Friday, April 6

Metacritic’s Standardization Problem (And How To Fix It)
Friday, 11:30 a.m., Arachnid Theatre

Metacritic has been criticized for a lot of things over the years, but one of its biggest problems is how it tries to standardize different scores from different outlets. An 85/100 from a site with tough grading standards is very different from an 8.5/10 from a site that gives good scores out like candy, and both scores are extremely different from a “B” grade from a site that doesn’t even use numeric scoring. Yet each of these scores becomes a simple “85” in MetaCritic’s calculus.  This presentation will lay out a new system, dubbed “Percentwise,” which converts scores using a percentile rating based around how outlets actually distribute their own scores across the entire scale. Under the Percentwise system, a game is judged based on an outlet’s actual average review score, rather than what that outlet says should mean “average.” Under the Percentwise system, 50% really is the middle-of-the-road!

Stuff Your Criticism, I Want A Review!
Friday, 3 p.m., Wyvern Theatre

Is there a difference between a game review and game criticism? Do you expect reviewers to talk about why a game is important in the annals of development or do you just want to know whether it’s worth your $60 or not? Should game reviewers even CARE if you’re going to purchase a title? As the video game media matures along with video games themselves, the purpose of a review isn’t as clear as it once was. Come hear what a panel of experienced reviewers and games media pundits have to say about these questions, and then let them know what *you* want out of your game reviews.

PANELISTS: Dennis Scimeca [Freelance Writer, G4, The Escapist, Gamasutra], Chris Dahlen [Freelance Writer, Kill Screen (co-founder), Pitchfork, Onion AV Club], Susan Arendt [Managing Editor, The Escapist], Mitch Krpata [Video Game Critic, Boston Phoenix], Kyle Orland [Senior Gaming Editor, Ars Technica]

The Blankety Blank Panel!
Friday, 6 p.m., Manticore Theatre 

Get ready to match the stars! Join a hilarious collection of writers, pundits, and comedians for PAX Game, the live version of classic TV game show Match Game. Members of the audience will be selected as contestants and challenged to predict how the panelists will answer excessively silly questions. Whoever matches the most answers wins! For a raucous evening of raunchy fun, stop by – and bring your sense of humor.

PANELISTS: Susan Arendt [Managing Editor, The Escapist], Graham Stark [Loading Ready Run], Kathleen DeVere [Loading Ready Run], Bob Chipman [Escape to the Movies, The Escapist], Kyle Orland [Senior Games Editor, Ars Technica], Mike Wehner [Tecca], Dan Amrich [Activision], Russ Pitts [Features Editor, Vox Games]

Saturday, April 7

How Not to Succeed as a Freelance Game Journalist
Saturday, 7 p.m., Arachnid Theatre 

Making a successful go at being a game journalist involves more than just good ideas and proper grammar. Join experienced editors (and former freelancers) Susan Arendt (The Escapist) and Justin McElroy (Vox Games), Kyle Orland (Ars Technica), Andrew Hayward (MacLife), AJ Glasser (Inside Network), and Rob Rath (freelance) as they discuss the common pitfalls, gaffes, and mistakes that give potential employers the wrong impression of you. Think it’s all common sense? Think again. If you’re interested in game journalism, this panel should not be missed!

PANELISTS: Susan Arendt [Managing Editor, The Escapist], Justin McElroy [Managing Editor, Vox Games], Kyle Orland [Senior Games Editor, Ars Technica], AJ Glasser [Managing Editor, Inside Network], Rob Rath [Freelancer], Andrew Hayward [Editor, Mac|Life]

The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) currently being debated in Congress is quite clearly a massive overreach. It gives the government the potential authority to effectively shut down major, largely legitimate web sites for hosting a minuscule amount of pirated content. It could threaten the very existence of sites that host a wide range of used-submitted content, and could easily be used by the government to stifle Americans’ free speech rights. The bill’s potential effects on the very structure of the Internet make it much too broad a cudgel for a problem like online piracy.

Yet online piracy is still a problem. And despite the myriad flaws with the legislation, I have to say I can kind of see where the Entertainment Software Association industry trade group is coming from when they say they support the law.

(full story)

The past year has offered plenty of major stories to keep gamers chattering. Here’s what we thought were the most important stories to hit the industry over the past 12 months.

(full story)

While politicians routinely cite video games as a contributing cause for everything from childhood obesity and lower test scores to youth violence, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) recently labeled a video game museum as something else — a waste of taxpayer funds.
At No. 9 on Sen. Coburn’s “Wastebook 2011″ list of 100 federal programs he sees as frivolous is over $113,000 in funding for the International Center for the History of Electronic Games (ICHEG), an outgrowth of the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, N.Y.

(full article)

Stories of Xbox Live users seeing their accounts hacked and used to make unauthorized purchases have continued to come in at a slow trickle since they were first widely reported last October. But one user has taken to the Internet with a highly personal account of her hacking experience, and what she says was, initially, an almost total lack of help from Microsoft on the matter.

(full article)

“I want to clear my name. I want to get these people to stop bothering me.”
That was the main message from Ocean Marketing’s Paul Christoforo, a former representative for N-Control’s Avenger controller attachment. He gained immediate infamy among the Internet gaming community after a hostile customer service email exchange went viral after landing on popular gaming webcomic Penny Arcade.

In a matter of hours, Christoforo went from being just another customer service agent to a focus of ire for thousands of gamers. Christoforo was featured in mocking images and videos, and the Avenger product he was representing was hit with widespread derision and negative Amazon reviews, forcing the company to publicly drop Christoforo as its marketing representative.

A chastened Christoforo is now looking for forgiveness from the Internet community he unwittingly antagonized, saying in an interview with msnbc.com’s In-Game he was “caught on a bad day” and that he hopes they will “let sleeping dogs lie.”

(full story)

Each year brings a host of new technologies to the table that make the gaming landscape seem significantly different from what came before, and 2011 was no different. Here are some of the most important technological advancements the game industry saw in the past 12 months.

(full article)

A lot has changed in the over three decades Shigeru Miyamoto has acted as Nintendo’s key creative visionary, shepherding series like Mario and The Legend of Zelda through over a dozen major iterations each. With both franchises now pushing past 25 years on the market, Miyamoto told msnbc.com’s In-Game that the evolution of Nintendo’s series has involved coordination between creating new technology and creating new gameplay simultaneously.
“In the case of ‘The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess,’ specifically, of course we took advantage of the motion-sensing technology to some extent,” Miyamoto said of the Wii launch title that first showed off the system’s motion-sensing remote. “However, we felt that something was lacking and we wanted to do more with more precise motion sensing technology, so at that time we were able to identify the specific technology we really want to use for the next time.”

(full story)

To say that writing “Star Wars: The Old Republic” was a massive undertaking would be an understatement. Like seemingly everything in the multi-year development of Bioware’s highly anticipated massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, which has already attracted over a million players before its official launch today, the developers took their previous experience making epic single-player console role-playing games (RPGs) and scaled it up for a new gaming space.
“The Old Republic” is “ten times bigger than any game we’ve ever done before,” Lead Writer Daniel Erickson said in an interview with msnbc.com’s In-Game. “It’s pretty much as big as every game we’ve done before put together.” The game’s 20 writers coordinated on what amounted to 60 man-years of work on the games multiple branching storylines, Erickson said, leading to the humbling thought that “it would have taken one person their entire natural life to write [the game].”

(full story)

Microsoft’s Kinect 3D camera got its start as an accessory that lets you use your body as a controller for Xbox 360 games like Dance Central. Since then, hackers have used the hardware for everything from art projects to robotic helicopters! Here are just some of the cool things clever hackers have done with Microsoft’s depth-sensing camera.

(full article)

When EA acquired the exclusive rights to the NFL license in late 2004, now-defunct publisher and former Blitz owner Midway used the opportunity to effect a bold change in direction for its popular football series, which originally debuted in arcades in 1997 as NFL Blitz.

2005′s Blitz: The League and its 2008 sequel featured fictional players and teams engaging in the kinds of activities that the real-life league would never approve of in an officially licensed game. Players earned bonus money for brutal, injury-inducing hits, which they could use to gamble on game results, buy drugs to treat injuries and even hire prostitutes to distract the opposing team.

Now, with the rights to the Blitz franchise in the hands of EA, the NFL imprimatur is back on the series’ coming relaunch, which has been in development for over a year by EA Tiburon.

