Over at Edge Online, they've reprinted a recent 'Time Extend' magazine article on Capcom's P.N.03, and it raises some interesting questions on the neglected title.

The intro notes: "To some, poor sales are almost a guarantee of probity – a coded message that invites the initiated to come inside and get devotional. Look at Beyond Good and Evil, say, or Jet Set Radio Future: they didn’t hit the sales jackpot, but they struck a deep chord with certain players all the same. What’s odd about Capcom’s P.N.03, then, is that unlike other games that vanished at the point of retail, there are few people willing to speak up for it."

But, as with so many perverted gamers who delve deeper, there's a bold claim: "Maybe it’s because P.N.03 is awkward. Its controls make it awkward to play. Its commercial failure makes it awkward to track down in the shops. Crucially, the skewed challenge it presents makes its peculiar appeal very awkward to explain. This is a game that confounds on many fronts." Will anyone else admit to a 'peculiar' attraction to P.N.03 in public? Feel free to do so in the comments, if so.

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

It's been a little while since we covered the PlayStation Museum, and the site that's the "culmination of years of research and dedication to the Sony PlayStation" has been adding more neat, obscure material.

A recent exclusive is screenshots and a review of Battleship for PS1, in which you "Experience the thrill of heart pounding naval action amid the surging spray and deafening explosions of real-life combat" - an odd, unfinished and unreleased conversion, but fun to poke at.

Other obscureness which denizens of GSW may appreciate include a comparison of Slap Happy Rhythm Busters, checking out the differences between an unpublished U.S. prototype from THQ and the final Japanese version - "subtle differences like different options available, between match conversations, health bar, and more."

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Poking around on Google News will only bring you pain - that, and a wonderful website article called 'The Purpose Driven Life Takers' on talk2action.org, which links Rick Warren, best selling author of The Purpose Driven Life, to the previously GSW-covered Christian RTS game series by Left Behind Games.

Talk2Action claims: "Imagine: you are a foot soldier in a paramilitary group whose purpose is to remake America as a Christian theocracy, and establish its worldly vision of the dominion of Christ over all aspects of life. You are issued high-tech military weaponry, and instructed to engage the infidel on the streets of New York City. You are on a mission - both a religious mission and a military mission -- to convert or kill Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, gays, and anyone who advocates the separation of church and state - especially moderate, mainstream Christians... you are playing a real-time strategy video game whose creators are linked to the empire of mega-church pastor Rick Warren."

Well, firstly, the game is based on the best-selling books by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, which, though we haven't read, are pretty sure that they don't advocate killing Jews and gays, even if we find them personally a bit scary. Secondly, Rick Warren doesn't really seem to have much to do with this, as the commenters note: "The international director of Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Church, Mark Carver, serves on the Advisory Board of the corporation created to develop and market the video game?!? That is some-kinda cheap guilt-by-association!"

Most of all, we don't really know what's going on - but Jack Thompson is quoted extensively (yay!), there's some GREAT illustrations, and the conclusion to the piece claims: "In the one hand, this video game is anti-American, because it endorses roving death squads engaged in faith-based violence without any regard for Constitutional law. On the other hand, the video game is anti-Christian, because it argues that the Kingdom of God can be advanced by using the methods and tools of the kingdoms of this world, namely guns and bombs." Christians, stop smiting Christians, already!

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, we got a nice note from one of the producers of the One Life Left radio show (which also has a MySpace page, inevitably), and is, as he explains: "...professionally produced and going out on London's Resonance 104.4fm, on Monday afternoons. Our contacts allow us loads of exciting guests to talk to and the opportunity inherent has got us loads and loads of fun contributors, from (gambling) tips to cooking to lexography."

But wait, there's more: "One Life Left is scattered with brilliant regular minifeatures, including: Bedroom Oding / Odds On O'D / Professor Game & Doctor Watch / Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right LA Start / Derek Williams' Free Market Economy / Uncle Charles, Uncle Charles: Is Gaming Cool Yet? / and more. To find out what they are, you will have to listen."

Co-presented by ex-Edge editor Ste Curran and featuring a seemingly endless parade of far too trendy glitterati guests such as Kieron Gillen (the Hunter S. Thompson manque of the NGJ set) and even 1UP Zine's Raina Lee (clearly the Kim Gordon of the video game zine world), this is clearly worth checking out. Unless you're a muppet. Are you a muppet?

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Good ol' SirBruce has updated his MMOG Chart again, up to v20.0 (!), and he notes of his latest additions: "This is a major update, with updated numbers for many games, most notably World of Warcraft, Eve Online, RuneScape, and most of NCSoft’s titles. I’ve also added three new MMOGs to the tracking data: Tibia, The Matrix Online, and Dungeons & Dragons Online."

The charts themselves, focusing on the rampant success of World Of WarCraft, and now with separated-out charts for Asian PCU figures, seem to be the main focus (though there are still some kinks in there with games released in both territories, like WoW and Lineage II). But we focus more on the obscure analysis - we had no idea that as of the beginning of 2006, Ultima Online "had about 130,000 subscribers worldwide, with about 70,000 of those in Japan" - more JP subscribers than Western? Wacky.

Also, SirBruce's extended E3 2006 MMO report is one of the best pieces of reportage we've seen from the show - he comments: "Picking a clear winner this year was quite difficult. Nearly all of the titles had something in particular going for them. I was also impressed by the graphics in almost every title; it seems technology and tools have progressed to the point that even a small MMOG title can have excellent graphics." Most interestingly: "The titles that fellow MMOG players seemed to be impressed with the most were Tabula Rasa, Huxley, and Age of Conan" - not what we would have guessed.

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Continuing GSW's wish to be the only website ever to link to the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer weblog, we note a new review of uber-obscure Japan-only 3DO title Autobahn Tokio, which the blog's author claims may be a seminal early 3D racing game.

He explains: "Autobahn Tokio is actually Ridge Racer meets Gran Turismo meets Battle Gear or Initial D. After Ridge, before Polyphonic, before anyone thought an AE86 was cool there was Autobahn Tokio on the 3DO. It's red car verses yellow car, hinting towards real racing dynamics and the recognisable cars of Gran Turismo or Initial D."

Although the game itself is 'not great', apparently, "Moving onto the tracks, particular the night city one, these are undeniably Gran Turismo. The night city mode is Special Stage Route 5, the mountain route is Grand Valley Speedway and the forest route is Deep Forest Racing Way. Of cause GT didn't make it to the PS1 for another 4 years after Autobahn Tokio was released. I don't care what anyone says - they, the 3DO ones, are the originals... the circuits are fairly short but eerily familiar." Hurrah for 3DO-based conspiracy theories!

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since it's my hometown, I'm rather intrigued by August's ZeroOne San Jose Festival, billed as a happening that "will transform San Jose into the North American epicenter for the intersection of art and digital culture by showcasing the world's most innovative contemporary artists."

Seems pretty highbrow, but we note some game-related content of some neatness sneaking in there, especially ARG-like content for the 'Interactive City' part of ZeroOne, such as 99 Red Balloons from Jenny Marketou and Katie Salen, "a game in which players must master the art of public persuasion by convincing non-players to enter the game and play."

According to the description: "Players take on the roles of Spy Fairies, each armed with a large helium balloon and wireless camera, which record the game play as the Spy Fairies work to collect as many followers as possible before time runs out... Footage from the Spy Fairy cameras is beamed back to the game Headquarters, where the progress of each Fairy can be tracked onscreen." It's all incredibly The Prisoner, isn't it? Yay!

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Former GSW blogger Tony Walsh has spotted an interesting new article on avatar-based marketing in the Harvard Business Review, and he likes what he sees.

Walsh comments: "The extensive article is detailed but easy to digest, leading readers new to virtual worlds (specifically, Second Life) through the basics and nuances of avatars, covering some of their current and potential relationships with marketing efforts. What most impresses me is the degree of research Hemp's apparently done, and the fact that he covers the potential for avatar-marketing failures."

The full article expands on this further, noting: "This new marketing landscape and audience come with all kinds of pitfalls. There are technology constraints. Stagecoach Island moved from the technology platform on which Second Life is built to the platform underlying Active Worlds, another virtual world. The Second Life platform required too much computer hardware capability of users, according to Collins, the Wells Fargo marketer." Definitely good to see realistic weighing-up of issues as well as advantages, here.

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Courtesy of Game-Science, there's information on Sony's new PlayStation Signature merchandise series, some _extremely_ high-end lifestyle tie-ins.

As is explained: "In a move to push the PlayStation brand into a lifestyle brand, in which the PlayStation means something beyond games, Sony announced the release of "PlayStation Signature" lifestyle items in Japan, which includes various items for the PSP and for upscale people in general. Most of the items will be available from 14 June, at the PlayStation Square in Sony's headquarters in Tokyo."

A Japanese-language Impress Watch article has lots of pictures of the line - we particularly like the super-custom 'EMILIO PUCCI X PLAYSTATION Signature PSP Case (each one unique)', but at 33,000 yen ($294), you could buy more than one PSP for the same price.

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Excellent import-centric blog SiliconEra has posted about the new Z-rated game list in Japan, where the official rating system just changed: "Now there are two distinct ratings for “M” type games. A game gets a “D” rating if it’s made for gamers 17 years old and the “Z” rating is for game is for adults only (18+)."

Most interesting, though, it the list of games that now merit a Z: "Currently only a few games landed the infamous Z rating and they are: Driv3r, Max Payne, killer7, Grand Theft Auto Double Pack, Grand Theft Auto Vice City, Grand Theft Auto III, The Getaway, The Getaway: Black Monday, Berserk, Simple 2000 Vol. 61: The Oneechanbara, Simple 2000 Vol. 80: The Oneechanpuru."

Well, Western-created games really _are_ doing well on that list, aren't they? Or 'well', I guess we should say - though the disgusting Grasshopper Manufacture and the D3 folks from Japan also sneak on there - dubious congratulations go to them.

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

First spotted this a couple of days ago, but looks like cable channel VH-1 has started the VH1 Game Break weblog, yet another video game-themed weblog to add to a long list (including, ahem, GameSetWatch itself, which is obviously waay at the top of your list, right?)

One particularly notable thing about this blog, though - it just added Jay Bibby of Jay Is Games to its blogger list, joining Village Voice columnist Harold Goldberg, so it looks to be a fairly entertainingly diverting read for alt.games and intelligent linkage fans.

The latest item of interest is a review of Russian Flash title Warp Forest from Bibby, noting that it's " a rather odd combination of action and puzzle elements that will challenge both sides of your brain." Mm, both sides of the brain.

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at the Guilded Lilies weblog, there's an an excellent post on the book modding project for The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, including an interview with modder Phoenix Amon.

The latest book mod, simply enough, is "to replace all of the 300+ in-game book jackets (that are a little ho-hum) with dynamic looking cover", and Amon, female herself, has some interesting comments about how gender may affect modding wants in games.

She suggests: "I don't think there's any type of mod that universally appeals to women rather than men, but there are probably some types that fill gaps more often noticed by women. For instance I think when NPCs in a game lack any form of personality, women will be more likely than men to be bothered by it. Mostly, though, I think mods make games more fun for individuals by allowing them to tailor their own experience."

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Publisher Majesco really hasn't had much to crow about recently, what with a financial meltdown precipitated by the financial flops of Psychonauts and Advent Rising - certainly nothing to justify having the company's NASDAQ symbol be 'COOL', haw.

But, on the way back to the budget bargain basement, the firm has struck a quirky chord, judging by its press release on DS game Cookin Mama's reception at E3: "Cooking Mama was awarded several honors including: "Most Innovative DS Design of E3 2006" from leading video game website IGN; and GameDaily's "Nod Award," which called Cooking Mama "a fun DS game that uses the stylus to near perfection."

The title, which was originally published by Taito in Japan, is ripe for an Iron Chef license, if you ask us: "Playing as a female chef, you have to prepare the food (slicing the vegetables, slicing the meat), then cook it on the stove. With touchscreen play, you can do things such as shake the skillet for an omelet and dip tempura in the oil." But those Alton Brown licensing fees are probably steep, so we'll settle for a decent translation, eh, Majesco?

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Something else we missed from last week - an excellent Clive Thompson column on Second Life/GBA's Tringo at Wired News, in which Thompson explains "the story of a game that became a hit -- inside another game."

You may have heard the story before - the game was created within Second Life, and was licensed by Donnerwood Media - it's now available for Game Boy Advance thanks to the reliably wacky budget publisher Crave Entertainment.

Thompson's conclusion contains the neatest comments,t hough: "Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of Tringo's already-kooky history, though, is that it shows a new way for games to be born. Many of today's best online games are moddable, which means players can reshape reality into something new. So why don't we actively encourage them to create new casual games? An online environment is a terrific prototyping lab: You can quickly make something, hand out copies to other players, and discover immediately whether your invention is any good."

Of course, this depends if the people playing Second Life (or any other prototyping platform) are actually demographically accurate for your final target market - but it's conceptually smart.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From last week, we spotted a post on celebrity 'coolstuff' blog BoingBoing that deals with 'an open online book from Hacker Manifesto author McKenzie Wark entitled GAM3R 7H30RY (gamer theory).

Well, that's GR3AT (great), but how does it work? Apparently: "The Institute designed a web site that would enable McKenzie to engage with readers before the book is fully cooked, to see how a larger conversation might impact its development. Each individual paragraph has its own comment stream allowing for fine-grained response to the text."

Of course, with slightly insane hypertextish-wanderings comes an incredibly highbrow section on Katamari Damacy which starts: "Sisyphus, founder of Corinth, father of Odysseus, founder of the Ismithian Games, is best known for a most cruel and unusual punishment, meted out to him by the Gods." Can you see where he's going with this? Grumpy commenter Toad claims: "Any real editor would have sooner pointed out this manuscript’s ridiculous, hopelessly obtuse, faux pretensious pandering to the video game community."

Eh, we disagree - but we _are_ the video game community. And the walrus. Also - an entire section on State Of Emergency? We just ejected our false teeth right into our afternoon tea.

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Now we're running with our new 'fast and loose' GSW style (do you like it? More posts, less OCD linkage!), we figured we could link to the latest issue of The Escapist Magazine, which deals with the game/work nexus (see 'Office Mode' in Defcon for a great recent example!)

The site's PR explains: "Have you ever gotten in trouble for playing games at work? The Escapist staff knows all too well not only the life of those who play games at work, but also those who play games for work, and the sometimes fine line between. The Escapist takes a look at how games affect life in the workplace in issue 47: “Office Space.”"

All the articles seem fun, but Cat Rambo's piece on putting MUDs on your resume is the most sharply written: "Over the next few years, this overlapping of the game and business world would occur over and over. I'd apply lessons in conflict management or negotiation I learned in MUDs to resolve situations, and the next day find myself in a management class thinking how best to use the material on the flash cards in front of me to steer my coders down a particular path." We've all kickbanned our co-workers, so we know just how that works.

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thanks to some silly promotional people, we got links to the two latest videos from Jack Black's Nacho Libre 'confessionals' - both of which co-star director Jared Hess, and actually discuss video games - here's the links - Episode 16 - 'Search for the Missing PSP' (.MOV), and Episode 17 - 'Thanksgiving' (.MOV).

Specifically, it's explained to us: "Jack Black loves video games. He does NOT love losing his beloved PSP handheld... check out this behind the scenes footage from the set of Jack's new comedy "Nacho Libre," in theaters June 16. Jack Black and director Jared Hess (Nacho Libre, Napoleon Dynamite) discuss Jack's missing PSP, how the Nintendo DS compares to the PSP, Thanksgiving food, and the Neverending Story."

Check out the 'Thanksgiving' movie, in particular, for Black explaining that his DS does not make up for losing his PSP: "That's how spoiled I am - Nintendo DS, that's all I got?", expostulates Black, before hurling his DS across the room (see picture!), and then commenting woefully: "Yesterday I actually had to read some of a book." We know, it hurts.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

According to our sister site, Gamasutra, Nintendo has decided to brand and in some cases re-brand more "accessible" DS games with its new "Touch Generations" label.

The company explains that the brand "will include titles that anyone can pick up and play, even with little or no experience with video games", and that the move "represents one of the many ways that Nintendo is making it easy for new demographics of people to be introduced to video games." In addition to its newer titles such as the Brain Training series, the brand will also be applied to long-time favorites Nintendogs, Tetris DS, and True Swing Tennis.

While I can understand the drive to let consumers know which games are more family-friendly, I feel this move may end up muddling a market already saturated with ESRB ratings and other age-specific warnings. So this is a Touch Generations title, does that mean an 80 year old can play alongside her grandkids? Wouldn't the ESRB "E for Everyone" label pretty much cover this?

The idea has merit, but all we have from Nintendo so far are buzzwords about demographics and "pick up and play." Only time will tell if the Touch Generations branding takes off in the US.

Posted by chasem at 3:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In an interesting twist on an old classic, Iranian students are developing a war game featuring American military forces as the antagonists.

The game is meant to be a protest of Western involvement in Iran's nuclear development program, and focuses on US troops in Iraq. The story will be based around a "Commander Bahman" infiltrating "enemy" territory to capture Iranian nuclear scientists who have been imprisoned by the US Army.

While the 2007-slated game is making waves for being anti-American, it's also true that we've used a lot of middle-eastern and arabic archetypes to play the "bad guys" in our war games for some time. Heck, our Army unabashedly uses a video game as a recruitment tool, and very few people are talking trash about that. While I feel that the development team may be skewing current events a bit, this is no worse than, say, Atari's Terrorist Takedown or Play It Ltd's America's 10 Most Wanted.

The point, I suppose, is that you don't get to be where the US is today without pissing some people off. We end up casting our video game "bad guys" wherever they would historically fit; for example, no one would complain if the enemies in a game about the Vietnam War were, let's say Vietnamese. Somewhere, and sadly in an increasing number of places around the world, we're the "bad guys" to someone. This game is going to be a fictional account of what would happen if America kidnapped Iranian scientists and sparked a war; it's not telling people to grab a gun and kill the nearest US Marine. It's all about context, folks.

Posted by chasem at 2:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

While poking around the NeverWinter Nights official forums in search of commentary on the apparent cutting of support for the first NWN from struggling publisher Atari, we ran into something much better - a call for help!.

Specifically, 'syrath1001' asks his fellow forumgoers: "A few weeks ago, I started noticing some changes in my wife's behavior. She just doesn't seem to be that interested in me anymore. Sure, we go out and she holds my hand, but the warmth isn't there like it used to be. We live together, so I fear this breakup might be particularly hard for me. I'm not worried about her feelings since I'm convinced she's cheating on me."

He continues, in a distressed tone: "One day, she left her MSN on. While I was playing in the first chapter of SoU, she received a message from someone I haven't noticed on her list before, saying "hey sweetie! xoxo". By the time I was able to click the box closed, I was killed in 2 shots by a kobold."

But here's the crux of Syrath's issue: "My question is this: should I stick with my pure rogue or should I multiclass some fighter levels for more survivability?" Wow, tough call! [A few replies later, Syrath reveals his solution - an excellent one!]

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Excellent shoot-em-up weblog Shoot The Core (which is run by The Postman, who contributed a shmups section to my Gaming Hacks book, incidentally!), has posted a detailed review of Japanese PC dojin shooter Zen-Ichi.

Posty notes: "Along with some of the regular features shown in doujin shmups today such as a replay option, choice of different ships with different abilities, and a crazy scoring system, ZI also is one of the rare titles that has two player simultaneous action! That should be enough to generate interest from any shooter fan, but when you dig deeper into what Zen-Ichi has to offer, you'll find an excellent manic shmup that lures you into improving "fever mode" combos and defeating a completely EVIL final boss." Hot stuff!

The game itself is listed on the Z page of The Postman's awesome PC Shooter Database, alongside a host of other titles. Can anyone else recommend some overlooked dojin shooters?

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Well, here's the dumb/amusing story of the day - according to the Associated Press: "A security guard at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant was so absorbed in playing a hand-held video game that he failed to see an inspector approach during a surprise inspection."

Bizarrely, Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Kathleen McGinty commented: "The issue is not the guard's use of the video game. The real issue is that his complete absorption in the game distracted him from noticing the repeated approach of our inspector. And that shows why this procedure needs to be changed and these video games disallowed."

Sooo... if the game had been less addictive, it would have been fine? Oh, and please suggest the games the guard could have been playing in the comments, of course, this is very important.

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Parallax Memories' is a regular weekly column by Matthew Williamson, profiling classic '16-bit' games from the Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, and other seminal '90s systems. This week's column profiles Chunsoft’s roguelike: Fushigi no Dungeon 2: Fuurai no Shiren]

What-like? Roguelike.

Wandering around in a world of hash marks, peroids, and number symbols may be familiar to the longtime gamers here. Entering a room and encountering the letter "D" could cause you to sweat after running though ASCII hell for days. This game would either have been Rogue itself, or a roguelike. When Enix commissioned a spinoff of the Dragon Quest series from Chunsoft, the result was a strange Super Famicom roguelike based on Torneko, the chubby shop keeper of Dragon Quest IV.

Chunsoft is a small development company - so small that they don't even have a Wikipedia entry (remedy this!). Their first game, that commission for Enix, was Torneko no Daibouken: Fushigi no Dungeon (Torneko's Great Adventure: Mysterious Dungeon ), but this article is not about the tubby salesman. This is about their first non-commissioned creation: Fushigi no Dungeon 2: Fuurai no Shiren (Mysterious Dungeon 2: Shirin the Wanderer). Released December 1995 in Japan only, Shiren uses a roguelike structure to create a hellishly difficult action role-playing hybrid.

The Impasse Valley

Shiren the Wanderer is firmly entrenched in Japanese culture and mythology. In a rain hat and cloak made of grass, Shiren attempts to reach the dwelling place of the Golden Condor at the summit of Tabletop Mountain, beyond Impasse Valley. He isn't the first to attempt this, and the designation “Wanderer” refers to “the men endlessly seeking this place.”

Death is a major theme of the game. Traversing the dungeons (and forests, towns, mountains, etc.) will lead to death in a multitude of manners which are all recorded on the high score chart. The game teaches you how to deal with this, or rather you slowly learn how to approach and survive the multitude of ways to die. It's notable and initially frustrating that when you die, you lose everything: money, equipment, and even your levels of experience.

There are cushions in place to dull the pain these hundreds of deaths. At certain points you can relinquish your equipment to have it return to warehouses throughout the game. There are towns where you can continuously upgrade your equipment in preparation for a run-through in the future. You can also enlist certain characters to aid you in your Wandering. And perhaps most importantly, the levels are randomly generated every time you enter them, without any of the problems that have plagued random levels from other developers (i.e. unreachable areas, impassable walls, blocked exits).

A Talking Weasel

To keep playing to reach the eventual end is only the original goal. The people in the towns through which you pass remember what you did when you were there previously. While you may die and restart and die and restart, the towns keep going, and visiting them will uncover new surprises about them and their progressing stories. Eventually, you begin look forward to your returns to these towns and start to live for the journey, and not just the destination.

Unfortunately the few Chunsoft games that have made it outside of Japan have been unsuccessful. The company's games are like climbing a mountain: unless you're strong enough and smart enough, you'll fall. Picking yourself up and starting again from the bottom, and maybe reaching that next ledge, are what these games are about. The concept seems foreign to most gamers these days, who are used to having their hands held by game designers, and for whom losing all their “progress” (sad, superficial, numerical progress) is like a slap in the face.

This fall, though, Chunsoft’s Pokemon Rescue Team games are coming out in Europe and the US for both the GBA and DS. I am greatly anticipating these Chunsoft roguelikes, and recommend that you don't let their “children's game” trappings steer you away or lull you into a false sense of security.

[Matthew Williamson is the creator of The Gamer’s Quarter, an independent videogame magazine focusing on first person writing. His work has been featured on MTV.com, 1up.com, Chatterbox Radio, and the Fatpixels Radio Podcast.]

Posted by Matthew Williamson at 9:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Over at FiringSquad, we spotted an interview with Introversion founder Chris Delay about the firm's upcoming PC indie title Defcon.

The absolute best thing about the interview is Delay's description of the seriously subversive Office Mode: "We're very excited by Office Mode. The basic idea is that a group of work-mates can start the game up in the morning in Office Mode, playing over their local area network."

He explains: "The game takes place entirely in real-time (you can quite easily end the world with nuclear conflict in 8 hours) and each player controls one territory, e.g. North America or Russia. You can hit the Panic key (press escape twice) which immediately removes the game from the screen and places a discreet icon in your system tray." It's like the fake spreadsheet key in those '80s PC games!

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The ever-trusty Edge Online has posted an interview with Bandai producer Uchiyama Daisuke on the new phase of the .hack PlayStation 2 'network RPG' series, and some interesting points are raised.

Daisuke comments of the 'relative' U.S. success of the game: "I always thought that, in the US, people liked simple stories like in Hollywood movies. The American hero wins at the end after a fight and save the beautiful woman or the world. I was sure that the first .hack would fail, that people in the US would find it too difficult or disorienting."

Yet he concludes: "People understood what we wanted to deliver. And in the end it sold more than 700,000 copies in the US." Of course, this was over quite a few titles, but hey, for iterations using the same engine, it really _is_ quite impressive - a sign of episodic success to come?

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The VintageComputing.com site, which is run by RedWolf of 'Game Ads A-Go Go' GSW column fame, has posted a rather fun scan of Sonic merchandise, seemingly dated to the Sonic & Knuckles era.

As RedWolf notes: "My favorite items are the “2 Dudes with Atti2udes” t-shirt and the sleeveless Sonic & Knuckles denim jacket. Real classy stuff." Stuff like this doesn't end up on eBay too often, unfortunately - or fortunately?

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at his personal weblog, Manifesto Games co-founder Greg Costikyan has interesting comments on PC casual/indie games, specifically commenting: "In general, I think a lot of developers are failing to remind downloaders enough, and therefore having fewer conversions (to paying customers) than they otherwise would."

