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Dragon's Dogma: The Kotaku Review This is a little disturbing: I was playing Kane & Lynch on the Games Convention show floor earlier today when I accidentally shot a business woman who was running around on the floor I was on. Instead of killing her, I apparently winged her shoulder. She lay sprawled on her back screaming in pain with the camera angle shooting straight up her skirt exposing a pair of white panties. (That’s her in that picture laying next to a dead body, one of my henchmen headshot her as I was about to take this picture.)
It wasn’t at all sexual and I don’t think it was meant to be. The sight of this terrified and injured woman, her panties invertently exposed highlighted the terror of the moment for this woman and how very vulnerable she was. Good idea or taking things too far?
Shanda is one of China’s biggest game operators and while they’ve been doing well recently (really, really well), they didn’t hit their stride for a few years. Chen Tianqiao, former real estate executive and co-founder of Shanda, talked with the Wall Street Journal about what it took to get Shanda off the ground and turn it into one of the dominant companies in the Chinese gaming market (we’ll ignore the lawsuits regarding copyright infringement):
Further ensuring that Western gamers will have a hard time escaping the sometimes cool, frequently criticised glut of games coming out of China and other points East, CDC Games – operating 13 games in China – is making plans to expand to the rest of the world through the creation of a new creatively-named subsidiary, CDC Games International (that would be ‘CGI’ for short).
As we mentioned last weekend, John Woo’s next film èµ¤å£ (The Battle of Red Cliff) is getting the MMORPG treatment courtesy of one of China’s biggest game companies, Beijing Perfect World. And in fine Perfect World tradition, they’ve presented us with an almost unintelligible press release telling us so! The game will be released ahead of the film and is scheduled to launch later this year (the film won’t be arriving until 2008). Full release after the jump.
Teach us about game design, that is. Gamasutra has the first part of a new series on ‘Game Design Essentials,’ a lengthy entry by John Harris on twenty difficult games (mostly oldies-but-goodies) and what their challenges illuminate about game design. It’s an interesting (if lengthy) trip down memory lane. The impulse to make video games easier can be traced to a fundamental change in perception over what a game should be. The older school of thought, which dates back and beyond the days of Space Invaders to the era of pinball, is that a game should measure the player’s skill.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) I missed the tail end of Gabe and Tycho’s Q&A with the crowd at PAX. After hearing the boys answer the audiences in their typically hilarious style and watching Tycho sing a song of his own creation they announced that they had a special guest arriving to greet the crowd. Being as I had a previously scheduled appointment, I was unable to stay and for the safety of my sanity, this was probably a good thing.
Apparently, the gleeful pair let loose with what may go down in history as one of the biggest let downs in surprise history, the introduction to director Uwe Boll. Luckily, the folks at Joystiq were on hand to catch every painful moment from his arrival on stage to massive booing and jeers to the crowd leaving in droves like rats from a sinking ship. Even more fun awaited in this half hour journey into hell including a hideous bit of his upcoming Postal movie and a gal who just couldn’t help herself from telling Uwe how she really felt about it. Watch and cringe in terror if you dare.
Just in time to miraculously coincide with PAX, Hothead Games had announced that the Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness website is now open for business. The episodic game is set to launch this year and will feature the ability to custom create a character that will join Gabe and Tycho in their exploits. PAX attendees will get a chance to try out the character creation at the Hothead Games booth. I have an interview with the Hothead folks tomorrow morning and will presumably get the chance to create a character myself which I will then try to convince them to let me photograph for posting later.
