Always looking for a fun PR angle around here, and Diner Dash publisher Playfirst has provided one by sending us a special 'Chocolatier'-branded gourmet chocolate bar and 'golden ticket' (containing a free press-only download link for the game) to promote their upcoming PC casual chocolate-making tycoon game (!) of the same name.

Not much info on the web yet apart from the aforementioned Gamezebo preview (I think the press releases hit tomorrow!), but from that: "Fans of Tradewinds will be pleased to hear that Chocolatier has a lot in common with that swashbuckling franchise, except that instead of being a freewheeling privateer, you're a budding chocolate baron who gets to travel around the world collecting exotic ingredients, turning them into delectable treats, and then selling the chocolaty creations at local boutiques."

How does that work, then? Sounds like shades of Ghirardelli, and I'm really starting to like some of the creativity in new-school casual games: "You start off in San Francisco, where you create a name and customized logo for your business. Then, Evangeline Baumeister introduces you to the art of chocolate making based on the recipes of her ancestors. You'll start with only one factory and a handful of recipes, which are all that remain of the Baumeister fortune. It's up to you to make some cash, re-open the factories, and most importantly hunt down all the lost family recipes."

[UPDATE: Aha, the official Chocolatier page is open on PlayFirst's website, including a downloadable trial version of the game. "Do you have what it takes to conquer the world through chocolate?" Dunno, I like eating it though!]

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over at the UK Guardian Gamesblog, editor Aleks Krotoski has been talking about "the findings from the data fiddling [she's] been doing with the International Game Developers Association's Game Developers Choice Awards nominations from 2007".

This most recently manifested itself in a post about regional variations in the 'Best Game' nomination voting, which Gears Of War actually won for after the finalists were decided, for those with a rusty memory.

The whole concept, courtesy Aleks: "I was curious about the cultural differences (and similarities) between the countries who voted when it came to what was perceived as worthy of gongs for Best Game, Game Design, Visual Arts, Innovation, Audio, Writing, Technology and Character Design, and whether there were any trends which emerged."

So, she digs in to the Best Game to find out what countries liked what: "As a reminder, the five games which were nominated by the most countries for this year's GDCA awards were:

Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (10 countries)
Gears of War (7 countries)
Company of Heroes (6 countries)
Elder Scrolls: Oblivion (8 countries)
Guitar Hero 2 (4 countries)."

This is pretty neat, and there's a series of other results in previous posts, including a look at the overall presentation given at the Women In Games Conference in Newport, all worth checking out too.

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, Salon.com has just posted an article entitled 'Why can't gay dwarves get married in Middle-earth?', and subtitled: 'Video games have been ahead of the real world in accepting same-sex marriage. Why doesn't a new online "Lord of the Rings" game allow it?'

So, is the piece a useful half-elf or a bit of a cave troll? It's actually an extremely well-researched, well thought-out piece which touches on a lot of the relevant issues regarding LGBT-relevant content in games, and even gets Rockstar on the hook to talk about the same-sex kissing in Bully:

"Rodney Walker, a spokesman for Rockstar, says the Rockstar team thinks of their games not like films, with static storylines, but as worlds that allow players to make their own choices, and Rockstar tries to shut down as few of those choices as possible. "If you're planning to take a vacation to California, you don't say to yourself, 'Where am I not going?'" Walker says. "When people talk about what's allowed in a video game, it's not about permission, it's about experience ... The thing that's so exciting about video games, which is why we think the medium is so popular right now, is because ... you can have an actual individual experience.""

Anyhow, apparently the reason why they're not allowing single-sex marriage in The Lord Of The Rings Online is to do with squirrel color: "When fans complained on the message board about an erroneous squirrel color, Turbine promptly corrected the mistake. Turbine had released a screen shot of a forest scene featuring a gray squirrel, but Tolkien once wrote in a letter that he hated gray squirrels." Jeez, that Tolkien, what a squirrel bigot! Uhm, OK, this isn't the exact reason, but it's an extension of the authenticity/Middle Earth argument, so it all flows along similar slightly cuckoo lines, apparently.

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A relatively unheralded Nintendo DS release of recent weeks has been EA's multi-game puzzle title Pogo Island, in which you can "... Hone your skills at five classic Pogo games, including Poppit!, Word Whomp, Squelchies, Tri-Peaks Solitaire, and Phlinx."

The 'Pogo' of which this speaks is EA's tremendously successful casual game website - as I speak (8.10pm PST on a Sunday night) there's allegedly 261,000 people online), and, though the game itself is on the average side, featuring basic-looking DS versions of the Puzzle Bobble and Bookworm-style titles which are a big hit on Pogo - the points-based connectivity is very interesting.

As the IGN review notes: "For those who use Pogo.com, EA added a pretty cool ability to upload earned tokens from within the adventure to your [Pogo] account using the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service. This function links the DS game with the Web-based network in a limited fashion, but if you're always on Pogo.com trying to earn tokens to enter their weekly cash drawings, this is a nice way to bulk up your odds of winning the prize money."

Of course, the game itself isn't that hot, and none of the titles even have online multiplayer connectivity. But the idea of earning points on your handheld to do something on the web (or away from your DS), with information transfer via DS Wi-Fi, seems like a potent one - and for hardcore Pogo addicts, that alone may be enough to get them to go and buy EA's product. More of this, plz!

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So it's totally Sunday night, and here's a compendium of odd, amusing, or otherwise interesting video game links from around the Web, starting with the following:

- Over at Shoot The Core, Posty has heard about some unfortunate issues with Raiden 3, the PS2 shooter that's newly released in the States: "Japanese games swap the functions of the "x" and "o" buttons - so "o" is used to confirm a selection on a menu screen, and "x" is used to go back. 99% of the time, developers Americanize this setup when translating a game for US release - not the case in Raiden 3. [Posty's local game] store had all three copies of Raiden 3 returned becuase "the game locked up on the memory card setup screen, and wouldn't progress any farther."" But it was actually that you have to press circle, and there's no prompt. DOH!

- Over at Sokay.net, they have a postmortem of Flash game 'Little Loki Escapes from Hell', and it's an interesting analysis: "Little Loki Escapes from Hell, which I developed at Liquid Generation, was my first experience developing a reflex based platformer game. It was the result of a bit of brainstorming and a good deal of freedom during the calm storm between projects. It was the type of project I’d been wanting to develop for a while and I dived in. I invite you to read about a story of its development." Calm storm? Hee!

- There was a week's worth of Hellgate London previews/related articles on 1UP last week, but I particularly liked a retro look at Diablo, Diablo II, and the Lord Of Destruction expansion pack, and they're notably big on the third of these: "Bought by millions and played by a good portion of them to this day, Lord of Destruction redefines staying power, a trait few would have predicted this game would have when it was released almost six years ago"

- Retro history alert! Steve Wetherill has posted a page about classic '80s UK developer Odin Computer Graphics, where he worked before moving out to Vegas to do the Westwood/Command & Conquer thing, and there's some awesome unanswered questions there: "* What is Lindsey from reception’s last name? * What is Dave, the original Nodes of Yesod programmer’s last name? * What the heck [does] PLOD mean (Dougie?) * Did we miss anybody/any games?"

- How important are single-issue sales of Game Informer to GameStop, as opposed to the normal 'trade in games, get a subscription' dealio? Well, according to Xemu, not very: "I had to argue with the clerk at the local Gamestop for almost 20 minutes to convince him to sell me a single copy of Game Informer (the one with GTA IV on it, natch). You'd think I asked him to let me walk off with my pockets full of stolen merchandise. I'm sure it was not a useful investment of my time compared to just paying for the subscription to Game Informer, which seems to be what they are hard wired to provide instead. But it was the princple of the thing. It galled me that they were insisting I could only get the magazine with the subscription, which I knew to be patently false. It took the guy calls to three other Gamestops before he could figure out how to do it."

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So, Square Enix is releasing this new line of software called 'DS Style' in Japan, with lots of mainstream Touch Generations-type content like 'Why Not Listen to Classical Music on the DS' (pictured - from Ouendan creators Inis, no less!), 'Flower Blooming DS: Gardening Life', and 'DS Yoga Lessons: You Can Start Today'. Blimey.

Anyhow, SiliconEra's Spencer Yip went and asked some online game writers about this very concept, and Game Developer's own Brandon Sheffield is the first quoted personage: "This is Square-Enix’s entry for a demographic that Nintendo lured into games for the first time. That being non-traditional gamers, the likes of the elderly, housewives, and people of that nature. I don’t like to call these ‘non-games’, because that that doesn’t describe what they are, it described what they’re not. These dry roasted peanuts I have on my desk are also non-games."

Spencer also chips in: "Like everyone else I think these are going to sell well in Japan too. I’m really not sure how a DS travel guide would sell in North America, but Square-Enix’s classical music program might be worth localizing. Maybe Square-Enix could team up with a University and use it as a supplementary learning aid. Either way I want to see it come over since Inis is behind it." Yessir!

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

When it's a game blog that pirates its content, of course. I'd been aware for a while (by checking Technorati, and from a couple of tip-offs) that there's at least one blog out there which just reprints GameSetWatch posts wholesale, but I was horrified to find out this weekend that several commenters/authors have started posting in these fake blogs, because they don't know where the story originated.

Specifically, Pro Game News, which also reprints content from Joystiq and Xbox 360 Fanboy, is the worst offender - I found GSW story subject William Volk commenting on the ProGameNews version of his story, as did Psychochild recently, ack! This is very not cool.

Another offender is TheGamerBlog.com - and sure, they just repost wholesale from RSS feeds, and I guess we should be flattered that they like GSW enough to nick our stuff, but enough is enough. Other bloggers should probably check those sites to see if they need to take action.

I've taken the first step of contacting the offending domain owners through their WHOIS contact info, and if I don't hear back soon, I'll presumably take it to the next step (ISP abuse contact and/or lawyers). [Also I'm hoping that this post gets reposted on the offending sites, which will be most amusing!]

[UPDATE: Aha, this post indeed makes it to the front page of ProGameNews. PGN, 'You are a pirate!'. Looking forward to hearing from you. As for TheGamerBlog, they wrote back pretty quickly, commenting: "TheGamerBlog has killed the autoblog feature. We were unaware this wordpress plugin was doing something wrong."

Looks like they're talking about a plugin by Elliott Back which is referenced here, it's called 'Autoblog', and it's explained: "This plugin is potentially dangerous: it converts xml into Wordpress posts. It could be used to run an aggregator site, or it might be used by spammers to push high-profit keywords into their blogs." Great!

And to be clear - 'reblogging' by referencing another site and linking to it is part of weblogs (see the Eyebeam reBlog or any linklog) but these automated scrapers - which both of the above mentioned blogs clearly are - are unfortunately lame attempts to make money from Google Adwords, etc, by just plain stealing content.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (16)

Was vaguely aware of news of another remake of classic Amiga futuristic sports title Speedball, but didn't know how far along it was until Kieron Gillen popped his bobbly little head up and previewed the new Speedball 2 PC remake for Eurogamer.

Ever-specific, Gillen provides "...two main impressions: 1) It's not Speedball 2 yet, in terms of polished playability. The player's speeds are slightly misjudged. The sliding tackle doesn't slide enough. The sense of HARD COLLISIONS BETWEEN STEEL-ARMOURED MEN isn't quite there. 2) I couldn't stop playing it."

Of course, the Bitmap Brothers really have fallen by the wayside a bit since the original, and there's been at least one slightly unfortunate remake. There's a nod to this in the preview, discussing the new Parisian developers: "You may remember Kylotonn from Ironstorm and Bet On Soldier, the first-person shooters. Which, at least for me, is a strong mark against them. Faith is more restored by the presence of The Bitmap Brothers' Mike Montgomery, who's supervising development." So.... we'll see, eh?

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Probably the least reported-on event by the media at this year's Game Developer's Conference was the 'Gangs Of GDC' real-life game, created by NY game developer Gamelab (Diner Dash, Arcadia), and described by them as "the world’s first... massively multiplayer mobile phone fighting game or MMMPFG" - so we got them to write a postmortem of it for Gamasutra.

Co-creators Gregory Trefry and Mattia Romeo explain the general notion in the intro: "The theme was that rival gangs such as the Match Three Boyz and the MMOFOs are vying for control of the GDC by fighting over three neighborhoods scattered throughout the conference center. Each neighborhood consisted of a large flat-screen display set up in a high traffic area of the conference showing a grid of nine blocks."

Continuing: "Players would dial up a number [using their cellphone] displayed on the TV, and be immediately placed on one of the blocks where they would either fight any rivals that were on the block or else flip the block over to their gang’s control. When fights occurred players resolved them through a simple rock-paper-scissors game... every five minutes each neighborhood would be scored and the gang that controlled the most blocks in a neighborhood would gain points for each block they controlled."

It's a really neat idea, and as always, I definitely appreciate the effort the Gamelab folks put in, in order to "...provide our fellow developers with a chance to interact with each other while diverting themselves from the whirlwind of activity that is the GDC." A lot of people are likely too busy to even play, but I know that those who do really get into it, and it's another part of the slightly eclectic GDC flavor, I reckon.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over at HDRLying, there's an intriguing new editorial entitled 'Giving Back: Market Dominance through Charity', and it posits that the more freebies or pseudo-freebies given out through 'philanthropic marketing', the more beloved a game company may become.

Prime example? Club Nintendo in Japan, he says: "The genius in Club Nintendo is two fold: not only are all products on the site (including figures, Nintendo Music CDs, and even games) exclusive to Club Nintendo, but members that gain a certain number of points over the course of a year are made Platinum Members. Platinum members then choose a free gift from a list at the end of the year, which is then sent to them, free of charge."

The Sony Game Advisory Panel is also mentioned, which is "...an invitation only network that allows Sony gamers to post their game collections, blog about their thoughts on gaming, participate in pivotal gaming surveys, and more. The whole idea is made to make the gamer feel special; to make them feel as if they have the ability to change the course of game development. Who knows? Maybe they actually do." So how about it? Can you 'buy' loyalty through programs like this?

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

Any regular reader of GameSetWatch knows about Simon and I's infatuation (some would call it obsession) with Mr. Dreamcast. Easily the most charming name for a game magazine ever conceived (with Japan's Beep running a close second), Mr. DC is a fairly obscure publication even in its home country of Britain, publishing only two issues before disappearing -- but I was lucky enough to pick up the second issue from a UK fan who sent it along to me with some other magazines.

Mr. DC (which is the name of the blue swirly thing on the top left corner of the cover) was published by Magical Media, an outfit run by longtime UK computer/gear-mag writer and publisher Simon Rockman. Simon hired a handful of people away from Future Publishing to found the mag, including editor Caspar Field, who (up to that time) was running DC-UK, Future's Dreamcast title.

Field and Rockman answered questions from UK computer-trade title CTW back before the launch in 2000, a time when the DC's fortunes were already slipping and the idea of not just a new DC mag, but a kid-oriented DC mag, was seen as a little daft:

"I think the key difference with Dreamcast is that it’s been launched at £199, and I think they’ll be announcing definite UK price cuts at E3. We just felt it was good to be in the market early and to see if we could challenge some of that received wisdom, I guess. Certainly the feedback we’ve been getting from readers and from kids has been fantastic.

Everyone’s been growing up and wanting to make magazines like DC-UK and [Official Dreamcast Magazine] that are aimed at 25-30 year-olds [...] when you talk to any games player about playing games in their youth, you forget how passionate you were about it then. That’s really, I think, forgotten, that kind of passion –- I think even I’d forgotten it -– and I hope we can tap into it."

So what does Mr. Dreamcast have in store for the potential reader? A lot of color and bright screenshots, for one. The issue starts out with a wealth of large previews, all done up in that classic old Future style where the text is kind of divided into three or four of what you'd normall call sidebars. "Club zone" occupies the mid-part of the magazine; it's filled with strategies, reader art, crosswords, a regular two-page column on the Neo Geo Pocket Color scene, and even a long sidebar that explains 60hz television modes to the young audience.

The mag's rounded out by the reviews section, with games rated out of 25 in graphics, sound, control, and "ideas," added up to a total score out of 100. There's also four pages titled "Your shout," which is probably the most original part of the mag -- a jury of 16 gamers (aged 11 to 15) play a game and state their opinions on it, complete with lots of pix of excited kids around the TV. (Almost no one liked Chu Chu Rocket, shamefully enough.)

It's really a nice little 84-page magazine for its audience, but as Field himself commented the last time Mr. DC was mentioned here, it was likely in the wrong place at the wrong time. "Myself, Craig, Jon and Camilla were proud of Mr. Dreamcast," he wrote. "It was for kids, it was written 'to a level', but it was packed with more info and less condescending-bollocks than any other kids' games magazine at the time [...] And by the way, we sold 12,000 copies of issue one... So it can't have been all that shit... Can it? Maybe it was just the free waterpistol..."

Still, I commend Caspar and his crew for giving us the magazine with, at the very least, the most whimsical name in all of history. Thank you!

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 6:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We don't normally link to much 'mainstream' next-gen video game coverage here, but over at Game | Life, Chris Kohler's recent editorial on Sony's online infrastructure is too important to pass up.

He particularly references the 'playing PS1 games on PS3' debacle, commenting: "In short, everything's screwed up everywhere. The thing that would make me actually want to download more PSone games arrives four months late -- and, surprise, only applies to one-fifth of the content. The catalog is embarrassingly poor."

Even worse than that: "In Japan, Sony actually seems to be embracing Long Tail to a greater extent than Nintendo, loading the service up with niche games from small publishers... But in the US, they have added one (1) third-party game despite the fact that third-party games were inarguably the primary reason to own a PSone in the first place."

I agree completely, and it's emblematic of a larger issue - Sony's lack of third-party relations/infrastructure in the West for both PS1-style 'classic' digital downloads and for XBLA-style indie games is a travesty, with closely held partners and an only _just_ emerging set of Sony-funded digital-download titles lagging far behind their competitors (Nintendo on the retro side, and the much more 'free' Xbox Live Arcade on the indie side).

In fact, the May 2007 issue of Game Developer magazine (out soon, cover postmortem is Konami's Elebits for Wii) finds me talking about this exact issue, compared to XBLA's relative success - how Sony and Nintendo not making contemporary indie game digital downloads easy/possible is messing things up for indie console developers, who can then only address fractions of the potential market. And it's the consumer who ultimately ends up with the short straw.

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a recent post, I was talking about what we should do to award game journalism, and in the comments, I noted: "I actually feel that a lot of the better, looser game writing out there would be less well recognized by formal aggregations of (largely print) journalists. Having said that, we got Game Developer and Gamasutra nominated in the definitely non game-journalist centric Maggie Awards, so I'm not against that type of thing."

Well, myself and the other editors zoomed down to Los Angeles last night for the 56th Annual Maggie Awards Banquet, and the April 2006 issue of Game Developer (which featured a postmortem of Ubisoft's King Kong game, our regular/canonical salary survey, and an interview with Will Wright, among other things) won the Maggie Award for Best Magazine (Computers/Trade).

Our competitors were fellow CMP pub Network Computing, the independent Microsoft-themed mag Redmond Channel Partner, the embedded-specific RTC Magazine, and our former colleagues at Technology & Learning, so it's good to see a game-centric pub triumph in a much more IT-led category - at least, it is for us!

If you look at the finalists, it's interesting to see just who is sticking around in the print space nowadays - there were web-specific awards at the Maggies, too, but it's definitely a print-biased association. Some sectors, such as health and beauty pubs and regional magazines based in affluent areas, seem to be thriving. Others seem a little more challenged in this increasingly Internet-specific age - especially if they don't already have a strong web presence.

But fortunately we have Gamasutra and Game Developer to synergize each other (something that will be happening a lot more in the next few months, if you'll excuse the buzzwords), and I'd like to thank Jill Duffy, Brandon Sheffield, and Cliff Scorso and everyone else at the CMP Game Group for their amazing work on the mag. Onward!

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I still feel like 1UP is the only one of the major consumer game sites which puts any personality into their features (a lot of 'Top X lists' rule the day elsewhere), and here's another one - James Mielke's new piece 'Thinking Outside The Chocobox', looking at the box cover for Square Enix's Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo Tales.

Now, having said that, Square Enix's Patrick Cervantes does say some pretty obvious stuff: "Knowing that our target for this title would be much younger and less familiar with the iconic chocobo character, we needed to show more about the game that would appeal to the new "younger" users as well as longtime fans who are up to date with current trends."

But turns out obvious is probably right, in this case, and it's particularly interesting to see some alternate, rejected box designs on the second page of the article - it's pretty rare to see these. Mielke also makes the point that "...some of the actual in-game elements, like the adamantoise/cactuar race on the mountain, actually made it on the cover", which is actually good news for all - there's been a few too many cases recently of box covers being very dissonant from content - ahem, Ubisoft.

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Longtime online game journalist Marek Bronstring (he co-founded Idle Thumbs, you see!) has his own blog called Gameslol, and I particularly appreciated a recent entry about 'Books on game design, creativity & marketing'.

In some ways, the later entries (on marketing and 'other media') are more interesting, but let's stick to the games stuff - Bronstring firstly appreciates Salen & Zimmerman's Rules Of Play, which is, "...as far as I am aware, the most solid theoretical framework for understanding games and game design. It’s a pretty epic textbook, but it’s absolutely worth digesting." He also gives nods to the Rouse and Adams/Rollings game design books, which I would also concur with.

There's also a hearty recommendation for a Valve opus: "Most gaming coffee table art books are disappointing, but not Half-Life 2: Raising the Bar. Valve shows how their sausage is made, revealing countless early prototypes, concepts and ideas that for some reason never made it into the final game. At times you can clearly picture multiple alternate versions of Half-Life 2 (some of them horrible, some of them great)."

[Random note: I kept Marek's Amazon referrer in these URLs, because he originally wrote the recommendations, and I thought that was fair. There was an interesting weblog post recently about the etiquette of removing and/or changing Amazon associate codes when you're quoting other sites - bonus points for anyone who can remember where it is, because I certainly can't.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Aha! Good news for all, since the GameTunnel Indie Game Review Panel for April has convened, surveying a world in which "...Sam & Max return for another take on reality, Virtual Villagers find some lost children, and Hard Time lets you play as a criminal...in jail where you belong!"

Top title of the month is Episode 5, 'Reality 2.0' of Sam & Max's Season 1 from Telltale, and new reviewer Caspian Prince (!) explains: "This outrageously polished, funny, intriguing point-and-click adventure is just plain brilliant fun (provided, of course, you enjoy point-and-click adventure games). Actually even if you don't think you do, you'll probably think Sam and Max: Reality 2.0 is just such a laugh and so well executed that you'll want to buy it anyway either for yourself or for your kids."

However, the second-placed game, Wonderland Adventures, is as or more interesting since it's much less well-known, and Russell Carroll explains: "For anyone who loves logic puzzles, like those found in the dungeons of Zelda, Wonderland is your game. The graphics are a vast improvement over previous versions, and though they are still pretty primitive 3D, they don't take away from the fun adventure of the game at all."

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

I'm not totally sure this has percolated out into the community, and I know a bunch of GSW readers are in the game biz, so wanted to point out that the Austin Game Developers Conference call for papers closes on Monday, April 30th - this is the successor to the Austin Game Conference which is now run by my colleagues in the CMP Game Group, of course.

The Game Developer/Gamasutra edit team was just doing some brainstorming with the Austin content director Jane Pinckard about our 'blue sky' list of invitees yesterday, and I think the MMO/online game crowd will be excited about a lot of the possibilities there - but we need great submissions too, so if you're in the online, writing, or audio spaces, read below (story passed on from Gamasutra), and make it so - fun 'People's Choice' track idea, too!:

"The event, which will take place September 5-7, 2007 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas, is the new incarnation of the Austin Game Conference, and abstracts can be put forward at the official Austin GDC submission page.

The topics which a prospective speaker can address must fall within one of the event's established tracks - for MMOs/online games (with four sub-tracks for business and management, community and marketing, design, and technlogy and services), as well as audio for games and writing for games.

In addition, the event will include a new People's Choice track featuring the sessions community members want to see most, and all proposals that do not fit into one of the other three tracks will be offered for voting on the People's Choice voting website. The deadline for submissions is Monday, April 30, 2007.

In addition to these four main tracks, Austin GDC will also feature a Game Career Seminar for students and job-changers researching entry into the game industry, and a Career Fair for experienced game developers seeking new job opportunities.

More information, including session content, speaker guidelines, registration information, and sales opportunities for the conference can be found on the official Austin GDC website."

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This one's quirky, but worth highlighting because it has a couple of GSW-beloved game design veterans front and center on it - and it's an adventure game, to boot! It's Mata Hari, "...a classic point & click PC adventure game" based on the life of the "legendary dancer and spy". In that order?

Anyhow here's the fun bit: "Story and game design of Mata Hari will be created by the industry veterans Hal Barwood (“Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis”; LucasArts) and Noah Falstein (u.a. “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade”; LucasArts). Hanover-based studio 4Head Studio is developing the game. dtp entertainment will publish Mata Hari worldwide under the ANACONDA label, with a Q1 2008 release date set for Germany, Switzerland and Austria."

Of these smart folks, Barwood, a LucasArts veteran who's now struck out on his own (though is largely semi-retired, I believe), is actually a college friend of George Lucas who worked on the script for Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and produced/co-wrote the movie Dragonslayer before working on a whole heap of classic LucasArts games - he's also a great asset to Game Developer magazine, because he produces detailed critiques of each issue for us.

Falstein is similarly neat, being a veteran game designer who started out working on Sinistar and Koronis Rift, also worked on a classic Indiana Jones adventure title, and has written the design column ('Game Shui', nowadays) for us on Game Developer for the last few years. Both are elder statesmen who, I think, are most interesting working on the story-heavy, protocol-heavy adventure games for which they were both famous at various times, so I'm definitely looking forward to this title.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We just covered him on GSW because of this feature, so it seems only fair to link it to - Alistair Wallis' latest Playing Catch-Up talks to Bullfrog and EA veteran Sean Cooper about his game career, from early title Flood through Dungeon Keeper II and on to his indie Flash games.

The making of the classic Syndicate is a key part of the retrospective, and it's interesting to hear the relative chaos of its development: "“It was just, ‘How about some guys with guns causing absolute mayhem?’ then, ‘Okay, let's do it!’” he laughs. “The design evolved from that: no documentation. ‘Let's just try some stuff and see how it all fits together’.” The development was similarly unorthodox, with Cooper and friends playing multiplayer games, and working out problems in the design from there."

He also talks about how he will ever make significant money from games like Boxhead, which are free to play: "“Free?” he exclaims in mock surprise. “Nothing is free really, but to the consumer it is. Microtransactions are something I'm looking into; if people really love the game and want a lot more, then they can simply expanded their game cheaply or expensively depending on how far they want to go. A bit like the arcades use to be. I never felt ripped of from putting £1 into an arcade machine. So, yes, other platforms and a wider audience would be great, if it is kept affordable for the consumer.”"

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sure, we at GSW get sent some strange promotional items from time to time, but this latest one - which came in a larger box filled with packing, and mystified us, soon sorted itself out as a cereal-based tribute to a recently released Hudson game for the Nintendo DS:

So this would be a custom breakfast food box for DS puzzle title Honeycomb Beat, in which you "...Solve puzzles by clicking on honeycomb tiles to match their color to the playfield." Actually, Konami/Hudson already sent us the game a few weeks back, but their authentic-looking cereal packaging is neat - and it really has honeycomb cereal inside (Post brand, for those intrigued).

Uhoh. Our dachshund Rollo has discovered the secret wrapped inside the mystery, like Charlton Heston in Soylent Green. Yep - 'Honeycomb Beat is EDIIIIIIIBLE!'.

OK, that's great. You can step away from the box, we've finished modeling it now, Rollo. Rollo? Rollo? (Frenzied crunching noises ensue.)

[Oh yeah, so this reminds me - if you'd like to send GSW relevant and/or weird stuff (games, books, CDs, promo stuff), here's our snail-mail address: GameSetWatch, c/o Simon Carless, CMP Game Group, 600 Harrison Street, San Francisco, CA 94107. And editors@gamesetwatch.com get us, too. You know what to do!]

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We only just pointed out the full gallery for the I Am 8-Bit game art show in Los Angeles, but longtime GSW buddy Ryan has just posted footage of Mega Man 2600, a game made especially for the show, over on GameTrailers.com.

Comments are already semi-slavering for the bizarro Atari 2600 'tribute' version of the Capcom classic - with significant changed-up gameplay: "That's awesome. And it actually resembles Mega Man 1! I so want to try this out soon. I'm guessing you hold up for jumps and press the joystick button to shoot, right? Still cool."

Anyhow, I can't really find much other information on Mega Man 2600 - who programmed it? Is there going to be a homebrew release? Is there a webpage anywhere with more information on it? I look to you, kind GSW commenters, to find the answer.

[EDIT: The GameTrailers folks have passed on the name of the author, David Galloway, who also co-wrote recent Atari 2600 homebrew title BliP Football, described thusly: "Faithfully mimicked in appearance, audio and gameplay, BLiP Football recreates the experience of playing the original electronic football [released in 1977]."

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[‘A Game Collector’s Melancholy’ is a bi-weekly column by Jeffrey Fleming that follows the subtle pleasures and gnawing anxieties of video game collecting. This week we take a look at the Clock Tower series. Games loved by some, hated by a few, and ignored by most.]

I’ve always had special fondness for horror themed video games. Perhaps because horror game designers show a greater cultural awareness and are more willing to incorporate influences from other media into their work. Most video games seem to be influenced by other video games but horror is a genre with a distinct literary and cinematic heritage that is quite separate from the world of Mario.

The First Fear

Most people know of the Clock Tower games on the PlayStation, but the series actually began on the Super Famicom. Created in 1995 by Human Entertainment, Clock Tower told the story of a teenage girl named Jennifer who was orphaned under mysterious circumstances. She and her friends from the orphanage are sent to live with a wealthy family whose gothic mansion lies isolated in the mountains of Norway. Upon arriving at the mansion things quickly turn sinister and Jennifer’s friends are murdered one by one in a variety of cruel ways.

Clock Tower resembled a point and click adventure but undermined the measured puzzle solving with a wicked twist. Periodically, a maniacal killer called the Scissorman burst into the scene and began chasing Jennifer. With no means of fighting back, she could only flee from Scissorman and hopefully find a safe place to conceal herself until the pursuer moved on. It was a unique style of play that called to mind frantic games of hide and seek or the desperate flights of nightmare.