“I think that without the NFL license, the game wouldn’t be NFL Blitz,” project lead Dave Ross told Gamasutra in a recent interview. “It’s kind of the hyper-real NFL football experience where you’ve got the 32 teams, 32 stadiums. For me it’s a lot of fun to choose my favorite team and go up against their rivals and opponents as I work my way through the game, so I think the game absolutely has to be NFL Blitz.”

(full article)

Legendary Nintendo game designer Shigeru Miyamoto — creator of long-running series including Donkey Kong, Mario and The Legend of Zelda — set off a bit of a firestorm Wednesday evening when a Wired report quoted him as saying he was planning on giving up his current, executive oversight role with the company in favor of a more hands-on approach to developing smaller, more personal games.

“Inside our office, I’ve been recently declaring, ‘I’m going to retire, I’m going to retire,’” Miyamoto said in the Wired report, referring to his current position at the company.
advertisement

Nintendo’s Japanese stock dropped 2 percent on the news before Nintendo put out an official retraction, stressing in part that “Shigeru Miyamoto’s role at Nintendo is not changing” and that his future priorities are “inclusive of overseeing all video game development and ensuring the quality of all products.”

Now, in an interview with msnbc.com’s In-Game, Miyamoto has repeated that assurance and clarified how he says his statements were misinterpreted.

“There is no plan to retire. I have no intention to retire,” he said through an interpreter. “And probably they won’t allow me to retire,” he continued, before quickly noting that this last part was a joke.

(full story)

If you’re used to iOS games that serve as simple time wasters that you can play to occupy your fingers and half your mind while the other half pays attention to a Law & Order rerun, you’ll have to set aside your expectations for Infinity Blade II (download Infinity Blade II for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad). Much like its predecessor, this is one of the rare mobile titles that delivers a game-console-like experience demanding your full attention to play.

(full article)

When credible reports about Zynga’s upcoming IPO filing started flying this July, expectations for the social gaming giant’s value were running $15 billion to $20 billion. Now, with Zynga detailing the offering ahead of trading set to start December 15th, the actual offering price could value the company from $5.9 billion to $6.99 billion, or $7.6 billion to $8.9 billion including employee stock options.

With options included, Zynga’s value will be $7.6 billion to $8.9 billion. That’s bigger than Electronic Arts’ $7.7 billion, but far short of just five months ago. One of the consequences is that some of the investors who invested in February are underwater. Those pre-IPO investors such as Fidelity Investments put money in at $14 per share.

What could have caused such a precipitous change in fortunes in just a matter of months? Here are a few possible explanations:

(full article)

Designing games for camera-based motion controllers comes with a set of unique challenges. But for Israeli developer Side-kick, which is making two games for the December launch of the Lenovo-backed Eedoo iSec, working with the system came with the additional challenge of tailoring motion controls to the culturally and technologically distinct Chinese market.

Side-kick has been working on motion-controlled software with Israeli camera maker PrimeSense since before PrimeSense even had hardware to show publicly, and the game developer partnered with Eedoo early on in the development of the unproven iSec. The first few months of that partnership were spent figuring out what kinds of games would work in a new market.

“[Chinese] don’t know the market that we know,” Side-kick CEO Guy Bendov said in an interview with Gamasutra. Outside of China, motion-based controllers like the Xbox 360 Kinect, PlayStation Move and Nintendo Wii Remote are relatively common. “[China's] not geared so much to game consoles like we are. They’re more geared to PC and online games, which are much bigger over there.”

(full article)

“I think it’s dangerous to make blanket statements about the effect of a medium on people when we all have different sensibilities on these things,” Jay told Gamasutra. “It depends on the level of literacy of the person playing the game. For some people they’re going to be distracted by it and bothered by it, and other people are going to report that it’s really not that notable. Perceptions are going to be variable.”

While some curse words, especially the “explicit” ones dealing with sexual and excretory function [i.e. "fuck" and "shit" -- ed.], have maintained their strong offensive power pretty consistently for hundreds of years, others like “hell” or “goddamn” have gradually lost much of their effect over the years through frequent, everyday use. Jay said he thinks the same process may be happening with the word “bitch” as it has increasingly entered mainstream use through hip hop and rap culture over the past few decades.

(full article)

Since Microsoft first announced vague plans to add live TV optionsto its Xbox Live service at E3 this year, industry watchers have been heralding the move as a potential death-blow for standalone cable boxes, and even for separate pay TV service itself.

Those cries have only increased with Microsoft’s announcement today of dozens of major partnerships with various media companies to bring video content to Microsoft’s online service.

Microsoft itself is selling it as “the best way for you to interact with TV, video, movies, sports and music” and “a WHOLE LOT more enjoyable and engaging” than current TV options.

As announced today, though, Microsoft’s Xbox Live TV plans seem like a squandered opportunity to extend the company’s strong position in online gaming into a foothold in the burgeoning IPTV market.

(full article)

Visual effects veteran and innovator John Gaeta says he can’t show you everything he and his team at the recently unveiled Float Hybrid is currently working on.

But the stuff he can show you includes some of the most interesting uses of the Kinect’s motion-sensing technology yet, and represents the tip of what Gaeta says will be possible with the advanced motion-sensing technology of the future.

Gaeta, who is best known for his graphical effects work on movies like The Matrix trilogy, says he’s been interested in branching out into interactive media for quite some time.

Float Hybrid was not established as a game developer — Gaeta says the company “did not begin with a mandate to do anything in particular,” but was created as a place to explore how to “create more depth to an interactive experience overall.”

One of Float Hybrid’s main focuses, as shown in multiple demos on its YouTube channel, is letting players easily navigate and interact freely in 3D worlds using the Kinect.

For example, the Float Hybrid team has developed a system that allows players to guide an avatar freely using just the upper body — lean forward to move forward, back to move backward, or twist at the shoulders to turn. Float’s demos also show players using outstretched arms to aim and fire projectiles, both from first- and third-person perspectives, and even dueling over a network.

“Everything that you’re looking at can be done seated,” Gaeta says of the team’s control scheme. “One of the abilities of our company is we can scale and tune to a very refined amount of space and movement and still have fluid interaction. We can do everything sitting with minimal motion.”

(full article)

It’s almost a cliche at this point for makers of war-based shooting games to tout their titles’ “realism.” In general, this means the military uniforms and jargon will look and sound right, the guns will be rendered correctly down to the last shell casing, the war-torn villages will be based on real satellite maps, and so on.

But when it comes to realistically showing the human side of war, most war games come up short. They won’t bother much with the innocent civilian, caught under rubble from a rocket attack, clutching a photo of her lost child and begging for help.

They won’t focus on the embattled president sending a desperate rallying cry to his overwhelmed troops, or the few loyalist soldiers arguing about whether to flee or wait for reinforcements. They won’t linger on the scared little girl, looking out from a burned out shack to a city square littered with dead soldiers.

These are the kinds of scenes that will take center stage in Warco, an upcoming war game that’s less action movie and more documentary.

(full article)

Over the past two years, the PapayaMobile network has leveraged popular self-published games like PapayaFarm into a user base thatnow comprises over 25 million people.

But Papaya CEO Si Shen told Gamasutra in a recent interview the company “always wanted to be a platform instead of a gaming company.” So the company recently decided to stop publishing its own games, a decision Shen says separates it from competing mobile social networks.

“If you look at [DeNA's Mobage] and especially Gree, most of the revenue they make out of games come from their own games,” Shen pointed out. “That’s something that’s going to be very scary to the developers, because it’s not a fair play. You control all the distribution channels, and at the same time you’re also selling on the distribution channels.”

(full article)

I’m beginning to think Nintendo has swung like a pendulum from extreme over-confidence in the 3DS prior to its launch to extreme under-confidence in the system’s quality now that it’s actually available.

Think back to last summer, when the 3DS was the surprise hit of the 2010 E3 show. Press and analysts couldn’t stop marveling at the quality and simple wow-factor of the glasses-free stereoscopic 3D technology.

The impressive gimmick, combined with Nintendo’s unblemished track record in dominating the portable gaming market for decades, led many inside and outside Nintendo to think the 3DS would be as big or bigger than the insanely successful DS.

Fast forward to March, when initial sales for the 3DS came in much lower than expected worldwide. Nintendo’s first reaction, afteracknowledging the problem, was cutting the price by nearly a third much sooner than anyone expected, and offering a parcel of free, downloadable games by way of apology to early adopters.

