Atari: Arcade Invader

Kotaku (46 unread)

A Week In Comments [Hyper Multi-tap]

Posted: February 22nd, 2010, 10:00pm PST by Brian Ashcraft

Tags: hyper multi-tap

Ubisoft On The Campaign Trail Over New PC DRM Measures
Comment by: miquonranger03
Nominated by: Tarr

First they raised the console game prices, but I did not speak, because I was a PC gamer.

Then they started using StarForce, TAGES, and SecuROM, but I did not speak, because I was not a software pirate.

Then, they made used game buyers pay for the free DLC, but I did not speak, because I buy my games new.

Then, they forced PC gamers to be constantly connected to the internet to play games, and there was nobody left to speak for me, because everybody was on hold with EA trying to get their Cerberus Network code to work.

Talk Amongst Yourselves
Comment by: skitzogreg
Nominated by: Duin

The other day I found a Wii Classic Controller Pro at a local game store in town. Trading in my Classic Controller, I joyfully left the store with another reason to turn on my Wii; the Wii which has stayed dormant for almost a year. My first thought when I plugged the controller was, "man, I've got to see how this feels on each (console) game". I fired up Ocarina of Time, A Link to the Past, Megaman 9, Sonic the Hedgehog, and even made sure I was comfortable browsing the Wii menu with it. Before I turned the console off, I remembered that I hadn't tried out a real NES game. Naturally, I gravitated toward Mario Bros. 3, a title I had purchased and neglected to play for a long time.

That's when it hit me. It sounds almost dramatic and strange that a game can bring back memories almost as much as a smell, but they can. I sat on my couch with my wife, I was playing the game, she was reading a book, but she looked at me and asked, "What are you staring at?". I wasn't staring at anything. I was peering into the screen that took me back years and years. I was imagining myself and my cousin, who's also my best friend, staying up until midnight night after night to simply get to World 8. The words, "Save the P-Wings!" echoed through my mind as I made my way through a castle and received one as a gift. I remembered that with our parents' alcoholism, we turned to video games to keep our minds occupied as kids; this game was our game of choice.

As said before, it sounds so dramatic. But I always feel sympathetic for a lot of us that almost feel attached to the past, playing games we love and remember. I'm not alone, as recently I read an article of a guy who, every year, would play through the entire game of the original Zelda with his dad until he passed. Before my Dad got real sick when I was younger, he thought it was "ingenious" to strike down Bowser with a Mechakoopa, and would ask me to see if I could "beat Bowser" because he knew it made me happy in a time when I was sad to see my father in pain. It's 9:30 in the morning here and I'm only saying this because this was on my mind as I fell asleep, and I've just woken up.

In conclusion, you're never to old or young to play video games. Sometimes, that break away from real life is just the thing you need. From Atari to Wii, enjoy what you play and have fun. It's not a contest of who can get the highest gamerscore, or who can nab the most trophies, no. Just have a fucking fantastic time, and don't keep games away from your kids.

Homeless RPG Comes to America
Comment by: (Starman) 258, Brigadier-General of the FireWire Battalion
Nominated by: octaslash

Welcome to Vagrant Chronicles, Bay Area Edition!

What character shall you choose for this fine vagrant adventure?

MALE◀
FEMALE

Name your character.

BEARDMAN◀

Your male vagrant named BEARDMAN is at Level 1 Drifter.

What city shall your fellow hoboes inhabit?

Oakland◀
SnFrisco
San Jose
Gilroy

Oakland is your character's new destination on the road.

He has chosen to stay in Jack London Square for the night. Two hours pass, and an Armed Cop comes by, and asks what he is doing taking residence in a public location. Desperate not to leave, BEARDMAN springs into action.

BEARDMAN encounters Armed Cop! What will BEARDMAN do?

TALK
OFFER
ACT "SHITCRZY"◀
RUN

◇ATTACK◀
◇DEFEND
◇SPECIAL
◇ITEM

BEARDMAN attack for 10 DAMAGE! Armed Cop auto-parries with StelthFist! 20 DAMAGE in return!!

Armed Cop defends.

What will BEARDMAN do?

TALK◀
OFFER
ACT "SHITCRZY"
RUN

BEARDMAN attempts to talk with Armed Cop.

Oh no! BEARDMAN's INTEL has not reached 5, the minimum for speech! As such, Armed Cop is agitated and aggravated by your actions.

Armed Cop arms self with TASER…

What will BEARDMAN do?

TALK
OFFER
ACT "SHITCRZY"◀
RUN

◇ATTACK
◇DEFEND
◇SPECIAL
◇ITEM

▪T2THBRSH
▪BRKNCLOK
▪MONEY~
▪BREAD◀
▪PRNOMAG

BEARDMAN uses BREAD. Recovered 10 HP. But scatters loads of CRUMBS in the process…

Armed Cop attacks with TASER!

MISSED

What will BEARDMAN do?

TALK
OFFER
ACT "SHITCRZY"
RUN◀

BEARDMAN attempts to RUN!

CANNOT ESCAPE

Armed Cop attacks with TASER!

BEARDMAN takes 150 fatal DAMAGE!!

BEARDMAN has fallen…

Your BEARDMAN hobo is now dead. As such pertaining to part IVX.234 of the Charter Code of the City of Oakland, BEARDMAN's body shall be disposed of by sanitation engineers in the early morning of the next Tuesday, and will be disposed of on Treasure Island, where voluptuous seagulls will presumably feast on BEARDMAN's remains. If not, then the raccoons will. If not them, then the college students of UCSF will presumably dine on exquisite Homo sapiens flesh that Tuesday evening…

GAME OVER

Would you like to start the game again?

YES
NO◀

First Screens From Assassin's Creed II's Bonfire Of The Vanities
Comment by: Spoony
Nominated by: zackfair

Except if you had read the developer's articles it would have made sense to you why they did.

They cut out chapters 12 and 13 when Ubisoft was like you're shipping by November no delays. So it was decided to cut them from the main game as they weren't that major to the plot. I mean the dlc is almost a gig, it's obviously not simply an unlock code.

Now after they shipped they had the prime opportunity to polish up the areas and sell them for a small fee for those people who wanted more AC2.

So it does not cheapen then AC2 as you put it. No one is forcing you to buy the DLC, the game is 100% complete without these two dlc packs. Because if DLC didn't exist these two chapters would not be in the game.

Think of this DLC like the director's cut of a movie.

You go to the theater to watch Lord of the Rings. But then wow hey look the extended edition comes out on DVD. Should i complain i saw the theatrical version in theaters and they took my money and held back footage of the movie so they could use it to sell me their expensive version of the dvds? Most people would say no, you got a full length movie in the theater and the extra footage was not vital to the movie so it's just that extra.

So really stop complaining about DLC when it's used properly and go back to complaining about the games that simply give you an unlock code.

Want to nominate comments? Send to tips any insightful or funny comments you read from other commenters. (Read: NOT YOURSELF). Be sure to include the post's URL, the commenter's page, the actual comment and your commenter page.

Here's a handy guide to commenting. Read it, learn it, live it, love it.

Delete
Mile Marker 17: AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! — A Reckless Disregard for Gravity [The Road To The Igf]

Posted: February 22nd, 2010, 12:00pm PST by Stephen Totilo

Tags: the road to the igf

newVideoPlayer( {"type":"video","player":"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/v\/8LRQzEunphA&hl=en&fs=1&fmt=22","customParams":[],"width":500,"height":412,"ratio":0.824,"flashData":"","embedName":null,"objectId":null,"noEmbed":false,"source":"youtube"} ); Tired of stodgy corporate games made by The Man and his minions? We're playing the 31 best indie games for a change of pace —- and so we can judge them. Today, AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! — A Reckless Disregard for Gravity.

In A Sentence
Part score-based sky-diving game, part re-imagining of please-the-crowd-while-you-plummet (snowboarding game) Amped 4, the game they call "AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! — A Reckless Disregard for Gravity" is also a game that, uh, seems to be flirting with me..

State Of Completion
You can buy it to play in full on your computer. Thankfully you can get this game online, meaning you don't have to attempt to ask for it by name — out loud.

Thoughts
This nominee for this year's Independent Games Festival's excellence in design award initially seems like nothing more than a Lawnmower Man or Tron-looking skydiving game at first. But then the design gets layered, requiring you to "hug" skyscrapers by falling near part of them, or "kiss" skyscrapers by passing objects in full, or flip off people standing on bridges who you don't like, all for points and with various goals defined.

The aesthetics are bold, with the game playfully taunting you and joking with you in almost every menu option. The design may be tight, but the aesthetic is closer to anything-goes. This isn't just a skydiving game, you see, it's one in which you might skydive past a very tall piece of bathing suit model pin-up art. Extra points if you can collide with a bird as you drop.

Answers We Demanded
Kotaku: The entries of the IGF are an eclectic bunch, ranging from esoteric art titles to straight forward drop-in-and-play casual games. In creating your entry what do you hope to accomplish with your game?

Ichiro Lambe of Dejobaan Games: AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! — A Reckless Disregard for Gravity answered some big questions for us: Can we make a popular game by infusing the studio's character into it? Can we create a game that's so uniquely Dejobaan that it'd be impossible to mistake for anyone else's? Will gamers accept things like an in-game guided meditation (played completely straight) and instructions for debristling a pig? So far, the answer's been a resounding "Yes!" I think the studio's character is a big part of what makes Aaaaa! fresh.

Kotaku: Who or what are your greatest influences when creating a game?

Lambe: This varies, from game to game, but I think it all stems from the classic Atari 8-bit games:

* Phillip Price and Gary Gilbertson for Alternate Reality - The City. They did amazing things with music and games that I still haven't seen replicated.
* Dan(i) Bunten for M.U.L.E. Here's a video game that's 30 years old, and every bit as playable now as when it was first released. It's possibly one of the world's most perfect games.
* Noah Falstein for Koronis Rift. An overlooked classic, it's a game that appeals to me the same way that Pokemon did — it's about collecting fascinating things.

Kotaku: How did you come up with the name to your game?

Lambe: Our gameplay guy, Dan, and I were sitting in my living room, coming up with possible names. We had a list that looked like this:

* Screaming and Falling
* Low Altitude
* AaaAaaAaa!
* Deploy Parachute for Hot Chicks
* Jumping to Earth From Tall Buildings
* Bridge. Antenna. Span. Earth.
* Falling Toward Earth
* Your Personal Crater
* Don't Forget Your Parachute
* Spicy Mountain Lion

"AaaAaaAaa!" was meant to be tongue-in-cheek. We brought our PR/marketing guy, Leo, in, and he refused to let me leave the meeting until we picked it! We spent the next hour discussing how it would be spelled and pronounced. It sounded like a cage match.

Make sure to check out the rest of the Independent Games Festival finalists as we head toward the March awards show.

Delete
Imaginary Triumphs: Sports As A Role-Playing Game [Stick Jockey]

Posted: February 20th, 2010, 1:00pm PST by Owen Good

Tags: Stick jockey

We stalk back to the visitor's clubhouse, everyone suffused with silent disgust. In my big-league debut, family beaming from the stands, I scattered five hits and one run over eight innings. Behind that my teammates, the Washington Nationals, scored nothing.
Their eyes follow me all the way up the Citi Field ramp. The tension is upon us all; I'm the phenom with the 98-mph blowtorch. My starts are found money, the opportunity that can't be wasted. When they are, it makes my distance from the team even more apparent. It makes it worse. And it makes it all up to me.

I fire my glove into my dressing room stall and stand atop my chair. The writers are outside but I'm sure they can hear. "You know what, fuck this game," I say. "This game is over and I no longer give a shit and none of you should either. We play tomorrow and I pitch next week and when I do I swear to you I will fuck the Braves up."
• • •
None of this happened in MLB 09 The Show. Nor will it happen in MLB 10 The Show. Nor, considering the language, will it ever happen in a licensed video game. I made it all up in my mind. I said these things to a television screen, stabbing my finger in the air in an empty room. It was another episode in a freelance narrative I'd pieced together over a month while brushing my teeth, getting the mail and buying groceries.

"No one has yet calculated how many imaginary triumphs are celebrated by people each year to keep up their courage," the Greek rhetorician Athenaeus wrote around 200 A.D. Even if it were calculable, the number has surely mushroomed in the advent of sports simulation gaming. And it's a figure that can only grow, for sports are the undiscovered country for the role-playing genre in video games. It's an urge that's been brewing for years and has only recently been tapped by solo-player career modes like NCAA Football's Road to Glory, NBA 2K's My Player and MLB The Show's exceptional Road to the Show.

But it lies outside the design orthodoxy of both console role-playing games and sports simulations. Sword-and-shield RPGs, no matter how open-world they profess to be, still supply a backstory, a goal and missions. Sports simulations have none, beyond the player's institutional memory of the league and its performers, then the games he plays, and the continuity he remembers.

RPGs will create milestones as one progresses through the story. In a sports career mode, not only must the player achieve them, he must create them. Nothing foreordains a seventh-game World Series showdown by your fifth - or any - year in the majors, but such climactic events are essential to standard RPGs.

Yesterday I put the question to the MLB The Show team. Is what you make a role-playing game? I expect them to say yes. Why not? It appeals to more players, right?

Not exactly.

