[Having contributed his knowledge of literature and mythology to Sony’s official God of War: Unearthing the Legend documentary, writer Zoran Iovanovici examines - including story spoilers along the way - how the brutality of God of War’s lead character Kratos is humanistic in its own bloody way.]

There is no shortage of video games based on ancient Greek mythology, but few have made quite the impact as the God of War series. While God of War is not the only series to look at ncient Greek myth for inspiration, it is the manner in which the source material is handled that has propelled the series’ lead character Kratos to pop culture recognition.

Part of this success is due to how the series incorporates some of the best elements of Greek tragedy and myth but refrains from use them simply as a blue-print for a modern video game.

Many ancient Greek myths employ the age-old theme of mortals who, despite their heroism and accomplishments, are inevitably at the mercy of the gods. God of war turns this paradigm on its head by putting Kratos in a position of power to shape events in a constant struggle for freedom and control while presenting the Olympian gods as petty and flawed.

Every major narrative turn and gameplay device in the God of War series revolves around this idea of empowerment, from Kratos’ overcoming of various trials, his slaying of mythical monsters and beasts, and the overall theme of usurping the gods of their power over humanity.

The Ghost of Sparta

One aspect of Kratos’ character that clearly stands in the forefront is his sheer brutality. Although a minor figure in Greek mythology, the few stories that involve Kratos describe him as the embodiment of power, the son of Pallas (the embodiment with war) and Styx (associated with death). This characterization is fitting considering that the God of War series centers around the idea of power, rebranding Kratos for a modern audience to deliver a very distinct and deliberate message about human freedom and independence.

More importantly, this characterization acts as a motif that establishes Kratos as a dominating predator in relationship to others around him. The cries of mercy and the screams of panic at Kratos’ presence throughout the game not only give players a glimpse into his past but also subtly reveals that Kratos possesses exemplary power capable of performing the unimaginable. One Athenian soldier goes so far as to lock himself in a cage in fear of Kratos, preferring imprisonment to death claiming: “I know who you are Spartan! I know what you've done. I'd rather die than be saved by you. The Ghost of Sparta! Stay away from me!”

There Will Be Blood

Perception is one thing, but backing it up is another and God of War certainly doesn’t fall short in this department. Here the gameplay shines by emphasizing power through sheer brutality. Not only does Kratos plow through countless enemy soldiers and classical monsters/creatures of Greek mythology, but he does so in a decidedly indulgent and violent fashion. The creativity and originality of many of these fatal flourishes are a major factor in drawing players to the game and countless YouTube videos have sprung up displaying the macabre artistry with which Kratos dispatches his foes.

Even more impressive is Kratos’ ability to defeat some of the most iconic and horrifying monsters in Greek mythology with relative ease. Where God of War differs in its reception of these classical figures is through simple multiplication. While Greek myth tells of a single Minotaur and only a trio of Gorgons, the game depicts them as entire species. The same can be said for the Harpies, Sirens, Satyrs, and Centaurs that all make similar appearances in packs, often overwhelming unskilled players.

When Kratos first encounters a new monster, he typically faces off against a single opponent, allowing the player to learn how to overcome the creature in terms of strategy. As the game progresses, it’s not uncommon to see Kratos fighting against a trio of gorgons as a Minotaur rampages among them and a flock of Harpies threaten from the sky above.

While their numbers may seem overwhelming at times, skilled players can turn the tables in rather gruesome ways by performing flashy instant-kills that showcase Kratos’ ability to overcome adversity through sheer strength and battle prowess. It all leads to one thing: a cycle of overwhelming odds in which Kratos brutally slaughters everything in sight, far beyond what any mortal would be capable of. It’s an incredibly satisfying gameplay feature that provides an unrivaled sense of empowerment for players.

From Servitude is Born the Desire for Freedom

Looking beyond the mythical creatures that Kratos must face in his journeys, his chief rivalry in the first installment is with Ares, the ancient Greek god of war. However, even this is just a small part of a much bigger picture, one that highlights how humans are at the mercy of the gods. Here we must consider the theme of empowerment once again: if one’s power is limited and dictated by the whims of petty gods, then how much power does one mortal truly have? That is a question that Kratos continually struggles to come to grips with and it eventually leads him to forsake the very gods themselves.

Through flashbacks and vignettes the series reveals that Kratos’ own wife and daughter were lost as a result of his zealous patronage to Ares and it was Ares’ warlike ways that led him to wander across numerous battlefields amidst the chaos of ravaged Mediterranean cities. Throughout the course of the first game Kratos slowly realizes that all his pain and anguish is a result of his servitude and patronage to the gods and that the impact of the gods on human affairs often leads to devastating results.

We see this disdain for servitude very early on in the first game when Kratos approaches a statue of Athena and pleads: “Ten years Athena! I have faithfully served the gods for ten years. When will you relieve me of these nightmares?” His plea, however, is met with little remorse or compassion. The gods, unwavering and demanding in their ways continue to impose their will on Kratos as Athena commands Kratos to rescue her patron city of Athens from a siege by Ares. This helps illustrate the characterization of the Olympians in the series where Kratos is at the whim of the gods, caught up in the petty conflicts that the gods wage against each other. The bitter struggle between Athena and Ares highlights a classical Greek trope of gods arguing amongst themselves and settling rivalries with humans swept up in the chaos.

In God of War, we see the involvement of the gods often bringing lives to ruin. Sometimes the gods seek to help humans and other times they interfere for their own selfish interest or whims. Kratos is but one of those mortals and instead of seeking to be a hero of the gods, he decides to defy them, to potentially upend Zeus and the Olympians in order to prevent their personal conflicts from continually spilling into human affairs. Starting with Ares in the first God of War before moving on to Zeus in the sequel and eventually eliminating Poseidon, Hades, Helios, Hermes, and Hera like a row of dominoes in the third installment.

Control = True Power

Perhaps the cruelest irony that Kratos must endure in the series is being ‘rewarded’ with a seat on Mount Olympus as the new god of war for ending Ares’ reign of chaos. It not only puts him in a position where he must endure the countless war and battle that he has been looking to break away from, but it sees him sitting amongst the gods in the very hierarchy he has come to find so distasteful.

This newfound perspective sees Kratos becoming more embittered than ever as he begins to initiate plans to usurp Zeus of his dominion over humans. Here God of War makes use of a commonplace theme in classical Greek myth and drama – that of patricide. In Greek myth, patricide (whether literal or metaphorical) was more than the visceral murder of one’s father; it represented breaking free of the old tradition and establishing a new order.

As such, Kratos’ intended usurping of Zeus is not a simple revenge tale against the very god he discovers is his true father. Instead, control of one’s own destiny and control of one’s own fate is the true power that Kratos seeks for all of humanity. By killing Zeus, he can end the gods’ petty rule over humanity, effectively putting the reigns of history directly into the hands of humanity.

Shaking the Pillars of Olympus

Not being able to challenge Zeus directly, Kratos sets out to gain power by undermining the very foundation that the ideals of Olympus are built upon. The game readily establishes how Kratos defies the classical Greek hero tradition of seeking glory in the name of (or with the aid of) the gods. Classical Greek myth and drama is full heroes who build and dedicate shrines to deities and are rewarded with legendary god-like status amongst mortals. It is only fitting that Kratos would face off against the Olympian heroes Perseus, Theseus, and Jason throughout his journey as these heroes owe most of their success to the aid and favor of the Olympian gods.

The manner in which these Greek heroes are presented in the God of War series is suggests the flaws of past heroes who relied on the gods to achieve glory. During their battles with Kratos they constantly invoke the aid of the gods to little avail and, upon defeat, each of the heroes cowardly pleads for mercy. It suggests, above all else, that their time has passed and that a new hero has risen to take their place: a hero of the people, not of the gods. This is doubly evidenced by Kratos’ victory over Hercules who still clings to the old order, hoping to one day rule as an Olympian himself. Defeating these vanguards of the old tradition is effectively an act that tears down the pillars of Olympus.

Who Needs Fate and Destiny?

Kratos’ most significant play for power involves him going after the Sisters of Fate and removing any chance of the uncontrollable notion of destiny from acting as a deciding factor in the outcome of his impending battle against Zeus and the remaining Olympians. As the Sisters of Fate hold dominion over both humanity and the gods, there is a slight feeling of futility wherein Kratos fights and endures hardships but has no real control over the outcome. Going after the Sisters of Fate is not then just a way to obtain his own thread of fate and ensure he can kill Zeus, but also a way to put humanity in ultimate control of its destiny. With the sisters out of the way, humanity gains true freedom to build the world as they see fit without the trappings of fate. It’s also a way for him to liberate humanity from the random and chaotic control that the fates impose on human history.

With the fates out of the way at the end of the God of War II, the stage becomes set for Kratos’ eventual annihilation of every remaining Olympian in God of War III. It’s no surprise that the final installment plays out in a violently indulgent slaughterfest where Kratos’ earlier struggles come to fruition as he not only kills the remaining Olympians, but exposes their greatest flaws of jealously, cowardice, arrogance, selfishness, and avarice. In many ways it justifies the wave of violence that Kratos rode throughout the series for the sake of freeing humanity from the flawed Olympians who hold their own interest above all else, often with complete disregard for humanity.

Whether the end justifies the means by which Kratos accomplishes his goals is eventually up to the player, but the God of War series certainly makes a strong humanistic case for the unfortunate necessity of bloodshed in fighting tyranny for the sake of freedom.

Posted by Zoran Iovanovici at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

[Every week, IndieGames.com: The Weblog co-editor Tim W. will be summing up some of the top free-to-download and commercial indie games from the last seven days on his sister 'state of indie' weblog.]

This week on 'Best Of Indie Games', we take a look at some of the top independent PC Flash/downloadable titles released over this last week.

The delights in this edition include a hectic online multiplayer game featuring mices, a point-and-click browser game, a 2D action platformer, a puzzle game with RPG elements, and a Ludum Dare entry loosely based on the popular Monopoly board game.

Here's the highlights from the last seven days:

Game Pick: 'Easy Joe' (Gamystar, browser)
"Easy Joe is charming little Flash game where you solve puzzles by clicking on objects in the correct order, progressing from one screen to the next until you reach the conclusion of Joe's adventure. The neon-style colour scheme makes it extremely easy to differentiate clickable objects on the screen, and most of the puzzles can be figured out with just a bit of trial and error."

Game Pick: 'Norapoly' (Nora Shishi, browser)
"Norapoly is an interesting take on the popular Monopoly board game, in which two or more players upgrade their onscreen characters by buying up the different types of houses on the map. Every player starts out with a thousand points to spend on asset purchases, and they can earn more credits by passing through the other three squares with coloured suits on the map."

Game Pick: 'Hero, Defeat the Demon' (R, freeware)
"Hero, Defeat the Demon is a puzzle game that plays rather similarly to Hojamaka's Mamono Sweeper, where the noble knight has to defeat lower-level enemies first and gain enough battle experience before taking on the stage boss. The challenge here is to figure out a way to defeat all enemies on the map without boxing yourself into an inescapable route."

Game Pick: 'Teppoman 2' (Ikiki, freeware)
"Teppoman 2 is a 2D action platformer that puts you in control of a caped assassin with a craving for bananas, specifically the brown-coloured ones which can only be found inside a heavily-fortified base under the command of a white-hooded man. Our trained killer has a number of specialized skills that could be used to navigate around traps and silence unsuspecting enemies, plus he can also utilize all manner of ranged weapons when the situation calls for it."

Game Pick: 'Transformice!' (Tigrounette, browser)
"Transformice! is a hectic online multiplayer game which is part co-op, part everyone go ballistic. On each level there is a piece of cheese and a mouse hole, and the idea is to run and grab the cheese, then take it back to the hole."

Posted by timw at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A couple months back, Konami announced that Def Jam Rapstar, its rap-themed take on karaoke game series SingStar, would feature region-specific songs in Europe and North America, with the latter receiving exclusives from Biz Markie ("Just A Friend"), Outkast ("So Fresh, So Clean"), Pete Rock and CL Smooth ("They Reminisce Over You"), Salt-N-Pepa ("Push It"), and Drake ("Best I Ever Had").

Most hip-hop aficionados will already recognize those classics -- not counting Drake's contribution -- so we thought it might be fun to share some of the songs reserved for UK, France, and Germany, tracks all popular in those countries but likely unfamiliar to the rest of the world. To be honest, aside from Dizzee Rascal, I don't recognize any of the artists!

The first track we've featured above, "Number 1", comes from Tinchy Stryder and N-Dubz and is exclusive to Def Jam Rapstar's UK release. More music videos after the break!

