That’s in the face of a 2.8% drop in new game sales and a quarter that didn’t include releases of “tremendous success” on par with Grand Theft Auto IV and Super Smash Bros. Brawl, both released during the same period last year. GameStop points to Resident Evil 5 and Street Fighter IV as quarter saving software. It also thanks strong sales of the Nintendo DSi as partially responsible for the 9.2% increase in sales.

Despite the drop in new game sales, they still accounted for $US770.5 million worth of GameStop’s earnings, compared to $US548.5 in “used video game products.” That boost in used game sales, GameStop CEO Don Dematteo says, illustrates “that value is becoming more important to our customers.”

During the quarter, GameStop managed to find 114 new locations to open stores. Someday, we’ll have one in every home in the U.S.!

[Image credit]

Both Naked Sky Entertainment’s Star Trek D-A-C and Wideload’s Texas Cheat ‘Em will set Xbox Live subscribers 800 Microsoft Points, offering top-down space combat and rule-bending, card-based mini-games, respectively. Let us know of your intent to pick either up in the comments.

New advancements in boob-modeling middleware could potentially allow for digitally-sculpted cans “as small as B-cups,” reports the respected news outlet. Sounds unbelievable to us, but if someone can managed to pull off something smaller than a pair of double-Ds in a game without the need for new hardware, we’re all for it.

Unfortunately, the Onion says that the tech is hardware dependent, meaning that until widespread developer support hits, its huge, motorboating-worthy jugs for all digital females. *sigh*

New Video Game Technology Finally Allows Rendering Of Smaller Breasts [The Onion]

Star Wars: The Old Republic community manager Sean Dahlberg quieted talk of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender themes in the MMO by writing that “As I have stated before, these are terms that do not exist in Star Wars” and locking the discussion thread. That lead to further allegations of GLBT “discrimination,” with knowledgeable fans pointing out instances of same sex relationships in the extended Star Wars universe.

Today, BioWare reps have decided to unfilter homosexual discussion, reopening the discussion thread and issuing a mea culpa.

Star Wars: The Old Republic community manager Sean Dahlberg issued the following apology and explanation:

I would like to personally apologise to “Elikal” and anyone I may have offended. My intention was not to demean anyone but simply to help promote a community that could discuss topics in a mature fashion. When I first built the word filter list, I added a variety of terms to the word filter that have been used numerous times in derogatory messaging. There were some words added to the filter that should not have been – we corrected this today.

I apologise for the confusion that this has created but I would like to be clear that there was never any intent to limit discussion. That said, I have overstepped my boundaries in my original statement and I sincerely apologise for doing so.

Spore, Will Wright’s far-reaching game about life, the universe and everything, is a journey, not just from microscope to universe, but of discovery and imagination.

It’s also the clearest example of how, in creating his games, Wright taps so deeply into the principals of his grade-school education which was based on a pedagogy built on child development first formulated more than 100 years ago in Rome.

Because of this, Wright’s greatest achievement isn’t delivering the universe as toy in Spore, the digital dollhouses of the Sims or even the planned towns of Sim City.

It’s his ability to touch a gamer’s imagination and inspire their intellect. To create not just games, but places and spaces of exploration

Interesting Playthings
The secret of good teaching is to regard the child’s intelligence as a fertile field in which seeds may be sown, to grow under the heat of flaming imagination. Our aim therefore is not merely to make the child understand, and still less to force him to memorize, but so to touch his imagination as to enthuse him to his inner most core. — Maria Montessori

In Montessori schools, the emphasis is on instilling a desire to learn in children, not in lecturing them.

“In western education we take theories, we deconstruct them, we categorize them and then we teach them in classrooms,” Wright says. “You are going to a school, going to a master, learning theory before you could go practice it.”

“Before that system, it was about practice, it was more of a failure based learning. I think that’s almost a more natural approach. It seems that Montessori is going with the grain in that naturalistic sense. It was later we moved to this narrative method, sitting back, listening-to-a-lecture model .”

The pedagogy was developed by Maria Montessori while working with intellectually and developmentally disabled children as part of her post-graduate research. By removing the idea that children were adults in tiny bodies that had to learn through lecture and memorization, and instead focusing on sparking a thirst for knowledge, Montessori found children could direct their own learning.

“Here aim was to arouse in the children a spontaneous response to the materials and I see that in (Will Wright’s) games,” said Virginia McHugh Goodwin, executive director of the Association Montessori International, USA. “Creativity is a component to his work and that is also key to Montessori’s work, because she sets the tone for creativity, the way she has her educational methods set up.

