Sunday, October 7, 2007
Arcade Flyer Art Saturday: The Classics Edition
11:00AM Flynn De Marco | After last week’s Arcade Flyer Art Saturday, I promised you something a little different this week. I went through TAFA and dug up the flyers for some of the more seminal and popular games that took video gaming from arcades and into our homes. Sure, a lot the art for these is not what you might consider terribly interesting but sometimes it’s good to go back to your roots. You can peruse the gallery at your leisure and after the jump, check out some short explanations of each flyer. More »
Too Human Trailer
10:00AM Flynn De Marco | Silicon Knights hits us up with a brand spanking new trailer for their upcoming sci-fi adventure. Looks pretty interesting if not a bit standard as far as space operas go. Will this be any sort of competition for Mass Effect? We’ll find out come early next year. More »
Ben 10: Protector Of The Earth Website Opens
9:00AM Flynn De Marco | People seem to really love Ben 10. The Cartoon Network show crosses the lines between kids and adults and when I saw the game demoed at Comic-Con, both sets of ages were there, enjoying the game with equal abandon. I tried it out myself and even though I wasn’t terribly familiar with the show, the game was pretty fun. With the game’s launch not far off, D3 Publishers has premiered the game’s website which is now open and ready for your rather stringent approval. I’m sure you’ll have plenty to say about it. Ben 10: Protector of the Earth Website More »
Evites Offers Wii Invites
8:00AM Flynn De Marco | Evites, the invite site for all your party needs, has now added Nintendo and the Wii to its roster of pre-made internet invites. Birthday parties, family reunions or just a simple Wii Sports or Mario themed party, all your bases are covered. So get with the hip internet set and send a Wii evite today. Or you could just embarrass yourself by sending a terribly outmoded Party City invitation over snail mail. The choice is yours. Wii party invites at Evites [Evites] More »
Immortals USA Hits 30,000 Beta Accounts
7:30AM Maggie Greene | Immortals USA is a MMORPG I haven’t heard much about, but they announced last week that they’ve hit 30,000 new accounts in the past month and are still signing up accounts through the game’s expected late October launch. The game is based on “5,000 years of Chinese mythology”, though apparently my anthologies of Chinese fables are lax in not mentioning “sexy elves of the Xia Dynasty”, and I don’t see any evidence of my favourite sexy bad girls of Chinese fables, the fox spirits. Basically, it looks like a sexed up version of WoW with the potential for some fascinating uses of Chinese fables and mythology – any Kotakuites played it and care to report back? Full release after the jump. More »
The Assassin’s Creed Collector’s Edition Figure: Now In Full Colour
7:00AM Flynn De Marco | A few weeks back, our good friend Cheapy D revealed that the Assassin’s Creed Collector’s Edition would include a nice little collectible Altair figure. Unfortunately, all we had at the time was a simple black and white photo. But thankfully, German website cynamite.de has gotten a nice colour photo of the whole set for us to check out, although truthfully, his outfit is mostly white anyway. I love that these collector’s editions are getting more and more elaborate. Pretty soon they’ll just come with a little game dev inside to help you through the game. [Thanks, Phil] More »
Bogost on Imagine: They Aren’t New, Y’All
6:30AM Maggie Greene | With all the press (mostly of the incredulous variety) swirling around Ubisoft’s line of DS games for girls (featuring such scintillating titles as Imagine: Babyz and Imagine: Fashion Designer, as Ashcraft mentioned earlier this week), Ian Bogost is here to set the record straight and chastise us all for having short memories and no sense of history (ouch!): the series isn’t new, and Babyz was first released in 1999. I think Bogost is being a little disingenuous here – is it any wonder that many of us have no recollection of minor software toys targeted towards adult women released in the mid-to-late 90s (and do interactive desktop pets really count as a ‘game’?)? I’ll concede that a more complete historiography makes for some more interesting observations: Petz and Babyz were software toys for adults, not for kids, at least not explicitly. They ran in a process on top of the Windows desktop, and the pets and babies literally moved around in the foreground, as you worked. They were little creatures and characters you could interact with …. None of these observations change Ubisoft’s strange assertion that girls want shopping and childcare, but the history of the titles make other observations possible. For example, Ubisoft is also just recycling old IP rather than reinventing these games from whole cloth. Bogost says that the brand value has apparently evaporated, necessitating that miserable deliberate misspelling – but how much value did it have in the first place? And does currency with the inching-towards-menopause market in the 90s really have any impact on how well it does with tweens and teens in 2007 and beyond? Imagine Game History [Water Cooler Games] More »
Sony’s “Create A Folk” Contest Winner Revealed
6:00AM Flynn De Marco | You may remember a few weeks ago we announced Sony’s contest for players to create a Folk for the upcoming Folklore. Well, the big winner has been announced and her name is Lisa (no last name given) and her creation, Quasarilli, will be available for download in an expansion pack soon after the game is released. For her efforts, Lisa will be receiving a free copy of Folklore and a limited edition art book. Congratulations, Lisa! [via PS3 Fanboy] More »
Games Are A “Backward-Looking Medium”
5:30AM Maggie Greene | It’s nothing that hasn’t been noted in a million blog posts over the years, but in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, Daniel Radosh is saying it again. Too much emphasis on graphics, not enough emphasis on narrative – and sometimes those purty cut scenes can be a hindrance to a satisfying game experience (Radosh points to Halo 3 as an example, picking up on something our very own Crecente pointed out in his review of Halo 3). Teenage boys (of all ages and genders) need not worry that mindless games will become obsolete. We will always love action movies, and Hollywood blockbusters will always be more popular than quiet, character-driven films. But gamers have a right to expect more than what the medium now has to offer. Video games are still emerging from their infancy. The first 35 years of motion pictures, from 1895 to 1930, yielded a handful of films that are considered masterpieces for their technical innovations, but the following decade was when cinema first became the art form that we know today. As cinema matured, films developed the power to transform as well as to entertain. Video games are poised to enter a similar golden age. But the first step isn’t Halo 3. I think Radosh makes some good points, and there’s little doubt in my mind that narrative design in games needs some serious tweaking. But the point about gaming really being in its infancy – especially compared to film, the medium most frequently held up in compare-and-contrast discussions – is one that bears repeating. Discussions from the ’20s and ’30s in regards to the art of film making frequently resemble the same things we yammer on about in regards to gaming – and there’s hope yet. Just maybe not in the form of Halo. The Play’s The Thing [NYT via GrandTextAuto, photo credit NYT/Ulises Farinas] More »