Dizzee Rascal's "Fix Up, Look Sharp" (UK Exclusive):

Tinie Tempah's "Pass Out" (UK exclusive):

NTM And Lord Ko's "Ma Benz" (French Exclusive):

Sefyu's "Molotov 4" (French Exclusive):

Sido's "Mein Block - Beathoavenz Remix" (German Exclusive)

Kool Savas' "Futurama" (German Exclusive)

They're definitely different from the hip hop we're used to in the States! Though tough guy posturing and aggressive deliveries seem to be universal with rappers across the world. It's interesting to hear what directions other countries have taken the genre toward, but I think I'll stick with the Wu-Tang Clan...

Konami and European co-publisher Autumn Games expect to release Def Jam Rapstar for Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii this October in North America and this November in Europe.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In a plentiful week for new job postings, sister site Gamasutra's jobs board plays host to roles across the world and in every major discipline, including opportunities at Infinity Ward, Rockstar North and many more.

Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.

It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, 'serious games', independent games and more.

Some of the notable jobs posted this week include:

ArenaNet: Web Developer
"ArenaNet is looking for an outstanding web developer to join our team. Qualified candidates should love agile development, working independently on their own challenges as well as together with the team on the bigger vision. You’ll work closely with everyone on the team to build fast-loading, AJAX-based applications."

Infinity Ward: Director of Studio Operations
"Join our ranks! Infinity Ward, Inc. is an award winning developer of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. We are fiercely dedicated to creating the best games on the market, and strive not only to exceed the standard in game development, but define it. An incredibly talented team, an exciting work environment, and competitive compensation await those who are interested in creating cutting edge games."

Namco Networks America: Senior Engineer, iPhone Games
"The entertainment and games industry is growing and so is Namco Networks! We are looking for exceptionally talented people to join our team. Work with evolving and challenging technologies across many best-selling game titles in a fast-paced, creative and fun environment. Join Namco Networks and play a vital role in this rapidly growing company and industry!"

Rockstar North: Online Architect
"This role is a technical leadership position. Serving as lead Software Architect for the Rockstar Games Social Club, you will be challenged with coordinating, developing, and implementing an online publishing & community strategy for all Rockstar Games titles. This role will direct & advise on all aspects of this growing online service including providing content, community and ecommerce functionality, as well as enabling integration of the multi-player game-play experience with the Rockstar Games community. You will work closely with various development and engineering groups to architect services for online gaming initiatives. The right individual will bring a mix of programming expertise and technical vision, with specific experience in highly transactional online systems and scalable databases serving millions of users."

THQ Montreal: Executive Art Director
"With our recent releases of Darksiders, UFC and Red Faction, we are well on our way to rebuilding THQ as a high quality, craft driven developer of world class games and transmedia properties. A key to this is our recent announcement to build a new 400 person studio in Montreal where we will develop new IP and partner with our existing studios THQ Studio Montreal is a very unique opportunity to get in at the ground floor and help us build a new and successful culture of creativity, innovation and fun."

Visceral Games: Combat & Controls Designer, Dead Space 2
"This M-rated action/shooter sequel is setting new standards for an action-packed story-driven console experience. Our team values are as follows: Gameplay comes first, controller feel is everything, culture of creativity, be highly iterative, playtest early and often, learn from failure, work fast and smart, and surround ourselves with the best talent in the world."

To browse hundreds of similar jobs, and for more information on searching, responding to, or posting game industry-relevant jobs to the top source for jobs in the business, please visit Gamasutra's job board now.

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

365 Days of Domos is an odd project from Chris Gritti that has him posting a photo of Domo-kun -- the affable, brown mascot of Japanese TV station NHK (and of Target's 2008 Halloween promotions!) -- and his family/friends every day.

In the past week, the project has focused on video games, featuring scenes of three Domo-kun toys (Bear, Sonny, and Irish) and gaming props positioned around miniature TVs/consoles. The three open-mouthed gamers play a variety of popular titles: Wii Fit, Mortal Kombat, Donkey Kong, and more.

I've included several of the video game images after the break -- for a better idea of what's going in these shots, check out the individual pages for the photos, as they have little exchanges between the characters as part of a bigger, silly storyline.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[PlayStation Home director Jack Buser tells our own Kris Graft that "every mature virtual item we have ever created has been profitable," adding that the service is something the industry "is still wrapping its head around."]

Some gamers and members of the press treat Sony's PlayStation Home service for the PlayStation 3 as sort of an oddball among other online gaming-related activities. Here's a service born out of the virtual world craze that implements microtransactions, and serves as a marketing tool for consumer products. And your 3D avatar has to walk around a lot.

Recently, an employee with Veemee, developer of the Home space London Pub, even found it necessary to reportedly say that Home is "not shit" during the Game in Scotland event earlier this year -- apparently he felt that enough people thought Home was shit to warrant such a comment.

PlayStation Home director Jack Buser acknowledges the skepticism and criticism that the service has garnered since its December 2008 beta launch. But he thinks there's an explanation for it.

"Home is new. We're doing a lot of really new stuff that I think the industry is still wrapping its head around," he said. "We're seeing a lot of innovation in the space, and some of us have hit success."

He added: "And I think it takes some time as the industry as a whole, whether that be consumers or whether that be the media, to start to shift their focus to these new types of platforms and see how people are actually spending their time with the console and with gaming in general. I think we are part of that evolution, part of that conversation."

"...The proof is in the pudding," Buser concluded. "With numbers like we have, it goes without saying that Home has been a huge success for our company, something that we have been very proud of."

Buser can rattle off the latest Home numbers on command: Over 100 games on the service; average user session of 70 minutes; over 50 virtual Home spaces; 85 percent of Home users at any given time have been there before; and 14 million users (defined as anyone who has ever downloaded the client and come into Home). With limited context, those numbers would indicate a healthy Home business.

The most interesting numbers -- those relating to the Home business' sales and profits -- aren't for public consumption, however. "We haven't talked too much about the platform itself, but what we have said is that every mature virtual item we have ever created has been profitable," Buser said. "We've released over 5,000 virtual items on the platform, and we know that once those items reach maturity, they are profitable. So you see us creating a tremendous amount of virtual items, because it is such a high margin business for us to be in."

It's natural that Home would have higher profit margins compared to Sony's bread-and-butter packaged video game business. It costs a lot less to create a virtual item and deliver it digitally than it does an expensive, full physical product found at brick-and-mortar retail.

The craze over virtual items originated on online PCs in Asia, where it became commonplace to buy, for example, clothing for an avatar for a few cents per piece via a social network. Now that Facebook has opened up social gaming, microtransactions have taken hold in the West with games like FarmVille and Pet Society.

Avid console gamers -- like the ones that Buser said PlayStation Home caters to today -- aren't known for their penchant for paid virtual garments. Buser said that's changing, and that U.S. console gamers are "absolutely not" resistant to the microtransaction business model.

"In fact, I would say that it is a very good business model for PlayStation, and quite profitable, I might add," Buser said. "I like to say it's one of the highest-margin businesses in the games industry."

And with the advent of DLC and other means of developers selling their products more directly to consumers, gamers are becoming conditioned to new ways to buy and experience games. "I think today the idea of virtual items transactions is becoming par for the course for a lot of gamers," said Buser.

"They're understanding that through micropayments, they can gain social context and social capital, or they can through gameplay context, upgrade their gameplay experience through microtransactions. And that's just becoming part of gaming."

What Sony is doing now is trying to make Home increasingly relevant to the more traditional gamer -- the one that's playing games like SOCOM, Red Dead Redemption and BioShock. Part of the growth strategy for Home is what Buser calls "Total Game Integration."

This is where in-game activity might unlock virtual Home items, as seen in the PS3 version of Red Dead Redemption, or the opposite, when activity in Home unlocks features or items in games. "We'll also see games build out extensions to narrative, such as what you saw in BioShock 2," he said. "It's this whole idea of expanding the world of your favorite games inside home. That's another big pillar of our strategy moving forward."

Buser wants to continue evolve Home from a a virtual hangout for 3D avatars to a social network that really appeals to gamers. After all, PlayStation is supposed to be about gaming, not wandering around aimlessly in a rendered world. "Our heritage is games, it's in our DNA, but it's also in the DNA of our users,' said Buser. "Games are the glue that can bind the social network together."

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

Disney is bringing more Encom games to life as part of its viral campaign to promote its upcoming Tron: Legacy film. Two months ago, we saw a playable version of Space Paranoids, the tank game from the fictional company introduced in the original Tron movie; now Disney has sent out postcards advertising more arcade titles from Encom.

The made-up games include ArcWars, Astro Gunner, Kraz-Bot, and Vice Squad -- "now playing at your local arcade"! Each postcard seems to offer a code when you examine them under a blacklight, but it's still unclear what their messages translate into, according to a report from FirstShowing. You can see the hidden code and the rest of the postcards after the break.

[Via Arcade Heroes]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Crayon Physics Deluxe developer Petri Purho and Dennis Belfrage has put out a curious physics-based puzzler called Cut It, which has players using their mouse to snip platforms and safely transport a box to safety across 10 stages.

"It started out as a tech test for a completely different game," says Purho. "I ended up polishing up the test and creating some levels to it and now it’s a 'real' game. And by real I mean as real as a quick and dirty prototype that was created in few days can be."

The game can turn frustrating, if not outright maddening, after dozens of tries to complete a puzzle without your box falling into a bottomless pit. Thankfully, Cut It allows you to immediately reset the level by hitting the spacebar, skip to the next stage by hitting M, and return to a previous puzzle by hitting N.

You can download and play Cut It on your Windows or Mac PC for free at Purho's site.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Am particularly excited about Eric Chahi's addition to the line-up from my colleagues at GDC Europe, since Project Dust was secretly one of the most interesting titles displayed at E3 this year - here's all the latest additions to next month's event.]

GDC Europe organizers have announced a rare lecture from Another World creator Eric Chahi on his new title Project Dust, also debuting an ESA/G.A.M.E. panel and a Heavy Rain production talk.

These lectures are the latest to be announced for the 2010 Game Developers Conference Europe event, which will take place August 16th-18th, and is located in Cologne, Germany alongside GamesCom, the leading regional trade and consumer show.

The notable new speakers for this must-attend show for European game developers are led by Ubisoft's Eric Chahi, the creator of seminal adventure game Another World (also known as Out Of This World) in the early '90s.

Chahi has recently returned to the game industry, and is presenting a lecture with Ronan Bel of Ubisoft called 'Creating a High-Performance Simulation: A Dynamic Natural World to Play With'. In it, the duo will introduce Galileo, "a real-time simulator of flowing water, lava, erosion, sedimentation and vegetation", and its use as foundation for a fully dynamic world-based game, the just-announced Project Dust.

In addition, a panel called 'Building Grassroots Video Game Activist Networks' sees Richard Taylor of the Entertainment Software Association and Stephan Reichart of G.A.M.E. (the German Games Developers Association) team with Crytek's Avni Yerli and additional, yet to be announced panelists to discuss how the industry can guard against censorship by using its biggest advocates - its fans.

Finally, one of Europe's key, critically acclaimed games of 2009 is examined in detail by Quantic Dream’s Charles Coutier in his lecture, 'A Challenging Production: Heavy Rain'. The talk will focus on the French developer's iterative processes and adaptive management approach in making the atypical title, with plenty of specifics on asset management and outsourcing practices discussed.

These latest announcements are part of a large GDC Europe line-up that includes lectures and panels from Remedy art director Saku Lehtinen on Alan Wake, Ensemble co-founder Bruce Shelley on creating a design proposal, plus a keynote from Chinese online game powerhouse Tencent.

Other talks in the packed line-up include significant lectures from Quantic Dream's David Cage, InstantAction's Lou Castle, and the creators of Crysis 2, APB and Split/Second, plus other lectures and keynotes from Sony, Playdom, and German gaming powerhouse Bigpoint (Battlestar Galactica MMO).

The conference, taking place Monday through Wednesday August 16-18, 2010 at the Cologne Congress Center East in Cologne, Germany, aims to present the leading game industry event for developers, consumers, publishers and trade professionals. The event will run alongside the major GamesCom event, to which free access is available for non-student GDC Europe passholders.

For more information on GDC Europe, which is created by the UBM Techweb Game Network, as is this website, and for which reduced price registration is in place until July 21st -- visit the official Game Developers Conference Europe website.

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

Final Form Games, a three-man indie studio working out of Philadelphia, announced its first title: Jamestown, an "old-school, handcrafted shoot-em-up" boasting four-player cooperative play and impressive 2D pixel art environments. The developer hopes to release the title for PCs some time in 2011 and other platforms afterward, and submit it for next year's Independent Games Festival.

Despite the familiarity of the game's title, Jamestown's plot isn't what you'd expect. It's set in 17th century British colonial Mars and promises "famous alt-historical figures", "majestic alien landscapes" "steampunk space tech", "hard-bitten settlers taking their shot at ekeing out a better life in the New World", and Redcoats and Martians settling their differences with spear and space-musket".