Visually, the designers of Clock Tower had a particular love for the films of Dario Argento with Suspiria and Phenomena being major points of reference. One of the first murder scenes that Jennifer witnesses is a recreation of the brutal first ten minutes of Suspiria, including an earnest attempt at imitating Goblin’s crazed soundtrack on the Famicom’s sound chip. The game also gave a nod to William Peter Blatty’s Legion (filmed as Exorcist III) as Scissorman wielded an enormous pair of autopsy shears.

Clock Tower was later ported to the PlayStation under the title Clock Tower ~The First Fear~ and versions were also made for Windows 95, and the Wonderswan. However, none of these made it the United States.

Clock Tower and Clock Tower II

Human returned to Clock Tower in 1997, this time producing a sequel for the PlayStation. After defeating the Scissorman, Jennifer is sent to a mental hospital to recover from the trauma. Predictably, it is not long before dead bodies begin to show up and the Scissorman is on the loose again. Showing the influence of Koji Suzuki’s 1991 novel Ringu, Clock Tower hints at dark rumors and morbid urban myths.

Human quickly followed up with Clock Tower Ghost Head, which came to America in 1999 under the title Clock Tower II: The Struggle Within. This time the events of the game take place in Osaka (changed to California in the U.S. version) and follow a new girl named Alyssa. Like Jennifer in the previous games, Alyssa is an orphan whose heritage is a mystery. However, she suffers from a split personality disorder and harbors a murderous male alter ego. Many of the puzzles in Clock Tower II revolve around manifesting one personality or the other to progress through the game.

Although Clock Tower and Clock Tower II sported rudimentary polygon graphics, they retained the point and click mechanics of the first Famicom game. This resulted in a slow, lethargic pace that was perhaps more frustrating than frightening. But they were distinctive and there was nothing else quite like them on the market.

The first Clock Tower game was published for America in 1997 by ASCII Entertainment, which later became Agetec. Somewhat rare, Clock Tower sells for around $25. According to Agetec’s web site, copies of Clock Tower II are still available new for $29.99.

Clock Tower 3

Despite the modest success of the Clock Tower games and other well-regarded titles like Fire Pro Wrestling, Remote Control Dandy, and Vanguard Bandits, Human Entertainment hit hard times and closed shop in 1999. The Clock Tower series lay dormant for a number of years until Sunsoft picked it up in 2003.

In Clock Tower 3 Alyssa is a teenager whose mother is kidnapped by an evil figure called the Dark Gentleman. In searching for her missing parent, Alyssa discovers that she can psychically project herself into the past where she must defeat a series of twisted serial killers before confronting the Dark Gentleman’s corrupt plan. Along the way, Alyssa can help put the tormented spirits of murder victims to rest by uncovering the circumstances of their deaths.

Given a much needed visual overhaul for the PlayStation 2, Clock Tower 3 moved at a faster pace than the earlier games, dispensing with the point and click interface and giving the player direct control over Alyssa. The series’ focus on hiding from danger remained, although it sometimes seemed aggravatingly impossible to give pursuers the slip.

Something that went largely unnoticed was Clock Tower 3’s lengthy cut-scenes that were directed by Kinji Fukasaku, one of Japan’s great (and sadly, late) subversive film directors. Fukasaku had a long history in the motion picture industry, having directed the epic Yakuza series Battles Without Honor or Humanity and the delirious Green Slime. He was the co-director of Tora! Tora! Tora! and worked with Yukio Mishima on Black Lizard. Fukasaku’s confrontational spirit was undiminished by age and his last film was the anarchic Battle Royal, released in 2000.

It seemed to me that Clock Tower 3 could have been a very appealing game for teenage girls. It had all the elements of a Richard Peck novel. A plucky female protagonist with mysterious psychic powers and a gothic romance setting that was spooky but not really all that scary. Also, the idea of helping ghosts find their peace was actually kind of sweet. If only the game wasn’t so malicious and violent, a virtual charnel house of vigorous, gory mayhem. But I suppose that was to be expected with Fukasaku’s involvement. After all, his hard, unsentimental style paved the way for bloody knuckled hipster/critical darlings like Takeshi Kitano and Takashi Miike.

Published in America by Capcom, Clock Tower 3 is still available new from GameQuestDirect for $14.99.

Haunting Ground

In 2005, Capcom developed and published Haunting Ground for the PlayStation 2. Although technically not a Clock Tower game, Haunting Ground was obviously intended as a new entry in the series. The basic Clock Tower elements are all present. An orphaned young woman is trapped in a madman’s castle and stalked by crazed pursuers. She has no real defenses and finding clever hiding spots is the only way to shake her tormentors off her trail. New this time is a White Shepard that accompanies her nightmare journey. The dog is a loyal companion that can help uncover clues, warn of danger, and fight off attackers with his vicious bite.

Haunting Ground is unusual from other games in that it is absolutely saturated with alchemical imagery. Every element of the game carries a trace of the opus circulatorium, both subtle and obvious. Game designers have often sprinkled bits of esoterica into their works to add some exotic flavor, like naming a character Sephiroth, or scanning in some Robert Fludd drawings for background art. But Haunting Ground’s entire vocabulary is a study in alchemy. To give you an example, one tricky puzzle had me stumped until I found the solution, not in a FAQ or a strategy guide, but between the pages of Paracelsus: Selected Writings. Haunting Ground makes a serious commitment to its aesthetics that is exceptional.

Out of print, Haunting Ground can be found online for around $20.

[Jeffrey Fleming is an East Bay writer. To read more, please visit Tales of the Future.]

Posted by jfleming at 2:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

May be a bit behind the curve on this one, but I-Mockery has posted a full gallery from the newest I Am 8-Bit art show in Los Angeles, showcasing some of the neatest-looking video game-inspired art to grace gallery walls since, uhm, the last I Am 8-Bit show.

The intro explains: "I know a lot of people have been waiting to see the all of the amazing 80's video game inspired artwork from the 2007 "I Am 8-Bit" show at Gallery 1988. Well, for those of you who didn't get to attend the opening reception here in Los Angeles, you're in luck. We took over a hundred photos of the show so you can check out most of the classic game creations that were on display."

However, it warns: "You'll have to excuse the odd angles we had to take the photos at sometimes... it was insanely crowded in there and we weren't about to shove people out of the way just to get a perfectly centered photo."

Actually, most stuff is well shot, and, in discussing this with a friend over IM, we agree that this year's show is basically 'more of the same', but pretty darn GOOD 'more of the same' that we'd be highly tempted to buy to hang on our wall, in most cases - though there's a bit too much Mario and Pac-Man, in general.

[Oh, and the official site notes that game company sponsors include Capcom and Foundation 9 (plus CMP's PR agency of record 47 Communications!), so thanks for supporting great art, youz guyzes.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Oh, semantics! We just got a note from Alex of previously GSW-linked site Insomni.ac, and he explains to us: "I recently wrote a little piece on my website about why the word 'gameplay' is stupid and why I think we should all stop using it."

Not saying I agree, or disagree, or have even thought about it that much, but... heeere's Alex's controversial thesis: "By far the biggest problem with the word gameplay is that it's too all-encompassing to be of any use. When you say "this game has bad gameplay" you are not really giving me any more useful information than if you had simply said "this is a bad game". Besides, it seems that different people have different ideas of what gameplay is supposed to be -- there is nothing like a widely-accepted definition (check also: dictionaries). So the term has come to basically mean: "I cannot be troubled to specify what I like or don't like about this game"."

Conclusion? "In the end, sloppy use of words promotes sloppy thinking, and before you know it you are sprouting nonsense like "The most important part of a game is the gameplay". If this sentence doesn't sound dumb to you it's because you've been brainwashed from seeing it in print a billion times. For perspective, this is just as pointless as saying "The most important part of a movie is the moviewatch"."

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (21)

Over at big sister site Gamasutra, today's main feature is called 'Made In Japan: Western Perspectives On Japanese Game Development', and Ryan Winterhalter has done a pretty good job of summing up how Japanese development is just handled differently, with the help of a few special guests.

Here's the overview: "How do best practices in the Japanese game industry differ from the West? Expatriates Gregg Tavares (LocoRoco), Dylan Cuthbert (StarFox), and the pseudonymous JC Barnett discuss what they've learned - and what we can all learn - about game development in Japan."

Absolutely unmissable is Dylan Cuthbert's summing up of game development culture throughout the world - and having worked in 2 of the 3, I have to say he's spot on regarding those:

“The UK is a pub culture - people like to doss and arse about a lot, but they are very good and very skilled at their jobs - when they do them.”

“The US is a corporate culture, everyone is a cog in the machine, even in a smaller company, so there is far less responsibility towards the company and its finances and people assume that they should have the best wage, best equipment, best software, best everything, even if they don't use them. That said, they have great responsibility to the work itself and there are some extremely clever and diligent people there. Corporate politics, gossip and rivalries can get a bit too much.”

“The Japanese games development culture is still slightly "salaryman", everyone kind of avoids responsibility by remaining quiet but they persevere by themselves until they get the product done. Unfortunately, this lack of sharing is hurting the technical development of the games industry here in Japan. The Japanese never give up until all the details are in place and they try and leave nothing haphazard or rough-edged, or oozappa (in Japanese).”

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Mr. Sheffield forwarded me a Midway PR email which contains links to some of the most uncomfortable video footage displayed in public in recent years: "Executives and guests from Midway Games Inc. visited the New York Stock Exchange on Tues., April 24 to celebrate the launch of its latest video game, "The Lord of the Rings Online"."

Oh yeah? "To celebrate this special occasion, CEO David Zucker rang The Closing Bell." And here's the video evidence that he did [.ASX link] Unfortunately, there seems to be a tiny little hobbit standing to his left, and then 'Gandalf' just to the side of him. 'Gandalf' is bopping his stick up and down in delight as Zucker alternately rings a bell and slams a mallet into the desk, in a Phoenix Wright courtroom stylee. Guys, this is pretty surreal! [The accompanying image has been blurred to protect the innocent!]

Oh, and over at MMOG Nation, the ever-online Michael Zenke has been talking about Lord Of The Rings Online on its launch day, and he has some neat conclusions: "It may seem to you like I put most of the core of the game under ‘like’, some fluff under ‘love, and some serious problems at the bottom. You’d be right. I didn’t shell out $199 for a lifetime membership because I don’t think I’m ever going to play the game that much. By biting the bullet when I did I can stick to the $9.99 membership and get my jollies at a lower cost."

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Jamie Fristrom, who once upon a time did 'Manager In A Strange Land' as a column for Gamasutra, has published a new 'MIATS' column on his weblog, named 'Quality vs. Scope', and it's as perceptive as ever.

He explains: ""Scope" is a fancy project manager word for "Size." I don't know why I use it. I guess to look fancy. You've heard that expression: "Cheap, fast, or good: pick two." (Or, as the guys from Id put it at the last DICE: "Cheap, fast, or good: pick *one*.") Well, there's a variable missing from that equation. What we really should be saying, is: "Cheap, fast, good, or big: pick three." Or, better still: "Cheap, fast, good, or big: prioritize them and find a balance you're happy with.""

Fristrom also has some interesting musings on this general issue of working out "...when you're doing something that's going to improve quality, or if you're just making the game bigger at the expense of quality" - which is much trickier than it might seem!

He concludes: "If this all seems obvious, I have to ask - why does choosing size over quality seem so epidemic in our industry? Maybe it's the schedule - it's easy to write down an estimate for how long it will take to "Get Snowblower Mode In"; it's not so easy to estimate how long it will take to "Get framerate to 60" or "Smooth out player experience.""

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Really enjoying how Gamezebo is taking the time to profile some of the leading casual game creators - the latest is an interview with Stanley Adrianus from Gamenauts, the creators of recent hit title Burger Rush, a game that's, yes, Diner Dash-y on the surface, but 'match 3'-like in its core, an interesting mashed-up concept.

He explains exactly how it came about: "In the case of Burger Rush, there were a couple of starting points - the first is that being a fan of obscure Japanese cooking games, I had wanted to create a game about food and cooking for a long time. The second is that at Gamenauts, we're particularly fond of merging 2 different genres together. In fact [previous Gamenauts title and non-hit] Spacebound itself is also a melding of 2 different games, although not as obvious as Burger Rush."

He also talks about why Burger Rush has hit the sales mark, but Spacebound didn't: "For our first title, I think we suffered that same problem that plagued many new game developers: Notunderstandingourtargetaudience-itis. The players who liked Spacebound the most are typically fans of console and handheld puzzle games, and not the mainstream casual games audience. This was a valuable lesson for us and we shifted our focus and attention squarely on the "casual moms" as the target audience for our next game." Neat stuff.

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The only true journalism on the Internet belongs to the increasingly lunatic Zorg and friends at UK Resistance, for whom the PlayStation 3's European launch has been a mind-shattering experience that's turned the site into a boggling variation on faux-Sony bashing that's basically... Sony bashing!

Actually, I think this has led some people to get confused about the site's satirical origins (or at least, satirical mid-life crisis), so it's good to see an interview with Sumo Digital about Virtua Tennis 3 which is asking all the wrong questions in just the right way.

For example: "Why is it that some games are glitchy and rubbish on Xbox Live, but others are really smooth? Surely developers should all enable 'Really Smooth Mode' by default?" Or... "Isn't it sad what's happened to Sonic The Hedgehog recently?" Or especially: "Finally, can you say something controversial, so we can make it the headline and get loads of traffic from Digg? Say something like "PS3 isn't as good as Xbox 360" or "Wii is just a Gamecube with a rubbish controller"." Which Sumo refuses to do, the rotters.

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at our sister mobile game site Games On Deck, the lovely Mathew Kumar has got out his journalist deerstalker and tracked down specifics on the announcement of Katamari Damacy Mobile, a currently Japanese-only cellphone version of the franchise.

Sounds like a pretty interesting title, because you actually tilt your phone to roll the Katamari: "Namco Bandai has announced Katamari Damacy Mobile, a fully 3D cellphone title featuring motion sensitive controls... The game is currently only confirmed for Japanese release, and will come pre-bundled with the iMode FOMA P904i phone. It will also be made available through download at the Bandai Namco Games Japanese web portal, starting this June."

What's more: "The motion sensitive controls are to be provided by Gesturetek's Eyemobile Engine (as previously discussed in a Games On Deck Q&A) which allows movement to be sensed through use of the in-built camera featured on many phones. It doesn't require that the phone have any dedicated hardware [other than the camera!] to sense motion."

[Oh, and a Japan-only release of a 2D mobile version of Katamari is also mentioned, which I'm not sure I realized existed. Neat - let's keep piling up more Katamari information on GSW until we've created a big aggregated pile of it!]

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Matthew Wegner's Fun-Motion has updated with news of a brand new demo-scene impelled physics game for PC, called Sumotori Dreams [87kb ZIP download link], and which looks like lots of stumbly fun to me.

Wait, 87k? As explained: "Sumotori Dreams is a small demoscene game created by Peter Sotesz for the Breakpoint 2007 96k game competition (it took first). The premise is simple: two self-balancing physics rigs face off in a sumo ring. The first rig to fall over loses. The implementation is simple but satisfying, and is well supported by solid physics, decent lighting, and good camera work."

Wegner concludes of the free-to-download game: "Sumotori is awfully impressive - self-balancing bipeds are a very difficult domain, even in the scope of “serious” research. Granted, a video game can tweak the rules of physics where a physical robot cannot, but it’s still a great achievement. I’d love to see Peter keep tweaking the physics to massage the gameplay to a more advanced state, but even now Sumotori is a fun party game." The demo-scene wins again!

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

A quick cross-post, then, to mention that we've set up some brand new discussion forums over at education site Game Career Guide, and for those who want to get into the game biz, we're hoping they will become a throbbing hive of information - or at least real people who aren't spambots! You get added Marc Mencher, too. Here's the info:

"Gamasutra's game education sister site GameCareerGuide.com has launched new forums to facilitate the discussion of topics related to getting into the game industry, game career paths, game education, and game studies. Readers are encouraged to create accounts, specialize their profiles with avatars, and start up conversations.

As apart of the new forum kickoff, game career specialist Marc Mencher of GameRecruiter.com is appearing as a guest poster to answer questions from forum users.

Mencher is a specialist in game industry careers who previously worked for such game companies as Spectrum Holobyte, Microprose, and 3DO, and is the author of “Get In The Game!” - an instructional book on careers in the video games industry. He has been an Executive Producer on several games, and is also a curriculum advisor to colleges offering game development degrees.

To register and jump into a discussion, interested parties can visit the new Game Career Guide Forums area. Please note that the forums currently require a new user login, separate from existing Gamasutra/Gamasutra Jobs registration."

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Roboto-chan!' is a fortnightly column by Ollie Barder which covers videogames that feature robots and the pop-cultural folklore surrounding them. This week's column covers the effect of the animated series Ideon on the future of gaming.]

It’s safe to say that ninjas are suitably potent. In the aeon old conflict with their natural adversaries, the eyepatch wearing pirates, ninjas have a distinct advantage due to their ability to channel real ultimate power. However, much like with mecha, you have two sides to ultimate power; real and super.

To commemorate my final entry into the Roboto-chan pantheon, I feel it necessary to cover the arbiter of super ultimate power and its effect on gaming as a whole. For those who are concerned about my imminent departure, fear ye not! Similar to the super robot shows from the 70’s, I have sourced a plucky replacement with hot blooded fists of justice. He will pilot the column with equal skill and insight (think Hot Rod rather Ultra Magnus in terms of competence). Naturally, as of the column's next edition he shall light our darkest hour.

Anyway, on with my final contribution to the column...

Shortly after Tomino helmed the original Gundam series, he ventured into somewhat uncharted territory. It’s safe to say that he had, and still has, a certain disdain for super robots. He originally directed the first Raideen, only to leave half way through due to a disenchantment with the whole super robot ethos. Gundam was realistic reaction to that.

Gundam was a turning point for mecha but that wasn’t enough for Tomino. Instead, he merged the newly formed real robot genre with a force of epically super proportions. The series was called Ideon and its influence can still be felt quarter of a century later.

For all intents and purposes, Ideon was a real robot show. It had a very clearly defined set of physical rules. Machines took damage, people died. It was very much a continuation of what Gundam started. With one major difference; the eponymous mecha Ideon was very much a super robot.

Admittedly, it’s super qualities were hidden from view to begin with. The gattai and henkei sequences weren’t crazy and the Ideon did take damage. However, the Ideon was the arbiter of a terrifying source of power and over the course of the story it became clear that this power was equitable to that of a God.

The Ideon had multiple weapons, one of which were a pair of beam swords that emanated from the hands. They had various levels of strength but the one that people remember is that of their ability to cut a planet in half. What’s more, the swords were one of the weaker weapons at the Ideon’s disposal. The simply dreadful Wave Leader Cannon could destroy sections of a galactic arm quite easily. The Ideon wasn’t your normal super.

What made series so special was the contrast between the realistic stance of the show’s background and the deified nature of the Ideon itself. It grounded the truly horrifying omnipotence of the signature mecha and amplified the sense that you were in the grasp of something that was considerably larger than meagre the confines of the television.

Despite all of Ideon's incredibly destructive weapons, it's final act in the film Be Invoked, which brought the narrative to a distinctive close, was to essentially re-boot the universe. You can't really top that.

Which brings me onto Ideon's significance in terms of gaming. If we approach a game as a rule set with an objective, how do you impart a functional allegory of Ideon's awesome magnifence? Naturally, many have tried and obviously fallen short.

Two Super Robot Wars games attempted the feat of mapping Ideon to a game. The first, F Final on the Saturn, approached its power with a deferred reverance. It was incredibly difficult to unlock the power of Ide without either losing all of your units or seeing the destruction of the Ideon itself. Like in the anime, the Ideon responds to the destruction of its allies or if it sustains substantial damage. So getting the unfettered wrath of the mecha at your disposable was a Herculean task (only exacerbated by the stringent tactics required on the part of the player).

The second attempt was more recent, Alpha 3 offered the Ideon but instead took another approach; give the player as much power as possible. Utilising the Ideon's menu of weapons was a fairly simple affair compared to that of F Final, stringent tactics weren't present for starters and gaining access to the Ide required far fewer of your allies to dive onto their swords.

Still, neither game really encapsulated the sense of potency. Considering that both games offered an insane map based attack, it still can't really approach the annihilation of the universe.

This brings me onto my final point; mecha games are the attempted embodiment of the anime that inspired their existence. When something like Ideon exists as a conceptual benchmark, how do you approach that in design terms? Can it even be really done?

Personally, I'm glad that impossible inspiration such as this exists. It forces games creators to chase after an elusive and difficult objective, something that has defined the mecha genre of gaming throughout the years and one I hope will continue to do so for many more to come.

[Ollie Barder is a freelance journalist who's written for The Guardian, appeared on BBC Radio 4 and contributed to Japanese mecha artbooks. He lives at home with an ever growing collection of Japanese die-cast robot toys and a very understanding wife.]

Posted by oliieb at 6:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Thanks to Tale Of Tales' Auriea Harvey for pointing out that there's a Flickr account which is posting all the official Katamari Damacy wallpapers that were available on the Namco Japan website at various points.

As is noted: "The Katamari wallpapers were taken from the official Namco Katamari Damacy website before it was taken down. I have/will posted the ENTIRE wallpaper collection (82 total) that was ever offered by Namco!" There's been 57 posted so far - some of my favorites include this almost folk art-esque entry, as well as a slightly surreal red carpet-pushing effort, and, uhm, Namco's office building (as seen on the Japanese cover of We Love Katamari) making another appearance.

Now, with Namco announcing Beautiful Katamari, a "...next-gen version for PS3 and Xbox 360 featuring online multiplayer modes and downloadable content expansions", will the series flow to new heights, or hang out as a bit of a pale pseudo-sequel, as the PSP version (the first without Keita Takahashi) did? We can only hope.

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now this is the kind of press release I appreciated, since it's headed: "Toribash adds virtual market for blood, body parts and user created content." Uh, what? Well: "The online fighting game Toribash now has a active virtual marketplace. The most popular items are custom head textures and the talented Photoshop artists creating them are already the richest members of the community."

We've previously covered the extreme oddness of IGF 2007 finalist Toribash, and this just about takes the cake: "If buying heads is not your thing perhaps some Vampire or Acid Blood from the blood shop is just what your Tori Fighter needs... The market place also has a Clan Story shop, first five stories are free and the merchant promise to tweak the stories until you are happy with them. Signatures, rotating heads, secret Toribash moves are other what to appears to be popular commodities."

What's more: "The ingame currency is called ToriCredits and are earned by winning matches or deposited using premium SMS." I notice the official Toribash community is getting pretty crowded now - '2765 Posts in 7403 Topics by 3376 Members' - so it's good to see an indie title take off online and get a good micro-community going. Here's a couple of new YouTube videos of uber-carnage, too.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm sometimes surprised at just who reads GameSetWatch, and Kevin Gifford's latest Game Mag Weaseling column has just turned up a most interesting comment from Game Informer EIC Andy McNamara.

To remind you, Mr. Gifford praised the front news and analysis section of Game Informer, but was a tad disapproving over the longform previews of Grand Theft Auto IV and the new 2K Sports football title, noting: "Both articles are interesting if you are interested in the game in question in the first place. They are glorified feature lists enhanced with developer quotes and insulated by hundreds of words of filler."

McNamara says a little more than this, but here's the meat of it: "I fail to see how getting world exclusive content that you can't get anywhere else isn't offering our readers something unique and worth the price of a magazine.

We also work very hard to make sure that those 16 to 20 pages of previews have as much unique content as possible, including many exclusive details and screens that aren't available online (I would say about 60 to 80% on average). Our reader feedback has always shown great support for our cover stories and features.

Saying that the magazine isn't completing its goal because the previews will be online months later seems an unfair judgment. By that same logic you would say those online sites shouldn't do the previews because Game Informer did it months before."

Kevin also weighs in, and indeed, here's the crux of his reply: "Speaking as a reader and a guy who loves print media and wants to see it stay as relevant as possible, once the next big exclusive reveal comes around, the way I'd like to see it approached is "All right, I have some screens and some features I'm allowed to talk about -- now what can I do to make the 6-8 pages I need to fill honestly interesting, to the point where people would want to read the feature even if they didn't care at all about the game/genre it was talking about?""

I have to say that I agree with Mr. Gifford here - I was disappointed in the GTA IV preview because it felt so 'managed' from the Rockstar end. It's clear that a very small amount of information was made available besides the screenshots, so there was nowhere to go from an actual reporting point of view.

Having said that, as Kevin also notes, I feel that Game Informer is building a strong base of well-researched, well-thought out pieces outside of the previews and reviews coverage, where they don't have to play ball with restrictive PR/marketing types. Which is great - they could sit on their laurels thanks to the subscription base they've built up, and they're certainly not. So it's just a question of getting Rockstar to play ball, eh? (As if!)

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ubisoft's game design supremo Clint Hocking has posted an excellent new in-depth blog post called 'Hollywood’s Bloody Ballet – What Game Design Can Learn From 300', and it's a dense, meaty read.

I can't really do it justice by excerpts, but here's a key couple of paragraphs for a taster: "If 300 proves that filmmaking is ultimately, at its core, about low-level visual storytelling, and that the lofty high-level plotting of a movie, while often important, is simply not central to a film, then there can be no real or meaningful convergence between the two mediums."

He continues: "Music is about the low level sequencing of tones. Cooking is about the low level blending flavors. Film is about the low level sequencing of images. Games are about the low level interaction between player and system... Saying that games can learn from film and vice versa – while not entirely untrue – is only as true as saying convergence between cooking and ballet would make ballet taste better and would make meals better express the beauty of the human form. Ridiculous."

[On this subject, actually, the whole convergence thing is being discussed by the 2nd Hollywood and Games Summit, being organized by my compatriots in the CMP Game Group alongside The Hollywood Reporter for later in June. There's some pretty interesting speakers announced thus far, including Jordan Mechner of Prince Of Persia fame, and TMNT director Kevin Munroe, plus Heroes exec producer Jesse Alexander. Not plugging - it's just relevant.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Via XBLArcade, news of an IGN preview revealing Xbox Live Arcade title Undertow from Chair Entertainment, and it's a 2D underwater multiplayer shooter from the creators of Advent Rising. Blimey.

According to IGN, the gameplay of the title" ...is best described as Geometry Wars meets Battlefield. Movement is mapped to one analog stick with attack on the other. Shots come in a constant stream a la Geometry Wars and depth charges can be activated with the pull of a trigger... The goal is to destroy your enemies and take control of their bases, with victory coming from a similar system to the flag and ticket system Battlefield is famous for."

A glance at Chair Entertainment's website reveals that their other projects include work with Orson Scott Card on Empire, "...a chilling look at a near future scenario of a new American Civil War. Chair is now simultaneously developing a feature film, and a future comic book series and video game all inspired by that same universe."

(Some may recall that the Mustard brothers worked on Advent Rising with Scott Card, hence the continuing connection. In the meantime, good to see an underwater 2D shooter for XBLA - continuing the proud tradition of In The Hunt by other means!)

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm absolutely delighted to see Wired News' Chris Kohler make a post about an untrue Square Enix news story that's recently been splashed across a bunch of major blogs - from Joystiq to Destructoid and beyond, with a complete lack of fact-checking when passing on the report.

All together, now - 'Responsible game blogging does not absolve you from factchecking!' I don't care who you are: If you're paid to blog, and fresh news comes your way, you should go find the primary source to make sure the story is true before posting it. It's as simple as that.

As Kohler notes of the claims (of a major change in Square Enix's business model!): "First off, a cursory examination of Square Enix's Japanese web page reveals absolutely no news stories, site updates, press releases, or investor relations updates regarding a shift in platform strategy." And I also noticed that an earlier version of this same story made it to the front page of Digg, with only a limited amount of complaints from commenters.

Anyhow, I've been accused of anti-blog bias before, since I also have a bee in my bonnet about this type of thing, so I think I have to be quite clear here. The problem is people not doing their homework before posting a story - and would be true whether it was the case on Gamasutra, or GameSpot, or any outlet for news about games.

In other words, it's not a game blogger thing, or a game journalist thing - it's an information thing. Everyone makes mistakes - heck, I made one earlier today when trying to divine the company affiliation of a LJ poster - but some are more fundamental and in larger arenas than others. Now if you'll excuse me, you'll find me down the pub, in the corner with Kohler, scowling at the other patrons, quaffing snakebite and black, and grumbling to ourselves under our breath.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Michael over at MMOG Nation points out something interesting going on in SOE's MMO title Star Wars Galaxies - the opportunity for players to act as in-game demolition experts, thanks to an overproliferation of abandoned player housing.

It's explained: "If your account has been inactive since April 17, 2006, any of the following structures on your account will be CONDEMNED, marked as abandoned and demolished beginning June 5, 2007: Houses, Harvesters, Factories, Player Associations.... Starting on June 5, 2007, those structures that have not been reclaimed will be marked as abandoned."

So what? Well: "An abandoned structure will then be subject to demolition by your fellow citizens. Citizens will be rewarded for each structure demolished... For each successful destruction of an abandoned structure, you will recieve one reward point. Reward points are redeemable at the Luck Despot for cool in-game items that you can use to decorate your own structures."

Not sure if this is tragic or incredibly clever - likely a combination of the both - but Michael notes: "The obvious reason to do this is to clear out the worlds a bit in anticipation of a server merge... Player housing is (I imagine) one of the stickiest wickets to tackle when it comes to considering bringing SWG player together."

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over at the LiveJournal of 'Bonuspoints', there's a neat/depressing story about evaluating games for publishing which shows the kind of issues with content developed by (possibly foreign) nerds, for nerds that can often dog low-budget games - both in terms of cheesiness and misogyny, unfortunately.

It's explained: "Among the numerous titles we received today was a Crazy Taxi clone. Upon selecting ‘New Game’, we were greeted with the game’s default character: a very large, muscular man wearing a kilt and brandishing a wrench. This was certainly not what we expected to see, and the three of us got a decent chuckle out of it. Stranger still was the next character who appeared to be a female mage complete with revealing ‘robes’ and a metal staff. Again, we laughed.

Sadly, the following two characters (a stereotypical Pakistani cab driver and a prostitute) were nowhere near as entertaining as the first two. Clicking the ‘Next’ arrow brought us back to the default character and thus crushed our hopes for further wackiness. Having made up my mind to vote for the most ridiculously out of place character however, I was quick to inform my coworkers of whom I felt they should select.

Me: “Come on guys, you have to pick the mage!”
Coworkers: “Wait, who? There was a mage?”
Me: “Yeah, the girl with the staff!”
Coworkers: “Ummmm, Nick? That’s not a staff.”

Upon taking a closer look I realized that what she was holding onto was actually a pole. It was at that moment that the rest of the details clicked into place and my error became crystal clear. I had just taken a stripper to be a female spell caster."