The move may have been prudent, but coming from a company that was very recently arguing that consumers should be willing to spend extra money for “high-value” games, it’s a move that didn’t reflect confidence in the hardware.

Then came today’s revelation, via a Famitsu article, that Nintendo is planning to release an optional “expansion slide pad” attachment that adds a second slide pad along the right side of the system. It’s as if Nintendo is telling consumers, “Not only was the hardware we released a few months ago too expensive, but it’s also not well-suited to control today’s games as is. BUY IT TODAY!”

(full article)

The way competitive video games are supposed to work is simple: the person who is better at achieving the game’s stated objective is the winner. This means the person with the better strategy, or the better reflexes, or the better visual acuity will be the victor, absent any confounding factors of luck.

But with many games, there’s a largely unseen factor in determining the winner, one that’s not directly related to the game’s stated rules and objective. This game behind the game — the metagame — is where a lot of the emergent fun can be found in today’s competitive titles, and designers would do well to keep it in mind when creating competitive systems.

(full article)

The team at newly formed Magic Pixel Games is probably best known for its work on EALA’s critically acclaimed Boom Blox series for the Wii. But as “one of the few teams that have dug deep on all three [motion control] platforms,” Magic Pixel Games president Mark Tsai says developers have to take the limitations and capabilities of the specific controller into account when designing motion controlled games.

“People think about these motion control games and sort of design by hypothesis — ‘It would be great if we could do X’ — and there are just some limitations around some of the edges of what motion control can do for you,” Tsai pointed out in a recent interview with Gamasutra.

He went on to decry the kinds of motion control games that are “meant for other platforms or control devices, [but] retrofitted to a motion controller.” At Magic Pixel, Tsai said, the team prefers to “build it from the controller end and finding out what it’s best at and building a game around it.”

(full article)

The game I played most on the E3 show floor this year wasn’t featured in any press conference. It wasn’t promoted with gaudy, costumed booth babes or sequestered behind closed doors, to be played by a select few. In fact, it wasn’t highlighted on even one of the hundreds of demo stations publishers set up for the show. Yet I and hundreds of other attendees found themselves sampling the title in a way only a gathering like E3 could make possible.

The game in question was the Nintendo 3DS’ StreetPass Mii Plaza, a title that shows off both Nintendo’s penchant for unique ideas as well as its seemingly utter inability to provide a meaningful online experience.

(full article)

Sony’s recently announced three-year, $20 million effort to get more exclusive titles on PSN is all about helping to empower indie developers on the platform. But PSN director of marketing Brandon Stander has a little quibble the image such wording might conjure up.

“I wouldn’t even say it’s an indie play per se, because I think indie has connotations of it has to be really wild and different and small and edgy and only for those that understand the nuances of the industry and a little esoteric,” he told Gamasutra in a recent interview. “I don’t think that’s necessarily what we’re going for. I think it’s more along the lines of ‘Hey, we as a company really value imagination in our products and having creatively differentiated experiences to offer our consumers.’”

Stander said Sony is looking for a specific type of innovation for funded projects, titles that “bring something new to the market, whether via a gameplay mechanic or design and aesthetic or storyline. There’s some innovative or interesting thread that continues through all the properties we invest in for the larger portfolio.”

(full article)

I’d always found people who love the Atari 2600 a little bewildering. Sure, I could understand the power of nostalgia, and on a purely intellectual level I could see their rose-tinted love for Atari’s first home console mirrored my equally rose-tinted love of the Nintendo Entertainment System, which I played obsessively while growing up in the late ’80s and early ’90s. But looking at things as objectively as I could, I just couldn’t see what Atari lovers saw in their system. I recognized that genre-spawning games like Pitfall! and Adventure were revolutionary for their time, but their limited, one-button gameplay and blocky graphics seemed decidedly worse than the likes of Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda, not to mention the countless, fully realized 3D worlds they eventually spawned. Much as the iPhone 4 is better in every way than the original iPhone, I felt that Atari 2600 games had been rendered obsolete by subsequent titles that were strictly superior in every way.

This phenomenon was a bit troublesome to me as a supporter of the inherent, artistic value of games. After all, plenty of people still love classic novels, classic rock, and black-and-white movies made decades before they were born. Shakespeare and opera and Renaissance painting and classical music have all survived as celebrated works that can move people centuries later, so why couldn’t I appreciate the value of a console that died off just a few years before I started playing videogames? Would kids growing up today see my beloved NES as a similar anachronism that can’t hold a candle to the Wii titles they grew up with? Did the force of nostalgia make anything that came before my first videogame experience defunct by definition?

That’s what I wanted to find out. So, with as open a mindset as I could muster, I decided to track down an old Atari 2600 system and some games, hook them up to my old, unused cathode ray tube TV, and immerse myself in a generation of home gaming that I had previously given only the most cursory and dismissive of glances.

The Escapist’s Susan Arendt recently wrote about the simple, magical joy she found as a child, learning she could control what happened on her TV for the first time. I was going to find out if a 28-year-old – with a lifetime of gaming experience but without the benefit of such Atari-related childhood memories – could capture that same magic roughly three decades later.

(full article)

Mark Cerny’s nearly 30-year career in video games has covered everything from Marble Madness and Crash Bandicoot to Killzone 2and God of War III. But one of the biggest changes Cerny has seen in all that time hasn’t been in the games themselves, but in the size of the teams making them.

In an interview with Gamasutra earlier this year, Cerny recalled that the arcade games he was designing almost entirely on his own had to live and die 25 cents a go, without help from today’s huge marketing budgets or press coverage, which didn’t exist at the time.

“Consequently that meant you made a game and you were 100 percent responsible for its success,” he recalled. “You couldn’t blame upper management who didn’t understand you, you couldn’t blame the marketing guys who didn’t put together the proper marketing campaign; you put your game directly in front of the consumers at a play test and if it earned enough money that game would sell and if it didn’t earn enough money that game wouldn’t.”

Now, that kind of direct connection with consumers is blocked by layers of marketing, and also by a whole team of people working on the game. Cerny said the increasing size of these teams has made it increasingly difficult for him to make his mark on a project.

(full article)

The late May announcement that Disney was including over 40 of its characters in Disney Universe wasn’t exactly a shock, coming from a company that had licensed its familiar film and TV characters into video games for decades.

But the idea of combining so many characters into a single title does seem a little odd for a company that usually gives each distinct universe a licensed title of its own.

“If you look at the Disney library, it’s so vast, and really we can’t make a game based on every character,” assistant producer Mark Orgel explained to Gamasutra at a recent demo. “These characters are beloved by game fans, and they want to see them star in games. So maybe they’re not stars in their own game, but we can incorporate them in to Disney Universe.”

(full article)

At least four members of IGN Entertainment’s editorial team have been laid off, according to reports coming out of the company today.

Dana Jongewaard, IGN’s editor-in-chief for “expanded audience,” posted on Facebook today that she has left the company after starting there in 2009. During her tenure, Jongewaard worked on IGN’s female-focused Greenpixels site and Girlfight podcast, among other positions.

Fellow Girlfight host and IGN writer Nicole Tanner also confirmed via Twitter that she has been laid off today. The future status of that podcast is unknown at this time.

Gamasutra has also learned that GameSpy editor-in-chief Will Tuttle and editorial team member Scott Bromley have also been let go.

(full article)

After over seven years as a traditional superhero-themed subscription MMORPG, City of Heroes will transition to a free-to-play model later this year, publisher Paragon Studios announced today.

City of Heroes Freedom, as the initiative is being called, is much more than just an extension of the current 14-day free trial offered to new subscribers, the company says.

In fact, the team at Paragon has been working for about a year to figure out the best way to make the transition in a way that “improves the overall customer experience,” executive producer Brian Clayton told Gamasutra. “Frankly, if the customer experience isn’t substantially better than it is today, I don’t think there’s much of a reason to make the change.”

(full article)

Best Buy senior VP of entertainment Chris Homeister said he’s been pleased with the company’s recent introduction of game trade-ins in 960 of its stores so far.

But as the company prepares to buy and sell used games at all American locations by this fall, he admits there is still work to be done to get consumers to think of the major electronics retailer as a place to go for trade-ins.

“We’re just beginning,” Homeister said in an interview with Gamasutra at E3. “We’ve got work to do from a marketing standpoint for sure, but we’re very pleased with the reception we’re getting to our messaging. [How much] the average consumer knows that we’re in these businesses, it’s still low, no doubt about it. But though it’s low right now, we’re still seeing results that we like a lot.”