So, we get Greg's top issues, which are actually pretty smart, and tie in well with Xbox 360 Live Arcade standards: "The first thing a player should see when he starts the demo is a screen that provides an opportunity to buy the full game, with a link directly to a purchase url... The last thing a player should see when he quits out of a demo is a full screen describing all the cool features he gets in the full game--and again, with a live link to the purchase URL." Plenty more hints if you click through.

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The ever-vigilant Press The Buttons has spotted lots of new information on classic SNES platformer Plok!, thanks to the new 'Zee-3' website from the Pickford brothers, creators of Plok!, now-defunct indie developer Zed Two (Wetrix), and an insanely large amount of other games going back over 20 years.

As PTB's MattG notes: "Surprisingly, Plok's creators still own the rights to the character.  John and Ste Pickford have launched an archive of material detailing their many many games, and fortunately for Plok fans everywhere there is a special archive devoted to the little guy.  Marvel at unused concept art for future unrealized marketing endeavors, thrill at the unreleased coin-op prequel Fleapit, and hope someday for a new proper Plok adventure." Awesome stuff!

The site also has info on the Pickfords' new game, 'Naked War', which is "a fun strategic battle game for 2 players over email", and perhaps a spiritual successor to the lumpen but intriguing Future Tactics, also by the Pickfords - though in using play by email tactics, Naked War reminds of another set of famous UK brothers, the Gollops, and their title Laser Squad Nemesis.

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[Our Blazing Destiny is a new weekly comic by Jonathan "Persona" Kim about our society, cultural postdialectic theory, and video games. But mostly the latter.]

So, as promised, we have a replacement comic for the saintly Shmorky's strip, and it's from Persona, whose work you may have spotted in The Gamer's Quarter and elsewhere. And here's Persona himself to explain the premier instalment of what we're hoping will be a lovably random enterprise:

"The first 'Our Blazing Destiny' comic features the new Metal Gear Solid 4 trailer and all the terrifying Raiden-ness that erodes up from it. I mean, did you see the size of that boy's robo-crotch now? He could take out a Metal Gear with that monster!" Ahem.

[Jonathan "Persona" Kim is sometimes a character animation student at the California Institute of the Arts, other times a ninja illustrator, but in his heart, a true comic artist looking for his destiny in the sea of stars. His path on the torrid road of comics include a quarterly manga on The Gamer's Quarter and his website on the internet drawing hub Mechafetus.com.]

Posted by persona at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Courtesy of the British Gaming Blog, there's a round-up of the top ten Game Boy Advance games ever, which seems oddly relevant at this time in history, as the writer acknowledges: "While many of you will toss your consoles aside and bring in your new DSes and PSPs to play on, there will always be those who do not forget these classic consoles and their games, but honour them."

Of course, the best thing about Game Boy Advance games is that you can play them all on the DS, and the countdown even sports some of the recent GBA titles you might have accidentally skipped, like Game Freak's under-rated Screw Breaker ("a simple play style that was easy to learn, but tough to master.")

What's possibly most interesting is a vaguely controversial overall #1 game - Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga ("mixed traditional Mario platform timing with RPG elements to provide what we think is the best.") So let's open things up to the floor - what's missing from the top ten of all-time Game Boy Advance titles, and what should _really_ be number one?

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Game theorist Jesper Juul has posted an update on his official weblog linking to extracts from his new MIT Press book Half-Real.

As we've previously mentioned, Juul's keynote at this year's Serious Games Summit @ GDC was possibly the most listenable and practically relevant talk we've heard from anyone who could be labeled a 'game theorist', and Half-Real looks to continue that interest.

As for the name of the book, the preface explains: "A video game is half-real: we play by real rules while imagining a fictional world. We win or lose the game in the real world but we slay a dragon (for example) only in the world of the game."

And the introduction (PDF link) notes amusingly of early game regulation/censorship (in 1457, golf was banned in Scotland because "it was felt that it kept young men from practicing archery". So there.) Anyhow, go poke around, already.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We've been checking out the official ChinaJoy 2006 website, for the massive and pre-eminent Chinese video game trade show being held in Shanghai from July 28th-30th, and interestingly, a button labeled '2006 Miss ChinaJoy' on the site links to an official ChinaJoy cosplay competition, with lotsa contestant pics.

The choice of a 'beauty contest' style moniker for the competition is distinctly odd. But we, at least, find this interesting because we only tend to see U.S.-set cosplay competitions, or the Japanese cosplayers hanging out at TGS or Comiket, and seeing the Chinese physicality applied to cosplay is actually a refreshing change that highlights what the rest of Asia like cosplaying (Final Fantasy titles, mainly!)

For example, this seems to be one of the leading competitors, and the whole portfolio showcases the intriguingly ethereal look of many Chinese cosplayers. [Oh, and if anyone can translate and tell us more about the competition and the winners, go right ahead.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

One thing you should be aware of as you read this column is that the United Kingdom loves its magazines. Loves them. Especially computer and/or game mags. Pretty much every major PC or game system over the years enjoyed at least two or three monthly mags dedicated exlcusively to it in the UK, with more popular platforms like the Amiga or PlayStation getting a good six or seven at once. Even systems you never imagined anyone could write 70 or 80 pages of editorial a month on, like Philips' CD-i and Commodore's last-ditch CD32 console, got magazines in Britain. In fact, at one point in the mid-1980s, there were three consumer-targeted computer mags in the UK that published weekly -- Home Computing Weekly, Personal Computer News, and Popular Computing Weekly -- each one with its own reviews, news coverage, and type-in programs for every 8-bit computer under the sun.

The Internet's slowed down this torrent of print media down over the years, but there are still far more mags in the UK than in America -- and while the idea of any new game mag launching in the US is pretty much unthinkable at this point, new titles are still hitting UK newsstands. How can they keep this up? Simple. Since distribution costs are smaller in the UK (because it's a smaller country, of course), publishers can keep magazines at circulations that would make their US counterparts pass out and still make a profit. (The usual make-or-break circulation for a UK mag is a little less than 20,000 copies a month; meanwhile, in the US, Ziff Davis Media cancelled GameNOW in 2004 when its circ dropped to "only" 80,000.)

How easy is it for a magazine to make money in England? Here's an example. I went to the UK in the spring of 2004 to cover some game or another, and while I was there I made it a point to buy every single game magazine on the stands that month. It nearly bankrupted me. I wound up going to a single shop and spending over 70 pounds on magazines -- and that was after I decided to skip over the strategy-only titles. I wound up discarding most of them before I moved cross-country, but one I saved just because it amazed me so much that it existed at all.

This is the last issue (March 2004) of the Official UK PlayStation Magazine. What? But certainly OPM must still be publishing in the UK. And yes, you're right -- the officially PlayStation publication in Britain, more correctly called Official UK PlayStation 2 Magazine, is still coming out and is in fact the UK's top games-only magazine. This, on the other hand, was the Official UK PlayStation Magazine. As in, PlayStation One.

In the US, the Official PlayStation Magazine did the sensible thing and incorporated PS1 and PS2 coverage into one magazine. Across the pond, meanwhile, Future Publishing figured they could make a bit more money by keeping the official PS1 mag going while launching a separate official PS2 mag...this despite the fact that after 2002, there really wasn't a whole lot going on with the old PS1, except for crappy budget games, and even those petered out by '03.

So how do you fill up a 100-page magazine with virtually zero advertising with coverage for a system that's been legally dead for nearly two years? Editor-in-chief Ryan Butt's solution: Get silly. OPMUK's final issue has a whopping two reviews (for XS Junior League Soccer and Ford Truck Mania, which is given a pity score of 7/10), a few pages' worth of capsule game lists, a feature on the 108 greatest PS1 cheats, and a primer on the PlayStation 2 for all those avid magazine-reading gamers who somehow didn't know what a PlayStation 2 was by 2004. The rest of the magazine is pure fluff -- 2 pages on the editorial staff, 2 pages covering a typical month of the magazine, a spread with character art you can cut out to "make your own OPM funeral" with, and an Operation-type game where you get to pull out all the bits from erstwhile editor Dan Curley. It's all remarkably well-written and amusing, which is the really surprising thing here because the readership had to have been in the four-figures by this time.

As it turns out, Future Publishing (the biggest UK game-mag publisher around) does this sort of thing all the time. The best example I can think of offhand is Commodore Format, a mag launched in 1990 devoted to the Commodore 64 computer. Launching a C64 mag in 1990 seems silly enough already, but amazingly, the mag survived...and survived...and survived, publishing 61 issues before finally closing in October 1995. 1995! Who the hell was using a C64 in 1995?

And this is exactly why the UK magazine scene is so neat. If you can find a few thousand people interested in reading PS1 coverage long after everyone's ditched their PS1s in the closet, then you can -- and what's more, it may just support itself in the long run. In the US, magazine overheads are too high to allow anything like that. (In fact, US mags didn't really experiment at all until the Internet forced them to in the early 2000s -- good for readers, but arguably a case of too little, too late.)

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He owns enough magazines to smother himself with should the need arise, and his secret fantasy is for someone flush with game-publisher stock options to give him a monthly stipend so he can spend a year researching their full history and finishing the site. In his "off" time he is an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Probably the only unmissable indie-related article every month is the 'Indie Game Monthly Round-Up' from GameTunnel, and - good news, the May 2006 edition is now online.

Looks like the overall game of the month is the excellent puzzler Eets, which actually recently posted its postmortem on GSW sister site Gamasutra, and received an overall 9.0 score.

Reviewer Mike Hommel commented of the title: "A really solid and original puzzle game. The emotions work out as a really interesting aspect to the puzzles, and the physics-y nature of it all makes the puzzles a little more lenient and freeform than you get in more tile-based puzzles." So yay!

Other well-rated GT titles included The Odyssey: Winds of Athena ("Instead of controlling your units, you try to steer them in the right direction by modifying their environment"), and Bone: The Great Cow Race ("...does a good job of using 3D graphics while retaining a warm Disney-ish painted look.")

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For those wondering what former 1UP staffer and current Microsoft community manager Che Chou is working on, turns out he's the community liaison for Forza Motorsport 2, the Xbox 360 racing sequel announced at E3, and coming out this Xmas.

Thus, he's running regular weblog updates on Forzamotorsport.net, and there's some pretty interesting stuff out there - for example, a trip to local exotic car dealership Park Place, where "a quest for exotic autos and soggy wet hamburgers", always a good combination, resulted. It's actually interesting to see (as with Ivan Sulic and Hellgate London) ex-journos being hired purely to provide community support and articles for single, high-profile games - and it's pretty neat.

[Oh, and while we're here, another fun third-party Forzamotorsport.net story is a chat with PGR art director Kiki Wolfkill and fame design director Chris Novak (hey, Project Gotham Racing 3 guys - sneaking onto the Forza site!), who "barnstormed the 425-hp British exotic through 5,000 miles of American countryside" in the 2006 Tire Rack Cannonball One Lap of America - neeto.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Back to the always fun Speed Demos Archive after a little hiatus, and this time they've added a speed run of SNK Playmore's Metal Slug 5, which, while maybe not the best of the series, is good fun to check out for wacky bosses and classic 2D fun.

The run, by Mike Uyama, is played at hardest difficulty with no deaths (wow!), and there's lots of good tactics-related discussion in the text submitted with the run, but Uyama notes at the end: "I'm satisfied with this run, I don't think there are more than 30-40 seconds worth of mistakes/bad randomness. I don't think I'll touch this game again even if there is a lot of room for improvement because it is the worst out of all the Metal Slug games. Hopefully I will have a successful run of Metal Slug 3 someday."

Luckily, if you don't like that version of the game, there are also runs of the first Metal Slug, of Metal Slug 4 (also called "the worst of the Metal Slug series"), and for Metal Slug X, one of the best MS titles - lots of blasting action to enjoy!

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, the title of this GSW post is the title of a new Slate article by Luke O'Brien, subtitled "And why that's bad for gamers", and dealing with the state of indie in gaming.

O'Brien has some fair points, such as :"In today's movie business, it's possible for an indie film like Napoleon Dynamite to become a sensation. Saw, which cost a mere $1.2 million, grossed 100 times that amount. That just doesn't happen in video games." Basically true - the barriers to producing and the variable sale prices for smaller budget games seem to have precluded such a major phenomenon as yet.

But other parts of the piece are rather meanspirited - claiming that classic creators are burnt out and solely working for the big boys, for example, with Sid Meier having "spent most of the last decade updating his previous hits at a company owned by Grand Theft Auto publisher Take-Two Interactive" - the acquisition was only recent, and saying Garriott "never produced another breakthrough like Ultima" rather underplays the importance of Ultima Online as a pioneering MMO, if that's not included in the statement.

And so, we reach the same old 'cultural crossroads' conclusion, which is as untrue as it ever was: "If the big studios stay in charge, it may return to its former status: the pastime of teenage boys and middle-aged nerds at gaming conventions." How about Nintendo's Brain Training, the casual game explosion, EA's moves toward developing original IP, the strides with games like Guitar Hero? I'm bored of this article, so why do people keep writing it?

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Andy Waxy.org Baio, who created now Yahoo!-owned events site Upcoming.org and is quite the gamegeek (and a GSW chum!), made the trek down to E3 earlier this month, and has posted his impressions of his 'E3 Underdogs 2006' at his personal site.

He does note, interestingly, that in finding the downtrodden: "This year was particularly hard. Partly because I spent most of the day waiting in line to see the Nintendo Wii, but also partly because the entire gaming industry is getting so weird."

He continues: "In catering to the casual gamer and trying to differentiate from the competition, every platform and publisher is spending serious money turning former underdogs into big-name titles... I was surprised to see games like Loco Roco and Viva Piñata with huge marketing efforts by Sony and Microsoft. (What hath Katamari wrought?)"

But some of the Baio-approved 'under rug swept' titles include our favorite Elite Beat Agents, Guitar Hero II, which Baio is parading around at work "(I won't be happy until I get Jerry Yang and David Filo to battle it out on "Bark at the Moon.")", and one title not really mentioned by GSW thus far, Elebits for Wii ("Part hide n' seek shooting game and part physics simulation, Elebits uses the Wii controller as a gravity gun to ransack ordinary household settings to find and capture cute little characters.") Neeto!

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We've been meaning to post this for a while, but well worth checking out (though not strictly legit) is the Sonic The Comic Archive, an almost complete scanned archive of every single Sonic The Hedgehog and Sega-related comic book published thoughout the '90s.

The handy info page explains it best: "STC is a comic based on the adventures of Sega's flagship mascot Sonic the Hedgehog, as well as including strips of many other famous Sega characters such as; Ecco the Dolphin, Sparkster and Streets of Rage. STC was produced by two companies over its 8 year and 223 issue life span."

We love Sonic, but our favorite bit is the special comics section, which includes such wackiness as an 'Eternal Champions' special edition comic, and a poster mag starring the Street Of Rage characters. Yay, Sega, yay! [Via #ic.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Our dear friends at Schadenfreude Interactive, last seen discussing game designs featuring renegade beekeepers with amnesia, have returned to sister site Gamasutra with a brand new column, 'Waiting For Hasselhoff'.

The feature "chronicles audio engineer Alex Voll mit Aalen's Beckettian odyssey, waiting for David Hasselhoff to arrive and craft voiceover for the firm's award-winning Cthulhu Karts series", and the lines he must speak are rather astounding: "A borean terror gnaws at my vitals as, before me, a many-tentacled creature waves its dire glaucous flag. Am I courting madness with this karting madness?"

We won't give away the ending, but suffice to say, the path of the Hoff does not run smooth, and Voll mit Aalen is obstructed, among other things, by German death metal band Moribund Impetus, who, he relates. "leave the studio a mess. Someone has left a pair of leather chaps behind an amplifier. I sigh and place them in the Lost & Found cabinet beside the Ottorino Respighi-shaped Pez dispenser, a deflated inflatable pig, and a cucumber wrapped in aluminum foil. This job is not as glamorous as I expected it to be -- some days I just feel like a janitor with a copy of ProTools." Working in games isn't as fun as we thought!

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Several smartypants are pointing out that Three Rings CEO Daniel James, the creator of Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, and a jaunty piratical hat-wearing presence at any conference or gathering you care to mention related to the game industry, has started a weblog, 'The Flogging Will Continue'.

The latest post, 'Burning Flipside, and the relevance of Burning Man to MMOs' has some interesting discussion on the future of MMOs and recreation. James comments, comparing the Burning Man experience to 'the Vegas experience': "The analogical contrast between Second Life and expensive content-driven theme-park MMOs like World of Warcraft is obvious."

He argues: "If humanity has a future (i.e. if we don’t blow ourselves up, or devour ourselves in green or grey goo), then I believe we’ll largely live lives of leisure. How will fill that leisure time will be profoundly important. As a creator of leisure, a builder of (virtual) leisure cities, I would much rather people spent most of their time at a virtual Burning Man than Vegas. That said, Puzzle Pirates is more Vegas than Burning Man. Heck, we’ve even got Poker. Clearly I have some work to do!" [Via Broken Toys.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Over at the War & Video Games blog, there's an informative post on the 'deadiniraq' art project, which, as is handily explained, was created by Joseph DeLappe: "He's been logging onto America's Army under the name dead-in-iraq, and choosing not to fight. Instead, he just types in the names of American military casualties."

Blogger Ed Halter has compiled some of the more eye-opening reactions to this virtual protest, for example: "Don't be surprised if there's a book deal in this. "My Noble Online Protest", by Joseph "surrender-monkey" DeLappe, coming soon to a B&N near you", or, indeed: "Couldn't he do something more original than name all the dead?"

There's also an excellent GameSpy article on the concept, noting: "One of the reasons DeLappe has specifically targeted America's Army is because he has some personal issues with the game itself. During our interview, he calls it "a tax-payer funded propaganda and recruiting and advertising tool for the Army."" Which... it is?

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

You knew about Virtua Fighter and that tennis one, sure. But did you know about EXTREME HUNTING 2: TOURNAMENT EDITION? Well, it's made by Sega Amusements USA, which is based in Elk Grove Village, IL - won't be too many more elk there for long! But anyway, it strongly appears to be an atomiswave game (just look at them robust screens), and is a tournament edition, meaning you can be ranked against other people who wear hats and plaid in public, should you so choose.

Check out some movies, where you'll find you can injure a bear then try to shoot it as it escapes! Then you can shoot fish in the water! Or even poorly animated squirrels! All the while listening to twangy, poorly constructed hillbilly music (and I know my hillbilly music, I worked at a folk music club). But don't forget, there are also frightening mystery animals - will it be a vicious bunny? Possibly a rabid duck? Maybe even a diabolical titmouse! You've got to play to find out!

The game was announced some time ago, but should be coming out in 'early summer, 2006.' which sounds a lot like now! You might think I was joking with the whole demonic animals thing, but just check out this quote from the tips section: "Keep a look out for the MONSTER ANIMALS, or the largest animals in the spot." The bold and caps are their own. Those frightening animals, wandering around in their natural habitat - frankly they're just asking for it! So, just wait til it comes out, then you can slouch behind a man with a red, impatiantly waiting for your turn. Will that man ever finish? The khaki pants brigade can't be kept waiting around! [X-post from IC.]

Posted by bsheffield at 6:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Somewhere round the edges of art, retro gaming, and music, there lies Sebastian Tomczak and his multitude of circuit hacking projects, the latest of which performed an insanely detailed Vectrex/Atari 2600 symphony at an event in Australia the other day.

Our minds boggle at what was going on, but to try to explain it in less than three pages: "The idea behind Black Dog White Dog is to have a 'visual score' written on the Vectrex Logo program...The Vectrex is then filmed via a video camera, which is on its side to compensate for the machine's unique screen dimensions."

But wait, there's more: "Connected to the TV was a set of twenty-four light dependent resistors (whose resistance lowers the more light is presented to them), each replacing certain buttons in one of four 'recreated' Atari 2600 CX50 control pads. These four matrix sets where plugged into two Atari 2600's each running a copy of Paul Slocum's Synthcart."

So basically, the Vectrex's visual output was controlling Atari 2600 music through light sensitivity, and: "Both Ataris had had a direct audio modification performed on them. The audio from the left Atari was played directly through a Marshall guitar amp. The right Atari was through a Behringer bass amp." Wow. Check out Little Scale and the Milkcrate homepage for more on the many and varied circuitbending projects on display here. [via Xir!]

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Holy canole, is it a GameTap time of the month again? We got an email from the 'all you can eat' subscription gaming service (which we still heart) with its schedule for new game additions over the next month, so thought we'd pass them on.

Today, the 25th, looks like we're getting MegaRace 3 ("Strap yourself in for this fast and futuristic combat racer"!), an amusing sequel to the over the top '90s franchise - as well as the Neo Geo MVS version (we think!) of Bust-A-Move, aka Puzzle Bobble - always fun.

Then, appearing on June 1st, we have Super BurgerTime ("It's rarely been seen but it's finally here...the 1990 sequel to BurgerTime!"), and June 8th sees Rolling Thunder 2 & 3 ("The SEGA Genesis presents two follow-ups to the spy classic, Rolling Thunder.") - certainly some neat obscurities popping out from the underbrush here.

Finally, June 15th has Legendary Wings ("Hey, Capcom, you got your vertically-scrolling shooter in my side-scrolling shooter!"), and June 22nd: "Sports Week: Football, bowling, wrestling...not to mention a few other heavy hitters." Oo, should be some nice Neo Geo and arcade titles showing up in there, we'd imagine. [UPDATE: Matt from Turner mentions in comments: "The "Sports Week" content was moved to July so we could celebrate Sonic's 15th birthday on June 23!" Hurrah!]

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In a rather touching post, the International Game Developers Association has collected a multitude of reports from GDC 2006 student scholarship winners, who each won a pass to GDC and a professional game developer mentor to help guide them.

Elizabeth M. Chung of Pennsylvania State University gives an idea of the general fun level of GDC [yes, yes, run by CMP, who also runs GameSetWatch, but no shilling here, it's a great conf!]: "You spend literally every waking moment of your time devoted to discussion with others about games, meeting exciting people in the industry, seeing the new games that are in the making, and enveloping yourself with the most creative people on the planet." Yay!

But actually, our favorite feedback is from Eric Peter Foster of the University of Advancing Technology, who goes completely against the grain and calls out Will Wright on his GDC 2006 speech: "He is a good speaker, however it did seem a little long, and it dragged on a bit... I think in the future, unless he talks about something more interesting to me, I will go to another session if there is a good one going on." Rawk! [Oh, and ta to Joystiq for P-A screenshot swipe!]

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Game Ads A-Go-Go' is a bi-weekly column by Vintage Computing and Gaming's RedWolf that showcases good, bad, strange, funny, and interesting classic video game-related advertisements, most of which are taken from his massive classic game magazine collection.]

Welcome back to another extremely whimsically over-analytical edition of Game Ads A-Go-Go! I'm actually finally almost done moving, so I have more time this week to write total pap. In this episode, we'll be focusing on what I like to call "visual hyperbole." Hyperbole (pronounced hi-per-bo-lee), for those who don't know, essentially means "extreme exaggeration." There are many examples of visual hyperbole in video game ads of yore since the advertisers typically want to get their point across in the most dramatic way possible. Let's take a look at a few.

All Hail The Great Shodown

Somewhere in the South Pacific there lives a race of tiny people in baseball caps that worships a god known as Shodown. The mighty Shodown, in an impressive display for his peoples, regularly manifests himself as a colorful upright wooden cabinet in a local cave. Every week the people of the village gather around Shodown to beg for mercy and forgiveness:

"Oh Great Shodown, we have worshiped you plenty. We have given you trinkets of rock and bone. Why, oh why have you not watered our crops this season?"

Normally, Shodown only responds to their pleas with swirling lights and sound. But one week, Shodown finally replied:

"Trinkets of rock and bone are not enough to satisfy the great Shodown. I require a much greater sacrifice: that of a large metal disc with a picture of a man's head impressed upon it!"

Puzzled by their god's request, the people went to their village's greatest minds: blacksmiths with years of experience in crafting odd metallic things. It took all of the village's blacksmiths working together for seven days and seven nights to craft the perfect metal disc for Shodown. Soon after, the people took the disc to Shodown and deposited it into a slot in the front of Shodown's cabinet. Another week passed, and the people returned, saying:

"Shodown, we have worshiped you plenty. We have given you the sacrifice you requested. Why, oh why have you not watered our crops this season?"

The great booming voice of Shodown replied:

"Last year, one disc was plentiful for Shodown. This year you must deposit four discs before I water your crops."

---

Folk tales aside, there is something else you should know about this ad. Look in the print at the bottom and you'll find this:

The Best Rack in Town

"Finally, there's a video pool game that actually 'feels' like real billiards."

I'm completely confused. First, this ad tells us to "chalk up" (Dude), then it tells us not to ("Do not try this at home" in the fine print), then they throw in a couple crude references to breasts, and then they finally reveal that all this hullabaloo is actually about a video pool game, and that we're not actually supposed to use our fingers as pool cues. Talk about mixed messages. Am I supposed to play with my fingers? Not play with my fingers? Chalk my fingers? Chalk the cartridge? Grope the billiard balls?

I think we're just better off skipping this game and playing a different one.

Be Careful What You Wish For

The other night I was in a similar situation as the young fellow pictured in this ad. I was sitting in my living room playing a crappy baseball game on my Intellivision, when I off-handedly remarked to my friend that someone should make a more realistic baseball game. Just then, a baseball hurled through my living room window, completely shattering the glass and hitting me in the head. My friend walked away with a few small glass shards in the arm, but I was knocked unconscious for a couple hours. When I awoke, a stunning revelation hit me: someone already has made a more realistic baseball game. It's called Baseball and people play it all the time. Then I jumped up, grabbed my shotgun, did a dramatic roll on the floor, popped up in front of the window and blasted the kid outside who threw the baseball at me.

Shortly afterward, in the police car, I realized that I had a problem with distinguishing video games from reality.

[RedWolf is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Vintage Computing and Gaming, a regularly updated "blogazine" that covers collecting, playing, and hacking vintage computing and gaming devices. He has been collecting vintage computers and game systems for over 13 years.]

