Studio Update 31

Wrapping up The Club, and BBR title update on the way...

The silliness is slowly coming to a close, and the end is in sight. The main push at Bizarre is now to get The Club finished up and out the door. A zero bugs build of the game is in sight, and once that is reached the code gets shipped off to SEGA for a damn good bout of testing. After that (assuming all things go to plan), the two console builds (Xbox 360 and PS3) are sent to Microsoft/Sony for certification. If they pass all the various tests then we reach RTM (release to manufacturer), where the discs are pressed and put in pretty boxes. It's at that point folks at Bizarre can take a breather, and chill out - at least for a week or so!

The PC version of The Club doesn't need to go to certification like its console brothers, so its schedule is staggered a little bit. This means that by the time the 360/PS3 versions have gone through cert, the PC version will be finished and ready to ship out for the same "Early 2008" release date. Of course, it's easy for me to say all of this because I sit in a different studio, away from the blood/sweat/tears of crunch time in which the majority of Shitstorm team are now elbow deep!

That doesn't mean the rest of us escape The Club fever though. Last week several of us travelled to Nottingham for the Game City event, where we demonstrated the game to a few members of the public. We also did a presentation on PGR4, where The Boy and I managed to deafen an entire cinema full of people (ourselves included). That has to be some kind of record.

In The Club presentation we showed off a couple of levels which are new to everybody who isn't a games journalist. "Escape From Newhaven" is set in the Prison Cells environment, and "A Bridge Too Far" is one of the early Venice levels. Both were Sprint game modes, which has the player going from start to finish racking up as many points as they can on the way.

There are plenty of other game modes too - my favourite is probably Time Attack, where you are tasked with going several "laps" of an area. All this time the stopwatch is counting down, and if it hits zero then you will explode! Subtle it is not, but it's certainly effective. Whilst you're doing your laps you must dispatch bad guys to add seconds to your timer (enemies add 3.0 seconds, whilst skullshots and time pickups add 2.0 seconds). Each lap of the course you make increases the enemy count, so by the time you reach your third lap you'll have to really know the route well in order to make it round in time.

As you might imagine, more enemies makes it tougher to stay alive but also provides more opportunities to keep your combo up and your timer in the black. A very interesting game mode indeed, and (to my knowledge) unlike anything else you'll have played in a third person shooter.

If you happen to be heading to the Igromir Game Show in Moscow this week, be sure to stop by the SEGA stand. Some Bizarre folks will be there showing off the game. Likewise you'll see The Club at the SEGA press event tomorrow (Wed) in the UK, assuming you're on "ze list" that is...

In other news, Gareth Wilson (a head Design honcho on Amax team) recently attended the GameHotel event in Zurich. He took the stage alongside Cevat Yerli (Crysis), Jade Raymond (Assassins Creed), and other top industry folk. If you were there, let us what you thought of the show in our forums!

Sarah, our Commercial Director, has also done a PGR-related Q&A over at Pro-G. It'll be online at some point later this week, so keep an eye on their web site for details.

Beyond that, our Amax team (you may know them as the folks who brought you PGR4) are now working with our new Activision friends on "What Comes Next". They've got some great ideas thus far, but of course if I mention them here I'll be shot before the day is over. Besides, it'll probably all change vastly over the coming weeks... this is the point when good concepts prove their worth and bad ideas are thrown out the window. It's going to be quite some time before you hear anything further from Amax team, so I'm afraid you're going to have to get used to the "no comment" you'll be hearing from Bizarre in the months ahead. Sorry about that.

The other "big news" buzzing around the Bizarre Creations offices is that the long-awaited title update to Boom Boom Rocket has just passed certification. Phew! Whilst we don't know exactly when the update will go live, you can bet that it won't be too much longer now. Here's the breakdown of what's new:

• Guitar and dancemat peripheral support (oh yes!)
• Japanese and Korean language support
• Tweaked scoring system to make grade awarded more fair (now purely based on accuracy)
• The huge loud "noise" which popped up occasionally on endurance mode is now gone
• Occurrences of scores getting overwritten with a lower score when playing with 2 profiles signed in is now fixed.
• Display updates when viewing the game through a VGA cable.
• Friends leaderboard now shows extra information such as grade, accuracy, etc.
• Multiplayer endurance mode fix for player colours swapping sporadically.
• Slightly bigger and better explosions (updates to firework rendering)

We're really happy that this update is finally going to see the light of the outside world, and we'd like to thank the Boom Boom Rocket faithful for sticking with the game through thick and thin. Let the embarrassing Youtube dancemat videos commence! Actually let me get it started, courtesy of the Bizarre Creations balancing team! Movie one is crushing defeat at the hands of the dancemat...

...and Movie two is an example of biting off more than you can chew!

Also you may have heard about BBR being included in the Xbox 360 Arcade hardware bundle. Good news indeed! If you're planning on buying one of these new machines, make sure that you connect it to Xbox Live to receive the latest new features and fixes when they become available.

That's all for now. Tara.