New of LittleBigPlanet being uttered in the same sentence as Barack Obama and of video games being included in the President’s push for new ways to inspire kids to learn science, technology, engineering and math sat well with Entertainment Software Association chief Michael Gallagher today.

“This is a very, very good day for the gaming industry,” he told Kotaku today. “This is a significant leap into maturity and toward acceptance.”

Gallagher literally sat one row behind former astronaut Sally Ride and right near the former chairman of Intel and the current head of the group behind Sesame Street today in Washington at a press conference where Obama announced plans for “Educate To Innovate,” a series of mostly privately-funded initiatives to improve kids’ knowledge of and enthusiasm for math and science.

The new programs could be the gaming industry’s reach for the stars, to build on an astronomical analogy Gallagher said he used with White House officials as the new programs were taking shape. “Much as the space program inspired a generation of children to go into engineering,” he said. “Today’s learners are inspired by video games.” Those who make games, in other words, have the capacity to influence America’s youth toward scientific and technological greatness.

The gaming aspect of the Obama program involves two contests, both geared toward making games that will help children learn science, technology, engineering or math, so-called STEM topics. One contest involves the design of LittleBigPlanet levels. The other challenges developers to make browser games for children of different ages. Both embody what Gallagher says are the two defining characteristics of the gaming industry: Innovation and Competition.

But today was unusual. The video game industry doesn’t often get a call from the White House, as the ESA did three months ago, to launch the programs announced today. Rare is the Administration that refers to games at all in a positive way.

Perhaps equally rare is an Administration that even understands games. Gallagher, who worked in the George W. Bush White House said that the “communication gap was a lot smaller” dealing with Obama officials. Some of the current President’s speech writers, after all, recently stopped by an ESA reception to play The Beatles Rock Band, he said.

The ESA has also worked to promote the reputation of games and has enjoyed the findings of groups such as the Joan Ganz Cooney centre, which announced earlier this year that it saw games playing a key role in the future of education.

All of this helped produce a climate that led the White House to think positively about games.

“There is a preponderance of belief that we’re a force for good and quality, as opposed to being stigmatized.”

So it wasn’t a complete shock to Gallagher that, three months ago, the White House contacted the ESA to invite the gaming industry to get involved in the President’s education initiative.

From that request emerged the STEM National Video Game Competition, the browser game challenge, which will involve not just the ESA and the Information Technology Industry Council (an advocacy group for tech companies), but also Microsoft and Games4Change, a group dedicated to supporting games that serve a social good.

Anyone will be able to make games for the contest, vying for a portion of the total prize of $US300,000. Even more alluring may be Gallagher’s belief that the winning entries, which will be announced in June at E3 could become part of school curricula as soon as next school year. “We could be reaching and saving today’s learners,” he said, not waiting for a future generation and giving up already on today’s kids.

“The objective is learning, not teaching,” Gallagher said of the games he hopes people will make. He explained that a popular belief among educators is that teaching — the dispensing of information — is over-emphasizes in school programs and that more attention needs to be paid toward learning — what goes on in a child’s mind. It’s learning where games have such strong potential, Gallagher argued, because the medium already has proven it has the ability to captivate a child’s imagination and tap his or her curiosity.

The other program announced today involves Sony providing 1,000 PlayStation 3s and copies of LittleBigPlanet as part of an effort backed by the MacArthur Foundation to encourage learning through digital means.

“We should be proud of this moment because it shows a maturity of our industry,” Gallagher told Kotaku today. “It shows an acceptance of our industry as vital to our country’s ability to meeting significant challenges.” If video games can help America get better at science, technology, engineering and math, Gallagher would consider that a job well done.

Fresno Bee writer Mike Osegueda reports that he and his wife initially were having a frustrating time playing New Super Mario Bros. Wii together.

And then, without the cost of a therapist, Osegueda had a revelation:

I realised the way I play “Mario” is like a bachelor lives — running through each level as quickly as possible, daring crazy jumps and sometimes paying the price.

She’s more slow and careful, watching how situations develop before making a move.

I’d see her glaring at me when I ran too far ahead. But she was there to slow me down when I was about to do something that would probably kill Mario and end our game.

As we continued to play, we started handling the game the way we handle chores — picking tasks that fit us best individually. It’s why she washes the dishes and I put them away.

Soon, I saw “marriage” in Mario’s every move. When our characters gather coins, they all go into one pot. Hello, joint bank account. Picking which level to play next is sort of like picking what to have for dinner. You should talk about it before pressing a button.

