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2008-04-10T15:01:00.000-07:00

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Xbox LIVE Arcade games to play

2008-03-31T08:08:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago, I started a list of PS2 games that are still worth playing, even in this era of "next-gen" gaming platforms.

kapital asked if I knew of any Xbox LIVE Arcade games that might be worth playing. They had some extra points left over after getting the downloadable Mass Effect module, "Bring Down the Sky" - great choice, btw - and wanted to know where they might spend those points.

Well, after taking a look at the games in my XBL Arcade library, I've found some patterns.

Of the games available from XBL I seem to prefer the puzzlers. I think it's because I can easily get into those games and don't need to play them for a long time, so if I've only got 15 minutes and want to get lost in a game these work great.

Of the true puzzlers, Bejeweled and Hexic are my favourites. They are similar games in that they provide you with a container and you have to rotate pieces in the container to make matches.

Zuma and Luxor are more arcade-style puzzlers. They present you with a row of balls, and you have to aim and shoot other balls into the chain to make sets of three. If the chain of balls advances into your "house" before you make them all disappear, you lose. Amazingly simple to play, amazingly compelling, too.

Of the shooter-type games, Geometry Wars and Rez HD (the same game I mentioned in the PS2 list, but ported for Xbox Live) are my favourites. Crystal Quest is similar to these, but rather than being a pure shooter, you have to pick up crystals while avoiding the enemy ships and mines. It's tricky.

A more recent game I've tried and quite liked is Omega Five, which is a traditional 2D arcade game in which you play a warrior with a big gun, shooting at things that come at you as you move across the screen.

And if you're older, and nostalgic for arcades of the past, you can always go for the old stand-bys: Galaga, Joust, Dig Dug, and Tron have all brought back memories for me.

Most of them good.

E3 2007 blogroll

2008-03-30T10:02:00.001-07:00

Last summer, I was in Santa Monica, Cali., covering the E3 Media & Business Summit from Tuesday, July 9 through Friday, July 13. I’m loading my posts from the show here, for posterity, y’know?

Saturday, July 14, 9:00 a.m.

Friday was the last day of E3 2007, but it was a full day for me.

I started off visiting Eidos, where I had full demonstration of a new massively multiplayer online game based on Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian. Titled Age of Conan, the PC version of this rich game is coming for the end of October. An Xbox 360 version will follow in 2008. I also had a chance to check out Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, which was inspired by crime dramas such as Dog Day Afternoon and Heat, in which two anti-heroes try to get themselves out of another mess.

Ubisoft has some great games coming out in the next while, the best of which is Assassin's Creed, which is a beautiful game set in what we now call the Middle East during the Third Crusade, in the year 1191. The demonstration I witnessed showed a historically-accurate Jerusalem, and the environments created by the Montreal development studio are simply breathtaking. With a unique movement and combat system, this game could change the way some action adventure titles are built in the future. I also took a look at Naruto: Rise of the Ninja, developed for the Xbox 360. Based on the biggest thing in Japanese anime in some time, this smooth, cell-shaded animated game combines platform-type gameplay with 3D fighting gameplay, all set in an open, sandbox environment.

Sierra, a division of Vivendi Games, picked up the rights to Timeshift, which was going to be coming from Atari. Senior producer and creative Kyle Peschel walked me through his reinvention of first-person shooting games, in which you have complete control over time. The attention to detail in this game is amazing, and it comes with a deep and robust story. Also from Sierra are a sequel to The Legend of Spyro and an expansion pack to the exhilarating F.E.A.R. I also checked out the Battlestar Galactica game being created by Sierra Online. It makes you a pilot and lets you play through the first three seasons of the television show. It is coming to Xbox LIVE Arcade and PC for download this fall.

Two of Midway's biggest titles for the fall are BlackSite: Area 51 and Stranglehold. BlackSite is an action shooter in which you play as a combat veteran in Iraq who encounters an alien and is ordered to keep it to himself. Years later, you're deployed to Nevada, where alien life forms are wreaking havoc. Susan O'Connor, who was a writer on Gears of War, is also writing BlackSite. That's a good sign. Stranglehold is a project being developed in collaboration with Hong Kong filmmaker John Woo, and starring Chow Yun-Fat as Inspector Yuen - Tequila - who was immortalized in the 1992 film Hard Boiled. It's an extreme and hyper-real game that has the spirit of Woo's cop films. The PS3 version of the game will ship with the Hard Boiled film on the Blu-ray Disc.

Warner Bros. Interactive are reinventing their Looney Tunes franchise for themselves (in the past, they had licensed their characters to other developers, with mediocre results). The first two games, Acme Arsenal for the PS2, Wii and Xbox 360 and Duck Amuck for the DS, are both cute, clever games that really embody the spirit of the classic cartoons. They're going to be fun.

THQ were showing off a number of new titles, including a Conan game of their own, a Wii version of the Destroy All Humans! game called Big Willy Unleashed, a sequel to the Cars video game (that was itself based on the animated film), and a clever puzzle game called De Blob, for Wii and DS, in which you paint a world that's been drained of colour. They were also showing off Darksides: Wrath of War, which won't be on shelves until fall 2008, but already looks great. You play War, of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and after the destruction of Earth, you are betrayed, and left to survive on the husk of the Earth, while angels and demons fight over what will happen next. It's a great concept.

But the game of the show for me, and for many other media and video game biz folks, was Bethesda Softworks' Fallout 3. The images here are screen shots from the E3 demonstration. Fans of the earlier Fallout games may not approve of how executive producer Todd Howard and his team have decided to reinvent the franchise, but they cannot deny that what Howard and crew have come up with is breathtaking. From the production design to the attention to detail to the complexity of the story and the world in which it is set, Fallout 3 promises to be the kind of game that will have gamers calling in sick because they've been up all night playing.

The game maintains the post-apocalyptic theme established by the earlier titles, and starts with your birth in Vault 101, at which point you create your character. The game will flash forward through your life, and really starts when you've reached early adulthood. It's being told in first-person, but you have the option of switching to an over-the-shoulder third-person perspective if you choose.

"You're born in Vault 101. You'll die in Vault 101," says Ron Perlman, in the narration that precedes the game. You do escape the vault and into the distressed and degenerated world above, but it won't be easy.

That's it for me for this year's E3. We've heard rumours that the E3 powers-that-be may decide to alter the format or venue for next year. Time will tell.

Thanks for listening.

E3 2007 blogroll

2008-03-30T10:01:00.001-07:00

Last summer, I was in Santa Monica, Cali., covering the E3 Media & Business Summit from Tuesday, July 9 through Friday, July 13. I’m loading my posts from the show here, for posterity, y’know?

Friday, July 13, 11:00 a.m.

Microsoft has taken over an entire hotel here in Santa Monica.

