• 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)

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.

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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)

1. Nintendo Wii sales will decline year over year in North America.
2. PlayStation 3 sales will increase year over year in North America.
3. Rhythm-game sales will decline year over year.
4. Industry-wide game sales will go up, year over year.
5. At least one download-only release will be on the shortlist for the Game of the Year awards.
6. No PS3 motion control or Natal-exclusive games will be on the shortlist for Game of the Year.
7. The PSP Go will drop in price during the first half of the year.
8. At least one new major console or portable system will be announced.
9. Nintendo will announce a portable Virtual Console of Game Boy classics for the DSi.

(full article)

(View on YouTube)

• Activision’s unorthodox early review access
• On the spoke missing from IGN’s MusicHub
• News bits

(full article)

During the first, beta season of Xbox Live’s 1 vs. 100, I probably played about two dozen rounds of the game’s half-hour, 37-question Extended Play mode, which pits thousands of live participants against one another in a straight up battle for trivia supremacy. In that time, despite having some pretty strong trivia knowledge (if I do say so myself), I didn’t once make it onto the prominently displayed list of top-10 scorers available throughout each round. It didn’t matter if I started the round with a string of quick, correct answers — there always seemed to be at least 10 other perfect players whose faster answers gave them at least a few dozen more points than me. I would often skirt the edges of the top-10 list for 10 or 15 questions before inevitably missing an answer and watching my chances of seeing my name in lights fall away for the rest of the round.

I thought more than once that the people putting up these top scores must be cheating somehow. Their answers were too perfect, their timing bonuses too high, their consistency too … consistent (the same Gamertags seemed to clog up the list throughout multiple Extended Play rounds). I figured these top scorers must be exploiting a glitch in the game, or using a group of trivia experts and super-fast Google searches to feed them correct answers, or something. There’s no way they could do that well without cheating, I thought.

I no longer think that way, because last night, between 11 and 11:30 p.m., Eastern Standard Time, I managed to defeat all but two of my over 34,000 trivia competitors to secure a third-place finish in the “Video Game Trivia” round of 1 vs. 100.

*Holds for applause*

(full article)

In general, gamers aren’t very effective at organizing to effect change in the game industry. Sure, there are hundreds of online petitions demanding everything from a “Full House” game to a generalized end to game hacking, but the vast majority fail to garner much attention or support. Even well-organized and well-publicized efforts, like those seeking LAN support in StarCraft 2 or further support for the Earthbound games are met with official responses ranging from polite refusal to teasing hints, and rarely with real change.

But this year, many gamers took a different tack to protest what they saw as a betrayal of a publisher’s past promises. Mere hours after Valve announced the planned November release of Left 4 Dead 2 (L4D2) at June’s Electronic Entertainment Expo, a group calling for an L4D2 boycott popped up on Valve’s own Steam user community. The group’s first public message asked a simple question that would come to define its cause: “Where’s all the content and the updates you promised for [the original] L4D, Valve?”

By casting their disagreement in the form of a boycott, the tens of thousands of gamers that joined the L4D2 boycott group immediately set themselves apart from the Internet petitioners that came before them. A petition is just a polite request for someone to change their mind, if they would, please. A boycott, by definition, is a statement of collective action — a way for a group to flex its economic power to force change. It’s a way for a community to effectively put its money where its mouth is and demand that its case be heard. It’s a cause that brings up images of patriotic movements, civil rights struggles, international incidents and other momentous events that seem much more important than a silly argument over the timing of the release of a videogame sequel.

But, in the end, was this boycott any more effective than any of the other failed grassroots petition efforts undertaken by gamers over the years? Now that Left 4 Dead 2 is actually available for sale, can those that took part in the boycott argue they achieved their goals? Did Valve change its plans to gain the approval of the masses, or did it effectively pacify the Internet throngs with nothing more than a couple of plane tickets and a hotel reservation?

In other words, was the boycott successful?

Well, it depends on what you mean by “successful.”

(full article)

In this issue:

• Electronic Arts fires final employee as “cost-cutting measure”
• Local game store surprised, saddened over failure of Pop’n Music midnight launch event
• Nintendo announces “ultra-portable” DSi XS

(full article)

In the nearly 25 years since the first Super Mario Bros., the series has remained the Platonic ideal of the single-player platforming game. Sure, you could always hand the controller off to a second player in-between levels or lives, and Super Mario Galaxy added the ability for a second player to use the Wii Remote pointer to assist as a helper, but the Mario games were always primarily a solitary experience. Even as the industry shifted more and more toward a multiplayer focus — first with the popularity of one-on-one fighting games and more recently with the perfunctory cooperative and deathmatch modes that seem to be infecting and overtaking the cinematic single-player scenarios they’re built around — the Mario games were still tales of a man against his environment, of the struggle to get from point A to the princess at point B while avoiding the varied and imaginative pitfalls in between.

But even a series as old as Mario isn’t immune to the winds of change, and so we get New Super Mario Bros. Wii — a game that finally adds a man-vs.-man element to the man-vs.-environment simplicity, with support for “UP TO 4 PLAYERS!” as the box screams. The results are far from awful, but more than anything, New Super Mario Bros. Wii proves that when you mess with a Platonic ideal, the results may be less than ideal.

(full article)

Modern Warfare 2 is a “rather simplistic shooter”¹. From “the spectacle and silliness of its single-player campaign”² to “the issues over the single player campaign length,”³ “don’t expect the game of the year.”¹ “This game just doesn’t boast the set-pieces … that made the first game stand out so memorably.”⁹

“Where Modern Warfare 2′s campaign drops the ball … is in its actual storytelling.”⁶ “The storyline certainly isn’t going to win any Oscars.”⁹ It “rambles along with holes you could drive a truck through,”⁵ and “the story beats are absurd (at one point you find yourself firing upon insurgents holed up in the Department of Justice).”² “There’s little of that gruff camaraderie that made the first time around really special.”⁵ Instead, this time around, there’s “a cast of characters more expendable than a minivan-full of American teens visiting that log cabin with the eerie music coming from it, where that serial killer is rumoured to have died.”⁹

“What plot there is is all pretty poorly and confusingly delivered.”⁹ “The game often expects you to already know the characters, extrapolate on one line of dialogue or a quick cut-scene, and then figure out the story from there.”⁶ “We’ve played it through and we’d struggle to relate to man or beast more than 50 per cent of what’s supposed to have happened “⁹ “At the end, it just gives up altogether and turns into a Bond movie,”⁵ “and, even more worrying, still haven’t a Scooby why the main plot twist in the game happens or the motivation behind it.”⁹ “In the end … there’s no real weight to anything you’re doing. … you never get a true feel for scale, or any actual emotional attachment to the events. … It just doesn’t stack up against some of the previous Call of Duty story modes, where single player was the obvious focus throughout the entire package.”⁶

(full article)

Review aggregators like Metacritic and GameRankings have a bit of a mixed reputation in and around the game industry. Millions of gamers love aggregators for distilling dozens of reviews into a single number that can aid in their purchasing decisions (and their message-board arguments). Publishers love aggregators for providing a concrete metric by which to rate the quality of their developers and PR units. Those same developers and PR units, of course, often hate aggregators for passing judgment on months of hard work with no real context. And the critics often hate aggregators for reducing hundreds of words full of personality into just another statistic to be lost in the crowd.

A new Web site is looking to solve that last problem, at least, by helping people get to know the critics behind the numbers a little better.

(full article)

For each hypothetical here, I tried to imagine a semi-plausible situation that could have caused these seminal events to turn out differently. While not all of these situations are entirely believable given the state of the industry, I tried to give each “What If?” at least a minimal grounding in reality. These stories are meant to be entertaining thought experiments, not definitive historical takes.

With that, let’s take a trip into an alternate universe where nothing is quite as we know it.

• What if there was a single, standardized videogame system?
• What if Sony developed the SNES-CD for Nintendo, as originally planned, rather than the PlayStation?

(full article)

Looking back from the end of the decade, the rhythm-game market of 2002 is practically unrecognizable. This was a time before Rock Band, before Guitar Hero, before even Karaoke Revolution pushed the genre toward the actual performance of recent, popular music. In 2002, rhythm games were dominated by follow-along gameplay and quirky Japanese musical influences. The J-pop-heavy Dance Dance Revolution series was at the top of its popularity, and occasional press-the-button-in-time-with-the-music Japanese imports like Parappa the Rapper, Space Channel 5 and Gitaroo Man dotted the landscape. In each case, following along to the beat of unfamiliar Japanese-inspired music served to limit the genre’s appeal to a small niche.

Eidos’ Mad Maestro!, a budget $20 release under the company’s short-lived “Fresh Games” label, wasn’t destined to explode this niche. How could it, with a focus on classical music, one of the only musical genres even less accessible to an American audience than J-pop? But for those paying attention, it was a unique and exciting take on a young genre that has had some subtle but profound influences on its future direction.

(full article)

There were Spider-Man games before Neversoft’s 2000 release Spider-Man. Most of them resembled the cookie-cutter brawlers of the day, with Spider-Man simply standing in for the street-tough protagonists, walking awkwardly down urban environments and punching and kicking anything that moved.

