by Adam Rosenberg

Up until a week ago, it had been roughly a year since I last saw Capcom’s and Airtight Games’ “Dark Void.” A cool premise and some ambitious gameplay components were overshadowed in that earlier demo by a litany of troublesome visual and functional issues. However, with “Void” currently circling a Fall ’09 release and E3 right around the corner, it came as no surprise last week when Capcom breezed through New York on a media tour with a fully playable demo level from the game in tow.

In case you need a refresher, “Dark Void” follows cargo pilot Will as he is blasted into another… uhhhh… “somewhere” after taking a small detour over the Bermuda Triangle. It’s not really clear what or where Void – the name of the place our hapless pilot ends up – actually is: alternate dimension, parallel universe, surreal dream-world… it could be any, all or none of those. Read more...

If you recently came upon a man in Washington state who was clinging to the side of his garage, holding a toy gun, and getting his picture snapped by his wife -- and if you asked him what in the world he was doing -- he probably wouldn't lurch into his theory about video games someday conquering all other forms of entertainment. But that is pretty much what put Ed Fries on that ledge.

A longtime rock climber and former head of developer relations for Microsoft's Xbox division, Fries was clutching his garage so that he could demonstrate to the makers of "Dark Void," an upcoming Capcom game about a hero in a jetpack, how a man could hang under a ledge and still have a free hand to shoot a gun. This isn't something rock climbers need to do very often, but jetpacked video game heroes do.

He wanted to help the "Dark Void" team get that part right, because "Dark Void" is yet one more game that Ed Fries hopes will help video games finally take over entertainment

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Since the last entry…

**I played more "MGS4" but can say no more until 12:01 tonight and I played more "The World Ends With You," reaching "The Last Day." Yeah, right.

**I also attended a four-company showcase in Manhattan, sampling hands-on and hands-off demos from Capcom (played "Bionic Commando"), Sierra (watched "50 Cent: Blood On The Sand"), D3 (played and stank at the impressive "Bangai-O Spirits" on the DS) and Codemasters (watched "Damnation" and "Rise Of The Argonauts.") Lots of interesting stuff there. "Bangai-O" was a highlight because it looks like development studio Treasure is just about melting the processors on the DS with its frenzied top-down 2D shooter -- a game that has new content for the U.S., all importers should note.

"Bionic Commando" gets a commendation for something I also wrote about "Dark Void" today: it's a game for which character movement is a prominent selling point. Shaping a game around how a character moves -- a staple of much SNES and Genesis design -- has long seemed to be a lost art. "BC" and "Dark Void" help bring that back. What you shoot or who you're fighting doesn't always have to be the selling point of an action game, does it? It wasn't that way back in the day.

Next: I felt terrible when I told two "Bourne Conspiracy" developers that I had received their game but ignored it in order to play "MGS4." I'm not sure I can make amends tonight. We'll see. I hear the "Bourne" game's quite good.

I might be remembering the 80s and 90s wrong, but I think you used to be able to tell one video game from the next by how their main characters moved. "Mario" games were the ones with the guy jumping on other characters' heads. "Sonic" games had the animal that ran fast, sometimes in loop-de-loops. "Metroid" games featured a person who could roll into a ball. "Strider" had tube-traveling dude; "Bionic Commando" had a grapple-hook-swinging guy.

And then at some point in this skewed, not entirely accurate history of video games, character movement stopped being as frequent a selling point, not compared to what kind of guns a character shot. So I considered it surprising and refreshing to check out two games at a Capcom press event yesterday that appear to be built on how their characters move: one was the well-documented 3D swinging of the new "Bionic Commando;" the other a jet-pack action game I knew nothing about called "Dark Void."

"Void" has some interesting movement. Like the old Batman TV show.

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