Of course, you can also contribute to the game’s underperformance by downloading the Wolfenstein PC demo, yours for the sampling. It’s available wherever fine Windows-based demos are offered, places like FileShack and FilePlanet.

Yes, that’s right, we’re now publishing reader reviews here on Kotaku. This is your chance to deliver sensible game purchasing advice to the rest of the Kotaku community.

And thanks to the very kind chaps at Madman Entertainment, purveyor of all kinds of cool, indie and esoteric film, the best reader review we publish each month will win a prize pack containing ten of the latest Madman DVD releases.

This review was submitted by Justin Robson. If you’ve played Wolfenstein, or just want to ask Justin more about it, leave your thoughts in the comments below.

Wolfenstein (PC, PS3, 360)

Wolfenstein, an attempt at reviving a classic…

Loved

Traditional Run and Gun: Wolfenstein isn’t overly deep or complex, but for old school FPS junkies it does some justice to the series. It might be nostalgia talking, but the id gameplay, although admittedly dated, has been preserved. Old school Nazi shootin’ hasn’t been fun for a long time, but Wolf has made it work yet again.

Godlike New Weapons: While incredibly overpowered, the big guns provide some of the most satisfying aspects of the game. The delicious “pop” when you fry baddies with Mr. Tesla, the fire hose effect of the particle cannon, and the feeling of chasing ants with a magnifying glass that comes with the flamethrower…limited ammo keeps these implements of death balanced, but good god, they are fun to use.

Hated

Linear Gameplay: Raven made a downright annoying, and ultimately useless attempt at non-linearity by using the hub city. It only makes the game seem more linear, as respawning foes and boring backtracking split up the gameplay and feel like cheap padding to stretch the game out, and also like a waste of recourses that could have been used actually making the levels.

None of the Classic Weapons: The staple guns of Wolf 3D and Return are goneski. The knife, the luger and the chaingun that defined the series previously, are replaced with a generic selection of TWO same-old machine guns, a rifle, and not much else…

Lame Powers/Upgrades: Your “powers” feel tacked on, and there isn’t much incentive to actually use them unless you need to (and there are a lot of tedious instances where you do.) This, coupled with the boring search for gold and weapon add-ons that don’t really make a difference…both just feel like they were put in there for the sake of having something else to add to the list of features on the box.

All in all, the revival of Wolfenstein is a fun, but essentially flawed experience. Only fans of the series are likely to tolerate it, while newcomers might want to give it a miss, or at best a rent.

Reviewed by: Justin Robson

You can have your Reader Review published on Kotaku. Send your review to us at the usual address. Make sure it’s written in the same format as above and in under 300 words — yes, we’ve upped the word limit. We’ll publish the best ones we get and the best of the month will win a Madman DVD prize pack.

The news, sourced back to 4players.de (translation) attributes a statement to Activision saying that “although it is not a conspicuous element in the normal game … we have decided to take this game immediately from the German market”.

Whether that means the content isn’t in the game but is on a disc for modders to exploit, or if it’s a swastika as part of a background somewhere, who knows. Planet Wolfenstein notes that the Wolfenstein teams from Endrant and Raven already have been laid off, putting a revised localisation into doubt.

We’ve emailed Activision for comment. Should any be provided, it’ll be updated here.

Update: Via twitter, Kotaku reader Spunior pointed me back to one of the sites also linking to 4player.de. Schnitterbericht has a ton of screenshots showing differences in the US and German versions of Wolfenstein. The final one (scroll alllllll the way down) shows a faint swastika at the bottom of a poster. If that really triggered a voluntary recall, Mein Gott in himmel!

Sell Stop in Germany [4players.de, via Blue's News]

According to a report from GameSpot, the Activision game sold just 106,000 copies across the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. Madden sold 1.9 million. Sure, combined Wolfenstein looks like it may have outsold the Wii version of this year’s Madden, but I don’t think that counts.

Not terribly good news for Activision, id or Raven, but news that helps shed a bit more light on those recent layoffs at the developer.

Here’s to hoping that Singularity, Raven Software’s other first-person shooter, fares better with its new release date.

Wolfenstein sells 106K on PC, PS3, and 360 combined [Gamespot]

Are video games creatively narrow, or rich? Epic Games’ Cliff Bleszinski calls this “the most loaded question I’ve been asked in five years.”

