E3 2002 –
Hands-on
Crave Entertainment showed Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter for the
first time at the E3 Expo. Crave has high hopes for this futuristic
first-person shooter to be a big hit this fall when it ships for the PC, Xbox,
PS2, and GameCube. The producers of Mace Griffin invited GameZone to get some
early views of the game on the Xbox, and from the looks of it, Crave has nothing
to worry about.
The game takes place a few hundred years in the future. Mace
Griffin starts the game out as a member of the Space Rangers, a special ops task
force of the future. After a mission goes awry, Mace Griffin is framed and
blamed for his comrade’s deaths and sent to prison for three years. Upon his
release, Mace joins the Bounty Hunters and searches for those who framed him.
In doing so, Mace unravels a complex scheme of political and religious
intrigue.
MGBH will take gamers from Alien spaceships, to distant
asteroids, to dog fighting aerial combat over a series of 20 missions with five
to eight cutscenes per mission to develop the complex story. Players will have
10 different weapons, 7 vehicles, and 11 different vehicular weapons at their
disposal. Several death animations make slaughtering alien races fun (when
isn’t it?). Direct hits with grenades send body parts flying and close calls
send corpses slamming into walls. With more than thirty hours of gameplay, Mace
Griffin: Bounty Hunter is sure to keep gamers glued to their monitors.
Much of the game is split between ground combat and aerial
combat, often going back and forth multiple times for one mission. Normally,
that would cause problems for gamers in two departments: controls and loading
time. Fortunately, MGBH foresaw this and remedied the situation gloriously.
For the controls, the developers simply made them consistent between space
combat and ground combat. No new controls to learn, no different system to
adjust to. To solve the loading time conundrum, Warthog developed something
that hasn’t been done before in a first-person shooter. They developed a system
for seamless transition between flight and ground combat. That is, you fly your
ship, you land your ship, you exit your ship, and you walk around on the ground
all without interruption. This has two advantages. First, there is obviously
no loading time. No waiting in the middle of a mission to move on to the next
part. Second, everything is real-time. If you are trying to pursue an enemy
and he takes flight in a ship, you need to be hot on his tail or he will be long
gone instead of starting at a preset distance after a loading period. This
feature greatly adds to the relentless action so prevalent in the game.
The environments may not be as detailed as they could be, but
the story and non-stop action keep this game pumping out the fun. Throw in
excellent death animations and a bit of gore, and you have a game that should
spend a lot of time on your console. Look for Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter for
the Xbox and PC in October and PS2 and GameCube in November.
