Quiksave Podcast Episode 25

The post-E3 fallout has embedded the seeds of wonder and excitement deep inside our video game gonads, (”vonads,” if you will) and animated discussion on the big games of the fall consumes all our free time.

Straight out of Nintendo’s press conference my long dormant fanboyism was reawakened and I tracked down a new Wii. The new Mario Bros. game, the Mario Galaxy sequel, and Team Ninja’s Metroid project took my breath away on Press Conference Monday, and renewed my faith in Nintendo, the granddaddy of Gaming, lately slated as a hardcore hater in favour of the casual market. They’re getting their act together, and the future looks bright for Wii owners old and young.

Heavy Rain, God of War 3, and Assassin’s Creed 2 all impressed at the big show, but how about Scribblenauts? You can really tell when a developer puts love into a game, when they show real commitment to a unique concept, and baby this is it. Over 10,000 creatures and objects available to play with, waiting for you to think ‘em up and type ‘em in. As far as I’m concerned, this is the only “must-play” of the portable world for the next little while.

The PSP Go is ludicrously overpriced, and though it’s got a sleek look to it, and I whole-heartedly approve of a step toward strictly digital media devices, that dog just won’t hunt, son. Off the top of my head, I can’t even think of any software for the platform I give half a damn about. Soul Calibur Broken Destiny looks nice and has great fluidity, easily as handsome a game as SC3, but really, what’s the market for a portable 3d weapon-based fighter? The PSP is a sinking ship, and as much as I’d like Sony to pick up the pieces and start making some money, the marketplace really doesn’t look to be balancing out as much as we’d all like, on the portable front as well as the console front.

By no means do I want to suggest the doom of the PS3; the lineup of first and third party titles gracing the system in the coming months is absolutely superb. The problem is an install base that just can’t seem to gain back any ground on Microsoft’s significant lead, regardless of the annual predictions of analysts who claim that each “next year” that comes along will be the year of the PS3.

Microsoft’s presser is being universally hailed as the champ, featuring Molyneux’s “Milo,” (pedophile joke here) Modern Warfare 2, Project Natal, and Halo galore. The latest rumour is that Natal is actually a staple component of Microsoft’s new console, a device to kick off the next generation. An interesting supposition, to be sure. Change is good, right? Then again, it seems as though developers are just hitting their stride in this generation of consoles. Big titles are starting to really grab hold of HD capabilities on the PS3 and 360, and motion controls are finally functioning the way we want ‘em to.

As it stands, my #1 game to look forward to is still Bioshock 2. A recent replay of the first game reminded me of how close Ken Levine and his team came to crafting the perfect game. The sequel, with a graphical upgrade and new gameplay options looks like a guaranteed home run. Other than that, Brütal Legend is on my radar, and I still spend most of my time with Street Fighter 4. It’s already been a stellar 2009 for gaming, and we’re gonna have us one intense holiday season, by the look of it.

Fans of Cam Clarke will lose themselves in despair when they hear this one. Ignition Entertainment’s gorgeous beat-’em-up on the Wii will hit North American shores without any English audio track available. Yup, that’s right. It’ll be arriving in our strange new country, not speaking a word of our language, with no pocket translator and no appreciation for football.

In all seriousness, this is good news, correct? Now we’re being forced to experience the game as intended by the development team, though certainly a great deal of this game’s target demographic would be switching the dialogue to Japanese as soon as they popped ‘er into the console. It is, after all, a mystical adventure through Japanese folklore and myth, presented in an anime-esque, hand-painted package.

As Ignition’s Shane Bettenhausen (who knows his Japanese stuff) told Siliconera, the game is “so deeply steeped in Japanese tradition, mythology, and culture that trying to dub it, trying to make something more Western is really not a service to the product.” Well said, Shane. This is about a development team preserving and presenting Japanese culture in the only medium they’re trained to deal in! Good on ‘em, right?

It says a great deal about the artistic vision and principles upheld by this dev team: to not even provide an English alternative, as has historically been the preferred option when shipping Eastern games o’er West, means we’ll be seeing the game they way they envisioned, whether we like it or not. They’ve made the decision for us in this case, and while it doesn’t bother some of us, there are assuredly a few people who’ll be a little upset at the lack of any choice in the matter: maybe your TV is too far from where you sit to read the subtitles, maybe there’s a Japanese voice actor you really hate, or maybe you’ve been cursed, and hearing spoken Japanese makes your nose bleed.

Bit of a bold move, Ignition. Then again, no guts, no glory!

Via Kotaku

I usually stop by my favourite Mother/Earthbound site once a month just to see if anything exciting is happening in the Mother world - such as NOA’s acknowledgement that the series exists - but usually come away empty handed, left to play Ness/Lucas on smash bros to get my Mother kicks. Today, however, I was blown away to see that the Mother 3 fan translation was finished! Finally we can experience the third chapter in Shigesato Itoi’s quirky masterpiece that is the Mother series.

Be sure to visit www.starmen.net and download the fan translation and order your handbook!

If you want to play the game, you will need an emulator and rom. Snes emulators are easy to come by, but the rom is pretty tough to find. I highly recommend this game, and if you need the rom, I’d be happy to send it to you!

The physical disc itself is printed like a record, a nice touch in keeping with the distinctive retro-futuristic aesthetic of the Fallout franchise. The CD sleeve, too, looks like a careworn record sheath.

The tracks are as follows:

1. “I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire” - The Ink Spots. A nostalgic crooner that’s been featured on the Fallout 3 trailers.

2. “Way Back Home” - Bob Crosby. A song from simpler, more carefree times. Cheerful, in that Leave-It-To-Beaver kind of way. I can’t wait to stroll through the blasted heath of a landscape with this playing.

3. “Butcher Pete (Part I)” - Roy Brown. This is a song to slay mutants to. Trust me on this. The refrain is something like ‘hackin’ and whackin’ and smackin!’, and there’s a lot of zany saxophone and piano to get your foot tapping while you fend off the radioactive hordes.

4. “Main Title” - Inon Zur. A dark, forboding orchestral piece wonderfully at odds with the cheerfulness of Crosby and Brown. It has all the fullness of a cinematic score right off the bat, vaguely reminiscent of Danny Elfman’s work.

5. “Megaton” - Inon Zur. The theme song for the town of Megaton. The theme paints the mental image of a desolate frontier town; dry gulleys, trees, and shifty townsfolk closing the blinds as you walk by.

Although the sample is small, it’s enough to whet the music afficionado’s appetite. If you can’t wait for the game release (or you just happen to be heading to pre-order yours now), don’t forget to get your hands on this tidbit.

Despite that minor, minor disappointment, the demo made me realize how much pure, unadulterated fun you can have with this game. As Matt pointed out in awe, over 3 million creatures have been made with the SPORE creature creation trial already. Just imagine what content will be unleashed with the vehicle and building editors on top of everything else.

Matt showed us the cell stage to begin with, and explained how your dietary decisions would set the stage for your later evolutionary development. He also showed us the menu screen that allows you to track your course between carnivore, herbivore, or scavenger, which was a nicely designed graphical display that will undoubtedly take the guesswork out of directing your biological destiny. The cell phase was brief, and Matt explained that it was designed for an hour or so of play, as Maxis wanted to get the player through the ‘mini-game’-like phase and right into the thick of things as quickly as possible.

Food levels are important in the creature phase, and more biological modifications (aesthetic or advantageous) are gained each time you mate and reproduce.

As you progress through the game, you choose your creature’s evolutionary path through taking aggressive or social paths, such as choosing to destroy a village, laying poisoned food traps for rival tribes, or attempting to negotiate. (True to form, the PAX crowd was bloodthirsty and steered a cheerfully compliant Matt through the most destructive courses.) Although we didn’t get to see it, Matt mentioned that in the tribe phase one can domesticate animals and use them to produce eggs - simple agriculture.

The structural support this game offers the player’s imagination is immense. It appears to have the versatility of an entirely random, open-ended development should the player wish to be surprised, but it also offers players with a specific goal in mind the input they’ll need to steer their DNA and their civilization in that direction. The way that one’s decisions in each phase impacts the next is fairly simple and intuitive, yet still seems to leave enough room for exploration. (I’m curious to see, for example, if a bloodthirsty and carnivorous creature race can become a force of benevolent religion in the civilization phase. Just how pathway-locking are these player decisions, on the whole?)

Having been an avid lover of the Creatures games by Millennium Interactive, and of course all the Sim-games produced by Maxis, I was excited for SPORE long before sitting down to the demo. The demonstration merely scratched the surface of what is a deep, deep pool, but boy, the water is warm.

SPORE arrives in North America on September 7th.

Arcade: $199
60GB Pro: $299
Elite: $399

$199!! That is an insanely cheap system. Will Xbox sales rival the Wii’s this holiday season? Probably not, but I can’t wait to see the NPD’s.

Chris Kohler of WIRED’s Game|Life blog had some strong insight in the wake of the drop:

Yes, whichever one gets up over the other this year will surely trumpet it loud and long. But the cat’s already out of the bag: Microsoft never should have let Sony get a foothold, just as Sony gave Microsoft no quarter last generation. Both have significant advantages over the other that they will leverage for small victories, but neither will pull out all of the stops, because there’s nothing to win anymore. As much as Microsoft and Sony like to talk about 100 million units or 10-year lifecycles, it all rings hollow: Somebody’s going to sell 100 million consoles this generation, but it’s not either of them.

Source

About the involvement with the narrative between Mike Krahulik (Gabe), Jerry Holkins (Tycho), and you guys. Was there anything he wanted to get into Episode 1 that ended up being cut? Anything you wanted in there that they weren’t too fond of?

we’re basically making the game, building all the assets. There’s a lot of back-and-forth. When it comes to the dialogue in the game, the writing, there’s both the writing itself, which Jerry has complete control over–and that’s how we all want it. There’s also the structure of it and the adventure gameplay; how you navigate through the dialogue, how many hints you get and so forth. So in Episode 1, I think we pushed it over to him a little too much, and so we had a lot of back-and-forth to get that structure right to make sure someone felt like they always knew what they were supposed to be doing, so they felt challenged by the dialogue, they got the right amount of hints. With Episode 2 we took a different tact, where we built a lot of that structure out with placeholder dialogue–very dry stuff–so he could later come in and replace the lines. That went a lot smoother.

Are you saying that this time you had all of this stock narrative that you needed to get across by way of dialogue?

What we’ll do is set it up for said encounter with said character: At this point in the game you have this object, and you need this object from them. By the end of the dialogue the player needs to understand this. This are the checkpoints that need to be gone over in the dialogue. We did that with episode one, but he would build the structure surrounding choices you have, it was a branching dialogue, totally non-linear. Since he’d never written in that non-linear fashion there was a lot of back-and-forth, whereas now we’ll tell him what the dialogue needs to contain, and here’s a rough branching structure. Now, he actually changes that up sometimes too, because now he’s experienced at it and that’s fine, but I think it’s easier for him to have that starting structure for the whole game laid out rather than having to come up with it himself.