Amid much discussion on whether games will one day be perceived as relevant art, one thing’s clear –it’s on today’s leading creators to break the cycle of sameness. What do games need to truly diversify?

If many of us gamers had our way, we’d play games and little else. For others, as much as we prize our favourite pastime, we’ve often lamented the same-ness of the experiences on offer – often, the biggest blockbusters are derivative of one another, cycling us through near-indistinguishable experiences again and again.

Industry veteran and Zoonami CEO Martin Hollis, most recently creator of quirky Wii Ware title Bonsai Barber, agrees that the thematic range of games isn’t very broad. “Pauline Kael famously criticised films as being only about violence and romance: ‘Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang’,” he says of the great film critic. “Games are virtually all about violence, or at least conquest and dominance. So we can say games are all ‘Bang Bang, Bang Bang.’”

Raven Software’s Manveer Heir has firsthand experience with the “Bang Bang, Bang Bang” – and agrees with the general idea that a lack of creative range is constricting games.

“There are some outliers, but we continuously make the same games about the same things,” says Heir, who worked on this summer’s Wolfenstein sequel. “The only things that change are our mechanics. We regularly have white male generic space marine characters as protagonists. Our NPCs are often cookie cutter and stereotypical. We use the same backdrops of post-nuclear apocalypse or colonizing Mars, or crazy fantasy worlds.”

The Sameness Cycle

Among gamers, Double Fine president Tim Schafer has attained the sort of hero status reserved for the coolest kid in school thanks to his consistent originality. He has a theory on why this same-ness keeps happening.

“There is a cycle in game development,” he says. ” People making games usually make games that appeal to themselves, and choose from a narrow set of inspirations — Star Wars, Aliens, Blade Runner, Tolkien, World War II, super-hero comics, and a few more.

“Then, those games appeal to a certain set of fans, and some of those fans will eventually grow up to make games themselves, and those games end up looking like the previous generation, because they were made to please a similar bunch of people. That loop just repeats and stays the same size forever.”

“I think any medium that only looks to itself for inspiration is limiting its scope of possibility,” says writer Marianne Krawczyk, who counts the God of War franchise among her projects. “It’s been a mantra of mine for a while now that we need to look outside of games (and movies and TV, for that matter) and start letting other art forms and other kinds of experiences influence development.”

For example, Braid artist David Hellman drew from the art of French Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne for the painterly style used in that game by . Although that decision came primarily from Hellman’s own tastes, he finds a parallel between Cézanne’s creative goals and those of the game: “Braid is about worlds of subjective perception and also about ideas and laws,” muses the artist. “Cézanne married impressionism’s transient play of colour and light with a powerful geometric order.”

“Games are very inspiring to me, but only for gameplay, not subject matter,” says Schafer. I will experience something awesome in a game, and I will think, ‘That was awesome.’ But then, I’ll think, ‘Why was that awesome?’ And try to deconstruct the experience down to its essence to find out why it works.”

Schafer says he got the idea for cult hit Grim Fandango from reading Mexican folk tales; Psychonauts was inspired by a class he took on dream psychology; Brütal Legend came from heavy metal album covers, and Full Throttle took its cue from something as simple as the story of his friend’s summer vacation.

“You never know where inspiration is going to come from,” says Schafer. “I think the secret is just to make sure you are exposed to a variety of inspiring influences all the time… I trekked around Nepal once, but that didn’t give me as many game ideas as just reading one book on Mexican folklore did.”

Risky Business

“Creative people need to look at all avenues of creative expression,” agrees Krawczyk, who says she’s fascinated by the Bigfoot legend, of all things. And one doesn’t even need to be an expert in their external hobbies and interests to draw inspiration from them – Krawczyk has had little success learning guitar, attempting surfing or trying to draw, but she keeps at it anyway.

“I allow myself to fail miserably, which opens up a kind of creative freedom that translates into the work I do care about,” she says. “If you are open to failure, at least in the beginning, you’ll take risks and eventually get something that is better than if you had played it safe.”

Risk-taking is a key element – Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello called Brütal Legend a “significant creative risk” — just before the publisher announced it’d be the one to rescue the title from its post Acti-Blizzard limbo. Fervent gamers now look forward to its breath of fresh air.