The studio has so far spent around 12 months working on Jamestown. "Year One was largely about investing a huge percentage of our energy into developing the game mechanics, technology, tools, and skillsets that we think are necessary to make our game great," explained Final Form's Mike Ambrogi. "Year Two is going to be about using them."

[Via louisg]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

[Ninety Nine Nights II producer Tak Fujii shares his thoughts with our own Brandon Sheffield on the decline of Japanese game design and tech, citing animation firm Studio Ghibli (Totoro) as a model for Japanese game companies to follow.]

As Western design philosophies have taken on increasing market dominance, how do Japanese designers view their differences -- and what do they see as their mandate as they aim to keep pace? Ninety Nine Nights II producer Tak Fujii sees an important marriage of scenario and distinctive technology evolution as a primary goal.

The newly-launched Ninety Nine Nights II is an extreme hack and slash game in the vein of Dynasty Warriors or Sengoku Basara, but versus its competitors boasts some one million troops to dispatch simultaneously. The game releases this week, and was developed by Feelplus under Q Entertainment, and is being published in North America by Konami.

We got a chance to speak with Konami-side producer Fujii about the game's unique qualities. Fujii previously spent several years working on the Pro Evolution Soccer franchise, familiarizing himself with Western game taste there.

Thus, we sat down with Tak Fujii to discuss the game itself, but also how Japan can return to its design roots to create something truly new - even if we may not be seeing that in Ninety Nine Nights II itself:

This hack-and-slash genre is pretty much dominated by Dynasty Warriors. Why tackle this crowded space?

TF: Well I would say that Dynasty Warriors is one of the successful titles in the Japanese market, and did well in the Western market as well so why not try. And you know go back to 2006 and Ninety Nine Nights itself was a kind of phenomenon, at least for a Japanese publisher, so, you know. Why not try and do another version?

Ninety Nine Nights II has a complicated history in terms of what publisher was going to release it. How did Konami wind up becoming the publisher?

TF: Well, that wasn't really our choice. It was up to Feelplus, or I would say AQ Interactive right now, who they went to for publishing. You know, we are a Japanese publisher and they are a Japanese developer and you know, what they're expecting was the best performance for the worldwide, not only Japan, not only the Western market. So you know, thinking about the publisher which does well, they chose us!

What is your specific role in working with Ninety Nine Nights II?

TF: Well, very much the publishing producer, but I also work with the team, figuring out how it should be, so it's very much half between the creative and half between the PR and publishing itself.

It seems that's much more true in Japan that someone who takes the title of "producer" actually has more creative input than in the U.S. In the U.S. the producer is much more of a scheduling guy, whereas in Japan it's like halfway between designer and PR sometimes.

TF: Well, for the typical Japanese style it's very much-- I would say they stick with the very much creative side much more than the management side. But, you know, things are changing, like, the reason I'm here is for PR. So, you know times have changed, and as you know, we used to have very good Japaneses game all over the world.

But now, compared to the others from capturing the Western market we are not doing really well, so we gotta change, you know, our scheme or style, which means the producer has gotta be much more on the PR side and the management side, rather than just in creating, creating, creating.

Why do you think that has happened, that Japan has kind of fallen behind? Because when I was a kid, all of the best games came from Japan, especially on the console.

TF: Well, I would say, hmmm...what should I say - can I say it's American fan's fault? [laughs]

I guess you could!

TF: No, seriously though, back to the nice old 90's-- 80's, 90's, you know. We developers, we hired so many people for these games, and a small team could make a good game, with a maximum of 20 people on the team. But now, talking game products in Western culture, it's a hundred something people getting involved with it.

But you know behind that, it's a totally different scheme right now, and to apply to our games all the fancy high-resolution high-def stuff you definitely do need the people and the money and of course technology. And I would say that all the western market game type of tech is based on the Hollywood technique, like CG work and stuff.

But if we're talking about a Japanese CG world, it's now really compatible with the western market. We don't use it so much for media. That makes a huge difference in these last ten years, where the technology was. And the Western market is getting more and more into realistic stuff like the World War II shooters and FPS stuff. But to make that, it means tons of money, and you know Nintendo brought out their answer. "We don't fight with technology. We fight with our game." That's one answer.

Just my personal opinion -- I think that to some degree because developers in Japan have noticed this trend toward technology in the West, they've tried to emulate this, but Japan's strength has traditionally not been the technology but rather the design and scenario, and I feel like in trying to get toward the technology, they have abandoned some of the design and scenario that was so excellent in the past. I feel like if you could combine those things...

TF: Right. That is exactly what we have to do. Because talking about technology stuff, if we tried to follow, you know, we're not gonna pass the West. And if you talk about Studio Ghibli, that cartoon studio? With Hayao Miyazaki?

Yes, I know them.

TF: They have their own tech, their own way, their own production style. And in the world, they're quite popular. And on top of that I'm talking about Gundam or some of the manga culture, you know. So we don't have to follow. We don't have to really emulate the Western culture. So we have to try to combine our basics, and new tech, and make something new. That's our task.

So, but, I mean I dunno if we will see this kind of example in Ninety Nine Nights II because it's a very straightforward genre, hack and slash. I mean, I dunno if it's going to push any of those boundaries. What do you think?

TF: Well yeah, at least in Japan, we have this thing where in the scenario we're like "Okay, I guess we've got to have characters represent light and dark." But I think we're pushing that somewhere else at least.

That was in the original Ninety Nine Nights too, though!

TF: But this time, it's even more!

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

With Activision having recently given Phoenix Online Studios the go-ahead to release its spiritual successor to the King's Quest series (though not without some troubles earlier), the group is hyping the launch of The Silver Lining (a.k.a. King's Quest IX) by putting out new media and giving out interviews.

In the above clip, former GSW co-editor and now 1UP news editor Frank Cifaldi sits down with Phoenix's project director Cesar Bittar to talk about the fanmade game, the studio's talented team (which has worked on the project since 2004), and the developer's efforts to take a more cinematic approach with the point-and-click adventure formula.

The first episode of The Silver Lining, What Is Decreed Must Be, releases for free on July 10th and follows the adventures of King Graham as he tries to save his children from a mysterious quest. You can learn more about the release and see a full trailer at The Silver Lining's official site.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The BBC just posted online this humorous sketch from British comedy group Idiots of Ants predicting the next generation of gaming and guessing at what kind of technological advances we might see from Wii motion controls in the near future (with similar peripherals likely coming to Sony/Microsoft consoles a couple years later).

Their skit is a bit predictable, but I loved the expressions and reactions of the "video game characters" here. And even if you don't find that funny at all, you can at least find entertainment in the idea that there are people out there playing traditional 2D fighting games with the Wii Remote and Nunchuk configuration. How absurd!

[Via Go Nintendo]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[As StarCraft II's anticipated release approaches, our own Chris Remo speaks to the game's lead writer, Brian Kindregan, about Blizzard's development process and why "writing and design have to really be one team".]

StarCraft II has been in development for most of this decade, and Blizzard promises to finally release the long-awaited real-time strategy sequel next month.

Despite that uncommonly long production cycle, lead writer Brian Kindregan has only been on the project since last July, giving him a fresher perspective. Kindregan inherited creative responsibility for a cast of characters beloved to strategy game fans for over a decade -- and which have not appeared in any new video game in just as long.

With a professional history that encompasses writing on BioWare's Jade Empire and Mass Effect 2, as well as a previous career as a storyboard artist on films like The Iron Giant, Kindregan brings to his Blizzard role a wide range of experience. He spoke to us about what it's like writing for strategy games, how Blizzard's system of development checks and balances extends to the writing process, and why it's harder than you might think to name a map:

As "lead writer," how much are you writing versus reviewing, editing, and managing?

Brian Kindregan: It really varies depending on where we are in the process. I would say that most of my time is spent writing, writing, writing. [laughs]

Other than that, I say the next biggest thing is meeting, meeting, meeting, because definitely there's an entire team of passionate, creative, and talented people, all of whom are invested in the story, the storytelling, and the characters. I like to pull as much out of them as I can.

Since you only came on about a year ago, how much of the fundamental story arc and the concept was already there when you started? How much of it has been developed since then?

BK: It's a healthy mix of both. There's definitely a lot of bigger ideas and overarching themes that really have been in place since the original game in terms of these characters and the drama and events that they undergo. But with storytelling, the devil is in the details. A lot of it we've refined and changed and really brought into focus over the last year.

What's your personal development history?

BK: Before coming to Blizzard, I was at Bioware, and before that, I worked in film as a storyboard artist, which is kind of a half artist, half writer position.

How do you find working in games now after coming from film and storyboarding?

BK: I love it. I mean, I'm a gamer from way back in the '80s, playing text-based adventures.

Infocom and all that?

BK: I loved Infocom. And yeah, I love working in games. It's a rapidly evolving field. Every game that comes out brings something new and different to the table. That's really exciting, just watching it evolve as a storytelling art form.

If you think about games three or four years ago that did a great job with storytelling, then you think how far it's come since then, you realize it's really a fast-paced, evolving medium.

BioWare as a company is very explicitly about storytelling in games. It's the number one thing in their mission statement. But StarCraft II is a strategy game. How do you make a story around that that is engaging and striking but doesn't step on the toes of someone who just wants to go in and fight a bunch of RTS battles?

BK: That's definitely something we think about every day. The answer I've come to is that everybody is interested in characters and people -- at least interesting people -- and events. If you get plugged into those things, they'll sweep you along. What they do is they inform the gameplay you're experiencing.

Rather than thinking of them as two separate things, we focus on making one complete experience so you can get swept up into the total experience, rather than compartmentalizing it.

In Blizzard terms, WarCraft is a series with new game material coming out almost non-stop for 15 years across multiple genres. With this franchise, there's StarCraft, Brood War, and now this. There's supplementary stuff, but most people don't know that. Has it been a challenge approaching these characters that have been essentially set in stone for more than a decade?

BK: Sure. Definitely, the first day that you sit down and write a line of dialogue for Kerrigan, it's a little intimidating. But it's a lot of fun, too.

With the big gap between the games, we've really tried to make sure it's an experience that will unfold. If you are very plugged into the events of the first game, you'll certainly notice subtleties you'll appreciate when you play the second.

If you don't remember the first game or if you've never played it, you can still sit down and meet these characters. You'll get a sense of who they are and what they're up against, and then you'll start to learn their stories. Before you know it, you're in the moment with them.

Is it just writers doing all the writing?

BK: It's something that changes. There have been two official writers at times, but I'll certainly lean on game designers who have a penchant or a talent for that when I need to.

I imagine you've got to be working with designers a lot, because in what I've played of the single-player campaign so far, there are a lot more custom scenarios and unique mechanics tying into the story a mission-by-mission basis [than there were in StarCraft].

BK: Absolutely. Writing and design have to really be one team making this. I am talking to the designers every day, and they're talking to me every day about making sure that we have the big overarching story with the characters, but also that that story is a part of every mission, and that every mission and every map has its own story that sets up, plays out, and pays off in that map.

I was a big adventure game player back in the day as well, and I remember closely following WarCraft Adventures. Still, a lot of the story of that game ended up being very pivotal in WarCraft III and World of Warcraft even though the game itself never came out. Have you had any similar experiences with StarCraft: Ghost, any story elements of story developed there finding their way into StarCraft II?

BK: Well, they're all part of the same universe, so I would say that's a distinct possibility. [laughs]

How involved are you with multiplayer sections of the game? Do you go in there and do all the little character barks?

BK: Yeah. That's an area particularly where I have to work really closely with the designers. The other writers and I have written a lot of the unit VO -- you know, when you click on the units a bunch of times.

There's even stuff to consider when naming the maps. There are a lot of multiplayer maps, so we want them to all feel like something that would logically be a part of the StarCraft universe, but we don't necessarily want to evoke a specific [real-world] place name. I do work very closely with designers on that. There's room for a lot of people to jump in and be creative.

I've always thought that with a game like StarCraft, especially in multiplayer, everything is so crisp -- it's all about being able to recognize things and counter them. You must have to think about really nitty-gritty issues, like not having acronyms of different units be too similar, and thinking about where the first letter of their name falls on the keyboard for hotkeys, so communication can be completely unambiguous.

BK: Absolutely. Absolutely. That's one of the places where I think Blizzard's process really helps. I sometimes am prone to not thinking about how this unit over here sounds like that unit over there, because I wrote them three weeks apart. But there are so many passionate and talented people involved that it will come up, and we have lots of solutions for those things.

Do you set up a bible or style guide to cover those issues? Are there established rule sets for tone?

BK: Oh, absolutely. We actually have people here who look at that specifically, and I lean on them very heavily.

Coming from a story-centric studio like BioWare, how does Blizzard compare in writing, on the development side? Their games are absolutely miles apart in almost every respect. How does the writing differ under the hood?

