Next Year. Swear to God.
Click here to read this week\'s twoplayer game comic.Here\'s the thing: I want 3D Realms to take all the time they want with Duke Nukem Forever. There\'s a contingent in my brain that believes that long development times are an honorable stand in an industry that collapses far too easily to the fast dollar. I can\'t think of many games that I\'d consider really good that were developed in less than a year, yet more and more I hear of publishers insisting on quick, rushed development cycles. And when I say not very many it\'s a coward\'s way of saying, None, but I might be forgetting that one freak-of-nature that turned out brilliantly despite being put together at gunpoint in thirty days. So if you read deeply enough, what you\'ll see is that this week\'s twoplayer comic is less about games than it is about laughing at the absurdities of politics. It helps that Noah got his start in the cartooning business through political cartoons, and my original vision of twoplayer was as a series of political gaming comics, much like this one is. When I read Rumsfeld\'s comments on CNN, the creation of this comic was a done deal.
On an unrelated subject, if you want to see something amazing, check out this next-gen screenshot here, and this second screenshot here. They\'re of the Project Gotham Racing 3 for the Xbox 360, confirmed by the developers. They\'re amazing. The claim is that these are not specifically chosen buildings to picture, but instead almost randomly chosen locations in the game. Shown to someone without telling them what it is, these screenshots could easily be mistaken for photographs. If you check out their website, you can find wire frames of these same images. It\'s really impressive. Even though there have been rumors surfacing lately that the next generation consoles are not really living up to their own hype during game development, I\'m consistently impressed with what gamers can look forward to in the years to come.
Finally, for a different take on the above screenshots, check out this image here, which is someone\'s idea of what all those pretty things in Project Gotham Racing 3 will look like in action. It was posted by Ka_Feosh over at EvilAvatar.com. Made me laugh.
Aaron Stanton
cartoons[AT]gamesfirst.com