Over the weekend I played New Super Mario Bros. Wii with a few other people. Not being a polygamist, I can’t liken that weekend session to any marriage I’ve ever been part of. The rotating trio of us had all the coordination and cooperation of a group of people running after a hundred dollar bill.

‘New Super Mario Bros. Wii’ is a lesson in marriage [Fresno Bee]

President Barack Obama announced today at a press conference that the overarching directive on the gaming plans are part of the Administration’s commitment to its STEM program, an initiative for focusing on science, technology engineering and maths education.

Among the participating private-backed initiatives is a two-year focus on science on Sesame Street as well as a variety of video-game initiatives.

“Our industry’s lifeblood is the energy and innovation of new, emerging developers,” Michael Gallagher, president of the Electronic Software Association, the industry’s lobbying group, said in a press release today. “To create the next generation’s epic titles and incredibly immersive storylines, we need America’s youth to have strategic and analytic thinking skills along with complex problem-solving abilities. It is my hope that it will produce games that will have a lasting impact on the STEM skills our nation’s students so desperately need.”

The Sony LittleBigPlanet initiative, Game Changers, is part of a $US2 million 2010 Digital Media and Learning Competition funded by the MacArthur foundation. It involves Sony donating 1000 PlayStation 3s and copies of LittleBigPlanet to libraries and community organisations. Participants will strive to create levels that involve science, technology, engineering and maths.

A second program, called the Stem National Video Game Competition, was also announced. It is a three-pronged $US300,000 contest encouraging entrants to create the best browser video games that teach the STEM disciplines for a trio of age ranges: 4-8, 8-12 and 12-16. This competition is intended to reach “historically underserved populations including girls and minority students,” according to an ESA press release. Specifics for this contest will be announced in early 2010, with winners showcased at E3 in June.

The gaming initiatives announced today are backed by the Information Technology Industry Council, an advocacy group. Microsoft and the Games4Change group are also both involved in these plans, according to the ESA release.

More details about both contests will be announced in the next few weeks, according to the ESA.

I usually use the Notebook Dump as a place to tell readers about facts I’ve picked up that don’t merit their own posts. Today, however, it’s more relevant to talk about why I don’t have as much to share this week.

A game reporter spends some weeks… distracted. This week was like that for me. I spent a chunk of Monday completing Assassin’s Creed II. I spent part of Tuesday sitting for a gaming-related interview for Spike TV (extending my streak of weeks during which I’ve worn make-up to two). On Thursday, I was indisposed for a couple of hours at one of those secret-for-now preview events for a game that comes out next year. All of this, in addition to spending a few hours chipping away at the Modern Warfare 2 campaign to keep pace with our Game Club, keeps a game reporter from doing that much, well, reporting.

That’s not ideal for me, mind you. For years, people have replied to my description of what I do for a living by asking me what it’s like to play games for work. They assume I play games from nine to five, but that’s something I’ve tried to avoid. It’s less easy to avoid that this time of year. Playing games spills into working hours. Working hours become added gaming time. Less reporting gets done. That’s yet another sign that the job of the reviewer and the job of the reporter aren’t made to overlap. Some would argue that they should not — or even that one person shouldn’t do both. Tell that to all the people who conflate games journalism with games reviewing.

Enough of this irregular Notebook Dump. By the way, that’s an image up top of a Mario t-shirt that I photographed at the Nintendo World store this past weekend. Say hello to his little friends.

Games I Got But Didn’t Write About (Yet?): NCAA Basketball 10 (Xbox 360, PS3), Assassin’s Creed Bloodlines (PSP), Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles (Wii)

EyePet Review: His Master’s Voice
In which Luke Plunkett’s furniture and lighting fail to meet Sony standards.

Command & Conquer: Red Alert Micro-Review: Palm-Size Power Trip
In which freelancer Matt Cabral forgives a key omission.

Left 4 Dead 2 Review: We Don’t Care How You Did It Up North
In which Michael McWhertor no longer worries about the corny and the hokey.

Assassin’s Creed II Review: A Season For Masterpieces
In which I praise, among many other things, the game’s infidelity joke.

LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues Review: Nuke The Mini-fig
In which Brian Crecente finds a silver lining to a Crystal Skull.

Asphalt 5 Micro-Review: Pedal to the iPhone
In which Cabral is driven to temporarily dislike one of his favourite bands.

Torchlight Review: The Fate Of DiabloCraft
In which Michael Fahey is on the verge of laughing — but holds back.

Star Wars Battlefront: Elite Squadron Review: Deja Vu in Space
In which Brian Ashcraft fires the Ion Cannon a tad too much.

