I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I hate it when MTV gets anything in video format. The above video might be awesome, but I won’t know. Feel free to rub it in my face in the comments.
That said, they also have a nice, lengthy accompanying interview that they apparently don’t mind if I read. Here are but a few excerpts:
Multiplayer: NERF toys are fun to play with in real life, but not necessarily something that would obviously be adapted into a video game. Why make a NERF game?
Jon Dean, Executive Producer of NERF ‘N-Strike’: Yes, NERF blasters are great fun to play with. Just about every video game developer has a few lying around, so we’re very familiar with what is so cool about them. The great thing about video games is that we can allow you to do things you can’t do in the real World, including getting your hands on dozens of NERF blasters – some real, some that will be coming out next year from Hasbro and some fantasy blasters that we invented just for NERF ‘N-Strike’. It takes enjoyment of NERF to a whole new level.
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Multiplayer: FPS-style gameplay is really popular with older gamers but clearly a challenge to implement in games for younger players because of content and ratings issues. When we interviewed John Riccitiello at E3 he described the game as a rare E10-rated shooter. Is that the goal here: to take the best of FPS gameplay but present it to a younger audience? If so, what are those core FPS gameplay elements that you think are interesting to bring to kids’ games? Which FPSes did you learn from?
Hansen: Our initial goal was to make something fun (we like the word fun around here) that would celebrate, not simulate, the NERF blasting experience for an audience that is younger than the typical gaming hard-core. In the end we found that that first person perspective was the most engaging way to accomplish that goal. Let’s face it, the game mechanics of FPS games are fun regardless of your age, it’s just that a lot of the FPS content is pretty mature in nature – so realizing that gave us a great starting point. We opted to keep human to human violence out of this game; it just didn’t seem to fit and our play test groups loved the fictional bad guys in our game which just happen to be an army of robots armed to the nuts and bolts with foam projectiles. NERF ‘N-Strike’ ended up not as a typical FPS – it has some old-school rail-shooting as well as some puzzles, alongside which we employed time tested techniques that make FPS games fun; it’s twitchy, surprising, suspenseful, fast paced, intense, immediate, and Nerfy (we like that word too, second only to fun).
Multiplayer: This is clearly aimed at a younger audience, but the Wii has managed to cross surprising demographic boundaries. Can NERF ‘N-Strike’ do the same? Would a hardcore gamer enjoy it? What about my mom?
Dean: We set out to design a really fun and credible video game for an audience that doesn’t have many games aimed at it – guys aged 8+. It was important to us that they loved it, and they certainly seem to. A hardcore gamer probably won’t get as much out of mission mode as a younger player will, but they’ll still have a total blast playing against their friends in multiplayer mode. And this game may just be the one that persuades Mom to finally go and buy a NERF Vulcan…
Multiplayer: Who are the characters in this game? (Does the NERF franchise even have characters?)
Hansen: We created some very cool characters that appear for the first time in NERF ‘N-Strike’ – they evolved throughout the course of the project. Shane is the first character that you meet in the game. He is a blaster wielding, arcade game pro that is up for any challenge. If there was an X games for NERF dart shooting, Shane would be the cover boy. Nobody can beat him in a duel and he knows it. You get challenged by the NERF ‘N-Strike’ Elite, including Komodo – a traditionally trained martial arts expert that is influenced by spaghetti westerns. He is part Bruce Lee and part Clint Eastwood and all attitude. Jackal is a brainy guy who happens to be the son of two secret NERF ‘N-Strike’ agents. And everyone wants to challenge Raven, a ‘don’t mess with me’ girl that seems to have an edge on every guy that comes her way. There is also a rough and tumble bruiser named Tango that was raised by a tough military dad. Oh yeah, and we can’t forget the bad guy. I can’t tell you much about him or I would ruin the story. All I will say is that he is metallic, smart and a bit off his rocker, and his name is B.O.B. (by the way – this is a homage to Bob Brown, inventor of many classic NERF blasters at Hasbro). — MTV Multiplayer
It sounds pretty interesting, though I’m curious as to what they’ll be charging for a game and a Nerf blaster.
Also, MTV Multiplayer’s title for the story says they’re giving it the “Halo” treatment, though strangely, I didn’t see any such comment in the story.
And finally, a Wii game I can play with my cats that doesn’t just involve watching the cursor move across the screen!
