Last summer, Sony announced the cancellation of internal projects The Getaway 3 and Eight Days, with the former garnering most of the press. Sometime later, a video demonstrating the basic navigation and cover system of Eight Days was uploaded to YouTube by near-legendary former BioWare/Ubisoft/Sony (& more) animator Jim Jagger, demonstrating a system far in advance of anything else out there to this day. The orignal has since been removed, but thankfully another user has reinstated it at the time of writing so appreciate it while you can.

Though it looks a little slow in relation to real gameplay balance that might have come later in production, the sheer fuidity of the actions and camera, and the multitude of states (poses) the character can move between is something of a marvel. One can only hope that we’ll see some variation of it in an upcoming game.

The latest issue of IdN magazine features an interview with motion graphics studio Logan’s Alexei Tylevich on his collaboration with Hideo Kojima to create the ten tv-spot-style intros for Metal Gear Solid 4, revealing a fair assessment of game development through the eyes of a design studio.

While what we’re doing is very segmented – the final look comes in the final moments, and you get impatient – in building a videogame, it’s more of a gradual thing. In games, you’re layering it consistently; so by the time you’ve got your engine running really well, even for the person who’s working on low-level stuff, everything looks great.

And on this side, we’re still trapped in this universe that requires such things as massive rendering times, which makes it impossible for us. The better it looks, the heavier it is; for us to change the movement of this character, we have to backtrack and change all these other elements. Whereas on the game, they could look at something on the screen – a door handle, say – and change that doorknob to make it look beautiful. For us, it gets heavier the better it looks. There was a moment I was watching what they were doing and I thought, “I want to do videogames!” Because they’re building this thing – and once it’s in working form, they’re working in real time on beautiful stuff, all within the engine.

David Sirlin, Lead Designer on the recently released Street Fighter II HD, has created this handy microsite hosting documentation that details the rebalancing changes made to the new version. It gives an interesting insight into the design decisions bringing this latest release to fruition.

I was deeply worried about a Vancouver-based team taking the mantle of perhaps the most perfectly balanced multiplayer game ever, but in playing I’ve already found it to be so much better than past home versions, and it more than whets the appetite for the upcoming 4th edition.