Art Style Digidrive Micro-Review: The Superiority Of Video Games
In which I praise a game that can be played on shaky boats, wobbly subways and other unstable places.

The Spike TV Video Game Awards will once again double as an E3 as new games are revealed and new trailers are unveiled. Halo: Reach is coming. As is whatever this game is, teased first on Kotaku right now.

Thoughts? Theories? Is it Ken Levine’s new game? Is it BioShock 3? Is it related to anything that shows up in Google when you type in 2K Games and Dubai? We here at Kotaku can only speculate about the secrets the VGA people are holding onto. They won’t tell us anything.

The name of the game and gameplay will premiere during the VGAs on December 12 at 8pm ET/PT (noon AEDT, December 13) on Spike. A Halo: Reach trailer is also scheduled for the broadcast.

1up.com reports that this is a teaser for Spec Ops and we can now even watch an August-posted TV commercial for it.

After a several weeks of inactivity, the Art Style series has returned to North America’s DSiWare shop with Digidrive an abstract puzzle game about directing traffic that can sit alongside Art Style: Boxlife, a wonderful game about folding boxes in a factory, as a suggestion that Art Style games are downloadable because, were they sold in stores, the descriptions on the back of their boxes would scare people away.

This game is a remake of Bit Generations: Digidrive, a 2006 Japan-only Game Boy Advance game from Q Games, the studio known best these days for making the Pixel Junk series on the PS3 and less-well-known for programming the PS3’s background ribbon thing. And, yes, their take on directing traffic, virtually, is fantastic.

Loved
Terrific Traffic Trope: The gameplay in Digidrive is as solid and simple as it gets. Thank goodness, you know, that game designers consider waiting tables and taxi-driving and other often un-delightful real life activities as subjects for games. Here, being a one-man traffic light is a joy. What you’ve got is a gradually sped up relentless flow of colour-coded cars approaching the centre of a four-way intersection from four sides. With either the d-pad or the stylus players can direct the cars to one of the three lanes that branch from the road on which they are entering the playing field. Your directive is to park like-coloured cars behind each other, which banks fuel. Doing this well and then cashing in that fuel by letting a siren-blaring emergency vehicle drive into that section of parked cars, provides force to a puck on the bottom of the screen. That’s important, because you are hoping to push that puck away from a plunger that is creeping up on it.

Yes, that’s weird. And no, that’s not how directing traffic works in real life. But it’s fun, because of a few smart twists: Going into a high-speed Overdrive mode if you have at least five cars successfully parked in all four lanes helps you bank a lot of cars. Also, a clever but risky technique lets you double your reserves if you sacrifice one of the rows of parked cars. Timid players will never park many cars and keep cashing in to bump that puck forward nudge by nudge. Bold players will bank more and more cars, doubling and re-doubling their reserves, waiting until the last possible minute and than cashing in to ignite a major push of the puck. Hey, trust me, OK?

Abstract Art: The techno soundtrack is good. Better is the iconography of the graphics. A less interesting development team would have used numbers to represent the number of cars successfully being parked at the end of a lane. Q Games uses shapes. Park five cars and you get a triangle. Park a bunch more and that triangle fills up and becomes a square. Repeat until the square becomes a pentagon, then a hexagon (if you haven’t messed up by this point and had the puck hit by the plunger), and then the hexagon becomes a circle. I like ammo counters and flashing words too, but I’ll take a game that signals success with shapes.

Hated
Touch Options: Hated is a strong word, but I found no great advantage from playing the DS version’s new touch mode. It allows players not just to direct the game’s cars with a tap of the screen but to tap the shapes of banked cars to cash them in, rather than waiting for — or sending out into the roadway — an emergency vehicle. This seemed to make the game simpler without making it better. I preferred the d-pad controls which allow me to play this game even when I’m standing on the subway, holding onto a railing for support with my other hand. Many portable games require you to play while sitting, leaning or standing still. Praise Digidrive for allowing us portable gaming on unsteady platforms, but if you do, don’t try those touch controls.

It’s hard to express the quality of a puzzle game when just putting it in your hands would prove that the balance and flow here is good. Don’t be deterred by the traffic-directing subject matter. In fact, I hope that kind of oddity emboldens you to try this game. It was fantastic on the GBA and makes the transition to DSiWare well.

Art Style Digidrive was developed by Q Games and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo DSiWare downloadable store on November 16. Retails for 500 Nintendo Points ($US5) Played three difficulty levels in single player, tried touch mode, tried two-player Vs mode against the computer and had trouble looking at the traffic in the intersections of Manhattan without wanting to get involved.

