Pictured: Simplified design document of Diablo III.
Image: Wikimedia Commons

Specifically, we get into discussions about Diablo III and the way that the Facebook version of You Don’t Know Jack, currently in beta testing, lure you in and keep you playing. By “we” I mean myself and Wired senior editor Chris Baker. Everyone else is either on some kind of crazy bike trip or… probably also playing Diablo. Baker brings up his time with Max Payne 3, and we do a lot of chatting about Star Wars games.

Finally, we close with some comments from Game|Life listeners. Last week, we introduced our call-in line where you can leave us voice or text messages that we may decide to read on the air, if we are feeling generous: 56 POW! GL FAN. Yes, that’s a phone number. Next week, we’ll be talking E3 predictions, so if you want to ask us a question or make your own prediction, call in.

Game|Life’s podcast is posted on Fridays, is available on iTunes, can be downloaded directly and is embedded below.

http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gamelifeaudio/gamelifereboot_031.mp3

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Episode 031

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An exclusive still from the 10th season of Red vs. Blue, the Halo parody series that will premiere on May 28.
Image courtesy Rooster Teeth

At about 5 p.m. one weekday in 2002 in Austin, Texas, Michael Burns clicked a button and uploaded a video to DrunkGamers.com.

It was a website that he and a couple of co-workers had started in their free time. The video was a parody of Apple’s Mac ads, showing a young man (played by Burns’ friend Gustavo Sorola) extolling the “virtues” of gaming on the undersupported Mac.

“Another great thing about the Mac is upgrades,” Sorola says to the camera. “On a PC, you have to open up your case, swap out your video card, change jumpers. On the Mac, when it’s time to upgrade, you just pick it up, throw it away, and go buy another one. Now that’s convenience.”

Burns and Sorola created the video purely for the enjoyment of their gamer nerd friends. But the very next day, one of those friends went to work at his Los Angeles office and dropped in on a friend who was always watching online videos. In 2002, this was not so common. YouTube was still 3 years away. But when the friend saw his buddy Sorola on the screen, he asked his co-worker if he also knew Gus. No, he said, he’d just heard this video was funny. The parody had gone viral in less than 24 hours.

Before the parody ad, DrunkGamers.com had just been for fun. But now Burns, always called “Burnie,” began to understand the power that the internet had to instantly find an audience if the content was good enough.

“It was this weird moment where we realized, man, the world’s just flat,” he told Wired.

Burns, now 39, is the CEO of Rooster Teeth, a company that he and Sorola established one year later to create humorous web video content. Their flagship creation is called Red vs. Blue, a parody of the popular shooter Halo created by adding voice-overs to actual footage pulled from the Xbox game. The 10th “season” of Red vs. Blue will premiere on Monday, May 28.

Burnie Burns is the kind of guy who will call you both “dude” and “man” in the same sentence. He is a film school dropout who created a multimedia empire, adapting along with the internet as it changed its shape. At 10 years old, Red vs. Blue has outlasted most science fiction shows on television. Rooster Teeth has conquered YouTube (it had the eighth most popular non-music channel of 2011) and iTunes (its podcast is the most downloaded one in the crowded Video Games category).

Rooster Teeth is a force to be reckoned with, but it all started in a spare bedroom in an Austin apartment.

When the parody “Switch” ad started taking off, Burns and Sorola were working at an Austin dial-up ISP called teleNetwork. They were friends with another employee there named Geoff Lazer Ramsey. He’d had his middle name legally changed to Lazer “as a joke.” The three became fast friends, starting a website called Ugly Internet in which Sorola and Ramsey penned scathing reviews of aesthetically unappealing websites, then emailed the link to the webmasters. They even wrote petitions to the American Registry of Internet Numbers to have the most egregiously hideous websites’ IP privileges revoked.

“We started getting death threats,” says Sorola. “People started e-mailing us photos of where we live. People were telling us that they were going to stab us in our sleep.”

Ugly Internet soon gave way to Drunk Gamers, which Burns joined. The three would review videogames while inebriated. The site was mostly an attempt to scam free games from publishers’ PR departments. In this sense, it was a failure. The only game they ever got in the mail was the mediocre Xbox game Blinx: The Timesweeper.

“That’s a game about a cat with a vacuum cleaner on its back that can alter time,” Sorola says with a laugh. “We gave it a perfect score. 10 out of 10.”

