Here's a thought-provoking discussion - over on the IGDA forums, Raphael Van Lierop (formerly at Relic, now working for 3D Realms) has been discussing Xbox Live Achievements, and he offers a very contrary view to a lot of enthusiasts of the system - myself included.

Lierop concedes: "I have many friends who LOVE achievements. They love the bragging rights, they love being able to compare achievements they obtained to other people, they love the idea of continuously revisiting a game in order to collect every last little achievement no matter how mundane or tiny or ridiculous or how far out of the realm or 'normal' gameplay they are required to go to obtain it."

But he suggests: "Personally, I dislike them...a lot. I find they are changing the way we play games, and the focus of the games we play, and make. I feel that games should be crafted to have enough intrinsic reward, that a secondary external reward system should not be required... was it really necessary for us to go back to the old 'High Score' system from the days of arcade games? I would have hoped that the gameplay and immersiveness of the 'next gen' gaming experience would have been enough reward, and that we wouldn't have had to fall back on cheap gimmicks."

This is a pretty interesting point of view, and I don't totally disagree with it - I myself have been known to do some pretty stupid things in Xbox 360 games just in order to get 10 Achievement Points - often things that aren't really the point of the game. But if it's enjoyable, and you can still play the game as originally intended and get points for that - who's really hurt? [Via Dearest Cope.rnic.us.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)

Via How They Got Game, the Stanford University blog about game preservation and studies, they point out a relatively new Game Face interview with Henry Lowood, the curator for the history of science and technology collections at Stanford - and it's got some useful, scholarly thinking about game history in it.

I've known Henry for a while, having worked with him to set up the Internet Archive machinima collection, among other things. Most recently, he originated the Digital Game Canon concept with folks like Steve Meretzky and Warren Spector - and look out for some Gamasutra-related news on that front pretty soon which should help bring further prominence to the concept.

In any case, I think Lowood is on the money when explaining: "Well, my personal view is that the published games themselves you might think of more as the library of game culture, the books if you will, not so much as the archives. The archives to me will be other kinds of materials. And by that I mean the evidence of the processes through which these games were created and also what players do - that is, the culture around the games." In other words, you need both first-person accounts of the game's creation and evidence of people playing them and interacting with them.

He continues: "Think of a copy of EverQuest that we might have on the shelf a hundred years from now... as a player, there would be very little you would know about what happened inside that game space from just being able to run that single copy of the game [without a server]. At most you could admire the art. You could get a little bit of information about how they created characters and things like that, but there would be no concept about the social dynamics or the political negotiations, the very sort of things that happened in the social world around that game."

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The quite frankly bonkers UK game 'web-a-zine' Way Of The Rodent has just released Issue 84, which seems to be themed around crap British summers and have a review of The Red Star in it (both positive things!), but there is a highlight, oh yes.

This would be an extract from Mr. Biffo's new book 'Confessions Of A Chatroom Freak', in which the TV scriptwriter, former Digitiser game writer and Edge columnist says stupid things to stupid people using the Internet. Yes, we've all seen this done before, but it's still funny - and in this case, video game relevant, though there are some mentally disturbing pictures of Biffo at various points further down the transcript, for the easily scared:

"LoopyLisa21f: What's your favourite game?
YELLODEVIL46: splinter cell
LoopyLisa21f: Splinter Cell? Is that the game where you have to crawl in and out of pipes, and cough mouthfuls of feathers at passers-by?
YELLODEVIL46: yeh
YELLODEVIL46: are u sexy
LoopyLisa21f: I don't think I can judge whether I'm sexy or not. That’s for my father to decide.
YELLODEVIL46: can i see a pic please
LoopyLisa21f: You can when I find one. What would you like a pic of?
LoopyLisa21f: I've got a pic of a puffin if you’d like that.
LoopyLisa21f: His name is Peans.
LoopyLisa21f: Puffin Peter Peans. I call him “Triple-P” for short. I keep him in my purse for luck."

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Worth pointing out, over at sister site Gamasutra - the just-posted feature called 'Uncanny AI: Artificial Intelligence In The Uncanny Valley', which looks at the almost-realistic theory of strange CG humans from a behavior point of view, too.

How so? Well, author David Hayward makes some great, lyrical points on why AI can just be... scary: "There's a small minority of people who are consistently strange in particular ways. You've probably met a few of them. Human though they are, interaction with them doesn't follow the usual dance of eye contact, facial expressions, intonations, gestures, conversational beats, and so forth. For most, it can be disconcerting to interact with such people. Often, it's not their fault, but even so the most extreme of them can seem spooky, and are sometimes half jokingly referred to as monstrous or robotic."

Ah yes, those people! Hayward continues: "I don't mean to pick on them as a group; nearly all of us dip into such behavior sometimes, perhaps when we're upset, out of sorts, or drunk. Relative and variable as our social skills are, AI is nowhere near such a sophisticated level of interactive ability. It is, however, robotic. Monstrous and sometimes unintentionally comedic; the intersection of broken AI and spooky people is coming."

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

MTV News' Stephen Totilo is off preparing for his wedding now (I know so - his out of office reply told me so!), but before he went, he pinged GSW about video game doc King Of Kong, something that we've covered extensively in the past.

Specifically, he notes: ""I suspect the [two MTV News King Of Kong stories] will be of interest to you guys, because I've attempted to set the record straight about what the film includes and what it leaves out (like an entire gaming expo where Billy Mitchell and current "DK" champ Steve Wiebe actually did both play the game -- and remember how things went differently, of course)."

And? "The main draw is that in the second of the two pieces, I've got Billy Mitchell talking about the film and what's it like to suddenly be known as a villain. This is the first time he's spoken, even though the movie's been out in festivals since January. It hits wide release in August with a dramatization from New Line to follow." Dramatization? Nice. But how much will it cost to hire the squirrels to recreate Billy Mitchell's haircut?

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at sister cellphone gaming site GamesOnDeck, the folks at Canadian mobile developer Capybara Games have conducted a suitably irreverent postmortem of Pillowfight, the possibly ironic game which apparently started from a one-sentence quip: "Here's an amazing idea: Let's make a pillow fighting game starring total babes!"

So, uhm, they did - and the results were surprisingly non-cheesy: "Pillowfight was recently reviewed on both IGN and on Mobilegamefaqs, receiving the IGN Editors Choice Award and the Mobilegamefaqs Gold Award respectively, proving that titles with sexy subject matter don't have to be devoid of great gaming experiences."

But there's good game design behind all the feathers, too - witness this smart approach to the genre on cellphones: "Because of the extreme control limitations every mobile game faces, it was clear to us that trying to emulate arcade-style fighting would just lead us to an over-bloated and clunky experience. We really wanted to avoid that, so designer Matt Repetski and the team decided try to create something that was more akin to Mike Tyson's Punch Out than it was to Street Fighter. By focusing on a very simple move set, our game became much more about timing and reading the opponent's attack pattern, instead of cumbersome movement and complex button inputs." Aha!

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

[The Aberrant Gamer is a weekly, somewhat NSFW column by Leigh Alexander, dedicated to the kinks and quirks we gamers tend to keep under our hats-- those predilections and peccadilloes less commonly discussed in conventional media. Hentai gaming, fantasy fanfics, twisted psychology and notes from the dark side-- we'll expose, discuss and enjoy the delicious underbelly of our beloved gaming universe.]

Hentai games offer the opportunity to experience things that can’t be experienced in any other kind of game. You probably think I’m referring to the sex—and you’re right, but not in the way you might be thinking.

The protagonist’s gender in any kind of game varies depending on a number of factors— necessary relationship to plot devices, or relevance to a specific audience, for example. Sometimes we get a female hero just because a chick looks better kicking butt in scanty clothes. Largely, though, female gamers are used to identifying as a man in the majority of games; similarly, males playing as gorgeous girls are far more likely to objectify their protagonist than to identify intimately with her. Plenty of games allow you to choose the gender of your player character—offering generalized dialogue and little more than a different sprite, perhaps a few other tweaks here and there. It's not a perfect science.

In any of these cases, a degree of separation, a glass wall, is interposed between the player and the character for whose fate they are responsible, between the player and his total immersion in the experience. That’s not to say that you and your protagonist need to have gametes in common to create a satisfying suspension of disbelief; personally, the game characters to whom I’ve best related have happened to be males, since relationship relies on a variety of factors, most of them subjective, with gender being minor among these.

But can you think of any other game that actually allows you to swap genders during the game—and moreover, uses this transient gender identity as a plot device?

The X-Change H-game trilogy (US distribution by Peach Princess) allows you to do exactly that. All three games revolve around the misadventures of Takuya Aihara, a limp-wristed high school kid who’s constantly being bullied by his female friends, of which he’s got no shortage. Jocks make him anxious, and gym is far from his best subject. He struggles to relate to the girls in his life, many of whom have inspired private crushes. What’s a poor guy to do?

In the exposition of each game, Takuya has some kind of science lab accident that results in him being turned into a girl. The sexual ramifications of such a switch on a game meant to be played by men are fairly clear, and as long as you get sexy CG, it doesn’t really matter which half of a male-female couple is you, if it means you also get lesbian scenes.

Far more interesting is the idea of getting to experience relationships (of all types) from the perspective of both genders. The girls who exploit male Takuya’s weaknesses in the fashion that only high school girls can suddenly convene compassionately to orient “the new girl”; close friends of Takuya who are aware of his change can’t hide their curiosity about his new form.

As for Takuya, his initial priority is returning to normal; it's the story's central conflict, with the all-important incidental sexual encounters peppered along the way. As time passes, though, he seems to become more comfortable as a girl. He now has a humbling effect on the very types of males he’d been inclined to avoid, and even the girls who know his secret and still treat him nastily have become less intimidating. It’s an interesting experience on many levels to see not only Takuya's change, but how you as a player relate to the other characters differently depending on his gender, how your sexual ideas of them change—and, over-arching, how your relationship with your protagonist can evolve.

In addition, all the X-Change games operate on the traditional basic dialogue tree that results in multiple endings depending on your choices. You have the option of returning to manhood, perhaps in part to further cultivate a romantic relationship begun in your female incarnation. Or you can decide you enjoy being a girl, and stay that way forever.

Playing these games is weirdly liberating—especially given the backdrop of high-school era strained male-female relationships, of which pretty much everyone with a pulse has dubious memories. And it’s the sort of singular experience that only a Hentai game could provide—after all, sex (in both senses of the word) lies firmly entrenched at the core of the human psyche.

(NOTE: There are actually 4 games under the X-Change umbrella; the fourth, Yin-Yang! X-Change Alternative was never Anglicized [EDIT: It actually was; thanks, Alice]. Additionally, the third installment of the series underwent some considerable censorship for the English-language release; see these fan reactions on the Peach Princess BBS to see what was changed and how upset true H-game connoisseurs got about it.)

[Leigh Alexander is a blogger at her Sexy Videogameland site and reviewer for outlets including Paste Magazine. She can be reached at leigh_alexander1 AT yahoo DOT com.]

Posted by Leigh Alexander at 2:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

The interesting thing about MMO games is that they enable humans to interact, with all the normal disagreements, controversy, and possible scheming which go with that - wonderfully evidenced in Scott Jennings' post on the latest Eve Online shenanigans at Broken Toys.

As Jennings notes: "In an astoundingly detailed (with many screenshots of internal tools and emails), vehement and visceral news posting, CCP’s internal affairs posts a detailed journal of their investigation, which concluded: Goonfleet deliberately attacked Eve Online... It’s not every day an MMO declares war on a huge segment of their own community. Then again, Eve is pretty damn hardcore."

As he goes on to note: "PvP games are serious business. You have the hardest of the hardest core, looking for every advantage possible. And Eve is the hardest of the hardcore PvP game out there. If you’re working on a game with a PvP component, there’s a lot to learn from all this in how to run your own game - and how not to." Which certainly makes it unmissable from an external observer's point of view - there's an almost Al Swearengen level of Machiavellian interplay in this and previous dust-ups which make it fascinating to watch, whoever is right.

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Delighted to note that Jeremy Parish has returned with a double-sized Retro Round-Up over at 1UP, enumerating and dissecting the various Wii, Xbox 360, and various other retro console offerings made over the past fortnight or so.

Many bonus points for one of the most succinct, lyrical descriptions of Actraiser I've seen in a while, recommending it for Wii VC along the way: "Genuinely inventive video games are hard to come by -- and apparently they're a hard sell, too, seeing as Enix's ActRaiser never really got a true sequel. It was such a simple idea, too: take the nascent "god sim" genre, a la SimCity, make it fast-paced and action-packed (shooting down monsters who try to capture your villagers), and then bookend each chapter of the game with a Rastan-like platformer."

Parish also makes a good point (referencing Actraiser) on Square Enix's alleged Virtual Console recalcitrancy: "Hopefully this is an indication of the company's intentions for VC rather than that ridiculous official statement a few weeks back about how they don't want to confuse children about how to pay for games or whatever. Fine, hoard your Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games to be rehashed into redundancy, but set free these great niche titles that you're never going to touch again. Downloadable content is the future. And the present, really. Of the past. Er, something like that." Amen to that.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

You know, I'm never sure what to think of the folks at Kuma Reality Games, since they mix advergaming, sometimes sensational political games, and History Channel tie-ups in one rather odd episodic whole - and fortunately, Alistair Wallis has quizzed CEO Keith Halper over at sister site Gamasutra to give me some extra perspective.

There's certainly some borderline rubbish in there ("A year after release, the Schick DinoHunters ads have become part of the fiber of the Internet"), and here's a particularly interesting section: "By far the strongest reaction we’ve ever had was our “Assault on Iran.” It was our first “future-speculative” episode, created to explore how the US might deal with an Iranian nuclear weapons program. It was written in reaction to President Bush’s statement that “all options were on the table.” We as Americans wanted to know what those options were so we convened a panel of experts and produced a game based on one likely scenario."

Oh really? And then what happened? "When we initially released the episode, there was a lot of discussion as to whether or not we were right, and whether such speculation was inherently immoral. We expected that... In the end, there were hundreds of thousands of downloads in Iran. We were denounced by name in the newspaper controlled by the supreme Ayatollah as a possible precursor to real US policy."

Halper claims that this "...speaks to the great power of real-time video games as a storytelling medium. We put Iranian and American gamers face to face, playing and talking together in a virtual space in a way that still eludes our real-world politicians." But, you know - is it possible that, like the John Kerry swift boat level, it's just a bit of a troll/attention grabber, with no real social point made? Or is that an unfair characterization? I'm rather unsure - comments welcome.

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Via all kinds of people, including GBGames, comes a link to the fairly new (well, it started in February 2007) 'Blogging Ultima' weblog, which explains itself as follows:

"The purpose is to blog the experience of playing the now-defunct Ultima series by Origin Systems (plus a few other names here and there) from beginning to end. I will be including all the non-remake spin-offs that I am aware of, under the theory of 'If I'm gonna do it, might as well go all the way.' I am not blogging as if I am a character in the game, or giving reviews. I'm going to write about the process of playing, the annoying things, the fun things, and the assorted mental musings that arise from any long-term activity." He's up to Ultima VII already, and there's all kinds of interesting commentary along the way.

Related to this very idea, GBGames comments of extending the concept: "The existence of Blogging Ultima led me to think about similar blogs. What about a blog for the Wizardry series? The Prince of Persia games? Even Leisure Suit Larry or King’s Quest games would probably make for an interesting story for someone to play today." Yesh, please make all of the above.

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

So, XBLArcade.com has been checking out ESRB ratings again for Xbox 360 Live Arcade games - the existence of which tends to mean that games are forthcoming for North American release - and it's noted:

"Continuing in a trend that must be giving Microsoft PR ulcers, they have rated [four] more XBLA titles... [that] were already known about, but the fact that they are now rated means the titles should be released "soon"-ish."

Among those are SNK's Fatal Fury Special (interesting because at one point, Greg Canessa was claiming that it was going to be an Asia-only title, for some odd reason) and Atari's Tempest (the original vector version, presumably without too much Minter-esque psychedelia) - but the big deal is Mutant Storm Empire, a title I've been drooling about in public for a year now.

As I noted wayback: "The pictures clearly show scrolling levels (as opposed to the single-screen mayhem of Mutant Storm Reloaded), as well as simultaneous multiplayer (likely/hopefully across Xbox Live!), and there are all kinds of weird beasties such as octopi, fish, and gigantic spaceship turret madness crazies sprawled all over the place - yay!" I'm speculating that making Bliss Island slowed down the PomPom folks, but I really do hope that Empire dawns soon.

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Veteran game creator and Krome co-founder John Passfield mentioned his Passfield Games blog in a recent GSW comment, and now I note that it's revealed a neat thing: "In collaboration with 3DRealms we've released Halloween Harry/Alien Carnage as freeware today!"

As Passfield explains: "Halloween Harry, the tough as nails marine from Alien Carnage, is 22 years old this year. He was the star of a game I wrote on the Australian Microbee computer system and released commercially in 1985. I was still in high school at the time and was super excited to have sold my second computer game (the first was called "Chilly Willy", a clone of the classic arcade game, Pengo)."

He also follows up with a post called 'Halloween Harry/Alien Carnage - what might have been!', explaining: "Of course there was a direct sequel called Zombie Wars released in 1996, but before that we kicked around a number of other ideas for games to put Harry in. Often times we mocked up prototypes to test out ideas - from Sidewinder Sally (a Harry spin off) to Halloween Harry: Undead (a 3D multi-player game) to the potentially very cool Lunch Break Commandos", which was "...designed as a "casual" game you could play during your lunch break", way back when. Early casual game idea alert!

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

This one's all over the indie airwaves, but I'll pick where I happened to see it first, which is on Dessgeega's blog - as she explains: "Joakim Sandburg’s Chalk has the sensibility of a shooter and the spirit of a ds title: the game is mouse-controlled, and revolves around drawing lines with left clicks while navigating with right."

Over at The2Bears, they're also raving about the game, explaining further: "Gameplay revolves around moving your character (right mouse button moves you to the cursor or ‘WASD‘) while drawing lines of “chalk” on the screen. There are certain elements that are eliminated by drawing between their points (they might have 2, 3, or more). Other enemies are killed by drawing a point back from a purple bullet to them. There’s more, plus bonuses and bosses to fight."

Finally, TIGSource has a linked YouTube gameplay video inside its entry, which is handy if you want to see what it looks like without downloading, with commenter AdamAtomic noting: "The boss fights especially are totally friggin sweet. I agree, This game could live happily on the DS I think!" Quick, publishers that are reading - go snap it up?

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

Import store NCSX continues to reveal some fascinating and fairly obscure DS games coming out of Japan, and the latest is called 'Kurikin: Nano Island Story', and is, we kid you not, a microbial life combat game, apparently created by Media Kite.

NCSX explains of the title: "Wee beasties are on the rampage and it's your prerogative to make sure they are marshaled properly to destroy other wee beasties. In the early missions, players control masses of nano creatures known as "kin" that look like dispersions of dust on the touch screen. The top display features a magnified examination of the kin, some of which look like paramecium while others look like clams with movable shells. To send the beasties into war, scribble a circle around them and then swish the stylus in a direction to mobilize them against enemy forces. "

What's more, you have to watch the solution you're swimming in to get an idea of battle tactics, apparently: "Similar to actual microbial life forms, the kin in the game are affected by temperatures and PH level. Some kin do better in warmer temperatures than others while an alkaline PH may lower the viability of certain kin." This is probably a bit quirky for Western release, but that's a shame, because it sounds pretty intriguing.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Over at Eurogamer, they've posted a new Kieron Gillen-penned interview with Introversion's Chris Delay, discussing the history and shape of the UK indie firm's 'bedroom programmer'-tastic titles.

And indeed, here's a good summing up from Delay on that very subject: "Comparing DEFCON to our other games is difficult. Uplink is rugged and buggy and ugly and still sells more than Darwinia every day. Darwinia is our oddball second album, our very own love letter to the Amiga and the soul of great videogames, and the game I'm most proud of. DEFCON is a relatively simple multiplayer game idea and I think that's probably the key to its success."

There's also some fun discussion on what the previously GSW-mentioned Subversion is - and the conclusion is that... nobody knows: "We can understand that everyone wants to know what it is, but we just can't say. If someone had access to all the source code and all the design documents for Subversion, and had listened in on the last month's telephone conversations between the directors, they still wouldn't know what the game was going to be about. It's experimentation. I think part of the problem is that people can't quite believe it still exists in the games industry, and no longer recognise it when they see it."

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Poking around on GameSpy, which I think is somewhat neglected by the blogosphere nowadays, I spotted that there's a regularly updated columns section which doesn't get noticed or linked to that often, despite having some good content enjoyed by GameSpy regulars. Anyhow, here's the column-specific RSS for those wanting to keep an eye on it - and there's actually some fun stuff in here.

Looks like the 'GameSpy North' office in the Bay Area has been getting some new personnel of late, with journalists hired from Ziff Davis and Future, among other outlets - though there are still GameSpy edit folks working in the Southern California offices, of course - a recent 'What We're Playing' column reveals that ex-G4-er Li Kuo and veteran Sal "Sluggo" Accardo are still hanging in there, for example. Listing some of the intriguing columns randomly:

- After OPM closed down, Thierry 'Scooter' Nguyen hopped across to GameSpy, and has a regular column, 'First Person Scooter', which I'm finding pretty entertaining. In one of the recent instalments, he admits, with a hangdog fanboy wink: "These days, while I still enjoy the likes of BioWare, Blizzard, Monolith and Valve, my tastes have gone a little more casual. To wit, I have a new favorite developer: PopCap Games."

- Andy Mahood has been running modding column Modify for a loong time (we're up to #42), and I believe I've linked to it once or twice in the past. Anyhow, it's still a good read, and the latest column takes a look at some of the mods that won a recent FilePlanet contest centered around F.E.A.R. - other columns span flight titles through FPSes to racing games and beyond.

- 'Dream Game' is a new column by former GamesRadar editor Gabe Graziani, and the latest one talks to the folks at Realtime Worlds and Crystal Dynamics about gameplay features and control tweaks to make the best-ever action game, like, ever. Oh, and along the way, he explains handily: "I don't think I'm going out on a limb when I state that every game would be better with either a grappling hook or a jet pack."

- Sure, the ol' 'play against the editors' thing is hardly new, but the 'Spy Hunter' columns write them up in a pretty fun way - with videos sometimes, to boot! The latest looks at Halo 3 Beta carnage, and includes the longest 'disclaimer' sentence evah: "Possible reasons for bootage include but are not limited to: an inordinate amount of swearing or other forms of epithets relating to sexual orientation or mental disability (if you can't make it through a match without dropping an f-bomb or calling someone an r-tard, mute your mic), unsportsmanlike conduct (gloating or otherwise insulting other players - especially team-killing in games that allow that sort of thing) and anything that might generally make you come off as a jackass." Bravo!

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We covered the web software acting like video games meme just the other week, and now, Kevnull.com has posted an in-depth critique called 'Iminlikewithyou and Game Design in the Web'.

This is a little abstract to explain, but the currently invite-only dating-ish website works like this: "Iilwy is based on “games” each person creates. Players use the in game point system to “bid” on games. The top 5 bidders at the end of the game are eligible to be picked as the winner by the game owner and the winner and game owner are subsequently contacts who can contact each other through the site messaging system."

The blogger, Kevin Cheng, is impressed with the concept: "Iilwy’s game system is actually a great system for meeting and filtering new people well beyond just the dating realm. In this case, a barrier that makes doing something harder is desired and very deliberate in its design." So how about that - couldn't this kind of thing be set up in an MMO, as well, with creative challenges between players awarded as an explicit game feature? Or is it already? Looking outside conventional games for game design is looking increasingly interesting. [Via Waxy.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Woops, it's been a while since I did one of these, but nonetheless - I'm going to talk about the games that I've been checking out recently, and then I'll open the floor for GSW readers to do the same in the comments. Here goes:

- WarTech: Senko No Ronde (G-Rev/Ubisoft, Xbox 360)
Though it's had a pretty low profile thus far, and $60 is certainly quite a lot to ask for a Japanese arcade shooter/fighter conversion, what I've played of Senko No Ronde so far has impressed me - it's a really artful mix of bullet-heavy shooting and one on one combat. Reviews have gravitated significantly, with 1UP's 5/10 getting some interesting and heated commentary over at Zerochan's LJ [Ta Xian!] - I like Eurogamer's review, which gave it 8/10, a lot more. But it's definitely a very niche title, and the pricing is a bit questionable. But hey, I bought it.

- Parappa The Rapper (NanaOnSha/Sony, PSP)
Probably a title that should be released on the PlayStation Store as a downloadable PS1 title, really, but the native PSP version was available on Play-Asia for $17.99 the other week, and I couldn't resist. This version comes out here in July, and there's a lack of extras - though there are apparently downloadable remixes in the U.S. version - how do you get to them in the Asian version, if they exist, anyone? But c'mon - even without them, you get widescreen, old school Master Onion action - what is there not to love?

- The Red Star (XS Games, PlayStation 2)
This has been a stupendously long time in the making, but having rented The Red Star for PS2 from GameFly, I can say that it's an awesome throwback to classic early '90s Capcom brawlers, taking the Christian Gossett comic book license and melding it into something that feels like Strider for a new age, with extra 3D and style galore. See, Acclaim's demise eventually spat out something wholesome! Oh, and it's revealed of the game on Wikipedia: "A projectile weapon used by the character Maya Antares is named the "Davbrentsky AKA4U." This is a reference to the UK comedy television series The Office, which features a character played by actor Ricky Gervais named David Brent, who speaks a line ending with the phrase "...AKA, for you.""

Other things I've been checking out? Just got Brooktown High: Senior Year for PSP, so will be trying that this week. And a quick perusal of my Xbox 360 GamerCard, which has just topped 6,000, will reveal bits of the ugly truth (yep, I just completed TMNT. Absolve me, Lord!), and some slightly better XBLA tastes, hopefully - still pluggin' away on Jetpac Refuelled and Lumines Live, and have been using Boom Boom Rocket's Visualization Mode as a background during soirees. Yikes, socialization outside friends lists? I'll try not to let it happen again. What have you been playing this week?

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:48 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.]

To begin with show-and-tell this week, I'd like to show you a typical ABC pink sheet, the document which advertisers rely on to give them an accurate picture of a magazine's circulation details.

The Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) is an organization that gauges and measures circulation, readership, and audience information for magazines, newspapers, and other publications. There are multiple ABCs around the world; the American ABC was founded in 1914 and is based in Schaumberg, IL, with offices in New York and Toronto. It's funded with fees from its members, mainly comprised of media companies, advertisers, and some universities.

Generally speaking, the ABC audits a magazine by first receiving a stated circulation number from the magazine's publisher, then comparing that number with records from retailers, wholesalers, and other links in the magazine distribution chain. ABC publishes its results every six months to members, but a full auditing process can take up to nine months for each six-month period, by which time the situation of the magazine being audited may have changed greatly.

In order to provide timelier numbers, the ABC takes the figures submitted by magazines at the end of each six-month period and publishes them as "pink sheets" without any extra auditing. These pink sheets are available two to three months after the reporting period. (If a pink-sheet figure turns out to be too much higher than what the ABC finds with its audit, the publisher may be warned and eventually have its membership revoked for repeat offenses.)

Game publishers are not required to report ABC-audited circulation figures to the general public. Instead they report their own figures -- usually in the form of "rate base," or the average sell-through figure they guarantee to their advertisers. Also, due to the expense involved, most general-interest magazines in America do not apply for an ABC audit unless their circulation is around 125,000 copies or greater. Once a magazine reaches its point, it usually raises its ad rates to the point where outside confirmation of their sales figures becomes vital. As a result of this, most of the "second tier" of game magazines (such as Play or the Beckett titles) do not have ABC-audited figures, offering their own figures to advertisers instead.

I've redacted any identifying information of the magazine in this particular pink sheet, but I thought you'd be interested in having a look at how the front page of such a report is set up anyway.

And now I'd like you to tell me something -- what's up with Nintendo of America such that they want to "license" out Nintendo Power and keep it a print magazine? This, according to Perrin Kaplan in an interview published at Game Informer. I mean, Ziff's allegedly been trying to sell its mag-heavy portfolio for ages with little success, right? Are you telling me that a company's more interested in licensing Nintendo Power than one of several mags which sell more than that? Crazy!

I'll refrain from further comment until I hear the whole story, but if the mag's moving, then I do feel pretty bad for one new editor up at NP, who got laid off at the Official PlayStation Magazine, moved to Redmond for the NP job a few months ago, and may be facing another difficult decision right now...

[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 4:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Habitat Chronicles is the blog of virtual world pioneers Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer, creators of the '80s LucasArts virtual world of the same name, which you can see screenshots of here, and of which even my boss' boss is apparently now aware of, thanks to the virtual world 'micturation'.

Anyhow, Farmer has just posted a new entry entitled 'Second Life History: The Jessie Massacre', and in which he admits to griefing the early Beta Second Life world for 'testing' purposes. He explains: "I'd been working with the object spawning directives in the scripting language. I'd also discovered that I could make an object very small (less than an inch in diameter), and very transparent (virtually invisible)."

And so? "It struck on me that I could make a weapon of mass destruction and do it very cheaply. It worked like this: a tiny invisible floating grenade that would explode into dozens of invisible tiny fragments flying outward spherically at maximum velocity and doing maximum damage and then immediately teleport itself to another random location in the simulator. It would be undetectable, unstoppable, and lethal: The perfect killing machine. It could only be stopped by me shouting the keyword: STOP!"

Lots of tiny objects released, and the result was rampant slowdown weirdness death, of course - this has happened in SL in various variations quite a few times since, I believe.

And what happened in the end to this possibly first-ever outbreak, according to Farmer? "It turned out that my grenades were too small and invisible. Though they were now inert I couldn't find them to remove them. In effect, they were a dormant virus in Jessie. So, I filed a bug report: "Unable to select small, invisible objects." The in next day or two there was a patch to the client to "show transparency" so that it would be possible for me to see them, select them, and delete them - which I promptly did. But the legend remains."