BK: That's one of those things where, certainly, you might say the delivery method is different. The way we get story to the player is different. And that's also true just coming from film. When you have someone sitting in a dark room staring at a screen that's 20 feet high, you know you have their full attention.

All of these different experiences have all shown me that there are really different ways to approach the story, but the unifying theme is just getting what giving the player or audience member or whoever to be a complete experience of characters and storytelling, and trying to engage them. That, fortunately, stays the same everywhere. I say "fortunately" because that's obviously the most important thing in entertainment.

I would think that in a strategy game, character would have to take on an unusual significance, moreso than plot, because any unit can basically die instantly. Probably 95 percent of the actual humans or aliens you see in the game itself are cannon fodder and they're going to die, so it must be all the more important to create an attachment to the permanent characters so everything doesn't just feel disposable.

BK: Absolutely. It always come back to character. With storytelling, there can be great plot twists and all sorts of amazing events, but they mean more when you're plugged into the characters. In the first game, when Sarah Kerrigan was betrayed and left to the Zerg, and then came back as the Queen of Blades, that's a great plot twist. But the only reason that you really care is that you liked Sarah Kerrigan.

Blizzard is one of the studios that is particularly notorious for doing really extensive playtesting to make sure mechanics are absolutely tuned. Is there any equivalent to that with writing? Writing is a much more amorphous skill than, for example playtest balance. How do you gauge what you've done at Blizzard?

BK: There are a number of checks and balances for that. The first is finding a group of people whose opinions and instincts you really respect. Certainly for me, working with Dustin Browder and Chris Metzen and a whole host of other really talented people is a really nice luxury because I can throw ideas at them, and they throw ideas back to me. If I throw a lame idea at them, I will definitely hear back that it's lame within about three seconds, which is good. So, you get that creative flow back and forth, and I think everything just gets better and better.

And then on top of that, Blizzard is a place where every voice matters. I certainly hear from everyone across the spectrum internally about what's working and what's not. It behooves everyone in the storytelling part of the team to consider every opinion.

How much are you thinking about the two further expansions, or sequels, or whatever they are?

BK: We're going full speed on them. We're talking about them, hammering out details, but really still looking at "big picture" stuff. It's exciting. [laughs]

How did it feel to approach the end of this project? At least publicly, until that date is finally given, Blizzard always projects the image that the devs have all the time in the world: "Oh, you know, it'll be out someday, whenever we get around to it."

BK: [laughs] Yeah. "When it's ready. When it's ready." As a storyteller, I always feel like there's always more to do. I'm always one of those "Not yet! Don't take it away! Give me more time!" types. I think there's a lot left to tell.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Gaming apparel shop Meat Bun revealed more than a dozen new, chic shirts, rach sporting designs that recall famous games like Golden Axe (parodying Super Mario World), Castlevania, Kid Icarus, and, um, Taito's The Ninja Warriors. One tee design manages to pack in references to Peanuts, Simon's Quest, and Eggplant Wizards!

My favorite shirt from the Summer 2010 "Wizards ‘n Warriors" Collection, though, is definitely the one with artwork from Nintendo Power's infamous second issue cover (pictured), which scared children and horrified parents with its image of a beheaded Dracula. The Symphony of the Night shirts, which read, "A Miserable Little Pile Of Secrets" are worth checking out, too!

You can buy the shirts in various colors for $24 before shipping at Meat Bun's online shop. Check past the break for more photos of the new tees!:

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Though E3 is already two weeks behind us, video game comedy skit group Mega64 has found a wealth of material from the trade show to mock, thanks to the latest "As Seen On TV" product, TruthPhones -- "the headphones that let you know what people are really saying!"

Here, Mega64 and TruthPhones examine what executives and developers were really telling us during Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft's big presentations. The advanced tech is amazing at spotting attempts to sell fake animals and game rip-offs to consumers! I hope these go on sale in time for next year's E3.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So long as companies continue to create model kits for shoot'em up crafts, we'll continue to post about them! Model manufacturer RC Berg is taking preorders for two 1/100 miniature ships taken from Cave's bullet hell arcade/PS2/Xbox 360 release DoDonPachi Dai Ou Jou, which hasn't yet made it to the states, but you never know!

The two resin-cast replica fighters, Type-A and Type-B (above), each sell for an astounding ¥14,700 ($168) before shipping or any mark-ups you might pay at an import shop. RC Berg plans to begin shipping orders for the kits this October. You can see more photos of the Type-A and Type-B models, as well as footage of DoDonPachi Dai Ou Jou, after the break.

[Via Kotaku]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 5:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[We're partnering with game criticism site Critical Distance to present some of the week's most inspiring writing about the art and design of video games from commentators worldwide. This week, Ben Abraham looks at Final Fantasy XIII, the mysteries of the PokeWalker, and what Tron's MCP thought of E3.]

A short post this week, as whimsy seems to have smothered the blogosphere like a blanket. I’d blame the giant come-down period that is post-E3, if I had to guess.

Nonetheless, starting out, Michael Abbott at The Brainy Gamer argues that Final Fantasy XIII is “a game that unfolds its narrative, not merely to extend gameplay, but to explore its themes and characters”.

On the same topic, Gerard Delaney writes at The Binary Swan about the ‘Personal Fantasy’ that the game demonstrates: “The Final Fantasy series is nothing if it is not a journey. The places you go on that journey are the story arcs and moments of character development whilst the landmarks are FMV cutscenes and orchestral scores but the vehicle is always the gameplay.”

Elsewhere, Zoran Iovanovici at GameSetWatch tells us this week ‘What Metal Gear Solid 2 Teaches Us About The Information Age’, commenting: "In an era defined by the rapid transmission of information; the game addresses the impact that control of these advancements can have in an information age where societies are increasingly reliant on digital storage and communication."

In an interesting post, Jorge Albor at the Experience Points blog looks at using motion control in public, and makes some observations about what is added by removing traditional control interfaces.

Mitch Krpata looks at a series of obfuscations and abstractions in a local penny arcade, one which turns money into credits and credits into tickets: “What does 270 tickets buy you at Dave and Buster's? A little can of Tootsie Rolls and a thing of Pop Rocks. If you've been following along at home, that means we bought about fifty cents' worth of penny candy with our $40 of game cards.” Of course, he gets to play games too, but still. There are insights here applicable to the online stores of so many platform holders.

LB Jeffries writes for Pop Matters about how much like a video game the film Groundhog Day is. For some reason, I feel like I’ve already linked to this one before...

Laura Michet at Second Person Shooter writes, “my new PokeWalker is a sorrowful, sorrowful thing. I can hardly use it. It feels false and deadening.” Why? Read the full story about her experience with the original Pikachu Tamagotchi toy to understand why.

Ian Cheong wrote about ‘The Great Disappointment of Hellgate: London’ this week for the somewhat newly re-minted Hellmode blog. Cheong notes, quite descriptively, that “Hellgate: London was the Hindenburg of video games. It had majestic ambitions and equally great things were expected of it”.

Eric Heimburg at the Elder Game blog wrote about situational awareness in a post titled ‘Deathtrap Design and the Invisible Gorilla’. Taking the jumping off point of a popular study that found intense concentration could cause participants to completely miss seeing things as outrageously noticeable as a person in a gorilla suit walking through the middle of a video. Highly recommended reading.

And to round out the week a pair of wry posts, the first from Alec Meer at Rock Paper Shotgun with the abridged version of Deus Ex, the second via Kirk Hamilton of GameMelodico with a visual extract from the movie Tron, and what the Master Control Program thought about E3.

Posted by Ben Abraham at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

If you wish there were more games with characters that looked like Gish's adorable black ball of tar, have a look at Oddy Smog, another environmentally unfriendly hero with special powers that let him stick to objects and climb up walls.

Unlike Gish, a puzzle platformer that had you exploring dozens of story levels, though, Oddy Smog's Misadventures is a high-scoring game that challenges you to climb up a tall smokestack with randomly generated elements and gears that will help you ascend.

Its story is quite charming, too:

"Meet Oddy Smog, nothing but a tiny bit of the Smog that Engulfes Everything. He used to be part of the System, but his desire for freedom pushes him to run away from everything he once knew.

Help him in his quest for a new life! Climb the entrails of the same machine from which the Smog erupts and free those who are still enslaved. Rumor says that there is a blue sky up there where the Smog is white..."

You can download Medusa's Oddy Smog's Misadventures for iPhone and iPod Touch for just $0.99.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Bill Roper, the former Blizzard executive who now serves as chief creative officer for MMO developer Cryptic Studios, will deliver a keynote address at the 2010 Game Developers Conference China in Shanghai this December, event organizers announced today.

In his keynote presentation, Roper will "speak to the future of game development" in a wide-ranging speech on his career and views on the industry, according to an official statement.

Best known for the decade he spent at Blizzard, Roper was heavily involved in all of the studio's franchises starting with its first PC game, WarCraft: Orcs & Humans, on which he served as producer. Over his time with Blizzard, he contributed in a variety of roles to StarCraft and Diablo as well, and became most associated with Diablo after becoming a VP at that series' creator, Blizzard North.

After leaving Blizzard in 2003, Roper co-founded Flagship Studios, which produced the online action-RPG Hellgate: London before the company folded. Since late 2008 he has been the CCO at Cryptic Studios, the original developer of City of Heroes and now the company behind Champions Online and Star Trek Online.

"We are delighted to host such a luminary as Bill Roper for the keynote address," said event director Meggan Scavio in a statement. "Bill's expertise helps cement GDC China's place as the essential event for learning, networking, and inspiration for the Chinese game development community."

This year marks the third GDC China event, to be held from December 5 to 7 in Shanghai -- more information on the event, which is created by the UBM TechWeb Game Network, as is this website, is available on the official event website.

Posted by Simon Carless at 3:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Chrono Trigger Fanfest 2010, a month-long online festival inviting fans of the classic Square RPG to "play through the game together while creatively expressing their CT admiration", kicked off last weekend, hosted by gaming merchandise shop Fangamer.

Along with live nightly playthroughs of Chrono Trigger by the Fangamer staff and community, the CT Fanfest 2010 site features walkthroughs and challenges for specific sections, fan-submitted work (e.g. art, comics, music, etc.), and other bonuses (wallpapers, posters, instructions for making Marle's Pendant, etc.).

If you're a Chrono Trigger superfan, or if you've always meant to finish the SNES RPG, don't miss out on this celebration!

[Via Good Game Get!]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[Colin Gordon of U.S. budget publisher Valcon (Raiden Fighters Aces) talks in-depth to our own Brandon Sheffield, saying that the box art is the most important part of a budget game, and that the import space is 'crowded.']

Redmond, Washington-headquartered Valcon Games is a U.S. publisher of budget retail console games, from Wal-Mart impulse buys to Japanese imports like Raiden Fighters Aces to games with peripherals such as Easy Piano.

Co-founders Colin Gordon and Glen Halseth met while working for Kemco’s US division, which briefly localized content for the American market back in the early 2000s. Besides its retail focus, Valcon has also recently started releasing Xbox Live Arcade digital titles such as Polar Panic and Greed Corp.

Valcon COO Gordon is a longtime veteran of the industry, who started out programming computer games in Ireland, including Mario Bros. for the Spectrum. In this extensive interview, Gamasutra spoke with Gordon about the company’s future plans, the difficulty of assessing the value market, and the changing world of import games.

How did Valcon get started? And what's your own background?

Colin Gordon: I've been involved in video games since maybe 1984. I started a development company back in the UK, in Northern Ireland. We made Commodore 64, Sinclair Spectrum, and Amstrad games back in 8-bit days. I've since moved around, and I ended up in the U.S. working for a Japanese publisher called Kemco up in Seattle.

That's where I met my current business partner, a guy called Glen Halseth. Glen's also been involved in the games business but on the American side for quite some time. Glen's focused on the sales and marketing. We both worked at Kemco, and as things kind of transpired there, we decided that it was time to use our skills and set up our own publishing company. So, we created Valcon Games.

What exactly happened to Kemco?

CG: I think that the problem was...originally it was championed by a guy over in Japan that just really lost interest and passion in the whole games space.

The American division lasted longer than the Japanese one, right? No, I guess perhaps not because Kemco sort of still exists in Japan doing some mobile stuff.

CG: Yeah. But you gotta remember that a lot of Japanese companies aren't just single-faceted the way that most U.S. companies are. They're multi-faceted. So, Kemco is still strong in Japan. I mean, they've got steel manufacturing. They do retirement homes. They own a golf course. They've got all kinds of different things. And yeah, they're still involved with mobile gaming in Japan.

Valcon started in the 2000s, right?

CG: Yeah. We're five years old, soon. We started up in 2004. Maybe we're six years old. Doesn't time fly? Yeah, we started in 2004.

And you started pretty much doing budget oriented stuff.

