And for just $20 at Gametraders this month, PC owners should do precisely that.

A short but sweet post. Kinda like the game, actually.

Langdell, at the centre of many controversies over the years regarding trademark rights to the word “Edge”, has been involved in a similar dispute with Electronic Arts since 2007 concerning its title “Mirror’s Edge.” On Sept. 11, EA filed a petition with the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to wipe out five trademarks involved in the case, saying they have been threatened by Langdell for a year over the distribution of Mirror’s Edge.

“EA has filed a complaint to put an end to legal threats over a trademark issue related to our game, Mirror’s Edge,” company spokesman Jeff Brown said Tuesday. “While this seems like a small issue for EA, we think that filing the complaint is the right thing to do for the developer community.”

Langdell, in a statement to Kotaku, called Electronic Arts’ petition “a desperate attempt by EA to see if they can win the right to use Mirror’s Edge by forcibly removing Edge’s legitimate rights to Edge.” Langdell pointed to a USPTO ruling in his favour, from August 2008, which found EA’s registration of the trademark “Mirror’s Edge” had been granted in error, and the company’s subsequent abandonment of the mark – made official Sept. 8 – “stands as an acceptance of Edge’s rights.”

The USPTO database does list the trademark “Mirror’s Edge” as “abandoned” as of Sept. 8, 2009. When asked about the timing of EA’s filing, Brown, the spokesman, said only that the company had been unsuccessful in its yearlong attempt to resolve the dispute, and “we feel it is important to establish the rights of developers in this situation. So we filed the petition to cancel those marks.”

Brown also declined to comment when asked if the petition was at all related to any upcoming product announcements using the word “Edge.” Nor would he specify how negotiations with Langdell broke down.

Over the years, Langdell has been accused of heavy-handed behaviour against developers who wittingly or unwittingly use the word “Edge”, which he trademarked years ago for use in video games, and a slew of other associated products since then. In addition to the disagreement with EA, Langdell has been involved in a bitter dispute with Mobigame, whose iPhone game EDGE has appeared on the iTunes App Store and was later removed when he challenged Mobigame’s usage of the title.

The notoriety surrounding this action in large part led to a campaign to have Langdell removed from the board of directors of the International Game Developers Association. Langdell voluntarily quit the board last month rather than face a removal vote.

“A lot of small developers who are faced with this situation settle claims because they don’t know how, or can’t afford to fight for their rights,” said Brown, the EA spokesman. “We hope that as a result of this action, other developers will be less intimidated by unwarranted legal threats.”

But Langdell counters that EA is trying to poison sentiment against his company, and that its accusations “sound like comments intended to sway indie game news reporters’ opinion and deflect you away from the obvious fact that it is EA [that] indie developers need to be protected from.”

In the filing, Electronic Arts alleges that Langdell has effectively abandoned these trademarks through disuse. While Langdell vigorously states his company is actively involved in the development of games, both Mobygames and this analysis say the last game published by Edge Games was in 1990.

Edge Games’ Web site says it is developing four multiplatform titles, one of which “Racers,” was released on Sept. 9. “Clearly, Edge has not abandoned its trademark and that allegation is obviously destined to fail,” Langdell told Kotaku. Langdell’s statement says Edge’s games “are on general sale at this time as they have been at all times over the past many years.”

Significantly, EA also alleges that Langdell fraudulently obtained the trademark registrations, filing out-of-date and even falsified specimens to obtain them. EA alleges two registrations, dated 1996 and 2006, used box covers from games published in 1989 and 1990 and were not examples of a mark used in commerce, especially as the 1990 game was developed for the since-discontinued Commodore Amiga. Another 2009 registration submitted an Edge mark used on the 1986 game Bobby Bearing, saying that game had been in use “continuously over the past five years,” on mobile phones. EA claims that is false.

EA says two other registrations, in 2004 and 2005, were obtained by submitting a nonexistent magazine cover in one case, and a Hulk comic book published in the 1990s in another. (Langdell claims to have licensed trademarks to the two publications.)

Langdell flatly denied that Edge ever committed fraud in applying for its U.S. trademarks.

Langdell has also claimed that Mobigame told him, in an email published here, that it and Electronic Arts had formed some sort of partnership, to what end he did not say. In a lengthy public statement published last August, Langdeel seems to imply that EA and Mobigame might be working together “to seek to undermine our rights in EDGE,” to get out of an agreement Langdell says Edge and EA had reached earlier.

Brown, the EA spokesman, said that to his knowledge EA has no formal relationship with Mobigame. A request for comment left with Mobigame was not answered as of publication time.

According to a notice sent by the USPTO, Langdell has until Oct. 27 to respond to EA’s petition. Should the matter proceed to trial, that will begin in the summer of 2010.

Electronic Arts’ filing may be downloaded here, in .pdf form.