There have been plenty of Spider-Man games since Neversoft’s 2000 release. Most of them resemble Neversoft’s 2000 release.

(full article)

Like most any other American gamer, I’m insanely jealous of Japanese gamers. Not only do they get all sorts of wacky games that will never come out stateside and all sorts of cool gaming collectibles, but they still have a vibrant arcade scene. Recently, though, I’ve discovered yet another reason to be jealous of Japanese gamers: They can get extremely good deals on good, used videogames.

The man behind my newfound jealousy is Wired game writer Chris Kohler, who recently created what he calls the “1000 Yen Challenge” to demonstrate just how far he (and others) could stretch their money in Japan’s many used-games shops. The results so far were astonishing to this American gamer. For the equivalent of about 10 U.S. dollars, these savvy Japanese shoppers were able to pick up a dozen games or more! Sure, some of the games were no-name, forgettable dreck, but the hauls so far have also included classics like Soulcalibur, Wave Race 64 and Resident Evil: Code Veronica, as well as obscure games of interest like Seaman and Vib-Ribbon. These games were going for prices as low as 20 yen. Twenty yen! That’s less than a quarter! As long as you aren’t particular about condition, and aim for systems that are old but not yet classic, it seems you can make a killing out there in the Japanese game market.

Too bad the American used-game market isn’t so amenable to ultra-cheap deals. Or is it? To find out, I decided to take on my own slightly modified version of the 1000 Yen Challenge in my own backyard. Here’s how it went.

(full article)

In this issue:

• Chumbawumba: We’re “totally open” to the idea of Chumbawumba: Rock Band
• Angry fans stage boycott of Madagascar Kartz, demand new content
• Nintendo reassigns massive development division to DSi clock and calculator development

(full article)

“Uncharted 2 received so many perfect scores, is there anything it does wrong? Well, yes, there is.”³ “The bread and butter of Among Thieves is by-the-numbers shooting, broken briefly by some linear platforming and the occasional light puzzle.”⁵ “There’s not really a lick of originality … It would have been nice to have at least something for the game to call its own,”⁷ and “it’s unfortunate that the gameplay doesn’t scale the heights of the production values.”⁵ “No, Uncharted 2 is not perfect.”⁸

“Uncharted 2‘s storyline is more or less predictable. … The story sounds like the premise for a cheesy and easily forgotten novel”² and “contains a number of not-so-surprising twists.”⁶ “The story isn’t incredibly original,”⁷ and “felt a bit too familiar at times.”⁸ It’s pretty much “standard action fare”⁵ with a “forced ‘warfare’ feel.”⁹ “The reasons for Nepal being a bombed-out shell provide a few eyebrow-raising ‘really?’ moments.”⁹ “Not everyone will be fond of the game’s concluding location — or, rather, what Drake discovers there … [and] few will argue that the climactic confrontation is a fitting way for [the game] to bow out.”⁴ What’s more, “the writing doesn’t have quite the same panache or character chemistry as the original.”⁹

“The gameplay isn’t perfect — the cover mechanic is too sticky in tight places.”⁶ The game’s “less than perfect cover system”¹ includes “a cover mechanic that [feels] like a slightly clumsy version of that in Gears of War.”⁹ No, “moving from cover to cover still doesn’t feel as slick as it does in Epic’s Gears of War series, with Nate occasionally refusing to do what you want him to.”¹ “Cover transitions can get you stuck in some precarious moments.”³ For instance, “it can be frustrating during some of the more intense battles if you find yourself sitting in the open air when you meant to hide behind a nearby desk.”⁶ Yes, “the occasionally unreliable cover system provides a larger frustration in the heat of competition.”⁵

(full article)

• Warner Bros. Interactive announces Citizen Kane: The Video Game
• I’m sorry, but these reviewer freebies just don’t merit a perfect score
• Money-saving tips for gamers

(full article)

The Beatles: Rock Band (TB: RB) is notable in the history of gaming for a few reasons. It’s the first time the Fab Four’s music has been featured in a videogame, for instance. And it’s the first music game to allow for three-part harmonies, to my knowledge. For me, though, the game is historic for a unique reason. The Beatles: Rock Band will always be the first game that both my mother and my mother-in-law expressed genuine interest in playing without any prodding from me.

Understand, when family members from my parents’ generation or higher talk with me about videogames, it’s usually with a polite but shallow curiosity. They’re interested in games as far as they’re interested in what I do for a living, but aside from the rare casual game like Peggle or FreeCell, they’re not clamoring to play any of the latest releases. So I was quite surprised when I got not one, but two requests to bring The Beatles: Rock Band along with me when I travelled home for the Jewish holidays a few weeks ago — to my parents’ in Maryland for Rosh Hashanah and to my in-laws’ in Philadelphia for Yom Kippur 10 days later.

Always eager to share my passion, I packed up the roughly seven million individual pieces required to play a full game of TB:RB and hauled them all across the Northeast. In between many large holiday meals, some horrible college football games and countless reminiscences with family and friends, we managed to squeeze in a few hours of good Beatles-based rocking across both sides of the family. Below are just a few of the things that I learned about my family, videogames, the Beatles and Rock Band itself during those all-too-short play sessions.

(full article)

Premise 1: Racing cars in real life is tons of fun. Premise 2: Most racing games are not very realistic portrayals of the real-life racing experience. Premise 3: Most racing games are pretty fun. Conclusion: An extremely realistic racing game will be even more fun than those other racing games.

As far as I can tell, this has been the logical motivation behind the Gran Turismo series since its start on the original PlayStation; a logic still in force for the much-anticipated PSP version of the game. But, as my logic professor used to say, the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises.

Don’t get me wrong, Gran Turismo is as detailed a replica of real-life racing as you’re likely to get on a portable system. The years of development effort are apparent in the almost fetishistic attention to detail in almost all elements of the racing experience. It shows in the hundreds of lovingly crafted car models — ranging from million-dollar racing coupes to pickup trucks (yes, really). It shows in the dozens of accurately recreated racing locales, including city streets and race tracks but also dirt- and snow-covered rally tracks. It shows in the feeling of power and acceleration as you push your feather-light car forward with hundreds of horsepower, past scenery that seems too beautiful for a portable system. The fact that such a realistic and physical racing simulation has been packed into a handheld system is an amazing technical feat.

But none of it makes the game any more fun.

(full article)

Making exercise less boring. For millions of gamers, this was the promise of the original Wii Fit. Sure, the game and its scale-like Balance Board controller could guide and grade you through simple yoga poses and strength-training exercises. But those sections of the game largely replicated exercises you could learn easily from a book or an exercise video.

The real appeal of the original Wii Fit — the thing that made it unique — was found in the Aerobics and Balance Games sections, where the game promised to distract and entertain even as it provided a full-body workout. For a generation that grew up controlling on-screen characters with their thumbs, this new mixture of gaming and exercise had the potential to be a hell of lot more interesting than jogging on a treadmill for an hour.

But most of the games in Wii Fit had a crucial problem: They were shallow. Extremely shallow, for the most part. While they held up decently well for the first few hours, few had enough depth to sustain a gamer’s interest for the weeks and weeks of regular exercise that make up a regular fitness regimen. It only took one or two play sessions to master the art of launching off a virtual ski jump or walking across a virtual tightrope or twirling a virtual hula hoop, or most of the other one-note activities presented in Wii Fit. After that, the games had roughly the same entertainment value as a stationary exercise bike (which provides a much more robust workout, by the by). The concept of “making exercise less boring” only works if the games themselves aren’t, you know, boring.

(full article)

In this issue:

• How to help your Xbox 360 fanboy cope with the PlayStation 3′s turnaround
• Police raid turns up “hundreds” of illegal casual games at office park
• Sega drops price of Genesis

(full article)

 1. You can jump over the flagpole in Super Mario Bros.

The myth: Hey, so you know Timmy down the street? Well, he said he could jump OVER the flagpole in Super Mario Bros. He told me he could! No, I didn’t see it, but his sister says she saw him do it. No, he can’t do it on any level; he said you can only do it in World 3-3 when that elevator thingy gets high enough and you jump at just the right time. Oh, and once he said he did it in 7-1. I tried like a MILLION times, though, and I couldn’t do it without the Game Genie. Come on, man, Timmy wouldn’t lie! Would he?

The truth: “No way!” “Yes way!” “No WAY!” Yes WAY!

Status: Plausible.

(full article)

Head on over to the iTunes Podcast directory and search for “video games.” Pick one podcast at random. Ninety-nine times out of 100, that podcast will adhere to a certain standard format: a bunch of videogame fans sitting around a microphone and rambling about videogames. Likely they’ll talk about what’s in the news that day or week, review games they’ve been playing recently, and maybe answer some letters from readers. If you’re lucky, they may talk to a game developer or touch lightly on some larger themes surrounding gaming culture or the industry. If you’re really lucky, they’ll avoid the kinds of inside jokes and rambling asides that make most gaming podcasts hours-long bores.