CG: Yeah. At that time, obviously, you're looking at the market looking at what's going to work, what's the right approach. PlayStation 2 is a huge install base. There are a lot of opportunities. I'm very well connected into the European development/publishing communities. So, we're able to pick up quite a lot of titles from Europe and bring them into the U.S., publish them through our labels, and put them on the shelves.

Budget Challenges

For some people, budget publishing is actually somewhat of a harder area to get into because you... Well, you almost have to choose titles very carefully because you're going for a totally different demographic.

CG: Absolutely. One of the things I’m asked, and I meet with a lot of developers who present a lot of different products, is "what are you guys looking for?" And I tell everybody the same thing: "If you look at our lineup, you look at the box, and the box is what sells it. By looking at the picture on the front of the box, you've got to know everything that you need to know about that game to buy it."

So, the title is important. The image on the front of the box is important. Because everything you're trying to do is drive the customer to pick that off the shelf and read the back of the box. But if they look at the picture and they don't get it, or the title and they don't get it, then it doesn't drive them to life it off the shelf and find out more, and it never makes into the shopper's hands.

And also the profit margins are somewhat difficult because you're selling at a lower price to goods cost level.

CG: Yeah. To be honest, working on PlayStation 2 with Sony was, I guess you can say, the smart choice, because they gave us a lot more flexibility. The Sony model is really good for PlayStation 2, so yeah, we were able to work that for us. But you can't afford to make too many mistakes. You certainly can't afford to have a large overhead and have a huge stack. One of the things we've been really good at Valcon is getting maximum effort out of the folks who are there.

Did Sony at some point change its policy once the PS3 was announced to allow more budget stuff? Because in America they were previously totally against it.

CG: Yeah, that's still the case. I mean, yeah, they say it's a little bit more lax today, but to be honest, nobody wants PlayStation 2 anymore, so it really doesn't matter. That's my experience. And one of the things that did our company well, given my development background and kind of knowledge of working with Sony, is that we were able to look at titles and decide, "You know what? This is something Sony could approve," and then emphasize the areas of the game to make sure Sony really understood what was in the game and why they should approve it.

I know a lot of folks that have presented titles that didn't get approved, and that was a hurdle. We didn't have very many fails. We had a few, but the ones that we failed on, I didn't think we'd be approved on anyway, but we gave it a shot to see what would happen.

For a while, Capcom was distributing you guys, right?

CG: We did one distribution deal with Capcom. It was kind of an experiment to see how that worked, and it was okay. I mean, it was alright, I think. Everybody did okay on the deal at the end of it, but yeah, that was a one-off.

Success In Retail?

And now you’re funding some new games as well?

CG: Yeah. We've done little bits of that over the time, over the course of our life. We're a private company so we don't have access to a ton of VC and everything else, so everything we kind of do ourselves. We're very careful with what we work and what titles we do fund. We're doing some funding on some XBLA games. We've done some funding on a retail title. We're continuing to do that.

The Nintendo space, which you’re tackling with Easy Piano, is particularly interesting because, you know, they still have consoles where some of the best-selling games are, but they're just not the third-party games a lot of the time. Unless you're Square Enix or...

CG: No, you can count the successful companies on a Nintendo platform on a few fingers.

But they're some of the most successful games ever, though, because you're selling 10 million copies of something, and then it just keeps going.

CG: Yeah, but you know, I think back to Super NES days, that was mostly true then, too. You know, there were a half-dozen companies that performed really well on the SNES and even the NES. Nintendo always had the lion's share.

In the budget space it seems like it's all about being at the right place at the right time. It's very difficult to know... How do you identify what the opportunities are now because, you know, the digital space is obviously good for a smaller publisher, and retail is difficult. But you're still tackling retail, so how do you know what to do?

CG: You know what? That's the $64,000 question, right? At the end of the day, you're trying to sell to a consumer who wants value for money. And they want something that will entertain them, that isn't too complicated, that's not over-engineered, and that doesn't require them to spend 30 hours to finish it.

You can kind of, you know, get a game, play it, and enjoy it. You know, and they're not spending a lot of money on us. They don't expect it to last them from week to week to week. You're looking for something that's... They look at the box, they know what the game is. It's not like they have to delve into it. It's still hard to find those things. It really is. Mainly because developers seem to like games that other developers make.

Yeah. Or that they want to play perhaps.

CG: Yeah. Or they think they want to play. Because I think after three or four months of developing a game, you're fed up with it. You don't want to ever play it ever again.

Fair enough!

CG: Yeah. It's tough. It's definitely tough. And it's a crowded space. There are a lot of titles out there.

The Import Market

With Raiden Fighters Aces, you've been bringing some Japanese titles to the West. How is doing that nowadays? It seems like it's different than it used to be.

CG: We did that on PlayStation 2 as well. We brought a couple Japanese games over on PlayStation 2. They maybe weren't as successful as we'd liked them to be. Raiden Fighters has done okay for us. Yeah, I'm looking at Japanese content at the moment to bring over. Some of the stuff is just too strange for the U.S. market. We're looking between the cracks as it were because the mainstream publishers are picking up all the high-end easy ones. So, we really see some oddball games, and some of them just aren't appropriate.

Well, the industry has changed a lot over there in the last 10 years or so. Or perhaps has not changed with the changes that have happened.

CG: Well, I was going to say for them, I think the explosion in mobile gaming has really made a difference to their consumer base. But yeah, it seems the Japanese haven't embraced online as much as everyone else.

It's unfortunate to see a lot of the kinds of titles that I'm interested in from there to not sell too well because I want them to continue coming out.

CG: For me, the most disappointing title personally was when we brought over Daisenryaku from Japan from SystemSoft Alpha. A hardcore strategy game. I was kind of hoping that at a low price point... Yeah, I knew it wasn't mass-market. I knew it didn't fit any of the rules that we were trying to set up. But I just hoped that maybe we could create a little bit of demand for it, and people would dig in, and there would be more of an interest in that kind of thing going forward. But it didn't work. Because that's my kind of game. That's the kind of game I enjoy to playing.

Well, I mean, if you wanted an edge, you could have gone for Moe Moe Niji Taisen. Are you familiar with that?

CG: Oh, yes. Yes. That's the one where the girls are like airplanes and tanks. Yeah, I played that recently. And I looked at that and I thought, "Hmmm..." [laughs]

To me, that's the one that you get Kotaku talking about... I don't know if that translates to sales, but a lot of people would talk about it.

CG: But I don't know if they'd talk about it in a serious way. I honestly, yes, I have a playable back in the office. I've played it, I sat and I looked at it, and I thought, "God. I just don't know."

It's hard to know.

CG: But the other problem is you got to take that... Because you got to remember, right, it's one thing to publish the game; you then got to get the buyer to buy it. If you go in and say, "We got this game where these girls are kind of half-robots, half-planes, half-sexy girls, and they kind of fight in this kind of turn-based strategy game," they look at you like, "Really?"

You’d have to sell it to the hardcore market rather than to the budget casual market.

CG: Right. Right. But as I said, that's completely outside of our normal space, and then the numbers. And yeah, Raiden is another classic example.

I bought it. A friend of mine bought three.

CG: We really thought, "Should we sell it at 40 bucks?" Because our people going to buy it. I think it ended up... I think it was $19.99? 29.99, I think, when it first came out. But are you going to sell that less at $40?

Probably not.

CG: So, we gave up money, but we were trying desperately to sell enough. If we do it at $30, then more people are going to buy it, we thought. But yeah, I think we probably could've sold it almost the same at $40.

It's always a battle. It depends on which title you’re going for because then sometimes some people sell a hardcore Japanese RPG for 50 bucks because they'll feel like the hardcore fans are going to be the only people who buy this. But people don't know this brand, so they actually just wind up not getting it. That happens sometimes, too...

CG: And that was the whole discussion we had internally on Raiden.

And how is it in the Japanese localization space competing against... Atlus is extremely aggressive now, and Aksys is getting more resources.

CG: It's a challenge. The great saying is if it was easy, everybody would do it. It's really about relationships. I mean, we've got some good relationships, and I think, you know, we're pretty honest with the folks we work with. Yeah. It's just leveraging relationships.

And where do you see Valcon going forward in the next five years?

CG: I think we're going to continue to explore the lower-priced space. I think PS3 is going to be an important platform for us. I think we'll continue to support 360. We'll continue to support... I really want to explore XBLA, and I want to explore PSN more, and kind of see what those markets can achieve. Take a look at some iPhone and iPad stuff. But once again, everybody else is doing that, so maybe that's not such a smart idea. Yeah, I mean, I think we'll... As dull as it is, more of the same probably...

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Every week, we sum up sister iPhone and iPad site FingerGaming's top news and reviews for Apple's nascent -- and increasingly exciting -- portable games platform, as written by editor in chief Danny Cowan and authors Tucker Dean, Jason Johnson, Ryan Hibbeler, and Mike Rose.]

This week, FingerGaming examines some of the major stories happening in the iPhone and iPad games space, covering an App Store adaptation of Zynga's FarmVille and the release of the iOS 4 firmware update.

Also within are the lists for top-grossing, most-downloaded free and paid Apps from Apple's store, as well as reviews for eBoy FixPix, Carcassonne, and Pix'n Love Rush.

Here are the top stories from the last seven days:

- Review: Carcassonne
"Carcassonne is really quite wonderful, and deserves a place on every gamer's iPod Touch, iPhone or iPad. You're guaranteed to have a blast with it, and you may just find yourself completely hooked."

- Top-Grossing Game Apps: EA Takes Over Charts During Catalog Sale
"Several Electronic Arts-published titles are featured among today's top sellers, thanks to an ongoing sale that drops the price of many of the company's popular iPhone and iPod Touch games."

- iOS 4 Software Update Released, Now Available as Free Download
"Apple's free iOS 4 software update adds over 100 new features, including much-requested multitasking functionality for iPhone 3GS and third-generation iPod Touch devices."

- iPhone 4 Now Shipping; Firemint Releases Upgrades for Real Racing, Flight Control
"Coinciding with the device's early launch, App Store developer Firemint has released iPhone 4-optimized versions of Real Racing and Flight Control, adding new features and enhanced graphics for both titles."

- Zynga's Free-to-Play Farming Sim FarmVille Now Available in App Store
"The iPhone version of FarmVille includes a set of exclusive items not found in the Facebook edition of the game, along with minor gameplay upgrades."

- Top iPhone Game Apps: Tiger Woods No Match for Angry Birds
"Last week's sales champion FIFA World Cup falls to eighth place in today's results, as Clickgamer's Angry Birds and Lima Sky's Doodle Jump take its place at the top of the App Store's paid game charts."

- Review: eBoy FixPix
"While there's not a lot of traditional gameplay or puzzle-solving on offer, players looking for something a bit different would do well to take a closer look, especially those who are fans of pixel art."

- Apple Features 50 of the "Best Games You've Never Played"
"Surprisingly, much of the list skews toward the hardcore end of the gaming spectrum, featuring lesser-known but excellent offerings like Cave's Espgaluda II, Square Enix's Hills and Rivers Remain, and indie standouts Eliss and Orbital."

- Top iPad Game Apps: GT Racing, Castle Warriors Enter Top Ten
"Clickgamer's Angry Birds HD tops this week's paid iPad games chart, as Gameloft's racing sim GT Racing: Motor Academy HD and GameResort's real-time strategy title Castle Warriors HD see strong first-week sales."

- Review: Pix'n Love Rush
"Pix'n Love Rush would feel right at home on the Island of Misfit Toys. But somehow, that's okay. It might even be better for it."

Posted by Simon Carless at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As if puzzle platformers from indie developers weren't complicated enough -- what with all the time-manipulating games (Braid), gravity-flipping releases (VVVVVV), and other creative, gimmick-heavy titles out there -- Michael Fruendt has what looks like a new mechanic to experiment with in his new unnamed project.

The game's primary mechanic is difficult to even describe, as Bytejacker points out -- it's kind of like those platformers in which you're controlling two characters in two different worlds at once (e.g. Reflection, Chronos Twins), but significantly different. It's pretty self-explanatory, though, if you watch the video.

Fruendt, who is building the project with Chevy Ray Johnson’s FlashPunk and Matt Thorson’s OgmoEditor, looks to still be in the early phases of the game's development, but he recently posted another video demonstrating the puzzle possibilities of this gimmick:

[Via IndieGames.com]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I've never felt the attraction to them myself, but there's a portion of video game collectors -- probably those with far more room than I have to store this stuff -- that love to acquire store kiosks. This auction for one such display is especially rare, as its from a limited run of prototype Vectrex stands.

According to seller Celprints, only a handful of Vectrex stands were produced, and this unit is possibly one of only three prototype versions that are still around. He proclaims, "If you want the rarest Vectrex item on planet Earth, now is the time to jump on this opportunity."