(full article)

When Riot Games producer Paul Bellezza left the company roughly a year and a half ago to focus on indie pet project The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, there were about 40 people working on League of Legends. Now, a few months after his return, the company has 220 people devoted to the game, and Bellezza manages a team almost as big as the entire company he had left. To say its been an adjustment would be an understatement.

“There’s definitely growing pains,” Bellezza told Gamasutra during an E3 interview. “We just moved into our new office a few weeks ago, and that was cool because we were crammed. You could not make a meeting, you’d have to do an interview outside because there was no meeting room. You go from learning how to make a game with small group of people just making decisions to ‘Oh we have to consider the audience here, we have to consider what the community wants’ and gut-checking things.”

That internal growth could have been even more explosive, Bellezza said, if the company didn’t take such pains to screen potential hires to make sure they’ll fit into the tight-knit culture that already exists in the company.

“We really believe you can be super-talented but, at the end of the day you need to be a team player and work with our community and believe in our goals,” he said. “We’d rather train someone who has the potential to be really awesome, and empower them to go forward. Hiring like that takes time and it takes active recruiting and it takes a lot of patience, and ramping up has been good but challenging.”

(full article)

At first glance, the recently announced partnership between Yale University’s Play2Prevent Initiative and Pittsburgh’s Schell Gamesmight seem like just another effort to wrap a healthy educational message — in this case, information about youth HIV risks — in a palatable candy coating of gaming. But the new collaboration is about much more than just throwing information at players and hoping it will stick.

“What we’re really striving to do here is behavior change,” said Play2Prevent director and principal investigator Dr. Lynn E. Fiellin in an interview with Gamasutra. “It’s really not about awareness or education per se. Awareness really doesn’t get at the essence of what we’re trying to do.”

(full article)

Speaking to Gamasutra, Ubisoft president Yves Guillemot says he’s been so impressed with the gaming features brought to the industry by Facebook that he’ll bring a lot of the platform’s best features to the company’s console games.

By next E3, we’ll be seeing many (if not all) Ubisoft console games using features like asynchronous gaming and easy friend-finding to improve the social experience, he said.

“[We're] taking advantage of all the great ideas that were developed for games on Facebook,” he said. “Social gameplay is something we’ve used in the industry for a while, but now I think it’s something we really can take advantage of [on consoles].”

(full article)

Ubisoft seems eager to extend the Ghost Recon brand as far as it can go. Today’s announcements of Ghost Recon: Commander – a Facebook and mobile title for the franchise — comes on top of the previously announced multi-console release of Future Soldier and the recently announced, free-to-play PC title Ghost Recon Online, all planned for release early next year.

But while all three titles are their own independent games, Ubisoft VP of digital games Chris Early says the coordinated release is defining the future of what he calls “companion gaming” — games that are interlinked so that success in one helps lead to success in the others.

“By playing Commander before Future Soldier comes out, it’s going to let you accumulate a little bit of wealth and some weapons so you have some sort of advantage [in Future Soldier],” Early said. “I know there’s a time when I’m going to sit down in front of my console and play that game, and I know there’s going to be a time when I have a few minutes to spare in between, and if I can use some of that time to generate consumables or generate an advantage in another game, I’m going to do that.”

(full article)

When Lenovo-backed Eedoo first announced a motion-controlled 3D system called the eBox, Microsoft’s Kinect had yet to sell a single unit. Now that Microsoft’s depth-sensing camera has sold upwards of eight figures, Eedoo’s decision to jump on the motion-control bandwagon seems a bit prescient.

But Eedoo’s system — now called the iSec and targeted for a Chinese launch later this year — is using depth-sensing hardware that’s fundamentally different from that powering Microsoft’s Kinect. That hardware comes from SoftKinetic, a Belgian company founded in 2007 that sees depth-sensing camera technology revolutionizing all sorts of computing tasks, from home automation to sports.

“It’s only been a relatively short time since the release of Kinect,” said Virgile Delporte, VP of marketing and business development at SoftKinetic. “3D cameras, combined with color and audio, will become familiar input devices, not only for video games but also for smart TVs, PC and mobile devices.”

(full article)

Making social games that are more than the casual, strategy-free clickfests many people assume come from the space is nothing new for Kabam, the creators of Facebook strategy titles likeKingdoms of Camelot and Dragons of Atlantis. The company says it’s trying to perfect that strategy with today’s wide release of Global Warfare.

“We were looking to utilize our engine in a much better way, to branch out into new themes and continue to augment our success in the strategy genre,” Kabam general manager Bryan Bennett tells Gamasutra.

That new theme for Global Warfare is a more modern take on an often fantasy-soaked genre, set in a militarized world that’s been thrown into chaos after widespread economic collapse. While that story is told through short Flash animations, the rest of the tile-based strategy game was built entirely with Javascript and a PHP backend, Bennett says.

“Javascript is actually a pretty powerful front end programming tool,” he explains. “We don’t even make use of close to all of what Javascript can really do. … Flash [would] make things a little easier, but there’s nothing we can’t do with just Javascript.”

(full article)

Like a lot of middleware developers, Tony Cannon started developing his own tool to solve a problem he himself was having. Unlike a lot of middleware makers, though, Cannon’s creation grew out of his problems as a player, not as a developer.

As a pro-level fighting game player and one of the organizers of the Evolution tournament series, Cannon was worried that the arcade culture he was steeped in was deteriorating.

“In the mid-90s, arcades were really dying, and we were in danger of losing this thing we really cared about, because everyone played in the arcades,” he said in an interview with Gamasutra.

A ray of hope came in 2005, Cannon said, when Capcom announced it would be releasing a console version of Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting with online play that could hopefully reconnect players who were no longer able to meet at arcades.

When the game came out, though, Cannon said lag and glitches made the internet play unusable.

“It was just bad,” he said. “It was literally unplayable for a hardcore fighting game person. If all you remembered was Street Fighter II on the SNES and you just jumped back in after eight years and just started playing it, maybe it was good for you, but for hardcore fighting fans it was just unplayable.”

(full article)

Everything that makes Super Mario Bros. 3 truly special is exemplified, for me, by a single image: A chain chomp breaking free of his bonds and bouncing off the screen.

You’d be forgiven if you didn’t know that chain chomps – the toothy, black, ball-on-a-chain cum guard dogs that first appear in level 2-5 – could actually break free from their eponymous chains. A chomp has to lunge a full 47 times for its silver chain to start flashing a distressing red, and three more lunges for the chomp to finally break free and bounce towards Mario. The entire process takes about 175 ticks of the in-game timer, depending on how much Mario goads the chomp. That’s easily seven times as long as even the slowest of players usually takes to jump past those snapping teeth and on to the next challenge, without a second thought for the poor, imprisoned enemy they’re leaving behind.

(full article)

For the most part, buying a video game system over the past three decades has meant tying yourself to games released in your designated region — North America, Europe or Japan, most commonly. But until recently there’s been one important exception to that rule — portable systems from the original Game Boy to the Nintendo DS could play games from any country without a problem (except, perhaps, for the impenetrable Japanese language).

That bit of regional openness is beginning to change, though, with Nintendo recently announcing that its anticipated 3DS system will only play games released in the same territory as the hardware.

(Full article available in the issue #246 (April 2011) of Electronic Gaming Monthly)

The writing is on the wall for the $60 PC game, and Stardock founder and CEO Brad Wardell says he has read that writing loud and clear. That’s why his company is today announcing a new set of free-to-play-focused features for their Impulse: Reactor middleware.

“The idea is that the PC game market is slowly moving over to a model that is more akin to what you’re seeing on mobile device, which are much less expensive,” Wardell said in an interview with Gamasutra.

“In an age where you’re used to spending only five, six bucks for a game, it’s really hard to go back to the PC and pay 60 bucks for a game, especially if it’s becoming increasingly loaded with features and content you’ll never make use of.”

(full article)

Primarily known for major free-to-play MMOs including Maple Story, Mabinogi and Dungeon Fighter Online!, the initiative is part of Nexon America’s effort to branch out to new genres and new platforms, with a specific focus on the North American audience.

“I think there are types of games that are just more popular here in the U.S. than in other markets,” Won Il Sue, Nexon America’s vice president of business development, told Gamasutra in a new interview. “A great example is the tower defense type of games — they’re hugely popular here in the U.S., not so much popular in the East.”