Posted by Benj Edwards at 5:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We've just spotted that the results of the Toronto Indie Game Jam are online, including ten downloadable titles and seven games that 'didn't quite make it' to a workable stage just yet - and the selection looks very cool indeed.

All created over a three day period, one of the initial highlights is definitely Kalishnikitty ("Graphically stunning. An animated cat! Parallax scrolling! Photo realisitc explosions! They owe it all to version control. Be sure to play until the end...")

But also well worth messing with is Glucose Maximus, in which "The goal is to feed the kids running towards the ice cream vendor. There are medic and ammo resupplying kids that will help you, don't kill them!" Niiice jam, guys!

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Good news, everybody! Three Rings, the creators of the excellent casual MMO Puzzle Pirates, have announced the public beta for Bang! Howdy, a multiplayer online tactical strategy game for the PC, in which "players face off in the steam-powered Wild West, using casual strategy game mechanics in a variety of gameplay modes."

The game, which has a Beta blog and is "a hybrid between turn-based and real-time strategy gameplay, and is played in short fast-paced rounds", looks very neat indeed - and it's going to be 'play for free, pay for items' when it launches, just like a whole bunch of Korean titles like Kart Rider that have been super-successful.

Also, damn, it's steampunk, and has a great press release quote: "We been diggin' away in the mines for a good long while and we can finally report that there's gold in them thar hills," said Michael Bayne, director of "Bang! Howdy" and Three Rings' CTO. "Hitch up yer wagons and get ready to ride, because yer not gonna want to miss out on all the fun."

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (20)

Our fave interviewblog Little Mathletics (whose Alistair Wallis may be helping out GSW with some interviews soon!) has posted a great chat with 'Warning Forever' creator Hizoka T. Ohkubo, and the intro sets things up really nicely regarding the Japanese 'dojin' title.

The piece explains: "If you were at all unconvinced about the amount of inventiveness in indie games, you'd do well to look at Hizoka T Ohkuba's Warning Forever. Like bullet hell shmups, but don't want to go through the drag of fighting your way through levels to get up to the bosses? This is the game for you."

Interestingly, Ohkuba talks (for the first time in English?) about his next game, commenting: "'I'm working on a follow-up now, but it's been slow recently because I've been busy with my job. I'm aiming to get it finished sometime this year, but I'm sure you'll understand if it doesn't get done. Knowing that I'm a fan of the retro type 2D games, like Warning Forever, you would think that would be what I'm making, but the next one will be an action game in 3D. It will be like Warning Forever in the way that it will be simple, and you will be able to play it at any time."

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at HardOCP, not generally known for its game coverage, they have an excellent interview with Oblivion's Ken Rolston, who is newly retired from the company (game designers getting to retirement age? The industry is growing up!) after a long career in paper/videogaming.

Rolston, who was "lead designer on the Bethesda Softworks fantasy RPG The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and its expansions Tribunal and Bloodmoon, as well as on the new sequel Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion", talks about his time, noting of today's game biz: "I preferred working in small teams with short schedules and smaller budgets, and I don't prefer the slick, polished products of today to the rougher, simpler products of a decade ago."

As for his retirement years? Rolston grins: "I aspire to be the nicest, most charming, most reliable husband, son, sibling, and friend in history. Against that laudable ideal, I plan to play the accordion. A lot. And sing in close-harmony groups. And wander around and sponge off friends, and have adventures. And play stupid paper-and-pencil RPGs. And paint toy soldiers. I may also become a positive force in society. Yeah. That's the ticket." Hey, that's what we want to do, too!

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Though much of it is rehash, a UK Sunday Times feature story on Gizmondo has a number of choice investigative-ish extras on the continuing, continuing, continuous story of the v.crooked, v.failed handheld gaming firm.

We particularly like this quote from Paul Davis of Gizmondo liquidators Begbies Traynor: “No matter how much you spend on cars, watches and directors’ perks, you just can’t get through a sum as big as this quite as quickly as Gizmondo did.”

There's also some good material on Carl Freer, one of the key figures in the whole mess: "Freer, who celebrated his 36th birthday on Friday, preferred luxury to performance — hence the chauffeur-driven Maybach. But behind the electric gates of their Hampshire home he and Anneli kept a Range Rover and a Land Rover Discovery as runabouts. In the garage were a couple of Harley-Davidsons — one with a diamond-etched crank case."

More evidence of overindulgence? "Last year the company spent £2m on leasing cars. It also bought a share in a racehorse. Papers show about £400,000 was spent on watches, many for potential investors and people with whom Freer wanted to do deals." That's... quite a lot of cash.

[In related news, we got some gangtastic mini-posters for legendary Gizmondo title Colors in the office recently, from the company's former U.S. PR firm. But we still can't get a copy of the mythical GPS-enabled Gizmondo 'killer app', even though there are some press copies floating around - mail us if you've got one spare!]

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, thanks to our friends at Backbone Entertainment, part of super-duper developer Foundation9, we have a new GameSetWatch competition giveaway, and it's rather awesome.

To help promote the new Death Jr. titles being released later this year (and Backbone's largesse in general), the lucky winner gets the pictured loot (click on the pic to enlarge!) - a Death Jr. T-shirt, a mini 'C-4 Hamster' action figure (!), and best of all, a special metal Death Jr. Case Core Coffincase.

This is a smaller version of the cases generally used by exceptionally gothy musicians as instrument-holders, with a Death Jr. plaque on the front, a beautiful red velour interior, and a copy of Death Jr. for PSP hiding inside it - along with a couple of green Death Jr. lollipops, clearly the highlight of the whole package.

So, in order to win, you need to answer the following question:

"When Death Jr. and friends appeared on the June/July 2005 issue of GSW sister publication Game Developer magazine, DJ was brandishing a scythe and pointing to a graph. What 'hilarious' joke descriptors are on the two axes of the graph?"

Please send your answers to editors@gamesetwatch.com any time before Monday, June 5th at 12 noon PST. There will be only one winner randomly picked from the correct answers, the judges' decision is final, and the C-4 Hamster will not blow up in the mail, according to its packaging. Happy trails!

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Whoomp, there it is! After a significant downtime, indie powerhouse site TIGSource.com has flipped back into life, just as swiftly as it exited the stage. With a pleasant new redesign and posts by a number of the previous writers (Dessgeega, Derek Yu, others!), looks like this could be good news for indie game fans everywhere.

The sidebar for the site says: "I'd tell you that we're back from the dead except we were never really dead in the first place. Just sleeping. Soundly." Suuuure. While it's been away, other sources we've been forced to peruse have included the ever-reliable GameTunnel, of course, plus the slightly more casual Jay Is Games.

But our favorite TIGSource offshoot, the Indygamer blog, which was rating and linking to an insane amout of indie titles, has apparently gone on semi-hiatus "due to personal reasons", as of last Friday. Let's hope that editor TimW restarts, either on TIGSource or his own blog, soon.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We always get some odd press releases at Gamasutra, and are happy to reprint them over at GSW, and the latest is introducing The Exchange Student, "an interactive sitcom and it will be sold online in the form of episodes, for PCs and Macintosh."

The title is developed in Flash, and features art by Will Eaken (who "has worked on some of the most popular adventure games in the history of the genre like The Dig and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis", though perhaps not quite in leading roles) and Dave Rigley (creator of the online comic 24 and a half.)

The plot, somewhat wackily, "...follows Emilio Carboni, a 22 y.o. Italian student who has never had a girlfriend in his entire life. His friend Vicenzo just came back from an exchange program in Sweden. Vicenzo was really satisfied with the program since he met a lot of very attractive ladies during his stay in Sweden. Emilio decides to follow his friend's path. He travels to Sweden to spend a semester there, studying in a city of Sweden called Västerås. Fate however is not that kind with our 'hero'. The game follows the events taking place from the moment that Emilio leaves his house in Italy until he completes his exchange program and returns home."

So, we're thinking some kind of Leisure Suit Larry meets American Pie thing, then? The concept art gallery certainly looks promising, if you dig the LucasArts old-school graphic adventure stylings.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The folks at RetroBlast! have hooked up with Coin-Op.tv, a retrogaming specific video site which has run some neat stuff in the past, and the first combined fruits of their loins are a video interview with SNK's Falcoon conducted at the SNK offices in Japan.

The story notes: "COIN-OP TV roving reporters Bobby & Alan visit SNK Playmore's overseas location in Osaka, Japan - where they spoke with 'King of Fighters' Designer and Producer Falcoon! Find out what inspiration drives a guy like Falcoon into the game business and what's in store for the new 'King of Fighters'"

Falcoon is a 'wacky guy', and you can check out the previous Coin-Op.tv episodes on the RetroBlast! site, including such goodness as a Bill Kunkel interview, plus lots of I Am 8-Bit and California Extreme coverage - we're heartily in favor!

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The ever-helpful Aggro Me points the way to one of the craziest MMO-related videos we've seen here at GSW in quite some time - an EverQuest II parkour video, in which various in-game characters do 'crazy jumps' across the fantastical architecture of Norrath.

For those not in the know, parkour's Wikipedia article explains that the 'sport' "...(also called freerunning, abreviated to PK) is a physical discipline of French origin in which participants attempt to pass obstacles in the fastest and most direct manner possible, using skills such as jumping and climbing."

Oddly enough, there's been a couple of other parkour references in video games recently - Marc Ecko's Getting Up from Atari twinned elements of parkour and graffiti in a 'tough urban package', and a GDC lecture from the Assassin's Creed team mentioned that the Ubisoft title "strives for real world rules and drew influence from many sources including parkour". [EDIT: Oop, and Jare points out Eidos' Free Running for PSP, which we hadn't spotted, and is out this month in Europe!] But heck, this is fantasy parkour with gnomes (elves? goblins? Hell if I know!), and as such, to be adored.

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Sister GSW site Serious Games Source, which is running two features per week on the whole 'serious games' phenomenon, plus a bunch of daily news, for those who dig that type of thing, has a new write-up on addressing post-traumatic stress through games, and it's pretty interesting and thoughtprovoking stuff.

The article discusses the Virtual Iraq game, which "is based on the popular commercial Xbox game, Full Spectrum Warrior, using assets from the game on top of others that have been added", and "uses gradual exposure to trauma in a manageable way, which eventually leads to habituation and extinction of the syndrome."

Thus, U.S. Army physicians are able to simulate increasing levels of trauma, from "being attacked or ambushed" to more gruesome follow-ons, "providing 3D sound, vibration and even scents (such as gunpowder, cordite, body odor, garbage, burning rubber, diesel fuel and Iraqi spices)" to add to the mix, to attempt to produce therapeutic results. It all seems disturbing, but since the initial cause is so disturbing - if it works, or helps, we're all for it.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ever since an urban legend that certain cell phone straps prevent cancer, it has been popular to feature them as promotional materials. Ever thought how useful it might be to have a weapon strapped to your cell phone? Capcom's got your back, according to Impress Watch! In order to promote the upcoming Sengoku Basara 2 (a sequel to the series known as Devil Kings in the US), if you preorder, you will receive one of five hero weapon cell phone straps at random.

Maeda Keiji's staff might also be useful as a fishing rod to snatch rare fish from your friend's aquariums when they're not looking! Date Masamune (that's as in Dah-Tay, not Win a Date with Masamune) offers his triple set of swords, perfect for pricking random people you don't like in public! Meanwhile, Saneda Yukimura's dual spears would be good for picking your nose surreptitiously. Chosokabe Morichika's harpoon might make a wonderful little spear to hold taffy on until you want to eat it later. Last, but not least, Mori Motonari's round, painful-looking dagger thingy (pictured left) might...help you disguise yourself as a New Age practitioner?

The little weapons will also come with an exciting trading card! Oh boy! Capcom's also planning some other things, such as limited edition covers, a Sengoku diary and fortunetelling. Oh my! Check back later to see if the new Cooking Mama will come with a set of Ginsu knives!

Posted by szshou at 6:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Parallax Memories' is a regular weekly column by Matthew Williamson, profiling classic '16-bit' games from the Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, and other seminal '90s systems. This week's column profiles Konami’s cyberpunk adventure: Snatcher]

Junked

Snatcher is a game that many people know, yet few have played. And if you haven’t played it yet, I don't know that I can change your mind with only a short column even though I will try. One doesn't quite play this game so much as just progress its story. But though its gameplay is lacking, Snatcher makes up for it in just about every other possible way.

The only English-language version was released in late 1994 for the Sega/Mega CD, although many versions of the game were released over three generations of Japanese consoles. The game takes full advantage of the CD format; programming tricks increase the number of colors the Genesis can display on screen, and the extensive voice acting is enjoyable and well produced. While not a commercial success (mainly due to Sega's mishandling of the Sega/Mega CD), it developed an enormous cult following and is highly sought after to this day.

Neo Kobe Pizza

Gillian Seed has recently been assigned to the Anti-Snatcher task force where he will be a Junker eliminating snatchers—artificial life-forms who take the skin of humans and wear it. Both Gillian and his wife have amnesia (which doesn't come off as cheesy as it sounds) and are separated as they try to regain their memories. They make their new homes in Neo Kobe Japan, a city both skeptical and scared of the snatcher invasion which has been leaked by the press. The scene is set for a sci-fi detective story.

While Snatcher is usually touted as being based on Blade Runner, anyone who has read Philip K. Dick's sci-fi novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (the inspiration for the film), knows that Kojima was also familiar with it. As both the writer and director of the game, a young Hideo Kojima shows his affinities for film and literature, even as he masterfully presents a piece of media that could only be accomplished as a videogame.

Snatcher is basically a menu-based adventure game; even the navigation goes through menus. Occasionally, you will get a shooting-gallery-esque section where you are to aim and shoot on a grid. The Konami light gun—The Justifier—can be used at these sections (though I can't imagine how it would be possible). Above the menus, you see your location from Gillian's perspective. "Looking" and "Investigating" will become your friends as you throw away logically looking in strategic locations and just search and look at everything a couple times before moving on.

Romantic Cyberpunk

I don't mean to sound negative about the game, just its mechanics. The story is engaging and masterfully told. The characters in the game all feel like more than just two-dimensional caricatures of real people. The relationship between Gillian Seed and his wife is truly touching. Because of the intimate and personal nature of their conversations, I always felt the need to return to the privacy of Gillian's apartment when calling her, even though I could have been anywhere. And just like in his most famous series (Metal Gear Solid), Kojima constantly reminds you that you are playing a game.

I hesitate to give concrete examples for fear of spoiling the parts that make this game so exceptional, but the game twists your perceptions with questions in a conversation tree, with options in the menus, and even by using your TV against you. Snatcher creates some of the most original and memorable videogame moments I have ever witnessed.

Looking above, I realize there is too much to say about the game and all its little touches. Touches like the name of Gillian's mechanical assistant "Metal Gear Mk2," the little homages to Konami games like Goemon and Castlevania, the visual jokes and puns, and personal memos from Konami staff and Kojima himself. All these things are just a small part of the whole—even combined with the clunky controls—that make this one of the best stories told in a game ever. On October 27, 2005, Konami renewed the Snatcher trademark, and although all it means is that US law requires the renewal every five years, at least we know that they have not forgotten the series.

[Matthew Williamson is the creator of The Gamer’s Quarter, an independent videogame magazine focusing on first person writing. His work has been featured on MTV.com, 1up.com, Chatterbox Radio, and the Fatpixels Radio Podcast.]

Posted by Matthew Williamson at 2:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Bill Harris at Dubious Quality has been digging around on EB Games, and has been trying to work out the retail climate for the increasing frequency of next-gen titles, and he's been coming up with some interesting results (though they're doubtless skewed by what companies have chosen to announce to retail.)

He notes: "45 Xbox 360 games are scheduled for release before the end of the year, but only 31 Xbox titles. Almost half of that 31 will be shipping by the end of June. After that, the 360 titles are listed in a 2-1 ratio for the end of the year... In other words, in about two months, the transition from Xbox to Xbox 360 is essentially over."

Even more interestingly: "2007? You can see for yourself. 40 titles listed for the 360. Zero listed for the Xbox. Again, that doesn’t mean that absolutely nothing will come out for the original Xbox next year, but even with a few additions, game releases for the Xbox are going to be very scarce."

There's also a good breakdown of current and forthcoming games by genre, in which it's also pointed out: "Fighting games and platform games? Just a niche now. Platformers drove the Genesis/SNES generation, and fighting games were a premier genre in the both the Saturn/PS1 generation and the early Dreamcast/PS2 generation, but no more. Less than 2.5% of the games listed for the 360 are fighters." Altogether, an excellent analysis.

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In our travails, we spotted a new Associated Press ASAP story on the rise of indie video games (ASAP being the youth-oriented AP division for the under-35s, interestingly!), and it's focused around the IGF-licensed 'IG: Independent Games' retail compilation done by the Moondance Games folks.

[DISCLAIMER: Some of the GSW folks also run the Independent Games Festival, whose name has been licensed by the Moondancers!]

Since the Amazon page is a bit non-specific about what games are on there, a Gamasutra story from late last year is a bit more exact: "Previously IGF-entered games featured on the compilation include full versions of Dark Horizons Lore, Global Defense Network, Rocketbowl and Strange Adventures In Infinite Space, as well as demo versions of Gish, Creatrix and others."

The piece notes the oft-discussed centerpiece: "In the '90s, indie studio Miramax forged onto big screens. Today, Moondance hopes to do the same on store shelves. It's been nearly 10 years since indie films swept the Oscars and changed the Hollywood landscape. Indie games, however, remain a decidedly niche and small-time affair. Who's ready to play?"

One suspects that outfits like Grasshopper Manufacture and even Quantic Dream could be called indies in some way, of course - just on a slightly larger, console-based scale - so the point is as characteristically blurred as always. But we love the indies who are IGF-sized, whatever.

The story also notes, rightly: "Moondance's biggest challenge has been convincing retailers like Best Buy that this subculture of gamers don't just wanna play indie games online at sites such as GameTunnel.com and MadMonkey.net." It's likely that most indie games will continue to flow to consumers digitally - but we like Moondance for trying!

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ah, Japan! Land of laws no one pays attention to! Used games have been sold since the dawn of the Famicom, despite the fact that it was technically not allowed. Any lover of games will tell you the used game market here is heaven. So when it technically became allowed in 2002, used games sales simply went one step up the nirvana ladder of completion. It certainly didn't please companies though, who lose quite a bit to a secondhand industry that is estimated to be 30% that of new retail.

Rental is also technically not allowed and this one works to a point: the only things you've been able to rent in a non-shady way here are demos and who wants to pay for the right to play a demo? However, in the land that invented the ninja, we have our ways of being sneaky. When you buy a game at any good non-chain retailer, you will probably receive a note on the date when the game's resale price will go down, and how much you can sell it back for before that date. Thus, if you're relatively quick, you can buy a game close to release date, play it and sell it back for an excellent price, which is kind of like Ninja Renting, because you have to be pretty skilled at games to complete them before the price goes down.

Now, in the year 2006, Koei has hired a female vampire to suck the blood of other companies' games and regurgitate it to you. Called RentaNet, the chain will be opening the first ever opportunity to legitimately rent games this week in Tokyo and Kanagawa, and is prophecied to extend into around 10-15 locations by the end of the year and a further 1800 by 2008. They say prices will differ by store, but the prices sound an awful lot like Ninja Renting without the pride. For new titles, a month's rental will be about 5000 yen, while a 5-day rental will be in the range of 2800 yen, which incidentally is kind of the universal budget game price.

For classic titles, or those that have been out for one year, about 500 yen for the 5-day rental is predicted. Like most game shops, RentaNet will employ a point system for discounts and bonuses. Locations will also be in places close to things like Namco's game centers in order to target game fans. The store offers a selection so far of EA's, Taito's, Sony's, Koei's, Bandai Namco's and Tecmo's lineups, though it naturally seems to be centered or exclusively based on their PS2 catalogs.

Despite wanting an ability to rent for a long time, now that it's here, I'm worried that it will keep the wonderfully healthy used games market from thriving. Psychologically, after years of conditioning that the only way to get a game here is to buy it or steal it, I've become so used to it, it's a bit weird to even consider renting.

Posted by szshou at 4:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, we're still mildly obsessed with budget PlayStation 2 racing title Earache Extreme Metal Racing (which has a MySpace page as its official site!), though we certainly make no guarantees to its quality. Go to that official site and check out the video. It's...something else! Also, do note the rating they've got for their box mockup. I'm guessing that 3+ rating might be a bit premature!

So as for what's new, Sky Nash, goth metal gal and game designer, has got a new advertising scheme for the game, along with her pop, Frazer Nash, of Frazer Nash communications. They've snapped up the domain 6-6-06.co.uk in order to promote the game, which is a damn fine idea. Release the power of Satan with Earache Extreme Metal Racing! Or something of that nature! The countdown you see there is for the release of the PC demo, which we're sure will be...well, a video game of some kind. Check out a choice quote from the press release: "So the sign of the Beast is about to hit our calendars- 666, yes all three digits are on the horizon. It can only mean one thing; the Beast along with his mates the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are about to unleash a plague of death across the planet! but on a lighter note;"

And that's the end of the paragraph! I simply just can't get enough. Let's have another bit: "The level will also be populated with the fearsome living dead who carry either the plague of death or the special acceleration boost, so don’t be shy and go in for the kill!"

People say that truth is stranger than fiction, but I think in cases like this, fiction is pretty damn strange. I'm imagining what a fearsome living dead person would look like, whilst carrying the 'special accelleration boost.' This game will be the best of all time, or else Satan himself will punish developer Metro3D for their crimes against...well, not humanity. Devil...try. I could go on and just quote the whole excellent press release, which includes things like: "They don’t want to spread fear and panic BUT we are all going to DIE!!" but I suppose I've got to draw the line somewhere.

For those curious, the elegant gothic lolita-esque Sky Nash herself can be found right here. We tried to get an interview with her at E3, but she was in exams. Pity. Try not to stalk her though, she's not of age.

Posted by bsheffield at 1:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Continuing the hard-hitting journalism for which GSW is renowned, we've been reading Bret Easton Ellis' latest novel, Lunar Park, which stars the drugged-up and dysfunctional 'Bret Easton Ellis', the author of all Ellis' previous books, struggling to cope as someone apparently impersonating his American Psycho villain Patrick Bateman starts terrorizing his home town.

Post-modern conceits aside (and the book is _very_ well written, incidentally), the relatively on-the-ball references to video games as part of Ellis' (fictional?) family life in the book are notable, including mentions of a Mortal Kombat Halloween character, Ellis' son reading GamePro and Nintendo Power, and various other reasonably clued-in passing jabs.

But on P.116, Ellis' trademark cutting wit gets to work on Blinx creators Artoon, or more specifically, their pre-Blinx PS1/GBA platformer, as referenced with regard to Ellis' daughter: "Sarah went to the media room to play Pinobee, a video game about a flight-challenged and oddly charmless bumblebee whose expression of disgust always managed to fill me with alarm."

We say it's time for a rumble between Sonic co-creator and Artoon founder Naoto Oshima and the fictional coke-snorting version of Bret Easton Ellis - who's with us?

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Well, we're sorry to announce that Dave "Shmorky" Kelly's weekly GSW cartoon strip The Multicart Project, which, you may recall, "detailed the lives of Nintendo Entertainment System characters way past their prime, living in low-income housing and just trying to get by", is no more, having reached the end of its run on GameSetWatch.

At least, we _think_ our relationship is no more, according to what we could decipher of a scribbled note thrown through our window by Mr. Kelly's lawyer Oscar Acosta. All of the previous 8 episodes of the strip are available in archived form, and we will forever love anyone who can make scrambled Dizzy jokes in the same strip as KC Munchkin medical testing gags and Alex Kidd-related racism taunts.

However, all is not lost - we will be starting a brand new comic from a new author next Monday (29th!), and GSW regulars should look out for all kinds of fun from it - or at least, a brief stifled chuckle. We're keeping the identity of our new cartoonist secret for now, mainly because it's not Doonesbury or Charles Schulz - but somebody much, much funnier!

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In Japan, it's time for Ertain's releasing Relax your Heart with Adult Color-In Painting! No, it's not a stress-relieving porno coloring book that uses the DS stylus in unique, adult ways - it's something of a paint program and game slapped around famous art pieces. In much the same way that Nintendo used the popular books by Ryuta Kawashima for Brain Training, Ertain hopes to strike lightning by releasing an adaptation of the extremely popular series of Adult Coloring Books.

These books have one of the most "fun" claims ever: they are classical art outline books that say they stimulate the frontal lobe when you choose the order and color of your paint, and the temporal lobe when you remember where you saw the painting before! (This just in: I'm going to release a series of books called Adult Male Urination Training which teaches you how to work your frontal lobe by aiming correctly and your temporal lobe by remembering the last time it burned so much. It'll make millions!)

In any case, Ertain's game seems a lot cooler than the books. Basically, a classical painting is displayed in the top screen, and the player (with lines for guidance) can render it in any manner they choose on the bottom screen. For instance, when you use the color pencil tools to spruce up a work, and erase something with the erase tool, little eraser shavings will appear on the screen, which you can blow off with the DS microphone.

The watercolor and oil painting tools will allow you to mix colors with the stylus for that hand-painted look. You can choose among different paper types, as well to give the picture different textures. By playing mini-games, you can expand your painting subject matter and pictures. Once you're done, you can have your painting analyzed and criticized by different virtual people, from the perspective of beginner painters all the way to first-class pros. While you paint, you can listen to the soothing sounds of Agematsu Mika, a professional South American harp player. The game releases on July 27th for Nintendo DS.

Ertain is one of my favorite small Japanese developers. I can only hope this will hit a home run for them in the same unexpected way Brain Training did, though I doubt it. It would be nice if the company hit the big time, because their stuff, ranging from an actually competent strategy game for the GBA, a gladiator training game and a stand-up comic game, is beyond unique.