Burns was taken with another Xbox game — Halo. He’d post video captures of games, sometimes with humorous voice-overs. In August, he posted a trailer for an animated series called Red vs. Blue, promising that episodes would be “coming soon.”

Then they forgot to do it.

Everybody got bored with Drunk Gamers in a few months. The trio shut down the site, replacing all of the content with a photo of Ramsey and Sorola flipping the bird.

That could have been the end of the story, had the editors of Computer Gaming World magazine not been in love with the “Switch” parody and wanted to include it on the promotional CD-ROM that they included with their popular PC gaming mag. They emailed Sorola asking for permission.

“Whenever you get any press at that size, you think it’s going to be the biggest thing ever,” Burns says. He and his friends were flipping out with excitement when they realized something: The video had a link to the now-dead Drunk Gamers site.

“Well, what if we did that Red vs. Blue thing?” one eventually said.

They registered redvsblue.com, added the link to the new version of the parody video, and set to work on actually creating an episode of the promised web series. On April 1, 2003, Rooster Teeth officially formed and uploaded the first episode.

Anarchy Reigns includes some previous Platinum Games characters such as MadWorld's Jack, now in color.
Image courtesy Sega

Osaka-based developer Platinum Games delivered some good news and bad news for fans interested in their upcoming multiplayer brawler, Anarchy Reigns. The good news: A robust demo is coming to PlayStation Network and Xbox Live next week. The bad news: We no longer know when the game will be released outside of Japan, since publisher Sega now lists the title as “To Be Confirmed” on its official English website.

This isn’t the first delay for Anarchy Reigns. Originally announced in January 2011, the game was slated for worldwide release last fall. Like many other titles, the game was then bumped after the Japanese March 11 disaster to January 2012.

January then turned into July last winter. Now July has become a question mark for most countries. The Japanese version known as Max Anarchy is still being released on July 5, but Platinum Games could not explain the change of plans abroad.

“Unfortunately… we don’t know when the game is coming out in the West. That’s up for Sega to decide. We worked really hard to make sure that everybody could get the game on time,” Anarchy Reigns writer Jean Pierre Kellams said in a video message on Platinum’s blog.

“The game is fully localized, if you buy the Japanese version or any version it’s going to have all the languages in it,” he said. “We really wanted everybody online around the world to play together at the same time, but unfortunately that’s not going to happen.”

Wired reached Kellams for comment, who confirmed that the Japanese PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 releases will also include English, French, Italian and Spanish language options. He added that next week’s demo, available on the Japanese PlayStation and Xbox digital storefronts, will be bilingual in Japanese and English. He was not at liberty to elaborate on the announced delay, however.

Getting back to the good news, the upcoming demo will be available on May 31 and includes online play as well as a portion of the game’s story mode, according to Platinum Games’ Japanese blog. There are two multiplayer options in the demo, four-player deathmatch and four-on-four team deathmatch, with six characters to choose from. Not playable in the demo is the recently-announced Bayonetta, the eponymous star of her own Platinum Games title last year.

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You know that thing that movies sometimes do, where one of the characters says the movie’s title, and everyone in the theater looks at each other and groans?

Max Payne 3 does something like that 14 times. After every level, the chapter title appears in the air ominously, foreshadowing some quip that Payne will grunt after killing a few hundred gangsters. “It’s drive or shoot, sister.” Or, “A fat bald guy with a bad temper.” And sure enough, you know somebody’s sister is going to be driving or shooting next to a fat bald guy with a bad temper at some point or another during the chapter.

It’s fitting, given the way the game presents itself. Payne is very much amused by his own observations; his self-reflective inner monologue is almost as sarcastic as it is omnipresent. When navigating from one firefight to another, you can be sure that Payne’s voice will pick up and ramble about the sorry mess he’s found himself in, or how he sure wishes he could have a drink or pop some pills right about now. Even in the game’s cutscenes (which make up roughly one-third of the single-player campaign’s length), most of Payne’s dialogue happens only in his head. Max Payne only opens his mouth to tell people that he’s about to shoot them.

And lots of people will be shot before the end of this PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 (reviewed) game’s 10-hour campaign. It seems that every enemy faction in Brazil has 200 or more soldiers just waiting to be violently shot in the face by Max Payne, usually as he dives sideways out of an exploding explosion and kills 15 people in slow motion before hitting the ground. Payne goes down quick when exposed to fire, but luckily for him, delicious, addictive pain pills that magically heal bullet wounds are scattered all around Brazil.