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You are reading Kotaku’s once-weekly (sort of) journey back to yesteryear.

I direct you to the June 24, 1990 edition of The Oregonian. The headline: “Video Games Capitalise On Popularity Of Movies.” But past reports of Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Dick Tracy games is a bit on something called Final Fantasy.

Tom Sarris, a spokesman for the Nintendo empire, said that the company expects about 70 new game titles out between now and the beginning of the year.

“Basically, you can expect something for everybody,” he said. “One of the most eagerly anticipated titles here is ‘Final Fantasy,’ which is very, very big in Japan, and that is very much geared to the adult market.”
Final Fantasy is a role playing-adventure fantasy game that will come with two maps and, Sarris said, the biggest instruction manual ever to accompany a Nintendo game — 84 pages long.

“It will be the most sophisticated game yet,” said Sarris. “We estimate the serious player can get through it in 60 hours. Casual players may take twice as long.”

I never played that first Final Fantasy. I never counted the pages of its manual. I couldn’t even say it’s not for adults, though I didn’t think it was geared for the adult market. But it certainly was big in Japan. Still is!

[PIC]

I was introduced to Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers last week, discovering quickly that this was not the kind of Crystal Chronicles game I had expected. It is, you see, a single-player game, the first in a splinter line of Final Fantasy games made for Wii platforms and previously designed for four players.

The Crystal Bearers is different, set 1000 years after Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and putting the player in control of a single hero, a mercenary named Layle. The series’ dwarf race, the Lilty Tribe, have risen to power. The mechanical race, the Yuke, have seemingly been wiped out.

I was told by a Square-Enix representative that this game would feel like a “true Final Fantasy” for the Wii. It will have a deep storyline. But it also has real-time combat and was described to me as 75 per cent mini-games.

What I saw and played clarified things. I was shown Lilty running through a farm, getting pulled into a challenge to pluck all of the vegetables from a field before a clock ran out. A scarecrow was the opponent, shooting at Lilty to try to mess him up. So don’t think of “mini-games” in terms of a Mario Party, I realised. Think of them is mid-game challenges.

Next, I was shown some combat. Lilty ventured to a dusty desert area and enemies attacked. The game is played with a Wii Remote and Nunchuk. The control stick moves the character. The Remote’s pointer is used for telekinesis, to pick up objects and enemies, then toss them. The d-pad on the Remote is used to swivel the camera, the only element of the controls I found hard to handle in the few minutes I played the game.

I was told that conversations with non-player-characters will be less than typical for an FF game. Instead, the interactions the player tries to get are “reactions”. You get these from enemies by encountering them. For example, out in that desert area, Lilty fought some dog enemies. Once he had a Reaction associated with them, he could get them to stop fighting, run over and, uh, urinate on him. Other Reactions are equally comical, sending enemies into a daze because they’ve had their heads knocked off, for example. It’s all cartoony, done for laughs.

Also, somehow, some way, you can take a cow, hold it over Lilty’s head and shoot enemies with its udders.

I’m a sucker for the absurd in my games, so, as little as I saw of the Crystal Bearers, I was encouraged. It’s hard to see it as being a “true” Final Fantasy game, but only a longer play session that presents more of the story can verify that claim.

The game plays swiftly, action-first. It is colourful and has fun visuals, as you can see in these shots. Crystal Bearers may be off some people’s radar, but it will indeed be out this year in North America, the day after Christmas, for the Wii.

Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days recently made the transition from rumoured software to announced product, but details about the game have remained scarce, even on the game’s official site.

I found some, however, on an assets disc I recently received from Square Enix, and they present some good news for those who played the first game.

The 2010 game switches the lead in the series, putting players in control of “self-medicated psychopath” Lynch. The story, according to the fact sheet, begins with Lynch having found peace in Shanghai and attempting to “make a fat deal where the pay is beyond his wildest dreams and nothing is going to get in his way”.

The plot summary promises that Lynch will find Shanghai to be the “perfect playground for expat criminals such as [himself]; seduction and corruption highlight the contrasts of the city as players fight through the seedy underbelly of Shanghai – a juxtaposition of old-world and new-world ideals ripe with black market opportunities for Kane and Lynch to exploit and reap rewards from”.

The game will support online co-op, in contrast to the original’s inclusion only of offline co-op. Competitive online multiplayer will return.

The fact sheet is light on gameplay details, though it does note that players who are shot to the ground in the new game will be able to shoot from a prone position or crawl away, giving them a second chance in the fight.

The game is in development at series creators Io Interactive. It is announced for a Q2 2010 launch on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC.