After battling the Los Angeles traffic, a friend -- my assistant for a day -- and I finally found our way to Activision headquarters, fashionably late for the X-Men Origins: Wolverine preview. On the second floor, a handful of other press persons and Activision personnel were already present, snacking on café sandwiches, cookies, chips, and bottled water. Ritzy. Having personal demo stations with Xbox 360s hooked up to 26" monitors wasn't too bad either, but we didn't get to play with those until later
First, we got a little background info from the team, some of which you may already be familiar with, depending on how diligently you've been following related news. Although their first Wolverine title wasn't so hot, Activision may be redeeming their 2003 X-Men transgression with X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
The encouraging news here is that Activision and Raven Software had begun working on this title before the movie was announced, finding out only months later that Fox was indeed planning to go somewhere with a similar project. So basically before Fox stormed into the picture, blabbering about their movie, Activision and friends were busy doing some background research on Wolverine for their game, hoping to do right by his character this time.
While the game is definitely related to the movie, sharing the same title and vague narrative structure, developers took numerous liberties throughout, meaning this isn't just a carbon copy of the film. Still, it's quite obvious from trailers and screenshots already plastered across the Internet that the game's protagonist was made to resemble Hugh Jackman; other likenesses will pop out throughout.
The fact that Raven developed the X-Men Origins game may also provide a glimmer of hope, raising our expectations with their previous Marvel successes: X-Men Legends, X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. Now I know high expectations can lead to massive disappointment down the line, but I had fun with two out of three said games (didn't get to play the third) so I'm fairly confident that X-Men Origins: Wolverine is going to be a better kind of movie-based adventure.
It's important to note, however, that Raven Software only worked on the "Uncaged Edition," basically the Mature-rated version on PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC. The PlayStation 2, PSP, Wii and Nintendo DS versions were actually developed by other studios and sport different ratings -- Teen for PS2, PSP, Wii, and Everyone 10+ for Nintendo DS. Between these platforms, a total of four different studios were contracted to work on the X-Men Origins game.
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