But if you’re extremely lucky, that videogame podcast you picked out at the beginning will be the one in 100 that doesn’t fit the standard formula. If you’re that lucky, you’ve probably stumbled upon Robert Ashley‘s “A Life Well Wasted.” (ALWW)

More than just a gaming podcast, ALWW is, as the tagline puts it, “an Internet radio show about videogames and the people who love them.” Rather than just jawing about whatever comes to mind with other game journalists, Ashley actually tracks down and and interviews gamers inside and outside the industry, on subjects ranging from game journalism to game preservation, independent development to fan fiction, hardware hacking to cosplay. Ashley then snips the best parts from the interviews and cuts them together with music from his band, I Come to Shanghai. The result is a roughly hour-long audio story that resembles public radio shows like “This American Life” or “Radiolab” more than other gaming podcasts.

(full article)

Since November 2006, NPD’s monthly console sales reports have provided the best publicly available data on the North American console market. But while these reports give a good rough sketch of the size and shape of the market, they leave unanswered some rather important questions. How many Americans, for instance, are playing games even though they don’t own a current-generation console? How many American households own more than one current-gen system? Are those Nintendo Wii buyers using the system by itself, or as an addition to an Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3? Which console combinations are the most common?

Luckily, an NPD press release from last week helps provide answers to those questions and more. Though the release was primarily focused on the power of “word-of-mouth” advertising and “hands-on play” in gaming purchasing decisions, it also included an interesting table on cross-system ownership among American households. With these new data points, and a few more provided by NPD and the U.S. Census, we can outline the American gaming landscape with much more precision than before.

(full article)

In this edition:

• Have you heard about this new Beatles: Rock Star game? An editorial by Your Mom
• Valve founder offers free trips, games to all Left 4 Dead 2 boycotters
• Report: Scribblenauts players overusing guns

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When I was growing up and dreaming of a position as a game journalist, I envisioned three primary perks to the job: 1) getting to play games all day, 2) getting to see games months early at the Consumer Electronics Show (the precursor to today’s Electronic Entertainment Expo), and 3) getting to play early review copies of games before they reached store shelves.

Of course, now that I’m a full-time game journalist, I know the somewhat disappointing reality behind of all these perks. Yes, I get to play games during the work day, but more of my time seems to be spent writing about them, which is the part I actually get paid for. Yes, I get to go to E3, but after a while the show seems less like a massive, freeform arcade and more like an endless, hellish slog filled with massive lines and boring appointments. And while I do get access to plenty of reviewable games before release, getting such access from public relations departments has sometimes been a struggle, especially when I was just starting out.
In an ideal world, there would be enough early press copies of a game available to satisfy every legitimate journalist with an interest in writing a review. In reality, though, almost every journalist I’ve talked to says they’ve gotten some form of the “we just don’t have enough copies available” excuse when requesting a game for review. And the public relations people I’ve talked to say that’s the line isn’t just a copout.

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You’d think that, being a Videogame Journalist Extraordinaire and All-Around Cool Guy (it says so on my personal Web site, so you know it must be true), I would know everything about the Xbox 360. You’d be wrong. True, I can rattle off a selection of the system’s hit games, its pros and cons versus competing systems, its various retail configurations and their features and prices, and lots of other information ranging from important to trivial.

But being a game journalist means there’s one perspective on the Xbox I struggle with: that of a normal videogame consumer.

While I did buy my first Xbox 360 (a Pro system) at retail, Microsoft has since sent me the upgraded Elite system, a debug unit to play unreleased games, three of my four Xbox 360 controllers, and enough Xbox Live Gold membership cards to last me through 2012. A majority of the games I play on the Xbox 360 are provided by publishers hoping I’ll review them, and the nature of my job lets me play games during the work day, rather than just during free time. All these things skew my experience with the system in some small way. Intellectually I know the true costs of the Xbox 360; but personally, I’m shielded from having to make the tough economic decisions most gamers face every day.

Which is why I’m grateful for my family. In the past six months, my sister and cousin, both teenagers, have gone through the process of purchasing Xbox 360s. Throughout this process, they both consulted me, the videogame expert in the family, for advice on everything, from what hardware they need to what games to buy. The process of guiding them into the world of a new (and, as you’ll see, somewhat bewildering) game system made me realize some things about the Xbox 360 that I hadn’t considered before.

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Every so often you’ll see some site pop up with a “Most Wanted” list of tracks it’d like to see playable in Rock Band. These lists are always fun, and a great way to get a discussion going, but they always had one major problem as far as I was concerned — an overabundance of choice. When you’re choosing from a pool of “every rock and pop song ever written,” whittling it down to just a few choices is practically meaningless. There are literally thousands of songs that would be great in Rock Band, and picking out 10 or so based on your personal tastes is no tough feat.

It’s different with The Beatles: Rock Band, though. Since the Fab Four only released 185 songs* in its short career, the potential space for downloadable songs is pretty limited. Take away the 45 songs included on the game disc and 31 more from “Abbey Road,” “Rubber Soul” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” that have already been promised as downloads, and that leaves only a little more than 100 remaining Beatles songs as potential future downloads.

With such a small remaining set list, MTV Games could easily code every single one for the game, letting players purchase and play through the complete Beatles catalog. If it falls short of that ideal, though, which songs make the cut is going to be a matter of some debate. Here are our humble suggestions for nine songs that we really, really want to see as Beatles: Rock Band downloads, and four that we could easily do without. Your mileage may vary, of course, so be sure to share your thoughts in the comments.

* Give or take, depending on what you count as a “song.”

(full article)

In this edition:

• Microsoft, Sony execs trade passive-aggressive barbs after price drops
• Warner Bros. announces Batman: The TV Show: The Game
• Exclusive: Halo’s “Spartans” to appear as Diablo III‘s mystery class!

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• PATIENCE IS A VIRTUE: After being leaked in ads from Target, Walmart and Best Buy, Microsoft finally confirmed a $100 price drop for its top-of-the-line Xbox 360 Elite system late this week. Anyone taking advantage of the new price should thank my cousin, who bought an Xbox 360 just three days ago, thus ensuring it would be cheaper before too long.
• CATACLYSMIC: Blizzard this week announced Cataclysm, a 2010 expansion for World of Warcraft that will include two new playable races, a higher level cap, and, most importantly, the ability to master Archaeology as a skill. Indy would be so proud.
• GOOD TASTE: According to a Twitter report, the sequel to cult classic and critical darling Beyond Good & Evil is “on hold” for the time being. Meanwhile, Cabela announced this week that the Wii version of Big Game Hunter 2010 would come with this large orange plastic shot gun. So congratulation, lowest common denominator. You win again.
• RECORD BREAKING: Germany’s new GamesCom conference saw 245,000 visitors, making it the largest gaming trade show in history according to organizers. Despite this, attendees failed in an effort to break the record for most cosplayers in a single location. Come on Germans, step up your dress up! Let your freak flags fly!
• LEGAL LIMBO: A bureaucratic snafu discovered this week means that England’s Video Recordings Act, which prohibits minors from buying adult-rated video games, has not technically been enforceable for the past 25 years. They’re working on fixing the loophole, but in the meantime I expect society will crumble as hordes of Manhunt-addled youths wreak destruction through the streets of London.
• AND FINALLY this week we saw pro skateboarders gleefully demonstrate how Tony Hawk: RIDE will make all those years they spent enduring injuries and mastering highly specialized real world skills completely obsolete. And that was the week in Gaming for August 28, 2009.

(Watch video)

The consensus seems to be that right now is not a good time to be in the print magazine business. Across the industry, newsstand sales fell 6.3 percent in the first half of 2009 and overall circulation has been flat. The narrower gaming niche is still reeling from the January shuttering of Electronic Gaming Monthly after a successful 20-year run. All over the media landscape, you don’t have to look very hard to find people proclaiming matter-of-factly that magazines are dead.

So it seems an odd time to announce a new 148-page quarterly magazine, focused on a single game, with no advertising pages, no newsstand sales and expensive, high-quality paper stock. Yet that’s exactly what Future Publishing is doing with World of Warcraft: The Magazine (WoW:TM), announced last week at Anaheim’s BlizzCon fan festival. What’s more, Future is doing it with a unique editorial and business plan that might just be crazy enough to work.

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Take the 376 West through Pittsburgh, then go down 279 South five miles or so, out to the sleepy suburb of Carnegie, Penn. Cruise down the four-lane Main Street, past the abandoned used car lot and the Wheel and Wedge sandwich shop (“Foot-long sub special: $3.99 + tax”). Hang a left across the Hammond Street Bridge to the industrial park on the other side of Chartiers Creek.

For 360 days out of the year, the big white building next to the Clark-Fishman Flooring Solutions warehouse looks like just another underused industrial property. But for four days in August (and a one-night charity event in February), the warehouse opens its doors to reveal over 30,000 square feet of immaculate space, housing over 400 pinball machines and classic arcade games. Welcome to the annual World Pinball Championships, put on for the 12th time in 2009 by the Professional & Amateur Pinball Association (PAPA).

