Microsoft’s Flight Simulator series has a history stretching back to around 1980-1982. With the release of Flight in early 2012, and the abrupt stop to its development and support in late 2012, the series seems to have come to an inglorious end.

To understand exactly what went wrong with Flight, one needs to understand the series’ development history. Many aspects of the Flight Simulator engine were gradually improved, seeing advances with every release, being built upon the previous game little by little. Indeed, the last public release of the traditional Flight Simulator engine was a long descendant from the original Microsoft Flight Simulator release in 1982.

The last major release of the Flight Simulator series before Flight was Flight Simulator X (otherwise known as FSX or FS10.0) released in 2006. At this point, the series was mature enough and advanced enough to feature realistic air traffic control, realistic AI aircraft, realistic 3D weather updated in real time from real sources, scenery featuring dynamically-generated buildings and trees, and an engine powerful and capable enough to handle extremely detailed add-ons. Some add-ons, especially releases by the PMDG, were so detailed that they were used by real-world pilots to practice procedures for aircraft as complicated as the Boeing 747-400.

See those buttons? You can click them.

The Flight Simulator series and engine finally came to a very quiet end in 2009 and 2010, after Microsoft shut down the ACES Studios development team (not to be confused with the ACES development team which developed the Ace Combat series), whose staff had worked on the series for nearly three decades.

Soon after, the Flight Simulator engine was sold to Lockheed Martin, who further developed the engine as Prepar3D to make it FAA-certified and suitable for training simulations. Amusingly enough, many former ACES Studios team members were hired by Lockheed Martin to work on Prepar3D, and the simulator is fully backwards-compatible with every add-on for Flight Simulator X. In the commercial instruction market, Prepar3D is a very successful contender against X-Plane due to its high customizability and manufacturer support.

When Microsoft announced that it would finally release a new flight simulation game built on a completely new engine which took advantage of modern computers, to be released in 2012, the flight simulation community was optimistic. This was a chance for a new beginning, and in-game videos and screenshots were promising.

When Microsoft released Flight on February 29, 2012, the reaction was less than stellar. Even though the game was free-to-play, it flopped hard. It flopped hard enough that Microsoft announced just five months later on July 25 that the game’s development would be discontinued entirely. The game was disowned so completely by Microsoft that Flight’s entire dev studio was shut down later on, and the last update to the game was on September 25. Flight lasted for just over half a year.

X-Plane offered realism across a wide range of aircraft and pulled no punches about being a simulation.

Flight was technologically and graphically superior to any of its predecessors, and was graphically superior to X-Plane, so why did the game flop so hard? Simply put, Microsoft aimed Flight at the wrong audience, put it on the wrong platform, ignored existing competition, and supported the game in the wrong ways.

First of all, Flight was targeted towards casual fans of flight simulation. It was a light game featuring an emphasis on light missions in the vein of the easy missions from Flight Simulator X. The game’s premier aircraft was the Icon A5, itself an aircraft aimed squarely at the sporty, rich, recreational pilot. The aircraft’s control panel and systems design was designed specifically to be as close to a standard car as possible. The aircraft itself was designed hot on the heels of the FAA’s new “Sport Pilot” license also aimed at the sporty, rich, recreational pilot.

In all aspects, Microsoft’s choice of making the Icon A5 the poster boy of the game perfectly reflects Microsoft’s target demographic. This is a far cry from the usual flight simulator audience of serious simmers, and the game’s design was opposed to that audience from the get-go. Seeing as how Microsoft has only sold around 5 million copies of its flight simulators in the past 10 years, its decision to cast off its previous user base was a large gamble. The gamble, it seems, didn’t pay off.

The Icon A5 is Flight in a nutshell.

Second, the game was very computationally demanding. The minimum requirements were around the range of a mid-high range consumer computer, while its recommended requirements were around the range of a dedicated enthusiast machine. In addition, Flight was only available through digital distribution. Its 10+ GB download raised the barrier of entry far beyond that of the casual gamer wanting a quick flight. The game’s requirement of the notoriously finicky Games for Windows Live interface did nothing to help ease accessibility for the casual player, and was a red alert for the enthusiast gamer.

Third, the game abandoned the 30-year tradition of having an easy, accessible add-on interface. Microsoft locked down the add-on system to push downloadable content in the form of aircrafts or scenery. This was Microsoft’s attempt to exploit the burgeoning free-to-play market of the time, offering the game for free but offering further additions at a price. There was talk of allowing third-party add-on makers to release add-ons for Flight, but through Microsoft’s marketplace system, with Microsoft receiving a cut of any paid add-on content. In the end it was largely idle talk that never came to anything, and Flight never received any third-party content at all.

There are over 10 add-ons running in the background of this scene from Flight Simulator X.

Fourth, the game was very low on content out of the box. Players were limited to Hawaii Island and three free aircraft. A further 9 aircraft could usually be bought at a price of $6.99 each, the rest of the Hawaiian Islands could be bought for $19.99, and a large part of Alaska could be bought for $14.99. If a player bought every bit of DLC, they’d end up with 11 aircraft, would be limited to the Hawaiian Islands and Alaska, and would have spent around $100 in total. Out of those 11 aircraft, only 3 had internal cockpit views.

In comparison, buying both Flight Simulator X Deluxe and its Acceleration expansion pack on release for around $90 would have allowed the player to go anywhere in the world, featuring 27 aircraft all fully modelled, 45 high-detail airports, 38 high-def cities, and over 55 missions. This is before the addition of the literal myriad of add-ons both free and purchasable online.

Fifth, the game already had a direct market competitor in X-Plane’s mobile versions, which are out for both iOS and Android platforms. The mobile versions of X-Plane also feature more aircraft and more scenery “out of the box” than Flight, in addition to having more purchasable aircraft and scenery at individual prices far less than Flight’s offerings. Most importantly, the mobile versions of X-Plane had a major advantage over Flight in that not only were they not 10GB in size, but they were actually mobile. The barrier of entry was near-zero due to the ubiquity of smartphones, and cost far less than Flight to have an equivalent experience. To add a further twist of the knife, the mobile versions of X-Plane have third-party add-on support.

A reliance on simplistic mechanics cemented Flight‘s status as nothing more than a game.

In the end, Flight was a game touting itself as the successor to the Flight Simulator series while missing almost every single key feature that made the series so popular. The game lacked scenery, a wide variety of aircraft, global travel, AI aircraft, air traffic control, realistic weather, a wide variety of aircraft, a high degree of simulation, any sort of radio navigation procedures whatsoever, and most importantly, add-on support. Not since 1988 had the series included such a small amount of features. Flight was aimed towards a market that was simply not there, while simultaneously scoffing at the enormous market of dedicated aviation fans that had been there for decades. Flight is so infamous in the simulation community that the developers of X-Plane even joke about it on their official website.

Design that was mediocre at best, marketing that was confusing under any circumstances, a barrier of entry too high for any casual player to hop over, and a level of complexity that was far too low for simulation fans all combined to make Flight an enormous flop that may have signalled the complete end of the series. With Microsoft tight-lipped concerning any further flight simulation games, especially considering how quickly it dropped Flight, the future of the series looks bleak. With the increased development of X-Plane and Microsoft’s spurning of the simulation market, the series may not recover even if Microsoft wants to give it another shot.

“The system is based on a different core architecture, so back-compat doesn’t really work from that perspective,” Microsoft Xbox Live VP Marc Whitten responded to The Verge’s question about backward-compatibility. For Microsoft, as for Sony, the next generation means a switch to a different type of architecture (x64 for Xbox One and x86 for PlayStation 4) that is simply not compatible with any of the software made for either Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. While Sony promises that the content will be available in the future via the company’s Gaikai streaming service, Microsoft explains that it does not plan to get rid of the Xbox 360 and that no such service is in the works for Xbox One. Achievements, GamerScore points and Entertainment downloads will be transferable to the new console though.

