There have been lots of rumors hitting the internet about High Voltage, one of those rumors was that High Voltage was mad at SEGA for not shipping more copies of the game to retailers. High Voltage’s Eric Nofsinger decided to tackle the rumors and give the fans answers to misinformation.
“We do wish that Conduit 2 had been carried by more retail outlets but we harbor no ill will towards Sega.”
In the end of the day, I completely forgot this studio existed. Don’t get me wrong, I hope the best to them and their employees, but they have yet to make a game that is spectacular.
2011 was an unbelievably great year for SEGA…for the most part. Even the best game company will always have its strings of hits and misses. However, last year I could only really think of one bad stinker. One starring a certain Norse god you will read about later on. With that in mind, I decided to comprise a list of SEGA games that disappointed me in some way. Games that while not outright bad (except one), did not live up to their expectations. If you find a certain favorite of yours on the list, do not take it personally, as this is mainly coming from my own personal view. Read on to find what SEGA games left me a little flat.
First, a quick apology to everyone, including SEGA, for the lateness of this review. I unfortunately lost my access to high speed internet shortly after receiving my review copy, and so I had difficulties with the multiplayer portion of the review throughout the summer. The multiplayer played a significant part in the final verdict, so I hope the good folks at SEGA who sent the review copy won’t mind the tardiness.
The original Conduit pioneered the Wii first person shooter, allowing every player to customize the game’s motion controls in a fashion that best suited how they wanted to play the game. It had its problems, however. Its online was easily hackable and virtually broke the game, and the single player offered absolutely nothing that hadn’t been done better in numerous other shooters. The environments, being based largely on modern Washington DC, were fairly generic aside from the odd monument. The level design was linear, and most of the weapons were pretty typical for the genre. With the announcement of Conduit 2, High Voltage Software acknowledged the problems of the original and promised to solve these problems with the sequel. Does Conduit 2 improve over the original, or does it fall even flatter?
Summary: Basically what happened is that Joystiq wrote a negative Conduit 2 review. Joystiq rated the game a 1/5, which would usually be the end of the story. But not with High Voltage. The writer for Joystiq, who happens to have a published book, all of a sudden just got a ton of negative spam reviews on Amazon.com for the book. After people accused High Voltage Software of writing them, the company has finally confessed that they did come from someone in the studio.
“Matt Corso did indeed write that internal email, however if you read the email he encourages folks to read Mike’s book and then write their own review in a ‘turn-about is fairplay’ sort of way” wrote Nofsinger in an official explanation. The email went to 70+ people on the list contains nothing slanderous or inflammatory; I believe people took it as such (the fact that there aren’t 70 negative reviews would support that assumption). Sure, it’s a tad unprofessional but if you knew Matt personally as I do, you would know it was nothing more than a tongue-in-cheek jibe at most. And for that, I apologise on behalf of High Voltage Software.” - Eric Nofsinger, Chief Creative Officer at High Voltage
So what does the writer for the inflammatory review have to say? What about the Joystiq writer who wrote the review?
SEGA and High Voltage’s sequel to The Conduit is finally hitting store shelves after many delays. The Wii shooter faces stiff competition today from Valve’s Portal 2 sequel and the new Mortal Kombat video game. Europe and Australia get the game on the 22nd.
Playstation 3 owners now get to play Virtua Tennis 4 with the exclusive world tour demo. The demo last week was exclusive to PSN Plus subscribers, this week it’s available for all PSN users. The demo clocks in at 878 MB.
Talking about PSN plus exclusives, Sonic 2 hits PSN for all users this week. Like the Virtua Tennis 4 demo, this was exclusive and free for Playstation Plus users for one week. The game will set you back a cool $4.99. Small price to pay for the best Sonic game ever.
Something that this generation doesn’t do enough of is split screen gaming. I used to love doing this back ‘in the day.’ I know, we have online now, but there are still those days that you just want to play with someone you actually know in real life.
Thankfully, the guys at High Voltage aren’t scared to add this feature into their upcoming Wii exclusive, Conduit 2.
Well clearly this guy’s been racking up the air miles….The new Conduit 2 trailer showcases many of the environments you’ll get to visit in SEGA/High Voltage Software’s upcoming Wii shooter. Locations range from the Bermuda Triangle (!) to Siberia, and from a city in the Amazon rainforest to the Southwest United States. And let’s not forget England and China.
I’m finding it hard to tell if all of these locations are from the single player campaign, or if we’re also getting a glimpse at the game’s multiplayer maps, since this trailer’s as frustratingly vague as the past few have been.
Conduit 2 releases exclusively for the Wii on April 19th in North America; Australian and European dates are the 21st and the 22nd, respectively.
High Voltage is best known for their game engine for the Wii called Quantum3. Quantum3 was billed to bring pixel shaders and other HD console effects to the weaker Nintendo Wii hardware.
The guys at the studio have been asked if they could still push the Wii further:
“Yes. It definitely can, but you need a lot of experience with the hardware. I would say that Conduit 2, in many ways, is not really achieving the system’s full potential. Every time we do a game on Wii, we find little advancements we can make with the hardware that we didn’t know we could do with the last game.” – High VoltageArt Director MattCorso
Matt Corso of High Voltage stated that if they get a chance to make a 3rd Conduit game that it will push the Wii further. I hear a ton of talk about how the Wii can do so much, but do you believe there is a ton of horse power still left?
Today IGN has posted a trailer for Conduit 2, this one giving us a (somewhat surprisingly) brief look at the multiplayer modes, likely one of game’s bigger selling points. The trailer’s only about a minute long, but you can hit the break for some of what you can expect from the game’s multiplayer if you don’t want to watch it for yourself.
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