Can you talk about any other big differences between the two episodes?

One of the things we’ve got a lot of feedback on was wanting to add difficulty, so there are difficulty settings in Episode 2, and the insane mode that you can unlock. We’ve changed the combat a little bit; the way that health items and revives work: you used to be able to revive with health, but now you have to use an explicit revive potion to heal a dead party member. We actually changed up the special attack minigames, so they’re all completely different. Also, the prompt you get to block is much more explicit now, we got a lot of feedback on that. The other thing that’s different, I think, is that because this is our second go at it, and because of the way we approach the production of the dialogue with Jerry, it’s much more adventurey. You know? The adventure game quests in the game have much more depth to them. Episode 1 was pretty simple. You were guided really clearly. The puzzles you have to solve now are a lot more like Monkey Island’s.

Meaning that it might be a little more environmental?

Just that it’s not so simple as “get this object, take it to this person.” Things fold in together, you have to get creative with how you solve some situations. It’s really satisfying, because when you solve these kind of puzzles you’re not just checking off a box. It makes you feel really clever, that “ohh, I get it now!” feeling.

So, development for Episode 2 is basically wrapping up now?

Yeah, right now it’s in the stage where we’re submitting it to the console manufacturers for approval, which, especially with Live Arcade, is a long and drawn out process. That’s frankly why we can’t release them as fast as say, Sam and Max episodes. So we’re in that bug fixing mode now, and we’ve had a chance to start on Episode 3. At the end of Episode 1, there was that “next time in Episode 2″ thing, and we have to have the same thing at the end of Episode 2, and that means we need to have enough of the episode three cutscenes finished to include. In fact, just to get it done quick, when we first started we knew what the story was for episode three already, so we actually made little parts of each cutscene to put together the teaser, and we can fill out the rest from there.

And so while Episode 1 and 2 were in development, DeathSpank has been going as well?

DeathSpank got started when Ron [Gilbert], who’d been helping us as a consultant, came on in January full-time as our creative director. That’s pretty well when we got started on it, we made a few hires to start building up the team, we have five or six people working on it full-time right now. All in all it’s well underway.

What can you tell us about that game, gameplay-wise? I’ve been told “Monkey Island meets Diablo.”

It’s going to be hilarious. It’s really going to be a lampoon, you know? It’ll be episodic, and the RPG gameplay will be more action oriented, less JRPG than the Penny Arcade games. The other thing that will be different is that there is a larger narrative tying the stories together, but you can actually play DeathSpank episodes in any order. It’ll all still make sense. DeathSpank is the kind of hero that is so over-eager, he does more damage than good, he really just wants to help people… he can be placed in a all kinds of scenarios. Ron’s really happy with the character he’s come up with because he can be put in a lot of different situations. He’s got a lot of stories he can tell.

Do you find that a lot of the atmosphere and attitudes you had at Radical were brought over to HotHead?

Radical was a great place to work; it was a really great studio. Certainly some of our practices we learned there, many of us built our careers there. It definitely has an influence. We have been very conscious as well to make sure we’re not just being Radical. HotHead was founded to do smaller games, we’re totally focused on digital distribution. So there are a lot of new lessons we’ve had to learn as well. It’s a different way of doing business, and a different way of making games, and with some of those things it’s been quite a challenge.

Can you name any of those challenges?

Yeah, one of the biggest ones was that we’re going to make smaller games. With this round of consoles, it takes 10 million bucks minimum to make a game, and to spend 2-3 years on it is just too big of a risk. So we said “let’s make smaller games, and digitally distribute them ourselves.” Ok. Good. But it was really hard to make the game small. It’s in our nature; we’d spent our entire career making games of a certain size. The game just grew. When we were half way through episode one we had to step back and reshuffle some of the content because we were making too big of a game. Another example, once we’d finished and shipped episode one, we’re like “ok, it’s time to get going on episode 2.” We’d already started on it, but the way I heard the team talking about it was as though we were making a sequel. I had to keep telling them that it wasn’t a sequel and we needed to escape that mindset or it would take us a year to get it done.

In an interview with Gamasutra you said that HotHead could be “the HBO of game development,” I guess meaning that the direction and quality of the games is very high, maybe also that you seem to be going episodic…

Yeah, saying HBO is kind of to evoke that quality, but also when you think of an HBO series it’s really critically acclaimed, it’s really well executed, but you may’ve never heard of any of the actors in there. They bring the right people together to make something really tight and really special. It’s also kind of niche, too, and then gets an expanded audience with the box sets and DVDs and such. Instead of just smaller games being digitally distributed, we think that digital distribution will quickly grow to include all kinds of things and we’re trying to be a part of it. A lot of people think of digital distribution as restricted to really simple, casual games, and frankly, the catalogue of Live Aracade games doesn’t help that.

When we announced the price of episode one for Live Arcade at 1600 Microsoft points, 20 dollars, everyone was saying “wow, that’s really expensive for a Live Arcade game.” No one was talking about the content or the length, or what they were actually getting for their twenty bucks! Some people would come in and say “it’s just a couple of coffees” and we’re with them. We think it’s a tremendous value. We like to think of the games we’re making as more than those casual games, but then again, they aren’t epic, 40 hour experiences that are too daunting to even starts. We all consider ourselves hardcore gamers, but we all have kids and busy lives, so these are games you can pick up and play and finish in a reasonable amount of time, while the quality is also top-notch. Like the Criterion collection, you know? A collection of really good games. Greenhouse is where we can bring other peoples games that are like that, made by indie developers, together in one place.

One of the threats of digital distribution is bandwidth. Do you think that as you guys and other indie developers grow there will be a problem fitting your games onto the pipes to get them to the people?

I don’t really worry about that too much. Bandwidth is always growing. I think the bigger hurdle with digital distribution is one of expectation for the consumer. People want a box, and that’s understandable. Look at how fast the music industry changed. I mean, iTunes was this little thing, Apple was throwing music up, and they celebrated their 5 millionth download, and now they’ve had over a billion. It just exploded.

I was in Wal-Mart recently–I was on a road-trip, and decided I needed some music for the car. I went to the CD section and the selection was paltry. All the discs were six bucks. How fast that’s changed, right? The whole music industry’s been turned upside-down, and we think the video game industry’s going to follow a similar change. Retail’s not going to go away completely, but would you want to be a shareholder in Blockbuster right now? It’s not a good time. Obviously Wal-Mart, Target, those guys will be fine, they sell a lot of stuff, but for EB Games it’s a challenging time to be in the retail business. It’s tough, too, because it’s a hostile relationship between those retails and the publishers and developers. The developers get completely screwed because there are so many people in the middle taking the money, the developers are lucky if they ever earn out or see any of the royalties at all. It’s hard to get into a store. You have to buy space on the shelf, there are things like returns and exchanges and all these other issues. And of course, retailers like EB are pushing used copies because the margins are much higher for them. It makes sense for them. The developers don’t see a dime from any of that. You go in there and they’ll push a used copy on you, and why wouldn’t want it? It’s half the price.

Do you see the Steam model, what with the client side IM and that stuff, as a direction you might take Greenhouse?

As we build up Greenhouse, we do think of it as a platform and not just a store. We have a lot of plans in that direction. I want to be clear: our approach with DRM to Greenhouse is to keep it simple. There isn’t going to be some client running in the background, no checklist for running a debugger… it’s not cool to treat the people who buy your programs like criminals, you know? We do have DRM in there to stop casual copying, but it’s not very onerous. It’s very straightforward, one-time authorization, that sort of thing. We want to build a client or extra features into Greenhouse purely as a way to make the experience better. Steam has achievements, and people really like that kind of stuff. So coming to Greenhouse, seeing a catalogue of games and past downloads, we want to build these features not only on the site, but possibly on a client.

Has piracy made a considerable dent in your release of Episode 1?

It’s almost impossible to measure. I was actually surprised, we fully expected the game to be pirated, everything is, right? Turns out, I’m not even really sure if there are many cracked versions of our game running out there. I heard there was one with a virus, which is unfortunate as we don’t want people think our game messed up their computer. It’s a waste of time and energy to devote yourself to protecting from piracy. People want your game, they’re going to download it. We choose to spend our energy working on the game. How effective is our DRM? How complex is it? Are we maximizing our ability to stop piracy? It’s all really hard to know, but there are hardly enough hours in the day to worry about making a great game, and I’d rather not spend too much time on those negative things.

Just to wrap up, do you think that there’s anything that the indie developers and the big guys can learn from each other?

Oh, absolutely. The indie developers that are in Vancouver, we all get together for dinners, we compare notes, stuff like that. We’re in this together. Digital distribution is going to explode. There’s a lot of stuff we can share.

We Quiksavers would like to again thank Joel and Hothead Games for their time!

The framerate was pretty shitty, especially when both the hero and the henchman waded into an onslaught of enemies with swords drawn. Hopefully that’s something that will be fixed before the game itself comes out in a few months, because it turned a fun two-person charge into a glitchy “Thriller” approach. Despite that, the combat system is pretty intuitive at a basic level. The helpful Lionhead booth chap, after watching me and the PAXer to my left carve through skeletons for a while, informed us that while it was all well and good to leap in smashing the X button, we were missing the opportunity to fight with style.

Special melee attacks are executed by using a bit of X-holding and left analog stick pushing, but it doesn’t seem like you can move while you’re winding up for a big sword-sweep or a bladed uppercut, which is a shame.

During combat, the hero’s dog - the dog Peter Molyneux wants you to love - will leap on fallen enemies and worry their limbs in his jaws like a bone. He’ll also charge ahead and snarl at upcoming threats. There was a rubber ball hidden in a treasure chest along the path in the demo, and throwing it for your pooch resulted in a pleasant bit of non-combat interaction and happy tail-wagging. He looked something like a Doberman, a good match for the beefy, shirtless hero the demo portrayed.

The spell system is also intuitive, accessible through an icon-based menu with an aesthetically appealing look. Casting spells is simple, but you can reap more effective attacks by adjusting your area of attack - a new, and very useful feature not seen in the first Fable.

The look of the game itself is almost identical to what we saw in the first Fable, with its fantasy feel touched with a bit of colonial spice in the flintlocks and, presumably, the towns. The Wraithmarch I was limited to was a misty, gloomy forest area populated by skeletal creatures that popped up out of the ground to meet their second demise by sword, gun, or a fireball blast.

The PAXer next to me told me that the sound was something to be appreciated, replete with rattling bones and atmospheric nuance, but a nearby demo of Rayman: Raving Rabbids blasting “Jungle Boogie” deprived me of that pleasure. I’ll just have to trust that helpfully informative PAX-going NPC.

In truth, the demo itself was mediocre because it didn’t showcase any of the things that make Fable exciting to me: the social interaction options, the non-combat abilities and uses of your pet dog, and the long-term visual effects of your moral choices on your character. Of course, in a short demo those things are difficult if not impossible to showcase, and the developer journals on Lionhead’s website have been feeding that craving for peeks of that nature admirably.