"I think we do a good job of tiptoeing that line" said Aaron Luke, a designer on the MLB 10 The Show team. And for a genre where true-to-life simulation sells the most copies, tiptoeing the line is about as far as anyone wants to go right now.

"One of the things that makes it hard to commit fully to a role playing game, even though the aspects of creating a player and improving him and customizing him are there," said senior designer Eddy Cramm, "is that role playing games come from a basis of fantasy and make-believe. But baseball, a sports game, is based on reality. When you're making a sports game, you are all about making it more accurate and true to life."

That's not to say your accomplishments in MLB The Show, or any sports game, take place in a vacuum. The announcers will tell the viewers you're making your debut. Through the seventh inning of a no-hitter, the ritual of not mentioning the elephant in the room begins. Closing in on a milestone victory, home run or hit carries its own special audio and cut scene, with celebration and catharsis.

But sports games still must serve the here and now more than posterity. There's a tremendous multiplayer constituency that console RPGs don't have to serve. "Me, I'm more of an on-the-field guy," says Cramm, "I play against a buddy, and that's my competition. But there are a lot of guys out there who want to compete against themselves, who want that role-playing aspect, that career aspect. It's important to reach them, too."

Luke, however, is a man after my own heart. As a designer, he's played thousands of games. But his most memorable one goes back to the original Road to the Show mode of MLB 07 The Show. "That's the one I'll always remember," he said, "I'm a Cubs fan, so I specifically remember pitching for Chicago, it was in the playoffs of my third major league season and I was the No. 3 starter."

Cramm nods at this. "This is three years later. It was one video game, and he still has an attachment to that moment," he says. "I think it says a lot."

I understand that sports simulations are largely sold on how well they reflect real life. You'll see it when MLB 10 The Show's marketing campaign ramps up. But that value isn't mutually exclusive to the fantasy it can deliver - which is the longest and most commonly held dream of a population more vast than video gamers worldwide. Generations of men have died wanting it before the pitch was thrown, the first goal scored, the first touchdown made on an Atari 2600: Make the big leagues. Win the big game. Hear the cheering of thousands. Now, if only as a palliative for our own regrets, missed opportunities, inadequacies or failures, video games are starting to soothe that.

"That exact philosophy is what spawned the Road to the Show mode three years ago," Luke said, "taking someone through that experience, something we all wish we had."
• • •
Luke treasures his first major league shutout. And now I'm on a mission for mine. In my second start the Nationals face the Braves in Atlanta. In the second inning, Ryan Zimmerman pumps a solo shot off Javier Vazquez to get us on top 1-0. (Vazquez, like others in this simulation of a 2011 season, have signed with different teams in real life 2010). I scatter a couple hits over three and the game locks into a pitcher's duel through five.

In the sixth I come to bat and Vazquez hits me on my right forearm, the nonpitching one. In the bottom of the inning, he comes to the plate with one out, everyone expecting me, the hothead, to hit him. I dismiss Vazquez on three fastballs. Then I deliberately put on two runners so I can face Chipper Jones, the future hall of famer, Mr. Brave, hitting third. Without hesitation I blast Jones between the shoulder blades, loading the bases. Only the implausible foolishness of the situation saves me from an ejection. I shrug and pat my jersey front but I can't even hear the umpire's warning; my ears ring with the hate of the Turner Field crowd.

But I make sure to leave the mound casually after freezing free-agent pickup Pat Burrell with a 1-2 change, plate umpire Mac Harvey pumping his elbow and punching at the Braves' dugout for effect.

Turner Field in April is a mausoleum as I finish this out. The score is again 1-0. This time, we win. My 11 strikeouts and one hit batsman have delivered on my promise. Two weeks ago I made the major leagues. But in my second start, I have made this team.

Stick Jockey is Kotaku's column on sports video games. It appears Saturdays at 2 p.m. U.S. Mountain time.

Delete
Atari's Missile Command Bound For The Big Screen? [Movies]

Posted: February 19th, 2010, 4:40pm PST by Michael McWhertor

Tags: Movies

Missile Command rights holder Atari is banking on Hollywood's creatively bankrupt studios to warm to a movie based on the 30-year-old trackball game in which missiles are commanded and cities are saved.

The LA Times reports that Atari is in "active discussions with studios" to option the rights to Missile Command as a film, hinting that some studios may already be prime destinations for the license. Yes, it does sound about as exciting as the movie based on Asteroids plus relationships.

But you'd be right in opining that a movie based on Missile Command is not as exciting a prospect as director Peter Berg's adaptation of Hasbro's Battleship. Why we're talking about any of these properties in advance of Yar's Revenge: The Movie in 3D is beyond me.

Atari's Missile Command, a potential Hollywood franchise [LA Times]

Delete
Sony Files Patent For Universal Game Controller [Sony]

Posted: February 19th, 2010, 5:00am PST by Brian Ashcraft

Tags: Sony

There are universal TV remotes, so why not universal video game console controllers? Sony's recent patent filing indicates that could change.

The Sony patent, which was filed in August 2008 but appeared online on February 18 of this year, reads: "Just like remote controls, game consoles, and thus game controllers, are becoming widespread. It is not surprising to find more than one game consoles in a household, especially when competing game console manufacturers attempt to attract unconventional consumer groups in the gaming industry. As understood herein, it would be useful to have a universal controller that would be able to work with a variety of game consoles."

This controller would feature a touch sensitive liquid crystal display that would display various button layouts depending on the consoles. For example, a Nintendo console would pull up a Nintendo controller layout, a Microsoft console would pull up a Microsoft controller layout and a PlayStation console would pull up a PS controller layout.

The patent also notes that this controller will have a speaker and rumble. Though, this is interesting. From the patent: "This document describes an adaptable or universal game controller which can be used to emulate the controllers of popular game consoles, such as, without limitation, the PlayStation.TM. made by Sony, a controller made by Nintendo, X-box.TM. game controllers made by Microsoft, Amiga CD-32.TM. controllers, Atari Jaguar.TM. controllers, Gravis Gamepad.TM. controllers, Sega controllers, and Turbographics controllers, one or more of which terms may be subject to trademark protection. For ease of exposition trademark symbols will not be further used herein."

Those consoles are all old. Is the PS3 getting a proper virtual console and an actual universal controller to go with it?

United States Patent Application: 0100041480 [USPTO via GoRumors via Gizmodo]

Delete
Bobby Kotick, Warm and Fuzzy, Defends Notorious No-Fun Statements [Dice 2010]

Posted: February 18th, 2010, 1:00pm PST by Stephen Totilo

Tags: Dice 2010

Bobby Kotick, head of Activision, thought he was Luke, not Vader. And he didn't mean that thing about wanting to make game-making no fun.

"I don't know how this happened, but all my life I was the rebel flying the Millennium Falcon or the X-Wing fighter and suddenly I wake up and I'm on board the Death Star." That's the second quip Activision's oft-vilified CEO said to start his talk at the DICE gaming convention today. His first was a joke about the height of his microphone, set not for his height (he's short) but for former EA chief Larry Probst.

Mistakes, Kotick has made a few and he was ready to admit them today.

Most notorious was a late 2009 comment he made that seemed to cement his position as more Vader thank Luke. No, he said today, he didn't mean to sound like, his words, "a dick."

In September he had told a group of investors: "The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games."

Today, he said, after describing Activision as a company striving for greatness, "Sometimes that commitment to excellence, well, you can come across as being like a dick. And when I say things like 'taking the fun out of making video games,' it was a line that has been often-quoted lately, but it was a line I used for investors. It was mainly because i wanted to somehow come across in a humorous way that we were responsible, in the way we made our games in that it wasn't some wild west, lack of process exercise and that we really did give some thought to the capital being used to provide a return of investment to shareholders. So I say things like 'taking the fun out of video games' knowing full well that all we're actually trying to do is keep the fun in the process because, as most of you know, when you're getting into crunch time it becomes really difficult to meet those milestones or get things polished the way you would like, that isn't a lot of fun. That is not what I meant by it."

The Kotick speech today was one of of putting on the good face of Activision and the man at the podium here at the Red Rock Casino. Kotick admitted that he's sometimes been so much the businessman that he's cost his shareholders money by not remembering to get close to game creators. "Sometime what winds up happening when you are 50,000 feet above is you can get insulated from that creative passion."

Blizzard? He should have bought them sooner. He had thought that a subscription version of World of Warcraft was "the silliest thing" he'd ever heard of.

Maxis? "When Maxis was getting sold everyone was being sold on Sim City 2000 being this fantastic product that was incredibly late and wasn't coming out." Kotick went to visit some executives at the company. In another office, Will Wright was working on a game called Jefferson. Kotick didn't meet with Wright. No one could explain the game to him. What Kotick missed was the game that would become the Sims.

For a CEO who has been vilified as a business-first enemy of video game creativity, Kotick wanted to reveal that he has made mistakes staying too distant from passionate game creators.

The most vivid example he gave was how he handled the purchase of the Guitar Hero brand and blew off the talented studio, Harmonix, that had built them, prioritizing the Guitar Hero franchise owner Red Octane and handing the development of the series to Activision-run Neversoft.

"When we were buying Guitar Hero, or buying Red Octane, the makers of Guitar Hero, we knew about Harmonix," Kotick said. "We had always known them as sort of somewhat a failed developer of music games." Activision decided that their own studio, Neversoft, made good games, so they would make Guitar Hero from now on, not the Boston-based Harmonix. He said that had Activision met with Harmonix, things would have been very different.

That's Bobby Kotick saying sorry. Note that Harmonix, now owned by MTV Games and creating the Rock Band games, has been distributed by Activision rival EA since then. That distribution deal is set to expire next month.

Kotick was warm and fuzzy, zip-up sweater over polo shirt, no suit and not much business talk. He was reminiscing in his 20s, the ex history of art major spending about $400,000 for a stake in Activision, a company he was worried was losing its soul. He wanted to explain that he was a gamer originally, then a businessman, one with apologies for some of the creators he may have ignored or insulted — and of course a company to brag about now.

"I loved Zork," he said of his gaming days. "I loved Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. I loved the whole idea behind Activision." That idea was that it was the anti-Atari, the company that rebelled against the corporate attitude of Atari and would champion creators.

He recalled scheming in the late 80s with his friend who had started a hedge fund to try to buy Commodore. "I tried for a bout a year to acquire control of Commodore," he said. He thought it could be turned into a great 16-bit console. The Commodore console could be better than the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System being sold in Japan at the time, he recalled himself thinking.

Kotick went from gamer to game maker to businessman. Kotick said he's not playing many games anymore. He's a single dad with three daughters and is wary of the kind of developer he would become, knowing his addictive personality (He confessed he is "addicted to food"). Did he used to be an avid gamer? "I still have callouses from Defender. I still wake up in the middle of the night and see the words 'Use key to open door.'" Does he play now? Not much: "If I was regularly playing Modern Warfare 2 I would not be able to stop and it would be at the expense of all my other responsibilities."

Kotick said that Activision is a company that supports creators and champions vision. He took barely-veiled shots at EA, comparing his interest and efforts in the past to help start companies such as Jamdat and Pandemic with the eventual fates of those companies now folded into EA and, in the case of Pandemic, shut down as an independent entity.

"If you have a company and you want to protect your creative freedom and the integrity of the creative process, if you want to retain your identity and culture, if you want the support of the mothership and the resources of the mothership, we're a really great mothership. But if you want to sell out and move on, there are definitely other companies to talk to."

Kotick made no mention of the deep cuts Activision announced earlier this week nor of the couple of hundred developers who were let go. He focused on projecting a game developer-friendly image and announced the start of a $500,000 independent games development contest.

Delete
Kotaku's Top Five List of Top Ten Lists [Lists]

Posted: February 7th, 2010, 2:00pm PST by Owen Good

Tags: Lists

Each week throws off several new video game lists ranging from the humorous to the trivial. What's better? A list of those. Here's a roundup of the rundowns out there.
•The 50 Greatest Gaming World Records [Games Radar] When I was nine I decided I would set the world record on Atari 2600 Defender. (The reverse in that game was a great way to slow things down when you had too many enemies on your ass. I used it repeatedly.) I rolled the score twice and then realized the polaroids of a screen rolled twice are indistinguishable from ones rolled once. Or even three or eight times. Plus I didn't even know what the record was. So I gave up. That's the only thing keeping me off this list.

•The 25 Worst Video Game Stock Photos [GameSpy] This is a common complaint, and despite that, stock photos of people playing games still suck, if not insult the intelligence. Maybe it's because actually playing a game is just not that dynamic of an activity. GameSpy has 25 of the most egregious depictions.

•10 Games You'll Miss for First-Gen Xbox Live [Technologizer] Luke got this discussion started last week after Microsoft announced it was ending online support for its console. Here's another writer's list. I absolutely forgot about TimeSplitters: Future Perfect. I really did enjoy that game. Crecente sent it to me back when I was going through a rough patch in 2005. Very good memories.

•"Sorry, I'm Dead": 30 Most Memorable Video Game Quotes [OC Weekly] Lots of old standbys here, from "A winner is you," to "All your base." While Duke Nukem's kick-ass/chew-bubblegum/out-of-the-latter delivery is indeed iconic, everyone knows Rowdy Roddy Piper said it first in They Live.

•10 Games of the 90s That Have Aged Well [Site] The Kartel started this subject last week with seven games from the 2000s that have aged well. Now they move back a decade, to the 1990s. Counter Strike, Starcraft, Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy VII, Street Fighter II, all very good choices.