Posted by szshou at 4:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We first heard about this in shadowy rumors at the Sony party at E3, but GSW co-editor Brandon has attempted to piece it together a little better for his weblog Insert Credit - an odd E3-related cultural semi-accident from the Japanese headquartered Hudson Entertainment.

As Brandon explains: "You may not know this, but Hudson had a bit of an interesting tactic for E3. They hired a group of models, all of whom would be available at any time for Hudson's partners, and certain editors-in-chief of important publications. Those involved were able to choose a girl based on pictures sent via mail. I'm told that most refused."

The post continues: "Now, this is a rather common practice in Japan, though it's not really out in the open. In Japan, businesses will hire escorts for their big clients, if ever they do business deals in a club or something similar - you've probably seen it in movies. Then the clients can negotiate with those escorts afterwards, with the obvious intentions. But here, the official word [at E3] is that the girls weren't supposed to be escorts, or arm candy, so much as kind of personal assistants - get you coffee, translate where necessary, things like that."

The full story isn't quite there, but it's noted: "Of course, they wouldn't send me the list of girls and their photos, but I'm pretty sure [the Hudson website's] features page [lists them]... complete with mini interviews and personal data: Music Plus TV hostess Yoi Tanabe, horror film actress Sharon Senina, eastwest magazine hopeful Chyna Chuu, and PhD student Theia Monera."

[So, the story isn't completely confirmed, and it's worth mentioning again that the above folks, if they're the same ones presented by Hudson pre-show, were hired to help out as assistants, nothing more. But it's all a bit of a cultural logjam, eh?]

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

GSW has talked about super-handy Xbox 360 achievement-related site Achieve360Points.com before, but we wandered over there today and noted that they've added a complete list of Xbox 360 Marketplace content per game in one place - extremely handy!

As the creators point out: "Ever hear about new content hitting the Marketplace but you aren't anywhere near your Xbox 360?" Problem solved! Now you can also marvel at some overall stats (which aren't _quite_ right, because of some overlap between items being classified in different places) as follows:

"Xbox Live Arcade: 56 downloads costing 13,980 Microsoft Points (U.S. $174.75)... Xbox 360 Games: 654 downloads costing 54,030 Microsoft Points (U.S. $675.38)... Everything Else: 223 downloads costing 3,780 Microsoft Points (U.S. $47.25)... In total, there are 933 downloads available on the Xbox Live Marketplace."

Another fun thing just posted are the achievements thus far for Rockstar Table Tennis, a much-awaited X360 game due out soon, since the rankings/icons are actually much wittier than your average game ranking choices - well, perhaps 'wittier' is the wrong word, but achievements include 'The Creampuff', 'The Noob', and even 'The G.O.A.T. - Achieve the highest TrueSkill rating possible in any Ranked online game mode.' Wait, did Jeff Minter work on the game?

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oo Okuki is a rather odd forthcoming Japanese console game from Global A Entertainment, a company which makes historical simulations, generally. Oo Okuki translates to Chronicle of Shogun's Harem, and is available for PS2. It's essentially a game about court intrigue, backstabbing and cattiness, from the perspective of a woman in the shogun's harem.

Within this unique-sounding adventure game you have to maintain good relationships with your other harem women, and beat your rivals, to become the harem's top woman. The game uses S-Force middleware for 3D sound, so you know when someone's approaching, if you're snooping in their room.

It's got a unique art style for the illustration, which is what originally drew me to the game. More of Global A's recent games do, actually, such as Edomono, and their recent Taito-published PSP titles . And, well...they did co-publish the new Choaniki.

As far as I know (I can't find the CERO rating - perhaps because the game's not yet released), Oo Okuki is not rated 18+ or anything, which makes one wonder how they'd get around that in a game about a harem. But hey, they bill it as a "trickery simulation" game. Can you beat that, really? It's coming out on July 13, according to Play Asia, where you can also pre order it. Beware though, this game will require extremely solid knowledge of Japanese. [X-post from IC.]

Posted by bsheffield at 5:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We must admit that we're not entirely up on the craziness that is massively complex, massively scheming PC MMO space sim EVE Online - though for those wanting to get a primer, the Wikipedia page and Jim Rossignol's PC Gamer UK article on the game [PDF link] are a great place to start.

Anyhow, via Nelson's linkblog, it appears that the Eve Intergalactic Bank has been formed by in-game players, and it provides a range of bank accounts for your hard-earned EVE Online dollars - even a 'high interest savings account' with a minimum deposit of 1,000,000,000 ISK. And personal in-game insurance! ("Gives the client cover for the loss of skill points and implants due to pod killing, or money due to ransoming.")

There's even a radio ad for EVE Online podcasts [.MP3] - complete with stirring classical music and requisite cool female voiceover, and other services the bank provides include a well-received share brokering service for in-game companies who go public. There's lots more info on the FAQ page - and the mind boggles.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

["I often import games from abroad and play them. On such occasions, my imagination is sometimes stimulated more as I don't understand the language.” – Fumito Ueda, creator of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. 'The Gaijin Restoration' is a weekly examination of underappreciated Eastern games that never cross to Western shores. This week's title is Tomato's wordimagesoundplay from Sony Music. It was released in 2005 for the PlayStation2 in Japan.]

Perspective/Tunnel Vision

In 1965, a man (who had dabbled in lingerie and had once cut off John Cage's tie in a music recital) shot the Pope. On video. With a new Sony Porta Pack, which legend tells he simply procured from a dock somewhere. That night he showed his saturated video and video art was born; video art was for the people. That man was Nam June Paik, who recently passed away this year, but leaving a legacy of video art that has transcended past the ruddy halls of public access and pushed through into the realms of interactivity, and thusly, video games.

Tomato's wordimagesoundplay is an odd little beast. A PlayStation 2 disc, it was actually published by Sony Music, not SCEI/J, the likely suspects. It was also given a stealth launch worthy of the Saturn and has had a mysterious, small, trickling release, with an estimated print run equal to the feeding of the 5,000. Despite being a Japanese release, the game has an undeniably British twang, since the full motion video clips and the music is supploed by Underworld, who actually founded the Tomato group, a collective of sort that seems to focus on art and design, with nothing to show for the culinary arts, despite their moniker. With this little 2D metallic doughnut's odd origins out in the open, let's step into this art project.

Semicolon/Breath

Their are four distinct modes, all with haute-couture names: Miracles and Wonders, Latlong, Phonology and Sleeping Eye. Respectively: a 3D space filled with a meandering narrator pludging (plowing while
somehow being sludge-like!) through the 3D Text; a story of London and Tokyo, shared on a screen, again with text, but now video sliding underneath keywords and the like, begging for a Found in Translation wisecrack, but generally enjoyable with a cinematic score; a human sequencer, where one choose from an octet of limeys who shout out catch phrases about fax machines or make awkward hand gestures with mouthy theramin sounds which you can then slightly manipulate and even save to your memory card; a 15 slider puzzle, with a twist, (but
still...) that unlocks linking mini-games (all tied together by some internal logic) that recall clay creatures and textual mazes reminiscent of the Atari 2600's Adventure (though dragons that look like ducks are still far more terrifying than the word snake.)

wordimagesoundplay has a lot of words, images and sound. Generous, heaping portions. Its the play that's in question. I love games and I love media art, but I find myself being overly conscious of lauding anything that combines these great two tastes into some delectable snack food. I'm a huge fan of Rez, whose work-in-progress name was Project K, a curt nod to Kandinsky, the synaesthesiac Russian painter. Toshio Iwai's Otocky and Electroplankton have a strong didactic urgency, something that I feel is an honest and earnest theme in the
budding art style. More importantly, all of those artworks acknowledge their ironic existence and allow the fact and feature of PLAY. Even Corey Arcangel's Super Mario Clouds acknowledges it in the most extreme of ways: by removing it. wordimagesoundplay is on the PlayStation 2 when it really could have all done in Flash (damnable, hateful, words, I know) and presented to the people there, instead of as a forced fetish boutique object.

Appropriate/Form

If the media is the medium is the message is the massage, then there needs to be a liquid feel for what is 'form appropriate.' This is clearly an art piece, pressed and presented in obscurity that will blossom on eBay. At some point the game collectors, the Underworld fans and burgeoning upstarts that populate Dorkbot will try to grab hold of its meager, mod-chip supported, aura. Now, to cement myself in hypocrisy, if it was ever to come out on an artfully mastered DVD, I'd throw down. And as an equal disclaimer: I don't own wordimagesoundplay, it was a loaner.

[Ryan Stevens is the associate producer on the various Cinematech shows on G4TV, which showcases many of the games written about here. He's been known to do the collaborative blog thing at That's Plenty. Yes, he went to art school.]

Posted by ryans at 9:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, we at GSW rented Konami's M-rated Rumble Roses XX for the Xbox 360 from our friendly neighborhood GameFly service, and we were unsurprised to find a fair amount of skin on view. The female-only wrestling title actually got fair marks for gameplay, but if even GameSpot notes that "the game's sense of sexuality is still rather unseemly", you know that there's plenty of weird CG jiggling going on.

But (and this is the reason for the upcoming jump), the Xbox Live-compatible Photo Mode in Rumble Roses XX for X360 was what really blew our mind - basically, you can buy costumes, customize characters and settings, and take pictures of them, then upload the pics to Xbox Live so everybody else can see them.

Japanese titles like Megumi: Virtual View and the ultra-NSFW Sexy Beach 2 obviously play up this voyeuristic photo angle with CG divas, but Rumble Roses is out in the States, too, and people on both sides of the Pacific are taking full advantage of the wide-ranging variables to pose the Rumble Roses girls in some very eye-opening poses. After the jump, we picked the three that made us splutter the most... does Microsoft know how close to the edge some of this material is?

[Though we do note that Rumble Roses XX is clearly an M-rated title - dumb 'scandal' is not the point here, just an arched eyebrow at Konami's taste... anyway, onwards, and we repeat - NSFW, NSFW, NSFW.]

Coming it at #3 on our 'we can download WHAT from Xbox Live?!' list is Mizyu's tasteful picture of one of the RR girls in a New York-type environment, complete with what looks like two small pieces of string as underwear. She's looking pensive - or possibly, just cold.

Mizyu's Xbox Live gamer info reveals that he's Japanese, and largely plays Dead Or Alive 4 and Rumble Roses XX - though he has got 4 achievements in Marble Blast Ultra! [All these pictures were taken by pointing a camera at a TV, incidentally, so apologies for the lack of quality.]

Straight in at #2 on the bogglemeter is Katsu555, with this classy pose of two girls, one of which seems to be inspecting the other's bosom area with some significant interest.

Most of the poses of couples in the Rumble Roses XX Photo Mode archives seem to be more tasteful (OK, _marginally_ more tasteful) modeling-style poses, as opposed to this action shot. Katsu555 is also Japanese, but all we know about him is that his Gamerscore is 445.

And the runaway winner is from Tiurin (also Japanese - but we're not trying to condemn a nation, they just seem to be the most skilled at taking the really suspect photos!), and evidently a fan of Ninety-Nine Nights and FFXI as well as Rumble Roses.

Although the picture as taken from the TV is a bit washed out, it looks similar when viewed directly - Tiurin's managed to get the lighting so washed out in the picture that any underclothes being worn effectively can't be seen. And that, my friends, is what happens when Konami gives gamers the ability to manipulate anything based on some pretty suspect character models and costumes to start with.

To conclude - Rumble Roses XX really is pretty terrible from a misogynistic point of view - but the entire game is sleazetastic, so there's no reason to be surprised? We still were, though - so you guys might be, too. Now, time to scrub ourselves clean, and back to playing Uno.

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

When we were checking out U.S. portable gaming site Modojo for its recent 'best of E3' coverage, we also discovered a series of handheld console retrospective features.

So far, these number the NEC Turbo Express ("the proverbial king of kings, a high class machine capable of amazing visuals"), and the Sega Game Gear ("essentially a portable Master System with a "high resolution" backlit screen... a cool little unit that had plenty of potential.")

Not having had a Game Gear, we found the game recommendation round-up for it, complete with video of a couple of the titles, particularly helpful - even down to the 'no Star Wars games on the Genesis' tragedy revisited ("Ok, so the Genesis loses out on Star Wars games while the Game Gear gets a watered down port of SNES Super Return of the Jedi!?!")

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Casual game powerhouse Jay Is Games has latched onto the fact that there's a new time-based point-and-click puzzle game from On, the creator of cult Flash game site Eyezmaze, from where the Grow series of games emanated.

The new game is really a clever enhancement o the oddly compelling Grow series, and Jay explains: "The time-based puzzle takes place in the dwelling of a creature that leaves early in the morning and returns in the evening. The object of the game is to move the correct items at their respective times throughout the day to complete the story."

Go ahead - try to score top marks (100/100!) by: "Click[ing] on items to act upon them, if possible, and change the time of day by clicking on the time buttons along the top of the game window." Also, commenter Jacob notes intelligently: "Its called Cronon cause Kronos is the Greek god of time, and the game has to do with time!"

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['My Perfect Game' is a new irregular feature, where we ask 'interesting people' what their perfect video game would be like. This third instalment is from IGDA's Independent Games SIG co-ordinator Michael Lubker, and deals with his particular obsession - strategy games.]

My perfect *strategy* game would be more about characters and influence. What training your character (leader) has would affect what types of units in a city would be attracted to you and come under your control. Fighting monsters would impress city leaders and attract them to you, or you could send in assassins or gossips and undermine a city's leadership. Don't always start out as an empire leader, but maybe a small town, and influence others (through battles, charisma gained by training and influencing certain groups of people, or all-over charisma by defending towns), diplomacy (influenced by charisma), economics, or covert ops) until you lead a large group. Also, control is important, I'm very much looking forward to strategy games on the Wii.

Resources - I have to say resources are important, and I actually like collection and using economies. I do think it would be interesting to have one or more characters that you actually control as in the above example, so you might zoom out to standard RTS mode and build some buildings (like for example a smithy) and then zoom in, select your character, and have him get training from that smith, thus upgrading his stats for armor and weapons, or buy a weapon from the smith (which comes from your overall resource stock). I'd like to see more economics and not so many RTT's.

Research - technology trees are great, but I'd like to see more connected units such as groups of researcher characters working together. It would be interesting to have scientist "hero" characters that each can learn things from mentors (who live in buildings built in RTS mode) and create new innovations. Each scientist could have his own tech tree which can cross pollinate with others' training and innovations, thus giving you a much wider range of technology. Lego-style creation, as in Alpha Centauri, Impossible Creatures, and Spore, is a great thing to have as well.

Diplomacy - I would like to see much more diplomacy in AI. I know that is a challenge, but an important one. I would like to see more trading abilities as well as effects based on influence and covert operations.

Mounts and Vehicles - I'd like to see mounts and vehicles need riders/pilots, not come with them.

Training and Building - I'd like to see units need training, start out as a worker, then be mentored by various people who live in the buildings you build. And you can zoom in and take control of any character and build him up into a new leader, start a civil war, and install a new character in the palace. Characters should also be customizable (clothing, personality, etc) and saveable, and persistant.

Building should be handled better, with people actually becoming "part of" the building and working there. Also it would be interesting to have people take shelter during rain. Strategy games should also have the option to build roads between buildings ala SimCity (and have pathfinding use the roads you build). It would also add a lot to strategy games to have disasters as in SimCity.

Multiplayer: I like the trend toward multiplayer campaigns and persistant systems. But I would really like it if you could build up and customize characters which you can import into battles. Say, you have your Super Scientist who has all these neat inventions, which you can then use in your next game, and your ally has another, and they cross-pollinate their ideas...

The 'Massively Singleplayer' game idea in Spore is also interesting, as it could be applied to other strategy games too... for example, imagine Rise of Nations' campaign with it averaging out everyone's mileage (not including your country, yours is affected by you) so that you see other countries' territories changing based on real stats from other players' campaigns.

[If you think you fit our random arbitrary definition of an 'interesting person' and would like to contribute, please mail us at editors@gamesetwatch.com to check (IMPORTANT - email address is now fixed, sorry if you tried before and it bounced!), and you can write about your perfect game, too. Otherwise - don't call us, we'll call you!]

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Currently on display at Parsons School Of Design in New York is a mod of Wolfestein 3D called WolfenGitmo by Evan Harper, and, as the War & Games blog notes: "In the game, you're a prisoner who wanders through a dungeon populated by attack dogs, American soldiers, and portraits of W. Since your hands are bound, you can't fight back." Controversy, anyone?

Harper's blog notes: "I've had some comments about this being in poor taste/political, and I hope that people can see it as an investigation into how games can comment on more serious topics", and Ed Halter's comments on the War & Games blog are also insightful: "The pop origin of the Wolfengitmo mod is itself meaningful: the Americans play roles previously held by Nazis."

Interestingly, it looks like this mod was created as part of Cory Arcangel's 'Disassembly: the Art of Hacking' course at Parsons - Arcangel being a veteran hacker/modder and a bit of an artworld darling, who does fun stuff like the Super Mario Clouds hack. [Via BB.]

(Oh, and before researching this post, we didn't know about Halter's new book From Sun Tzu to Xbox: War and Video Games, " a definitive history of the longstanding relationship between games and military culture, from wargaming's roots in ancient civilizations, to the Cold War development of computing for battle, to a recent crop of Pentagon-funded shoot-'em-ups, big-budget commercial titles and homemade hacks." Sounds interesting.)

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Someone else we know who's agreeably cantankerous, Matt 'Fort90' Hawkins, has posted an extremely long 'expose' of the GameLife online video show's 'depraved' past - we've previously covered a lot of the reaction to this 'Wayne's World'-style show on GSW.

Well, that's a lie - we haven't covered the recent 'insanity', which started up somewhere around a tip to UK Resistance about fake snuff-ish pictures posed by female host Melissa, and then... ack, this is all so LJDrama that we can hardly bring ourselves to write about it.

Anyhow, there was some alleged (and pretty weaksauce) scandal, as described by Matt (with additional vague conspiracy theories about Chobot-style power grabs), and now Melissa and friends have posted 'E3 True Hollywood Story: Gamelife Melissa', which makes the excellent point that - uhm, they can do pastiches of E! True Hollywood Story with a reasonable degree of accuracy? OK, we give up, we're never going to be Defamer - time to go back to talking about text adventures.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Though it's a little bit after E3, the award-related shenanigans are still in full effect, but we thought we'd point out an area that got a bit ignored in the next-gen hype - handhelds. Both US portagaming site Modojo (with a full set of E3 2006 awards) and similarly styled UK site Pocket Gamer (with a multiple-article 'best titles' E3 round-up) have recently posted their impressions, and there's some neat stuff there.

At Modojo, a notable 'mobile game of the show' winner was Lumines Mobile, which, it was suggested, may even be better than Lumines 2 for PSP: "...surprising new features and solid design of Gameloft's version for mobile phones really came out of nowhere and brightened my day. Three block colors in a single level, special blocks, and new block shapes do a lot to further the Lumines experience."

Over at Pocket Gamer, their best of PSP list puts a title we also adore listed first: "Compared to the frantic energy of most other PSP titles on show, coming to LocoRoco is something of a shock to the system and things feel disappointingly cumbersome... Give it a minute or two and your senses adapt – you're soon entranced by the hypnotic music and locked in a beautifully vibrant world as far away from racing cars, combo-crazed fighters and special forces operatives as you're currently likely to find."

[Also, it's not entirely portable, but since Chris Kohler has given Elite Beat Agents his overall Game Of The Show award over at the 2006 Game|Life E3 Awards, he gets a shout out too. And he's right!]

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

This won't go up until Saturday, but I'm actually writing this column on Wednesday, because I'm flying to San Francisco over the weekend. I deftly scheduled this the week after E3 because I wanted to get massively drunk and party hardy with all my game-industry friends while they're still in that post-E3 "God, I don't want to do actual work yet" phase. In fact, the party will likely begin before I arrive -- it'll begin at George Bush International, where I'll take my hefty GameSetWatch paycheck and spend it all on longnecks at the Fox Sports Grill so I'm suitably sedated for the three-hour flight.

And speaking of senseless debauchery and complete wastes of money, I'd like to talk to you this week about the incite magazines.

incite is the name of several video-game magazines published worldwide simultaneously by Computec Media in 1999. Computec, established 1989 in the German city of Nuremburg, was (and still is) the largest game-media publisher in the country -- its current game titles, including PC Games, PC Action, Xbox-Zone, and German-language editions of Edge and Computer and Video Games, have a combined guaranteed circulation of over a million copies.

In late 1998, Computec -- gifted with millions in dot-com-era investment money -- decided to aggressively pursue the American marketplace. The full-court press it launched on the industry in the ensuing year was like none seen before or since.

Computec USA head Torsten Opperman began by investing $100,000 in a market survey of American gamers. The survey, which was one of the first to look at the PlayStation-era game marketplace, confirmed the now-common knowledge that over 80 percent of male gamers were between 16 and 34 years old. "We also found that 86 percent of people who play games had never read any hard-core gaming magazines because they didn't think they were written for them," Opperman told PR News magazine in 2000.

With this knowlege in hand, Opperman and crew began to put together two magazines that were at once hardcore and accessible to the general public. A $12 million ad campaign was prepared to launch alongside the magazines on TV, in print, and on outdoor media like billboards and kiosks. Nearly all of the editorial staff was hired on from rival game magazines, including Gamers' Republic, PC Games, Computer Game Review, Ultra Game Players, and more -- a titanic round of headhunting, the likes of which wouldn't be seen again until Gamers.com hooked a fair bit of Ziff Davis Media's top brass with its dot-com promises. (The name "incite" is a combination of the words "inside" and "excitement"; it was invented by SBG (now called Enterprise IG), a brand agency that Computec worked with before the magazines' launch. One of the early names reportedly thrown around was "Dorsal".)

To cap it all off, Computec held the Charge! event in July 1999, an industry conference meant both to discuss the study's findings and to launch the incite name to the general public. The publisher spent over $1 million on the conference, which included ice sculptures, comedian Dana Carvey, over 300 industry attendees, and coverage from CBS, Fox, and other national news outlets.

incite Video Gaming and PC Gaming hit US newsstands simultaneously on October 26, 1999. Both were priced at a loss (Video Gaming at 99 cents, and PC Gaming at $1.99 with CD-ROM) to get them in the hands of as many curious readers as possible. Computec's incite.com gaming website also launched on the same day, featuring a large staff and more video than had been seen before at the time.

The sales strategy was enormously successful at first. The first issue of PC Gaming sold 408,000 copies, while Video Gaming sales topped 548,000, making it the most successful game-magazine launch of all time. Reflecting their stated mission to attract casual gamers, both magazines heavily featured celebrities on the cover and in regular articles. Video Gaming seemed to love covering WWF stars, putting The Rock and Chris Jericho on two separate covers and featuring at least some wrestling content in every issue. PC Gaming, meanwhile, often struggled to find relevant stars, opting to put a random model on the cover instead on more than one occasion. (The joke at the time was that they would have to put Trent Reznor on every cover, since he was the only celebrity back then with a well-known interest in PC games.)

This initial success flared out quickly, as Computec failed to attract long-term advertising for either title. Despite the strong launch video-game companies were concerned that its audience was too casual to be interested in their games -- and non-game advertisers found the magazines' editorial slant to be too "hardcore" for their tastes. This was disastrous for Computec, which overestimated their projected ad-sales figures and subsequently relied heavily on advertising for incite's revenue. The ad rate for a spread (two adjacent pages) in the incite magazines was set at $16,000 per issue, the same rate that Maxim charged and one that was far above any other game magazine at the time. Management was anticipating each issue to be over 200 pages in size -- an extremely optimistic target even at the best of times, but downright impossible by mid-2000, when the game industry was about to enter the lull before the launch of the PlayStation 2.

The magazines proved to be a huge income drain as Computec struggled with the post-dot-com landscape, and Opperman was recalled to Germany on June 26, 2000, essentially shutting down the US arm. Total reported losses on the venture amounted to over $23 million.

The incite magazines didn't take off the way Computec hoped primarily because they were unable to target a specific audience. The titles were infamous for its intertwining of model- and celebrity-based interviews and features with its game coverage, something that neither the hardcore readership nor the magazine's staff was particularly enthuisastic about. Since the editorial was primarily picked from "hardcore" gaming magazines, they naturally preferred to offer hardcore gaming content -- but this butted against Computec's original aim to produce a magazine for gamers "threatened" by hardcore gaming magazines.

In retrospect, both incite magazines feature surprisingly entertaining writing, arguably the equal of Maxim and other "men's lifestyle" magazines. However, readers of all persuasions were turned off by its lack of focus, and the magazine wound up attracting no audience when it hoped to attract the entire audience.

IDG attempted a similar editorial design with GameStar in 2003...but that's another story.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He owns enough magazines to smother himself with should the need arise, and his secret fantasy is for someone flush with game-publisher stock options to give him a monthly stipend so he can spend a year researching their full history and finishing the site. In his "off" time he is an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 1:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Agreeably cantankerous virtual worlds blogger TonyW (who has now retired from active GSW service, incidentally - we'll miss him!) has been doing bizarre faux-Japanese horror things with the virtual 'Pussy Cat Dolls Lounge', a virtual environment "intended to market music and other products to teens."

Walsh, who is as cheeky as ever explains: "Modders can easily access and completely alter the graphic images that comprise the material surfaces in the world, including the sky, walls, billboards, and even the skin of user-created avatars... Given this level of freedom, I decided to mod the PCD Lounge into the sort of environment seen in the Silent Hill series of games, turning the Lounge's attendees--even the Pussy Cat Dolls themselves--into disfigured monsters. And, just for fun, I replaced all the billboards with images from Frank Fairey's Obey Giant campaign."

The results are certainly pretty scary, and Walsh notes: "If [developer] Doppleganger doesn't hide the source files in the final release of the PCD Lounge, it will be very simple for modders to create "nude" skins for the characters, as well as easily block all advertising." Of course, it's a whole load of hassle to mod stuff that most players won't go through, but in principle, it's absolutely correct. We like the Silent Hill version more than the original, though.