It’s a sign of pinball’s recent tough times that the game’s premier tournament has to take place in such a remote and seemingly inauspicious setting. But it’s hard to feel gloomy about pinball’s fate standing inside the sprawling PAPA headquarters, listening to hundreds of pristine, playable pinball tables dating back to the ’40s fill the air with their clanging. There’s a nervous energy as hundreds of attendees mill about the wide aisles, feed tokens into random machines, gently jostle cabinets to avoid gutters, talk strategy with old friends, or simply look on respectfully as the best of the best show off their skills.

For the 2,000 fans and nearly 400 competitors that will stream through the doors over these four August days, this obscure warehouse is the center of a vibrant, competitive pinball subculture that is far from dead. This is the story of just some of those people.

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• SLIMMING DOWN After months of credible rumors Sony finally unveiled the PS3 Slim, a new model that’s 33% lighter, 36% smaller and, most importantly, $100 cheaper than the bulbous old PS3. The new Slim system removes the ability to install the Linux operating system though, drawing protests from the feature’s dedicated fan.
• Meanwhile, in Britain, Microsoft is reportedly planning to raise the price of the Xbox 360 from 130 pounds to 160 pounds. I know this is due to a weak exchange rate across the pond, but still, someone ought to tell them they’re going in the wrong direction…
• THE BLOODBATH CONTINUES According to NPD sales data released this week, every single video game system reported a year-over-year sales decline in July. The Wii was particularly hard hit, dipping to its lowest sales rate since systems were in short supply in March 2007. Even so, the Wii still handily outsold every other console on the market this month, so congatulations to Nintendo, the biggest shrinking fish in a smaller-than-ever pond.
• SURVEY SAYS: YOU SUCK! A survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released this week found that American gamers were more likely than non gamers to be fat and mentally unstable. On the other hand, the same study found the average gamer is now 35 years old, thus proving that GAMES AREN’T JUST FOR KIDS ANYMORE! YAY!
• MAGICAL MYSTERY SONG: Harmonix this week revealed 19 more songs for their highly anticipated Beatles: Rock Band game leaving the final track as a hidden surprise. The mystery track could be anything, but I’m secretly hoping for “Why Don’t We Do It In the Road.” Classic.
• LONG LIVE DEAD TREES Future Publishing this week announced a new official magazine devoted exclusively to World of Warcraft. I’d say this would make great bathroom reading for devoted players, but I’m pretty sure most of them are so hooked they’re taking the game with them to the toilet. Ew.
• TWENTY YEARS AGO this week, the Sega Genesis first hit store shelves. Also 20 years ago this week, I got my first Nintendo Entertainment System for my seventh birthday. Coincidence? I THINK SO!
• AND FINALLY this week a new Scribblenauts trailer showed Abe Lincoln shooting a giant crab with a mini-gun, which isn’t technically news… or historically accurate… but is definitely cool enough to earn and endlessly looping playback in this space. And that was The Week in Gaming for August 21, 2009.

By any measure, the Madden NFL series is a bona fide videogame phenomenon. Since its start on the Apple II way back in 1989, the series has consistently been at or near the top of the year-end videogame sales charts, generating over $2 billion in cumulative sales for publisher EA Sports. The game is a favorite among sports stars and celebrities, who frequently mention it as a favorite time-waster at home and during long road trips.

Madden’s popularity has spawned the Madden Challenge, a nationwide tournament with thousands of Madden players competing in 18 cities for a $50,000 top prize, and “Madden Nation,” a reality-television competition entering its fifth season on ESPN2 this fall. The Madden Curse, an urban myth surrounding the unlucky fate awaiting anyone picked as a Madden cover athlete, has become a household term, and a 2005 deal with the NFL has turned Madden into the only officially licensed version of America’s most popular sport.

This is a game that is almost impossible to ignore. And yet, for most of my life, I have successfully ignored it.

(full article)

Given its standing among developers, critics and fans, it’s surprising that there aren’t more games that blatantly rip off Super Metroid. Where Super Mario Bros., Street Fighter II and DOOM inspired whole movements of cash-in clones, Super Metroid‘s distinct item-based, nonlinear action-platforming has been confined primarily to two franchises: Metroid itself and Konami’s Castlevania series.

There are a few exceptions in recent memory — indie hit Cave Story, for one — but the subgenre has been coined “Metroidvania” precisely because of those two series. With the release of Shadow Complex, though, the genre may just have to be renamed. I’m still undecided on what that new name should be. Metroidvaniacomplex? Shadowmetroidvania?

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• TOUGH TIMES: Bionic Commando developer GRIN announced this week they were shutting down due to an “unbearable cashflow situation,” while Six Days in Fallujah developer Atomic Games said they’ve had to lay off “many” staffers while searching for a publisher for the controversial docu-game. Meanwhile, SEC documents filed this week showed Midway Europe Director Martin Speiss recently purchased the French and British arms of the crumbling company for… a single Euro? Wow… he got totally ripped off. OOOH BURN!
• Speaking of stretching your money, Nielsen Research reported gamers were spending 21% more time playing games this summer than last, despite buying fewer new games and systems. Yup, there’s nothing like a recession to make you appreciate all those old games you never had time to finish.
• LOOKING GOOOOOOD! A major update for the Xbox 360 Dashboard introduced new features such as synchronized Netflix movie-watching parties, downloadable versions of select retail games and the ability to purchase clothes for your avatar. Meanwhile, your local Goodwill announced a new program where you could spend that money on clothes for real people, y’know, if you were so inclined.
• ANNOUNCING ANNOUNCEMENTS! Square Enix president Yoichi Wada said in an interview with Japan’s IT Media that an announcement of the Final Fantasy XIII release date would be coming “in a few weeks.” Meanwhile, Sony announced they’d be “making an official announcement regarding our forthcoming Video Store, next week, at Gamescom.” So, consider yourself warned, I guess. In other news, it’s August and this is what passes for other news in August, OK?
• SAFE BETS: Raven Software designer Manveer Heir this week publicly offered to reimburse all receipt-holding purchasers of the upcoming Wolfenstein game, but ONLY if the game outsold the upcoming Madden NFL 2010 in August. So, wait, he’s essentially risking money against the success of his own game? That’s a little depressing, although, given the summertime sales success of previous Madden games… I can’t say I really blame him.
• Speaking of Madden, in honor of the game’s launch today, Walmart is lowering the price of a dozen roses to $8 for gamers who “may need some early forgiveness [from] gals who don’t want to feel ‘left out.’” Yeah, those flowers ought to shut her up while you spend all weekend sitting on the couch building the Lions into a Super Bowl caliber team.
• AND FINALLY this week we saw a video of a kid solving two Rubik’s cubes WHILE playing an Expert-level Ozzy Osbourne song in Guitar Hero. This isn’t technically important news but…. uh… sorry, I’m… I’m just mesmerized here. Um… that was the week in gaming. For August 14, 2009.

(Watch video)

Script:

• THE NUMBERS GAME! Newly released corporate earnings reports from Capcom, EA and Nintendo revealed some concrete software shipments numbers for a bunch of big name releases. Some highlights:
  Bionic Commando: 550 thousand
  EA Sports Active: 1.7 million
  The Sims 3: 3.7 million
  Resident Evil 5: 5 million
  Wii Fit: 21.82 million
  and Wii Sports: 47.62 MILLION? Good lord. Pretty soon they’re going to outpace those AOL discs.
• PRICE DROPS? HAH! Nintendo president Satoru Iwata said a Wii price drop is something “there aren’t a lot of discussions going on about” despite slowing system sales. No word from Sony on a PS3 price drop either, even though CEO and executive VP Nobuyuki Oneda admitted this week the system costs them 70% less to make now than it did back in 2006. And Microsoft? Well, they’re reportedly getting rid of their $300 “Core” system configuration, so… hmmm… is a price disappearance is kind of like a price drop.
• BETTER LATE THAN NEVER! Activision announced that a version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare will be coming to the Wii this holiday season. That’s the two-year-old original Modern Warfare, not the highly anticipated sequel. That one’s only coming to fancy systems like the Xbox 360, PS3 and, er, mobile phones… *cough*
• BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: PART II: Games joining the ever-increasing “delayed until 2010 list” include Activision’s Starcraft II, Capcom’s Dark Void and Ubisoft’s Splinter Cell Conviction and Red Steel 2. Some of these delays were actually announced last week, and I’d have told you about them then, but I was… delayed! Eh? See what I did there?
• UNNECESSARY PROTECTION This week we learned the German Collector’s Edition of Codemasters’ Operation Flashpoint 2 will reportedly include a full sized army helmet. Useful for deflecting all that shrapnel you’re likely to encounter SITTING ON THE COUCH!
• AND FINALLY this week, the publishers of Golden Tee 2010 produced this music video trailer to promote the game. Because nothing represents the world of golf better than… alt country… And that was The Week in Gaming for August 7, 2009

When I got done writing my Wii Sports Resort review last week, I looked around at some of the other reviews out there to see how my opinion matched up with the consensus. I wasn’t that surprised to see other critics give the game generally good but not spectacular reviews, earning it a good but not spectacular metascore of 80 on review aggregator Metacritic.