Whitten debunked the requirement for being always connected to the internet, but said that this will be something that might change from game to game as developers are free to use Microsoft’s Azure service to host a part of the game in the cloud and, therefore, make always-on a necessity to play their game. This contradicts what Phil Harrison, Microsoft’s Vice President, told Kotaku at the event in Redmont where he mentioned that Xbox One has to establish an internet connection every 24 hours.

A Microsoft representative in an email to Wire confirmed though that games will feature a mandatory installation after which they will be tied to a user account, similar to Steam or Origin. What is different from those services though, is that if the disk would be used with a different account, the owner would be given an option to pay a fee and install the game either way. The price was not specified and we can guess that the details are still being ironed out and should be announced at E3.

Source: The Verge; Wired, Kotaku

We wanted to take the Planescape franchise into a different direction and present the players and fans with a different, more direct experience than before. Planescape: TormentZ, a visceral cinematic first person shooter, takes place in a fantastic world where The Nameless One….

Your throat becomes dry, a clot forms in your stomach and tears stream down your swollen red cheeks.

Why do we react this way?

Franchises are a great way for rights holders to create a packaged product with a set identity. In a way it is comparable to a brand, it distinguishes itself and sets customer expectation towards the product.

In other media, franchising functions mostly by having distinguishable characters or settings which then are expanded into other media. Take, for example, Star Wars as a media franchise; it was created with the original trilogy and later expanded into novels, video games, animated movies, and comics.

The “expanded universe” of the novels tells stories set in the same universe, sometimes even thousands of years before the events of the original movies. Games like The Old Republic use the familiar film-imagery and certain canonized elements to tell stories in the accepted Star Wars setting.

The Star Wars franchise is flexible because it came from the film medium, from the setting and characters of the first movies, it is not tied to a specific style or technique. As long as certain canonized elements are present, there could be a Star Wars comedy show, period drama, or musical without damaging its identity.

When talking about franchising in video games however, the situation is quite different.

Genres in older media are predominantly about subject matter and intimately tied into their setting, but with video game franchises the interactive nature and its current taxonomy by arbitrary gameplay genres do not behave like older media.

In video games the inception of a franchise is tied to its gameplay genre, and therefore intimately tied to its mechanics. The franchise identity rests on the recognizability of gameplay and mechanics, and rightfully so, since the gameplay genre decides the branding, demographic and marketing strategies employed to hit the target audience.

A change in gameplay genre, most often associated with game reboots, is often perceived as a disastrous move. After all, the current audience has built an expectation of the franchise. Instead of fostering the audience already in place, a change in franchise identity discards them and tries to capture a new one, people get upset.

Some more upset than others.

Of course setting isn’t unimportant in franchising a video game, but it is just one part of the equation when it comes to its identity.

The recent reboot of Syndicate (2012) into a first-person shooter kept most of the setting intact: the cyberpunk imagery, the corporatism, and the themes of control were still all there, but the genre changed significantly from a real-time tactical game to a first-person action-shooter.

What attracted players to Syndicate in 1993 isn’t the same that would attract them in 2012.

Sometimes the change of identity is justified as a calculated risk, especially if the change is to reel in a new audience. However, what marketeers seem to oftentimes forget is that reeling in a new audience is as hard as creating a new one out of whole cloth.

If we take Syndicate as an example, the change was largely justified from a marketing standpoint. The Syndicate IP was dead in the water since 1996, and rebooting it in a new form could have made it relevant again. With video games, sixteen years of inactivity means that at least five hardware generations have passed (in the case of PC gaming, more than that), and chances are that only a small percentage of the currently possible audience actually even remembers the IP in the first place.

The problem came with choosing the franchise’s new identity to be an FPS, where it would compete in a saturated market-space with some of the strongest and most successful IPs in existence. Syndicate was never a strong enough franchise to compete with the giants in the first place, not to mention on what could be now considered their home-turf.

Syndicate 2012 tried to compete with the big boys on their home turf.

Conversely, Fallout could be seen as a good example of a successful franchise identity transition.

Fallout 3 changed its effective genre from isometric turn-based tactical RPG, to a first-person real-time action-pause RPG. In the case of Fallout, the genres were still very similar and did not impact the perception of the audience (enough) to warrant significant push-back from the established audience.

Furthermore, in the realm of first-person RPGs, it was unique enough to establish its own identity clearly without competing with the top-dogs of the industry.

Unfortunately successful does not necessarily mean good in design and gameplay context.

Fallout made a successful transition of franchise identity.

Franchising is a process for creating repeat customers through branding. The purpose of a franchise or brand is to standardize expectations from your customers or audience. Apple has a certain image attached to its brand, and if this identity is changed it might lead to reduced sales. The manipulation of perception is a powerful thing in marketing and branding.

For the customer, franchising (just like branding) is useful as well. We get a set of attributes packaged and tied up neatly with a bow, a convenient shortcut for our tastes, and can set our expectations rightly for experience and content. We know what to expect, and the marketing knows they can expect our dollars.

When these expectations are not fulfilled, our reaction is often emotional because we feel like we have been tricked to invest into something that didn’t follow the rules. We feel like our expectations, our trust, has been betrayed.

A franchise’s identity can be changed, it can even be changed successfully, but more often than not the process involves diminishing returns on a long term basis. What certainly doesn’t help is rejecting the franchise’s original audience by principle, as a recent example involving a haircut has shown.

A change in identity can create more harm than good in a myriad of different ways, that can have repercussions on more than just the franchise itself. The emotional response can damage the producers or developers image, or it can lead to a person not investing into franchises anymore, forming a sort of cynical immunity to marketing.

Of course the mileage varies from person to person depending on the level of involvement by each individual.

Nevertheless, changing a franchise’s identity is a risky move, and if a company keeps repeating the same mistakes it might find itself in a spiral of diminishing trust from its audience. However, that’s not the only risk; it also reinforces an industry-wide standard of negative expectation, just like there is one with movie tie-in games.

Following today’s reveal from Microsoft regarding their newest console, Ubisoft wasn’t far behind to announce their games’ availability on the next-gen system. Both Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag along with Watch Dogs are going to be available on the Xbox One.

Co-founder and CEO of Ubisoft, Yves Guillemot, regards the next-gen lineup with praise. “The next generation of consoles will reinvigorate our industry and make it possible for us to deliver incredible new entertainment to gamers,” he said, also making sure to note the potential for immersion, connectivity, and social gaming. Whether the Xbox One will cover the needs of Ubisofts Uplay service or if they will implement something more robust for the console was not mentioned.

As for future planning, Ubisoft promises to release more of their own IPs and existing titles to come within twelve months after the Xbox one’s launch. Fans can look forward to more Raving Rabbids in the next-gen age.

Source: Press Release

After years of leaks and rumors, Microsoft has finally revealed their followup to the Xbox 360. What is is called? Neither 720 nor Infinity it turns out, but instead the Xbox One.

Tellingly enough, the big reveal was kicked off not with games, but with Skype and live television. The Xbox One will feature something called “Snap Mode” which will allow users to run two activities simultaneously. This means watching a movie while browsing the internet, while Skyping, etc.

“Team Xbox is on a new mission,” said Don Mattrick, president of the interactive entertainment business at Microsoft. The emphasis is on entertainment in all forms rather than just games. Yay?

He said the goal is to build a system that lines up games, television and software, and that the most important part is that it must be “simple, instant and complete.”

“It is time for technology to step behind the curtain and you and your entertainment to take the stage,” Mattrick said.