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's a well-known fact that any gaming system worth its weight in gold needs to have a version of NetHack, in which, as any fule kno, you "...take the part of a dungeon-delving hero in search of the Amulet of Yendor. The quest is played through over 50 randomly created levels." And it's ASCII all the way, baby.

Well, the latest portable machine to grab a NetHack conversion is the GP32, with GP32x.com noting the debut of NetHack 3.4.3.1 for GP32, from the same guy who made NetHack for the TapWave Zodiac, another even more seldom-seen handheld.

As the readme on the conversion's website explains: "The user interface for this GP32 port is based on my Palm OS roguelike ports, which in turn are based on the excellent Sony PSP Angband port by abszero and Gendal. There is a full on-screen-keyboard and macro "star" interface. The Stick can be used to select items from inventory/equipment lists or other menus as well as selecting quantities of items." Hot stuff!

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So we've been reading the 'Best Of E3' lists from the consumer sites with some interest - for example, 1UP.com's list tips its hat to a lot of the stuff we dug too, including Spore and Assassin's Creed. But we were kinda weirded out by GameDaily's press release for its E3 'Nods', which picked a multitude of games in a weird publisher-specific layout.

Most other people do 'Best X Game', but GameDaily's style this year is just to nominate multiple games for each publisher: for example, Sega has four nominations for Chrome Hounds (Xbox 360), Sonic Wild Fire (Wii), Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz (Wii), and Virtua Tennis 3 (Xbox 360/PS3), and even semi-shovelware firm Game Factory made it onto the list for, uhh, Noddy and the Magic Book (PS2).

Our disconcertedness is further underlined by the comment immediately before the 'Nod' winners: "GameDaily Nod awards ensure confidence in purchasing decisions as both retailers and consumers look forward to the busy holiday season. Publishers seeking marketing artwork and editorial quotes may contact Cory D. Lewis..." Seems like these awards were much more publisher-facing than reader-facing, for some odd reason?

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Posted by at 4:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Several ages ago, we referenced an interview with crazed Xbox 360 gamer ST TheKing, who had just broken 20,000 Gamerscore at that point in time. Well, we can now see his current progress on the awesome 360Voice.com blogs, and he's up to 35,428!

But the point of this wasn't the score, actually - it's the awesome blog concept, which you can see by scanning the most popular blogs - here's Major Nelson's one, in which his Xbox 360 talks back in hilarious ways: "You would think I had died and gone to heaven when Major Nelson showed up to play. Gamer score stands at 3437. He played UNO gaining 1 achievement, Marble Blast Ultra, and did it while drooling over my awesome graphics and sound."

A good summary of how it works was recently posted in the UK Guardian, noting that Microsoft outputs all of your play stats, and explaining: "Users are already finding ways to repurpose and even humanise this Xbox 360 XML stream. Two internet professionals from Chicago set up 360voice.com, allowing Xbox owners to enter their gamertag... and then view a daily blog, "written" by their machine. The blog doesn't just list what you played and when; the creators have built in dozens of phrases, so the resulting blogs read like they've been created by sentient humans."

[Mind you, I don't want to start one, actually, because my X360 will come off all needy and I'll start to empathize with it, and then we'll start fighting and have to get a trial separation.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[This first ever 'Game Rag Slapdown' column begins a regular, exclusive bi-weekly Thursday feature by The Game Rag's Nathan Smart that's always video game related, sometimes funny ha ha, but mostly funny hee hee (and sometimes funny, period). This week's column is a guide from a beginner on the dos and don'ts of E3.]

E3 2006 was my first E3. Somehow, I got myself a pass by charading as a 'Game Journalist.' What does that title even mean - that I journal games? Whatever. I got in and that's all that matters.*

When I first got to E3 I didn't really have any guide as to what to do and what not to do. What kinds of things were 'kosher' and what kinds of things were like 'eating pork.' I ended up making a LOT of mistakes and so I decided that for you, the reader (and I use that term loosely, you illiterates), I would make a list of things that would be good to know for when you get to go to E3. The problem is, I can't remember any of the things I wrote down because I left my notebook in LA. SO! You're going to have to make due with this impromptu list I just made up on the spot. This should cover mostly everything you'll need to know but if you want more, you'll have to ask Juanita at the Alhambra Super 8 for a peak inside my lost, treasured notebook.

DO take your shoes to a cobbler if you've got a hole in them.
DON'T if you don't live in 18th century Britain. Just get new ones.

DO make a controller respond to your movements.
DON'T do it if you've just spent an entire year making fun of it. Hypocrisy has a tiny Wikipedia entry.

DO play Guitar Hero 2.
DON'T play on expert even if you've almost beat Bark at the Moon on the first one. You're not as good as you think.

DO see the Wild Summer game booth for a cool new GTA style 'hanging out' game.
DON'T ask the booth babe if her boobs are real. She doesn't think it's cute, suited guy.

DO see the Classic Gaming Museum in Kentia Hall.
DON'T tell the guy standing there that someone left the Virtual Boy on and ran out the batteries. He doesn't work there.

DO a good drama about smart kids in Boston.
DON'T do a stupid family comedy about a road trip in an RV. Especially if the movie is named after the plot device.

DO play Xbox Live Arcade games on the Xbox 360.
DON'T play Xbox 360 games on the Xbox 360. No point.

DO talk with SimonC from GameSetWatch.
DON'T make a joke about the Queen of England in front of him. Oh God.

And that's all I remember. I hope you can use this guide when you go and I hope it's not too specific to me. I don't think it is.**

*There are other things that matter in life such as food, water, shelter and a steady supply of Vicks Vapor Rub, but in this case, for the purposes of this article, getting a pass to E3 is all that matters.
**I do. Who cares.

P.S. Here's a pre-E3 video made by the Game Rag staff, LIVE! from LA, in which: "The Game Rag staff and one lucky winner record an audio podcast live from E3 just a couple of days before the show." Enjoy.

[Nathan Smart is a fake news writer for The Game Rag and really enjoys the benefits of it (no facts, no research, no real interviews). He also does Bobby McFerrin versions of indie rock songs with his one man group Indie Blockedappella. He thinks things are funny.]

Posted by nathansmart at 9:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The always fun The-Inbetween.com has decided to post about the epidemic of in-game crabs shown at last weeks' E3 Expo - apparently, crab-like creature are vital to the next generation.

Clearly semi-seguing off the crab in the 'Sony Press Conf In 1 Minute' video, revealed in techicolor are "...all the crabs that I've noticed in screengrabs or released screenshots. Some of these might be a little loose in the definition of "crab", but they're all very much crab-like aliens or mutants or crab-robots."

But really, the crab from PS3 title Genji 2 (showcased in the Sony press video!) still wins every time, because, as is pointed out: "Once the giant crab creature showed its face in this historic game with real battles from history, there was no saving Sony's showing."

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Yesterday we got a real. honest to God snail-mail flyer (yay for paper!) for California Extreme, hands-down the best classic arcade game show on the planet, and due to take place on July 8-9, 2006 in the Parkside Hall in San Jose, California - right next to where GDC was held this year, if that helps orient you.

Apart from the fact it's about 300 yards away from my house, California Extreme rocks because of the insanely large amount of rare games that collectors haul out of hiding specifically for the show. For example, this is almost certainly the only place in the world you can play Marble Madness II: Marble Man this year - same for the mindblowing, double playfield Akka Arrh, a prototype-only 1982 Atari machine.

Last year, GSW co-editors Simon, Frank, and Brandon all made a pilgrimage to the show (there's plenty of old picture galleries online to give you an idea), and my own personal favorite was Atari's Quantum, an awesome trackball title that got pretty limited distribution back on its 1982 release - only 500 machines ever made, I seem to recall.

The other two wacky guys got waaay into Fire Truck, a dual-player 1978 Atari title where "the front player sits and drives the rig while the rear player stands and steers the trailer." Awesome. [Oh, and CAExtreme has got an absolute crapload of awesome pinball machines, too, for the pinheads amongst us - we have a pinball column starting on GSW soon, incidentally - more info in due course!]

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The excellent ARGN blog has more news on the New York-based public gaming event to be held this September, and named 'Come Out & Play Festival', noting happily: "Does playing on a computer cramp your style? Feel restricted by that Monopoly board? Or maybe you're a Puppetmaster who wants to do more than the usual email and websites with your next ARG."

Though not strictly video game-based, the new festival obviously has a sorta ARG crossover, and apparently "seeks to provide a forum for new types of public games and play", and "will feature games from the creators of I love bees, PacManhattan, Conqwest, Big Urban Game and more." Yay, PacManhattan!

Among the festival's organizers is Nick Fortugno of gameLab, we note, and you can submit your game right now - we're looking forward to the theoretical prospect of the Nintendo Amusement Park guys making an open-air appearance, in our dreams.

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['My Perfect Game' is a new irregular feature, where we ask 'interesting people' what their perfect video game would be like. This second instalment is from Ernest Adams, the veteran game designer and lecturer who runs popular game design workshops, consults for companies like Ubisoft and THQ on game-related matters, and writes The Designer's Notebook column for sister site Gamasutra. He also has great hats.]

My perfect game includes no villainous thugs nor evil overlords; it takes place in no dungeons or decaying urban landscapes. To defeat an evil overlord was the adolescent fantasy of a generation ago; to be a villainous thug appears to be the adolescent fantasy of today. I am not an adolescent and my needs for fantasy have changed.

My perfect game is a garden of earthly delights, not a den of brutality and pain. My perfect game contains no snarling semi-naked vixens dressed in skintight leather, wielding breasts and weapons of improbable dimensions. My perfect game contains instead fully naked dryads who peep at me shyly from behind the trees that are their homes, and, when I have successfully lured them out, come to sit with me upon the grass and read me verses from Shelley in voices that resound gently like silver bells.

My perfect game is a ramble through the woods in autumn, a wander over hilltops lit by shafts of sunlight piercing through the gathering storm. Ruinous stone circles rise from the earth and whisper ancient magic to me, and men in cloaks and sandals with eyes the color of the sea tell me tales of hunting the walrus on the shores of Ultima Thule. We play games of kubb and hnefatafl on the beach in the gathering dark as the fires of driftwood glow, and we drink the aqua vitae made by the monks of Lindisfarne.

Then the stars burn brighter and I unfold my wings and sweep aloft, sailing among the canyons of the skies and looking down upon the twinkling lights of the cities of men, whirling and diving and rejoicing in the chill night air. South I glide to descend and play senet with young Tutankhamun and mancala with Shaka Zulu. I visit Solomon and dispute philosophy with him for a laugh, but in my perfect game I prove to be wiser than he and he gives me gifts of spices and cloth-of-gold. I load them all upon my robo-camel, fire up the steam engine, and together we trek with a clank and a clatter across the Euphrates and into Persia. And in my perfect game I risk all the spices and cloth-of-gold on a single game of shatranj with a magician in the court of Darius the Great (he must be taught the rules, for shatranj will not be invented for another thousand years). But I win and to pay his bet the magician must bring my robo-camel to life and set her free.

And so laughing I steal one of Darius' horses from the royal stables, and ride like the wind to Samarkand, where we learn to play polo together and I trade Solomon's spices for a palace with a thousand fountains and a personal spacecraft that requires no fuel. And from time to time I invite Kubla Khan for coffee and petits-fours and a game of go. We have a good laugh at the expense of that junkie Coleridge, but later I realize how much I owe to him, because he has made it all possible -- all of it, the walruses and the spices and the spacecraft too, that romantic junkie poet: he invented the willing suspension of disbelief.

My perfect game is filled with mystery and wonder, not sweat and struggle. My perfect game is easy. My perfect game is beautiful. My perfect game is joyous.

[If you think you fit our random arbitrary definition of an 'interesting person' and would like to contribute, please mail us at editors@gamesetwatch.com to check, and you can write about your perfect game, too. Otherwise - don't call us, we'll call you!]

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

The ace virtual world blog 3PointD has revealed that residents of Second Life can soon be able to order up physical versions of their avatars, or any of their favorite Second Life objects,

According to the story: "Simon Spartalian (aka Simon Jezebel in SL) and Mike Beradino (a recent graduate of the Art Institute) will launch the service on June 1, offering to mill SL objects up to 9″X 5″X 5″ out of anything from foam to wax to stainless steel. The pair are already documenting their milling efforts at their Recursive Instruments blog."

We remember we were super-excited about these 3D milling machines at SIGGRAPH last year, mainly because we pretended they were affordable - and we'll still have to pretend, unfortunately, since it's noted: "A cost model has yet to be determined, Spartalian tells me, but it sounds like a typical avatar, milled in foam or wax, would run something between $30 and $60."

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over at PressTheButtons, MattG has spotted a teeth-grindingly weird unofficial Nintendo theme park concept, in the form of Nintendo Amusement Park, "...a real life obstacle course which a player jumps through using a power assist harness."

As Matt says, delightedly: "Who wants to be the first to slap on a special bungee cord and go leaping through the fantastic Mushroom Kingdom (if the Mushroom Kingdom were made of tarps, balloons, boxes, and deflatable Goombas)?"

But the creators, clearly geniuses, have a scalable plan - that's right, it's $35 million for the 'Magic Winch', and they also reveal: "Our ideal partnership would be a collaboration with Nintendo and Disney Imagineering to develop an entirely new experience."

Don't know about you, but I really think that Disney should have reconsidered the Pixar thing in favor of these guys - though one does wonder if the pitch is an elaborate art-world hoax.

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The new Sam & Max title from Telltale Games and original S&M creator Steve Purcell has been known about for some time, but by heck, there's a new E3 trailer on the official site to help promote the game's signing by our friends at GameTap, and it's as sassy as you'd come to expect from the pair, hurray!

Also, we totally hadn't spotted the 'Make Your Own Sam 'N Max Comic' page, in which "you can give everyone's favorite canine shamus and hyperkinetic rabbity-thing the power of speech from the comfort of your own home or office." Please, no swearing!

Finally, those totally gorgeous Sam & Max art prints we spotted on Steve Purcell's Spudvision page a few months ago have returned in the merchandise section of the site - and they're signed by Purcell, too, so grab 'em before some other SCUMM-y freaks do.

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In the wild, wide-eyed world of mobile gaming, and of special importance to UK gamers, mobile firm Player X has announced that it "has been signed up by Hornby to publish exclusive mobile Scalextric games."

Much-loved by callow UK youths, Scalextric is "a slot car racing brand that first appeared in the late 1950s", and "Scalextric for mobile is a classic top-down racing game with a unique track editor featuring five different racing car models."

Though we don't generally like companies that call themselves 'ambitious' in their own press release, we do agree with the final quote from Tony Pearce, Player X CEO: "The best mobile games have one-button gameplay and that's exactly how you play Scalextric."

[It's all about one-button games on mobile, which is why we're so enchanted with Gamevil's awesome one-buttoner Nom 2, which we've been playing recently on a Korean cellphone they kindly lent us - we're looking forward to Gamevil's alleged U.S. debut, too.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We actually ran into Matt Wegner, who runs physics blog Fun Motion, at E3 last week, but we did not push him over to see if he rag-dolled, because we're polite like that (oh, and we found our voice recorder, thanks for asking!) But, in a newsworthy turn of events, Fun Motion does have a new video-enabled review of Armadillo Run, a physics-based PC game.

The title, according to Wegner, is "...a build-and-simulate puzzle game in the same vein as Bridge Construction Set and The Incredible Machine", and essentially: "The goal of the game is to guide the armadillo—it’s basically a basketball—to the target area. To accomplish this you have a limited budget to spend on building materials like metal struts, cloth, rope, and rockets."

The positives are a slick interface (" Rather than forcing you to draw on a grid, you can simply draw supports wherever you like. The game will automatically segment pieces while you draw them"), and negatives sloppy goals ("The player goal in Armadillo Run is very loose, particularly in contrast to other physics-based puzzle games"), but overall, it's concluded, the title "...represents the evolution of puzzle physics games. It is both familiar and new, and offers something fresh for players bored with building bridge after bridge."

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Definitely lost in the melee that is E3, the folks at the tabloid-a-docious Noooz have spotted a preview of Lemmings for PlayStation 2 that reveals some fiendishly cool EyeToy support for the game.

The title was already announced for PSP (with Tim Follin music, natch!), but this preview explains: "The big feature that will differentiate the PS2 version is the EyeToy mode, in which you will use your body to help guide the lemmings, as opposed to the controller. There will be 15 to 20 EyeToy-specific levels in the finished game, and the game uses a new edge-detection technique to help with the precision needed in the game."

So yep, it's just as you thought in your head: "When you play the game and use your arms to build bridges, the lemmings walk along with great precision, and you can even flick them over obstacles if you're precise." We've loved Lemmings ever since DMA Design (yes, now Rockstar North, the Grand Theft Auto chaps!) birthed them back in 1991, and Noooz's post on the game has links to a couple of screenshots of Lemmings climbing all over kids, yay.

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

We've covered some of 3D Realms' fun 'The Apogee Legacy' series before, catching up with classic PC shareware types, and the latest talks to the notorious J-Ro, also known as John Romero, about his formative game creation years.

An amusing story, for starters, is Scott Miller's tactics to 'borrow' Romero from former publisher Softdisk: "Scott knew I worked at Softdisk and knew they filtered mail to make sure no one was trying to steal their programmers and artists. So he sent me about 4 letters in the mail, all of them pretending to be someone who played the game and wanted me to write them back for various reasons."

Another notable in the 'alternate history' department: "Paul Neurath asked me to join him as his first employee at Blue Sky Productions (later Looking Glass Technologies). I didn't take the offer because I had already planned on starting a company with my boss (Inside Out Software). If I had taken the offer at Blue Sky then an incredible amount of things would have been different. I'm glad I did what I did."

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thanks to online wargame publisher Battlefront.com and developer Hussar Games, there's a completely free release of PC title 1848, described as: "a turn based computer strategy game for the PC. The game [is] set during the violent era of the Hungarian Independence War of 1848-49."

In fact, this could practically be considered a 'serious game', since: "The game was sponsored by the Hungarian Ministry of Education and the hungarian version was released for the anniversary of 1848 in March 2005. It was a huge success in Hungary: in a country of 10 million people, the game had more then 100,000 downloads."

This is all a generous promotional deal to help promote For Liberty!, which is "a turn based computer strategy game for the PC, covering two independence wars – the North American Independence war of 1775-1783 and the Rakoczi War of Independence in Europe 1703-1711", using an upgraded engine from 1848 - it'll be released on July 4th in the U.S.!

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

You may not think of video game chess tournaments as a place for violence, but casual game firm King.com has revealed that former boxing world heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis will 'step into another kind of ring - the chess ring', playing online for cash prizes.

Lewis commented, somewhat amusingly: "Chess has been around for centuries. It improves your focus, reasoning skills and teaches you how to strategize. For me, playing chess takes the stress away, which is why I enjoyed playing when I was training. The sports are similar in that it's one on one, and in boxing, it helped me prepare a strategy to beat my opponent." Yes, we also can see how boxing and chess are similar (and yes, we know about chess boxing.)

Apparently: "King.com players will have the opportunity to challenge Lennox for free to a game in the online Chesster lobby: Any player who beats Lennox will win $1000, and receive a document certifying that they 'knocked out' Lennox." Time for Bobby Fischer to come out of Icelandic hiding, perhaps?

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

['Parallax Memories' is a regular weekly column by Matthew Williamson, profiling classic '16-bit' games from the Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, and other seminal '90s systems. This week's 'special edition' column takes a look at the Classic Gaming Expo's History of Video Games exhibit at last week's E3 Expo.]

While at E3 I was almost completely absent from the internet last week, but I still don't think there's been much coverage of the The History of Videogames "booth" in Kentia Hall. There were little displays all over the show floor—usually containing mini-arcade cabinets of Frogger, or old PC games in good condition boxes—but when I found the full exhibit, there was much more than I expected. Enjoying older games as I do I was happy to get the opportunity to take a break from the overwhelming amount of new ones.

Friday was the shortest day of E3, and I still had to conduct a few interviews and check out far too many booths . But I had to get a good look around the display. I had to spend more time there than was healthy; I was compelled. At what could only be the center of the labyrinth that is Kentia Hall, I gazed eagerly upon row after row of arcade cabinets ranging from Asteroids to R-Type.

At a first look, the arcade cabinets ranged from good to excellent condition, but upon closer inspection there were noticeable blemishes. The buttons were all original and so not always in the best shape. The monitors ranged from blurry and unwatchable to clean and burn-free. But overall, the cabinet artwork was in wonderful shape; the original painted side art was intact, as were all stickers and instruction cards.

There were more games than I can list here, and all were on free play. The games ranged from all eras of the arcade up to the early '90s. I could only take the time to play a few games of Tempest and Centipede (two games that are fairly difficult to in the arcade "wild").

Behind the rows of arcade cabinets there were hundreds of stacked boxes of handheld electronic and LCD games. They ranged from mini-arcade mock-up cabinets to obscure Japanese handhelds. It was stirring to see this massive collection laid out on the floor. I saw games from Japan that I never knew existed, including one based on Dr. Slump (a manga from Akira Toriyama of Dragon Quest and Dragon Ball fame) and a two player Hokotu No Ken game(released as Fist of the North Star in the United States).

Even further back in the exhibit, I found some rare and older videogame systems on display. The systems featured most often in this column (the Genesis and SNES) were represented, but they were only showing very common domestic games—nothing of real note. However, there were a couple Vectrex machines that were still in amazing shape for their age; it's always astounding to see those super-sharp vector monitors in action. And I grabbed the opportunity to play the Atari Jaguar's port of Raiden (which was, unfortunately, quite poor).

I skimmed parts of the display; there really was just too much to take in at once. Seeing a classic Apple II monochrome monitor really warmed my heart, and the Coleco Vision reminded me of long-past weekends with my uncle. As I headed back to “the future of gaming,” I spied Keith Robinson (co-founder of Intellivision) playing a skillful game of Jumpman Junior on a Commodore SX-64. With so much talk about moving ahead in games right now with the “HD era” upon us, it is comforting to know that some people are making note of the past.

[Matthew Williamson is the creator of The Gamer's Quarter, an independent videogame magazine focusing on first-person writing. His work has been featured on MTV.com, 1up.com, Chatterbox Radio, and the Fatpixels Radio Podcast.]

Posted by Matthew Williamson at 5:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

UK PC/game journalist Richard Cobbett has a sassy take on video game issues, and his latest journal update takes apart Ritual's SiN Episodes Vol.1, released last week during E3, with some aplomb.

You may recall that we marveled at Ritual's E3 booth 'attendants' outfits, and Cobbett claims that the plot is as thin as their costumes, noting of the Source engine, Steam-distributed game: "Characters stand around like lemons, idly watching as you massacre their workers and destroy their labs, only springing into action for their cut-scene. Elexis turns up every few minutes, gleefully talking about her plans for the main character one second, then trying to have him killed, then forgetting, then showing up again with a whole other idea...usually in holographic form, invariably with her breasts hanging out...and once again plotting generic evil with her collection of genetic mutations."

Cobbett's conclusion is cuttingly specific, if not completely damning: "Sin: Episodes is a bizarre game, really. The engine’s there, the production values are decent enough, there’s plenty of action, and you do get a solid chunk of game for your money... There’s nothing special about the action to keep you holding on for the next instalment; it’s nothing you wouldn’t get in just about any shooter you pulled off the shelves, and it’s sure as hell not one you follow for the story - a story which pretty much begins and ends with the artists getting to draw jiggling breasts, and the rest of the team playing dress-up with fetish models." Youch.

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Apologies for two bosom-related posts in a row - the devil made us do it, honest. Anyhow, IGN's bright spot, Anoop Gantayat (who has a very readable blog on the site, incidentally) has noted that Capcom are including a bikini packed-in to the Limited Edition of PSP title Finder Love, out this June in Japan.

Anoop explains: "Since we're sure only a handful of you keep up with the cutthroat world of live action Japanese love sims (this week's newsletter is coming soon, boys!), here's what Finder Love is all about. Finder Love is a combination gravure disk and love sim focusing on three hot Japanese girls: Hara Fumina, Hoshino Aki and Risa Kudo. The game lets players interact with the three hotties and snap pictures which can be then be traded with friends."

Impress Watch has pictures of the outfits in question, as well as the Limited Edition bikini outfits, which will clearly be never worn by a girl, since none of the people buying the game know any. IGN notes as a capper: "Capcom warns that the bikinis can't be actually worn. We'll have to see about that!" Please don't tell us how?

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You know that everyone and their mother is starting a video game weblog? Well, looks like MTV has now joined the family circus with the MTV Games Gamedrop weblog, which started just before E3, and _may_ have been just a one-time E3 deal, since it seems to have slowed down now.

So, not sure if it's a continuing thing, but the E3 posters on Gamedrop included Carrie Shepherd, late of PC Accelerator, GamesRadar.com (the old one!) and GMR magazine, and Greg Orlando, ex. Electronic Gaming Monthly, Next-Generation, Xbox Nation, and GameNow, plus Paul Byrnes, who's written for CGW, EGM, and various others.

In other words, a crowd that we wouldn't mind blogging more permanently - but we understand if it's just a special event deal. Still, add Gamedrop to a list of unknownish blogs by big companies that are worth checking out from time to time, and keep reading the main MTV News game news page for excellent Stephen Totilo articles like this one about Yukes' development of WWE SmackDown that was reported in Japan last month, but posted during E3.

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Scavenging around somewhere or others, we came across the Game Rave guide to the x360 Demo Disc, which is not for the Xbox 360, but rather a very rare demo disc for the 'x360' surround sound system for PlayStation 1, bizarrely enough.

As the description explains: "A very cool promotional item given away at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in 1998. It's really just two simple demos that demonstrate the sound capabilities of the PlayStation", including Maze Demo ("A First Person Shooter, you need to quickly run around and shoot the alien space ships as they appear. There's no real end, at least until you lose you tin-plated armor from shots fired. The emphasis in this demo is the explosion effects as it travels past you through sound.")

