Our attention now switches to the Xbox that has been waiting patiently on the table and the brightly coloured visuals it is producing on the attached TV. Jon explains how they rejected typical gaming menus in favour of a more toy-orientated approach: a board game interface selects modes and such, navigated with a neat Crayola crayon cursor. In Story Mode, players collect items to unlock new toys to play with in The Toy Box, though collecting every item isn’t necessary to finish the game, completists can check their progress until every secret has been discovered. But the meat of the game is the much-mentioned Toy Box mode, which Jon begins to load up. ‘Who would you like to play as?’ he asks us. Unanimously, we choose Buzz Lightyear.
‘Poor Woody and Jessie!’ a nearby assistant laments.
‘They never get any playtime, it’s just like in Andy’s house,’ Jon confirms. The mode loads and we find Buzz in a stylised western town, modelled after Woody’s Roundup. Graphically, the game is reasonably impressive, the bright, cartoony look of the films replicated satisfactorily on screen. Buzz trots around the town as if in some pre-teen friendly Grand Theft Auto game, chatting with townsfolk and tossing hapless Pizza Planet aliens with reckless abandon. Controlled by Jon, Buzz interacts with the town’s inhabitants, makes shops, rides Bullseye the horse and is given tasks to complete by other characters, such as Hamm, Rex and Slinky Dog. Jon explains that the tasks are there for players who enjoy structure. The Toy Box also accommodates for players who enjoy exploring, in its myriad of things to discover and for those who like to customise their game worlds, in the multitude of options that can be utilised to alter game features.
‘Once you’ve built up your town to a certain point and it’s prosperous enough, outlaws will come into it to rob your people, so if we have enough money, we can purchase a jail to hold your outlaws – if you don’t, the outlaws will take all your people’s money,’ says Jon, discussing the possibilities of the game. Buildings and characters are purchased in-game with money collected through completing tasks and collecting gold nuggets. ‘There are some characters you can buy that you can ride, like Bullseye. Riding around on Bullseye is great,’ he demonstrates as the horse capers around with Buzz on his back. There are numerous races to complete with Bullseye around the game world to partake in at the player’s leisure.
‘You can buy a car and it opens up the racing area, a kind of Skate Park with stunt-driven missions. If you enjoy racing games and playing with cars, and that’s all you want to do, that’s completely an option. There’s a bunch of preset missions and areas where you can just screw around doing stunts. You can customise your cars, you can change what type of car you drive…’ Eager to show us more of the possibilities of the game, Jon loads up a profile on with more features unlocked.
‘If you remember when you were kids playing with toys, you’d never seem to have a full set of toys that were all from the same set, it was always kind of a mish-mash of stuff, but it was okay because it made sense to you and that’s all that mattered, so we wanted to replicate that feeling. There’s toys that fit in the Woody’s Roundup set, and then there’s toys make absolutely no sense, but are fun to play with anyway,’ Jon says, explaining the eclectic aesthetic of the game.
Jon discusses the amount of time players can expect to have with the game. ‘The Story Mode lasts for about four solid hours for a good gamer, if you’re a completist, for younger gamers, it’ll take a bit longer. The Toy Box is really open ended; there’s no end, we never roll credits. You play there ‘til you’re done playing. That could be ten hours, it could be twenty. I’ve been playing my session for about twenty-two hours and there’s still stuff I’m not done with yet! What was amazing when we were play-testing the game, was that out of the sixty groups playing it, not one of the games ended up the same. Of course, they were doing the same missions, but their game worlds were all completely different.’
The new game loaded, we are confronted with a much bigger town with more denizens. One of the buildings is decorated like a clown fish from Finding Nemo and there is a NPC styled after Syndrome from The Incredibles. I asked whether there were a lot of nods to other Pixar films and Jon confirmed that in many of the customisation options, there were various tributes to Pixar’s repertoire, including Wall-E and Monsters Inc. too. Other new options in the game include a goo machine, which dispenses globules of pink and green sludge that can be used to grow and shrink characters and items, affecting how the player interacts with the in the game. For example, a shrunken Bullseye is quicker, whereas a giant Bullseye can crush obstacles. There are also bigger toys to purchase in the game that offer new challenges, customisation options and tools, such as Sid’s Haunted House, which unleashes monsters on your town for you to defeat.
Finally, it is our turn to have a go. We enter split-screen mode. The controls were intuitive enough and the game had a fluid feel to it. Players are under no obligation to play with or against each other whilst in multiplayer, but we decide to have a race on our horses. I’m pretty rubbish and lose the race, but it was pretty good fun nonetheless. I had a go on a monster truck too, which was also a hoot.
With that, my time was up and I was ushered out of the room. Though I only spent a short time with the game, it seemed like a lot of fun. I’d also barely scratched the surface of the number of options of features of play. I imagine that Toy Story 3: The Video Game will do a lot of good for the mediocre reputation of tie-in games, and will prove popular, especially among the franchise’s younger fans. If the rest of the development team at Avalanche are half as passionate and enthusiastic about the game and put those qualities into its production, Avalanche should be on to a winner.
http://www.blogomatic3000.com/2010/06/25/exclusive-toy-story-3-the-videogame-hands-on-report-pt-2/
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