The Grinder Forum

Sorry MB, I couldn't wait for the new game page to be approved. Anyway, The Grinder is a first person shooter pitting players against hordes of vampires, werewolves and other nasty creations. Inspired by Left 4 Dead, it aims to offer similarly frantic gameplay.

Interview, pics:


Random tidbits:

Eric: I can't tell you how excited we are to be sharing The Grinder with you! We've been playing a lot of Left 4 Dead and there really isn't that kind of frantic cooperative experience on the Wii right now. There's certainly nothing that takes advantage of the Wii hardware the way we are able to with our engine. One thing that we learned from working on the Hunter series is that we'd prefer to feel like badasses who are suiting up to go out and slay monsters. This opens up all sorts of possibilities for enemies, weapons, characters and story.

Eric: I don't want to give too much away right now, but the game takes place in a world we've imagined where monsters are real. Vampires, werewolves, and undead are all a part of everyday life and this world has adapted to their presence. Our group of heroes is a sort of the cryptobiological A-Team of going into areas with infestations and killing everything that moves. We've definitely been influenced by lots of great horror movies and the grindhouse style is something we've tried to incorporate into our characters and storyline.

Matt: Although The Grinder E3 demo we are showcasing has been designed to focus on a limited set of abilities and weapons, we currently have plans to incorporate weapon and character upgrades into the final version of the game.

Kerry: We call the technology our Imposter and Instancing system. We are able to take a single enemy and replicate him over and over again. Along with the replication, we can also scale, color, and otherwise modify each instance. This allows us to get an unprecedented number of unique enemies on screen at once at a fraction of the cost to do it otherwise. During our in-house testing, we have been able to see up-to 65 enemies on screen at once. These were initial tests… [Smiles]

Eric: We want to capture the sound of Trent Reznor and Ennio Morricone in bar room fight after watching Dusk Till Dawn, Dawn of the Dead, An American Werewolf in London, and Tremors and doing copious shots of tequila. Our phenomenally talented audio team is going for lots of Skinny Puppy / Coil-style ambience and music that that adapts to what is going on with gameplay. We're trying to alternate between creepy music that generates tension and all out frenzied tracks for the times where you're mowing down hundreds of vampires.

Eric: For the E3 demo you will see feral vampires, werewolves, and the Slasher. The characters in The Conduit were primarily focused on ranged attacks, but our vampires are all melee. They do have some teleportation tricks as well. The Werewolf is more a mini-boss character who requires coordination between the players to defeat. The Slasher I'll keep under wraps until E3, but he's got some special tricks up the sleeves of his straightjacket.

Etc.

I just noticed that promotional image shows artwork for couple more enemy types.

A properly winged vampire-ish boss which I assume will also fly more, and the low-end mob form of the werewolf side which looks more humanoid as Linky wished. There also are a few more great looking screenshots so be sure to check them all out.

It sounds like it could be neat game, if done right. This replication thing is clever, but it will mean nothing without well animated characters that respond to NPCs and the player, as well as environment. On the evidence of the Conduit, I don't expect it will be fluid and as reactive as one would hope.  I wonder also if it will have a AI Director. Have Voltage created a new AI model for this game?.  If not, that would be a mistake. Nobody wants a lame shooting gallery game, which I think this would turn into without strong AI.

We want to capture the sound of Trent Reznor and Ennio Morricone in bar room fight after watching Dusk Till Dawn, Dawn of the Dead, An American Werewolf in London, and Tremors and doing copious shots of tequila.

Audio is so undervalued in such games. I thought Dead Space brought audio design to a new level, will this game too, I doubt it.

On another note, what the fuck is it with Voltage Software and character design?,  these characters look like they have been ripped from Resistance 2 and have had wings attached. Why not look at the breadth of Vampire depictions throughout the last century and create some NEW FFS! I think their design looks iffy. I wonder if they roost and fly.

The red eyes are shite also. Do we really need red eyes?, it seems so childish, it's something kids use to portray evil. Real eyes are far more menacing, they should create real eyes that track the player.

I just think it's premature to get excited over a game made by a company whose original game everyone is excited about (The Conduit) would be a laughably bad console FPS.

I am well aware of that  fact. I just think it's a shame that Voltage who are doing something admirable in attempting these games, fail in such a essential aspect for good Wii software design. Good game engines mean nothing if the quality of art is low, and that applies to any platform.

They look more like Resistance characters than Nosferatu's great film depiction. They have a very similar colouration and body posture, and even have the same spouts coming out their spines, all that's missing is some light armour.

The Werewolf looks like all the other depictions of a Werewolf we have seen so many times before. Why not provide something new and interesting instead, a re-imagining using current knowledge - based on how a human might look if it had genes spliced with a Wolf. It's the mutation aspect of the werewolf that intrigues people, not simply a humanoid wolf. There's no trace of human in that Werewolf's face at all!

rant /

You can as a fighter, in Vampire / Darkstalkers. Unfortunately not in another genre though.

The site is incredibly slow right now, i can't seem to approve wiki submissions at the moment. Hope that it will fine in a moment. Anyway ...

It's looking great, in my opinion. I really hope it turns out to be a decent game, since it appeals a lot more to me than The Conduit and their other game in development. The co-op online element is definitely something the Wii has needed and if it turns out to be good, I think it could easily be one of the most enjoyable online Wii games.

I can't wait to see more at E3.

Nope, I haven't tried it. I heard it wasn't very good though.

I hardly expected a type of game like this to come on Wii. If the online for this game really does work well, it might be a game I may ACTUALLY play with friends (yeah, I'm not really a multiplayer person, but I will go for co-op).

It's cool to see a company going all out with Wii development and making some interesting games.  Keep up the good work High Voltage.

I'm not sure how to respond to this one. Though I like the idea of the Wii getting some more mature (teen?) rated fun, I can't help but feel like this is a cop-out to Left 4 Dead's success (on that note, I wonder if Valve will have anything to say about this one). As others before me have said, I question the character design; though the art style is decidedly realistic, looking at the models I can't help but think of Saturday-morning cartoons, particularly that old show... Was it actually called "Gargoyles"? Yes, Wikipedia deems it so. I don't know why it makes me think of it, but it does.

I'll follow this one for a while, see where it goes. It would be nice to get some footage up in this piece.

Thanks bro! We just gave eachother two seriously sarcastic brojobs behind the first page of this thread!

They also did an awesome job in making the environments 110% bland and generic and the enemies all completely uninspired!  My recomendation would be to cover all solid block surfaces in more mounted deerheads, even the cliffs and rock ledges, and to enlarge the reticle so it takes up the entire screen regardless of where the gun is aimed, change the gun to a mounted deerhead and mount a tiny deerhead on the side of it.

Copies of the game.

Maybe High Voltage will just announce one derivative Wii game a day until the Wii has at least one game that closely approximates every other popular game out there.