Sudeki

Each of the characters has his/her own attributes, as well as melee attacks, blocks, techniques and magic spells. Climax has explained that there are parts in the game where the player will only be able to direct one of the characters, where as there is other sections that demand the whole team be controlled simultaneously.

Climax has confirmed that Sudeki will be a single-player game, and there will be no co-operative features. a sure blow to the gaming community. Just imagine, four friends, each with their own character, running through the world together. It's really unfortunate that more companies don't take use of co-op modes. Nonetheless, Sudeki is still in early development and there's always a chance of new options, features and modes being added.

Sudeki is played from a third-person perspective, but what's different about the game is that it never stops. literally! Even when the player is fiddling around with the inventory or pause menus, the game is slowly progressing in real time. Although the pace is much slower when in any sort of menu screen, enemies will still attack and people within the world will continually move, talk and act, just like if everything was normal. It should be neat to see how this little feature works in the final product.

The Sudeki world is designed to fit an almost Japanese anime style. The vast, unique environments in Sudeki topped off with the sexy, fresh character designs prove that a ton of time, effort and research has been put into the game's design core. From what we can tell so far, the colors are vivid and tend to blend with the atmosphere quite well (darker, more scary themes associated with the gruesome enemies the player will face).

On another front, it must be said that longetitivity is important in a role-playing game, or any game for that matter. Climax has clocked Sudeki's main story and plot at just about 40 hours. Tolled up with the variety of side quests, level exploring and other secondary game playing, Sudeki is expected to go beyond the 60-hour mark. There are also hundreds of non-player characters ready to be interacted with all around the Sudeki milieu.

Building on Climax's visual expertise (exposed to gamers with MotoGP last year), Sudeki is promising to drop the jaws of thousands upon release. The game will utilise full Xbox technical benefits not available on other consoles, from the small visual effects to maybe even deep use of the built-in hard drive to customize soundtracks and download content of the Xbox Live service. The possibilities are certainly on hand; it's just a question of how much time the development studio has possession of.

Although Sudeki is still in the early stages of development, Climax and Microsoft have already been able to get the gaming media incredibly excited about their new product. Sudeki has been given some much-deserved spotlight as of late, both online and magazine publication wise. This is certainly a game vital to the filling of the role-playing genre gap in the Xbox software line-up.

We'll make sure to keep snooping around for more on what could be the Xbox's hottest Winter 2003 release!