Langdell, for his part, accuses EA of playing the bully in this matter.

“The key dispute for the past two to three years … has always been between the multinational conglomerate EA and Edge fighting for its rights as a relatively small indie developer up against the giant corporate bully, EA,” Langdell wrote. “It is a great pity that another fellow indie developer, Mobigame, got caught in the crossfire, but at least EA are now out in the open with their fight, now openly trying to stifle the legitimate rights of indie developers.”

The mansion is set up like the board game Clue, except nobody dies. Instead, somebody breaks something and your Sim has to find out who did it by going over every inch of the mansion for clues and questioning other Sims. I know you’re thinking “Whatever, standard adventure game stuff for kids.” But, dear cynical gamer, there’s something here aimed directly at you, not at a kid.

On the second floor of the mansion, there are some portraits you can interact with. Peer at a smaller one toward the right of the collection and who should be staring back at you but Faith from Mirror’s Edge. Later, with some dedicated snooping and side mission completion, you can score an Isaac Clarke outfit from Dead Space for your secret agent Sim to wear.

Little details like this make up a lot of the MySims Agents experience. This makes sense, because the game is about becoming a star detective—and you won’t get far on that path without an eye for details like strange portraits, footprints or hair salons. Throughout the game, you level up your snooping skills by upgrading gadgets and improving personal stats like charisma. You also build out your detective agency’s headquarters and recruit other Sims to work for you.

That’s another important detail I missed in my first look: the dispatch missions. Sure, I saw one of them and wrote about it—but I didn’t grasp quite how important they were to the game as a whole. There are a total of 50 dispatch missions that you can send your recruited Sims out to solve. While a dispatch mission is in progress, your Agent Sim will receive texts on how the mission is going and sometimes a random chance card in the form of a phone call. Completing dispatch missions raises your Agent’s relationship with client. Raise a relationship high enough and you can recruit that Sim to work for you (or just dance around like a moron) in your HQ. Once you finish all the dispatch missions, you’ll get to see not one, but two alternate endings after finishing the main part of the game.

I’ve said before that I get the feeling Agents is taking the MySims series in a different direction than previous games. Before (in, say, MySims Kingdom), the series was mostly about building things and visiting familiar characters from within the series. It was isolating to the point where I was embarrassed to play MySims Racing without a child companion to use as an excuse. But now—what with Dead Space references and an actual plot—I feel like the series is moving toward a type of game that could appeal to everybody despite being designed with a younger audience in mind. Kind of like Pixar films in the Disney lineup.

MySims Agents will be released later this month.

When chatting with Need For Speed producer Jesse Abney recently, as he showed me the PS3 version of Shift, I was struck by how effectively the virtual cockpit view portrayed a genuine sense – not just of speed – but of immersion in the body of the driver.

Shift has a fully articulated driver model in the cockpit view. You can, as you might expect, look all around with a nudge on the analogue stick. More than that though, the camera is actually mounted on the driver’s head and coded to react to the physics system. When you accelerate, the force pins the driver model back in its seat, and thus the camera too pushes back; it’s the opposite when you brake, as you’ll feel the camera slam forward. When you crash, you’ll feel the disorienting effects of your head bouncing around in the cockpit. Everything is calibrated to reflect what a real driver’s head would be doing while racing at top speed.

Abney explained how this feeling of the “driver experience” was one of the key areas of development focus.

“At high speed where we’re blurring the dashboard and everything in the cockpit is desaturated to blacks and whites. We’re pushing the view ahead on the track to give you a farther field of vision. It’s what drivers call Driver Vision in that at top speed you don’t want to be focused on the things in front of you, you want to be focused down the track. It kinda creates a tunnel vision straight down the track. That’s just one of the assists we offer that came from real world experience and help the player control the vehicle at high speed.”

This reminded me of Mirror’s Edge, in particular the efforts developer DICE went to in striving to make the player feel like they were inhabiting Faith’s body. Which, in turn, reminded me that Abney had earlier mentioned DICE’s involvement in the development of Shift. Factor in that DICE founder and now vice president of EA’s European publishing arm, Patrick Soderlund, sidelines as a professional endurance race driver, and that his studio created the well-received Rallisport Challenge on the original Xbox, and it starts making sense.

I asked Abney to explain Soderlund’s role on the Shift project.

“He’s brought the creative direction and a lot of the driver’s experience has been through his eyes,” he said. “His time on the track has lead to the crafting of the dynamic camera system, the visual effects, the g-force modelling, inertia, the crash dynamic… and just the style of the game. All that comes from Patrick’s experience and that’s why I always credit DICE as well because they are very much a part of it. DICE is a driving studio; when you go to DICE and talk to those guys about racing, you have a lot of people who know what they’re talking about.”

