Rayman Origins is special, rare and precious. Somewhere in the last few years, the classic notion of games being benign and whimsical escapist fantasies was lost in favor of battered, war torn landscapes and desolate dystopian apocalypse. Vibrant worlds turned to rot and grit, smiles turned to screams, and it seemed that by and large, gaming lost its innocence...
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This week, Sony brings its usual raft of new and tweaked content to the PlayStation Store. Notable additions to their selections include Dead Space 2 as a downloadable for $29.99, with a free full game trial for PS+ subscribers. More »
After several years of Rabbids mayhem, Rayman is finally back in the spotlight, with Rayman Origins. That's most certainly a good thing - he's a quirky character and has starred in some great games over the years. Origins comes packing four player co-op and incredibly lush 2D graphics...
Ubisoft confirmed today that a demo of Rayman Origins will be released on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network next week. The demo will feature three playable levels: Jungle, Ocean and Food. Players will also be able to unlock a costume for use in all three areas...
Check out more screens in our Flickr set
The following is a Ubisoft internal interview with Game Director Sebastien Morin...
How many different worlds and environments will we be able to get around?
There are five universes and 10 different worlds to discover. Additionally, we have the Land of the Livid Dead, which is a bit hard to reach but is a whole new universe as well.
At the beginning, each world is introduced one after the other. In each, you will gain a new ability and master how to use them.
Then after you complete the first set of worlds, you've grown enough to be dropped in the wild. Just like that a whole new set of worlds are revealed and you have a lot of places to discover at your disposal.
Will all these actions be available from the start, or will some of them be powers you unlock along the way?
At any moment, we give you enough abilities to explore exhaustively each world. So if you feel like playing a level again and again to discover every nook and cranny, it's up to you.
However, you won't have all your abilities right away. At the beginning of the game, Rayman and his gang are still incomplete heroes. They'll need to find and help the fairies to get all their powers back.
Will running be an unlockable power too?
As a Game Designer, an important question is "how do you make gameplay better?”. In Rayman, it could be answered by "chain a bunch of acrobatic moves together faster and faster".
So it was natural to give this ability right away, for all the players that dare to run in a minefield.
Will there be different “flight modes” as in previous Rayman games? (like the power to fly up?)
The best way to fly in the game would probably be riding on a mosquito. However, you’ll also learn quickly to glide. The glide ability allows you to fly in a number of different ways. At first it’s a very helpful tactic to extend a jump and land out of harm’s way. But we also put a lot of wind in the game, which can extend a glide to more of a flying action. But that’s not always a good thing. Winds are there to help or hinder you, push you to safety or towards a spikey death. Also, some enemies use the wind as traps and it should be noted that you’re not the only one who can fly!
So many different moves must require a lot of different animations, how many are there in Origins compared to the first opus?
Way more! Rayman and his gang have a lot of new abilities, so there’s a lot more animation. Besides having all the animations for the abilities, you have to create more animations for combinations and transitions between those abilities you have. So each playable character has more than 250 animations! I can’t even begin to count the animations of the evil characters, because they can be defeated in a lot of funny ways.
In a fall season that is almost insultingly packed with massively marketed triple-A titles, Ubisoft is hoping you'll take a few hours away from murdering assassins, shooting soldiers and throwing batarangs to jump around some paintings as a cartoon character with no arms or legs.
Still with us? ...
I've had a casual fondness for Rayman during most of my life as a gamer. I couldn't tell you the names of the fanciful worlds he trots over, or the reason why his trademark white gloves hover independently from his body (my guess is "magic"), but that hasn't stopped me from liking him...
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This new trailer for Rayman Origins treats us to a release window for the lovingly animated 2D platformer: November 2011. It also treats us to a sweetly serene moment of diegetic music ... followed immediately by a scene of what appears to be Rayman assaulting an angry neighbor with her own husband's head.
The included Ubi fact sheet doesn't specify which platforms will see their version of Rayman in November; Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, and 3DS seem like safe assumptions ... but probably not PlayStation Vita, since that system won't even be out in North America or Europe by then