The seller notes a couples differences between the prototype and other Vectrex displays he's seen: the images of games have been laminated or plasticized; and the body of the stand appears to be around three times thicker than normal production Vectrex kiosks, which he says makes this "far stronger and also much heavier."

As of this posting, bidding for the stand is at $405.00 with more than four days to go. Make sure to also check out Celprints' prototype Sega game display stands!

[Via GameSniped ]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Ontario-based indie developer Streaming Colour Studios (Dapple, Monkeys In Space) have released LandFormer, a new puzzler that has you raising and lowering square sections of terrain until the entire grid is at an even height.

It's a really simple but addictive concept you should be able to pick up quick, and you can download the game's first 10 levels, a level editor, and the level-sharing with your friends for free -- you won't be able to save your levels with those latter two features.

A $1.99 in-app purchase will net you 50 more levels available in four different difficulties, as well as the ability to save levels you've created or received from others. You can also purchase special themes, like the Discotheque Theme, to change the look of LandFormer.

[Via FingerGaming]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

['Homer in Silicon' is a biweekly GameSetWatch-exclusive column by Emily Short. It looks at storytelling and narrative in games of all flavors, including the casual, indie, and obscurely hobbyist. This week she looks at Love and Death: Bitten, a hidden object game from Playfirst.]

According to some branches of non-Stoker lore, vampires have an obsession with tidiness: they can't pass by a knot without untying it, or a spill of dried peas without picking them up. A ball of twine and a bag of rice are almost as good against a vamp as a stake and holy water.

Some such rationale might half explain Love and Death: Bitten, a vampire love story/hidden object game. In between plot events (and sometimes even when gripped by the urgency of the hunt) the vampire protagonist will stop to collect, say, six match sticks, five plates, and a pair of stockings from a messy room. This doesn't explain why his human love interest does the same.

I am not a great fan of hidden object gameplay. I played Love and Death: Bitten for two reasons: it was getting strong reviews as a casual game with a lot of story content, and it also contains a number of other types of puzzle.

The reviews don't lie: if we set aside the essential implausibility that the protagonists stop at the most inopportune times to search for trinkets, this is a pretty decent story/gameplay mesh for a hidden object game.

During the opening scenes, we're invited to visit the same places as both the vampire Damon and the human Victoria, and the things they look for and notice remind us of their differences. Damon is more agile, but he has his vulnerabilities, too: there are things he can't touch or step on, and he has a need for blood now and then to replenish his strength and let him lift heavy things. Victoria can't climb to the same heights, but crosses don't bother her. The meaningful shift in perspective makes it somewhat more tolerable to search the same settings twice and do the same puzzles over again in just-slightly-different variants.

After the first act, the hidden object experience is used to unveil Damon's past and the characters' different attitudes towards that past, rather than to set up their overall abilities. Much of the action is set in the castle where he lives: the hidden object screens are full of memories when he manipulates them, and discovery when Victoria does. The list of objects to find in a given scene gives some hint about what the viewpoint character might be thinking, even when he or she offers no explicit comment.

Victoria, for instance, investigating Damon's study, finds an assortment of objects that point at his talents and musical abilities. Damon, on the other hand, notices the tokens given to him by previous lovers, and cast-off bottles of wine -- hints at a dissolute lifestyle. The game does not go into this in any explicit detail, but perhaps we can judge from this that Victoria sees Damon more favorably than he sees himself. In any case, it's a relatively deft and thoughtful use of this play style.

Finally, in one scene, the player is required to combine the hidden objects into a tableau that tells the full story of Damon's background. It's contrived, but it does work; it gives the backstory of how Damon became what he is, and connects several previously unexplained pieces of evidence.

There are some missteps. The authors don't help themselves by drawing attention to the implausibility of doors that can only be unlocked with the right collection of four tiny related objects (or seven, or twenty, depending on how far you are through the plot and how determined are the designers to string things out). The heroine thinks aloud about this several times, which is a mistake. All the same, the multiple viewpoint tricks, and the exposition by way of hidden object screen, do surprisingly well to bring together story and game.

At the end of the day, though, these merits are relative: the story in Love and Death: Bitten is decent for the kind of game it is, which is to say, if you're expecting almost nothing.

Looked at with any seriousness, it falls apart. It is held together by convention, not by compelling narrative logic. Why should Damon seek out Victoria as a victim, then refuse to kill her? He gives some weak explanation of having to leave because dawn was approaching, but I'm sure he could have spared the time to bite or abduct her first, if he'd really wanted to.

Why does Victoria fall for the man who has been terrorizing her town, based chiefly on a couple of extremely weak exchanges of witty banter? Why does Damon strike a cheesy pose in his own garden with his poet shirt open down the front? Do these characters have anything in common but the expectations of the genre in which they find themselves? No. They're not in love, not really. They don't have motives. They're contractually obligated to get themselves into such situations as cliché demands, that's all.

There are other games that take their writing more seriously or are more inventive, but a very great number of them share the core problem with Love and Death: Bitten. It feels constructed. It is an artificial rose hot-glued together from the scavenged petals of other artificial roses.

There is not a moment of human truth from one end to the other.

That's not because it's a fantasy about vampires. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" was a fantasy about vampires, and that had many moments of raw surprising honesty. The premise doesn't have to be realistic for the characters to be truthful. "Buffy" puts its most affecting observations about the nature of death into the mouth of a thousand-year-old retired vengeance demon.

Genre conventions supply premises, situations, and types of conflict. Genre signals to players what sorts of interaction they can expect to have. Genre is useful. The problem arises when a game or story has nothing to offer beyond what the genre has already supplied.

What "Buffy" has, what Love and Death: Bitten and many other games lack, is observation. Within an imagined universe where we accept that vampires are real, it still places plausible people at the center. The characters have motivations we recognize and actions that feel right instead of obvious.

For that to happen, the writers have to be willing to look not just at other works in the same genre, but at the real world.

(Disclosure: I played a copy of this work that I purchased at full price. I have had no commercial affiliations with the publisher at the time of writing.)

[Emily Short is an interactive fiction author and part of the team behind Inform 7, a language for IF creation. She also maintains a blog on interactive fiction and related topics. She also contracts for story and design work with game developers from time to time, and will disclose conflicts with story subjects if any exist. She can be reached at emshort AT mindspring DOT com.]

Posted by Emily Short at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Open source web browser Mozilla Firefox released a new update over the weekend specifically aimed at resolving a bug that prevented users from playing popular Facebook game FarmVille.

While FarmVille's audience has decreased significantly in recent months due to changes made to Facebook's application notifications, the Zynga-developed game is still the most popular app on the social network, attracting more than 63.7 million monthly active users, according to figures from AppData.

A portion of those users likely use Firefox v3.6.4 to play the farming simulator, and some reported that the game "hangs the browser long enough for [a] timeout to trigger and kill it". The latest version of Firefox, v3.6.6, uses an interim solution that increases the timeout, as developers look for a more ideal fix.

The FarmVille issue is the only listed bug in the new update. Though no other games or apps are listed on Mozilla's site as having issues with the previous v3.6.4 release, several Firefox users have reported that the bug occurs on other Flash sites.

So, the anonymous poster who commented on the update, "I can't believe FarmVille is solely responsible for a Firefox update *facepalm*", can find solace in the fact that non-FarmVille users will benefit from installing v3.6.6, too.

[Via The Ludologist]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Last September, we featured some of Alberto Mielgo's gorgeous artwork from the first half of The Beatles: Rock Band's superb trailer, which looked to tell a "brief story of young Beatles." Mielgo unfortunately took those images down not long after posting them, but they're back up again!

He's also put several new pieces up showing the Fab Four running through Liverpool and jumping through cars to avoid crazed fans. "All this first half was 2D and AfterFX (with some minor exceptions)," explains Mielgo. "So, as you can imagine, this BG has a hell of layers. This particular scene was create in AfterFX (and other softwares of hell) by ... Jhonny Still"

You can watch the original trailer after the break. Make sure to check out Mielgo's blog for a lot more fantastic non-Beatles art!

[Via @Capy_Nathan]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hemisphere Games's ambient, even calming PC title Osmos, which took home the 2009 Independent Game Festival's Vision Award, will soon see a release on iOS devices, first on the iPad on July 8th, then on iPhone/iPod Touch around a month later.

In Osmos, players guide a single-celled organism (Mote) as it propels itself around to absorb smaller motes, while avoiding bigger organisms and using the gravitational pull/push of Repulsors/Atractors to their advantage. It's like a mix of ThatGameCompany's fl0w, Nintendo's Orbital/Orbient, and Spore's cell stage.

Hemisphere says it's worked more than six months to rework the iOS versions from the ground up, adding a new game structure, multitouch controls, more levels, and new menus. The studio says it's also smoothed out the difficulty curve and tweaked everything for the devices' screen sizes and processing power.

[Via Nobuooo]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

[While GDC Europe is up first - and look for a super-neat speaker announcement for that on Thursday -- my colleagues at GDC Online, set for Austin this October, are starting to roll out some v.interesting lectures of their own, starting with this.]

Organizers of GDC Online (formerly GDC Austin) have announced the first set of lectures for this October's pre-eminent conference related to online games, including a 'Live' track featuring Sony Online, Wizard101 and IMVU speakers.

The Austin, Texas-based GDC Online conference and expo is keenly focused on development of connected games including social network titles, free-to-play web games, kid-friendly online titles, large-scale MMOs, and more, with a leading advisory board guiding the evaluation and choice of lectures.

While there are already over 25 confirmed lectures across the entire event -- created by the UBM TechWeb Game Network, as is this site -- organizers are focusing on the 'Live' track, which discusses the vital topic of successful strategies for online games post-launch.

The rise of swiftly iterated social games and microtransactions have led to a wide array of new techniques and technologies that can help increase fun, profitability and retention, and the 'Live' track will deal with many of these.

Some of the highlights of the GDC Online 'Live' track, as announced thus far, include:

- In 'From Shadowbane to Wizard101: Strategies for Expanding Player Communities and Sustaining Enthusiasm After Launch', J. Todd Coleman & Josef Hall of KingsIsle Entertainment will reference their 10 million registered-user online game and previous experience, identifying "sustaining community that transcend genre and generation, the importance of always having new content in queue, and strategies for communicating milestones and methods for remaining engaged in public conversation."

- 'Surviving Social Media: Advice From The SOE Playbook' sees Sony Online Entertainment's Linda Carlson discussing how the Free Realms and upcoming DC Universe Online creators "identify the best outlets for ROI, implement efficiencies in time and money, involve all departments for the common good, craft audience-specific messaging, proven strategies to engage and motivate fans, manage multiple games in social media, maintain brand strength" -- with "plenty of war stories and scars to prove points!"

- IMVU's Brett Durrett will present 'Building A Successful Business After Launch through Rapid Iteration', showing how, by "creating systems that utilize A/B testing, instant customer metrics and a sophisticated deployment process IMVU is able to shorten the iteration loop and deploy new software to production up to 50 times per day" - leading to an avatar-heavy online environment with over 100 million registered users.

In addition to the main conference content, GDC Online will present specialized Summit programs, with in-depth business and technical advice on major up-and-coming facets of the game industry, including 3D stereoscopic games and iPad development.

The event is also hosting the first ever Game Developers Choice Online Awards -- honoring the accomplishments of the sometimes overlooked creators and operators of persistent online video games -- from large-scale MMOs through free-to-play titles to social network games.

GDC Online will take place October 5-8, 2010 at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas. To learn more about the newly announced lectures across all tracks for GDC Online, for which registration is now open, please visit the official GDC Online website.

Posted by Simon Carless at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

You might have seen some of RabbitRampage work before, small but adorable felt cases modeled after the original PlayStations or Game Boys, perfect for protecting phones of iPods. The craftster has now ventured into the current generation of home sonsoles with her creations, though, offering felt PS3 slim pouches.

She constructed these 5 1/8" by 3 1/4" cases out of 1mm black felt with a gray felt lining, a velcro closure, and handsewn details (e.g. PS3 logo, power/eject buttons). She also offers a plush controller that you can attach to one of the white straps, sold separately.

And if you're more of a Microsoft fan, RabbitRampage sells a felt case and plush controller for white Xbox 360s, too (photo after the break). Unfortunately, it looks like just sold out of her PS3/Xbox 360 felt cases, but she plans to create more, so keep an eye on her Etsy shop for when those come back in stock.

[Via technabob]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Continuing our coverage of mods inspired by ThinkGeek's iCade mock-up from last April Fools', here's another prototype of an iPad arcade mini-cabinet, this time from Freekade, a UK outfit that specializes in building small, custom arcade setups.

Like the Japanese cardboard iPad arcade setup we previously featured, Freekade's work somehow sends commands from the joystick and buttons to the tablet through its dock connector -- the firm stresses that this is not simply a VNC-type client.