Delete
The Final Fight Of Aliens Vs. Predator [Clips]

Posted: January 29th, 2010, 9:20am PST by Mike Fahey

Tags: Clips

Sega takes a trip down Aliens Vs. Predator memory lane, unearthing this little gem from Capcom that probably should have stayed earthed. It's time to hunt!

Sega's blog post starts with the first Alien film and keeps going, covering the Atari 2600 game, the Atari Jaguar port of AvP, and this Final Fight clone from Capcom, in which the Predators arrive on Earth just in time to help giant cyborg and cute scrappy girl cleanse the planet of its infestation.

If Capcom tried to release this game today, the pure ire from the assembled Aliens Vs. Predator fans of the internet would spontaneously combust the entire company. Those were indeed the good old days.

Aliens: A Retrospective [Sega Blogs]

Delete
Uncharted 2 Leads Nominees for AIAS Awards [Awards]

Posted: January 21st, 2010, 5:00pm PST by Owen Good

Tags: Awards

Uncharted 2's 15 nominations lead all games up for honors at the Interactive Achievement Awards, given by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. Assassin's Creed II and Batman: Arkham Asylum also are among the multiple nominees, announced Thursday.
Assassin's Creed II got 10 nominations; Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 nine; Batman: Arkham Asylum received 8; and four were given to both Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time and Brütal Legend.

Three new awards were also created for this year's presentation, the 13th annual. They are Portable Game of the Year, Outstanding Achievement in Game Design, and Social Networking Game of the Year.

The awards will be given Feb. 18 in Las Vegas during the DICE Summit 2010. Comedian and actor Jay Mohr returns for his fifth year hosting the show.

Following is a partial list of nominees. A full list may be found here [.pdf]

Overall Game of the Year:
Assassin's Creed II
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Batman: Arkham Asylum
Publisher: Eidos/Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment
Developer: Rocksteady Studios

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Infinity Ward

Dragon Age: Origins
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: BioWare

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment America
Developer: Naughty Dog

Action Game of the Year:
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Infinity Ward

Left 4 Dead 2
Publisher and Developer: Valve Software

Prototype
Publisher: Activision
Developer: Radical Entertainment

Red Faction: Guerrilla
Publisher: THQ
Developer: Volition

Shadow Complex
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Developer: Chair Entertainment

Casual Game of The Year:
Drawn: The Painted Tower
Publisher and Developer: Big Fish Games

Flower
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment America
Developer: thatgamecompany

Flight Control
Publisher and Developer: Firemint

Plants Vs. Zombies
Publisher and Developer: PopCap Games

Scribblenauts
Publisher: Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment
Developer: 5th Cell Media

Role Playing/Massively Multiplayer Game of the Year:
Borderlands
Publisher: 2K Games
Developer: Gearbox Software

Champions Online
Publisher: Atari
Developer: Cryptic Studios

Demon's Souls
Publisher: Atlus
Developer: From Software

Dragon Age: Origins
Publisher: Electronic Arts
Developer: Bioware

Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Alphadream

Social Networking Game of the Year:
Bejeweled Blitz
Publisher and Developer: PopCapGames

Farmtown
Publisher and Developer: Codebell

FarmVille
Publisher and Developer: Zynga

Restaurant City
Publisher: Electronic Arts/Playfish
Developer: Playfish

Outstanding Innovation in Gaming:
Demon's Soul's
Publisher: Atlus
Developer: From Software

Farmville
Publisher and Developer: Zynga

Flower
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment America
Developer: thatgamecompany

Scribblenauts
Publisher: Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment
Developer: 5th Cell Media

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment America
Developer: Naughty Dog

Adventure Game of The Year:
Assassin's Creed II
Publisher: Ubisoft
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal

Batman: Arkham Asylum
Publisher: Eidos/Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment
Developer: Rocksteady Studios

New Super Mario Bros. Wii
Publisher and Developer: Nintendo

Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment America
Developer: Insomniac Games

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves
Publisher: Sony Computer Entertainment America
Developer: Naughty Dog

Delete
Star Trek Online Boldly Goes To Del Taco [Promotions]

Posted: January 21st, 2010, 10:20am PST by Mike Fahey

Tags: Promotions

Atari teams with Del Taco to deliver free trial-laden limited-edition Star Trek Online collector's cups, with a free Type-8 Shuttle pet for those opting to supersize to the full game.

Visitors to the nation's number 2 Mexican fast foods restaurant will be able to procure one of four Star Trek Online collector's cups with purchase of a "Macho-sized" drink. Each cup contains a promo code good for a 48-hour free trial of the game. Customers can stack up to four of the free trial codes, at which point Atari will tack on an additional 48 hours, for a grand total of 10 days of free access to the Star Trek universe.

And should players opt to continue their journey by purchasing the full game after the trial is over, they'll score a free Type-8 Shuttle pet, which will follow their starship around the galaxy like a legless Aibo.

"Early response to Star Trek Online has been tremendous," said Jim Wilson, CEO and President, Atari, Inc. "Our partnership with Del Taco brings this unique sci-fi massively open online game to an even broader mainstream audience as well as avid Star Trek fans."

You can visit [www.startrekonline.com] for more details on the promotion.

Delete
An Attempt To Solve The iPhone's Joysticklessness, Radically [Innovation]

Posted: January 21st, 2010, 7:40am PST by Stephen Totilo

Tags: Innovation

There's a big problem with video games on Apple's iPod Touch and iPhone. There's no joystick to control them with, no directional pad to press. Just glass to touch and a device to tilt. At last, there's a strange solution.

Prepare to welcome to the world the two-directional virtual joystick, a virtual slider rendered on the bottom left corner of a major upcoming iPhone game, Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed II Discovery. It is used to move the game's hero, the Renaissance Italy assassin Ezio de Auditore through his 2D, side-scrolling world. Under the player's thumb, the slider "moves" left, "moves" right and ... that is all. (We recently previewed the game, slider and all.)

In the logic of technological advancement, the two-directional virtual joystick makes no sense. Since the days of Atari joysticks and arcade machines, people have been able to move gaming characters in four or even eight directions. Pac-Man needed to support movement in four directions. Galaga kept players moving in just two directions, but the stick at least tilted more ways than that. Super Mario Bros supported left, right, up and down on a four-directional "d-pad" on the original Nintendo controller. And in the 90s, gaming consoles began to use analog control sticks that supported leaning and nudging in dozens of directions.

Joysticks and directional pads and analog sticks have proven so essential to video games that, for a year, developers of games on the joystickless, pad-less, stick-less iPhone have been rendering virtual versions of the things in the lower left corners of their game screens. They've been asking gamers to go with it, to pretend and to tolerate the twin aggravations of one's thumb winds up covering part of the screen and the fact that you can't feel virtual control sticks.

So much for the opportunity to admire the big screen of the iPhone in its entirety or to have nuanced directional control of a game on it.

Here are three examples, Zenonia and Dungeon Hunter, two popular iPhone games, along with the iPhone version of Sonic: The Hedgehog, trying to make do.

The people making Assassin's Creed II Discovery for the DS considered faking it too. "Quite literally we just tried it all," the game's producer, Ben Mattes, told Kotaku in an interview. A producer from game giant Ubisoft, he worked with handheld gaming specialists Griptonite Games to create Discovery. "We tried a sort of virtual analog stick for the left thumb, [but] it meant your thumb had to cover even more of the screen real estate." Mattes had taken out a ruler and made some "rough calculations." He determined that a virtual stick, covered by the player's thumb, obscures 18% of the game's screen.

His team tried the other clumsy solution: Maybe let the players tilt the iPhone left and right to make the character move?

We tried the accelerometer-based [style]," he said. "Tilt it left to run left, tilt it a little bit left to walk left, tilt it right to run right, tilt it a little bit right to walk right. That sucked because you would have to tilt your head a little bit in order to keep your eyes level with the screen. Or you would risk not seeing the enemies you were trying to sneak up on. For a slower-paced game that type of accelerometer control might work. But for a game as fast-paced as Discovery that was just not going to happen."

Instead, the developers of Assassin's Creed II Discovery made — perhaps invented — the two-directional virtual control stick. Bear in mind how radical this was, not just to ignore the 30-year technological trajectory of control stick design but to ignore, well, themselves. The team making Discovery had already developed and released the game for the Nintendo DS. On that system, it supported the system's directional pad, all eight directions of it.

It turns out, eight directions was six more than were needed. Assassin's Creed II Discovery's hero does sometimes need to do more than move left and right. He sometimes needs to climb a wall or lower himself down. It turns out that right and left can accomplish that, if you think of a two-directional stick not as something that moves a character left and right but forward and back. A little move of the slider to the right would have Ezio walk. A move further to the right would make him run. If he faced a wall, he'd climb it. To lower himself back down, the slider needed to be moved to the left. (There's also a virtual jump button on the right side of the screen, for, well, jumping.)

"When we dropped it down to just this left and right slider, we were able to get very nuanced subtle control of Ezio and still get all of the controls we needed in the game," Mattes said. "We didn't need the up and down and we still had all the gameplay mechanics we wanted."

The bonus effect was that the slider took up very little room on the screen. A player's thumb, using it, would occupy far less than 18% of the screen.

There's a problem with the Assassin's Creed breakthrough, of course. The game Mattes' team made is a side-scroller. Up and down really isn't that important in a side-scrolling game, as opposed to, say, Zenonia and Dungeon Hunter, the games pictured above that are played from an overhead perspective. For those games, the ability to move in all directions of a compass still seems essential. Or, well, is it?

No developer has made a game that used a two-directional stick in a long time. There's been a breakthrough here, and welcome relief to gamers whose iPhones just haven't been able to fake the feel of a game controller well enough. Credit to Mattes and the teams at Ubisoft and Griptonite Games for trying something new, something simpler, something streamlined.

Two directions might be more of the right direction than anyone ever considered before.

Delete
Jeff Bridges: Battlezone Fiend [Tron]

Posted: January 16th, 2010, 2:00pm PST by Owen Good

Tags: Tron

To get into character for 1982's Tron, Jeff Bridges became quite the video game fiend. But it was fun with a purpose. The actor reminisces about playing Battlezone, a vector-graphics tank shooter loosely similar to the film's fictitious "Space Paranoids."
The Orlando Sentinel film critic Roger Moore (incidentally, a guy I read every Saturday when he was at the Winston-Salem Journal) also shared a love of Atari's hit from the early arcade days, but got its name wrong revisiting the subject with Bridges.

I recalled an interview with him from the '80s, us talking about a shared favorite arcade game of the 80s, "Battle Ground," the primitive graphics tank-battle game that I'd loved and he'd played incessantly as a way to get into his Tron role.

"Battle ZONE!" He corrects me with a cackle.

Bridges apparently became quite hooked on the game. Director Steve Lisberger had trucked in video games, lining the walls of the sound stage. ("For FREE!" says The Dude. "You didn't have to bring quarters to work!") but they turned into a distraction.

And so many of us in the cast just got locked into them in between takes. It's a wonder we got that film finished. We'd hold up shots, everything, if I was on a high score roll. But this time [for Tron Legacy] they didn't do that. Probably heard stories about me and Battlezone from the first one.

Jeff Bridges on Returning to Tron, and his Battlezone Days on the Original [Orlando Sentinel]

Delete
The Cost Of Playing Star Trek Online [At What Cost]

Posted: January 15th, 2010, 2:20pm PST by Mike Fahey

Tags: At What Cost

Cryptic and Atari have announced the subscription rates for Star Trek Online, finally giving players an idea of the cost of playing the Trek-themed MMO, aside from sleep deprivation and a gradual loss of skin pigment.

Cryptic is going with the current paid MMO standard of $14.99 a month for Star Trek Online, but there are several options for the dedicated Star Trek fan to get more for his or her money. For instance, there's the 12-month plan for $119.99, which drops the price $3 for a year and grants two additional character slots. Better hurry up on that one though, as it's only being offered through February 2nd.

Then there's the ultimate Star Trek Online membership, the lifetime commitment. $239.99 scores a player lifetime access to the game, along with two additional character slots and access to a Starship captain who has recently been reclaimed from the Borg collective. Yes, playing with the Borg always comes at a price, and like the 12-month plan, you've only got until February 2nd to commit. Resistance, as they say, is futile.

"This subscription pricing and launch promotion announcement is one of the last steps we take before officially releasing Star Trek Online," said Craig Zinkievich, Executive Producer on Star Trek Online. "We are absolutely thrilled to reveal these final details and we are incredibly excited about launching Star Trek Online this February. For us, this marks the beginning of our game's life — a life of new adventures, discoveries, and dangers. Truly, ours is a universe that will never stop expanding and we simply cannot wait for people to experience it with us."

It all comes to a head on February 2nd. Mark your stardate calendars, ladies and gentlemen.

Delete
This Female Japanese Popstar Wants More Gaming Jobs [Famitsu]

Posted: January 15th, 2010, 12:00am PST by Brian Ashcraft

Tags: Famitsu

Mari Yaguchi rocked to fame in the late 1990s as a member of idol group Morning Musume. (Check her out in the video for Morning Musume's Jyosei Kashimashi Monogatari.) That was then, this is now.

Now, Yaguchi records solo tracks and appears on popular program Quiz! Hexagon II. She is also a columnist for Famitsu, where she writes the column "I'm A Gamer." According to Yaguchi, "I want to write about how girls too are passionate about video games."