What did surprise me, however, was the wide range of opinions on each individual sport within the game.

There were a few offerings that the critics universally loved or hated, but opinions on the majority of the WSR mini-games ran the gamut from exquisite to execrable. While most of the final review scores for the game fell into a relatively narrow range, the particular way each critic arrived at those scores seemed to vary wildly. And while Metacritic gives a good aggregate opinion for the game as a whole, it doesn’t break down the critical consensus on each individual sport.

To fix this oversight, I decided to use a bit of pseudo-statistical analysis to figure out which sport was the generally agreed-upon “best” one on the disc. Call it boredom, call it morbid curiosity, call it a need to have my opinions validated by an outside force; but I just had to know. And once I knew, of course, I had to share it with you.

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Script:

• RED INK A slew of earnings reports this week showed Microsoft’s console and PC gaming sales DOWN 12 percent, Sony’s gaming and computer sales DOWN 37 percent and Nintendo’s Wii and DS sales DOWN 40%. On the software side, Ubisoft’s first quarter sales were DOWN 51% and Viacom said Rock Band sales were DOWN 41%. The one bright spot: THQ’s earnings were UP 77% on the strength of UFC and Red Faction: Guerrilla, proving once again that the road to riches is paved by hitting stuff.
• PUBLIC RELATIONS FAIL Electronic Arts courted controversy this week with a Dante’s Inferno “Sin to Win” promotion that asked Comic-Con attendees to post pictures of their “Acts of Lust” with booth babes. EA issued an apology, then picked this picture for a runner up prize, so… um… hmmm… yeah.
• SILVER SCREEN An updated list of games that may or may not be getting movies. Infamous, YES. Grand Theft Auto: NO! Myst, YES. Halo, NOT ANYMORE! Gears of War, YES! The Rock in Gears of War… apparently not, according to director Len Wiseman!
• WORKING THE SYSTEM London’s Telegraph newspaper reported this week on plans by psychiatrists to offer in-game counseling to addicted World of Warcraft players. In related news, Alcoholics Anonymous announced this week they’d start holding meetings at bars!
• POWER TO THE PEOPLE In Germany, an Internet petition protesting a potential violent game ban has garnered 68,000 signatures and forced a public hearing on the matter. Wait, an internet petition actually did something useful? That can’t be right… no apparently that’s right. Wow.
• FIFTEEN YEARS AGO this week, the newly formed Interactive Digital Software Association proposed a game rating system to Congress. Fifteen years later, nearly one in four parents apparently don’t generally care if little Billy wants to kill a bunch of virtual hookers.
• AND FINALLY THIS WEEK concept art has leaked out for “Epic Mickey” a secretive Warren Spector project for the Wii set in a post-apocalyptic, Disney-infused steampunk universe. Just like Uncle Walt envisioned decades ago.

In a way, Wii Sports Resort and its included Wii MotionPlus accessory represent an admission of failure on Nintendo’s part.

Since late 2005, Nintendo has been promising that the Wii Remote would change the way we played games by replacing button-presses with real-world motions. The original Wii Sports, packaged with the Wii, single-handedly sold millions of Wii systems at $250 a pop, many to people who had never before considered picking up a game console.

But Wii Sports‘ proof of concept for a marvelous, motion-controlled future was aided by a significant helping of smoke and mirrors. Extended play showed that the Remote wasn’t accurate enough to detect the angle of a tennis racket as it made contact with the ball, or correct swinging form in Baseball or Golf. The cracks in the motion-control scheme really started to show in the Boxing mini-game, with matches that universally devolved into a mess of random Remote- and Nunchuk-swinging that had little to no correlation to the action on-screen.

There was a ray of hope in the original Wii Sports: The bowling mini-game, unlike the others, showed the real promise of motion controls by accurately detecting the angle and power of your Remote swing as you hurled the virtual ball down the lane. Here, finally, was a game where the Wii Remote was used in a way that couldn’t be emulated by a traditional controller — where how you moved the Wii Remote was just as important as the fact that you were moving it at all.

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Script:

• THE SKY IS FALLING! NPD announced this week that June game sales suffered their worst year-over-year drop in nine years, with software sales off 29 percent and hardware sales down 38 percent. In happier news, the number of pundits calling gaming “recession-proof” plummeted nearly 100% this week.
• CROSS-PROMOTION The San Diego Comic-Con brought word of new comics based on God of War, Dead Space Extraction and Free Realms. In exchange, the world of comics is giving gaming a cameo appearance by Stan Lee in the upcoming Marvel Ultimate Alliance game. Uh… is it too late to trade back?
• YOU’RE THE STAR Harmonix this week announced the Rock Band Network, a new initiative that lets indie bands upload tracks for consideration as Rock Band downloads. So instead of pretending you’re in some of the world’s biggest musical acts, soon you’ll be able to pretend you’re that garage band from down the street that got seven people to show up for its last show. Whoo…?
• Speaking of USER CREATED CONTENT LittleBigPlanet celebrated the creation of its one millionth user-made level this week. MediaMolecule says it would take over five years to play through all of them… or over five minutes to play through all the good ones. AW SNAP!
• HOLLYWOODCRAFT Legendary Pictures announced this week that Sam Raimi is directing a film based on the Warcraft universe. Early reports indicate the main characters will spend the first hour of the movie killing small animals and standing in the middle of town, begging passersby to let him join their guild.
• ALTERNATE HISTORY 10 years ago this week, Steve Jobs introduced the original Halo at Macworld ’99. The game went on to help sell millions of Macintosh computers and cement Apple’s reputation as a company that cares about gamers… IN BIZARRO WORLD!
• LEGAL EAGLES New York state legislators this week passed a bill that bans playing video games while driving. In other news, apparently before now it was legal to play video games WHILE DRIVING in New York! Who knew?
• AND FINALLY this week, Activision unveiled the first trailer for Band Hero, which is apparently just like Guitar Hero… only for insanely beautiful people.

In this issue:

• Konami announces new line of barely interactive “LetsRelax” games
• UFC president challenges all EA Sports employees to a fight
• Sony, Microsoft preparing answers to Wii Vitality Sensor

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“Frankly … I’m ashamed. I have made myself a Twitter page and officially joined the world of technology. Perhaps Luke may help me update.”

With those words on June 29, 2009, what had been just a fictional character in a Nintendo DS game became a fixture on Twitter. Over the coming days and weeks, the TopHatProfessor account would post dozens of riddles and brainteasers of the type found in 2008′s Professor Layton and the Curious Village and the upcoming Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, soliciting answers from his slowly growing cadre of followers. Along the way, the professor happily answered questions about the upcoming title and shared little slices of life from his day, all without ever breaking character.
Many followers, this reporter included, were bemused and intrigued by what they assumed was a clever new viral marketing campaign put on by Nintendo ahead of Diabolical Box‘s August release. In reality, though, the TopHatProfessor account was the work of a lone college student and amateur game journalist, trying to get attention for a game he felt was being sorely neglected by publisher Nintendo and the media at large. The network of followers and related Twitter accounts that TopHatProfessor eventually attracted highlight the evolving effect that social networks are having on game journalism, PR and even fandom itself.

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With the global recession showing no signs of slowing down, millions of people are looking to save money any way they can. That doesn’t have to mean giving up the game you love, though. Here are some simple tips for stretching that gaming dollar further.Playing free games

Hey, have you heard of this thing called the Internet? It’s full of games, and a lot of them are absolutely free (legally free, I mean. If you’re looking to pirate games, try another article). The trick, of course, is finding the good ones amid the thousands and thousands of awful ones. Some good resources for picking the wheat from the chaff:

• 365 Days of Free — GamesRadar’s big list is all over the place re: quality, but should take a while to slog through regardless.
• Jay is Games — The best of Flash and downloadable casual games. Great time-wasters, all.
• IndieGames.com, The Weblog — Mostly free, entirely inventive games from small-name creators.

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The iPhone has brought a lot of unique features to portable gaming — a large, multi-touch screen, a tilt sensor and significant built-in storage among them. But one of the iPhone’s most revolutionary features is its large library of instantly accessible free games. Every previous portable system required at least a little bit of money, effort and forward planning to buy a game and take it along, in anticipation of future gaming on the go. Now, with the iPhone, you can download any one of thousands of free games the moment you find yourself with some free gaming time.

The question, of course, is whether any of these free games are worth your time. To find out, I thought I’d put the App Store to the test by downloading the top 25 free titles from the “All Games” category (based on number of recent downloads as of July 17, 2009), and playing each one for as long as it could hold my attention. The only caveat was a 15-minute time limit for each game — because if a free game holds your attention for at least 15 minutes, that’s pretty good!