“We need more games that are willing to go out on a limb and try something new,” says Raven’s Heir. “And we need them to be smaller-budget games that are very successful at first, so that large companies will take the risks down the road.”

The Emerging Market

Trying innovative, smaller-budget titles with a creative bent is the tack that Zoonami’s Hollis has chosen. He’s been focused primarily on Bonsai Barber of late, but he’s also so humble that perhaps few gamers know that during his career, he was one of Rare’s earliest programmers and directed and produced not only critically-acclaimed Perfect Dark, but widely-beloved Goldeneye 007, a dorm room mainstay for a generation of gamers.

He says he’s often inspired by his own “failed” prototypes, but as for friendly plant-hairstyling Bonsai Barber’s influences: “Henri Rousseau, thematic influence from Magritte, a structural influence from Friends, a game design influence from Animal Crossing, and there is also something ideological within the game,” he says. When it comes to the industry’s influences, “I hope no one looks only at games!” says Hollis. “That is going to lead to stagnant creations. You can’t breathe the same air forever.”

And yet the pattern of the video game industry tells us otherwise. Derivative games sell, sequels are the watchword for the holidays, and the audience’s appetite for war campaigns and space marines seems never to wane. What’s wrong with more of the same, if that’s what people seem to want?

Power Fantasies Sell

Keeping to the familiar can cap games’ commercial potential. While core audiences may not mind the same-old, the gaming audience is growing, andthose narrow tropes aren’t appealing to anyone new. “You can see from the best-selling titles on the Wii that those games aren’t generally the ones that make huge headway into the market,” Heir points out. “Our narrow focus on male power fantasies is going to hurt us in the long run.”

Epic’s Gears of War has become the poster title for that much-maligned “male power fantasy.”. The original game and its sequel have moved more than 11 million units to date, numbers that challenge the assertion that musclemen chainsawing aliens in a sci-fi warzone is a concept with limited appeal.

As progenitor , Gears-head Cliff Bleszinski has become a polarising figure over the years among those who’d like to name the franchise—and Bleszinksi, by association—as simple pap for meatheads. His influences? “A childhood filled with Transformers, GI Joe, Thundercats, Inhumanoids, MASK, and mountains upon mountains of sugar cereal,” he says.

But Bleszinksi, too, describes non-traditional influences as playing a primary role in his work. “I believe it’s crucial for developers to maintain a competitive edge by playing the games that their peers create,” he says. “However, over the years I’ve found that real life experience can not only inspire the creative process, but also be a wonderful way to decompress from the stress of development.”

He “decompresses” through hobbies like jungle ATV rides and trying out zero gravity on parabolic plane flights. Bleszinski enjoys activities as energetic as the style of gameplay he favours in design, demonstrating that life experience drives developers’ work. “Pursuing new experiences and enjoying the art of fun can translate into understanding how to have a better sense of speed, momentum, adrenaline rushes, or overall satisfaction,” he explains. “You’re channeling that experience back into the sofa when you build a game.”

But Is It All Talk?

People like Krawczyk, Hollis, Hellman and Heir aren’t the only intelligent, creative professionals working in game development. Not every other developer takes their cues solely from shallow, limiting archetypes. And yet the epic games to which so many developers and publishers devote the largest share of their budgets make only occasional progress toward breaking the tiresome loop Schafer describes. ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, BioShock and Portal make strong arguments against shallowness and sameness—but how long are gamers going to milk those?

“I think we can use games to reflect society, hold a mirror up and show people how we are as a culture in a way other mediums can’t do,” says Heir. What, then, does a Wolfenstein re-up say about us as a culture – that we’ll never get tired of shooting Nazis?

Multitudes of annual trade events convene developers for discussion on meaningful narratives and immersive art, and yet creative people still do uncreative work. Developers bemoan male power fantasies and yet more games with “war”, “dragon” and “star” in the title, and yet they keep signing up to make them. The commercial nature of the games biz may constrain the risk inherent in breaking new ground, but that’s not a sufficient excuse—all art is commercial.

