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Del Toro working on Hellboy

Director getting into games.

Film director Guillermo del Toro is consulting on a pair of new games and has high hopes for the medium.

Speaking to IGN, del Toro said that he and Hellboy creator Mike Mignola were both consulting on a new Konami title due out in 2007 and based on the comic book.

Details of platforms and other specifics are few, but del Toro did say that as well as being able to use his glove, Hellboy will be able to use anything that's lying around to batter his enemies - smashing up doors to create metal cudgels and so forth.

The storyline will move between past and present, he said. "You can go from one environment, like the Gobi desert, to a haunted town in medieval Japan. And then you can go and play in the ruins of a castle that is full of Nazi doomsday machines.

"And then you can go and wander through the empty streets of a haunted Eastern European village. And each of those levels has a common threat enemy, and a great vibe to the gameplay."

The other game, Sundown, is being developed at BloodRayne studio Terminal Reality, and will see players thrust into a post-apocalyptic setting alive (or nearly-alive) with zombies. The director says they're shopping it around to publishers.

"I do believe that the future of storytelling lies within an interactive platform and more likely or not it will come out of a marriage of movies, videogames, and TV, so I'm trying to learn all those mediums," he told IGN.

He believes that with the advent of the Internet in particular it's possible to have "an almost ongoing relationship as a storyteller with the people unfolding the story".

"I think there is a future there. The technology is there, and it's just about applying the storytelling," he concluded.