If anything, the hands-on affirmed my suspicion that the game will be playable and it will be enjoyable, and that the co-op mode will kick up the Fable experience a notch in the fun department.

We’re new at this. Two full days on the show floor and hitting up panels left Luke, Simon and me a little clueless for day 3. We spent a few hours walking the expo floor, gathering as much video footage as Luke’s little Flip could hold, and then we needed a break. Simon and Luke headed off to give the tabletop building a gander, and I sat decided to suck it up and do some serious line waiting!

There was a big upside/downside thing for Gears 2. When you get the controller in your hands, they let you keep it for a full 3-7 round match. That’s a lot of time. A lot of time to watch the eight guys in front of you get chainsaws through their faces. I eventually had my go, and you don’t need me to tell you that it’s good, that it’s great, that it’s better than ever. It’s a satisfying thing to play. Sure, it feels like the original in all the good ways, but all the little perks like extra, more fluid animations, moving around when you’re almost dead, chainsaw battles, new weapons… it all adds up to a first class update on an incredible franchise. The demo was just a 5 vs. 5 VIP mode, but it was good enough to make me move through the line twice. Well done, Epic.

After that, we all met up and headed back to the hotel to get some work done. Sure, it’s not the most exciting thing we’ve ever done, but we have an obligation to you, reader! After that, we hit up Benihana, an establishment mysteriously absent from the North, where we dwell. After some pricey sushi it was time for beddie-byes, and we bid a fond farewell to the nerds, the booth babes, the cosplayers, the entirety of the 58,500 in attendance: Good-bye, PAX! You were a kind host.

We met up with Hothead’s COO Joel DeYoung about PAA: Episode 2, Deathspank, and the state of digitally distributed games. They’re a really great team, and we thank them for their time. It was an awesome interview (should be up soon).

Tom and Luke hit up the Destructioid.com panel. They had this to say about that:

The ‘How to Make People Give a Shit About Your Gaming Blog’ panel was hosted by the Destructoid team, and lemme tell you, it was nothing but a jiggling mound of internet hubris dancing and shouting at itself, wearing red briefs and a funny hat. At least that’s how I remember it. The crowd was there to mingle; it was just like reading the C-Blogs and D-Toid forums, but brought to you in brilliant three-dee. Every character showed up in costume and entered the stage area with a shout ‘n dance combo, announcing their presence. There was an abundance of inside jokes I couldn’t hope to understand, and much meemery. The panel’s stirring advice regarding jumpstarting your blog could be summed up as ‘keep at it.’

While Tom and Luke were suffering through D-toid self-buggery, Marri and I were at a panel called ‘Old Journalism and New Media,’ or ‘Old Journalism and the New Journalism,’ or something. It broke down the differences between a review, preview, and critical article. What’s useful, what you can write when, and when you should write what you think. Very insightful, charming panel. It wrapped up with Karen Chu’s discussion on the danger of review aggregators; how they favour the high score, forcing an unfair majority opinion that really discusses nothing. Honest fun.

Then the Fallout 3 demo happened. I had played Fallout 3 on the show floor the day before and was impressed by the richness of the world and the micro-management that takes place even during tense close-quarters combat, but the hour-long demo preformed for thousands of gamers in the main theatre blew every quality to some new and extreme size. What I take away from my Fallout 3 experience over the last few days is that It’s a lot more like Bioshock than I thought. Is that crazy? I’ll ramble on about that in some other post.

After the Big Show, we ponied on down to the Totally Rad Show’s meet-up, then 1Up’s meet-up. Both were awesome. We met some interesting folks and our hosts were humble.

Check out the Quiksave team!

“…a chance for her paladin to practice ‘laying of hands’…”

“ZOMG!!!”

PAX rings with the enthusiastic mating calls of the geek to the industry: A cacophonous union of anticipation, love, desire, and seething thirstiness. The upcoming fall release season is especially succulent, with a score of titles gamers have been waiting for for quite some time. And here I’ve had the chance to observe these games, whetting my appetite for the coming-of-age avalanche the industry is preparing to unleash.

Looking back to the delightful fiasco of Day One, I saw a lot of thirst in the ubiquitously myopic eyes of the video-gaming masses. Glasses everywhere reflected the lusted-after objects. Fallout 3, Dragon Age, more, more, more. You know the titles, and if you’re lucky enough to attend PAX, you may know the hunger in the eyes of which I speak. The only thing standing between your sweaty hands and an early experience of Rock Band 2 are the lines, dense and humid things that they are.

But that’s okay. I propose that nowhere on earth is a more entertaining place to wait for something. Pop on your DS, get into a Pictochat room, draw some penises! Listen to the gaming in-jokes everyone around you understands. Look out for men dressed as Princess Peach and women dressed as Scouts or obscure JRPG heroines. Or, just turn around and start talking. Geeks are especially friendly, and the common ground of a convention is fertile soil for friendship.

Taking the pulse of PAX on Day One, I would say that the gaming industry is secure. Faces young and old were in evidence, from the fresh-faced n00b who may have stumbled into PAX unknowingly from the city streets to have his cherry popped thoroughly and gloriously, to the grizzled online champion who flew halfway around the world to be here. The games being shown - from the big titles to the indie products just fledging - are all of an unprecedented uniqueness, quality, or both. There hasn’t been this much love in the air since Woodstock.

The pulse of PAX is rapid, hearty, and it’s time for this Quiksaver to plunge back into the fray.

Day Two begins now!

“All I saw was confusion, and geeks,” said Marri, Quiksave correspondent, and my BFF.

They gave us “swag” for picking up our passes. Let me tell you what’s in these bags.

The Pax Swag Bag, with ads highlighted in bold:
• 2 PAX schedules
• 1 GameDeveloper quarterly magazine
• 1 Goozex brochure (some kind of web site)
• 2 PAX pins (pretty cool, I guess!)
• 1 ad for The MAW
• 1 ad for Sakura-Con 2009
• 1 ad for Champions Online (under the guise of an invitation to a party being held at a public library)
• 1 ad for CompuCom Excell Data (whatever that is)
• 1 Precipice demo (on CD)
• 1 PAX 10 Award Ballot thing
• 1 card with MK vs. DC on one side and TNA Impact! on the other
• 1 Fallout 3 pamphlet, regarding the PAX demo (and playable!!)
• 2 RESET Generation card, telling me I can play their free game
• 1 WOW 14 day trial
• 1 Twin Skies pamphlet
• 1 ad for Twitcher (’STFU n00b!!! I pwn ur FACE!!!1′)
• 1 SouthPeak catalogue (I’m gunna jack off to X-blades art tonight in the hotel room bathroom)

Guh, more shit. Who cares. I feel like I’m watching TV.

Our hotel room, by the way, is a cell. Two beds, a prison bed, no lights, shitty internet, no fridge. I don’t mean to be a bitch about it. We need drinks. PAX is back.

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Cool stuff, no? The fatality is comicly timed and horribly twisted. He just shoots her in the face. That’s so Joker, right? The details of the “rage” mode are predictable, maybe a little tired, sure, but even though it looks very standard for a fighting game, it has enough charm and brand power behind it to make its way to my living room.

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Many bloggers are celebrating, all the while heedful of the the Dark Lord, and his many keeps in this land. Will pompous Gamestop only encourage digital distribution by aggressively pursuing this pre-order, pre-played silliness? I’m worried that there are no real champions, here. Look at photography.

I’ve worked in a photo lab for around six years now, and we’ve gone down to printing around 3000 prints a day on technology designed and purchased to print 2000 prints per hour. Nobody does this any more, and the industry is worried.

Not only do people not get photos developed any more, they hide em’ away on corruptible technology - even backing them up completely to the cloud! We’re gunna be hit by a photography dark age in the coming decades, and the same thing could happen to video games.

Will I be able to find and play Braid in 20 years? Where’s the guarantee that these intangible properties will hold up platform to platform? Man I ask a lot of questions.

In my mind’s eye I can see them - kids in tight little shorts trying so hard to maneuver over barrels and up ladders, through mazes, down paths of precious Pac-dots, and yes, sliding left and right, deftly escaping alien missiles, saving the world. Alas, I did not ride that cannon. And I’ve never been able to understand how such a punishing game could ever really be fun; as you shoot Invaders, if you didn’t know, the wave picks up speed until the acceleration is obscured by the bottleneck of light reaching your eye. The gameplay in Extreme escapes the problem of being so abusive simply by spacing the waves out. Still lots of Invaders, but more waves. What this allows for is lots of tiny victories. It also allows for faster gameplay overall, which allows for a lot of other things that sets the game apart from the zombie horde of remakes.

There are several classes of Invader, and five colours for each class. Each colour corresponds to a powerup that drops if you can get a hit combo of four of the same colour. Each wave is organized carefully to present an interesting problem with multiple solutions based on the classes and colours positioned in the wave. There’s often a best solution for dealing with each wave. Some times you figure it out after the fact, as it’s often the case that the later waves will build off the themes of the previous, and the desire to start the stage over, getting closer to that perfect run, can be overwhelming. This is good and bad, depending on how you like to play games, but those who appreciate speed runs and high scores will transcend the thin illusion of progress and bathe in snooty completist glory.

The initial arcade mode experience can be completed in two to three hours by a normal human being, which is a little jarring, but it quickly becomes apparent that it’s a tip-of-the-iceburg situation. Beating the normal game unlocks an extreme version which, aside from the stage bosses, is a whole new champaign, extra hard, but very interesting. Expert mode was clearly the escape for designers from creating watered down, entry-level waves; new, crazier classes of invaders start appearing, and if you can’t get better, hopefully you’re ok with beating the game the first time round’.

The iconic Invaders themselves have more or less retained their blocky nature, which is great. A lot of Space Invaders remakes fail to capture the spirit of the original because the original is so rife with cut corners, remembered nostalgically by Taito acolytes, and the Invaders are commonly the first to change. Most visual elements of Extreme pay tribute to the original, in fact, or at the very least the neo-retro movement as a whole. The background is a little overly psychedelic, which is a little distracting, but fits perfectly with the distracting techno soundtrack. It’s true that when Tomohiro Nishikado was designing the the first Invaders game he had to scrimp on the desired flare due to hardware limitations. The over-saturation is touching, in a way; this is, perhaps, a closer game to his original vision. If a little annoying. You can turn both the over-active background and the music off.

But It’s not all chipper tunes and sexy Invaders in this juicy cannon-shaped pleasure dome. An evil magic spell has been cast upon the multiplayer functionality of Extreme for the PSP, specifically. What the PSP did to deserve this curse isn’t clear, but it’s the only explanation acceptable to me for why a multi-media device like the PSP should lack infrastructure and ad-hoc download play that exists in the DS. It’s hard enough finding another human being with a PSP, let alone a PSP with the same game in his or her system. It’s tragic.

Tragic as it is, it’s hard to stay angry. Space Invaders Extreme is the ultimate reconstruction of a brutal arcade game, loaded with low-hanging fruit - fruit with little pictographs of a satisfaction beyond the mortal quench of plant life, beyond simply completing a wave, a stage, or the game itself. I feel like I can play this thing forever, always perfecting my score. This is the one’a those games that you’ll always bring with you.