Unlike that previous prototype, though, this one sits the iPad in portrait mode and plays classic games like Mr. Do, likely made possible through jailbreaking the system. While most iPad owners probably wouldn't consider jailbreaking their system, I'd sure many would still love to see Freekade add custom cabinets like this to its catalog/services.

[Via Engadget]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

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

   

I was lucky enough the other day to come across a scanned collection of Video-Ace Dendy, the first magazine in Russia devoted wholly to video games. "Video-Ace" is the name of the Moscow-based publisher behind the mag, and "Dendy" is the brand name of (at the time) the most popular gray-market NES console in the nation.

The Dendy, a PAL-compatible clone of the Famicom, was released December 1992 across Russia by Steepler, an importing company the sourced the consoles from Chinese manufacturers. The system went on sale for 39,000 rubles (the equivalent of about $94 at the time) and was a very quick success -- by mid-1994 over a million Dendies were in Russian households and Steepler was selling at least 100,000 consoles per month. Part of this was because of Steepler's ad campaign, which included everything from TV ads (featuring the jingle "Dendy, Dendy, we all love Dendy! Dendy: Play it!") to that elephant mascot guy above, designed by animator Ivan Maximov.

This market naturally created a demand for new games and magazines, and Video-Ace Dendy debuted in July 1993 to meet that demand. The first 28-page issue lists a catalog of 59 games available for the Dendy at the time, 15 of which are "X-in-1" cartridges and all the others of similarly not-quite-legal status. Young Russian gamers didn't care, though, and they ate up Video-Ace's mix of strategy, reviews, and game-themed trading cards.

Equal coverage was given in the pages between the Dendy, Mega Drive, Game Boy and SNES, but one gets the idea that anything besides the Dendy would've been far too expensive a purchase for the average reader -- the coverage, much of it borrowed from British and French magazines of the day, was probably thrown in for a "look at this cool stuff we might get someday" effect.

Like a lot of Russian businesses in the early post-Soviet years, Video-Ace occasionally struggled to stay afloat. The fifth issue was completed in late 1993 but delayed several months because the publisher either failed to find an available printing house or couldn't afford one. Printing duties wound up getting outsourced to an outfit in Finland starting with issue 6 in 1994, though, and the magazine began to aggressively expand soon afterward, doubling in size and vastly improving its production values.

In 1995, Video-Ace split off the 8-bit Dendy coverage into its own magazine and launched a new one, Velikiy Drakon (Great Dragon), named after one of the in-house pseudonyms used in the Dendy mag's reviews. Great Dragon concentrated on 16-bit consoles and other platforms, and while the Dendy mag soldiered on until mid-1996, the new publication was a much longer-lasting success, surviving until the parent company's bankruptcy in 2004.

Several of Great Dragon's writers moved on to the mag's top rival, Strana Igr (Game Land), which launched in 1996 and maintains a circulation of around 80,000 copies today. Looking at Game Land's web page today makes me marvel at how far the Russian game media's advanced from its early days of printing paperback books full of tips for 200-in-1, 50-in-1, 9999-in-1, and so on for pages at a time. Ah, progress!

[Kevin Gifford used to breed ferrets, but now he's busy running Magweasel, a really cool weblog about games and Japan and "the industry" and things. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots of publishers and game companies.]

Posted by Kevin Gifford at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

With the number of board game adaptations for modern video games increasing recently (e.g. EVE: Conquests and World of Warcraft: The Board Game), it's only right that several classic titles receive their own tabletop editions, such as Maziacs the Boardgame.

Based on Don Priestley's 1983 ZX Spectrum release Maziacs (video after the break), this board game version challenges players to navigate a randomly-generated maze full of dangerous but dumb spider-like monsters -- the Maziacs -- while trying to find gold and an escape route.

Jorge Arroyo, creator of Maziacs the Boardgame, explains how it works:

"The game uses tiles to build a new random maze each play and mechanics to create a unique path towards the treasure. This path is slowly uncovered by the player by asking prisoners that can be found randomly through the maze.

Also, the Maziacs will appear randomly and try to kill the hero, but as long as he has a sword, he'll be safe. There's also a mechanic that will adjust the chance of a new Maziac appearing based on the number of Maziacs already on the board and the distance from the exit.

In the end, it's all about beating the game system, either as a solo or cooperative game, trying to maneuver through the tight corridors fooling Maziacs into dead ends and finding the correct path to the treasure."

You can download everything you'll need to play Maziacs the Boardgame for free at BoardGameGeek.

[Via RetroRemakes]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Longtime readers of the site might recall our spotlight on Manic Miner: The Opera several years ago, an audio sketch hoping to "make classical music appeal to a younger audience" with a fictional opera for Matthew Smith's classic platformer Manic Miner, performed by The Franz Kafka Big Band and aired by BBC Radio Scotland.

Colin Broom -- who composed the three-part opera with librettist Colin Edwards and singer Kenny Reid -- has returned to the five-year-old project with a video for Manic Miner: The Opera's first scene, Central Cavern, using footage from the game's CPC Amstrad version to accompany the song and show "Miner Willy and his journey through the mines".

The video ends at a cliffhanger with Willy encountering a stage full of "Wacky Amoeeeeeeeebatrons" -- hopefully we'll see videos for the rest of the scenes, too! Broom says he'll produce clips for the rest of Manic Miner: The Opera's scenes if he finds time.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 2:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

[Following the announcement of the 2011 Independent Games Festival competition, IGF Chairman Brandon Boyer goes in-depth on the changes made for this year's Festival, examining the ethos for the competition and the major shifts in policy and rules for this year's 13th annual IGF experience.]

The IGF's mandate has been, since its inception, to provide the best showcase of both the evolution and the revolution the indie development community has continually provided, year after year, since the festival's foundation in 1999. And while -- from my outsider's perspective -- it has succeeded at doing so, part of my own mandate as its new chairman is to help the festival itself undergo that same evolution as it grows in terms of both simply size and in importance to the wider game development community.

Over the past month, I've been in discussions with not only the IGF team itself, but with a wide variety of indie developers, to figure out what we can do to make this year's lucky-13th festival even more successful than it has been in the past. What follows, then, is the three main changes -- minor tweaks and major restructuring -- that hopefully will make the new IGF the most inclusive, responsive and fair festival we've put together yet.

And this first step's a doozy...

From here on out, mobile games will be a part of the main IGF.

There have been few recent shifts in the gaming industry as radical as the changing landscape of mobile gaming since the IGF Mobile competition first debuted in 2008. Major platform holders like Sony and Nintendo have opened their doors to indie developers with downloadable initiatives like DSiWare and PSP Minis.

Apple's unveiling of the iPhone & iPod Touch App Store provided a clean break from the wily world of mobile phone carrier decks and from the hair-tearing variety of specific device requirements, giving indies a (more or less) single target to sight in their effort to put their games directly into the hands of millions.

And so while the first few rounds of the IGF Mobile may have served to highlight achievements in a space unfair to compare to PC or console counterparts, the advances in mobile tech -- and in the artistry indie devs have been eking out of that tech -- means that the dividing line has been sufficiently blurred as to no longer exist.

Starting with IGF 2011, all games created for iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Android, DS, PSP or any other device will be allowed entry into the main IGF Festival to compete in every category, and we'll be adding a specific Best Mobile Game category to the festival to highlight specific achievements in the space.

Doing so will necessarily boost the number of entries in the IGF, so we're also changing the way games are judged on their unique merits. Specifically:

IGF entrants will now undergo both a judge and jury process.

We tested this process starting in 2010 for the Nuovo Award category of the festival, and now we're expanding it across the board. Rather than grading games on a numerical scale to quantitatively determine the "best games", the wider body of judges will be asked instead to nominate the games allotted to them for any of the IGF's categories like design, visual art and audio.

The top-nominated games will be then passed to a smaller jury who will together determine the finalists and winner after rounds of debate and conversation. Our hope is that this will make the process more engaging for the jurists and more fair for developers, who will now be directly appraised by a jury of industry peers: visual artists for the visual art category, engineers for technical excellence and so on.

But the changes to the 2011 IGF aren't all quite so focused on the mechanics and organization of the festival itself, as we will also be modifying some of the thematics, as in:

IGF 2011 will include more finalists for the Nuovo Award.

Experimentation and innovation have always been a hallmark and keystone of indie game development, and the IGF's Nuovo category is meant to honor achievement in advancing games as a medium for artistic, auteur-driven and otherwise esoteric expression. This year, the IGF is expanding its spotlight on that by honoring a total of eight finalists in the Nuovo category, up from five in the previous year (counterbalanced by tuning the Student IGF finalists from ten to eight).

While it may be a minor modification, we hope an increased focus on Nuovo finalists (which have previously included games like Cactus' Tuning and Jason Rohrer's Between) helps draw wider attention from a mainstream audience to precisely what it is that makes indie gaming unique -- how the indies continue to defy and change expectations on what gaming can be, and how they set themselves apart from the more traditional games industry.

Final thoughts...

We hope you'll agree that the changes outlined here are a strong step toward continuing the IGF's mission in supporting and celebrating the wide breadth and diversity of the independent gaming community, and we hope you're more encouraged than ever to debut your game as a part of the festival.

In years past, we know that some developers -- especially those that have taken home prizes in previous years -- have been hesitant to enter their newer titles because they believe they don't necessarily "need" the recognition that comes with being an IGF finalist.

For those people, I'd simply like to add that part of my personal mission as new chair is to guide the IGF to a place where it can be as inclusive and all-encompassing as possible -- to bring together everyone from true beginners making their first foray into the medium, to seasoned veterans leaving the larger industry to express and create something more personal, to the underground rogues with zero commercial aspirations who simply want to test the boundaries of the medium.

One of the most heartening and entirely unique aspects I've taken away from indie gaming over the past many years is the spirit of sharing, support and community that permeates every level. You might argue that the IGF, simply by its structure of finalists and winners, might on the surface appear to run counter to that. But my belief is that it can be more rightly approached as a challenge for everyone involved to push each other into crafting better and more unexpected experiences for players, and to help each other prove to the wider world that you don't need a development team of several hundreds or a budget of several millions to create something truly beautiful.

As always, feel free to reach out with any questions or concerns about the thoughts and changes outlined here by emailing me directly. Looking forward to seeing what each of you create!

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Any fan of the Civilization series knows how easy it is to get sucked into a campaign and lose hours, if not a full night, to the strategy game. Playing on the addictive nature of the game several years ago, Firaxis and 2K Games created several humorous videos around a fictional group that looks to support Civ junkies struggling with their addiction.

With Civilization V just around the corner now -- you can mark September 21 in your calendar -- the companies have brought back CivAnon, a "12-step support group for the most hardened Civ addicts", updated for modern concerns, like the franchise's broader audience and iPhone editions of the game acting as a gateway drug.

Posted by Eric Caoili at 10:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The UBM TechWeb Game Network, organizer of the industry-leading Game Developers Conference events, is pleased to announce that submissions are now open for the 2011 Independent Games Festival -- to be held at GDC 2011 in San Francisco next March.

The longest-running and highest-profile independent video game festival, summit and showcase is now accepting entries to the 13th annual Festival, with deadlines in the Main and Student Showcase categories by October 18th and November 1st respectively, and finalists to be announced on January 2011.

All games selected as finalists will be available in playable form at the IGF Pavilion on the GDC show floor, and will compete for nearly $50,000 in prizes, including the Nuovo Award, Excellence in Design, Art, Best Student Game, the Audience Award and the $20,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize. Winners will be announced on stage at the high-profile Independent Games Festival Awards on Wednesday, March 2, 2011, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

The Independent Games Festival Awards are held immediately before the wider Game Developers Choice Awards, and both multi-thousand person attendee award shows are part of the 2011 Game Developers Conference, taking place February 28th-March 4th, 2011. GDC 2011 also includes the 2011 Independent Games Summit, which is entering its fifth year and offers two days of inspiration and practical lectures and rants from the top minds in the independent games world.

Continuing to honor the best and brightest of the indie gaming community, the Independent Games Festival is expanding in its thirteenth year to recognize the new opportunities open to mobile and handheld game developers. Responding to developer feedback, games made for Apple's iPhone, Android, Nintendo DS/DSi, PlayStation Portable, and all handheld devices will compete in the same traditional IGF categories. They will also be eligible for a new Best Mobile Game award, honoring innovation, achievement and artistry in handheld gaming.

Other changes to the 2011 festival include an expanded focus on alternative elements in independent gaming, with the number of finalists for the IGF Nuovo Award -- honoring abstract, shortform, and otherwise esoteric 'art games' -- increasing from five to eight games in total.

The festival's judging process has also been modified to see winners decided via jury debate from focused industry peers. Expanding on a successful 2010 experiment using the Nuovo Award, entrants will be recommended for consideration in individual categories by the larger IGF judging body of over 170 notable industry participants. Following this process, smaller juries with specific knowledge of the award in question will discuss and choose the finalists and winner in each individual category.