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Over at major Australian newspaper The Age's 'Screen Play' blog, they've interviewed ACMI's Helen Stuckey about the Melbourne-based exhibition of 'The Best Of The Independent Games Festival 2007' which opens early next week, and which we've previously mentioned.

Some excellent points are made about the rise of indie games (pictured: Ball Of Bastards), thanks to publicity around the launch of the exhibition: "Ms Stuckey says low budgets are a major challenge, but independent developers often overcome hurdles "with creativity and ingenuity to produce games with interesting gameplay and smart ideas". The biggest problem can be finding an audience. "(Fortunately), a growing focus on digital distribution has really helped the indies become more available and easier to find. Xbox Live Arcade has also introduced many people to independent games such as Wik and Alien Hominid.""

And, as I've said before (and bias as the Chairman of the IGF notwithstanding), it's nice to see someone in a position of power at a cultural institution pushing games as a valid art form with multiple different exhibits - the previous Melbourne House and Sonic exhibitions also looked to be excellent: "Ms Stuckey says her aims for the [Australian Center For The Moving Image's] Games Lab include exploring different areas of game culture and the history of games, engaging visitors to think critically about games within a cultural context, raising awareness about Australia's game creators, and focusing on the inherent creativity of games and players."

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Blocking briefly from your memory the horrendous attempted pun in the title, you might be interested to know that the top titles from the 2nd Annual Toronto Indie Game Jam are now available for download on the official site, and include People's Choice Gold winner XIQ, recently mentioned on GSW, but a number of other neat titles.

Event co-organizer Rob Segal explains breathlessly to us: "TO Jam 2 was recently held in Toronto from May 4-6, 2007... Filled with the creative power known only to Torontonians (and its surrounding areas) 62 select few intrepid warriors ventured out into the depths of their minds and souls to achieve the pinnacle of game development greatness." And that would include People's Choice Silver winner Benny Hinn's Bible Blast For Cash, methinks.

In that title, which references the televangelist, you're exhorted to: "Touch believers for easy cash! Cause as much carnage for cash as you can before facing off with the devil! Don't let him take your money!" Woh boy. Other winners and entrants posted thus far, all freely downloadable, include Quiver, in which "...you feel like you're in a deep, dark forest battling zombies", and Trishade Aduro, a shooter with a same-color chaining mechanism. Keep up the experiments, guys.

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[“Might Have Been” is a bi-weekly column by Todd Ciolek that explores the ways in which promising games, characters, and concepts failed. This week’s edition looks at SNK's Super Baseball 2020, released for the Neo-Geo in 1991.]

In the years just before sports games came to be dominated by authentic rosters, realistic visuals and the terrifying visage of John Madden, there briefly flourished a school of titles that looked to the athletes of the future. Simultaneously cynical about human nature and optimistic about technology, they envisioned worlds where the public was entertained by brutal robot linesmen and exploding soccer balls.

Few of these games made a mark; Mutant League Football remains a cult favorite and Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball may live forever in infamy, but no one really remembers Namco’s Powerball, Sofel’s Klash Ball or Bitts and Triffix’s odd Space Football.

SNK’s Super Baseball 2020, however, is better known, partly because it’s a Neo Geo game. Specifically, it's a Neo Geo game that hit 1991, just when SNK was ferociously promoting the system as real competition for the Super NES and Genesis. That idea met with a quick death, but SNK’s marketing attempts won Super Baseball 2020 the sort of attention paid only to a new console’s first wave.

Featuring the Ninja Black Sox

Set only three decades or so from its release year, Super Baseball 2020 isn’t terribly radical in its changes to the sport: humans wear jetpacks and armor while playing alongside robots, but the positions and rules are tweaked only a little. The Cyber Egg stadium (the 2020 version of Tokyo’s Big Egg) has a narrower zone for home runs, and would-be homers instead bounce off the shielded stands and hit the field below. Yet the real innovation lies in the game’s power-up system, which allows teams to earn money and spend it on armor that enhances fielding, hitting, or pitching abilities. Unlike SNK's fighting-oriented Soccer Brawl, Super Baseball 2020 doesn't stray too far from what it's supposed to be.

Presuming that the entire world will one day enjoy baseball instead of soccer, the teams represent international names, such as the Naples Seagulls and Aussie Battlers, as well as presumably borderless outfits like the Metal Slashers and Tropical Girls. Each includes a different mix of the game's three character types: The men are fully armored grunts, the robots are cute headless things that roll around on tank treads, and the women are busty, long-haired amazons who wear lipstick, shorts, and cleavage-baring vests, and they celebrate homers by blowing kisses to the crowd. In other words, they were uncanny predictions of SNK’s future female characters.

Dusty Diamond 2 awaits

Overt sexism aside, the game’s easy to enjoy. An arcade quarter-muncher at heart, it doesn’t bother with elaborate statistics or customization, borrowing much from SNK’s Baseball Stars series. The controls lend an action game's simplicity to pitching, hitting, stealing bases, buying power-ups for players, and using jetpacks to jump for fly balls or slide for last-second catches.

For these special moves, the game shifts into quick close-ups of the players, who, for all of their simple animation, looked impressive back in 1992. The rest of the game’s visual design is the same: striking by the standards of 16-bit baseball games, but strictly adequate today. At least the soundtrack’s still catchy.

And Super Baseball 2020's just so darned cheerful about everything. In sharp contrast to the mechanical violence of Konami’s Base Wars or Atari’s Cyberball, the Cyber Egg stadium of 2020 pulses with life, as crowds surge beneath protective domes and fouls fly over concession stands manned by bubbly, swimsuit-clad clerks. The players aren’t terribly serious either, not when they’re breaking electric bats across their knees or, in the case of the robots, tumbling to pieces when a batter gets a homer off their pitch. Nor do the rosters play it straight, with robots called Johnny-6 and ED-309, and a team of end bosses apparently named after leading members of the Nazi party.

Small Hurt Baseball

In fact, the cast seems to have fun even when they’re tossed into the air by landmines. The game’s only real hazard, “Crackers” crop up on the diamond more and more as the innings wear on, though it’s rare that fielders actually run into them.

Aside from some strange oversights (such as the basemen/basewomen/baserobots never leaving their posts), the only real problem is that the baseball of 2020 isn’t goofy enough. Once you strip away its robot umpires, power-ups and jetpacks, Super Baseball 2020 really isn’t all that different from Baseball Stars.

And that killed it. SNK released Baseball Stars Professional 2 the next year, making Super Baseball 2020 the second-best sports game on a system where games cost $200. It was ported to the Genesis and Super NES in 1993, but no sequel arrived, perhaps because Pallas, the company that co-held the game's copyright with SNK, dropped off the face of the earth. The developers, known as Team Galapagos, moved on to the Samurai Shodown series before fragmenting, and rumors now place their former members everywhere from Capcom to Yuki to Arc System Works’ Guilty Gear team.

Super Curling 2020 died in the design stages

Yet perhaps a sequel wouldn’t have been right. Super Baseball 2020’s ideas beg more for different sports: hockey, tennis, football, soccer or perhaps even a beach volleyball game that would have conveniently justified sticking female players in revealing uniforms.

The gaming market of the early '90s would have allowed anything short of a lacrosse spin-off. Mutant League Football begat a hockey-themed sequel and an unreleased basketball game, and the Turbografx’s mediocre TV Sports series spanned the same territory. And yet SNK, drunk on the possibilities of aping Street Fighter II, simply wasn’t interested in more than one sports franchise in the early ‘90s. Indeed, as the decade continued, the company wasn’t interested in much beyond fighting games and Metal Slug.

As with all but the worst Neo Geo games, Super Baseball 2020 has a number of fans, and it’s a shame that they’ll never get to body-check robots in a brightly futuristic hockey arena or power up a quarterback so she can throw a 250-yard Hail Mary. But they’ll always have SNK’s foray into the future-sports genre, and a hint of a franchise that could’ve been an upbeat, robot-filled alternative to boring old realism.

[Todd Ciolek is a magazine editor in New York City.]

Posted by Todd Ciolek at 8:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

So audio columnist for Game Developer magazine, LucasArts staff composer/music supervisor Jesse Harlin, is asking the public at large about game sound for his August 2007 column, and he needs you to fill in a poll on that very subject.

Questions asked include asking us plebs whether: "I have played a game where the sound effects were absolutely necessary in order to complete the game", and indeed: "For Xbox and Xbox 360 users: I have used the Xbox's Custom Soundtrack feature to put my own music into a game." Looks like you can see the current results, too - and they're pretty interesting thus far. So go ahead and vote some more, dear GSW readers.

[Also, if you want to know more about Harlin, he's got an entry in the Wookieepedia, I just found out, which reveals, among other things: "For Republic Commando, Harlin created the Star Wars language 'Ancient Mandalorian,' which later became the basis for Karen Traviss's Mando'a." Oh, Star Wars.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Look see, no sooner had we linked up Jesper Juul's excellent history of 'match 3' puzzle games, than he admits that he's just released a PC casual game, 'High Seas - The Family Fortune', which he co-designed and programmed, and is based at least partly on what he learned researching the article.

Here's an overview of the game, in which you play disaffected traveler Tricia McDormand, using her father's treasure map: "With the map in hand, players join Tricia as she sails the seven seas in search of the mysterious family fortune. In order to power Tricia’s ship, players must drag rows of jewels and align them by shape or color - and receive big bonuses for aligning by shape and color."

Juul particularly notes of the title: "Yes! It is a matching tile game, but with some radical twists!... Physics model: You can interact with all tiles on the screen, all the time... No waiting for tiles to fall. Free interaction without making matches... Match on shape or color... Developed story (!): Tricia travels the world following her grandma’s map in search of the Family Fortune." Seems like it mixes things up in an enticing way - anyone had a chance to play it and would like to comment on whether it evolves the genre at all?

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

Sometimes, I think that GSW commenters cock a snook a little unfairly at 'powerhouse game blog' Kotaku - and while I agree that the informedness of its contributors varies, like any organ, I really enjoyed the newly posted, Brian Ashcraft-penned feature 'Sex, Gambling, But Not Games in Japanese Arcade Hell' - as a work of photojournalism, as well as a downtrodden ramble through the dysfunctional Japanese psyche.

Why? It has fluid writing like this: "A row of taxis lines up across from the New Shinbashi Building, not the Shin Shinbashi Building. An old lady is laying in the street, and I can hear the rhythmic siren of an ambulance. Businessmen in ill-fitting suits move in transit from work to bars, and a gaggle of young girls wearing thigh-highs and mini-skirts cluster near the doorway, putting on eye liner and talking on cell phones."

And it has depressing, neon-flecked prose like this: "An old man sits down in flannel, stuffs a coin in and begins playing. His fingernails are dirty, and I write down the game's title: Cherry. Bonus. IV... Another Konami banner tells me that "Wing" has mahjong — Along with Virtua Fighter and Tekken. The game cabinets are deserted, and salarymen sit hunched over, lighting cigarettes, putting them out, lighting them again. They don't notice me." So it works. More fatalistic urban decay in video game blogs, please.

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

GSW is definitely a fan of Rogue-likes, as can be seen by an entire column devoted to the subject, courtesy of John Harris - and no doubt he'll be delighted to learn of the brand new 'Temple Of The Roguelike' blog, dedicated to the dungeon crawler in all its many-tentacled forms.

Quite apart from alerting us to wackiness like the latest version of Gearhead 2, "...the roguelike game of inertia space mechafighting and random plots", the new site has a rather good interview with Glenn Wichman, one of the creators (alongside Michael Toy and others) of the original and much-cloned Rogue.

Wichman reveals one particularly good reason why Rogue-likes are still interesting today - the random factor, still spectacularly underexploited in mainstream games: "IMHO, The quintessential feature of a Roguelike is that the computer creates a world for you to explore. The adventure has to be different every time, and the game has to be capable of surprising even its creators." [Via TIGSource.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We briefly mentioned this at Gamasutra, but it needs some underlining - Ian Bogost's Persuasive Games has announced a partnerhip with the New York Times "...in which they will be publishing newsgames we create on their op-ed page, as editorial content, not just as games."

As Bogost notes: "This is unprecedented, and at the risk of tooting my own horn, I think it represents another important shift in videogames as a medium. This is news/editorial in videogame form, rather than videogames trying to make news fun." [There's more on this whole subject from a recent Creative Loafing Atlanta story featuring Bogost and his fellow Georgia Tech issue-based gamers - and a snarky IGF judging reference!]

Of course, the only barrier for entry for this project is that you have to be a paid TimesSelect subscriber to play the game in question, 'Food Import Folly', detailed on the Persuasive Games page as having the player "...protect the country from contaminants in foreign food imports using extremely limited resources." But Persuasive has plenty of other games, including the 'Arcade Wire' ones for Shockwave, that are free to play.

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at new-to-GSW blog Microscopiq, they have an interesting discussion on music, karaoke, and gaming which points out, thanks to insight gained from a Korean karaoke bar in New York, that having timed subscription access to massive amounts of songs might actually be more fun that individually grabbing Guitar Hero 2 mini-song packs, for example.

The blog notes: "Recently, for instance, Karaoke Revolution creators Harmonix started selling song packs for Guitar Hero 2. You buy it, you own it, but only 3 songs at a time and you can’t pick and choose. While it’s a cool idea (and one I’ve been dying for since Frequency), this is one place where subscription could do better."

Why so? "That’s because on karaoke night having bunches of songs at your fingertips for an evening beats the shit out of owning a few songs forever. Variety bests longevity. Of course, licensing fees, bandwidth, and content creation cost are issues here. Still, I’d pay a nice sum to get a few hours with a library of downloadable songs for a Karaoke Revolution party, or even a monthly fee to have that access always. Would you?"

Heck, I'd probably pay $10 a month for a multi-hundred song Guitar Hero 2 library that included all kinds of randomness. But I suspect it makes much less financial sense to the companies involved, sadly. Yet Microscopiq notes: "While Steve Jobs clearly has a point that people want to own their music (85% market share can’t be wrong), the same may not hold true in gaming." It's debatable!

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

[‘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 look at the often-dismissed Zone of the Enders series.]

Giant robots have been a staple of Japanese pop culture for decades. As Roboto Chan! shows, the robot in manga and anime has been rich source of inspiration for game designers. So when Konami’s Hideo Kojima decided to bring his post-modern touch to the giant robot genre, expectations were high.

Zone of the Enders

Released in 2001 for the PlayStation 2, Zone of the Enders was a remarkable demonstration of what the new hardware was capable of. Abandoning the lumbering tank movements of other giant robot games, the robots of Zone of the Enders moved with a pole-dancing, acrobatic style that would become the hallmark of modern action games like Devil May Cry or Dynasty Warriors. Called Orbital Frames, the game’s mecha were designed by Yoji Shinkawa as lithe, airborne seraphim. As if to emphasize their aerial nature, they did not even have feet. Instead, their legs terminated in elegant spikes. In close combat the Frames whipped out flashing energy blades. From a distance they launched bolts of plasma from their hands like a 50 meter Sailor Moon gone berserk.

Despite the slick presentation, Zone of the Enders was unable to get by on its looks. Initially the game invoked a wide-eyed thrill, but after a few hours of play, Zone of the Enders had revealed most of its impressive tricks, leaving the remainder of the game feeling only half-formed.

Zone of the Enders is an easy game to find, so don’t pay more than $15. However, make sure that it includes the Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty Demo disc which allows you to play the Tanker chapter up to the Olga Boss fight with the original Japanese voice acting.

The Fist of Mars

Determined to grow an Enders franchise, Konami followed up in 2002 with Z.O.E – The Fist of Mars for the Gameboy Advance. Developed by Winkysoft, creators of the long-running Super Robot Wars series, Fist of Mars combined light strategy with a melodramatic anime storyline.

Using the same basic design as the Super Robot Wars, Fist of Mars played out on a large grid where terrain was mostly just background for its turn-by-turn combat. In Super Robot Wars, when units engaged in battle you were treated to a flashy cut-scene of them trading blows. Fist of Mars made these cut-scenes interactive by requiring you to catch the enemy in a crosshair as they dodged across the screen. The size of the crosshair and the speed of the enemy would vary, as well as length of time allowed to make a hit. Similarly, when defending it was necessary to weave back and forth across the screen, avoiding the enemy’s aim. Unfortunately, there was a seriously game-breaking trick for dodging enemy attacks that once learned, considerably reduced the game’s challenge level.

Pay about $20 for Z.O.E. - The Fist of Mars with its box and manual. Also look for the two Super Robot Wars available in English, Super Robot Taisen – Original Generation and Super Robot Taisen – Original Generation 2 for Gameboy Advance, both published in 2006 by Atlus. The first is out of print and sells for around $25. The second is still available new for $29.95.

The 2nd Runner

With the previous two Enders games being interesting but ultimately flawed, one asks why collect? My answer is Zone of the Enders – The 2nd Runner, a game that finally delivers on the series’ promise. With 2nd Runner, Kojima’s team created a tight, responsive game that is lovingly crafted down to the smallest detail. Like an expensive Italian sports car, 2nd Runner is a work of kinetic art.

Unlike the first game, 2nd Runner has a compulsive drive, with one event leading smoothly to the next. Dramatic action suddenly gives way to intriguing narrative, which quickly sets up a new round of frenetic combat, constantly drawing you forward. Perhaps the best way to enjoy 2nd Runner is to set aside some time and play it straight through from beginning to end in one sitting like a movie. Some might complain about the game’s short length (a little over four hours) but 2nd Runner is exactly as long as it needs to be.

I try not to be seduced by graphics and I enjoy plenty of games that are far from the cutting-edge of visual presentation. That being said, 2nd Runner is absolutely ravishing. Clouds of enemies shift and dart across the sky like schools of fish. Explosions spray fragments of super-heated metal as radiant beams split the air. Black tendrils of null-space leave ghostly tracers as Orbital Frames fold time, warping instantly from one target to the next. In 1964 Leary, Metzner, and Alpert called it the “Retinal Circus”. Play 2nd Runner and begin to understand. As an extra visual treat, sharp-eyed observers will recognize a guest design contribution from Shin Megami Tensei’s Kazuma Kaneko, done in his deliriously aberrant style.

Perhaps because of ambivalence over the first Zone of the Enders game, when 2nd Runner was released in 2003, most people passed it by. Big mistake. Now out of print, the game is becoming increasingly difficult to find. Expect to pay around $45.

Anime

If you want to delve deeper into the world of Zone of the Enders, Sunrise (the animation studio behind Gundam, Escaflowne, and Gasaraki) produced a well-made tie-in anime series. When the first Enders game came out in Japan it included an OVA called Idolo. This was followed by a television series called Dolores, i. Both were released in America and are now available together in ADV’s Zone of the Enders Complete Collection for $49.98.

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

Posted by jfleming at 9:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

You may recall that GSW is a bit of a pinball fan, so it was neat to see that distinctly retro gaming site RetroBlast! has spotted an extremely impressive pinball-themed full-arm tattoo, done by Darren Brass of the reality show Miami Ink for game developer Amy Gunson.

Gunson notes that the gigantic and rather stylish tattoo "...took two sessions and close to 9 hours to complete", and further comments that "...it's an homage to one of my first loves, pinball. I've moved across the Pacific five times and had to sell most of my pinball collection in the process. Now, I have something that I can take with me anywhere I go. It's bold and colorful and full of energy!"

Apparently, anyone working at EA Vancouver can admire the tattoo themselves, since Gunson works there as a technical artist - she further details: "The design was done by the fantastic tattoo artist, Darren Brass who used to play a little pinball himself, with Theatre of Magic being one that stands out in his mind. Those of you who play might recognize the ball locks from Big Bang Bar, rails galore, and the big bold color in the pop bumpers that look like they may have jumped out of a Charles Bell painting." Awesome-o.

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It's really a bit painful, in a 'tree falling in a forest' type way, that there's a four-part Warren Spector treatise on storytelling up on The Escapist for a few weeks now, and, uhm, nobody has really made a big fuss about it. And they should, because it's pretty interesting, if on the dense side.

Randomly picking Part 4, here's some perceptive, if slightly depressing prose: "Once we can create beautiful, photorealistic spaces, players will expect us to do so, and then we'll have to teach our NPCs how to navigate through and interact with ever-more complex worlds appropriately. Rapid advancements in graphical fidelity and depth of simulation have always left AI and design playing catch-up. That problem seems likely to get worse, not better, in the next few years."

Getting away from TEH DOOM for a second, Tom Chick's Escapist column has been proceeding apace, and apparently, the Fight Club logo designer still hasn't sued yet (parody!), yay. So far, a random email exchange is probably the funnest one, for me, since it included the immortal line: "He can't do it. He just got a job as a viral marketer for Second Life. I need you to do it." Though I will note that splitting up longer articles into X weekly installments is totally a print trick, and doesn't work very well on the web.

Also, Mr. Chick has now brought his own brand of laconic spitballing to GameSpy, where his first Alt-Tab column is up, and it's also a load of entertaining, hyper-intelligent bollocks: "Let's talk about the things that are untrue about you. You are a twenty-four-year-old leggy girl from Texas who worked as an exotic dancer for four years so you could save up money to put yourself through a PhD program in electrical engineering. You only date guys you meet from your World of Warcraft raiding guild."

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Last year, sister site Gamasutra chatted to Sega Entertainment U.S.A. about the rebirth - or at least some minor stirring - of the U.S. arcade scene, and we just got a press release revealing some concrete additions they're making to their GameWorks arcades.

It explains: "Sega Entertainment U.S.A., Inc’s. (SEUI), casual dining brand, GameWorks, will install three different, and very original, gaming attractions to the entertainment mix at its 14 GameWorks locations. The company has added 3 units of the newly released OutRun 2 SP SDX Driving attraction to their Las Vegas , Detroit and Chicago venues, install 84 Sega UFO Catchers throughout the company's US locations and is testing Virtual Bowling by Brunswick as an attraction in Las Vegas ."

Of these, OutRun 2 SP SDX is definitely the most interesting - Kikizo already has a bunch of detailed screenshots from the upgrade to the OutRun 2 upgrade (!), which was originally unveiled last year, and Sega explains the twist: "In traditional racing games, one player drives the car. In the new version, two players are seated in the car and each has their own steering wheel, brake and accelerator."

Wha? "The control of the game is determined by how well a driver maneuvers the course - once they hit a wall or crash, control will immediately shifts to the second player. This will happen for the entire length of the game, and during stage changes as well, sometimes changing player control 6-7 times. Players can easily check their rankings in the middle of the race, through the electrical bulletin board attached to the game... CCD cameras are also installed at each cabinet to take pictures of players, and are then aired on a large monitor." An interesting gameplay mechanic and deluxe giant playscreens means a unique arcade experience, which can only be good for the biz. Bet the machines cost a bomb, though!

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

So, Michael Zenke, whom you also know as Slashdot Games editor Zonk, has been helping us out with his awesome GSW column 'MMOG Nation', based on his blog of the same name, over the past few weeks and months.

Sadly, this is no longer to be the case, as he explains on his MMOGNation.com blog: "You’ve probably noticed that my ruminations on the GameSetWatch site have been absent from the site of late. The reason is that, following some discussions allll the way back at GDC, the ‘MMOG Nation’ column has found a new home. Now to be known as ‘Massive Update’, it’s going to try to be a slice of the previous week from the Massive perspective."

He explains: "It will still feature my opinions, but instead of a grand subject I’ll be focusing on concrete things that have happened in the recent past... The keenest bit? Massive Update’s new home is the 1UP Network" - and here's the first 1UP Massive Update column.

Congrats to Michael for getting picked up by the Ziff folks, and many thanks to him for his excellent MMO column-ing that he did for us over the past few months - as you may recall, the columns here are done on a slightly voluntary basis for a slightly random audience, so we're very happy if people go on to bigger and more trafficked things.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

[The Aberrant Gamer is a weekly, somewhat NSFW column by Leigh Alexander, dedicated to the kinks and quirks we gamers tend to keep under our hats-- those predilections and peccadilloes less commonly discussed in conventional media. Hentai gaming, fantasy fanfics, twisted psychology and notes from the dark side-- we'll expose, discuss and enjoy the delicious underbelly of our beloved gaming universe.]

Can you call a game a “sex game” if there’s no sex?

It’d be tough to classify old chestnut Princess Maker 2, originally created by Evangelion maker Gainax in 1993, as a Hentai game—in fact, it’s probably most appropriate to call it a parenting sim. More similar to Nintendogs than it is to any sex game, the player is tasked with raising a girl child to adulthood. A laundry list of stats—things like strength, grace, morality and stress-- combine to determine what kind of woman she’ll be. Her health and well-being, her job, and even her future husband are the result of the way you raise her.

The story begins under a fantasy premise—“the gods” bestow you with a little girl about ten years old as a reward for defeating a demon lord and saving the city. Apparently, there’s no gratitude from the populace in the form of monetary compensation (there never is, is there?) because despite being a supernatural war hero, you must immediately put your dewy-eyed ten-year-old to work. Each job causes a boost in some stats and a decrease in others—working at the farm, for example, boosts strength but lowers refinement. You can also affect her condition by gifting her with pocket money or scolding her. Finally, the game has an RPG-style adventure mode, which allows you to raise a little fighting heroine, in addition to snagging special items.

There’s a dizzying number of possible endings— among others, your daughter might end up a nun, a scholar, an innkeeper, a lady-in-waiting or a lumberjack. She can also be a soldier, a bounty hunter or a street performer. She can even become Queen, if you raise her up real well.

But what if you don’t? You wouldn't entertain dirty wishes for your little girl, would you?

The game’s already a step ahead of you—your little girl can start working at the “Sleazy Bar” at the age of 15, and at the “Cabaret” by 16. You’re responsible for her “sin” and "sex appeal" statistics, and it’s possible for your dear daughter to develop into a bar wench, bondage queen, or prostitute (regular or “high class” varieties). Additionally, you've got rather precise control over the child’s body size—even allowing you to administer pills to enhance her bustline.

It is perfectly possible to be a sterling parent and play it cute and clean for the duration of the game. But it’s also possible to dress a 12 year old girl—who calls you “Daddy”— like a whore. With the help of the widely available “UnDress” patch, you can even dress her in nothing at all—while she continues to stand front and center of the main screen, beaming devotedly, perfectly secure in your fatherly guidance.

True Hentai games usually feature absurd scenarios—your father’s just remarried an insatiable woman with five equally insatiable daughters, or you’ve just inherited a mansion staffed by sexually available maids. Compared to this, the simple premise of raising a daughter seems quite tame. But Hentai games, much like the rape that often plays a prominent role, are about control. The idea’s to give the player a “what-if” sexual scenario where anything goes and everything usually does. You cannot have sex with—or even sexually touch—your daughter in Princess Maker 2, but the undercurrent of manipulation, of ownership, that undercuts the entire child-rearing process is nearly as intense, and no less sexual.

All H-games are a little twisted—that’s what makes them fun. Hard to say, though, what’s more twisted—a graphic rape game, or a parenting simulation that can be sexualized.

It’s not too uncommon for members of either gender to fantasize that women enjoy rape, and the fantasy reaches hyperbolic proportions in H-games—despite a violent nonconsensual coupling, the girl always comes away grateful, transformed and in love. As for your little princess, when her eighteenth birthday arrives, a potential husband comes knocking. And if you don’t want to give your beloved child away, it’s possible to marry her yourself-- though it's the most challenging ending to achieve.

You put her to work in the bar, starved her to keep her waistline down and dressed her in skanky clothes. And yet, radiant-eyed and adoring, your daughter will approach you, saying that she wants no man but you. Princess Maker 2 might not be a Hentai game, but it's more like one than not.

[Leigh Alexander is a blogger at her Sexy Videogameland site and reviewer for outlets including Paste Magazine. She can be reached at leigh_alexander1 AT yahoo DOT com.]

Posted by Leigh Alexander at 7:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Aha, what do we spy here? "Game Tunnel has just published the May Independent Video Game round-up, its 35th monthly panel reviewing what is new in indie games." This is rather awesome news, we fear.

The Game Tunnel-ers continue: "The 10 games in this month's article include an incredibly edible castle, an insane lighthouse, a monkey named Darwin, and a "hyperkinetic rabbity thing" named Max." And this time, the Game Of The Month is not a Sam & Max title, rather Chocolate Castle, the Lexaloffle-created PC indie puzzle title that we've previously covered on GameSetWatch.

In fact, Caspian Prince positively raves of the title: "Lexaloffle has a wonderful unique style in the indie game world today - a kind of raw 16-bit retro with no anti-aliasing which really works and brings back memories of times when gameplay reigned supreme. In Chocolate Castle we've got a slickly presented puzzle game polished to a sparkling shine ... and what's this! It's totally original! At least as far as I know." I also get the warm fuzzies over Lexaloffle's unique stylings, so congrats to him for winning out this time round.

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

What's the wrong way to get the attention of the game biz? Seems like Digital Domain found out the other week when the CG house's announcement it was planning to make video games was overshadowed by the connection to company co-chairman Michael Bay, director of the famously vapid Armageddon - or at least, the announcement has got the goat of Ubisoft's Clint Hocking in his Click Nothing blog.

It's probably the very 'Hollywood' tone of the Los Angeles Times article breaking the news which is particularly disagreeable - it reveals that Digital Domain "...plans to develop four or five games over the next two years", and says oddly nonsensical things like: "As video entertainment becomes more sophisticated, the line between video games and movies is blurring."

At one point near the end of his commentary, Splinter Cell supremo Hocking rages: "They actually think that they can just hand over lead creative on a game to someone who made some movies and that will work. Well, I wish them luck. Okay, that's not true. I don't wish them luck. I hope they fail. I'm sure people will be happy to tell me what an egotistical asshole I am. But let's not forget I'm not the one gambling 25 million bucks on an ego that says just because I directed some movies I can therefore direct games. Maybe we'll get to see if the man-god can bleed after all."