The Xbox One will come with an enhanced version of Kinect. The entire console will be voice controllable from the moment you power it up. Enhanced gesture recognition is also confirmed. What’s more, Kinect will now to be able to capture video in 1080p and is sensitive enough to read your heartbeat while exercising. Surprise surprise, so far this is all sounding very much in line with what we’ve been hearing about the console all this time.

The Xbox One has 8GB of RAM, a Blu-ray drive, and native 64-bit architecture. It includes a 500GB onboard hard drive, HDMI in and out with passthrough capabilities for use with your existing home theater setup, and 802.11n Wi-Fi. To top it all off, it packs an 8-core CPU and USB 3.0 connectivity. These specs are more or less what we’ve been hearing, and put the console just about dead even with the PS4 specs wise.

The big advantage of the Xbox One is said to be its architecture, according to Microsoft’s Marc Whitten. He claims that the system combines three different operating systems into one to deliver a seamless transition between games, apps, and live entertainment. Both you standard Xbox architecture and Windows are present in the Xbox One, linked together via a third OS that handles fast switching between multi-tasking apps.

“THE CLOUD” is back and better than ever in Xbox One. Xbox One Live is said to have over 15,000 servers backing user data up. Your console’s media content, games and save files can all be stored on these servers, allowing for better portability and migration from one system to another. There is, of course, also the capability to record your gameplay, similar to what has been seen in the PS4.

All in all there have been very few surprises so far coming out of this event. It seems just about everything there was to know has already been known for months. I’m very disappointed at the lack of games being shown off. In fact, the only thing I can honestly say I’m mildly interested in so far is the new controller design, if only because it looks like a slight improvement on the existing design. Look at that D-pad!

The Xbox One launches globally later this year. Pricing, for the moment, remains unknown.

Source: TechCrunch

Genre: Interactive Story
Release Date: May 15th 2013 (Final Version)
Developer: Will O’Neill
Rating: 18+
Platform: PC
Retail: $5 USD

Actual Sunlight comes with its own health warning: not because it contains excessive amounts of violence and gore like your average 18+ game, but because it centres on extremely mature themes – namely depression and suicide – in ways that scant few others dare to. That alone should be a good indicator of whether or not you want to be playing this game, since the subject matter – accentuated with adult language – may be a little too difficult to stomach for some.

For those of you who are still interested, Actual Sunlight is an interactive story taking you into the dark recesses of the mind of Evan Winter, a nobody in his late twenties who is stuck in a dead-end job and binges on junk food and video games. All of Evan’s delusions and disillusionment due to the mundanity of life are exposed in uncompromising detail. Here’s fair warning to you: this guy is not a barrel of laughs by any stretch of the imagination, and it’s only a matter of time before any ounce of optimism you may have previously had crumples under the soul-crushing weight of negativity surrounding Evan – not just emanating from Evan himself but from his oppressively apathetic work environment. That is not to say he is devoid of his own toxic brand of wry humour  however; Evan’s oftentimes sarcastic and bitter thoughts are responsible for such cheery quips as “Why kill yourself today when you could masturbate tomorrow?”  There is no shortage of quotable lines, but I would be doing a disservice by revealing any more of the little gems the script has to offer, which are best left unearthed in the context of the narrative.

The JRPG character convention in full swing.

Contrary to the impression you may currently have, Actual Sunlight should not be disregarded as the author’s spewing his hatred and self-loathing onto the player through the mouthpiece of his protagonist, which, admittedly, wears the player down; that is not the game’s true intention at all, for in reality it is a positive force more than it is a corrupting one. In his Alan Wake review, Evan writes “It is not romantic that the game deals with ‘broad themes of loneliness and despair’ – you are actually alone”, but that is not what the author wants you to believe after playing Actual Sunlight; O’Neill makes this explicit when he uses his personal voice in the ‘Please Read This If You Are A Young Person’ short.  Out of Evan’s hopeless despair and downward spiral ending in suicide comes a paradoxically powerful message that emphasizes the fragility and sanctity of life, a moral that serves not only as a stark reminder to cherish the people and moments we live for, but to take charge of our lives before our hopes and aspirations drift irrevocably out of our reach.

Who said there isn’t enough player choice in video games?

Regrettably, the game’s presentation belies the mature themes residing at its core. They might not particularly detract from the player’s overall appreciation of the story, but the RPG Maker graphics are underwhelming. At least the almost comically out of place NPC sprites have been replaced this time around for the main characters. Regardless, to judge Actual Sunlight by its modest exterior would be missing the forest for the trees; the writing is very much the selling point here. Small additions have been made to the art, music and script for the new version, making for a more polished package, but I cannot honestly say these improvements alone are reason enough to go back for a second playthrough.

As for newcomers, the free demo is well worth checking out, and you can then decide whether you want to continue playing. I cannot recommend the game highly enough to people who have been affected by depression at some point in their lives, either personally or through someone close to them. As well as being instantly relatable, this tale provides a better understanding of the self-deception and powerlessness depression fabricates in sufferers. While Actual Sunlight can be completed in a single sitting (hypothetically…), the experience will stay with you long after, and for a new lease on life, I’d say this macabre show is well worth the $5 entry fee.

Back in the 90s and early 2000s, renting games was simple and efficient. You would walk into one of the many video rental store franchise buildings – Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, West Coast Video, etc. – pay a bit of money for a game and play it. If you’re done with the game, or the game just doesn’t appeal, you can return the game and pick up a new one at the same time. Or if you like the game you could just call the store up and have them charge you for more rental time. Better times.

But once movie and television show renting became more convenient through services like OnDemand and Netflix people found little need for places like Blockbuster, and thus the age of video rental stores came to an end, and so did game renting as well. The difference is that, video games don’t have anything that compares to services like Netflix. Many have tried though, and I’ve done my best to search for a suitable replacement.

Gamefly has more or less become the head honcho when it comes to video game rentals. You can rent most games from this generation, and a few from the last, for $15.95 a month. The game comes in the mail, when you’re done you return it and you can get another game of your choosing, as long as it’s in stock. I’ve been an on-and-off Gamefly user for years, and one of the main problems I’ve had with the service is the time between sending back a game and receiving a new one. I often find myself going a week or more without a game, subscription time being eaten up while I wait for snail mail. And most of the time I find the game I want, which is usually a new release, is out of stock, even if I requested to rent the game months before its release. Months after their release, I still haven’t received Farcry 3 or Metal Gear Rising.

The main problem with Gamefly is that it hasn’t fully joined us in the digital age, where the only wait times are download times and games are in unlimited supply. Yes, Gamefly does have a service where you can download PC games, but you have to pay extra for those and only a select few older games are free to play with a subscription. There are many other sites that operate similar to Gamefly, including Blockbusters’ online service, and though I haven’t personally tried all of them, from reading comments by users, it seems these sites have many of the same issues that Gamefly has.

A relic of a bygone era

Redbox is, as its name implies, is a large red box you’ll usually find inside supermarkets that contains DVDs and games available for rent. The system works similar to a rental store; you go to the box, pick what you want to rent, and have it back before your rental time expires. The problem with this is the lack of availability, both in terms of quantity of a singular game and volume of individual games to rent. The only games available are some of the most popular recent games. You can look at the limited list here http://www.redbox.com/games.

Then there’s the Playstation Plus, a service that you pay a year or a few months for and get full access to select games available on the PS3, with new games added each month, along with discounts on other games. While this service stretches the definition of renting, it’s definitely a service that provides a lot for what you pay for, and you get enough games each month to tide you over. It’s probably the best reason to actually pick up a PS3.