Oh dear - let's draw a veil over that whole incident, shall we? There's also another postby the same author discussing and explaining an interesting PC puzzle game called DNA - there's a demo if you click through, looks worth a peek! [EDIT: Apparently, the LJ author doesn't work for 5th Cell, though, as I previously guessed - apologies for confusion.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

The latest Media Coverage column over at GameDaily has Kyle Orland discussing how to become a game journalist, and he interviews a bunch of professionals about it, including Gamasutra Podcast producer Tom Kim - I appreciate well-crafted articles with multiple points of view like this.

Here's a couple of key paragraphs: "But there are always other outlets, right? Some think the explosion of games writing on the Internet and mainstream publications has made it easier than ever to break into the field these days. "There are a lot more outlets for videogame writers now," Wired's [Chris] Baker said. "There may be tons of competition to write for EGM and GameDaily, but your hometown newspaper may be open to pitches.""

An interesting quote from IGN's Peer Schneider, also - he thinks that breaking in to game journalism today is harder because games are "more than just the little brother of the movie biz. ... Even though the means of publishing things online have become more accessible thanks to video-sharing sites and blogs, it's tougher for a hopeful candidate to stand out as games and entertainment journalism are now much more in the public eye."

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The curator of the PlayStation Museum pinged me to point out that he's now posted full details on the Superman game for the PlayStation 1 - an unreleased title that was going to be published by Titus (creators of the infamous N64 version.)

As is explained: " In 1998, BlueSky Software began working with French developer Titus to bring Superman, based on the WB animated series, to the PlayStation. At that time Titus had almost finished work on the N64 version of the game in France with their own team. Originally, the plan was to take the N64 game and port it over to the PlayStation. All that was to be done was to take the art and reformat it to run in a PlayStation engine. Then the Superman N64 game was released. One reviewer stated" "This game exists for the sole purpose of firmly establishing the bottom of the barrel”."

So what happened? The game was extensively redesigned, but it's claimed: "Unfortunately the license from Warner Brothers had expired. Essentially, Superman continued to be developed with no assistance from DC comics or Warner Brothers. The plan was to surprise everybody with a finished product." Wait, was this really the plan?

Anyhow: "After almost 2 years of development, Superman reached a milestone: it received approval for release from Sony and issued a product code of SLUS-00712. Many retail outlets were accepting pre-orders for the game and advertisements were created... By the time the game was completed, Titus was unable to secure the license. Superman for the PlayStation was officially laid to rest." There's video linked on the page, too, and the Museum folks claim that it's actually quite a playable game.

But, uh - I think you can tell that this wasn't completely licensor-approved: "Superman is littered with secret codes in the game such as clearing kryptonite or showing coordinates. There are even codes to select a level, language, or start a demo. But the one Easter egg that shows the developer has a sense of humor is the ability to change the splash screen to a picture of Lois Lane ripping her shirt off revealing her bra and the words "Keep your shirt on.""

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

Very few new US mags hit shelves the past couple weeks, but that's all right because everyone was too busy dissecting GI's GTA4 feature anyway. I have the entire magazine on my mind, though, and click on to read my views on how the world's top-circulation game mag is doing in its quest to keep itself relevant...

Game Informer May 2007

Cover: Grand Theft Auto IV

I'd like start by reprinting some of editor-in-chief Andy McNamara's opening statements this issue:

"I find it funny that almost daily I read about how print is dead on some Internet site. It's like they have nothing better to do than belittle their competition, rather than compete. To the naysayers: Magazines are here to stay, whether the Internet likes it or not [...]

I actually enjoy the avenues that open up to us when creating a magazine. In the early days of Game Informer, we spent a lot of time and effort cramming as much news into an issue as we possibly could. Thankfully, regurgitating every minor press release is no longer our charge. Magazines are about the big picture. This lets us do more in-depth reporting and analysis. we can look at what is and what isn't important to the gamer today, and find the stories that we think are shaping gaming now and for the future."

I think statements like these should be pretty familiar to anyone who's read this column before. As I've mentioned, pretty much every magazine these days, from GI and EGM all the way down to Beckett's publications, are trying their best to be interesting to read in and of themselves -- become coffee-table items, in other words -- rather then pretend to be authoritative on every aspect of gaming.

So how well has this issue of Game Informer (arguably one of the most closely examined in years) lived up to McNamara's goal of covering the big picture over the details? Well, the "Connect" news section up front personifies it. This particular month's Connect is a little more news-y than usual, devoting spreads to previews of upcoming MMORPGs and the very old news of Sony's GDC announcements (Edge did it nicer a month ago).

Much more interesting, however, is the six pages on game focus groups -- a feature I think EGM did a while ago, but with nowhere near this amount of depth and featuring this amount of input from both group members and industry people, both "speaking under condition of anonymity" and not. There's also an interview with Randy Pitchford (an interesting talk about the very boring topic of FPSes) and a very nice piece from the chief creative officer of Cryptic Studios (City of Heroes) about the future of the MMO industry.

Following this is the feature well, with 10 pages on GTA4 and six on All-Pro Football 2K8. Like most issues of Game Informer, this is where I start to wonder if McNamara's team loses their focus on "the big picture". What is it about either piece that couldn't have been done by IGN (and, indeed, probably will be done over the next few months)? I'm not sure there's much of anything, really.

Both articles are interesting if you are interested in the game in question in the first place. They are glorified feature lists enhanced with developer quotes and insulated by hundreds of words of filler. The same continues with the 17 pages of "regular" previews afterwards, which give you very little reason to want to read them at all, and the reviews are as they are in any mag -- helpful as another opinion, but not what you're buying the magazine for.

Now, GI is not the only magazine with boring features and previews. They all do, though I'd make the argument that mags like EGM, OXM and Games for Windows are at least trying to do away with them. What's more, GI's news/commentary section is totally unique among US games media (online or off) and I think it's easily worth the price of a subscription all by itself.

But does having an enormous circulation and every PR lady in the world trying to get her game on your cover mean that it's OK to publish features and previews that not only could be reproduced online, but probably done better online? I know I'm being harsh by expecting an industry leader to completely revamp itself overnight against the wishes of management, but while GI has made great strides toward McNamara's goal, I think they have just a bit further to go.

Tips & Tricks May 2007

Cover: God of War II

This must be what it feels like when you're attending a White House dinner and find yourself wearing the same evening gown as Laura Bush. Tips & Tricks this month starts out with six pages on the professional gaming circuit...just as an entire magazine, Beckett eSports, debuts on newsstands that's devoted to the same topic. T&T even printed the exact same photo of Halo 2 player Dave Walsh on the cover's top-right corner that eSports used for their main cover subject. The article's more interesting than all of eSports, though, concentrating on all the highlights of the scene without feeling obliged to report every little tournament detail.

The column lineup's exciting as ever, including two more pages of ancient Nintendo toys (I need to find out where Chris Bieniek got this stuff) and a couple of neat dev interviews.

Hardcore Gamer May 2007

Cover: Spider-Man 3

Was I the only subscriber to HGM who thought that this cover was actually a stick-on advertisement hiding the "real" cover? For that matter, am I the only subscriber to HGM at all? Is there anyone else out there? It's lonely...

The big news this month: all the editors now have weblogs, which you can access via hgmblog.com if you're too cool for clicking. Otherwise, you know the score for this mag by now, although the GDC "Junket Journal" is kinda a fun read.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 10:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

While researching for some new Gamasutra columns, Alistair Wallis pointed me to UK-based game designer Sean Cooper, specifically because of his awesome Boxhead: More Rooms game currently up and running on Flash game aggregation site Kongregate.

It's basically a 'kill lots of zombies with Lego-style characters' shooter, as the official plot explains: "Jon Bambo is back and a new beast is out to get him. Equipped with even more weapons and equipment, the Zombie has become cannon fodder and the new Beast will take you down unless you get all the 90+ upgrades and perfect your skill!"

Just had a chance to play through a few levels, and it sure has some fun physics (zombie recoil!) and switchable weapons - commenter Kyriva notes: "Very addictive. Worst thing is to shoot a barrel after you’ve laid it and it switched to pistol. Brilliant to scatter barrels so they all go off at once when the demons attack them."

Sean's official website has a big list of the titles he's worked on - Alistair summarizes: "Former Bullfrog artist, programmer and producer. Assistant producer on some of the earlier games like Syndicate, Populous II and Magic Carpet. Lead designer on Dungeon Keeper 2." Cooper also worked on a number of big EA titles (including initial concepts on The Godfather and James Bond titles) before leaving in 2005 to do the indie Flash thing. Yay.

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A little early weekend GameSetLinks, then - this one mainly compose of stuff I found during the week which was just a little small, weird, or otherwise darling to make it to a standalone post. Here we goes:

- via Dearest Copernicus, a new linkblog by GameSpy veteran Joost Schuur, Korean game-themed blog GameStudy.org has info on how well Korean MMO game firms are doing overseas, showing that in most cases, non-Korean divisions of Webzen, NHN, etc are apparently not profitable. Not particularly surprising, particularly because they're trying to break into new markets, but one does wonder whether we'll see a retreat at any point.

- Game Of The Blog points out an interesting 'Best Of Rockstar Games' official video, set to The Who's 'Eminence Front'. GotB's Joel notes: "It's interesting to note the games that aren't shown. From what I can tell (I haven't played them all), it's pretty much just The Warriors, the GTA 3s, Bully, Red Dead Revolver, the Midnight Clubs, the Max Paynes, and Manhunt. No 2D GTAs, State Of Emergencys, Smuggler's Runs...hell, not even freakin' Oni for God's sake!."

- I'm presuming most of you read it anyhow, but Game Developer editor Brandon Sheffield's Insert Credit has been a bit more active recently and I wanted to point out a couple of posts in particular - info on a new Korean PC 2D fighting game called 'CHOSUN MUSA : Chosun Hokeouk Geumlok', and the 'Typing Of The Dead'-style title Typing Mania 4, which is actually a free Flash game - nice.

- A blog to watch out for is Inside Xbox Live, since, as the author notes: "I will be a visiting researcher at the Community Technologies Group at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington between July and December 2007, primarily looking at online gaming." He's hoping to get access to varying amounts of Xbox Live data and analyze it for the good of all - which is great! Just a couple of posts up so far, and I'm not sure whether Microsoft types are aware of this blog yet - but hopefully MS can work to make this happen.

- I can't not link The New Gamer, so here's their review of THQ's S.T.A.L.K.E.R., a title that I was sent, but have sadly not had a chance to check out - it's in the hands of our Counter-Strike-lovin' sales guy right now, actually. Anyhow, The New Gamers' conclusion sums up well what I've been hearing about the game: "There are a dozen reasons you could truthfully use to call Stalker a bad game, but there are likewise a dozen reasons why it's the best game you'll play this year."

- Tale Of The Rampant Coyote has pointed out the release of female friendly RPG upgrade Cute Knight Deluxe, and he explains handily: "I tend to think that even though this is a very "girl-friendly" game, it is just good fun, and has a significant ... "guy friendly?" ... good ol' fashioned dungeon-delving hack & slash component. Hit the dungeon, bash monsters, gather loot, upgrade your equipment with magical treasure... good classic stuff. Just do NOT forget to change out of that bloody, dented plate mail before attending the ball, because it is just SO unbecoming!" There's a good interview with the creator here, and a fascinating story in how female-friendly RPGs (also see: Aveyond) have gotten onto casual portals, incidentally.

- Future U.S. (publisher of GamesRadar, OXM, PC Gamer, etc), has a semi-public marketing blog, and I'm going to have to call out their video of WWE Diva Ashley promoting GamesRadar by, uhm, being completely unable to string a series of words together to actually do so. Wait, is this marketing, or just hilarious?

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Apparently, Frank mentioned this game in the 1UP Retronauts podcast from this week, which is possibly why it popped up again, but Metafilter has an informative post on insane 3DO vapoware game Duelin' Firemen.

Here's the wisdom of the original MeFi post: "Duelin' Firemen was originally conceived as a 3DO game. According to this old subgenius post (Rev. Ivan Stang was apparently part of the cast), it was slated to be completed in July of 1995. It never saw the light of day. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), some of the game's video sequences survive, edited together in all their seizure-inducing glory [YouTube link]."

As the post ends: "Watch for cameos by Rudy Ray Moore, Mark Mothersbaugh, Tony Hawk, Timothy Leary, Steve Albini, David Yow, and a whole bunch of others... if you can actually bear to watch it."

There's also a very informative comment on the MeFi thread from 'eatyourlunch': "A few years ago, Grady [Sain, also one of the folks behind Urban Yeti alongside a slightly deranged old friend of GSW's] told me they'd hoped to revive the game, but then 9/11 happened. Planes+WTC and Space Shuttle+Sears Tower were too close for their comfort so, barring a rewrite and reshoot, this is all we're ever going to see of Duelin' Firemen."

He concludes: "But the spirit of runandgun is still alive and well with their alumnus Dave Foss (you certainly don't want to miss Horned Gramma or his alter-ego, TV Sheriff.) Other amazingly creative folks from the early 90s Chicago video scene include VJV2, Brian Dressel and Brien Rullman at OVT Visuals, and of course the inimitable H-Gun." All crazy, all the time.

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Regular GSW readers may recall that Vinny Carrella's column for Gamezebo is one of my favorite pieces of game writing on the web, and his latest, 'The Game That Changed The World', is no exception.

He explains: "There are these magic moments in life when a work of art seems as if it's sent to you by the gods. It hits you in just the right way at just the right time, and usually when you need it the most - Walt Whitman's Song of Myself, Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks, Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye - and it's cathartic, it's life-altering. After you see them or hear them or read them, you look at things differently. You change. It happens most often to me with music or books, but in games it's rare. Yet it did happen. Twice."

And? "The first time was in 1992 and that moment is tattooed on my brain. I remember it so clearly. It was a little-known adventure game called Out of This World [aka Another World], from a French studio named Delphine. It came on five floppies. There was no manual and no tutorial. The box was cryptic and offered little in the way of assistance to my understanding of game-play or plot. I had no idea what I was about to play. I was taking a chance. Little did I know I was pulling the cover off a masterpiece."

Now, the second game that changed Vinny's world is Snapshot Adventures: Secret Of Bird Island, a brand new game that a) nobody has really spotted so far and b) Vinny helped produce, but I actually think that the Large Animal-developed title looks pretty darn interesting (a Pokemon Snap-styled bird photography casual game!), so I'm pretty convinced that this is genuine conviction on his part, rather than hyping. Nice.

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Semi-via game metrics blog We Can Fix That With Data, we spotted the homepage of Orbus Gameworks, a newly founded game metrics analysis firm set up by Darius Kazemi and friends to help game developers make better design choices.

Anyhow, they have a blog featuring some neat visualizations of metrics info they're working on, most recently trying things out using Quake 3: "Green dots are health/armor pickups, blue dots are ammo, and red dots are weapons. The white lines you see represent frags: we draw a line starting at the position the killer was in, and ending where the victim was killed. And then we put a little triangle where the player died, so it makes a kind of wonky arrow."

There's also another newer visualization, and in this one, using a Java app to display the results: "We visualize 5-second windows of time during a deathmatch involving 7 bots on the map q3dm3. Within each window, we plot where a bot was when it fired a weapon. The point is color-coded by bot. If a bot successfully fragged another bot, we draw a line from the killer to the target, putting a big circle on the target. The circle is color-coded to the target bot’s color, and the line we draw is the color of the killer." Pretty neat stuff for game design purposes - also for fetching patterns.

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['Cinema Pixeldiso' is a semi-regular column by Matt 'Fort90' Hawkins that takes a look at movies that are either directly based upon or are related to video games, with a focus on the obscure and the misunderstood. This week’s selection is another documentary that chronicles a world record attempt, but this time we get to take a look at the most famous video game record holder of them all.]

Last time we examined the story of a man vs. machine - Bill Carlton vs. Missile Command. This time we have Steve Wiebe vs. King Kong, but the true heart of the story is man vs. man, Steve Wiebe vs. Billy Mitchell. And who's Billy Mitchell? Why, he's "gamer of the century" of course.

The King Of Kong

Cinema Pixeldiso's previous entry, on 'High Score', and this latest one, on 'The King of Kong', might seem identical, since both tell the same tale, of one man's mission to be immortalized as the greatest player of a particular classic video game. Both even feature a normal, everyday kind of person on such an absurd quest. But that's where the similarities end.

Whereas in the case of Bill Carlton's journey, the key difference is the person he was also going after, the man who held the high score that Bill was determined to shatter. In High Score's case it's Victor Ali, a nice, mild-mannered man who felt that his achievement, which attained during his youth, was something that he was proud of, but it hardly defined or dictated his life. It was ultimately some silly little thing, and High Score did a great job illustrating that hardcore gamers are usually normal folks that have a quirky obsession, and that's about it.

The King of Kong, on the other hand, goes the opposite route, by showing how much ego, absurdity, and insanity can come into play as a record holder for video game playing. How? By taking a close look at a man whose entire persona, even existence, is built around the fact that he plays video games very, very well.

The Superstar And His Entourage

Billy Mitchell is indeed one of the first superstars of the competitive video game playing world. Back in 1982, during the golden age of the arcade, Mitchell came into prominence by being the first to beat many popular machines, all at the age of 17. Around this time, Twin Galaxies, the world's first organization dedicated to collecting and verifying high scores, discovered Billy along with other expert players, and over the course of the years, Mitchell would become the unofficial figurehead of their entire universe.

His achievements, along with his prowess and even personality would help to form a cult of sorts; in many minds, at least those who believe having the high score in Pac Man is a god-like act, Mitchell is in fact a god to them. And one gets the sense that Mitchell drinks his own Kool Aid as well; early on the film, Mitchell is quite proud of his records and abilities, since they are simply the result of his underlying philosophies in life, that is to always be number one, and to take the enemy down like a fierce hunter.

Aside from high scores, it's gotten him recognition and fame (as silly as it sounds, his high scores has gotten him trips across the globe, appearances on television shows, and countless awards and photo opportunities.... there's even folk songs written about the man) - even letting him continue a successful family hot sauce franchise.

One interesting figure in Billy's universe is Steve Sanders, who first met Mitchell back when LIFE magazine gathered all the hot players at the time for a photo-shoot. Sanders' claim to fame was having the highest score to Donkey Kong, which Mitchell sensed was b.s., and it actually was. So Sanders was challenged to a head-to-head match and thoroughly trounced. But from that rather embarrassing and humbling moment, seeds were planted.

Sanders attributed Mitchell as the source of inspiration, what drove him to be a better person in life, and that Mitchell is the reason why he's a successful business person himself, and the two have remained close friends ever since. Another intriguing personality is the founder of Twin Galaxies, Walter Day, a rather frail looking, and obviously friendly sort of fellow, who plays folks guitar and practices transcendental meditation, and a man who takes great enjoyment and pride in cataloging the great achievements in electronic competition. He's the absolute authority, the final judgment. He can also make, or break, video game gods.

Walter is more or less a one-man operation, though he does have operatives, such as Robert Mruczek, the senior referee for Twin Galaxies, who was actually the "authoritative voice" in High Score. At one point we get to check out his apartment, which has stacks upon stacks upon stacks of video tapes that people had sent in of their record attempts, all of which has to be watched and verified by Mruczek, who describes the process with a "its a dirty job, but someone's got to do it" attitude.

We meet others too from this bizarre world, all of whom are a contrast to the friendly, relatable, and more importantly, approachable folks in High Score. Many of the folks in King of Kong are quite simply misfits of some sort (to put it nicely) that have found solace and meaning in life via the act of achieving greatness in a video game, and again, Billy Mitchell is their father-figure. Even early on he comes off as someone who's quite full of himself, but at least he seems like a nice enough guy. For the most part if feels like an act, which is further reinforced by the way he presents himself; at well above six feet, and rather lanky, he's got a mullet, a rather cartoon-ish beard, and is always seen sporting a very patriotic necktie.

Back to Donkey Kong, Mitchell nabbed the title of greatest Kong player back in the day, and its been his record ever since, as well as one that he's quite proud of, due to the fact that it's "... by far the hardest game." So being the King of Kong was something to be happy with, though there's not much stress or worry involved since it seemed so unattainable for others. That is until...

The Born Loser

Enter Steve Wiebe. Wiebe is that one person that everyone knows, the guy who always has so much potential, but just never manages to achieve true greatness. Wiebe's talents are varied, ranging from music to sports, and he's had chances to shine, but he's always come up short when the time was finally his. The dude just has bad luck, like when he signed for his first house, which was also the day he found out he was getting laid off. So with time on his hands, Wiebe discovered that he was good at Donkey Kong, and after checking out the highest score on record via the Twin Galaxies online database, he decided to go for it.

Thanks to a combination of having seemingly excellent hand-eye-coordination and OCD (which folks around him thought was autism), Wiebe played hard, as well as studied hard. Which was how, before any player before him, Wiebe discovered the true secret behind playing the game, a means to control the action onscreen. So one day, with a machine in his garage, and a camcorder on the screen, Wiebe decided to beat the record, and he succeeded (even when one of his children begged him to stop playing to help change his diaper due to an accident he just had).

And instantly, Wiebe becomes a superstar, with local news clamoring to talk to the man that broke a long-standing record. Granted one, that no one really knew or cared about, but that didn't matter, especially to Wiebe. At last he was a somebody. Wiebe had bested Mitchell. And that's when his troubles began.

Not too long afterwards, two mysterious men showed up to Wiebe's house while he was gone, and while his wife asked them to leave and come back, they simply brushed her aside and went on with their mission. The two men, who were from Twin Galaxies, went about and stripped Wiebe's Donkey Kong machine, to verify the hardware, to make sure if wasn't tampered with to give Wiebe any sort of edge. They would find one tiny little technical detail that did cast doubt, so the score was stricken from the record and Mitchell was given the title once more.

One primary reason for the doubt in the first place is that the board was supplied by Roy Shildt, a long-time nemesis of Mitchell and his gang. He achieved numerous high scores that Twin Galaxies refuses to acknowledge (there really wasn't any mention of him in High Score). Like Mitchell, Shildt is a cartoon character, having created a persona, called "Mr. Awesome", one that's reminiscent of an 80's WWF wrestler. The documentary even shows some footage of one film that Shildt created himself, "The Awesome Guide To Girls." Mitchell also accused Shildt of threatening his life, which he denies, so there is legitimate heat between the two.

Anyhow, Shildt saw in Wiebe someone who could take down the man he hated the most, and since Wiebe needed the hardware, the relationship was beneficial, but unfortunately a primary impetus for doubt in his achievement. Though the official reason that was given was that to truly break the record, the score has to be done live, in person, something that Mitchell always championed, the idea of performing under pressure.

Once again, Wiebe was a loser. But Shildt refused to allow Wiebe to be "chumpatized" and encouraged him to prove himself in front of all the doubters, at the holy grounds of classic gaming, Funspot at Weir's Beach in New Hampshire, which is American's largest arcade, and where many high score records had taken place, including Mitchell's famous record for Pac Man. So Wiebe headed east...

Into The Lion's Den

It's only when Wiebe arrives at Funspot, and into enemy territory, do we finally realize the entire scope of how ridiculous the little world that Mitchell and his cohorts have created for themselves. Unacknowledged and unwelcome by the faithful, Wiebe simply comes up to the place's Donkey Kong machine and starts to play. At this point we are introduced to Brian Kuh, a rather mousy character who was anointed by Mitchell as his "prodigy".

Much like Mitchell, there's the cockiness, but at least Mitchell has some degree of bizarre charm, whereas Kuh is just plain annoying, and he obviously has zero faith in Wiebe's abilities. Which is why he's beside himself as he witnesses Wiebe's skills firsthand, which he then reports to Mitchell via telephone, who at that moment is still down south in his native Florida, with Doris Self, the world's oldest competitive gamer, who was about to leave for Funspot herself, to cement her crown as champion Q Bert player. Also at this point do we finally see Mitchell's calm, cool demeanor begin to break down, and we see concern, even fear. As Self boards her plane, Mitchell hands her a special package to deliver, a grand surprise of sorts.

Another highlight of the movie is when Wiebe is approaching the end of his game, the "kill screen" as it is called (which is when the game simply cannot go any further and player's character is dies instantly), we see Kuh run around the arcade to tell anyone and everyone that "Someone's gonna hit the kill screen in Donkey Kong!" like a total dork. But Wiebe finally hits it; his score bests Mitchell's, and with not just eyes on-hand, but plenty of breathing down his neck. Victory is finally his... at least for a few minutes.

Not too long after, Mitchell's package arrives on the scene, and its a videotape, of Mitchell nabbing a higher score than Wiebe had just a few moments ago achieved in person. Again, Mitchell had stolen Wiebe's thunder, but worst off, in the same manner in which he was criticized for. Making matters worse is how the tape appeared to be tampered with, yet Walter Day still allowed it to be officially acknowledged.

Seemingly totally crushed, Wiebe goes back to his home state of Washington with little fanfare or regard...

"Some People Ruin Their Lives To Be There"

A few months later, Wiebe gets a phone-call. He discovers that the Guinness Book of World Records have decided to enlist Twin Galaxies as their official arm to tabulate and authenticate video game high score to be added to their books. Furthermore, a brand new competition is taking place to re-verfiy records, and its taken place in Florida, practically in Mitchell's backyard. Wiebe decides to give it yet another shot, and this time, even if he comes up short, he's determined to face the so-called King of Kong.

What follows is a cat and mouse game, one that proves that politics is everywhere, even as something as benign and innocuous as having a high video game score. What takes place, much like the entire film, is truly fascinating stuff - which we're obviously not going to spoil here. Like the very best documentaries out there, the reason why The King of Kong so amazing is that you hardly believe what you are seeing is real, but it is. Steve Wiebe is not unlike High Score's protagonist or hero, Bill Carlton, but in this instance, Wiebe is far more identifiable, since all of us have had sand kicked in our faces by a Billy Mitchell type, an overly proud and arrogant figure, one that is flat out despicable and who you wish would just come tumbling down.

King of Kong is, to a large degree, utterly frustrating, because we witness the jerk come up on top time and time again, but that's what also makes this movie so intense and effective. Like all good stories, we see people grow and change; false faces fade away and true natures become apparent, and how the people in both camps react is also compelling. Of note is Wiebe's wife, who just wants to see the man she loves be the best in just one thing in his life, as well as Steve Sanders, who also has to tow the line between friendship and reality.

Aside from the story, which again is one that is relatable to anyone, regardless of any interest in electronic games, the editing is superb, with effective use of on-screen graphics, as well as smart usage of music.

Final Score

The King of Kong is quite simply the finest documentary on the subject of video games this reviewer has ever seen. It is to video games as what Beyond the Mat was to professional wrestling and Spellbound was to spelling bees. We give it the highest recommendation possible.

BTW

For those of you in New York City, you can catch The King of Kong starting next week in the Tribeca Film Festival. Otherwise, you can catch it later this summer when it is released nationwide by Picturehouse on August 17th - GSW previously covered some of this info with added links, for the interested.

[Matt Hawkins is a New York-based freelance journalist and Gamasutra contributor. He also designs games, makes comics, and does assorted “other things.” To find out more, check out Fort90.com.]

Posted by at 4:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Always enjoy it when Eurogamer bust out an interview to break up the news and reviews, and there's a neat interview with Harvest Moon creator Yasuhiro Wada up there right now, answering some vital questions.

If nothing else, I enjoy the simple statement from Wada about why he created the series: "I wanted to convey the goodness of rural life - not urban life, but rural life - and farming was the easiest instrument to realise that feeling in a game. That's why I chose to make a farming game."

He also muses on the game franchise's success, and just why that might be: "I think it's very gentle and friendly. These days there are other games such as Animal Crossing that bear similarities, but before there wasn't such a game at all. Perhaps that's why people identified so much with Harvest Moon, originally."

Also, looks like Wada might be working on some interesting titles, to say the least. Though he still oversees Harvest Moon from a business point of view: "I'm working on something on the Wii platform, which is top-secret. I'm also working on No More Heroes on the Wii, which is headed up by [killer7 designer] Goichi Suda. It's a totally different world to Harvest Moon..."

So that's two more Wii titles worth at least a glance, then. Actually, while we're on this very subject, why hasn't one single major Western 'name' game designer announced that they're working on a Wii-only game? Am I just blanking on them? Is this because the Wii has been considered a family console, and edgy fare and cutting-edge graphical tech (not very likely on Wii) defines major Western creators better? Very vexing.

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Was reading this on the train the other day, and now it's online - alt.paper SF Weekly has a longform profile of Jane McGonigal, called 'Future Games' as their cover story this week, and it's eminently readable.

The most interesting thread in the article is an interest to harness the power of ARGs for serious, world-changing reasons: "To explain where she's coming from, McGonigal likes to quote one of the inventors of ARGs, Sean Stewart, who works at the Emeryville-based company 4orty2wo Entertainment. Until last year, McGonigal worked with his team on their commercial games. "He said that these games create "a collective intelligence that is unparalleled in entertainment history,'" says McGonigal. "Because it is unparalleled, I believe it would be a real crime to use it only for entertainment.""

Specifically: "McGonigal wants to harness the power of the communal cerebellum her games create, and put it to work solving real-world problems. Maybe young folks in warring countries could play games together, and would be less inclined to shed each other's blood. Maybe players could analyze real scientific data in the course of a game, crunching numbers and looking for patterns just as they always do, but with a payoff that goes beyond advancing to the next stage of a game." Realistic? Certainly provoking.

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The latest in Alistair Wallis' (and before that Frank Cifaldi's) 'Playing Catch-Up' column series for Gamasutra talks to Conflict 2500 creator William Volk - but if you didn't know about the cult 1981 strategy game, there's another fascinating part to his biz history.

Specifically, this is one of the first detail descriptions I've seen of how Activision came close to going out of business in 1991. Volk talks about how he helped to champion Cyan's Manhole at the company, and then it's noted:

"Activision was going through a number of financial issues, including an ill-advised decision to get involved with non-gaming software under the name Mediagenic, and the continued monetary fallout from a 1985 patent lawsuit from Magnavox in regards to Activision’s publishing of “ball and paddle” games. “The saddest thing about the patent judgment is that it almost put Activision out of business,” Volk sighs. “Almost everyone was laid off and we lost Cyan as a developer. We could have been the publisher of Myst! Amazing.”"

What's more: "The company changed management, with former Four Kids Entertainment CEO and Director and then-BHK Corporation head Robert Kotick stepping in as Director, Chairman of the Board and CEO in after acquiring a controlling interest in the company in February 1991. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and lost the majority of its staff at this time, but still managed to develop and release a number of titles – most notably, Steven Meretzky’s Leather Goddesses of Phobos 2, which Volk helped program, since the company was down to just 12 people at the time."