Well, a couple of counterpoints here. Firstly, Digital Domain are on a panel at the upcoming Hollywood & Games Summit being organized by my colleague and GDC head honcho Jamil Moledina, and the impression he has is not really that it's a 'film director'-led exercise, rather that they are using CG talent and recruiting from the game industry to make conventional game teams, but with some director input. In other words, it's quite possible that the L.A. Times played up the, uhm, L.A. angle - at the expense of making it sound like any game creators had input into the burgeoning division at all.

And one particularly notable paragraph near the end of the piece: "A recent TV ad that Digital Domain made for "Gears of War," the popular Microsoft science-fiction game for Xbox 360, showed off the new direction. Instead of relying on conventional software, Digital Domain's visual-effects artists created the 60-second spot using the same software that the game runs on. The commercial featured realistic effects and took only five weeks to make, about half the regular time."

A CG house using Unreal Engine 3 to make a commercial? That makes convergence sound pretty damn interesting. But we'll see - after all, fellow CG house Rhythm & Hues stepped up to the plate in the mid-'90s and the result was, uhm, Eggs Of Steel. So really, anything could happen!

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

['Roboto-chan!' is a (hopefully) fortnightly column formerly ruled with an iron fist by Ollie Barder, but recently stolen off him by Christopher Bruso, alias TOLLMASTER - it covers videogames that feature robots and the pop-cultural folklore surrounding them. This week's column covers Activision's 1995 PC title MechWarrior 2, a simulation-style mecha game that somehow became a hit in a time long past, practically introducing mecha games to the Western audience.]

Americans love big things. Americans are a radically diverse people, but wherever in the United States you go, you'll find an appreciation for scale, even in unlikely places such as the South (I, for one, consider the monster truck fan to be a relative of Homo mechotakus, or the giant robot anime fan). It was only a matter of time before the United States would notice similar appreciation for size in their neighbor across the sea in the genre of giant robots, and attempt to create a work in that genre, combining both Japanese and American elements.

Add to this humanity’s universal penchant for war and explosions, and you got a game called MechWarrior 2, many Westerners’ first experience with the mecha video game genre, and one that is still fondly remembered those gamers lucky (or wise) enough to have played it.

The story of Mechwarrior 2 begins with BattleTech, a American tabletop wargaming and role-playing game series by the FASA Corporation. Battles were decided between hulking giants of metal called BattleMechs (‘Mechs for short), bristling with beam weapons and more standard fare such as cannons and missiles, in addition to more familiar units such as tanks and infantry.

BattleTech was hardly a unique concept; its early history included lawsuits due to similarities with some of their ‘Mechs and to the mecha of Japan’s Super Dimensional Macross (you may know it better as Robotech) and Fang of the Sun Dougram. In fact, Dougram’s boxy look can be seen as having had a major influence on FASA’s artwork despite the removal of infringing material. But despite these close aesthetic similarities to, and obvious inspiration from, Japanese mecha, BattleTech was its own beast.

The ‘Mech might be a powerful weapon, but they were still fairly limited in power compared to some of Japan’s realistic robots, such as the ever-popular Gundam. A team of ‘Mechs would often be supported by other vehicles, such as aircraft or tanks, and these were at least somewhat comparable to ‘Mechs in terms of firepower; meanwhile, tanks in Gundam were useless antiques with less a chance of survival than your average Star Trek redshirt. America did not have the “Super Robot” television shows where a single heroic mecha would save the Earth from an entire evil empire, and thus could hold a more realistic interpretation to what these humanoid war machines might bring to a futuristic field of battle.

This lack of firepower compared to their Japanese counterparts, however, did not make them any less appealing. Instead of specific mecha, fans grew attached to the political and military entities that fielded these weapons, setting the stage for a complex plot. And by happy coincidence, many of the early 3D computing games attempted to simulate vehicles in a realistic manner. For the obsessed fan, it wasn’t a far jump from a program simulating real-life tanks and aircraft to a program simulating a walking humanoid robot.

While the more fantastic Japanese anime of the time would have to wait for more processing power and a long series of failed game designs to create simulacrums of their frenetic dogfighting, the down-to-earth BattleTech design must have seemed perfect for a three-dimensional game at the time. The ‘Mech was fantastic, but real enough for the imagination—programmers’ imaginations—to grasp. Thus, the conditions for a successful computer game based upon the franchise were all there, just waiting for Activision to create what would become a legendary game among PC enthusiasts and giant robot fanatics alike.

MechWarrior 2 is one of those rare examples of a game that got everything right, by filling an open niche with a game designed to fill that niche exactly. There had been, of course, 3D vehicle simulators, and you may guess from the number in the title that MechWarrior 2 was not the first BattleTech PC title. But it was the first game to enthrall a mass audience. The combat engine looked great for the time, and was advanced enough to portray the massive robots in a way that made them feel “solid”—you were not just a robot, but a 100-ton walking death machine who rained down fire and brimstone upon your enemies.

Combat was relatively simple to learn but deep enough to be engaging. Missions were more complex than “destroy all enemies” and could take a few attempts as you tried to figure out the best way to tackle your objectives. In the exact opposite of Doom and other popular games at the time, it had a rich backstory that explained the various factions and their philosophies (pulled from the political and military maneuverings of rulebook “fluff” material and official fiction). It even had primitive multiplayer support in later editions, which was a rarity at a time when modems were measured in now obscure terms such as “baud.”

But the most impressive feat that MechWarrior 2 performed, and why MechWarrior is still remembered today, is that it was a simulation. Arcade-style games featuring mechanical humanoids were and are a dime a dozen; just replace what would be a human character with a robotic-looking human, and you’re set. But MechWarrior 2 wasn’t a simple action game. There were controls for more than just turn, aim, fire and speed; to master the game, you had to learn how to twist your ‘Mech’s torso, order your weapons into groups to deal with changing circumstances on the battlefield, watch your heat levels as you fired energy weapons, and even override your own shutdown mechanism to get that precious extra shot in before your unit exploded into a nuclear flame.

The default first person view, with critical information appearing in your cockpit's HUD, added to the realsim. And if the various ‘Mechs weren’t to your tastes, you could edit them between missions, giving your unit more missile ammo at the expense of a few lasers. This simulation-style gameplay may have turned off a few users who were used to Doom’s simpler control scheme, but Activision had given computer players the impossible by allowing players the chance to pilot a fictional vehicle.

MechWarrior 2 is still, unfortunately, only one of a small number of mecha-oriented games which took this simulation approach. Other than the other games in the MechWarrior series, there are the Heavy Gear PC games (also developed by Activision, and also based upon a Western company’s wargame/role-playing game property), the excellent Armored Core series, Earthsiege/Starsiege, the Gungriffon series, and the Xbox’s Steel Battalion—which actually shipped at the retail price of 200 dollars, because Capcom apparently felt the simulation experience necessitated the largest peripheral controller for a console ever.

Robot Alchemic Drive for the PS2, developed by Sandlot before they became internet-famous for the Earth Defense Force games, could also be counted as a simulation, but it might more accurately be called a meta-simulation, given that you control a character who controls a robot rather than just the robot directly. But today, most of the mecha games produced focus more upon the action and drama of the anime series they are based upon, acting more like distant relatives of 2D “bullet hell” shooters than true simulations of what those mecha would be like if they truly existed. Mecha simulator games are one of those genres that may never die, but whose glory days have certainly passed.

Every few years I try to get MechWarrior 2 to run on a modern Windows system, just as fighting game fans will plug in their SNES once in a while to play Super Street Fighter II and remember the “good ol’ days” before other genres pushed our own favorite genre out of the limelight.

While the genre itself might be on life support, it’s good to know that MechWarrior 2 was an important step forward for gaming. It was one of the first PC games to combine a powerful narrative with complex mission objectives, and this legacy is carried on today in the more complex first person shooters, which tend to have a good amount of backstory and objectives that are more than “kill the enemies” or “the bad guys are out to destroy the world.” Mechwarrior 2 was proof that a large audience could tolerate a story inside an action game.

And while playing Mechwarrior 2 over the net was an option exercised by only a few people due to the connection speeds and lag times of the period, MechWarrior 2 was certainly a major step forward in the expectation that major PC releases would have some form of internet play, and one of the first instances where closely-knit groups would gather together and form team-based tactics, opposed to more traditional “deathmatch” oriented clans. Being able to edit your own ‘Mech’s parts helped popularize customization style games, making Gran Turismo a possible relative of MechWarrior 2 on the video game family line.

Finally, while the simulation style of gameplay has all but died off, many popular computer games now include deeper levels of sophistication, with more options leading to a greater variance in the number of possible strategies. Even if the game and the genre it belonged to are almost forgotten by the mass audience, Mechwarrior's legacy lives on in the more complex game styles of today.

If you'd like to see the game in action, nice people on Youtube have been able to record videos of the game, illustrating the slower pace of the simulation style gameplay. The methodical pace of the robots would probably not feel right when compared to the "instant action" games made today, but the simulation feel is what made the game so memorable and fun. If you're going to pilot 100 tons of steel, it should feel like 100 tons of steel, and the first time you accidentally run into an enemy 'mech you WILL get caught up in the simulation and flinch.

As far as playing the game itself, the original Mechwarrior 2 will run on XP for some people, but others like myself have to load up DOSbox and a hack just to get the game running, and a bit slowly at that. The good news is that the system requirements are fairly low (I ran it perfectly back in the day with 120 mhz and MS-DOS) and a working CD shouldn't be too hard to find.

Posted by chrisb at 4:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (9)

Thanks to Shawn McGrath for sending over info on his new PC/Mac/Linux freeware title, XIQ, which is, reversibly enough, "...inspired by the arcade classic QIX", and was made at the 2nd annual Toronto Game Jam - which looks to have been a v.neat event - full game list from it coming soon.

For this abstract shooter (mmm, abstract shooter - there's a video at the bottom of the info page!): "The objective is to create boxes on the screen that enclose triangles. You shoot lines in four directions using wasd and move with the arrow keys (gamepad works too). You can use the lines both offensively, (creating boxes), and defensively, (blocking off space, creating safe paths to move, etc)."

What's more: "There's four powerups - two that stay on the screen permanently, (and cause great distraction if you leave them for too long), and two temporary ones that are risky to try to get, but are often life-saving." Looks like a well-designed retro treat - and honestly, judging by the video, this is the first game in which I've ever found vector-based triangles to be menacing. So that's a big plus.

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Ah, guerilla marketing - where would we be without you? Probably in a situation where I didn't receive emails such as this one, which starts: "Hi Carless: As a fan of Game Developer's great gaming reviews, I'm happy to offer you some quality fuel for your late-night sessions."

Well, Game Developer doesn't actually review games, and that's my last name, but please, keep going: "I represent Carl's Jr. and Hardee's new Spicy Buffalo Chicken Sandwich (www.spicybuffalo.com). Inspired by the best of dive-bar hotwings, the Spicy Buffalo combines Frank's classic Red-Hot sauce with juicy chicken breast, giving you all the kick and spice of your favorite bar food without the spilled beer and sawdust."

Oh, OK, I see where the video game relevance is here! "And since you're into games, you might like to play with our Lunch Invite widget. Make a Lunch Date with Ashley Hartman (uh, there's a different East Coast link for Hardee's)... you get a $1 off coupon at the end, and you'll get to see a gorgeous girl do your bidding." Aha, appealing to the geeks, here. And the 'gaming insider' capper? " Of course, if you roll female Blood Elves, you're probably used to it."

Dude, I 'roll female Blood Elves' ALL THE TIME. But separately of that, I learned the following:

a) Don't try to shoehorn random gaming references into completely random subject matter;
b) If you're sending out a mass email, try to personalize correctly both the name of the person you are sending it to and what the outlet actually does;
c) Imagine if Electronic Arts was called something different in New York to California. That's the problem Carls' Jr and Hardee's has. Ouch.
d) I just gave these guys free publicity anyhow. Ack.

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Just posted at sister site Gamasutra yesterday is the feature 'The Everyman and the Action Hero: Building a Better Player Character' by Iron Lore's Ben Schneider, who most recently worked on the rather mythological Titan Quest, and has also labored over games for Harmonix and Stainless Steel Studios.

It seems that Schneider has some genuinely well thought-out comments on character crafting: "Working from the template of the everyman and the action hero can help you achieve buy-in from the player, but it’ll take more than that to make your player character something special. In fact, making your protagonist safe is really directly at odds with making him or her original, evocative, or lifelike. There is a vital arm-wrestling match that goes on here between all those limitations and the creative goal of making a really good, memorable character."

Another intriguing point explored in the piece: "Most game developers do a pretty good job of finding that action hero/everyman sweet-spot, but far fewer take the time to make more out of the hero or find a compelling, striking way to introduce them. God of War, Max Payne, and Grand Theft Auto 3 (and 4, it appears!) stand out in this regard, simply for properly setting up the beginning of the game, even, in Max Payne’s and GTA’s cases, if the setup is a pastiche of pulp fiction clichés."

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

Nethack has gotten a lot of talk here, and it remains perhaps the most complex roguelike out there due to its profusion of object interactions, but it is by no means the roguelike with the "most to do." That is, the objective of Nethack, although more complicated than the old days where ultimately all you just had to get fire resistance, level teleport down to the Amulet, get it, then climb out, is still relatively straightforward. The game got a lot more complex in version 3.0, and more complex still in 3.1, but in this respect it really hasn't changed too much since Hack.

The roguelike with, by far, the most to do is ADOM (Ancient Domains Of Mystery), which is perhaps the example of the genre that takes the most ideas from the world of other RPGs. Nowhere is this made more evident than when examining the game's complex web of quests. Nethack has four (although one is different for each character class). ADOM has dozens.

Here is a very small sampling, chosen for a mix of ease of observation by beginning players and raw cool factor.

Save a puppy!
The little girl in Teryino, the first town, asks you to save her dog from a nearby cave. The cave doesn't appear on the map until she asks you. The cave always has a good number of ants in it.

The "cute dog" must be generated (its level reached in the cave) before fourth game days have passed for it to remain alive, which is a very strict time limit considering that the required overworld travel will necessarily take up some of that time. Because of this, the player has almost no opportunity to advance in level except in transit, making this fairly difficult.

Make the Plains Safe For Adventurers!
The sherrif, Tywat Pare of Teryino, assigns two peacekeeping missions to the player during the game. Kranach and his band of raiders appear as a random overworld encounter near Teryino until you reach experience level 6, meaning that sometimes the player won't be able to complete this one due simply to bad luck. Wilderness encounters also get more difficult over time, and wandering the plains uses up a lot of food, so it's not recommended for beginners. The reward is 3000 gold pieces, which some players will find more interesting than others.

The other involves killing the crime lord Hotzenplotz in the nearby outlaw town Murderberg Lawenilothehl, a task that's either challenging or simple to a character at about that point in the game, depending on whether he has ray attack spells. As in, if you don't know any, then his bouncers will probably bounce you to death. If you do know one, you can beat him and is cronies without taking a hit. What else can be said, except, "Wizards rock?"

Kill the Mad Carpenter! (or cure his madness)
Later in the game the player must cross a piranha-infested lake. There are only two ways across the water, and one of them involves learning the skill of Bridge Building. This means something must be done about Yriggs, who carries the only source of that skill in the game, the Manual of Bridge Building.

The Yriggs quest (which I also mentioned last time, should this sound familiar) is one of the coolest features of ADOM, and it comes early enough that it can be done first if the player wants. After talking with Rynt in Teryino, the player can go down to the dungeon approximately to the south-east and descent to level seven to find him. If killed he drops the objects necessary to build bridges, but, usefully, he can also be saved by purposely running away from him, letting him chase you to Jharod the healer on level four. (Like with many of Nethack's features, there aren't many hints within ADOM that this is possible.) Doing this will satisfy Jharod that you are worthy of learning the extremely valuable Healing skill, increasing your rate of natural hit point restoration.

Like many quests, this is also worth a bit of an Alignment change towards Law, which some players will appreciate, and some find annoying.

Perform Last Rites for a Dying Sage! (Or....)
ADOM contains multiple dungeons. The "main" one, usually not seen until the player already has a few experience levels, is the Caverns of Chaos. And in this dungeon, some way down, is the endangered sage, Khelavaster.

The opponent philosophy of roguelike games is, in essence, "everyone is a monster." Characters considered NPCs in other RPGs get full stats, and can usually be attacked and killed, in a roguelike game. Usually they will become angered in the process and made hostile. They are controlled by AI just like the dungeon opposition. Khelavaster is an interesting case, however, because unlike the roguelike tradition, he is part of a scripted encounter.

Khelavaster is generated peaceful on the downstairs of his level, surrounded by chaos servants. In ADOM, there is no way to descend dungeon levels without using stairs, so the player will eventually have to get Khelavaster off them to continue with the game. This is typically not a problem, as talking with him (with the chat command, shift-C) will cause him to immediate die and leave his stuff to the player.

This is the story. See, Khelavaster is the sage who originally predicted this chaos stuff would plague the game's fantasy world. He went into the Caverns of Chaos to try to do something about it And Was Never Seen Again. While Khelavaster is not actually fighting the chaos servants, he is "in stasis" on his level, about to die. But he is actually immortal until the player talks to him; he always perishes in the conversation, in dramatic fashion.

However....

While ADOM's treatment of the encounter may not be roguelike normal, there is a very clever thing the player can do concerning him. It requires finding one of the game's more useful items, an amulet of life saving. As with Nethack's item, if worn by the player or a monster it will save his life one time, remedy the fatal condition, then disintegrate. Also like in Nethack, these are not too common to find. Actually they're pretty rare in ADOM, even more so considering that the game is thought to weight item generation according to dungeon difficulty.

If the player can find an amulet of life saving before talking to Khelavaster, then instead of chatting with him, he can give him the amulet, which logically enough will save his life. This is a fairly nifty trick, right up there with curing Yriggs the Carpenter. It makes the stuff gained from the sage much better (somehow), and late in the game enables the player to attempt an "ultra" ending if he wishes.

The problem is that amulet of life saving are quite rare and usually don't appear until later in the game, while Khelavaster is typically found about one-quarter the way down the Caverns of Chaos, fairly early. None are guaranteed to be generated, and even if the player searches all the available dungeons before reaching that point frequently he won't find one. They can be wished for, but wishes are not much more common than the amulets are, and there are plenty of other things that the player might want instead. But then, it isn't called an "ultra" ending for nothing. (And there are worse things the player must accomplish in order to achieve that....)

Collect ...um... Strange Items!
Ah, the si. For a game that has dozens of artifacts, hundreds of monsters, devious quests, secret features and ultra endings, it's amazing how it's the little things that come to define the game in one's memory.

The si was a relatively early addition to ADOM's equipment list, and despite the fact that it has no real purpose, and doesn't even have much of a logical explanation, it's still there. Probably because were Thomas Biskup to take it out, he'd probably have to fend off a hundred enraged ADOM fans with a stick.

"Si" stands for "strange item," and if you're expecting more of an explanation than that, well, you won't get one, mostly because there isn't one to give.

No one knows what a si looks like. We know the level it's on is filled with a strange smell. We know that the si is a kind of tool. We know it weighs 10 stones. And we know that the si is an artifact, of sorts, despite the fact that the major defining attribute of artifacts, uniqueness, doesn't apply to it.

This is because the si multiplies. So long as one is carried, they will slowly make more of themselves. The means by which this happens is obscure. No message is printed on the screen when it happens. It doesn't seem to happen if it isn't in the player's inventory.

Because they will periodically add an additional 10 stones to your carry weight, careless players will eventually get weighed down by them if they don't notice what's happening and drop some of them. Like artifacts it cannot be destroyed except by special means, but it has little other use, except for generic artifact things: they can be sold for cash, they can be sacrificed to make your god happy with you, and should you need something that's generally indestructible, they more than fit the bill.

Ultimately, what the si is is a whimsy. It's not a reference to anything. It's kinda silly and cool, even though it's not an explicit joke. Like naming the fruit in Rogue, it's just a neat thing that got thrown in just because.

It's good enough for me, anyway.

Sources:
ADOM Guidebook (the most complete source on the game on the web): http://www.andywlms.com/adom/

Posted by John Harris at 8:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

Once again, GSW sister site Game Career Guide has been brave and let Eric-Jon Waugh out of his fenced-off area to analyze, from a game design point of view, a recent and interesting video game.

This time, he takes the lawnmower to Capcom's Xbox 360 exclusive Dead Rising, and within which he calls the game "...the self-appointed answer to everything wrong with videogames as they are now."

He sets the scene rather beautifully, too: "Somewhere between note-sharing exercises like the Game Developers Conference and the growing impact of games like Grand Theft Auto and Gears of War on the Japanese charts, goaded on by the phenomenon known as "gamer drift", in which existing players stop playing and no new players can be found, Western games have slowly begun to resume their aborted influence on Japanese design - just as Japanese design has influenced the West since Nishikado's Breakout-tile Invaders first began to boop down from orbit."

He then neatly files Dead Rising in an interesting place: "At its core what Grand Theft Auto wants is to recapture the glory of Asteroids and Centipede - the old American school, from before Atari fell off a cliff and the PC scene got weird... Dead Rising is that same idea, plus structure. It completes the picture by dragging GTA back into Ed Logg territory, and turning it into the modern equivalent of an Atari Games battle of attrition. Namely, sort of, Gauntlet." Waugh thing, I think I love you.

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Though I'm not as much of a collector as our very own MagWeasel, I've been known to hop on eBay from time to time to pick up some gaming magazine memorabilia, even if shipping for all that dead wood is a little bit excessive.

In fact, Gamasutra contributor Jason Dobson and I [EDIT: Uhoh, grammar fiend commenters object!] recently fought through a fierce bidding war to each pick up a few mid-'80s issues of arcade/amusement trade journal RePlay Magazine, and boy, there's some pretty amazing stuff in there.

RePlay stood alongside rival Play Meter magazine as the only trade chroniclers of the arcade industry as it grew up, crashed, and was reborn in the '80s, and there are some stand-out looks at the Japanese arcade biz in 1986 and in-depth interviews/site visits with Capcom and Konami's U.S. divisions in the issues that I managed to purchase.

However, we obviously wouldn't reprint these articles without permission (something we're currently talking to RePlay about - we'll see what happens!). But in the meantime, there was one Nintendo-supplied press photo from the August 1986 issue of the magazine I wanted to scan in for you all, because I'm pretty sure it's never been available online before, and it shows the beginning of a seminal relationship in the history of video games (click through for hi-res version):

This picture was taken on the first-ever signing of an outside software developer, Rare, to produce titles for Nintendo's VS. System, the NES-based arcade setup. So, from left to right, there are some people you may have heard of - Joel Hochberg of (Rare's U.S. business partner) Coin-It, Chris Stamper of Rare, and Nintendo's Frank Ballouz, Howard Lincoln, and Minoru Arakawa.

What happened from there? Actually, a Steve Kent article for Screenager Central (!) has much of the skinny. Skiing title Slalom, at least, made it out for the VS. System, and also for the NES itself. And obviously, Rare went on to a much closer relationship with Nintendo, creating RC Pro-Am, Donkey Kong Country, Killer Instinct, GoldenEye, and a host of others - and Lincoln and Arakawa were key figures in Nintendo's rise to power in the West, too. And this is where the Nintendo/Rare relationship all started - which makes it an important image.

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Stephen Totilo sent over a note linking to his new MTV News article on "...some observations and interviews I had from Sony Gamer's Day centered around the -- for once -- surprisingly frank and open response to attacks on violent video games" - he comments on it on his blog and the full piece is on the MTV News website.

As Totilo notes: "In previous years, when video games both violent and tame were showcased at the Electronics Entertainment Expo, video game makers did not go out of their way to refer to controversy... Offstage at Sony's San Diego event there were other indications of a change in tone." He's talking to the God Of War PSP folks in particular, and indeed they do try to justify the violent nature of the titles, as follows:

""Chains of Olympus" creative director Cory Barlog knows some people are put off by what Kratos' adventures ask of them. Standing in front of a big-screen TV playing the game, he argued that the discomfort some players feel is intentional. "During [the ancient Greek] wars, people weren't hugging — it was very, very brutal," he said. "We really wanted to stick to that mentality, creating situations within the game to force the player to choose, and kind of morally have to be, what Kratos is like."

You know, I don't really think that's a great explanation. But my God - this _is_ an attempt at explaining artistically why it's done, and that's light years ahead of the normal Rockstar 'do bad stuff, don't comment on it' attitude that they used to radiate - though I will note that even they have got better recently, for example, talking on the record about the same-sex kissing in Bully.

And overall, I do appreciate that there's an attempt to think things through, and particularly, some agreement that there is some thought given to morality: "Ru Weerasuriya, whose Ready at Dawn Studios is handling most of the creative duties on "Chains," agreed that the line is sometimes hard to see. "You go as far as you can," he said, chewing a piece of gum. "Sometimes you have to push it far to then bring it back a little."" The fact that we're discussing a line is certainly making the biz look much less Neanderthal.

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Disney is getting _really_ interesting in the game space recently, and here's the latest example from the House Of Mickey:

"Timed to the release of the Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End video games, Disney Interactive Studios announced today a partnership with Walt Disney Parks and Resorts to release exclusive content for the upcoming Nintendo DS video game at Walt Disney World Resort and Disneyland Resort."

Specifically: "Beginning May 22 with the release of the video game, Disney park guests who bring their Nintendo DS and a copy of the Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End DS video game with them during their visit can download new video game content at specific "X-marks-the-spot" hotspots hidden near the Pirates of the Caribbean attractions. This download unlocks new content such as unlimited health and "savvy," as well as fun extras, including additional costumes. This special content is only available to Disney park visitors and can be accessed with a Nintendo DS."

Personally, I love the idea of wandering around a Disney park with my DS to get extra content in specific places, especially if that content can only _ever_ be unlocked that way and it's cool and bonus. Not sure about unlocking 'cheats' that way like unlimited health - that seems a bit potentially game breaking. But hey, as long as the extra costumes are neat and the game itself is decent, I'm not complaining. More ideas like this, please!

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The New York Times published an intriguing article over the weekend entitled 'Why Work Is Looking More Like a Video Game', which tries to point out that games can teach software a lot of things about motivation and usability - or something like that?

Of course, you only have to wait for the first paragraph for overt implications of games being juvenile: "Paul Johnston has remade his company on the idea that business software will work better if it feels like a game. Mr. Johnston is not some awkward adolescent, but the polished president and chief executive of Entellium, which makes software for customer relationship management."

The gaming comparisons continue: "Rave isn’t exactly the business version of Madden N.F.L., at least not yet. But Craig K. Hall, president of Logos Marketing Inc., a graphics company in Albany, said it reminded him of video games he has played, like the Legend of Zelda. Mr. Hall, 31, says he likes the way Rave pops up information, including news that will matter to clients." This is all a little tenuous, to be honest, but it then wanders into a decent discussion of serious games, so hey!

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at Gamasutra, 'serious games' creator Ian Bogost is making the case that video games should be more mundane, particularly discussing of Nintendo's Brain Age: "It’s certainly a very different kind of game from Halo or even Miyamoto’s own Zelda series, games that allow the player to inhabit complex fantasy worlds. Instead, much of Brain Age’s success seems to come precisely from the ordinariness of its demands."

So - what of this? Would games become more accessible if they tapped into everyday things a little bit more, as opposed to spiralling off into fictional realities? Bogost suggests: "As a medium becomes more familiar, it also becomes less edgy and exciting. This is what [clothing designer] Marc Ecko means when he refers to movies as demystified. Over time, media becomes domesticated, and domestication is a mixed blessing."

But, he cautions, there's an upside: "On the one hand, it allows broader reach and scale. It means that more people can understand and manipulate the medium. Grandma and grandpa understand what they are looking at when you send them a VHS tape of junior blowing out the candles." Do you want to live in a world where games are 'ordinary'? Because sooner or later, we're going to get there - or that's the suggestion.

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Wuhoh, bad news for the folks at the PlayStation Museum, who explain on the site: "The PlayStation Museum is liquidating all of our retail and development hardware and software. Now is your chance to get over 1,500 games, a lot of hardware (including a 10 Million Model PSX and MIB edition) plus a few other surprises."

Here's the eBay auction in question, and let me be the first to say that the selection is _insane_ - though they do note: "Virtually all hardware listed on this site is in the auction and a lot of the software. Due to NDA, the gaming graveyard games are generally off limits (unless listed in the auction)... Unfortunately, this is not a promotion nor a joke."

Quite apart from the ridiculous amounts of boxed software and hardware, including plenty of rare development kits and a prototype PlayStation keyboard, there's by far the biggest set of Lightspan educational PlayStation games I've ever seen - as the linked article says: "In a groundbreaking strategic partnership with Sony, San Diego-based educational software and Internet company Lightspan has cornered the K-8 market on video games in the classroom... PlayStation produces all of Lightspan's software at Sony Disc Manufacturing, and Sony charges license fees for the use of its gaming platform for a for-profit venture." Now, the 'BUY IT NOW' price is $30,000, of course, but you can always make an offer?

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

One of the games I picked up recently (and, actually, was the first to reveal, thanks to GameFly's advance listing madness) is THQ's Tetris Evolution for Xbox 360, Sure, the game is inexplicably not for XBLA, rather shipping on a disc. But the Mass Media-developed title is at least a relatively cheap $29.99, so we'll have to forgive it for not being Arika's awesome Tetris Grand Master Ace arcade conversion.

Now, there are a couple of notable issues with Evolution - most particularly that nowhere in the manual or the game itself (that I could find!) does it explain the T-Spin, a tricky rotation move that you need to master to get more than one Achievement. Fortunately, the excellent TetrisConcept wiki has a special page devoted to it and mastering it.

In fact, TetrisConcept goes even further in terms of tactics, and has an 'ST Stacking' page, explaining "...a more-or-less sustainable (under Random Generator) method of stacking tetrominoes to form successive 4-line clears and T-spins." And yep, used it and busted out a two-line T-spin in no time, so it definitely seems to work.