“To be creative you have to have the freedom to explore and to master the specific techniques and that leads to unleashing the human spirit so that the process of creating can come from within.”

Montessori’s first school opened in 1907 in Rome and her methodologies have since spread around the world. Including to places like Atlanta, Georgia, where Wright attended such a school until sixth grade.

Another important element of Montessori education is the use of self-correcting toys. These Montessori toys allow children to play without realizing they are learning.

“The structure of Montessori toy is that the kid will discover things while playing with a toy,” Wright said. “Having the kid discover these principals is so much more powerful than a teacher coming up and saying we’re going to learn about this.

“The way we approached Spore was a lot like that. What are the components I want a gamer to discover when playing with this?”

And that’s not an unusual approach for Wright. None of his games are really games, he says.

“I build more interesting toys than interesting games,” he said. “I always thought of Spore as a toy universe. I think there is an interesting distinction between toy and game. I think a toy is more open ended.

“The game is a subset of the experiences you can have with the toy.”

And toys and play, Wright says, go hand-in-hand.

“Play is a toy version of problem solving that we’re going to encounter later in life,” he said. “Getting people to be playful around serious subjects is the most effective ways to develop an intuition to that.

“It gives us ways to kind of map things intuitively.”

An Elegant Tool
“Free the child’s potential, and you will transform him into the world” — Maria Montessori

Wright’s first experience with Montessori was brief and intense, attending an elementary school in Atlanta until the sixth grade. The school introduced him to the idea of self-directed education through creative inspiration.

“I bring it up every now and the,” he said of his Montessori education. “It gives people a grounding of where I am coming from. “

Goodwin says that many Montessori graduates tend to be more interesting in exploring things, in asking a lot of questions.

“They’re critical thinkers, problem solvers, because they’ve had the ability to do that from a very early age,” she said.

For Wright, Montessori helped him realise that when he was personally involved or interested in something he learned about it much more efficiently.

“When I was starting to research SimCity I started reading about urban dynamics,” he said. “It became more of an obsession, because I was able to play with my guinea pig simulation, instead of trying to learn facts and figures.

“When Sim games started moving forward we wanted to draw that out.”

He did that by creating games that were a form of autodidactic toy, that taught by inspiring people to become interested in a subject.

“It’s about getting a player creatively engaged,” he said. “Computers can get students very motivated to be interested in things.”

But Wright contends that Montessori isn’t as direct an influence on him as some might think. He doesn’t, he says, come up with his idea for games from Montessori.

“I pick themes, things I’ve been fascinated with, then it’s ‘How can I convey this to a lot of people?’,” he said. “Montessori seems like a very clean, natural way to make these subjects approachable.”

Instead, Montessori’s influence is more subtle.

“I don’t think it’s something you work into a game, I think it’s inherent in the structure itself,” he said. “It’s in the design premise.

“It’s an elegant tool. It’s not the end state goal. It just happens to be the best tool for the job.”

Loops of Super Mario Bros.
Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed. – Maria Montessori

As with the Montessori Method, in Wright’s games failing is almost as important as winning.

“Montessori knew that children needed freedom to make mistakes, to develop skills that are unique to his or her personality,” said Goodwin. “The freedom allows for the development of the creative thinking and the problem solving skills. To be able to look at things from a different perspective.

“Montessori allows for success and failure. She felt that people learned from mistakes. Mistakes are not looked down upon or frowned upon, they are part of the process.”

For Wright, that was one of the hardest things to come to grips with as a game designer.

“One of the counter intuitive things I needed to learn as a designer was that players enjoy failures more than success,” he said. “As long as it’s diverse, they like to explore the failure space of a game.”

All games are made up of what Wright calls interaction loops, events that have both a success and failure side to them.

“In Super Mario Brothers, once you succeed at knowing how to make him move you go on to the next step. Now you go up and
hit a creature and you fail a different way.”

Wright’s games have always had a diverse and interesting mix of what Wright terms the failure space.

“It’s the failure that’s fun,” he said.

But what you won’t find in Spore is any form of direct completion with other gamers, another tenant found in Montessori teachings.

“Montessori does not encourage competition in the traditional sense,” Goodwin said. “The idea with Montessori is that children strive to do the best that they can do.”

Instead, in both Spore and Montessori, the emphasis is on collaboration.

“Children learn to collaborate and work with one another and then each child is motivated to reach his or her potential so they can contribute to the project in a collaborative way, their best skills,” Goodwin said. “So there is competition, but it is done in a very nice way. And I don’t see Wright with a lot of competition in his games.”