Yaguchi now writes how she'd like to do more voice acting — such as for the popular Professor Layton puzzle games, which already feature Japanese celebrities. She is already slated to appear in upcoming PS3 exclusive Yakuza 4 (Ryu Ga Gotoku 4), lending both her likeness and voice to the game. The singer, who has been compared to pigtailed Final Fantasy XIII character Oerba Dia Vanille, also says she would have liked to voiced the FF character. According to Yaguchi, "I wanted to try my hand at Vanille!"

"This year, I'd like to try to do even more game work," Yaguchi states in her column. So Mari Yaguchi writing in Japan's most famous game magazine has advertised herself as being interested in doing more video game voice gigs. Bet she gets them, too.

矢口真里「FF13のヴァニラの声優がやりたかった」「レイトンの新作に出たい」 [はちま起稿]

Delete
New Movies As Old Video Games [Art]

Posted: January 13th, 2010, 3:30am PST by Luke Plunkett

Tags: Art

Games as book covers, movie posters as game covers...what's next? How about new movies as the box art to old Atari games?

Sure, why not.

Aussie artist Robert Penney has re-imagined some recent flicks like Avatar, Cloverfield and Snakes on a Plane as games on a fictional, ancient "CVS" system. Prison Break is featured too, but it's not a movie, and since that didn't fit with the whole "movies as games" theme, I've left it til last.

Retro Games With Modern Themes [Penney Design, via GameSetWatch]

Delete
More Hands-on Details From Xbox 360's Game Room [Ces10]

Posted: January 7th, 2010, 8:00pm PST by Michael McWhertor

Tags: ces10

Microsoft's newly announced Game Room for the Xbox 360 and Games For Windows platform was available to play on the CES show floor today, giving attendees a chance to go hands on with classics like Pitfall, Scramble and Tempest.

Those old school arcade and Atari 2600 games played mostly as one would remember them, 8-bit visuals and audio in tact and well emulated by the developers at Krome, responsible for Game Room. Some played better than others at this point—Scramble and Crystal Castles played near flawlessly, Finalizer a little slower than it should—but Microsoft reps say the team is striving for accurate emulation on all titles, with plenty of work still left to be done before launch later this year.

In between bouts of playing old school games, we browsed the Game Room arcade virtual space, distributed across multiple floors and arcade rooms. Each room can be customized with an overall theme—one looked very Tron-like, another like a spooky graveyard, another featuring an Old West aesthetic—and decked out with arcade cabinets and decor.

That decor consists of items as straightforward as coin changers and Atari or Intellivision logo-style tables, but it also means items like chainsaws, wig stands and paintings of vampires that can be hung on the walls. Customizing rooms was simple, choose a theme and place cabinets on empty slots.

The service doesn't follow a PlayStation Home-like interface in the sense that you don't see your Avatar walking around the virtual space, heading from room to room or machine to machine.

And while Game Room does offer a handful of two-player games, those games will feature real-time multiplayer in a local sense only. Two-player games like Football, Sea Battle and Armor Battle will be playable in versus modes locally only at launch, according to Microsoft, something that could change in the future.

On Xbox Live, two-player score challenges will require each participant to play through the game in full, then compare scores. The option to play one life, then let a friend take his or her turn, won't be available for Xbox Live matches at launch. Microsoft reps stressed that should the community demand real time multiplayer for Game Room via Xbox Live it would look into adding such features.

Getting in and out of individuals games was quick to load and easy to navigate, something Microsoft says it will continue to focus on as the Game Room library expands from 30 at launch to over 1,000 in the next three years. It expects to dole out 5-7 games per week via Xbox Live Marketplace.

One aspect that may make the purchasing of (somewhat pricey) Game Room games go down easier will be the addition of Achievements to each title. In the demo we saw, this included three medals, based on time spent playing a title and high scores. It sounds like Microsoft and Krome don't plan on adding more specific Achievements to Game Room titles, as it may compromise emulation. But if you're into Gamerscore boosting, you'll find more options here.

Additional competition will come from the option to play regular or ranked versions of each game, letting you compare your scores to friends within the Game Room. Each title in your personal arcade will display a virtual banner above it, with the high score in your circle of friends. Those banners are color-coded and display green if you're the current champ on a particular cabinet.

We saw a few games not mentioned in the list of announced titles, including games like Super Breakout for the Atari 2600. That particular title—and Crystal Castles—didn't play quite as they did originally, as each required a custom control scheme. Microsoft reps say they didn't intend to offer paddle or trackball controllers to support titles like these, but that controls will be tweaked to make games like Super Breakout more playable on an Xbox 360 controller.

Super Breakout was one of the titles that was recommended by Game Room after playing through another title. You'll see game recommendations like this in the menu screen after a gaming session and on virtual monitors scattered about the arcade.

If you'd like to see more of Game Room in action, check out our quick video from earlier today.

Game Room is planned to be released to all Live members later this year on Xbox 360 and Games For Windows.

Delete
The Ten Most Influential Women In Games Of The Past Decade [Top Ten]

Posted: January 1st, 2010, 6:30am PST by Trina Schwimmer

Tags: Top Ten

Gaming Angel's founder Trina Schwimmer's list of women in games includes ten people who have helped change the game industry from the inside. While it's not all inclusive, it is a very sound list.

This is the time of the year where most sites are doing their top ten lists about different subjects. Personally, I hate top ten lists. If I'm going to do one, then it's going to be about something I'm passionate about. Therefore, we have two top ten list articles on GamingAngels.com. Here we are looking at the ten women that influenced the gaming industry in a big way over the last ten years. This isn't an all-inclusive list and I'd love for you to join in the conversation by including your nominees in the comments. The game industry is starting to see change and some of it is due to the women on this list paving the path. Here in random order, are ten women that really changed the game industry over the last ten years.

Lucy Bradshaw has to start the list with her work on the Sims beginning in the year 2000. Lucy and the Maxis team created a game that would be named the best selling PC game to date. The Sims is also credited for bringing more women into playing games. Lucy Bradshaw now leads the efforts of the Maxis team on the various Spore titles. She is an amazing speaker and is always pushing the industry forward.

Kim Swift took the game industry by storm with the much praised hit, Portal. Swift was hired by Valve after graduation and won many awards with a title that appealed to casual and the hardcore. Swift has now joined Airtight Games to assist with games aimed at a more diverse audience.
Jade Raymond was the producer on Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed. While she had been a producer on previous titles including The Sims Online, Jade definitely had to put up with controversy from men that couldn't get over her looks. Yes guys, it is possible to be gorgeous and talented.
Corrinne Yu is an amazing woman. She's the principal programmer at Microsoft's Halo team. I met her at a GDC Women in Games luncheon where she was rewarded for her work on the Halo series. She dresses like a rock star and talks about programming theory unlike anyone I know. Corrinne is an inspiration as we look at the problem of not enough women going into programming as a discipline.
Megan Gaiser is the President and CEO of Her Interactive. Through her work at Her Interactive, she has helped make intelligent games for the younger female audience. Her Interactive games create the Nancy Drew series of games that are very popular. Megan works hard in both talks and through her work at Her Interactive to get more girls interested in gaming both as a hobby and as a career.
Kellee Santiago is an amazing young woman from the Interactive Media program at USC. She is the president and co-founder of ThatGameCompany, a company that strives to create games that create an emotion in the player. Their first two games, flOw and Flower on the Playstation 3 are not only beautiful but also appeal to a more diverse audience. During our interview with her at the Spike VGAs, it was great to see her passionate and excited about the future of ThatGameCompany. We look forward to Kellee pushing the boundaries of what we think about games.
Amy Hennig works as Naughty Dog as the Creative Director on Uncharted and Uncharted 2. Uncharted 2 is second in the top 20 ranked Playstation 3 games on Metacritic. Amy concentrates on story and actors and it shows. Uncharted 2 has some of the best voice acting of any game out there. It will be interesting to see how close to films that Amy and the Naughty Dog team can take video games.
Deborah Mars is the Managing Producer at SCEA Santa Monica Studio who worked on PSN title, Fat Princess. The title had early uproar from various websites because the game was built around the mechanic of feeding your princess cake so she would weigh more and be harder to kidnap. In the end, Deborah and her team proved that Fat Princess is an incredibly fun title.
Cammie Dunaway is the executive vice president of sales & marketing at Nintendo. As one of the most powerful people at Nintendo, she led the way to reach out to women gamers with the Nintendo DS and Wii. She has had a rough road being criticized for being too nice or even fake. I interviewed Cammie at the 2007 Women's Conference and she was sweet but also very knowledgeable about the products available. She genuinely wants to see a more diverse audience enjoy gaming.
We end our list with a female that has taken community on the Xbox 360 to another level. Christa Phillips Charter, better known as Trixie360, was responsible for many community initiatives for the 360 that is what makes us feel at home on the 360. She organized Game with Fame nights, Community Spotlights, Gamer Spotlights, and created/founded GamerChix a place where female Xbox gamers can gather to talk about gaming. Christa has always made herself available to gamers. Her new title is Social Media Lead of Xbox LIVE and we can't see where she takes Community and Games next!

I hope you enjoyed our list and I'd love to hear who you think should be on the list. We didn't include the wonderful women that run amazing communities or clans, but they definitely could be here as well. I'd like to thank Robin Yang for working with me on ideas for this list. Here's to another 10 years of greatness from women in games!

Reprinted with permission from GamingAngels.com.

If you ask Trina, she was born a geek girl at heart. Starting with the Atari 2600, Trina was quickly hooked. By eight she was programming games in Basic and starting her collection of comic books. Trina created a female-based guild for Phantasy Star Online. This started the idea of what a place on the web for women gamers would look like. GamingAngels.com was born in 2003 as a video game cosplay site and transformed in 2006 to an online gaming community. Today GamingAngels.com is more than just gaming. With the help of her team, Trina has created a community where women that love all things geek can speak freely about their hobby.

Trina has appeared on panels and been interviewed about her strong opinions about women in gaming and technology fields. If she's not working on GamingAngels.com, she might be cheering on the Vikings, playing videogames or reading Twitter.

Find her on Xbox Live with Gamertag, GamingAngel or on Twitter as GamingAngel.

Delete
Guilty Gear Gearing Up For 360, PS3 [Arc System Works]

Posted: December 29th, 2009, 11:30pm PST by Luke Plunkett

Tags: arc system works

Series creator Daisuke Ishiwatari has revealed that Arc System Works are looking at bringing a new entry in the Guilty Gear series to the PS3 and Xbox 360.

"What we can say about Guilty Gear is that it is not dead yet", Arc System's Tomo Ohno told NowGamer. "It has not ended. The producer/creator of Guilty Gear, Daisuke Ishiwatari, his comment for this meeting [was] ‘I have the full intention to create Guilty Gear for PS3 and 360."

That's a proper Guilty Gear, too, not a spin-off thing like Overture.

Fans will remember that earlier in the year it emerged that Arc System Works had lost the rights to the series. Guess Ishiwatari and Sega managed to work something out! Or, at least, are trying to work something out.

Next-Gen Guilty Gear In The Works [NowGamer]

Delete
Historians Rebuilding Old Atari Chips [History]

Posted: December 29th, 2009, 7:00pm PST by Owen Good

Tags: History

The Atari Museum is reconstructing several of the original company's proprietary chips - including those from the 2600/VCS, 5200, and the 8-bit personal computer line - using data recovered from the reel-to-reel tapes used in their original manufacture.

The Museum's Curt Vendel says the project has a practical application beyond the living history factor. "What is the potential of this?" he said to Atari Age. "Doing the chips in smaller SMT packaging, and potentially bringing back to life some of the later CMOS designs of combo chips which could lead to a SoC - System on a Chip.

"The future just got a little brighter in terms of preserving and continuing the legacy of Atari's custom IC chips," he added.

The more technically inclined can follow a deeper discussion here. The project involves the TIA, used in the Atari 2600; the GTIA, used in the 5200 and the 8-bit line (the Atari 400 and 800) and the MARIA (used in the Atari 7800).

Atari Chips Reconstructed [GameSetWatch]

Delete
2009 In Review: The Disappointments [2009Yearinreview]

Posted: December 22nd, 2009, 10:00pm PST by Luke Plunkett

Tags: 2009Yearinreview

There were plenty of things to be happy about in 2009! Uncharted 2, Batman, the return of E3 and a PS3 resurgence to name but a few. But you know what? 2009 also had its fair share of crushing disappointments.

Things that should have been great, but were average. Things that should have been good, but were awful. Whether through accident, misstep or a good old-fashioned cock-up, here are what I think are the biggest disappointments in video gaming of 2009:

The PSPgo
It could have been a revolution in video gaming. The dawn of the digital-only era, a rebirth for Sony's flagging portable. Instead, it's done little but underwhelm.

First, there were strong suspicions it re-purposed the casing from an existing Sony device, the Mylo. Then some retailers refused to carry it. Then a promised UMD exhange program washed up on the beach, while digital versions of existing games were slow to materialise.

Oh, and it didn't help it was priced at a ridiculous $249.

In short, Sony have provided existing PSP owners with almost zero reason to purchase something the company badly needed to convince them to purchase. And consumers have responded, sales of the PSP having gone nowhere since the machine's launch.