Personally, I like Tetris Evolution a lot more than the mediocre Tetris Worlds from the previous gen - though Evolution does have the 'infinite rotate at bottom of screen' or 'Easy Spin' rule by default, which is part of the almost weirdly scary, Henk Rogers-enforced Tetris Guidelines now. I quite like it, but many purists rage over it.

Finally, what's particularly neat is that Evolution has networked high-scores, and you can see the actual game replay from the people on top of each of the (many) Xbox Live high-score tables for each mode. Seeing what the masters are doing is incredibly useful for racking up high scores of your own, particularly for the limited-time modes, and gets a massive thumbs-up from me. [If you don't have the game but wants to see Tetris masters in action, there's an excellent YouTube Tetris video glossary on TetrisConcept, too.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Last weekend, the New York Times published an excellent article by Clive Thompson called 'Sex, Drugs and Updating Your Blog', which deals with how the web is allowing musicians to connect with fans and make a living via altogether different promotional means than simply booking a gig, posting some flyers, and turning up to it.

Thompson explains how "...fame can come instead through viral word-of-mouth, when a friend forwards a Web-site address, swaps an MP3, e-mails a link to a fan blog or posts a cellphone concert video on YouTube. So musicians dive into the fray — posting confessional notes on their blogs, reading their fans’ comments and carefully replying."

So my question is - why don't more indie game creators make sure that they have blogs that talk about themselves, how they make games, day-to-day musings, and hints about what they're working on? If your audience connects with you and gets to know you, then they will be even more loyal and happy to interact with you. Since you can simply subscribe to an RSS feed to keep tabs on creators nowadays, I think all indie game makers should do this.

A couple of random examples - Cave Story creator Pixel has (or had) a development diary which was pretty simple, but even got translated into English because his fans are so rabid. On the other hand, Armadillo Run creator Peter Stock has a fascinating story behind his title, but his homepage doesn't even give a hint that a single person created the entire game, let alone the quite probably interesting trials and tribulations behind it.

Of course, it's your own choice - and anyone is welcome to be private, there's no mandate to be self-exposing. But don't underestimate the advantages of letting your potential audience know about you, and not just in the form of a playable demo - rather, in the form of humanizing info, pictures, and remarks. More people just might buy your game because of it!

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Over at Eurogamer, Alec Meer has been taking a close look at Ageia's PhysX cards, on the occasion of the release of CellFactor: Revolution, which is "...a game originally intended to be a full-blooded celebration of PhysX."

He makes some good points about the hardware physics card solution (though there's also a software SDK underlying it all with the same name, just to warn again confusion), particularly focusing here: "To become a success, PhysX needs games based upon rather than merely aided by its abilities, but, as the smallness and brokenness of Cellfactor demonstrates, such a game won't get made because not enough people have PhysX cards. Catch-22."

In the end, Meer suggests that, unless Unreal Tournament 3 is spectacularly better with PhysX, it's pretty much over for Ageia, and concludes: "If PhysX dies, it won't be because the hardware has failed; it hasn't. It'll be because it was a small fish in a small pond already filled with sharks. It's Beagle Two up against NASA, and while you have to admire its pluckiness, its homemade, tinfoil and sellotape approach was never going to be able to compete with infinitely rich giants that could turn its ideas into just one tiny mass-produced component amongst thousands."

I'd only add that over $65 million in funding doesn't make the firm a spectacularly small fish - but it's definitely rough for a company to compete with a $300 hardware card that doesn't have any physical outputs on the back of it, and works with just a handful of major games. Probably a sign of the company's performance so far is that I have a couple of the cards that I was considering giving away in a GSW competition - but I decided that people wouldn't be interested enough. Doh. Integrated physics cards in GPUs for the longer-term future, though? V. possible.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Just wanted to check in - has anyone had issues with posting comments to GameSetWatch in the last couple of weeks? I just happen to have posted a comment that got filtered as junk for some random reason, and I went and grabbed it out of our 'Junk Spam' directory, but that makes me a little concerned.

Right now, we're using Akismet on top of a MovableType install, but honestly, we're probably one of the largest game blogs still allowing anonymous comments without login, due to the ridiculous amounts of comment spam out there - looks like GSW is getting about 1,500 spam comments per day right now, youch.

Anyhow, comment below, or if that gets spam filtered (hah!), mail us at editors at gamesetwatch.com, and tell us when your comment did or didn't get posted. Also, suggestions below on possible solutions are welcome - should we add a CAPTCHA? We could even use TypeKey with forced login, but I don't think that's too popular.

In the longer term, we're moving toward single sign-on across all CMP Game Group sites/events, so we might be able to tie that in to commenting here - which would be the best and coolest, but won't happen for a while.

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Now here's an interesting question, much along the lines of the AP discussion about Paris Hilton we covered a while ago - when, if ever, should deliberately controversial gaming subjects NOT be covered? Shacknews' Chris Remo has a detailed post called 'On Giving Attention to V-Tech' which looks at this issue even further magnified.

Remo explains: "Yesterday, we ran a news piece dealing with the media coverage and political situation surrounding Ryan Lambourn's tasteless game based on the recent shooting at Virginia Tech. I approved the story... because of its well-researched and, I believe, contextually clear angle highlighting the sadly myopic view of video games taken all too frequently by those with a public voice."

He continues of Shacknews user complaints not to give the creator attention: "That complaint is one with which I would generally agree if we were simply reporting on the game's creation and availability. This, however, is not the case. More relevant to the coverage sphere of this site is the situation that has sprung up around the game, with elected officials using the game's subject as a platform to further erode the already embattled reputation of the video game industry as a whole--or even the concept of games as an entertainment form!--and with mainstream media effortlessly blurring the line between a freely distributed nonprofessional game and a product of the established game development community."

Over at TIGSource, Derek Yu does some further analysis, due to a Destructoid double interview with Lambourne and Super Colombine RPG's Danny Ledonne that's just been posted. And I think he's right on the money with the following statement: "I find it interesting that Ledonne is very articulate and Lambourn is… well, he did it for the “lulz.” Neither game is a success, in my opinion, from a gameplay perspective or a social perspective. What they’ve proved is that games can create discussion and cause controversy… is that something that needs to be proven?"

A particularly interesting comment in the TIGSource thread from 'Underwhelmed', too: "I know that Ledonne says he did it for art, and Lambourn says he did it for attention, but really, Lambourn is the only one telling the truth here. Both of these guys are attention whores, Ledonne is just a little more articulate and willing to pretend it was for some other reason."

So what's the fix here? As Remo says, whenever games are not seen by public figures such as politicians as a monolithic entity, then it'll be easier for the entire art form not to be tarred with one brush - Hollywood and YouTube are not synonymous, despite both being filmed, for example. But then again, if we're asking for games as a whole to be awarded free speech rights on the basis of 'flagship titles' such as SCMRPG, are we going about it the right way? Like many of you, I'm deeply conflicted, and wish our poster child wasn't quite so ugly.

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

There's an excellent editorial over at HDRLying called 'Board Games and Portable Heroes: Gaming Accessibility and Ease of Entry in the Modern World' which talks about how games need to change for the modern gamer's time availability.

There's nothing that's that new here in the intro, though it's explained eloquently: "With age, comes heaping responsibility, and diminishing free time. I spend an excess of 8-10 hours at work. Many times I have no time to play games at night time after work, either because social responsibility calls, or I merely feel too drained from the day`s events to undertake a long play session."

But there is an interesting variant for commuting on public transport: "Since I moved to Japan, I began taking the train to work instead of driving, which left me with at least 45 minutes each day with little to do but admire the scenery. Then, at work, I find myself with a couple hours of rest time on my hands, yet again having little to do. Just a few short weeks after taking the job, I found myself bringing a DS to work each day, playing RPGs and long sprawling adventures with little hesitation." So... should game companies analyze commuting trends in different countries to decide what type of portable games to design?

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Got an interesting note from Australian machinima/short movie maker Thuyen Nguyen: "Thought you might be interested in a short film I just completed. About a month ago, I read what seemed to be daily reports of the "games are bad" variety. As a gamer, I disagree, of course. But why is that?"

He continues: "Thus, I put my feelings about what games mean to me into a 5-minute film [called 'The Most Powerful Person In The World' - YouTube Link, Archive.org link.]. To my knowledge, there hasn't been a "love letter" like this before. It's quite "artsy", but I hope you enjoy it nevertheless."

And, you know - I did enjoy it, even if the concept of fan-made videos cutting up game segments tends to fill me with dread. But it seems to have a little soul and thought behind it, with an 'inspiration' credit to pensive art-film 'Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait', a loping idm soundtrack by Finnish musician & Monotonik-releasing buddy Lackluster, and some of my favorite moments from games collaged artfully. I guess when games can have memorable collages like this, we know we're getting somewhere with the artform, hm?

[For those wanting to know more about Nguyen, there's a mini-profile of his work up on the MachinimOz site, specifically discussing some of the machinima he's made using The Sims, such as 'An Unfair War'.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

['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.]

Before kicking off, I thought it'd be a good idea to discuss the rumors that Nintendo Power is closing, first reported by IGN.

The rumor seemed to come as a pretty big surprise to the rest of the industry, even with the recent unclear state of which Nintendo of America sections are moving to which new area of the US from Redmond. However, everyone I've contacted who'd be in a position to know what's up with NP isn't saying anything -- a "no comment" state of affairs, where you'd think that folks would be denying it up and down if things were sailing along smoothly over at NP.

I don't have any evidence to back up the following claim, but I think this indicates that NP is either folding or could theoretically be turning into a Wii channel. The latter option makes absolutely perfect sense to me personally, the more I think about it. NOA and NP produce the exact same content they're producing now, except they charge 200 Wii Points or whatever for every fortnight's update. Their overhead's drastically reduced (no postage, no printing costs), and their target audience -- remember the teenage male "fanboys" discussed in NP's own media guide? -- is served on a more direct and personal basis.

With OPM dead in the US and off sharply in the UK thanks to a lack of cover disc (and OXM rapidly reinventing itself thanks to a 360 coverdisc not being that big a deal to Internet-ready households), an elves-leaving-Rivendell type exodus to online seems like the ideal next evolution for "official" publications. Nothing is going to compare to Nintendo Power as a magazine, but would Nintendo Power the Wii channel have access to a wider audience and potentially be useful to far more people than "fanboys"? I hope so.

You can hear me pontificate more on this subject tomorrow when Episode 30 of the Player One Podcast is uploaded. I'm on there as a special guest, and in addition to Nintendo Power's situation, I'll be discussing the modern state of magazines, great old mags, how I managed to pack over 6000 issues and three ferrets into a single room, and much more. Listen, you!

Until then, click forward for a rundown of all the game mags of the past two weeks.

Game Informer June 2007

Cover: Army dude

All of a sudden, Game Informer has an influx of non-endemic advertising -- Old Spice, Honda, three branches of the US military, Ball Park Franks, and (as always) gold ol' Bowflex. Apparently GI's readers are a lot more patriotic (and have far more stupendous abs) than I envisioned them.

Assuming that these are not complimentary (i.e. free) ads of some sort, then GI's marketing department is certainly earning their keep, especially considering how much higher GI's ad rates are over the rest of the game-mag pack. It all helps to make this month's issue 132 pages long, 20 more than last month and bucking the "summer of discontent" thinning-out trend that the industry traditionally faces. Hope they keep it up -- I know that all tech mags face the same issues these days, but having such an enormous, billion-dollar business covered by dinky little 100-page mags just seems wrong.

Connect (the news section) is utterly fascinating as usual. There's a two-page feature on the "uncanny valley" of game graphics, a concept I'm amazed that any consumer game mag besides Edge would try to tackle, along with a seven-page T&T-style roundtable that attempts to answer "the big questions" -- is PC gaming dead, has Sony already lost, can anyone make good Wii games besides Nintendo, and so forth. I'm tempted to say "forget it" to any other US mag's news section at this point because now that Computer Games/MASSIVE is gone, GI does it so much better than anyone else that it's not even close.

The features I'm not quite so ecstasic about. Call of Duty 4 and Square's The Last Remnant are the main ones, and after reading them both, I think GI dropped the ball on the cover choice. A marine shoot-em-up franchise changing venues from one hackneyed, played-it-a-million-times European location to a hackneyed, played-it-a-thousand-times Middle East location is not news. Square's first serious, full-budget original franchise in years, complete with a ton of interesting quotes from the game's Japanese director, is definitely news -- and it also makes for one of GI's better-written features in recent memory. Besides, what's the point of putting a brand name on a cover if you can't even really make out anything on the picture that goes with it?

Smaller features on Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Conviction (which looks exactly like an episode of 24, they aren't trying to hide it) and random-Codemasters-title-of-the-week Rise of the Argonauts round out the feature well. The reviews are fine as always, unless you like Pokemon, in which case maybe you're better off not opening this issue at all. You've been warned.

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

Cover: World of Warcraft

Not much is happening in PC games right now, apparently, so what the hey, how about 13 pages out of a 102-page magazine devoted to World of Warcraft? This would normally be disaster for a casual reader (as anyone who's picked up a copy of Beckett Massive Online Gamer knows), but this piece is written by Sean Molloy, who I still think is the best writer in all of video games media (and who would probably be very embarrassed if I brought up his GamePro "persona" at this point, so I won't), and his 13 pages are half deep look into the Blizzard offices in Irvine, half trivia about the game and its developers. It's all great to read and easily worthy of the good name GFW's building up for itself in the realm of features.

For the more hardcore among us, there's exclusive coverage of Flagship's Mythos and a dev profile of the crazy Russians behind IL-2 Sturmovik. For the not-so-hardcore, there's an interview with Peter Moore that continues to make him look as evil-incarnate as he possibly can. I don't remember him having that look at Sega, I dunno...

Game Developer May 2007

Cover: Elebits

Awwwwww. This would be great cover art for Nintendo Dream or some other hardcore-oriented Japanese mag, but it looks positively lovely when juxtaposed with GD's simple cover look. The internal illustrations inside the Elebits postmortem are quite endearing, too, not to mention Shingo Mukaitoge's text.

Beckett Spotlight: Cheat Codes June/July 2007

Cover: Super Paper Mario

This magazine has no ads. At all. The back cover is an "alternate" cover of sorts with God of War II on it. That's pretty rough.

But I don't care about that, because this issue kicks off Video Gamer Spotlight, a page devoted to interviewing one of Cheat Codes' readers that reminds me of the goofier days of Nintendo Power's letters section. The first subject is Marcellus Swint, a 19-year-old Philadelphian who works for FYE as their "resident know-it-all" and lists Sonic Adventure as his favorite game of all time ("I'll admit that the series has hit its inevitable rocky period, but I remain steady and true to the Blue Blur").

I'd love to scan the picture that Marcellus Swint sent into the magazine, but I think I'll save it for the next big natural disaster or terror attack, because I'm sure we'll all need a good laugh then.

Ultimate Videogame Codebook (CHEATS!) Volume 12

Look out, it's another Future special! This one has PS3 and Wii cheats, I hear, nestled somewhere among its 320 pages!

I feel like such a tool for buying these sometimes, but I just can't resist CHEATS! in big block letters for some reason. Ah well.

[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 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over at the indie game love-in that is Gibbage, they've revealed a bunch of info about Kudos: Rock Legend, the PC 'life sim' strategy game follow up that continues the GSW-mentioned title by means of LOUD ROCK MUSIC and star-making shenanigans. Neat!

Explaining the game, creator Cliff Harris sez: "Kudos: Rock Legend casts the player as the singer in a band. You can choose your avatar from some presets, before putting together a backing band made up of up to 5 members... Each musician has their own attributes - ability, motivation personality etc. Some are articulate (great for interviews) some are photogenic, some are lazy, pessimistic, egotistical etc. Some are destructive and can cause damage backstage and smash up instruments."

What's more: "You write songs by slotting together different song ideas in a minigame, and you can ‘unlock’ more ideas through seeing rival bands, playing great gigs or listening to CDs." Oh yeah, and: "The game's music was sung specially by Julianne Regan, who was the singer for All About Eve, all those years ago." OK, you would think that would be on the shoegaze/folk-y end of rawwwk, but it's an awesome get for an indie music game, don't you think? I guess Regan's collaborative project Jules Et Jim does music for a few games, actually - neat.

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

Hey, it's that time of month again where we debut a new issue of Game Developer magazine, our adorable print offspring, and there's some pretty neat stuff in here - especially the Elebits postmortem from Shingo Mukaitoge, since it's awesome to get a Japanese perspective on development for the Wii. Here goes:

"The May 2007 issue of Game Developer magazine, the sister print publication to Gamasutra.com, and the leading U.S. trade publication for the video game industry, has shipped to subscribers and is available from the Game Developer Digital service in both subscription and single-issue formats.

The cover feature for the May issue is a postmortem for Konami's Wii-exclusive title Elebits, and is described as follows:

"With an almost reverse-Katamari Damacy aesthetic, in which the player throws objects in various environments while searching for creatures, Elebits is Konami’s latest original IP for Wii. Producer Shingo Mukaitoge gives an uncommonly straightforward assessment of the ups and downs of working with a constrained hardware — and more importantly, in a short development cycle."

The May issue of the magazine also includes a themed 'Professional Career Guide' section within it, headlined by Paul Hyman's 'Moving On Up' feature, which talks to multiple game professionals about how to get ahead, and is described as follows: "A career move doesn’t always involve leaving a company. Developers have a bounty of choices within reach, from changing job titles to moving to a different studio within the same company. But the decision isn’t always entirely in one’s own hands."

The major technical feature for the issue is 'Collada: Content Development Using An Open Standard', in which the open-source file interchange format is discussed by one of its primary creators at Sony: "Collada is a free to use standard that allows developers to share files across multiple applications in order to improve workflow. In this technical article, Rémi Arnaud and Kathleen Maher reveal Collada’s roots and practical application."

The issue is rounded out by the customary in-depth news, code, art, audio, and design columns from Game Developer's veteran correspondents, as well as product reviews and editorial columns.

Worldwide paper-based subscriptions to Game Developer magazine are currently available at the official magazine website, and the Game Developer Digital version of the issue is also now available, with the site offering six months and a year's subscriptions, alongside access to back issues, all for a reduced price.

There is now also an opportunity to buy the digital version of May 2007's magazine as a single issue. Newsstand copies of the magazine are now available at North American outlets including Barnes & Noble and other specialty bookstores."

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Got a press release here about the Hip-Hop Chess Federation and Ubisoft, and really - isn't that enough to run the press release info about it? The event it's promoting is tomorrow, too - here goes: "Today the Hip-Hop Chess Federation (HHCF) announced that Ubisoft, one of the world’s largest video game publishers has been added to the list of donors for the Hip-Hop, Chess and Life Strategy Tournament held at the Omega Boys/Girls Club in San Francisco, CA on May 19, 2007, from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m."

"“I am grateful and honored that industry leaders like Ubisoft have extended a helping hand to the HHCF. They have been consistent in creating games that are not only visually exciting, but mentally uplifting.” says HHCF co-founder Adisa Banjoko. Ubisoft, creators of hit video game titles like Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell®, has donated hundreds of its top-selling Chessmaster® X games to provide to participants of the HHCF tournament." Is Chessmaster X a bit like Terminator X?

What's more: "HHCF programs include a variety of different activities including: chess lessons combined with life strategies coaching, general public vs. entertainers chess tournaments, star-studded grudge matches and more... Participants in the Hip-Hop, Chess & Life Strategies Exhibition include Chessmaster spokesperson and chess phenomenon Josh Waitzkin, platinum recording artist RZA of Wu-Tang Clan, award-winning film director Kevin Epps, DJ QBert and countless others." Here's an AllHipHop.com story about the summit - it's all a bit Sun Tzu, really.

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Via Nelson Minar's Del.icio.us, he points out the awesome World Of Warcraft Small Pets guide at Warcraftpets.com - and I call the site awesome because I don't play World Of Warcraft (unopened box sitting above my monitor right now!), but I'm still fascinated by what is effectively an Audubon book for WoW.

As is explained on the page: "WarcraftPets.com is your guide to all 71 vanity pets (also known as noncombat pets, minipets, trophy pets, and critter pets). Use the pet filters to sort this list by binding, faction, source, or rarity."

Some of my favorite critters that I was amused by while browsing include the 'adorable' cockroach, of which site owner Breanni says: "While roaches repulse most people, this one is pretty neat. When you’re on the move, he flies behind, landing whenever you come to a halt."

Or, even better, Peanut the mini-elephant: "This pet is chosen among three vanity pets as a reward after completing a chain of Children's Week quests that begin in Outland... Collecting all three pets on the same character is possible (over the course of three years) since the quests are repeatable each year." Oh, jeez, discussing collecting characters over three years? That sums up how crazily addictive WoW is, I suspect, which is why my retail box is staying unopened for now.

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

That, my friends, is the question that all the cool kids are asking themselves today, since sister site Gamasutra just published 'Eugeneology: An Interview with Eugene Jarvis', with the Defender and Robotron creator discussing "...his work at Raw Thrills, controversy over Target: Terror, and the XBLA legacy of his twitch game trailblazing."

There's some neat insight in there on today's arcade scene, with Jarvis explaining of projects at Raw Thrills such as The Fast & The Furious: "Our budget ranges from two to four million dollars typically for an arcade game... that includes software, hardware, special interface boards, mechanical engineering for controls, and even the plastic mold. People want to see a new-looking game, so you have to put new plastic mold on where you sit and on the control panels. It's kind of a style-conscious business."

Also, when asked about the Robotron influence on some of the top Xbox Live Arcade titles, and whether he'd consider going there, Jarvis explains: "We have [considered Xbox Live Arcade], and it's something we've been tossing around and would like to get involved in. We've just been so booked up on doing real arcade games that we haven't had the chance yet, but we hope that maybe some day we'll have some of our arcade releases show up on Xbox Live." We can but hope!

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

At the shooter oasis that is Shoot The Core, Posty has revealed the first annual World's Greatest Shmup Player Tournament, which "...will be held on June 9th and 10th as part of the Midwest Gaming Classic at The Olympia Resort Center in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin." Dude, Oconomowoc!

Anyhow, this actually sounds like fun: "This tournament, co-sponsored by Twin Galaxies, Shoot The Core and the GOAT Store, LLC, will be held to declare the best overall shmup (or "shoot em up") player in the world! [The tournament] combines many of the best games in the genre into a unique challenge designed to put the skills of players to the test in a way which has never been attempted in a traditional video game tournament."

The only slightly odd thing, as far as I can see, is the organizers won't tell you what games are being prepared, beforehand - so you basically have to 'know' all shooters to some degree, a rough task when a lot of them are fairly memorization-based! But if you can master them, that's why you're the World's Greatest, I guess.

[There's more info on the Midwest Gaming Classic events available, incidentally - the Midwest Pinball Tournament is also taking place there, and yes, there are women's and kids' versions of the shooter tournament too. Wacky.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

There's a certain, slightly obsessive breed of person who wants to explore some of the less-traveled roads of console gaming. I fear that I'm one, and I know that Joel Reed Parker is, judging by his new Game Of The Blog post, which runs down some of the Xbox and Gamecube game exclusives that you probably weren't thinking very hard about.

He notes by way of introduction: "Notable titles I've found so far: Tork, Cel Damage, Whacked (all Xbox) and two for the Gamecube: Universal Studios Theme Park (more on that one another day) and Chibi-Robo (Holy shit! I'm actually playing a well-made game!)." And boy, Universal Studios for GameCube is a story unto itself - both myself and co-workers seem to have independently played it and adored its terrible gameplay.

Anyhow, Joel has a pretty good list if you click through, but feel free to either add titles to it, comment on some of the titles on it, or add some PS2 exclusives. What we're really asking, as he points out in the comments, is system-exclusive last-gen titles which are 'interesting', but not God Of War-size obvious - for Xbox, PlayStation 2, or GameCube. What are they, and why are they worth looking at and/or laughing at? That's your GameSetQ for the week!

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

The blog of the terrifically bearded game scholar Henry Jenkins has just posted a thesis extract focusing on 'modding' Animal Crossing, as written by his student Kristina Drzaic, and as he notes: "This passage is interesting in part because of the way she brings together an analysis of game mechanics with a discussion of the grassroots fan culture surrounding the game."

Kristina explains of the game: "No Animal Crossing village looks like any other. For instance, gamers Filip and Zvonimir Sola transformed their village into an ethnically Croatian one. They made their animals wear Croatian colors, designed a Croatian flag, and made their animals speak Croatian phases, (certainly a modification the programmers never imagined.) In contrast, gamers Will, Neil, Nic and Dan Secor, in their village "E" caused all the animal villagers to wear naked human clothing. This modification effectively transformed the village into a nudist colony, another unsanctioned alteration within the game."

It's a little dryly described, but I get what she's saying - you give the players enough latitude to 'create their own fun', effectively: "Fundamentally, the creation of player made secrets sustains Animal Crossing as a game. In effect, the rule modifications function as self-created attractions. Game play is maintained through the attraction of secrets and the display inherent in perceived subversion. The game has no narrative and no end, instead the player jumps randomly from self-made attraction to attraction. In essence, Animal Crossing is an endless jolt of surprise or (if you will) a video game of player-generated secret attractions."

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over at big sister site Gamasutra, Alistair Wallis has completed his latest 'Playing Catch-Up' column, this time talking to adventure game notable Jane Jensen, creator and designer of Sierra’s Gabriel Knight series.

There's some interesting notes on the behind-the-scenes genesis of the Gabriel Knight franchise itself: "“At the time, [Sierra co-founder] Ken Williams was like, ‘Well, I’m a little disappointed in this idea - I wish you’d come up with something lighter and more cheerful. No one wants to play something dark and depressing on the computer. But I guess we’ll let you go ahead’. That was pretty nerve-wracking,” Jensen comments. “I worried that he was right, that it would flop.”"

Jensen also has interesting, and I think very possible, plans for the adventure genre in casual games, which is getting more and more expansive in terms of game design possibilities recently: "“Long term,” she considers, “I really would like to see adventure games in the casual gaming space. We should be able to sell a million units of a good adventure game - not just mine but any good adventure. That’s what I’d like to see.”"

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Just received a note from Jane McGonigal about her ARG World Without Oil, and it's well worth re-iterating and checking out the work towards a solution on Unfiction.com, because it's a pretty interesting project - it was mentioned in passing when GSW covered the SF Weekly article on Jane, but we didn't really focus on it.

Jane explains that World Without Oil is "...funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and it’s the first alternate reality game to harness the collective intelligence of gamers to address a real world problem (oil dependence!)... In the first two weeks, we’ve had 1500 people from around the world (including soldiers in Iraq!) contribute original content to the game (videos, photos, web comics, blog posts, etc.) and over 35,000 people play."

What I found particularly notable is that there's an Unfiction messageboard thread which isn't directly solving the problems of the ARG - but rather, talking about the issues of alternative power, with commentary like this: "Until we build more nuclear, hydroelectric, geothermal, solar, wind, wave, etc. power generation facilities, fuel-cells are not the answer to our problems." So people are thinking about the problem - which is the entire point of this exercise.

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So, blimey - no sooner did I post about Naughty Dog co-founders Rubin and Gavin's new project, then commenter 'Hanford' points out a TechCrunch article that MySpace looks to be buying the Web 2.0-style tech company, which "allows users to create slide shows using video, photos, text and effects/transitions" directly in their web browser.

As TC's Michael Arrington notes: "Flektor has a killer team of founders, Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin, who previously co-founded game developer Naughty Dog (Crash Bandicoot and Jak [&] Daxter) and were acquired by Sony Computer Entertainment in 2000. Rubin and Gavin have leveraged their experience with gaming to create an awesome user experience at Flektor. Also, Flektor is custom code built on Flex, whereas Photobucket’s competing offering is built with Adobe’s tools. If Adobe decided to compete directly in this space, MySpace will be in a better position owning their own code."

He continues: "The acquisition also makes sense from a strategic standpoint. MySpace has massive distribution as the largest site on the Internet. Photobucket brings storage to the table, and the Flektor team looks to be able to create awesome tools for users to create content. The three services actually fit together nicely." This is not officially confirmed by MySpace or Flektor yet, but TechCrunch is generally on the money - congrats to Rubin and Gavin if so!

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[The Aberrant Gamer is a new column dedicated to the kinks and quirks we gamers tend to keep under our hats-- those predilections and peccadilloes less commonly discussed in conventional media. Hentai gaming, fantasy fanfics, twisted psychology and notes from the dark side-- we'll expose, discuss and enjoy the delicious underbelly of our beloved gaming universe.]

The H-Game genre is a peculiar one; many people have played at least one cracked title traded furtively over message boards, and they're easier to find on torrent sites than many mainstream ROMs-- yet they're almost never openly discussed.

Recently, though, H-Game discussion's begun spreading like venereal disease, piquing the curiosity of the uninitiated and leading to some inevitable questions-- are these really just sex games, or is there more to the story?

Though The Aberrant Gamer will examine individual titles in further detail (as Sexy Videogameland has done with Kana: Little Sister and with Nocturnal Illusions), an over-arching truth emerges as a commonality among all of these decidedly bizarre titles-- there's always something else going on.

Some of these games make an earnest attempt at the romantic-- even if their vision of romance resembles that of a fifteen year old boy (give flowers, receive sex marathon). These "dating sims" can be all the more haunting in that respect-- it feels a little uncomfortable, a little greasy-handed, to nobly woo a sweet-faced high-school girl in a game that you play-- let's be frank-- to get off.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, H-Games can feature elaborately complex, often dark storylines-- sometimes a flimsy smokescreen that seems designed to forgive sexual situations that would raise the eyebrows of some criminal psychologists, and at other times a downright suspension of reality, making the entire masturbatory experience seem downright surreal.

Whatever the device, H-Games inevitably evoke some reaction other than plain old arousal-- you might laugh at them, you might feel like a creep, you might be rather offended (yeah, since we gamers are so sensitive to ambiguously-aged anime chicks). Or, as with Kana: Little Sister, you might even get a little choked up. Far from being simply a more interactive alternative to plain ol' porn, the H-Game is definitely its own animal.