Imagination Amplifier
We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry. – Maria Montessori

Because Wright isn’t trying to lecture gamers or teach them the nuance of physics, evolution, of astronomy or biology, the science of Spore wasn’t designed to be “dead on accurate”.

“If you step way back and look at Spore as a whole it’s meant to show a grand arch, the story of life,” her said. “The Sims is like the story of life on Earth, Spore is life with a capital L.”

“I wanted people to have a sense of the vast scope that their life is inside of. There’s a journey in Spore from microscopic to galactic. There aren’t too many experiences in games, books or movies that gives you that distant perspective.”

And along with that perspective, the different stages of Spore allow a gamer plenty of aesthetic and strategic creativity, all geared at getting players not to learn but to express their creativity.

“A lot of people have a very low opinion of their own creativity,” he said. “When you give them a tool to make things that they didn’t think they could make it can be very powerful, especially when five or six people comment on it.”

Goodwin says Spore “amplifies the imagination.”

“When I look at Spore, that’s what it seemed to say to me,” she said. “That it really uses the imagination.

“Another thing I think I saw with (Wright), is that he is really, really into that idea of discovery and exploration. That is one of the key tenants of Montessori’s work. The materials that she designed allow the child to discover. It’s manipulative materials that go from something abstract to the concrete.”

After the game’s launch, Wright and his team started to see people step outside the limitations of Spore and continue to create.

“People were creating narratives of who their people are and how they evolve,” he said. “It was really about ownership at some level.”

Manchild
The greatest sign of success for a teacher… is to be able to say, “The children are now working as if I did not exist. — Maria Montessori

The more than four hundred pages of Maria Montessori’s book, The Montessori Method, is packed with lessons that seem at times written as much for game development as they are for education.

It often talks of creating a system of rules that don’t inhibit, but enhance the experience.

Wright laughs in surprise when I tell him that after reading the book it seems to me that many games treat gamers as children, puppets that are lead through games by a strict set of rules, rules that often harm the experience.

He seems to be agreeing with me when he says that Spore was created to be very player focused.

“Where Montessori is very child centered,” he says, “we are very gamer centered.”

But modern games aren’t as condescending in their design. They expect more now from players.

“If you look at them ten years ago they were more linear,” he said. “But now the Sims, Grand Theft Auto, Roller Coaster Tycoon, even the Wii games or music games, they leave a lot more room for creative expression of the player.”

And it’s that desire to free that expression that seems to keep driving Wright back to Montessori’s methods.

“I’m not trying to evangelize Montessori,” he said. “I want people to feel creative and involved and feel like they’ve doing something constructive. Montessori is a great tool for that purpose.”

By Leigh Alexander
We may have an M-rating for “adult content” in games, but that doesn’t necessarily make them mature. What will it take for games to grow up?

In our March podcast we play and talk with Guerrilla Games about their Playstation 3 masterpiece Killzone 2.

Eric Boltjes, senior game designer for Guerrilla Games, talked to use about the studio’s in-game clan, the design goals for the game’s multiplayer, how World of Warcraft influenced some of their decisions and the game’s controversial controls.

We also heard a bit about what’s to come and talked up the possibility of a Killzone movie.

Watch the Killzone 2 Video Podcast on your iPod or Zune!
Right click and save link as to download.
Subscribe to our Kotaku Video podcast on iTunes and the Zune Marketplace.

It’s been a long time in coming, but our February podcast is finally here. Yes, I realise it’s March.

In this episode Mike McWhertor and Adam Barenblat talk with Seth “S-Kill” Killian, community manager for Capcom and master Street Fighter. Not only do you get a chance to see if Killian can talk and play at the same time, but you’ll also get a few secrets about Street Fighter.

Watch the Street Fighter IV Video Podcast on your iPod or Zune.
Right click and save as to download.
Subscribe to our Kotaku Video podcast on iTunes and the Zune Marketplace.

The Resident Evil: Degeneration movie features plasticine characters, impossible situations, a nonsensical storyline full of plot holes you could drive a truck through.

It’s fun to look at, and the action is pretty absorbing — but ultimately, it’s vapid.

Finally, a perfect Resident Evil movie.

Say what you like about Degeneration. I’ll say I like it, because for good or for ill, it’s actually the ideal reflection of the franchise on which it’s based. True, the plot makes little traceable sense – but try and find a Resident Evil plot that does. We’re talking games about obscene mutant zombie viruses, here.

