Visiting Dead Island: Riptide with some terrible tweens
Comments 4
I knew my hands-on with Dead Island: Riptide at PAX was in trouble the moments a pair of nine-year-olds lined up at the stations next to me, with a single ineffectual parent at the other end of the row. They each went for the same controller, fought briefly over it, then settled down and put on their headphones. Suddenly, mine were filled with exactly the kind of nonstop falsetto cursing and shit-talking that I spend most of my multiplayer life trying to avoid.
On the plus side, it’s not often you get to preview a game under the dreariest real-world conditions imaginable. In some ways it’s a good thing: just as bad games can help put good ones in perspective, interacting with bad players challenged what I thought I knew about the audience for games like Riptide. You see, Riptide isn’t a game for children, but a pair of little kids loved it all the same. And that’s a problem.
I've written "kick a zombies [sic] head off" in my Dead Island: Riptide notes and I'm not entirely sure I remember why. The adjacent notes don't offer any clues: "improved physics, zombie fell over lolol" and "new enemy types, man with guts out". I can only assume that, at some point in the two-player co-op presentation of the Dead Island sequel, creative producer Sebastian Reichert kicked a zombie in the chest and its head came flying off. That feels right. Yes. That is probably what happened.
Dead Island is a game about killing undead people, lopping off their limbs and shooting them in their heads so that all their blood and brains come out. It's developed partly in Germany, though curiously, due to the country's restrictions on the sale of violent media, the game is not widely available in stores there. Which is obviously frustrating for Dead Island's developers, who would probably like to show the game to their friends. Sebastian Reichert, creative producer on Dead Island: Riptide, was frank about his annoyance: "it feels [effing] awkward to have one of the most successful games in years and nobody in your country knows it".