Consumer demand has the largest influence over the games that hit the market. So, if games are limited, it also suggests that the legions of fervent gamers, bloggers and enthusiast writers who devote endless words to their desire for culturally significant games are simply paying lip service to an ideal they won’t back up with their wallets. Either that, or this most vocal vertex is a segment of the market too small to matter.

The same games keep getting made largely because that’s all the core audience is interested in. So maybe it’s gamers, not game developers, who need to get a life.

And even when games great and small take big risks on new ideas, many will still fail to rock the boat. But there’s a glimmer of hope: it only takes one to break the derivative loop, says Schafer. “If you throw a wild card into the cycle—like Grand Theft Auto did with urban crime—then that game reaches a new set of fans, previously unserved. Then some of them grow up to join the industry, and maybe expand it with their own wild card ideas.”

“So, if the games industry is going to keep growing, it has to pull in influences outside those currently explored in games,” he adds. “Life is very broad, and games so far have only sampled a narrow slice of it.”

[Leigh Alexander is news director for Gamasutra, author of the Sexy Videogameland blog, and freelances reviews and criticism to a variety of outlets. Her monthly column at Kotaku deals with cultural issues surrounding games and gamers. She can be reached at leighalexander1 AT gmail DOT com.]

Himmler’s Schutzstaffel is on the verge of harnessing a dark paranormal power that would mean the end of the free world as we knew it in 1943, and special agent B.J. Blazkowicz is the only man who can stop them. The direct sequel to Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Wolfenstein finds B.J. slinking through the fictional city of Isenstadt, performing guerrilla-style missions in order to weaken and eventually overthrow the Reich’s grip on the region, thwarting their vile plans in the process. Luckily for fans of the series, B.J.’s idea of slinking involves shooting tonnes of Nazis in the face, this time while harnessing the strange powers of a mystical amulet to accomplish that very task.

It sounds a bit far-fetched, but then the Wolfenstein franchise was never known for its grip on reality or historical accuracy. What it is known for is delivering some of the most entertaining and influential games in the first-person shooter genre. Does Wolfenstein follow suit?

Loved
Point and Shoot: At the heart of Wolfenstein is a rock-solid first-person shooter experience. The controls are tight and accurate, the movement fluid, and the action on each of the weapons is, for the most part, very satisfying. If you are going to make an FPS with the Wolfenstein name on it, you’d better get this aspect right, and the developers nailed it.

Semi-Open World: Rather than following standard FPS conventions and guiding the player by the nose through a series of linear levels, Wolfenstein allows players to explore the fictional city of Isenstadt between missions, randomly spawning enemies at various locations to deliver the illusion of an ongoing conflict. As you complete missions, you’ll see more resistance fighters on the streets, following your example and standing up to their Nazi oppressors. It’s certainly a pleasant change from your average shooter.

Magical Powers: As you progress through Wolfenstein, special agent B.J. Blazkowicz gains a variety of supernatural powers via a magical amulet, such as the ability to slow time, or uncover hidden passages by slipping into the Veil, a sort of paranormal parallel dimension. The powers are gimmicks, and they feel like gimmicks, but at times they can be really handy gimmicks, granting the player multiple ways to approach a situation. Should you slow down time and rush in with guns blazing, or use your Veil vision to pick off targets from afar? In a genre known for its linearity, choice is always good.

Big Bad Boss Battles:The Wolfenstein series has featured some of the most entertaining boss battles in the genre, and while there is no robo-Hitler to vent your frustrations on, there are several bosses that require much more than simple run-and-gun techniques to defeat. In fact, some aren’t even damaged by your weapons at all, leaving you to use your wits alone to take them down. Your wits, or GameFaqs.

Hated
And I Care Why?: In the original Wolfenstein games, B.J. Blazkowicz wasn’t much more than a portrait at the bottom of your screen, and it’s really no different in this installment. B.J. is a generic action hero, saving generic foreigners from the mean old supernatural Nazi regime. If it weren’t for the fact that history has established the World War II-era Nazis as the most villainous military force that ever existed, I would have had serious trouble being motivated take them down. The game excels at death, but could use more life.