Maybe they'll get it right with the PSP2!

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
Modern Warfare 2's multiplayer is, when it's not being exploited, wonderful. There's little to disappoint with that part of the package. But the game's singleplayer...oh boy.

The original Modern Warfare was a colossal entry in the field. It contained thrilling set pieces, an engaging storyline and memorable characters. All the game's sequel needed to do was provide more of the same, and millions would be happy.

But no. Infinity Ward tried to get clever. Tried to turn what had been a reasonably realistic tale of Modern Warfare into a Michael Bay movie. A rugged, lovable SAS Captain became a monologue-happy madman. The "your player is dead" trick was over-used to the point of becoming laughable. The "No Russian" level was an exercise in poorly-envisaged shock tactics, and the game's storyline would have confused Hideo Kojima.

It's not a terrible game by any means, as it still has its moments - particularly when repelling the Russians from the US - but when you look at the gulf in what could/should have been and what we ended up with, it ranks as one of the year's biggest disappointments.

Ghostbusters
It's not enough that this was a Ghostbusters game. It was, in theory at least, supposed to be a third Ghostbusters film, written by the men who wrote the movies and starring the vocal talents of those same, gifted actors. What could possibly go wrong?

Try almost everything. Developers Terminal Reality seemingly had little idea how to build an enjoyable game around the experience of being a Ghostbuster, so instead settled on a series of limited, repetitive and frustrating mechanics to get us through. Boring PKE section, tiring ghost wrangling, boring PKE section, tiring ghost wrangling, etc etc.

The only thing to look forward to was the vocal talents of the film's stars, and even that was found wanitng, only Dan Aykroyd putting any real effort into a bland and forgettable tale.

Maybe it was our fault for getting so excited about a Ghostbusters game, maybe it was Atari's fault for digging up the license in the first place, who knows. But when you make a game based on such a treasured franchise, and get serious Hollywood talent involved, it needs to be better than this.

DJ Hero
Few people seem to comprehend how significant a failure this game has been for Activision. And how big a disappointment it's been to everyone else. This isn't some Guitar Hero spin-off; it was an expensively-backed assault on a market the mega-publisher believed was being excluded from its Guitar Hero franchise.

This was to be the phenomenon for hip-hop and dance fans that Guitar Hero had been for everyone else. Activision guessed right that, yes, that's a big market, and one worth capitalising on. What they got wrong was...everything else.

DJ Hero had to be "cool" to sell, and thanks to it's faux-rave setting, it wasn't. It needed to be hip-hop, and it wasn't. It needed to be dance, and it wasn't. What it was, courtesy of the decision to focus solely on "mashups", was a confusing, bland, fence-straddling mix of music styles that ultimately appealed to neither fanbase.

The publishers decision to focus much of the game's marketing efforts on DJ Shadow was perhaps most telling. This game needed to be "Endtroducing". All it was in the end was "The Outsider".

Killzone 2
Again, not a bad game. Just disappointing.

Consider the amount of money and work that went into the game. The amount of expectations placed up on its shoulders. The scope of its marketing, all the attempts to turn Killzone into Sony's own Halo, an evergreen sci-fi franchise for the core market.

In some areas, it succeeded. It certainly looks, and sounds, expensive. It should be praised a lot more than it is for successfully implementing a working cover system in a first-person game. And Brian Cox can make anything bearable. But only to a point; the rest of the game is equal parts forgettable and offensive, poor characters propelling you through a dreary wasteland of a game, populated solely by clichés and a world so depressing you wish Rainbow Brite would pop in and make a cameo.

Halo succeeds in much the same way Uncharted and Modern Warfare do: they serve as the gateway to a franchise, to a lifetime of fandom. They are summer blockbusters, games that not only excite, thrill the senses then leave you madly in love with a world and its characters. How else could so many people adore Captain Price, for example? Or the mute, faceless Master Chief? But in Killzone, who do you love? What makes you remember the game aside from an endless parade of grey buildings and a guy who swears too much?

Resident Evil 5
Resident Evil 4 is one of the greatest games of all time. So this game had a lot to live up to.

And it didn't come close.

While Res 4 maintained the series' antiquated movement and control scheme, its levels and pacing were designed so perfectly that they managed to cover them up. Resident Evil 5, on the other hand, with its expansive shoot-outs and slant on action, exposed them for the relics they are.

It's a game of two minds. It so wanted to be a 21st-century run-and-gun title, with co-op play throughout and exciting action sequences, yet was so hamstrung by "tradition" (ie slow, plodding controls) that it was unable to take the plunge and finish the job Res 4 began: leaving the Resident Evil series behind.

When you follow a game as great as Resident Evil 4 with something as compromised as this, it's a disappointment.

Honorable Mentions
Tony Hawk Ride - The way the series finally dragged its rotting corpse over the shark would have been disappointing to die-hard Tony Hawk fans...if there were any left.

WiiWare - If the Wii is the most successful console of the current generation, why is WiiWare - its digital shopfront - so awful? There needs to be more games on this service. Well, more games people actually want to play.

Madden - EA Sports' FIFA series continues to innovate, and show the world an annual sports franchise can also be a great game. So why does Madden get away with continually releasing what is essentially the ninth version of the same game?

Duke Nukem Forever - Had gone beyond a joke, so it wasn't crushing to see it finally give up the ghost, but still...news of its ultimate demise was still a little disappointing. There'd always been hope, no matter how small, that one day it would have made it to a shelf. (thanks TheHeeyyy!]

That about does it for me, but what about you? What were you most disappointed with in 2009?

Delete
Atari Adds An Arcade To Its Web Page [Websites]

Posted: November 23rd, 2009, 2:20pm PST by Mike Fahey

Tags: Websites

Why sit at your computer working all day long when you can head over to the new Atari.com and play Yars Revenge all day long?

The new Atari.com represents phase one of the company's internet re-launch, allows fans of the company's works to browse the latest Atari titles, buy games from the Atari Store, enter contests, and most importantly, play six classic Atari games for free as long as you;d like, unless your boss is watching. The six games currently on the site include Asteroids, Adventure, Battlezone, Crystal Castles, Lunar Lander and Yars Revenge, each retro-fitted with leaderboards so players can keep track of how much they suck at Crystal Castles and how many times they blame it on the lack of a trackball.

"Today commences the first stage in Atari's ongoing commitment to growing its online business with the re-launch of Atari.com," said Jim Wilson, President and CEO of Atari, Inc. "Our online roadmap contains a multitude of enhancements and exciting new features which over time will redefine how people play and connect with Atari."

Yes, yes Jim, whatever you say. More Yars Revenge please.

Delete
Champions Online: One Million Heroes Strong And Growing [Cryptic Studios]

Posted: October 29th, 2009, 9:40am PDT by Mike Fahey

Tags: cryptic studios

According to developer Cryptic Studios, Super Crecente is just one of more than a million superhero characters created since the launch of the massively multiplayer Champions Online.

Atari and Cryptic announced the one million character milestone today, using the figure as an example of the strong reception Champions Online has received from both fans and game critics since the game launched in early September. A million superheroes running about saving the day is nothing to scoff at, though I'm sure the companies would rather that was a million registered players. Still, Atari seems pleased.

"We are very pleased with the wonderful praise Champions Online is receiving," said Jim Wilson, CEO, Atari, Inc. "We credit the great MMO fan base and look forward to seeing what players create as the game continues to grow and develop. We are working hard on new content and updates that will expand the universe and give Champions fans more to explore."

Expect that number to increase by a large amount this weekend, with a free trial of Champions Online kicking off tomorrow.

Delete
Marc Ecko Vows to Re-Make Hipster Graffito Game "Even If It Kills Me" [Facepalm]

Posted: October 8th, 2009, 8:40pm PDT by Owen Good

Tags: facepalm

Hey, remember "Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure?" the brand-extension venture of apparel designer Mark Ecko? Remember its thudding reception, which he blamed on hillbilly gamers skeered of the big bad city? Yeah, he wants to do it again.

Destructoid talked to Ecko and found he's ready to reboot the story of how, with love and courage, one man heroically spray painting crap on a wall can triumph over oppression and give a voice to people yearning to be free. Or just make Marc Ecko some money.

"Getting Up was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears," he told D'toid. "Atari s—t the bed, you know? And I'm gonna f—-ing make that game again if it kills me. I'm gonna do it. I want to see the brand out there again."

I think the last part of his comment is the most revealing. I think this has more to do with spreading the Ecko brand than with satisfying the cries of gamers beating on pots and pans for a next-gen turf-tagging simulation.

Ecko said the game must be untangled from its legal arrangements with Atari, which predate the publisher's current reconstituted form.

Marc Ecko Wants to See Getting Up 'Brand Out There Again' [Destructoid]

Delete
Atari To Release Project Runway Game, Make It Work [Game Announce]

Posted: October 8th, 2009, 12:40pm PDT by Michael McWhertor

Tags: game Announce

Fashionable reality show Project Runway will be fitted for a video game release next spring, courtesy of publisher Atari, with the first licensed title planned for a Wii release.

Variety reports today that the Project Runway game will likely feature the likenesses and involvement of co-hosts Tim Gunn and Heidi Klum. In addition to fulfilling our dream of a low-polygon count Klum barking at us in a video game, the Wii version is reported to feature Wii Remote and Balance Board support, the latter for walking one's chosen model down the runway.

Atari's deal with the Weinstein Company reportedly includes the option to release a series of games, so brace yourselves appropriately.

'Runway' poised for videogame makeover [Variety]

Delete
Star Trek Online Hides Clothes In Star Trek Blu-ray [Bonus]

Posted: September 28th, 2009, 2:30pm PDT by Mike Fahey

Tags: Bonus

Star Trek fans who buy the Blu-ray version of The Original Series' third season will find themselves in the Admiralty when Star Trek Online launches next year.

The Blu-ray releases of the original Star Trek come packed with extras, as well they should, because when you make something very old very clear it generally makes it look even older than it is. Along with rare pilot episodes and various other bells and whistles, Star Trek: The Original Series season three on Blu-ray comes packed with a special code that will unlock an Admiral costume for your character to wear in Cryptic's Star Trek Online.

"For a limited time, sets will include an exclusive free offering in Atari's Star Trek® on-line game. Each set will include an insert that includes a unique code that will allow game players to outfit their avatar in an exclusive Admiral's outfit available only with this offer."

That's certainly one motivational extra for fans of the series and serious MMO fanatics. I just hope they keep things authentic, so when players don the Admiral outfit they suddenly find themselves trapped behind a desk, desperately trying to give orders to starship captains who have no respect for authority - for example, all of them.

The third season of Star Trek: The Original Series on Blu-ray ships in December.

Star Trek News [TVonDVD.com via Big Download]

Delete
Turbine Swept Up in Infringement Lawsuit [Turbine]

Posted: September 16th, 2009, 7:00pm PDT by Owen Good

Tags: Turbine

Turbine, maker of Dungeons & Dragons Online, has a busy legal department of late. In addition to suing Atari, it's being sued - along with Sony and Blizzard - by a holding firm alleging infringement of their patented realtime technology.

The company, Paltalk Holdings Inc., has successfully settled claims against Microsoft, alleging it infringed the same patents in Halo. The technology in question concerns how multiple players in different locations still see the same events - explosions, monsters, etc. - in real time.

Paltalk bought the patents in 2002, and allege that Turbine and other companies are infringing them. The suit's been filed in federal court for the Eastern District of Texas, which is known as a plaintiff-friendly venue for such litigation. Microsoft's settlement, back in March, certainly makes it harder to deny the validity of Paltalk's claim.

In addition to Turbine, Sony (Everquest) and Blizzard (World of Warcraft), NCSoft (Guild Wars) and Jagex (Runescape) are also named as defendants.

Westwood-Based Video Game Maker Named in Patent Infringement Suit [The Boston Globe]

Delete
Kotaku's Top 5 List of Top 10 Lists [Lists]

Posted: August 29th, 2009, 4:30pm PDT by Owen Good

Tags: Lists

Each week throws off several new video game lists ranging from the humorous to the trivial. What's better? A list of those. Here's a roundup of the rundowns out there.

•Advertising 101: 10 Awesome Game Trailers to Learn From [The Bits, Bytes, Pixels and Sprites] Game trailers have emerged as a kind of art form to themselves, the same as theatrical trailers did around the late 1980s and early 1990s, when people lined up to see Batman's. The BBPS rates the best hype-builders, as a model of effective advertising. Really though, most of these are relying on past reputation for impact. Fallout 3's trailer (No. 8) was just a re-edit of the game's opening cinematic. Probably took about 20 seconds to make.

•Top 20 Mario Power Ups [Official Nintendo Magazine] There are more than 20? ONM's ranking covers pretty much every performance enhancer in the Mario continuity, beginning with the hammer from Donkey Kong. No. 1 is The Tanooki Suit. No-brainer. But just because I'm a contrarian old school bastard, I'd have thrown in the POW bumper from original Mario Bros.

•The 5 Best Console Wars [GamePro] Son, let me tell you about the old wars. Genesis versus Super Nintendo was epic, sure. But in my day, it was Intellivision vs. Atari VCS. It was 5200 vs. ColecoVision, right there on the pages of Consumer Reports. It was Commodore 64 vs Apple ][. It was fistfights in the recess yard. It was Bill "Dynamite" Douglas tossing a missile at Tom "The Bomb" Bethea's face and knocking his mouthpiece into Madison Square Garden's third row. Wait, wrong nostalgia. But let's not pretend console wars started in 1991. It's been around as long as there's been consoles. And wars.

