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It's been a pretty amazing year for the game's industry. We've seen record sales, major layoffs, the disbarment of Jack Thompson and not a few smaller stories to mull over as well.
By John Gaudiosi
Hollywood Producer Avi Arad, 33, hopes the production studio he runs with his father, Avi (former head of Marvel Studios), Arad Productions, becomes the premiere home for game developers and publishers to work with. Having helped turn Marvel comic book franchises like Spider-Man and X-Men into blockbuster film franchises, Arad is now focused on doing the same for games.
Among the games he's bringing to the big screen as big-budget, studio tent pole films are Lost Planet, EverQuest, Mass Effect and Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. Arad attended E3 this year to announce that he is taking Capcom's hit Lost Planet game to the big screen with David Hayter writing the script and Warner Bros. distributing the picture.
"Lost Planet felt really original visually with the huge, snowy planet and the giant insects and the VF suits," said Arad, who's an avid gamer. "I really liked the art design, which made it look like a futuristic Jules Verne creation. There was also a lot of interesting story elements like Wayne, who's almost like a Top Gun pilot. You have a lot of different factions and everyone has a point-of-view. Some of the stuff we're working on with Eisenberg is really close to how he was in the game. But we have to make a credible argument of why he thinks he's right. Having spent a lot of time inside the game, I felt like there were a lot of characters I could build a story around."
Arad said he's played every one of BioWare's games over the years and he's had a great respect for the Edmonton-based game maker. When Mass Effect first came on the gaming radar two years ago he became very interested in it.
"Once I played the game, beyond this massive world, the story's almost structured like a spy movie like a Casino Royale or The Bourne Identity," said Arad. "You have this guy, the first human spectre, and he has all of this pressure on him to deliver for his species. Then he uncovers this plot that he has to chase down because he's a hero. I think that's a good central character for the movie."
By: Leigh Alexander
You're picking your way through the destitute skeleton of an abandoned building. All around you, decaying, discarded décor reminds you that people lived and worked here once, just as it prompts you to wonder what happened to them. Strange noises and crawling damp seep through the rotted walls.
Your backpack is stuffed with cryptic objects you inexplicably picked up in your exploration - unsettling to look at and obscure in their application, they somehow hold the solutions to the puzzles that impede your progress, if only you can figure them out.
It's dark, you've got a weak flashlight, a short knife, maybe a length of steel pipe you picked up along your way. And you have a sinking feeling that at the end of the next corridor, death is lurking in the shape of a shambling, deformed monster. But you press on through the dispassionate madness, driven by unravelling mysteries and the unresolved ghosts of your own past.
This is survival horror - does it still exist?
LittleBigPlanet isn't just about game creation, it is, the developers hope, a whole palette of tools that can be used to create anything from a puppet theatre to graphic novels to pop-up books to music sequencer.
"It's a creation tool," said Kenny Young, LBP's audio designer.
The misconception that LittleBigPlanet is all about game creation is likely fed by the deep toolset included in the game that supports making games. Media Molecule included those because they wanted to make sure people could, if they wanted to, make their own games. But they hope that's not all people do with the game.
"Games have conditional elements," said Kareem Ettouney, Media Molecule art director. "We wanted to make sure that there is a tool set in there that allows you to create those elements.
"But the exciting part of LittleBigPlanet is everything else you can do with it. We didn't want to hinder people. What we wanted to make sure we widened the palette. The only real limitation is your imagination."
So when Sony Computer Entertainment of America called Media Molecule and suggested that they hold a design contest at the historic Parsons School of Design in Greenwich Village, the team jumped at the opportunity.
With just 42 days left until the United States chooses its 44th President, it is vital that the electorate is well versed in the key issues affecting the country.
Although many cultural commentators bemoan the lack of political engagement in the general population, and both the Democrat and Republican campaigns have condemned video games as a negative influence on the young, the fact is that gamers have a significant advantage in understanding the complexities of the Presidency. By playing games across a wide spectrum of genres, a gamer can experience first hand the tough decisions and burning questions that will test the leader of the free world.