Among other issues, The Aberrant Gamer will review these games regularly, and welcomes your tips and suggestions about the strangest, best, worst and silliest Hentai titles you've seen-- and anything else sexy, creepy, twisted and clinically aberrant in the gaming world. More to come, so keep your eyes peeled and send me your tips!

[Leigh Alexander is a blogger at her Sexy Videogameland site and reviewer for outlets including Paste Magazine. She can be reached at leigh_alexander1 AT yahoo DOT com.]

Posted by Leigh Alexander at 11:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Definitely appreciate a good 'ol spoof, and just got a press release which I was pretty sure was not completely legit - and indeed, a good Googling reveals that the company, Game-A-Vision, is, according to the Wikipedia page, "...a fictional video game publisher to be featured in an upcoming animated series from G4. The company appears to produce games in the "old school" style, but with a decidedly warped sensiblity."

Here's the meat of the press release: "Put away the 20-sided die, fold up the Monopoly board and get ready for a new type of game – a "Video" game! Gameavision is leading the 8-bit revolution with two new electronic games, "CrossWalk" and "Bar Fight." Feel the heat of crossing the street! Get drunk and fight like an honest American! Gameavision even has a homepage on The World Wide Web and it's already generating substantial buzz on the internet and on industry web logs...You can even play versions of our best-selling games like " 2 Card Monte" and " Hang Man.""

Also pretty 'interesting' - their company bio: "Based in Sunnyvale, CA, Gameavision has been a creator of fine interactive entertainment for over 25 years. Gameavision rose to supremacy with its early hits like "Hobo Killer" which rivaled the profits of other early arcade games "Galaga" and "Centipede"." Uhm, 'Hobo Killer'? Oh kaaay.

[Oh, and there's an initial press release from G4 last year about this project: "G4... has signed a deal with writer-director-actor Adam de la Peña (“Minoriteam,” “I’m With Busey,” “The Man Show”) for a half-hour animated pilot set in the freewheeling world of 1980s video-game programmers. The series will be produced in Los Angeles by de la Peña’s company, Monkey Wrangler."]

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We previously mentioned the distinctly eyebrow-raising student game 'Scientology Pwned' - and look, there's been a comment on that GSW post since I last checked it:

"The next case of a killed Scientologist might be traced right back to this site, stirring up hatred and murder. Think about it."

True or not, Derek at TIGSource has a new update revealing: "Zi-Xiao Liang, creator of Scientology PWNED, has informed me that his game (in which you blow away the faithful followers of Xenu) was the target of local police, who are making him change the name of the game."

There's an IGDA forums thread from Liang in which he explains: "I got a call from Detective Chris Kiriakopoulos from the Hamilton Central Police Station's Hate Crime Unit/Intelligence Branch [and then Liang visited the police station for questioning].... we play Q&A for a while regarding my background. Kiriakopoulous begins by asserting my game borders a hate crime. So I spend a while convincing him: a) my game is not motivated by hate b) I had neither the intention nor the capacity to carry out attacks against scientologists c) scientology is not a religion in canada. d) the game is not solicited and therefore I'm not actively advocating anything."

He continues: "A reoccurring question Kiriakopoulous kept asking was "Given that your game has offended people, what do you plan to do?" To which I initially responded "nothing" since I was under the impression offending people isn't a hate crime. He didn't like that answer too much.... anyways, in the end he 'suggested' I change the name of the game to something which made no reference to Scientology. He didn't mind me keeping the sprites, bullets, blood etc." Interesting, to say the least - again, I don't know that the game has a particularly sophisticated social message, but there are potent freedom of speech issues in there.

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Many of you may be fans of Daniel Cook and his Lost Garden blog, so we're delighted to note that we've got him to write some features for Gamasutra, and the first, called 'The Circle of Life: An Analysis of the Game Product Lifecycle', is now online.

Cook starts by explaining: "In 1994, encyclopedic game site MobyGames lists that 20 graphic adventure games were released. By 2002, the number of titles had plummeted to 3. The halcyon days of the graphic adventure genre are now long past and many of its descendants are relegated to a niche status in the modern gaming market."

He continues: "This is all part of a much broader trend. Genres can be treated like product categories that evolve through a predictable series of life cycle stages. They rise in popularity and then decline. Along the way, both the needs of your users and the competitive dynamics of the market shift quite dramatically. Understanding the genre lifecycle trends can help you strategically position your game design for an improved shot at success." All this is well-supported with graphs, too - blimey!

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Over at 1UP, former GSW columnist Benj Edwards has just had his 'Videogames Turn 40 Years Old' feature posted, and it's an awesomely well-researched look at the history of games, drawing on his interviews with pioneers such as Ralph Baer.

The intro itself is practically lyrical: "In 1967, a bold engineer with a vision led a small team to create the world's first electronic games to use an ordinary television set as a medium. Wary of naysayers from within, the video mavericks sequestered themselves behind closed doors, and for good reason: They worked under the payroll of Sanders Associates, a giant Cold War defense contractor. As hippies on the streets of San Francisco stuck flowers in the barrels of guns, three men in snowy New Hampshire crafted the future of electronic entertainment deep in the heart of a commercial war machine. In May of 1967, the world's first videogames -- as we know them today -- made their quiet, humble entrance into the world."

In addition, Benj has posted an in-depth interview with Baer's associate Bill Harrison over at VintageComputing.com, and it's more vitally important work into the genesis of games - "The inventions of [Baer and Harrison] and a third [man], Bill Rusch, would later appear commercially as the Magnavox Odyssey console in 1972." And this was the first time Harrison has ever been interviewed about his work, making it doubly important for historical reasons.

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

Gamezebo has pointed out what may be my favorite license announcement so far in 2007 - casual game firm Tikgames has debuted 'Merriam Webster's Spell-Jam', capitalizing on the word games craze with yes, an official endorsement from the dictionary giant.

Here's the info - though the Big Fish Games page for the game has a horrible typo which I am going to bold, and which is highly ironic for a spelling game: "Spelling has never been this much fun! Improve youre word prowess and prepare to be the next Spelling Bee Champion! Get the whole family in on the exciting action with a Multiplayer game. With 3 exciting game modes to choose from and thousands of words to spell, Merriam Webster's Spell-Jam has something for everyone."

Why is this cool? Well, little did the creator of the dictionary know that almost 200 years later, casual video games would be licensing his name to popularize their spelling bee titles! Next up - a strong entry into the field from Funk and Wagnalls, perhaps?

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

['Parallax Memories' is a (trying to be more) 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 features the not so fabulous Captain Novolin for the SNES.]

Captain Novolin is a game with the lofty goal of teaching people about diabetes. It was developed by Sculptured Software (developers of such stunning games as: Raid Over Moscow and Chavez 2), published by Raya Systems in 1992 on the Super Nintendo, and funded by Novo Nordisk. Diabetes is a disease in which the beta cells of the pancreas are unable to produce insulin to prevent hyperglycemia (high blood sugar).

This disease affects at least 171 million people world wide, and it's estimated that one of three Americans born after 2000 will develop diabetes. Taking on such a prospect in the early age of gaming would probably have been thought of as commendable.

I guess that this game could be categorized as a "serious game," though it would be better defined as edutainment because it only uses the game as an excuse to teach people something. Captain Novolin isn't as effective a game that, oh say, Oregon Trail is (where I first learned what diphtheria was) because it's not really all that interesting to play.

Unfortunately the game really isn't all that serious either. In this insane world Captain Novolin, the only super hero available to stop the evil Blubberman and rescue the Mayor, has diabetes. Great super villains know how best to exploit the weakness of a super hero, and like Lex Luthor using kryptonite on Superman, Blubberman turns all his henchmen into junk food. At least with Captain Novolin there's something to be said for learning about the human condition of living with diabetes through the metaphor of gameplay.

Serious, totally. Captain Novolin taught me that having diabetes is hard. You can look and act like a normal person but in reality there are all kinds of evil foods out there which want to kill you. Getting by from day to day and only eating small amounts of prescribed foods will allow you to survive from meal to meal. Between meals and throughout the day you must meticulously check the status of your insulin and sugar levels. Life itself is divided up into meals and nothing else.

Having diabetes means that even making a normal trip through town will get you accosted by food that will kill you. Not only will this food attempt to attack you, but it will also jump and move in strange manners on the street or in the water. Luckily a doctor will state what is edible for your main meals and you can find these items sparingly among the terrible temptations of junk food.

OK, now I'm serious, honestly.

The game is divided up into meals levels where the Captain has to stay alive (a difficult task), and also keep his blood sugar levels in check by eating doctor prescribed foods. Preceding each level the doctors will tell the player about the disease and they will also have to monitor the Captain's levels. This even includes taking a shot of insulin if needed.

When the Captain goes out to fight evil (more on that later) he can pick up proper snacks and icons which will give the player more information about diabetes. This information will later be used in an evil quiz in which the player will be harmed for answering incorrectly.

Being that Captain Novolin is a super hero begs the question, what are his super powers? Can he leap over tall buildings? Shoot flames from his finger tips? Lift cars over his head and throw them like insects? Nope, none of these. His trade off for having diabetes must be that he lost any hope of having a real super power. Perhaps this happens in a radioactive waste accident which also created Blubberman, who knows. The Captain is possibly the worst super hero ever: he can only attack when holding down while in mid-air.

This leaves the player open to attacks from all kinds of junk food and eventually death from high blood sugar. It's all the harder on the player because the enemies move in erratic patterns that range from hard to dodge, to impossible. Top it all off with a character sprite that fills up close to 1/3 the damned screen and you'll spend most of the game angry, not educated.

Captain Novolin has taught me, most importantly, that you cannot beat diabetes. Even if you're a super hero and you can save the Mayor, in the end you still have to check your blood sugar levels. Hopefully you can learn from me and never ever, ever, play Captain Novolin. Seriously.

[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, Entdepot, and the Fatpixels Radio Podcast.]

Posted by Matthew Williamson at 5:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over at our sister education site Game Career Guide, the ever-handy Alistair Wallis has taken a look at a once-fabled path into the game industry, in a new feature called 'The Acid Test: QA as a Bridge to a Game Career'.

As he notes in the intro: "It's certainly a common idea within the games industry that those who start in quality assurance are headed for a career well past that one post; possibly even a career in a popular field like design or production. But can QA staff and testers make their way up the ladder in the way people think?"

There are mixed responses, of course, from professionals at studios ranging from Toys For Bob (Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam) through Evolution (MotorStorm), but it's true that QA can be a good leg up if you're in the right place at the right time - something many of the respondents do acknowledge.

Zachary Slater of the Game QA Blog has likely some of the more depressing feedback in the piece - at least for those who care about game testing for game testing's sake: "QA could be a worthwhile career path for console and computer games if only it were treated and respected as such It isn't... and probably won't be. Game developers and publishers seem to regard QA as an unfortunate expense required in the development process. It is a problem for anyone who wants to actually focus on it that they won't be respected for doing so."

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

Commercially released serious game Peacemaker, which simulates the Israel-Palestine conflict, seems to have been getting a new round of publicity as of late, and over at Plush Apocalypse, Borut Pfeifer has made an extremely detailed post critiquing the game, with a lot of interesting insight.

He particularly notes that the game is, well, realistically difficult: "On my playthroughs I typically get ousted by lack of public support, even if I’m making progress towards peace or world opinion of me is high. The game does a great job of pointing out how overconstrained the problem is. As Israeli leader you can have people signing petitions to take down security walls, but the army may just refuse to do it. Settlers may ignore your order to freeze construction of settlements. You can spend money on domestic social or economic initiatives, but that earns the criticism of the hawkish parts of the government."

But Pfeifer seems to be saying, in some ways, that a realistic portrayal makes for a depressing, if well-crafted game: "So naturally, while you the game leaves you with a picture of how screwed the situation is, it also highlights the hopelessness of it. I mean, you already feel powerless as a regular person to do anything, but when most of your choices as a leader don’t really do anything either, you realize both leaders are also sort of powerless to do anything effective about it."

[Oh, and here's an interesting aside on the official Peacemaker blog, after the creators received a letter from the Nobel Foundation, which "...was a “warning/cease and desist letter” for using the Nobel medal as part of our game. As it turns out - the Nobel foundation owns trademark registrations and the letter claims that we “take unfair advantage of their intellectual property rights, in a way that is detrimental to the distinctive and repute of this trademark”." They had to remove the reference, sadly.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Ah, here's a note from freelance game writer Bonnie Ruberg, who wrote the Koster/Hocking interviews that just ran on Gamasutra: "Just wanted to send you a friendly heads up about a new column I started last week with The Village Voice which I thought you might tickle your fancy. It's called "Click Me," and it's all about cybersex, with an emphasis on sex in virtual worlds."

She continues: "The first piece is just an introduction (with some amusingly unsexy girl-on-girl tidbits), but there will be sex stories, Q&A's, even cybersex how-to guides. The Voice also bought up my blog, Heroine Sheik, so I'm going to be posting about games and sex and culture every day now." Having seen the formidable amount of referrers Gamasutra gets from the IGDA's Sex In Games weblog, I'm not surprised that the Village Voice has hopped on this particular train.

And indeed there is much new posting on Heroine Sheik, with a recent blog post discussing Dan Savage's advice on whether 'cheating in Second Life' is really cheating - to which a comment by 'Moo' is likely the most existential ever posted on a sex-related blog post: "We are our own interpreters of the world. It’s not about being “right” or “wrong”. Things simply *are*." Blimey, now we feel all zen.

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

Was turned on to James Wallis' COPE blog thanks to Jim Rossignol's most recent 'Blogged Out' column for Gamasutra, and there's a fascinating recent entry discussing an alternate scoring system for games.

Specifically: "Since the days of yore video-game magazines have given games a numerical rating. Often it’s out of ten or out of one hundred. Sometimes it has cute star-based systems and breaks things down by different categories. Whatever the system, they all suck..."

He continues: "Back when I was editing Crazynet we picked up a reviewing system from our French sibling Micro Dingo, which we twisted onto its back, made it cry, “Mon oncle!” and got Gabe from Penny Arcade to draw us some icons for it. Each item reviewed received 0-3 angels and 0-3 devils. Angels meant good points, devils meant bad points. So three angels and two devils meant “This is very good, but contains quite a lot that will make you throw things across the room. Worth checking out if you have a high tolerance.” A review that got no angels and no devils meant “This is completely unexceptional in every way.”

So what happened? "It transpired that nobody except me understood this system. But hey, icons by Gabe." This is actually a really interesting and valid idea. It's just borderline insane and unintuitive! Wallis then spirals off into further big thinking: "What video games need isn’t numeric ratings, or me trying to get cute. What they need are Michelin stars." Wait, I thought we established that game scores needed to be 7 or 8?

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Our more or less final GDC-conducted interview is up on big sister site Gamasutra today, and it's an interestingly detailed chat with Ubisoft's Clint Hocking, quizzing the Splinter Cell supremo about "...his influences, what we can learn from Oblivion, and how to create great games through "different flavors" of player exploration."

Hocking is an provocative thinker, and in the chat, he talks in particular on the advantages of the sandbox: "Spacial exploration isn't mandatory. It's not required in any game. It's a certain play style and a certain type of player who's interested in playing in that way. There are ways to design to support that well and ways to do it badly. I think it's pretty clear which games do it well. Grand Theft Auto, Oblivion, they make players who might not even be that kind of player become interested in the act of self-motivated exploration."

So what makes it worth finding new places in the world? Hocking has an answer: "Well, I talked a lot about exploration games needing to provide ubiquitous, low-value rewards. Oblivion, like I said, does that really well with alchemical ingredients. But what I didn't talk about, and I intentionally left it off to the side, was this idea that one of the things I did in Oblivion was I went to places just to get beautiful panoramas. I went to the highest mountain I could find just to see how far I could see. I went all the way to the sea at the bottom of the world just to see the sunset."

"Literally, I left my controller there and drank a beer while the sun set. There is no reward for that. It was just wanting to see what the game did and how it worked. So there is this other kind of reward which is just the feeling of this openness and seeing how rich the simulation is, which is something you can’t usually do in games."

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Randomly stumbled across the proceedings of last year's Unaustralia Conference in Canberra, which is the Cultural Studies Association of Australia's annual conference, since you ask - and there's one particular submitted paper of interest to GSW readers and video game geeks - weird ones - alike.

That would be 'Virtual Unaustralia: Videogames and Australia’s Colonial History' [.PDF link] by Thomas H. Apperley (University of Melbourne), and it explores "...how two games – Europa Universalis II (Paradox Interactive, 2001) and Victoria: Empire Under the Sun (Paradox Interactive, 2002) – represent a specific moment: the colonization of Australia." The author explores the setup, historical, background, and many possible outcomes of the games, including making Australia a Brazilian colony (!) in one of his playthroughs.

The most interesting parts of the paper point out how the virtual geography in the nation-building game coincides with real-life feelings: "For example, one fan forum, Vojska.net, based in Croatia, has advocated serious changes to the map of the Balkans in Europa Universalis II, to have provinces boundaries drawn in a historically authentic manner. In this case the community also produced their own map, which they distributed as a ‘mod’ for the game, allowing other players to play in what they considered a more historically realistic geography of the region."

Putting real-life locations in fictional games can be fraught with real-life politics, of course - and Paradox Interactive has run into this in the past, with the Chinese government banning strategy game Hearts Of Iron "...for 'distorting historical facts' in describing Manchuria, West Xinjiang, and Tibet as independent sovereign countries within the game."

But 'changing history' by using real countries is half the entertainment of these games - and I'd hate to see restrictive regimes put a kibosh on good ol' Risk-style fun. So long may the fictional colonization of Australia (Unaustralia?) continue! God save the Queen!

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

GameSetWatch only deals with the most important issues in video games today - and the burning question for this Monday is - why is Rayman Raving Rabbids called that, when the original French name is so subtly different?

I noticed this when Ubisoft sent over some promo notepaper which had the French name for the game, Rayman Contre Les Lapins Cretins, which my schoolboy French translates as 'Rayman Vs. The Crazy Rabbits'. Actually, I think 'cretins' is a little closer to mentally subnormal, aka the politically incorrect 'retarded', isn't it? There's a definition of the English word which claims its derivation: "French crétin, from French dialectal, deformed and mentally retarded person found in certain Alpine valleys."

In any case, the weird thing about the English language title is that it's not 'Rayman Vs. The Raving Rabbids' - the antagonists are just described in a title run-on. Though there's meant to be a colon after the Rayman, I guess, but it doesn't show up in the English game logo. And, of course, it was decided that plain old 'rabbits' wouldn't cut it, so the reference to the 'rabbits' being 'rabid' was added - hence 'rabbid'. Or that's how I read it. The French-language site has some good puns too - one of the options is labeled 'Lapinvasion', hah.

In conclusion - there's really no conclusion. I just thought it was an interesting example of a title being slightly rethought when it changed languages. Possibly much more interesting is this question - did Michel Ancel completely disavow himself from this game?

As the Wikipedia entry notes: "On April 5, 2006, Ubisoft announced Ancel was leading the development of the fourth game in the Rayman series, Rayman Raving Rabbids, for the Nintendo Wii. The game began production in early 2005 and was released on November 15 2006 for the launch of the Wii. However, Ancel was notably absent from the project after its E3 announcement, and he has made no public appearances regarding the game after the development team switched focus from a free-roaming platformer to the final minigames format shortly after E3." So what happened? And what's he doing now?

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Game designer Mike Bithell pinged me about this a few days ago, but I forgot to post it until Gnome reminded me - ah, and now I see that TIGSource has reviewed it, too - 'it' being Mike's new Flash game Reunion.

Derek Yu at TIGSource is a bit on the fence about the game: "In the game, you control a sleeping boy by leading him with fireflies. Even though I really dig the concept, in practice it ends up being rather unwieldy. The worst part is that every time you fall into a pit or otherwise go off the path, the wind sends you back to the beginning of the level."

However, I really loved the interactive intro, and this is from the same person who created the previously GSW-mentioned Visiting Day homebrew title for PSP, and it's totally free, too - so that's good news all round. Maybe a candidate for Kongregate uploading to get a higher profile, Mike?

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:33 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Was poking around the excellent Atari Age the other day, for reasons I forget, and decided to use the site's search engine to look up the absolute rarest non-prototype Atari 2600 games they list (rated '10, Unbelievably Rare'). And there's some pretty interesting results, of which these are the highlights:

- Music Machine was "...only sold in religious bookstores. It’s based on a line of Music Machine products that also included LP’s sold by Sparrow. Some collectors claim to have purchased the 2600 game in a bundle with the album, but that has never been proven." The company who made it is still a major Christian music company, too.

- Video Life is perhaps even more rare, and "...was only available to owners of Magicard, making it perhaps the rarest of all 2600 games. It was only available directly from CommaVid, who sent a letter to owners of Magicard with an offer to purchase Video Life. We believe fewer than 500 copies of Video Life were produced and there are probably many fewer still floating about today. Video Life is a version of the classic computer-based life simulator in which you create an organism and watch it grow."

- Finally, of course, there's Pepsi Invaders - the first ever anti-advergame! "Coca-Cola commissioned a game from Atari to give to their Atlanta employees. In this case, Atari redesigned Space Invaders so that you shoot the letters "P E P S I" instead of space creatures. There were 125 copies of this game made. There is no real box for this one, just a flimsy Styrofoam shell. So it isn’t really a prototype, but it wasn’t a commercially available game either. And no, Coca-Cola does not have any copies left."

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

When I was in Tokyo for TGS last year, one of the most notable things was the complexity of some of the arcade games - here's a blurry pic of one of them, which was a complex battle sim using CCG cards recognized by the arcade cabinet, far beyond beetle or horseracing sims in complexity.

So, the Arcade Heroes blog has pointed out Namco Bandai's New Space Order, another one of those complex Japan-only arcade titles, and they note: "This game was briefly mentioned in reports that came out of AOU 2007 and it raised a few eyebrows by featuring a sit-down arcade cabinet that included a keyboard and mouse, much like CounterStrike NEO."

They continue: "Well Namco Bandai has an official site dedicated to the game, replete with screenshots, videos and even linkage to a subsite that features a series of Flash anime videos that tell an interactive story about the game."

Interestingly, a Highway Games-hosted report about AOU, actually sourced from The Stinger Report, notes: "The game was displayed as a networked Satellite Terminal (ST) space combat MMOG game - using the same cabinet layout as the Counter Strike NEO game with ten connected terminals and a central display and card dispenser, the product able to update LEDZONE facilities with a new game package. The success of the LEDZONE franchise recently reflected in NBG financials."

Hm, I couldn't find info on Ledzone's success in NBG's numbers - can anyone point to them? - but interested parties should check out the Gamasutra report on 'The Localization of Counter-Strike in Japan' which deals with the setup of the awesome-looking custom Ledzone net cafes to host Counter-Strike Neo. This was genuinely innovative work on Namco's part, I think.

[UPDATE - Ah, and I see YouTube has the New Space Order intro movie, which can only be described as 'attractively apocalyptic', as well as a shaky-cam filmed AOU trailer, which shows a bit of the gameplay near the end.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sparked by the MPAA taking tobacco use into account when rating movies, Matt Matthews at Curmudgeon Gamer has done an analysis of ESRB ratings for tobacco-including games, asking the question: "Does smoking of tobacco get a game rated at least a T? Or maybe even M?"

Matthews' basic factual conclusion? "The 141 games which refer to tobacco or show use of tobacco break down as: * 29 rated E * 18 rated E10+ * 91 rated T * 3 rated M." Comparing, he explains: "75% of movies with even a fleeting glimpse of smoking were given R ratings -- and thereby limited in theory to people who were 17 years of age or older. By comparison, only 3 out of 141, or 2.1%, of games with any mention or use of tobacco were given an M rating, the rating that most closely approximates the MPAA's R rating."

So what, are youth are being led astray horribly by these depictions and/or references - which are two very different things, of course? Matthews highlights: "The PlayStation 3 game Calling all Cars, released just this week, has the "Alcohol and Tobacco Reference" descriptor and is rated E."

I'm presuming that this descriptor isn't related to the people who made the game (Jaffe-ton, OMG!), so I'd love to know - what are all the references in these E-rated games - Calling All Cars and others - and how oblique are they? Is it more common in Japanese games (Metal Slug pictured above, for obvious reasons!)? Yes, this is a Lazyweb research request. It's odd, because I'm pretty sure kids don't want to smoke because of games.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Over at Dessgeega's blog, there's an extremely illuminating look at the odd 'Hunt The Wumpus'-inspired interactive fiction piece, Wumpus 2000 - which I suspect is the kind of experimental text adventure which can influence wider game design concepts from its odd niche.

Dess explains: "wumpus 2000, perhaps, owes less to contemporary interactive fiction than it does to “roguelike” titles. the game is set in a randomly-built network of caves, seeded with tools, weapons, and enemies who wander the tunnels on their own agendas. as in any roguelike, survival depends largely on knowing the rules of the cave: how to identify safe drinking water, how to raise the protagonist’s strength."

Particularly cool? The game _forces_ you to go oldskool and whip out pen and paper, since Geegs notes that the game's "...first and most important rule is: you must draw a map (and the underline is not mine). in a graphical roguelike the dungeon map materializes on-screen as the player explores it; in wumpus 2000, all that’s available at any given time is a description of the player’s present location - the range of the protagonist’s vision - and the numbers that correspond to adjacent, visited rooms (and on the game’s hardest difficulty, not even these numbers are shown)."

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

You, dear GSW reader, might have heard of Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin due to the fact that they co-founded Naughty Dog, creators of both the Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter game franchises. But after Rubin left in 2004, to apparently work on a new title called 'Iron & The Maiden', everything went a little quiet.

Well, in fact, Andy Gavin also left Naughty Dog a couple of years back (oop, we SO need to update our Game Developer advisory board masthead to reflect that!), and Jurie at Intelligent Artifice has pointed out that their new project has launched - and it's in the form of a Web 2.0 site called Flektor, rather than a game.

Social media blog Techcrunch explains of the site: "Flektor allows users to create slide shows using video, photos, text and effects/transitions... in our testing we also found the Flektor creation wizard to be far easier to use than the current Slide and RockYou offerings." They predict a swift acquisition for the site, thanks to its slick interface - hey, maybe the game guys have something to show the Web 2.0 guys regarding usability after all?

[Oh, and as for Iron & The Maiden? The MySpace page for the project reveals it will be coming out in comic form first, with Rubin noting: "I can announce a shelf date for book 1, with the other books following right on its heels: August 2007, just a few hot months (at least in LA) away. I also have a publisher... that I will announce in a short time." Mysterious!]

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

There were a few other GSW-worthy links on big sister site Gamasutra and our other sites that I wanted to pass on this weekend, not least because it's been a pretty frantic week - two conferences and lots of game announcements - masking some of the neater non press-release-y material! Presenting:

- Alistair Wallis' regular 'Playing Catch-Up' talks to comics and game veteran artist Steve Englehart, and there's about 20 years of fascinating fringe game stuff in there, such as: "His first project as a designer for Atari was E.T. Phone Home, for Atari 400 and 800 computers – a product designed to cash in on the movie, just like Howard Scott Warshaw's Atari 2600 adaptation, which was developed simultaneously. “We were all aware of those problems,” he says of the 2600 version’s rushed and tumultuous development, “though I didn't connect them to any one guy.”"

- Oop, just mentioned him in the last post, but Bonnie Ruberg's interview with Areae's Raph Koster is well worth checking out, because he hits some key points on how the online game biz might get left behind, talking about his GDC talk: "“Where Game Meets Web”: that's the one where I basically said that everyone in the industry is doomed because the web is stealing their thunder. This industry isn't working with the web very well at all." Then he gives examples!

- Over at mobile site GamesOnDeck, veteran Steve Wetherill has posted the first part of 'EA Air Hockey: Designing A One-Button Mobile Game', and accessibility is again a key factor: "The other compelling reason to create a one-button game is to appeal to the so-called "casual" gamers and the non-gamers (the "to be converted") as it's these folks who makeup the vast majority of "mobile phone users". A game that is playable with one button should contain little to scare away or embarrass such a player." More good insight in there.

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

It used to be that venture capitalists left the video game industry well alone - mainly due to the gigantic hit-miss nature of the biz.

But with digital payment and the ability to spread risk, there's increasing amounts of investment in mobile, casual, online, and in-game ad areas of gaming as illustrated by a list of recent VC and angel investments in the game biz via the 'Stuck In Customs' blog, from John Galt Games' Trey Ratcliff.

The deals are undated, and a number of them are quite a few months old, but it's a good list because it gives an idea of where investors are looking to step up - and hey, here's one we all know: "Company: Telltale Games, San Rafael, CA... Investment: $ 0.8 million... Investors: Keiretsu Forum... Description: Telltale develops and deploys cinematic quality animation and storytelling technologies, to create interactive content. Telltale offers content development and custom publishing services to assist license-holders in adapting their properties for interactive delivery."

Of course, the interesting thing is that it's only for $0.8 million, whereas some of the other perhaps dodgier plays in the in-game ad market (even more dodgy now that Sony looks like it may be doing its own in-game ad platform) have seen double digit millions raised.

But it's all about chasing the prize, of course, and a lot of the fundings and subsequent acquisitions right now are for infrastructure companies in an unknown market, where the acquirers (often big media) feel like they 'can't miss out'. But there's very little creative about those companies in terms of making great art. Why can't VCs and investors gamble on companies that create lasting art?

[Answer: because art is subjective, and successful corporate entities are increasingly - and have generally always been, to some extent - those which sort and regurgitate art as a commodity, rather than create it. Oh well. Thanks to Raph Koster for the initial link, incidentally.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['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.]

   

Well, you're not hardcore, because otherwise you would've subscribed to Super Gaming, Sendai Publishing's magazine devoted entirely to Japan-only video games.

Here is how Sendai advertised Super Gaming in their own magazines, including Electronic Gaming Monthly and Mega Play:

Are you the type of video game player who has always wanted to know about the latest games and systems but could never find a magazine devoted entirely to what's new and in the future? Not just games for the Genesis, Turbo and Nintendo, but also previews of Japanese titles that won't arrive on these shores for years -- if ever!