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Right now, the site exists as an incredibly adorable news dump on the game. A cute lil’ sackboy hangs out in the corner, giving you the ability to customize the background of the site with stickers. Apparently this place will eventually be the home of important community information after the game’s launch this October. My guess is it’ll display the best custom stages made by the players, as well as the usual tournaments and contests and such. I’ll take any crumb of LBP I can get my mitts on.

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What I Like

One of the reason Quake Wars and its predecessors are so successful is their diverse Class System. Classes differ from each other by not only weapon types, overall gameplay style and (to a certain extend) required skills from the player. For example, the Medic’s job is to heal/revive players, the Engineer’s to repair/build structures, and the Field Ops’ to provide support fire and resupply the team. Those unfamiliar with Quake Wars won’t find themselves too far out of their comfort zone, and the seasoned veterans can really take advantages of the Class System to complete missions efficiently.

Besides its complex Class System, Quake Wars is a very straightforward FPS with classic controls: W-S-A-D to move, space to jump, and so forth. There are class and vehicle specific controls to handle special actions like deploying structures and flying planes, but they’re pretty simple, reasonably defaulted, and can be customized easily.

Building on top of Wolfenstein: Enemy Territories’ objective driven missions, Quake Wars takes it to the next level with larger maps, more variety in the objectives, and side-missions. Also, thanks to the introduction of pilotable vehicles, battles in Quake Wars can now be fought on so many different levels, it really puts you in the game. Check it, this is you:

LIFE IS CHAOS! I’m in the middle of a very large battle, and there are so many things that’re out of my control and are none of my business. I MISS MY FAMILY! I should just go ahead and complete my objectives. WHAT’S THE POINT OF ALL THIS DEATH!?

What I Don’t Like

One of the things I don’t like about Quake Wars—and I’ll admit I can’t really blame them for—is the lack of a single player mode. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territories didn’t have a campaign, so I guess it’s okay… but ET was about WWII so I kinda know what’s going on. Sometimes when I played too much Quake Wars in one sitting, I’d start to wonder: “Why am I doing this again?”. I know Quake Wars sort of follows the story of the original Quake, but I’d still like to have a single player mode so I can get the story’s delivery better (that’s probably just me).

One other thing I can blame Aspyr for is the unbelievably sloppy performance of the Mac version on my MacBook Pro (2.2GHz Core 2 Duo, 128MB GeForce 8600M GT, and 4GB of RAM). To avoid the threat of constant murder and slowdown I have to play at 800×600 with almost every setting turned to its lowest level. I understand this is a very complex game with very, very large maps and tons of stuff going on, but I’d expect my MBP to be able to do better than that.

Final Thoughts

I would very much like to see this series grow to a level of popularity as high as Counter Srike’s, kicking off a thriving community of ladders and tournaments. The advantage Quake Wars has over Counter Strike is it’s scale of battle. It would be absolutely epic to watch 32 players battle over a huge map. Will it happen? Who knows, but I remain ever hopeful.

The demo has apparently been downloaded by over 900,000 different Xbox Live users, making it the “most downloaded action demo in its first week.” That’s certainly a huge base for the game to have hit before a release, and though the demo’s free where the game is $60, I think we can count out Denis Dyack wetting himself with embarrassment come the launch party.

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I am still (aside from hand-helds) of the previous generation. While I’ll immerse myself deeply into SCIV today (though not as deep as Tom’s penis into the blood the conquered), I’m content with my overripe pile of ps2 shame. This week? Final Fantasy XII.

What I’d been playing last week was Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 2, which I will henceforth and forever refer to as FiFan T to-the A D 2. It really does take the franchise in an interesting direction. Clan privileges try to trick you into feeling a little less fucked by the judge laws, which is a lot like a psychopath making you watch micro bikini oil dancing while he twists your ballsack around a knife as if he’s twirling spaghetti, but it’s still an improvement. And the world, my god, is finally whole.

FFTA’s Ivalice really felt incomplete next to FFXII, but now both games are on par with each other, and the result is this delicious continuity. And it’s funny how all of a sudden the inferior story being told in T to-the A D 2 is helped and made less shitty by this other story that just happens to be occurring on the other side of my living room.

Also, I hear tell that the PAX schedule will be appearing shortly. I eagerly await it. And I eagerly await the brainstorming session that is fast approaching. Expect coverage–but more importantly, expect unique, considerate coverage. By people with gorgeous genitals.

This is exactly the kind of game we needed around the Quiksave community to keep spirits up until summer’s end gaming-wise. Everyone’ll get their feet wet, and eventually land on their new favourite character, busily studying away to find the perfect leg-sweeping technique that will spell unconditional victory time and time again. There are, however, just as many who will continue to perfect the ancient art of the button-mash; though they should be hated, they should also be feared.

Entertaining as a good Soul Calibur party can be, we’ve also got a chunk of the crew who’ve resigned themselves to watching Sport Centre and maintaining a 75% erection until Madden ‘09 launches, at which point they will disappear into the blackness until Roger Goodell blows his silver horn to signal the season’s beginning. Exciting times indeed, Maddenites. I’m sure the extra 20 tackle animations and a new voice on the play-by-play warrants the $80 collector’s edition. In all seriousness, I will destroy all comers with my ferocious 100% shotgun strategy led by the fearless Tony Romo.

Also, we’re starting to get plenty excited for PAX, now a short 31 days away. Myself, along with Luke, Simon and Marri will be providing some delicious coverage come August 28th, and with the freshly announced Exhibitor Hall Floor Plan, we know we’re in for a treat. They’re also slowly starting to roll out the titles that’ll be in playable form at the convention, and you better believe we’re going to do our best to hit every single one.

I was fully on board with the popular idea of hating this game. The more I see, the more interested I become. It looks like it can really function, and if nothing else, the DC characters are going to provide a new feel to characters in a fighting game. It is worth mentioning, however, that it’s still totally dumb that any of these jerks can hurt Superman.

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* July 30: “Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2” – The latest version of the wildly popular retro shooter offers screen-melting intensity and insane new features, including six action-packed gameplay modes, new enemies, scoring strategies and a diverse list of exciting Achievements. “Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2” is rated E for Everyone by the ESRB and will be available at 800 Microsoft Points.

* August 6: “Braid” – From acclaimed developer Jonathan Blow, “Braid” is a mind-bending and artistic puzzle-platformer where the player manipulates the flow of time in strange and unusual ways. “Braid”is rated E10+ for Everyone 10+ by the ESRB.

* August 13: “Bionic Commando: Rearmed” – The classic 8-bit side-scroller reports back for duty in a stunning remake, complete with all-new HD graphics and features that put 2D gaming back on the map! “Bionic Commando: Rearmed” is rated M for Mature by the ESRB

* August 20: “Galaga Legions” – The legend lives on with “Galaga Legions,” a reimagining of the classic arcade shooter. Featuring table-turning game dynamics and updated graphics, the game was created by the team behind the bestselling “PAC-MAN Championship Edition” from Namco Bandai Games. “Galaga Legions” is rated E for Everyone by the ESRB.

* August 27: “Castle Crashers” – Award-winning studio The Behemoth brings red hot arcade adventure to Xbox LIVE Arcade with “Castle Crashers,” featuring hand-drawn characters and an array of weapons to choose from as you defend your kingdom and save the princess. “Castle Crashers” is rated T for Teen by the ESRB.

Pretty good, no? And all the fun kicks off in a couple of days with Geometry Wars 2. Lord have mercy, thassa lotta Micrsoft points. I think it’s safe to assume that Bionic Command: Rearmed will hit the PSN for the Thursday update of the 14th.

Announced alongside the now beloved clown-villain was the Green Lantern, another fanboy-fave, who could tear Joker’s ass apart without breaking a sweat. Again, just sayin’. For any of you Mortal Kombat fans, (Are there any of you out there? Can you hear me!?) Jax and Kitana will also be returning for the Green Lantern to make short work of.

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Let’s start with Buffalo’s second year back Marshawn Lynch. Lynch ran for 1115 yards, averaged 4.0 yards/carry and had 7 touchdowns. He missed 3 games with injuries, so those numbers are slightly less than what they could have been. They are, however, still extremely mediocre. His 90 rating in Madden 09 isn’t so mediocre. This is a relatively unproven kid, who although did well, only broke 100 yards rushing 3 times, and had only 18 catches all year long. Ryan Grant broke 100 yards on the ground 5 times, had 8 touchdowns, and averaged a astounding 5.1 yards/carry in only starting the last 10 games. He has an 86 rating, which is one I agree with, because he’s only had 1 year in the NFL, and still needs to prove he can replicate that success even after defences have prepared for him.

Edgerrin James is a 92. Gross. I feel dirty just typing it. He was good at one time, but that time is over. He is now 30 and his skills are diminishing. I don’t even want to talk about it. I’m getting upset. Let me move on…

LT is a 99. I think I’m okay with that.

I’m a little wary of Larry Johnson’s 94, but at the same time: when has any player not completely rebounded after a season plagued by injuries and poor performances? (see Shaun Alexander)

Jacksonville has two very good backs, and I’m glad the stat guys at EA recognized this. Fred Taylor is a 94 (maybe a little high) and Maurice Jones-Drew a 91. Hopefully their running attack works as well in the game as it does in real life.

Willie Parker is an enigma wrapped in a riddle. This guy has skill, yet managed only 2 touchdowns all year in 2007. I like the 93 rating, because he really can be that good, but I think it’s better to start him lower and bring him up in roster updates.

Adrian Peterson’s 95 is just right.

Darren McFadden is an 85. Rating rookies is one of the hardest things to do in the entire world (I’m totally not even exaggerating, those doctors curing cancer have no idea), but I think they got this one right. 85 is a little low for a starter, but still very good for someone who has never played a down in the NFL. I have a feeling that McFadden will have a similar year to JaMarcus Russell; they will both have their moments, but the growing pains will be tough in Oakland.

Madden 09 is set to be released on August 12^th in North America. NFL Head Coach 09 can also be bought in a bundle with Madden 09 on the 12^th, but won’t be sold alone until September.

From SportsGamer

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For three years now we’ve been without a competent Star Wars MMO–I’VE been without one! Ever since the combat upgrade mass exodus of Star Wars Galaxies in 2005. Patience has payed off. A game that Star Wars fans actually want is in production and supposedly scheduled for a 2011 release.

I remember those summer days in 2004 when my life was beautiful. I had a moisture farm. I sold moisture for credits. People today don’t know the potential of MMOs anymore! It was entirely possible to play SWG nonviolently, to literally exist as one would in the volatile Star Wars universe. Obviously KOTOROL will fall in line with the MMOs of the day, but even so. If I can be an Ithorian again? It’s all over.

N. Evan Van Zelfden, the man with many names, broke the story on his blog at portfolio.com in an interview with Riccitiello: “We’ve got two of the most compelling MMOs in the industry in development.”