It's a very stylish thing for the stylish company to do. The Viceroy, on Ocean, is one of those stately old hotels that has undergone a boutique transormation. It almost seems as though the refurbishment was done at the bequest of Microsoft, so at home does the Xbox team seem here.

I was here yesterday to talk with Ryan Bidan from Xbox Canada and to see a demonstration of Bioware's upcoming Mass Effect game (which is so going to kick ass), but today I was back at the Viceroy to get a more complete look at Halo 3.

The video game, which is scheduled for a September 25 release, is perhaps the most eagerly anticipated game of the year (although there are many developers and publishers who would contest that).

I was underwhelmed by the multiplayer beta that was made available earlier in the summer, but that's in part because I've never had much fun getting killed so quickly and so often. I prefer my shooting and action video games to have some story to them, which is one reason I am such a Halo geek.

The demonstration I sat in on played the first part of the introductory level to Halo 3, minus the opening cinematics, because Bungie doesn't want the story leaking out. In that first mission, Sierra 117, you - playing as Master Chief - is with a group of marines, moving through a forest, battling the Covenant forces.

The first thing I noticed was the dialogue chatter from the other marines, which is a nice addition given that so much of the first two games were so solitary. But I noticed that there was too much chatter, which distracted from the eerie atmosphere soundtrack that I liked so much in the first two games.

The second thing I noticed was that the Arbiter appeared to be a character fighting on the side of Master Chief.

The Arbiter, a Covenant warrior, became a playable character in Halo 2. It was a brilliant stroke, forcing gamers to play as the enemy, and gave the entire story a moral gray that seemed fitting, given the epic, operatic tale being told.

I've been wondering how the Arbiter might be used in Halo 3, and it appears that he joins the Master Chief in the final game. In fact, it may be that the co-operative play, which Halo has had since the beginning, allows two players to play as Master Chief and the Arbiter together. It may even be that playing the solo campaign mode, you can switch back and forth between Master Chief and the Arbiter.

This is all speculation on my part, because Microsoft and Bungie representatives were mum when I asked.

The very talent that Bungie has shown for storytelling is enough for me to be excited in anticipation of the final chapter of the Master Chief's tale.

Maybe I should book some holiday time near the end of September.

E3 2007 blogroll

2008-03-30T10:00:00.000-07:00

E3 2007 blogroll

2008-03-30T09:58:00.002-07:00

Last summer, I was in Santa Monica, Cali., covering the E3 Media & Business Summit from Tuesday, July 9 through Friday, July 13. I’m loading my posts from the show here, for posterity, y’know?

Thursday, July 12, 7:00 p.m.

On Wednesday afternoon and Thursday, the focus of my exposure here at E3 shifted from hardware and the 'Big 3' to the video game developers and publishers.

Konami thrilled with their announcement of Metal Gear Solid 4 (for the PS3) that creator Hideo Kojima says will be the definitive end to the franchise. Also pending from Konami are new versions of their popular Dance Dance Revolution games for all platforms. They also screened a trailer for Silent Hill V, which was suitably creepy and looks to bring the horror franchise into the high-definition world.

Today, I started off at Electronic Arts, where I was shown the revamped Need for Speed Pro Street game from Vancouver's EA Black Box studio. Producer Mike Mann said that they "wanted to make it faster and more violent". Army of Two comes from EA's new Montreal studio, and is an aggressive shooter that truly invokes co-operative gameplay. You cannot succeed in the game without your partner; if you don't have any friends, the computer AI will help you out. But the most exciting games - as far as I'm concerned - coming from EA are two that I mentioned last night: EA Playground, from EA's Burnaby campus, and Boogie, from Montreal, both of which were created for the Nintendo Wii. EA Playground is "for kids and the kid in all of us," explained EA's David Tinson. He gets the award for best soundbite of the show, by the way.

2K Games were showing of Civilization: Revolution, the first true version of the strategy game for consoles, which provides all of the fun of the PC game, with simplified controls. More fun, less frustration. Bioshock, also from 2K Games, is a frantic, frenetic, futuristic thriller in which you need to put a stop to the diabolical plans of a megalomaniacal rich genius. It's a first-person action game with whacked-out weapons, the walking dead and psychokinetic powers.

Sony was showing off lots today, including the online-only Warhawk, which has morphed into a massive battle game and Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, which has the spirit of Indiana Jones with a little bit of Apocalypse Now thrown in. Two games for their PlayStation Network download service caught my eye: Pain, in which your objective is to cause as much physical harm to yourself and the environment as possible, and Everyday Shooter, a collection of levels inspired by various shooter games, accompanied by a ripping guitar rock soundtrack. Little Big Planet is also reason to be excited about your PS3. Just Google it.

Microsoft has two big reasons to be excited this fall: Halo 3 and Mass Effect. The first will wrap up the story of Master Chief, and stands to become the biggest selling video game of all time. The second, developed by Edmonton's BioWare, is perhaps the deepest, richest role-playing game ever created. You'll be in command of a starship, and every action you take, every decision you make will affect the story you play.

More reasons that you should start saving your pennies so you can buy games this fall:

Beautiful Katamari (Namco Bandai)

Soulcalibur Legends (Namco Bandai)

Turok (Touchstone/Disney Interactive)

Club (Sega)

Nights (Sega)

The Golden Compass (Sega)

Devil May Cry 4 (Capcom)

Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles (Capcom)

Dark Sector (D3 Publisher)

Dragon Blade (D3 Publisher)

On Friday, I start meetings with video game publishers at 9:00 a.m., and do not stop until 5:00 p.m. I don't even have room in my schedule for a bathroom break.

But I'll file a final report after it's done, to let you know what I see tomorrow. There are even more reasons to get excited.

E3 2007 blogroll

2008-03-30T09:58:00.001-07:00

Last summer, I was in Santa Monica, Cali., covering the E3 Media & Business Summit from Tuesday, July 9 through Friday, July 13. I’m loading my posts from the show here, for posterity, y’know?

Thursday, July 12, 4:00 p.m.

As you can tell by the pictures here, attending a trade show in Santa Monica is far more pleasant than hanging out in a convention centre.

Overall, the 'new' E3 has been good. Cutting the crowd from 60,000 to about 3,000 means I'm able to move around like I couldn't at previous events. Getting from one hotel room to another in time to meet my back-to-back appointments has been tricky at times, and I've been a few minutes late regularly. But I lucked out in that most of my meetings ended up being clustered in one location or another. Subconsciously I must have known something when I booked my schedule.

I haven't actually made it down to the beach; there's been too much going on, too many things to see.

Maybe it's enough to have seen the beach from a distance.

Maybe not.

Oh, I should mention one other thing. If you are visiting Santa Monica for any reason at all, don't jaywalk. Just don't do it.

Trust me.

E3 2007 blogroll

2008-03-30T09:56:00.000-07:00

Last summer, I was in Santa Monica, Cali., covering the E3 Media & Business Summit from Tuesday, July 9 through Friday, July 13. I’m loading my posts from the show here, for posterity, y’know?