That doesn’t mean the company is focused exclusively on American developers and Western-targeted games for the contest, however. “We could have a studio from Singapore that has a great idea for the Western market,” Sue said.

“Generally, though, the people here know the market better. … If we find something that we think will work globally, we’ll be very interested in that as well.”

(full article)

Video games are by and large about projecting power, and who’s more powerful than the leader of the free world? Video game appearances by U.S. presidents — both real and fictional — run the gamut from inspiring to embarrassing. It’s one thing to have your leader spur you on with a rousing speech or a cry to battle, but having your president thank you for saving his life by offering to take you out for a burger? That’s humiliating. Thanks, Ronnie.

With the Big Gipper included in the bunch, here are a few of our Presidential favorites on both sides of the coin. While you’re kicking back on this President’s Day, think about your favorite video game leaders, and whether you would have voted for them, or shoved them off the ballot.

(full article)

Today, when my colleagues see console fanboys arguing fruitlessly in comment threads, they see a group of illogically territorial misanthropes more concerned with winning an argument than enjoying games. But that’s not what I see. When I see a fanboy, I see someone eager to relive the joy of their first exposure to videogames by sticking with the company that brought it to them. I see someone who’s invested an important part of their identity into what a videogame company has come to represent to them. I see someone trying with all their might to convince themselves that they’re not missing out on anything over the rich kids whose parents can buy them all three major consoles and dozens of games every year.

When I see a fanboy, I see the person I was – someone trying to recapture a simpler time, when videogames meant only one thing and also meant everything.

(full article)

Recently appointed Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences President Martin Rae tells Gamasutra the D.I.C.E.-organizing body plans to offer a membership option for individual developers “in the next six months.”

“There’s no question we’re going to work toward defining and providing more benefits to individual members,” Rae said in an interview ahead of this week’s D.I.C.E. game executive conference in Las Vegas, which Gamasutra will be covering in depth.

“As digital distribution and iPhone development is becoming easier to take advantage of, there’s a lot of individual developers that we would like as members of the academy, so we’re looking at that in a big way,” he continued. “We don’t have a defined set plan, but we will within the next six months.”

(full article)

(full article)

The lead counsel for the video game industry in the upcoming Supreme Court fight against California’s proposed violent video game restrictions outlined the problems with the state’s legal arguments in a recent public appearance.

Speaking at an intellectual property forum at Chicago-Kent University last week, Jenner and Block LLP Partner Paul M. Smith said that no matter how a state defines “extreme” violence in such laws, they will run into constitutional problems with vagueness.

“I’ve litigated nine cases in a row where states have tried to define the category nine different ways – and they always lose when they make this case because violence is considered a perfectly appropriate and normal part of what we give our kids to see starting from a very young age,” he said.

(full article)

The lead counsel for the video game industry in the fight against California’s proposed violent video game restrictions gave a preview of the types of arguments he will make when the case is argued before the Supreme Court next month.

Speaking at a Gamasutra-attended intellectual property forum at Chicago-Kent University last week, Jenner and Block LLP Partner Paul M. Smith said that treating violent content like sexual content, as the state wants to, runs up against the current state of American culture.

“Violence is considered a perfectly appropriate and normal part of what we give our kids to see starting from a very young age,” Smith argued. “Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, there’s lots and lots of violence in all of those things.”

Trying to write a definition of violence that accepts things like Lord of the Rings but restricts more extreme violence for minors causes constitutionally unacceptable vagueness problems, Smith said. “That’s different in a very fundamental way, I think, from sex, where there’s not a lot of sexually explicit things that are targeted at the kid-friendly side of the world that you have to carve out,” he said.

(full article)

When the AIAS announced earlier this week that former Sunleaf Studios CEO Martin Rae would be taking over the president’s position held for over six years by Joseph Olin, Rae said he was “honored to have been selected by the Academy’s Board” and “look[ing] forward to building on [Olin's] accomplishments.”

But if you had asked Olin about the position at a different point in his life, the answer reaction not have been the same. “Frankly, the job, when I looked at it, it might not have been something I would have looked at years ago,” Rae said in an interview with Gamasutra.

“But I looked at it, and I said Joseph’s done a great job, really built a good foundation, and there were some things I thought we could do long term that were pretty exciting for me.”

(full article)

In the vast majority of games, the story and the gameplay and inextricably intertwined.

Whether the game presents a sprawling, branching narrative based on player choice or simply implies some sort of background motivation for the action (“Once upon a time, a team of Giants from New York really wanted to go to the Super Bowl…) it’s usually impossible to completely remove the idea of the story from the idea of playing the game.

Level-5′s Professor Layton series of Nintendo DS puzzle games provides a rare exception to this rule. In these games, the storyline and gameplay progress almost entirely in parallel, with the happenings in one having little to no relationship to the happenings in the other.

Each game in the series could quite easily be split into two wholly independent parts –- one an animated movie of the story, the other a collection of dozens of unconnected puzzles -– without being much worse off. In fact, in many ways, the separated products would be more focused and satisfying.

(full article)

The tremendously successful ‘tower defense’ hybrid Plants vs. Zombies isn’t the first Popcap game to make the transition from the PC to Xbox Live Arcade.

But while both Peggle and Zuma had control schemes that lent themselves naturally to an analog control stick, senior producer Matt Johnston says the team behind the Xbox 360 version of Plants vs. Zombies ran into some trouble converting the mouse-centric game to the Xbox 360.

“Taking this particular game, a game designed around mouse clicks, and bringing it over to the game pad was something I was worried about at the beginning of the process,” Johnston told Gamasutra as part of an in-depth interview on the George Fan-designed game’s console conversion.

(full article)

Don’t get me wrong, I understand why Apple doesn’t just go the Android route and allow any app written by some yahoo with a developer account onto its iOS devices. Apple has an interest in guaranteeing that the apps it allows its users to download won’t be destructive, unusable, or misrepresentative of Apple or any other companies or entities.

The majority of Apple’s newly-revealed App Store Review Guidelines, which deal with these kinds of issues, are perfectly understandable.

But like so many other content reviewers before them, Apple has taken this little bit of reasonable restrictive power and extended it to unreasonable levels.

The company’s App Store Review Guidelines have the air of soundness and comprehensiveness about them, but the seven-page document is full of hypocritical, inconsistent and vague restrictions that limit App developers’ rights to free expression.

(full article)

(full article)

Indie games have had a major presence on the major American digital distribution channels for a while now. But indie games from Japan are a bit harder to find on these services, with companies like Rockin’ Android localizing shooters for PC and PSN, but very little support for indie RPGs.

A pair of independent American localizers are setting out to change that state of affairs, however, by forming a new company, Carpe Fulgur, focused on bringing relatively complex doujin (Japanese indie games) to English-speaking audiences.

(full article)

To this point in gaming history, gamers who’ve wanted to dance like Michael Jackson have had to settle for mimicking his moves with timed button presses in Space Channel 5 or kicking and jiving their way through generic bad guys in the beat-’em-up classic Moonwalker. But this holiday season, Ubisoft is cashing in on the late king of pop’s name and the resurgent popularity of motion controls to bring us what the game’s International Brand Manager Felicia Williams calls “an authentic dancing experience … you are going to dance like Michael Jackson.”

(full article)

Given the PlayStation Move’s visual similarities to a sort of futuristic magic wand, it’s perhaps not that surprising that one of the first Move games Sony showed at its E3 2010 press conference used the device to cast spells. At that first live demo of Sorcery, The Workshop Chief Creative Officer Christian Busic promised the game would provide “the grail of development: a total sense of immersion” with “the kind of fidelity … that isn’t possible with any other kind of motion control.” I’m not sure if I’d go that far, but the Playtation Move controller was definitely integral to my enjoyable time with a short, roughly 20% complete demo of Sorcery shown at Gamescom.

(full story)

Here at Game Theory, we’ve already discussed the topic of used games and their effect on the industry several times. But with a recent Penny Arcade cartoon and news post bringing the issue to the forefront of discussion yet again, we felt it was worth exploring some of the misconceptions about the market effects of used game sales.

Wednesday’s Penny Arcade comic refers to the used game market as “a kind of parallel economy.” This implies that the used game market and the new game market operate completely independently of each other, never crossing paths. In reality, the two markets are closely tied. In fact, the mere presence of the used game market can help prop up game prices in the new game market.