Sure, there are the expected on-rails segments: boat rides, dangling helicopter fiascos, etc. But mostly, Max Payne is all about walking slowly through beautifully rendered environments, only stopping to take cover and shoot lots of people or sit through a cutscene. Often, cutscenes and gameplay combine for a set-piece moment that forces players into a time-sensitive slow motion shootout with gang members or corrupt policemen.

I’ve played dozens of shooters that claimed to have “enemies that move dynamically to flank the player,” and it’s almost never true, but Max Payne’s enemies really are smart punks. They’re good at taking effective cover and moving to better positions just when you need to reload. As a result, combat isn’t just about waiting for your enemy to pop his head out of cover – taking that strategy will get you killed quickly. Instead, players have to keep a close eye on their surroundings, carefully use the slow-motion ability to take out dangerous targets and move almost constantly to avoid getting swarmed.

Whenever you kill the last enemy in an area, the camera goes into ultra slo-mo and follows the bullet from Max’s gun as it punches through the unlucky gang member/corrupt cop’s body. Then, as the enemy slumps to the ground, the player has the option to continue wildly shooting bullets into the corpse by rapidly pulling the trigger. The result is a gruesome, blood-splattery scene that would instantly earn any movie an R rating.

The plot sags a bit in the first half by focusing so hard on Payne’s alcoholism, but otherwise the dialogue and overall plot feels on par with what you’d expect from a big-budget action movie.

And really, that’s all Max Payne 3 is – a beautiful, playable action movie.

I didn’t expect to like the multiplayer, but I came away feeling pretty impressed by it. It’s all wrapped in a Call of Duty-style progression system, because of course it is. Kill other players to get XP, use that XP to customize your loadouts and buy stat-boosting gear. You know the drill.

The game encourages players in team deathmatch mode to pursue personal vendettas against players that they’re killed by, offering bonuses for taking out an enemy that you’ve declared a vendetta against. Rockstar even managed to make the slow-motion ability work in multiplayer – when using the slow-down power, every enemy in your line of sight (but not everyone on the map) slows down too. While you create a location-specific time rift, other online players keep going, unbothered by the slow-motion madness happening in your area.

That vendetta system almost works too well. Every time you’re killed by a player, you’re shown how many times that particular person has beaten you and vice versa. I found myself really getting worked up whenever somebody consistently got the better of me, to the point that I was yelling at my TV. It works, though, because once you finally nail a tormenter and settle a score the feeling is great.

To keep playing Max Payne 3 longer than 10 hours, you’re going to have to get into the multiplayer. Playing through the game’s solo campaign is akin to spending a whole day watching every Die Hard movie: fun, but something you shouldn’t do more than once in your life.

WIRED Refreshingly interesting third-person shooting mechanics, surprisingly good multiplayer.

TIRED Campaign’s story sometimes drags.

Rating:

$60, Rockstar Games

Read Game|Life’s game ratings guide.

The Umbrella logo from the Resident Evil series features prominently on the game's official website.
Screengrab: Wired

Paging all masters of unlocking: a Sony subsidiary is presenting a “real escape game” in a shuttered Tokyo hospital this summer aimed at Resident Evil fans. Players will assume the roles of UN investigators who are trapped in a hospital and infected with a virus. The goal is to find a vaccine and an exit before time runs out.

The game will be staged in a former hospital in Shibuya that now serves as a studio for horror films and other spooky projects. The event will be produced by Scrap, a company that stages a number of “real escape games” in locations such as stadiums, theaters, and even abandoned schools. Games involve puzzle solving and code breaking, although given the horror-theme and the Resident Evil connection, this particular game will look to scare players as well according to Japanese blog 4gamer.

The Tokyo game runs Thursday through Sunday starting on July 19 and ending on August 31. Tickets go on sale June 2 and cost 3150 yen ($40) for advance purchases and 3650 ($46) the day of the game. Due to the puzzle-solving nature of the game, players are asked not to re-attend so that the experience remains fresh for other guests. Each game lasts about an hour and a half and latecomers may not be admitted, so be early. Children are welcome to attend but must be accompanied by an adult.

Earlier this year, Scrap debuted Real Escape Game in the U.S. The next game, called “The Crazy Last Will of Dr. Mad,” will take place in July in San Francisco.