Now the editors of Electronic Gaming Monthly, always the first word in video games, has created a magazine especially for you! Super Gaming will take you where no other game magazine has ever gone before, with the latest news and game previews for your Sega 16-bit, NEC or Nintendo systems! With Super Gaming you will know about the hottest carts of tomorrow today, as well as new developments and game systems!

   

All four issues of Super Gaming released were only 32 pages long, but they were available both on a subscription and at the newsstand, as the Electronics Boutique price stickers on my issues indicate. The contents mostly read like a "lite" version of the EGM of the time -- lots of little previews divided up by console, a handful of large features packed with colorful screenshots, and not a heck of a lot of real in-depth content. Starting with issue 2, the magazine had its own review section, covering nothing but Japan imports and featuring scores from editor Mike Riley, associate editor Ken Williams and someone named "Samrye" (get it? huh?!!).

Unfortunately, this sort coverage meant that the only advertisers interested in such a magazine were mail-order shops that specialized in Japanese games. The magazine failed to become a marketplace success, and so with the third issue Super Gaming repositioned itself as a "video game preview" magazine, with early coverage of both Japanese and American games. This failed to make much of a difference, though, and the magazine folded after one final issue, which dropped the Japan stuff entirely and devoted most of its pages to 1991 Winter CES coverage instead.

So there you have it -- probably the most obscure Sendai Publishing title, and one that folded before it could find any sort of niche in the marketplace. It's certainly not a good magazine by any stretch of the imagination. So why do I care? Because I'm trying to get everything Sendai ever published -- and completing this Super Gaming collection was damned difficult, because the mags go for way too much money online and are impossible to find elsewhere. So, that's another Sendai title complete...now I just need to figure out where to find copies of Hero Illustrated and Internet Underground...

[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 6:48 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Kyle Orland's regular 'Media Coverage' column for GameDaily this week discusses 'Going To The Dark Side', subtitled as "...the surprisingly common phenomenon of journalists going to work for the game industry."

As some may know, I have a strong opinion or two on this, and I'm delighted to see Stephen Totilo at MTV News vocalizing some of those: "Talented reporters taking jobs in the fields they cover is nothing new, but it seems to happen so often with so many of gaming's brightest reporters and critics, that I can't help but feel a reflex reaction against it... I ... cheer for the day when writing about games will be a rewarding enough experience -- creatively, personally, and financially -- that more people will be able to stick with it."

But on the other hand, I've learnt to fight that gut response just a little, since I realized that there are some professions that you are naturally just better at or more suited to. After all, it worked for me the opposite way round - as Kyle quotes me saying in the last paragraph of the GameDaily piece: "I realized that I'd really always had more fun and felt more capable as a writer about games... I felt like I was just better suited, more capable, and would be happier writing about games, not making them. So I did that."

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Over at Eurogamer, Dave McCarthy has ventured where many gamers fear to tread with his feature 'The Bluffer's Guide To Hentai Games', which talks about the wonder of English-language 'erotic Japanese PC games' from a European perspective.

As handily explained: "There's... a wide range of play mechanics, from simple dating games, where you've got to impress the girls enough to get them into compromising positions, to choose-your-own adventure style flowchart games, where you simply have to make choices at key moments to propel the sexual narrative along." It's actually good to see acceptable English language explanations of what is a pretty interesting, often badly explained gaming subgenre.

Further coverage of that very same genre has recently been taken up by Sexy Videogameland, the blog of Paste/Escapist contributor Leigh Alexander, and she looks at this conundrum: "How, then, does a Hentai game come to be bestowed with gravitas?" It then gets into Kana: Little Sister, which is all kinds of taboo, and the game does deal with oddly emotionally mature themes (the death of a family member, and coping with that), somewhat apart from the sexually mature parts within it. But as Leigh notes: "Dealing with such poignant concepts-- the lifelike vulnerability of your ill little sister, the burden of a family who may soon lose its innocent-- seems just a little bit twisted, actually."

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Some might says that there aren't nearly enough museums and cultural institutions doing game-related exhibitions right now - with the traveling Game On! exhibition being a notable exception.

But Helen Stuckey and compatriots at the Australian Center For The Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne, who previously mounted a great history of Melbourne House's output, are now going ahead and showing off a new exhibition, 'The Best Of The Independent Games Festival 2007'.

This is actually the third time that ACMI has put this on, and it's neat because the public can play titles like Aquaria and even Castle Crashers ahead of their public release, and also check out some of the most notable Student Showcase games such as the wacky Opera Slinger and brain-scrambling South Korean puzzler Rooms.

The free to attend exhibition, which is billed as 'A sensational selection of winners and nominees from the 'Sundance' festival for games', is open at ACMI from Wednesday, May 30th 2007 to Sunday, September 30th 2007. It's fully supported by the IGF (of which - disclaimer - I am Chairman!), and there's a private opening night reception on May 29th, with Mike Fegan, CEO of Heroes Of The Pacific creators IR Gurus Interactive, opening the show. Neat stuff - and if any other U.S. or foreign institutions want to put on an IGF show, then ping me.

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You are presumably thinking that the above headline makes absolutely no sense, yes? Well, it's referencing Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi's GDC Europe 2005 Game Design Challenge entry, which is a robot cat for grandmothers: "Embedded in the cat is the capability for it to communicate wirelessly with other cat controllers (on other Grannies' knees) in the neighborhood."

Of course, the genius element in Takahashi's design is that the other members of the family are told to pretend that the cyborg cat is normal, and that only Granny can talk to it. Not so with Webkinz, the cyber-cat (and other Beanie Baby-style plushes) for kids which is the subject of a new CNET News article called 'I fell in love with a cyber alley cat'.

It's explained: "The phenomenon has been a huge hit; Ganz claims that more than 2 million units have been sold to retailers and 1 million users have registered on the Webkinz site, where kids can create lively domiciles for the virtual versions of their animal, shop for pet paraphernalia, and chat with fellow Webkinz owners."

Michael Zenke has actually previously covered Webkinz for us as part of a wider article on kids' virtual worlds - it's a plush toy, with game/virtual world elements after you register said toy - and though it doesn't have any wireless or directly code-based elements to it, unlike the virtual Barbie Girls MP3 players, it's another example of games, virtual worlds, and toys getting hopelessly intermeshed in the name of addictiveness and repeat business. Neopets was just the beginning, folks - and this is far more sinister than just perplexing Granny.

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[“Might Have Been” is a bi-weekly column by Todd Ciolek that explores the ways in which promising games, characters, and concepts failed. This week’s edition looks at Right Stuff's Flash Hiders and Battle Tycoon, released for the PC Engine in 1993 and the Super Famicom in 1995, respectively.]

Many will snort derisively at the idea of fighting games having storylines. The fighter, they will tell you, has always been about competition, about facing another human in matches free of plot or computer-controlled opponents. And they’re right. Modern fighters typically offer some story mode or a similar one-player attraction, but they’ve never really needed them. In fact, the first genre offerings to follow Street Fighter II’s 1991 debut had no real narratives. Fighting games had characters, and, if you were lucky, endings. That was all.

It wasn’t until 1993 that a developer called Right Stuff bothered to change things. They’d made a name by dealing in PC Engine games like Emerald Dragon, Fang of Alnam, and other RPGs heavy on cinematic cutscenes and anime archetypes. Why then, someone at Right Stuff surely asked, couldn’t a fighting game have the same focus? And so Flash Hiders emerged.

Unhidden flash

Much like the typical CD-based RPG of its day, Flash Hiders begins with a lengthy animated intro, one that finds an easily annoyed martial artist named Bang Bipot and a temperamental sorceress named Tiria Rossette on a trek across a half-medieval, half-futuristic world. In the game’s main “Scenario” mode, the not-quite-a-couple runs across and all but adopts Erue, an emotionally fragile young man somehow connected to an assortment of thugs, bounty hunters, and stranger things.

As a manga-style yarn that haphazardly meshes fantasy and science fiction tropes, Flash Hiders’ story isn’t particularly remarkable. It doesn’t help that the presentation’s uneven: some sequences are just talking heads or static images without even some two-frame lip flap thrown in for dramatic illusion’s sake. And while there’s a bit of comic timing in the characters’ constant bickering, it’s rarely imaginative. An example: the first scripted fight results after Harman, a curvaceous and vain female mercenary, angrily kicks over a restaurant table when Erue calls her “Oba-san” (“Grandma”), leaving Bang to avenge his ruined meal. If you’ve seen any given sword-and-sorcery anime comedy, you’ve seen Flash Hiders.

Leveling up

Yet in 1993, it was revolutionary for a fighter to develop any story at all, and Flash Hiders borrowed more than cutscenes from Right Stuff’s RPG experience. Before each match, characters can buy and equip different items, and then selectively boost their defense, attack power, and speed. Simple as this may be, the selective stat raises add a lot to the fighting template, and actually allow far more freedom of character development than the typical 16-bit Japanese RPG.

Though the Scenario storyline restricts players to controlling Bang, the “Advance” mode takes the rest of the main characters down their own goofy plot threads. In testament to Right Stuff's target audience, both modes automatically have your chosen character controlled by AI; you’ve got to fiddle with the options before the game lets you play instead of watch.

And watching isn’t all that fun. The animated intermissions may be colorful (and a bit too glossy), but the battles have a washed-out look, with limited animation and muted palettes. Still, the soundtrack isn’t bad, and Right Stuff spent considerable sums on a voice cast that includes then-famous anime actors like Kumiko Watanabe, Konami Yoshida, and the revered Megumi Hayashibara, who could practically sell a game on her own back in 1993.

Simple depths

And beneath all of the shiny, huge-eyed vixens and shrill battle cries, there’s a surprisingly detailed fighting game. The controls are precise, and the cast of characters is quite balanced for a fighter that was never designed for fierce competition. There's a intriguing mix in the three classes of fighter: the magicians specialize in projectiles, the cyborgs are slow and powerful, and the remaining warriors, as members of some "were" race, morph into wolves, tigers, and other predators during their special moves.

The combatants even use dashes and guard canceling, now-standard techniques that were strikingly uncommon in the time of Mortal Kombat. Perhaps that's why Flash Hiders, unlike many fighters of its era, doesn’t feel wholly outdated when matched against the current complexities of Guilty Gear X2 #Reload or Street Fighter III: Third Strike.

In the mid-‘90s, however, Flash Hiders didn’t quite catch on. Every popular fighting game of the era started in the arcades, and a PC Engine CD release didn’t command the same attention, not when the PCE’s stock two-button controller simplified Flash Hiders’ four-button mechanics. The game never even showed in the West. The U.S. TurboDuo was one-tenth as successful as its Japanese incarnation, and if NEC couldn’t be bothered to release Street Fighter II on their American system, they couldn’t be bothered with Flash Hiders.

Flash Hiders EX Plus Lesbian

Right Stuff took another chance on its fighting venture in 1995, with Battle Tycoon: Flash Hiders SFX for the Super Famicom. The alleged sequel loses the original’s Scenario mode and all of its cinematic sequences, though the in-game fighters at least animate better. The Advance mode, meanwhile, is substantially improved in Battle Tycoon, in which players can roam freely from one city location to another, picking fights, upgrading characters, and even visiting a coliseum to bet on all-AI showdowns.

Battle Tycoon also lost four of Flash Hiders’ duller fighters, replacing them with the cyborg Guston Slade, Bang’s father Jail Lance, and a swordswoman named Patchet Vayne. Perhaps Battle Tycoon’s only real point of invention, Patchet stands as one of the fighting genre’s first lesbian and/or bisexual characters. (Or the first at all, if one ignores Variable Geo, and one should.) Naturally, Patchet’s also a complete stereotype: muscular, hedonistic, and not particularly bright, she spends most of her Advance-mode story lusting after the other female fighters. One of her moves makes her resemble a metal-skinned wolf, but I doubt that’s tied to her sexual proclivities.

Right but largely irrelevant stuff

Battle Tycoon made even fewer waves that Flash Hiders did, and for the same reasons: it wasn’t an arcade game, the market in 1995 was already saturated with fighters that were, and no one cared to translate a dated-looking fighter for North America.

Right Stuff gave up on the would-be franchise soon after, turning instead to a doomed sequel to their Alnam RPG. The company didn’t survive the decade, and their demise killed chances for a world where Flash Hiders eventually would be a hit, a world where fans would hold tournaments in its name and the lonelier devotees would buy suggestively posed statues depicting Harman and Patchet instead of Cammy and Mai Shiranui.

Yet if Flash Hiders didn't get far, its ideas did. Modern fighters such as Soul Calibur have elaborate weapon-upgrading system, while the likes of Guilty Gear, Melty Blood, and Tech Romancer have engaging story modes. It’s not clear if Namco, Capcom, and other developers were inspired by Flash Hiders or if they merely followed a natural evolutionary path, but even if Right Stuff’s little experiment had no far-reaching influence, its spirit lives on in any fighter that’s fun to play solo.

And, of course, any game with a metallic lesbian werewolf.

[Todd Ciolek is a magazine editor in New York City.]

Posted by Todd Ciolek at 5:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Over at the Disposable Media homepage, Gillen points out, they've posted an article about the state of the game print media (confusingly enough, called 'Disposable Media?') in Issue 7 [.PDF link] of the, uhm, virtual magazine.

Anyhow, the start of the piece asks: "By instilling such power in what remains a largely unknown entity, have we essentially handed over the gaming press to a generation of illiterate 13 year olds broadcasting from their bedrooms?" Potential literates like the aforementioned PC Gamer-esque Kieron Gillen, as well as GI.biz and Eurogamer's lovable Irishman Rob Fahey then comment, and make some good points about the speed and relative accuracy of print vs. online.

There's some amusing quotes in there, too: "Ever concerned with snatching enough hits to generate advertising revenue, many such websites have a set tally of news that must be uploaded daily. If an editor demands 6-10 stories a day but, in reality, there is nothing to cover, inevitably that site – and indeed those who mirror its coverage – is flooded with hearsay and speculation to fill the quota." Dammit, we really must ramp up the hearsay on Gamasutra!

But, slight hyperbole aside, it's interesting to hear considered opinions on this massive shift, albeit from an online publication obviously enamored with the print medium. Whither now the considered, in-depth New Yorker-style article on the Web, eh? [It's possible to do them, but often difficult to monetize them if page views are your currency. Not inconceivable, though!]

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, after my recent post on GameTap adding a bunch of Neo Geo titles, I got a really interesting email from Matt Matthews, he of Curmudgeon Gamer fame, and he kindly allowed me to share our email conversation here on GSW, because it's pertinent to game preservation, and he makes some good points. Opinions on the below?

Matt: "Can you please explain (in 50 words or less) why you're so hip on GameTap?I I thought you might have had an interest in making sure archives of digital works would exist far into the future. However, I assumed that you'd be on the side of making sure those archives were not purely commercial in nature.

That is, if we could be guaranteed that GameTap would be around for 200 years, then fine. We'd have time for laws and technology to change to the point that people could probably back up or reverse engineer the games on GameTap for archival purposes independent of GameTap. But as it is, once that service shuts down (and I think it's a given that it will, perhaps even in the next five years) then how are we to keep copies of [games such as] Sam & Max for future analysis and study? Or any other game that they publish in pay-to-play format?"

[Click through for more curmudgeoning!]

Simon "I just like them because they make old, interesting games available legally. It's as simple as that. There will still be ROMs and standalone copies of these games (Sam & Max is coming out as a standalone digital download too, and at retail, don't forget). Sure, there are some exceptions like Uru, but that needs a server to exist anyhow.

Are you being a Curmudgeon? :) What do you think they are doing wrong? It's not possible that old games would just be available for free, because companies can monetize them. We have to wait for the public domain to kick in for that."

Matt: "Perhaps a bit of a curmudgeon, but more importantly a person who likes being able to purchase copies of media. Do we know that [all the games GameTap offers exclusively on their service] will be untethered? The lesson of Half-life 2 and other Steam-linked products is that you may find yourself dependent on the service for authentication -- either now or in a few years when you want to revisit a game -- even if the game itself doesn't require anything online.

That's what my friend/co-blogger Ruffin calls the virtual rare book room, and it's a reasonable analogy I think. There is a gatekeeper who stands between you and things that you (think you) own (in the instance of, say, a public university where the people ostensibly own the library's holdings).

It reminds me of the security/freedom exchange often attributed to Benjamin Franklin. Something along the lines of "He who would sacrifice essential right of ownership for a little convenience deserves neither."

I'm not asking for the games to be free -- short of a revolution overthrowing the U.S. government and then a new constitution with reasonable copyright laws, I'll never see any game fall into the public domain because it's copyright expired. I'm asking that people who study or value games as a medium be allowed to purchase copies of them -- as we do with almost every other medium such as audiovisual media and music, even sculpture -- be allowed to actually own a copy of those games.

I can do this with almost everything on GameTap, I confess. Archivists can (and should) purchase originals of arcade games and console games and Windows/DOS games and others as often as they can. But the model that GameTap and Steam and XBLA and PSN and other services represent is one in which the company always stands between you and your game, ready to exact a toll if they can work out a way to do it. That gatekeeper is one I cannot abide."

Simon: "I think it's much more of a problem for Steam (potentially) than GameTap, because the point of GameTap is that you can ALREADY buy physical versions of most of the games. The only game on GameTap that you can't get ROMs of (less than legally) or buy carts/boards/discs of is Uru Online, and that wouldn't even be running without GameTap's help at this point. I guess you say that further down your commentary, though."

Matt: "Just to be clear, this is the slippery slope we're on right now. Boiling the frog, foot in the door, whatever analogy you want to use. If we relinquish our interest in owning copies of things we *could* get in physical form, then the natural next step for a publisher is to skip the physical copy altogether (in the name of cutting costs, sold as a benefit to the consumer) and offer only virtual copies.

Those virtual copies will likely include tethers to some home server which will be justified as a means to easily, seamlessly patch the game and offer extensions to the original game. As we've seen with Xbox Live, however, the model will then be used to sell (e.g.) map packs for Gears of War. The first hit's free, to throw in yet another needlessly trite analogy.

Finally, let me say that there are other areas which have struggled with precisely this problem. Academic journals can be accessed through the web, provided your university buys a subscription. As soon as the online subscription costs aren't paid, all that knowledge is walled off. Compare with paper copies which are obviously less convenient, but permanent ownership of knowledge. You can guess which I'd prefer *in the long term*."

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Tim Edwards kindly points me to a new PC Gamer UK feature posted on C&VG, discussing some of the more suspect sexual practices in online world Second Life (text somewhat NSFW, obviously), and with notable timing given recent controversy over explicit content in the world.

Writer Graham Smith explains ruefully: "Sex in Second Life is more than mere mimicry of the real world: it's an entire industry unto itself. Here, in the bottom floor of this mansion by the sea, among the finely coiffed and immaculately undressed, my avatar looks gormless and crude. Designed primarily by hitting the randomise button too many times on the character creation screen and infused with life by clumsy, default animations, I look like an overly-stretched man stumbling with the wandering gait of Frankenstein's monster."

Unfortunately, Smith has some virtual, uhh, performance problems, thanks to some faulty 'add-ons', and concludes: "I can objectively understand how someone might enjoy this, how if they were to commit themselves to the fantasy then perhaps, yes, this could be exciting. But I feel detached, and silly, and self-conscious, and even a little bored. Were I to know this person, have an actual connection to them, then I can imagine this might be fun, an emotive process or an extension of our relationship. But it's not."

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[‘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 iconoclastic game designer Kenji Eno.]

Kenji Eno founded Warp, his small, independent game studio in 1994. Coming from a background in music, Eno wanted to bring the same energy and spirit of the electronic music scene to the rapidly expanding world of video games. With long hair and black clothes, Eno would pose for publicity photos with his Roland Jupiter-8 synthesizer (analog of course), cultivating a rock and roll image at a time when game designers were still considered members of the pocket-protector set. He also made it clear that Warp was not part of some corporate hive.

The company’s first games were for the 3DO system. Its straightforward licensing structure dispensed with the cumbersome and arbitrary approvals process that other hardware manufactures required and the machine’s CD-ROM format made it easy to publish for, lowering the barrier to entry for the start-up developer.

Warp’s initial efforts were basic puzzlers and mini-game collections. Although somewhat primitive, they were done with an absurdist graffiti style that made them distinctive. One of these early games, a Tetris clone called Trip’D made it to America in 1995, but it was the horror adventure D that would make Warp famous.

D

D was a graphic adventure in which a young woman named Laura must explore a spree killer’s tormented psyche in order to solve the mystery of his murderous rampage as well as her own strange relationship with the killer. D played similar to Myst with nicely rendered cinematic transitions between static frames. To enhance D’s creepy atmosphere, Eno composed a suitably dark ambient soundtrack. Operating in true garage band style, Warp utilized consumer level Amiga computers to generate D’s visuals rather than the expensive Silicon Graphics workstations that were considered the standard tool for creating computer graphics.

D’s big conceptual trick was to require its players complete the game in one sitting. It had a two-hour time limit with no pausing or saving allowed. This was a bold stance for Eno to take, refusing to allow his game to be evaluated on the basis of length or replay value.

D was first created for the 3DO but soon ported to the PlayStation, Saturn, and even DOS. Of these, I’ll go with the Saturn because the Sega logo adds a nice symmetry to the collection. Published by Acclaim in 1995, D shipped on two discs so make sure both are present before committing to buy and expect to pay around $10.

Enemy Zero

The 3DO struggled against the newer 32-bit machines that were coming on the market and plans were made to create a successor called M2 that would be based on PowerPC chips. Warp began work on a sequel to D for the upcoming machine and work-in-progress screenshots were used to demonstrate the advance graphics capabilities of the M2 hardware. For the sequel, Warp seemed to be moving in a fantasy direction and early screens showed a richly detailed, polygon-based gothic castle as its play environment. However, by the end of 1996, the 3DO was discontinued and the M2 project was shelved less than a year later.

Putting the D sequel on hold, Warp turned away from cutting edge graphics and created a game called Real Sound: Wind of Regret that had no graphics at all. Released in 1997 for the Saturn, Real Sound was an adventure game played from the perspective of a blind person and relied exclusively on audio cues. Re-released on the Dreamcast in 1999, Real Sound utilized extensive Japanese language voice acting, making a Western release impossible.

Having stripped away everything that makes a game a video game with Real Sound, Eno decided to create a new work called Enemy Zero that would fully engage both sound and vision. Set on a deep space towing rig, Enemy Zero found Warp riffing on Alien as well as its own D. Although not a sequel, Enemy Zero featured D’s Laura as the main character, employing her as a “digital actress”.

Enemy Zero was a hybrid graphic adventure and first-person shooter, fast paced and cinematic in presentation, a sort of game equivalent to the summer blockbuster. The shooter elements were unique in that you faced invisible enemies, forcing you to depend on audio cues and sonar pings to locate your target. As you crawled through a maze of ductwork and darkened halls, a clammy, panicked sweat would trickle down your brow as the oscillating sonar warned of approaching enemies. Unfortunately, the shooting part was implemented in a painfully realistic manner, forcing you to draw your gun as the invisible monster approached, wait for it to charge up, and then fire hopefully hitting your target. If not, then you had to wait for the charge cycle to complete before you could fire again. Oh, and the gun’s batteries had a limited number of charges. Frightening? Certainly. Frustrating? Absolutely.

Published in America by Sega in 1998, Enemy Zero came on 4 discs labeled 0 to 3. Search for it online and pay around $25.

D2

D2 had the distinction of being one of the first games announced for Sega’s new Dreamcast console in 1998. Rather than dust off the work that they had done for the M2 version, Warp went back to the drawing board and came up with completely new game. It would again feature Laura as the main character but moved the action to the snow covered Canadian mountains. Its story begins with a hijacked airliner being improbably hit by a meteor in mid-flight and crashing in the snowbound mountains. Laura survives the crash but finds her fellow passengers infected with an alien virus that causes them to abruptly burst into drooling bug/plant/cephalopods with an urge to mate. The game only gets weirder from there.

With the power of the Dreamcast, Eno was free to fully indulge his mash-up style, creating in D2 a game that was an elaborate layer cake of genres. When exploring D2’s massive environment, the game was played from a third person perspective and much effort went in to accurately depicting the frozen landscape. Distances were realistic and it could take many minutes just to trudge over an icy mountain pass. Periodically, mutated creatures would pop out of the snow and the game would switch to a fixed, shooting gallery perspective. Guns and ammunition were oddly plentiful and combat was over quick in a rapid-fire hail of lead and green goo. Sifting for clues was handled point-and-click style and the bizarre story was advanced by lengthy cinematics. On top of it all, D2 featured a Deer Hunter style mini game that allowed you to poach varmints for meat.

D2 was released in America in 2000. Published by Sega, the company thought it wise to make a few judicious cuts to the game, toning down some of the alien on human rape imagery. D2 shipped on 4 GD-ROM discs and can be found for around $20.

Despite the advance hype, D2 came too late in the Dreamcast’s short lifespan to really connect with consumers who were already looking to the PlayStation 2 for their kicks. Warp folded in 2000 and transitioned into Superwarp, a multimedia company whose focus shifted away from games. Eno resurfaced in 2006, announcing the formation of a new game development studio called fyto (From Yellow to Orange) and hinting that the Wii will be his platform of choice.

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

Posted by jfleming at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Game theorist Jesper Juul has just posted an article from a forthcoming academic journal, named 'Swap Adjacent Gems to Make Sets of Three: A History of Matching Tile Games', and it does a creditable job of summing up the influences and path of the 'match three' genre.

This actually extends the project from an earlier GSW-linked diagram by Juul attempting to chart the genre, and it's noted of how it might have started: " From the top of the diagram [.PDF link], there are two progenitors of matching tile games, Chain Shot (figure 4, Moribe, 1985) (also known as Same Game) and the better known Tetris (figure 5, Pajitnov and Gerasimov, 1985). We cannot rule out the existence of earlier little known matching tile video games, but we know that Tetris was an extremely successful game that spawned a number of imitators, and we can see the influence of Chain Shot at various points in the tree. Both of these games were originally non-commercial."

The subject of casual game cloning is also dealt with in a section called: 'Zuma: The controversy of moderate innovation', explaining quite correctly: "Even more than other distribution channels, the casual game channel is characterized by the two opposing requirements of familiarity to the player and an element of innovation to differentiate a game from other games on the market. This creates a somewhat schizophrenic environment of cutthroat competition between developers simultaneously trying to out-innovate and out-clone each other." And yes, the whole Puzzloop, Zuma, and Luxor thing is then discussed, for kicks.

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over at excellent indie game site GameTunnel, Gish co-creator Josiah Pisciotta has revealed actual sales on the IGF-winning blob platformer, and it's OK, but a little underwhelming for the indie PC gaming world.

Why? Well, even though it was a high-profile IGF winner, the Chronic Logic guys sold 4521 copies only through their website, for a total of about $81,000. After the retail/affiliate income and the IGF winnings, they ended up netting about $121,000 - not bad for a game done in 6 months by 3 people, but not spectacularly impressive.

As Josiah notes: "As you can see Gish did not sell well in retail or on other sites and the majority of income generated from Gish (67%) was from direct sales through chroniclogic.com. Gish also missed out on a number of opportunities that could generate a lot more income such as North American retail and console distribution because of a lack of a shared vision among the developers."

My point of view is, partly, that digital distribution of PC indie games was still becoming accepted when Gish launched in 2004, and that I suspect less well-known games are doing better now. As an example, I heard anecdotally (and unconfirmedly) that Armadillo Run may have sold at least 5,000 copies directly from its website.

In addition, it seems fairly easy to rack up 20 or 30,000 paid downloads at $10 each if you can get on Xbox Live Arcade as a console-based indie. There are _wildly_ diverging opinions about whether console distribution is good or practical for indies, but I think it aggregates the hardcore indie-friendly consumers and makes it easy for them to pay, so it's a very good thing. But we need more data points! Anyone else want to volunteer figures, esp. for XBLA titles and major PC indies?

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Noel and Charles at the previously GSW-discussed Power Of 2 Games, who are a fascinating San Diego-based startup featuring game biz veterans going ultra-indie, have posted an in-depth new entry about game prototypes, and it's excellent stuff.

They explain, that instead of building a complex game engine over a period of months: "We decided to start with a prototype. This isn't supposed to be a "prototype" that eventually morphs into a shipping game, or a prototype that uses the same technology as the production code, or even a prototype that's used to impress the big-wigs to squeeze some money out of them (ha!). No, all that stuff detracts from the ultimate goal of our prototype."

How so? "Our approach was very similar to what Chris Hecker and Chaim Gingold described in their GDC presentation [.PPT link, GameSpy write-up]. We had the need to answer one very specific question: "Is our game idea fun?" And we wanted the answer as quickly and cheaply as possible. Everything else was secondary." A great approach, and they reveal: "Now at least we can be confident that the game is going to be pretty fun." Of course, we don't know WHAT the concept is - but now we're all interested.

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Those crazies at new indie hotness publisher GameCock just mailed around that their new GameCockLove.com website is live - and actually, we interviewed them on Gamasutra yesterday about their E-I-E-I-O barnyard-ish alt.E3 event.

But what caught my eye was the beautifully insane 'About' essay on the new GameCock website, thanks to head honcho and G.O.D. co-creator Mike Wilson. It's wonderfully semi-fictional, and it's about - well - the hunt for funding, I guess? "Harry “El Gringo” Miller and I had knocked on every money door we could find from Wall Street to Hollywood to Silicon Valley to a gay massage parlor run by the Korean Mafia. After a great massage, we hit the stones again and these guys crawled out, bank rolls in hand and fire in their eyes."

There's also some leftover vitriol from G.O.D's sale to Take-Two: "Where's Max Payne now? Now that this industry is tied to the proverbial tracks. Dead. Dead like Serious Sam and Mafia and even Railroad Tycoon. Like every franchise brought in by a great Indie team and then bought, coddled, and quietly smothered to death by a bloated public company. We had all become the hollowed out pawns of the rotten, crooked puppeteers supplying the grease to the wheels that make this crummy gaming business turn."