Thursday, July 12, 1:00 p.m.

Now that the big console manufacturers have had their moments, it's time to find out what the game developers are up to.

On Wednesday afternoon, I crammed into a hotel ballroom with other media from around the world, for the press conferences for a few of the major video game publishers.

Electronic Arts led off with a presentation by Kathy Vrabeck, a veteran of the industry who was recently hired to head the new EA Casual Entertainment division.

Her division wants to "bring interactive entertainment truly to the masses," which is a sentiment that's been echoed by everyone here at E3.

EA has an interesting year ahead of them, as they have committed to getting off the sequel bandwagon by creating new gaming experiences and new franchises. In the biz these are called IP, for intellectual property.

In particular, EA has a couple of Wii titles that I'm very intrigued with: Boogie, a singing and dancing game with the Wii remote and nunchuk translating your body's grooving into on-screen action, and EA Playground, with the charm of Wii Sports and the attitude of Bratz, in which schoolyard games have been mashed up and reinvented for the fun of it.

Said Vrabeck of the EA Casual mandate: "Easy, quick to the fun and incredibly addicting."

More on EA's offerings later today after I have some meetings with them.

By far the best briefing of yesterday, though, was Activision, who had the foresight to enlist comedian Jamie Kennedy to host their press conference.

Although he came across as having had a few too many Red Bull and vodkas with lunch, he was funny and had an ease with the stage he was on that contrasted sharply with the many vice presidents of marketing that had been reading press releases from the podium.

Kennedy interviewed the developers of Activision's games on stage in a talk-show format, even bringing out special guests Tony Hawk (Tony Hawk Proving Ground) and Slash (Guitar Hero III), from Velvet Revolver and Guns n' Roses.

Activision, like Microsoft, know the benefit of celebrity.

E3 2007 blogroll

2008-03-30T09:54:00.000-07:00

Last summer, I was in Santa Monica, Cali., covering the E3 Media & Business Summit from Tuesday, July 9 through Friday, July 13. I’m loading my posts from the show here, for posterity, y’know?

Wednesday, July 11, 7:00 p.m.

Sony is behind the 8-ball.

Sales of their PlayStation 3 video game console are, like, half that of their competitors, and they've got some ground to make up.

Which is why they announced, late last week, a $100 price cut to the 60GB version of the hardware. It's an attempt to jump start sales that have been, frankly, lagging.

Unfortunately, their press briefing, held at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, only served to establish - for me anyway - how lackluster things are. Jack Tretton, president of Sony Computer Entertainment America, hosted the event. While Tretton may be a fine executive, he's not much of a presenter, and he stumbled his way through the press conference.

In previous years, the effusive Kaz Hirai had hosted the PlayStation briefings, but his promotion, to president and COO of Sony Computer Entertainment, meant that Hirai felt he needed to step back from the event.

Too bad, because Hirai had a talent for getting audiences excited with the sheer force of his personality.

Hirai did put in an appearance, to unveil a new PlayStation Portable. Lighter and slimmer, with a longer battery life, the new PSP will be available in piano black and ice silver. A special edition Star Wars Battlefront edition, white with a stencil of Darth Vader's helmet on it, was presented by none other than Chewbacca.

Phil Harrison, president of Sony's Worldwide Studios, was also on hand to show off some of the company's upcoming titles.

Notable are Killzone 2, Little Big Planet, Echochrome and Pain.

Sony claims they'll have 140 titles for the PlayStation 3 available by the end of the year. They need them. A price cut is not enough to get people purchasing the units.

Now it really is all about the games.

E3 2007 blogroll

2008-03-30T09:53:00.001-07:00

Last summer, I was in Santa Monica, Cali., covering the E3 Media & Business Summit from Tuesday, July 9 through Friday, July 13. I’m loading my posts from the show here, for posterity, y’know?

Tuesday, July 10, 11:30 p.m.

I shouldn't have been surprised that Santa Monica High School has a 1,000 seat outdoor amphitheatre.

Nor should I have been surprised that the hipsters at Microsoft Xbox would have selected the location as a venue for their 2007 E3 press briefing.

Twilight was just upon us as the people crowded in to the auditorium, and as the dark descended, the entire crowd was bathed in the eerie green light that is the trademark Xbox colour.

Last week, Microsoft formally acknowledged that the failure rate of their Xbox 360 console was unreasonably high. More than a third of 360s have been stricken with the "red circle of death" since the gaming hardware was launched in November 2005.

To quell the furor, Microsoft's Peter Moore, corporate vice president of the Interactive Entertainment Business in the Entertainment and Devices Division at Microsoft, announced an extension of the Xbox 360 warranty to three years. The move is likely to cost Microsoft more than $1 billion USD.

Obviously, Microsoft wanted to get that bad news out of the way before this week, so they could focus on the positives and not spend this week being grilled about hardware issues.

So what did they have in store? Nothing too dramatic, I'm afraid.

"Xbox 360 is driving the [video game] industry," said Moore, onstage at the E3 briefing. "And this holiday we're shifting into high gear."

There certainly are a host of excellent games coming to the platform this fall, from Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed to Bioware's Mass Effect, from Rock Band to Viva Pinata: Party Animals.

But the big story for Microsoft's gaming division and the Xbox 360 this fall is the September 25 release of Halo 3. Despite the building hype around the game, there wasn't much of it on show in this press conference.

The press conference opened with a live rendition of the Halo theme music played by Corporeal, a group of five Halo fans from Illinois that Microsoft discovered online, and closed with a new trailer promoting the game. Aside from that, there wasn't much Halo surprise.

Moore revealed that there will be a special Halo edition Xbox 360 console released in September, but that announcement got little attention from the crowd.

Shane Kim, corporate vice president and head of Microsoft Game Studios revealed that the game Peter Jackson is developing for Xbox 360 is set in the Halo universe, but that was announced some time ago.

The only truly interesting Halo moment was a screening of a short, artsy, live-action Halo film by Neill Blomkamp, who was Jackson's choice to direct the Halo film, which is in limbo since Universal and Fox, who were to co-finance the film, pulled out. It was a thinly-veiled attempt to show what Blomkamp can (or can't) do with the subject matter, right in the backyard of the Hollywood studios that effectively pulled the plug on the movie.

You can get Microsoft's take on their press conference over here.

More from me tomorrow after the Nintendo and Sony press briefings.

E3 2007 blogroll

2008-03-30T09:38:00.001-07:00

Last summer, I was in Santa Monica, Cali., covering the E3 Media & Business Summit from Tuesday, July 9 through Friday, July 13. I’m loading my posts from the show here, for posterity, y’know?

Monday, July 9, 9:30 a.m.

The traditional, annual Electronic Entertainment Expo has been replaced by the new E3 Media & Business Summit.

What that means is that instead of 50,000 gaming fanatics running around downtown Los Angeles in May, 3,000 video game journalists will be swaggering down the Santa Monica boardwalk in July.

