Gaming Destroy All Humans!

[Semjaza]

[QUOTE]Due in spring 2005, Destroy All Humans! (known internally at THQ as DAH!) is a third-person action-adventure game with fully open design, giving players the ability to jack humans like Tommy Vercetti jacked cars in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. That's right, you can hypnotize or simply inhabit any living creature. As an alien, players have numerous "alien" capabilities, including the most delectable one, the ability to inhabit their bodies.

The most common example we were given is the idea that players can human-jack a military general. At any point in the game, as the general, you can attend a special UN forces meeting and clarify to the rest of the staff that the recent "Alien" citings are nothing more than hearsay and conspiracy theory. With this special ability, players can confound numerous citizens and genuinely mess with the order of humanity. And haven't you always wanted to do that, anyway?

Build around the 1950s premise of aliens -- small-bodied, big-headed, evil-eyed, with small but powerful laser guns that naturally pilot flying saucers, DAH! is filled with in-jokes, parodies and tongue-in-cheek jokes that touch upon the colossal vault of alien conspiracy and myth created over the last 50 odd years.

The story is hilarious in itself. You're a clone of an alien, the 300th or 500th (some special number we can't remember right now) one of a certain alien from a distant planet, and you're told to go back to one of your old colonies where DNA as been planted long ago to help save your race from a weakened and failing bloodline. You travel via the classic flying saucer to Earth and realize you know knowing about it -- which creatures are smart, which aren't, and which ones dominate. Naturally, being an alien, you think that cows are the smartest creatures on the planet, so a significant amount of time is spent trying to get cows to give you information. This is about as alien as they come folks.

But you do eventually move on from cows, and figure out finally that humans are what you're after. Players can travel via foot or through the air in their upgradeable spaceship. On foot, you can sizzle humans by laser gun, but a much more entertaining way is to use your alien powers. You can levitate or use a jetpack to move around; you can hypnotize humans, commanding them what to do and where to go, you can harvest their brains, or you can corral them and scare the heck out of them. Or, you can temporarily take over their bodies -- without anyone else knowing -- and life their lives.

The amount of dark humor one can have on ground is tremendous, and though this game sounds a little goofy, maybe a little abstract, just think of it like this: It's like Grand Theft Auto, except you're an alien with near ultimate powers to jack humans, abduct animals, cars, and humans for research, or cause large scale destruction just for the fun of it.

The environments, naturally, are destructible, and you can explore the five vast 1950s American landscapes using your arsenal of alien abilities (hypnotize, body-snatch, read minds, levitate, kill, etc.). Weapon-wise, players can arm themselves with a glut of alien weaponry on land or in the air, including the Ion Detonator, the Zap-O-Matic, the Sonic Boom, or even the Quantum Deconstructor -- used to eradicate those silly, feeble humans.

Destroy All Humans is still very early. In fact, THQ just announced it yesterday. But Pandemic, the red-hot developers behind the upcoming military action/RTS Full Spectrum Warrior is fueling this game with an enormous amount of ideas, humor and classic gameplay elements. (Technically, the Pandemic team behind this game is Pandemic Australia.)

THQ would not reveal its potential online plans (just yet), but there very well will be more to announce in the upcoming months. Due in winter 2005 on Xbox and PS2, Destroy All Humans has us captivated with its open design and hilarious premise. We'll have more soon.[/QUOTE]

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I think this game sounds awesome. It reminds me of a combination of Body Harvest and Zombies Ate My Neighbors, with some GTA and Syndicate Wars thrown in. I only wish it wasn't half a year until its release heh. I'm most interested in the fully destructable environments.

[Joe]

Strange, yet very interesting.

A game about a massive human-slaughter. Sounds fun.
Most of the reason I liked the GTA games for the PS2 was the sense of freedom. Not a ton of restrictions like many other games. Hopefully this will be a game that you can beat, and it will never get old (that is, if it has an ending).

[Shinmaru]

Heh, Zombies Ate My Neighbors was a pretty influential game, wasn't it lol? You see quite a few games released each year that end up getting compared to it, heh. Anyway, the game looks pretty interesting, and destructible environments are always a good thing. What's especially great is that there are humans of different characteristics that you can hijack, which means that the game won't be getting boring very quickly.

I'll be so bummed if this doesn't end up coming out for GameCube :(

[Semjaza]

[quote name='Shinmaru']I'll be so bummed if this doesn't end up coming out for GameCube :([/quote]

Be bummed. It's not.

PS2 and Xbox only. It's not coming out till early next year though... so I'm sure you can get a PS2 by then. They're only $150 with the Network Adapter now heh.

I mostly think of Bender when I think of this game...

"Hey sexy mama... Wanna kill all humans?"