Enter The Matrix screenshots

Found out about this from a Dark Horizons link. My first thought was "Is this a fucking joke?".

I read about pc/console video games heavily, and I've been anticipating screenshots from the upcoming Matrix game for quite some time. A Matrix game has vast potential, but matching the type of action in the film would require a revolutionary feat of gameplay mechanics design and control scheme design.

Max Payne has come closest to creating Woo/Matrix firefights in a game. The implementation of the slomo-dive button made for brilliant and cinematic gameplay, and the idea is so good I can't see the Matrix games improving on it without directly ripping off the concept.

But that only covers a small portion of what Matrix gameplay should be. It needs to simultaneously incorporate complex acrobatic moves, close-up martial arts, and independently targeting limbs for dual-fisted gunfights. It's a monumental task, the best we can probably hope for the game is for it to barely scratch the surface of these concepts.

I have a few theories regarding these screenshots and the nature of their release. First, their overwhelming ugliness. The complete lack of technical or artisitic quality (I would equate their look to PC Games from around 1997-1998) leads me to believe these are fan-made fakes, put up on Electronics Boutique's website due to pure negligence. Equally possible is that these are pre-visualisations from extremely early in the games developement, or from an earlier, extremely crappy graphics engine that was scrapped.

Either way, unless the developers at Shiny Entertainment and the Wachowski brothers have been tripping on shrooms for the more than 2 year period this game has been in developement, I would think these screens have absolutely nothing to do with the way the final game will look.

Methinks EB and The Matrix Online need to be e-mailed questions regarding the legitemacy of these screens (of wich I'm guessing there is none).

Here's the link to the screens at The Matrix Online's site, thanks to Dark Horizons for the heads up.

<a href="http://www.thematrixonline.com/docs/7862.html" target="_blank">http://www.thematrixonline.com/docs/7862.html</a>

Also: In the screenshot that's supposed to be Trinity, it looks like she's got a fuckin mustache.

So, they're real...that is some pretty sad news. It just kind of boggles the mind. The Tomb Raider comparison was accurate, the lighting and look of the textures give it the appearance of a slightly upgraded PS1 game. Terrible.

My opinion on old game graphics is if they have great creative and artistic quality, it won't hold back the gameplay, wich is why I play my Genesis and Super NES nearly as much as my newer PC games and systems. But these graphics not only resemble a 4 year old PC game in complexity, they have awful artwork (the models, lighting, and textures.) I can't give full judgement on the graphicws yet because the pics are such low resolution, and they were released without any big press event of any kind from Infogrames, wich means no journalists got to see gameplay footage or try it, wich means all we know about the game is that it looks like shit. What the fuck is Infogrames doing, the game is supposed to come out in 5 months.