Kane and Lynch: Dead Men Coming to PS3/PS2/PSP!

[Siraris]

Some big news today with Atari Australia sending out a release schedule. No, that's not the news. What is news is that appearing under the PS3, PS2 and PSP sections is none other then Kane & Lynch: Dead Men - a game previously only announced for the XBox 360 and PC in mid-2006. The title is being developed by Io Interactive, who have series' such as Hitman and Freedom Fighters to their names. Kane & Lynch: Dead Men follows the fortunes of a flawed mercenary and a medicated psychopath forced together on a violent and chaotic path seeking redemption and revenge. No means is too harsh as the volatile partnership is pushed beyond reason in this brutally realistic, character-driven third person action shooter. The game is due out on all platforms in June 2007.

I thought this was exclusive to 360/PC, but it's awesome to hear it's coming out on PS3 as well!

[VG Aficionado]

How come Atari is releasing a game on a platform their president said would struggle to sell a million units?

Oh, I see...

[LiquidEagle]

This could make my day! link?

[McLaren]

http://www.futuregamez.net/news/news.html

[LaLiLuLeLo]

360 lost another exclusive! 360 is teh doomed!!!! MS should just give up! Or start buying off lots more developers, what is Microsoft's problem!!!

[GTAce]

Great, +rep!
Awesome i was really hoping that this one goes to PS3!

EDIT:
360 lost another exclusive! 360 is teh doomed!!!! MS should just give up! Or start buying off lots more developers, what is Microsoft's problem!!!

LOL!

[OmniCloud]

meh...Still haven't seen enough gameplay to get excited about it. The story sounded kinda interesting, and I think it's a Co-op game right? That's good if it is...

[LiquidEagle]

But its main inspiration is Heat!!!!!

That alone has me psyched but I also think the game is looking fantastic... I was really sad I was gonna have to get it on PC instead of PS3, but alas :)

[Grovestreet]

360 lost another exclusive! 360 is teh doomed!!!! MS should just give up! Or start buying off lots more developers, what is Microsoft's problem!!!

I hope your being Sarcastic man ;)

[Z]

I hope your being Sarcastic man
he's just regurgitating the opposed impact as seen daily on the other side of the spectrum. sad isn't it?

[jaxmkii]

360 lost another exclusive! 360 is teh doomed!!!! MS should just give up! Or start buying off lots more developers, what is Microsoft's problem!!!

LOL... now thats its on the other foot

[curryking1]

How come Atari is releasing a game on a platform their president said would struggle to sell a million units?

Oh, I see...

They had some sort of epiphany while they were drinking their early morning coffee one day, finally realising Sony didn't just disappear into thin air.

[Sephiroth_VII]

My PS3 is delayed, so this'll be my 3.000th post, even though I'd planned to use it to post a pic of my PS3 setup :cry2:.

Anyway, as you probably know, IO is a Danish company, so they naturally had this game at DK's biggest gaming event: D3. It's amazing. Especially the way the two main characters constantly bounce line off each other and interact is great.
Not to mention that they let us play a build of a disco with hundreds of people in it, and when one fired a gun in there, they'd all run amok and some would actually get trampled to death.

They also had a level where you had to infiltrate an office building. You could choose a lot of ways to get to the room where your target was located. For example, you could go in with guns blazing and killing all of the guards, or you could choose get in by flying to the roof of the building in a helicopter, then climbing down the side of the building, taking care not to be noticed by office workers, of course.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that this is a great game!

[section]

Citizen Kane and David Lynch: An Interesting Movie remake.

[VG Aficionado]

My PS3 is delayed, so this'll be my 3.000th post, even though I'd planned to use it to post a pic of my PS3 setup :cry2:Now that the European launch will be announced today :-p

[yoshaw]

Here's a megapost of what I'd been gathering in the 360 section looooong time ago.

http://pix.nofrag.com/77/bf/17da2e936042e6c5e3eed2775f7f.gif

Scans (http://forums.e-mpire.com/showpost.php?p=1154581&postcount=1)

Looks Splinter Cellish in graphics but way cooler in style. I like the story though, one crazy one sophisticated. Gives the oldschool 'good cop bad cop' idiology a new meaning.

http://pix.nofrag.com/99/24/f78d973edbde6d1bc6877f6ab70b.jpg
http://pix.nofrag.com/81/da/eebd2b59f618704718bd851f7c37.jpg
http://pix.nofrag.com/82/ba/ade057021321846366c431b8f19a.jpg
http://pix.nofrag.com/30/18/af8e93d6d95a8b0f4788e386a496.jpg


New IGN preview and screenshots!
(http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/726/726596p1.html)

I love the setting of this game! High Rise buildings, disguise as painters, families held hostage, forced to do dirty work for the mob etc. Pure Nostalgia!!!