•Five Consoles We'd Like to See Get Slim [MTV Multiplayer] MTV lays down a wildcard with "Capcom's CPS-2 Arcade Board." But for consoles currently in production, there's only one that can take a rightsizing, and it's the 360, and Microsoft's shot that down. Everything else before it - including original Xbox - can have its architecture jammed into 1/5th the space, sure. You can play Genesis games on an iPhone. How's that for slim?

• Top 10 Best Video Games for Couples [SF Weekly] I like anything that gets the qualifier "for couples" because it usually means porn. Man, this one time in my Rocky Mountain News days, my girlfriend and I were driving back from a date and she suggested we get "a movie," and then I had to waste 15 minutes pretending I didn't know where the porn store was, when if I had let go of the steering wheel the car could have probably driven itself, like goddamn Knight Rider, to the nearest spank booth and parked in my assigned space out front. Where was I? The selections here are mostly cute, non-core stuff, with Contra on the NES as one counterintuitive pick and House of the Dead: Overkill as a surprising No. 2. Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved gets No. 1.

Delete
Battleswarm: Field of Honor Preview: Choose Your Genre [Preview]

Posted: August 21st, 2009, 6:40pm PDT by AJ Glasser

Tags: Preview

Battleswarm: Field of Honor is a Chinese-developed war game that blends both real-time strategy and first-person shooter genres. The catch is you have to pick which genre you can win with.

Another catch to Battleswarm is its pay-to-play system called MetaTix – the latest endeavor of former Atari headman Nolan Bushnell, plus Mark Hood and Mike Williams of Reality Gap. It's basically a microtransaction system that uses small payment increments (i.e. pennies instead of dollars) that supposedly lowers the gamer's natural aversion to entering credit card information and reduces the risk for developers to try new and weird ideas.

Like Battleswarm – it's kind of new and weird.

What Is It?
Battleswarm: Field of Honor is a war game where two factions fight for control of various maps. The human faction functions like an FPS with an alternate third-person shooter view. The insect faction works like an RTS with the ability to zoom in to almost third-person action view. On each map, players can accept missions (like kill x amount of y) to win special items that they can then use or sell in the consignment shop (which costs MetaTix) and the overall goal is the level up and graduate to the expert server.

What We Saw
Christopher Mahnken, Senior Producer at Reality Gap gave me a crash course on MetaTix, the store system and both factions before turning me loose for a rookie match. I chose the insect faction because I heart RTS games.

How Far Along Is It?
The game will enter open beta next week and go live sometime in September.

What Needs Improvement?
Steep Learning Curve For The RTS Faction: Not to knock on the complexity of shooters, but strategy games typically have a steeper learning curve. This is especially true in Battleswarm because the RTS faction doesn't function the way many contemporary RTS games do – there's no base to level up, no resource points to whore and the map is entirely visible to both factions at all times, so scouting is a waste of units. The only constraints to work around are the unit number caps (e.g. 200 on the field at one time) and the geography of the maps which sometimes creates good choke points. It takes some getting used to even if you are an RTS buff.

Concept of Ownership: You don't buy weapons and keep them in Battleswarm – you lease them and then customize them with chips that you find or earn in the game 9which revert to you when the lease on the weapon is up). Something about this bugs me because even though I have proof leveling through the chips, I don't feel like I own my equipment. That could just be a weird nuance of mine, however; and there may be some merit to a system where you can rent only what you need for a certain map. Time will tell.

What Should Stay The Same?
Crazy-Intimidating FPS View: The human faction plays like a typical first person shooter, but there's something to be said for having an entire horde of insects around you, battering you and shooting you with green slime. The screen turns red and a blood splatter effect obscures the screen the closer you get to death – and still the bugs keep on coming and the satisfaction of killing on is hollow because you know it's not your opponent. It's just a piece of his enormous horde. The overall effect is visually overwhelming and somewhat different than dying in other shooters.

Interesting Concept That Could Go Somewhere: It seems to me like the developer deliberately kept the RTS and FPS gameplay on the shallow side so that every gamer could go back and forth between the two factions. Also, it probably helped them balance the factions by not giving the RTS faction too much to babysit and not giving the FPS faction too many ways to kill. However, it would be interesting to see what would happen if a higher level RTS faction where bases and resources points were in play fared against a more complex shooter faction that had a cover system and so forth.

Final Thoughts
Microtransactions make me uncomfortable only because there's an assumption with pay-to-play games that the richest gamer will automatically be the best. Mahnken heard as much from playtest users and even gave one a ton of MetaTix to see if that user would prove the point – but he says it's just not true of Battleswarm. The smarter players are the better ones, he said, and there's nothing in the game you can't buy with gold as well as MetaTix.

Delete
Kotaku's Top 5 List of Top 10 Lists [Lists]

Posted: August 15th, 2009, 4:30pm PDT by Owen Good

Tags: Lists

Each week throws off several new video game lists ranging from the humorous to the trivial. What's better? A list of those. Here's a roundup of the rundowns out there.

•Fifteen Classic Game Console Design Mistakes [Technologizer] Many of these fixate on poor controller design, even the good ole lovable Duke from the original Xbox. The Virtual Boy owns two of the 15, but one of them is not "That The Thing was Even Made." Notable absence: Uh ... the ... 360?

• Top 25 Most Explosive Video Games [GameDaily] GameDaily bravely tackles the subject of stuff getting blown up in games, somehow managing to barely find a scant 25 of them that feature explosions. This would be like putting together a "Top 25 Most Shootiest Games." Your number one pick is Crysis. Mine is Pole Position II. I love how the car exploded and flung off its tires.

• The Most Accurate/Inaccurate Comic Book GamesNot a top 10 per se, but Games Radar does examine which comic book games took the most liberties with their stories, which by nature, take liberties with everything from U.S. geography to particle physics. My most inaccurate game? Spider-Man for the Atari 2600, because you couldn't wall crawl without shooting a web.

• The 10 Worst Video Game Systems of All Time [Network World] Seems like every week someone does this, but Network World hauls up some really obscure failures to populate its hall of console shame. The Apple Pippin? Oh man, I totally forgot about that horrid excretion from the Gil Amelio days.

• Classic Novels Turned Into Games [IGN] Since Dante's epic poem The Divine Comedy just got its game adaptation with Dante's Inferno, IGN turns its eye toward other deserving classics of literature. I like it that Of Mice and Men is a beat-em-up for some reason. The Catcher in the Rye as a DDR game - "If you fail to keep Holden's interest meter above a certain point, he shrugs his shoulders and goes to his parents' house." - is likewise inspired. Me, I'd go for Slaughterhouse Five, as a kind of SCUMM-based adventure through time. The Tralfamadorians for some reason remind me of the Purple Tentacle.

Delete
Music Video Done 4-Bit Style [Music]

Posted: August 8th, 2009, 4:00pm PDT by Owen Good

Tags: Music

Arman Bohn, formerly of the band Eureka Farm where he played alongside current members of Deathcab for Cutie, has put out an album inspired by the Atari games of his youth.

This video is "No Escape!" and in addition to its visual style, adds a nice story to make it eminently watchable. The music, self-described as electronic/pop/indie rock, is well-suited to such a 1980s throwback.

No Escape! - from the album "Bits" by Arman Bohn from Distropolis on Vimeo.

The visuals were "created in groundbreaking LD Video at a staggering 96x54 pixels and 256 colors!" Cute, but you can tell a lot of creativity went into it.

If you're interested in the album, the site has links over to iTunes and other online stores.

Armanbohn.com [Site]

Delete
Your U.S. Xbox 360 Games On Demand Launch Titles [Xbox Live]

Posted: August 5th, 2009, 12:20pm PDT by Mike Fahey

Tags: Xbox Live

The Xbox Live summer update is right around the corner, and Microsoft has released a list of the Xbox 360 games you'll be able to download directly to your hard drive at launch.

Along with Avatar clothing and accessories, movie sharing, and the ability to update your Netflix queue directly from your television (yes!), one of the main features of the Xbox Live summer update is the ability to purchase and play Xbox 360 titles directly from the console. Microsoft today released a list of the twenty-four launch titles for their Games on Demand service in the U.S., with big name titles like Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, and BioShock existing peacefully alongside more niche titles like Dance Dance Revolution Universe and Disney's Meet the Robinsons.

Want the full list? We thought you'd never ask.

U.S. Games on Demand Launch Titles:

Assassin's Creed (Ubisoft)
Burnout Paradise (EA)
Call of Duty® 2 (Activision)
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Fight Night Round 3 (EA)
Kameo: Elements of Power (Microsoft Game Studios)
LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga (LucasArts)
Mass Effect (Microsoft Game Studios)
Meet The Robinsons (Disney)
MX vs. ATV Untamed (THQ)
Need for Speed Carbon (EA)
Need for Speed: Most Wanted (EA)
Perfect Dark Zero (Microsoft Game Studios)
Prey (2K Games)
Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis (Rockstar Games)
Sega Rally (Sega)
TEST DRIVE: UNLIMITED (Atari)
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Vegas
Tomb Raider Legend (Eidos)
Viva Piñata (Microsoft Game Studios)
Viva Piñata 2: Trouble in Paradise (Microsoft Game Studios)

A nice varied list, which includes several titles that I might never have purchased at the store but could potentially purchase from home if I get bored enough. It could finally be time, Viva Piñata 2.

Delete
Kotaku's Top 5 List of Top 10 Lists [Lists Of Lists]

Posted: August 1st, 2009, 6:30pm PDT by Owen Good

Tags: Lists of Lists

Each week throws off several new video game lists ranging from the humorous to the trivial. What's better? A list of those. Here's a roundup of the rundowns out there.

• The 11 Biggest Frauds in Gaming [Crispy Gamer] Gizmondo, Atari 2600 Pac-Man, those are no-brainers. But MotionPlus and PSP Go already on this list? Where's the Power Glove? Where's ROB? Where's Duke Nukem Forever? And that No. 1 sounds like an awfully personal selection.

• Top 10 Games to Help Ride Out the Summer {MTVU oops, that's mtvU] Basically it's Madden, some old-school console classics, and then all the current big selling new releases. And, for some reason, The Conduit.

• Top 11 Video Game Worlds You DON'T Want to Live In [Bam! Kapow!] Post-apocalyptic settings are an easy call. So is Half-Life's City 17. And No. 1 - Second Life - is an absolute no-brainer. But my No. 1? Paperboy's city. That place had four Addams Family houses on each block, nonstop road construction, break-ins, nasty dogs, and breakdancers. God, the breakdancers.

• Top 10 Favorite (sigh, Favourite) Game Cube Games [The Bits, Bytes, Pixels and Sprites] Rogue Squadron, Wind Waker, Metroid Prime and two Resident Evils grace this list. I did not own this console so I do not feel qualified to comment.

• Top 10 Old PC Gaming Franchises We Want Rebooted [GamePro] Wing Commander? Fuck and yes. Descent, Heretic, and the unsurpassed X-Wing/Tie Fighter series? Gimme, gimme, gimme. But I got two words for you that aren't on this list, and they are Full and Throttle.

Delete
The Witcher Uncensored For North America [Nsfw]

Posted: July 31st, 2009, 7:40am PDT by Mike Fahey

Tags: Nsfw

Forget the Enhanced Edition of the acclaimed PC roleplaying game The Witcher, because The Enhanced Edition Director's Cut is out now, adding in all the mature content the North American version lacked.

The Witcher novels feature quite a few sexual situations, so it made sense that the game would as well, though perhaps reducing said sexual situations to a sort of perverse collectible card game was the wrong way to go. Either way, the North American version of said cards got a makeover in order to be slightly more acceptable to our country's high moral standards, and....excuse me a moment. I need to recover after typing "our country's high moral standards."

Ahem. North America got a slightly tamer version of the game than the rest of the world, and now Atari is fixing that. The Director's Cut is available today as a patch from Atari's website, and all digital distribution points (Steam, Not Steam, That Other One) will now offer the Director's Cut in place of the normal Enhanced Edition.

Of course if you really cared that much you would have already downloaded the unofficial mod, but official nude pictures are always more tasteful than the unofficial ones.

Delete
Who Can Stop Dragon Quest IX In Japan? [Sales Get!]

Posted: July 30th, 2009, 11:40am PDT by Michael McWhertor

Tags: Sales get!

Certainly none of this week's new games! While plenty of new titles hit Japan this past week, none of them came within spitting distance of Dragon Quest IX's continued strong sales. Only next week will we see a real challenger.

That's when Monster Hunter 3 for the Wii will arrive at Japanese game retailers, a software boost that the Wii could really use overseas. It ships this weekend, actually. Expect sales to be strong, possibly better than next week's DQ IX performance, but we'll be interested to see how the two games match up in the long run.

Anyway! Back to this week. New Nintendo DS games represented well in the top ten, with the latest Katamari release moving enough units to secure a top spot. The rest of the new debuts are things we'll likely never see in North America. But, hey, there's Punch-Out!!, managing to land at 17th.

The top thirty bestselling games in Japan for the week of July 20th to the 26th, courtesy of Media Create is below.

