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Hail to the Chimp wants to prove politics are fun
Wideload Games has released the first trailer and bits of information for their new PS3/360 party game, Hail to the Chimp. Dubbed an "over-the-top party game" with "biting political satire," the title appears to be a cross between brawlers like Powerstone and the political comics like Doonesbury. Sporting a cartoony look with subtle cel-shading, the game looks bright and colorful but fairly unremarkable. You have a mixture of political/racial stereotypes done up in animal form smacking each other around, with 'hilarious' and 'topical' newspaper headlines tossed in. Gameplay looks extremely generic and uninspired, but it's hard to tell from the short trailer. What do you guys think? Does this game have any promise? Do our brawlers really need second-tier political comedy to make them more entertaining?
You there, Hail to the Chimp ... now!
If there's one thing we can say with absolute certainty, it's that the Xbox 360 is desperately short on games in the animals-fighting-for-political-power genre. Thank goodness for Gamecock and Wideload (of Stubbs the Zombie fame) and their upcoming title, Hail to the Chimp. 1UP recently scored a sneak peek at the game. Here's the story: the lion has been ousted, and now all the animals are competing to become the new king of the jungle. Thus, politics factor into the game, though the gameplay itself revolves around paw-to-paw combat. The game is laced with subtle satirical humor. For instance, clams play a big part in the game, though we're talking about actual clams here. Several of the gametypes award victory to the "candidate" with the most clams. We'll let you puzzle that one out for yourselves.Wideload hopes the game will be available in time for the U.S. elections in 2008.[Via Joystiq]
First look and video of Wideload's Hail to the Chimp
Having not heard an awful lot from Wideload since they announced it back in February, 1UP's sudden coverage of Hail to the Chimp is definitely a welcome surprise, since now we don't have to wait until Gamecock's EIEIO party to check it out. Best described as Animal Farm meets Power Stone, the developers behind Stubbs the Zombie have set out to create the party game for the next generation. "I think it started off being called Happy Fun Easy Party... Party," claims Hail to the Chimp writer, Matt Soell.Set in a smarmy political climate, Wideload is hoping to get Hail to the Chimp out on shelves during the 2008 presidential elections.
Joystiq interviews Wideload Games' Alex Seropian
As one of the first to leave Bungie Studios after co-founding the developer, Alex Seropian transitioned from creating Xbox's then-surprising megahit Halo to starting afresh with Wideload Games, a small development firm he founded in Chicago. After finding success with the humorous Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse (which sports a pretty hip soundtrack, we might add), Wideload went silent until earlier this week, when they revealed Hail to the Chimp as their sophomore title. The game, which is a political-party title involving animals vying to become head of the animal kingdom, is being published by the fowl-loving, former Gathering of Developer heads now known as Gamecock. With the candor and humor, Alex endured bad audio quality to talk to Joystiq about gaming, politics, and chicken suits. How did the Gamecock deal come about? I've known Mike Wilson for a number of years back to the Gathering of Developer days, and we kind of became friends back then when we were both working with Take Two. This is when I was running Bungie; we had a distribution deal with Take Two, like Gathering did. We've kept in touch for a long time and he kind of gave me some fair warning that he was going to try and get something started up again about a year ago, which is about the same time we were coming off of Stubbs and planning our next project. We were trying to figure if it would be possible to do something together and the timing worked out really well, and the whole way that they are set up and the things that are important to them kind of aligned really nicely with how we're set up and what's important to us. It was like getting our chocolate and their peanut butter or something. [Laughs]
Halo co-creator's project: part MMO, part reality TV
Alex Seropian, the co-founder of Bungie, co-creator of Halo, and head of Wideload Studios, creators of Stubbs the Zombie, has another project on his plate: Spectrum MediaWorks. They plan on delivering X-Quest as both a massively multiplayer online game and a reality television show produced by Ron Howard's Imagine Entertainment.Sure, it sounds crazy, but that's an awful lot of talent to dismiss. Seropian says, "Entertainment convergence is something that has been talked about for a long time, but the multiple media distribution pipes are now in place to create properties that can work on multiple levels." It's unclear how the two properties will interact; according to Spectrum MediaWorks, "Gamers will be able to enter the world via Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and interact with reality show contestants... and events in the game will have a direct impact on the TV show."Color us skeptical. Something about the combination of the Fox channel, reality shows, buzzwords like convergence, and a generi-title like X-Quest doesn't inspire confidence. Then again, the possibility that this could work, and that the 360 may have a killer MMO, has me all giddy. [Via Joystiq]