The Not-So-Constant Struggle: Wolfenstein might have some impressive boss fights, but getting to those fights can be frustrating, thanks to an oddly unbalanced cast of enemy characters. One moment you are fighting a swarm of enemy soldiers who react intelligently to your actions, following you into buildings, and generally doing things we would expect enemy soldiers to do, such as dying in droves. The first time you encounter one of the larger enemy types sets you off balance, but soon enough you realise the range of your sniper rifle is much longer than the range of their sense, making it easy to take them out with well-placed bullets to their weak spots while they wander around randomly firing off their weapons. This puts the player at ease, making the ultra-fast, silent-movie Veil Assassins even more frustrating, killing you repeatedly before you can even point your camera down. Don’t worry – death points it down for you.

Multiplayer Meltdown: Developed independently by Endrant Studios, Wolfenstein’s multiplayer side is a bit of a letdown, especially after spending a good 10-12 hours playing through the solid and mostly satisfying single-player campaign. The three modes and eight maps quickly become stale, especially when constantly faced by jittery enemies that almost seem to flash wildly about the screen. The developer did try to change things up a bit, adding three classes – engineer, medic, and soldier – and the ability to use cash earned during play to purchase upgrades to your equipment, but the experience as a whole is simply disappointing.

I can’t imagine the sort of pressure that a development studio faces when they are tasked with creating a follow-up to one of the most iconic franchises in the history of gaming. Wolfenstein 3D paved the way for today’s first-person shooters. Without it, there might not have been a Halo or a Modern Warfare to compare this game with, and while expecting a shooter on par with those titles might be unrealistic, a new Wolf game should at least bring something special to the gaming table. The single player Wolfenstein experience comes close to doing just that, but the multiplayer misses by a mile.

It might not live up to its name, but Wolfenstein is still a solid, entertaining first-person shooter with some ambitious ideas. It’s easy enough to find enjoyment in the game, as long as yours doesn’t hinge on taking the fight online.

Wolfenstein was developed by Raven Software, id Software, Pi Studios, and Endrant Studios and published by Activision for the PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 on August 18 in North America and on August 20 in Australia. Retails for $US59.99/$AU109.95 ($US49.99/$AU99.95 PC). Played Xbox 360 version of the game on default difficulty to completion, participated in multiple rounds of online multiplayer.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

In a prepared statement released to Kotaku today, Activision confirmed that Raven, a subsidiary of the company, had laid people off today, but declined to confirm or deny the number of people impacted.

“With the recent completion of both X-Men Origins Wolverine, based on the summer blockbuster movie, and Wolfenstein, the next chapter of the famed franchise, Raven Software is slightly reducing its workforce to better reflect the studios upcoming slate,” the Activision statement read.

But our sources tell us that the layoffs were the aftermath of an over-budget and under-performing Wolfenstein and the delay of upcoming time-shifting shooter Singluarity.

The delay for Singularity, which was pushed back from a holiday release to sometime next year, forced Raven Software to move members on the Wolverine team to the project to help reduce the delay, we are told.

The shift in personnel, increased expenses and lacklustre sales led Raven to drop from a three game team studio to a two game studio, our sources say.

The filmmaker penned the Silent Hill script and was slated to make a big-screen version of Wolfenstein.

In January 2008, Avary was involved in a car accident which saw his wife hospitalised and his friend, 34-year-old Andreas Zini, killed. The director entered his plea in a Ventura, California court this past Tuesday.

He will be sentenced on September 29 and is currently free on bail.

Arts, Briefly – ‘Pulp Fiction’ Writer Pleads Guilty in Crash [NYTimes.com]

Our poll covered attitudes about Wolfenstein, which dropped on Tuesday, and then four multiplayer console exclusives from gaming’s class of 2007, plus three multiplatform games released around the same time. More than 15,000 of you responded, which is impressive, and I know you’d like to see the results. So here they are:

1. Based on what you’ve seen and read, would you stop playing your current game to start playing Wolfenstein?

Yes: 23 percent (3,593 responses)
No: 56 percent (8,711)
Undecided: 21 percent (3,357)
15,661 total responses

2. Based on what you’ve seen and read, do you plan to purchase Wolfenstein?

Yes: 18 percent (2,361 responses)
No: 55 percent (7,233)
Undecided: 27 percent (3,586)
13,180 total responses

There’s not that much to say here, other than the Wolfenstein reboot has failed to really capture the imagination. The fact that 56 per cent wouldn’t put down whatever they’re working on now to play it is a very strong negative. And another 55 per cent who say they wouldn’t buy it means a hard verdict has already been reached, and was likely formed well before the question was asked.