And I get to be one of them.

Since I'm such a sharing guy, I'll be sharing my E3 2007 experience with you here. I'll be attending the press briefings staged by Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony, and have meetings with the major video game publishers from around the world.

What I discover I will pass along to you.

While the average fan won't be able to get in on the action this year, you will be able to get a sense of what Microsoft Xbox is up to in California, though, courtesy of Xbox LIVE.

Starting on July 10, you can access E3: Bringing it Home, which offers downloads of Microsoft content from the show, including trailers, gamer pictures, and demos from upcoming games such as Assassin's Creed, BioShock, Guitar Hero III, and Lost Odyssey.

They'll also be providing access to video updates directly from the show.

If you're kicking around online, you can also visit E3 Insider, produced by GameTrailers. They'll have all game trailers released at the show in addition to interviews with "top industry players".

But for a real insider's peek at the E3 action, stay tuned to this blog for regular updates on what the video game developers and publishers have planned for you in the next year. I'll be updating regularly starting with the Xbox press briefing on Tuesday, July 10.

PS2 games worth playing

2008-03-27T11:01:00.000-07:00

As a follow-up question to yesterday's answer, rawbean is asking what PS2 games might be worth checking out.

Which brings up a great point: the PS2 is a great gaming system, even in light of the PS3 and Xbox 360.

Plus, you can get a new PS2 for just over $100 these days and you can find a plethora of used games available for cheap - online and at various trading locations. In fact, it seems to me that the Ps2 is still the most popular gaming system in the world.

So, given that, let's start working on a list of PS2 games that newbies might want to pick up, or that the rest of us might want to keep in our library.

I've already said that Katamari Damacy belongs on that list, but here are some others.

Okami is a beautiful and engaging game in which you play a wolf and must rejuvenate the environment by painting it.

Rez is a modern-day shooter - think Asteroids all grown up - with an incredible musical soundtrack that is generated by your play.

Ico is an action-adventure in which players take on the role of a young boy who must save a princess from some ominous, shadowy figures.

Shadow of the Colossus, created by the same developer that brought us Ico, which seems to be a sequel of sorts. Beautiful and, yes, emotional.

God of War is more of a hardcore game that requires quick responses and some coordination in pushing buttons, but the storyline - set in the world of Greek mythology - is second to none, and playing it will spike your adrenaline nicely.

Add your PS2 game suggestions in the comments.

The evolution of first-person shooters

2008-03-27T10:32:00.000-07:00

Last year wasn’t significant because of the number of first-person-shooter games released. For a few years now, this has been a popular niche for developers and publishers since it caters to the hard-core gamers who are the bread and butter of the video-game industry.

The reason 2007 stands out is the variety and excellence of the first-person shooters that were released, due in part to the processing power of the next-generation PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, and to the increasing emphasis that developers are placing on story and character development.

Halo 3 (Microsoft Game Studios; Xbox 360; rated mature) This game’s single-player story mode is exactly what it needed to be: more of what the first two games gave us. Where there was innovation in Halo 3 was in the multiplayer options available for FPS gamers. With the ability for 16 people to go after each other, or for four players to cooperate on playing through the story, Halo 3 made a plural out of the FPS genre.

Bioshock (2K Games; Xbox 360; rated mature) Bioshock was groundbreaking for two reasons. First, the art direction and singular vision behind the game make it a complete and entirely believable world, despite its madness. The second reason involves the debate as to whether FPS games should construct the protagonist as a blank slate. The idea is that individual gamers are better able to “become” the character if that character is vague. This is why nobody knows what Halo’s Master Chief looks like. In Bioshock, the character you play has no identity at all, and this becomes critical to how the story plays out. The clever game designers took a philosophical argument and made it a plot point.

Jericho (Codemasters; Xbox 360; rated mature) It’s the talented storytelling of Clive Barker that causes Jericho to stand out. He’s crafted a horror game that is gory, weird, and tinged with religion, basing the story on gnostic texts. You are the commander of a seven-person military unit trained in conventional and occult warfare. Each squad member has some kind of occult power, and you can move from team member to team member, making strategic use of each one’s talents. This ability, compared to switching from one gun to another, is a great game-play mechanic.

The Orange Box (Valve; PC, PS3, Xbox 360; rated teen and mature) You’ll use surprisingly few weapons in the Half-Life games, of which three are included in The Orange Box. The protagonist, Gordon Freeman, isn’t a soldier, super or otherwise. He’s a scientist, and his primary weapon is a gravity gun, a device that allows him to pick up and move heavy objects. Admittedly, such objects can crush enemies, especially when flung at high speed. Unlike so many games that beat you over the head with explanations, Half-Life is refreshingly vague about what you are supposed to do. At times, trying to solve the puzzle of “How do I get across this room?” becomes maddening because of the lack of clues, but most gamers appreciate being left to figure things out.

BlackSite: Area 51 (Midway; PC, PS3, Xbox 360; rated teen) BlackSite is built on mystery. You play as a U.S. soldier caught up in a conspiracy, starting the game by looking for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, but instead stumbling across some bizarre and dangerous creatures. Imagine your surprise when you encounter the same creatures in the desert around Rachel, Nevada, the closest town to the rumoured American military base at Groom Lake—Area 51. No shock, then, to discover that the enemies you fight in BlackSite are aliens. I was able to overlook some of the technical problems with this game, and instead enjoy the sly subversiveness of the game’s story, which is a pointed commentary on U.S. involvement in Iraq.

Crysis (Electronic Arts; rated mature) Crysis was developed to push the limits of PC gaming systems, and would be fairly standard first-person-shooter fare if it weren’t so visually stunning. You are a member of a special-forces squad sent in to secure an archaeological site, but there’s something on the island that’s making meat out of all the soldiers. The flowing imagery of Crysis hasn’t been achieved before, and it sets a new standard for visual fidelity. To really make the most of this game, you’ll need a topnotch system running Windows Vista. You can play the game on lesser computers, but you’ll miss out on what makes it so special.

[originally published in the Georgia Straight]

You've got questions? We've got answers

2008-03-26T10:01:00.000-07:00

rawbean asks:
I have a PS2 but only have two games: Katamari and a disc (disc?) of old arcade games like PacMan. I have played a total of 20 minutes since receiving the PS2. What should I do now? PS I also like the sims.

Well, rawbean, Katamari is still one of the most fun, most clever video games ever made. There is a new version of the game - which is essentially the same as that first one - for the "next-gen" Xbox 360.

But if you say you haven't played the PS2, you might not realise how much fun there is in a session of Katamari Damacy.

I believe that everybody is a gamer. What differs is the type of game people prefer and the degree to which they like playing. Even paper-and-pencil Sudoku puzzles are games. So are crosswords.

Monopoly? Texas Hold 'Em? Fetch with your dog?

All games.

In terms of video games, though, they have come a long way, to the point where they are truly interactive entertainment.

Both Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3 will give you access to game demos, so you can try some new games to see if you like them.

Xbox LIVE, which is the online marketplace for the Xbox 360, has a wealth of arcade and casual games for people to download and play without having to commit 80 hours or $80.

And the PS3 is still the best Blu-ray player on the market, so if you are thinking about upgrading your DVD player, the PS3 is cheaper than other players, it's a better player than the others, and you get the option of playing games if you want, too.

Does that help?

Lego Portal in stop-motion

2008-03-26T08:21:00.000-07:00

Quick! What do you get when you cross Lego, Harryhausen, and Portal?

This video, created by Nick Larsen.

Inspired by the best video game of 2007, Larsen's stop-motion video is set to the Portal closing theme song, "Still Alive," composed by Jonathan Coulton.

It shows what appears to be a number of different subjects navigating through the environment controlled by GLaDOS. Not all of them survive. Some fall victim to misplaced portals, others to the perils of the puzzles, and still others just can't resist the offer of cake.

Take a few moments from your day to watch Larsen's vid. And browse some of his other stop-motion Lego creations, which are just as fun.

Getting extreme with Dark Sector

2008-03-25T15:53:00.001-07:00

Dark Sector is a new video game developed by London, Ontario's Digital Extremes (co-creator of Unreal) and published by D3Publisher, and it shipped to retailers today.

It's a dark, mature-themed game (seriously: this game is not for kids) set in a "decaying Eastern European city". You'll play as Hayden Tenno, an elite black-ops agent who is attacked and wakes to find that he has been, well, altered.

Look closely at the image here and you'll see that Tenno is armed with what can only be described as the Glaive from Krull. Nice weapon.

It'll be on shelves in the next week or so, and is available for PS3 and Xbox 360.

Exclusive, one-of-a-kind Xbox 360

2008-03-25T08:10:00.000-07:00

Here's a strange but interesting juxtaposition: high fasion and video gaming.

As part of their Toronto Fashion Week event, design group Kidrobot included a fundraising project for War Child Canada. They enlisted top Canadian designers to come up with 18" vinyl dolls they call MUNNYs.

Xbox Canada commissioned Nelson, B.C. artist Patrick Thompson, who came up with a MUNNY design of fashion icon Karl Lagerfeld and paired it with a similarly painted Xbox 360.

You can bid for the MUNNY and Xbox 360 - as well as other MUNNYs created for the fundraiser - at this eBay auction.

Remember, all proceeds benefit War Child Canada.

Radiohead's digital distribution experiment

2008-03-25T07:44:00.001-07:00

For all the hype around Radiohead’s decision to release its 2007 album In Rainbows as a pay-what-you-want digital download, the experiment wasn’t all that groundbreaking, and ultimately amounted to nothing more than a big publicity stunt.

The band’s last album with record label EMI was 2003’s Hail to the Thief. Although it was offered multimillion-dollar contracts with other major labels, Radiohead decided to stay independent. The decision to distribute its next album digitally was intended to subvert the music industry’s promotion and marketing machine. In numerous interviews, including one conducted by David Byrne for Wired, Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke explained that the plan was to let fans preview the new album themselves, instead of the songs being filtered through journalists.

Radiohead’s managers, Bryce Edge and Chris Hufford, suggested the band could take this a step further by letting fans determine how much they were willing to pay for the album. So In Rainbows was released to the public on October 10 in the form of MP3 files, and people paid what they thought the download privilege was worth.

About a million copies of the album were downloaded in the first month it was available. According to comScore Inc., which reports Internet traffic statistics, about 40 percent of those downloads were paid for, resulting in an average price per download of US$2.26. Compared to what Radiohead would have been paid by a record label—at a generous royalty rate of 15 percent—the band made more on its own. Radiohead isn’t confirming any numbers, but the band had likely made in excess of US$3 million by the time the download offer ended on December 10.

However, by asking people to pay even a small amount you give them basic consumer rights. So when fans realized that the files they had paid for and downloaded were low quality, many felt they had been cheated. The MP3 files that were released were encoded at a bit rate of 128 kilobits per second. If you were to convert a CD without losing any sound quality, your files would be at a bit rate of 320 kilobits per second. If the download had been a free preview, which was the original plan, nobody would have complained, but some fans spent up to $200 as a show of support for Radiohead, only to find that the quality of their digital download was substandard.

Radiohead’s announcement that In Rainbows would be released on CD by independent label ATO on January 1 rubbed salt in the wound. It’s now being sold everywhere.

Hufford told the New York Times in December that he and Edge suggested that the band release only the digital album and a deluxe collector’s edition that would include an In Rainbows CD, a bonus CD, a vinyl version of the album, and limited-edition artwork. But the band overruled them and chose to release a stand-alone CD as well, believing that there would be a demand for it. Nielsen SoundScan reported that in the first week it was available, 122,000 copies of the CD version of In Rainbows were sold in North America.

Artists using the Internet to distribute their music isn’t a new thing. Toronto’s Jane Siberry, who now performs as Issa, moved the sales for her personal label, Sheeba, on-line in 1996, and adopted self-determined pricing for digital downloads in 2005. Last year, Canadian indie band Stars released In Our Bedroom After the War to digital retailers a full two months before the CD was released in stores.

Vancouver’s Nettwerk Records advocated the use of digital technology as a distribution enabler before anyone else, and music released by Nettwerk is open-source (there are no restrictions on the use or sharing of the music), in order to “encourage fans to share it with others and promote our Artists”, according to the company Web site. On his blog, cofounder and CEO Terry McBride writes that Nettwerk is in part a branding company where the artists are the brand. Fans of the artists, he suggests, are the promotion, marketing, and sales team.

Other forms of digitally distributing music include subscription models such as Rhapsody and advertising models like Spiral Frog. The most intriguing model, though, is demand-based pricing, like that used by Amie Street. When songs are first made available, they are free. The more popular a song becomes, as measured by the number of times it’s downloaded, the higher its price (to a maximum of 98 cents US).

This model seems best for emerging artists, and rewards early-adopting fans. Listeners can take a chance on something new without risking anything. As well, for recommending songs to the community, they receive credit that they can use to purchase music. The artists who are making music that people want to hear then benefit as their popularity grows. This system should really help the cream rise to the top.

In the Wired interview, Yorke explains that the download experiment worked because Radiohead has a strong fan base, which isn’t the case for all artists. Yorke’s note of caution to emerging artists was that if they are looking to sign a deal with a label, they shouldn’t give away their digital rights. Artists who do get no share of digital-download revenues, and everything points to that being the most important channel in the future.

[originally published in the Georgia Straight]

Dead Space feature film in the works

2008-03-21T21:00:00.000-07:00

Electronic Arts is adding another medium to its Dead Space project.

The survival horror game - inspired by films such as Alien, Event Horizon, and The Thing - is slated for release this Halloween for PS3 and Xbox 360.

Dead Space is a new intellectual property developed at EA, and the game is preceded by a six-part original comic book series written by Antony Johnston (the excellent Wasteland) and inked by Ben Templesmith (the equally excellent 30 Days of Night). The first issue is now available.

EA has also teamed up with Starz Media to develop an animated feature film that will bridge the plots of the comic series and the game. Starz plans to license the feature for television broadcast as well as release the project on DVD. The film is expected to be released at the same time as the game.

It's looking to be a very cinematic - and very creepy - project.

It's about a parasitic alien race that inhabits the bodies of other species. Like humans. Nice.

Remember the tag line for Alien? "In space, no one can hear you scream."

Arthur C. Clarke is gone

2008-03-18T22:19:00.000-07:00

He was a visionary, a prophet, an inspiration. He was a thinker, a philosopher, an inventer, a futurist. He was practical, but imaginative; grounded, but insightful.

There will never be another like him.

Obits are already flooding the Net. Here are some:

"Sometimes I am asked how I would like to be remembered. I have had a diverse career as a writer, underwater explorer and space promoter. Of all these I would like to be remembered as a writer."

I hope he travels far.

Let us know your favourite Clarke novel in the comments. I'll start things off with Childhood's End.

Major studio notes on JUNO

2008-03-17T20:31:00.000-07:00

Ken Levine (not Ken Levine) is a television writer (MASH, Cheers, Frasier, The Simpsons, and a bunch of others). More specifically, he is a television comedy writer.

At his blog, by Ken Levine, he ruminates on the business of Hollywood and film and television (and baseball, but he's an American, and that's the sport you follow down there). He's very funny.

In November, in his annual Holiday Movie Preview, this is what he wrote of Juno: "Teenager puts her baby up for adoption. Great buzz on the script. Written by a former stripper. If the strike drags on forever she at least has something to fall back on."

Told you. He's a funny guy.

Yesterday, he wrote the notes that he imagines a major movie studio would have given on Diablo Cody's script for Juno.

For those of you who may not know, notes are the suggested changes that are passed on to a writer or producer. Sometimes calling them "suggestions" is just being nice. They are suggestions in the same way that a military draft is a volunteer effort.

When Juno says “it all started with a chair”, we’re missing an opportunity for a block comedy scene and a trailer moment by not seeing the actual sex act between Juno and her boyfriend. Make it funny and not explicit of course. We’re missing a bet for physical comedy – two horny teenagers, a chair – imagine young versions of Jim Carrey and Carol Burnett. Wow!

In this current draft the parents react to Juno’s pregnancy announcement by accepting it. This seems false. We’ve certainly never seen a scene like this. We believe they should be furious. Unless they really scream at Juno we don’t believe they love her.

The very notion of an abortion clinic is a downer. Not to mention controversial. Do we even have to raise this issue? How ever they handled it in KNOCKED UP, just do that.

Read the rest of the notes over here.

X-Men 3's Ratner to make Harbinger

2008-03-16T19:32:00.000-07:00

News came out on Friday that Brett Ratner, the guy who directed the three Rush Hour films as well as X-Men 3: The Last Stand, has locked up another comic book to bring to film.

Harbinger is a comic series from the 1990s that was created by Jim Shooter and published by now-defunct Valiant Comics, which was sold to Acclaim Entertainment in 1994.

A new company, Valiant Entertainment, has been formed to bring Harbinger and other Valiant characters back into the pop culture fabric.

Harbingers, in this world, are people with "incredible abilities triggered in the face of severe stress that, reflective of their personalities, could make them feel abnormal and alone. Without guidance, Harbingers could become dangerous."

Toyo Harada is a megalomaniac who runs the Harbinger Foundation, and is secretly trying to take over the world. Sting, a former student of Harada, has assembled a rag-tag group who try to put a stop to Harada's plans.

Ratner is attached to the new film project as a producer and a director.

In the meantime, Valiant Entertainment has released a digitally re-coloured and re-mastered special edition of the Harbinger origin story, written by Jim Shooter. It's available in comic stores now, but you can preview Harbinger: The Beginning, for free over here.

Getting my hands on a MacBook Air

2008-03-13T08:00:00.000-07:00

I spent yesterday morning hanging out with some of the Apple Canada folks at their Richmond, B.C. offices. It was my first opportunity to get my sweaty paws on one of the new MacBook Air portables.

On paper, the MacBook Air's 3 pounds doesn't seem like a big difference from the 5.8 pound PowerBook I currently lug around, but the difference - in the real world - is significant. The Air is light without feeling cheap or flimsy. It still has substance, y'know?

It's a slick, slim machine, with a bright display and a slightly recessed keyboard that doesn't touch the screen, so no more greasy outlines of keys on the monitor.

I'm still holding out, though, for a second generation model that recognizes that portable computers can do without lots of USB ports, but can't do without replaceable batteries.

Apple's Brian Hutchison also showed off the new Time Capsule device, which combines a hard drive with a 802.11n Airport router. I happen to have one of these on my desk, but haven't had time to unpack it yet.

I love the price points on these, though: $329 for a 500GB drive and $529 for a 1B drive. Priced for purchase!

The other thing that Hutchison walked us through was the major upgrade to Aperture 2. I'll confess that before today I had written this software off as strictly for professional photographers, but after seeing what Aperture can do, I'll be dumping iPhoto, thank you very much.

Stay tuned to my Straight "Techno Logic" column for a feature on this impressive software and its 100+ new features. I'll link to it from here when it publishes.

Always fun spending time with the Apple folks. They give us media types really nice t-shirts, too.

Wii Rock: Guitar Hero III Tournament in Burnaby

2008-03-12T19:35:00.001-07:00

Last year I was invited to cover the first ever Wii-lympics, a public competition of gamers playing Wii Sports.

The Wii-lympics was a crazy couple of days of Wii golf, tennis, bowling, and boxing. The event, held on a makeshift stage in the food court at Burnaby's Crystal Mall, was raucous with activity.

The Simon Fraser University student association that produced the event, SFU YOURS, is holding another competition this Saturday, March 15.

This year, though, gamers will compete in a Guitar Hero III tournament on the Wii gaming system.

Prizes for this competition are impressive, too. First place takes $500 cash, second gets $300, and third place gets $100. There are also two performance awards, for Best Stage Presence and Best Star Outfit, each of which net a $50 gift certificate.

On top of all that, every contestent will be entered in a draw to win airfare to Las Vegas.

The entry fee for your two-person team is $18 ($15 for members of the YOURS association).

Full details and the entry form are available at the event's Web site.

So if you are in the Greater Vancouver Area, and you can shred on Guitar Hero, drop by the Crystal Mall this Saturday to strut your stuff.