With that said, let’s dive right in to the top free games:
1. Wooden Labyrinth 3D Lite

I had a love/hate relationship with my old tabletop Labyrinth game as a kid. I loved the concept, but I hated how much I sucked at manipulating those little knobs to guide the ball past the holes. The iPhone version, with its simple tilt controls, makes things more enjoyable. I’m surprised how accurate and realistic the physics are, and I love the way the 3-D perspective shifts as you tilt the unit, making the screen feel like a window into an alternate world. The randomly generated levels in this “Lite” version are hit-or-miss, but the variable difficulty ensures lot of replay value.

Time wasted: 15 minutes

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• PUSH ‘EM BACK PUSH ‘EM BACK WAAAAAY BACK!: A bunch of games are getting pushed back to 2010
• JAPANESE RPGs: Dragon Quest 9 sells 1 hojillion copies.
• PLATFORM SHUFFLING: A bunch of games get release for other systems.
• BORING EXERCISE: Konami announced rhythmic walking simulator “Lets Walk it Out” for the Wii
• FIGHTING WORDS: UFC president Dana White says he’ll blacklist fighters appearing in EA’s unlicensed Mixed Martial Arts game.
• RETURN OF THE KING:  MCV reports a new game feature King of Pop Michael Jackson has been in development for months and is due out by Christmas.
• AND FINALLY this week Activision announced a $150 “prestige edition” of Modern Warfare 2 that includes working night vision goggles.

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I was bit surprised to see last week that Bitmob’s Dan Hsu had compiled a list of the Top 10 Bad Things the Internet Brought to Gaming Journalism. Sure, the list made some good points, and was generally fair about considering opposing points of view. But overall, focusing a list solely on the problems caused by the Internet presents a pretty skewed picture of how the medium has changed game journalism over the last decade or two.

The simplest way to correct this skewed picture is obvious: a similar list of the top-10 good things the Internet has brought to game journalism. And here it is:

10. Community

While two Electronic Game Monthly readers had very little chance of interacting with each other (unless they happened to meet in real life), two readers of a videogame site can easily connect and share their common interests through comment threads and message boards. Sites like Destructoid and 1UP (and Bitmob itself!) work hard to cultivate this community, and make themselves into places people come not just to get information, but also to share their passion with like-minded people.

On the other hand: The “communities” surrounding many sites are either eerily silent or filled with trolls and fanboys that seem unable to carry on a serious conversation.

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With Major League Baseball taking a break for the All-Star Game this week, we thought it’d be a good chance to take a look at videogaming’s all-star performers for the first half of 2009. These are the games that brought something new and interesting to the table, the games we keep coming back to when we should be working, the games that we don’t want to forget about when it comes time for the year-end lists.

Top vote-getters

 

1. Plants vs. Zombies

What we said: “Before you know it, you’re deploying watermelon catapults to drive back rows of Zombonis (those are zombies on zambonis, don’tcha know?) while erecting a protective canopy of palm trees to protect your balloon-zombie-popping cacti from an overhead assault by zombies on bungee cords. The change is so gradual that it barely registers from level to level, but at some point you look up and realize that Plants vs. Zombies has grown from a small, insignificant seed into a complex, chaotic, fast-paced strategy game that’s as addictive as the best in the genre.” — Kyle Orland (Read his review)

Second-half prospects: The addiction has held on this long, but it may be a faded memory by the time 2010 rolls around. Upcoming versions for non-PC platforms, though, could bring it back — stronger than ever.

(full article)

RunnerFaith

 

Faith | Mirror’s Edge
OW! Just skinned my knee while jumping over razor wire. OwieowieowowowOW! F***!

 

skate.er
sk8r | Skate 2
@HallofMeat Just broke ten bones, including my skull. Good enough 4 U?

PacItUp
Pac-Man
Who the hell put a key in the middle of the maze? This thing is inedible. Blech!

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• POLITE REQUESTS Tecmo Koei CEO Kenji Matsubara mentioned in an interview with Computer & Video Games that he frequently asks Sony reps to quote,  ‘Please cut the price’ of the PlayStation 3.
• ECONOMICS In Japan, Enterbrain reports games sales are down 25% in 2009, but in the US Nielsen reports “hours played per week” has hit an all time high on the strength of strong used sales and rentals.
• WORLD OF WARCRAFT got an in-game client to read and send Twitter updates as well as a free version of casual gaming favorite Peggle.
• GAMES FOR HEALTH Bayer revealed the Didgit, a portable blood-glucose meter for the DS that unlocks in-game items through consistent testing.
• THEME PARKS Six Flags announced that it would feature the upcoming Wii Sports Resort in its theme parks.
• UNSURPRISING FOURS. This week EA revealed Command & Conquer 4, actress Mila Jovovich confirmed a fourth Resident Evil movie and Valve said that Left 4 Dead 2 has twice as many pre-orders as the original. Shocking…!
• AND FINALLY this week, the ScrewAttack Gaming Convention hosted to the world’s first NES cartridge blowing competition.

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In this volume:

• Report: 86 percent of your Xbox Live friends “watching a video or some shit”
• Tecmo/KOEI unenthusiastically reveals yet another Dynasty Warriors game
• Supermarket Sweep Live coming to Xbox Live Primetime

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In some ways, I’m probably the worst person possible to review this game.

For one, I’ve never played any of the original Monkey Island games. Call me a delinquent game journalist if you must, but despite the never-ending seas of critical praise for LucasArts’ classic PC adventure series, I’ve never bothered to figure out the Secret, cure the Curse, or try to Escape from Monkey Island (much less fend off LeChuck’s Revenge).

While I’ve hung around enough gamers to recognize the name Guybrush Threepwood and the joys of Insult Swordfighting, I’m definitely not part of the nostalgia-influenced market Telltale is targeting with this remake. This worried me a bit going into this review — I feared the game would be full of references to characters and events from a decade-old series I had no experience with. To Telltale’s credit, while I feel like I missed a few obvious inside jokes directed at Monkey Island veterans, for the most part Tales of Monkey Island works well as an introduction to the series.

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In this edition:

• Plastics!
• Sony Rumors!
• Game Movies!
• The Future!
• Real Time Protest!
• Fire Sale!
• Girl Gamers!
• And finally: 3D Glasses!

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What do you do when you’ve spent nearly a third of your life writing about games for a single company, only to see that company decline and be sold off as a faint echo of what it once was? If you’re Dan “Shoe” Hsu, the answer is simple — take a short break, then finally go into business for yourself.

An 11-year veteran of Ziff Davis Media, Hsu rose to be editor-in-chief of the magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly and editorial director for 1UP.com before leaving in April of 2008, just months before the magazine was shuttered and 1UP was sold to UGO. Since then he’s dabbled in freelancing for G4, launched a gaming video series with his girlfriend, and started a personal blog called Sore Thumbs with former EGMer Crispin Boyer. Then, just before E3, Hsu revealed his long-planned mystery project, Bitmob, a game site that relies on a mix of professional content from Hsu and some fellow Ziff Davis alums and community content written by Bitmob readers.

I talked to Hsu about his thoughts on the post-departure Ziff Davis, his vision for Bitmob and the future of the game journalism in general.

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Back at E3 2006, motion control was the star of the show for the first time, with the new Wii Remote drawing two hour lines at the show’s height. At E3 2009, motion control was again the big focus of the show, with Nintendo’s more accurate WiiMotionPlus; Microsoft’s camera-based, hand-controller-free Project Natal; and Sony’s best-of-both-worlds, camera-and-magic-wand Motion Controller demo. These new technologies understandably have developers, journalists and gamers excitedly imagining what kind of brand new, exciting game experiences might be possible in this brave new world of more accurate motion control.

Nuts to that. Why come up with all new game experiences when there are tons of classic games and franchises just begging to be remade for this new generation of controllers? Here’s a quick list of some games we want to see brought back for some motion-controlled fun.

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• Top Story: Bethesda buys id!
• Fighting Words: Activision’s Bobby Kotick disses the PS3
• Celebrities: Shia LeBeouf and Jack White are mad!
• Awards: Uncharted 2 wins the GCAs
• Apple: Releases new firmward for the iPhone/iPod Touch
• Portable Crime: Rockstar bringing ChinatownWars to the PSP
• Happy Birthday: Sonic turns 18
• Colorful News: New colors for the Wii in Japan
• And finally: Sony’s PlayStation Home held a Humans vs. Hamsters dance-off. Because apparently that’s a thing now…

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In this issue:

• Left 4 Dead 2 boycott group offers manifesto, new demands
• L.A. Convention Center Neighbors File Complaints Over E3
• Uwe Boll: I’d “like to ruin Fallout next.”

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The main point of a beta test is to let a small section of dedicated players figure out what works and what doesn’t before wider release to the general public. To that end, Beta Notes makes constructive criticism about what can and should be improved before the game goes gold.

This week: 1 vs. 100

Your basic trivia quiz with a massively-multiplayer twist, 1 vs. 100 lets players compete against each other on Xbox Live for multiple-choice supremacy. The regularly-scheduled Extended Play sessions offer a nonstop stream of canned questions, but the Live shows play out more like the show on which the game is based. In these two-hour sessions, one lucky player (“The One”) faces off against 100 randomly selected opponents (“The Mob”) to see who can last the longest without missing a question. As Mob members drop out, the prize pool of (thus-far imaginary) Microsoft Points gets bigger, until the One misses a question (letting the Mob split his winnings) or decides to stop (taking the prize for himself). Those not selected as the One or the Mob can play along as members of “The Crowd” for bragging rights.