The modifications continue to expand the Independent Game Festival's global importance as the largest and most all-encompassing showcase of independent game talent across the wide spectrum of artistically- and commercially-aimed development. Notable former IGF winners include World of Goo, Braid, Castle Crashers, Everyday Shooter, Darwinia and Audiosurf, with IGF 2010 prizewinner Limbo a key game in Xbox Live Arcade's 'Summer Of Arcade' line-up and 2010 nominee Joe Danger a recent, acclaimed release on PlayStation Network.

Brandon Boyer, Chairman of the IGF, said of this year's event: “Expanding the IGF to include mobile and more artistic experiences is our way of recognizing the constantly evolving landscape of indie game development, and the advancement of the expression possible in the medium itself. I'm more excited than ever to see what the indie community creates for this year's festival, and wish all the entrants the best of luck!"

Submissions to the competition are now open to all independent game developers; important dates for IGF 2011 are as follows:

June 28th, 2010 - Submissions are Open
October 18th, 2010 - Submission Deadline, Main Competition
November 1st, 2010 - Submission Deadline, Student Competition
January 3rd, 2011 - Finalists Announced, Main Competition
January 10, 2011 - Finalists Announced, Student Competition
February 28 - March 4, 2011 - Game Developers Conference 2011
February 28 - March 1, 2011 - Indie Games Summit @ GDC 2011
March 2 - March 4, 2011 - IGF Pavilion @ GDC 2011
March 2, 2011 - IGF Awards Ceremony (Winners Announced!)

For a complete list of information on the 2011 Independent Games Festival, including submission specifics, frequently asked questions, and more discussion on this year's changes from the IGF Chairman, please visit the official Independent Games Festival website.

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

Inspired by Ken Masters' alternate "cowboy" outfit in Super Street Fighter IV, hat company Stetson created a headpiece based on the video game character's in-game models (pictured). The cowboy hat features a hand-made leather hat band and the inscription "Made by Stetson especially for Ken Masters".

Stetson only made three of the hats -- two of which are already taken by Capcom's producer Yoshinori Ono and senior community manager Seth Killian -- and Street Fighter fans will be able to win one of them at EVO 2010 in Las Vegas next month.

To win the cowboy hat, Ken fans will need to play as the dragon punching fighter in his "Cowboy Ken" outfit for the entire Super Street Fighter IV tournament. The top-finishing Ken player to do so will take home the hat and all the manliness that comes with it!

[Via Capcom Unity]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 7:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Though the real Adventurers Club -- Walt Disney World Resort's themed nightclub set during New Years Eve in 1937 -- was closed to the public in September 2008, you can still explore and experience a virtual version of it thanks to a new Garry’s Mod release from modder Breben.

Breben spent around 730 hours in the past 15 months trying to create an accurate model of the former Walt Disney World attraction, complete with interactive props and audio recorded at the actual Adventurers Club. He used a variety of media and reference material, especially photos Adventurers Club visitors posted on Flickr.

The modder says he created this virtual replica with "the hope that someone (wealthy) will someday be able to use my video to build their very own Adventurers Club to the exact same specifications as the original one." He admits, "[It's] a far-fetched dream, but you never know…"

[Via Boing Boing, Inside The Magic]

Posted by Eric Caoili at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Rounding up the feature-length stories from the Gamasutra network, here's the top full-length features of the past week on big sister 'art and business of gaming' site Gamasutra, plus the new GameCareerGuide pieces that debuted last week.

Some genuinely neat stuff in here - including chats with the folks behind Deadly Premonition and Halo: Reach, plus an interview with Activision's chief operating officer, a fun new Game Design Challenge, a look at outsourcing in today's market, and much more.

Cha cha cha:

Halo: Reach - The Beta Story
"Bungie's Jarrard and Carney discuss Halo: Reach's extensive beta, the evolving multiplayer landscape, and learning from the community while still driving the series' evolution."

Reward Systems, An Excerpt From Level Design: Concept, Theory, and Practice
"Presenting an excerpt from Eufloria co-creator Rudolf Kremers' 'Level Design: Concept, Theory, and Practice' -- from escapism to simulation, reward systems and structures."

Activision: Business Is Good, And Getting Better
"This extensive interview with Activision Blizzard COO Thomas Tippl covers the current state of the company's business and its prospects for the future -- taking in how decisions are made and how franchises can be expanded and preserved."

Outsourcing: A Little Checklist to Save You a Lot of Hassles
"Working with outsourcers is a vital part of game development these days, but it's easy to get off track, and this article from a former Development Director for 2K Games delves into methods to increase reliability and foster communication."

Thank You And Guys, I Love You!! - A SWERY Interview
"Deadly Premonition creator Hidetaka "SWERY" Suehiro explains the cult-favorite game's unique creative decisions, the polarized reception from fans, and the breadth of his vision."

GCG: Game Engines and Frameworks for Small and Independent Studios
"Written as a report for Nanyang Technological University, Singapore masters of science degree, this comparison of different engine technologies indies and students might use is a helpful resource for making tech decisions."

GCG: Game Design Challenge: Michael Jackson
"Ubisoft recently announced it has the rights to develop a Michael Jackson game -- but why wait for them to announce it? Get cranking on your own King of Pop adventure!"

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

After a turbulent development history that has involved possibly being canceled and uncanceled multiple times, a sequel to the 2003 cult favorite action-adventure game Beyond Good & Evil is publicly in the works, but series creator Michel Ancel says the game will "take time" because he is deliberately keeping the team size small to "preserve creativity."

"On this game, we're keeping the team small, to preserve creativity and so the game doesn't become a commercial product, so that is has soul," Ubisoft designer Ancel said this week, according to a Eurogamer translation of comments made in French at the Montpellier in Game conference.

Last week at E3, Ubisoft announced the development of Rayman: Origins, the latest 2D game in the Ancel-originated platforming series.

It is being developed by a team of only five, using tools intended to reduce the number of technical hurdles between artists and game development. The team plans to eventually release those tools to the public.

Ancel indicated that the Beyond Good & Evil 2 team is using similar tools for its own game. "It takes a bit longer," he admitted, "but we're very keen to use this system with this game, because it's an ambitious game and we want to create something exceptional." Some reports have indicated that the designer, like the Rayman: Origins team, hopes to release those tools to the public.

Beyond Good & Evil was originally released for PC, PlayStation 2, GameCube, and Xbox. Although it was not a major commercial success, it received a positive critical reception and generated a passionate fan base.

In the seven years since its release, Ancel has frequently expressed his desire to return to the game's universe. In 2008, a teaser trailer for a sequel surfaced, but Ubisoft later claimed it was merely a concept video, and was not confirmation of a new game.

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

[Xbox director of platform marketing Albert Penello talks to our own Kris Graft, post-E3, about the Xbox 360 motrion control device Kinect's biggest question marks -- from market fragmentation to pricing and third-party publisher support.]

Last week's E3 reveal of the motion-sensing Kinect and new Xbox 360 was a preemptive strike on a potential mid-life crisis for the console. Microsoft wants to expand beyond its core gamer audience and attract a wider demographic by trying to lower the barriers of modern gaming.

Albert Penello, director of platform marketing for Xbox, knows that the road ahead won't be easy, but is confident that once skeptical core gamers get their hands on (off?) the Kinect, they will be convinced.

But attracting current and potential Xbox 360 gamers to the motion control market will be a difficult proposition. The price has to be appealing to the target mass market, the third-party developer support has to be there and market fragmentation between traditional controllers and Kinect must be addressed.

All of these factors are currently big question marks. In this in-depth interview with us, Penello makes his case for the Xbox 360 strategy a week after having digested the major L.A. conference:

How do you think Microsoft did at E3 in relation to your competitors. How do you think you stood up against the new offerings everyone else has?

Albert Penello: Oh, we were terrible. [laughs]

[laughs] Yeah, like you're going to say that.

AP: I feel like we had the single biggest piece of news, which was the new console and the fact that it was shipping. [Nintendo] let a lot go about the 3DS before the show, and even though there were rumors about the new [Xbox 360] console, nobody had seen anything before we announced it that day.

I think everybody had some interesting things. We were going to be a tough spot because we were going to be talking about a product [in Kinect] that the core gamer is inherently nervous about. Obviously, when you're building something for a different audience with a new type of content, I think we knew going in that we're not going to get the best reaction from the briefing. But once people play it, they're going to feel better. I wish that all of the people online could actually play it.

I agree that the new console was some pretty big news to come out of E3. But it seems like it was so overshadowed by all the Kinect stuff. It didn't seem like quite the exclamation point that maybe it should have been.

AP: We intentionally wanted to leave it as a surprise moment at the very end. The fact is, we weren't going to spend a ton of time on it in the briefing because it's shipping. That's the big news, that you probably would be able to pick one up in the next three days. … Maybe in retrospect, it might have been good [to spend more time on the announcement], but that's the fun of looking back on these things.

I assume that you've seen some of the rumors about the price, and nothing is official yet, even though it's on Microsoft's online store for $150. Has Microsoft been gauging the reaction to that rumored price point?

AP: The Microsoft store is just a retailer, so don't take that as being anything official, although we had a conversation about that today. We didn't want the discussion at E3 to be about price until you got to see the experiences. There wasn't some sort of a nefarious fear or any kind of weirdness about not talking about price at the show. We'll announce the price when we feel the time is right.

You know what happens. We're three minutes into the conversation and we're talking about price. … We didn't want price to be the primary discussion at the show. Our goal was to prove it to people. … We'll talk about price when the experience is what people want it to be.

Pricing is such an issue though because a lot of people are already under the impression it works and we've known about Project Natal for a year. But there's a conflict because it's aimed at a mass market that wants to buy a console for $200, yet we have a peripheral that could potentially cost more than $100. How do you communicate the value of a $100 or $150 Kinect, or a $400 Kinect-Xbox 360 bundle to the mass market? And these are all speculative prices, of course.

AP: How do I want to put this… I think we did a pretty good job listening to people about the Xbox and features they wanted, and we added a lot of value to the new box and we kept the price the same. We haven't announced our full lineup for the holiday, so I would say let's talk again after we've announced price, and after we've announced our full lineup, and then perhaps it will be more clear.

There's maybe over a dozen announced games so far for Kinect. As far as third-party publisher support goes, are you satisfied with where that is right now for the Kinect?

AP: This industry thrives on being able to take an engine or game and put it on as many platforms as possible. … We don't want shovelware, we don't want ports, we don't want stuff with motion controls tacked onto it. That's not a slam to our competitors. We wanted original games that were really taking advantage of what our technology does.

I know we're going to have less games for [Kinect] than our competitors, but I think each one of those [games] is doing something interesting, and our system works differently and has different advantages than the wand, quite frankly. We're basically asking publishers to go out and make exclusive content for this new technology and this new customer. … To me it's way more important to have a handful of really good game titles that take advantage of the tech than 40 titles of which half of them are controller games with waggle added onto them.

We continue to say that the controller is the best experience for controller games. When people say, 'Why don't you have Halo?' Well, I don't want Halo on Kinect. I want Halo on a controller. Now would it be interesting to see what kind of game they could make using Kinect? Yeah, I would love to see what those guys could do, or what the Call of Duty guys could do. But I don't want to play Call of Duty 4, I want Call of Duty: Black Ops on the controller. So yeah, I'm really, really happy with the stuff that [publishers] are doing. … The most interesting stuff is going to be what comes out six months to a year from now when people come to grips with the technology and really start taking advantage of it.

When you talk about controller games, it brings me to the next point, market fragmentation. Unlike the Wii, the Kinect isn't integral to the Xbox 360 experience. You'll have games that are better with a controller. Is Microsoft worried about the fragmentation that could affect developers as well as the market?

AP: That's a concern that people have expressed. I think what you've seen us do is we're aligning a lot of our efforts around Kinect. We unveiled the new branding, we unveiled the new console, the name, the sensor -- Kinect does not look like it's something that's sort of tacked onto the side of the ecosystem.

I'd say stay tuned. I believe it's our goal to make Kinect a core part of our experience going forward. We're not abandoning the controller stuff at all, I think we're going to continue to want to make those games and support that. But we're trying to avoid exactly what your concern is. We want people to think of Kinect as part of our console offering.

A year or year-and-a-half from now, will today's core Xbox gamer see Kinect as an essential part of the Xbox experience?

AP: I hope so. And we teased some stuff. There's more technology in Kinect. We talk about the motion and full body recognition, but we also showed the UI working, the multi-array mic with echo cancellation that lets you do a lot of voice stuff. Even if Dance Central isn't your style of game, the integration with the system is going to be pretty robust. I think it's going to be a must-have thing, even if there's only a handful of experiences for the core gamers, I think the integration is really going to get better and better over time.

Posted by Simon Carless at 12:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)