Plenty more good stuff if you click through - turns out the actual Activision resurgence was helped by Return To Zork, which Volk was one of the key players in: "“I also think Bobby believed in my vision on the multimedia adventure stuff,” he muses, “and Return to Zork proved him correct.”

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

For some reason, I was talking to someone on IM the other day, and I realized that there's a whole market in video game personality-themed board games that are just itching to be done.

Yes, I know Fantasy Flight Games make a World Of Warcraft board game, among many others, and I certainly remember the Pac-Man board game from Milton Bradley, but that's not what I'm going for. Specifically:

- How about 'Jeff Minter's Clue!' (or 'Jeff Minter's Cluedo' for non-Yanks)? The board could be Minter's idyllic welsh farm and paddock, the characters could include various sheep and goats, alongside Minter and his companion, and the murder weapons could include a Nuon controller and a Pink Floyd album. Obviously, nobody would be dead - just stoned. But hey, maybe there could be a limited edition with a gold Konix Multisystem controller, too?

- Rockem Sockem Robots with Nolan Bushnell and Ralph Baer. Why so? Well, Gamasutra writer Benj Edwards has already interviewed Ralph Baer and discovered some hints at some totally cute animosity: "One of the complaints that his highness Nolan Bushnell had was "Well, you didn't have any scoring on screen."" Apparently there's more to come from both Bushnell and Baer, and in the absence of any actual duels with light guns, maybe the guy who patented the computer tennis game and the guy who 'borrowed' the concept for Pong can have a little robotic square-off. Done.

- Everyone knows that special editions of Monopoly rock. But how about an Ion Storm version of Monopoly? The 'Do No Pass Go' card could be 'Do No Reach Alpha On Daikatana', the main characters could include a lovably modeled Superfly Johnson and JC Denton, both cast in 18 carat pewter, and best of all, John Romero could be Rich Uncle Pennybags. Would also come with a cast-iron guarantee: 'NO ROBOT FROGS INCLUDED!' You're feeling this, right?

But yes, this is a bit silly. Hey, sometimes I get all obscure and ephemera-referential - this is why GSW is an editor blog and not an organ of record, sorta.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at Namako Team, Jiji has reviewed 'Simple 2000 Series vol. 113: The Tairyou Jigoku' for the PlayStation 2, the latest budget-priced Japanese title from the ever-dependable D3, and it seems like it's only borderline awful, yay.

He explains in the intro: "What makes a Simple 2000 release worthwhile? Does the concept need to be original? Does the game have to be "good?" Or simply playable? There are roughly three grades of Simple 2000 games out there: those that are terrible and unplayable, those that are terrible and playable, and those that are not terrible. I had fully expected this game to fall into the first category, but I found something that just barely sneaks into the second."

So what's it all about? "The Tairyou Jigoku, which loosely translates as "The Overwhelming Hell," puts the player in the shoes of high school student Erika Mizusaki, who at the game's outset has lost her cell phone and has returned to her school to retrieve it. Unfortunately for her, it's not where she left it, and it turns out that a very Carrollesque white rabbit has swiped it. Erika, of course, gives chase, through several nightmarish environments, covering (roughly) four stages."

So it's all a bit Fear Factor, really: "These stages are infested with all manner of creepy-crawlies, from insects to arthropods to rats to rather more supernatural creatures. It seems that they must like Erika's choice of perfume, because they have a tendency to swarm her whenever she moves near them. When she's being swarmed, Erika panics and can't move until she's shaken off all the critters... proximity to any given biomass causes Erika to be panicked, as represented by an onscreen meter consisting of the Japanese words "zowa zowa," onomatopoeia for the chills running down poor Erika's spine. If the creepy lettering reaches across the screen without being lowered, Erika will simply collapse and die of fright." Neat!

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

So, it's true that EA/Pogo and Bizarre Creations' Boom Boom Rocket for XBLA is somewhat of a missed opportunity - at first, some presumed it would be Fantavision-like, and in fact it _is_ Dance Dance Revolution using a joypad, with little extra complexity. But I've been playing it quite a bit and enjoying it despite those faults (it's definitely been worth $10 of my money), and here's some random feedback along those lines:

- Composer Ian Livingstone has obviously been told to hew _very_ closely to some electronic artists - for example, '1812 Overdrive' is so Apollo 440 that it hurts (other commenters noted its resemblance to the Lost In Space Theme by the group). Madness and Goldfrapp are also referenced in major, but kinda fun ways, integrated into the classical tributes.

- The biggest issue that I and other Boom Boom Rocket players are running into is the odd ranking system for getting an A, as opposed to a B. It's about timing your notes perfectly as well as not missing any, and it seems like the difficulty has been cranked up just a bit high on it - plus there's no sensible degree of certainty on how you achieve a higher score. Or if there is, nobody understands it yet.

- Finally, a shout-out to the visualization mode in the game - which other people seem to dig enough to take pictures of. It drifts around the cityscape while fireworks explode in time to the music of your choice (streaming from your PC is pretty easy, of course). It's all slightly Minter-esque and gorgeous - you can control camera angles, pan, and zoom in real-time too. I've mainly been listening to 808 State's 'Lopez', featuring James Dean Bradfield of the Manic Street Preachers, while flickpanning around the fireworks as they reflect off the buildings. Serene.

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Iron Realms' Matt Mihaly has posted a new post discussing the minimum cost of an MMO, seguing off Brian Green's post on the same subject, and it's neat to see dueling specifics as far as cold, hard cash numbers.

I'm just going to cite Mihaly's specifics, because they're pretty interesting: "So, does it cost $2 million or $3-$3.5 million to make an MMO that garners 10,000 players? Neither. It can be done for less than a million.

- Puzzle Pirates was released for less than $1 million (30,000 active players). (Though yes, it was released before WoW.)

- Sherwood’s total development cost to date is whatever the sole team member values his time at plus the cost of some (a few dozen I’d estimate) low-end art assets. That is almost certainly far less than even a quarter million and that’s being generous I suspect. (100,000 unique monthly players currently, monetized via Adsense.)

And of course, we’re doing Earth Eternal for less than $1 million. I’d say I’m willing to bet quite a bit that it’ll be capable of garnering at least 10,000 active players but I’ve already bet the development budget! (And happily, we need less than half that number to run in the black if we keep it lean and mean.)"

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I'm pointing to this week's issue of The Escapist primarily because it covers both nautical pirates and software pirates at the same time, and I consider this such a cheeky, naff act that it must be documented.

I have to say that some recent Escapist articles are getting so erudite and abstract so as to be practically a language unto themselves - witness this piece starting: "Pirates are currently at a peak in the social consciousness of the U.S.", and continuing on to talk about hobo markings, and the key quote: "Mennenga thinks pirates are over, and zombies are already the next big thing."

But hey, there's a Daniel James interview, basically necessary for any pirate-themed periodical, in which he notes: "I was invited to a pirate party, and it was ridiculously fun. Everyone knew what to say and the outfits were awesome." I think Mr. James' entire philosophy is built around plank walking and parrot familiars, and the rival cowboy faction within his company are probably cowering in terror right now. Or something. Booty!

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thanks to Alistair Wallis for passing on an entertaining Switch Gaming blog post, which is all about an intentionally terrible game, created in order to work out how to make games better/more accessible.

It's explained of the Greek university-made title: ""Game Over!" is the world's first (and hopefully only) universally inaccessible game. This practically means that it is a game that can be played by no one. But why was such a game created? Well, the goal of Game Over! is to be used as an educational tool for disseminating, understanding and consolidating game accessibility guidelines."

Here are some of the evil level setups - and really, the descriptions are enough for you to work out the insanity, although the game is downloadable for PC/Mac/Linux as well, yikes:

"Level 2. Piano Man
Gameplay: The player must use awkward key combinations to control the spaceship (e.g., Shift + L + Left Arrow to go left).
Guideline: Avoid simultaneous button pressing.

Level 5. Spell Check
Gameplay: The player has to type 'left' to move left, 'right' to move right and 'fire' to fire.
Guideline: Support alternative input techniques.

Level 11. Hakuna Matata
Gameplay: Information about how this level can be played is provided in Swahili.
Guideline: Use simple language and provide easy to understand instructions.

Level 21. Speechless
Gameplay: The player is asked to listen to "the voice" and fire when instructed to do so. If s/he doesn't, or if s/he does it any other time, s/he loses. Unfortunately, "the voice" cannot be heard.
Guideline: Provide closed captions for dialogue and sound effects."

As Switch Gaming notes: "There are 20 guidelines included, of which it would be wonderful to see mainstream developers take heed of. Even if it was only for them to include fully reconfigurable controls and wide difficulty options - that would at least be a start!"

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

This announcement seems to have got lost behind the couch cushions, but 1UP has a preview of new PlayStation 3 downloadable title Nucleus, dated late last week, and developed by Kuju's Surrey studio (where-in I used to work in the late '90s).

Overall: "The game looks a bit different from your typical Geometry Wars clone", though it sounds like it might, uhm, play a bit like one - difficult to tell. Anyhow: "For instance, Nucleus doesn't take place in outer space, but in "Inner Space" (no relation to the film, as far as we know). And instead of shooting aliens, you fight bacteria while swimming around blood cells and collecting proteins."

But here's a particularly neat bit: "Beyond the setting, Nucleus has a different vibe compared to other shooters out there. The graphics are minimalist and dark, but the real distinction comes from the soundscape provided by Rephlex's Bogdan Raczynski. The very Aphex-Twin-like music shifts between ambient noise and fast paced oddness." It's all about the Braindance!

[Actually, I'm wondering whether my old Kuju colleague Chris Williams had anything to do with this - he's such a big fan of Bogdan's music label Rephlex Records that he had its logo put in Tank Racer, the odd PS1 title we worked on ages ago. Wacksome.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just discovered the new Games and Men blog, which is a relatively anonymous developer's look at the game biz, and there's an informative new post on 'How to become a Game Designer? - My experience' just posted - well worth sharing.

The first point, on 'requirements': "There is no precise set of requirements for becoming a game designer. Most designers come from different fields of computer arts, programming or directly out of QA and I could totally see people from science or psychology fields orienting themselves in the video game field. In fact, the more diverse are your knowledges, the better."

Interestingly, the author is working in a niche of the biz that is less remarked-upon: "I'm working for a company that develops educative games for young children. I have not heard about a lot about these companies as there is few of them but from where I work, I can tell that the quality of life in these environment is much higher than with the big players."

The Montreal-based dev concludes: "First of all the company is much smaller, which gives place for more discussion and employee empowerment. I'm not doing any overtime and if ever I have to (in exceptional occasion) I'm paid for it. My bosses care about their employees and the environment is much more relaxed. I'm really enjoying my experience so far and the games are of tremendous quality." Overall, though quite general, the piece is a neat introduction.

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This is actually about a month old, but Brandon just pointed out to me Tom Fulp's nice write-up of the 2007 Independent Games Festival @ GDC over at NewGrounds - it's the Flash portal that's closely affiliated with The Behemoth, of course.

As the current 'daddy' of the IGF, it's great to see lots of game impressions and photos herded into one place, and the Castle Crashers guys obviously had lots of fun representin' at GDC - which is the way it should be!

Some fun quotes: "We met REAL video game celebrities! Wednesday night was the awards ceremony, so Edmund and I got photo ops with Cliffy B (Gears of War game designer) and Miyamoto (ever hear of Mario and Zelda?). After taking the pic with Cliffy, he sent me off with "Tag, bitch!" - a classic line from a GoW collab here on NG. If you think I'm sick, just look at that hand gesture. Two in the pink, one in the stink?" Oh dear.

But overall, the NewGrounds/Castle Crashers guys largely behaved themselves, and their conclusion is uplifting: "It was a long, fun week and we met a lot of great people. In an industry that is so dominated by people who don't actually make games, it is nice to hang out with a group of people who do all the heavy lifting themselves. Real programmers, real artists, real human beings!" Roll on 2008 - there should be an initial announcement on dates in the next 2 weeks or so.

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is already rolling up the Digg charts as I speak, but a hat tip to Brian Crecente's dissection of Jack Thompson's Fox News report over at Kotaku - a sensible and necessary look at some commentary that's beyond the pale.

I'm not really sure what to say about the original news report, other than it'd be nice if tragic events were not spontaneously linked to games at every turn:

"Just hours after the shooting on the Virginia Tech campus, Jack Thompson worked his way onto national television to attempt to tie the tragedy to video games - hours before authorities had released any information about the suspect or his motive."

Crecente's conclusion to the whole sorry affair: "What do we learn from this assessment of Thompson's babble on national television? That you can say anything on TV and not have it fact-checked as long as you say it quickly, when TV needs someone to fill time and it's a good sound bite." I'm officially depressed, which is why this whole entry is just a little bit, you know...

[UPDATE: David Thomas (I presume) at the IGJA has added some commentary: "It’s shameful, and perhaps indicative of the lack of professionalism at all levels of the journalism world, that Fox returns over and over again to Thompson as an expert. While experts may have controversial claims, and may reach debatable conclusions, we certainly need to exclude anyone as an expert source who simply, and consistently, get their facts wrong."]

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Returning once more to 1UP, there's a fun new feature called 'Total Makeover: Same Game, Different Name' which explores "...drastically changing a game and giving it a complete makeover" in the name of... well sales, persumably?

Author Kurt Kalata explains helpfully: "Perhaps a publisher thinks a title will sell more if it's associated with popular cartoon or movie characters. Sometimes, companies want to create a brand-name association by tying a game in with a well-known franchise. Maybe the game is too culturally alienating and needs to be made less "foreign."

Wow, the piece itself is a gigantic 11 pages long, and I definitely learnt some stuff - for example, that Dexter's Laboratory: Robot Rampage is actually Elevator Action EX for the Game Boy Color: "The original Japanese version...featured three different playable characters. These were changed into three different versions of Dexter, each wearing different outfits. All of the bad guys were changed into robots, and the story scenes were altered to include Dexter's archnemesis, Mandark." Also, Dragon's Lair: The Legend was a conversion of Rollercoaster? Blimey!

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The entertaining Richard Cobbett has returned with a comprehensive look at the Leisure Suit Larry series, giving Al Lowe's creation of comic genius - or, at least, perceived comic genius when we were growing up - a little coloring round the cheeks. Not really sure which cheeks, of course.

Anyhow, he shrewdly notes: "The series was almost completely harmless, using Carry On style innuendo, rarely dropping a swearword, and bitterly disappointing any kid who got their hands on a copy with the near total lack of sex, nudity, or anything else they'd been told to expect. Rather than a comedy sex game, it was a comedy about sex - an important distinction - and one which offered a much more moral core than non-players expected."

I particularly appreciate Cobbett's predilection for Leisure Suit Larry 7, which I also heartily enjoyed: "It's the atmosphere that wins out in Love For Sail. It's a relentlessly cheerful game, with almost every character kicking back for casual fun in the sun - unlike the often cynical earlier games. The plot is non-existent - it's just a competition for the guys on the ship to spend the week with its pin-up girl Captain - but it's playful enough to get past this. More than any of the earlier games, this is the one where the reward for getting one of the girls on the ship is seeing Larry suffer... The encounters are fun, packed with jokes - some good, some bad, some intentionally absolutely terrible - and ultimately, it's just a really likeable adventure."

[And dammit - I just found out that Al Lowe's planned comeback with Sam Suede: Undercover Exposure has been put on hiatus due to "...the challenges of acquiring additional funding and establishing an international publishing partner." This is empirically not fair, and some real-life lounge lizard should step up immediately and front the cash for it.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Tools company interviews generally aren't _that_ riveting, but I did appreciate colleague Brandon Sheffield's interview with Havok's Jeff Yates on Gamasutra - the physics engine is seen in games like Half-Life 2, Dead Rising, and MotorStorm, but this conversation was a bit more wideranging than just bouncy boxes.

Havok is diversifying into animation and other tools, but my favorite question is after Brandon mentions that having a fixed simulated physics world would be a shame, because he 'loves breaking games' - and he does, folks!

Yates notes: "I think that the more people who aspire from a development standpoint for complexity, the more ways there will be to break stuff, especially with procedural animations. Everybody wants emergent results, but when you get that, you actually have a very hard time testing it. It's a very serious practicality issue that everybody is facing. Ragdoll and physics are the same way. You can stack things up and get out of a game's world! It's pretty wild. Somebody should design a game based entirely around that premise."

Oddly, this is more or less exactly what Brandon does at every game showcase he visits, the adorable scamp. Games broken by Mr. Sheffield in the past 3 months include Crysis and Lair.

Also very notable is talk about Xbox 360 to PlayStation 3 conversion: "It's changing for sure. I think the PS3 has great potential, but it's a very different kind of architecture. If people build their games with an understanding of what their challenges are going to be with porting between consoles, we can do a lot. In some cases, though, we're seeing people start with a 360 SKU and defer thinking about the PS3 port later. That can have some pretty dire consequences for how you process your art."

Conclusion? "We try to advise people that if they're thinking about moving to PS3 eventually, that they need to talk to us at the start so we can get things sorted out. I think that's going to be a very big challenge for everybody for awhile, because this idea of many, many cores with smaller local memories will present a lot of challenges in many different directions."

[One other note, while I'm on work stuff - Gamasutra writer Alistair Wallis is doing an article for Game Career Guide about testing and Q/A. If there are any testers out there who could talk to him about what they do, on the record - he can check with your PR folks after you contact him - then ping him at his Gamasutra address. Thanks!]

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now, Hanford Lemoore is a bit of an interesting guy - he does product design in Silicon Valley, including for ReplayTV and the Rio MP3 player, but he also makes wacky games such as Rocknor's Donut Factory.

Anyhow, his latest blog post is regarding UI design, and is entitled 'Don’t do what your users say…', concluding: "...do what they’re telling you." He explains specifically: "It is rare that a user outright lies for no reason. There is almost always a root cause for what your users are saying. The trick is to find that root issue to truly get what the user is telling you."

He has an awesome example, too: "I sent a private beta version [of Rocknor's Bad Day] to some close friends to get their take on it. A few days later I collected feedback via email and phone conversations. I got a good variety of comments back. Constructive thoughts. But I noticed an interesting trend: The most common thing suggested was “Add an undo to the game”. It seems almost everyone who tested the game had asked for an undo option."

But.. that's not what he immediately did - he did an in-person user test, which revealed: "After the user test is was clear to me that the root cause for undo requests was that the controls were too sensitive for the average player. There were a few other things that were revealed too. People really loved solving the puzzles in the game -- the first time. But if they had to restart, they really did not enjoy redoing the puzzles they had already solved." More if you click through, and it's an excellent lesson for all developers.

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Over at 1UP, they've got excellent coverage of a Japanese event hosted by Grasshopper Manufacture titled Snake vs Zombie Vol. 2, and "... featuring a series of talk shows between famous game creators and musical performances from artists such as Norihiko Hibino (Metal Gear Solid Portable Ops) and Akira Yamaoka (Silent Hill)."

But probably the wackiest and least remarked-upon bit of the whole caboodle is the following: "Mizuguchi was surprised when Iida mentioned hearing about his involvement with one of Al Gore's projects. Although Mizuguchi was reluctant to talk about details at this point, went on to say, "Like in the recent movie An Inconvenient Truth, we talk about preventing global warming, about conserving water, energy, reducing gas emissions and so on, but I think it is not easy. I think that we would need to see our own planet from outer space."" OK - we have no idea what this project is!

Mizuguchi continues: "We see that there are no borderlines between the countries and simply notice how beautiful it is. And maybe then, we will be more conscious about the environment. It's about gaining a new perspective, like when we moved from 2D to 3D. When we gain a new perspective, I think our conscious mind changes." Still have no idea. Anyone?

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

DoomRL is a game I did not expect to like.

As you may have guessed by now, I have pretty strong ideas as to what constitutes "roguelike," one that is more in line with the term’s original sense, as seen in games like Moria, Larn and especially Hack. These are all games with random areas and random items, where melee combat is the norm and distance attacks are fairly limited, where optimized exploration strategy is fairly important to survival. DoomRL has none of these things.

In case you missed the throwaway link last time, DoomRL is a roguelike game based on the classic first-person shooter Doom. Not based as in "inspired by." Based as in, if you ignore the overhead perspective and turn-based play, "pretty damn close to." It seems like it would be a quickie throwaway game, but the goofy premise hides rather a lot of interesting play.

Is this gimmicky? Oh brother, of course it is. But so is that new-fangled "Wii" thing the youngsters are fussin’ about. A good gimmick can get you pretty far, if it really is good. And DoomRL gimmick is.

Fortunately, there’s more to this than just a good gimmick. DoomRL's primary addition to the genre is that, while it still has walk-into-foes melee attacks if it should come to that, missile weapons are what players will use 99% of the time. Lots of monsters can also use missile weapons, changing the dynamic from the game from managing melee proximity to range and line-of-sight. Like in Doom itself, cover matters for a lot; facing down a small horde of soldiers will probably get you slaughtered, but if you retreat behind a wall, and put a bit of distance between you and that corner, you can keep yourself out of danger surprisingly long. It helps that most monsters are stupid enough to instantly forget about you the moment you leave their vision.

Also like Doom, it is important to learn the secret Art of the Reload: shotguns may be powerful, but it takes an extra turn to pop another shell into its chamber. More specialized shotguns can be found, like double-barreled, or combat shotguns. The combat ones have a limited automatic reload while you’re fleeing, enabling a thoughtful player to use them nearly as effectively as a pistol.

One thing that DoomRL does not have, which I consider to be necessary for a true roguelike, is an item identification system, but where it lacks there it makes up for it with a rich tactical game, and a limited, but well-designed, bestiary. All the monsters come directly from the original games, and their abilities line up pretty well with that much-admired spawn of Carmack and Romero. They’re tough, tough in a way that brings to mind fond memories of running from Trolls and Griffins, which is to say, almost unreasonably tough. Just tough enough that there are times that fleeing for the stairs makes more sense than sucking down a tough monster’s experience points. Tough enough that the high score list means something.

DoomRL’s item system does have room for special equipment and multiple weapon types, which is more than Doom had, but it does suffer a bit for giving players many more pistols and shotguns than he’ll ever need. There are only so many They aren’t strategically useless, but since their ammo cannot be salvaged, to gain proper use of them requires lugging about a lot of extra guns just to drop them when their bullets run out. DoomRL enforces a very strict inventory limit, even more strict than Rogue’s, and it is easy to fill up much of that with stacks of pistol and shotgun ammo. There are also items that work like Doom’s powerups, in that instead of entering inventory they activate the moment they are collected, which is a fairly significant innovation for a roguelike. And Doom’s fairly clever health system, where players can supercharge their health over the normal maximum at the cost of it slowly draining until the surplus is gone, is copied unchanged.

Probably the coolest thing about the game, though, is its approach to "user deformable terrain." Many roguelikes contain things like pickaxes and wands of digging, but in DoomRL changing level layouts like this becomes almost a first-class play mechanic. Most walls can be destroyed with a rocket launcher, or by pushing an explosive barrel up next to it and shooting it. Barrels, properly utilized, can greatly harm many monsters who would ordinarily outclass the player. Monsters can destroy walls too, and their explosive shots can set off barrels, providing a nice balance of risk to shoving those things around a level. One way to measure a roguelike is by noting how foes can be harmed through methods other than basic attacks, and those barrels make DoomRL very strong in this area.

One of the more entertaining things about the game is that, while the graphics are ASCII and the gameplay is turn-based, the sound comes directly from the original game. MIDI-based music that sounds pretty close to Doom’s soundtrack plays throughout each screen-sized level, and it is difficult to avoid grinning when mowing down a horde of ‘h’s, and they make the same sounds as the original game. Especially interesting is that the sound effects are not only same, but they serve the same purpose as Doom. While games like ADOM and Nethack play messages when something important happens out of sight on the level, DoomRL actually plays the sound, and adjusted in volume depending on how far the foe is from your angry little @-sign. The sounds only play after each move however, so it makes sense to play the game with the volume up.

While its lack of complex item play means the game will always lack in the greater scheme of roguelike strategy, it says a lot for the game that its inclusion would arguably dilute its play. DoomRL is, ultimately, an awesome little game that sets out to do one thing, and do it well. There is certainly room enough in the genre for something like that.

DoomRL
http://doom.chaosforge.org/index.php?module=downloads

Posted by John Harris at 3:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (11)

Over at GameProducer.net, they're hosting the 'Carnival of Game Production - Third Edition', described simply enough: "In this carnival, some people sent me several articles related to production and games, and simply some fun stuff."

It's actually a bit of a mixed bag, but Jake Birkett does contribute 'I’ve finished my game - now what?', which has some great points about getting casual games distributed, with specific info on which portals worked for him.

He explains of his methods: "Either find a publisher who’ll do all the hard work for you and be prepared for them to take a cut (could be worth it to save the hassle) or do it all yourself - it’s a learning experience but it’s HARD WORK. Make a list of portals and contact them in an organised manner and chase them up. Only tell them about complete games (include screenshots and a web address) that you can send them a full version of."

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

Already talked about Official Xbox Magazine briefly this weekend, but there's one detail from the May 2007 issue of the mag (which you should subscribe to for the disc freebies, if nothing else, imho!) that I thought was worth passing on.

Specifically, in a look at Bizarre Creations' new shooter The Club (which will apparently consist of 50/60 levels, each a couple of minutes each, with elaborate Woo-style shootout combos being the name of the game!), this tiny sidebar caught my eye: "Aside from Boom Boom Rocket for EA, developer Bizarre has two other Live Arcade games underway, including one by Geometry Wars creator Stephen Cakebread."

First time I've seen this info, so I thought I'd communicate it on to you kind GSW readers. Actually, I invited Mr. Cakebread to speak at the Indie Games Summit at GDC this year, but he sadly wasn't available - but it'll be great to see what he comes up with next (I'm highly presuming a Geometry Wars sequel).

[And remember, though Boom Boom Rocket has its design detractors, and perhaps rightly so, it was actually designed by Pogo.com and executed by the Bizarre-ites - so fear not for the originality or playability of the other upcoming XBLA games, I hope.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This actually ran much earlier last week on Gamasutra, but I realized it wasn't cross-linked a lot of places and is rather GSW-ish, so wanted to point out Jim Munroe's interview with text adventure author Emily Short.

Well, Short has been an important part of interactive fiction for some time now - actually, her Wikipedia page sums it up well: "Emily Short is the pseudonym of an interactive fiction (IF) writer, perhaps best known for her debut game Galatea and her use of psychologically complex NPCs, or non-player game characters."

Particularly referenced in the interview is Savoir Faire, "...about a magician in 18th-century France searching his aristocratic adoptive father's house." Talking about pacing IF, she explains: "The game should stay fun for as long as it takes to play; no aspect should take more of the player's attention than it deserves. What that means in practical terms will vary a lot from one work to the next. In Savoir-Faire I mostly thought in terms of puzzles and their rewards." Lots more good stuff in there.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So, one of the best-kept secrets in the game biz is the original Indie Game Jam - and it's mainly a secret to the web, actually, because the creators (including Chris Hecker and friends) haven't managed to update the website with info on the 2005 and 2006 iterations.

I did ping Chris briefly, and he said it would be updated soon, but I found out about some of the results of the 2006 Indie Game Jam via Casey Muratori's MollyRocket.com site, where there's a brief messageboard thread linking to three of the music-based games done there.

Firstly, stealth code ninja for hire Atman Binstock has posted his title 'Beat Butter' on his site, explaining: "This game was inspired by previews I read for REZ. Ie, I imagined it was something like this... I wanted a game where the music, level, and gameplay all encourage (but not force) the player to use the controller in a visceral way that *feels* good."

In addition, former Game Developer magazine code columnist Sean Barrett has posted 'Beat It!', another game with some intriguing influences: "The primary motivation for the gameplay was my sense that Harmonix-style beat-matching gameplay created the feeling of playing a musical instrument, but only by forcing you to synchronize to a previously constructed audio track which you must mimic; the experiential effect is only binary: either you're playing it correctly or not. The hope with Beat It! was to provide you with an arcade game which you can play while totally ignoring the music, and yet in the process of playing it you would create music."

Thirdly, programming veteran Muratori (who MC-ed the GDC Programmer's Challenge this year) has linked to his game 'Ears Of War' [.ZIP], explaining: "You may need to play with the Windows microphone gain setting in order to get mission mode to work, as the audio recognition is not very good (it was made in about two hours, and I know nothing about audio recognition."

No idea who else has music games out there from Indie Game Jam 4, but hopefully they will be posted online in due course. It's wacky, actually - these folks, who may be relatively unknown to you, are some of the hidden geniuses behind the nuts and bolts of game creation, alongside Jon Blow, Mark Cerny, and other similar svengalis. You'd be very surprised to learn what they all worked on, I'm guessing.

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Uhoh - over at Broken Toys, Lum has posted a story called 'Acclaim: Being Black Is Awesome!', which reveals: "Acclaim’s new DANCE! Online dancing-required microtransaction-driven MMO has decreed that being a black person on the dance floor is so totally awesome, you must earn the privilege."

Let's just cite the particular argument as Lum explained it, since it's... touchy, to say the least.

"Or, as one somewhat surprised user asks,

'I GOTTA PAY TO BE BLACK?'

to which a “player moderator” replied,

'Black is an EXTRA feature. It makes your person look unique, so that is an EXTRA feature. Therefore, you having to PAY for it. (Or ask a friend to pay for it).'

Thankfully, before Rev. Al Sharpton was made aware that MMOs exist, an actual Acclaim employee immediately chimed in with

"As an optional character upgrade, we must put this in the item shop for players to acquire. This is the only way to offer the African-American heads. However, it should be EASILY accessible to all, so we made it just 1 POINT in the shop (which is basically for FREE). You don’t have to spend any money to get it, just play the game and earn points. Thanks!""

Wait, and Broken Toys commenter 'GreyPawn' chimes in: "It is in deeper trouble than just its racist tenor. In-game, there is a built-in marriage system for characters. However, the system intentionally excludes same-sex couples." Oh dear! Set up the PR barricades, Acclaim, it's going to be a long week.

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

So, I recently got Issue 70 of Future's U.S. Official Xbox Magazine, which was my first chance to check out the 'OXM Universe' episodic game which is _only_ available on OXM coverdiscs starting with the April 2007 (#69) disc. And... so far, it's not quite 'there' yet. But let's explain more!

OXM's Dan Amrich has pretty much the only official info up about OXM Universe, as a FAQ on the Xbox.com forums, explaining: "OXM: Universe is an evolutionary, episodic game available exclusively on the Official Xbox Magazine (US) game disc. It’s developed by Go Fever and OXM." No screenshots online yet, guys?