The first is Warhammer Online, which comes out soon. Hopefully EA will use WO as a learning experience; Star Wars fans are fragile, and may not be able to handle another janky MMO release.

When Zelfden asked if the second was the rumoured KOTOR MMO, Riccitiello replied “Yes.” And the sweet bell chime–the sugary, hopeful note lit the sky, and a sparkle reflected in the eye of every poor, unsuspecting son of a bitch that’s been waiting so long for some god damn satisfaction.

Just three more years.

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Also dropped were a few features enhanced character customization, a new shopping system, the ability to use your Mii in your town, and of course the Animal Crossing essentials of room and home design. It’s here!

Future followup discussions in the coming hours will, I’m sure, bring into focus just how massive this potential MMO truly is. Can’t wait!

Rage, of course, is ID’s new ip and promised mac-friendly post apocalyptic first person racing, junk castle, and tavern game. Its E3 presence consisted of this trailer and an announced partnership with EA games.

See the goonie-esque baddie for yourselves, sirs!

We are not worthy.

The duo now have a stranglehold on the music game kingdom; new peripherals aren’t what’s going to win this battle, but rather the songs that will be included, if any of the names on the list provide any indication. I can hear Activision taking a crap in its pants.

The selection is more diverse in terms of the genre than the previous iteration. Just listing off a few of the band names: Disturbed, AC/DC, Beck, Tenacious D, and yes… Bob freakin Dylan! Oh yea, and regulars like Kansas, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rush, and Journey (as well as a few lukewarm ones like Linking Park and Jimmy Eat World). And to cap it all off, a single by the name of “Shacklers Revenge,” off of Gun’s and Roses’ much anticipated forthcoming album “Chinese Democracy”! Is that the sound of a tap out bell I hear? Here’s the knock-out punch:

They then went on to announce that all the original tracks form Rock Band 1, as well as your DLC, can be transfered over to Rock Band 2. And to put the icing on the cake, they wanted to include 100 total songs on the disc, but couldn’t fit them on. So coming up this fall, MTV will be releasing 20 master tracks to download, for free. So lets say that leaves us with a approximate total of 500. Ok, just tap out now!

All in all, this is a huge announcement for MTV and Harmonix–just when it looked like Guitar Hero was gaining ground, they get slapped down once again. It’s yet to be seen if there will be changes made to the Band World Tour Mode (maybe online?!?), or any other significant changes to the gameplay. Yet, while us music junkies hold our breath, we wait to see what the retaliatory blow from Acitivision will be.

From IGN

Now, why on earth would anyone not pony up an extra $20 bucks to get a hard drive rather than the skimpy Arcade version? Also, with this news now out the Microsoft door and in the lap of the happy public, will we be hearing anything from Sony regarding a cheaper PS3? Now’s the time, with E3 one day away.

Starting with Athens 2004 and now Beijing 2008, the graphics are quite decent on these new games, but for some reason the athletes still look weak and stiff; this does not portray the beauty, technique, or power involved in any of these athletic competitions. I was excited when I heard that Sega was working with the heptathlon and decathlon Commonwealth Games champions, but sadly, the animations don’t look to be much of an improvement over those of Athens 2004. In fact, Beijing 2008 looks like Athens 2004 was just repackaged in a new fancy box with a few world champions on the front and a small graphics upgrade; however, from IGN’s preview of the game, it appears that finally some more complex joy stick twiddling and button pressing/releasing has been used to make the game more challenging and interactive. The real reason I will buy this game though is for its online support. I want to see if I have the best button mashing skills in the world!

Now for a little history, to learn how track games have evolved - or lack of - into Beijing 2008:

Over the years there have been two exceptions to the basic rule I mentioned above. These games are last winter’s Sonic & Mario at the Olympic Games, and International Track and Field for the GBC (apparantly the rarest of the Sydney 2000 games as I can’t find any screen shots from the game). Sonic and Mario was revolutionary because it was the first game to bring the two icons of gaming together, but sadly it just replaced the old button tapping for Wii mote waggling. I enjoyed it for about a week, and instead of having sore fingers, I had sore arms - especially from that 4×100 swimming relay! On the other hand, International Track and Field was quite a good game! It oddly has Maurice Greene on the front cover, even though the game is a decathlon game. I will forgive this small slip-up for the fact that Daley Thompson appears in the game! Anyways, the game has the basic practice and competition modes, but where it shines is in its story mode, unique from any other track game that I have played. You are a student athlete at a university and throughout the season you have to schedule your training for either speed, jumping technique, throwing technique, stamina, or weightlifting for power; however, if you train to much without resting or hitting the town on a Sunday, you can suffer varying injuries, resulting in a possible hospital trip, or even have a nervous breakdown! It is very addictive to train as hard as you can, but not slip over the edge and get injured. During the year you can meet new people and learn special skills for your events - you can only hold three skills and these skills make those three events more interactive, and also make your character a lot better at these events - and even get one of two possible girlfriends - or play it cool with both! So as your year goes along, you compete at the all-comers meet where you are introduced to your rival, Thorpe, a total douche bag, who usually smashes you at this meet. You get your revenge though, if you trained well, at the state championships later in the season. If you win there, it’s onto the big stage at the world championships!

I thought now, eight years after ITF for the GBC, that there would be an improvement on this fantastic storyline idea for a console track game, so I’m hoping that Beijing 2008 offers something new to the world of track and field games, and not just the same old and worn out junk again. If not Beijing 2008, how about New International Track and Field, scheduled to come out later this year for the DS? I can see a DS track game either being quite fun and addictive or horribly gimmicky and disappointing.

Silicon Knight head Denis Dyack has been in the spotlight recently defending his game, under heavy scrutiny for… some reason. A demo will at least give us a chance to get a feel for the universe he’s been trying to explain for the last 10+ years.

As for Microsoft’s campaign strategy surrounding this year’s E3, the general consensus seems to be that big M is trying to drown out a lack of big flashy announcements with a heavy stream of this sort of content. That’s not a bad thing by any means, but does that mean their offering up of a demo platter should be looked at as an appeasement strategy, trying to compensate for a lack of exciting news?

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It’s a strange thing, to experience a dynamic element of gameplay promised by a developer. Some crazy, pie in the sky dream of a mechanic, actually implemented in its full glory. “Destructible environments” have existed in games of all shapes and sizes through the last two generations, right? Breaking a crate here, kicking a board and watching it disappear in a puff of smoke… wasn’t that as interactive as things could get? Fully destroying walls, breaking glass, making craters in the ground and blowing out roofs of unsuspecting Russian homesteads are a few of the surprisingly present features of Battlefield: BC. Besides being beautiful to behold, this wonderful mechanic creates a new playstyle for an FPS, one where cover can never be trusted.

Keeping this new style in mind with regard to level design, the single player campaign delivers a fairly standard experience in a with a shiny new coat of paint. The characters are stereotyped, yes, but they go beyond the usual cast in an FPS by actually having a personality. Your three AI-controlled allies have a very believable chemistry about them, and though they’re completely useless in helping you reach your objectives, the fantastic voice acting and quirky storyline makes the whole experience feel special. The only snag in the entire campaign would be the enemy AI, which could definitely use a tune-up. Enemies have nothing in their battle-repertoire beyond “stand in doorway and shoot,” making potentially intense firefights feel a little like a shooting gallery, at points. They also always know where you are, and while its cool to have a tank blow away walls to get a shot at you, it can take you out of the experience when he kerplodes you from three miles out. Besides being expertly designed, the campaign is also loaded with an absolutely insane amount of collectable weapons to unlock. 50 of these suckers can be found at drop points labeled on the mini-map, and at the feet of fallen enemies. Gold bars are also hidden on every stage, and though finding them doesn’t actually do anything, it gives perfectionists something to do.

The campaign alone warrants a purchase, but the multiplayer is what’ll keep you coming back. Ahem, CALL OF DUTY 4. The system in place is very similar, with few new features added to pretty the community up a bit. The same character customization exists, with players meeting certain conditions to gain XP, and the XP is in turn used to purchase new weapons and perks. The same satisfaction of a delicious “+10″ appearing after the kill is present, and made extra delicious by bonus conditions adding experience to many of the kills. Headshots, revenge kills, avenging kills… they all net you a tasty bonus. Another cool little feature in place is the dog tag system. Whenever you get a kill with your trusty knife, you automatically take the dog tags off of your prey, and they’re stored on your statistics page. There’s a huge support system in place for stat tracking at the Battlefield website where you can view all of the players you’ve knifed, and see how they’re doing now compared to back in the day when you put your knife inside them.

In a multiplayer community with so much depth on the customization side, I was surprised to see what I thought was a cop-out on the play side with the inclusion of only one game mode, “Gold Rush.” Two teams, one attacking and one defending, battling it out over strategically placed crates, I assume filled with gold. After playing a few rounds you realize that within this one mode exists a plethora of content and strategy. The teams are large, (though not by traditional Battlefield standards) and the maps are enormous, but handled perfectly. Once the first base/crates are destroyed by the attacking team, the map expands to include the new base in the field of play. The frontline of the battle continues to push forward (if the defending team sucks) until the climactic showdown at the largest base of the map. It might sound like some pretty standard multiplayer, but when you factor in the dynamic levels, destructible terrain, and huge selection of vehicles you’re left with an amazingly deep and compelling experience. More game modes are arriving in the coming weeks, but I don’t think they’ll get much attention with Gold Rush on the table.

A new gameplay concept executed perfectly, a thrilling, clever and genuinely fun storyline, and a multiplayer system designed around player rewards and community. This is the way video games are supposed to be.

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From Joystiq

Anyways, some of the members over at Starmen have started a project called PK Call’N. The basic outline of the project is: call NOA and tell them that you want to see Earthbound and Mother 1 on the virtual console, or Mother 3 and Mother 1 + 2 for the DS released in NA. Along with calling into NOA, you can also vote for Earthbound and Mother 1 in Nintendo Power’s virtual console pole (email vcpoll@futureus.com with your future virtual console hopefuls). For the past three months these two games have been in the top spots. I can only wonder why NOA likes to tease Mother fans so much? Finally, Earthbound was rated by the ESRB, on May 2nd, for its release onto the virtual console; however, it has still not been released. Myself, a huge Mother fan - I have played all three games in the series, including Mother 3 in Japanese - will buy this game on the virtual console the first day that it comes out and will relive the magic of this truly original game.

On a side note: I told you that NOA likes to tease Mother fans… Could this be about a NA release of Mother 3? Most likely not. I have a feeling it is Kingdom Hearts news.

Here’s another little info dump on the other bosses:

Galaxy Man: level consists of portals that fling Mega Man all around the level, maintaining his momentum with each fling (a lot like Portal, actually), plus enemies that divide into multiple copies of themselves.

