E3 Impressions: High Voltage Software

If you listen to the Nintendo Gal podcast, you already know that I have been waiting for The Conduit with feverish anticipation since I got the chance to play it at E3 a year ago. Finally, The Conduit will be hitting the shelves on the 26th of this month. In order to build the hype, publisher Sega arranged for The Conduit to be playable in not just their booth, but also in Nintendo’s booth and in High Voltage’s separate booth. If you got in line for it in Sega or Nintendo’s booth, you were given a chance to play through a short demo of the single-player mode, but if you went to High Voltage’s booth, they had four Wii’s set up and linked together for a multiplayer demo.

After beating the single-player demo in Nintendo’s booth (sorry to the guy that stood behind me for 20 minutes), I snagged two short sessions with the multiplayer demo. The game type they had going when I played was an interesting variation on the classic free-for-all death match called Bounty Hunter. In this mode, each player is assigned a single enemy they must kill to gain two points. If they kill anyone else, they lose one point. If someone is assigned to kill you, you can kill them without penalty, but the only way to know who is trying to kill you is to wait for them to shoot you. I came in last pretty much every time, but I blame it on the controls. The key to playing The Conduit well is to have the controls perfectly tuned to your play style. Since I was in the middle of a firefight, I didn’t have much chance to adjust my controls, but I did ok despite my limitations. I think my best match had me at 17 points, while the leader finished at 25.

I still think that The Conduit is quite the killer app. Once you have your settings down perfectly, the game becomes so fluid that the setup that worked so well for Halo instantly seems simply archaic. Look forward to someone on our staff reviewing this soon.

High Voltage has really come a long way in the last few years. If you look through the list if titles they developed, you’ll notice some surprisingly big names in there, but before announcing The Conduit they were just another small fry. As the studio grew, they eventually reached the point where they could fund their own project from scratch. The first game to be conceived and developed entirely inside of High Voltage Software was The Conduit, shown for the first time a little over a year ago. Now, after being signed with Sega to publish The Conduit, High Voltage has been doing well enough to fully fund two projects that are being developed entirely internally. They are The Grinder and Gladiator A.D. It’s really amazing to see the company come this far in so short a time, and after seeing these two games at E3, I once again look forward to a year of feverish anticipation.

The Grinder takes after The Conduit as a first-person shooter using the same controls and the same graphics engine. Unlike The Conduit, however, the focus is on cooperative play and the enemies in this game are of the occult. Werewolves, zombies, scads of vampires and at least one nearly unkillable axe-weilding slasher were in the demo I saw. The setting for The Grinder is a desolate mining town in the middle of a desert, but even in that God-forsaken country the landscape was gorgeously detailed. Our tour guide for the game ran non-stop through ancient houses, desert canyons and railroad warehouses blasting through unending hordes of enemies with all the standard anti-undead weaponry: dual Colt .45’s, AK-47’s, pump-action shotguns, molotov cocktails and TNT.

The action comes at you ultra fast without being too proud to go for the cheap scares. Enemies will almost always appear suddenly right next to you or, even worse, right behind you. The worst offender is the slasher, who, on top of being able to take nearly every bullet you can carry, will teleport directly behind you if you break line of sight for more than a second. You can run from this guy, but hiding is an extremely bad idea.

The visual style and over-the-top story are sort of in the style of the old B-grade horror flicks that tried to be scary but were instead mostly just funny. The old western setting and distinct characters are perfect for this. There is even a video overlay that fades the outside edges of the screen and flashes photographic artifacts and those vertical lines across the screen just like an old film reel movie. The developers present assured me that this would be worked into the game somehow so that perhaps as the action gets more intense, more noise will appear on the screen. All of this just makes me so happy because I absolutely love good B-grade movies. Grindhouse, anyone?

The second title, Gladiator A.D. is a step in a completely different direction. Gladiator A.D. is a fighting game modeled after the gladiatorial combat that took place in the great Colosseum in Rome. The game had a number of interesting features that seemed pretty unique. The first and most notable one was when the two fighters circle each other, instead of moving the camera to keep the fighters on a two dimensional plane like in Soul Caliber, the camera will not move that much while one player moves in between the other player and the camera. To allow the fight to still be visible, the player closest to the camera becomes translucent while they are in front and become opaque again as they move off to the side.

Characters are fully customizable with armor and weapons that can be collected as you progress. In keeping with High Voltage tradition, your controls and loadout can be totally customized to perfectly match your fighting style. You can have a shield and a sword, a shield and a club, a sword and a club, two swords or any combination of whatever other weapons will be in the game.

The action seemed pretty slow for a fighting game. Of course, the only fighting games I ever got really familiar with were the Smash Bros. series and Soul Caliber, so maybe I’m just a little biased there. Even so, the fights seemed like they were more about strategy than about speed and timing. Since blocking still resulted in losing a little health, you have to be judicious about blocking or sidestepping an oncoming attack. Also, there is a super attack that can be used, but again you have to be careful when you use it. The developer playing the game missed with his super attack twice in a row with disastrous results.

The graphics were absolutely amazing for a Wii game. In one arena, the contenders duke it out in an ankle-deep pool of water that splashed beautifully as the battle raged on. In previous tech demos of the graphics engine, water reflections have been a major bragging point, so hopefully we’ll see some of that here as well. The audience in the arena was made up of over 200 individual spectators jumping up and down and waving their hands, and other elements of the arena, such as a lion pit, will be fully interactive in the final version.

I’ve rambled on too long, but I can’t help being extremely excited about these new announcements. I hope to be in contact with High Voltage in the coming months to keep tabs on these projects.