Game of the Week [2/7/03]: Enter the Matrix

GOTW puts on its "cool" goggles and interviews Dave Perry, head of the Enter the Matrix project. Plus: Is Sega doing the right thing? And does anyone care about the N-Gage?

(GamePro's Game of the Week is an in-depth look at the single game and the breaking news that caught our attention the most over the past week. Read GOTW every Friday to see what's hot, what's not, and what's happening with the industry. You'll come out of it a much smarter gamer.)

That foreboding hum you hear in the background is the Matrix hype machine slowly cranking up the decibels... slowly on its way to the deafening proportions it will reach this May. Earlier this week, Air Hendrix and Tokyo Drifter headed down to the Warner Bros. lot to witness firsthand how this juggernaut will touch and possibly forever

change the way games are made. (Unless it doesn't. No need to go too overboard here.) The heavy participation of the Wachowski brothers in the production and how it ties into the upcoming movies will make Enter the Matrix an absolutely must play title for fans. Whether it?ll be a good game or not is still up in the air, but you can check out our earlier first hand report to judge for yourself.

To gain further insight into what we can expect, GamePro sits down for an interview with Dave Perry, head of the ETM developers at Shiny. How many sentinels can fit on the screen at once? Can you hack the Matrix? What are the Wachowski?s like? Where is Tommy Tallarico involved in all? All these questions (except for the Tallarico bit) are answered in our interview transcript.

Take me to the Enter The Matrix preview

Take me to the Enter The Matrix interview

This Week's Main Events

Just like a lot of other magazines in Japan and worldwide, Famitsu gives out awards to games that score high enough in their reviews section. As mentioned earlier, each game gets looked at by four writers and is rated from 1 to 10 by each one, meaning that the maximum score a game can hope to receive is 40 (it's happened four times in 17 years). Games with a cumulative score of 30 or higher receive a Silver award; games that score 32 or higher get a Gold award, and anything that rates 35 or higher gets the coveted Platinum award.

The thing about this system that differentiates it from any other mag is that any game that scores a Gold or Platinum award gets an extra page of content (character profiles, enemy lists, basic strategy, that sort of thing) following the reviews section for the next five issues. This is great for software companies since it increases the visibility of their titles, but if too many games make the grade?there are 13 games receiving this full-page treatment right now?then the amount of work on the editorial side quickly balloons into enormous proportions. Plus, it also means that games like NFL 2K3, which reviewers loved but average Japanese gamers couldn't care less about, get more coverage than the readers could really use. It works both ways, we suppose.

Take me to the Famitsu news section

Since GOTW loves currying controversy, we might as well start with what's become the hottest story of the week in just a few hours' time:

Sega Sports Drops GameCube Support (2/7)
Despite the fact that the end of the 2KX series on GameCube was really the only sane thing to do economically, message boards across the metaverse have been packed with hundreds of messages arguing the importance of this terse announcement. It's really not a pretty sight?the Xbox fans are laughing at the GameCube fans, and the Madden contingent is laughing at all them at rather annoyingly high volume.

This move means two things for the industry: one, the GameCube's gonna have a lot less Sega support (ten out of the 15 games in Sega's GC library are sports titles), and two, Sega's gonna lose a little bit less money every year. Simply put, Nintendo console owners don't buy sports games. This trend started back in the 16-bit days, when EA set up shop on the Genesis and ruled the world for five years, and it's more powerful than ever before when you look at the current generation. Nintendo can do whatever they want about this, but that's the way it's added up over the years. As a result, if you're a Sega fan you could pin this up as the sanest decision they've made in recent memory.

Of course, if you're not a Sega fan, you could also say that they should really quit the Xbox while they're at it, but that's another can of worms, there...

Nokia's N-Gage (2/5)

Tomb Raider on the N-Gage. It looks boss and it (reportedly) runs at a fairly fast clip, too. Hopefully you can finish the game in the couple hours it takes before the batteries are drained.
From the "rich dork" point of view, the N-Gage is the greatest portable ever invented. It can do 3D (not incredible 3D, but still far from appalling), you can listen to the radio with it while playing, it's got wireless multiplayer, it's got support from all sorts of software houses (including Eidos, making the jump to mobile for the first time)?how can you go wrong?

From the "normal person" point of view, however, it's a little difficult to surmise what kind of audience Nokia is going for with this device. It's more powerful than any portable released before, yet Nokia says they're not competing with the Game Boy Advance. It's packed with so many features that its operating battery time is laughable compared with any modern portable. They're aiming for the American market, but the American market isn't really one that cares about playing games on cell phones en masse quite yet. All that, and it will also cost $500 or so, although this cost will probably be subsidized in one way or another by the phone carriers.

Will it succeed? Well, the support's there (at least it is in Europe)?now we just have to see if enough rich, gadget-crazy gamers are willing to take the plunge.

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