We recently had a chance to talk to Dean Martinetti, who has been working on Turning Point: Fall of Liberty.
 
THE GAME REVIEWS (BEN):  So we were talking about this earlier: do you think the potential of the PS3 has even been tapped?
 
DEAN:  Na, not even close.
 
TGR:  Not even close, really?
 
DEAN:  What my PS3 engineer says is we’ve maybe tapped 2%.
 
TGR:  2%?

DEAN: …it’s all the architecture … you have to make a game that goes to that architecture.  Look at Uncharted.  Uncharted is gorgeous. I mean not just drop dead gorgeous like the game, and I mean the game play as well…
 
TGR:  Right.
 
DEAN:  Now imagine, you give a developer 3 ½ years, which is a long freakin’ time, but 3 ½ years and a good budget to make a game for PS3, and you just say, guys have at it. Here is the technology, here are the tools kits you need, here are the SDKs you need, what ever else you need, and we are there for you 24/7.  You get that kind of support from your publisher and from Sony first party; you’ll be knocking home runs out of the park.  You’ll be the Barry %#@$ing Bonds of the gaming industry.  You know what I mean?  Which is cool, as it is what we all want. This is what Sony wants and what Microsoft wants.  I think the biggest problem there has been is everybody is rushing to get the consumer dollar.  They are forgetting the core point of this whole thing.  We have to make entertainment that is quality enough that the player is going to like it.
 
TGR:  Right.
 
DEAN:  People are not idiot’s.
 
TGR:  So they bust your balls?
 
DEAN:  We’re sheep to a certain point.  No, Sony never busted out balls, ever.  They were always cool, they were just kind of slow, you know, but I mean they were slow with the PSP when it first released.  Then all of a sudden, second generation, I mean you got all the support you ever needed plus, you know?  So, who knows, but as far as like game development and what-not man, you’ve got to start looking at it as the entertainment like you get at the movies, right?  With movies, they look at receipts from past movies, they see what’s hot and then they make IP off of that, right?  What we’re doing in our industry, we’re becoming a little stale.  We are rehashing old ideas again.  If I see another Halo, I’m going to throw up, like I’m done with that.  I don’t need it.  Another Gears of War type game, if… I mean, the one thing I will say about Epic, I love them, but every game they’ve made… They all have their armor on.  They’re all like these big burly dudes with you know, which is really cool for like the first generation, but…

TGR: So what’s different about Turning Point Fall of Liberty?
 
DEAN:  He’s just a regular guy. He is just an average dude, he is a construction worker.  He doesn’t want to fight.  He doesn’t want to get involved in war; he just wants to be left alone.  That’s the whole thing: we give you like an average guy’s perspective on what’s going on.  He gets sucked into this whole thing against his will.  He fights because he feels like now he has to because his backs against the wall.  Otherwise he would just rather go home, drink a beer, and watch TV.
   

     We did a lot of research on WWII history, the what-if scenarios.  There are a million books out there on what-if scenarios.  So we tapped into that and we, well you know, we looked over those resources.  But we just wanted to keep it simple man.  That’s honestly the big thing here and lot of people… some hardcore gamers are like, "I don’t get it, why is he you know, why is he like this, how come you don’t have that?  Where is co-op?"  We wanted to keep it simple and fun.  I wanted everybody to play this game; that was our mission statement…
 
TGR:  Simple and fun has been a really persistent theme.
 
DEAN: And that’s that theme that we are going to keep with this game, and we wanted to keep with this game.  Dude, I mean there’s some really cool games here, but there really difficult for the casual gamer to pick up and go with.  They don’t know what the hell they are doing, you know.  One guy complained that one of the games was too realistic, that he just wanted to get in and shoot $@#%, and I’m like, "Well dude, get in, shoot $#@%."  That’s what we made this game for.  You know, just get in and have a good time, and you can laugh a couple times while playing our game, or you see a couple things and you go, "Holy $@#%, I can’t believe I just saw that, we won.  We did our job."
 
TGR:  I like those zeppelins, man.
 
DEAN:  Yeah thy’re cool as hell and the fact that you get to blow them up later on and watch them like burning in flames, screaming into the ocean… is a killer.