Reminds me of this one setting in the awesome movie 'The Usual Suspects'.

http://www.enregistrersous.com/images/727528465f0e8a786572cfb550829965.jpg
http://www.enregistrersous.com/images/8e14cfac5f4ac459a644b8a396532f80.jpg

Well these are the guys who created Freedom Fighters and Hitman.

New preview and screenshots at CVG

Exclusive: We get dead serious as IO Interactive's new shooter is blown wide open in our comprehensive reveal!

Two and a bit years ago, a game called Freedom Fighters was released and it didn't change the world. Lost in a monolithic EA release schedule and yet another in a long parade of third-person squad actioners, I reviewed it back then and enjoyed it enough to give it 75%. And you'd have thought that would be case closed - but the game just would not leave my head.

As time went on I just began to remember it with abnormal fondness - to the extent that it has now become one third of my holy trinity of 'games you've probably never played, but should' list. It's a flawed game, but even now I rate it alongside Beyond Good & Evil and Psychonauts. Why? Why the attachment? Well, partly because it's a game that few played - and it didn't deserve that treatment - and partly because over-riding the game's problems there were moments of pure gaming exhilaration. There was this barking Russian choral music, simple squad controls that had the game rattle along breathlessly and... Well... You just felt a lot of love had gone into the project. If you don't mind, we'll gloss over the shit AI and repetitive levels for now...

FOR FREEDOM!
As time passed since Freedom Fighters' release, everyone apart from me seemed to forget about it. With the gaming nation distracted by the shiny bald pate of IO Interactive's more successful Hitman series, the third-person squad mechanics of FF's plucky revolutionaries seemed to have been a one-off. A flop. An aberration. But deep in their Copenhagen lair, a group of developers apparently begged to differ. They were going to make a comeback - and this time they'd do it with style, and not a little lashing of old ultra-violence.

Kane & Lynch: Dead Men is an attempt to bring the purer end of cinema action onto your PC. Not the silly comedic mugging of the later Brosnan Bonds, nor the overblown budget of a Schwarzenegger outing - but the realistic gunplay, looks, sounds, chaotic atmosphere and dialogue of a Heat or Tony Scott's Man On Fire.

In fact, Io are so consciously following the works of director Michael Mann, this could be a game forged under his tutelage. This fact is underlined when Io boot up their jaw-dropping club scene and have lead character Kane shoot a man in the crowd; the similarity of which to the scene where Tom Cruise's cool-as-ice hitman performs a public execution in Collateral being overwhelming. "Michael Mann owes us one anyway," laughs the game's producer Hugh Grimley when I meet up with him later on, jangling the keys to the Hitman series as he does so.

But who are the sultry men who adorn these pages? Well, it's simple at one level, but the story gets complicated. "Everyone at IO will hate me for saying it, but it's kind-of a buddy movie thing," frowns Jens Peter Kurup, the game's director. "Just please, please don't call it a buddy movie! That just makes it sound like it's Mel Gibson and some guy... It makes it sound like something with lots of funny little jokes. It's not. It's dead serious."

ENTER LYNCH
So let's start with Lynch. He's the subsidiary character who'll accompany you (Kane) throughout the game, or who a mate will get to control in co-op. He's a psychopath. A proper, full-on medicated schizophrenic who distractedly hums at nothing in particular before embarking on murderous rampages through crowds of enemies and civilians alike. Let's get over it now: Dead Men is not a particularly accurate or knowledgeable account of mental health issues in modern-day society.

IT STARTED SO WELL...
Described by Io as looking like a "German teacher gone wrong", Lynch is not a happy cupcake. He once worked a day job in Detroit warehouses, but one day came home to find his wife brutally murdered - and seeing as his schizophrenia has had him blacking out and committing unspeakable acts of brutality, he's not altogether convinced that he didn't have a part in it. Conviction and death row beckons, and we'll leave him looking rather sad in a prison transport vehicle - sitting alongside the man he'll be baiting throughout the exciting plot arc that follows.