I see a lot of benefits that a streaming rental service could provide to both the industry and its customers. Look at Steam for example. You have demos, discounts, alphas, betas, etc. I think many of this features could be applied to a rental service. Perhaps if you rent a game the service could provide you a discount for the full game based on how much you spent renting. Developers could also put their alphas and betas available to be rented as a free trial to create incentive to rent the game once they are fully released. It really makes me wonder why Valve doesn’t just create a rental system themselves considering they handle just about everything else.

But let’s say Steam does provide a rental service, that’s just for PC users. But with advances in the Xbox Live Marketplace, Nintendo eShop, and the previously mentioned Playstation Plus service there’s no reason this can’t be emulated. We can already download exclusive indie developer games, demos, and even full games.

Considering that many people are wary of spending $60, even on games in long running franchises, I think the opportunity of a rental system would entice people to actually buy more games, and maybe even curb that piracy business. There are some in the industry who would disagree with me. Industry analyst and Puzzle Clubhouse CEO Jesse Schell made a fairly compelling argument against the practice of demos and the like.

Schell makes a good case, but honestly his stance is basically just a way to make money off of people and not caring if they’re disappointed or not. “The thing is, with no demo, you’ve gotta buy it if you want to try it.” Basically translates to “Just buy it anyway! It’s only $60.” It just seems like another way to sell over-hyped AAA games no matter if they’re good or not. It’s about the quick buck. From my experience, this practice will only hurt their customers when they basically have to gamble on game.

You broke my heart

For instance, I wish I had a demo of Paper Mario: Sticker Star before I bought the game. Believing the game would be similar to the original and Thousand Year Door, I blindly trusted the developer, Intelligent Systems, and ended up with a game I wasn’t satisfied with. Because of this, I’m less willing to buy a future game in the Paper Mario series, and anything by Intelligent Systems in general. The last retail game I purchased was Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon, and that’s only because I was able to try a demo at 2012’s New York Comic-Con. The thing that sold the game for me was that I got to try it before I decided to buy it.

In an age where demos are scarce, game trailers don’t show gameplay, and hyped titles turn out mediocre there’s a greater need than ever for a rental system. I think many other console developers should take hints from the Playstation Plus service, though I’d really love to see an entire library of rentable games in a streamable cloud system that spans from arcade titles to the current generation. Maybe giving players the opportunity to try a game first will help entice them to actually buy the game. Maybe a modern approach to renting could actually pull the industry out of its funk.

Yesterday Arc System Works announced the continuation of the Guilty Gear series, Guilty Gear Xrd -SIGN-. In this new version they showcased how the entire game is now animated in 2.5d, 3d characters on a flat plane. The new game is being made in Unreal Engine and it is using a new cel-shaded style in lieu of their previous pixel art style. We’re not certain if it’s UE3 or UE4 yet, though if it’s UE3, it may suffer framerate and slowdown issues on consoles. No platforms have been announced yet, but it can be presumed that it will be on the next generation systems, and maybe PC (Arc Sys has done PC ports before).

Daisuke Ishiwatari, the original creator of the series, is acting as director again, and it looks like Ky and Sol are being kept very faithful to their original designs. Here are two images comparing Ky and Sol as seen in the trailer with their previous sprites. They’ve also had some changes made, like Sol getting more decked out in belts than ever, and Ky sporting a new ponytail.

They showed off some of Ky and Sol’s signature moves, like Grand Viper, which looks like it will be returning to its #Reload incarnation, Greed Sever, Stun Dipper, Tyrant Rave v.Beta, Bandit Bringer, Volcanic Viper, Stun Edge, Fafnir, Vapor thrust, Sacred Edge, Ride the Lightning, and subsystems like Blue Bursts, which are used to escape from combos, the 6P, with upper body invincibility, useful as an anti-air, as well as Sol’s classic dustloop combo. The trailer also features a new song by Daisuke Ishiwatari that is completely rockin’, suggesting a new soundtrack for the game. Also at some points both Ky and Sol used attacks where the camera rotated around in a cinematic way, suggesting that Instant Kill attacks may be more cinematic than they previously were. The trailer concludes with a brief shot of Millia confronting Eddie, suggesting that this game will continue the story where it left off.

All I can say is, I hope they keep it true to the original. I’m a bit disappointed with the change in visual style (I think it looks a bit too Wind Waker/generic anime-ish), but Guilty Gear was facing some serious system bloat before (it had like, 4 advanced blocking systems, Faultless Defenses, Slashbacks, Instant Blocks, Dead Angle Attacks, Jam had 3S style Parries), so the overhaul may be a great thing for the series. It’s pretty incredible how accurately they translated the old 2D animations into the new style, smears and all, and it looks like all the old normals on Ky and Sol are exactly as they were. I hope they keep the game running fast as ever, because if any fighting game series deserved a revival, it’s this one.

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For those of you who don’t like hat-based warfare games – good news! We’ll be occasionally rotating the server between the more popular choices, including CS:GO and more arena-styled shooters.

The original video was compiled by Novril and is located here. It focuses on one ofthe craziest fighting game players of all time, Kusoru. Kusoru is a portmanteau of the japanese words for Shit and Sol, and he certainly lives up to his name with risky gambits and tactics that only the insane would attempt. And we love him because he manages to pull it off thanks to insane technical skill and fundamentals.

There were a few things in the video that I didn’t really have time to explain, so I’m explaining them down here.

The first one is the faultless defense, also called green block, used in the first clip. Every character can faultless defend by pressing back and two buttons that aren’t dust, or slash and high slash. Faultless defense prevents all damage and pushes the enemy away, but it costs meter to use.

Faust’s super is used in the second clip. It’s called Shigekiteki Zetsumeiken. This super has Faust swim through the land and if it hits 4 chests appear. It’s invincible on startup, so it has priority over any other move. When it hits, Faust presses punch, kick, slash, or high slash to determine which chest the angel is placed in. The latter chests do more damage. Then the person hit gets to choose a chest by also pressing a button and if they choose the same one Faust did, then instead of damaging the target, he damages himself.

Roman Cancels are a core Guilty Gear system that enables any character to completely cancel an attack that they successfully hit an opponent with. It returns them to a neutral state, allowing any followup. Roman Cancels are performed by hitting 3 buttons that don’t include Dust on a successful hit on an opponent. Regular Roman Cancels have a red flash when done successfully. Roman Cancels cost half your meter, which is the same amount a super costs. Force Roman Cancels work the same way except they are signaled with a blue flash and can only be done at very specific points in specific moves. They ignore the normal rule about needing a successful hit, and will cancel out if you hit them with the right timing no matter what. Force Roman Cancels cost 25% of your meter, which is as much as a force break (powered up special attacks).

Sol has 2 moves of interest in this video, Grand Viper and Riot Stomp. Grand Viper is the special move where he zooms along the ground, streaking fire behind him, then uppercuts his enemy at the end of it. It’s low to the ground and hits low, so it’s great for hitting people who aren’t used to blocking low, or who are expecting you to hit high. It does nice damage and can avoid a number of attacks that are reasonably high off the ground. Riot Stomp is where Sol kicks off the wall at the edge of the screen and zooms in at his opponent to stomp them. Typically considered a move for fools, it can be alright if you and your opponent are right in the corner, because it is an air attack and thus hits high. Riot Stomp has an FRC point very shortly after kicking off the wall, so you can fake people out with it by kicking off the wall then canceling out.

Do you have a video of someone doing something amazing in a video game? Send it my way in the comments and I’ll add it to my youtube playlists (Here, here, and here), and maybe break it down in the future. Feel free to have a look through, I’ve collected over 400 so far and the collection only keeps growing.

Till next time, I’ve got a long walk in the dusk ahead of me!

A Trion Worlds representative confirmed to Gamasutra that it has laid off more employees following last month’s release of the MMO Defiance.