But what do you do in the 'game'? "Just put in the OXM Game Disc. You’ll notice that the background of the standard disc interface is now an animated 3D solar system. Head to "OXM Universe" on the menu to build probes, manage your space program, and explore your discoveries." So basically, you get OXM points for playing on-disc demos, filling out a survey, and watching movies all the way through - and you can then spend those points in interactive menus to build and launch spacecraft, etc.

There's been a couple of unfortunate things so far - firstly, the existing OXM Points (which are separate from normal Achievement Points) go back to 0 for this project: "The slate was wiped clean when OXM Universe launched. Everybody’s starting fresh. This was necessary, since the original plan -- to redeem OXM Points for Gamerscore points -- did not work out." However, neither the new nor the old points (which are still technically viewable if you pop in old discs) are redeemable for Gamerscore, yet - yikes!

Secondly, the content of the 'game' so far is really, really on the rudimentary side. The first two discs have you building your first spaceship. But you're just buying compulsory-to-purchase parts with your OXM Points, and there's no more interactivity in the game so far than 'click here to purchase this' - and the spaceship hasn't even launched by the end of the second disc, even if you got all the OXM Points possible, from what I can gather. I guess I was expecting something a little Outpost Kaloki X-like or something with resource management, even at this early stage?

Now, it sounds like there are big plans for rewards, expanded content, and even networked elements in the future. But my concerns are echoed by a longish thread on the forums, in which OXM reader 'Areacode' gets the tone exactly right: "I'm hoping the OXM Universe will be more than spend points upgrading things; go to a planet; read some text; unlock a "prize"; rinse, repeat. Nice, but I need more if it is a real game - otherwise the old format worked just as well, and didn't take several issues to complete. I do however love that you are trying something new, and hope it works out well. Just add more game elements to it and I will be more than happy with it." Let's see how things pan out, mm? Having physical discs compete with digital downloads is an awfully tough task.

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

After a pretty short run (the blog only soft-launched in December 2006), Om Malik has posted on parent site GigaOm revealing that "...we are putting [his company's game blog] GigaGamez on hold."

Malik notes: "With our current focus, it was one of our blogs that just didn’t catch fire. That blog struggled to get out of first gear. Some might suggest three months wasn’t long enough to make that site work, but the numbers were telling us: hasta la vista baby. So we are now back to the drawing board, rethinking and re-tweaking the focus of the blog, to see if we can bring it back."

And indeed, the Alexa stats show that GigaGamez struggled to make it past even little ol' GameSetWatch, which is a resolutely non-pro 'weird stuff' editor blog at this stage. On the other hand, Malik's New Teevee, which launched at the same time, is doing much better, it can be easily seen from the Alexa graph.

Personally, I was a little disappointed that Om didn't give the newest editorial team - which included Alex Handy, Blake Snow, Raymond Padilla, and Jason McMaster, overseen by head Second Life cheerleader Wagner James Au, time to evolve. That second staff iteration had been in place only since February or so, I believe.

But GigaGamez was definitely a bit confused about whether it wanted to cover broad business, opinion, or consumer stories, or much more specific things. It's notable that the announcement post trailed it as "...focus[ing] on the business of games, online worlds and other related sub sectors of the business" - which actually seems like a 'everything' mandate, rather than a focus.

In any case, a great deal of the writing on GigaGamez was intelligent, and it was hardly an effort to be ashamed of. I think there's room for at least one more professional game blog out there - but probably as a Joystiq and Kotaku competitor, not as whatever odd business hybrid Om and friends were going for. But - anything is possible!

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Got a press release which reveals a new independent PC game with a neat twist on the 'Tycoon' paradigm: "Winter Wolves Games has just released their new PC/Mac downloadable simulation game called TV Station Manager. The game lets you take control of a small independent television station about to go bankrupt."

So how does that work? "The player must buy or sell rights to display various programs from 16 different categories ["from Action to Gossip, Documentary to Kids"], manage exclusive advertising deals, and arrange everything on a weekly schedule. Success or failure depends on matching programs with the proper audience and advertisers."

Oh wait, there's more: "If you're not satisfied about the current market offer for TV programs, make your own TV Show with the "Production Studio" ! Choose which actor/actresses will take part, decide the plot, the setting, and produce your own masterpiece!" Ah, nice, one of the possible stars is called 'Miggo Vortensen'! It's all a bit like The Movies vs. normal sim games, but simpler and indie-er, I guess?

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The UK girl-oriented gadget site Shiny Shiny has just posted a 'Top ten list of female video-game characters you should idolise' - and that appears to be in a more positive fashion than your average countdown.

Blogger Katherine Hannaford notes: "Whatever happened to having some nice wholesome girl-next-door type characters to idolise, that you can happily play a game featuring the vixen infront of your Dad, and not fear an embarassing pants-tent episode?... I've put together a list of who I think deserves to be on the Shiny Shiny Top Ten List Of Gaming Vixens who aren't just featured for their 34-24-34 ratio and ability to knock out a vertically-challenged man with a simple quiver of the lady-lumps." Fair enough!

Here's one pick I especially liked, in theory: "2.) Carla Valenti from Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy - the NYPD officer is incredibly committed to her job, to the point of experiencing panic attacks. Wielding a weapon, she is a tough-talking woman who yearns for a private life, instead pouring all her waking hours into her job - the modern careerwoman."

But of course, Carla's presumably male inventors made her pose, virtually speaking, for Playboy in 2005, negating her carefully empowered game character in all manner of ways, and re-proving the whole point Shiny Shiny was making to start with - doh! [Via Wonderland.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A cute little post over at VH1 Game Break interviews Patton Oswalt about his role in Pixar's Ratatouille - and the stand-up comedian, geek, and 'King Of Queens' regular is quite a gamer.

To wit: "When we spoke, Oswalt expressed enthusiasm – to put it mildly – about gaming in general and several games in particular. In fact, he said he’d gotten rid of all his games for his own protection (he kept his PSP, though). “I can’t do anything if I have them around,” Oswalt told me. “Gears of War would take over my life. That hand-held footage? And if you have the controller that vibrates?” His eyes widened."

And wow, he can reference semi-obscure retro gaming legends: "I asked whether he had any fond memories of playing games as a kid. Did he ever! “I had the Atari 2600, and we used to play the Adventure game, the one by Warren Robinett. I remember when we found that hidden room! I thought I was Don DeLillo with the Kennedy assassination.”" DeLillo! Robinett! You rock, Oswalt.

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Kyle Orland's latest GameDaily column discusses Intent Media's new UK-based Games Media Awards, and he's done a good job of summing up an event which I'm, to put it politely, a bit uncomfortable about.

My quizzical looks are particularly because Intent's Stuart Dinsey explained that "...he'd like to get votes from "all the leading companies" in the games industry, probably by asking PR representatives to consult with their colleagues and place a vote to represent the company as a whole... Dinsey said they might consider letting members of the press vote and that the final voting panel would likely be some mixture of industry and press."

Enter a NGJ czar with some pithy comments: "But the mere specter of industry voting was enough to give some members of the press pause about the awards. "The games industry are the last people who should be voting for awards in games journalism," said British game freelancer Kieron Gillen. "It's a bit like the prisoners voting for who's their favourite prison guard." Gillen said he worries that the industry voting will make the award one "you wouldn't want to win.... because it's basically shorthand for 'Lapdog of the year award.'""

As Orland notes of the largely UK-specific awards: "Hard hitting critiques and investigative journalism are unlikely to be rewarded by the companies that work so hard to generate positive coverage and keep secrets until they're ready to be announced." So... what to do about the lack of game journalism awards judged exclusively by peers? Anyone want to start some, separately of the companies we work for? Not that we probably have time, doh.

[A possibility - I note the IGJA has some commentary on this very 'game journalism awards' issue, although they are probably giving me hideous looks over my attempted style guide critique. But hey, I just found a good defence of the guide on Games.net, so it's possible I'm just wrong/grumpy on that one. Anyhow, IGJA, take the lead on the whole journo awards thing, and I promise to behave in the future!]

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Somewhat obscure indie blog Too Normal, which is run by Puffbomb creator Mike Kasprzak, has a nice post on 'simplification' as a movement for video game.

He explains in an intro: "I think [simplicity is] an important direction and discussion for game design. Sure, as a gamer, I can handle complicated control schemes. I’ve done my time and held my own in hotkey crazy RTS’s, twitch FPS’s, and I can be pretty menacing in Tony Hawk. But most of these games aren’t getting any easier. I don’t even care to finish Tony Hawk’s Project 8, or the Underground games, because the things you need to do at the end are ridiculous."

Continuing: "It’s almost like the game industry hard-on for 3D graphics and difficulty is starting to calm its ass down. Actually, what happened instead was the polar opposite distinctly emerged. Casual games. Short, easy games you can play for hours, if they so compel you... The Wii happened too. The secret theoretical solution to FPS’s on the console." These are good points, elegantly phrased - accessibility is key to the future of the game biz.

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

One of the most affable, smart and helpful game developers we've been lucky enough to work with for Game Developer magazine and GDC is Noel Llopis, who runs the Games From Within blog and was most recently at High Moon Studios as a tech lead.

Anyhow, the latest Games From Within blog update reveals of the MechAssault and Darkwatch veteran: "Charles Nicholson and I decided to take the plunge and create our own game development company: Power of Two Games. So I finally get the chance to follow the dream I've had for a long time!" And there's a new Power Of Two Games website/blog so everyone can keep up with his new indie start.

The 'About' page explains: "We strongly believe that two passionate people in a garage (or closet) can make great games even in this day of multi-million game projects. So we put our money where our mouths are, quit our nice and secure jobs, and decided to embark in this crazy, wild ride." And the first entry is super cute: "Noel is all too proud of stealing (!!) his new monitor stand. Somewhere in the greater San Diego area, two children are lost, cold, and slowly starving because they don't have their Yellow Pages." Subscribe to their RSS and follow the ride!

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['MMOG Nation' is a weekly column by Michael Zenke about current events in the world of Massively Multiplayer Games. This week's column focuses on the blogging efforts of an EverQuest 2 player.]

World of Warcraft's MMOG-glossary lists the definition of 'Aggro' as "This means the monsters are mad at you and you've 'activated' them to attack you. They are now in the motion of trying to reach and attack you." That fairly accurately sums up the writings on the blog Aggro Me, a now mostly-retired site that focused almost solely on the EverQuest 2 title developed by Sony Online Entertainment.

While for the most part his commentary ran to the esoterica of EQ2 patch notes and a weekly humor column, he was also fairly well known for some inflamatory statements made in the heat of the blogging moment. In particular, his scathing dismissal of the Penny Arcade comic early last year garnered a lot of attention on forums around the Internet. He also vigorously decried the concept of the SOE Station Exchange when it was originally launched, and expended a good deal of effort in examining its flaws and shortcomings.

Aggro was kind enough to answer a few questions for us, and so today we have a look behind the screen at the gent who has (for good or ill) done a fair bit of aggroing of his own in the last two years. We had a chance to talk about his past with Massive games, the reason his blog has been so quiet of late, and I've got a plethora of links to some of the best content the Aggro Me site has to offer. Read on for a look at a focused blogger, who has never been afraid to let you know about that chip on his shoulder.

Aggro Who?

Michael: If you don't mind my asking, what is your home life like? Do you have any children? A spouse/girlfriend? What's your day job?

Aggro:I’m an attorney and I work at a prestigious (read: intensely stressful) law firm in midtown Manhattan. A lifetime New Yorker, I currently reside on the Upper East Side. I am in a serious relationship (you can figure out the time it started by reading my blog and seeing where the daily posts dropped off). That’s cut down on my writing and gaming a bit, but, as Shakespeare once said, “Love is the phat-est lewt of all.”

Michael: Do you have any hobbies outside of Massive gaming? Do you do any more traditional PC/console gaming?

Aggro: Fantasy is a common theme in my hobbies as I enjoy reading fantasy novels (stay tuned for a fantasy novel review blog) and playing fantasy sports. I do occasionally zone outside the apartment to complete the typical NYC quests like getting reservations at a hot restaurant before midnight, finding a play or musical to buff my cultural stats, and conducting raids on area museums. I’m not a huge console player but my PS2 is the only place I can find good SRPG’s (Disgaea 2 currently) and rock out with Guitar Hero 2. I have yet to take the next-gen plunge but I do own a DS (great) and a PSP (horrid). I definitely do a lot of PC gaming, although these days it’s usually more casual games. I find it’s the casual, independent games that often have the most innovative and interesting design.

Michael: How would you characterize your experience with Massive games? Do you consider yourself more casual or 'hardcore'? Ever done any raiding?

Aggro: I’m so hardcore that at the same time I’m answering this question I’m leading two separate high level raids for fabled drops by dual-boxing (on an Amiga and Atari ST I’ve hacked to run Vanguard). My actual preferred play style is semi-casual play with a static group. But I have ranged the gamut from being part of a hardcore raiding guild to casual soloing, so it really depends. I find it mirrors life: It’s good to be alone sometimes, but you get bored (soloing); parties are fun but you don’t want go to one every night especially since there’s always one or two annoying people there (raiding); and in the end the best thing is to share some good times with a group of friends (static single groups).

Michael: How many MMOGs have you played? What was your first game?

Aggro: I played some BBS door games back in the day like Legend of the Red Dragon and messed around in a few MUD’s. But I was a total noob when it came to real MMOG’s until relatively recently. I tried Everquest but never had the time to really get into it. City of Heroes was the first MMOG I spent significant time with. Its amazing character creator and streamlined play served as a great introduction to the MMOG world. I consider CoH/CoV a perfect first MMOG for people new to the genre. Anyway, that’s when the love affair started and I’ve since played every major MMOG release and many minor ones. I’ll try any MMOG once, no matter how horrible it looks.

Michael: What would you consider your favorite game? Your least favorite?

Aggro: I’m going to have to go with Fantasy General by SSI, because I’ve never really stopped playing it. It’s fun and intuitive to pick up and play but has an incredible depth of strategy. The replayability is almost endless and the choral music is my favorite game music to date. I was so into my first single-player campaign that I renamed every single unit and the game had such a lasting impression on me that I still remember some of those names. I’m currently running Sorceress Mordra through the third continent and after all these years, I still have a lot to learn about Fantasy General. Runners-up are Heroes of Might and Magic and Shining Force.

Least favorite is trickier. I don’t mind games that are hilariously bad. For example, I actually spent a decent amount of time playing the awful MMOG “Prison Server” and I had a good time doing it. Doom III is probably the most recent game I finished and absolutely hated. The Movies was probably the biggest disappointment to me in recent memory. I hate Myst-clones or any pixel-hunting game. If you’re only talking about MMOG’s then EQII is definitely my favorite. There are so many bad ones but I found DDO to be especially repulsive.

Michael: To follow up with that, do you have a favorite memory from a Massive game? I like to call it 'something you'll tell your grandkids about." :) Anything like that?
Well, a lot of my favorite memories spring from trying to grief my friends. Just the other night I managed to annoy them in Planetside by piling up vehicles near a ramp in the training area. That gave me great pleasure.

Aggro: I have some wonderful memories from PvP. I used to have an EQII guild named Aggroculture on Nagafen and we would schedule wars with the Brownie Troop guild from EQII Daily (home of the EQII Daily Podcast). Those were always a hilariously good time. But probably the most memorable experience I’ve had is slaying Darathar with my first EQII guild. It was a long, fantastic quest culminating in a return to the Isle I had first started on at Level 1. The fight was dramatic and challenging and the reward was amazing. It was wonderful to accomplish such a difficult goal with people who had become friends.

Michael: Conversely, do you have a bad memory that's tainted your experiences with Massive games in general? A horrible group, or something like that?

Aggro: I love horrible groups, because they give me ideas for humor columns. My worst memories in an MMOG are probably technical issues. I remember there was a named in Zek my group and I fought for literally forty-five minutes in the early days of EQII. The server went down when he had just a sliver of health left. It’s also incredibly annoying to have the server go down in the middle of a raid and be faced with a lockout timer.

Michael: What is it about Massive games that appeals to you? What makes you keep playing these great big beautiful games?

Aggro: When I was younger I asked one of my friends, “If you could live in a world with wizards and dragons and be a hero, would you do it?” The answer for both of us was: in a second. Massive games let me pretty much live out that dream while still pursuing a career and enjoying non-digital relationships. MMOG’s are simply the most entertaining thing in existence. What keeps me playing is always the people I group with and the bonds I form in a game’s community.

Michael: What made you start a blog in the first place? How did you decide on a name?

Aggro: I actually had an idea for a novel related to MMOG’s. The protagonist had a blog named “Aggro Me.” I decided to create the “faux-blog” as preparation. Of course, the novel never made it past the first chapter, and, meanwhile, Aggro Me has hundreds of lengthy posts. I discovered just how much I loved MMOG’s and just how much I loved blogging. When thinking of a name, the first step was eliminating the MMOG slang already used in other blog titles. I really wanted a name with an aggressive connotation and it actually does fit my play style. I just aggro-ed an entire zone in Vanguard last night, culminating in a gigantic train. And when I play a DPS class, it’s only a matter of time before I give in to my overnuking urges.

Michael: What keeps you going, writing on the site?

Aggro: It’s really the fact that I get so passionate about these games that if I didn’t write down the things in my head, I’d probably explode. I also love getting comments on my posts and I’ve met so many great people through the site and its forums, some of who I group with regularly in MMOG’s.

Michael: You seem so well-rounded, both in and out of gaming. What got you hooked into Red Dragon and the BBS games?

Aggro: I just loved the whole BBS thing. I remember that incomparable sound when your modem connected; I remember poring over the phone book to see which 516 area codes would still be billed as local from my 718 zone; and I remember having to send away by regular mail for a password to one BBS and the excitement I felt when I received a return mailing. The amount of time you could spend on certain BBS’s was originally limited by a timer. Then one day I came across a game which allowed you to gamble your time allotment and win additional time. I was completely hooked. From there on I sought out and loved any BBS game.

Michael: Your appreciation for EverQuest 2 is obvious to anyone who has read your blog for a bit. What about SOE's flagship has kept you hooked when others have fallen by the wayside. You said EQ never really grabbed you, so it's not the nostalgia some players feel. What keeps you in Norrath?

Aggro: EQII is just a good game that has gotten markedly better since I started my blog. The community of players is the most wonderful I have seen. I’ve also gotten the chance to meet some of the EQII team and they’re truly a bunch of passionate, intelligent people.

Michael: Your discussion of writing outside of your blog is interesting. What drives you to write things like your 'Aggro Me'-protagonist novel? Are you working on anything right now?

Aggro: I just love to write. Nothing else gives me that feeling of flow, of complete focus, enjoyment and passion. I’m currently working on a detailed script for a (non-existent) SRPG/wargame called Res Aciei. It’s intended to marry strategic play with a strong, involving story. Additionally, I’m working on a list of concepts for an artist friend of mine who wants to submit his comics for publication but needs an original idea. So I’m creating the backstories, settings and characters for him to choose from. I’m pretty sure neither of those projects will actually come to fruition. But it’s the journey I love. People tend to dismiss daydreaming and fantasizing in our culture as somehow worthless or even reprehensible. I think it’s an awesome time.

Michael: Is there anything that you'd like to say to your site's readers? Anything you'd like them to say or know in specific?

Aggro: I love you

Smells Like Froglok? Or Maybe SOE.

The primary focus of the site, then, is EQ2. As you can imagine, this means Aggro offers up a fair bit of kvetching about the minutia of EverQuest 2's systems. There was his two part discussion of update 24, notes from testing update 18, and some extremely harsh commentary on update 17. Most of the time, though, Aggro focuses on higher level conversations. He has notes from the releases of the Kingdom of Sky and Desert of Flames expansions, and his discussion of the Frostfell Event was part of the reason I started playing the game in the first place.

This high-level focus extends to the EQ2's sister titles as well, and general commentary on Sony Online Entertainment in general. Aggro's talked about SOE's digital download service, the all-access pass, GM services, and future SOE MMOG development. He's also had some very specific words to offer on the recently released Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. For some interesting comparison of 'then and now', it's worth looking back to Aggro's debate with the blogger Quylein the Mage about the title from last summer.

One specific issue that Aggro has focused on since it was originally announced is the SOE Station Exchange. From his first angry initial reaction recent discussion of the white paper, Aggro has been one of the loudest decryers of institutionalized RMT. He commented on the service as it morphed from their initial announcement, being honest about what they were amending in the face of public pressure, and then wrapped up the first year of trading with an insightful look from a player's point of view. I still find his initial reaction to be the most interesting:

"Being relatively new to MMORPG's I don't have the built up ill will towards SOE that some do. I have often given them the benefit of the doubt when more experienced players have not. I gave them kind of a free pass on the Froglok nonsense. I have been willing to accept their mistruths and missteps and have always tried to take everything in a light and humorous way. But not today. Not on this day.For years I have listened to SOE and other MMORPG companies vilify IGE and the secondary market to the point where they have become the devils that cause all that is evil and wrong with online gaming. Whether this is true or not is a matter for another debate. But now I know why SOE was bashing IGE. Not as an enemy, you see, but as a competitor."

You've Got Your Funny, And Over Here Your FanFaire

More than any other blogger, though, Aggro has made an effort to keep conversation light. Every week during his heyday of posting, Aggro made sure to put up a Friday humor feature themed around EQ2. Some of them, like EQ pick-up lines and 'player types' ... strain the definition of humour a bit. Luckily, he's a pretty funny guy, and more often then not there was some goodness in his weekly offerings. My personal favorites include the MMOLympics ("Pick-up Group Survival: One contestant at a time groups with five randomly chosen group members. How long can each contestant survive the horror?"), Looking for Group 'Advertisements' ("Group LFM: Hot wood elves only."), and Rejected Expansion Ideas (Mogloks: Let's tell players there is a new race in the Expansion called the Mogloks, waiting to be unlocked and that all they need to do is finish some quest. Eventually we'll finish the art, character design and animation for this race and then announce it.)

Some other excellent Friday features include EQ2 glossary terms I and II, some EQ-themed limericks, and Everquest 2 Motivational Posters.

I usually find posts made while traveling to be some of the most interesting writing a blogger can do. It should be no surprise, then, that some of my favorite Aggro posts were made 'on the road'. He went to last year's FanFaire event (the annual EverQuest get-together), as well as the SOE Community Summit for 2005, and wrote extensively about both experiences. The now two-years old Community Summit is especially interesting to read through, as it gives a snapshot of the game less than a year after the game had launched. His FanFaire coverage is even more in-depth, offering up details on changes to PvP and Tradeskilling, many of which we've now seen implimented in the game. There, again, it's great to look back at what the future was going to hold and compare it to the here-and-now of EverQuest 2.

"'Polished' is a word often associated with WoW. And no, I'm not saying 'OMG EQII copies WOW lol.' But maybe recent times in the MMO world have shown that the general market prefers polished content even at the cost of lack of new content on a timely basis. Now, I'm not saying SOE is going to mirror Blizzard, who I'm sure is going to be releasing an expansion sometime this decade. But they do seem to be moving a bit more to the "polished" model which is something I think both the game designers and players will appreciate. However, I think you will still see SOE continue to push new content on a rapid basis, as today's Live Update shows. That pace may just be slowed from a sprint to a run."

At the end of the day, it's always great to read someone who is passionate about a specific topic talking about something he loves. That kind of enthusiasm is something that I think everyone responds to ... whether positively or negatively. Aggro may not be posting regularly anymore, but his body of work stands as a testament to what many people see as the 'other' big Western MMOG. Even if EQ2 hasn't captured the imagination of millions, it can still arouse the passion of one man. And that, that is nothing to sneeze at.

[Michael Zenke is also known as 'Zonk', the current editor of Slashdot Games. He has had the pleasure of writing occasional pieces for sites like Gamasutra and The Escapist. You can read more of Michael's ramblings on Massive games at the MMOG Nation blog. ]

Posted by mzenke at 3:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Venerable university newspaper The Harvard Crimson recently posted an article about the expansion of game studies and societies at Harvard, explaining: "The newly-formed Harvard Interactive Media Group (HIMG) is trying to spur a new way for undergrads to connect to each other, largely by connecting them to the [game] machines they love."

The most interesting thing about it, though, is the Harvard Interactive Media Group, which will publish a magazine called the Review, "...featuring articles by students, professors from Harvard and other universities, and prominent figures in the gaming industry and other relevant fields, the first issue is scheduled to appear in late April. With a projected circulation of about 5,000, the Review aims to bring interactive media to a wider audience. "

The contributor's list is pretty impressive, since it includes a lot of the more prominent gaming academics, from Henry Jenkins through Edward Castronova to Jim Gee, and even sneaks in the ineffable Peter Molyneux. Looking forward to getting a copy of this somehow (or maybe even extracting some bits, with their permission!), since print magazine manifestations of this kind of thinking are relatively rare. [Via The-Inbetween.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Matthew 'Fort90' Hawkins has a new weblog entry up discussing a visit to see Mega Man tribute band The Protomen in NYC, and it actually sounds like the band are trying some interesting things in their quest to 'interpret' the Capcom classic.

Matthew explains: "They basically have this quasi-rock opera based upon the Mega Man mythos... So the Protomen conveys this whole story, or at least the underlining themes, I think, via various songs, while also somewhat focusing on the human element. While the rest of the band plays rock music, all decked out in black and red southern threads, as well as some silver face-paint, the leader singer switches between Mega Man and Proto Man when addressing the audience, like some sort of pep rally. And at the end, it culminates with a confrontation between the brothers."

Ah, i see there's an interview with The Protomen over at GamerHelp.com, in which they handily explain: " Put simply, Sandy, the story of Megaman is allegorical to every epic war. Look at the facts: Megaman is Blue. Protoman is Red. Now look deeper, Sandy. Deeper...DEEPER! Pepsi Vs. Coca-Cola. Democrat Vs. Republican. Obi Wan Vs. Darth Vader. Rocky vs. Ivan Drago. White Castle Vs. Krystal. Un-oxygenated Blood Vs. Oxygenated Blood. Goodwill Vs. Salvation Army. Blue Coats Vs. Red Coats. Captain D's Vs. Red Lobster. Wal-Mart Vs. Target. Dominos Vs. Pizza Hut. Crips Vs. Bloods. Hall Vs. Oates." Wait, that makes no sense. Oh well. There's some MP3s up, too.

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Over at Wired.com, Clive Thompson's recent 'Games Without Frontiers' column is named 'You Grew Up Playing Shoot'em-Up Games. Why Can't Your Kids?', and he has a bit of a dilemma.

Specifically: "Gamers like me have spent years railing against ill-informed parents and politicians who've blamed games for making kids violent, unimaginative, fat or worse. But now we're in a weird position: We're the first generation that is young enough to have grown up playing games, but old enough to have kids. So it turns out that, whoops, now we've got to make sober calls about what sort of entertainment is good or bad for our children. And what, precisely, are we deciding?"

There's one particularly interesting perspective in there: "Chris Anderson, my uber-boss -- the editor in chief of Wired magazine and lead editor on Geekdad -- suggested a even more intriguing strategy: the "Lego Rule." The Lego Company, it seems, has a policy of not producing toys that replicate 20th century weapons. "You can have swords, and you can have laser guns in space, but no actual 20th century guns," Anderson says. So his four children can play games like Halo, since it contains only futuristic, fantasy war, where you're killing only green- or blue-blooded aliens. The same goes for Roman swordplay titles. "But it clearly walls off Grand Theft Auto.""

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The St. Paul Business Journal has a new article up discussing circulation gains for Game Informer magazine, the U.S. video game mag which is bundled by GameStop with its 'loyalty card' for secondhand purchases (and is also available for standalone purchase/subscription), and which keeps shooting up in circulation numbers.

The article reveals: "The video game magazine, which has its offices in the Minneapolis warehouse district, said its rate base guarantee -- or the circulation level it can promise advertisers -- has increased from 1.8 million in 2006, to at least 2.3 million for 2007." The magazine's associate publisher says it's largely down to next-gen consoles, and then concedes: "Subscription sales through the magazine's partnership with retailer GameStop have also risen."

Well, of course, GameStop actually owns Game Informer Magazine, and I'd wager cash money that pretty much the entirity of that circ increase is down to the favorable subscription deal at GameStop (a year's sub is basically free when buy just a few secondhand games, since you get a 10% discount on used games and they put that toward the $15 subscription/card price).

Nonetheless, as Kevin Gifford has been commenting recently in his column, the Game Informer folks have been using some of that high-circ freedom to run some good quality features and analyses of the game scene, from Columbine RPG analyses to higher-end interviews. Their review scores may skew a little high at times, but the Minneapolis kids are alright with us!

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here's another of these cross-posted Gamasutra stories on GameTap that I worked out thanks to the Angled Whiteboards folks - and working at home on Thursdays, so having access to the GameTap client easily! As I wrote over at Gama:

"Following the recent news that Turner's GameTap subscription PC 'all you can eat' gaming service has now added Sega Saturn games, the company has confirmed the seminal Panzer Dragoon and Panzer Dragoon Zwei as forthcoming titles.

Alongside the official launch of platform game Bug! today, the 'Coming Soon' page within the GameTap PC client now lists the Saturn versions of both the classic Team Andromeda-developed on-rails shooters. No specific arrival date has yet been given for the titles.

Gamasutra sister weblog GameSetWatch has recently published a detailed history of the Panzer Dragoon series, with writer J. Fleming noting of the first game in the series, released in 1995: "Set in a post-apocalyptic future in which the planet has been rendered unrecognizable by genetically-engineered super technologies, Panzer Dragoon was a sophisticated mix of 60’s and 70’s science fiction filtered through the visual sensibilities of the French comic magazine Metal Hurlant."

As for the second game: "Panzer Dragoon was a commercial success and Team Andromeda followed with Panzer Dragoon II Zwei in 1996. Expanding on the promise of the first game, Zwei was a refinement in every sense. The game engine was enhanced to provide a smoother frame rate. The graphics were an explosion of retina sizzling color and the somber narrative was as memorable as the game play. As a shooter, Zwei was regarded as one of the finest. With elegant control and visual drama, it fully satisfied the pleasures of reflex and spectacle."

Although at least one [EDIT: Ta, RoushiMSX!] of these titles have appeared in little-known converted PC versions around the time of the original release, sources close to GameTap have confirmed that the titles are indeed running in a Sega Saturn emulator, rather than simply the PC SKU."

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

[‘A Game Collector’s Melancholy’ is a bi-weekly column by Jeffrey Fleming that follows the subtle pleasures and gnawing anxieties of video game collecting.]