Plug Man: home to the required “disappearing block” puzzle

Hornet Man: bees, lots of bees

Jewel Man: there are swings here that you have to move with built-up momentum - we had to try it several times before we could make the jumps

Magma Man: lava and plenty of one-hit-kill beams

Concrete Man: the Guts Man of Mega Man 9

Tornado Man: scourge of the Midwest has one of the hardest levels with tons of mid-air leaps and spinning platforms

Oh yes, it’s also worth mentioning that while there has been rampant speculation that it will appear on XBLA and PSN at some point, the only platform confirmed to harbor Mega Man 9 is the Wii, distributed through WiiWare. A recent Famitsu scan revealed that the game has been slated with a September release for Japan, but with the minimal (I assume) amount of text to be translated, a Western release shouldn’t be too far behind. We’ll find out at E3!

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Download audio file (quiksave16.mp3)

Back when we had Renegade Kid’s Jools Watsham, co-founder and Lead Beard, do his video blog preview Moon’s gameplay, I was its biggest fan. What we saw then evoked moments from System Shock, moments from 2001: A Space Odyssey. It hinted at moon-buggyery, and maybe gameplay in varying levels of gravity.

Wellsir, a new wave of more official preview vids have hit the blue marble. The enemies are doom-like; banal, hovering, more or less innanimate. What does seem at first to be a dynamic enemy eventually shows this horrifying on-rails AI (or lack thereof), like a homeless man pulling his sack out in an elevator after promising not to with his eyes. And the audio, well, I just don’t know any more.

Hey, kids! Explore the moon for yourself, with Google Moon!

As WWI approaches, Blizzard decided to suddenly change the rating of the event to M, for mature, which is odd because Diablo is their only series with that rating. Can things get any better you may ask yourself? Well beginning on Sunday, Blizzard has set up a teaser on their homepage. It is a block of ice that melts and cracks each day, and also a new symbol, or rune, appears on the ice each day. Now if I remember correctly, the 1.11 patch teaser proclaimed that Hell had frozen over. Is Hell about to be unleashed this weekend? Additionally, there are many odd things hidden in the image’s source code and some appear to point towards Diablo. As of Wednesday, there is one symbol for each of Blizzard’s three big franchises. Day two’s hel rune represents the Diablo series. As the week progresses and WWI starts, we can only hope that the heavens open and Tyreal presents us with a beautiful new gift: two free skill points! Wait, I mean Diablo 3!

Oh, and did I mention that the closing day of WWI is the same day that Diablo 2 and its expansion, Lord of Destruction, were released on? Very interesting.

Download audio file (quiksave15.mp3)

Legend/God Tetsuya Nomura has come out and said that Final Fantasy Versus XIII is currently “on hold” so that the development team can go give the regular FF XIII team some help getting their shit in gear. Not that we should’ve expected it any earlier, but it looks like we’ll be getting FFXIII in late ‘09 (at the earliest) and Versus XIII just before the world ends, if the Maya are to be believed.

Versus XIII is apparently going to be a more action-oriented adventure with a Kingdom Hearts feel to it, whereas FF XIII classic will have more conventional Final Fantasy battle system, though the early trailers suggest that fluidity between adventuring and battling will be a big advancement.

UPDATE:
Square Enix, in response to this story, told Eurogamer that “Reports that development for Final Fantasy Versus XIII is on hold are false. The truth of the situation is that when free, some staff from the Versus team have been helping with the XIII team on development of Final Fantasy XIII. Development for both titles is continuing as originally scheduled.”

Sounds like the guys on the Versus XIII team aren’t going to be getting much sleep between now and 2010.

From Kotaku

As a kid who sat around doodling creatures of my own imagining and then fitting them into ecosystems on nonexistent worlds, you can imagine I was pretty excited about the release of this little taste test, especially since I’ve had to watch Robin Williams and others have all the fun already. The creature creator, just one part of the game experience Spore promises, isn’t exactly breaking news - but this is the first time you get to hop behind the wheel yourself.

The creature creator’s menu and interface is very user-friendly, and fits the deceptively cartoony aesthetic of the creatures themselves. This friendly aesthetic is deceptive because despite the creatures’ propensity to look like Saturday morning critters rendered in Playdough by a child savant, you can also utilize this tool to make eldritch monstrosities that should not see the light of day.

Yes, I’m talking about those people who have seen fit to use this device for evil. Namely by making penis monsters. (You can easily find footage of these pitiful beings on YouTube, if that’s your bag. There’s too many to link to just one.)

That’s another feature I immediately noticed about the creature creator: it makes sharing your monsters incredibly simple. The option to take snapshots and capture video and upload it direct to YouTube is right there. It’s easy to see that sharing and community is going to be a huge part of this big “single-player MMO,” as it has been called.

Presumably the full version of Spore will continue this trend of user-friendliness, and perhaps expand upon it.

I was disappointed that the demo only offered insectoid and carnivorous mouths, but I suppose I can forgive Maxis for coveting their omnivore and herbivore maws. Even the few body parts that come with the demo are more than enough for you to satisfy your twisted fantasies of being Dr. Moreau’s apprentice.

Creating a creature is quite easy, though I was disheartened by the limitation on spine length. Even the longest spine wasn’t long enough to satisfy me. Here’s hoping “limitless spine” is a feature reserved for the full version.

Body parts each have a cost associated with them, which stops you from creating a creature entirely studded with mouths and/or antennae at the demo level, where earning money is impossible.

Once you realize that the game allows all sorts of logic-defying, sordid physiognomies even despite the cost limit, your inevitable descent into cruelty and perversion will begin. I started out with “shashifras”, a relatively innocuous, presentable little carnivore:

I wound up with “spiny podunk”, the forbidden love-child of a grasshopper and a tyrannosaur, with eyestalks on its obscenely elevated knees:

And this is why I’m more excited about Spore than ever. With just this morsel of the game - nay, this crumb, when you consider everything else Spore has promised - it has threatened my hours of free time. I’ve already lost one friend to its depths, and this is only a limited demo. (Dave, please come back to us.)

Once you’ve created your obscenity, you can go to the “test run” arena and watch the animator at work. That this game renders all sorts of modes of locomotion is impressive, though I did notice that my Terrorcow’s legs liked to phantasmally pass through one another, especially when it danced.

You can make your creature emote, dance, and even give it up to three little offspring to interact with within the limited walkabout space.

The demo is just enough to make me crave more. If I’d been sitting on the fence about Spore before, the amount of fun I’ve had just dinking around in the character creator would tip the scales in favor of a purchase. But don’t take my word for it. Give it a go yourself, so long as you don’t have any important deadlines coming up.

Spore is slated for release in North America on September 7th, 2008.

New Arcadia is brought to its knees by four-foot, fruit-fucking automatons and feral hobo-kind, and it’s up to Gabe, Tycho, and you (!) to stop the absurd onslaught. Almost every element of the game, from the hobos to the dubious placement of poo, has undergone some form of meditative, one-sided conversation in the thousands of years that Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik have been writing the tri-weekly web comic. Their brazen style of humour will shock naked eyes. Even as a gamer, and even as a fan of Penny Arcade, I didn’t anticipate the level of free-floating vulgarity. But the waters warmed quickly, (probably from the pee [there's a lot of pee in this game]) and with them did my heart.

I actually thought the game was pretty ugly at first, (I played it on a mac) but cranking the resolution soon revealed the crisp, saturated world for what it really was. Translating 3D characters into a 2D-like style is just now becoming acceptable, but to do the opposite brings on all new challenges that are not regularly met. Precipice makes a point of showing you how flawlessly Krahulik’s art can become a 3D model by, in some cases, transitioning straight from one form to the other. I found that once I got accustomed to them I didn’t even notice the transitions, and the lines bled even more.

A large portion of my play time was spent actually doing things, (clicking, smashing boxes, getting my junk gnawed on by clowns) which was pleasing. You can smell the various RPGs that inspired the game’s battle system, which is extremely Japanese traditional. The system lives in such a refined state, though, that it seems almost new. Each party member has three timers, representing item, attack, and special. When the first timer maxes, the second timer begins, and so on. If two or all three characters max all of their timers, they can dispense a combo. There are also secondary character timers that act like summons, which are useful as damage-dealing moves for the first three fourths of the game, but they can also act as time bonuses, allowing your main party to get their specials while the cat licks itself.

There’s rarely a moment in the combat where you’re not selecting something, and what results (for mouse-users anyway) is mild frustration. You have to click the move you’d like to preform, then, in the event of a special attack, you have to select which special you’d like to use, and then you can select the enemy you’d like to use it on. It wouldn’t be so bad if the characters weren’t zig-zagging on the screen some times, so your mouse click misses occasionally, forcing you to begin the process from stage one. This entire deal would be a non-issue if you were able to map the controls to a controller or the keyboard, but you can’t. In fact, there are no control options at all. It’s a small issue in most respects, but I can see whole seconds lost during combat hanging over my head like a fourth-dimential scar I’ll have to live with for the rest of my life.

There’s also a small collection of mini-games that look like they were made in flash and feel just as cumbersome. You don’t have to spend much time with them, thankfully, and by no means is it the greatest crime a game has ever committed, but much like the golden saucer in Final Fantasy VII, these janky little things are unwanted, at least by me.

When the chips are down, Precipice is a six hour comic strip wearing RPG groucho glasses. You can look at the game in many different ways, most of which will leave a sweet taste in your mouth and a salty freshness in the air around you, but if it’s solid narrative and quality words you’re looking for, pound for pound, this game rolls with the big boys.

Download audio file (quiksave14.mp3)

11:32 am.
After a lengthy install featuring Snake smoking a cigarette, we are being treated to a confusing montage of existential clips. Women dancing with a giant pink octopus. David Hayter selling eye-patch computing to an amorous woman. Why is this?

11:43 am.
Game begins. The battlefield is bathed in a symphony of mooing mechanoids. This is a different kind of confusion.

12:26 pm.
We have discovered the iPod, which has a disturbingly varied selection of tunes on it. It also has a 10 minute podcast about Metal Gear stuff. Also, Snake’s ass is sexy and perfect. That part’s a cheeky secret between you and me.

1:36 pm.
Met up with Drebin - his monkey no longer has a baby diaper… I’m a little disappointed.

1:39 pm.
A poop just happened.

2:26 pm.
There’s a macbook pro in this game - just for a second. I accept this product placement.

3:26 pm.
Another install screen… I guess that makes sense! The game’s installing itself over the course of the game. Look at him enjoy that cigarette!

5:04 pm.
Five and a half hours means dinner break! I dread the next cutscene… “Hey Snake! Let me talk to you for 35 minutes!”

7:25 pm.
We’re back! And after some satisfying man-tracking, we’re in a typical now-you’re-firing-a-gun-from-a-moving-vehicle minigame. Give and take!

Tom note: The tracking/hunting scene is truly fantastic. Every little nuance was taken into account, all the way down to the barely audible hum made by Snake’s infrared eye-patch being heard by enemies hiding amongst the bushes. Amazing!

7:40 pm.
The legendary Raiden vs. Vamp scene just happened. We need to take a Boom Blox Break. Wow.

8:13 pm.
Everybody in the room just screamed in disappointment as Otacon failed to become a man.

9:45 pm.
Simon’s gone, and I’m all alone with Snake. A total stealth mission combined with a handful of MGS1 & 2 throwbacks make this a precious moment.