What we like:

• The pacing: Questions and answers come at a good clip, with 37 questions in the average half-hour Extended Play episode. Plus, the quick answer timer makes it nearly impossible to Google for answers. Good move!
• The competition: Playing live against thousands of other players lets you revel in their ignorance when they miss an easy question en masse. Which is the whole point of trivia, after all.
• The interface: Bravo for compressing a lot of information on scoring, Mob and Crowd performance, and statistics into an easy and pleasant-to-read format.

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The Beatles created a revolution in rock music. Rock Band created a revolution in music videogames. Combine the two, and the revolutionary power is enough to topple every government on Earth!

Well, maybe not, but it’s still a pretty big deal. I sat down for a quick chat with Lead Designer Chris Foster about the development of The Beatles: Rock Band, his favorite bands and what’s next…

Crispy Gamer: When Harmonix’s Beatles game was first announced, Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos promised, “This game is not just a Rock Band song expansion pack.” How exactly is this not a Rock Band expansion pack?

Chris Foster: It’s interesting; at the time, we knew … the decision to acknowledge that it was a Rock Band game was one that came from both [the Beatles'] Apple [Corp.] and MTV. For the core gameplay, clearly there are significant changes, most notably the vocal harmony. But what’s key is that it’s a game really about the Beatles and telling their story. We don’t have the World Tour in there from Rock Band. It’s not about cash and stars and fans; they kind of had all the cash and fans they needed from the get-go. It’s not just about going through a bunch of live venues. It’s not the exact same game mechanics, like, again, with vocal harmony, so there was a real interest to make it its own thing and give it the care and attention it needed. That’s what was intended by the original statement.

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The 10-Cent Tour: David Crane’s cult NES puzzle-platformer, A Boy and His Blob, gets a long-overdue reboot on the Nintendo Wii.

1. The very first thing that strikes you about the game is the beautiful 2-D art and animation. Each area features its own hand-drawn backgrounds, complete with 10 to 12 layers of independent scrolling for a deeper look. The team estimates thousands of frames of animation have been made for an extremely smooth, rounded look reminiscent of “Winnie the Pooh,” “The Iron Giant” or, more recently, gaming’s Wario Land: Shake It!

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Matt Clark is a 29-year-old union staff representative and gamer from Dayton, Ohio. Like most gamers, he’s always dreamed of being able to go to E3. Unlike most gamers, he actually got to live out his dream this year.

Clark was one of a handful of gamers that won the chance to help cover E3 as part of contests held by major media outlets. He earned his chance to help cover the show for 1UP.com with a tongue-in-cheek blog spot that made merciless fun of his fellow entrants. At the show, Matt filed dozens of blog posts on everything from his favorite games to goofy, man-on-the-street interviews about a fake game.

Clark said he’d been following E3 closely for over a decade and considered it “a gaming mecca.” Even after years of mental preparation, though, he said he still wasn’t totally prepared for his pilgrimage. “I guess I didn’t anticipate the enormity of it,” he said after the show. “I mean, it’s just so much to take in. I felt like I had a serious ADD spaz-out the first half of the first day. Don’t get me wrong, I knew it was going to be huge … I guess I just never imagined how hard it would be to try and see everything.”

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Kyle Orland: “Was he super-excited to see the Beatles?”

This was, apparently, the first and only thing my father-in-law asked my wife about my trip to E3 this week — the only bit of news about the gaming show that had broken through to his decidedly non-gaming consciousness. Unfortunately, my wife had to report that I didn’t have any reaction to the appearance of the remaining Beatles and their widows at Microsoft’s pre-show press conference. Because I was in an airplane at the time. Flying out to E3. To cover the week’s big events. Like the FREAKING BEATLES showing up at the FREAKING MICROSOFT PRESS CONFERENCE that I FREAKING MISSED.

I’m a pretty huge Beatles fan myself, so you can imagine my distress when I finally landed in L.A. and saw the MTV Games PR email announcing the Beatles appearance I had just missed. For over a day I beat myself up for my poor planning and the vagaries of Southwest Airlines’ fare structure, which caused the situation.

But then I caught an archived video of the Microsoft presentation online and, quite frankly, I got over my disappointment quite quickly.

Had I been in the room, I’m sure I would have been caught up in the emotion of the moment, and taken part in the standing ovation that greeted Paul and Ringo’s appearance. But from my detached view on a hotel-room bed with a laptop, I didn’t see what the big deal was about their awkward, 30-second photo op. They didn’t play a song. They didn’t play the game. They didn’t field questions from the press or give any insight into their storied careers or even talk about the experience of helping design their first videogame. They just came out, bantered awkwardly about the incredible awesomeness of themselves and their game for a bit, then left as quickly as they’d entered.

None of this really matters, in the end. The appearance did its primary job of giving mainstream news outlets the hook they needed to break through both my father-in-law’s awareness threshold and the wall of indifference with which they greet most videogame news. But it almost seems like a waste that these two amazing musicians, who no doubt still have a lot to share with the world, have so far been reduced to mere promotional puppets for their first foray into the videogame industry.

Not that I mind too much. If I’d missed a full-on performance or an in-depth interview with THE FREAKING BEATLES because I was on a plane, I’d probably still be bawling softly to myself.

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The 10-Cent Tour: Despite the continuing legal battle, the turntable-based rhythm game Scratch: The Ultimate DJ was actually playable at a party adjacent to this year’s E3, which is more than could be said for Activision’s competing DJ Hero.

1. It’s Beatmania. Seriously, if you’ve played any of Konami’s Beatmania games, you know what to expect: notes falling from the top of the screen; you tapping buttons in time as they reach the bottom (and occasionally scratching a turntable in special sections). The concept’s pretty simple, and the single row of five buttons means the challenge tops out well below that of the Beatmania games, but the well-timed note patterns and quality sound samples made good use of the thumping club music.

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The 10-Cent Tour: The included-with-every-Wii game that brought virtual bowling and golf to nursing homes the world over returns. Wii Sports Resort includes some more action-oriented games and a new controller accessory that makes the Wii Remote more accurate.

1. It all starts with skydiving. To get players used to the Wii MotionPlus accessory, the game uses a skydiving Mii making a series of simple mid-air formations as an analogue for the Remote — leaning down to go faster, or splaying out to slow down. The added responsiveness and accuracy of the peripheral are immediately apparent from the first moment of play.

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The 10-Cent Tour: It’s Wii Fit … plus some new stuff!

1. Let’s get the boring stuff out of the way first. As the trailer shows, there’s a smattering of six new yoga poses and strength-trainers for those of you who like to use your Wii Balance Board for boring stuff. Wii Fit Plus also lets you arrange these training exercises into timed sets that focus on a specific part of your body (hips, legs, etc.). Zzzzzzzzz.

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E3 is such a massive show that it’s incredibly easy to spend the entire three days just immersed in the biggest, most buzz-worthy games on display. But those who took the time to trawl through the hidden corners of the emptier booths could stumble upon some unexpected gems. These are the games that demand to be noticed for their originality and quality gameplay, not their marketing budgets. Here’s a quick look at some of the easiest-to-miss but hardest-to-ignore games of the show.

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We saw many funny, silly, surreal things at last week’s E3. In fact, some of those funny, silly, surreal things were actually us. After processing everything over the weekend and letting our rum hangovers fade, we’d like to hand out a round of unconventional awards for all of those small, unrecognized moments that may have passed most of you by last week.

Without further ado, here are CG’s E3 2009 Unwards. Ladies and gentlemen: Give them all a nice round of un-applause, will you? You are all un-winners!!!!

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The 10-Cent Tour: This Halo 3 expansion features a new protagonist, a new urban campaign and a new multiplayer mode.

1. You are not Master Chief. Instead, Halo 3: ODST gives you control over … an ODST (Orbital Drop Shock Trooper) referred to simply as “The Rookie.” Set between Halo 2 and Halo 3, you’ll explore bombed-out urban environments looking for clues to the fate of your missing teammates. These clues trigger flashbacks in the form of cut scenes and even gameplay vignettes where you control other ODSTs.

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The 10-Cent Tour: Mario returns to his two-dimensional roots with a new focus on multiplayer mayhem in New Super Mario Bros. Wii.

1. The game seems to combine the best bits from old Mario games. You can pick up fellow players and throw them, evoking Super Mario Bros. 2. There’s the idea of transformational suits from Super Mario Bros. 3 (more on those below). Mario and friends have the spin jump from Super Mario World and the butt-stomp from Super Mario 64. Yoshi can eat item-granting berries as in Super Mario World, and has his mid-air flutter jump from Yoshi’s Island. It’s like Mario’s greatest gameplay hits.

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The 10-Cent Tour: You know Rock Band? Well, The Beatles: Rock Band has songs from the Beatles in it. I know, right?