Recently Nippon Ichi Software America announced their line-up of new releases as well as some big developments for their online store. To find out more, I posted a few questions by email to Jack Niida, marketing manager of NIS America and Mitsu Hiraoka, vice president of NIS America Online Business Development.

NIS America announced a slew of new titles including GrimGrimoire and Soul Nomad & the World Eaters for the PS2 as well as Disgaea and Dragoneer’s Aria for the PSP. Those, along with the upcoming Atelier Iris 3: Grand Phantasm and Aedis Eclipse: Generation of Chaos represent a fairly busy release schedule. Do you expect to continue to move at that pace and are Sony’s PS2 and PSP the target platforms for the foreseeable future?

Jack Niida: We’re setting a good pace for now. It’s a busier release schedule than our norm, but the localization process is going well. Unless something drastically goes wrong, we won’t make any adjustments to our release schedule. That being said, the 2nd half of the year will be quieter than the first half, with fewer releases scheduled.

For a long time, NIS America has been releasing titles for the PS2 and PSP, so some people might think we are solely dedicated to Sony, but that is not true. Our goal is to provide quality games and services to all game fans, and looking ahead, there are several platforms that can help us reach out to a broader audience and gamers can expect surprises from us. Of course, we will also continue to work closely with Sony, providing great games for PS2/PS3/PSP users as well.

Tell me a bit about the new face of your online store at www.RosenQueen.com.

Mitsu Hiraoka: 2 years have passed since the opening of the NISA online store. During these past 2 years, we have been connecting with the media at press events, and also through our daily PR work, and we have communicated with our fans, receiving encouraging voices. However, at the same time our fans have voiced their concerns as well. Every year, in the month of July we hold a booth at Anime Expo to have an opportunity to meet with our fans. We also hold various contests that prove to be an important opportunity for fan interaction. Through these various activities, we have always contemplated on the “value” that we can provide for our customers. We came to realize that it is always important to increase game quality, but it is also equally important to provide a value that can offer a truly rich gaming environment. NISA is not the only company that is thinking about value. If we can provide fine products from these companies to our customers for their satisfaction, it will be very meaningful.

The RosenQueen Company is taken from an item shop within a video game series by Nippon Ichi Software called Marl’s Kingdom. Etoile Rosenqueen, the rival of Marl’s Kingdom’s main character, is the representative of the RosenQueen Company.
As I mentioned in the previous section, it became necessary to create a vendor that isn’t specifically named after NISA, in order to provide non-NISA related products. However, at the same time, it is necessary to carry on the spirit of NISA. And RosenQueen fulfills both requirements.

People enjoy the fictional part of video games, so we’re hoping people will enjoy the fictional setting of the vendor as well. Initially we will provide game related products that NISA is good at dealing with. But, eventually we would like to move forward with various other products and services, since even Disgaea is turning into an anime.

Now, even the cocky Etoile cannot live without the help of our customers. Therefore, like the NISA online store, we would like to provide products and services that the customers will enjoy.

I notice that you are making certain titles from XSEED Games and Atlus USA available through RosenQueen. What is the relationship between NIS America and those publishers?

Mitsu Hiraoka: From a business sense, our relationship will be as “publisher” and “vendor”. You might suspect that we, as a publisher, are in competition, but as I mentioned before, providing high quality products and services will benefit the customer the most. As a publisher, we acknowledge each other and increase our quality through competition. However, as a retailer we have a mutual relationship with those publishers to provide true value to our customers.

I was extremely pleased with the deluxe packaging that you gave Ar Tonelico – Melody of Elemia. Can we look forward to more premium editions? What are the economics of special boxed editions? Do you see less profit because of the printing costs? Are they more difficult to get on the shelves of retailers?

Jack Niida: Judging cost effectiveness on a bonus item for video games is always a difficult task. What it comes down to is cost-benefit, customer interest, affordability, and future impact. If we believe that the added bonus would not gather enough numbers to cover the total cost we would pull the plug. However, if there are additional positive impacts by releasing a similar, yet smaller bonus feature that costs less for customer satisfaction, we may do so. There is no single specific recipe for a successful bonus campaign, but through our past campaign data and experience we have a fairly good picture of the outcome.

Placing special edition packages could be a challenge in itself, depending on the retailer. Few are flexible enough to work with these large size displays. However, there are retailers that are very cooperative and we really appreciate it. For our future titles, we would like to provide similar special editions packages.

On the subject of Ar Tonelico, one of the unique aspects of that title was its incorporation of Visual Novel elements. Although a popular genre in Japan, American game reviewers seemed to have trouble wrapping their heads around the idea. Is the U.S. ready for Visual Novels?

Jack Niida: There is no denying that visual novels are still a foreign game style. However, feedback from players was positive, so we believe there is at least an increase in interest. In general, we found that those with positive feedback are fans of anime or manga, so their understandings of the Japanese gaming culture perhaps helped embrace the new style. With all the increased interest though, we have yet to determine whether or not a full visual novel game will succeed in the states. Perhaps we should test the waters with some of our Japanese titles.

With the upcoming Atelier Iris 3: Grand Phantasm you are making the soundtrack available separately through RosenQueen. Is it imported from Japan or are you establishing a US music publishing division?

Jack Niida: We are not importing the soundtrack, but not necessarily establishing a music publishing division either. The music source is provided from the Japanese developer, so we would re-master, create new package, and manufacture them on a small scale. Nothing extraordinary is done, but like I mentioned earlier, our goal is to provide quality games and services to our game fans, so we try to do our best to bring what they wish for.

Finally, I am very intrigued by Hayarigami. With the popularity of Japanese horror films and games is there a possibility that Hayarigami or its sequel may see a US release?

Jack Niida: With the increased popularity in Japanese horror films, there is certainly a chance. Our only concern is the game play style. Hayarigami is a full visual novel style game and unlike Ar tonelico it does not have any traditional RPG features, like combat and adventure. So, we are still a bit hesitant to release this game. However, if there is enough demand we will definitely try to bring the game over.

Many thanks to NIS America.

Images: © 2007 NIS America. All Rights Reserved

[Jeffrey Fleming is an East Bay writer. To read more, please visit Tales of the Future.]

Posted by jfleming at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yesterday, we put up Matt Barton's awesome 'History Of The CRPG, Part III' on Gamasutra - 19,000 words of insanely knowledgable specifics on the PC RPG scene of the last 10 years, and we thank him profusely for it. Following on from there, the smart 'Tales Of The Rampant Coyote' blog has posted some handy analysis/perspective on the piece.

The, uhh, Coyote is particularly good when he looks at what this history means for the future of the genre, given that pure RPGs don't get the billing they used to: "I would hope that we're only at another dip in the road. With the amazing success of the Elder Scrolls series (and the somewhat more distant success of Diablo II still resonating years later), interest by publishers in RPGs remains high. But publishers, leery of the enormous expense of making RPGs compared to other games - seem to focus on cutting the wrong things to keep things on budget. Maybe not the wrong things from a short-term, "let's make this as profitable as possible" perspective. After all, we gamers are having fun - which is the whole point - and the games are making money. But I feel they are painting themselves into a corner in the long term."

So what now? "I think in some ways, we DO need to go backwards. I think there were a lot of possibilities suggested out by some of the games discussed in this series of articles that were only partially explored. Maybe it was because of the lack of technology to pull it off, or maybe it was just a running out of steam. But I see lots of uncharted territory out there to be explored." Do you think pure PC-style RPGs need a boost? And if so, how?

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Pleased to see other personalities thinking about the nature of game journalism, and Slashdot Games' and MMOG Nation's Michael Zenke has just written an extremely interesting piece on 'opinions' and the game press, citing a Raph Koster piece about Time Magazine's redesign.

Specifically, Koster suggests: "The days of letting facts be reported without comment seems to be dwindling… and while it opens up lots of questions about whether we’ll ever see truly unbiased reporting, it does mean that perhaps less facts will pass by unexamined. And that would be a good thing."

Zenke notes: "In the gaming news space (the focus of my professional and private efforts for more than a year now), this has resulted in a very mixed bag. Unbiased reporting is far and away the preferred method of news consumption among the gaming hardcore. Sites like Kotaku and Destructoid fuel the interests of their readers with a little bit of personality to go with their crunchy news nougat. (It’s a lot like Fox News, actually, though I like Brian Crecente a hell of a lot more than Sean Hannity.)"

There's a whole bunch more great analysis in there, but as Mr. Zenke notes - we just have to deal with this sea change by adjusting our personal habits to whatever style of information suits us: "To get a little GitS on you, if we’re going to be swimming in an ever-deeper ’sea of information’ we need to get used to it. Twenty years ago my parents lived in a comparative desert, waiting days just to find out what had happened in their own back yard. Whether you choose to stay in the shallow end of the pool and tread water with IGN and Fox News or head out and risk getting bitten by sources like Destructoid or Wonkette, at least you’re swimming."

(Of course, this also means that I have the right to whine about the water quality, but it doesn't mean that anybody will fix it, because - let's face it - there's nobody 'in charge'. Fair enough!)

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Over at GamesOnDeck editor Mathew Kumar's personal blog, he's penned a fun new piece, '52 Gaming Similes To Describe Your Relationship', in which he and his girlfriend pick some choice verbiage to describe interpersonal relate-y fun!

I'm just going to excerpt the first 5, but you will get the general idea - it's actually witty and sly, despite the fact that list articles are often annoying and pointless (see previous post - totally joking - kinda - maybe!):

"Our relationship is like…

1. Killer 7. I don’t understand what you’re saying, and I don’t even know who I am any more.
2. Resident Evil 4. I’m protecting you from all the world’s evils, and you won’t even let me look at your pants.
3. Super Mario Kart. I’m sabotaging the progress of others to reach the rainbow road.
4. Tetris. Shit keeps piling up.
5. Bust A Move. You keep bursting my bubble." Haw!

[Hijacking this post for a sec to talk about his non-leisure time stuff, Mr. Kumar recently edited up the first part of an interview with Trip Hawkins over on GoD, as written by The Gamer's Quarter's Matthew Williamson. It's quite entertaining, and the final bit is up tomorrow - go sister mobile site go!]

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I don't generally have a chance to write any articles for people outside of the whole Gamasutra/GameSetWatch/Game Developer nexus, but when the folks at Wired.com asked me to write a piece on the 'Top 10 Most Influential Amiga Games', I mean - how could I resist?

It's actually a gallery with pictures of the best Amiga games of all time, in my humble opinion (with screenshots from Hall Of Light), along with some extended captions - but they ended up having to cut my extended intro to fit into the space provided, so I thought - with Wired's kind permission - that I would put the extended one here. Amiga nostalgia alert - it was my weapon of choice from 1988 to 1996 or so, at least!

"In the 22 years since it was unveiled by Andy Warhol at the Lincoln Center in New York, the Commodore Amiga computer has arguably birthed more breakthrough multimedia creative efforts than any other, being a vital pre-PC tool for everything from art through video, CG, professional audio and video games.

As just one example, much of the CG for J. Michael Straczynski's groundbreaking sci-fi show Babylon 5 was created on Amigas, and Wallace & Gromit-creating studio Aardman Animations used the Amiga for stop motion image capturing at one point in its history. And even in the early years of the 21st century, thanks to admirers in the retro gaming scenes and associated art and 'demo-scene' worlds, the Amiga still has a large fanbase.

For one, Warhol's Amiga-constructed painted digital film 'You Are The One' was rescued and restored, showing with a custom soundtrack for a single day (due to "threatened legal action tied to estate disputes and to its pending seizure") at the Detroit Museum Of New Art in 2006

Commodore's computer was clearly a useful tool to Warhol - in an interview with Amiga World magazine in 1986, Warhol commented of the Amiga: "The thing I like the most about doing this kind of art on the Amiga is that it looks like my work."

More recently still, the MindCandy DVD featuring a multitude of Amiga 'demos' (executable programs that functioned as works of art and showed off the audiovisual capabilities of the system) has just been released, and is available at MindCandyDVD.com. Showing off the unique power of the system, the DVD "covers fifteen years of demo evolution with thirty of the best Amiga demos created." In addition, the impressive demos all used real-time effects, including some of the earliest real-time 3D vector graphics on any home computer, and even some texture-mapped models and real-time procedural effects that prefigured their use in many video games.

But separately of the demos, video games themselves were one of the most vibrant creative scenes on the Amiga, and many of the games created back then for the computer were a major influence on today's gaming genres. The Amiga's heyday for games was in the late '80s and early '90s, when its custom chipset and advanced (for the time) audiovisuals led to sumptuous 2D titles in a variety of styles, and even some basic 3D games, from standout creators such as The Bitmap Brothers, DMA Design, Sensible Software, Cinemaware, and more.

Many of these games are still relevant today. For example, Microsoft's X06 European press event saw the announcement that Amiga classic Sensible Soccer would be coming to the Xbox Live Arcade service for the Xbox 360, complete with custom online leagues playable over Xbox Live. And multiple game franchises created for the Amiga have gone on to bigger and brighter things. So let's look at some of the most creative entries in the game canon for one of the all-time most creative machines."

So there you go - check out the full Wired.com gallery and my vaguely pithy comments, and feel free to agree/disagree about what I left out and why the hell It Came From The Desert! isn't there, etc, etc.

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

['Roboto-chan!' is a fortnightly column by Ollie Barder which covers videogames that feature robots and the pop-cultural folklore surrounding them. This week's column covers the effect of one designer who has taken the concept of real robots to their zenith.]

About seven years ago I stumbled across some interesting designs within the pages of Newtype. I used to buy Newtype semi-regularly, mainly for my Five Star Stories fix but also because the magazine often held host to some pretty interesting stuff.

The designs that caught my eye were from a soon to be serialised novel by the name of For the Barrel and they were, quite frankly, utterly revolutionary. You see, For the Barrel was a re-imagination of the original Gundam series, except with a far greater emphasis on realism. The designwork was consequently unnervingly palpable.

A few years later, Capcom announced a truly bizarre mecha game on the original Xbox. It would have a monstrous bespoke controller covered in a myriad of happy flashing buttons. Naturally, the mecha designs needed to look the part especially with such a high emphasis on realism for the game.

The common link between the two is a man by the name of Junji Okubo and it’s about time his effect on mecha design and the future of gaming was covered.

In some ways saying that For the Barrel merely re-wrote the original Gundam sells it more than a little bit short. Considering that Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, one of the founding fathers of the original Gundam along with Yoshiyuki Tomino, has approached his Gundam The Origin manga with more than a little trepidation only shows the magnitude of the undertaking for outsiders.

For the Barrel didn’t just re-write Gundam it approached every aspect of its setting and re-examined its implementation. From the psychological make-up of the characters to the technology used to power their machines of war. The latter being pertinent in light of what Gundam has done for the real robot mythos.

When I interviewed Okubo a few years ago, he made a very interesting observation in regards to mecha design. He used a word to describe contemporary mecha, that of keren. The word originates from kabuki and means “playing to the gallery”, and is basically regarded as indicating excessive theatrics.

In the context of mecha, Okubo was referring to the crazy nonsense of Getta Robo’s gattai sequence, as the three craft impossibly morph into one another. Real robots eschewed this emphasis on keren and were consequently more palpable. However, real robots were born from supers and they retained a certain amount of vestigial keren.

Okubo’s approach to mecha design is, for all intents and purposes, keren free. The results are some of the most realistic looking mecha designs to date and unsurprisingly with such a great emphasis on realism games like Steel Battalion were possible. From a functional standpoint, the designwork framed the gameplay.

Okubo recently had a book published, entitled Izmojuki Industrial Divinities it contained a lot of his designs for Steel Battalion (including concept sketches) as well as his other non-game work. Apart from the artwork, the book also contains several CG renders of his designs photoshopped into real world locations (similar to Katoki's work on Gundam Fix). This only emphasizes the quality of the design in terms of its real robot focus. They look like machinery that's already part of our daily lives or at least very soon will be.

I mentioned in a previous column how Ryosuke Takahashi's approach to making mecha functional tools in a narrative context has had a noticeable effect on Japanese mecha games. Whilst Takahashi has the right approach, Okubo's designs are the pinnacle in terms of that approach's execution.

You see, whilst Okubo is striving for realism in his designs he acknowledges the history that pre-dates that. He made comparisons to his designwork being chimaeran. Multiple facets from the history of mecha coalescing into a form that supersedes its inspiration. This is something that a lot of Western mecha games could learn from, in aiming for realism you need to be aware of the history of fantasy that enshrouds mecha in Japan.

Whilst Okubo has tried to minimise the amount of keren in his mecha designs, he is still in awe of the work that was done on Dunbine and Galient. Two series that embody the fantastical element of Japanese storytelling and consequently have a high degree of keren in their mecha designs.

Real robots were a reaction to the supers and in turn took part of that with them. In making mecha more real, the framework of supers is still apparent though more in its refined and selective absence. The point here is that, Okubo's skill and insight comes from a cultural and historical understanding of mecha. Something that paid untold dividends in the creation and development of Steel Battalion. Maybe it's time that the games industry outside of Japan cottoned onto that.

[Ollie Barder is a freelance journalist who's written for The Guardian, appeared on BBC Radio 4 and contributed to Japanese mecha artbooks. He lives at home with an ever growing collection of Japanese die-cast robot toys and a very understanding wife.]

Posted by oliieb at 9:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Oo, look, a missive from Ray Barnholt with a rather gorgeous announcement: "recently completed a project for my personal site, Crunk Games: an episode guide to the popular Japanese show Game Center CX. I'm not sure what else I can say about it that I haven't in the article itself or on my 1UP blog, but basically I'd love for the show to get more exposure."

I've seen this show available on DVD when I've been in Tokyo, but I never quite picked it up. Now that seems like a folly, as Ray explains: "Japan has given us a few television gems over the years. A lot of memorable anime series, sure, but a fair share of live action programming as well (what, you want me to make a list?). But for the country that redefined "game culture," not a lot of interesting game-related programming has come through. Can we blame them? Just like the rest of the world, most of the video game stuff that’s been produced are kids shows, a TV news story every so often or, these days, nerdy Famitsu DVD segments — nothing really, truly memorable."

"Game Center CX is different. It’s comedic, dramatic, even a bit mental, but altogether it’s an unforgettable show about what sounds like a forgettable concept: a guy trying to beat old Nintendo games. I was late to the party when I saw it, but once I did, I had to see all of it. After that, I decided I had to share it the best way I could, and this episode guide is the result. You could call it "spoiling," but I’ll gladly risk that if I can get anyone else to find it and love it as I have." A bit of a cultural phenomenon, and an awesome write-up.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Over at MTV News, Stephen Totilo has been profiling GSW columnist and wacky NY guy Matt 'Fort90' Hawkins - or, more precisely, his ""best" worst-games list of all time."

You may have read this on Matthew's blog already, but the write-up makes it a tad more fun: "His inspiration? "I'm a big fan of wrestling managers who like pissing off the audience." You don't have to remember Captain Lou Albano or Brother Love to know what Hawkins means. Just check his list, which he presented two weeks ago at the I-CON science-fiction and fantasy festival in Stony Brook, New York. His 10 — well, 11, counting a two-way tie for first place — includes favorites "World of Warcraft," multiple "Grand Theft Auto" titles, the "Madden" series and even a "Final Fantasy" game. He wanted to get booed, at least by some."

Actually, this statement fully captures the nuances of Mr. Fort90's personality, as Harvey Pekar-esque as he ever is: "Hawkins never wanted to go after the easy topics. "There's a lot of games out there that I vehemently despise and hate, but they're popular. And I guess that's how it is for anything. Everybody knows 'that album sucks' or 'that book is horrible, but it is so popular that it drives me nuts,' and it lowers the bar for everyone." The games on his list aren't necessarily incompetently made, in his mind. They are worse: They are bad influences."

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

So, those with keen memories may recall that Gamasutra won the 2006 'Game-Related' Webby Award, which meant I had to go to New York and try not to humiliate myself in front of Rob Corddry and an assembled audience of cognoscenti - which I successfully did! Nice to be honored in the 'Oscars Of The Internet', too.

Well, Gamasutra entered again this year, and we are again a Webby Award finalist for 2007, yay. As we note: "Other nominees in the 'Games-Related' category this year are CNET Networks' GameSpot and AOL's GameDaily, as well as the official websites for LucasArts' LEGO Star Wars II and Thrillville."

What's more: The Webby Awards are presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences, a global organization with over 500 members including internet 'founding father' Vinton Cerf, R/GA's Chief Bob Greenberg, Simpsons creator Matt Groening, The Huffington Post's Arianna Huffington, and film producer Harvey Weinstein. Winners will be announced on May 1st and honored at The 11th Annual Webby Awards on June 5 at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. The gala event will once again hosted by former Daily Show correspondent Rob Corddry, and will showcase award winners delivering their famous five-word acceptance speeches."

But here's the important bit, and it's so important that I'm going to bold it: "In addition to the main Webby Awards, which are determined by the The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, there is also the People's Voice Awards, in which interested readers can vote for Gamasutra in an all audience-determined category, presented alongside the main award." So quick, go tell your friends and make your voice heard in the wilderness of wild untamed website fun.

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

["Beyond Tetris" is a column from Tony "Tablesaw" Delgado about puzzle games that transcend mere abstract action and instead plunge deep into the heart of problem-solving. This installment revisits an earlier topic with the release of Deadly Rooms of Death: The City Beneath.]

I didn't want this to happen. It was only a few months ago that I first wrote about Deadly Rooms of Death, and I didn't think I'd be writing about it again for at least a few months. My plan last weekend was to get The 7th Guest running again, so I could write about that today. But instead, in an oddly phrased announcement, Erik Hermansen and Caravel Games released DROD 3.0, or The City Beneath. And that's when my time disappeared.

The game was released on April 1 (which somewhat accounts for the logic-puzzle phrasing of the announcement), exactly two years after DROD 2.0, Journey to Rooted Hold. The downloadable game can be purchased for $20, with a CD version promised in the future. As with JtRH, there is also a demo which can be used to create and solve level sets (called holds). Caravel Games has not yet set up a page with links to the demo, so we'll link them here: Windows demo, Mac demo, and Linux demo.

A Kinder, Gentler DROD

The most one of the biggest changes in The City Beneath comes shortly into the game, when Beethro reaches the Gate of Sheathing. Past this point, he is told, he will have to put away his Really Big Sword. And when he does, he enters into the titular underground city. It's bright, filled with people, looking vaguely like any town in a generic RPG. This sprawling level is a hub for the story. And though there's little smiting to be done, there's plenty of scripted events and cutscenes to discover while finding your way to the next dungeon level. But though the levels are more spread out geographically, the plot remains linear, and you won't be able to move to the next puzzle level until you've completed the one you're in.

DROD 3.0 aims to give a higher level of polish with alpha-layer effects, like weather and dynamic lighting. These deliberately have no effect on the puzzles of the game, but definitely make it a sight prettier. The scripting has also been revamped, and it allows you to create levels where the player is a character other than Beethro (The City Beneath includes a level where you play one of the NPCs that first appeared in Journey to Rooted Hold). And the game now allows honest-to-goodness cutscenes. In previous games, story events could be ignored as desired, but The City Beneath wrests control from the player to choreograph detailed non-interactive cutscenes. It's used well in the game, but it still feels inelegant compared to the control offered to the player in previous games.

On the other hand, the voice acting for these cutscenes is excellent, perhaps surprisingly so, given their origin. Late last year, Caravel Games held a contest where forum members were asked to record themselves reading lines for specific characters. From the winners and runners up of this "Grand Audition," Caravel pulled together a diverse cast of characters to supplement the already-established roles.

A Dastadlier, Deviouser DROD

Aside from the cosmetic and story-driven changes, the newest version of DROD adds a staggering number of game elements. For some reason, the best list of new elements is currently at Wikipedia. I'd love to go over them all here, but there are just too many of them, and all of them are hard to describe without examples. Every puzzle level introduces a new aspect of the game, and nearly all of the rooms of that level are dedicated to puzzles that rely on that monster or object. When you meet adders (a new type of snake), you can expect to kill several of them on that level. When you see your first speed potion (which lets you take two moves for the monsters' one), expect to be doing a lot of running.

And the elements have been well chosen to fill a number of interesting puzzle functions; take mirrors, introduced realtively early in the game. These can be pushed around by Beethro's body, but they can also be pushed around with his sword. And if you're not carefull, you can attack the mirror with your sword so that you break it completely. Further, it can be used to reflect the line of sight of creatures like evil eyes, who only attack after they see Beethro. Caravel could have easily made a simple block that is only moved in sokoban-esque formations (and, indeed, there is already a sokoban hold in progress, using room designs by David W. Skinner), but in The City Beneath, the mirror puzzles still manage to avoid simplified block pushing. Similarly, though the new platforms often have to be moved like a sliding-block puzzle, because Beethro always has to stay on top of the moving platofrm, the blocks can't be moved in the obvious ways.

But what's been most maddening about The City Beneath is its difficulty. It's hard, of course, but because the elements of the puzzle keep changing, it doesn't rise up to the same level of insanity as many of the later levels in Rooted Hold, which used a more reserved set of puzzle parts. As a result, the entire game is pitched at the level of frustration that keeps you hacking away at the problem instead of turning away and taking a break. You can sit down for a few before eating lunch, and when you check the time, you'll see that you've been playing so long you've skipped lunch and dinner.

Start Delving

The demo linked above includes several story portions of the game, but only two levels of puzzles. The game starts slowly, showcasing scripting and effects. Veterans of DROD may find it rather unsatisfying, the game doesn't reach its groove of difficulty until a few levels after the demo ends. Presumably that's just a ploy to get the devoted to actually buy the game. If you haven't got the funds, I'm sure that there will be some user-made holds with 3.0 elements soon, but the y'll take some time to come down the pipeline. On the other hand, newcomers to DROD will probably find the demo levels rather inviting. The game includes some on-the-spot tutorials to get newbies up to speed with the developments of the game (the behavior and strategies for basic monsters like roaches and goblins), but the game still gets complicated. I would still recommend that newcomers to the series start with King Dugan's Dungeon or Journey to Rooted Hold, or even the recent "Smitemaster's Selection" Smitemastery 101.

According to the CaravelNet statistics (which can be a bit unreliable), I'm about four-fifths through the game, and I've encountered all of the new elements I've seen in the level editor. But despite spending every spare moment this week (and a few moments that I really couldn't spare) I'm still not finished. Even writing this article is difficult because I just know that I have a way to beat the new level of rock giants (a huge new monster that takes up four spaces). Hopefully, the end is in sight, because I don't know how many more sleepless nights I can afford to lose.

[Tony Delgado is a member of the National Puzzlers' League, and a solver and creater of puzzles of all sorts. Other than his work as the copy chief for The Gamer's Quarter, he finds his job unsatisfying and is open to career-change suggestions.]

Posted by tablesaw at 2:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

At GamerDad, there's a particularly interesting article from Colleen Hannon entitled 'Mainstream Media and Videogame Studies', and subtitled: "Do Violent Videogames really make kids violent? Momgamer takes an in-depth look at how the media interprets the data."

Obviously this is a mother who's very knowledgable about the subject, but it's certainly an aggressive piece that charges the mainstream media with over-frequent hyperbole: "If you are a game-aware parent and you care about your kids see and hear, it's a real fight to get straight answers. And if you're in the industry yourself you get angry when they publish these things. Like when you're interviewed for an article then totally ignored for a sensationalist piece of crap that makes people think strangers and child predators can get to your child via their Nintendo DS in a public place."

A worthy conclusion: "Those think tanks, lawyers, doctors, and politicians are right about one thing. Our children's well-being is at stake. But we need the truth. We need real facts, and we need them now so we can have wise rules about media consumption in our homes. And along with that truth, this web of lies and ambitions cannot continue to drive our public policy."

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Over at my favorite LJ feed from the Lifemeter Comics folks, they're previewing their upcoming mini-comic with some awesome new art, including a totally not-official Guitar Hero one-page black&white strip that rather rocks (sorry, metal-s).

This one was "Written and drawn by Jacob Chabot", and there's also a new Dragon Quest b&w comic, too: "This great DragonQuest comic comes from new Lifemeter contributor, Lamar Abrams. Make sure you check out his site as well as his self-published comic, Remake."

As for when this is coming out in actual paper form - not so sure! But the folks tease in an earlier post: "If you enjoyed the first Lifemeter Mini, you're going to go nuts this summer. Patience is a virtue!" OK, kids!

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Got an email from the Logler.com folks noting that their first annual Casual Game Awards are now online, "...based on the Global Top 10 results for the first 52 weeks."

As they explain: "Every week starting from end of March 2006 we publish Casual Games Global Top 10 on Logler.com (more info about CGG Top 10 can be found here). Our weekly Top 10 is based on sales/popularity data from 16 major casual portals and shows what is hot in casual games space." So it's actually reasonably empirical - up to a degree! The overall winner (branded as 'Best', though it's presumably 'highest selling' too) is Cake Mania from Sandlot.

Particularly interesting, too, is an attempt to rank by game subgenre by number of games entering the Top 10: "1. match3... 2 - time management... 3 - hidden object and card & board... 4 - sim... 5 - shoot3 (aka marble popper)... 6 - adventure... 7 - object inlay (aka brain teaser) and word". Some of these are a bit 'cryptic', but it turns out that if you rank by # of weeks on the charts (much more sensible!), 'hidden object' games like Mystery Case Files: Prime Suspects win out, followed by 'time management' Diner Dash-esque games like Cake Mania and sim games like Virtual Villagers. Fascinating stuff.

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Parallax Memories' is a (not-so) regular column by Matthew Williamson, profiling classic '16-bit' games from the Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo, and other seminal '90s systems. This week's column asks where you want the column to go?]

What excuse can I make up for the tardiness of this column? I really can't think of too good of one, so I'll just pretend like I've been busy. To add insult to injury, if you're one of those three people who've been looking forward to the column's return, well, this isn't even a proper column!

Honestly, I'm looking for some help and perspective from the readership here. Great sites are built on their community, and this one is no different.

Since my last column something huge has happen: the Wii came out. Now the Virtual Console has shifted the way I was going to look at this column. Since Nintendo now feeds its users new 16 bit (and other) era games I'm not sure if I should continue to look at the games of the early nineties in a general perspective, or focus in on what has recently appeared on the Virtual Console.

Now, there's no way I could buy everything that comes out (nor would I want to), and I wouldn't be doing any kind of standard review on them. I would just continue the column as it's been going but just limit the content to recent or overall virtual console releases with the occasional distraction.

So if you have any input on what direction you would like to this column go, let me know in the comment field.