01. Dragon Quest IX (DS) - 270,000 / 3,202,000
02. Tomodachi Collection (DS) - 74,000 / 428,000
03. Wii Sports Resort (Wii) - 74,000 / 763,000
04. Penguin no Mondai x Tenkuu no 7 Senshi (DS) - 43,000 / NEW
05. Okaeri! Chibi-Robo! Happy Richie Oosouji (DS) - 35,000/ NEW
06. Katamari Tribute (PS3) - 28,000 / NEW
07. Katekyoo Hitman Reborn! DS Flame Rumble X (DS) - 28,000 / NEW
08. Pro Yakyuu Spirits 6 (PS2) - 22,000 / 72,000
09. Pro Yakyuu Spirits 6 (PS3) - 21,000 / 95,000
10. Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G (the Best) (PSP) - 18,000 / 818,000

11. Boku no Natsuyasumi 4: Seitouchi Shounen Tanteidan, Boku to Himitsu no Chizu (PSP)
12. Miku Hatsune Project Diva (PSP)
13. Dragon Ball: Tenkaichi Daibouken (Wii)
14. Moyashimon DS (DS)
15. Pokémon Platinum (DS)
16. Wii Fit (Wii)
17. Punch-Out!! (Wii)
18. Mario Kart Wii (Wii)
19. Toro to Morimori (PS3)
20. Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days (DS)
21. Sloane to MacHale: Nazo no Monogatari (DS)
22. Taiko no Tatsujin Wii (Wii)
23. Rosario to Vampire Capu 2: Koi to Yume no Kyousoukyoku (PS2)
24. Mario Kart DS (DS)
25. Mario & Luigi RPG3!!! (DS)
26. Ys I & II Chronicles (PSP)
27. New Super Mario Bros. (DS)
28. Narisokonai Eiyuutan: Taiyou to Tsuki no Monogatari (PSP)
29. Pokémon Fushigi no Dungeon: Sora no Tankenta (DS)
30. Blazing Souls Accelerate (PSP)

Media Create Weekly Software Sales [Gpara]

Delete
Atari Founder Returns To Development With Battleswarm [Nolan Bushnell]

Posted: July 30th, 2009, 10:20am PDT by Mike Fahey

Tags: Nolan Bushnell

Nolan Bushnell, creator of Pong and founder of Atari, returns to game development with Battleswarm: Field of Honor, a real-time strategy / first-person shooter hybrid he describes as "a mash-up between StarCraft and Starship Troopers."

Bushnell has been out of the game making business for quite awhile, but he's coming back with Battleswarm, an online PC game that allows players to switch between the roles of strategic commander and front line fighter, much like S2 Games' Savage. Instead of having different roles on the same team, however, one side plays the RTS-controlled alien bugs, while the other team is tasked with their extermination in first-person format.

The inspiration for the genre-mixing title comes from wanting to play games with his five sons.

They're all avid gamers and like first-person shooters. The problem is, as you get older, you lose some reaction time, and as a result, I'm getting slaughtered by them. A real-time strategy [RTS] game, however, is more my [preference], a good resource game is what I love. Battleswarm is both an RTS and a shooter, a mash-up between StarCraft and Starship Troopers, if you will. You can switch sides, too, if you feel like an RTS instead of a shooter, or vice-versa.

It actually sounds like an interesting solution to bridging the age gap, giving those of us slowly losing our reflexes a fighting chance against our young nephews...or whatever. Not that I am losing my edge or anything. It's just that kids these days can see forever, and might have psychic powers.

'Father of electronic games' on his next project, the state of the industry [USA Today]

Delete
All The Star Trek Online Screens You'll Ever Need [Screens]

Posted: July 30th, 2009, 8:40am PDT by Mike Fahey

Tags: Screens

Things have been awfully quiet on the Star Trek Online front lately, so developer Cryptic and Atari are startling patient fans awake with all the screenshots they could find.

A few of these screens we've seen previously, but a good majority of them are new, depicting strange, new words; new life, and new civilizations; and people boldly there. Did I just go there? Oh yeah I went there. Boldly.

Delete
Dragon Quest IX Is Still Tops In Japan [Sales Get!]

Posted: July 27th, 2009, 3:00pm PDT by Michael McWhertor

Tags: Sales get!

Square Enix's Dragon Quest IX held onto its number one spot in its second week on sale in Japan, flirting dangerously close with 3 million copies sold in a rather short amount of time. Success!

DQ IX easily outperformed the week's second bestselling title, Konami's baseball sim Pro Yakyuu Spirits 6 for the PlayStation 3, which forced Wii Sports Resort into third place. The rest of the top ten is filled with recently familiar bestsellers, including Nintendo's Tomodachi Collection and Sega's Miku Hatsune Project Diva.

A handful of new debuts, including the latest repackaging of Ys I & II made their way into Media Create's top thirty bestselling games. We'll know next week if Dragon Quest IX can hold onto its lead (that's a safe bet) and if Japanese PlayStation 3 owners shine to Katamari Forever.

01. Dragon Quest IX (DS) - 613,000 / 2,932,000
02. Pro Yakyuu Spirits 6 (PS3) - 74,000 / NEW
03. Wii Sports Resort (Wii) - 72,000 / 689,000
04. Tomodachi Collection (DS) - 61,000 / 354,000
05. Pro Yakyuu Spirits 6 (PS2) - 50,000 / NEW
06. Ys I & II Chronicles (PSP) - 19,000 / NEW
07. Boku no Natsuyasumi 4: Seitouchi Shounen Tanteidan, Boku to Himitsu no Chizu (PSP) - 17,000 / 91,000
08. Miku Hatsune Project Diva (PSP) - 15,000 / 131,000
09. Monster Hunter Portable 2nd G (PSP) - 11,000 / 800,000
10. Pokémon Platinum (DS) - 9,000 / 2,481,000

11. Wii Fit (Wii)
12. Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days (DS)
13. Sloane to MacHale: Nazo no Monogatari (DS)
14. Mario Kart Wii (Wii)
15. Gyakuten Kenji (DS)
16. Ken to Mahou to Gakuen Mono 2 (PSP)
17. Taiko no Tatsujin Wii (Wii)
18. Mario & Luigi RPG3!!! (DS)
19. Mario Kart DS (DS)
20. Pokémon Fushigi no Dungeon: Sora no Tankenta (DS)
21. New Super Mario Bros. (DS)
22. Qupu!! Mame Goma! (DS)
23. Rorona no Atelier: Arland no Renkinjutsushi (PS3)
24. Rhythm Heaven (DS)
25. Valhalla Knights 2: Battle Stance (PSP)
26. Metal Fight Beyblade (DS)
27. Inazuma Eleven (DS)
28. BlazBlue (PS3)
29. Animal Crossing Wild World (DS)
30. Meccha! Taiko Drum Master DS: 7-tsu no Shima no Daibouken (DS)

Media Create Weekly Software Sales [Gpara]

Delete
Ghostbusters Out In Europe In October [Europe]

Posted: July 27th, 2009, 6:00am PDT by Luke Plunkett

Tags: Europe

Ghostbusters is out in Europe right now. Provided, that is, you want it on PS3 or PS2. If you want it on PC, 360, Wii or DS, though, it's not out now. You'll have to wait until October.

Atari have today announced that the versions of the game not covered by their controversial partial-publishing deal with Sony Computer Entertainment Europe will be out on October 23.

That amounts to just over a four month delay. Which for many games would be murderous, but then, it's taken 25 years since Ghostbusters for this to turn up. Another four months isn't going to hurt the marketing for this game.

Ghostbusters for 360 gets release date [Eurogamer]

Delete
Insert Kopeks to Enjoy This Goat-Carcass Polo Game [Weird]

Posted: July 26th, 2009, 1:00pm PDT by Owen Good

Tags: Weird

Jason Torchinsky tried to import a Polish automobile; he got this instead, Ulak-Tartysh, a video game about the Central Asian sport of buzkashi, in which polo is played with the headless body of a goat.

Torchinsky, the guy who built a gigantic functional Atari joystick for the I Am 8-Bit art expo, breaks down the cabinet's hardware and Ulak-Tartysh's gameplay. The game hails from Kyrgyzstan, and is a combination of weird, hilarious and fascinating.

This one appears to have been built in 1983, at some state-run electronics factory in the city of Mailuu-Suu. The coin slots say "15 Kopeks," but I think at that time all the USSR satellite states used that denomination. [...] It's based on what appears to be a KR1858VM1 chip, which was a copy of the Z80. Most of the other chips are TTL logic ones, with very little large-scale integration. The video seems to be about 148x116 (?) with what I think are 8 colors. The graphics have that really satisfying gigantic-pixel look, but I think are pretty nicely rendered, considering.
I got it here as a strange sort of compensation when a warehouse owner in Poland was unable to ship the Fiat like we had agreed; apparently, this machine was just sitting, forgotten, in a corner of the warehouse. To restore it, I cleaned up the case, and replaced the power supply system with a cobbled-together 110V unit, from the 220V it originally had. I've made repairs, and had to replace the screen/CRT, but beyond that it's as I got it. I left the case in its battered state, but the marquee cleaned up surprisingly well. I'm not sure of what all the words mean, but via an online Kyrgz dictionary, it seems the TAPT button means "grab" or something similar, and I think it says "GOOD!" (pronounced "Djackshi?) when you get a goal.

Dead Goat Polo Arcade Game [Boing Boing]

Delete
Kotaku Originals: I Said Turn Off That Machine Now! [Originals]

Posted: July 25th, 2009, 7:00am PDT by Owen Good

Tags: Originals

This week Crecente ported some game classics to a more analog platform - the back yard. Reminds me of the time Mom kicked me and Fletch out of the house and we played Atari's "Adventure."

This was also in the middle of summer vacation and Mom was at the end of her rope. Fletch and I had already created a scandal by stealing scrap wood from Dr. Perry's lumber pile to make (and attempt to set fire to) the Phoenix from Battle of the Planets. Inside we were fighting over the Atari, so Mom unplugged it, stuffed it in a cabinet and threw us out in the yard.

I forget what the rules were, but since I was the younger brother, I didn't make them up. I think I was the cube and Fletch was the green dragon, and when he ate me (no, not that way) and refused to let me "reincarnate" I bitched about it so relentlessly, Mom got on the phone to Dad demanding country justice. "They're whining and moaning about dragons and Yorgle and some goddamn thing ..."

So remember, it all looks fun when Dick and Jane are wearing bags on their heads playing tag; but as soon as they start arguing about sprite collision IRL, you can kiss the ass of that idyllic summer goodbye.

We had a load of other copy this week, too. Check out the list below:

Kotaku at Comic-Con 09

Summer of Gaming
Have We Reached Exercise Game Saturation?
Backyard Adaptations Of Video Game Classics

Previews, Reviews, Hands-On and Impressions
Bit Boy Micro-Review: Stuck In The Past
Dead Space Extraction Preview: What The Wii Can Do
IL-2 Sturmovik: Birds of Prey Preview: If You Think Planes Are Beautiful
The Secret Of Monkey Island SE Micro-Review: Still Fights Like A Cow
The Beatles: Rock Band Preview: Get Back In Harmony
Champions Online Combat Preview: Challenge Accepted
Wizard of Oz Preview: Partying Up With The Tin Man

News
Resident Evil Series Unsure On Direction, Developers
Call of Duty: World at War Map Pack 3 Screens
Castlevania Icon Koji Igarashi Still At Konami, Working On New Project
Ex-Visceral Execs Making Game Based On Existing Activision Franchise, Leading New Studio
BioShock Action Figures Ready To Set Bees Upon Comic-Con
New Beatles: Rock Band Trailer Confirms Eight More Tracks
Microsoft Patents Drop-In Co-Op In Shooters
Greenpeace Turns PS3, Wii, 360 Into Spokesmen Against Toxicity in Consoles
Which Game Character Would Star in the Game of Your Life?
Daigo Wins 2009 Evo Champs
33 Months Of Motion Control, The Wii's Hidden Struggle
Microsoft Seeks a Few Good Store Managers
Gold Cartridge Buyer Recreating Nintendo Championships Today

Xbox Live
Hands On With Xbox 360's New Dashboard
Netflix Party Play in Action
Xbox 360 Avatar Marketplace: Giant Cotton Swabs to Steampunk Goggles
How Much Xbox 360 Avatar Clothes And Toys Cost
Making Xbox Live Safe, While Keeping It Fun
Frak to Cleveland Steamer: Xbox Live's Big Book of Forbidden Words
New Dashboard Commercials Bring Ad Breaks To Your 360
The Rising Price Of XBLA Games
August Xbox 360 Update Bears Good News About Save Files

Band Hero DS
Band Hero DS Braces For The Skeptics, Offers A Lot
The Band Hero DS Drum Peripheral Revealed

Wii Sports Resort
Getting Barefoot With Nintendo
How Wii Sports Resort Took Over Times Square

Mobile/Handheld
Gangstar Preview: Very Much Like GTA On An iPhone
Lots of People Bought iPhones
New Shin Megami Tensei Game Coming To DS
Dev: DSi Is "A More Powerful Platform" Than DS Lite

Mobile Ads
ESA Sues For Rights To Advertise Games On Chicago Buses
CTA Defends Anti-video Game Ad Ordinance

Bigtime Spoiler Alert
A Gears Of War Screenplay: Our Thoughts [Update]

Delete
Actually, The Sims 3 Was The Biggest-Selling Game In June [The Sims]

Posted: July 22nd, 2009, 9:30pm PDT by Luke Plunkett

Tags: the Sims

While there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the poor performance of June's console games, on PC, things were looking a little healthier, with EA's The Sims 3 emerging as the month's biggest-selling game on any platform.