(full article)

In recent years, there has been no shortage of game developers leaving PC exclusivity behind because of the threat of piracy. It’s not hard to see why, with overall PC game piracy rates north of 70% according to some estimates (and running even higher for some individual games), making it hard for even the biggest games to make money on the platform. Consider that Modern Warfare 2 was both the best-selling game of 2009 on consoles (pushing 11.86 million units worldwide) and the most-pirated game of 2009 on the PC (downloaded 4.1 million times from torrents, with legitimate sales “lagging way behind“).

Yet the console market shouldn’t necessarily be any better. The Wii, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 can all be hacked via hardware or software to run pirated copies of games downloaded from torrent sites. So why are download rates for the PC versions of such illegal torrents “often five or ten times higher than the console versions” according to a recent study?

(full article)

So, you think you’re hot stuff because you can beat the Japanese version of Super Mario Bros. 2 without warping or continuing? You think finding all the chaos emeralds in Sonic 3 and Knuckles means you can take any platforming challenge out there? You think your no-deaths run of Battletoads means you’ve got mad platforming skillz?

Kid, you ain’t nothing unless you’ve conquered these incredibly punishing indie platformers. Without the constraints of a mass market audience, these downloadable or browser-based PC titles are free to present unreasonably tough run-and-jump challenges without fear of pissing off scaring away the lowest-common-denominator players. Good luck… you’ll need it.

(full article)

Much has been made of the “race to the bottom” pricingon the iPhone App Store, which makes it hard to sell a successful app for more than a dollar or two. But I didn’t really realize how pervasive this problem was until I downloaded The Incident, a simple survival-platformer game that involves dodging and climbing heaps of junk falling from the sky. While I enjoyed the old-school graphics and sound effects, I found the gameplay to be a little dull and shut it off (probably for good) after only half an hour of play. Despite the game’s $1.99 price on the App Store, I still went away from the experience feeling like I had been ripped off.

Believe me, I know how ridiculous it sounds to be complaining about the value of a game that sells for less than $2, especially when there are dozens of worse games retailing for $60 or more on store shelves right now. This kind of impulse purchase isn’t exactly going to put me in the poorhouse, after all. Furthermore, at an adjusted rate of $4/hour, I realize that my short experience with The Incident was a better value than many other things I could do with my time.

Despite this, I can’t help but feel disappointed and a bit regretful with my purchase. Part of the problem, of course, is the structure of the market itself. No matter how good a  game is on the App Store, chances are there’s a free alternative out there that approximates the experience relatively well, or at least provides a comparable distraction for less money. To overcome the huge perceived value gap between free products and even cheap products, the paid version has to be a whole lot better than anything that’s available for no cost.

(full article)

How long should a video game be, exactly? It’s an endlessly-debated topic that got more attention recently when dozens of game developers weighed in with their thoughts. The consensus opinion seems to be that dozens of hours of gameplay are not, in and of themselves, a requirement for a good game, and thus one deserving of your money. Many developers argued that shorter and smaller games like Braid, Portal and Limbo prove you can offer a wholly satisfying gaming experience within the span of only a few hours.

Curiously, Hello Games’ Sean Murray, one of the developers behind PlayStation Network (PSN) downloadable hit Joe Danger, was one of the few that disagreed, arguing that games can indeed feel too short if they’re not designed correctly. To Murray, games are “much more than a beginning, middle and end. It’s about experiences: Learning new skills, exploring, challenges and competition. The longer those last, the deeper the experience.”

(full article)

First, the good news: Fighters Uncaged Prodcuer Luc Verdier recognizes that there have been too many casual, family-oriented games announced for the Kinect thus far, and says the game is his attempt to fix this. Now the bad news: based on a recent demo of the game at Gamescom, Fighters Uncaged utterly fails in this attempt.

As you can see in this live demonstration video, the movement recognition for Fighters Uncaged is far from perfect at this point. Punches can be completely finished and retracted in the real world before they even start in the game, making it hard to string together quick combinations of moves. In fact, Verdier said combos in the final game would actually be activated using a quick-time event system, asking players to string together preset poses for an unblockable chain of attacks. A similar match-the-on-screen-pose system is already in place to dodge or block incoming attacks, and feels incredibly unwieldy.

(full article)

We already said this when we talked about the multiplayer gameplay in the upcoming Wii version ofGoldeneye 007, but it bears repeating: This is not your Goldeneye N64 game all prettied up. In fact, an eyes-on walkthrough of the game’s Jungle level at Gamescom this week showed off just how much first-person-shooter game design has changed in the last 13 years.

The changes were incredibly apparent right from the start, when the developers guiding the demo sneaked up behind a guard and took him out with the kind of close-quarters combat neck-snap you might expect to see in every bit of pop culture ever (but not the original Goldeneye). Taking out two more guards with headshots ensured that the alarm wouldn’t be raised and the game could remain a Splinter Cell-style stealth experience for at least a while longer.

(full article)

Ubisoft’s entry into the already burgeoning Kinect casual sports game market was roughly 60% complete in a demo at Gamescom this week, so the game was still looking pretty rough around the edges. Of the six different sports available on the menu, only downhill skiing and boxing were available to play.

The skiing game was enjoyable enough, detecting slight variations in my lean to guide the on-screen skier down a pretty basic hill. The experience felt much smoother and more natural than similar games designed for the Wii balance board, which I usually find a bit twitchy in skiing simulations. I liked how the game recognized a low crouch as a way to improve aerodynamic speed, and how swooshing my arms at any time resulted in a satisfying ski pole push. Aside from some frequent graphical glitches (which made my skier look like he was showing off the bottom of his shoe), the demo was a great proof of concept.

(full article)

Okamiden on the DS manages to capture the painterly art style of the PlayStaton 2′s (and then the Wii’s) beloved Okami while also adding a heavy dollop of adorableness to the mix. This really comes through in some of the animations, such as tiny wolf god Chibiterasu’s darling backflip attack, or the way he flails his paws in mid-air, Saturday-morning-cartoon style, before he falls from a collapsing bridge.

Okami‘s trademark magical paintbrush is back in the DS game, of course, and the short Gamescom demo showed it being used to manipulate the world in some of the same ways as the original game — slashing rocks and obstacles in half, circling trees to make them bloom, and building bridges across gaps. Using the stylus to do all these things feels a bit more natural than awkwardly painting with the Wii remote, but was essentially similar.

(full article)

Amidst so many Gamescom titles that seemed to tread familiar ground, Ubisoft’s From Dust stood out with its impressive technology and wholly non-violent gameplay. We had a chance to speak with creative director Eric Chahi (who you may know as the creator of Out of This World) and producer Guillaume Bunier about their unique project.

Joystiq: Our first question is for Eric: What have you been doing all this time? Why has it taken you so long to make another big game [Since 1998's Heart of Darkness, by our reckoning]?

Chahi: I did many things. I did some landscape painting, I made a software editor to improve syntax and sentences, and also I traveled to many places, [such as] the desert and an active volcano, which has been a really strong source of inspiration for From Dust.

So why come back to video games after doing all those things?

Chahi: Because I had many ideas that accumulated and I wanted to make them real, so I decided to create a new game. Since maybe 2004 I knew I wanted to do something, but it takes some time to let the idea to mature. From Dust really took root in 2006. [I wasn't working] full time since then, but after I presented it to Ubisoft, it took a while to form a team, etc.

(full article)

Sony had a new, roughly 60% complete build of The Fight on hand at a pre-Gamescom press event, and I have to say, my experience with the game couldn’t have been more different from the one Chris Buffa had a few months ago (when the game still had its “Lights Out” subtitle). For one, I found the artificial intelligence to be at least competitive, if not overly hard. My computerized opponent — a thin, bouncy, tattooed Asian gangster — came at me constantly, using quick jabs to take advantage if I opened myself up with too many attacks and not enough guarding. The player who went before me actually lost to his computer opponent, a beefy black man in a wifebeater who countered an endless series of high, straight punches with some accurate low body blows.

(full article)

We already know quite a bit about how From Dust (née Project Dust) uses a few layers of basic elements to create a highly realistic and malleable virtual world. What’s been less clear was how Eric Chahi and his team were going to make an actual game out of this lava-filled sandbox. Until today, that is, when Chahi and producer Guillaume Bunier presented the first details of From Dust‘s gameplay in a Gamescom demonstration.