[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 8:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

So one would expect there to be a bit of negative feedback, but imagine my surprise when two negative-leaning reviews of God Of War 2 wandered along in the self-same weekend. Blimey. Firstly, we have the New Gamer's D.Riley looking quizzical, and noting: "God of War is a game that is very technically proficient, but has no heart. Its combat system is lackluster, its enemies are generic, and its story is barely even there."

His capper? "The rub is that God of War suffers from the same colossal flaw its predecessor did. It sets the bar amazingly high in its opening moments and never gets back to that high point. Would it have been a better game if they'd placed the Colossus battle at the end? Maybe, but that'd only be addressing one of the myriad of problems that stops this game from being 'great' and makes it a more solid 'average'."

What's more, Andrew Toups has a smack at the game over at ActionButton.net, commenting: "Yes, God of War 2 has meticulously rendered backdrops, skillful, inspired art direction, sweeping, breathtaking vistas, a dramatic, cinematic score, cleverly designed stage layouts, and setpiece after memorable setpiece. No, none of this matters. At the end of the day, God of War 2, though thoroughly well-designed, well-intentioned, and near impeccably well-put together, is an abject failure of videogame. The fact that it has been a success — both critically and commercially — is simple evidence of the sorry state of the medium." Grumps? Or successful spotters of prime overhyping? Let the jury decide!

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Many of you may recall that Frank 'Lost Levels' Cifaldi is features editor over at big sister site Gamasutra. Well, tragically, that ain't so any more, because Frank is leaving (sniff!) in a couple of weeks to take up a job in Atlanta as Editorial Manager at our fave crazed PC subscription game download service GameTap.

Our proposed GameTap news boycott vengeance has sadly been cancelled after someone told us we can't really do that (nuts! S'ok, GameTap, we still like you), but that leaves us with a position to fill as Gamasutra.com features editor.

This position is full-time with benefits, based out of our San Francisco office (2nd and Harrison, South Of Market), and basically consists of being 'thought leader' for our eclectic blend of technical, trend-based, business, and historical articles which have helped make us the most successful B2B game website by any metric (revenue, traffic, reputation), including a recent Webby Award win and an appearance in the UK Guardian's 'Top 100 Websites' list.

Here's the official blurb, for those who are interested: "Major responsibilities include 'owning' the feature schedule on Gamasutra, by managing the vision of the features section of the site; planning, commissioning and scheduling longform features to run daily; editing and laying out (or contracting out the layout of) those features when they are submitted; managing payment and the budget for Gamasutra features. Additional responsibilities include helping out with posting and editing of Gamasutra's news on occasion (if other parties are not available); reporter duties, including event coverage and interviews; miscellaneous other website tasks."

If you're interested, please send over a quick note and a copy of your resume to us at featureseditor@gamasutra.com. We promise to keep all applicants confidential, obviously, and we may have additional newly-created positions becoming available soon, too, so your application will also be considered for those. Have at it.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Oddly enough, easily one of the most-commented GameSetWatch posts to date has been about the preview disc for video game-themed horror flick Stay Alive, and actually, Matthew 'Cinema Pixeldiso' Hawkins made a in-depth review of the film for us late last year.

Well, now it's UK game journo Richard Cobbett's turn, and he has all kinds of fun tearing it to bits, for example: "Really Annoying Brother makes an incomprehensible reference to Quirky Girl having ‘body karate’, to which Goth Chick announces “Anyone who says size doesn’t matter never played a third person shooter.” I have no idea what that’s supposed to mean. Sure, yeah, it’s a penis reference, but if we’re going to do game gags about sexual characteristics, shouldn’t it be something like ‘wrapped round a hot rocket launcher’ or ‘had to wear a bra built to transport baby elephants’. Third person shooter? That’s nonsense, movie!"

Wait, you want more sarcasm? "A bloodsoaked, Bible style book floats onto the screen, and opens up to reveal the ‘Prayer of Elizabeth’ - a bit of generic Goth prose that doesn’t respond to any controls. Yes, the movie has crashed. Oh, wait. Sorry. Quirky Girl suggests that they might have to read it out loud, like the half-hour opening crawl from the Alone in the Dark movie. “No way,” Irritating Brat tells her. “That’s next generation technology!” I wonder who’s going to tell Konami, which released Lifeline three years earlier." It's an enjoyable tearing to bits - so please to enjoy.

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not really sure that all of these are GameSetLinks along - some are more interesting still than that - but I choose to lump them altogether, because it's Sunday night, and I'd love to dispose of them all at once, so here we go:

- Dan Marshall, creator of the wacky indie 2D game Gibbage, has converted the Gibbage.co.uk website into an indie game portal, and notes: "The trouble with the independent games industry is that, all said and done, there’s very little money in it" - very true. So: "From now on, every penny of profit this site gains will be plugged directly into funding future independent game projects." A laudable concept, and let's hope he helps the indies out with this new redesign - there's not that many pure indie portals out there yet.

- Fun-Motion has revealed a new editor for cult physics game Ski Stunt Simulator, explaining: "In case you haven’t been following the comments thread on the Ski Stunt Extreme page: Sean McTuble just released a new integrated version of his editor. His new bundle, SkiStuntST, includes a new category of levels. He’s included two of his levels, which are great, and the third level is linked to the export path of the bundled editor." The release is mirrored on the above links - which is nice.

- I don't really think anybody besides GameSpot readers are talking about their new streaming video show, Indievelopment, which chronicles the development of a game called Black Powder, Red Earth. The company is called Echelon Software, and according to their blog: "We've all shipped software in the past. Phil and Altay have shipped games for Disney, including one you can play at the Disneyland in Florida called "Ride the Comics". Most recently Altay and myself produced several iterations of the Paltalk video chat client as well as redesigning their social network."

- Videoludica is doing great at spotting new game books, and points out 'Reset: Changing the Way We Look at Video Game' from Rusel DeMaria, described thusly: "In Reset: Changing the Way We Look at Video Games, gaming journalist, bestselling author, and concerned parent Rusel DeMaria examines the pervasive myths and stereotypes about video games, turns them around and reveals another face: their potential to promote positive personal and social change." Sounds a bit like Everything Bad Is Good For You just for games, then. Also, Rusel is a super-nice guy.

- A very juicy MMO-related rumor via Bill Bishop: "Towards the end of last week, the Chinese press starting running stories that EA was going to license FIFA Online to The9 and pay about USD $200M for a 19% stake in The9. One reporter claimed to have confirmed that The9's CEO Zhu Jun was now in Los Angeles (EA's headquarters are in Redwood City, CA.)" Questionable, but Bishop was on the money very early about the Mythic/EA deal, and EA is having all kinds of troubles getting licensed to debut FIFA in China, by the look of it, soo....

- I saw this and then forgot to link it, but Grand Text Auto handily reminds me - Kenta Cho's Japanese freeware shooter L.A.2 is now out in Flash form - and it "repurposes the Game of Life as a shooter - you shoot “gliders” into the self-generating and attacking grid around you." As usual, some awesome abstract shmup action by one of the genre's masters.

- Hey, a good-looking third-party PS3 downloadable game that ticks a few indie boxes? My gosh, 1UP points out Super Stardust HD (pictured), an update of an Amiga title from a developer with an interesting background: "With 12 years under its belt, the Helsinki based Housemarque has been around longer than both of those, making hardcore shoot 'em ups like Stardust and The Reap on Amiga and PC. In the last few years, Housemarque has done work on TransWorld Snowboarding for Atari and helped program part of Guerrilla's Killzone: Liberation." Looking forward to this.

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Slyly themed to go live around Easter time, but largely bereft of Jesus-ian references (apart from a side reference to "some Christian complications sure to earn me a bumper crop of e-mail"), 1UP's Scott Sharkey is counting down 'The Top 10 Videogame Resurrections', subtitled the 'deaths that didn't stick'. Ohmy. Some vague spoilers within, obviously.

Sharkey's charming writing livens up a completely ridiculous countdown, with particular note given to Dracula in the Castlevania series: "Dracula's died and come back so often it barely counts. They've done this song and dance so many times they started setting the games in the future because they're down to one weekend in 1470 where the guy was actually dead for more than a couple minutes."

Also a fun read - Sephiroth from Final Fantasy: "At some point Square is going to have to come to grips with the fact that if they keep bringing him out in spin-offs/prequels/whatever, they're going to run out of ways to remix "One-Winged Angel." Opera is good. Electric guitar is pretty OK. But eventually they're going to be down to ukulele and a kid with a kazoo, or a washboard and a saw." Hey, if XOC did it, we'd be into that!

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

An update earlier this week from import superstars NCSX [whom we are financially unrelated to] brought all kinds of new Mario merchandise with it, from toys through cushions and beyond - all manufactured for the Japanese market only, of course, but grabbable on import.

I particularly like the cool (but largely sold out) cushions: "Banpresto continues their flood of Nintendo products with fluffy cushions inspired by New Super Mario Bros. A red-capped Mushroom, a toothy Goomba, and a Star Coin are featured in the collection. Each cushion measures 31cm or 12.20" in length and are approximately 2" thick. Sit on one and rest in comfort knowing that a familiar Mario icon supports your weighty girth with all of its might. Stack all three on top of each other and you'll have something that looks like an egg (star), tomato (mushroom), and hamburger (Goomba's the meat) sandwich."

Also fun/odd though, this puzzle: "Anyone who's played Super Monkey Ball will take to [Mario Bros:] Crystal Maze like a fish to water. By using the red joystick/lever located at the bottom of the game, players tilt the play board to move three metal marbles (one at a time) from the START area at the bottom of the board to the GOAL located at the upper left corner of the board. It's pretty challenging due to the convoluted and tight-spaced maze one has to maneuver through."

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Starting up a new little thing on (each or alternate) Sundays here, whereby I talk about some of the games I've been playing this week and what I thought of them - and then I encourage erstwhile GSW readers to do the same. Here we go:

- Jetpac Refueled (Rare/Microsoft, Xbox 360 Live Arcade)
Now, this one may be because I'm British, was born in 1975, and my first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum - therefore making Rare's early Ultimate Play The Game output some of the key games I played growing up. But at 400 points ($5), and with an accurate retro mode and fun, extremely challenging 'Refueled' mode, this cross between Defender and Joust is an incredibly fun short-term blaster. Definitely in my Top 3 XBLA titles so far (though some co-workers just can't stand it).

- Puzzle Quest (Infinite Interactive/D3, PSP)
There's obviously been a lot of buzz for this title - though Infinite Interactive's webpage misreads a Gamasutra chart citing Amazon.com a bit, I still think it's going to be a notable sleeper hit - and I've only just got started with the game. But... what an awesome idea! I can't decide whether a 'match 3' puzzler mashed up with a hardcore fantasy RPG is an accidental perversion or a genius breakthrough. But adding RPG progression and leveling to the puzzle genre - in a much more meaningful way than Popcap's Bookworm Adventures - makes the game fiendishly addictive.

- Sonic & The Secret Rings (Sonic Team/Sega, Wii)
Just rented this one, but yes, echoing some of the reviewers - this is definitely the first Sonic game I've enjoyed in quite a long time. The Wii-specific controls are fun, though they do suffer from a lot of the issues motion controllers have when expecting extreme precision (you have to break acceleration/tilt thresholds to trigger movements, I think, which is just subtly different from direct button-pressing actions.) The biggest issue with the game is that Sonic moves so damn fast, and the base levels are pretty long, so you can sorta tell (at least in my mind) that they ran out of content quite quickly, and mixed things up with lots of 'challenge' levels, some of which can be contrived and a bit obnoxious.

Other things at I least touched this week - Konami/Hudson's Honeycomb Beat for DS (clever, slightly brain-hurting puzzler), Konami's Arcade Hits for DS (completely bizarre, super-detailed emulation specifics and options, some decent emulation of obscure titles), Ubisoft Montreal's TMNT for Xbox 360 (Prince of Turtle! I kinda like this, though I shouldn't - mainly it's for the easy Achievement Points, I fear.) What have you guys been playing, and (optional!) how did you like them?

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Catching up with the fun at the Speed Demos Archive, there are all kinds of interesting new runs posted, but I'd particularly like to concentrate on the news page and this info: "Those unfamiliar with the remake of Resident Evil for the GameCube may not realise that it's possible to unlock an "invisible mode", where zombies and other enemies are not visible to the player." And somebody has speed run it? Blimey.

The page blurb is quite illuminating for the 1 hour, 36 minute run from David Stierle: "You will see a four-segmented Speed Run of Resident Evil: Remake on hard mode including "Invisible Enemy". It would be too boring to show you the same run only on hard mode, that's why I decided to run it additionally on Invisible Enemy. It makes the boss fights much harder; especially you don't have auto-aim. You get also less ammunition, less defence weapons and only two attacks of a zombie can kill you."

He continues: "There are only two very annoying situations in my run which could be done much better: * First situation: I have never done this mistake. While running upstairs where the two hunters are, the first one jumped in front of me and attacked me. Then the second hunter came and also attacked me. I got about four or five hits. Very annoying. * Second situation: The Underground where I... meet Liza. I missed the lever (very stupid for a "runner") and got hit about two-three times. Also very annoying." Still, I would have been lost after the first room with invisible foes.

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over at LJ, Kidfenris has a fun little post looking at the history of PS2 title The Red Star by box covers, seeing as the comic book-based shooter has been so hideously delayed. And it starts adorably: "I'm playing The Red Star demo. I still live in Ohio. And Acclaim is still in business."

Mr. Fenris continues: "It impresses me. I'm aware of the nicely illustrated and unsubtly allegorical comic on which it was based, but the game really sells me by marrying two old-fashioned gaming staples: shooting enemy soldiers and beating the crap out of legions of street punks.... A few weeks later, Acclaim goes under, and amid all the gloating of now-grown ‘80s children still bitter over Total Recall for the NES, some choose to mourn the fact that the company's gone to the grave with what might have been its best game in years."

But wait! The game lives again - maybe? Fenris notes: "I'm checking ebgames.com every month to see when The Red Star is coming out. And it’s always the next month. Always. But the new cover suggests that someone's doing something somewhere with regard to the game. Even if Makita's going to catch her death of cold." The latest, of course, is that the PS2 version of the title will come out in about 10 days. But apparently it's been like that for a good while anyhow. Doh. Good luck, The Red Star!

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

My esteemed co-worker and Austin GDC content manager Jane Pinckard has been posting quite a bit to her Game Girl Advance blog recently, and in addition to Jane's posts about heels and Guitar Hero II for X360 (yay!) and an interesting post on gender-balanced work environments.

In addition to her posts, GameGirlAdvance co-conspirator Steve Bowler just put up something interesting about unlockable content which I think is well worth discussing.

Bowler notes: "My buddy Jerry over at Penny-Arcade today discusses what I'm sure a lot of folks (myself included) get frustrated about: unlockable content. His concern is a real and valid one, and it's a tough road to hoe as a game developer. On one hand, the consumer deserves the whole product. They paid for it, they should get to play it. But on the other hand, if the player gets all the content up front, in many cases, this makes the game experience dull and unrewarding."

His conclusion? "Really, we play unlockable content every day, in every game. It's the nature of gaming. You can't fight the boss without first making it through the waves of grunts; you can't level up without first acquiring the experience points to do so; you can't just jump to the end of the game without playing the levels in order; you can't play the encore without first rocking the crowd. When unlocking content is done right, we love it, and hardly even notice it. But when it's done wrong...hooo boy. Hell hath no fury like a gamer's scorn." Thoughts?

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which covers video game magazines from the late '70s all the way up to right now.]

We all want something that we just can't have. Me, I want to have more time and money to source old magazines I need to complete my assorted collection runs. Does anyone have the November 1990 or April 1995 issues of AmigaWorld, for example?

Regardless, click forward for coverage of all the fine magazine that hit US shelves in the past two weeks. Everyone's abuzz about Game Informer's GTA4 cover, but it won't actually reach readers for just a little bit longer, so hang tight.

Electronic Gaming Monthly May 2007 (Podcast)

Cover: The Future of Videogames

As Dan Hsu puts it in his editorial (that part of the editorial where he isn't discussing how much Nintendo hates EGM, that is), this is the first "themed" issue of EGM ever. The theme: the future of video games, which covers almost half the editorial pages and confirms what people like me have been stating for a while: game mags are interesting when they complement the gamer lifestyle, not try to be the sole outlet for everything in the industry.

The theme centers around a 22-page piece in the middle that divides the "future" into six distinct areas -- controllers, online, TV displays, the industry, the gamers, and finally the games themselves -- and has one writer do a large-scale piece on each. The articles aren't just something some freelancers made up, either: Each one is packed with quotes from developers and other industry people, from the usual suspects (Cliffy, Warren Spector) to the more unusual (a gaggle of analysts and professors, along with David Cross and his unique take on the year 2343). One designer gets a crack at designing the future of their chosen genre (Ted Price for platformers, the Virtua Fighter guy for fighting games), and it's all oodles more interesting to read than 22 pages of previews.

Every other section of the mag, including Seanbaby and the retro bit in the back, gets the "future" treatment, too, and by and large I'd call it a success.

This is another Afterthoughts-heavy issue, with pieces on MotorStorm and God of War II. Also worth mentioning: The Forza Motorsport II ad, the first time I've seen a "smell strip" ad in a video-game magazine. It smells great.

GamePro May 2007

Cover: Heavenly Sword

After a pretty neat April issue, GamePro gets a bit back to normal with a very large PS3 preview feature in the middle and the usual rabble of previews and reviews elsewhere. Unique bits this time around include a page on Duke Nukem Forever (really, DNF delay jokes never get old, do they?) and the annual LamePro roundup...except GP cut LamePro down to a half-page advertisement of sorts, as opposed to Game Informer going four-page nutso with its April Fools stuff. (LamePro has an amusing cover redesign, too. You'd appreciate it if you saw it.)

A couple of tiny copy-editing mistakes show up here and there: one page has "April 2007" on the bottom instead of May, and an image of Team Ico's Famitsu help-wanted ad in the news section still has the massive 2ch Japanese watermarking text all over it, which makes it look pretty silly.

Games for Windows: The Official Magazine May 2007 (Podcast)

Cover: Army dude

Crysis, Company of Heroes, and the usual PC genres dominate this preview-heavy issue of GFW, along with an eight-page look at Windows Vista as a game platform. Of more interest to mag-heads: Cindy Yans, one of the people behind the already-fondly-remembered MASSIVE Magazine, contributes a few pieces to this issue, including a review of the new Broken Sword game (jeez, they made another one?) and an MMO column. I hope for more.

PC Gamer May 2007 (Podcast)

Cover: If I had to guess, Guild Wars 2

This is the quintessential PC Gamer US cover right here: enormous logo of a game that's ages away from release, a random swipe at console gamers in the corner, and some kind of inscrutable MMO giveaway (apparently you can win Paris Hilton's dog? I don't know) lining the top. Inside, there's 13 pages on Guild Wars and its sequel, four on Hellgate: London, and two on game physics -- a seemingly favorite topic amongst PCG editors, and I had no idea that the folks behind the PhysX card were still around.

PSM May 2007 (Podcast)

Cover: Devil May Cry 4

15 pages on DMC4 (including a very nice and deep interview with Hiroyuki Kobayashi), six on Turok (whoa), and eight devoted to an interview with Sony's Jack Tretton (fresh off stints in EGM and GamePro) are the main highlights here. Not a whole lot to say otherwise.

Official Xbox Magazine May 2007 (Podcast)

Cover: Project Gotham Racing 4

OXM gets all DUB and Maxim'd out this month, with six pages on PGR4 and a disk with demos of Def Jam: Icon and NBA Street Homecourt. Again, though, it's OXM that shows the most originality out of Future US's mag stable, with six pages on Xbox Live Achievements -- an inside guide to landing the most difficult ones (wave 100 in Robotron 2084? No problem!), and a guide to getting a Gamerscore of 10,000 in 30 hours. All tongue-in-cheek, all very fun to read.

Beckett Massive Online Gamer April/May 2007

Cover: Why, WoW, of course

There's a "pirates vs. ninjas MMORPG" joke on page 4 and I'm a little scared to go any further.

Game Developer April 2007

Cover: Like a deer in the headlights, so go game industry salaries this year (Plus Burger King)

I really, really, really, really wish Simon had given the Burger King games postmortem the full cover (now that would turn heads at bookstores). But GD's annual salary survey is admittedly just a bit more important to the magazine's readership, and if you're in the industry you'll be studying it carefully before your next evaluation (unless you're in QA, in which case you'll just cry over your 3rd bowl of Cup Noodles today).

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a site for collectors and fans of old video-game and computer magazines. He's also an editor at Newtype USA magazine.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 3:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at The New Gamer, they have a thoughful post on Lars Von Trier's experimental film projects, and how they might just have some reverberations in the video game world.

One of the focuses is on Von Trier's Automavision, of which it's suggested: "Now... that's really intriguing. Von Trier, in his everlasting quest to remove intentional framing & composition from his films, has taken the cameraman out of the equation all-together. Instead, a camera is placed in front of a scene and then a computer randomly selects the framing and angle for the scene. The entirety of The Boss of It All was shot using this method."

Intriguing - G. Turner continues: "As suggested by Mr. Smith's closing comment "Anybody up for a game of Halo directed by Lars Von Trier?", Automavision hints at a future time where cameras in-game aren't just patterned after object recognition and collision detection, but also take into consideration more artistic merits, such as emotional impact and more 'classical compositional' attributes, as well as being able to mathematically deal with more auteuristic visual narrative elements. To re-use the film director analogy, imagine having the choice between having say, God of War directed by Von Trier (an incongruent and edit-happy, but still somewhat understandable, mess) or say, Spielberg with loads of low-angle pseudo-tatami shots?" Of course, if it makes the game less playable, then we may have a problem...

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

Having rectified some kind of odd RSS issue I had with TIGSource, I caught up with a few days of posts and discovered the release of Lexaloffle's new puzzle game Chocolate Castle beckoning me sweetly from afar.

As Derek Yu rhapsodizes: "Joseph White’s games are always brimming with charm and atmosphere, and Chocolate Castle is no exception! Really, as soon as you see that wonderful Lexaloffle logo, you know you are in good hands. Little details, like the windows in the castle that light up as you complete stages, and the way the chocolate gets munched up and leaves crumbs, make me feel like I’ve been stuffed into the warm belly of a Taun Taun after spending hours on the cold, frozen surface of Hoth."

He continues: "Like Zen Puzzle Garden, one of Joseph’s previous games, the gameplay is simple but the puzzles can be devious. I really love the mouse control… it makes playing a breeze. The object is to click and drag chocolate (and other obstacles) around so that your animals can eat them without leaving any chocolate left. Chocolate of the same type sticks together, making your task more difficult." Alistair Wallis previously interviewed Joseph White for GSW last year, if you want more info on the man behind the myth.

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We recently ran something on Microsoft's video-heavy On10 service and their GDC appearance, and I spotted that they're still posting neat tech videos from the conf, particularly this one featuring the Novint Falcon.

As the blurb explains of the haptic controller: "The award-winning Novint Falcon is the first controller that makes high-fidelity interactive three dimensional touch possible and practical for consumer computing applications. Being introduced initially as a PC game controller, the Falcon is, in essence, a small robot which lets users feel weight, shape, texture, dimension, dynamics and force effects when playing enabled games."

Blogger/video-er Tina Wood notes: "It's a bit of learning curve for shooting and such but I give you a demo of it while playing through a little known game titled Half Life 2." I've heard of that! Also recently posted - a video of Crytek's CryEngine 2, a look at the GDC XNA Challenge, and, uhh, an interview with Frank Black about his Ghost Recon soundtrack contributions. Odd!

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

Videoludica has pointed out first impressions of one of the most wide-ranging game exhibitions ever mounted: "Julian Oliver of selectparks describes the opening of the superb GameWorld exhibition that has just opened at the Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón, Spain.

They continue: "Curated by Carl Goodman, GameWorld explores video games as an art form and presents contemporary art related to video games. A must read/see.... Also, the mighty Tale-of-Tales has a virtual exhibition that can be seen here. The Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial in Gijón is the new Guggenheim."

From the selectparks piece: "You'd be right to think Gijon, Spain might seem like an unlikely place to host the largest exhibition on the field of artistic games to date. This didn't stop thousands from attending, many who flew in for the show. The great turnout was of course also due to the fact that Gameworld was just one of four concurrent exhibitions inaugurating the opening of the Laboral, the gigantic new Asturian art center (North of Spain)." Sounds absolutely awesome - more of this, please.

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, there's a new issue of Way Of The Rodent out, where-in the charmingly ramshackle UK online mag wanders through a number of random PS3 launch-related topics. But also in there is 'This Gaming Life', by Mr. Nath - which I like.

In this NGJ-y picture/caption piece, the protagonist wanders through pieces of game hardware and his recollections of what happened when he owned them, from the BBC Micro ("Only 5 at the time, my memories of BBC gaming are more swirling impressions than hard and fast recollections - the suicidal thrill of attacking a Police Station in Elite, the lurid pinks and blues of Citadel and the hypnotic rhythm of Repton's head-bobbing") to the Sega Master System ("After it had mesmerised me in the arcade, in-house R-Type felt like a proud and rare beast held captive, and discovering areas we'd never had the combination of money and skill to reach on the Black Lion cab was like trespassing on hallowed ground.")

We end up with a PlayStation 2, circa 2004 ("£500 came through from University for a prize I'd won on the Masters, and I used it to buy my own PS2, along with copies of Pro Evo 3, Ico and Rez. I hammered PES, playing 6 seasons of Master League, loved the haunting Ico, and was non-plussed by Rez"), and a career that switched from academic to a job on the UK Official PlayStation Magazine back to "a three-year PhD scholarship back in Sheffield" that paid more than the magazine job (ouch, UK journo salaries!), and an affecting story. Keep it up, WoTR.

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thanks to Gus Mastrapa of Looky Touchy for pointing out this gem to me - on NeoGAF, it's the story of how mathrock band Trans Am appeared on the Afterburner: Black Falcon PSP soundtrack, and it's somewhat bizarre - but we'll have to reprint the piece in (more or less) full, since it's borderline genius.

The specific post is passed on from developer Planet Moon's Trevor Grimshaw, who explains in hilarious style: "I was at my friend Jens house to watch Deadwood and I started complaining about what a load of crappy bands we had as potential game music. she says. "why don't you ask my boyfriend, he's in a band". I've never met the guy before and assume she's dating some blowhard doorman or bartender in some lame local rock band. like every other San Fransisco mission hipster. but, to be honest, I didn't know what the whole story on this character is so couldn't say for sure..."

Continuing: "She calls him on the phone and says " my friend Trevor is here, yeah, that one, he needs some music for a game he's working on do you want to talk to him? ok. " she hands me the phone. "so Jen says that you are in the music business or in a band or something" i say. "yeah i guess you could say that" he replies. " well, so, were making this video game with some jets in it, and we want some decent rocking tunes that doesn't sound like nu-metal whiny crap. we need a relatively inexpensive band that's good, but not huge so we can afford it, i don't know, someone sort of hip, but that doesn't totally suck, i mean, someone instrumental, like trans am, i guess , have you ever heard of trans am?"

"yeah" he says. Jen is looking at me with this expression on her face like I'm a huge jerk. I continue. " yeah, someone like trans am, but not trans am because nobody knows who the hell they are, i mean, they're cool but they're totally obscure. I like them, but they basically don't exist as far as mainstream music goes." Jen is now glaring at me. " i mean, besides the metaligensia record store clerks at Aquarius records and some math rock sweater nerds, who's heard of them? nobody. " "what is wrong with you!" she yells and tries to grab the phone from me "give me back the phone" "oh, do you know someone in trans am?" i ask him. "um, yeah" he says. " I'm in Trans Am".""

Payoff: "I accused him of lying, or being some session guitarist or something, or of just joining them. Jen was convinced i was just screwing with everyones head and knew it was him all along. but, no, it turns out he really was in Trans Am and is a cool guy. I stuck by my guns however and argued with Jen that, seriously, aside from a few people, no one has ever heard of them. I even made a bet that absolutely no one in my office will know who they were. I walked into work on Monday. "hey guess who we can get to do our soundtrack!" i exclaimed. " Trans Am!" the Project Lead stared blankly at me. "Who's that?"" Awesome, blossom.

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So I was obviously aware of journalist Tom Chick from his QuarterToThree.com blog/industry messageboard, as well as his excellent monthly columns in the sadly defunct Computer Games Magazine, so it's good to see him turn up at The Escapist with a new weekly 'Shoot Club' column.

Even more bizarrely, I went and looked up Tom's Wikipedia profile and found out that Tom is also an actor, and "...his best known TV roles are as Oscar's lover Gil in the US version of The Office and the hard-hitting reporter Gordon in The West Wing." Whuh? Certainly the video game journalist/actor combo is not one I'm particularly used to, but this is extremely cool. (Yes, I'm aware you all knew this already, shhh.)

Anyhow, the first Escapist column is typically smart, sardonic, and a little more about human follies than games - which is great: "Gentlemen, welcome to Shoot Club," Trevor announces. He is overweight and losing his hair, which is too long. There are Doritos in his beard. The godmode ON T-shirt is fraying. It might even stink. But he doesn't care. We're just a bunch of dudes. "The first rule of Shoot Club ..." "... is you don't talk about Shoot Club?" the new guys offers. "Heh." Trevor fixes him with something like a glare. "Actually, you should totally talk about Shoot Club. If people didn't talk about Shoot Club, guys like you wouldn't be here.""

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

Of course I realize that Kaiju Big Battel is a bit more exciting in some ways, but the International Game Developers Association is just starting its 2007 IGDA board elections, so members are now being balloted on their favorite shiny game developers to join people like Epic's Mike Capps and 'game attorney' Tom Buscaglia on the IGDA board.

Some notable applicants this year include Chris Charla, who is one of Death Jr's daddies, actually, "is the director of business development at Foundation 9 Entertainment, working with teams across the company on game pitches and new IPs", and you might remember as a former EIC in the game magazine/website biz, too.

Also of a fairly high profile is Jay Moore, formerly the evangelist at GarageGames, and nowadays "...driving a new consultancy, The Strategery Group (TSG -- pronounced stru-tee-jur-ee), focused on brand and business development for talented game dev studios." We recently interviewed Moore on that subject, actually - and the other IGDA board applicants, including Dustin Clingman, Coray Seifert, and Bob Bates, are all also important community contributors, so good luck to 'em all!

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Ah yes - a little Thursday GameSetLinks action here, with a variety of cool, odd, and relatively insane parts of the gaming blogosphere concentenated together into a squelchy little whole, as follows:

- At Game Of The Blog, Joel Parker points out one of the sillier disclaimer screens in the history of video games: "Here's a warning screen that appears when you boot up the classic Habitrail Hamster Ball for the PS2. I don't remember seeing a similar screen preceding 50 Cent: Bulletproof... This game is purely fictional fun and in no way represents the proper treatment of real hamsters. Refer to our Hamster Care Guide on how to look after your hamster." How about those monkeys in balls, too?

