Features// SPOnG's Review of the Year 2010: July

From one high-profile developer to another, we had managed to steal the rather excitable Peter Molyneux for a lengthy chat about E3, Milo, Kinect and everything inbetween. He didn’t seem to think that Microsoft didn’t quite “pull a rabbit out of the hat” at E3, but admitted it was hard to keep secrets leading up to the event. He also liked Mark’s name for Kinect, ‘Xbox Space,’ but I think he was humouring him to be quite honest. I don’t recall anyone else liking it.

July seemed to be ‘interview month’ in general, as SPOnG wasn’t just chilling with Molyneux, Rein and Boivin. It was multiplayer time for Kane & Lynch 2 and we published a Q&A with the mode’s director, Kim Krogh, to learn how IO planned to improve on the online aspects of the original. I sat down with Bizarre Creations to talk about 007 Blood Stone - a departure from the usual arcade and racing games that the British studio is known so well for.

H.A.W.X. 2 creative director, Edward Douglas, was quizzed on his approach to the flight combat genre and Bungie’s Niles Sankey offered a few moments to discuss one of the biggest games of the year - Halo: Reach.

Nintendo was riding high on the back of the 3DS’ positive reception, and hosted a special event in London to give us some more time with the device. A selection of demos, both playable and non-playable, were available to experience - from trailers of Mario Kart and Kid Icarus to playtests of Pilotwings, a new Nintendogs game and Ubisoft’s Hollywood 61. Metal Gear Solid 3D, an interactive movie built as a tech demo, and Capcom’s Resident Evil Revelations were some of the more impressive third-party projects on show.

Speaking of new hardware, Microsoft had sent us a brand spanking new Xbox 360 S model in July too - so we did the natural thing and made a montage of unboxing photos. You can see it here. When that was all sorted we put the console through its paces and reviewed it just for you guys - the Xbox 360 S review was the most popular SPOnG feature for July. Guess a lot of people were curious about how reliable the hardware was.

This was probably the first month in 2010 where things in the release schedule world were acting as expected. As a result, we reviewed Ruffian Games’ Crackdown 2 for the Xbox 360 and XBLA title Limbo and spent the rest of the time getting excited about future projects.

My Halo: Reach interview with Niles (linked earlier) was accompanied by a lengthy preview of some of the game’s Firefight mode, while we caught the first glimpse of Fable III in action and had a little game of football with EA’s new FIFA 11 as well. There was also room for a rather scathing retrospective of Acclaim’s South Park game, Chef’s Luv Shack. That article was probably more popular than the game itself on release, thank God.

[b][u]Finally…[/u][/b]

Microsoft-owned Rare Ltd was quite proud of the fact that it could afford to expand to a brand new studio, so it took the liberty of creating a video to show the whole world (Video: Rare’s New Digs, 16th July).

Unfortunately, no googly eyed characters were represented in the video, but if you ever wanted to know about the “urban location with the edges taken off” that complements Rare’s existing Twycross studio, then it’s probably worth a watch.