Gamasutra’s source that is close to Trion verified that the layoffs may affect nearly half the company, as teams in Austin, Redwood Shores, and San Diego will be affected, with the Defiance team in San Diego being “obliterated”.

This is not the first layoff at Trion, as this follows the layoffs this past December of the Rift development team, where earlier in the week Trion stated Rift will become free-to-play.

Trion presented a statement addressing the layoffs to news organizations:

To best position Trion in a rapidly changing industry, we have reorganized our teams and are expanding our free to play offering. With Defiance, we delivered a great game that more than one million gamers registered to play and continue to enjoy. As we progress from launch to ongoing development of the game, we are adjusting our staffing levels to deliver new content and improved features. RIFT, and our other titles in development, were unaffected by these changes. We are very much looking forward to the free to play release of RIFT and are excited by the other new titles currently in development.

A Trion representative has disputed the claims that employees are being escorted from the building, and that senior Trion leaders at San Diego will be denied severance pay.

This is bad news, and hopefully employees affected by the layoffs will be able to find work and be able to recover from the experience. IGN encouraged employees that were affected by the layoffs to consult this Google doc to search for jobs within the industry.

With Defiance just having been released in April, this does not bode good news for the game either, as a majority of Trion’s workforce being let go, this will certainly negatively affect updates and patches for the game. With DLC being scheduled, it is unlikely that it will be as in depth as Trion had intended.

Sources: Gamasutra, IGN

Resident Evil: Revelations is being re-released for the home consoles and PC this month on May 21^st, 2013 in North America and May 24^th in Europe. Previously a Nintendo 3DS exclusive, Capcom seems to be bringing this title to more platforms after the poor reception of Resident Evil 6.

Set between Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 5, the premise and gameplay is closer to the tone of RE4. The game’s action feels pretty grounded and not as extreme as some of Leon Kennedy’s more evasive maneuvers in RE4. This is a different kind of animal compared to Equilibrium‘s “Gun Kata” that Leon pulls off in RE6, and the full blown war time conflict of zombies with assault rifles faced by Chris Redfield.

As far as what can be seen in the PlayStation 3 and Wii U demo, the visuals look slightly more improved than the 3DS. The game is rendering at a much higher resolution than a 3DS, but after a close comparison the textures don’t seem to be a noticeably higher resolution compared to the handheld version. Character models seem just the faintest bit smoother, and with an increase in hardware the PS3 and Wii U version offer an improvement in lighting. During the May 17^th Nintendo Direct, Iwata explained Resident Evil: Revelations would use the Wii U Pro Controller, which will presumably control similarly to the PS3 version. The 3DS version featured three control styles, where as the the demo offered two play styles; one that played like the traditional Resident Evil game where the player had limited movement when aiming, and one that used double analog like most first person shooters.

Creature Voices is a feature of the Wii U version.

The Wii U version features a control style where the player can quickly switch through their weapons by the Gamepad’s touch screen, where as the 3DS requires the d-pad to cycle through the available weapons. The Wii U demo also allows for off TV play with the gamepad. One final control advantage with the console version was that on both the PS3 and Wii U version, the hand scanner is given its own button to allow players to use it when needed rather than having to switch out their firearm like in the 3DS version. There’s been no word yet if the Wii U version will make use of the Wii-mote to relive the flawless controls of RE4 on the Wii.

There’s a new difficulty called “Infernal Mode” which seems to shuffle up bad guy placement, some improvements to “Raid Mode” such as the addition of a new monster, the ability to play as Rachel and HUNK, and new alternate costumes for some of the existing characters.

Rachael and HUNK

For anyone still on the fence on whether to buy the console version or the 3DS version (which will no doubt be cheaper), it boils down to a choice of controls, accessibility, and additional content.

Oculus Rift support for the game was reached as a stretch goal, which will give players that have a virtual reality headset to have a much more vivid experience.

Hardly ever has a horror title have gamers playing as a two-year-old. Normally in a horror title, we are playing as an adult, not as a defenseless toddler. As adults in games, we are able to comprehend the environment around us, and we are not nearly as vulnerable. However,  as a toddler, we are not only defenseless, but we are still mentally under-developed, which will make the encounters that much more terrifying.

There also won’t be the option to take out a handgun and shoot whatever is menacing us. Being forced to flee in a horror game is what can make experiences more memorable.

Previously, Siren: Blood Curse was one of the few games that brought horror out of its shell. A very obscure title, that made use of enemies that forced you to escape and think on your feet. Recently, horror titles focus less on horror, and instead on how you can kill your way out of a situation. By forcing gamers to flee, and playing as a toddler, Krillbite has taken a new perspective on a genre that is being overrun with action titles falsely labelled as horror.

Moreover, there is one thing Among the Sleep potentially connects all gamers to: our childhoods. When we were children, that fear of the dark and the unknown is common ground that all gamers can relate to and a fear we will always remember.

The game is due out this coming December.

For $20 you can preorder the title on Krillbite Studio’s page.

Sources: Kickstarter, Krillbite Studio

Hi everyone! Thanks for sticking with us through the server troubles we had earlier this year. As an apology, we’ve set up the site on some seriously beefed-up hardware, and (according to my calculations) we should easily be able to run a dedicated game server of some sort.

So, get voting! More suggestions? Post them in the comments for this article. Once enough votes are in, we’ll get to work implementing your server of choice!

Update (05/21/2013): Poll closed, thanks for voting! To see what server is currently available, check the sidebar!

It has been brought to my attention that a “Role” can be interpreted in two different ways. The theatrical denotation of a role is: a character assigned or assumed (Merriam-Webster). In this definition, the player is not playing any particular role in a video game because this type of “Role-Playing” implies that the character you are controlling is acting based on what the game has the character do; something that the player is unable to control. In addition, one of the biggest parts of acting, or “role-playing” in this case, is simulating a personality. That can happen through script or improve, and is most associated with Tabletop RPG’s. But those aren’t video games. Technology has not advanced enough for a player to act out a personality within a video game. The best a video game can do is present a personality to the player through pre-determined actions, but this doesn’t actually constitute as gameplay or a player “playing” a role.

The other interpretation, and also the interpretation that is specific to a player’s “role”, is: a function or part performed especially in a particular operation or process (Merriam-Webster). In terms of gaming, this means that a player has interactions with the environment and has a part to play in why certain events transpired. It is not the game that is determining what the character does, but instead the player. Gameplay can be accomplished in this manner by giving the player several different choices to choose from in certain situations, and the player chooses from them. This constitutes as “playing” a role by the fact that the player, and not a character, is acting of their own free will in the game.

In this situation, players are an actual part of the game that is being played. When players make decisions when presented with complex situations, the particular actions that they take reflect their personalities. In addition, these kind of decisions make it easy for players to project their personalities onto the character that they are playing as.

Let me illustrate this. Let’s say that you are playing a game involving relationships (which is a lot of games). If you as a player are assuming a role in the events that transpire, then the game might give the you a situation like this: Your significant other will engage in a discussion with you. The game will give you chances to respond, with each response having a different outcome. Depending on how you respond, your significant other will either like you more or less. Notice how you as a player are inflicting your personality onto the playable character while you are interacting with the significant other; If you choose to continually, say, harass your significant other, then that reflects that you, as a person in real life, are a jerk. But if you are nice to your significant other, then that reflects that you, as a person in real life, are nice.

I want to stress how important it is that the characters that players are playing as have no personality. Keep in mind that playable characters are only a medium through which the player interacts with the video game’s environment during gameplay. Every action that this playable character takes should be the player’s decision.

It didn’t work, Sakamoto.