The Game Rave site also has a full PS1 box art variants listing, as well as an insane amount of interesting material in its PlayStation Perfect Guide, from which the x360 Demo update is taken - so go geek around, immediately!

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[" 'The Gaijin Restoration' is a weekly examination of underappreciated Eastern games that never cross to Western shores. This week's 'special edition' column looks at games, both Japanese and not, highlighted at last week's E3 Expo.]

E3 is over. Worked fourteen days in a row. 170 hours. Before this starts sounding like a LiveJournal with byte diarrhea, I’ll stop. But consider yourself warned. With no time to play games, and with Simon, the patron saint of obscura ludo, blogging the bejesus out of games ripe for this Gaijin, all I have to offer is my lateral thought patterns on the organized chaos that strikes three days each year.

As Simon mentioned, my good friends at the U.S. D3 (who just released a killer Cabbage Patch GBA game, featuring – get this – puppies!) shocked me on two fronts. First, the lovely Baito Hell is coming state side under the guise of WTF. I’m very interested on how the translation will be handled and how they’re going to price this sucker. Also, surprising but awesome was the resurrection of the 100 Bullets license - though for all-new games, not the cancelled Acclaim title. Smart moves like that coupled with the cash Naruto most be bringing in, I really peg this as a publisher to watch. Hopefully we’ll get a shovel-load-ware of Simple XXXX games in the States some day soon.

Speaking of ballsy U.S. publishers, I take my hat off and offer a low bow to Atlus - Rule of Rose is coming Stateside. Now, after Hot Coffee (and perhaps Michael Moore) nudging publishers like Atari to censure games like Fahrenheit, it takes some big cojones to bring out a game that’s constantly dressed in an odd mist of amateur pedophilia. Now, I’ve seen about six trailers for this game and the first few hours of gameplay, and while it’s by no means a child molestation simulator, that odd inkling of writhing preen limbs and fat girls going a little heavy on the lipstick does help lend a certain aura of creepiness that you can chalk up to cultural differences and perhaps natural perversion… still, it’s in the minutiae that the games atmosphere truly locks you in. Screw the cool AI dog companion, it’s all about using your weapons, like a FORK (Ultima VI joke here), in situations where your character puts one hand over her face and starts swinging blindly.

On the flip side, Final Fantasy III on the DS looks fantastic and will hopefully destroy Dirge of Cerberus, which is horrid and is only trying to dry hump the cash cow. FFIII was my first import, and you never forget your first. It’s also the only FF game I’ve ever completed, and while I can’t speak much of the overarching plot, the scenario writing is fantastic, with a job system that is lenient enough for exploration but obvious enough to keep you floating on that linear quest for crystals or whatever. Bonus: you can turn your party into frogs or tiny heroes. Like Yoda.

Slumming through Kentia Hall and the country-specific booths in the main halls led me to the cornucopia of cell phone games. I got to play Gamevil's Nom2, in its entire one button splendor: it’s the real deal. The GameQuest Direct guys seem to have republished the entire Shadow Hearts series for those who missed out on it the first time, and the definite rip-off artists Phoenix, complete with British accents, were trying to hawk 8 quid Disney-esque games like Mighty Mulan, Son of the Lion King and Countryside Bears. [We just noticed they have a game called 'Furry Tales', too - yeeeeeuch!] Barry Hatter was, sadly, MIA.

Speaking of Disney, Korean company Windysoft wins the Engrish 06 award for their press CD. Reading: “Windysoft: Disneyland of Online World! Compant (sic) that shares dreams with customers”, I found myself re-evaluating Korea’s standing in the games industry. But I leave you with a final game, also Korean. Diet Queen [we found a pic on the E3 2006 Korea site] from E3net is a cell phone game that promises you that slim body you always wanted via mini-games, jazzercise and aromatherapy. It also has a calorie calculator. This is perfect for that imaginary girlfriend you were trying to break up with. And now I sleep.

[Ryan Stevens is the associate producer on the various Cinematech shows on G4TV, which showcases many of the games written about here. He's been known to do the collaborative blog thing at That's Plenty.]

Posted by ryans at 1:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

You may recall an alt.publishers article a few weeks back which called out Variant Interactive, the outfit supposedly publishing much-loved PC dojin title Cave Story for PSP next year. Well, now the Little Mathletics site has interviewed Variant's CEO Christopher Boyer, who strikes back at the skeptics.

Boyer claims: "There are some fans who think we're trying to steal the game from Pixel, and thusly are going around to web forums and news sites claiming that we are "shady."... The thing is that some suspicious fans of the original game emailed Pixel using Babelfish to ask him about our adaptation, and when he said he didn't know what they were talking about, they went all "AHA!" on us."

This is all fair enough, but if Variant Interactive is a 'proper' publishing company, would they not sign a contract with Pixel and get concept approval from Sony for the game before 'announcing' it to the world? It's not immediately clear that they have done either of these things - they're certainly listing games like Speed for the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo DS on the site without having development kits for either, as far as I can ascertain.

We somewhat wish that Little Mathletics had given them a harder time, but if any of the Variant folks are reading and would like to riposte, that's what the comments are for...

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

['My Perfect Game' is a new irregular feature, where we ask 'interesting people' what their perfect video game would be like. The first instalment is from Jason Scott, who runs Textfiles.com, directed the BBS Documentary, and is currently working on both text adventure doc Get Lamp, and Arcade: The Documentary.]

"I'm luckier than most, I guess; I have already bumped into my perfect video game. I've done it multiple times, and with it likely to happen again. Maybe my standards are just low. But I think it's more that my perfect game isn't a specific DESIGN, but an APPROACH.

Coming up through the early video games (where you needed a whole quarter to play), I was more intrigued by the games where you could advance as you accomplished more, cascading into an ever-changing set of levels and sights until finally your faced an end against a horrifying creature and then broke through to a credit screen. Since my experiences could be measured in minutes, this was perfectly fine.

But once I started to play games where you entered greater and greater spaces, added 3-D, and played at home, this ever-changing set of unique levels lost the fun for me. You always ended up with a feeling, at the end, that you'd just walked a long distance, haphazardly, having nothing to show for it but a set of ticks on the right side of the screen, or some arbitrary number.

Maybe it was just me getting older, but I have found the perfect games for me are ones like Hexen, Super Mario 64, Mario Sunshine, Zelda: Wind Waker... games where you start out in a place, and over time you return to the same places, but changes have occured in you and your skillset and now you can achieve things that you couldn't before. Or the location has tweaked ever so slightly and you can make out new avenues to travel. Or maybe there's just a lot more cool stuff where there wasn't before.

If a game has that sense of regarding old locations and events with a new eye and using skills you've acquired within the game, that's as perfect as it gets for me."

[If you think you fit our random arbitrary definition of an 'interesting person' and would like to contribute, please mail us at editors@gamesetwatch.com to check, and you can write about your perfect game, too. Otherwise - don't call us, we'll call you!]

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Keeping the record of being just about the only site to link to the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer blog, we note an interesting new review for the Japan-only 3DO version of 'Wacky Races'.

But, first things first: "Wacky Races is not, I repeat, 'Not', a racing game. Shocked? Yes - me too. Wacky Races is split into two parts. One part is betting. The Second part is map and object finding." Oh, and: "Dick Dastardly speaks Japanese. Fluently. As does Penelope Pitstop. And the Ant Hill Mob."

Ultimately, it seems a little, well, iffy: "You bet on a race by selecting two cars from a selection of 10, they then race - such as it is. Each race is composed of a sequence of pre-rendered clips. These clips are not as good as the actual cartoon and while faithful to varying degrees it should be remembered that the cartoon was 2D and the game is rendered, 1990's style, in 3D. It suffers. Once you win a bet it's time to take a trip. Since the game is 90% Japanese language and 10% Japanglish the nature of the trip is somewhat, what can I say?"

[Though not great, Wacky Races for Dreamcast from Infogrames Sheffield is much better - but don't get the PS1 version, a different game entirely from Ecco creators Appoloosa, unless you like bleeding eyes.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

All through E3, the folks at our favorite 'all you can eat' subscription site GameTap were interviewing people for their live GameTap TV service, both offstage (yours truly!) and onstage by the mercurial Space Ghost (a whole heap of video game industry luminaries!). Well, the full vids are available on the GameTap client itself, but someone put a filmed version of the Space Ghost / Peter Moore video up on YouTube, and it's pretty much classic.

Among the highlights - Moore getting all vindicative against the PlayStation 3 after Space Ghost pitches some kind of dermatological-based shooter for the Xbox 360, rebutting the superhero with: "Go see the guys at Sony - they've got that funky controller - that sounds like a lot more creativity than they're doing there right now, let me tell you."

The clip ends with Moore dancing for a dollar, and really, that probably sums things up better than any extended E3 wrap-up, right? Hopefully Turner will officially release a bunch more of these, because George Lowe can be pretty darn funny on the fly when he gets going. [Via Evil Avatar.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at ARGN, they have an extremely handy overview of the Lost TV show's 'Alternative Reality Game', named 'The Lost Experience', for which there's actually an official 'making of' blog on ABC's website.

Actually, Lostpedia's 'The Lost Experience' entry is also an excellent synopsis of the concept, noting: "According to a New York Times article at news.com, the game will be "a multimedia treasure hunt that makes use of e-mail messages, phone calls, commercials, billboards and fake Web sites that are made to seem real." The Lost Experience is created by the show's actual writers and will progress the storyline."

ARGN is certainly digging the ARG, which is even using Hanso Foundation TV ads to communicate messages, summing up: "So far, the game has performed well, and updates to the Hanso site give players the sense that the game is something they should be watching every day. This is one Alternate Reality Game a lot of people have been waiting for, and it has opened the door to ARGs for an entirely new audience."

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at Dubious Quality, they've spotted a really smart thing - a PC utility which allows Guitar Hero practicing, using the Guitar Hero DVD-ROM placed in your PC.

Some of the features of the VGSPlayer? "The Speed control allows you to slow the song down to observe the fast/complex parts in detail. This is done using audio time-stretching, so the overall pitch of the song does not change with the speed... An Animated fret display shows the fret button presses for a given difficulty setting... Optionally, the software can hint early presses for upcoming notes."

Bill at Dubious Quality notes: "This program doesn't support the Guitar Hero controller--yet. You just play along unconnected, but it's still really helpful. However, controller support is listed as a possible future feature. Freaking amazing."

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

So how was your E3? Hectic, I bet, wasn't it? One of the advantages to working for a magazine whose primary subject isn't video games is that I don't feel obligated to attend the show any longer -- and there's no way in 'ell I'd attend it for fun, because it really isn't fun. There is nothing identifiably fun about having to elbow a 380-pound man wearing a T-shirt with "Orcs FTW" written on it in order to play Destroy All Humans 2 so you can write your 20th 600-word preview of the day for GameWanX or whatever site you're working for. The fun comes in getting drunk at parties for free and throwing people into the Figueroa Hotel's swimming pool. This is scientific fact and everyone knows it.

I would like to say that things were different back when E3 was held for the first time on May 11-13, 1995, but I'd be lyin'. Sure, the show was smaller -- accepting only about 50,000 GameStop employees instead of over 100,000 -- but the three-day cycle of noise, chicks, and sweating has swirled unabated for 11 years now. If anything the partying was particularly hardy in 1995, because the IDSA (called the ESA nowadays) had just been formed and the industry in general was so fed up with the Consumer Electronics Show that they all jumped for joy, literally, when IDG announced E3. (Fun fact: The CES was planning to hold a game-biz show of their own, CES Interactive, at the exact same time as the first E3. It was cancelled after the IDSA officially sanctioned E3 and companies ignored it en masse.)

Here are the three issues of the 1995 E3 Show Daily. (Inferior sites watermark their images. I dogamark mine.)

If you read the ESA's official E3 history, you may get the idea that they "held" the show for its entire history. This isn't quite true -- they just sanctioned it, and IDG (publisher of GamePro and organizer of such events as the Macworld Expo) actually set up the whole thing. This means that the Show Daily was written by the staff of GamePro and Electronic Entertainment, IDG's de-facto PC games magazine at the time.

IDG turned over show management to the IDSA for the 1999 show, and after that there was a conflict between the two outfits over money owed or something like that (I only heard snippets of the story). Therefore, IDG was never allowed to have a booth on the show floor, and therefore, when I worked at GamePro, I had to update our website from a suite in the Staples Center that we always had to give up on Day 2 because the Lakers would have a playoff game scheduled that evening. Ah, memories. Regardless, with that transition, publication of the Show Daily went to Imagine Media until 2001, when Ziff Davis Media picked up the rights. Future handled the paper this year, and they've got it until 2008. I haven't read their effort yet, and to be honest, I'm not sure how many people really read the Show Daily -- I have the impression most people grab it just so their swag bag has some kind of flat support, for ease of stacking crap on top of.

But what was walking the show floor really like in 1995? For a taste, let's refer to the floor plan as it was published in the 1995 E3 Show Daily:

The South Hall of the LA Convention Center, home to Microsoft, EA and a gaggle of third-parties these days, tends to play second fiddle to the West Hall in the minds of most E3 showgoers. Not so 11 years ago -- Sega, Sony, 3DO, Atari, and Philips (with their CDI console) all had booths here, making this venue the place to scope "the future" as it existed in 1995. In fact, Sega had the largest booth of the show (larger than any first-party's today), and they turned it into a Saturn madhouse, complete with nearly a dozen pro athletes pushing their sports lineup.

Acclaim's booth is the same size as EA's; they had the real-life Batmobile in the booth that year to push their terrifying Batman Forever games. SNK has an enormous booth on the left side for reasons I can't fathom. Bigger than Capcom, Namco and Konami, for Chrissakes. Meanwhile, there are tons of tiny little booths dotted everywhere (mostly PC publishers and hardware makers), a stark contrast to the more spread-out layout of today.

West Hall, as always, is dominated by Nintendo. However, 1995 didn't feature a particularly robust showing from Nintendo -- the Ultra 64 had just been delayed a year, there was no conference, NOA chairman Howard Lincoln spent his keynote address whining about SNES software piracy, and the booth's twin highlights were Killer Instinct and the Virtual Boy. It was arguably a lamer showing than even 2003, when their top attraction was Pac-Man and...erm, that's about it, actually. (Good thing Reggie Fils-Aime was forged in NOA's laboratories in time for their big comeback in '04.)

Big booths from companies that don't exist anymore include Ocean, Gametek, American Softworks, Jaleco, and Berkeley Systems (this is when they were swimming in You Don't Know Jack cash). Biggest of all is the infamous Playmates Interactive, who had their top asset stolen from them when Interplay announced the purchase of Shiny Entertainment just before E3 started.

Booth 4124 is occupied by Abco Distributors, who bought up a great big chunk of space to advertise their hot new title: Cooking with Dom DeLuise, a 2-disc CD-ROM cooking reference. If you thought Eidos holding backyard-wrestling shows in 2004 was lame, how about a fat Italian man showing you how to steam tomatoes? And have him not even dressed up as Mario?

E3 did not occupy Kentia Hall in 1995, so all the dregs of the industry slunk around instead in Petree Hall, now home to Midway and Atari. I'm not including the list of companies in this scan because I honestly don't recognize any of the names apart from magazines and the late American Sammy.

The Day 3 edition of the Show Daily reports that John Wayne Bobbitt made an appearance at a Petree booth: "Rumor has it that he willingly showed his scar to all those who were curious, and periodically employs a comedy writer to come up with genitalia jokes." The Show Daily doesn't identify which booth paid him to show up, but I'm guessing either Bacchus Releasing or "Beautiful, Beautiful Women" (yes, that's the name of a company).

The conclusion to make from all this: E3 today really isn't any different from E3 past, except the porno companies have been shoehorned out by the random Asian MMO publishers. That, and the term "FTW" did not exist in 1995.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He owns enough magazines to smother himself with should the need arise, and his secret fantasy is for someone flush with game-publisher stock options to give him a monthly stipend so he can spend a year researching their full history and finishing the site. In his "off" time he is an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 11:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Jason 'Textfiles.com' Scott sent over a link to a new press release about Trade Wars, described as "the pre-eminent BBS game" in its Wikipedia profile, in which "...the player is a trader in a galaxy with a fixed set of other players (either human or computer). The players seek to gain control of a limited set and amount of resources, usually fuel, ore, food, and technology, and travel through sectors of the galaxy trading them for money or undervalued resources."

The release explains, announcing a new version of the c.1974 (!) title, explains: "Trade Wars: Tournament, the Trade Wars remake, will attempt to retain much of the addictive core gameplay that made the classic such a success. In an effort to reach a more broad modern audience, this classic gameplay will be exposed through a 2D/3D graphical interface style." Woohoo, 2D and 3D!

Interestingly, it's also mentioned: "Between 2000 and 2003, EIS worked with developer Realm Interactive, LLC, and publisher NCSoft, to develop Trade Wars: Dark Millennium (later called Exarch), an MMO Trade Wars spin-off." This was a long-in-development space sim, and I'm not sure the Trade Wars connection was ever heavily plugged.

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This actually debuted just before E3, but it's so GSW-ish we still have to run it - Scott Sharkey's 1UP feature on 'The Best Worst Ads' in game magazines.

Sharkey starts: "Each time I discarded an ad it was like killing a little piece of myself, but in the end we were left with the absolute cream of the crap", and then delightedly shows off horrific artifacts such as Color Dreams' generic horrors ("Nobody's quite sure what the absolute worst Nintendo game is, because every game Color Dreams game ever made is tied with every other one for first place.")

Also highlighted - a really pointless Secret Of Evermore ad - "I still don't get the point to this one. There's no actual trick involved or anything, unless you count making people bob their heads in and out of their magazines like morons." Oh, and the pictured Gaiares ad is mullettastic!

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The rather wonderful Jiji at Namako Team has posted an extremely lengthy overview of D3 Publisher's recent Japanese output, including information on the latest Simple 2000 releases in Japan.

There's actually some really neat stuff out there (none of which is ever coming to the States, curses!), including Simple 2000 Series Vol. 99: The Caveman, "...kind of a cross between Pikmin and Artdink's Tail of the Sun. You lead your little tribe of monkeys around a series of environments, coordinating to achieve goals and overcome enemies, and evolving them bit by bit into humans."

But, ironic detachment aside, the Simple 2000 games often aren't actually that good, being borderline shovelware, after all, and Jiji's review of The All*Star Kakutou Matsuri makes that clear: "It's a semi-cel-shaded 2D fighter with 3D backdrops featuring characters from a bunch of different D3 games. It's...unsurprisingly average."

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

While we were at E3, we spotted that Ziff Davis had launched a game-specific search engine, Gazerk, and, more to the point, that Search Engine Lowdown has a closer look at Gazerk, a site intended to provide "targeted articles, advertisements, videos, blogs, game updates and cheats in a central area."

We tried the vertical search engine on GameSetWatch, and the results aren't bad - similar to what we might see for Google. Trying a big E3 game such as Gears Of War, the results are decent - but don't really seem that stratified, or useful, beyond a normal search engine. But... it's early days, right?

The Search Engine Lowdown review is similarly a little skeptical: "When the search industry is striving to become more relevant and more a part of a person’s life, it seems odd that Gazerk would essentially ignore how seriously gamers take this information and give them something that is less relevant than any of the other search engines and package it in a design that is flat and annoying."

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Holy crap, E3 is basically done and dusted - the show floor is closed, the press room is slowly thinning out, and Gamasutra's live E3 2006 coverage is completely done. So we'd better round up some of our favorite alternative games of the show, hadn't we?

- Game of the show, for me, was Inis and Nintendo's Elite Beat Agents for DS, which we already mentioned - Deep Purple and Steriogram confirmed so far for the soundtrack, an official page up with video and screenshots, and lots more to come. And really, it's basically Ouendan 2 - who's going to argue with that?

- But also very much drooled over by GSW staff was Capcom's Dead Rising, which has a somewhat hilarious 'Welcome To The Williamette Parkview Mall' fake brochure for the X360 exclusive, complete with fake adverts and mall map, and some much gorier game ads ("Desecrate the dead!! Show no mercy!!") It's all tremendously tongue in cheek, mind you (soccer balls! shears! traffic cones on heads!) and that's why it's adorable.

- Rounding up some of the other highlights for alt.gaming idiots like ourselves - D3's Work Time Fun (WTF for short!) for PSP is, of course, the U.S. version of Sony Japan's previous 'Gaijin Restoration' - reviewed Baito Hell 2000 - and as such, is pretty darn smart.

- We didn't get a chance to check it out properly, but on the mini-game and music front, LucasArts' recently confirmed Traxion, designed by my old chums and co-workers at Kuju Entertainment, looks like much fun - you can plug any music track in and just play, much like Vib Ribbon.

- Also, just say yes to Backbone and Konami's Brooktown High: Senior Year - U.S. dating action that looks to outdo Sprung, if that's even possible. And, heck, Tennis for the Wii was a blast. And now, sleeping is the new rock and roll. Bye bye E3!

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Posted by at 6:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

While we've been here at E3, errant Game Developer editor Brandon Sheffield (who, yes, also co-founded Insert Credit) has been roving the floor doing on-the-fly interviews with Gamasutra, and some of them are worth repeating here, vaguely niche as they are.

- Q's Tetsuya Mizuguchi and Phantagram's Sanyoun Lee were rather interesting, actually, and Mizuguchi was in particularly philosophical mood: " War games are easy, just fight with somebody, beat them, that's it. Physically everyone wants to fight, that's a basic instinct. That's ok. But I think that war has really dark aspects. So if you use the hi-def technology, and the blood sprays everywhere, the head is exploding and things like that…do you really want to watch that? Do you want to have that sort of experience? I don't think so."

- We really love Gamevil and President Kyu Lee, thanks to Skipping Stone and other awesome mobile games, and his chat revealed that the firm is considering a DS game, and rather adores Nintendo: "Actually Nintendo is a company that I really like. At the Game Developers Conference, I liked what they said about disruption [essentially, that Nintendo is trying to shake up the industry], and that's really something the game industry has been missing for a long time."

- Also, Hudson Entertainment's John Lee had some neat stuff to say, particularly when it comes to getting Turbografx games on the Wii Virtual Console, and even re-licensing non NEC or Hudson titles: "It comes down to two things. One is resources, and right now I'm sure our lawyers are working non-stop. There were so many games that came out for that system, over 300. So we have to go back to the original developer, and some of them aren't even around anymore, to say "we want to bring your games back on this platform."

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wait, where did that E3 pre-show day and a whole Day 1 go? Oh yeah, up the wazoo. Still, if you're reading the gorgeous Gamasutra live E3 2006 coverage, you'll know that we're busy bringing you all the news that matters. But here's the real important stuff, the news that matters slightly less:

- The absolute best personal appearance at E3 this year? This would be German peripheral company Fanatec featuring Tyson, the skateboarding bulldog on their stand. Yes, the famous skateboarding bulldog, stop looking at us funny, OK? We saw Tyson wandering around outside the Kentia Hall, with his very own E3 badge (wonder if they asked for tax records for dogs?) and his master carrying his battered skateboard just ahead of him, and we thought - my God, E3 is a wonderful place.

- Wait, we have to talk about games now? We drooled all over Inis and Nintendo's Elite Beat Agents, which is a completely new-scenario filled U.S. localized version of the gorgeous Ouendan, of course, and an absolute must-buy, especially since it includes Steriogram's awesome Walkie Talkie Man (see amazing Michel Gondry video for the original song here!) as one of the two demo E3 tracks. The other song on the E3 version was 'Highway Star', which we presume is the Deep Purple song also used in Rock N Roll Racing, but didn't have any headphones spare to confirm.

- Finally, Korean MMO Wiki is on the WebZen booth, and you may remember that "Officials from Nintendo have raised concerns through its Korean distributor Daiwon C.I. that characters in forthcoming Webzen-published South Korean PC online game Wiki may violate trademarks from its GameCube title The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker." Well, the title is now playable on the E3 show floor, and honestly, WebZen, we don't want to be too rude, but check out the screenshots - we're not sure why giving Link some new clothes and haircut makes this any less of a blatant stylistic yoink.

And... hey, wait a minute! From the official Wiki game description: "One entity binds time, space and dimension the World Tree. By using the nutrition saved in the World Tree’s leaves you can travel to the past. And everything you do in the past dramatically affects the present." Isn't this all a bit Ocarina Of Time? Or maybe the paranoia police have got us, late on an E3 evening. To the bed-cave, Batman!

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

['Game Ads A-Go-Go' is a bi-weekly column by Vintage Computing and Gaming's RedWolf that showcases good, bad, strange, funny, and interesting classic video game-related advertisements, most of which are taken from his massive classic game magazine collection.]

Who knew that moving gigantic boxes of hundreds of heavy game magazines would be so hard? I guess I did...or I should, since I moved them out of storage recently for use in this column. But now I have to move them all again, along with bajillions of (metric) buttloads of other heavy stuff into my new Snarky Commentator Headquarters (SCH), which is located on the opposite side of town. Despite the immense and neverending Great Move, I took a short break today to bring you a few new ads for your consumption. This week's column deals with bad written puns in game advertising. Let's take a look.

Take a Byte Out of Crime

In this The Lawnmower Man ad, Time Warner Interactive crams not one, but five bad puns into one page, all dealing with the word "byte." Get out your Magic GoGo-Pens at home and see if you can spot all five. 1000 GoGo-Points to the person who finds them all first!

Actual Scream Shot

Wow. The resolution of that image is pretty good considering it's an actual 3DO game screen shot. Oh wait...it says "SCREAM SHOT." *slaps forehead* Silly me. Turns out it's just another boring picture of a velociraptor screaming.

Rune Your Day

Like any hardworking man, I need variety in the ways I ruin my day. That's why FCI has released "the ultimate game," Ultima: Runes of Virtue II, for both the Super Nintendo and Game Boy systems. Now I can ruin my day twice: once at home, and once on the go by playing this horrible game. Incredible technology, really.