Can the same be said for the candidates themselves? Far from condemning video gaming, McCain and Obama would do well to embrace gaming culture in the hope that some of our collective wisdom will rub off.
This will not be easy. Obama will have to flipflop on numerous anti-games speeches, while McCain must contend with long hours of advisors patiently re-explaining that a 'computy-game' is a sort of electric coconut shy or bagatelle.
I am not an MMO player.
I might go so far as to say my preferred play style is inherently incompatible with the mere idea of MMOs, never mind personality quirks that make spending time online with strangers sound more like torture than fun. I'm a solitary gamer, so when I fire up a console or turn on a handheld, I'm looking for a solitary escape. I want to get sucked in, be it flinging chickens in Harvest Moon or sinking into an RPG for hours on end. Generally, I don't want to share my gaming experience — sure, I do multiplayer games at parties, I've sat around with friends and watched them play or had them watch me as we discuss games. But in general? Please, please, please leave me alone.
But when an email from a Perfect World PR person popped up in my Kotaku inbox, asking if I'd like to take the new 'international' version of Wanmei shijie for a spin, I — against my better judgment — said 'Oh, what the hell,' booted my poor little Mac up into Windows, and downloaded my first MMO client. Because as solitary a gamer as I am, I do write a lot about MMOs, have friends who play MMOs and delight in telling me their latest exploits, am interested in the mechanics and social elements of MMOs. I'm generally fascinated by the dynamics of online communities, so wouldn't it be nice to be an observer from the inside for once? I marveled at the character creation options, selected the human melee 'blademaster' class (with a minimum of eye rolling), and ran with it.
Being a video game retail outlet employee is a very important job in the gaming industry. While the more net savvy gamer might occasionally get a chuckle out of a bit of misinformation overheard at their local store, every day hopeless, helpless parents look to them like modern-day gurus, only instead of joining caravans to climb mountains they're climbing into Caravans and Mountaineers, the dreams of their little game-hopeful children riding on the wisdom or lack thereof delivered from some mildly annoyed customer service representative's mouth. For them, these fellows are the end all, be all when it comes to gaming. We're all plugged in, but what kind of information would we find if - just for a moment - we pretend we're as disconnected as some parents today?
I decided to see what sort of guidance the lost parents, aunts, and uncles get from video game retail by presenting one hundred stores with one question. "What video game system should I buy for a 15 year-old boy?"
Diablo III fan site DIII.net has a list of known and rumoured features in Blizzard's revised Battle.net online gaming service.
Battle.net has fallen by the wayside since it's late nineties heyday but when Blizzard spoke to Kotaku back in June they were keen to stress that the new 'n' improved service would be a centerpiece of the Diablo III and StarCraft II experience.
The confirmed list is after the jump, but the rumours include an Achievements system, Accountability (to track cheaters and those who use hacks) and Voice Over IP in-game chat.
Multiplayer has come a long way since the turn of the century, of course. Do we still need something like Battle.net?
Features that DIII have been able to get Blizzard to confirm:
Last night I signed on LIVE for a little Team Fortress 2 fun. You see, after Mass Effect dropped, I blacked out for a few weeks. When I woke, aside from realising that a monkey had written my posts for some time (the experiment was a success, btw), that Orange Box was sorely in need of some attention. So I played some TF2. And then I remembered, again, what I despise most about Xbox LIVE.
By: Bob Denerstein
Back in the '80s, when such favourites as Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, and Q-bert were being played in bars, I was busy with what I regarded as more appropriate saloon activity: knocking back enough cold ones to make a mockery of eye-hand coordination.
Despite my lack of personal knowledge, I decided to check out director Seth Gordon's "The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters," a documentary about men who play competitive Donkey Kong. You gamers already know most of the details: An outfit called Twin Galaxies establishes the standards, and various folks vie to break records on what the movie regards as one of the most difficult machines ever, requiring amounts of concentration that would challenge an eastern yogi.
But forget all the game stuff. It's not the game that makes "King of Kong" so entertaining; it's characters in conflict. Sure there's a cast of supporting dweebs, but the movie boils down to a mano-a-mano Kong-off between Billy Mitchell, an arrogant champion, and Steve Wiebe, his humble challenger.