10:30 pm.
Everything is explained. All the mysteries solved! My head is spinning! One little 25 minute cinematic opened my eyes, and I can finally say with confidence that I understand! You’ve missed it, Simon! I am enlightened! By missing this scene, you’ve lost your ticket to Metal Gear Heaven!

10:58 pm.
It’s been a long, beautiful day, but after a treacherous encounter with a B/B hottie, it’s time to turn in and dream sweet dreams of what’s to come.

I hope that wasn’t too whimsical for you, though, if you did find yourself carried away I assure you it was due to my stirring narrative, not the yawn-worthy content. The truth is that if you’re one to pursue what I’ll reluctantly call high narrative in games, Ninja Gaiden II may not be for you. If you pay attention, it’s enough to get Ryu from point A to B, but character development remains unchecked on the Team Ninja “to-do” list. How Sonia, the female protagonist (complete with a watermelon satchel on her chest) exchanges maybe five words with Ryu through the course of the game, and falls madly in love with him by its conclusion is a question that will remain forever unanswered, and not in a cool artistic way; they just don’t tell you why. Characters in this game don’t have emotions, only goals. Whenever one of them gets a chance, they’ll fill you in on just why they’re doing whatever it is they’re doing. I’m sure Ryu appreciates it, but as the omniscient player I’m already aware of why the bad people are doing bad things, and I’d just like to get on with the head-cutty-offy.

I may as well get it out of the way and talk about the reportedly abhorrent camera the game features. You can’t click anywhere these days without finding an interview, review, or rant about how terrible it is. It’s not that bad. The majority of the battles have you up close and personal with melee-based enemies, and with the exception of an odd crippling angle, there’s no harm done. The problems come later in the game, when every enemy is gifted with an automatic rocket-launcher, and you have to deal with constantly being flipped over and knocked down by off-screen foes. For god’s sake, please let me zoom out! I cry, but to no avail.

The combat, as mentioned earlier, is first class when you can see what you’re doing. The enemies are well animated and all together pretty-looking, and the system in place for guarding, counterattacking, and combo input works flawlessly. The pace of the fighting can be intimidating at first, but with practice a mastery of this system really makes the art of fighting properly a beautiful thing to behold. The fluidity of both Ryu and the enemies’ attacks make a random encounter seem like a perfectly choreographed fight scene from an anime. For fans of this genre, it’s also worth mentioning that the enemy AI and fighting style feel very unique. In games like Devil May Cry or God of War, feats of the same variety can be easily accomplished against flailing, helpless foes. In Ninja Gaiden II, the enemies (particularly the human ninjas) really feel like they know what they’re doing; their strikes are focussed and planned, their rage is intense, and they always capitalize on your mistakes. Upon severing a limb, they abandon caution and charge you (or crawl at you) balls-out, willing to end their own lives for a chance at taking yours. That feeling really came through for me, and combat was a truly dramatic experience.

The selection of weapons provides yet another level of depth to the already unfathomable abyss that is NGII combat. With eight to choose from, each one appearing as an unlockable as the game progresses, your particular style can be catered to. With changes as obvious as close-range vs. long-range, power vs. speed, and high hit frequency vs. single attacks, every player should find their perfect fit. On top of having completely different fighting styles each weapon also has its own selection of Obliteration Techniques (finishing moves). After a limb has been removed from an enemy, pressing the Y button while facing the enemy initiates a small cinematic attack for the length of which Ryu is invincible. All the nasty, excessive gore you ever dreamed of in a game can be found within these brutal finishers. My personal favourite involved the Eclipse Scythe (a massive grim-reaper style weapon wielded with two hands) being used to pierce an enemy, throw him into the air, and slice him in half–diagonally–with an upswing just before he hit the ground.

I don’t need to tell you that this game is difficult, even on the lowest setting. The “Easy” mode is nowhere to be seen; for your first playthrough, you can choose between the Path of the Acolyte (Normal Mode) and the Path of the Warrior (Hard). Upon completion of the Warrior’s Path, you unlock a higher difficulty, and a fourth, nigh impossible mode awaits your completion of after that. The game is still difficult, though it’s a great deal more playable and accessible in this area than the last iterations of the Ninja Gaiden series. Your life bar now recharges to a certain point after clearing a room of enemies, at least allowing you a chance to catch your breath. Some encounters are easier than other, but there is a stark contrast between boss battles. The nameless, giant monster bosses at the end of 75% of the levels were very cruel to me. Featuring a slew of unblockable attacks, constantly flipping camera angles and throws that do inhuman amounts of damage, they were a real treat. The fights with the Greater Fiends, however, were incredibly simple! A few easy blocks and there would be a clear break for you to input your most deadly combo. Literally two or three of these would be enough to dispatch the demigods, and it was the same for all of the human-sized major enemies featured throughout the whole story. I’m not saying I’m upset that I didn’t feel like taking my own life after fighting these guys, I just wish that they’d make the giant armadillos and dragons a little friendlier.

People seem to have adopted an “it could have been better” attitude toward this game. Sure it could’ve, but there are a lot of good things that Team Ninja’s done here to refine their already fantastic combat system and action gameplay. A pop-up menu for items and weapons goes a long way, as you no longer need to pull yourself out of the action with loading times and flashy menus. The platforming features are fluid and add a nice touch of stealth/ninja class to the experience, and reinforce the maneuverability of Ryu, reminding you that he’s not just a killing machine–he’s so much more. Fans of the series owe it to themselves to indulge in a little obliteration, and all action fans can find something very worthwhile here. I wouldn’t even be surprised to see fans of Dante and Kratos converted to the banner of Ryu Hayabusa after slicing a demon’s face off.

Apparently Mirror’s Edge is a tutorial for future world leaders; O’Brien explains:

“You can’t force other people to live by your rules and your society, even if your society is better…”

Abandoning his own seemingly loose concept of a story, the developer immediately jumps into the Whedonverse:

“To be very honest, I’m a big Joss Whedon fan, and a lot of the things in the story of the game came from Firefly and Serenity.”

Call it cheap hackery or honest dystopian storytelling–read the whole interview here.

From Gamasutra

As a Miami Dolphins fan, my eyes immediately fell to Josh McCown. He has an overall rating of 79, which seems fair, judging by his struggles in Oakland last season. However, one stat boggled my mind; McCown has a speed rating of 79, meaning that of the 32 starting quarterbacks, he is supposedly the third fastest. However, during the course of his career, he has run the ball an average of only 13 yards per game. The next thing that caught my eye was Vince Young’s 88 overall rating. Last season, Young managed to throw only 9 touchdowns to 17 interceptions, but he was given an accuracy rating of 84. Another player who is way over rated is Marc Bulger. He has been given a rating of 89, despite a 70.3 quarterback rating last season. He did have to battle through injuries and a devastated offensive line, but that doesn’t completely account for his below average 199 yards per game and an 11/15 touchdown to interception ratio. The last thing I’ll let myself ramble on about is Eli Manning’s stats. I’m not totally sure why, but I’ve always really liked Eli Manning, and I’ve almost always found myself cheering for him. However, even I don’t think his Super Bowl win warrants a 93 overall rating. The younger Manning completed a measly 56% of his passes, and threw only three more touchdowns than interceptions during the regular season. He was fantastic during the playoffs, but in no way has he vaulted into elite QB status.

Madden NFL 09 is expected out on August 12. I hope that’s enough time for developers to clean up some of those stats.

From SportsGamer

Now that we’ve established what you are, I guess it’s safe to tell you what Qore is. Qore (pronounced “core”) is the new interactive gaming-media program delivered through PSN. It’ll be an assortment of exclusive videos and previews, developer interviews, beta invitations and demos that will presumably be available only to those who pay the hefty Qore subscription fee ($2.99 per episode, $24.99 for an annual subscription).

The premier episode, hitting tomorrow (June 5th) features supposed never-before-seen footage of the big Sony titles for the season, including Afro Samurai, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, SOCOM: US Navy Seals Confrontation, Secret Agent Clank and Soul Calibur 4. There’ll also be a slew of Blu-ray trailers, I’m sure.

One last thing: it’s hosted by Veronica Belmont, first lady of the internet. Not bad, Sony. Not bad.

From Playstation.Blog

In a similar vein as Kokoro Scan (which uses voice input to guess mood, and also has a very bizarre trailer with one helluva earworm for a theme song), 99 Tears takes a step away from traditional genres to explore the human condition - or something like that.

99 Tears proposes that crying is a form of stress relief, and its aim is to coax those sweet tears out of you with user-targeted stories, pastel colors, and delicate piano music.

You can look at the trailers on the Japanese page here. The first one doesn’t tell you much, but the second one sets up the structure of the game a little.

You can also try out a demo here (though it’s 99.9% text, and in Japanese). You sally up to the bar, where “Master,” the most charming greyscale bartender I’ve yet to meet, will welcome you and ask you a few questions. Children, pets, and your general mood seem to be the demo’s prime concerns, but the trailer suggests even more interactivity and feedback, with good use of the DS’ touchscreen and built-in microphone.

This might be a uniquely Japanese game that never sees the west, or it might usher in a new genre of ladies’ lit DS games that take the place of daytime soaps and romance novels. In either case, it’s always refreshing to see a unique game experience hit the shelves.

Nevertheless I’m impressed at how the graphical upgrade has come along without changing the nostalgic feel I get from the old SNES titles. I’m also really looking forward to a Quiksave tournament once we get our hands on a copy. There will be hadokens through the roof, y’all.

Oh my god! Who could do such a thing? Al-Qaeda has really done it this time: they’ve hit the White House. To think, all of Washington DC gone in one nuclear blast… What’s that you say? It wasn’t al-Qaeda? It was Bethesda Softworks? Wow, I knew they made good video games, but I didn’t know they made such potent Weapons of Mass Destruction! That said, Oblivion did manage to blow the competition out of the water in 2006.

The SITE Intelligence Group found the above picture on a “password-protected forum affiliated with al-Qaeda”. It was quickly realised that it was concept art for the highly anticipated Fallout 3, which is being developed by Bethesda. A lot of confusion arose out of who SITE accredited the photo to, but that isn’t terribly interesting, so I won’t bore you with the details. What is interesting is that Fallout 3 is expected out this fall. The developers have been very discrete with the games details thus far, but look forward to more trailers and screenshots before too long.

From Gamespot

It’s still fresh in my mind, how fast they were. Their shoes were clean; saved for these moments on the mats. The arrows were ascending like rain drops in reverse, and the music filled the quiet arcade, and the soft reflection of In The Groove 2 could be seen upon the dusty monitor of the DDR machine.
It had been maybe thirteen months since I’d set foot inside Johnny-Z’s. Apparently this place has become an icy monastery, where only the hard core dwell.

I remember playing Fourth Mix in front of a cloud of asians while Captain Jack told me exactly what the military step was, and when to do it. I remember seeing the craziest individuals busting out on both dance mats at once. It’s nothing compared to what I saw the other night. The night I discovered my city’s In The Groove community.

