QUOTE said:You may recall last year we ran a little preview of a game called The Grinder, a first-person shooter made for Wii by High Voltage Software, the team that brought The Conduit to life on the Nintendo console. This game was to be a first-person shooter follow-up to The Conduit that featured four player co-op gameplay in a horror setting, similar to Valve's Left 4 Dead series.
You may also recall our story we ran just a few short weeks ago that revealed that High Voltage Software was making The Grinder as a multi-console game, versions for the Wii and Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, for release in late 2011.
There's another chapter to this tale, and it's unfolded at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week. Behind closed doors, High Voltage Software revealed to us the first playable of The Grinder on the Xbox 360. And it was not a first-person shooter. At all.
Instead, it's a top-down shooter in similar vein to Robotron or Gauntlet, with all four players sharing the same screen and controlling their characters with dual-analog control: left stick for movement, right stick for shooting.
Shot of the Xbox 360 version. Check out more by clicking it.
The theme of the game is still the same: a wild west setting with towns overrun with vampires, imps, werewolves and other crazy killers. The idea is to blast your way through the environments with the variety of weapons at your disposal, all the while picking up health, ammunition and other items that'll increase your weapons' power.
The game looked sharp on the Xbox 360 console but it definitely has a ways to go – a year and a half is a good amount of time to get all the bells and whistles into a game and tweak the controls and optimize the framerate.
The reason for the change: while The Grinder would have been one of very few first person shooters on the Wii, it'd be among several on the higher def consoles and the team decided to not enter that genre glut with a "me too" product.
No final decision has been made about the Wii version, however – it could end up the first-person design that it was always originally intended to be, or it could end up a version of the game that's being created for the 360 and PlayStation 3.
Screenshots of the new design are forthcoming. Stay tuned.
Source
I'm here to announce I've lost all hope for HVS and this game. At first I was like "cool, a L4D clone for the Wii". Satisfied. Then it went multiplatform and I was like "Okay, this is getting stupid." Then it was slated for release LATE NEXT YEAR and I was like "Okay, this is stupid". Then there's this, and now I'm like "Alright, HVS is a shit dev". Well, the Wii version may still be a FPS, but I'm not gonna wait for a game that's coming out late next year when it should've come out this year. Well, it may be a decent Smash TV type game, who knows...