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APB's Geek Squad: Miyamoto, Molyneux, Spector & Garriot
Posted by Michael McWhertor at 6:30 PM on February 23, 2008
During Dave Jones' GDC session, essentially a reveal of Realtime Worlds' online game APB, he touted the game's character customisation tools. After generating a handful of characters you certainly wouldn't want looking after your kids, he showed off APB's ability to recreate real-life characters. Namely, Jones showed digital versions of developers Shigeru Miyamoto, Peter Molyneux, Warren Spector and Richard Garriott that were made in the character editor.
While the above pic may not be of the best quality, we got a few individuals snaps that are much better looking. They're behind the jump, front page visitors, because I'm pretty sure that pic of a pants-less Miyamoto is not safe for work.
Seriously, man. Put some khakis on!
Kim Swift and Erik Wolpaw, two of the key developers on Portal, gave GDC attendees a behind the scenes look at The Orange Box hit, focusing on the process of integrating narrative and design. The two also showed early and, by their own admission, failed, version's of the game's final boss fight with GLaDOS, the talkative, ever present artificial intelligence. They highlighted three attempts at making a successful boss battle, driving home the fact that ample playtesting brought them to the incinerator battle they ultimately settled on.
A few weeks back, EA boss John Riccitiello was 
Whenever a PS3 or Xbox 360 game comes out, Wii owners say it would be great if Nintendo's console got a port. And for some games, it really would! For others, it wouldn't be so great. Devil May Cry 4 is one of those games, says the title's producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi. According to him:
The usual strategy for releasing new graphics cards is as follows: company releases ridiculously expensive graphics card, few can afford it, then as its technology ages it gets cheaper and trickles down to the lower ends of the market. Nvidia's strategy for its new GeForce 9600 GT is a little different: it's being pitched directly into the massmarket. The 9600 GT is the first card in Nvidia's GeForce 9 series, and instead of coming in at a silly-expensive price will launch in the entirely reasonable $US 169-189 range. Bold new territory for a graphics hardware company, then, but it also shows Nvidia are serious about this whole 
Shigeru Miyamoto is not some lovable man-child! He 
So you bought Guitar Hero III on Wii, you got it home, and found out it 
No shake ups last week in Japan, as the Wii continues to top Media Create sales charts on strong Super Smash Bros. Brawl and Wii Fit sales. The Xbox 360 is unfortunately holding on to nothing but a sliver of the Japanese hardware pie, with figures dropping to lows Microsoft hasn't seen since last fall. The full hardware list for the week of February 11 to 17 is right after this.
I didn't forget to do the Dojo Dump! It's just a little late. Had to go play Street Fighter IV, you see, and certain things simply must take priority. With the Smash Bros. Dojo coming closer and closer to ceasing daily updates, a good amount of hidden content is taking priority. So be warned, spoiler freaks, secret characters and stages await. Still, there are plenty of details left to creep out, so there's interesting reading ahead.
Shmupcrafters Warashi have updated their website to indicate that the arcade to Dreamcast to Xbox Live Arcade translation of Triggerheart Exelica will be hitting Xbox Live Arcade this Wednesday! Triggerheart is about humanoid weapons systems that just so happen to resemble cute anime girls, fighting to save humanity from the Ver'mith. You're good, they're bad, shoot them. Both ships have different weapons but both have the power to perform an anchor shot, snagging enemies to use as a weapon or shield. Not sure I am ready for this yet, as Omega Five is still kicking my ass on a regular basis, but I suppose when it comes to shmups, the more the merrier! The only problem? While it will definitely be out in Japan next Wednesday for 800 points, I am seeing now official word on other regions, though Xbox.com did 
When Crecente arrived at the Sir Frances Drake Hotel for GDC, he dumped nearly a dozen new PSP demos and review builds on us. Patapon and God of War: Chains of Olympus are just two of the many UMDs stashed in my check-in luggage, so I expect I'll be firing up the PlayStation Portable quite a bit this weekend. After my interview with Q-Games Dylan Cuthbert earlier this week, I've got an itch to go back to PixelJunk Racers, too. Need a bit of winding down time after GDC, so I plan to sleep 'til noon. Good times.
I think I need to start attending TV talk show tapings, just in case my Xbox 360 fails. First Ellen, and now the oddly adorable Rachel Ray of Food Network fame gives out Microsoft's console to her audience. This time around it's an Xbox 360 Arcade system, complete with the family free quiz game Scene-It, which is just amazing until everyone memorises the questions, just like the real game! All of this from the woman who got paid so you could watch her travel around the world eating food, which I would do completely free but probably without half as much spunk. Thanks to Kotakuite Gerald, who apparently has time to sit around watching daytime television with his camera close by!
Codemasters' Connect '08 event at the Omega Sektor in Birmingham England is coming March 14th and 15th, and they've lined up some truly amazing freebies for visitors to their MMO showcase. Probably the coolest item is for RF Online players. They've had Masamune Shirow of Ghost in the Shell fame create a suit of armour for every class in the game, and my god are they beautiful. The suit above is for a female Cora Warrior, and the rest are just as cool! Lord of the Rings Online players who attend will get a special in-game title for their character, while Archlord players will get some exclusive armor. All attendees will also get a Jumpgate Evolution pack complete with a beta key! I was invited to go myself, but seeing as I am moving on the 15th there's not a chance in hell...and I want some Shirow armor dammit! You go look at the pretty armor while I go cry. 