(full article)

A music game that’s just about singing? That’s so 2003. Or if you’re the SingStar franchise, it’s so, um, today. Sony’s PlayStation karaoke series has proudly focused on grading vocals for years now, but that’s about the change with this fall’s release of both SingStar Dance and SingStar Guitar. I got a chance to try both of these games at Sony’s pre-GamesCom press event, and have written up some quick initial impressions after the break.

(full article)

Cafe World had been sitting comfortably at around 20 million monthly users for the entire month of July. So it was a bit of a surprise when Facebook’s public statistics (as reported by AppData) showed the game’s user base shooting up 75% over a period of three days, to a high of over 35 million monthly players at the end of the month. The change wasn’t limited to Cafe World either — dozens of games saw stratospheric increases in the same period.

Facebook eventually confirmed to Inside Social Games that the sudden increases were due to a bug in their reporting. But this temporary problem highlights the risk of trusting Facebook to report on the success of its own games without independent verification.

(full article)

The past few weeks have seen a distinct ramp up in rumors surrounding a new Google social network in the works — with social gaming being a big part of those rumored plans. Even though we have no details on what such a service would look like, we’re pretty excited about the potential of what a company like Google could do to revolutionize social gaming as we know it. Here are five features we’d like to see Google look into if and when they finally enter the social gaming arena.

Recommendations: One of the best things about Google’s search algorithm is that it almost always seems to magically know exactly what you want, no matter how cryptic the search phrase. Imagine if you had these same sort of magical recommendations to guide you to interesting social games. Google’s experience finding patterns in reams of data could help their social network lead players to the games they’re most likely to like.

And rest assured, Google would have reams of data to work with; from the play habits of you and your friends to your physical location to your search history and even the contents of your Gmail and Google Docs accounts. Sure it’s a little creepy to think about all the data Google collects about an average user, but if they’re going to be mining that data anyway, they may as well pay you back with some interesting game recommendations, right?

(full article)

(full article)

Without a doubt, Xbox Live Arcade’s Limbo is an instant classic. The reviews are near-unanimous in their praise. Limbo is “bleak and beautiful.” It’s “haunting.” It’s “elegant and minimalistic.” It’s “clever.” It’s “gorgeously constructed.” It “will stay with you for a very long time.” Some are already calling it “a masterpiece.” Others are breaking out the dreaded a-word: “Art.”

But there’s one other thing Limbo reviewers are almost equally unanimous about. Some seem almost reluctant to bring it up. Others seem proud that they were able to find some flaw to balance out an otherwise glowing review.

Regardless, the critical consensus seems to be that Limbo is excellent but, well… it’s kind of short.

(full article)

“You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks.”

Such is the basic description of Cow Clicker, a new Facebook game that definitely delivers what its title promises — the ability to click on a cow. Yes, there are a few other social game trappings thrown in there — you can invite neighbors whose cow clicks count towards your total, and you can purchase prettier cows with in-game “mooney” — but there’s really little besides the titular cow clicking to this simple parody game.

Cow Clicker Creator and Georgia Tech professor Ian Bogost describes Cow Clicker as “Facebook games distilled to their essence” and in a way he’s right. Read that description from the first paragraph again. Replace “a cow” with “crops,” and “clicks” at the end with “coins” and you have a bare bones description of the basic gameplay in Facebook mega-hit Farmville. The same process can be applied to describe countless other popular social games. Cow Clicker even lets you spend mooney to skip the six-hour wait for more click opportunities, mimicking the way many other social games let you spend in-game money to avoid having to wait for rewards.

But Bogost’s simple parody utterly misses the point of social gaming in some major ways. Sure, in strict gameplay terms, there’s little to differentiate Cow Clicker from countless popular social games. But for million of players, the appeal of social games isn’t in the gameplay, but in the opportunity for world building and role-playing.

(full article)

Advergames on Facebook are nothing new — there are Facebook games marketing everything from cars to the distrubingly wholesome power of milk, and practically everything in between. But so far there hasn’t been a Facebook advergame that markets the field of marketing itself. Until now!

PoweRBrands is a creation of Reckitt Benckiser — the parent company of brands like Clearasil, Lysol and Woolite — that invites you to “use your innovative sales skills and marketing ideas to outperform your rivals, and work your way up to be President of the company.” Along the way, you’re told you’ll learn to “think and act like an RB person” and “learn something about global FMCG along the way” (that’s “fast-moving consumer goods” for those of you who aren’t already marketing professionals)

(full article)

The recent hard times for the social gaming market have been harder on some games than others. Last week, social-gaming mega-publisher Zynga decided to shut down two well-established parts of its catalog. First, the servers for Roller Coaster Kingdom (RCK) were shut off, then Ponzi Inc., a promising game Zynga got as part of a Challenge Games acquisition less than a month ago, went dark for good.

So, what can we learn from the abrupt termination of these two games? Well, one lesson seems to be that the standards for success in social gaming are going to keep increasing — at least for the big publishers. Despite their declining popularity, both Ponzi Inc. and Roller Coaster Kingdom had a relatively decent number of monthly active users when they were closed – 221,000 players for Ponzi and 1.2 million players for RCK. That might not seem like much compared against Farmville’s industry-leading 62 million monthly players, but it probably doesn’t seem like chump change to many struggling social game makers just getting their start.

(full article)

• Joe Danger dev explains why publishers don’t get downloadable games
• Can Kinect handle a player lying down? Yes and no
• Lionhead talks about Fable 3 voice stats, emotional storytelling
• Rare discusses new challenges of Kinect development
• Double Fine’s next projects: four ‘smaller’ games
• Develop: Molyneux talks Fable 2 problems, Fable 3 fixes
• Sony limiting use of 1080p 3D in PS3 games
• Develop: How a movie screenwriter helped save Enslaved’s story

As usual, there was no shortage of highly anticipated games at this year’s Electronic Entertainment Expo. But amidst all the new game announcements, there were a few games that were conspicuous by their absence — games that had been announced or mentioned at past E3s that were, for one reason or another, relegated to the shadows for this year’s show. Here’s a rundown of some of the games we missed at this year’s show, and the latest on their status.

(full article)

Zynga’s newly released iPhone version of FarmVille is a passable if flawed miniaturization of its popular PC cousin. But the move to Apple’s popular mobile phone brings with it the opportunity to add some rather unique new gameplay to the familiar farming experience. Here are just a few ideas for how Zynga can take full advantage of the iPhone hardware to make a better (or at least a fresher) overall game.

Geo-location: Visiting your virtual neighbors in FarmVille is all well and good, but sometimes you want to see what’s going on with your actual neighbors. With the iPhone’s built-in GPS (and IP-based geo-location for iPod users), this should be easy enough to implement. Simply let players opt-in to share their locations, then let them visit other farms are being shared in a set radius (anywhere from a few feet to a few hundred miles should be available). In addition to helping people discover new FarmVille freaks in their area, this feature could also let businesses and attractions set up virtual farms that are only accessible by visiting their real-world locations.

(full article)

And here’s the proof: a quick video showing off the basics of the iFarmville interface. Look for more detailed impressions of the newly mobile Facebook game here soon.

At first glance, the set of five independently developed computer games that went on sale as a downloadable bundle on May 4 didn’t seem especially noteworthy. Even the collection’s name reflected its lack of pretension: The Humble Indie Bundle (HIB) — containing PC, Mac and Linux versions of indie favorites World of Goo, Aquaria, Lugaru HD, Gish, and Penumbra (plus late donation Samorost 2) — wasn’t trying to revolutionize the way indie games are sold and distributed. It was simply “a unique kind of bundle that we are trying out,” as the official Web page put it.

But when the bundle was taken off the market 11 days later — after attracting over 138,000 purchases and nearly $1.3 million in donations — that built-in humility started to look a little ridiculous. Sure, those numbers would be a drop in the bucket for a big-budget developer, but for the relatively small world of indie games, the HIB was a veritable blockbuster.

“When you’re an independent game developer, and there’s no publisher or other middle-man, you only need a tiny amount of sales in order for it to be a gigantic success,” said Jeffrey Rosen, co-founder of Penumbra publisher Wolfire Games and one of the men who organized the HIB.

(full article)

In the last decade, eight states and two cities have passed laws that try to restrict the sale of violent video games to minors. In each case, federal courts have blocked those laws as unconstitutional restrictions on free speech.

