WIRED OUTTAKES: SAMURAI ISLAND

As part of my contribution to Wired magazine's October feature on Second Life, I took a raft of high-resolution screenshots to accompany the copy.  Most of them, of course, ended up on the cutting room floor, so I'll be running a few of my very favorite outtakes throughout this month-- starting first with the wholly badass melee combat game of Samurai Island.  Which also means I need to start with a correction: In the final copy of the article, KatanaBlade Anubis is incorrectly described as the game's creator, when she's actually the island's owner, manager, and sponsor of the game.  The gameplay portion of the island was created by the team of Esprite Xavier, Ayame Musashi, and Archanox Underthorn, who also posed for my Wired screenshots; my apologies that this distinction was lost during the arduous editing process.  I originally wrote that the island is "[o]verseen by statuesque KatanaBlade Anubis, a retired exotic dancer. 'After 13 years of dancing,' she says, 'I retired because I make more money in SL, and I can be home with my baby girl.'"

Read my NWN write-up of Samurai Island (with YouTube video) here.  And after the break, see Esprite, Ayame, and Archanox demonstrating their own fight system in all its high-res glory.

Comments

[Torley]

One of the most standout features of Combat: Samurai Island is the "double-dash", in which you can press the Up arrow key twice and sail forward rapidly, thrusting your avatar's body, sword in hand. Wish we had something like that *without* use of scripted attachments, because I find running using Ctrl-R to be so inconvenient:

http://torley.com/run_on_1.htm