If playable characters have personalities of their own and act of their own accord on occasion, a player can still role-play as long as the game is constantly giving them chances influence events. But if characters take specific actions in games that players have no control over, then games are taking away the idea that the player is in total control of how the playable character is interacting with the game’s environment. This implies that two different forces are controlling the playable puppet: the player and the character.

In addition, when the playable characters take on specific persona’s, then the idea that a character and a player are the same person is taken away. It is also incredibly difficult for players to use their imagination and visualize the playable character as the player when the playable character has a fictional personality. Once again, while the playable character doesn’t have to be a blank slate for the player to be role-playing, it makes for a far more interesting and engaging experience when everything in the game is happening to the player and not a character that the player is playing as.

Let me illustrate another example that doesn’t involve emotion: The Stanley Parable. If you haven’t played the Stanley Parable, it is a Half-Life 2 mod that is a satire to the idea that games dictate what the player does. I included a link below. But the gist of the mod is that it has a narrator (supporting the theatrical definition of a role) telling you where the playable character is supposed to go. If you as a player choose to not follow the narrator’s instructions, the narrator will punish you for not following instructions. The point is that you as a player are given choices when the game is trying to dictate what you are supposed to be doing. The decisions to not follow the narrator’s instructions demonstrate that players can have free will in video games, which proves that players can have influence over then events of the game instead of having the game show you a linear progression of events. And once again, your decision not follow the narrator’s instructions, and also how you defy those instructions, reflect who you are as a person. If the character “Stanley” had a personality and took some actions of his own accord, then the entire idea that this is all happening to the player is broken. Just the player would no longer construct the events in the game, but another persona (a fictional one at that) is doing so as well.

To sum everything up, playing a role in a video game means that a player is able to diverge from having a game dictate what actions the playable character takes. Masking playable characters’ personalities helps immerse players into games’ atmospheres as well, making it feel more realistic that the playable character and the player are one entity when the player makes decisions. To conclude, I want to encourage everyone to play (or replay) The Stanley Parable. It is a wonderful example of what it really means to play a role in the events of a game, and it reminds players the satisfaction they can get from making their own decisions and having consequences for those decisions. I could easily go on and on about what it means to role-play in video games, but the best way to illustrate is to do it yourself. There is no better game, that I can think of, to do that with than The Stanley Parable.

Now, allow me to repeat my question: what genre is To the Moon? It is not an unreasonable summation to call it an RPG; it was made in RPG maker after all. You ‘role-play’ as doctors Eva Rosalene and Neil Watts, but the focus of the narrative falls squarely on the comatose Johnny. To the Moon is only an RPG by name – it lacks the archetypes of character growth/customization, random battles and dungeon exploration.

Due to its narrative-driven structure, perhaps visual novel would be a more befitting description. However, that would imply the use of static graphics and an anime-influence, neither of which are present. To the Moon borrows elements from the graphic adventure instead; you point-and-click to move around and interact with objects, but the lack of complex puzzles or creative use of items make it an inaccurate rendition of the sub-genre. The overarching term of ‘adventure’ is equally as perfunctory and unhelpful as a descriptor.

Every RPG should have these battle options.

The root of this problem lies in the under-developed gameplay elements. They feel tacked on, especially the tile-flipping puzzles which have no real reason for their inclusion, other than to pad out the experience. Clicking on random bits of scenery is also quickly exposed as an arbitrary process for triggering the next scene transition, and the brief shooter and horse riding sections represent a haphazard attempt at variety. Remove these elements, though, and you are left with a brilliantly written, emotive story superior to big budget titles in terms of the execution of the plot and themes covered.

For that reason I think To the Moon would’ve been far better as a film or novel, and would be the first addition to my list of games that shouldn’t have been games. As a film especially, it would still be able to deftly set the mood through music and ambiance, while the story itself would benefit from professional acting and cinematic direction. In fact, the shift in tone to create a looming sense of dread at key points in the story, through the use of sound and the distortion of reality – something the game achieves with alarming success – would not be out of place in a psychological horror film.

In terms of content, To the Moon is actually easier to compare to films than it is to other games – the concept of planting memories in the human sub-conscience forms the premise of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and the plot device of moving further back in a timeline to unravel the story is used in Memento. These examples show how To the Moon might be better analyzed purely as a work of fiction, ignoring the fact that it is a video game (kind of like how I’d recommend approaching Dear Esther). In doing so, the taxonomy of To the Moon is not nearly as contentious.

I would deem it a tragicomedy in the truest sense, as it can be interpreted as both a tragedy with comic elements to lighten the mood, and a tragedy with a double ending. The comic elements are self-explanatory: Neil provides much of the comic relief and his banter with Eva lightens the mood, as do humorous nods to video game and pop culture scattered throughout. What I want to elaborate on is the duality of the ending.

There’s no denying that the story is sad – not only does it tackle difficult subjects like death and coping with autism, but the setting of the abandoned lighthouse and lone house perched on a clifftop creates an ubiquitous sense of loneliness, not to mention the numerous allusions to a dark secret in Johnny’s past. Even so, the ‘happy’ ending felt like a cop out at first. The thought of Johnny and River being reunited solely through the ‘power of love’ and some fanciful notion of predestination before blasting off into space had me cringing. But then I asked myself if it truly is a happy ending.

What Johnny dreamt before slipping away was not reality. It may have been real to Johnny, but we as the player are left desperately aware of the real reality – that Johnny never understood what River was trying to say to him through the origami bunnies, and he never got to explain to her why he couldn’t remember their first encounter before she passed. Johnny may have wiped away a stain on his memory in the same way as the beta blockers did, but he ended up living a lie as a result, and that is what makes it so tragic.

If this scene didn’t make you cry you have no soul.

There’s no denying that on a technical level To the Moon is far from perfect. But to judge it merely as the sum of its parts would be unfair. To The Moon is so much more than that – it is a thought provoking allegory of the morality of individualism, expressed through the juxtaposition of River and Isabel, Johnny and Nicholas, Johnny’s feeling of unworthiness and consequent desire to fulfill the role of Joey, the personification of the lighthouse, the symbolism of the platypus, the stars and Animorphs books… heck, even the game’s theme song, which begins with the repetition of the same two notes, and which Neil initially scoffs at, transforms into a beautiful and powerful piece.

At the risk of making this article sound like a review (which by now it should be abundantly clear it isn’t), I want to point out that even though To the Moon, and, now that I think about it, Journey, have both been criticized for their relatively short length and simplistic gameplay, I would give both games nothing other than a 10 due to their evocative motifs, unparalleled emotional force, and sheer originality. By transcending the glass ceiling imposed by the inflexibility of genre conventions, To the Moon elevates the creatively starved medium of modern video games to new heights.

The open spot among Electronic Arts’ board members has been filled, according to an announcement made by EA earlier today. Denise F. Warren, formerly of The New York Times, joined EA yesterday and her specific expertise in the digital medium has Executive Chairman, Larry Probst, excited for their future.

“Denise Warren brings an enormous amount of digital media experience to EA’s Board of Directors,” he states in their release. He goes on to thank Greg Maffei, who stood down for re-election and will be leaving the board to commit further at Liberty Media.

Warren, eager to apply her talents, expresses her optimism, “EA is transferring its business by extending the consumer relationship with digitally delivered high-quality products and services,” she continues, “I’m impressed with the management of the company and look forward to helping them extend their products to a broader audience on new platforms including mobile and tablets.” AT NYTimes, Warren is currently the Executive Vice President of the Digital Products and Services Group.

EA launched their own digital games distribution Origin to a rocky start, and caused many to be frustrated with the launch of Sim City earlier this year. Similarly, NYTimes introduced their pay gate to only allow for half the amount of subscription-free articles, down from 20 to 10 in April of last year. Readers found it difficult to adjust to running into the site’s pay gate much earlier than they were used to, however, the new policy has not since been altered.

