Following up on its recent Zapak partnership, developer Rocking Pixels has finally updated their official website with the first in-game screens of Love Story 2050. Does it look better than the accidentally-released screens of the engine tests? Sure, but we still don’t see what the big fuss is about it. There certainly isn’t anything that screams massively multiplayer just yet. Nor I doubt I’ll ever publicly blurt out “Sweet Baby Moses, is that puppy running on a 9800GX2?!” while eyeing anyone playing this, but technical accolades were never so much my main point of concern as compared to the general emptiness I felt with the whole art direction and design. GameGuru.in has an amateurishly taken cam video uploaded on Youtube, but there’s not a lot to decipher from there. As usual.
Anywho, we’ll let you guys decide for yourselves. Gallery pics of digital Harman-goodness after the jump!
Back in May, we got an early glimpse of some less-than-riveting screens of LoveStory 2050 for the PC, the official game based on the upcoming sci-fi film that unapologetically “borrows” as many flicks as Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer can do with Hollywood blockbusters in a few months time (minus the near-existent humor). Then Sanjit Daniel, CEO of Rocking Pixels and 2050’s developer, pops in and slaps us with a large cartoon trout with “Engine Tests!” written all over it. He also promised we’d be seeing some real info in about “two weeks time”, but that was nearly a month ago. Fast forward to today, and now we’re hearing talks of a massively multiplayer online game, backed up by Indian gaming portal Zapak. A sphincter says what?!
Rocking Pixels has associated with Love Story 2050 to create for the first time a Bollywood based 3D game that will bring realistic “avatars” of the stars to the masses that will be able to connect with their most popular icons in a way never before possible. The massively multiplayer games with hundreds of thousands of players competing with each other provide the most interactive lean forward medium which associates players with the stars.
On this occasion, Sanjit Daniel, CEO, Rocking Pixels said, “When Love Story 2050 was announced we realized that the movie will be a great fit to showcase our technology as it was futuristic and loaded with special effects. With Harman himself being a hard core gamer we managed to create a breakthrough game which brings the movie in all its glory to the world of 3D gaming. The game will be released as a massively multiplayer game and will feature exciting game play in a futuristic Mumbai, exactly as depicted in the movie”.
Talk about unexpected developments. Yet, there’s still no mention of a pinned release date or what sort of a MMO will this be exactly. RPG? FPS? Second Life meets Blade Runner? Tieing up with Zapak seems like a good initiative, but having to deal with the weight of a thousand or so players all interacting at the same time is a huge undertaking. That doesn’t come from just an everyday gamer’s perspective, that personally comes from a QA tester too.
The movie will be releasing this Friday. As usual, more info when it hits.
Whenever we catch breath of “news” like this, our somewhat attempts at analyzing it usually draws to the same conclusion. Indian developer announces or shows off game project. Indian developer assures that the game will hold significance when released to the masses. The Angry Pixel pans Indian developer, with the sort of reasoning you get after getting being butt-whipped with a wet towel in the boy’s locker room while changing. Rinse, lather, repeat. And trust me, I don’t like it coming down to that. I want India to grow as a viable platform for game development. But this is just making it too easy, that even Ravi decided not to comment about it. And he wrote the book on Bollywood bashing around these parts.
UPDATE: Apparently, these screens are from an in-house engine test and are nowhere near the current version’s visual representation. Expect to see some real hard facts, and less PR blunder. Thanks to Sanjit for the coolly, collective clarification. Gosh, aren’t I the bumbling douche bucket now. I don’t suppose anyone from the Rocking Pixels team would be interested in dressing up as a ninja, eh?