"Kane is a little bit more complex." explains JP Kurup. "He starts out as a normal father of two: he has a daughter, a son and a wife - life is generally good. He works as a consultant for large companies who outsource work in other countries; Venezuela in this case." So our lead character is a talented man, although presumably not doing the sort of outsourcing that puts our energy supplier queries into the hands of a Bangladeshi lady with a working knowledge of EastEnders. Tragedy, however, isn't far away: his two-year-old son finds his gun and shoots himself, dying two weeks later. Kane can't cope and skips the country.

Two years later and he's a mercenary - using his negotiation skills and brute force to bring home the bacon to an empty house - presumably with a hammock, as that's what mercenaries generally sleep in. Four years later and he's contacted by a shadowy group known as 'The Seven' who are interested in becoming 'The Eight'. If Kane joins them, which he obviously does, then he gets the moon on a stick and the sun on a flagpole - but if he ever breaks their rules, then he's all kinds of buggered.

"It's a brotherhood of unlimited power, but you've got to behave." explains Kurup. "He's with them for about 13 years and everything is fine - they're working on their last big job, their retirement job in the US, but it all goes horribly wrong. Kane, however, manages to survive and get away with all the loot. He gets to Venezuela, but is caught, brought back and sentenced for the atrocities he's committed and is sent to death row." One Kane? One Lynch? Sitting together in an armoured car? That makes it bust-out o'clock, don't you think?

Let's leave them there for the moment though; I don't want to shovel too much back history down your throat. And, coincidentally, neither do IO - which is why so much of the narrative will be told through the conversations you have as the game progresses or, cleverly, in brief aural flashbacks of Kane's son dying or past conversations on the occasions that your ineptitude will have him near-dead.

LOOKS FAMILIAR
The action that will have left him in this position, meanwhile, is very, very similar to what went before in Freedom Fighters. So similar, in fact, that a keen eye could spot that they'd even borrowed its squad command icons for the purposes of the demonstration put in front of me.

Essentially, members of your crew can be distributed into strategic points through right-clicks of the mouse, and each will mimic your own tactics - so if you're attacking then they'll surge forward, if you're taking cover then they'll do the same. The aim is to rob squad-shootery of its complexities and drown it in fast-flowing simplicity - action being viewed from a third-person perspective which can be drawn into an over-the-shoulder viewpoint should a sharp shot be required.

All of the guys you're ordering about, one of whom will always be the psychopathic Lynch, are in it for themselves and won't necessarily risk their neck for you - but there will be quite a few of them. Generally, you'll have four or five guys to order about, but in later stages of the game each of them will be able to have four or five 'satellite' hoodlums following their moves. This means you'll be heading up attack forces of more than 25 characters; which is less third-person action and more all-out war.

PRODUCTIVE DAY
A typical chapter to describe, meanwhile, are the periods of calm and chaos you'll experience as Kane, Lynch and two other members of their 'crew' descend through a Tokyo skyscraper, pausing only to massacre a group of businessmen in a meeting, steal a briefcase and for Kane to give a dead foe a scar on his cheek to match his own. Seeing the four guys rappelling down from the roof with the blue open sky above, tiny cars below and office workers busying themselves at their desks (some noticing the action outside, others not) through the glass is a true sight to behold.

As soon as an explosive charge has been set outside the meeting room's window and the music starts pumping, however, you won't have time for 'oohs' and 'aahs'. The combat that follows is also notably grenade-heavy, especially since IO are also introducing smoke bombs and tear gas - the wafting of which we're promised will be far prettier on a PC than in the simultaneous release on our bastard cousin the 360. The action then progresses through the Japanese skyscraper's lobby, with our anti-heroes cowering behind samurai works of art as they're slowly pummelled into pieces by enemy bullets, before spilling out onto the street.

It's here that the influence of Michael Mann becomes most apparent, the scene instantly recalling the intense street battle that follows Heat's bungled bank robbery. Huge crowds scatter, cars screech and cops open fire - the action is just pure grit, and liable to get grittier with other set-pieces due to cover actual bank robberies and breaking other characters out of jail. Bundled with, surprise of all surprises, a co-op mode that will actually see the light of day on PC and a multiplayer mode Io believe is so revolutionary, they're not going to show it off for a very long time for fear of other developers cribbing off them, and this is set to be quite the action package.