Source: EA

Photos by Helen Han from the Twofivesix conference on May 11th, 2013

Located in a gallery called the Invisible Dog Art Center, where fine sculptures and photography are displayed, the introductory sign reads “ALL DAY TWO5SIX VIDEO GAMES ARTS CONFERENCE”. The conference awaits us upstairs, filled with experts, students, and otherwise friends of Kill Screen, emerging with an avid interest in video games. Stepping inside, I am undeterred by how fine art is presented alongside games culture. I can tell the dialogue is going to be fairly far beyond what I’m used to.

Trying something completely different, Jamin Warren and everyone else at Kill Screen put together an unlikely conference called Twofivesix. The conference featured eleven talks filled with spontaneous bursts of politics, engineering, and play. Uniquely, all but three of the scheduled speakers and interviews were paired from very dissimilar departments. Warren’s warmth and knowledge supplanted humor and introspection during his interviewing, though there were moments of straightforwardness.

Jeffrey Yohalem of Far Cry 3 – “I think we’ve got this whole range that we can work within to create meaning.”

The challenge, as he posits, is where is there a place where you can explore ideas, without necessarily having to be a game designer? From there, my mind began to expand. Can we gather our perspectives, learn something new, and form a different angle or are we fixed in what we know now? Is evaluation of the medium inert when we’re left to our own devices? Do we even have a choice in our own creations?

Where do our choices go when we world build anyway?

Paola Antonelli of MoMA -
“The way one appreciates design [...] it’s a work of synthesis. [...] And it’s not only function or utility, sometimes it’s emotion. You know, sometimes it’s like the aesthetic experience. So there is that sense of adding something to the world that I think is very important.

His guest list ranged from industry folks steeped in code for more than a dozen decades, CEOs of startups that have supported the games industry, proponents of play for America’s youth, and sports enthusiasts outside of gaming lending their expertise to competitive gaming. The stage was open to professors, outdoorsmen, professors, curators, publishers, painters, designers, and architects to communicate how gaming’s past and present effected them, and by proxy, us.

Yohalem – “Maybe these addictive, fun loops are bad for us [...] Maybe this makes us into Norma Desmond.”

But before the talks begin all the way to its end—barring the few toddlers who also joined the attendants—many listeners have known or been present for the evolution of games and what went into them. Let us listen to ancillary topics, that when it comes to a massive population and their experience in an MMO or a tablet game, all the way to a specific visage of Mark Cerny working on something in his youth, we’re already getting the references. The stimulation to learn more about the world and ourselves presents itself.

Jeffrey Lin of Riot Games – “If you look at the same player who’s playing a normal game of League of Legends or a ranked game of League of Legends, exact same person, but behaviors change. And it really shows you how context can really twist behaviors.”

Briefly, towards the tail end, Warren lays down a brief ‘what if?’ situation of flooding after we’ve all received Flash Flood alerts. Therefore some of the faces we’ve seen thus far are given survivalist leadership roles. These are obviously riffs on just the surface of what we’ve delved into during their presentations, yet suddenly I really like this lifeboat.

We’re in the Noah’s Ark of gaming and studies on gaming and I can’t be happier.

Rod Humble of Linden Lab, Everquest – “The thing about [the Voynich Manuscript] is it’s the spectacle of a mystery. [...] And I’m on the mystery’s side. I don’t want anybody to solve it.”

So far, I’ve heard about sculptures and 19th century literature right next to Wong Kar Wai’s process where Chungking Express and Fallen Angels originated. Stage directions that are meant to take you out of the experience and building a house in the woods for eight days are things you can sign up for. Numbers for a baseball statistician’s dream ledger to the dynamic on a study of teenage boys choosing their own path to perform better in schools while not giving up video games are up on the internet. Noting the niche for video games to first be curated into the Museum of Modern Art had already existed under Interaction Design, and Valve’s Source engine supporting a voyeuristic Bergman experience is soon to be released on Steam.

Bill Squadron, Bloomberg Sports – “It’s really hard for people to think of things that they haven’t seen, and that’s why people who do have that creative vision— they have to sometimes fight their way through. But, you know, they can make that real difference.”

As a refrain, I am in a beautiful candy store. This is it. I approach Tim Schafer and he thanks me cleverly for being a backer. We part after an impromptu photo. I talk to others about pitches big and small on Kickstarter while the co-founder in person defends their growing diversity in a pie chart to the owner of Foursquare. They share compatibility nods. The data supports their endeavor. And with one grandparent at a time, the Oculus Rift is here to change the paradigm of virtual reality.

Constance Steinkuehler, Univ. of Wisconsin – “The reason is that most game text is at high school level or up. So we gave [the student subjects] text that they should never have been able to handle, but they got to choose the topic. And this time what we found is that when you allow them to choose the text, struggling readers and non-struggling readers—the difference completely goes away.”

The attendees are escorted to endless snacks and refreshments on a rotating basis. Then, once we’re told the event will continue to a selection of indie games downstairs in the gallery and of course, drinks, we get what we’re promised. Outdoors in a walled garden (only literally, since figuratively anyone can walk in and out) some mill about in the wake of an earlier flash flood and it’s so not Los Angeles that it’s almost jarring. Not unlike the video games conference, taking place inside an art gallery that still has its collection up. The juxtaposition doesn’t go unnoticed by the audience, and we’re the better for it. Can you imagine?

Andy Hunter, Electric Literature – “I don’t think that giving players rewards is inherently bad. I think like anything else [...] it’s a tool at your disposal. And as a creator, you can use it well.”

Prevalent is the cynicism of player behavior, but we also love the medium. The community is evolving as it’s surprised us. Self-regulation along with positive reinforcement are both things that happen to this day. Our faith is restored like the bold building blocks we thought them to be. Where did that immutable cynicism go?

Even the creator of DrawQuest is here to tell us how the community doesn’t truly benefit from constant moderation. Lin tells us how he believes anonymity is not what drives bad behavior.

Nicholas Felton, Daytum – “If you’ve done a good job representing the data, people will see it as a mirror. They will recognize themselves in it.”

Inevitably, Journey comes up. Surveying the audience, a quick show of hands belonging to people who’ve played it pops up and nearly the entire room is filled with a sense of knowing. Where else are you going to get that around here? A majority of people present can see its depth, willing and able to talk that to death, with both Robin Hunicke and Kellee Santiago of the game’s dev team who’ve since moved on also present to do the same.

Dave Merrill, Sifteo – “If the Rubix Cube were invented for this interface, that’s what it would look like.”

Perhaps it’s time to bring it all in, video games are essentially a cross-section of such a vast scope of interdisciplinary works that we have to discuss so much more than we initially see. The commonality between us is that we are all invested and it’s time we showed that.

Below, where the beverages and games are, lays an amalgam of industry people open for a 4-player session of Monaco or an in-depth discourse on Time Til Dick and obscure western European army tanks. The creator of BaraBariBall noticed that players might need instructions so he laminated a couple sheets. Then we brought up the intricacies of DiveKick. We agreed that game will go farther than its criticisms. I learned that Bastion’s production had no interference from Warner Bros. giving them the freedom to make what they want to in a small team and how cool Transistor is going to be.

Tim Schafer, Double Fine – “When [Iron Brigade] finally came out, with all its mechs and shooters, it still had a lot of heart. I think that all of our games have a lot of heart in them. You see the love of every alien that you shoot.”

