THE LAST OF US: VGA announcement trailer

in a word WOW, so this is how good console games can do plants and water when they actually try? thats impressive if its all actually in game like it says. Coming from naughty dog i would not be surprised.
So what is it?
Its the road meets i am legend meets those japanese survival games that never get popular over here. Starring Ellen Paige. Fighting fungal zombies in a ruined new york.

Personally i am very excited for this, i wondered why nobody tried to use the real world zombifying cordycepts fungi as a plot device before.

heres hoping its very tough makes survival more important than fighting and going one man army on it.

ALAN WAKE: American Nightmare VGA announcement trailer

Welp, guess we know what the next instalment of the Alan Wake series is all about. No longer named night springs apparently. I adored the first, beat it about 8 times last year so im sure i will get this too. Interesting that it features more about mr scratch, an idea in the first game many just dont even know was in their after they beat it. That and new kinds of taken.
All in all it looks like Alan Wake may actually be leaning more towards the survival horror influence of its roots than its action thriller ones.
So lets see how this pans out- and relates to a full retail 'second season',

WELP.

I tried to ignore the nu-mettul. God help me, i tried.

So yeah, here is the latest, unfortunately put together, trailer for silent hill downpour. My opinion? my early thoughts about some inspiration from the suffering and alan wake seems like it was right on the money. I'm gonna hazard a guess that they may even try the alan wake/ alone in the dark route and make it more like an episodic horror tv series. Which i cant say i would be adverse to. Both of the aforementioned examples, regardless of overall game quality, pulled it off quite well. I think it would certainly help in a game like this to have a "previously on silent hill" when you load it up after a while without continuing.

Am i expecting a good story? possibly. Maybe a little cliche' in that 90's american horror kind of way but i enjoyed that schtick with Obscure so it could keep me entertained here. What about the gameplay though? the brief fashes we see between all the cutscenes showed what looked like a 3rd person clunky movement thing that reminded me of deadly premonition. Which let's be honest was dogshit at its best, however its story carried it through. Will this be able to do the same? Honestly i kinda doubt it.

We're gonna have to wait and see. After all it's not like we aren't going to play it when it's released.

Right now i'm tentatively excited for it, its showing a lot of influence in its direction from resident evil 5, alan wake, the suffering and silent hill homecoming so maybe it could be a perfect storm of influences. Or just the accumulated crap of all its touchstones combined into one terribad package. Time'll tell i suppose.

Well its friday.

So by now you, along with the rest of the world should be aware of the announcement trailer for dead island not being, well, dead.
If you haven't heard of it before it was announced in '05 or '06 and was due in 2008, it had a trailer that has aged terribly. Both in terms of what the game was like and the style of videogame trailers (namely terrible heavy metal music and smash cuts to lots of red text every 9 seconds on a black background) and a couple of videos to advertise its still impressive 'multi layered damage system'.
Then it vanished. Like Duke Nukem Forever and Alan Wake most folks assumed it was dead. A project to ambitious to have seen fruition.

I was pretty surprised to hear an announcement trailer for the product had appeared and was doing the rounds. Even more so that so many people where gushing about it being one of the best trailers ever made for a videogame. So of course, being a horror fan and a filmmaker i had to check this out.

I was not disappointed.



Not only doe's that get me excited for the game but that is, from a technical standpoint, a superb piece of work. In less than 3 minutes with no dialogue we get a narrative about a family vacation that has gone as wrong as it could possibly go and it invokes genuine emotion in its audience.
Sure the choice of music and the focus on the girl is a bit of an obvious, guaranteed heartstring pull but still it remains bloody effective. -pun not intended.

As a videogames enthusiast i am excited for the game without seeing anything to do with how it plays, so it definitely did its desired job with me. As a filmmaker myself i am impressed by it. Personally i feel the edits of it in chronological order have a bit more emotional impact, but still it remains an impressive piece that is easily up there with gears of war's mad world trailer or resistance 3's 'on the rails' trailer as one of the best attempts to sell a videogame as something a little more meaningful than "Bro check it, you will totally be able to kill some dudes in this!". For that alone the creators of such trailers should be applauded.