That’s a pretty good track record, as far as the game industry is concerned. But all those successes could be rendered moot when the Supreme Court takes up the case of a California violent game law in its next session, starting this October.

“Frankly [I'm] a little bit nervous, because you just don’t know what the Supreme Court is going to do,” said Sean Bersell, Vice President of Public Affairs for the Entertainment Merchants Association, a party to the Supreme Court case. “They kind of wiped the slate clean and said, ‘We’re going to decide this issue.’”

(full article)

On March 23, Nintendo of Japan leaked the existence of a new portable system codenamed the Nintendo 3DS. According to the leak, the new dual screen portable will support “games [that] can be enjoyed with 3D effects without the need for special glasses.” With further details on the system not expected until June’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, we wondered: how would a glasses-free 3D portable work. Here are a few possibilities.

(full article)

It was midnight Greenwich Mean Time on Feb. 28 when the errors began showing up. Millions of PlayStation 3 owners the world over tried logging on to Sony’s online service only to be greeted with the now-famous cryptic message: “An error has occurred. You have been signed out of PlayStation Network (8001050F).” Even players that didn’t want to go online were unable to play most of their games, because their systems had reportedly “failed to install trophies.” Debug units — used by developers making PS3 games and journalists trying out early review copies — were reportedly stuck in an endless cycle of reboots. Later in the day, Sony officially suggested to most of its customers “that you do not use your PS3 system, as doing so may result in errors in some functionality…”

Panic ensued. “PlayStation Network down” became the 14th most popular search term on Google.  #Sony and #PS3 became trending topics on Twitter, as did the pithily misspelled #ApocalyPS3. A thread on gaming message board NeoGAF generated nearly 8,000 posts discussing the issue in a single day. Popular gadget blog Engadget labeled it “a full-on PlayStation disaster.”

An then… the problem fixed itself. Exactly 24 hours after the errors first appeared, they disappeared just as suddenly, and PlayStations the world over started working as intended once again.

Looking back, the reaction to this temporary problem — caused by a leap year interpretation error in an internal chip on most older PS3s — seems a bit overblown. But it definitely didn’t seem overblown at the time. “The overall tone of PS3 owners was a frantic one,” said Anthony Severino, owner of community site PlayStation Universe. “The PlayStation Network has been down before, but this bug left users unable to play their games — games they paid hard-earned cash for. … As time went on, panic turned into anger, sending a larger portion of the PlayStation community on a tirade.” Joystiq blogger Griffin McElroy, one of the first to cover the breaking story, said the initial reaction from gamers was “just what you’d expect,  a lot of rage and fear from the PS3-owning community, and a whole bunch of braying and guffawing from the diehard 360 fans.”

(View on YouTube)

The eclectic group discusses augmented reality games, Xbox Live achievements, Blizzard’s formula for constant success, the future prospects of rhythm games, and more.

(Download MP3 — 54.7 MB 59:42)
(More info on BitMob.com)

Atari has added a social gaming twist to the latest revival of its venerable Missile Command franchise. The newest version of the game, released yesterday on social gaming hub OMGPOP, expands the city-defending, missile-destroying concept of the original with power-ups, achievements and, most importantly, an online multiplayer component.

Much like the original game, you have to shoot down incoming missiles raining down from the top of the screen with defensive missiles of your own, leading your shots to create chain reactions of circular explosive coronas in the sky. In the new version, however, your defensive turret is only one of up to eight shooting at the incoming threat, a first for the series.

(full article)

“The Hero League needs your help stopping The Silver Valkyrie from destroying Star City! Choose your super hero name and join the battle!”

So begins Hero World, the newest Facebook game from Rockyou, the publisher also responsible for dark horse hit Zoo World.

At its core, the game resembles nothing so much as a superhero-themed version of Mafia Wars, where you click buttons to perform missions, draining your energy to earn money and power points. These can, in turn, be exchanged for new equipment to make your hero more powerful (and better looking), new hideouts (to generate yet more money), new vehicles (to access new areas and missions), more powerful abilities and attacks, and more.

(full article)

(Download MP3 — 47MB, 1:22:11)
(More info on GamersWithJobs.com)

As I write this, all the letters I type are slowly falling down and drifting ever so gently to the left in my mind. And I keep imagining a little figure in overalls, about two letters high and one letter wide, jumping on top of those letters as they appear, or bashing them from below to unlock valuable coins inside.

The reason for these odd hallucinations is Tuper Tario Tros., a Flash-based combination of two of the most addictive games in history — Tetris and Super Mario Bros. — into a game that … well, it isn’t quite as addictive as both games combined, but is awfully close.

(full article)

• Do We Need Physical Conferences in a Digital World?
• How the Spike TV Video Game Awards Are Hurting the Game Industry
• News Bytes
• Quote of the Moment
• change

(full article)

Highlighting only the useful products shown at the Consumer Electronics Show misses half the point of one of the largest trade shows in the world. The real attractions of CES are the odd, one-off products, the over-the-top booths and the sheer weirdness on display everywhere you turn. And so, the CES Special Awards Division makes its triumphant return this year to capture a small portion of that weirdness for those of you that didn’t risk getting crushed by 10,000 people trying to get the same cab outside the Las Vegas Hilton. Enjoy!

(full article)

Since the Electronic Entertainment Expo split off from the Consumer Electronics Show in 1995, CES hasn’t exactly been the primary showcase for videogame publishers and developers. But while the software makers may have moved to a different show, many gaming hardware makers have stuck with CES, showing off their new wares in Vegas each year. Here are the most noteworthy of the selection shown at the show this year.

(full article)

With the coming of 2010 and the leaving of the Noughties, there are a lot of ways you could go about determining the “Game of the Decade.” You can just pick your own favorites, of course, but that’s always going to come off as overly subjective and personal. You can choose some nominees and ask the public to weigh in, as we did with our epic Game of the Decade bracket, but that really just tells you what’s popular with a certain subset of readers of one site. You can look at review or sales numbers, but those just tell you how well a game was received at the time of its release (by critics and the public, respectively).

What I wanted was a definitive Game of the Decade list — a collection of choices that represented a wide range of professional, knowledgeable opinions about the last 10 years of games. I figured such a list wouldn’t just pop into existence on its own, so I decided to build it myself.

(full article)

The holiday season is a great time to be a gamer, with big new releases hitting seemingly every week. But for game journalists, it can also be a stressful time, full of rushed reviews, tight deadlines for gift guide features and visits to family members that don’t even have an HDTV (what is this, the Stone Age?).

To relieve some of that stress, some members of the Game Trust took part in a virtual White Elephant gaming gift exchange this year. It was a chance to take the focus off the latest and the greatest and exchange some cheap-but-fun-but-overlooked games from the recent past in a relaxed environment. It was also, hopefully, a way to learn something more about our fellow Game Trusters.

(full article)

The idea behind the next great experiment in reviving the American videogame magazine didn’t come from the board room of a powerhouse publishing giant. It wasn’t spun off from an existing lifestyle magazine or adapted from a successful Web property. It wasn’t the product of a focus group or a marketing survey or a know-nothing middle manager trying in vain to capture younger readers by focusing on a medium he knows nothing about.

Instead, Kill Screen magazine started out as the subject of idle chatter over Indian food.

(full article)

You’ve patiently listened to Uncle Crispy rant and rave about his least-favorite gaming moments of 2009. You’ve looked on with horror as we recounted the year’s oddest gaming moments. Now it’s finally time to talk about the reason we’re all here: the games themselves. Specifically, the best games to come out in 2009 (Yeah, we know the year’s technically not over yet, but we hope you’ll forgive us for not holding our list off in anticipation of Playmobil Pirates and Guitar Hero: Van Halen).

To keep things simple (and to avoid months-long arguments/barroom brawls over which games truly belonged where), we based our game-of-the-year rankings on a secret ballot. Eighteen members of the Game Trust submitted a ranked list of their top-five personal favorites for the year. First-place picks received five points, second-place picks got four points, all the way down to one point for fifth-place picks. The point values were added together to create the rankings below.

If you really can’t get enough statistics, there’s a detailed breakdown of the voting at the end of this piece. But for now, let’s get right down to it with our top 10 12 picks for the year:

(full article)

In this issue:

• Tony Hawk Looking for People to Play Tony Hawk: Ride With Him
• Charity “Desert Bus” Drive Goes from “Hope” to Havoc
• Actually, do you want to play with me?

(full article)