- Electronic Arts Los Angeles' Borut Pfeifer has an excellent new developer blog, and one of the first posts deals with his thoughts on David Jaffe's canceled 'Heartland', in which he muses on how the allegedly politically charged game might have shifted perceptions: "The point is to change people’s minds. Have them pick up a shooter by the director of God of War (oooh, pretty explosions!). And be forced into situations where you have to think about political issues today. And maybe change your opinion. Or better yet, act on it. Because even if most people agree with that opinion, what are they willing to stand up and do about it? Imagine a world where a game actually inspired someone to that level of action."

- Just because it gets a little buried in other 1UP stories, I'm pointing at this week's Retro Round-Up: "Let's see: man-shaped foxes, frogs, bunnies, falcons, apes, rats and turtles. And a kid who finds himself cursed to transform into a lizard-man. Yep, Nintendo's after the DeviantArt crowd this week, peering deep into our souls and beckoning us all to get in touch with our inner fursona. All that's missing is a tender moment in which Fox McCloud gazes longingly into Sonic the Hedgehog's eyes -- but I guess that's what fanfic is for. Get writin', kids." Whatever the hell that means. Also, great Retronauts Bonus Stage devoted to Mega Man. You go, guys.

- Tip to the big game blogs - I like it when there's a bit of continuity to your news writers (ie - not 'Post by writer 1', "Post by writer 2', 'Post by writer 6'), because a little personality goes a long way, and different post 'flavors' actually go down yummy. I'm particularly enjoying the Kohler/Arendt double-act over at Game|Life right now, and Susan spotted an extended Viva Pinata commercial which particularly tickled my palate. Wait, why am I commenting on game sites in a way that makes it sound like I'm wine-tasting? Destructoid has an earthy hint of blackberry! Nurse!

- The ever-crazed PlayStation Museum has now got prototype screenshots of Blues Brothers 2000 for the PS1 - though it looks like not much actual gameplay ever got going on PlayStation: "Unfortunately, by the time the license was obtained and development started, the movie was out of the theaters. It would have been 2 years after the movie release by the time the game could be completed. The development team was shifted to focus on other PlayStation titles and Blues Brothers 2000 was dropped. Ultimately Titus decided to proceed with Blues Brothers 2000 on the Nintendo 64 and borrowed many of the ideas from the PSone design."

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Normally we at GSW talk about 'all you can eat' PC service GameTap, but this time I wrote a story on Gamasutra about it, since: "Turner's GameTap subscription PC 'all you can eat' gaming service has now added Sega Saturn games to its service, with the debut of platform game Bug! as a special Easter-timed Easter Egg for its service."

Tip of the hat to the ever-excellent Angled Whiteboards for partly pointing this out, though I had to work out what the 'sekrit search word' was myself: "The game is currently filed as 'Insect?' as a 'secret' feature for gamers to discover within the service, which has 851 games currently available as part of its monthly subscription."

Excerpting the rest of the post, since it's all kinds of relevant: "The range of legacy titles include games for the arcade, Atari 2600, Commodore 64, Sega Dreamcast, Game Gear, Genesis, 32-X, SG-1000 and Master System, as well as the Intellivision, DOS Windows, and Neo Geo. However, the service is probably best known for partnering with developers for GameTap Originals, which include Telltale's Sam & Max episodic gaming series, Cyan Worlds' Myst Online: Uru Live, and the upcoming Galactic Command series from 3000AD's Derek Smart.

As for Bug!'s appearance on the service, the game's description explains that the debut is "...a hidden one-week sneak peek of planetary proportions", and continues: "Stay tuned for the launch of more games for the Sega Saturn later this year." Specific titles to debut from the Saturn on GameTap have not yet been revealed, but all first-party Sega games could be likely candidates for an appearance on the service. Sega-published Dreamcast games currently available for play on GameTap include Chu Chu Rocket, Crazy Taxi and Toy Commander." Neat.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Uhoh, word from that crazy guy James Kochalka again: "Everyday, I draw a diary comic strip and post it at AmericanElf.com. Just a little strip about something that I did that day. Today's strip is about using the Nintendo Wii to create little monster creatures."

Hey, so it is! Go to AmericanElf.com if you want more in the way of wacky sketchiness. And go check the Kochalka wayback machine by searching GameSetWatch for the various other game-related stuff he's been up to recently, including my favorite, a picture of Zelda eating Cool Ranch Doritos.

BTW, I'd just like to make a random plea to the artistic community out there - why isn't there one good, single website that sells paintings loosely or wholly based on video games? I know I Am 8-Bit is totally awesome, but you can only buy most of that stuff in a gallery once a year. I know I'd pay money for paintings of Zelda eating Cool Ranch Doritos. And I'm sure all of you agree. There, my Lazyweb request for the day.

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

At the risk of linking sister site Gamasutra daily for the rest of existence, our friend Mr. Sheffield has an excellent in-depth interview with Jeff Minter posted today, quizzing the Llamasoft star on "the upcoming Space Giraffe for Xbox 360, his work ethic, his involvement with the ill-fated Nuon 'console', and his pet sheep."

One of the funniest things (and I think something I was partly responsible for helping disseminate, alongside Gary Whitta @ QT3), is the naming of Space Giraffe, his upcoming XBLA title: "Well, it just kind of stuck. It all came down to this one forum post, where there was just this one picture. I was working on this little creature, and at that stage it was just called "The Little Creature." I didn't have a name for it. Then I saw this one picture of a giraffe at a watering hole, and it looked just like my little creature standing at the side of the web."

Minter continues, loopily: "So I started this one thread in my forum called "The Space Giraffe," and posted that picture there. Within hours, all the gaming sites were reporting "Jeff Minter's new game: Space Giraffe!" At that point, why go back? Space Giraffe is memorable, and people remember it. It may be a silly name, but people remember it."

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Escapist's weekly magazine of crazy clever chaos death is discussing 'religion and philosophy in games', and while that may sound like it's going to make your head hurt, it turns out that there a few interesting contributions.

Probably one of the funnest is 'Why Christian Games Are Doomed To Fail' by Lara Crigger, which shouts to the top: "So many contemporary Christian games are unintentional self-parodies. By embracing Evangelical culture so indulgently and completely, these games are nothing but interactive stereotypes."

The gnashing continues! "Take the above-mentioned Eternal Forces. Rock stars as the messengers of the Antichrist? A faux-Pope, decked out in snazzy Catholic cardinal robes, acting as the right-hand man of evil? You can't be serious. Anyone who willingly plays this cringe-inducing balderdash should rend her PC in shame. Worse, Eternal Forces is far from alone in its self-indulgence and supercilious attitude toward its "built-in" audience. Many Christian titles address their consumers as both simpletons and suckers: Because our game includes crucifixes, you'll overlook its contrived, outrageous plotlines." Good, if inflammatory piece.

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

So, I know action figures aren't that relevant to video gaming - but when it's a totally cool mini-sculpture of Simon Pegg and Nick Frost from Shaun Of The Dead, and Frost has his 'I Got Wood' T-shirt on and PlayStation controller in his hand - come on!

Looks like NECA Online have just come out with this 2-pack figure set [detailed image clickable!] from the self-styled 'rom zom com', and as those who are a fan of Pegg and Frost's previous project Spaced may recall, there are quite a few video game references dotted around their output - though mainly zombie video games like Resident Evil, of course.

Wait, fun blurb awaits: "Where would you go for shelter in the middle of a zombie plague? The nearest police station? A shopping mall? Well, if you're anything like Shaun and Ed, the unlikely heroes of Shaun of the Dead, you'd brave hordes of zombies, a miserable stepdad, and a pissed off ex-girlfriend to make it to your favorite pub, The Winchester. This March, the Shaun of the Dead: Winchester Two-Pack from NECA hits stores. Featuring a brand-new sculpt of Shaun and the first-ever figure of Ed, this set is a must for every would-be zombie-slayer out there." YAY!

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, we previously covered that video game documentary King Of Kong was picked up at Slamdance by movie studios Picturehouse and New Line - and now we get a press release that: the film "...makes its NY Premiere in the Tribeca/ESPN Sports Film Festival Program of the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival" later in April, and opens nationwide on August 17th.

Though I'm sure it won't get into all the big multiplexes, this'll definitely be the widest distributed video game documentary ever, since the HBO & New Line-co-founded Picturehouse, who now have a webpage for it, are the guys who released Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth in the States, among other movies. Here's how they pitch the movie in the press release: "It’s man against beast! Man against machine! And finally man against man; in this epic journey that pits two modern day gladiators against one another - in order to prove to themselves and to the hoards of world-wide believers that they are the ‘King of Kong!’"

"Picturehouse presents KING OF KONG, a new documentary directed by Seth Gordon, produced by Ed Cunningham, and featuring two of the most focused ‘athletes’ ever to be captured on film – the slick mega-star legend of the video game world, hot-sauce impresario Billy Mitchell; and the mild-mannered family-guy challenger to the crown, middle-school science teacher Steve Wiebe. These two, as well as all the other die-hard gamers vying to conquer the likes of Q*bert, Joust, Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, make KING OF KONG colorful, compelling, competitive entertainment."

The capper? "This is no wimpy spelling bee or wheelchair derby. There are no cutesy penguins here…Kong would crush them. This is rivalry, competition, enthusiasm and obsession brought to its most exemplary level!!" Our very own GSW Cinema Pixeldiso columnist Matt Hawkins will be attending the press screening of the movie at Tribeca, so we should have an early review of the doc for you pretty soon.

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The second post from the Tale Of Tales blog I've linked recently, this one, from the creators of art-game-happening The Endless Forest, talks about a review of fl0w, ' Games journalists and The New Games', and it's... interesting.

The slightly controversial positioning, based around a Eurogamer review of the PS3 version: "It is quite clear that Flow is not a game like most. That its focus is not on gameplay as such but on a different kind of interactive experience, an experience that inspired its title. I’m happy that games websites report on products like this because I think they are extremely important for the future of the industry. But after reading the review, I’m starting to doubt whether games journalists should be the ones doing this job."

He continues: "It’s a bit like having sports commentators criticizing a fine art exhibition. Not that I want to make a big issue about Flow being art or something. But it does seem to be designed with different purposes and require a different attitude than that of a games journalist (or a gamer for that matter). Not necessarily so these kinds of games could get better scores. But because their scores might be better motivated. Now it seems too much like judging an opera performance based on the cut of the dress of the soprano. It might be an ugly dress, but that’s hardly the point." Thoughts?

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Here's what you need to know - firstly, sister site Gamasutra posted 'Hudson's Revenge - Looking Forward With The House That Bonk Built' on Monday, likely the most detailed interview on Hudson Entertainment in quite some time, thanks to editor Brandon Sheffield's notorious knowledge of Bomberman's buddies.

One particular highlight in the interview, thanks to Hudson's John Greiner: "[The hardware division] in Japan was located in a building that we created out in Hokkaido's more rural area. It was a very cool building that they did and had a train that ran though it - a train that you could actually sit on and ride. And there was a station in the building... And I saw, many times, very big executives from NEC, to Nintendo, to all the bigwigs out on this tiny little train riding, going round in circles, in and out of the building."

Anyhow, the not emo (despite what they say) Brandon just posted on Insert Credit with a triumphant follow-up: "Assembler uploaded a little video that shows the Hudson miniature train in action. If you didn't read the interview I linked [previously], that thing actually uses coal! The video stars the Pink Bomber (though that's Kabuki from Tengai Makyou that you see in the image), who has her own oldschool-catchy music video here." This is just multiple layers of awesome, really.

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over at the Arthouse Games site, there's a neat interview with Rod Humble about his experimental game The Marriage - and the first thing I spotted was Humble's interesting background, with games such as The Humans, which is almost Tail Of The Sun-esque, and predates it.

Nowadays, he's Head of The Sims Studio at EA, and is intrigued by the reactions to his distinctly arty art-game: "The amount of people who immediately understood and liked the game was larger than I had imagined, their main criticism was that they felt my explanations were unduly detailed. I stand by the decision to include the explanation however as I think it helped some folks understand my intent and I didn't think it was fair just to leave them without explanation."

He also talks about his upcoming personal experimental games, both of which sound interesting, to say the least: "The first is a game about power politics and identity, I am struggling with it. The second I started last week as I was reading some of the responses to The Marriage and the discussion of what is and isn't art. It's a game which takes as its starting point the fact that the oldest games we know are far older than the oldest music we know. So I am taking an ancient piece of music and translating its message into game rules, or at least trying to."

[Oh yeah, and Kloonigames put forward 'The Divorce', a very April 1st-themed game based on The Marriage: "The bats are of course my parents. My parents are very long and thin, so this is represented by the shape of the boxes. The ball is an unwanted child of their marriage. I was quite young when my parent’s divorced so, that is represented by the size of the ball."]

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['MMOG Nation' is a weekly column by Michael Zenke about current events in the world of Massively Multiplayer Games. This week's column examines the growing influence of youth-oriented virtual worlds.]

Imagine the fun of a Massively Multiplayer world inhabited by adorable penguins, cute fuzzy animals, or some of those incomprehensibly popular Disney television characters. A disturbing, post-apocalyptic vision of future gaming? To hear veteran Massive designer Raph Koster talk at GDC earlier this month, that's not the future: it's the present. At the Massive Games: Past, Present, and Future panel held on Wednesday of GDC week, Koster spent much of his available talking time discussing the successes of quirky online games aimed at kids, like Club Penguin and WebKinz. You think World of Warcraft is America's most popular online world, right? Club Penguin averages 1.6 million unique users a month. WoW may have 3 million subscribers in the states, but how many log in each month? The online gaming world is changing, and the new thing is new people: kids.

Today I'm going to do a quick rundown on the future of the youth-oriented Massive game. While subscription-based fantasy titles certainly have all the headlines, non-traditional games are quietly taking over the world. The increasing popularity of these titles raises a number of contradictory issues, and I certainly don't have any easy answers. Today we'll discuss a little bit about the business aspect of the market, some of the social issues these games raise, and what these titles mean for future entries into the Massive genre. Make sure to grab your fuzzy pet on the way out the door.

Massive Markets - Smaller Users

If you think about it, it's actually a no-brainer. Adults play online games as a stress reliever; we come home from a long day at work and kill orcs to get our minds off of the idiosyncrasies of our workplace. Kids, though, play online games to feel empowered. Tweens, especially, feel the need for some control over their (virtual) lives. For kids old enough not to be 'babies', but not old enough to do 'teen stuff', the likes of Club Penguin must seem like an oasis in a desert of annoying siblings, homework, and after-school activities. These markets, then, are a built-in gold mine for the companies running these services. Aging kids will tire of your world after a few years, but new customers are always 'on the way up'. With only a narrow window in which to grab them, you have to have aggressive marketing, of course, and they do: the users themselves. The viral nature of these games is self-evident. If your best friend is playing this game, talking about it at school, why wouldn't you give it a look? Most titles have a freebie trial period, making it even easier for the game to get 'sticky'.

If you think Mr. Koster is overselling the importance of this trend, you should know that CNN Money would tend to agree with him. In an article posted to their site in March on the popularity of kiddie MMOGs, they mention the recent launch of a Nickelodeon-branded online space and the upcoming release of a similar Disney product. Both of these worlds will leverage the extremely popular brands that these companies have on offer, and both are (somewhat callously, and unlike Penguin) ad-driven. While this has the danger of driving away easily-annoying youths and some media-cautious parents, the dangers may be worth the reward.

Though the tie-in that WebKinz has with plush toys already makes it a 'commercial' product, the marketing of brands like 'SpongeBob' and 'Hannah Montana' is sure to tap even more of the monetary value of this tween market. According to the CNN article, there are "29 million U.S. kids ages 8 to 14, with a combined annual purchasing power of $40 billion. Nearly 90 percent of these children are now online." Aside from the over-commercialization of the young in general, the integration of virtual worlds with toys and youth-oriented products may be cause for concern among some. As consumer-driven as youth culture already is, how much worse can it be made if persistent virtual spaces become standard fare for children's toys? In response to a recently announced doll tie-in world, legendary MUD developer Richard Bartle asked 'what monster have I unleashed?' Though he certainly meant it in jest, there may well be cause for concern.

Small People, Serious Issues

At the moment, though, the heavy hitters seem to have their hearts in the right place. Reading over the documentation on sites like Webkinz World or Virtual Magic Kingdom, the language seems to be focused on 'keeping kids safe' and 'ensuring a fun experience'. Several of these titles only allow constructed statements using canned words or phrases. Webkinz doesn't even allow kids to see this canned chat if your chat buddy isn't on your friends list. While any company can talk a good talk, these companies honestly do seem to be keeping online safety at the forefront. Club Penguin has a parental guide front and center on their main page. They talk up their safety standards, but don't dodge the issue either: "While the Internet has opened up an exciting new world of educational, entertainment and social opportunities, online activity does not come without risk. Our goal is to minimize that risk as much as possible and protect Club Penguin users by continually upgrading our systems and policies."

The flip side to this, of course, is the question of the rights these children have. Future titles like Nicktropolis or Cartoon Network World may not have such a focus on online safety. The goal of Nicktropolis, certainly, is likely to revolve more around commercial success via purchases, branding, and advertising than around social network development. On a higher level, in her post about Nicktropolis, Sara Grimes is down on the safety measures used by these kid-oriented titles: "You will note that -- similar to the Disney.com revamp and CBBC's planned venture -- Nickelodeon's MMOG has incorporated an array of so-called safety measures (in collaboration with the Center for Missing and Exploited Children). This aspect of the sites should not go unexamined...with DOPA-esque legislation back on the block via the recently proposed 'Protecting Children in the 21st Century Act' it will be interesting to see how children's rights and/or agency are limited in the hopes of quelling parental anxieties about online predators and bullying."

To layer another confusing element onto this discussion, there's the question of whether a title is even 'aimed' at kids in the first place. Certainly titles like WebKinz are aimed at youth culture, but what about a game like Puzzle Pirates or Habbo Hotel? Both have elements that would appeal to younger gamers; stylized graphics and some humorous elements. Certainly Daniel James has spoken of the occasional challenges of younger players, and with a game like . Habbo, at least, is intended for audiences 13 years and older, but how often do 9-12 year olds find themselves on the service? Moderation in Habbo is an ever-present possibility, allowing parents some peace of mind ... but again raising issues of privacy and personal growth for the young people using these services.

Welcome to the (Fuzzy) World of Tomorrow!

Putting aside for a moment business and social issues, what does the general popularity of kiddie-oriented Massive games mean for the genre? Are there any lessons that the AAA titles can learn from these outfits? What can we expect to come of the trend towards 'a virtual world with every product'?

First and foremost, it seems fairly easy to imagine that these games are priming younger people to appreciate Massive games in general. Kids now between 10 and 12 will be looking to games like WoW or EverQuest 2 in just a few years time. Well-developed typing skills and an inherent understanding of the virtual world metaphor, as well as experience with other types of games, will make these kids savvy consumers of AAA subscription titles. Certainly the popularity of the free-to-play title RuneScape is indicative of this interest. As Mr. Koster put it at a GDC panel: WoW is the game these kids play when they have the allowance money to do so. RuneScape is what they play otherwise.

Money is going to be a major sticking point with these folks, and that's an issue that I feel will have to be addressed by subscription titles sooner rather than later. Within a few years, the newest crop of AAA players are going to find the idea of paying $15 a month for these services alien. They'll consider it an affront, their access to a virtual world a default assumption. On the flipside, they'll be completely unsurprised by the inclusion of advertising in a virtual space. They'll be comfortable with the idea of being charged on a per-item basis, and won't squawk if they have to pay a fee to get to 'extra' content. Once they are in the front door, they'll expect to be charged; they will just expect the door to be left open for them.

This open door policy is likely extended by these players' blurry understanding of what a virtual world is 'for'. While primarily Massive spaces have been platforms for games, the likes of Club Penguin definitely shave off the 'G' from MMOG. Intended as a social setting first and a location to play games second, the connection many new spaces have with specific products is easy to understand. If all you want out of your virtual world creation is a place for users to talk about your product, buy virtual items related to your product, and play games themed around your product ... compare that to the content requirements of a AAA title and things start to sound fairly straightforward.

These games and these game players are, from a realistic point of view, the future of the Massive genre. While many of us spend time talking about World of Warcraft or EverQuest 2, titles aimed at the young and vigorously technologically-savvy will be taking over the world in the background. It's going to be fascinating to watch the crash and burns, the huge successes, the increasing mainstream understanding of what virtual worlds are ... all of which will result from spaces aimed at fuzzy pets and Disney characters.

[Michael Zenke is also known as 'Zonk', the current editor of Slashdot Games. He has had the pleasure of writing occasional pieces for sites like Gamasutra and The Escapist. You can read more of Michael's ramblings on Massive games at the MMOG Nation blog. ]

Posted by mzenke at 3:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Worth pointing out that sister site Gamasutra has made the GDC 2007 Programmer's Challenge, the uber-geeky tech quiz that was one of the highlights of this year's Game Developers Conference, available in streaming video form. It's supremely geeky stuff - and entertaining in a very offbeat way, even for non-coders.

Over to the Gama write-up: "As we explained in our GDC write-up of this panel: "Six of the industry’s most well respected programmers were brought together to form teams and answer some of the silliest video game and programming questions conceived.

Written by Jeff Roberts and Casey Muratori, who also hosted the event, questions on everything from Dijkstra’s algorithm to strangely named Gundam games garnered huge laughs from competitors Josh Adams [Epic], Brian Jacobson [Valve], Chris Hecker [Maxis/EA], Eric Malafeew [Harmonix], Jonathan Blow [Number-None], and Chris Butcher [Microsoft], as well as the audience.

As funny as the questions were, many of them communicated some of the serious hardware and software issues that exist among game industry programmers. One category of questions - “Compensation: Questions about the largeness of things (or lack thereof)” - dealt primarily with console architecture and how they never seemed to have enough memory available."

[Many thanks to Challenge MC Casey Muratori for posting the original version of this video online, to Eric Malafeew of Harmonix for encoding the video, and to Mitch Soule of RAD Game Tools for manning the camera.]"

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at Gnome's Lair, the gnome himself has pointed out the neat, v.retro RGCD, a CD-based downloadable retro disc-magazine which "features tons of exquisite content covering everything from retro remakes, to game reviews, to emulators, to interviews, to excellent freeware games."

Gnome rambles endearingly: "I've always been quite of fond of diskmags, you know, and I've followed them from the dark but happy BBS ages all the way to modern offerings like the demoscene oriented Hugi and PAiN." And he's right - it's good to see a packaged standalone diskmag, incredibly anachronistic though it is. Oh, here's the download link, btw.

As the RGCD site notes: "Highlights of Issue #01 include in-depth developer interviews with the programmers behind the excellent Typhoon 2001 and Thrust Extreme (Thorsten Kuphaldt and Wiebo de Wit respectively), previews of Crownland and Sub Hunter (two awesome forthcoming 8-bit projects) and even an exclusive PC remake of an Atari ST classic. Every game featured in the magazine is also included archived on disc (along with any necessary emulation software), making RGCD your one-stop retro-gaming resource." All the games are legal, too - or as legal as clones (in some cases) get, I guess, but it's not commercial software, that's the point.

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here's one of the oddest stories of the week - fitbabits of Evil Avatar has pointed out that "Mr. Biffo, one of Edge magazine's regular contributors, has decided to go public about his newest column being pulled from the magazine", and it's been reprinted in full on his personal blog. And it's completely wacky.

Where to start? Well, how about here, from the start of the Biffo column? "Back in February, I attended the 2007 Marillion Weekend (shut-UP), in Holland. It was basically three days of gigs, and getting really, really drunk... Mid-auction, the band’s keyboard player put an impromptu shout out to one “Phil Harrison”. Turns out that this was the Phil Harrison you and I know as the president of Sony Computer Entertainment’s Worldwide Studios. I’d heard rumours that he’s a friend of the band, and something of a fan of their music, but I hadn’t realised he was at the convention."

According to the aforementioned Paul 'Mr. Biffo' Rose: "Rather than bid, Harrison offered to auction a brand new PS3, paid for from his “own pocket”. The band’s keyboard player duly started the bidding at around 100 euros, getting a couple of incremental increases from interested – but slightly bemused – fans." And from then on, as you might have guessed, this wanders into an alleged, slightly bizarre Sony hype fiasco - though it certainly was for charity, which might have given the Edge editors second thoughts about running it. But hey - you decide!

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]

For 34 weeks now we've talked about all kinds of roguelikes, including many of the major ones and a few niche cases. These are games that can attract incredibly loyal fans, not loyal, perhaps, in the dress-up-at-DragonCon style, but fans who can nudge the system of an intrinsically chaotic game like Nethack to the degree that they can maintain incredible winning streaks.

Hmm, I said nudge there. That seems oddly appropriate; the game genre that roguelikes most resembles, in a sense, is pinball. Traditional RPGs are games in which the world is laid out beforehand, every encounter planned out. Other than the very earliest of these games, there is generally a way out of any situation you can get in. This is, in fact, more or less game design law these days throughout the industry: if the player is not dead or inescapably falling towards it (like, seconds away), then there must be a way out. Although one or two may strive mightily, there is nothing to prove that a roguelike is winnable every time. Notice that all the major streaks in the list linked to above have ended months ago.

The need, in traditional computer games, to avoid inescapable situations produces certain subtle limits to their play. Most Lucasarts adventures are actually impossible to lose. Because of this, the player can mostly disregard that pesky danger sense. He won't die, he won't get a puzzle into an unsolvable state, and he won't be able to lose an item he needs to win. If an item is needed to win, but can be lost, then if there is an infinite source of them somewhere in the game (like, say, the clown in the first year of Grim Fandango telling you he'll provide as many worm balloons as you want) it's a pretty sure bet it's important somehow.

The fourth case of the original Phoenix Wright has a place where Detective Gumshoe offers you a choice of three different tools to use in searching for clues. Only one provides the necessary clue. Because of this, it's always possible to go back and try a different item if you picked incorrectly....

Can always go back? Wait a second!

That doesn't sound like it's a real choice at all! And in fact, Phoenix Wright, traditional adventure games, and many other games too like console RPGs, suffer from an absence of player choice. He may be able to roam around, but that rarely matters to the game. He may need to solve puzzles to proceed, but it's more of a choice between solving it and moving on, and not solving and being stuck. He may (in Phoenix Wright) lose a case because he's been penalized too many times, but running out of points is the only resource in the game, and the play doesn't change in any other way from losing them.

It seems to me, and feel free to debate me on this, that when you reducing the fractions all the way down thes games end up being nothing more than sophisticated versions of a "next page" prompt. If games ultimately are about the choices a player makes and their consequences, then these cannot properly be called games.

Now, it should be said that the common definition of "game" is a little different from this, and that even under a strict definition this is not always true. There are some computer games that tell a story with branching outcomes, and the player's decisions, ultimately, determine which branch is followed. There are even games that make the "decision" a game mechanic: Ogre Battle is notorious for its "Chaos Frame" game system, where a score is kept of a number of variables, with more points usually assigned to more difficult practices (like not over-leveling your characters), and the characters who join and the ending are determined by the score.

And there are interesting things happening with Chris Crawford's Storytron, which is an algorithmic storytelling engine. In fact, if you take a roguelike as being a tool for the player to create his own adventure story, then Storytron starts to look a little (but just a little) familiar.

This is why roguelike games are especially important now. As games move further into being "interactive stories," with increasing deemphasis on "interactive," games are becoming less and less game-like. And as games increasingly take movies as their model instead of board games, puzzles, pinball, and so forth, this problem will only get worse.

For putting up with this admitted rant, here is a special bonus section: a list of games that are not roguelikes. Just pretend it's still April 1st ,folks.

DOOM
Although the seminal first-person shooter may have nothing to do with roguelike games, a bit of thinking reveals surprising simularity. You fight monsters and explore from the same "world," after all, and there is a considerable amount of chaos there. But in the end the set mazes, encounters, powerups and "puzzles" mean it's really not a lot like Rogue at all. (There is one notable person trying to close the gap between the two, mind.)

CIVILIZATION
It's got random maps, risk/reward encounters spread around the world, deep play and turn-based movement. You can even get an open-source variant, and you can play Middle Earth nations in that, so you can be an elf too! Surely, this must be a roguelike. But no, no: all roguelikes have dragons in them. Where are the dragons, Sid Meier? Also, Civ is a world-conquering strategy game, with no amulets Yendor in sight.

ROBOTRON:2084
Has real-time play and no inventory system at all. But other than that, suspeciously similar. Arnold, Wichman and Toy should get around to asking Eugene Jarvis where he got the idea from.

STREET FIGHTER II
Obviously not a roguelike, although SLASH'EM's support for SF2-like special moves (a special ability of the Monk class in that game) may fool some.

DIABLO
Oh, get serious.

"Objection!" image from Jeux Video. DOOM screenshot from ID Software. Civilization screenshot from Firaxis. Robotron and Street Fighter II screenshots from KLOV. Diablo 2 shot from markeddragon.com.

Links of the two-week-period:

Roguelike The Magazine, back in action and better than ever: http://magazine.roguelike.us/

Glenn Wichman, one of the three guys who created Rogue, participates in the 7 Day Roguelike Project, making one out of Javascript, saving games as browser cookies, and yes I'm about to explode just contemplating such a thing: http://www.babelsphere.com/7dayquest/game/

Posted by John Harris at 7:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (17)

Something that we just posted on sister site Gamasutra this morning, and I wanted to point to here - some definitive answers on game industry salaries, and the foundation of Game Developer Research to do in-depth analysis on the biz. S'not incredibly GSW-y, but myself and (especially!) Alistair Wallis have just spent a lot of time preparing the new report, so wanted to pass it on:

The editors of Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine have revealed the results of its 2006 Salary Survey, calculating an average American game industry salary of $73,316, slightly down on 2005's figure of $75,039.

The core data from the 2006 survey is now available in the April 2007 issue of Game Developer magazine, being delivered to subscribers in the near future, and including information on all of the major job functions, with all the free-to-subscriber information that has been available in previous years.

According to the new survey, conducted in association with Audience Insights, the average salary in 2006 over all American game programmers was $80,886 - basically flat on the year before, thanks to an influx of entry level coders to the game business, but with significant increases for veteran programmers.

The 2006 average for artists was $65,107, again basically flat on 2005, though average salaries of experienced lead artists and animators rose the most. The game designers' average was $61,538, with salaries scaling within a $5,000 range over the last 3 years over all experience levels.