DICE don’t just know about racing though. After Mirror’s Edge they know about movement and creating an immersive first-person camera. The Driver Vision technique also works in similar fashion to the use of the crosshair in Mirror’s Edge as a preventative measure against motion sickness.

“It’s one of the design aspects we have to consider when creating something like this,” said Abeny. “This is something that Patrick and [co-developer] Slightly Mad Studios worked on for about a year. Mirror’s Edge was the same. It’s this whole process of refinement of a camera system because it’s a very powerful thing to feed back to somebody that kind of movement. So yes, I think we found a lot of success in this, that people aren’t getting sick.”

Based on what I’ve seen, Shift really does appear to have succeeded here. Just like Mirror’s Edge, the tight connection between camera and physics provides a kind of feedback I haven’t felt before in a racing game. You might even call it fully sick.

So to speak.

In an interview with Gamasutra, EA’s Frank Gibeau has said:

I think in the spirit of your question, I think we launched too many new IPs all at once in Q3.

I would have spread them out and found better windows for them. I would have had longer marketing for them. The marketing cycles were fairly short. We didn’t have enough assets to really build the fanbase, build the community, and get that long lead demand built.

So I probably in hindsight would have picked a couple different windows for Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge.

In hindsight, yeah, I bet you would have. But you know, for all the people getting down on both those games…in the 6-9 months since their release, word has spread. Both were, for their quirks, excellent games (probably my two favourite from 2008, even). So when the sequels roll around, things will be different. People will be ready. Ready with money.

A Different Track: Frank Gibeau Talks Strategy [Gamasutra]

Patrick Soderlund, senior vice president at EA Games Europe, admitted to game site VideoGamer.com that Mirror’s Edge was not perfect by any means and EA would have liked the game to sell better, but the company was moving forward with a sequel of the “risky” title.

According to the exec, “You will see another Mirror’s Edge for sure. It’s just a matter of when that time is and what we do with it. We have a small team on it and I’m excited about what we do.”

Soderlund offered no further information about this previously unconfirmed sequel, nor did he offer a launch window for the title.

EA confirms ‘small team’ working on Mirror’s Edge 2 [VideoGamer]

The work of Jesse James Allen and his crew, it shows Faith (played by Yen Ryder) doing the kind of thing she does best, in the kind of places she likes to be seen.

While some of the shots in the gallery are a little cheesy, others restrain themselves enough to bring a little light to our dreary Monday morning.

The Mirror’s Edge [Savage Land @ Flickr]

I’m not happy with the direction DICE took with the Mirror’s Edge downloadable content. I want more rooftops, not weird floating islands. Thankfully, users can now make their own new levels.

If you own a copy of both Unreal Tournament III and Mirror’s Edge, all you need to do is perform a quick folder copy and, presto, you’ve got yourself a Mirror’s Edge level editor.

With the real game marred by too many indoor levels (even though it was, in hindsight, probably my favourite game of 2008), here’s hoping fans and modders can provide us with some extended rooftop sequences. More jumping, more running, less getting lost inside office buildings.

Mirror’s Edge Editor… Found? [Beyond Unreal]
Modding [On Mirror's Edge]

Remember EA boasted that last year it put out 15 games getting 80 or better on Metacritic? Guess that’s no longer an operative statement. A senior exec told investors “We didn’t make hits” last year.

John Pleasants, EA’s chief operating officer, told a Goldman Sachs conference last week the company’s plans for success last year were built on assumptions that games like Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge would be blockbusters. They weren’t.

“The biggest thing was that we didn’t make hits,” Pleasants said, although many of its games were profitable (including those two.) The way to make hits? Marketing, not development, apparently.

Marketing is “one line item on our P&L that’s increasing. We’re reducing on other items, but we have titles that we want to have hit,” Pleasants said. Looking back at the past three years, they figured they weren’t spending enough, or spending at the right times, to get good games into hit status.

“The game-development process has evolved, so the marketing should as well,” Pleasants said, meaning more focus on Web marketing. “It’s less about ‘We have an idea, we go away for 24 months and spend $30 million working on a game, then put a little buzz out there and hope it works.’ We need to have a dialogue with the audience, take a longer lead time and make sure we have the right mix of digital and traditional.”

EA COO: ‘The Biggest Thing Was That We Didn’t Make Hits’ In 2008 [PaidContent.org via CVG]

You’ve played Mirror’s Edge in first-person. You’ve played Mirror’s Edge in third-person. Now, why not play Mirror’s Edge in 2D?

Created as part of EA’s ongoing marketing campaign for the innovative yet frustratingly flawed DICE title, Mirror’s Edge 2D is a remarkably faithful (sorry) translation of the original. It’s super stylish, moves beautifully and punishes you with its trial-and-error platforming. Still, that opening tune is just gorgeous.

Mirror’s Edge 2D [Official site]