I stepped out of my skull and watched it swell as their perfectly calibrated twitches broke reality. I remember thinking, as my eyes began to itch with strain, they’re too fast. How could have these beings been grinding away at this game for so long, to get so good, without some kind of massive powerwell forming above the arcade? They were like bats in an obstacle course, twisting through the darkness on the signal of an echo.

“He made this one,” my Sherpa said to me. “He’s the only one that can get above 90% on it. He’s got it memorized.” Apparently you can fucking make songs in this game.

I kept my eyes on the guy. ITG2 is essentially DDR, but it’s a coked-out super-DDR. And these people craft impossible songs and beat the shit out of their own bodies beyond anything DDR could have allowed for. Most of the songs I saw them tackling couldn’t even be completed by a single human being. Yes, the speed was insane, and they even kept up, but this flimsy, physical husk, this ancient primate vessel we all slog around in, just isn’t good enough. One fellow (the one pictured) managed to complete his own song, the one only he could reach 90% on, and started to shake.

“He’s gunna crash.” They all said to each other. And, “dude, did you crash?” they later asked him. And he would nod silently.

Aftermath

A spunky girl jumped over to me and outstretched her hand. She was inviting a shake. “I’m Sarah,” she let me know.

“I’m Simon,” I said.

“Do you come here often?”

“The last time I was here–,” she became distracted with one of the sweaty rhythm-gods, then apologized for her mercurial focus and looked into my eyes. “The last time I was here–,” I said again, but it was too late–she was gone.

These people, these night-dwelling, flashdrive-carrying nerd/maniacs were simply existing in a faster world. I could only observe, and be affected by their ways. She tried again, this time with an empathetic smile on her face, but it was time for me to go.

But enough about masturbating when you should be playing videogames: the trailer awaits after the bounce jump.

Yeah, that was good. Besides the flesh we’ll be immersed in, the game itself looks pretty damn cool. Kilik is never not a total badass.
From Kotaku

“Can [Age of Conan] really succeed based on players’ desire to kill each other, or has MMO gaming simply run out of ideas and is instead opting to ape the online shooters from which they originally evolved?”

First of all, who says MMOs evolved from online FPS? I’m gunna go ahead and disagree. Maybe MMOs evolved from RPGs? That, at least, sounds better to my old ears. Maybe I’m wonky.

You could argue that Age of Conan has a very tightly structured playing experience, as the people who play it seem to sing often of bloodlust and glory to whomever will listen. So we know for sure that there’s bloodlust in AOC, and glory, which sure sounds like a PVP experience to me, but there’s something else that Cavalli missed, I think.

In Rory Manion’s piece for 1up.com, a romantic notion lies:

“I honestly can’t see myself enjoying AOC on a non-PVP server. Not because I’m too masochistic to have fun without the constant threat of violence, but because that threat forces the kind of teamwork that online games are supposed to engender and, in doing so, makes the grind more bearable.”

I know we try not to use the word “emergent” these days when we’re talking about video games, but doesn’t that resonate? Risk and danger might be all AOC needs to separate itself from Wow, and maybe pull in a million or two subscribers, if it can scale. So maybe PVP, if you leave it loose enough, is actually a doorway to a more sophisticated type of play. Or at least something different and interesting.

What can an aging 80s rock/metal band do to reach a new audience? Dr. Feel Good prescribes releasing a single from an upcoming album to Rock Band. “Saints of Los Angeles” has also been released for download from places like Amazon and ITunes, but has only managed to break the 10,000 download mark on those sites. On Rock Band alone, it has reportedly been downloaded roughly 47,000 times since its mid-April release. This is another example of the entertainment industry catching on to the soaring influence of video games (let’s not forget Ricky Gervais’ appearance in GTA 4). Motley Crue’s new album, also entitled “Saints of Los Angeles”, is set to hit store shelves Tuesday, June 24, in the US.

From Gamespot

Unless you hid under a rock well outside of any wi-fi coverage zone, you’ve heard that IGN.com gave the game a 10, which means it is “Masterful,” and the “pinnacle of gaming brilliance.” While I’ve clocked a fair few hours in the game and look forward to finishing it, it hasn’t punched me in the gut with brilliance quite yet. A lot of the game’s enjoyment is derived from its free-form and multiplayer elements which aren’t integral to the game’s actual storyline, but rather rely on an individual player’s ingenuity and curiosity to create such precious moments.

The multiplayer is an absolute must. I’ve never heard a group of strangers laughing, hooting, and giggling non-stop for so long before. There are some truly creative profanity-weavers out there in the world. Cussing virtuosos, if you will.

There’s just something about car accidents and explosions that brings out the best in mankind.

The core game is good. Excellent, even, but I shy away from that 10 rating for a few reasons. I’m not trying to be contrarian; GTA IV is mostly comprised of stunningly attractive facets. I know this makes my complaints about as palatable as a cruiseliner passenger insisting that their month-long tour of the Caribbean was spoiled by the one or two gnats they inhaled while standing poolside on the observation deck, slack-jawed with cocktail in hand, but those are gnats that ought to be mentioned.

As in any Grand Theft Auto game, one must start with talking about the grand theft of autos. And grand it is. GTA IV definitely caters to the set yearning to act out fantasies that were born upon first seeing Gone in 60 Seconds, fantasies which summarily grew fat at the teat of The Fast and the Furious.

My first impression of the driving system was an unfavorable one. How, I wondered, as I skidded into my third fire hydrant (and eighth pedestrian), would I ever get the hang of this? Perseverance paid off, and while it’s still easy to clip a few pedestrians every now and again, I now actually enjoy the way the controls are set up. Whether or not the fact that every vehicle handles differently in the game (as in real life) is a fantastic feature or a royal pissoff will depend on your skills and style of play.

And through Brucie, the bullshark testosterone-pumping homosocial homophobe you’ll quickly love to hate (or at least roll your eyes at), you can engage in street races and pick up select vehicles to add to his personal collection.

Seeing the sun rise or set over Liberty City as you fly across the bridge in a stolen convertible, ambulance, or Mack truck offers players with sensitive souls some surprisingly poignant moments.

I never thought so much Gaussian blur could make me feel so good.

It’s a little less moving when Niko’s digital arm goes through a car door to pop the lock rather than into the window he’s just smashed, though it’s a rendering foible I suppose I can ultimately overlook.

Once the sun sets, the city is a different place. It is a dark place. I don’t mean metaphorically, I mean I can’t see shit without turning up the brightness and contrast. It’s hard to feel like a bigshot gun-for-hire when you’re repeatedly bumbling into a wall while two bums look on, hoping that that secret entrance to the gun seller’s shop is “around here somewheres.”

It’s also hard to feel cool when you fail a mission for the fifth time. Fortunately, GTA IV is very accommodating of dunderheads like me, and offers the convenient option of checking your phone text messages to jump right into an automatic reattempt. It makes it easy to get back to the crushingly difficult attempt to outmanoeuvre a S.W.A.T. team in an abandoned building with a backpack full of coke, and I like that.

Liberty City itself is huge. If the fold-out map that comes with the game didn’t impress you enough, check out the online GTA IV City Map. There comes a point after the first few missions and your move from Broker to Bohan, where you’re fully equipped with everything you need to get your missions done. You have your cell phone, Internet access, a host of colourful NPCs ready to give you money to kill people, thieve cars, reclaim coke, and more. This tipping point, when the game spreads itself before you in all its promise and glory like an all-you-can-eat intercontinental buffet, may make your stomach flip-flop.

Am I complaining that a game is somehow frightening or intimidating because of its wealth of content? Maybe. Am I complaining that the game takes off the training wheels and throws you out there too soon? Heck no. I just liked it when I could go to sleep before 3AM.

The city is full of colour and that irreverent GTA satire we’ve come to love. The characters this time around are incredibly engaging, from lovable and nigh-incomprehensible Little Jacob and your gambling-addicted optimistic cousin Roman, to the guys and girls on the street you don’t even know. Finding a lone, pot-bellied man in overalls sweeping the concrete down by the docks at 4AM on a Tuesday in-game reminds you of the dynamics of the city, and the AI is good at giving you the illusion that you’ve touched the lives of these nonexistent people. I know that the trio of gangsters who saw me fly through the windshield of my beamer only to roll like a rag-doll to their very feet will never be the same. Maybe they’ll clean up their acts, and go on to get college degrees.

As a sandbox of potential, this game is exquisite. The 3 XBOX 360 owners without Live Gold will be missing out on a lot of the experience, but they’ll still have an overall excellent game on their hands.

I’d like to know who made this game (aside from Reflexive Entertainment, obviously, I mean the actual human being) and find out what else he/she’s done, what his/her favourite creation is, so on. Let me know if you have more information.

“Unit 3, Capture Bravo!”

“Special task force, capture hostile 4 and torture them for the rest of Red Team’s battle plan!”

Oh wait, that last one didn’t work. I guess Tom Clancy isn’t the biggest supporter of the Bush administration (for the record: according to Wikipedia, he isn’t).

Tom Clancy’s EndWar is the next big thing on the real-time strategy front. It’s incorporating a vocal command system, which according to Gamespot, is working extremely well. This new dimension will help to spice up an arguably stagnant genre. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never been a hardcore RTS gamer, but I have been a casual fan who has always enjoyed the likes of Red Alert and Starcraft. To me – and to probably a lot of others like me – the small graphical upgrades and occasional changes in scenery have been getting old for a while now. Being able to bark orders at your loyal squad is a very attractive quirk. In an effort to make game play smoother, Ubisoft has also taken out many features most current-gen RTS’s would normally employ. It has yet to be seen if this will hurt the replay value significantly.

Multiplayer is also going to be getting a nice big twist with an immersive World War 3 experience. Everyone will be fighting with their friends to move the front lines back and forth over the entire planet. If nobody can wait until roughly September of this year (depending on whether or not you can ever trust Ubisoft to stick to a release date), check out Shattered Galaxy, which is a free MMO-RTS that’s pretty fun.

From Gamespot

N’Gai Croal of Newsweek said of the game’s trailer: “There was a lot of imagery in that trailer that dovetailed with classic racist imagery”. It’s obvious the racial issues of the game go deeper than just some white protagonist killing black enemies. Croal points out that the problems aren’t based on the colour of the zombies’ skin, but rather the impression that “it’s like they’re (the native population) all dangerous; they all need to be killed”. Either Capcom hasn’t paid much attention to the critics of the trailer, or it simply hasn’t dealt the dilemma publically. Expect them to address the issues closer to the release date. Capcom is hoping Resident Evil 5 will be released by March 2009 at the latest. You can view the trailer here, to see what all the hubbub is about for yourselves.

From Kotaku

Download audio file (quiksave13.mp3)

“I looooove some new clothes??”
As of this date, no one knows exactly where this video comes from, or where the guy who really wants to be Scott Weiland from Stone Temple Pilots comes from, but I’m sure it’s the same place, and I’m sure I don’t ever want to go there.
“Sometiiiimes yoou, can’t yeeeeell..“

From Joystiq