Zombie mobsters from the Yakuza series at Tokyo Game Show 2010.
Photo: Robert Gilhooly/Wired

Sega will release a new Yakuza game in Japan this December for PlayStation 3, according to this week’s Famitsu magazine.

Yakuza 5 promises to be the biggest entry in the series to date, with five protagonists and action taking place in five major Japanese cities.

The Yakuza series has proven to be a winner in Japan, blending third-person action with dramatic interludes featuring top-class domestic actors. Often compared to Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto games, both series feature open-world gameplay in urban settings with morally-compromised main characters linked to organized crime who frequently break the law.

Sega’s four best-selling PlayStation 3 games in Japan are all Yakuza games.

Yakuza 5 will take place in five different locations around Japan: Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Fukuoka and Sapporo. Previous games had been centered around a single neighborhood in Tokyo based on the real-life red-light district of Kabukicho.

Last year, Sega actually polled fans about which city should be the setting of Yakuza 5 only to announce later that all five cities would be involved.

Just as Yakuza 4 divided its story among four protagonists, Yakuza 5 will feature five main characters. Three are returning from the fourth game: series poster boy Kazuma Kiryu, loan shark Shun Akiyama and former death row inmate Taiga Saejima.

Tatsuo Shinda is a brand-new character, an ex-ballplayer banned from the sport for gambling.

The fifth character is a young girl named Haruka Sawamura, seen in previous games but never playable. Famitsu did not reveal how a child would fare in the combat portions of the game, which are frequently brutal.

The game is reportedly running on a brand-new engine and is 70 percent complete. Assuming it makes its predicted December release, it will will be the fourth Yakuza game in four years on the PlayStation 3.

Last year, Sega released a zombified spinoff that was delayed by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami. It came to the United States in March under the name Yakuza: Dead Souls.

We know that the Nintendo 3DS library isn’t exactly robust right now, but two musical games coming this July will have you dusting off that 3-D screen. If you like music games. If not, don’t bother looking for your 3DS for a while.

In this episode of Game|Life Video, I take a hard critical look at Square Enix’s Theatrhythm Final Fantasy, which has a terrible name but an excellent song list filled with all the classics from 25 years of the popular role-playing series. And I also get into Sega’s Rhythm Thief, which is more of a combination of Rhythm Heaven and Professor Layton.

The virtual card game Shin Sengoku Buster has changed its sales tactics in the wake of a Japanese ruling making a certain type of virtual-goods sale illegal. Images: KLab

Japan’s social game makers are tweaking many of their top-grossing titles following a government ban on “complete gacha” sales tactics.

The country’s Consumer Affairs Agency said last week that the virtual games of chance will be considered illegal and subject to legal action effective July 1.

“We wish to alert businesses and consumers that we have decided, in accordance with the Act against Unjustifiable Premiums and Misleading Representations, that ‘complete gacha’ sales are illegal,” Minister of State for Consumer Affairs and Food Safety Jin Matsubara announced in a press conference on Friday.

Matsubara made it clear that the agency was breaking new ground, noting that this was the first time this law was being applied to virtual goods sold online.

“Gacha”-style sales, named after the Japanese word for toy vending machines, are only one of a number of microtransaction models used in social games. The “complete gacha” system that has been banned offers rare prizes to players who complete a set of items through random drawings. It is this aspect of the service that the agency deemed illegal, not the selling of random virtual goods per se.

The move also bans “bingo gacha,” a similar practice in which players try to fill bingo cards through random purchases, according to coverage in the Yomiuri Shimbun.

Japan’s largest social game companies have already decided to drop all “complete gacha” sales by the end of May, well in advance of the government deadline.

With the self-imposed ban already taking effect around the industry, games are beginning to introduce similar sales mechanics that fall on the right side of the law. Shin Sengoku BUSTER by KLab now offers players a 1,000-yen ($13) gacha game in which collecting a full set of 10 cards earns a special rare card, according to Japanese blog ITmedia.

The key modification is that it takes exactly 10 purchases to win the rare card. This small tweak is enough to circumvent the ban.

Other games have removed the “complete” aspect entirely — to the chagrin of some users.

Gundam Card Collection by Namco Bandai now offers ultra-rare cards as random prizes rather than as a reward for winning particular cards. Users are complaining they now have no idea whether or not they are getting closer to winning an ultra-rare card, with one reportedly spending 75,000 yen ($942) to no avail.