I mean, why should a powerful pharmaceutical company invent an obscene mutant zombie virus, anyway? There’s never any good reason – and Degeneration stays on point, utterly refusing to offer one. And in the games, when the D-Day biohazard outbreak inevitably occurs, the government tries to cover it up instead of prevent it every time (yep, that happens in Degeneration).

We’re talking about games where people leave their top-secret files lying around to helpfully edify interlopers, for example – a high point of Resident Evil 4 is discovering a handwritten note titled “Our Plan.” Y’know ,just in case you wanted to know. And no matter how gruesome the viruses get, some power-hungry villain always elects to inject themselves, paradoxically trading away any actual control they had over the situation. Degeneration doesn’t break that pattern, either.

Speaking of patterns, are you seeing one here? Yes — Degeneration is utterly faithful to its source material, even admirably so. In the film, Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield team up for the first time since Resident Evil 2, and this time around isn’t too different for the pair: Claire still goes to great lengths to protect a little girl, Leon is still too shy to admit he’s interested in a tough woman, and the two must split up to pursue separate objectives throughout the story – which again culminates in a fight against a self-injected, large-armed G-Virus mutant villain.

No whining about spoilers. You could have seen it coming a mile away. There’s even a seminal self-destruct sequence activated. Of course.

At face value, then, it seems that Degeneration captures the “flavor” of Resident Evil far more than the dissociative Milla Jovovich films that bear only a passing memetic resemblance to the games — fans don’t tend to like those films, do they?

So if you dislike Degeneration, maybe you actually dislike the source material.

The more storied a video game franchise, the more challenging it is to create a film based on it. As a matter of fact, instead of challenging, let’s go with impossible. We either end up with a decent film that has nothing to do with the game (but have we yet had a good one?); a flick that admirably reflects the game but is utterly unappealing to non-fans (dear Advent Children!) , or, what we most often get – a terrible film that both movie-goers and game fans despise.

If Degeneration was a bad movie, that’s because it was faithful to the games – and what makes the games good simply isn’t the same kind of thing that makes a good movie. There’s obviously a broad schism, then, between the way we experience game stories as players and the way they translate as narrative.

It sure looks like scriptwriters and producers consistently aren’t “getting it” when it comes to what’s lovable about a video game they’re trying to translate to the big screen. On the other side of the canyon, audiences are unlikely to understand Resident Evil or Final Fantasy VII when it’s presented as film, outside of its native context.

But is it really that film production is just not taking games seriously enough? That the film industry doesn’t understand how sophisticated games really are?

Perhaps to an extent; unfamiliar with the language of games, films often mistranslate a title’s appeal. That’s what happened with Silent Hill, which might have been successful as a well-acted psychological thriller – but turned out mediocre, if we’re being kind. It reproduced the game’s visual style and feel almost unsettlingly, even chill-inducingly, going as far as to incorporate pieces of Akira Yamaoka’s original soundtrack.

But it completely missed the boat on what makes Silent Hill appealing – its psychological subtlety – and instead zeroed in on the series’ most obvious elements, stripping them of their context and highlighting their ridiculousness. It might have been possible to make a complex, mature Silent Hill movie if it had focused on the right things.

The dominant problem, though, is that the narratives of games are unfortunately not nearly as sophisticated, intelligent, affecting or entertaining as we think they are.

Story can be important to games, and sophisticated story is arguably key to advancing the medium beyond toy status. But it’s not always necessary to an excellent video game – just look at the strength and success of Resident Evil even despite its ridiculous plot lines. Resident Evil 4 is so good, for example, that it manages to be awesome even though it features an annoying Napoleon-man chasing Leon with a gigantic mechanical version of himself – and he’s a lot more appealing than the girl you’ve got to rescue. That’s a seriously solid game, right there.

Similarly, there are some excellent video game stories out there that run alongside really awful games. But a movie is a story – period. It’s got no choice. On the big screen, a video game’s weird, clumsy narrative doesn’t have things like gameplay to hide behind. On film, games can’t escape the fact that they’re often shallow without their interactivity, their action pacing, or their player-created experience. And ironically enough, it’s the major action franchises that end up being made into films – the ones that need story the least.

And yet every time we go to the theatre for a video game movie, we’re expecting – what? Something that resembles a live-action cut scene from the game? Or a deeply-affecting, sophisticated dramatic journey based on Max Payne? Seriously?

We have high hopes of video game movies because our emotional relationship to games is so strong. Perhaps this love leads us to expect more from a film representation than it’s reasonable to expect – and that’s the source of our cultural trait of being impossible to please regarding films. But we’ve also learned the language of games; we’ve learned to treat broad-stroke stereotypical characters as shorthand for whatever we’d like to fill in.

