Poster signed by the movie and game voice talent

Teh gam3z
After breakfast, I checked out and hung out in the lobby with some of the guys until noon when we went down to one of the conference rooms for the event. The first room can be seen in the pictures with one of our groups sitting at a table facing the (then empty) panel table and television. The room we started off in did have the signed movie poster seen in the pictures as well as an almost floor to ceiling graphic of the same art, but without the signatures. We were supposed to be eating lunch, but I think most of us were pretty anxious about getting things started. This anxiety was only heightened by the sounds in the conference room beside us. The sounds of bass and explosions had some of us *cough*Jack*cough* chomping at the bit.

When we were brought to the second conference room, we were given an introduction to the games by Dan Suarez, a look at the intro to the game, and a developer run demo before they let us loose on the hands-on demos. The video was really slick, which was not surprising if you’ve played Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, because it was done by the same company that did that game’s opening sequence. We should have a version of it hosted soon, but a sixty second version of the video can be seen on June 17th when Transformers: The Game sponsors the Star Wars Robot Chicken special on Cartoon Network. There will also be a short making of feature during a commercial break that will feature Dan Suarez.

Mr. Suarez’ talk filled us in on some new (or clarified) info. on the console (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PS2) and PC versions of the game. They were in development for about eighteen months, and their first impressions on the robot designs were similar to ours. It sounded like they weren’t too hot on the designs at the start, but warmed up once they saw them in motion more and became more accustomed to the models. There was a lot of collaboration between the game team and the studio (which is not very typical for a movie licensed game), but here is where a misperception I had was corrected. The Industrial Light & Magic resources were used as the basis for the in-game models, but those character models were far too detailed to be used in the game, so Traveler’s Tales did still have to create the game’s models.

Left to right: Joe, Ian, Daniel, Adam, Ryan, and Jack

Hasbro collaborated with the game developers as well. You know the Swindle action figure in the movie toyline? That character is one of the drones in the game. Hasbro worked with Traveler’s Tales to create characters that would work as drone enemies in the game as well as action figures. I think that’s some awesome creative synergy, and it was just another one of the things that made me realize just how much some of these guys had personally invested in the game. When Activision brought the G1 character models that will be in the game to Hasbro, the person at Hasbro reportedly said something along the lines of, “Hey, that’s a lot of G1 stuff.” Hasbro also made sure to emphasize that the fanbase supports both factions, with 50% of Transformers sales being Autobot and the other being Decepticon, so that was one of the factors behind allowing the player to play characters from either faction. Somehow, I don’t really think the development team even needed to be told this, because several of them were already true believers.

Yeah, the Target website had a code recently that let people get the cheat codes to unlock G1 Prime, Starscream, and Jazz as playable characters. What most people have assumed is that these will be G1 style skins for the movie character models. Wrong. I saw G1 Prime running around the suburbs at night. We were also told that G1 Megatron be a playable character. Going with the topic of G1, the mission that Prime had was to fight a certain purple triple-changer based on a G1 character. Can you guess who it was? If you guessed Astrotrain, Octane, or Blitzwing, you’re wrong. It was actually Shockwave in his new artillery turret/helicopter/robot triple-changer incarnation. I think that may have been even cooler to see than the G1 Prime.

The basic design for the games was explained to us as an open world game with different hubs* that have missions and opportunities to unlock side missions or bonus material. The games aren’t open worlds in the style of the Grand Theft Auto games, but more like Need for Speed. You have all these different areas filled with missions, but they’re not physically connected. There are nine playable characters in the game (both Autobot and Decepticon), and new characters are opened by progressing through the game via completing story missions. I mentioned unlockable bonus material earlier, and this would refer to the playable G1 characters, Transformer comic covers, and G1 TV promos. To unlock stuff, you could collect energon cubes to unlock side missions or do certain tasks like drifting, speeding without crashing, or jumping while driving to unlock bonus material. [*My word, not theirs.]

Same crew, but Jack's taking my picture

I can’t finish this broad summary of the console games without mentioning a few nice touches and what makes these games next-gen (even the one on the “new-gen” Wii). That thing is that everything in the game is destructible. At least, that’s what they said and that’s what most of my time playing was spent testing. The only things I could not tear up to my satisfaction were the overpasses on the highways and the humans. However, I doubt a T rating from the ESRB would have been received if I could go around smacking or stomping humans into goo as Barricade or an irate Bumblebee. There was a system in place similar to the GTA wanted levels that did a pretty darn good job rewarding the morality of the character you use. If you start tearing up Earth, the authorities do start coming after you, but that’s not the clever design part. If you’re a Decepticon, and you start destroying stuff like helicopters that are coming after you, energon health cubes drop. However, there is no such bonus for an Autobot who does the same thing, just a higher destruction level and more pursuers. Suarez also pointed out one of the G1 references with a painted billboard on the side of a building for “Seaspray’s Fish and Chips.” I thought it was cute.

One last bit, everything you have read above applies to the non-handheld versions of the games, and the Nintendo DS version is extremely different. I will talk about it, but I’m saving that for when I talk about my hands-on experience with the DS Decepticons game.

Hands On
After the speech and video, we were split into groups and put on twenty minute rotations for each game. Through some fluke, I ended up being unable to check out the PSP version except for over Adam’s shoulder. The silver lining was that I got to go back to my favorite version on the 360 and get in some quality explosion time. As a disclaimer here, I would like to point out that we were restricted to certain characters in specific hubs, and were playing (as far as I know) an incomplete build of the game. Also, while the graphics on the developer’s demo looked great, I think there may have been some issues with some of the setups we played on.

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