Gree, one of six publishers making the joint decision earlier this month, said it did so “in the interests of improving the content of its services for users,” not because of any “infringement of current Japanese legislation.” Gamemakers such as Konami and Namco Bandai quickly followed suit.

Prior to the official ruling, the Yomiuri spoke to an anonymous programmer working at a social game developer in Tokyo’s Minato ward who laid out how important the controversial “complete gacha” sales tactic is to the business model.

“Whether it’s a good game depends on how much you can make a player buy virtual items,” the 30-year-old man told the paper.

“The key is making ‘haijin kakinsha’ players use the game,” he said, using a Japanese slang term for players hooked on online computer games. These big spenders can run through tens of thousands of yen in a month.

“It’s our goal to make more than 10 percent of all gamers spend money,” he continued. “It’s important to keep their spending within certain bounds, since they may not come back to the game if we squeeze too much out of them.”

To that end, the company (which is not named) sends the programmer data every hour with notes such as “Sales are down” or “User counts are too low.” He then changes parameters on the fly, for example, lowering the price of a 300 yen item to 100 yen (about $1.26).

“It’s all about figures,” he says. Online feedback is also monitored and changes can be made to reflect complaints. When too many users say they can’t get the last card in a set, he makes it easier to win.

What of the so-called “haijin” addicts who play these games? Yomiuri talked to a 27-year-old Tokyo office worker about her experience. She started playing social games in April 2010, at first for free, but later she started spending on rare items. It took her less than a minute to spend 3,000 yen ($38).

In total, she said she had spent about 500,000 yen ($6,281) on this “free” game.

Hell must have high ceilings.
Image: Blizzard

Cross another winner of multiple Vaporware Awards off the list: After many long years, Diablo III is finally available.

Blizzard has clearly aimed to capture everything people loved about Diablo III’s 12-year-old predecessor, the addictive dungeon-raiding gameplay that made them crave a sequel so badly, and update it for modern times. This is reflected in the cinematics, soundtrack and game design. Everything is snappier, more intuitive and all presented in high definition. Picking up the explosions of loot that enemies drop like grotesque pinatas is much easier on the ol’ clicking finger.

Before you even start to appreciate the smoothness of Diablo III‘s gameplay, you’ll be blown away by the sights and sounds. The cinematic scenes are so gorgeous that I spent more time looking at the pores on the characters’ faces than I did paying attention to what was happening in them. The soundtrack, for my money, is the best I’ve heard in a videogame in at least five years. It was composed by seven different musicians: Russel Brower, Derek Duke, Glenn Stafford, Joseph Lawrence, Neal Acree, Laurence Juber and Edo Guidotti. Other game music composers need to find out what these guys put in their coffee, because they’re making everybody else look like hacks.

The cutting-edge graphics make the game’s writing, in comparison, seem a bit behind the times. Diablo III’s approach to storytelling makes you wonder if somehow the writing team at Blizzard is trapped in a time warp, permanently stuck working with storytelling tools from 1999. The writing is dry at best, with ambitions that avoid rising above telling a run-of-the-mill dark fantasy story. The main story beats told in the epic cut-scenes are fine, but NPCs function as little more than generic fantasy text generators and the in-engine scenes have all the kinetic energy and narrative punch of a middle school play.

Evil sorcerers have very little variation in fashion sense.
Image: Blizzard

Blizzard tried to spruce things up by adding in lots of diaries lying throughout the game that function like the audio logs in BioShock, but this feature is handled clumsily. Once I helped this necromancer-type guy activate some magical totems, and, after thanking me, his diary flew out of his pants and landed at my feet. He didn’t hand it to me; it emerged, as if of its own free will, from his boxers. So instead of just talking to this guy to learn about his past, I took his crotch-book and listened to an audio reading of his personal logs, performed by him. This is all while he’s standing in front of me. Again: The word is clumsy.

I complained about Blizzard’s difficulties merging story, dialogue and game mechanics in my first impressions piece last week, and I ran into more of that while playing through the game’s full 20-hour campaign. My favorite example happens every time my character runs out of “hatred,” an expendable energy used to fuel special attacks for the Demon Hunter class. Right-clicking to use the attack while I’m low on hatred prompts Demon Hunters to holler out the sort of ridiculous phrase you would only ever hear in a videogame: “I need more hatred to do that!”