An unannounced air combat game titled "Stormbirds," in development by Juice Games, was recently cancelled by THQ, according to former Juice artist Greg Calvert.
Stormbirds was set for release on Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC--before THQ apparently got cold feet. As a result, the team of over 30 developers was laid off by Juiced owner THQ.
"The game was in the same genre as Ace Combat and HAWX," wrote Calvert in a recent blog post. "THQ deemed the project too high risk, [and] as a result the entire team were made redundant on the 1st of December 2008."
Juice Games was acquired by THQ in 2006. The developer is best known for the "Juiced" series of racing titles.
Rather than see the fruits of their labors go to waste, assets from the Stormbirds project have been released by both Calvert (above) and Steven Kerswell of CG studio RealtimeUK. The intro cinematic, created by Realtime, can be seen below.
Well that's not in-game footage, but it illustrates exactly how an arcade jet fighter style game should be. GRID in the sky basically. Shame it couldn't be realised.
It's amazing how many crap games do get released, and when a game (apparently) can be something else in the middle of all the shit we see getting released, it gets cancelled. The producing companies should grow some balls. Or we'll have a market saturated with "WoW - Revenge of the Oompa Loompa's" and "The Sims 4 - Disposing the Corpses expansion pack".
Give new franchises a chance, and the old ones a rest.
Damn nice video. I'd only hope that the game saw the same amount of effort. Still, Juiced was a so-so racer, Stormbirds would probably have been a so-so jet shooter. That harrier was nice though. Don't think I've played an arcade/sim that let you pilot a harrier.
Oh, and it's all nice and good to blame the publisher. Big bad evil corporations just want to make money. You ever look at the sales of jet sims? Niche markets are buckling under the weight of all the money casual games are making. THQ didn't see a profitable future, and I don't blame them because I don't see a profitable future either. We're entering 2009 on the back of some of the largest unemployment rates seen in decades. Don't forget that.
Same here, mate. I *tried* to play it a few days ago, but it doesn't work. Vista loads it absolutely fine (before any smart-arse chimes in ) but the game doesn't detect, or use, the latest graphics cards -- and it ends up with corrupted graphics in Hardware mode. Playing in Software mode eliminates the graphic issues but it runs in 640x480, looks like shit and runs WAAAAY too fast.
Same here, mate. I *tried* to play it a few days ago, but it doesn't work. Vista loads it absolutely fine (before any smart-arse chimes in ) but the game doesn't detect, or use, the latest graphics cards -- and it ends up with corrupted graphics in Hardware mode. Playing in Software mode eliminates the graphic issues but it runs in 640x480, looks like shit and runs WAAAAY too fast.
Yeah that is a big shame and the price we pay for having our new powerful hardware and wide screen monitors nowadays. Dungeon Keeper 2 was one of my favorite games of all times but I can't play it because it crashes because it can't handle the modern hardware. Microsoft Virtual PC helps on other games but sometimes blue screens on Dungeon Keeper 2 for me. O well
Fallout 2 runs perfect but on my 22 inch wide screen it looks horrible. Its a eye sore that's for sure. Which really sucks for me seeing how Fallout 2 has remained my #1 game of all time for 10 years now.
Of course I can see us saying the same thing 10 years from now about the games we play today while we are using holographic monitors while using new hardware that makes Crysis run at 5000 FPS no matter what we do.
By the way, unfortunately, one of the videos has no sound (Youtube had already muted it by the time I got to it), so don't be surprised by that.
The game looked really far along. One of the videos says that the level geometry was done, and had already been sent to outsourcing to finish the art and decoration pass. Surely Marvel won't release the Avengers movie, their biggest thing ever, without a video game tie-in. The movie's only 8 months away, which isn't enough time to make even the shittiest new tie-in game from scratch. I hope there's some kind of miracle, and they end up finishing this one instead. I love the idea of first-person co-op superheroes, and the execution looked solid (if not unpolished, of course). More interesting than the usual cookie-cutter beat-em-up superhero movie tie-in games, at least.
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We *need* some Ace Combat type games on the PC. Far too many damned flight-sims for my likiing.
) but the game doesn't detect, or use, the latest graphics cards -- and it ends up with corrupted graphics in Hardware mode. Playing in Software mode eliminates the graphic issues but it runs in 640x480, looks like shit and runs WAAAAY too fast.
