Art of Nexus – Delicious space battle defeats Euro fatigue

SPOnG was taken to see Nexus: The Jupiter Incident recently, which as regular readers will be aware, isn’t really our kind of game. Though we were taken to Amsterdam to see it, which eased this slight genre-based issue somewhat.

After a seven hour taxi ride, we landed at the European Space Agency headquarters, quite the most unimpressive, well, thing we have ever seen. Imagine a load of seventies Porta-Cabins lumped together with a slide outside and you should get the idea. However, the giant cardboard box covered in turkey foil representing a “satellite” was impressive on a number of levels.

So as we filed in, the collected UK contingent began doing what it does best – Looking for free lager and making snide speculation as to what the European Journalists, inevitably dressed in black, would be asking. “On how many discs does the game come.” It was asked. “Of how many polygons is the spaceship constructed?” That was asked too. We were on a roll.

So the lights went out and most people started nodding off. SPOnG estimates that about half the attendees had a little snooze during the presentation, which, following the boring bit became rather interesting.

The point of Nexus is that it’s easy to get into with a constant curve of learning that lasts the duration of the game. It dispenses with the need to manage and maintain resources too, meaning that mining is replaces with warfare and death – alien death at that. Now we were interested.

Speaking to one of the game’s producers later that evening, we got into a conversation about the really rather striking aesthetic of the game. Having heard the “…we want our game to be more than a game – an actual cinematic experience…” earlier in the day, perhaps the most oft-used phrase in the art of game presentation, we hadn’t really paid much attention until the game started running. It really is cinematic, and between the painful menu demonstrations (again at the request of our continental cousins) the actual stellar violence was magnificent to behold. And as such (and because we promised to) here are some grabs from the more arty aspects of what is a beautiful game, out this Friday for PC.

And, though you didn't hear this from us, the Xbox version has just gone into planning.

Enjoy.