Taku Murata, general manager of Square Enix's research and development division, announced at today's GDC session that the company has dropped the White Engine name for its cross-platform game engine. Squenix is now pitching it as Crystal Tools, showing off a fancy new logo that extends the Final Fantasy brand even further.
Well it's not 
Microsoft has revealed the winners of the inaugural Xbox Live Arcade Awards, which features the best in XBLA titles as chosen by you, the player. Over 26,000 people voted in January on six different categories, with the finalist chosen by a panel of industry journalists. Your pick for Best Overall Arcade Game? Hudson's Bomberman Live, which also took home the Best Competitive Multiplayer award. The big winner was Pac-Man: Championship Edition, which won in three categories including Xbox Live Arcade Staff Choice. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles both won in two categories, with Team 17's Worms the only single award winner for Most-Played Game. Not one new IP on the list, which I see as a resounding win for the classics. Sometimes the best new games are old ones. 
Dave Jones of Realtime Worlds wowed GDC audiences this week with his presentation "My First MMO", debuting the successor to the award winning Crackdown known as APB. APB, Jones explained, is a massively multiplayer online game without the grind, one that draws inspiration from Counter-Strike more than it does from Ultima Online, EverQuest or World of Warcraft. Why Counter-Strike? "There's no persistence, no progression, no customisation, its just damn fun," Jones said.
No word yet on exactly how widely distributed Capcom's latest Street Fighter will be to U.S. arcades, but a Capcom source told us yesterday it's definitely coming to the U.S.
Super Smash Bros. Brawl director, similarly famous for his work on the Kirby series, is speaking at the Game Developers Conference this morning to talk about the creation of the Wii fighter. His talk, "Building Characters: The SUPER SMASH BROS. BRAWL Postmortem," is about to get underway, if just a few minutes late. We've been warned that Nintendo has restricted video and still photos of the talk, so you'll have to imagine what's going on with the combined power of your imagination and Kotaku-style liveblogging. We've also been promised exclusive, confidential information about Super Smash Bros. Brawl, so it should be worth your while to make the jump and F5 like mad.
Today, during a GDC presentation, Nintendo's Takashi Aoyama announced a new expansion to Nintendo's Wi-Fi services called Wii Pay & Play. Aoyama explained that Nintendo will begin "collecting fees for some services [that] will allow us to adapt flexibly." In other words, by subsidising additional, unnamed service and feature costs to consumers, Nintendo feels they can explore new concepts and channels.
After the Star Wars: Force Unleashed presentation, we sat tight in the Lucas Arts auditorium to check out some bits of their new game, Fracture. Lucas Arts has been working with Day One studios to create what they hope will be a fresh new IP in their corral. Unfortunately from what I saw it doesn't seem to be much of a contender, at least at this point. The story is based around a future Civil War over genetic engineering and the bits that we saw took place in the San Francisco of the future. The battle mechanic is all involved with manipulating terrain. Weapons can be used to rain down rocks on your enemies, giant spikes of earth can be brought up to repair bridges or hills can be created to block you from enemy fire. Giant vortexes can also be created that will sink the earth, dragging in everything around it.
"One thing that stands in my mind...we got an inquiry from the Wall Street journal asking about succinctly captured tax policy", Sid Meier relates to a packed audience of GDC attendees, referring to the most surprising response to his games. "It's just a slider". 
Nintendo dropped us a line to clear up a bit of misconception in our write up of 
Whilst my Kotaku brethren were toiling away at various long winded sessions, I had th honor of being shipped out to Lucas Arts Studios to check out some of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Once we arrived I was greeted by a Yoda fountain outside and an incredible waiting area with amazing old movie posters and some life size figures of Darth Vader and Boba Fett. We were then ushered into the theater where the the presentation began. 
While many of GDC's industry attendees were excited to hear about LucasArts' technology pipeline and day to day methods of operations, we sat in with the hopes of getting a sneak peek of the game. And after listening to an interesting anecdote (The Force Unleashed could have been replaced by the self-explanatory game Wookie Warrior had Lucas not ripped the idea), LucasArts did show us several minutes of restricted-photography real-time gameplay...along with a few early concept videos that were fairly amusing. 
On September 4th of last year, firefighter Jeff Diederich came home from work to discover his year-old son Aiden lying strangely still in his crib, grey and yellowed from Jaundice. He and his wife Heather rushed to the hospital only to discover that Aiden needed a liver transplant, and was no way the always crowded National Donor List route would save him in time. Their only option was a living transplant, where a portion of a living donor's liver is transplanted into the recipient. The father offered to undergo the procedure, but his family changed his mind. The 40% risk of donor death meant that Heather would be left alone with two children, so they had to look elsewhere. Enter Aiden's Uncle, Jeff Shoemaker. 
CDC Games, which I assume has nothing to do with the Center for Disease Control, has just launched their first MMO in North America under their CDC Games International unit. Lunia is a nifty little manga style action MMO where you take on the role of one of four main characters and fight through story chapters, completely with manga style cutscenes. You can start your own party or have the game automatically set you up with other players as you play through stages, using the arrow keys to move and the A and S buttons to attack. There is no clicking on monsters here...this is an MMO action RPG. Think Champions of Norrath or better yet...Record of the Lodoss War for the Dreamcast. It uses the ever popular free to play, pay for items model so popular in China, so you can just download the game and go. I screwed around a little with it this morning, and I liked what I saw. You can sign up through 
Critics weren't shy with praising Bioshock or putting it on countless top 10 lists. But if there was one element that enough could not be said about, it was the audio. The dark, eerie sound design pulled us into a game that could have been just another scary FPS. 