Stargate: The Ark of Truth

2008-03-11T17:15:00.000-07:00

The first direct-to-DVD feature film in the Stargate universe hit shelves today. Perfect timing for the release of my feature interview with Robert Cooper, executive producer for the Stargate franchise and writer-director on the film.

Stargate: The Ark of Truth is, essentially, a condensed version of what Cooper had planned for season 11 of the show. "I look at it a little more now as the final chapter to seasons nine and ten. There’s an eight or nine minute recap at the beginning of the DVD, that’s because a lot of the payoffs, a lot of the story points that are in the film are really very much intended to be conclusions to those moments," he told me.

The full interview is available over at CinemaSpy.ca. Lots of exclusive photos there, too.

'Bring Down the Sky'

2008-03-10T14:08:00.000-07:00

Mass Effect fans who've run through the game a couple of times (don't laugh, I know a few who have) get another reason to play today.

The first downloadable content pack for the space epic released today.

“Bring Down the Sky” includes an uncharted world that introduces a new alien race: the Batarians. In the storyline, a Batarian extremist group has hijacked a mobile asteroid station in the Asgard system, and have set the asteroid on a collision course with the nearby colony world of Terra Nova.

It's up to you, as Commander Shepard, to save the millions of innocent civilians before the asteroid impacts the planet.

The 90-minute download pack is available for 400 MS points via Xbox LIVE. You'll also be able to earn 50 new Gamerscore points.

I'm adding something to my "to do" list: find some time to play more Mass Effect.

Rockstar pledges quick 'Bully' fix

2008-03-10T09:14:00.000-07:00

Bully, the video game in which players take on the role of a student in a boarding school, made a nice splash when it was released for the PS2 in 2006.

But the latest version of the game - which was developed by Rockstar Vancouver in, well, Vancouver - has been making news because of a plethora of bugs.

Bully: Scholarship Edition essentially takes the PS2 game and ports it to the Wii and the Xbox 360, but the Xbox 360 title has been routinely crashing for many users.

In a release to media, Darlan Monterisi Rockstar Games PR spokesperson had this to say:

We are very aware of the problems some people have been experiencing with the Xbox 360 version of Bully: Scholarship Edition and have been doing everything within our powers to resolve these issues as quickly as possible. We will be releasing a title update through Xbox Live within the next week that we are confident will rectify the problem. We apologize wholeheartedly for the inconvenience that this matter has caused some owners of the game.

Other gamers have come across a statement from none other than Rockstar big boss Sam Hauser:

We have just become aware of the issues people are having with Bully Scholarship Edition on Xbox 360. It appears that some older 360s are experiencing framerate issues, freezes and other problems. You have our word that we never experienced any of this in QA - in any of our offices or at Microsoft. I am horrified, and we are now working around the clock to rectify this situation. Thanks to Neo-Gaf for bringing this matter to our attention. We love our games and put a huge amount of energy and care into making them all that they can be. We would never shove anything out the door - we never have and never will. We apologise to everyone affected for the inconvenience. Respectfully, Sam Houser

So if you've had problems with your Xbox 360 version of Bully, stand by. A fix is coming soon.

Future Shop offers HD DVD trade in

2008-03-07T15:24:00.000-08:00

One of those early adopter types who figured HD DVD might have a shot at winning the high-def DVD format war? Stuck with an HD DVD player that is suddenly and instantly yesterday's technology?

Future Shop can help.

Until April 3, Future Shop is offering consumers the opportunity to trade their HD DVD player for a $100 discount on a LG or Samsung Blu-ray Disc/HD DVD combo player.

This allows people who have a library of HD DVD movies to continue being able to watch them, while getting a Blu-ray player which is the new single format for high-definition DVDs.

Better yet is that it doesn't matter where you purchased the HD DVD player from. Future Shop is offering the $100 discount to customers whether they purchased their player at Future Shop or another retailer.

HD DVD players - which, it should be noted, are still useful as upconverting DVD players - that are collected by Future Shop in the campaign will be donated to Boys and Girls Clubs locations across Canada for use in their after-school and evening programs.

So you can upgrade your experience, while upgrading the experience of kids across Canada. Feel good about it all.

Get full details at your local Future Shop store.

McAdams would like to be ‘Black Orchid’

2008-03-07T12:29:00.000-08:00

Canadian actor Rachel McAdams has designs on playing the superhero Black Orchid. In particular, she told MTV Movies Blog that the reimagining of the character by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean is what she likes.

“I like all the Neil Gaiman stuff. It’s great,” she said.

She’s a great actress and has the subltety to really play the character that Gaiman and McKean created. She's also got the perfect look for the role, I think.

Over at his blog, Gaiman said that he’d “like to see that too. I didn't know what I was doing when I wrote Black Orchid, and it shows, but there's some dialogue I'm still really happy with, and a wilful attempt to avoid cliche that I'm still proud of. And Dave McKean created an entire school of realistic superhero art (one he's still apologising for). It was our first full-colour baby. I wish her luck.”

EA says collaboration with Thompson 'impossible'

2008-03-06T10:26:00.000-08:00

Gamasutra today published the contents of an e-mail letter in which Electronic Arts tells Jack Thompson to stay away from them and their business.

Jack Thompson, in case you don't know, is a U.S. conservative activist (read: wacko) who has tried to make a career out of preaching his backwards opinions as facts. He continually misrepresents aspects of the video game industry in his one-man crusade to try and rid the industry of violence.

Thompson's nemesis is Take-Two Interactive, the publisher of Rockstar Games titles such as Manhunt 2 and Bully. Thompson has repeatedly tried to get those games banned in any territory where a judge will actually grant him court time.

Now Thompson has taken his personal battle against Take-Two to Electronic Arts, and offered his assistance in helping EA succeed in their takeover bid for Take-Two.

In an e-mail letter sent to EA shareholders and media, Thompson makes bizarre statements about the character of Take-Two chairman Strauss Zelnick:

Strauss Zelnick is not a 'Boy Scout' as he actually hilariously described himself in The Wall Street Journal this week. Strauss Zelnick is a "Boy Scout" like Jeffrey Dahmer was a gourmet cook. Zelnick proved that with his Take-Two golden parachute scam.

How did EA respond to such an interesting offer?

Well, they essentially told Thompson to take a hike. But they did it very politely:

In response to your offer to assist in the proposed acquisition of Take-Two, we would strongly prefer that you not get involved in this matter.... EA is a strong supporter of creative freedom for game developers. We feel that your past statements – including false claims about content in our games – make any collaboration with you impossible.

Nice one, EA.

Game Luminaries Chat at GDC

2008-03-05T13:45:00.000-08:00

GameDaily BIZ, the news wing of GameDaily, has been running a transcript of a 90-minute GDC session that featured an informal conversation between six of the video game industry’s most interesting minds:

The group's discussion ranges all over the place, from what “next generation” means to how the gaming industry may have missed the boat with the mobile platform.

Read the entire transcript at these links:

Big changes coming to PlayStation Network?

