[Gamers' Day 2007] Rat-tat-too-ee
Not even next-gen is safe from the licensed movie tie-in juggernaut. We go hands-on with Ratatouille.
Published: May 17, 2007
Clearly the folks working at Pixar are pure evil -- or at the very least can't count in their number any person who has ever had to work the box office at a movie theatre. Not only are they going to have yet another hit on their hands that everyone will go to see, but the title is French. French! Do they understand how often the people buying tickets to the movie will be butchering that name all over the country? Well, they might, seeing as all the posters and trailers for the movie make sure to spell it all out phonetically (kinda like we did for the title up there).
All commentary on the movie moniker aside, pumping gamers for hard-earned greenbacks hasn't been a problem for most Pixar movies-turned-games, but we're going to go out on a limb here and say they haven't all been stellar titles. Developer Heavy Iron Studios and publisher THQ don't care, though, they're charging onto Sony's little $600 next-gen system with an adaptation that they finally pulled the wraps off of at the Gamers' Day event earlier today. Can it break the licensed kid's game curse? We decided to find out.
The first thing that struck us was just how expansive the actual levels were in the game. That was apparently a conscious decision, something afforded by the extra horsepower of next-gen systems, and it gives the game something of a mini-playground to explore across the almost half-dozen set pieces from the movie. The idea is that Remy, a rat that longs to be a proper French chef, is rather... well, let's say he doesn't really fit the height requirement to don that hat.
Not that that's stopping him, of course, and it give the folks at Heavy Iron a chance to play around with scale, tossing plenty of real-world objects into the level that could be played off for maximum hop 'n bop action. We actually jumped in mid-level, getting a little guidance toward the end when we basically had to dash to hit one of the pre-planned tours Sony had set up of their studios, so we couldn't get the full spiel, sadly.
Still, what was there was fun, if not entirely unfamiliar. At one point we did manage to witness the only current implementation of the SIXAXIS controller: controlling one of those little paper umbrellas you get in tropical drinks to glide in different directions (though in this case we were supposed to actually cross a chasm that would have been otherwise impossible. The rest of the control felt nice and tight, though, with plenty of kid-aimed item collection and other platformer staples. At least with the world as large as it is, there's not as much on-rails funneling as we've seen in most old-school platformers. And hey, what's a next-gen game without next-gen hair, right? Remy is, even at this early stage, quite the looker; animated well and sporting some rather fancy looking fur. We'll hopefully be able to spend more than a couple of minutes here soon and give you the full skinny.
All commentary on the movie moniker aside, pumping gamers for hard-earned greenbacks hasn't been a problem for most Pixar movies-turned-games, but we're going to go out on a limb here and say they haven't all been stellar titles. Developer Heavy Iron Studios and publisher THQ don't care, though, they're charging onto Sony's little $600 next-gen system with an adaptation that they finally pulled the wraps off of at the Gamers' Day event earlier today. Can it break the licensed kid's game curse? We decided to find out.
The first thing that struck us was just how expansive the actual levels were in the game. That was apparently a conscious decision, something afforded by the extra horsepower of next-gen systems, and it gives the game something of a mini-playground to explore across the almost half-dozen set pieces from the movie. The idea is that Remy, a rat that longs to be a proper French chef, is rather... well, let's say he doesn't really fit the height requirement to don that hat.
Not that that's stopping him, of course, and it give the folks at Heavy Iron a chance to play around with scale, tossing plenty of real-world objects into the level that could be played off for maximum hop 'n bop action. We actually jumped in mid-level, getting a little guidance toward the end when we basically had to dash to hit one of the pre-planned tours Sony had set up of their studios, so we couldn't get the full spiel, sadly.
Still, what was there was fun, if not entirely unfamiliar. At one point we did manage to witness the only current implementation of the SIXAXIS controller: controlling one of those little paper umbrellas you get in tropical drinks to glide in different directions (though in this case we were supposed to actually cross a chasm that would have been otherwise impossible. The rest of the control felt nice and tight, though, with plenty of kid-aimed item collection and other platformer staples. At least with the world as large as it is, there's not as much on-rails funneling as we've seen in most old-school platformers. And hey, what's a next-gen game without next-gen hair, right? Remy is, even at this early stage, quite the looker; animated well and sporting some rather fancy looking fur. We'll hopefully be able to spend more than a couple of minutes here soon and give you the full skinny.
