New Doom 3 For Xbox 360 And PlayStation 3 Supports Head-Mounted Displays 
Far Cry 3 And The Stranger In A Strange Land 
Why Robin Makes Batman Better 
Resistance: Burning Skies: The Kotaku Review 
Harley Quinn's Revenge Is Batman: Arkham City's Bad New Ending 
High Scores And Egos: There's Always A Bigger Doodle Talk of how we review games has been swirling about for quite some time now. Many people have commented on the lack of audience/reviewer gap, as we see in book, food, and movie reviews — but have also commented that the gap is becoming more obvious as casual players start making up a larger part of the gaming audience as a whole. Kieron Gillen has a great piece up on why we need an ‘elitist’ reviewing culture for the good of gaming. Drawing from music examples of year end charts, he points to rarified tastes as being good for exposing even a hardcore audience to more ‘under the radar’ titles:
I’m relatively sure that my experience with Fracture’s multiplayer mode at the Games Convention in Leipzig is a whole lot like what AJ experienced on her experience in San Francisco, only we had much better beer. She’s already gone over the modes, the guns, and the grenades, all the while fulfiling Kotaku’s quote of fisting references for the next three months, so I won’t bore you with those details. The event here in Leipzig was set up as a team affair, with six stations set up on one side, six on the other. Journalists took turns taking on the other team until the matches were over or the tremendous heat inside the room shorted out the power strips. At one point, as you can see in the picture below, they had to turn off an entire side, resulting in a spontaneous free for all death match taking place on the working half.
Pretty much anyone who reviewed Alone in the Dark on the Xbox 360 heaped hatred on the game’s controls and camera system, and developer Eden Studios have learned their lesson. Not only is the forthcoming PS3 version going to have better movement and non-claustrophobic views, the 360 will get a patch that Eurogamer says “will implement most of the changes that have been made to the upcoming PS3 version”.
Eden opened its AitD presentation at Leipzig by listing all of the flaws in the 360 game. “We have absorbed and taken every piece of criticism about the game that was constructive and would help”, a rep said. Eden’s spokesperson also explained why they thought the tight camera position was a good idea at the time. Writes Eurogamer:
Poor Shanda. Poor Chinese game companies! A surprising number of suits have been brought against them in the past year, but this — for a more reasonable 11,000 RMB ($US 1600) — takes the current cake. Shanda froze the account of a Legend of Mir player (for unspecified reasons), who is now suing for emotional distress and the return of his virtual items:
And that comes from SCE Development. In PlayStation’s Europe message board, he says the producer who spoke yesterday was confused when he said LittleBigPlanet would be region-locked. All shared levels will be available in the game worldwide. Verbatim from Sony:
Hi all, as many of you may have heard already in an interview at Leipzig the senior producer for LittleBigPlanet announced that the game is region locked. This is in fact not the case, and all shared levels in the game will be available worldwide. The confusion arose out of regional differences in how moderation will work as there are different legal rules each region have to play by, and at one point this looked like it may require the game to be independent in each region – however this has been worked around and there will only be one region for the game…. a LittleBigRegion.
Apologies for any confusion over this issue, however I’m pretty sure you’re happy with the result.
LittleBigPlanet is Not Region Locked [Official PlayStation Community, thanks Combichristoffersen and many others. We're having issues with our tips e-mail this morning]
Have time to waste on this lovely August Saturday? If you do, there’s an appallingly expansive look at the history of Atari’s early years (19 pages, plus one for citations) over at Gamasutra. This is actually a companion piece to the first Atari retrospective, which looked at the years from ’71 to ’77 (also clocking in at a mere 20 pages). It’s stuffed with quotes, so the length isn’t simply ‘and then … and then … and then ….’ Steve Fulton describes this period as one of the most exciting for Atari:
Our friends at Manchester University have published another study looking at developing nations where the poor earn money by gold farming or powerlevelling in MMOs. The estimate is half a million people do the work for pay, a supermajority of them in China. Of the online toilers, 400,000 are involved in gold farming, the rest powerlevelling and other services.
The study’s author admits that precise estimates are not possible because of the underground nature of the activity. But it’s at least a $US 500 million global industry as of now, with organised crime snaking its tendrils into the business.
The growth is entirely predictable and not really a new phenomenon, when you think about it. “When you get people with more money than time and time than money the two will find a way to meet”, said Stephen Davis, of game security firm Secure Play. Quoted for truth.
Compared to a lot of esoteric ruminations on game design, Ernest Adams’ little essay on ‘the dao of game design’ is remarkably grounded and to the point. The question of how to make a game that players — not just the designer — would want to play is an obvious one; perhaps more obvious is the fact that a designer needs to know what they’re trying to convey (though, considering the muddled end products we’re sometimes presented with, perhaps some designers don’t pay enough attention to the ‘message’):
