this game.

Amazon (has ship-on-release date option and you may be able to save yourself some sales tax)
EB Games (you can pick the game up in store on 2/23)
Newegg (has a reputation for extremely fast shipping)
Best Buy (another place that you can pick the game up in store on 2/23)

One attractive bonus with pre-ordering Heavy Rain is that you’ll get a free downloadable prologue chapter (titled The Taxidermist). Unfortunately due to publisher delay, however, this chapter won’t be available until March 4th.

Upon initial development of Heavy Rain, Quantic Dream planned on utilizing the motion controller for the PS3. In fact – David Cage (CEO of Quantic Dream) even admits that hardware driver code involving the motion controller still exists in the game’s source code. The problem is – Sony won’t be releasing the motion controller peripheral for another year.

“If you are talking about Motion Control, this is something we initially considered for Heavy Rain,” Cage revealed in a Q&A for Dagbladet.no. “The very first version of the game design was based on motion control, but it was not feasible at the time. But all the controls of the final version of ‘Heavy Rain’ is still based on motion.”

He then went on to say “I have a lot of interest in Sony’s motion device and there is a good chance that we announce something about it in the coming weeks”. This is also interesting news as there haven’t been a lot of developer’s announcing anything regarding Project Natal.

Evidence suggests that a multiplayer mode might be under development for I Am Alive. Per a job posting at Gamasutra, Ubisoft Shanghai was looking for a multi player developer for an unmentioned game that strongly resembled I Am Alive. The game’s lead designer, Paul Robinson, also had the following statement in his LinkedIn profile: “Game Director for I Am Alive – we’re doing some exciting stuff and if you are a lead mp designer, drop me a line”. You can read more about this story at the following link.

I Am Alive Multiplayer: More Evidence Uncovered

This doesn’t, by any means, guarantee that there will be any form of a multi-player mode in the game – even if they began development for it. With the online revolution of gaming, I think some form of multi-player gaming has to at least be considered for any new game. It would be interesting to see how multiple players could be incorporated into this epic adventure. I would love to see some sort of co-op mode where we would be attempting to survive disaster with a friend or two over the Playstation Network.

According to several sources, Heavy Rain will incorporate a unique control system. A trigger button on the PS3 controller will move the character forward. A major focus will be placed on the button’s analogue function, allowing the user to control the speed of the character’s movement by pressing harder or softer on the button. The left analogue stick will control the viewpoint of the character and the direction the character moves in relation to where the character is looking. According to Quantic Dream’s CEO David Cage, this will free the movement of the character from the perspective of the camera. The rest of the gameplay is adjusted according to the context of the current scene. This will likely mean that several different actions will be mapped to the main controller buttons depending on the game event at hand. Players are able to bring up a selection of their character’s current thoughts by holding the L2 button and pressing corresponding buttons to say or do what they’re thinking. These thoughts will sometimes blur, and selecting them at the wrong time will affect the character’s reaction, causing them to say or do something in the wrong way.

Action sequences, such as when the player is being attacked, play out as quick time events. Players will be presented with various symbols, requiring them to either press buttons, move the right analogue stick in a certain way, or shake or tilt the controller (think Indigo Prophecy/Fahrenheit). Failure to execute these commands successfully could result in detrimental effects to the storyline or even character death. For example, in one scene, Norman Jayden is interrogating a suspect named Mad Jack when he starts to suffer from withdrawal symptoms and button prompts will show up. If he fails to take his drugs, he will be taken to a scenario in which he will have to escape from a car before it is thrown into a crusher, killing him. In scenes like these, a “timer” scene (a portion of the screen that is devoted to show the player how long he or she has until their time runs out, or another event is scripted to occur, which is shown through several different camera angles) is shown at the bottom of the screen, indicating how long the player has to escape from his predicament.

Anther unique feature of this game is how character death is handled. If a character dies, the game resumes with the player having control of another character – with the previous character’s death affecting the story. There are 4 possible playable characters. If all 4 were to die, there is a proper conclusion before the game ends (in other words – you won’t simply get a “Game Over” screen).

In the previous post, I mentioned that I Am Alive is being re-developed featuring the game engine that Ubisoft is using in Splinter Cell: Conviction. I wanted to further dig into the details of the SC:C engine.

This engine (known as LEAD) is an evolution and expansion upon the game engine used in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. There was discussion about Ubisoft utilizing either CryEngine 3, Unreal Engine 2, or Unreal Engine 3 – but, in the end, the developers chose to improve and use their own homebrewed engine. Their developers have been quoted as crediting the LEAD engine as having amazing lighting effects, a fully dynamic environment, the capability to display and render a large amount of objects simultaneously, a destructible environment, and all the latest trends and enhancements in the gaming industry.

SC:CT was a well received and well developed game – so this would appear to be good news (at least for the Splinter Cell franchise). How this translates to I Am Alive will remain to be seen – though I have to admit that screenshots that I’ve seen of Splinter Cell: Conviction are truly gorgeous (see below).

According to this news story from IGN.com, Level 5 (developers of the Dark Cloud series) would “seriously consider” developing a 3rd Dark Cloud game.

Dark Cloud 3 development under “serious consideration”

If this story is true, the key factor in determining future development would be public demand. Level 5 is a Japanese company, so unless you understand Japanese – it may be difficult to contact them. I, however, will provide a link to their translated contact page here.

Translated contact page

Here is also a petition for Level 5 to develop this game.

Dark Cloud 3 petition

This blog was created to provide any potential information about another game in the Dark Cloud series. The Dark Cloud games were extremely addictive and vast RPGs that originated on the PS2. The 2nd game (in my opinion, one of the best games to hit the PS2) came out back in 2003. Due to possible commercial disappointments with the series, a 3rd game has yet to be produced. The Level 5 team went on to develop Rogue Galaxy (similar in style to Dark Cloud, but not quite the same) – however there has been no further developments in this wonderful series. I will pursue any information that I can find about Dark Cloud 3 – and if we get enough people interested, maybe we can harass game producers enough to consider ordering this game for development. Stay Tuned!

PS. I will also blog about Dark Cloud 1 and Dark Cloud 2 as there’s very limited content available for any future games in this series.

For a game that’s familiar with release delays, I Am Alive has once again been delayed – this time until at least April 2011.

Source: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/26843/Guillemot_I_Am_Alive_Rebooted_Delayed.php

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot stated via conference call – “We have been totally re-engineering the product, so it is still on the way. It will use the Splinter Cell engine. We think it can become a very good quality product.” This statement reeks of overall project uncertainty, so I’m starting to feel a little doubtful of its release at all. The “Splinter Cell engine” that Yves is referring to will be first seen in Splinter Cell: Conviction. It also doesn’t appear that Jade Raymond (of Assassin’s Creed fame) will have anything to do with the final version of I Am Alive. I’ll try to dig up more information about the game development life cycle directly from the source (Ubisoft Shanghai) as I’m interested to see how substantial the “reboot” of the game is.

I’m looking for more recent trailer videos (hopefully some that display gameplay footage and other game action). For now, click the picture below to see the awesome preview trailer from E3 2008. I love the intense graphic detail of this game – even in such subtle objects like the water bottle.

Here’s some “I AM ALIVE” screenshot images that I found. These are mostly environment pics likely work from Ubisoft Shanghai’s level design department. These were released back in the summer of 2009. I will continue my hunt for more media for this game, for now – enjoy!