SHALL I GO ON?
But why are two men who hate each other so dearly going on such an extravagant global killing spree? Let's return to the set-up of the piece. I believe we left the pair together in a prison transit van, tasked with delivering them to their doom. Well, the next thing that happens is that Lynch tells Kane to cover his head; he does so, there's an almighty crash and then his already screwed up life gets even screwier. He also breaks his nose, which presents him with the rather fetching plaster-cast he has in all the screenshots.

"We then have a fairly grand-scale bust-out scenario where a group of armed mercenaries herd you through the location," explains JP Kurup, as he describes what at first seems to be a rescue attempt but is in fact a high-profile kidnapping. "Later, you meet the guys who busted you out - four members of The Seven. They survived and have come back to the US, and quite rightfully they blame Kane for being a traitor: he left them in Venezuela to burn and he got away with all the loot."

Kurup continues: "That's the main theme of the game: is Kane a traitor or not? The Seven want to kill Kane and his family, but the problem is they really need this loot. So they bend their rules ever so slightly; if Kane brings them the stash then they'll still kill him, but they won't kill his family. Kane accepts the deal and Lynch has been given a phone and instructions - he's there as a watchdog. He'll be with him throughout the game - just to make sure he doesn't go off and do something crazy."

BUMP AND GRIND
As if to underline this, I'm suddenly presented with the 'Collateral' club scene - and Kane and Lynch are making their way past the bouncers and trading unsubtly hateful repartee. Lynch is bitching, at this stage becoming increasingly batty without his medication, and Kane is responding with one-liners like: "Don't answer back to me you arrogant f***." Dialogue like this takes place throughout the game, and when you're tired of it - just like in real life - you can just walk away and Lynch will shut up and stare at you with unbridled vitriol.

In this case, Kane turns a corner and the dancefloor comes into view - and sweet mother of the baby Jesus, it's incredible. As far as IO are concerned, you can't have a convincing action scene in a realistic urban setting without hordes of screaming innocent people. And you can't have a club scene which contains two NPCs wobbling beneath a mirror ball. When you do a club scene, you need anything up to 800 or 1,000 beautifully rendered clubbers gyrating to hard, gritty music. It honestly looks like the scene from The Matrix Revolutions where the people of Zion discover they're all about to die and respond by having a massive sweaty slow-motion dance orgy. When you walk through them, they slow your progress - and when you start firing bullets into the crowd, then those in the 5ft radius around you who can hear the gunshot will start panicking, and the panic will gradually spread to all those present.

The technology already impressive in the Mardi Gras level of Hitman: Blood Money has truly come of age - compare this to when you jumped up and down next to two oddly animated Hong Kong clubbers surrounded by mirrors in Deus Ex and you realise just how far we've come in a very short amount of time.

The dastardly duo are here to see Yoko, the club's manager and old associate of Kane - but you're not here for smalltalk - you're here to smack her, tie her up and kidnap her. Lynch then carries her out and it's up to you, with limited ammo, to take out all the security men and bouncers and ramp up so much panic that a forlorn struggling Japanese lady being thrown around by a bearded madman is lost in the chaos.

END OF THE LINE
And so, as the end of the page draws near, perhaps we should leave them to their own wicked devices: a mercenary traitor with everything to lose and an unhinged psychopath with everything to win - essentially some sort of evil middle-aged mirror-image of Ant and Dec. "They're not good guys in any conceivable way," underlines JP Kurup. "What they're doing is wrong, any means they take are never appropriate - but they do it anyway."

They say dead men tell no tales, or at least Pirates Of The Caribbean did, but this pair are about to tell an extremely good one. Just don't tell Michael Mann's lawyers - it'll be our little secret.
http://computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=144810

http://computerandvideogames.com/medialib/screens/screenshot_160775.jpg
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Leipzig Trailer
http://www.xboxyde.com/news_3369_en.html

[VG Aficionado]

C'mon yoshaw, you didn't break a sweat :laugh:

Damn, can't +rep you yet, too much +repping over the last 24 hours :cry2:

[section]

You can give it to me instead? ;)

[VG Aficionado]

You can give it to me instead? ;)What did you exactly do to deserve it? :chinese2: ;)

[BruceWayneIII]

Posted this early on:

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/01/24/kane-and-lynch-sighted-for-ps3-ps2-psp/

Got my credit for handing positive PS3 news :)