Johnny Whatever punks up the Xbox @ Gaming Target

Written by John Scalzo on July 21, 2004

News: Anarchy in the U.K. God save the Queen. And Whatever.

Just call me Sid Vicious as I relate the story of Warthog announcing their latest Xbox game, Johnny Whatever.

It's the future, and New London has been taken over by a robot army called The Iron Royals. The Royals have used their evil Robo-Bunnies and Worker Drones to enslave the people and kidnap the Queen. The job to save London naturally falls at the feet of an unlikely hero, punk rocker Johnny Whatever. Johnny is pulled into this fight after his bands, The Hooligans, are also captured. He teams up with a mad inventor, Roland Clockworks, to "enhance" his guitar and give him the power to take back London. God save the f***ing Queen indeed.

Warthog has also pulled outаa lot ofаvideo game PR-speak in this announcement as they say that Johnny Whatever will feature "Spherical harmonics, global shadowing, deformable meshes, realistic physics and more!" Beyond realistic physics, I don't know what any of that means.

But a few promises we can translate are that Johnny Whatever will be a unique "Musical Action" game. Riffing on Johnny's guitar is the weapon of choice in New London. Johnny has to capture his prey in his guitar and then attack them by playing the right notes by hitting the right buttons on the Xbox controller. This kind of play could be quite addictive and yes, unique, if Warthog can hit all the right notes.

A slew of Xbox Live features are also lined up as Johnny Whatever will include Cooperative, Deathmatch, Dueling Guitars and Free-Form Band modes. Downloadable content is also planned for the future.

Warthog has yet to find a publisher for Johnny Whatever. but itаis scheduled for release in September of 2006, so I'm sure we'llаlearn much moreаaboutаJohnny Whateverаbetween now and then.