We’ve learned to back-shelf absurd plot elements in favour of creating our own story about the joy of the boss fight. We’ve let our imagination make characters far more exciting and intriguing than they are.

What’s to like, really, about Leon Kennedy — besides the fact he does a bad-arse suplex? Albert Wesker’s among many people’s favourite video game villains of all time, and yet it’s true that he’s barely even got a consistent characterization from one game to the next. We like him because he talks creepy and he looks cool doing it, and now he’s got those red eyes, and that thrust punch thing in RE 4? Amazing.

In fact, you might be getting a rush of enthusiasm just thinking about these characters – hey, I do. Ready to rush to the comments to talk about them, to share your favourite moments from Resident Evil, to explain why you think the stories are really good?

Go for it. But the vitality and adoration you feel around Resident Evil comes from your relationship to it. That’s something that will never translate to the big screen – might as well quit hoping.

[Leigh Alexander is news director for Gamasutra, reviews for various outlets, and maintains her gaming blog, Sexy Videogameland. Her monthly column at Kotaku deal
s with cultural issues surrounding games and gamers. She can be reached at leighalexander1 AT gmail DOT com.]

From Croft to Cammy, I’ll take a female protagonist over some cheesy line-spewing pretty boy any day of the week.

So Bayonetta, the upcoming third-person actioner from Platinum Games (compiled of key members from Okami’s Clover Studio), is high on my list of games to play.

While I’m inclined to focus on the the eponymous, gun-footed heroine, the game’s real draw is its pedigree; aside from the Clover connection, the game’s director, Hideki Kamiya, had a hand in creating the Devil May Cry franchise.

One look at Bayonetta’s dripping-with-goth environments, super-stylized combat, and crazy-arse creatures, and Kamiya’s influence will hit you like an oversized demon sword. In fact, it wouldn’t be out of line to sum up Bayonetta as “Devil May Cry with a woman”, as it absolutely oozes with similarities in all the best ways.

Most prominent of these, are the game’s effective use of fast-paced, over-the-top action and oversized boss baddies.

When checking out the game at a recent Sega event in New York, my demo opened with a playable prologue set 500 years before the game’s story (Bayonetta is an older-than-dirt witch), that saw Bayonetta battling atop a rapidly falling clock tower.

As the Big Ben-looking structure raced toward its brick-breaking fate, Bayonetta stylishly dispensed some of the game’s antagonist angles–that actually look like clean cut demons–with the dual pistols in her hands and attached to her high heels.

Another battle saw a screen-filling foe erupt from the ground, fists first, right before picking up the stone cobbled bridge Bayonetta was standing on and rattling it like a stick. Both scenarios hinted at a focus on highly produced and polished set-piece battles.

When our angel-slayer isn’t strutting through epic encounters, she’s fighting determined hordes of low level beasties, with style to spare.

In addition to her four-gun arsenal, she packs the expected high-kicking acrobatics of a game with Devil May Cry pedigree as well as some special attacks. Most impressive are her torture moves–acquired by collecting orbs during regular battle–that allow her to summon up old-school killing machines such as iron maidens and guillotines.

While the title is brimming with eye candy at every turn, it was these creative kills that made a lasting impression; watching her kick an enemy into one of these devices, then witnessing the resulting head-lopping, torso-impaling deaths, had me craving some play time in this strictly hands-off demo.

These wicked encounters should have prepared me for what was next, but I’m guessing nothing could prep even the most seasoned gamer for Bayonetta’s naughty bits-revealing hair attacks.

The bespectacled heroine is totally covered in hair, but unlike your Speed-O sportin’ uncle; her hair is more like form-fitting black leather, wrapping skin tight around her taunt. In fact, the only time it really looks like actual hair is when it unravels for a totally bizarre–and awesome–finishing attack. When a boss is weak, she unspools the menacing mane into an enormous hair dragon–I’m not kidding—while players mash buttons to ensure the hirsute beast finishes the fight. All the while, the mostly-naked Bayonetta watches on.

Admittedly, this alone sold me on the game. And despite having only a hands-off demo to check out, I see a lot of promise in this title.

Its adrenaline-amping action, engaging art style, and solid pedigree guarantee it a spot on my must-play radar. That said, I’ll need some hands-on time to get a true reading on its potential, as it’s breakneck pace could spell trouble if the camera and controls can’t keep up. Still, based on my brief time with Bayonetta, I’m already counting the days till our next date.

Bayonetta Official Site

—-Matt Cabral