But basically, the gist is that they lost - and then won - the investment to start up GameCock in a crazed illegal razorblade-toting cockfight: "In marched the birds, and on came the betting. Feathers flying, I was dizzy watching Harry place his bets and keep raising the stakes for the first fight- which was over in about 10 seconds by my count. They were using razors strapped to the birds’ feet." This is spectacularly not true, but it's tremendously readable, and I think that's meant to be the point. Bravo, Gamecock-eteers!

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, I was trying to explain to MTV News' Stephen Totilo earlier why I don't link his awesome material more - not through lack of appreciating it, either. I came to the conclusion that the stuff he writes is so relatively sophisticated that it sometimes lacks 'hooks', and so I have trouble communicating it on in a sensible way to GSW readers. Either that, or I'm just lazy.

Anyhow, his 'Player Two' blog continues to update, if you want to cut out the middleman, but I wanted to showcase two notable recent updates - first, an interview with Grant Morrison on his game work, which is probably a prime example, since Morrison really doesn't have any current game projects. But he does dish on 'Citizen Death', his idea for what sounds like a completely surreal version of GTA: "The vehicles you could actually get were more interesting, like UFOs, flying saucers and boots that would allow you to bounce around over skyscrapers."

More recently, we have some ruminations on 'The Pit', as triggered by ""Super Paper Mario"'s Pit of 100 Trials, an endurance test buried in the sewers of the game's main town." Totilo asks: "This used to be the only kind of experience games provided. Every game was designed to bring the player to failure... [but] Isn't the game world outside the Pit just another Pit in disguise?"

[Oh yeah, and Tom Kim just conducted a Gamasutra Podcast with Totilo yesterday, talking about "...how games coverage might differ from traditional news reporting, specifically with regard to blogging and non-traditional first person writing" and a multitude of other issues. He gets it, guys - which can only be good for the industry.]

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

Felicitations to Gamezebo for pointing out that VH1 Games and Diner Dash creator Gamelab have just released their first casual game collaboration, Downbeat, and it's - wait for it- a mouse-based casual '80s rhythm action title, using licensed music.

Why would this be awesome? Well, for starters, because Gamelab continue to make some of the all-out best and most innovative casual titles around - some of which, like Plantasia or Egg Vs. Chicken, are honestly a bit too sophisticated to take off in the town where 'match three' is king.

But now Guitar Hero has burned itself into everyone's retina, the time is probably right for Downbeat, one of five new titles Gamelab will be introducing over the next few months, and described as follows: "Finally! A rhythm-action game for the rest of us. With ten classic 80s hits, Downbeat busts out with dazzling graphics, pumping tunes, and can’t-touch-this gameplay."

So how does it play? Well, it has the Beatmania and/or Guitar Hero 'press the button in time to the music when an object hits a line' stylings, but it switches things up by having you manipulate the mouse to place colored objects in the relevant audience area, and drop objects in specific orders to make combos and stop the crowd from fleeing. Plus - the soundtrack (instrumentals only using loops, no vocals) includes Madness' Our House (the clip is close enough!), Rick James' Super Freak, and Nena's 99 Luft Balloons, to name but three.

Only had a chance to play it briefly - it's a Shockwave.com title where you can download and play for 60 minutes for free before paying for the full version - but it's nice to see the rhythm action genre coming to PC casual games with Downbeat, and in such a relatively sophisticated way. We'll see if it takes off.

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Another story from sister site Gamasutra worth pointing at (promise we won't do it _every_ day), former EverQuest designer Kevin Carter (not the Manic Street Preachers one) has written 'Living Worlds: The Ecology Of Game Design', promising "...three simple guidelines you can use to make your game worlds that much more believable, and therefore that much more exciting to play through."

He explains in the intro: "I’ve compiled notes on the conditions that enhance, or at least encourage, the feeling that a game’s environment is a real place, that it may theoretically exist somewhere out there and is not just a collection of levels built solely for my amusement. Surprisingly, this kind of immersion has little to do with graphics (though good graphics never hurt, they are not the focus of this article). It has more to do with subtle elements borrowed from the real world."

A particularly interesting point is that creatures are shaped by their environment, something not always well communicated in games: "The easiest of the tools that can be used to tie creatures into their world come from environmental associations between the creature and the surrounding game geometry. In other words, wherever a creature appears in game, it should be nearby an object (or objects) typically associated with that creature type." Can anyone think of good/awful examples of this?

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ah, a note from a staffer at KQED Public Broadcasting in San Francisco: "We recently did a TV story on video games that are accessible for everyone for QUEST, our multimedia series on environment, science and nature."

The story is called 'Video Games - Access For All', and the KQED site has a nice quality official streaming video version of it on the above site link - which is awesome, go PBS! The official Quest blog has some notes on the segment, specifically: "QUEST TV takes you to the international Game Developers Conference celebrated recently in San Francisco, where a group of gamers used colorful tactics to convince mainstream developers to make video games that are accessible for everyone."

Barrie Ellis of OneSwitch has some nice comments in the Quest blog post, too: "A very fine video, touching on most of the main points of game accessibility. Can’t say that I agree with Noah Falstein’s thoughts that main-stream developers will likely never embrace accessibility. Many of the features essential to disabled gamers add very little development time if thought out in advance, and can offer much to the main-stream. For example - speed control, reconfigurable controls and closed captions can benefit all gamers."

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, apparently I'm the only member of the press who logs on to GameTap's client and checks their 'Coming Soon' section - but I'm not complaining, since it gives me plenty of good info on what the 'all you can eat' PC subscription service has coming up - and for GSW-style game geeks, there's some powerful good Neo Geo action forthcoming.

Of course, one could argue that the best Neo Geo games have been a bit slow coming to GameTap - but they're starting to leak out now, with King Of Fighters '94 (the first KoF game to appear on GT) scheduled for May 10th, according to the page, shortly followed by Art Of Fighting (some time in May), and undated debuts for Samurai Shodown, Last Blade (mm!), and - especially appreciated - Metal Slug 2, X, 3, 4, and 5, to join the just-added Metal Slug.

Also listed on 'coming soon', outside the whole Neo Geo thing, is classic Interplay board game Battle Chess, which I remember delightedly playing on my Amiga back in 1988 or so, with Origin's all-time classic Ultima VI also mentioned, with an unspecified arrival date. Neato.

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

N'Gai Croal's always insightful LevelUp blog at Newsweek has roped Midway's Steve Allison in for a guest editorial discussing what developers should learn from marketers, in partial answer to Denis Dyack's recent series of suggestions, and it makes for interesting reading.

It's a little bit depressing - but maybe I don't work the best as a profit maximizer, and Allison is definitely trying to be realistic: "According to our numbers, the actual success rate of new IP over the past four years is just seven percent. In other words, 93 percent of new IP fails in the marketplace. So while the 90-plus review scores and armfuls of awards create the perception that titles like Psychonauts, Shadow of the Colossus, Okami and other great pieces of work were big successes, the truth is that they were big financial disappointments and money losers."

There are some things that don't ring true in his rhetoric - a bit too much random Midway hyping, for starters - witness this statement in the second part: "A game's sales potential is entirely determined by the strength of its overall concept, while the difference between its sales potential and its final tally is determined by its execution. And given the phenomenal execution of Psychonauts, Ico, Psi-Ops and the other art house games listed above, their failure can be ascribed to a misguided concept, poor timing or both."

Wait, Psi-Ops (which was, yes, made by Midway) is an 'art house game'? Nonetheless, Allison has, abstractly, a pretty good point - "What happens all too often in the videogame business is that we get art house movies made at blockbuster budgets." This is true in a number of cases, but I wonder - how many of those titles were aimed squarely at the mainstream but just failed to understand the market properly?

Well, I'm pretty sure that Psi-Ops is one of those 'mainstream missers', for starters, and it's going to be interesting to see whether Midway, increasingly playing a high-stakes game, can hit home runs with the titles they need to, such as Stranglehold and Blacksite: Area 51. If they do, then Allison has really delivered on the concepts he espouses here. If not - well, I guess we can always blame it on the art house?

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)

['@ Play' is a bi-weekly column by John Harris which discusses the history, present and future of the Roguelike dungeon exploring genre.]
I'm back and fully rested after a break for column #20. And before you complain about the extra week, note that it took quite some doing to get play time in on this week's game....

Up until now we've mostly gone after fairly low-hanging fruit. We've discussed four of the five roguelike biggies: Rogue, Nethack, ADOM and Dungeon Crawl -- Angband is waiting until I can get a proper handle on it. We've also looked at Pokemon Rescue Team and ToeJam & Earl, which each have some roguelike qualities, and DoomRL, which is roguelike but very different in style. But all these games are fairly available. ToeJam & Earl is the hardest of this lot to find, and that was only until Virtual Console put it within the reach of nearly everyone with eight bucks and a Wii, although that may be small consolation.

But the thing about roguelike games is, the genre is seriously old. Rogue, a computer game with random dungeons, a full inventory and tremendous strategy, was created in 1980, a year before Pac-Man. In those 27 years since Rogue's birth we have seen a good many roguelike computer games, and it is no longer so easy to get to play some of them.

Along those lines, the Roguelike Restoration Project is the incredibly noble effort to take some of these ancient games and make them playable under common operating systems. Among the eight games that can be found there are three versions of Rogue, two of Advanced Rogue, and three other games with "rogue" in the title but that take increasing liberties with the play. Like Rogue, all of these are fairly playable today. Unlike Rogue (and like Nethack), they lose some of Rogue's clarity by adding so much to the game. But at least they still exist.

There are some other roguelikes it's getting harder to find nowadays. Moria, Hack, Larn and Omega were the first ones to branch further off from the tree, and there is little, if any, development going on in those branches now. None of these are so easy to find. At least Moria evolved into Angband, while Larn and Omega mostly stagnated. Hack, of course, would become the imposing Nethack, also called Gradewrecker and Thesisbane.

Hack, itself, inspired a few variants back in the day, and one of those is our focus this time: the game HackLite, a little-known variant that is most difficult to play these days because its main version was for Amiga home computers.

Genealogy of the Dungeons of Doom

Hack was originally the branch-off roguelike to stick closest to Rogue. For example, it and its descendants still call many Rogue monsters by old names. Nethack's latest version contains Giant Ants, Floating Eyes, Violet Fungi, Gnomes, Invisible Stalkers, Jackals, Kobolds, Mimics, Purple Worms, Quasits, Rust Monsters, Umber Hulks and Xorn, but Rogue's does not, despite all these foes first appearing there. (Trivia moment: rumor has it the monster names and symbols were changed specifically as an attempt to thwart the automatic Rogue player Rog-O-Matic, but we've already covered that little program.)

In between Rogue and Nethack there were a few different Hack versions, games that were only in currency for a moment compared to their descendant's lifespan, but are still referenced fondly by Nethack's history file. Another version of Hack, one that doesn't get a lot of mention anymore because it was not part of Nethack's lineage, is HackLite, of which versions were made for DOS and the Amiga personal computer.

Meet the Wizard of Yendor's Lost Brother, Neil Yendor

Even while Nethack survived and prospered, HackLite sunk into obscurity, perhaps for two reasons. The first is right in the game's readme: "It is interesting to note that, in the world of Hack descendants, HackLite is the only one I know of that believes a limit on game complexity is a good thing." At a time when players seemed interested in the most detailed game experience possible, the existence of Nethack, which was composed by taking the best ideas from multiple Hack variants, must have seemed awfully compelling. These days there is a thriving side of the roguelike genre composed of games that try to rein in some of the complexity of which they are capable, so it could be said that HackLite was ahead of its time.

The other limitation was a longer-term issue. Hack's source code has long been public, even if not expressly open, back in those heady days when code was considered free by default if available. Thus it was that HackLite forked off of Hack and Nethack's source code right before Nethack switched to the "Nethack Public License," which was based off of the Bison license, and the nature of that beast should become obvious when I tell you it was produced by Richard Stallman. While Nethack ended up with a license that looks more than a little like the GPL, HackLite's source code was never released, and remains obscure today. No source means no variants, no user-made patches, and no development by anyone other than the author and his agents. Meanwhile Nethack has drawn repeatedly from the work of interested users, fosters a patch-writing culture, and its open nature early on attracted the infamous Devteam.

There is one advantage to keeping a lid on the source. The workings of HackLite are more mysterious than those of Nethack. While its origin came from the folding together of a version of Hack and Nethack 2.3, the game was changed in other ways than that. The specifics of the resulting program no one really knows. When it comes down to it, a lot of the dissatisfaction many have with Nethack comes, not from the fact that it requires spoilers (which it technically does not, all information needed to win is available in-game, although it takes a whole lot of play to see enough of it), but that those spoilers are easy to obtain, and exhaustively correct. How did they get that correct? By source diving, of course.

So that leaves us with the mysterious game itself. The opinions here come from playing the Amiga HackLite v2.8.0, scavenged from Fred Fish disk #799.

"This corridor seems dusty.[More] Perhaps if you cleaned more often?"

HackLite is based off of earlier versions of Hack and Nethack 2.3. Importantly, this was before version 3.0, which instituted many changes to the game system (blessed items came around here) and version 3.1, which gave us the modern dungeon layout. This means that the player is in for a game a good deal more like Rogue than he may be expecting.

Importantly, while HackLite has prayer its purpose is obscure. It does not seem to be a general-purpose plea for aid, and it doesn't even work unless the player has taken a certain measure first. Monsters do not seem to be much worse than Nethack's, but neither is food in greater supply, and without prayer for early emergency feedings lots of players run out. Many of my trial games were ended by starvation, it being a far more potent killer than any of the monsters.

"You feel strong! But you don't feel agile, tough, smart, wise or charismatic."

HackLite also is missing all player stats other than Strength, level sounds ("You hear someone cursing shoplifters.") and burdening levels (plate mail seems to "weigh" the same as a gemstone). The burden level thing is a much greater change than it may seem at first. One of the more head-scratching things about modern Nethack is the proliferation of weapons and armors that go unused. 3.1 players soon learn to avoid plate mail because of its tremendous weight; only those with high strength can carry both it and basic equipment without becoming burdened, while mithril is not hard to find in the Gnomish Mines while being much lighter, and mid-game characters usually wish up or make Dragon Scale Mail, which has the best Armor Class, is extremely light, and provides a free resistance to boot. By doing away with burdening, HackLite restores plate mail's usefulness.

But HackLite is more than reduced Nethack; it makes some additions of its own as well. One interesting change positive change made to the game, that Nethack itself could gain benefit from, is that items in shops are a lot more similar in price to each other. Scrolls of Identify no longer stick out like a sore thumb as the cheapest thing in bookstore inventories, which may seem like a little thing but actually changes the game quite a lot. Finding that first ID scroll is a milestone in Hack-family games, since the player must happen upon it by chance and test-read to discover its type. This, plus the inclusion of a few additional item types like rings of addiction and wands of futility, can throw players expecting fewer tricks for a loop.

Plays Great - Less Taxing

So, why is HackLite still entertaining to play? It is simple, the same reasons that games like Dungeon Crawl and DoomRL have become more popular in recent years. It is a roguelike that doesn't require what amounts to a Master's degree in the game to be successful at it. Some tricks will help, and there are secrets, yes, but Nethack has entire game mechanics that are secrets. HackLite, on the other hand, does without many Nethack 3.0 and 3.1 that are sorely missed (like player attribute scores other than Strength), but it still contains bones, engravings, vaults and the like.

This is a general feeling one gets while playing the game. Nethack has become so balanced (to some, "easy") over time that successful play is most often attained by playing ultra-cautiously, price IDing items when possible, avoiding testing scrolls if it can be helped, using dipping and other means to figure out the bad potion types, being cagey with wand charges to ID them, and so on. Many experienced Nethack players manage to avoid trial and error identification nearly all the time. HackLite has fewer of these features, so item information must more often be traded for (by usage, which often wastes resources and inflicts bad effects) instead of obtained for free. This makes it a much more chaotic game than NetHack, even despite its simplified game world.

A note about playing this game:
HackLite actually evolved out of an Amiga port of Hack, which was then converted into a DOS version. The Amiga port is still the nicest way to play, due to its interesting, though idiosyncratic, graphics. If you wish to try the version pictured here, you will either need a stock Amiga, or the UAE emulator and images of the Kickstart and Workbench disks, the rights to which are currently owned by Amiga Forever, who sells copies for about $30.

HackLite
Dos version: http://roguelikedevelopment.org/archive/files/executables/hacklite283.zip
Amiga version: http://ftp.funet.fi/pub/amiga/fish/701-800/ff799/

Sources:
The Rogue's Vade-Mecum
Readme for HackLite
Dungeondweller's awesome Roguelike archive

Other news:
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, the version of Dungeon Crawl that sees active development, reached 0.2.4 about a month ago.

Reference:

Here are my notes concerning differences noticed between HackLite 2.8.0 (2.8.3 is the most recent version) and the Nethack 3.1-3.4 line.

SPOILERS FOLLOW! Do not continue if you wish to avoid them!

Different:
No dungeon branches.
No pet displacing. (Very annoying, this.)
No exercise.
No stats other than strength
Shift-X learns spells (not the read command)
Absent commands, no #chat", no #untrap", no #monster
Shops sell objects for more, price differences are less great.
Some messages are different.
"You don't know how to/still can't/will probably never learn to walk through walls"
General items cannot be blessed or cursed. Equipment can be cursed only.
Monster attacks that damage weapons reduce plusses, instead of causing "rusty," "burnt" or "corroded" states.
Preserved items. (Probably analogous to Nethack "erodeproofing.")
Dungeon levels have more rooms. (This is positive.)
Some polymorph monster abilities implemented via special extended commands (#? to get list)
Doors are not "open" or "closed," but always open.
Tins contain food types instead of monster types (salmon makes fingers slippery like french-fried food in modern Nethack). Also, each tin contains random food instead of a predetermined type (that could be, say, identified).
Dead rats always make you "feel sick"
"Reading this scroll confuses you. You are awarded the Yendor Prize for Poetry!" (Confuses player for a good while)
No level sounds.
No burdening levels: plate mail weighs the same as a gemstone.
Dead zombies are edible?
New items: Ring of Addiction, Wand of Futility
Fountains can be generated in shops
Eating rock moles can result in message "You feel tougher!"
Starvation is a much bigger problem.
No partially-eaten things.

Similar:
Monster corpses do grant intrisics.
Eating floating eyes does confer
Bones levels are in the game.
Overaged corpses can kill players via food poisoning.
Polymorph is in the game.
Potion dipping seems to be in the game, but its use isn't yet known.
Prayer: #pray. (However, it is not as useful as a generic escape from trouble. Speculation: punishment makes prayer available? When punished and praying, I got "the gods accept your tithe.")
Doors cannot be passed through diagonally.
The engrave trick for identifying wands does work.
Vaults are in the game, as well as the teleport traps that lead into them.
Monsters can use weapons, including thrown weapons.

Posted by John Harris at 1:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)

This has already been splattered all over the Interweb, but thought I should point it out too - big sister site Gamasutra has an in-depth interview with FeelPlus president Ray Nakazato, the chap who's currently executing on Lost Odyssey under the direction of Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi - and it's an absolutely fascinating piece.

This is mainly because Nakazato talks incredibly frankly about the biz, from his time at Microsoft Game Studios Japan working on Ninety-Nine Nights ("It was just going so wrong. So I was there [in Korea], Mizuguchi was there, to kind of sort it out") to previously unknown Xbox 360 titles ("Then one project that we were doing with Mr. Okamoto (and Game Republic) was canned... It was a third-person shooter game with a Japanese samurai. Kind of half historical, half sci-fi.")

He also talks about the challenges of developing Lost Odyssey with Unreal Engine 3: "It was hard, because it was a new platform, and Unreal Engine 3 itself was in development, so we had to deal with incomplete middleware. We actually released a Lost Odyssey demo in Japan in November, though we finished it in June of last year. Back then, the Unreal Engine was still incomplete, so we had to release something on incomplete middleware... Now that they've done Gears of War, the engine itself is much more stable." There's oodles more in there (Matsuno references!), so feel free to check it out in detail.

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

One of my favorite niche weblogs, the animation-centric Cartoon Brew, has been praising the recent animated Guitar Hero II Xbox 360 ad, but it bought up some interesting info on the director along the way.

Editor Amid notes: "Gorillaz animation director Pete Candeland of Passion Pictures has turned out a visually stunning spot [.MOV, alt. YouTube link] for the videogame Guitar Hero II. It would have been even better if the animation of the guitar playing had been more closely timed to the music, but the superb drawing and movement of the two main characters, not to mention great inking style, makes this spot a winner."

Anyhow, Candeland's portfolio page on the site reveals that he did indeed work with Gorillaz creator Jamie Hewlett on the music videos to tracks like Manana and the awesome Dare clip, as well as a bunch of other neat animated vids, along with a whole bunch of collaborators.

[And also, I had the same reaction as a Cartoon Brew commenter, actually: "I saw this ad while skipping commercials on my DVR the other day and it was actually visually interesting enough that I went back, JUST TO WATCH THE COMMERCIAL." This is impressive! Score several to Activision for commissioning this.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Back to Microsoft Casual Games' bizdev guy Kim Pallister, who mentions an issue regarding student games that I've been meaning to point out for a while.

He notes: "In a conversation with some Digipen students at the IGF at GDC (their game was a finalist), I was *shocked* to learn that they didn't actually have the right to commercialize their game, but that the Digipen school owned the rights to any games created by their students... I was also naive. It turns out many of today's educational systems are imposing unreasonable copyright terms on students in their media programs."

One of the commenters on this post is Steve Chiavelli of 2007 IGF Best Student Game winner Toblo, who explains directly: "We knowingly (naively?) signed away the rights to everything we would make when entering DigiPen. Personally, it seemed like a good trade-off. I would be attending what I had researched to be arguably the best place for learning how to be a game programmer... Unfortunately, I never could have foreseen the whole Slamdance drama. Having the school attach my game (and name) to something against my will was an unpleasant experience, to say the least."

For those not clear on the particular issue, it's written up here: "On January 16th, the DigiPen Institute of Technology -- the college we attend -- overwrote our decision and readmitted Toblo to the Slamdance Festival. We still have very strong feelings regarding the removal of Super Columbine Massacre RPG! from the competition, and we have not been satisfied with Mr. Baxter's numerous rationales for dropping the game."

As Chairman of the IGF, an event which student games figure very heavily in, I definitely feel some unease about schools owning game rights. It becomes a problem if those Digipen (or Full Sail, or USC, or whichever school's) students sign their rights over, but then their views and wants diverge from that of the school's. Obviously, this has happened publicly at least once, with Toblo and Slamdance, and I'm hoping that it doesn't happen again. Maybe someone in the faculty at a game school can comment on why ownership makes sense?

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (13)

Matteo Bittanti has been nice enough to point out First Person Shooter: The Play, which premiered in San Francisco on Saturday night, and "...takes us inside ‘JetPack Games’, a start-up video game company, where the hottest, most violent game on the market has brought instant success to its twenty-something tech geniuses."

According to the SF Playhouse page for the play: "Their celebration fizzles when their game is blamed for a schoolyard shooting. As the young CEO of Jet Pack deals with an impending lawsuit and the father of one of the victims, he must confront whether he has any responsibilities in the world beyond his computer screen."

Bittanti points out a review/analysis piece over at the Mercury News, too - which mentions Virginia Tech a lot, considering the disproven connection, but oh well. In addition, Firing Squad has a good interview with playwright Aaron Loeb, who is also COO of Giants: Citizen Kabuto creators Planet Moon Studios, as it happens.

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Having finally sorted out a decent sound system for my TV (and thus having two audio output methods), I decided to download some Rifftrax, which are essentially Mystery Science Theater (at least the Mike Nelson version) continued by other means.

Anyhow, I picked up the Star Wars Episode 1 Rifftrax commentary - and that clip actually has a random Psychonauts reference in it, so there's some game relevance right there. (In case you don't know the deal, you download the MP3 and play it synchronized with the movie DVD. In my case, suddenly I felt like my Star Wars DVD purchase was actually worth it again!)

There's an article about Rifftrax in the New York Times today, as it happens, and so this further got me thinking - Half-Life 2 has a commentary track, right? Why don't game developers step it up a notch and have self-deprecating comedy commentaries includes as part of their games? Heck, Chet and Erik could do it for Portal, 'cos Valve certainly has the technology. C'mon, whaddaya say, guys?

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Got a note from the folks at Slitherine Strategies, the plucky UK chaps who have been IGF finalists on multiple occasions with their PC indie wargames - most recently Arcane Legions, which I think may have morphed into The History Channel: Great Battles Of Rome, an interesting license agreement.

Anyhow, they've announced 'The Kameleon Project', which "...has been created to assist other independent developers to bring their games to market." It's explained: "If you’ve got programmers but no artists, the Kameleon Project will arrange a match. If you’re missing music and sound effects the Kameleon Project can help. If you need design, marketing, business or general advice the Kameleon Project is your one stop shop."

Why bother? "Over the years Slitherine have made many friends and keep in regular touch with them, exchanging information and ideas, and sharing experiences, good and bad. During this time it became apparent to Slitherine that whilst many independent teams lack nothing in talent they have little or no experience in dealing with marketing, publishing, contracts, and the million and one other things that are needed to successfully launch a new title."

Now, you can argue that this is just a biz move by Slitherine - and it is, partly - but in the niche PC areas like wargames, it's nice to see a developer coming forward to help other devs. They note: "The first release from the Kameleon Project is ‘Commanders – Europe at War’ from Firepower Entertainment and DoubleThink Studios, which will be mastering in May 2007."

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Publishing periodical Folio Magazine has a cover feature called 'Ziff's Last Stand' in the May 2007 issue, with the front cover headline being 'Breaking Up An Icon', and yeah - it's a little bit depressing from the point of view of the print media behemoths.

The story starts, regarding the EGM, Games For Windows and 1UP.com owner: "Of the big three tech publishers (CMP Technology and IDG are the others), Ziff Davis Media has had by far the most interesting story and in some ways, the most startling success. During the six-year tenure of CEO Robert Callahan (he joined in October 2001) it has had a two-sided challenge: Stanching the decline of print while building out an e-media business. It hasn’t been easy. The company barely skirted bankruptcy in 2002, carries a crushing debt load, and unlike its two peers, had essentially no resources for growth."

There's some insight on the Ziff Game Group - with specific stats - from John Davison: "In the Game Group, the challenge has been responding to a slow start. “Competitively, the situation we were in was our print brands were very strong in this space, but we were late to the online world,” says Davison, senior vice president and editorial director of the group. “We once had GameSpot, which was sold to C|Net. And the other big online game site was IGN. They’re both huge and keep getting bigger. I think IGN is about 20 million monthly visitors and GameSpot is close to that.” The piece then cites the 1UP Network at 13 million unique visitors and 97 million page views monthly.

But here's the money quote when it comes to what's happening to Ziff Davis, which is still for sale, of course, according to remarks from an un-named 'expert': “[Possible acquirers] would probably all like to have the online assets... Ziff has done a terrific job of building their online business, but they still have a major position in big print magazines and they are all still continuing to struggle—the opposite of economies of scale are diseconomies. You have to figure out what your standalone expenses are.” [Via PaidContent.]

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

Over at The Gamer's Quarter forums, Dessgeega has published a fun, screenshot-filled guide to some of Epic's 'Super ZZT' games, published back in 1991 for PC, and - one might vaguely credibly claim - the farthest back predecessor to today's Unreal Engine 3.

Dess explains: "zzt was the first shareware title to be released by epic games (then called "potomac computer systems". it's a text-mode game that uses ascii characters to represent game elements - symbols are recontextualized, level design becomes language, form becomes function, and games are living, breathing ascii art."

Continuing: "the games themselves were created in a freely-distributable level editor, giving them an overall coherence and letting the creator's voice really come through. the editor is a whole other thread, though. it's the games that we're interested in now - specifically, the three super zzt titles, volumes five through seven, which were compiled in a special editor that allows for - among other things - huge scrolling maps rather than single-screen areas." Lots and lots of screencaps and explanations follow - v. neat.

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, Petri Purho at Kloonigames, whom we last covered for his April Fool's spoof of Rod Humble's 'The Marriage', in the form of rather Pong-like 'The Divorce', has just released another 'made in a week' PC indie title, called 'Daydreaming in the Oval Office'.

He explains of the actually rather politically-themed game: "You’re Mr. Bush and you’re daydreaming in the Oval Office... trying to collect imaginary pieces of evidence about the Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Use arrow keys to move George around. Try to keep the beach ball of the floor and try to collect the pieces of evidence." Iiinteresting.

Oh yeah, and we never linked his previous game, 'Forbidden.exe', which is "...an experimental horror game. So be warned, there’s harsh language, violence and other fun forms of violation. One could say that it’s an experimental violation game." Rapid prototyping FTW! [Via The2Bears.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

['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.]

Hah! Even Nintendo Power admits it in their media kit! It's true!

And with that bit of silliness out of the way, click on to read all about the US magazines that have hit newsstands in the past two weeks. I've got a long update this week, but I suppose you could say I had a lot on my mind...

Nintendo Power June 2007

Cover: NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams

The old mixes with the new in this issue, as per usual. On the one hand, you have all the really early first-look Wii/DS previews that you'd expect from Nintendo Power -- a news section packed with games I never heard of before, a cover feature on Wii NiGHTS that would have been hot-sclusive if it weren't for that darn Swedish magazine, an interview with Tomonobu Itagaki (yet another "no way would you see that in Nintendo Power" moment there) and three pages on Space Station Tycoon that actually make the game look kinda interesting.

There's also a new section, Power Profiles, that interviews game designers about the creative process. Mr. Miyamoto is the first entry, of course, and two pages of Mr. Miyamoto is always quotable as all get-out.