[RedWolf is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Vintage Computing and Gaming, a regularly updated "blogazine" that covers collecting, playing, and hacking vintage computing and gaming devices. He has been collecting vintage computers and game systems for over 13 years. He is also a big fan of bacon.]

Posted by Benj Edwards at 5:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So, we just got back from a special Wired Magazine event to help celebrate their (pictured) special Game Issue with Will Wright on the cover. Alongside a cocktail party, Wright was on hand to do a hands-on demo of Spore, which is looking absolutely phenomenal, as always.

But the particularly neat part of the demo was when Wright mentioned that it was incredibly easy to make alien creatures in Spore, and called up a willing volunteer in the front row - who just happened to be Robin Williams, a video game fan of some repute.

Williams then proceeded to use the insanely cool Spore creature creation tool to make a gigantic-schnozzed, 6 armed monstrosity which could hardly walk, its nose was so large, and actually crashed the entire game when he pressed the button to see what its offspring would look like.

So there's your headline for the day/month/year - a Robin Williams vs. Will Wright showdown to match, uhm, Weird Al Yankovic vs. Coolio. [But we were kidding about Wright being mad - he was actually pretty amused, cos, you know, Robin Williams is funny - we note Kotaku has some of his on-the-fly one liners up already.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One of the funnier things we've come across thus far at E3 is an official 'Nintendo Style Guide' hand-out given to us after the pre-E3 press conference yesterday - let's excerpt the important bit.

Subtitled: 'A Guide to the Proper Usage of Some of Nintendo's Products', the hand-out reveals: "Wii: Nintendo's upcoming home video game console. It is simply Wii, not Nintendo Wii. It is pronounced "we," indicating its all-inclusive nature. The name works best at the beginning of declarative statements. For clarity, it is best to avoid passive verbs and prepositions."

Wow - we feel like we're reading Eats, Shoots and Leaves suddenly. Of course, this means that Nintendo really want you to call it 'Nintendo's Wii' [EDIT: OK, they would prefer just 'Wii', but 'Nintendo's Wii' is technically correct, and 'the Nintendo Wii' is not, we think.] Ugh - not happening.

The rest of the definitions are less interesting, though the sheet of paper does officially note that: "DS stands for Dual Screens (or Developers' System)" when talking about the Nintendo DS, confirming that the DS part doesn't really have a single definition. More fascinating grammar-related E3 news later.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Well, E3 is fast ramping up here in Los Angeles, and after covering the Sony event in voluminous detail for Gamasutra (keep checking the E3 live coverage page!), we're off to the Nintendo and Microsoft pre-E3 press conferences today - hopefully, their marathon nature won't drain our laptop batteries too bad. As for what has happened thus far:

- The Second Annual 'Not An E3 Party' failed to live up to its name, since it definitely appeared to be E3-related, but a number of nice people, including VGMWatch's Kyle Orland, the IGDA's Jason Della Rocca, the San Jose Mercury News' Xbox 360-related 'man of the moment' Dean Takahashi, and the IGJA's David Thomas made an appearance at the succulent Golden Gopher. Oh, and Kotaku's Brian 'Brain' Crecente, who wondered why we didn't link to his Columbine RPG impressions from a Columbine survivor, pretty edgy stuff. Oh, we just did.

- Just about to write it up for Gama, but GameTap are debuting Sam & Max and URU Live exclusively on their network - though Sam & Max will be available for non-GameTap download later, fear not. As regular readers know, I still like the cut of GameTap's jib - I'll be appearing on their GameTap TV on Friday sometime talking about the show, I believe.

- At some point during the Sony press event, a fanboy gave the geekiest whoop we've ever heard after viewing the Final Fantasy XIII trailer, at which point GSW co-editor Frankc yelled out: "Is that guy OK?". Well... we thought it was funny at the time. Also, Kaz Hirai's PSP-manipulating hands looked pretty much in need of a manicure when projected in HD on a massive screen right in front of you, poor guy - PS3 launch must be a nailbiter.

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Parallax Memories' is a regular weekly column by Matthew Williamson, profiling classic '16-bit' games from the Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, and other seminal '90s systems. This week's column profiles Sega's platforming game: Ristar, released in 1995 for the Genesis.]

The Shooting Star

Pretty late in the Genesis' lifespan—after the Sega CD and 32X, and just before Saturn was released—a little-publicized game was released: Ristar. The concept for Ristar came from Yuji Naka's leftover ideas for Sonic the Hedgehog. Originally, Sonic was to be a rabbit that could reach out and grab things with his ears, but as the speed of the game increased, a new animal was needed in its place.

While Naka was not part of the team itself, lead designer Mitake Takumi—a designer previously for Sonic CD and later for NiGHTS into Dreams—stared to create Feel. The game didn't have a rabbit, but it did have a black blob wearing a star-like mask with two predominately ear-shaped points. Feel was never released, and most of the ideas and designs carried over to Ristar with only a small makeover.

Greedy Galaxy

Ristar is woken to save the galaxy from Greedy, who has corrupted all its leaders—no subtleties of symbolism there. Most of the gameplay in Ristar involves either grabbing something, headbutting it, or using it as a handle. When grabbing, Ristar will stretch his arms out like rubber bands and grab hold of pretty much anything on screen. As a result, jumping is only mildly helpful, and moving Ristar can be somewhat complicated. The first two levels are just a warm-up, but you need them to get use to the controls.

After becoming familiar with the way Ristar works, its ingenuity begins to show. Before climbing ladders, you have to grab them. To attack enemies you need to grab them first, then headbutt them. But after spending some time just running into or bumping off of enemies and the environment, you start swinging around on them.

The more you master the controls the deeper the game becomes. Testing your skill on a cliff, using your arms to get higher and higher, will usually reward you with hidden items or areas. New paths become clear after you learn how best to interact with the environment. The pace of the game becomes more organic and less linear; you feel like Tarzan swinging freely around in space.

Unexplored Space

Place a new mechanic in something very familiar, and the game is completely different. Most areas and elements of the game don't fall too far from the tree of Sonic the Hedgehog. The artistic aesthetic is almost identical in the designs of environments and backgrounds. The game also has play mechanics similar to Dynamite Headdy. Yet as similar as these things are, they feel original when navigating them with Ristar's spandextrous arms.

From the music to level design, everything is high quality, which is expected in a game that arrived late in the system's history. The best thing about it is that even if you don't feel like pulling out your Genesis—or, god forbid, purchasing another system—the game was hidden in the Sonic Mega Collection, available for all 3 current generation systems. You may already have this classic sitting on your shelf.

[Matthew Williamson is the creator of The Gamer's Quarter, an independent videogame magazine focusing on first person writing. His work has been featured on MTV.com, 1up.com, Chatterbox Radio, and the Fatpixels Radio Podcast.]

Posted by Matthew Williamson at 12:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, we'll try to come back to GSW as much as possible, but we'll mainly be covering the E3 Expo in Los Angeles this week for sister site Gamasutra - including liveblogging of the major press confs on Monday and Tuesday, woo!

We're also planning plenty of Q&As throughout the week, and we're going to try to do efficient, swift booth round-ups, like we did for Slashdot Games back in 2003. (One of our pet peeves is that nobody does brief impressions and descriptions of each of the games on the major booths, compiled together by company, to get a good overview without having to read through a loong preview for each game. So we're gonna do that!)

Anyhow, check out the Gamasutra E3 2006 live coverage page, and we're gonna update as regularly as we can here, in a similar way to our 'GDC tidbits' series from back in March. You'll like it!

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, we (and by we, I mean I and especially my wife!) really like gameLab and PlayFirst's modern update of Tapper, Diner Dash - and it's obviously been a big smash in the casual gaming world.

So, we weren't so surprised to see Diner Dash 2, a straightforward but fun sequel in which you "Join Flo as she returns from Nirvana to help four fellow restaurant owners defeat the greedy tycoon, Mr. Big." A recent Detroit Free Press review of it notes: "Like the original, the sequel is full of quick, mindless, engaging fun" - and while we think it's actually good for the brain, we agree in principle.

But we _were_ surprised, though delighted, to see a completely apposite licensed applied to the game - yep, SpongeBob Diner Dash has just launched. Apparently: "Mr. Krabs is expanding his Krabby Patty kingdom one restaurant at a time. Slippery sturgeon, antsy anchovies, and even Bubble Bass keep everybody's favorite fry cook-turned-server on his tip-seeking toes." Oh em gee, we're so there - whoever thought of this tie-up should get a medal.

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (30)

Over at the Rooster Teeth Productions homepage, they've revealed the release of Red Vs. Blue Season 4 and The Strangerhood Season 1 on DVD - they're both available at the machinima producers' store, and at your local GameStop bricks & mortar retail establishment, too.

You can check out the recent RvsB season vids for download, too, and it's fascinating to see the large amount of feedback they're still getting for the Halo 2 machinima, despite the fact it's not as well publicized as it used to be - over 18,000 comments on Episode 72 of the show, for example.

Sometimes I think The Strangerhood, which uses The Sims 2 engine and was co-sponsored by EA when it debuted, is even more slept-on than it should be, so all should go check out the first season immediately, if not sooner.

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A few months back when this weblog started, we noted a rather hilarious Mario-related video from Jim Munroe at No Media Kings,

Now he's made a bunch more game-themed vids, most recently a video called 'Freeware Rebellion', dealing with Raigan and Mare of N creators Metanet Software - some of the most militant indie game creators around - but extremely charming with it!

Their story and philosophy is pretty fascinating, and Jim's other vids are also well worth checking out - as an example, 'Million Dollar Gamer', a "fake movie preview that asks: what if the plucky heroine from Million Dollar Baby was into the Dance Dance Revolution videogame instead of boxing?" Neato.

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We've previously reported on Jason Scott and his currently in-production Get Lamp documentary, about the history of the text adventure. Well, simultaneously, as if one documentary isn't enough, he's now announced Arcade: The Documentary.

Scott explains of the concept: "It will be about arcades. Not so much about games, which has been done quite to death, but about the actual places, the come on inside to the flashing lights and drop some money into some skill games and you'll lose your money but have a great time places that have been around for about a hundred or more years and which have included various types of machines ranging from skill cranes to pinball to pachinko to skee-ball to shooting galleries to video games."

But for those worried about Get Lamp falling by the wayside, he explains: "It will be a shadow documentary, the night shift, the guy who uses the office and the photocopier when the company's closed. This doesn't mean it won't be good, just that I will not turn down an interview with an Infocom Implementor because I need to go find some shots of a pinball machine in a bar." So there! His excellent BBS Documentary is still available for purchase, if you want to check out his first multi-DVD doc.

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wandering back to appropriately named game music site Music4Games, which has recently redesigned, we note that there's a new interview with Bungie composer Marty O'Donnell, regarding the newly released Halo 2 Volume Two soundtrack.

The Halo soundtracker is particularly interesting when discussing the soundtracks that have shaped him: "There are a lot of influences in there. Brahms, Stravinsky, Barber, Gentle Giant, Genesis, and of course don't forget Mike Salvatori. I was in an early music ensemble at USC and I also loved my counterpoint classes."

In addition, he gives a good overview of why game music matters to him: "My philosophy is that a memorable hook well never let you down. If you have the chance to connect it to a great game or movie - go for it. I also believe that good music will bring people to deeper emotional levels, give them context for the time they spend playing the game, and will stay with them long after they've finished playing."

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The last time we covered Matt Sakey's regular 'Culture Clash' IGDA column, we got all het up (again!) about some of the invective in it. This time, however, his May column, on developers vs. academics, comes from a basically sound concept - the suggestion that the two parties should mingle and mix contentedly.

For example, I think the following is absolutely true: "The application of film theory and criticism to motion picture production has resulted in better movies, and a deeper understanding among filmmakers of what ingredients go into quality film... An understanding of the theoretical and critical context of games will help the medium evolve to provide ever more meaningful and impactful game experiences." A good point.

The only note of distate I find is the sentence: "Xenophobia is common throughout all industries. Insular communities tend to be protective of their shared wisdom and suspicious of outsiders. They believe that only their own confederates can possibly contribute anything of value, even when it's applicable across multiple disciplines and incontrovertibly proven." Note the link to the previously GSW-discussed Jason Della Rocca piece on quality of life issues - is this meant to imply that Jason's argument is 'incontrovertibly proven'? I do hope not.

As for Sakey's comment: "In the games industry, many developers are quick to angrily and often rudely stereotype academics as frustrated wannabe game makers" - well, from what I hear, the lecture hall was completely packed out for the GDC 'Top 10 Video Game Research Findings' talk, and the Serious Games Summit @ GDC Jesper Juul keynote was also a notable success, so... I don't know, sometimes I feel like the IGDA (and, in particular, Sakey's column) browbeats game professionals entirely too much, for being a complementary organization. It'd be nice to start from a position where both parties are given the benefit of the doubt.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day. This week's inaugural column starts, appropriately enough, at the beginning.]

There is no better way to start a column devoted to game-magazine history column than to document where game magazines began in the first place. (To tell the truth, I can actually think of several better ways, but I lack the supple, alluring physique required for any of them. And the lube.)

The exact debut dates are lost to time, but it's generally agreed that the very first magazine specializing entirely in games was Computer & Video Games, which was launched in mid-October 1981 by British media firm EMAP. Its editor, Terry Pratt, was both a tremendous game fanatic and a very technologically-minded guy -- the premiere issue of C&VG includes not just new game announcements and tips for arcade games, but also columns on programming in BASIC and successfully building a Sinclair ZX81 computer kit:

"As I mentioned before, always take care when soldering in components, especially transistors, to prevent overheating. Two transistors are supplied with the ZX81, TR1 and TR2. Both are ZTX313s, which are very small physically, and proved a real problem to even the most skilled kit builders. The effects of overheated transistors are distorted characters or no picture at all. For those who think they may have damaged theirs, the direct equivalent to the ZTX313 is the 2N2369."

With this editorial bent (which likely did not excite your typical 10-year-old Atari 2600 owner in 1981), it's little surprise that Pratt left CVG in 1984 to head up Beyond Software, a British game publisher. He stayed on as the magazine's publisher until 1987, by which time CVG had dropped the technical mumbo-jumbo and became the UK's version of GamePro, part industry cheerleader and part game/lifestyle rag for teens. Just like that, it coasted all the way to 2004, when it was killed not by low circulation, but by getting bought by rival publisher Future and closed in favor of Games Master, Future's own "multiplatform, kiddie and not all that opinionated" magazine.

By most accounts, the UK's Computer & Video Games beat out America's Electronic Games by a mere week or two. EG got its start with Arcade Alley, a column in Video magazine (a monthly devoted to TVs and laserdisc players and that sort of thing) written by Bill Kunkel and Arnie Katz starting in 1979. Once Activision was founded and video games showed their first sign of becoming a fad, Kunkel convinced the higher-ups at Reese Publishing to produce a one-off magazine devoted entirely to video games. That became Electronic Games, and sales were hot enough to make it a regular bimonthly, then monthly magazine.

Just like Computer & Video Games irrevocably defined British game mags, Electronic Games' basic style became the prototype for nearly every US magazine that followed it. Terms like "easter egg," "scrolling," and "screenshot" were originally coined by Kunkel for the editorial (yes, someone had to invent these terms), and the magazine became both a vital gamer resource and something of a trade mag for the home video-game industry. The result made Reese Publishing a rich company -- and as Kunkel writes in his book Confessions of the Game Doctor, it couldn't have happened to a less deserving publisher:

"Just think of the range of magazines that Reese was publishing in those days. They were probably the last company on Earth still doing those sleazy detective magazines that were already becoming retro-chic in 1981 [...] Beaver, however, gets its own paragraph, at the very least. Beaver was a men's magazine that occupied the absolute bottom of the porno ladder. The head photographer, a charming and gifted gentleman named Tony Curran, got many of his models straight off the bus at the Port Authority. Sometimes he got them right off the street. He would bring them up to the office and let me tell you, these were some of the skankiest-looking women I saw until crack came along."

The success of Electronic Games allowed Reese to move operations to downtown New York and its employees to consume the best cocaine that the early 1980s could produce. By the fall of 1984, though, the party was over -- ad sales had fallen to miniscule levels, and Katz and Kunkel both left the magazine as the publisher hired new staff that didn't know anything about games to put it in a new direction. That direction was computers, and productivity, and Sharper Image-style electronic toys, and readers didn't care less -- the rag limped into 1985 and didn't last much longer. "I've often thought in the ensuing years about what might have been if Electronic Games had simply gone quarterly and ridden out the crash," Kunkel later wrote. "We would have come out the other side in 1986 when the NES hit and we would have had the kind of credibility that money couldn't buy. But that didn't happen."

With Electronic Games failing to survive the crash and Computer & Video Games the victim of magazine consolidation, the oldest currently-running game rag in the world is Computer Gaming World, which premiered in December 1981 and just put out issue 263 this month.

It was founded by Russell Sipe in 1981 in response to a lack of game coverage in the computer magazines of the day. "In early 1981 I had some questions about perceived problems in computer history-based simulations," he said in a 2005 CGW interview. "I looked around to see if I could find reviews of these games. Of course, there were none. It occurred to me that no one was paying attention to computer games in the press, including the computer press. It was obvious to me that computer games were going to be big one day. So I said to myself, 'Someone should start a computer game magazine.' The rest, as they say, is history."

The magazine launched almost simultaneously with Electronic Games, but unlike EG and many of its imitators, it kept a very low profile, keeping page counts small and limiting circulation to several thousand copies. Despite (or, perhaps, because of) this underground approach to publishing, Sipe attracted a large pool of talented regular contributors, including Charles Ardai, M. Evan Brooks, future editor-in-chief Johnny Wilson, and Scorpia, the first noted female writer in game magazines and the main source of CGW's RPG and adventure-game coverage for nearly 16 years. CGW was the only game-exclusive magazine to survive the Atari shock of 1984, which Sipe later wrote was mainly due to CGW's extremely low-key approach.

CGW did not seriously try to grow until 1986, when it expanded to nine issues a year. The following year it launched Computer Game Forum, a subscriber-only seasonal magazine concentrating on strategy. It ended after two issues, and CGW became a full-fledged monthly soon after, with most of CGF's regular features (including the "Rumor Guy" news column) crossing over to the old magazine.

Sipe's magazine expansion program continued through the early 1990s, culminating in the sale of his company to Ziff Davis in 1993. Many readers were concerned about this sale, but it was arguably a necessity -- by 1993, CGW's coverage was still chiefly targeted at fans of hardcore RPGs, wargames and flight simulators, at a time when the PC marketplace was rapidly becoming younger and action-oriented. The magazine went through an evolution phase for much of the mid-1990s, but by the end of the decade was the largest PC magazine in the US. Not that it is anymore, but hey, can't win 'em all.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He owns enough magazines to smother himself with should the need arise, and his secret fantasy is for someone flush with game-publisher stock options to give him a monthly stipend so he can spend a year researching their full history and finishing the site. In his "off" time he is an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 11:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

At this point, we're gobsmacked at how long the Gizmondo Ferrari story is dragging on, but the Los Angeles Times has now published an entire new article entitled 'We can't help but gawk at the Ferrari wreck', and interviewing local website editors and TV reporters about the continuing interest in the story.

Apparently, the town is still obsessed with the 162mph crash: "According to KTLA [local TV news reporter Bill] Smith, who crisscrosses the Southland numerous times each week doing live remote broadcasts, interest in the Ferrari mystery has remained as constant as "American Idol" ratings since February. "Most of our feedback has been in the field," he said. "Wherever we are, people come up to the live truck asking about it. They begin conversations, 'Were you the guys at the Ferrari? Did you see the Ferrari?' ""

Let's leave the final word to LA Observed's Kevin Roderick: "There is no substantive issue here, there's no societal imperative at all... "And I keep waiting for it to turn out to be less than what meets the eye; I keep wanting to let it die. But it won't. And I'm running out of ways to wink at it: 'This is a lame story, but here. Here's another twist.' " Yeah! Uh... yeah!

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at the ever-reliable MTV News, Stephen Totilo has a new interview with Hideo Kojima up, one that again uses a little more tangential style and grace than your average game maker Q&A.

Firstly, it's noted: "The renowned game designer of the nearly two-decades-old "Metal Gear" series keeps a Spartan crash pad just down the street from the design studio where Kojima Productions is developing the PlayStation 3 installment of the adventures of Solid Snake. Against the wall, he keeps two dark, framed images, each featuring several MRI snapshots of his brain", apparently from some previous "spine and neck problem".

There's also some good questions on how politics affect his games: ""I think there are two types of games," he said. "One game is a tool that you play to have fun. An example is like a bat or a glove — it's a tool to play baseball and have fun. It's a sport. The other is that it could be a novel or movie type, meaning that there is a message or there is an eye-opener to the people who actually see it or read it." He said he feels he makes games of the second type, but that even those involve a bit of playing catch."

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over at sister B2B site Gamasutra, there's an extremely informative postmortem for PC indie title Eets, detailing what went right and wrong in the development of the darn cute-looking title.

The first thing that went right, apparently, was a pair of wacky web cartoonissts: "With zero budget in marketing, we garnered 7,500 downloads over a single weekend. Much praise has to be given to Tycho from Penny Arcade, whose link distorted our web stats by the hour (we could literally see the stat bars rocket upward, AT, or “After Tycho”), and to Fileplanet, who graciously hosted the demo and placed it on the front sidebar."

There's also some very interesting discussion regarding why the Eets creators decided not to partner with Valve for the company's Steam download system: "Valve wanted to have exclusive online rights to Eets (unless it sold poorly), and we could not make the business case given the reluctance from Valve on providing us with their Steam sales numbers on similar games, nor would they provide basic user information such as active installed base of female game players, and region-by-region active Steam users." Interesting stuff.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Some sharp-eyed smarties on the NeoGAF forums have spotted that Microsoft has launched the May edition of its 'Power Up' digital Xbox 360 magazine, which requires a free Xbox.com account required to access, and in it is a new list of forthcoming Xbox 360 Live Arcade titles, a couple of which are unannounced.

After a grand total of zero new XBLA games in April, we were frowning at MS, but this new list for 'Summer' release is making us grin, lots! Apart from previously announced titles such as card game UNO, the free Texas Hold 'Em Poker game (developed by TikGames), and the much-awaited Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting, now confirmed for the first time is hardcore shooter sequel Mutant Storm Empire by Pom Pom (the original is my most-played XBLA title!), as well as the recently revealed Cloning Clyde from Outpost Kaloki X makers NinjaBee.

Also listed of note - the previously announced Roboblitz from Naked Sky Entertainment, the similarly mentioned Heavy Weapon from PopCap, and a brand new game called Small Arms by Fuzzee Fever creators Gastronaut Studios, of which nothing is known. Hopefully, they will all be playable next week!

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This whole post is very vaguely NSFW, but we just had to say how amused we are with Ritual Entertainment's E3 promotional model campaign for SiN Episodes, based around "cover girl and Playboy model Bianca Beauchamp (Elexis) and Cindy Synette (Jessica)" - both of which appear to be sporting outfits which are basically painted on.

We think that this is hilarious primarily because this type of thing used to be tolerated back in the late '90s (I'm particularly thinking of the Gathering Of Developers lot at E3, which was always liberally staffed with schoolgirls and Duke Nukem's exotic dancer 'friends'), but the Ritual guys don't seem to have got the 'no booth babes' telegram - or if they did, they don't care. And anyhow, we still imagine they adhere to the 3D Realms school of female relations.

Now, GSW colleague FrankC claims that he's just impressed with the fine workmanship on the lovingly crafted uniforms for Elexis and Jessica, and it's true that relatively little flesh is being shown (Jill from GDMag was particularly fascinated by how low the librarian-style glasses were on Bianca/Elexis' face), but then again - maybe this is just the same as having a real-life model for 'girl power'-totin' Lara Croft, just with more... vinyl?

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over at Edge Online, they have an excellent new interview with Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto, who, I don't know, you might just have heard of?

The piece is subtitled: "What happens when a doodler and dreamer becomes the senior managing director and general manager of Nintendo's entire game development programme?" Well, lots of wonderful things, apparently.

There's plenty of happy, grinning prose here: "Since his debut as Jumpman 25 years - nearly half of Miyamoto's life - ago, Mario has led a march which has never strayed from its simple goal: accessible, playful, entertaining games. In the DS that idea has crystallised into a piece of hardware and with Mario Bros' arrival comes the strong sense of a circle being closed."

And, actually, Nintendo's whole line of persuasion just seems so... contented, as Miyamoto gushes, all fluffy bunnies and rainbows: ""For example, when it comes to Revolution, we don't call it a next-generation console. We call it a new-generation console. We want each household to always have a Revolution console connected to their TV. If someone comes into your house and there isn't a Revolution sitting comfortably next to the TV, we want them to argue, and say: 'Oh! Why don't you have Revolution?'" We melt with you, Nintendo.

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by at 2:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The Indygamer weblog continues to do sterling work reviewing awesome PC indie titles, and its latest set of reviews cover the Ludum Dare 48hr game competition, which has just started judging.

One major highlight so far, reviewed by Indygamer, is Jari Komppa's 'And The Sky Full Of Stars', "combining elements from both Katamari Damacy and Fumito Ueda's Ico" - and all done by one person is just 2 of our Earth days, too!

According to IG: "Shadowy figures are attempting to destroy your town, but fortunately you have the ability to pluck stars from the sky and use them to smash these evil creatures." Oh, and the site has added an easy way to see the Ludum Dare games, even setting up a ZIP file with all the entries - awesome.

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The world of MMO websites has been seeing some stealth and not-so-stealth takeovers recently, and Grimwell Online has details on the latest machinations of noted and controversial gold-seller IGE, whose holding company has purchased Allakhazam.com, one of the biggest MMO item info sites out there.

Over at Broken Toys, Scott 'Lum The Mad' Jennings has plenty more insight on the move, and, among other things, cites a post to Allakhazam which suggests: "The value of the purchase is really obvious. Thottbot and Allakhazam are the two largest sites for the largest MMO game in the world. The two have cancelled each other out financially, since anything one would charge for in a premium service was offered by the other for free. Now with both sites, we can expand our premium service to cover all WoW players."