And maybe, if you’re anything like me and you stay a little longer, you get to hear about just how close to Catherine that Far Cry 3 initially was that Yohalem was surprised no one’s brought it up to him. In addition, we’re all here to find new experiences together, whether after it’s been made easier to be good by way of the Tribunal, or we’re diving our hands right into a pile of Sifteo cubes because our hands aren’t made to be flat, we’ll be sure to track our peaks and valleys over our entire lives outside of chat logs.

Unintentional as it may be, the running theme of this conference of abandoning our in-game norms coincided with Kill Screen’s upcoming issue the seventh, titled The Great Outdoors. You can find previous works here in their shop.

The entire Twofivesix conference was archived on Twitch.tv and can be found streaming here.

For a brief rundown of when is what, check below:

• 00:23:41 – 00:29:38 – Intro by Jamin Warren
• 00:29:40 – 01:02:32 – “Storytelling for the Next 100 Years” with Andy Hunter, Publisher of Electric Literature and Jeffrey Yohalem, Lead Writer of Far Cry 3
• 01:02:47 – 01:32:12 – “Games as Interaction” with Robin Hunicke, Co-Founder of Funomena and Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of the Department of Architecture & Design at MoMA
• 01:59:14 – 02:27:20 – “Online Communities and Growing Pains” with Chris Poole, Founder of DrawQuest and Jeffrey Lin, Lead Designer of Social Systems of Riot Games
• 02:28:34 – 03:03:56 – “Rod Humble Keynote” with Rod Humble, CEO of Linden Lab
• 04:49:00 – 05:16:15 – “Sport and Digital Domains” with Bill Squadron, President of Bloomberg Sports and Mike Sepso, Co-Founder of Major League Gaming
• 05:15:29 – 05:47:47 – “The Education Sandbox” with Zach Klein, CEO of DIY and Constance Steinkuehler, Asst. Professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison
• 05:48:13 – 06:16:19 – “Can Good Game Design Give Us What We Want?” with Christopher Paretti, Former Head of Design, GREE and Nicholas Felton, Former Designer at Facebook
• 06:34:37 – 07:05:08 – “The Controller is Dead” with Matt Boch, Project Director of Dance Central 3 and Palmer Luckey, Creator of Oculus Rift
• 07:08:30 – 07:26:40 – “Enchanting Everyday Things” with Dave Merrill, Co-Founder of Sifteo
• 07:27:05 – 07:51:49 – “Playful Creativity” with Yancey Strickler, Co-Founder of Kickstarter and Dennis Crowly, Co-Founder of Foursquare
• 08:12:11 – 08:55:34 – “Tim Schafer Keynote” with Tim Schafer, Founder of Double Fine

Afterwards, on display were five playable indie games which included Hundreds, Proteus, Badlands, BariBariBall, and Monaco.

Platinum Games’ lightning-paced cybernetic murderfest Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance will come crashing down on PC gamers sometime this year. This news comes directly from series creator Hideo Kojima, who confirmed the existence of the port today via HideoRadio podcast. This news was since further confirmed by Platinum Games creative producer Jean Pierre Kellams.

I am excited to see Rising hit the PC. BTW – direct all please direct PC MGR questions to @konami. :)

— JP Kellams (@PG_jp) May 17, 2013

From the sound of that, it looks like Platinum themselves won’t be involved in the porting process, and Konami will instead be handing that job over to some currently unknown developer. Depending on who exactly they use, this could either wind up being the definitive version of the game or a clunky trainwreck to be salvaged by the modding community. Could this be the first hint of a wider adoption of PC for the series as a whole? They’ve already gone from Sony exclusive to multiplatform. How great would it be to play Metal Gear Solid V on PC?

Source: Konami

It is considered by many to be the first true manifestation of cinema, using the medium to its fullest. However, when talking about “the Citizen Kane of video games,” what exactly do we have in mind?

If we take it to mean emulating the visual storytelling of Citizen Kane, it would simply denote a game that used cinematography and visual narrative to convey its story. We have had many games since the dawn of the 3D era that utilized typical cinematic techniques for storytelling.

Games with different camera perspectives tend to use different techniques that compliment the chosen style of visual presentation; they use dramatically important lighting, acting, depth of field, camera angles and other, popular, visual framing devices. Shadow Of The Colossus with its cinematic camera could serve as an example, and many cutscenes still employ the same techniques pioneered and iterated upon since Citizen Kane.

The camera in Shadow of The Colossus underscores the gameplay.

However, I sense that this is not what most people mean when they invoke the ghost of Orson Welles. It may be that we want something that would influence games just as much as Citizen Kane did for film as a medium. In this case the answer seems trivial.

There have been multitudes of games that are considered hallmarks of the industry, games that would change the industry and design forever, milestones in design have existed since the paddles started moving in Pong. There is a long list of video games that were as influential for game design as Citizen Kane was for film.

A recent example could be Half Life; its scripted events influenced storytelling in games to the point where almost every game with a narrative now uses them as the prime method of story conveyance. When it comes to gameplay however, the examples are not always as clear-cut.

Game design is a highly iterative process, closer to engineering than artistic expression, and genres/taxonomy are dependent on mechanics rather than content, style, or subject matter. Games like Doom, for example, were certainly influential in their genre, but their design and mechanics are not translatable to others outside of it. Finding a game that would influence the entirety of the medium from a mechanical perspective is hence an impossible task.

Half-Life’s scripted events shaped the game industry just as much as Citizen Kane shaped Hollywood.

The search continues.

Could it be that we are looking at this from the wrong perspective? Is it really influence and visual storytelling that we are after? Is it perhaps instead the auteurship of a piece? Games are often collaborative efforts; in this aspect they are very similar to film. Dozens of details have to come together in a movie: stages have to be built, costumes sown, cameras manned, scripts written, characters acted, and editing performed.

The public perceives the genius of Citizen Kane to be the work of one man, Orson Welles. Evidence suggests that Welles’ involvement in all aspects of production was what made the film the piece of cinematic history that it is today. Auteurship is a rare occurrence in game design and development, especially when talking about large budgets and “AAA” development, but it is not unheard-of.

Enter Hideo Kojima, and with him possibly the most well-known example of auteurship in game design: Metal Gear Solid 2.

Kojima’s involvement in the Metal Gear series – his creative control – mimics that of Orson Welles with Citizen Kane. While both Citizen Kane and Metal Gear Solid 2 were of course collaborative efforts, it is undeniable that both Kojima and Welles were the individuals that made these works what they are. They became integral parts of the execution.

In this sense, concerning involvement and direction, Metal Gear Solid 2 can be seen as “the Citizen Kane of video games,” and with it, Hideo Kojima as “the Orson Welles of video games”.

Welles and Kojima share a surprising amount of parallels.

Another interpretation might be that we ought to see Citizen Kane as an embodiment of an ideal form of execution in the medium. Our quest becomes the search for the fabled Gesamtkunstwerk, as described by Wagner and applied to game design. An ideal game, a perfect amalgamation of elements of the medium used for narrative delivery.

Unfortunately a work like this does not yet exist. Speculation on what kind of elements this hypothetical ideal game would have? Impossible. Though, what if we are entirely wrong? What if invoking Citizen Kane as an example or metaphor in context to video games is not applicable at all?

The media are so diametrically different – one driven by the work itself, the other by the audience. Interactivity in games is the driving force of narrative, the player becoming a co-author in the experience itself. It is so distant to film and cinema that a comparison between the two becomes tenuous at best.

Couldn’t it be said that interacting with the game is part of the process of creating the work itself? Games rely on participation of the audience, something which cinema and film do not. How can we expect a designer to create something like Citizen Kane if he does not have the full creative control over his own work? If he did assume full creative control, could the resulting work even be called a game?

Perhaps we need more distance from other media, a bit more introspection instead of trying to look outwards. Maybe we don’t need to emulate history. Maybe that’s the only way this medium is going to mature.