While the top-selling console game was Prototype, with 419,000 copies sold, EA shifted an impressive 820,000 copies of The Sims 3 in the US market. And that number only includes the copies sold via traditional retail channels (stores, major mail order outlets), so when you factor in digital sales, the number may well be approaching the million-sold mark.

That's a more successful launch than the Sims 2, which "only" moved 700,000 units in the US in its first month on sale. And considering The Sims 2 is still a heavy-hitter in the PC market, we can only imagine/fear what kind of success The Sims 3 will have.

Obviously, the game stopped the NPD Group's monthly sales charts for June, but if you'd like to see what ran 2-20, the full chart is below.

1. The Sims 3 (EA The Sims Studio, Electronic Arts)
2. The Sims 3 Collector's Edition (EA The Sims Studio, Electronic Arts)
3. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe (EA The Sims Studio, Electronic Arts)
4. World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King (Blizzard Entertainment)
5. World of Warcraft Battle Chest (Blizzard Entertainment)
6. Spore: Galactic Adventures (Maxis, Electronic Arts)
7. World of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment)
8. Spore (Maxis, Electronic Arts)
9. Empire: Total War (The Creative Assembly, Sega)
10. StarCraft Battle Chest (Blizzard Entertainment)
11. World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade (Blizzard Entertainment)
12. Reel Deal Slots Adventure (Phantom EFX)
13. Civilization IV: Complete Edition (Firaxis Games, 2K Games)
14. WarCraft III Battle Chest (Blizzard Entertainment)
15. SimCity Box (Maxis, Electronic Arts)
16. Diablo Battle Chest (Blizzard Entertainment)
17. The Sims 2: Apartment Life (EA The Sims Studio, Electronic Arts)
18. Prototype (Radical Entertainment, Activision)
19. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion GOTY Edition (Bethesda Game Studios, Bethesda Softworks/2K Games)
20. Ghostbusters: The Video Game (Terminal Reality, Atari)

Exclusive: The Sims 3 Breaks 800K, Tops U.S. Game Sales In June [Gamasutra]

Delete
Bit Boy Micro-Review: Stuck In The Past [Review]

Posted: July 22nd, 2009, 1:30pm PDT by Mike Fahey

Tags: Review

Maneuver your way from the early days of 4-bit games to the majestic 128-bit era in Bit Boy, Bplus' latest WiiWare offering.

Bit Boy's friends have been scattered throughout video game history, and it's up to him to travel through the various eras in order to find them. A simple collect-the-dots game, Bit Boy's hook is the fact that after five levels of wandering around avoiding enemies and collecting friends, you then progress to the next generation, where you avoid even more enemies and collect more friends, only things look a bit better.

It's a very intriguing hook, but do the creators of WiiWare's Plättchen Twist 'n' Paint and Niki - Rock 'n' Ball have the chops to make it truly shine?

Loved
The Concept: The concept behind Bit Boy is rather clever. Taking a simple 4-bit maze collection game and advancing it bit-by-bit (sorry) through the various recognized eras of gaming is the sort of idea that makes gamers - especially aging gamers - sit up and take notice.

Hated
The Execution: The flash of inspiration that delivered this amazing concept to Bplus seems to have quickly fizzled out once the studio got around to crafting an actual game. The simplistic game play that is so charming in the 4-bit and 8-bit eras quickly loses said charm once you realize that moving about poorly-designed maps while avoiding enemies hell-bent on wandering aimlessly about block your path is all you will be doing for the rest of the game. It's even worse once you hit the 3D levels, where the horrible camera forces you switch camera angles to the same top-down perspective you've been using all along.

The More Things Change: Bit Boy's game play isn't the only aspect of the game that fails to change with the times. Music and sound effects remain largely the same throughout the course of the game, as does the overall presentation. You get the same early-arcade start and high score entry screens no matter what era you've just left, which only serves to remind you that you're playing the same game with updated graphics over and over again.

Bit Boy had the potential to be an interesting study in how video games have evolved over the years, from their primitive beginnings to their current-day 3D glory, and to an extent it succeeds. Watching the crude graphics slowly evolving with each new level is initially fascinating. I couldn't wait to see what was coming next. Unfortunately Bit Boy only gets the idea half right. Rather than being an evolution of the video game, it's merely the evolution of video game graphics. Coupled with frustrating and bland game play, we're left with an unpleasant reminder that it takes much more than enhanced visuals to make a video game "next-gen."

Bit Boy's field trip through video game history would have been a great deal more enjoyable if the fun hadn't fallen off the bus back in the Atari 2600 era.

Bit Boy was developed by Bplus and published as WiiWare on July 13th. Retails for 600 Wii points. Played the game from beginning to end several times, each play through taking under an hour to complete.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

Delete
Have We Reached Exercise Game Saturation? [Video Game Summer]

Posted: July 22nd, 2009, 12:00pm PDT by Brian Ashcraft

Tags: Video game summer

Get up off your ass. Move, move, move. It's summertime! No need to go outside. Video games can help you become active and maybe even lose weight. This is hardly new, but have we reached saturation?

"When I was in Best Buy the other day and saw the huge EA Sports Active displays it felt like we'd hit saturation but until we have Richard Simmons Wii Workout I don't think we've reached it,"says Ben Sawyer, who co-founded of the Serious Games Initiative and heads up the Games for Health initiative. "Famous last words, right?"

EA has been capitalizing in the last couple of months on the fitness game craze with half-a-million-plus seller EA Sports Active, but Nintendo lead the re-newed interest in "exergames" with Wii Sports and Wii Fit. In 2007, Nintendo was coming off its smash-hit Wii Remote and Wii Sports one-two-punch. Those successes laid the groundwork for Wii Fit: players got up off the couch, moved around, swung their arms. There was an audience for this — but there had always been. Thing is, it was a largely untapped audience.

During the early 1980s, the VCR revolution brought exercise into the home with Oscar-winning-actress Jane Fonda telling folks to "go for the burn" with her 1982 exercise debut Jane Fonda's Workout. The tapes sold millions and made millions. The same year computer maker Amiga released the Joyboard, a peripheral on which players would stand and use their body weight to play a slalom skiing game. It was a failure, and the two follow-up titles to support the peripheral were never released. Ditto for an Atari exercise-controlled bike that never found its way out of the concept stage. The exercise bike game would later be realized in 1996 by Namco with Prop Cycle.

There was a market that could be tapped, but it needed someone to do it. And do it right. Enter Nintendo.

The Kyoto-based game company brought the Power Pad to home consoles in 1988, letting kids jog in place on a mat marked with giant buttons. The next year, Namco followed up with Dance Aerobics for Nintendo Entertainment System, foreshadowing the deluge of rhythm dancing games released in the following decades.

While they were developing Konami's Dance Dance Revolution, Konami's own staffers were reporting weight loss. Same for players when it was finally released in the late 1990s. Konami continued to release updated versions of DDR with increasingly complicated steps. The home versions were more forgiving, but the arcade ones were not. In Japan, Konami has even introduced DDR exercise routines into its health club chain called "Groove Motion DDR". Group classes use digital projector screens showing DDR patterns, mats and motion sensor belts.

Nintendo has struck gaming gold with Wii Fit, selling over 18 million copies of the game. The follow-up, Wii Fit Plus, goes on sale later this year.

"When we first announced the Wii Balance Board, people were skeptical," recalls Denise Kaigler, Nintendo of America's vice president of Corporate Affairs. "But consumers responded quickly and told their friends about it. Now when a new fitness game like Wii Fit Plus is announced, no one bats an eye. Fitness games are now an accepted part of the video game landscape." Not only that — but the larger cultural landscape. In 2008, Nintendo teamed up with Westin Hotels to offer Wii Sports and Wii Fit as part of the hotel's fitness program.

Get up off your ass, sure, but why not get out of your house? Go take a walk. Jog. Trend or no trend, what's the point of exercising with a game indoors? Explains Nintendo's Kaigler, "Legendary Nintendo video game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, who led the Wii Fit team, is fond of saying, 'If it's sunny, go outside and play.'" Sometimes that's not always possible, she continues. "Sometimes it's because of the seasons or inclement weather. Other times it's situational: Some people come home late from work, while others can't leave the house because they can't leave the kids alone."

The medical profession has started latching onto these exergames. Geraldine O'Shea, D.O., an osteopathic physician and Chair of the American Osteopathic Association's Bureau on Scientific Affairs and Public Health, first began looking at the impact of video games as physical activity in 2007. "What might appear as nothing more than another entertaining game was revealed as a tool for not just activity but directed physical therapy," explains O'Shea.

Around the same time, researchers began using Wii Sports in physical therapy. O'Shea has spearheaded a measure by the American Osteopathic Association to support video games as part of a patient's fitness and therapeutic program. "Because I believe any activity is better than no activity," she adds, "I have become a convert."

"Wii gaming actually turns over more energy than sedentary gaming, but not as much as authentic sports," said Gareth Stratton, a co-author of British study on Wii Sports health benefits. "While it's not going to replace the real thing," Stratton told The New York Times, "it's certainly moving in the right direction." Several researchers conclude that Wii Fit does not replace regular exercise, but concede that the game has done something key: raised fitness awareness.

"I think it's more important to realize now that with Wii Fit and EA Active Sports we may be beyond this being a trend," says Sawyer. "We might really begin to see a genre emerge and stay."

Delete
Newspaper Names Budget of Ghostbusters: The Video Game [Money]

Posted: July 20th, 2009, 3:00pm PDT by Stephen Totilo

Tags: Money

It's not often that the public gets word of what it costs to make a specific game. But a multi-million-dollar range was given for the latest Ghostbusters game in a Texas newspaper.

The Fort Worth Star Telegram fingered the cost of development for the game at $15 million to $20 million.

The budget figure ran in a profile of lead Ghostbusters development studio Terminal Reality, which earned the opportunity to make a Ghostbusters game after one of its militiary-shooter prototypes impressed Vivendi Universal in 2006.

Ghostbusters film and game actor and co-writer Dan Aykroyd has also talked about the budget to the press, estimating in a June interview with the magazine If that the game's publishers spent "like $12 or $15 million" to make the game.

Last month, the CEO of Ubisoft said he expected the average video game budget to swell to $60 million in the next gaming hardware generation.

Vivendi, which merged with Activision, did not publish the game when it was released in June. In the U.S., Atari did. But a representative from the publisher did not respond to a request about these budget figures by press time. Kotaku has also inquired directly with Terminal Reality and will let readers know if they can shed any more light on the cost to make the game.

When it came to producing a video game that was exciting and captured the spirit of 'Ghostbusters, a Lewisville outfit got the call [Fort Worth Star-Telegram]

Delete
Forty Years Later: Putting Video Games on the Moon [The Moon]

Posted: July 19th, 2009, 3:30pm PDT by Owen Good

Tags: the moon

Tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of the date humans first landed on the Moon. Earth's satellite has been a setting for games, or levels in them, going back to Lunar Lander in the 1970s.

The Toronto Star waxes nostalgic about moon games in a writeup that spans some of the major games set on the moon, in whole or in part. Naturally, Williams' Moon Patrol stands as one of the granddaddies; Atari's Lunar Lander of 1979 - an arcade port of a game common to PCs before then - was something of an oddity, a science-fiction game that was non-violent. Well, unless you crashed your lander, of course.

In addition to those two, Military Madness, Command & Conquer: Yuri's Revenge, Duke Nukem 3D, the Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask and I Wish I Were the Moon are all mentioned for featuring the moon, in whole or in part. I'm certain there are more than just those games. For example, DuckTales' moon level - cited by many as having the greatest level music of the chiptone era.

So what else did the Star miss in the Moon? Think it over, while you play this lunar lander flash game. Or listen to President Kennedy's address of Sept. 13, 1963, one of the best in his campaign to make landing on the moon by the end of the 1960s a national priority. Why, indeed, does Rice play Texas? Maybe InsidiousTuna, as the private-school doormat representative from that state, can tell us.

Glows in Many a Title [The Toronto Star]

Delete
NPD Top 20 Home To Ghostbusters, Nintendo Dominance [Npd Group]

Posted: July 17th, 2009, 3:40pm PDT by Michael McWhertor

Tags: Npd Group

Yesterday, the NPD Group released its estimates for U.S. video game sales for the month of June, with Activision's Prototype and THQ's UFC 2009: Undisputed topping the list of bestsellers. That list was missing a few key releases.

Games like Atari's Ghostbusters failed to find a place in the top ten, as did the perennially bestselling Wii Play. Also missing were the PlayStation 3 versions of June's biggest games, which do appear in Gamasutra's NPD data highlighting the top twenty games from last month.

Looks like Ghostbusters: The Video Game just missed a top ten showing, kept from glory by Infamous for the PS3. While the UFC brawler and the PlayStation 3 version of Prototype represent, the bottom half of the top twenty is dominated by Nintendo titles, including the recent Punch-Out!! and long time bestseller Mario Kart DS.

See if your game of choice sold well at the full list.

Nintendo Again Dominates NPD Top 20 [Gamasutra]

Delete