But in reality, this is all a little confusing - are all these legitimate sites owned by IGE and partners (and not blatantly advertising gold sales yet) just being bought for legitimacy, or is IGE just one obsessed-over corner of a business empire that just includes MMO info sites too? Or are we overanalyzing this? We do want to know who's funding the whole caboodle, though.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Scott at DragonShadow has ported yet another Playstation Yaroze game to the Nuon! This time it's BreakDown, originally by Chris Wallace. It's a multi-directional shooter, with a kind of early Psygnosis-like design, which originally had digital and dual-analog modes. As an added feature for the Nuon, since it doesn't have dual analog, he's implemented a 2 player simultaneous control scheme, where through use of two controllers, you can control each turret individually. You unlock the two player mode by holding down B and C-down at the title screen.

This isn't actually a stand-alone release, incidentally. It's added to his existing suite of Nuon releases, which you can get in one package now. It's got Katapilla, Invs, and BreakDown. Word on the street is he might start on the awesome Robot Ron from Hermitgames, if the creator is into the idea. I'm all for it personally - as, well...I suggested it! If you've got a Nuon, and even if you don't, go check out DragonShadow for updates. [Cross-posted from IC.]

Posted by bsheffield at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You may know that GSW has been singularly obsessed with the now basically defunct Gizmondo handheld gaming system, having followed the 'car crash in the making', all the way from the lavish Gizmondo UK launch party to the, uhm, actual car crash.

So now, we have a, how you say, coup de grace? According to a source close to the former development arm of the company, the Gizmondo Manchester (formerly Warthog) development studio in the UK was working on pre-production for a 3D, FPS Halo title for the Gizmondo in 2005 called 'Halo: Spartan', before the company declared bankruptcy. And the game, had it gone into production, would have used the Gizmondo's back-mounted camera to detect motion and provide a 'mouselook'-like effect as you swiveled the handheld around, enabling the player to change the camera view just by physically rotating the machine. Whoa.

Now, you may be aware that the 'Halo for Gizmondo' rumor has come up before - in fact, Bungie specifically stated back in January 2005: "I am told Microsoft does have a relationship with the handheld maker, but I can tell you right now the arrangement does not include Halo." And, just to be clear, we believe Bungie - it's pretty likely that Gizmondo never officially signed a contract to do Halo for the Gizmondo.

However, Gizmondo did sign an official deal with Microsoft Game Studios in November 2004 for Gizmondo versions of Age of Empires, MechAssault and It's Mr Pants, with "at least two more titles to come from the deal in the coming months." Those extra games may well have been undecided, and were still subject to negotiation - they've certainly never been revealed.

But then, the rumor started (or more specifically, was actively encouraged by Gizmondo executives) that the Gizmondo was Microsoft's unofficial 'Xbox Portable', and thus the release of Halo on the Gizmondo (as one of those unannounced games) was only a matter of time. The execs used deals like this one with Microsoft to extract tens of million of dollars from investors (at least one of whom, who lost tens of thousands of dollars, has written to GSW mentioning that 'Xbox Portable' and portable Halo was used prominently in Gizmondo sales pitches!) Of course, the resulting funds seem to have gone in part to yachts, multi-million dollar homes, and sheared-in-twain Ferraris.

Yet the fact remains - there's video on the web of the 'Gizmondo Augmented Reality' prototype, which was to use the camera as an integral part of gameplay, as you looked at the Gizmondo screen and the handheld placed 'virtual items' on top of the photo output - a really neat idea. It wasn't too much of a stretch to simply use that tech concept to sense directional changes by monitoring the camera output, and map it to mouselook - something that the Gizmondo technical team apparently had working using the open-sourced version of a popular Id Software FPS running on the Gizmondo, as a test.

As for the plot of 'Halo: Spartan', it was to revolve around the first ever mission for Master Chief, as depicted in the Halo: The Fall Of Reach novel written by Eric Nylund in 2001 as a prequel to the first Halo game. Or at least, that's how the folks at Gizmondo saw it. It's possible that Gizmondo never even mentioned to Microsoft that they were working on this tech and pitch, and it was simply to tell investors about - we wouldn't put it past the insanity of the company to just start pre-production anyhow.

Or it's possible that it was a pitch to fill one of the remaining slots in the Microsoft contract, and was never approved - none of those other licensed Microsoft titles ever came out for Gizmondo, incidentally. But in any case, it existed, and as an intriguing footnote in the history of both Halo and Gizmondo, it shouldn't go unrevealed.

[UPDATE - 05/05/06: Former Gizmondo Manchester employee 'exhog' has popped up in our comments to confirm that "a storyline and basic game structure at the very earliest stage of concept" existed for the game, but to take issue with any claim that coding had started, stating that it was all done "with a wink and a nudge to extract more cash out of the investors". He says (along the way confirming that the Manchester studio was working on a Gizmondo version of MechAssault): "It never went anywhere close to becoming real, maybe just maybe if Giz bosses weren't such crooks and knew anything we would have released the mech assault game and then who knows, big M might have started to consider the possibility." Oh, and he also adds: "While i am here i hope that ape Erikson and fatty Freer rot in prison."]

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

We're delighted to note a last-minute addition to the E3 party fiesta that should be a blast for chiptune fans: "dublab & Party Scammers present... BLEEP BLOOP - an evening of video game inspired sights and sounds."

We're hosting the full web-friendly flyer version of the info, but here it is: "As the E3 video game expo kicks off in LA, dodge the corporate fuzz and come join dublab for music, art & heavy joystick action... Bands: 11hz Robot: http://www.myspace.com/11hzrobot; Dolphinforce: http://www.myspace.com/dolphinforce; 6955: http://www.robotandproud.com/6955/; Virt: http://virt.vgmix.com/ .... Tuesday, May 9th / $7 / 21+ / 8pm-2am, the Little Temple, 4519 Santa Monica Blvd, Silverlake."

Yep - that's the godlike Virt, live in LA for the first time ever, with other amazing chiptune types like 6955, and DJs, visuals, plus a Tetris tournament running all evening, yikes. Miss this and you are squarewave.

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at Animation Magazine's website, they have an excellent interview with Gish co-creator Edmund McMillen, talking to the artist and animator on life after winning the IGF Grand Prize in 2005 for the gloop-heavy PC platformer.

Unfortunately, as McMillen discusses the post-IGF course of Gish creators Chronic Logic, it's clear that there has been a mutual, but slightly unfortunate breakup, as he notes: "Because of the company split and disputes over rights to the game, we lost a lot of mainstream publishing deals. Personally I think that Gish would have done really well on handhelds and Xbox Live."

However, plenty of good is on the horizon, since McMillen is working with Gish co-creator Alex Austin on two new titles, including Book Of Knots, where "you take the role of a physics-based biped who sets out to collect the souls of the immortal creatures written about in the Book of Knots. Think [Sony’s] Shadow of the Colossus in 2D meets Gish, and you'll have some idea of how the gameplay will feel." Sounds mouthwatering - looking forward to it, and the other referenced indie titles, soon.

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Asmik Ace has announced that the latest in their series of forward-pushing SRPG series will be released this winter for the PS2. Entitled Tensho Gakuen: Chronicles of Moonlight (Japanese link, click on the white sidebar for a very cute announcement animation!) is a sequel to the spin-off from the main series, Majin Gakuen. (The difference between the two splinters is that Tensho Gakuen takes place in modern day, while Majin Gakuen takes place in the Edo period.)

Both series revolve around people in Japan interacting with spirits and gods, Majin with warriors who communicate with the gods, and Tensho with schools that train practitioners to maintain the balance of a spirit world. Thus, while the whole series feels a little reminiscent of Shin Megami Tensei, Tensho Gakuen titles have a feel similar to Atlus' Persona series, and this latest will take place five years after the first Tensho game, and will apparently interact with save data from the first game. Since its appearance in the late PSOne age, the Gakuen titles have earned a considerable amount of support and praise from hardcore fans.

These games are noted for one feature in particular -- when talking to people, the usual dialogue selection choices are given, but there's also a different dialogue system in place. Two circles with four emotions or approaches, each represented by an icon appear to have you respond to the character, things like worry, comradery, friendship, love, anger, coldness and so on. In later games, as you tend toward certain responses, the icons change to reflect your personality -- coldness may change to cruelty or heartlessnes for instance.

Previous titles have worked in a lot of gameplay changes and storyline branches into this system and there's no reason to expect Tensho Gakuen will be any different-- the details we have for a start reveal that the series' habit of splitting up gameplay into the usual dialogue scenes ---> battle are still there, with the third mode being a Valkyrie Profile-esque map of the school of with limited time blocks consumed by different activities and conversations with different people, that once eroded, move you onto the next chapter.

Tensho Gakuen will most likely have refinements in its considerable SRPG engine as well--already the graphics look heavily improved over earlier titles and are more isometric a la Tactics Ogre than the series' standard Fire Emblem style--but these, as yet, have not been revealed.

Posted by szshou at 12:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Even though there's been all kinds of doom and gloom about the future of the UMD movie format, with a lot of the major studios largely bailing on UMD, we were kinda heartened to get a pre-E3 press release from Silver Platter, who bill themselves as 'the indie UMD label'.

There's a good recent interview with the founders on the Video Business website, in which it's noted: "The Venice, Calif.-based company thinks core PSP consumers will eat up the 35 titles it’s releasing this year on UMD, the PSP’s format. The line primarily consists of extreme sports discs priced relatively low at $17.95." Title include neat skate vid The DC Video and the amusingly named Teddybear Crisis snowboarding vid.

Also: "Further underscoring its faith in PSP titles, Silver Platter is opening a 1,000-square-foot retail outlet near its Venice headquarters. Dubbed UMD Lab, the store will hold 50 to 75 UMD titles, including its own and major studio offerings. PSP hardware, accessories and game software also will be sold. A Wi Fi-equipped gaming lounge will let customers test the wares." Whoa... hopefully, margins will be good enough to bring all kinds of weirdness to UMD - like 8-track!

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We sat on this for a bit long, so everyone has picked it up now, but since we already wrote that nice headline, we're going to run it anyhow - PRWeb, home of ridiculous self-constructed PR puffery, has a new press release touting the non-sensible GameLife gaming video show, claiming that it "has overcome David-and-Goliath style odds" to reach fame and fortune.

If you haven't seen it, GameLife is a much-remarked upon, so-amateur-it's-unmissable broadcast, starring the guy whose voice breaks repeatedly in the Simpsons - or some nerdcore variant there-of. Kotaku's Brian Crecente handily supplies them a quote: "Expect to see a lot more of this video game version of Wayne's World in the coming months." To which we'd like to point out - Wayne's World is fictional, and was created by actors to be intentionally funny? Sorry, we've evidently got our curmudgeon hat on today!

Still, car crash TV is still TV, and apparently: "Ziff Davis Media has also taken an interest and obtained first distribution rights for the show's E3 special, in trade for media access to the floor of the world's largest video game convention." So, expect GameVideos.com to be crushed under the load when the E3 special comes out.

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The somewhat bizarrely named NeoGAF, which is where the gigantic pedantic Gaming-Age Forums hang out nowadays, also posts features, and its latest is named 'A Tale of Two Scores: Video Game Reviews and Their Conflicting Metamessages'.

The intriguing piece, which appears to be some kind of first-year J-school essay, conducted actual research, which revealed that independent viewers estimating scores based on the text of a video game review tended to underestimate the resulting score by anywhere between 0.8 and 1.3 points out of 10, depending which of two slightly convoluted ranking methods were used.

The conclusion: "In conclusion, well, there really is no clear conclusion, just as there is no clear cause of conflicting metamessages and no clear solution. Thanks to their unique composition, video game reviews carry two metamessages, and for whatever reason, these metamessages don’t always reinforce one another as they should."

[We think this sucks/rocks, and rather thought that it showed that actual scores are higher than game review texts currently 'imply'. But we were never that good at reading graphs.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

　Mainichi News reports that Tougeki '06- Super Battle Opera, the fourth in a line of tournaments held by Enterbrain -- publisher of many magazines like Famitsu, creator of the RPG Maker software, and publisher of titles like Fire Emblem's sister game, Berwick Saga--and their arcade magazine, Arcadia has begun on the 3rd of May. (Rather disingenuously, Arcadia advertises their various Tougeki Soul and tournament-related game strategy guides below the announcement.) Harmony of Kicky Punch, err, Super Battle Opera's preliminary rounds will be held all over Japan in 270 shop and arcade locations, though previously selection rounds have been held in Hong Kong, South Korea and America.

The interesting thing about the Aria of Knuckle -- sorry, Super Battle Opera -- is that it doesn't revolve around a single game, but rather nine different games: Street Fighter III: Third Strike, Virtua Fighter 4: Final Tuned, Tekken 5: Dark Resurrection, Melty Blood Act Cadenza, Guilty Gear XX Slash, The King of Fighters XI, Neo Geo Battle Coliseum, Samurai Spirits: Tenkaichi Kenkakuden and Fist of the North Star.

Symphony of the Figh--oh, who am I kidding?-- Super Battle Opera's preliminaries will be held from the 3rd to the 5th. Separate tournaments are scheduled for each game, three on each day, to cover the entire nine. Its so easy to tell this is a Japanese tournament by the conspicuous lack of Soul Calibur and Marvel vs. Capcom 2.

Posted by szshou at 1:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The ever-reliable interactive fiction site Grand Text Auto has news of the debut of vitally important IF language iteration Inform 7, and there are some major changes.

Nick Montfort explains: "After years of work and anticipation, Graham Nelson’s new interactive fiction development system, Inform 7, is out. The new system is in many ways more different from Inform 6 than OS 10 was from System 9: Code looks like natural language (like English prose, specifically), a new and well-crafted IDE from Andrew Hunter is provided, and numerous improvements to the language and world model have been incorporated. Games still compile to z-code, however, to run on the standard interpreters that run earlier Inform games."

Here's some example source code (!) from a sample Emily Short game, as quoted in the news piece: "The warning sign is scenery in the Entrance Hall. The description of the warning sign is “You know the words by heart, having heard them first from your father, and then studied them yourself on many more recent occasions.” The printing of the sign is “Those who seek to leave the castle depart at peril of their lives and souls, unless another servant be provided in exchange, or a fixed term of absence be granted by their master.” Understand “old” or “familiar” as the sign." This is... source code? Iiiinteresting.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

GSW contributor and Gamasutra staffer Frank Cifaldi also runs that there Lost Levels thing in his leisure time, and luckily enough, the site has just updated with a look at obscure, unreleased Sunsoft NES title Pescatore, courtesy Mike Thompson.

As Frank explains: "Our latest awesome and badical Lost Levels Feature Presentation spotlights Pescatore for the Famicom, a lost puzzler from the days when Sunsoft made really great games. Except Pescatore isn’t a really great game. In fact, it’s kind of crap. It’s like Dr. Robotnick’s Mean Bean Machine (aka Akuma no Densetsu Durakura PuyoPuyo Bushido Gaiden) except that instead of featuring monkey robots and fat guys, it has random crashes."

But it appears that this was one late NES title that it was a wise move to skip on releasing: "Had Sunsoft released this game at or near the time it was displayed, the company would likely have taken a financial hit. It's unfortunate that Sunman was never released, and it's an utter shame that most gamers missed out on both Mr. Gimmick and U*fouria. But leaving Pescatore unreleased was probably a wise business decision."

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Admittedly, it's a pretty small squad. According to a press release over at Coinop Today (official PDF here), Sega has hired two new ladies to the merchandise division. Their names are Candice Lozano and Daria Szpiczakowska, and they are clearly the beginnings of Sega's legion of the undead, poised and ready to re-assert Sega's dominance in the console and arcade arenas. Candace, who we assume to be the brunette, was previously the Business Manager of Sega Studio Kansas City(!), which is apparently "also the first studio site to house redemption products." I bet that means something to somebody! But later, upon a move to darkest Ohio, she took on the title Food & Beverage Director. This, you'll find, is a euphamism for blood-sucking!

Daria, she of the death stare and the blonde hair, is a new graphic designer. "We knew Daria was a “prize” as soon as we met her and saw her work,” said Laurie Jezuit, Sales and Marketing Manager of the Merchandise Division. I bet you did - after she drained the blood from your body! Here's another thing: "Together, the amusement team will be developing a strong campaign for Sega’s new business opportunities..." - that's the bit where they take over the world again. Nevermind that they all work in the arcade division, and just sell plush toys and things. Not in our minds they don't! Fly swiftly, Sega Vampires, we're rooting for you!! Thanks to cap'n frank for the link! [Cross-posted from IC.]

Posted by bsheffield at 7:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

['Parallax Memories' is a regular weekly column by Matthew Williamson, profiling classic '16-bit' games from the Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, and other seminal '90s systems. This week's column profiles Taito’s side-scrolling shooter: Darius Twin]

Warning! Giant Ship Approaching!

Darius, as a series, is usually the odd man out when the topic of horizontal shooters comes up. R-Type and Gradius are the names that get thrown around, and occasionally Darius will be mentioned as a side-bar. But a patron of '80s and '90s arcades couldn't ignore the gigantic three-screen arcade cabinets that held Darius and Sagaia (Darius II outside the United States).

The first game in the series released for the SNES was Darius Twin in 1991. When every other console release was a port of either Darius or Sagaia, Twin aimed to be something new. Most changes were aesthetic, but the flow of the game was altered heavily. The original branching triangular path was changed to twin diamonds, separating, converging, then separating again. At the point of convergence is a level that scrolls in all directions, most prominently diagonally. Stationary obstacles come at you at all times from all directions, forcing tight maneuvering and unique puzzles.

Tuna Sashimi

Giant fish are probably the last thing you expect to see in a shooter, but one of the many charms of the series is its collection of aquatic bosses: coelacanths, mackerel, squid, nautilus, lobsters, sea horses, sea turtles, and a huge anglerfish the size of four screens. These are mechanical fish that attack with lasers, arms, glowing orbs, and occasionally other fish.

These intergalactic ichthyoids, in addition to having planets to lord over, all have distinct names and code numbers (which carried over from Sagaia). The sea turtle is MX04: Full Metal Shell, the squid is BD4Z: Demon Sword, and the mackerel is HH02: Killer Higia. Bizarre, but not at all uncommon in this series.

Like the fish, the music was composed in the tradition of the series by Taito in-house band Zuntata, who wrote some of the most memorable soundtracks for games of the '80s and '90s. The score is creepy and eclectic; it stands out from the from the first stage and haunts you to the last. And even though the Darius music is overlooked by many, it sure got a large and expensive soundtrack release.

Zone Is Over

This game departs in many ways from the previous games in the series, presumably to make it more palatable to console gamers. Twin is nowhere near as difficult as Darius and Sagaia. But to balance this, there is never an option to continue; the player is forced to single-credit the game. Usually in the Darius series, death spells defeat as the levels have get more difficult and the upgrades rarer. In Twin, the ship retains its power-ups post-mortem, sweetening the bitter taste of defeat. The game is accessible to those unwilling to spend the many hours required to master the other Darius games, but not so easy that everyone can beat it on their first try.

Twin added marvelous little touches to this epic series. It named most of the planets in Darius' galaxy. It resurrected and upgraded some of the series' best bosses, including a deadly duet of Emperor and Queen Fossil. And the pace and tone are never so serious that you feel the need to take notes. Even with its unorthodox (and unorthogonal) scrolling, it's a relaxing break from its own series and from other, more technical, shooters.

[Matthew Williamson is the creator of The Gamer’s Quarter, an independent videogame magazine focusing on first person writing. His work has been featured on MTV.com, 1up.com, Chatterbox Radio, and the Fatpixels Radio Podcast.]

Posted by Matthew Williamson at 3:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

We've been fans of the competitions over at Shmup-dev.com for a while, and the latest, "dubbed “DRAGON SHMUP” has been launched on May 1st, 2006."

According to an official press release (oo!): "This competition is focusing on any aspect of the shmup genre under a few conditions. The game must star a fantasy/medieval dragon as the main character. The dragon must shoot something, either lasers out its eyes, or some sort of gas out of its mouth (or both)." Hawt - can anyone make anything to rival Irem's epochally good Dragon Breed?

In addition: "The competition setting must be in a fantasy realm that appears to be in the medieval era mixing with magic that has been seen in many “fantasy” style games / movies.... Judges will be rating the games on most original, best graphics, best sound, and of course, best of the best!" The contest is available to enter until July 1st - and there's more info at the official Shmup-Dev website. And may the best firebreather win!

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, we totally love Lumines, which is why Modojo's new information about Gameloft's version of Lumines for cellphones fills us with delight, in particular the news of the soundtrack: "11 skins/musical tracks across an eclectic mixture of genres including house, reggae, and electronica. Tracks from Mondo Grosso and Andy Hunter have been confirmed."

Now, Mondo Grosso, which soundtracked the PSP version, is a not unexpected choice, but it's neat to see electronica wiz Andy Hunter also featuring on the soundtrack - hopefully, with some Mizuguchi input, the rest of the licensed artists will be suitably enigmatic.

Also notable is a whole bunch of gameplay changes: "[In arcade mode there are] multiple types of blocks will be discovered and unlocked - some will boost your high score, while others will spark off explosions that will clear the screen", plus there are: "Additional shapes beyond the traditional "square" are present, as well as a third color, creating an additional layer of depth and difficulty at high levels of play."

Not sure if this stuff is turning up in recently confirmed Lumines 2, as well, but either way - a mobile puzzle game to rival Tetris? Just say yes!

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at trade mag Electronics Business, which is more about manufacturing electronics than playing them, San Jose Mercury News tech guy Dean Takahashi has posted an excellent cover story on the Xbox 360's manufacturing challenges, apparently using a lot of material from his Xbox 360 Uncloaked book.

Particularly interesting is the explicit Xbox 360 shortage explanation: "Both Samsung and Infineon Technologies had committed to making the GDDR3 memory for Microsoft. But some of Infineon's chips fell short of the 700 megahertz specified by Microsoft. Using such chips could have slowed games down noticeably. Microsoft's engineers consulted and decided to start sorting the chips, not using the subpar ones. Because GDDR3 700-MHz chips were just ramping up, there was no way to get more chips. Each system used eight chips. The shortage constrained the supply of Xbox 360s."

There's also more unprecedentedly good juice in here: "Microsoft's brass was worried that Sony would trump the Xbox 360 by coming out with more memory in the PlayStation 3. So in the spring of 2005, Microsoft made what would become a fateful decision. It decided to double the amount of memory in the box, from 256 megabytes to 512 megabytes of graphics double-data-rate 3 (GDDR3) chips. The decision would cost Microsoft $900 million over five years, so the company had to pare back spending in other areas to stay on its profit targets." So there you go - even non-techy GSW readers probably realize that $900 million is a big chunk of change.

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The entertaining game-related Aeropause weblog has spotted an unlicensed, but nonetheless Tetris-'inspired' clock from Japan.

As is noted: "Strangely, it looks A LOT like Tetris blocks but is just a bunch of random blocks falliing at the same time. The number of blocks piled at the bottom indicates the time passed and you can switch over to a normal view to see how much time you've wasted watching this thing."

So sure, "It's simply a creative way to watch time pass", but perhaps this is our opportunity to ask for more Tetris merchandising! Are we the only people who have been jonesing for Tetris pillows, plush toys, and other ephemera? Wait, don't answer that.

[Incidentally, we just interviewed the God-like Alexey Pazhitnov for a forthcoming Game Developer feature. He's quite Russian!]

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, we had this GameSetQ feature ("a daily question to be answered by GameSetWatch readers in the comments of this lovable weblog, and in some way related to the day's gaming issues"), and then we forgot about it a little bit, and then we remembered it again, so we're going to do another one!

And, since we just posted some game developer reactions to the naming of Nintendo's Wii next-gen console over at Gamasutra, we figured that we're both too late and too bored of the 'OMG! What do you think of the name?!' questions, so we offer the following, to be answered in comments:

"What name do you think most suits the Nintendo Wii, and what would you have named it, if you were the highly paid chief of Nintendo's crack branding team for this crucial pre-launch period?"

Uhm, when we say crack, we mean efficient, not actually smoking crack. You guys know that, right? The best answer will probably get mentioned in an update to the story - or we'll just laugh and point at it.

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The Multicart Project is a weekly comic by cartoonist Dave "Shmorky" Kelly - check out the full comic archives so far.

[Dave "Shmorky" Kelly's cartoons have appeared in all sorts of exciting internet places, such as Keenspot, Shmorky.com, and Something Awful, where he served as animator on the Doom House DVD, and is currently outputting The Flash Tub on a weekly basis. He also has an Internet Movie Database entry, which makes him more famous than you.]

Posted by Frank Cifaldi at 1:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The perceptive Toybane have an extremely interesting post on how and why Nintendo's Super Princess Peach box art has been revamped from the Japanese release of the DS game to its Western debut.

There were some raised sexism-related eyebrows in some quarters when it was revealed, on playing the Japanese import, that Peach's special powers included crying and getting angry - especially since she normally plays a damsel in distress in the first place.

Toybane notes of this design decision, as it extends to the box: "The storyline for “Super Princess Peach” involves Mario and the gang being kidnapped by Bowser. Yet the original Japanese cover portrays Peach clearly stuck in the same state of “distress” she has been in since 1985. The cover shows her with her mouth agape and her eyes widened with fear."

They continue: "When designing the U.S. Box art, NOA clearly tried to soften the misogynistic implications of this image. They chose to replace the bubbled portraits of Peach’s emotional states (known as “vibes” in the game) with a single bubbled portrait of Mario being tied up, a clear attempt to highlight the fact that Peach has been “empowered” and thrust into the role of the heroine."

As the Toybane folks go on to point out, the change isn't wholly successful, but it definitely downplays Nintendo's oddly emotion-orientated game mechanics to some extent - either an improvement, or an 'under rug swept', then.

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)