The old Nintendo comes out (besides NP's usual custom of calling Japanese people "Mr. [last name]," even where "Mr." would be omitted with Western names) in "Wii Welcome You," an advertising pamphlet that comes included with the subscriber edition. Wii Welcome You won't be news to NP subscribers, since it serves mainly as an introduction to the Wii and all its abilities, but it's worth taking a peek at just for the internal art -- it's nothing but drawings of creepy-looking Miis (we're talking 80s box-art creepy here).

Official Xbox Magazine June 2007 (Podcast)

Cover: My Beautiful Katamari

Despite my initial impression, OXM has put several Japanese games on the cover of the magazine before, most recently Lost Planet. But this is certainly the most Japanese-y OXM cover ever, and the imagery undoubtedly makes for a better cover than The Darkness, the other big preview inside. (I mean, it's so dark, and besides, PSM already has a no-name FPS on its cover this month.) The editors spend 7 pages discussing things with localization man Lindsay Gray, then three more going over the rest of the 360's upcoming Japan lineup. It's quite nice.

The rest of the features aren't quite as hot as Katamari, though -- they include a bit on the Xbox dashboard and the team behind it, as well as an except from the (yawn) Mass Effect prequel novel (zzz).

Two neat little bits in this particular issue for magazine buffs. First off, OXM takes a page to print 698 Xbox Live tags -- all the people who got 16,000 OXM Points by going through every single OXM disc in the past year-and-a-half before they reset the scores for OXM Universe, which gave me flashbacks to Next Generation printing their entire subscriber list over several months in 1998. The second is in the letters section, where a reader notes that four of the past five issues have had review covers and lambasts OXM for it ("The whole point of a cover story is to give us new info about a new game that is coming out"). Sounds like the letter writer would be happier subscribing to Game Informer...

And speaking of that disc, I hope you like baseball, because MLB 2K7 (along with a buggy-arse Star Trek: Legacy demo that takes three minutes to load) is the main highlight.

Tips & Tricks June 2007

Cover: Command & Conquer 3

EIC Bill Kunkel notes something that I realized a few months ago in this month's editor column -- the so-called "lifestyle content" (i.e. all of T&T's columns) now take up as much of the mag as the tips and the tricks. "We believe that our readers are fascinated by the lifestyle of gaming, from movies and music to action figures and animation," he writes. "We look at gaming from the point of view that anyone who enjoys playing video games will also have a natural curiosity about, and affinity for, other components of the game culture."

The "lifestyle" section of T&T stands at 33 pages and at least 14 sections (some aren't in there every month), and like Kunkel says, there really is something in there for everyone. I read Collector's Closet every month, of course (it's been in 68 straight issues; I wonder how well a special one-off compilation of past columns would sell?) and usually steal a glance at Japan Report, Sports Desk and the toy/gear sections; otherwise I at least look at the pictures on all the rest, including the bits on animation, game music, World of Warcraft, and (making its debut this issue) downloadable console content.

I think it's all neat stuff, and with such a variety of content to stare at each month, I would make the argument that T&T is more "hardcore" these days than, say, a certain magazine with "Hardcore" in the title. But then that old problem crops up -- would someone who wants Tips and/or Tricks care about this? Or, for that matter, would they care about strategy for a PC game (I think that's the first time a PC game went on the cover)?

I like the "lifestyle" approach a great deal; it's just that, as someone who doesn't care about reading print strategy guides, I sometimes wish the whole mag was "lifestyle". In fact, I think such a mag in 100-page format would be pretty darn close to the game-mag idea I had a couple months ago. I know I'm just dreaming here, but I think that'd be utterly radical.

Play May 2007

Cover: Odin Sphere

Has there ever been a game better suited to Play's cover than this one? Halverson and crew give us a 10-page blowout on Odin, including a dev interview and a review closing with a perfect 10-out-of-10 score. It's almost like a collector's keepsake; that's how lovingly created this little feature was. Great reading by Play standards.

There's also a four-page preview of the new Crash game, and that, in its own special way, is also something you'd only find in Play these days. Still, you can't help but smile at some of the things the devs say in the piece, discussing Crash's internal motivations and such.

Play Japan seems to be getting bigger by the month. It's nine pages in May, kicking off with three on Gundam Musou. Hardcore Gamer covers Japan games extensively, but the writing's a lot better here.

GamePro June 2007

Cover: "The new Tony Hawk game" (I guess there's no name yet)

GamePro used to be the King of All Tony Hawk Covers. I think every title got on the cover in an unchallenged streak of thrash until Activision jumped ship and gave T.H.U.G. to Game Informer in 2003. GP gives the new game a two-cover special-edition treatment this month, with eight pages (including probably the nicest lead-in spread I've ever seen in GP) and interviews with Hawk and Neversoft devs.

I'm noticing a definite upgrade in the visual look of GamePro in this issue. Maybe I hadn't been paying attention earlier, but there's a ton of original art in this one, including a nice, original piece setting up a not-so-original "33 essential handheld games" feature. A more interesting feature premise: "21 Ways to Die!", a look at fatalities through the years. Awesome stuff there -- it tries to treat its content seriously, but when the list is dominated by games from the mid-90s blood-n-guts boom, you can't help but laugh your arse off at it.

PSM June 2007 (Podcast)

Cover: Pissed Off Army Guy (POAG)

Some sad-ish news here that I forgot to mention for months on end -- after a 10-year run that began with Issue One, Chris Slate has left the EIC job at PSM to head up Future's Special Projects section. His replacement: Rob Smith, another Future veteran who's had stints running both OXM and PC Gamer.

I'm hoping that Smith joining the PSM crew portends changes for the mag, because I think it could use a touch-up or two. I know I picked on Game Informer's preview features earlier, but I can't remember the last time I read anything very tangible in a PSM cover story, either. They suffer from "nothing you can't do online" syndrome, except often they're longer than the equivalent GI cover feature, so it's even more noticeable. That'd be fine if the rest of the mag was fun to read, but PSM is almost all straight-on news, previews and reviews, with very little diversion in between. I know PSM wasn't like that before, so how about messing with the formula a bit, Mr. Smith?

PC Gamer June 2007 (Podcast)

Cover: LOTR Online

For the second issue in a row, PC Gamer pulls the old "Buy this mag and get some free MMO crap" rabbit out of the hat. It's getting to be old fast (not to mention something that Computer Games magazine did a lot near the end), but I'll forgive them because through the stock previews/reviews, there's still a mess of interesting genre columns, not to mention at least one eye-opening news piece a month (this time around, a bit on professional video-game instructors).

[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 9:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Aha, I see - via WarrenEllis.com, that the Transmetropolitan creator is up and running blogging at the official Castlevania: Dracula's Curse website, talking about some of the choices he's making in scripting the direct-to-DVD animated adaption of Konami's classic game franchise.

The animation is being produced by Project 51 (also involved in "...a series of animated shorts based on the hit video game series Ape Escape", according to their 'About' page!), and Ellis typically sets things up with some sass: "The film is, of course, set in Wallachia in 1476. We’ve worked with Koji Igarashi to get the film solidly inside the Castlevania timeline, and he’s approved everything I came up with, including some new embroidering to the timeline."

He explains, grinning: "To make it work as a film, I had to introduce new backstory, and I went through five drafts of the premise and three of the full outline to get the material where IGA wanted it. He remains absolutely passionate about Castlevania. After eight rewrites of pre-production material, I remain absolutely passionate about beating the crap out of IGA in a dark alleyway one day."

Ah yeah, and there's this 'bombshell', which Ellis subsequently gets almost apologetic ("No, you’re not getting it... We want to do three films.") on behalf of: "Sypha Belnades is in the film... Grant DaNasty is not." Fair enough!

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at Clickable Culture, Tony Walsh has been discussing the new age and identity verification system for Second Life, which may actually be a big deal, given the amount of adult content strewn all over the virtual world.

Walsh notes: "According to an official blog posting, users who do not pay a fee to verify their age will be restricted from accessing Mature-rated areas of the virtual world. These areas will be identified by virtual land owners, who Linden Lab says "are morally and legally responsible for the content displayed and the behavior taking place on their land."

Walsh's analysis is on the money: "This is a major move for Linden Lab, with major ramifications for Second Life residents, who up until this point have been enjoying a combination of Wild West meets Roman Orgy meets Sesame Street since 2003... Later this month, a cold, dry Second Life experience will replace the old, sloppy, Burning Man-style Second Life experience... And while adult content in "safe" areas will never go away, at least Linden Lab has washed its hands of the entire, sordid mess."

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

So over on sister mobile game site GamesOnDeck, there's a new interview with SkyZone's Chief Publishing Officer Bob Shireman which is interesting because it discusses the firm's conversion of 3D Realms/Human Head's Prey for cellphones - a project that on the surface, seems ridiculously high-end.

However, he comments: "Prey is a complicated PC game and staying true to that product while acknowledging the limitations was quite a challenge. Ensuring playability is first and foremost our goal and once we make a game that is fun, then we focus on bringing the key elements from the PC and console title to mobile. With Prey for mobile, the Deathwalk sequence is intact but changed slightly to fit the form factor."

Shireman also makes an interesting claim of cellphone titles: "You very seldom hear, "It was a great title on the Xbox, PlayStation, PC but the mobile version sucked" when reading about 3D titles nowadays. Of course it's a different experience. Of course it isn't as aurally or visually rich. Consumers get it. Given that, they still want it to be fun, engaging, and re-playable."

[Oh yeah, and on the mobile front, sometime GSW columnist Matthew 'Fort90' Hawkins has started pro-blogging for mobile site Zedge, and he just posted a neat editorial in two parts called 'Cell Phones: Yet Another Ellis Island For Gamers?' Notably, consumers nowadays "...just want some a quick burst of fun, and both the Wii and cell phones are providing it, though one is doing a better job than the other."]

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

We've linked him a few times before, but it's time for a final link, because Yakumo's excellent Retro Core classic Japanese gaming videocast is now coming to an end, with Volume 32: The Final being, uhm, the final one featuring game footage and sardonic English commentary.

As Yakumo further explains on The Gamer's Quarter: "I just no longer have the time to produce the show anymore now that I've become a father. Still, it's been a great 3 years and within that Time Retro Core has covered over 390 games... In the final volume of Retro Core we take a look at the PC Engine and its games."

He continues: "There are many PC Engine games that are also featured on the Mega Drive. Retro Core compare 4 of them side by side, as well as taking a look at some of my personal favorite games in my collection. As well as that we've got Japanese game ads and the following games..." Big list follows, random selection is, well, these: "PC Engine - Ninja Spirits... PC Engine - Pop'n Twinbee... PC Engine Super CD - Psychic Storm... PC Engine Arcade CD - World Heroes 2." Nice!

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's one of the wackier charity endorsements in casual gaming of late, as an EA press release reveals that Pogo.com "...has teamed up with talk show host and philanthropist Rosie O’Donnell to launch their newest charitable program ‘Pogo Cares Benefiting Rosie’s For All Kids Foundation’."

Like, how? "Players are invited to participate in several online events at Pogo.com. The first event in the Pogo Cares program is the “Play & Chat with Rosie Sweepstakes” where anyone who plays “Tumble Bees” between May 17th and May 23rd will automatically be entered into a random drawing for a chance to win an opportunity to play and chat live with Rosie O’Donnell during the month of June."

But the most notable bit is that Rosie is talking up games, commenting: “I played a lot of videogames as a kid and now I am an avid Club Pogo member and have been for quite awhile. I play Word Whomp, Tumble Bees, Poppit! Squelchies, Qwerty, and World Class Solitaire – I like to mix it up. I’m online almost every night! It is a great way to relax and stay in touch with people out of state. There is a grandmother in Kansas that I play with … she has no idea who I am. We talk for hours about her grandkids and her latest projects. I love it!” High-profile game advocates are good for the biz, whoever they are.

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

Another fun bit of indie randomness that looks worth supporting: "KarjaSoft releases Sheeplings, a thrilling mix of puzzle solving and sheepherding action" - there are screenshots and a movie on the official site for those who want to see it in action.

Ah, really? "As Windsor the sheepdog you must protect and guide your flock toward the final goal: the sheep-jumping competition in Woolyville. Armed with only your bark you will face ravenous wolves and eagles, sheep-napping bandits, logic puzzles, stubborn sheep, hidden powerups and much more."

What's more: "Sheeplings is designed to provide fun for the whole family. The casual and non-violent gameplay is suitable for kids, but adults will also find themselves challenged by more than 80 wool-raising levels divided into three quests. Sheeplings also features an innovative unlocking scheme that lets you tackle the levels in any order you want." This type of v. alternative title, basically made by 2 people, is the kind of thing that makes me grin - nice mouse control, too!

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Random fact of the day - I actually live down here in San Jose right next to a street called Woz Way, which is, of course, named after Apple Computer co-founder and all-round tech geek demi-god Steve Wozniak.

Anyhow, over at Gamasutra today, Benj Edwards has managed to grab a rare interview with Woz about video games, since, as it's pointed out: "Wozniak... has also left his footprint in gaming history, having developed the initial prototype for classic Atari game Breakout in 1975 before founding Apple Computer."

Most notably, when asked: 'How did the existence of video games influence you personally as an engineer and computer designer?', Woz replied: "Extremely. Totally, for the Apple II. As a matter of fact, it was those four days that I did at Atari doing Breakout that really influenced the Apple II, to make it as special as it was. I saw hints of color. It was fake color with Mylar color overlays on a screen. I saw hints of color on a screen at Atari those nights, and I thought, "How gorgeous that looks." That was when I was very sleepy, and an idea popped in my head for generating color on American TVs with a $1 part." And the rest is history.

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You may remember we raved about it a few months back - or at least the concept - and now it appears that PC 'Holmes vs. Cthulhu' adventure Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened has debuted, and Rampant Coyote has added some first impressions of the Frogwares-developed title.

As the Coyote explains: "The game opens with Watson in his bed (without covers - no wonder he's got a sleep disorder) having nightmares about cults and monstrous horrors. Obviously, the dude has been through some rough stuff and has lost a few sanity points dealing with Cthulhu Mythos. Those of us who have played the Call of Cthulhu RPG know what's going on here. Anyway, he wakes up, and then you hear his mental dialog about how this all began."

There's actually a handy Adventure Gamers review which also expounds upon the game, and is a little disappointed by the lack of hardcore mythos: "Unfortunately, it seems that most game designers have only heard of one of Lovecraft's stories, The Call of Cthulhu, which tells of a group of demented people trying to raise Cthulhu, a squid-like being of tremendous power currently dreaming at the bottom of the sea — again, The Awakened is no different. As matter of fact, the mock-Lovecraft elements are so weak that the group Holmes is trailing could have been worshipping Ogoun Badagris or the Flying Spaghetti Monster without requiring much change to the plot."

Still, apart from the fact that it apparently uses StarForce (UCK!), it seems like a not completely horrible title, with Coyote noting: "It's not a high-budget, "AAA" game by any stretch. Fortunately, I'm not a AAA snob. Assuming I can figure out what Sherlock's hang-up is, I'm liking the game so far. There's detail where it's important, particularly in the clues, reports, and documents that Holmes acquires during the course of the game."

Posted by Simon Carless at 5:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Got a note from author Urs Regli (yeah, I believe that's his real name - he's Swiss!) about his very neat-looking PC indie title Blumenmacht, "...a unique mixture of shoot'em up and memory game play. The nonviolent game comes with a colourful flower power theme and is controlled only with the mouse."

Ah, and here's a YouTube video of Blumenmacht. So what's it about? Uhm, well: "In Blumenmacht Ballerinas are joining a flowerpower pogo dance. You are in control of the Ballerina who takes the leading part. She is the Prima Ballerina. To win a dance your Prima Ballerina has to throw flowers at the other Ballerinas until they are all happy. They try to do the same with your Prima Ballerina. But if they succeed and your Prima Ballerina is happy, you lost the dance."

Urs continues of the project, which has a GameDev.net blog: "To become a successful Blumenmacht player you need your imagination. Two examples illustrate this challenge: 1) As you can take control of each Ballerina, there are no real enemies in Blumenmacht. Fleeing from a more talented Ballerina is actually a bad idea. Just turn the tables! Left click her and take control of her. Now the advantage is on your side. 2) After you stopped time with a right mouse click, catch a Ballerina (hold left mouse key) and move her through flowers to make her happy. This would be as if Neo would move his opponents through bullets while time is slowed down in the matrix. In Blumenmacht this is called "blossom time"." Unique stuff!

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Aha, look what we got from John Baez: "Independent game and toy developer The Behemoth announced today the first shipment of exclusive handmade trophies honoring the top players of Alien Hominid HD on Xbox Live Arcade". And more to the point, there's a special 'making of' page showing how the trophies were constructed.

Why is this cool? Because physical objects are still completely awesome for awards/special editions, even though XBLA-stylee digital downloads work awesome for delivering games. And what other game developer would have a paragraph like this on their site?

"At first we thought we could laser engrave the base, but we could not find anyone who had a laser with a spindle in the San Diego area... Thank goodness Al Gore invented the internet, otherwise we'd all still be living in caves. After a fairly short web search our solution became apparent...use photo etching for the base!"

It's explained on The Behemoth's homepage: "If you're not certain how to enter our competition, it's simple! First make sure you have a Xbox 360, then you need to log-on to the Xbox Live Arcade service and download Alien Hominid HD (only 800 Microsoft Points!) Finally, you need to be the top scorer in any of theese three categories: Alien Hominid HD (Main Game - Hard Difficulty), All You Can Eat (Weekly Ranked Match), PDA Games (Monthly Ranked Match)." More info on the Alien Hominid leaderboard page, of course.

Posted by Simon Carless at 7:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over at MSNBC, they've done an in-depth story on game industry salaries, at least partly based on the 2007 Game Developer magazine Salary Survey that we ended up creating for the April 2007 issue of the magazine.

The piece has an interesting, if odd angle - why is $73,000 (the average salary for a game developer in 2006) actually fair? "That sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? These folks aren’t saving lives or even doing your taxes. So why would the typical game developer — whose average age is somewhere between 31 and 35 — make twice as much as the average social worker?"

Oh, wait, here's why: “Because the industry as a whole makes a lot of money,” says Matthew Tateishi, a San Francisco-based game designer with nearly 13 years of experience. “And for the most part, a lot of that gets passed on to the employees.”" This is partly true, and then of course: "But if you think game-makers spend all day playing “Quake,” think again. This is a fast-paced, competitive business with inflexible ship dates and punishing hours."

[Also, Game Developer's Jill Duffy, who was quoted in the piece, would like to give a shout out to Audience Insights' Kevin O'Neill, who, despite the credit to her in the piece, was actually the person who conducted the survey and crunched the numbers, before she whipped it into shape and made it contextual and cool-looking. Yay.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 2:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Over at The2Bears, they've spotted a cool piece of DS homebrew, called Maelstrom DS, and clearly an abstract 3D tribute to classic arcade title Tempest.

Excerpting from the tech information: "Much of the code for MaelstromDS is the same as that in the original GBA version, the major change being that the DS has 3D hardware built in, and therefore there is no need for the code to transform the scene into 2D lines. Additionally, the view can be moved by touching and dragging the screen."

What's more: "Finally, the transparency of the outside of the tunnel is achieved by drawing the tunnel twice. Once with the polygons set to solid and the front faces drawn, then with the polygons set to half transparent and the back faces drawn. This is necessary because the DS cannot correctly handle multiple transparent polygons drawn on top of each other." Cute tech information, fun title!

Posted by Simon Carless at 9:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The world of Japanese 'dojin' PC fan games is still pretty awesome, and in the maze of visual novels and shooters, there are also some pretty interesting 2D fighting games popping up from time to time. So here are a couple that I just noticed!

Firstly, Subatomic Brainfreeze has video of "the new doujin fighting game Big Bang Beat", and it's noted of the crazed title: "So far, so good. Imagine Guilty Gear on fast-forward with Hokuto no Ken's dash-canceling taken to a ridiculous extreme. This shit is absolutely spastic.. I've been playing training mode late into the night." Looks like SelectButton has a thread with more info, including a link to the trial version.

Also recently frontpaged on SelectButton is Akatsuki Blitzkampf [YouTube trailer link], which is "...a fighting game by independent Japanese group Subtle Style. Inspired mostly by old-school games such as the King of Fighters, Street Fighter and Samurai Shodown, Blitzkampf seems to be set in some sort of alternate reality that still features Nazi influence (possibly during WW2). It has a very distinctive style to it, and although the very nature of the subject matter is somewhat controversial, the game itself is worth looking into for its wealth of options and gameplay, among which are a 2 on 2 simultaneous battle mode, netplay, and what seems to be some sort of mode that involves a die."

[UPDATE: Aha, Subatomic Brainfreeze noticed my link and did a proper hands-on with Big Bang Beat, commenting: "The graphics are pretty nice, as you've seen. The resolution of the sprites is low, but the detail is excellent, and the game manages to look extremely flashy (YouTube link) regardless. The speed of play is really fast: maybe it's just because I've been playing so much Arcana [Heart], but this game is jarringly fast. It feels faster than even Guilty Gear."]

Posted by Simon Carless at 4:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You probably saw the multiple recent GameTap announcements that the Turner-owned PC service will be broadening with "a free to play, ad-supported version of the service launching May 31st, and a new digital retail storefront debuting with Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Anniversary", among other things.

But I noted more detail from a couple of fronts - firstly, Angled Whiteboards added some feature set info, explaining that some of the new service-wide features will include "...user ratings, related games, user profiles and avatars, forums, enhanced search, shared playlists, quick game launch, and more." Oh, and this is the first time I've seen the King of Fighters series stealth-confirmed for network play, too.

On the other hand, and to present an intriguing contrary view, I note that Microsoft Casual Games biz dev guy Kim Pallister has posted a short note on the changes, commenting: "This announcement today that Gametap is adding more types of content (current release PC titles), and more business models (ad-supported/free, paid download) to its already wide mix of offerings... I don't believe it's going to help."

Pallister suggests: "As I've said before, I think their problem is that they don't offer a clear best-of-breed, 100% complete solution to any one customer need. Just many things, none of them well." Is Pallister, who is somewhat involved in XBLA, right? I'm not really sure - I know that I just bought a Media Center PC for my living-room partially so I can play GameTap with a wireless X360 controller, but I also know that I'm certainly way into the hardcore gamer niche who might be charmed by some of GameTap's more eclectic offerings. YMMV!

[Oh yeah, and for those of you who miss Gamasutra features editor Frank Cifaldi, who recent left to join the GameTap rabble, he's already turned up on GameTappers.net hinting slyly: "Tomb Raider Anniversary and Tomb Raider Legend are not the only great Eidos games coming soon to GameTap. In fact, peering into the Looking Glass, you'll find another great game that might Steal your free time away very soon." Gorsh!]

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Over at Futurelab's Business & Games blog, Ilya Vedrashko has been discussing Mattel's brand-new virtual world, Barbie Girls, explaining that it "will allow children to create their own virtual characters, design their own room and try on clothes at a cyber mall."

He cites an Associated Press piece on the site, which just launched, and notes: "I barely squeezed in for a moment (the site was so overcrowded it wasn't accepting new people all morning). The experience is pretty straightforward; it's somewhere in the neighborhood of Kaneva, Coke Studios and Virtual Laguna Beach but more pink."

Oh yeah, and here's the really scary bit (devices pictured above!), from a Reuters piece: "On Thursday, Mattel unveiled Barbie Girls, four-and-a-half-inch tall MP3 players designed to look like dolls. The devices turn into live characters at BarbieGirls.com, a new Web site where girls can interact with one other in a manner reminiscent of Second Life, the virtual world for adults." So though they're not compulsory to play on BarbieGirls.com, looks like having the MP3 players will get you special unlocks in-world, etc.Wow.

Posted by Simon Carless at 6:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Over at Square Haven, they have a pretty decent interview with freelance Square localizer Alexander O. Smith, whose "...projects for Square include Vagrant Story, Final Fantasy X and Final Fantasy XII. We touched base with Alex to learn more about his career in the game industry, and his most recent projects adapting Square Enix games for the English-language market."

There's some interesting and sophisticated talk about localizing the uber-cult classic Vagrant Story: "Usually the goal with any game at the beginning is to make it not suck in the time you are given. That said, I think every Japanese game has an inner English game hidden away, and once you start to find it, it sets its own bar and the goal then becomes to meet those expectations, again within the constraints of time available. Vagrant Story was one of those rare projects that was just screaming to be in English from the moment it was made, so the bar, though high, was very clear."

Also, holy crap, we get into some otaku territory with a discussion about Final Fantasy X (mild spoilers here!): "Oh, and one thing I've already seen in print from an interview with Nojima, so I know it's okay to talk about: yes, I specifically went to Nojima ahead of time to discuss the pros and cons of translating Yuna's last line to Tidus from "arigatou" to "I love you." I've actually written a whole article about that decision for a Japanese literary magazine, Subaru, if anyone cares to look it up. I think it's a great example of translating a cultural context, like I mentioned above." [Via Jiji.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 1:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Some GSW readers may remember that I mini-reviewed the 'Halo Effect' book a few weeks back, and in there I mentioned that "Kevin R Grazier, apparently the science advisor to Battlestar Galactica... contributes 'Halo Science 101', including... lots more insane planetary calculations based on the Halo mythos."

Well, delighted to say that the folks at Smart Pop Books have allowed us to reprint the 'Halo Science 101' article in full on Gamasutra, and it's extremely fun frippery:

"The Halo universe, detailed in the video games, novels, and upcoming movie, is a richly detailed one and lends itself well to such musings. An entire book could be written about the science and physics, both explicit and implied, within the Halo universe, but with only a little scientific knowledge we can have a lot of fun simply musing about a spinning ringed megastructure—suspended between a planet and its moon—that doubles as a research facility and a superweapon."

More random examples from Mars space scientist (!) Grazier: "A 5,000 kilometer radius [for a Halo] would yield a circumference of roughly 31,400 kilometers. If the Halos had a width-to-radius ratio similar to that of Niven’s Ringworld, they would be approximately 5.37 kilometers wide. They are significantly wider, though, at 320 kilometers. The Halos, then, would have a surface area of 10 million square kilometers— slightly larger than the surface area of Canada, and approximately 2 percent of the surface area of Earth."

[UPDATE: Ahem, text updated - the publishers somehow gave us a pre-production version of the article with a honking great decimal point error in it. This is now fixed, and I only lost about half my sanity doing so, hurray.]

Posted by Simon Carless at 8:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Kudos to Brian Crecente for sitting down with former 1UP staffer Luke Smith to talk about his transition to a media guy over at Bungie, creator of some game called Halo 3 - which you may have heard of.

I've chatted to Luke a bunch about his transition, and I think it totally makes sense for him, but it certainly does clash a little with some of his more idealistic concepts about the purity of game journalism. So here's where it gets interesting: "Instead Luke hopes he will be doing something that he thinks will bridge the gap between journalism and PR, something that cuts out the middle man and gets the information straight to the gamers."

Smith is quoted as saying: "You see these developers who can bridge the gap between fans and the development community... I think there is a really rich opportunity for someone to come in and tell the stories that people want to know. I think there is a very interesting potential shift about how people are going to cover and get information about games. Right now you have four bridges between developer and reader: Developer to pr, to journalist to reader. This could get rid of those middle two bridges."

The closest thing I can think of to this concept thus far has been Wagner James Au's New World Notes, which essentially was Au being paid by Linden Labs to be an 'embedded journalist' within Second Life itself - though I believe NWN is an independent entity now. And Second Life was a bit easier to be independent in because the users create and interact with the world, and the software is largely a 'shell'.

So what Smith is essentially saying is that developers are fairly 'pure', spin-wise, so he wants to come in there and facilitate the direct make-out session between developers and readers, without all that marketing-mandated 'buy this game now' nonsense. Is it possible? No idea, but it'll be fun to watch him try, and one would imagine that Bungie will have the quality games to make this type of thing 'easier', if it works that way?

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Not content with just winning a Maggie Award for Game Developer last Friday, the team here at Gamasutra awoke this morning to find out that we won a Webby too, and for the second year running, too.

This time, our Chicago-based news editor Brandon Boyer is the lucky personage who will be charged with turning up and delivering a witty 5-word speech (and not getting laughed at by Rob Corddry!), after my semi-successful attempt last year, yay - here's the full info on the win cross-posted from Gama itself:

"Gamasutra is pleased to announce that, after winning a Webby last year, it has once again been victorious at the 11th Annual Webby Awards in the 'Games-Related' category, a significant achievement for the CMP Game Group-run site in the competition that the New York Times calls 'the Oscars of the Internet'.

Other nominees in the 'Games-Related' category this year were CNET Networks' GameSpot (which picked up the 'People's Voice' public-voted section of the awards) and AOL's GameDaily, as well as the official websites for LucasArts' LEGO Star Wars II and Thrillville.

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 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, with David Bowie and the founders of YouTube winning special achievement awards."

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Posted by bsheffield at 5:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (23)

So, we've started a new feature over at our GameCareerGuide.com educational site, which includes analysis of the design of major titles from interesting folks. The first one is an in-depth analysis of Animal Crossing: Wild World for the DS from the saintly (and just slightly crazy) Eric-Jon Waugh.

It's actually called 'Ambition And Compulsory Design In Animal Crossing', and here's a brief extract: "Animal Crossing is sort of an anti-game - if by "game" we're talking about a goal-oriented production where you collect 100% of the allotted trinkets before blowing up the last boss real good. Or if we're thinking of a sandbox, where the player is left unsupervised to conduct middle school science experiments with a game's reality. Neither is this a "god game", where you're given an omnipotent and omniscient overview of a certain scenario - resulting in a sort of a sandbox through a telescope."

"The best way I can think of to explain Animal Crossing, strictly in modern videogame terms, is Shenmue without the plot. This isn't a minor distinction, though the reasons aren't as straightforward as they sound. In Shenmue the plot serves as a vague MacGuffin, creating a cognitive dissonance in the player between what knowledge of videogame law and the protagonist's sense of honor (a fun parallel, that) compels the player to do, and what alternative paths the gameworld thrusts before the player." The full piece is lots more 'wacky' fun along those lines!

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)