Tuesday, June 10, 2014

E3 - Hands On With Splatoon, Nintendo's New Multiplayer Online Shooter


Forbes - I’m deep in enemy territory, surrounded by hostiles, and nearly out of ammo. But I still have a few tricks up my sleeve. Hefting my weapon, I squirt a tiny patch of green goo on the ground, and then dive into it; my squid form disappears into the murk.

When enemies come for me, I’ll be waiting. And when their backs are turned, I’ll drown them in my ink.

 
 
I’m playing a new Wii U game called Splatoon, which was announced this morning as part of Nintendo's E3 “digital event.” It’s a team-based first-person shooter, in the style of Team Fortress 2, but with a family-friendly Nintendo twist: The soldiers are cartoonish squidlike creatures, and you win by covering the ground of the arena in your team’s colored ink.

Each Splatoon match involves up to eight players in a four-on-four battle in an enclosed battlefield full of hallways, platforms, gates and ramps. Your soldier carries a weapon that looks like a big water gun, and it’s fed with brightly colored ink from a tank worn on your back; when you fire the gun, it squirts a solid stream of liquid that coats and colors anything it hits.

It feels like shooting propulsion gel from Portal 2, and has similar properties; when you’re on ground coated with your team’s color, you can dive and swim through it at high speed. You can climb up walls coated in your ink, or slip under obstacles via the colored ground underneath; you can even become effectively invisible to enemies if you stay still.     Read More