3. Is Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii) still worth playing?

Yes: 38 percent (5,201 responses)
No: 40 percent (5,422)
No Opinion: 22 percent (3,000)
13,623 responses

We’re going to tweak this type of question this weekend because, as a reader pointed out, “still worth playing” implies that the game was “worth playing” in the first place—a value judgement the respondent may not share. But for now, the general feeling is that Brawl, nearly two years after its release, is played out.

4. Is Team Fortress 2 (PC) still worth playing?

Yes: 65 percent (9,042 responses)
No: 15 percent (2,050)
No opinion: 21 percent (2,896)
13,988 total responses

Valve’s commitment to keeping Team Fortress 2 fresh with consistent updates has given the franchise an enviable reputation for quality. It’s 15 per cent “not worth it” score was the lowest of any title surveyed last weekend, which includes Modern Warfare and BioShock.

5. Is Warhawk (PS3) still worth playing?

Yes: 16 percent (2,313 responses)
No: 37 percent (5,351)
No opinion: 47 percent (6,759)
14,423 total responses

Some might have felt Killzone or Killzone 2 should have been here. Here’s the problem. Killzone is on the PS2, is four years old, and lacks the multiplayer scope of shooters in this group. Killzone 2 is barely six months old, and this grouping was calling on games from the class of 2007. The same problems left out Resistance: Fall of Man and Resistance 2, as Res 2 went out last November and moots Resistance, which is a year older than the games in this grouping. So we were left with Warhawk as a kind of imperfect representative of a PS3 exclusive from two years ago, and the shoulder-shrugging 47 per cent no opinion shows. It, rightly or wrongly, points up the PS3’s most glaring weakness in the release window surveyed: Catalog size, especially in exclusives. We’ll revisit Warhawk later, but promise that questions in the meantime will reflect more of what PS3 gamers are playing right now.

6. Is Halo 3 (360) still worth playing?

Yes: 43 percent (6,472 responses)
No: 41 percent (6,069)
No opinion: 16 percent (2,366)
14,906 total responses

In light of one million unique users still playing this game’s multiplayer every day, Halo 3’s narrow “Yes” plurality can likely be attributed to polarised views about the title’s perceived importance, or lack of it, to gaming at large, and its close association with both Microsoft and the Xbox 360. In other words, a fanboy effect. Again, this is an unscientific survey with opt-in respondents coming from a specific readership, so no one expects 100 percent. But we’re very opinionated around here, and these numbers seem to reflect more a weariness with the game’s exposure than its quality of gameplay.

7. Is Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (any platform) still worth playing?

Yes: 69 percent (9,197 responses)
No: 19 percent (2,504)
No opinion: 13 percent (1,713)
13,414 responses

Modern Warfare pulling the highest “still worth it” rating is likely a no-brainer to many. But where the full-bore Team Fortress multiplayer experience is only available to PC gamers, Modern Warfare emerges as the multiplatform standard-bearer for multiplayer shooters. How Modern Warfare 2 pushes this number will definitely be worth watching later in the year.

8. Is Assassin’s Creed (any platform) still worth playing?

Yes: 34 percent (5,029 responses)
No: 49 percent (7,252)
No opinion: 16 percent (2,425)
14,705 responses

Repetitive gameplay and the pending release of Assassin’s Creed II are probably what is dragging down a game that was, generally speaking, still favourably reviewed during the time of its releases.

9. Is BioShock (any platform) still worth playing?

Yes: 69 percent (10,765 responses)
No: 21 percent (3,232)
No opinion: 10 percent (1,573)
15,570 responses

Interestingly, the final question got the second-most total responses, just 100 fewer than the first. It suggests a heavy participation by folks who wanted to vote, scroll down and comment and not spend much time in the middle. But BioShock still tied for the highest positive rating of any of the seven surveyed – even two years later, singleplayer only, and with a sequel on the way soon. The landslide response speaks to the game’s depth of experience and enduring impact on games as an art form.

Those were last week’s questions; we’ll have a new batch of Kotaku Approval Ratings questions for you this Saturday. To all who participated, thanks.