1. Besides the new songs, the biggest gameplay addition is the option for three-part harmonies. Three color-coded bars scroll along the standard vocal track area, allowing each player to find their appropriate tone with ease. During sections without harmony, all three singers can help each other out on the single vocal track. Harmonix calls the setup “constructive harmony,” meaning, basically, “you don’t get penalized for being awful if someone is good.”

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So you’re pretty good at games, huh? If only there was a way to prove it to the world. Oh, wait, there is: The Twin Galaxies Intergalactic Scoreboard is the Guinness-endorsed clearinghouse for videogame high scores, and adding your name to the list is easier than you think (and I should know: I have the world record in Balloon Fight, Game C).

How can you follow in my footsteps? Read on.

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In this issue:

• Exclusive: Kojima working on countdown clock-based game
• The Rumor Monger presents: E3 predictions
• Win a trip to E3 from the Fryer!

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A strong first impression: It’s important for meeting new people and it’s just as important for meeting new games. These days, those gaming first appearances increasingly come during flashy E3 press conferences, where game publishers and hardware makers give presentations that can make or break important product launches.

These conferences have had their fair share of embarrassing, exciting or just plain inexplicable moments since E3 made its start back in 1995. We’ve chronicled what we think are the 10 most memorable of these moments below, but there were many more that didn’t make the cut. Check out the honorable mentions for more E3 press conference goodness.

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In a little over a week, thousands of journalists and game critics will be among the tens of thousands of industry members descending on the Los Angeles Convention Center for the Electronic Entertainment Expo. But 29 of these critics enjoy a special position in the throng. They’re the judges in the E3 Game Critics Awards (GCAs), and they’re among the most important tastemakers and kingmakers on the show floor.

While the GCAs aren’t directly affiliated with E3 itself, they’ve become the de facto independent standard for evaluating the show’s hottest playable games since their start in 1998. Winning a GCA sets a game apart from the hundreds of games that come out each year, and helps drive the kind of hype and pre-release coverage that can lead to greater interest and sales when the final game eventually comes out. Indeed, winners of the GCA’s 16 categories are often among the best-selling games of the year, and marketers use the “Game Critics Award Winner” badge on game advertisements and boxes as a mark of the game’s quality.

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Today’s virtual racing fans have an embarrassment of riches at their feet. From realistic simulations to arcade-style driftfests to futuristic hover-racing to weapon-based vehicular combat, the genre is as broad as it is deep.

But today’s varied racing-game market is the result of a steady, 35-year progression in technology and game design. With the Indy 500 coming up, we’ve compiled a list of the 10 most important innovations that fueled that progression.

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Even in the context of its PlayStation release in late 1997, Klonoa: Door to Phantomile looked a bit anachronistic. Coming a year after Super Mario 64‘s wide-open three-dimensional worlds, Klonoa was still confined to a linear, two-dimensional plane, using graphical trickery to evoke a 3-D feel. In a time when games like Final Fantasy VII were changing the way we looked at epic videogame storytelling, Klonoa seemed to revel in a simple narrative that didn’t resort to fancy CGI cut scenes. Even in 1997, Klonoa smacked of a gaming past that was quickly receding — a past where bright, colorful levels and mine-cart excursions and collecting 100 freaking gems for an extra life weren’t just accepted, but expected, parts of what gaming was.

Over a decade later, all those anachronisms still remain in the recent Wii re-release of Klonoa. Rather than dating the game, though, they make it a delightfully charming throwback to a style of gaming that seems quaint and nostalgic.

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In this issue:

• Nintendo DS being traded as currency in Japan
• New group seeks to preserve Duke Nukem Forever jokes
• StatSheet: Preparing for E3

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When I talk about the subject of blogs (and videogame blogs in particular) with fellow journalists, PR people, developers and readers, I keep hearing the same few complaints:

• Blogs just publish press releases and stuff from other outlets. They don’t do any original writing.
• Blogs just post fluff like screenshots and rumors and pictures of cakes. They don’t publish real news.
• All the blogs just steal stuff from each other (and the partisan corollary, [Blog A] just steals everything from [Blog B]).

While these arguments may apply to some blogs (and have perhaps fit all of blogging at one point), they didn’t really apply to my experience writing for Joystiq from 2006 through 2008. Sure, a lot of our day was spent summarizing and linking to the work of other people, and we posted our fair share of screenshot galleries and picture of cakes. But we also did a lot of original reporting, and wrote consumer-focused reviews, previews and other features that tended to get lost amidst the never-ending drumbeat of news posts.

Of course, I could make this firsthand argument to anyone who cared to listen, but I never had any hard data to back up my claims. Until today.

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It starts out small. So small, in fact, that it’s hard to imagine it ever growing into anything. When the first level of Plants vs. Zombies rolls out a single lane of grass, and asks you to click falling sunbeams for fuel to grow a pea-shooting plant that can hold off a line of slow-marching zombies, it’s easy to assume the worst. They’ve dumbed down the tower defense game! They’ve over-simplified things for the Bejeweled crowd! They’ve turned a proud, new strategy genre into a glorified click-fest with cutesy graphics!

But then the game adds new branches to this simple trunk. First it lets you harness more sunbeams with crucial, resource-producing sunflowers. Then it introduces new, tougher zombies that require more firepower from new, tougher (and more expensive) plants. Then you’re battling it out on nighttime levels where short-range fungus shooters can grow like weeds (except where there are zombie-producing gravestones). Before you know it, you’re deploying watermelon catapults to drive back rows of Zombonis (those are zombies on zambonis, don’tcha know?) while simultaneously erecting a protective canopy of palm trees to protect your balloon zombie-popping cacti from an overhead assault from zombies on bungee cords.

The change is so gradual that it barely registers from level to level, but at some point you look up and realize that Plants vs. Zombies has grown from a small, insignificant seed into a complex, chaotic, fast-paced strategy game that’s as addictive as the best in the genre.

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Nintendo’s never been one to leave well enough alone when it comes to hardware. The original Nintendo Entertainment System begat a smaller, top-loading version of the system near the end of its life. The original Game Boy gave way to the smaller, sharper Game Boy Pocket. The clunky Game Boy Advance preceded the svelte, flip-folding Game Boy Advance SP, which itself preceded the tiny, tiny Game Boy Micro.

So it is with the Nintendo DS. After overhauling the original 2004 system with the smaller, sleeker DS Lite upgrade in 2006, Nintendo still couldn’t stop tinkering. The DSi, released in North America on Apr. 5, 2009, again refines Nintendo’s dual-screen portable with a new form factor, new multimedia features and even a new online shop from which to download new games.

Is all this newness worth the $169.99 sticker price? Read on to find out.

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In this issue:

• GameStop under fire for recommending bad games
• Reporter’s Notebook: CAPTIVATE09 in Monte Carlo
• “Jake and the Fatman” star “hopeful” for game revival in wake of Mr. T announcement
• Sega announces new compilation of best compilation games

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The Skinny: Seven years after the U.S. government got into the games business in a big way with the first America’s Army, the game gets a major update with a focus on realism and new technology in America’s Army 3.
1. It’s about “outreach, not recruiting.” That’s according to PR Director Lori Mezoff, who explained that there are no recruiters in the game pestering the best players to sign up, “The Last Starfighter”-style. It’s more about “telling the Army story,” Mezoff said, providing a feel for the Army life and letting that attract people. Is it working? According to Mezoff, 30 percent of young Americans have played an America’s Army game, and 30 percent of those players say they’re more likely to enlist in the Army because they played. You do the math.

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I noticed a weird bit of subject synchronicity when scanning through my gaming Web comics yesterday. Both VGCats and Real Life Comics seemed to be hammering home the same somewhat crotchety message: Today’s gamers aren’t worthy; we had REAL gamers back in our day, dagnabbit!

I’ve got to say, I’m getting a little tired of this kind of us-versus-the-newcomers mentality among the “hardcore” gaming set. Yes, more people are playing games now, but this is not a bad thing! In fact, it’s been vital to making the industry as exciting and varied and downright enjoyable as it is today.

The argument that new gamers are somehow ruining the industry is not new. Penny Arcade laid out the case back in 2001 as part of a four-part series of comics analyzing why “videogames suck now” (as the introduction put it). The problem started, apparently, when Sony tried to market the PlayStation to “the same f***ing guys who used to beat us up in P.E. They’d never turned into an eggplant in Kid Icarus. They had friends and girls and sports. Why did they need games?”

Believe me, I get where this argument is coming from. Games were an overwhelming, integral part of my youth. From just before I got my first NES at age seven through about my senior year of high school, practically the only way I interacted with my peers was by either playing games or talking about them. Games gave this shy, scrawny kid a vital social outlet that helped him get through adolescence relatively pain-free with a group of other awkward, like-minded children, and I’ll be forever indebted to the medium for that.
But back to Penny Arcade’s eight-year-old question, echoed in this week in other Web comics: “Why did they need games?” The answer is, of course, they didn’t need them. But that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t want them, if they were offered in the right way. More importantly, it doesn’t mean they don’t deserve them now.

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