Previews// Reporting from Rezzed: Impressions from the Floor - Part 2

There are two resources that the player must keep in check to increase their likelihood of success: health and vitality. Health is only depleted when they are attacked and it is possible to bleed out due to particularly nasty wound. Vitality drops as the player moves and interacts with the world and can only be replenished by eating and drinking foodstuffs that they find.

The player's inventory has a limited amount of space in a similar fashion to Diablo, which can force the player to make some tough choices when they find something particularly useful yet a tad large, a rifle being a good example.

As I played though the game it became clear one of the major influences was DayZ. The need to tread carefully and not make your presence known is paramount in Sir, You're Being Hunted to the point where the more successful you are, the more aggressive the robots become.

During the demo I played I managed to find the second piece of the transporter by following a willo-the-wisp. As I made my way back to the stone circle with it I discovered four robots guarding the stone circle, none of whom were there before. My choice of action was to lay into them with my pistol and hope I could take some of them down and then run away into a detour that would lead me back to the stone circle. This 'plan', if you can call it that actually worked as I managed to not only kill two of the robots but also evade the other two by distracting them by throwing a bottle, which they duly ran after.

I found Sir, You're Being Hunted to be brilliantly put together and thoroughly entertaining. The dark humour that runs through it does much to add to the menacing atmosphere of the game and left me gagging for more. The developers promise that Sir, You're Being Hunted will be released sometime this year, I for one cannot wait for its arrival.


Beatbuddy: Tale of the Guardians

Music and video games have had a bit of a tortuous relationship. In the early days music was barely present and it wasn't until the arrival of the Commodore 64 and its mighty SID chip did people see the value of including tunes that are worthy of listening to into video games.

Beatbuddy takes the inclusion of music beyond the normal atmospheric generating mechanism to make it intrinsic to the game itself. Few games have attempted this, with Everyday Shooter and Rhythm Paradise being the stand-out examples, and Beatbuddy does much to add to this much under-represented genre.

Set in a the magical world of Symphonia, the player controls Beatbuddy, who has been charged with preventing the world from being destroyed by Prince Maestro, who apparently likes things that are shiny and wants them all to himself - at any cost!

The mechanics of the game require the player to use the environment around them that is moving and pulsating to the beat of the music, hence the name of the game! For it the base-line of the music that the player primary interacts with, although there are times when they must react to the melody too.

As the music is played various creatures and growths throughout the world modify it to the extent that other creatures react to it in certain ways. One of the earliest creatures the player encounters is the snail, which when hearing a snare drum (played by a snare crab) project spikes from their shells and become mesmerised.

To get the snails to retract their spikes the player needs to strike out at the crab who temporarily retreats into his burrow and the snails go back to their docile selves. At which point Beatbuddy must race past them, for the Snare Crab will return and when he does the snails will once again go into a frenzy and project their harmful spikes.

Other interactions include a base drum that sends Beatbuddy hurling at high speeds, which can be useful when breaking through walls of sea shells that litter the environment. There are also walls of bubbles that can only be passed through on the off-beat of the music, requiring the player to carefully time their passage by listening to the beat of the background tune.

Visually Beatbuddy has a high quality cartoon-like style that uses focus relief to create a sense of depth on a two dimensional plane. It is extremely effective and does much to reflect the quality of the music that is featured in the game. The animation is also very fluid and comical, with the snails' eyes smashing into one another just as the Snare Crab starts playing its drum again.

Beatbuddy was one of the unexpected highlights for me at Rezzed and I for one cannot wait for its release in this summer.