2008-03-04T09:27:00.000-08:00

In an interview with Gamasutra, Sony Creative Entertainment’s John Hight mentions that there will be big changes coming to the PlayStation Network in early April.

Apparently there will be “new interface stuff largely based on customer feedback. Simplification, cutting down on the number of mouse clicks, making it easier to find stuff that you want to find... that's kind of an outgrowth of us having more content now, so we have to make sure that you can get at it easily.”

Play a serial killer in new video game

2008-03-04T08:53:00.000-08:00

This is interesting. A new video game project promises to let players enter the dark world of Dexter, the serial killer who works as a forensic blood spatter expert.

The character of Dexter ~~was created for~~ was created by author Jeff Lindsay and adapted for the television series of the same name. Michael C. Hall, who you’ll remember from Six Feet Under, plays the vigilante who has found an outlet for his psychopathic behaviour by seeking to punish criminals he believes have escaped justice.

In an announcement today, Mark Ecko Entertainment announced that it has licensed the character and the show for a video game.

“Dexter is the extremely rare television show with enough layers of action and tension to translate perfectly into a compelling videogame,” said Marc Fernandez, VP of Marc Ecko Entertainment, in a statement. “Our game designers, writers, and artists are going to give Dexter’s morally complex world the kind of interactivity that gamers will love.”

No word yet on what platforms the game will be created for, or when gamers can expect to be able to step into the experience.

One things is for sure, though: this game has the potential to be creepy good, and to challenge critics and gamers alike.

Read American Gods for free

2008-03-02T09:13:00.001-08:00

I'm a book lover. Always have been. I spend more time reading books than I do watching television or movies or playing games.

For me, it all starts with books. I believe this should be a first principle for everyone.

One of my favourite writers is Neil Gaiman. And now he's made his book, American Gods, available to read for free. You can do so over at the HarperCollins site.

You can't download the book, only read it in some flash-like format at the site, which is not the greatest experience, but still.

It's American Gods, one of Gaiman's best, and it's free. For a limited time.

Off you go.

Have podcast, will travel

2008-02-28T08:49:00.000-08:00

On a wall in the Vancouver offices of CBC Radio 3 hangs a map of the world with pushpins sticking out of it. Each pin represents a person who has written to Grant Lawrence (pictured here), host of The CBC Radio 3 Podcast. When I interviewed Lawrence earlier this month, he proudly pointed out pins marking faraway places such as Iceland, Germany, India, and Easter Island.

One listener, Lawrence reflected while sitting on a couch in the Radio 3 lounge area, had downloaded the podcast to her iPod in an Internet café in Mongolia, and then listened to the show hundreds of feet underground while working in a uranium mine. When she’s on hiatus, she lives a few blocks from Lawrence in the West End. Canadians can be found everywhere in the world, and for many of them The CBC Radio 3 Podcast is a lifeline to their home country and its unique musical culture.

What's a podcast?

The term podcast comes from combining iPod (the Apple computer term that itself comes from “portable on demand”) and broadcast, and refers to the content and distribution. A podcast is a program—usually audio, but increasingly video—that can be automatically syndicated to an audience. The first podcasts appeared in 2004, but the format’s surge in popularity in 2005 led the editors of the New Oxford American Dictionary to declare "podcast" the word of the year that year.

The CBC Radio 3 Podcast was a first for the public broadcaster. Steve Pratt, director of radio digital programming and CBC Radio 3, thought there was a good fit between the New Music Canada Web site, which is produced by Radio 3, and the newfangled distribution method. “We wanted more people to hear the music,” Pratt told me in a downtown coffee shop. The artists who were streaming music on New Music Canada owned the rights to their material, so Pratt and his team developed a waiver that asked for permission to podcast that same music.

“Steve Pratt is always thinking way ahead of the game,” Lawrence said. When Pratt suggested that he host a podcast, Lawrence’s response was, “What the hell is that?”

“When I first got here,” Lawrence reminisced, “you edited interviews on reel-to-reel tape and cut it with a razor blade and taped the tape together.” Despite his reluctance, Lawrence started hosting the new program. After a couple of weeks of shows had been produced and made available through a few podcast directories, iTunes came calling. Lawrence’s show was one of the only music podcasts that had legal rights to the music being played, Pratt explained, and the Apple initiative was doing everything it could to promote sales of the now-ubiquitous iPod. iTunes promoted the CBC Radio 3 Podcast by putting it on iTunes Stores’ front pages in territories around the world, and the downloads went from 400 to 20,000 overnight.

CBC Radio 3 Podcast appeals around the world

“The thing that blew us away,” Pratt admitted, “is that it’s all over the world. We realized half our downloads were coming from outside Canada. There are fans of indie music around the world who just like that music, and we’ve got a great reputation around the world for a killer music scene.”

“For whatever reason, it’s clicked with people,” Lawrence said. “Radio is a fairly intimate genre, and the podcast is even more intimate because generally people listen on their headphones, so it’s straight into their head.”

His podcast was the only CBC offering for about 18 months, but as the show’s popularity continued to grow, more Radio 3 podcasts were introduced: Sessions is an in-studio series with Canadian bands hosted by Tariq Hussain; New Music Canada Track of the Day is, well, a track of the day; and The R3-30, a weekly chart show hosted by Craig Norris and producer Pedro Mendes, has picked up steam in the past year. Each week, Pratt said, between 100,000 and 120,000 Radio 3 podcasts are downloaded.

CBC builds on podcast success

In the past year, there has been an explosion of CBC podcasts, from both radio and television. Most, like Definitely Not the Opera, Quirks and Quarks, the Hour, and the National, simply strip out elements that the CBC doesn’t have permission to podcast, and repurpose their broadcasts in podcast form. The CBC Radio 3 podcasts are different because they are produced specifically for that purpose.

“We are a world leader in podcasting,” said Pratt, who in addition to being the head of Radio 3 is also responsible for all CBC Radio podcasts. “There are about 50 podcasts that you can get from CBC, and they are all doing really well. There’s a growing audience every week that chooses to get their CBC programming that way. We feel like we’re doing a pretty good job.”

Although CBC programming decisions don’t rest on how “podcastable” a potential show is, Pratt said that from day one of program development, “We talk about the different platforms that a show can live on, and we talk about music rights, we talk about the way the show can be produced so that we can put it out as a podcast as well as a regular program.”

New CBC Radio shows like Search Engine and Spark typify this kind of thinking. These shows, Pratt said, were created with multiple platforms in mind: Web site, podcast, and radio show. “We’re trying to take advantage of the fact that they are shows, but they live in a lot of different places,” he said. Other shows, such as Between the Covers, only exist as podcasts.

The catch-22

The problem, Pratt said, is that government funding for CBC Radio doesn’t cover new-media initiatives. Ironically, the dramatic success of the podcasts has threatened their very existence, because the CBC found that it couldn’t afford to continue making them. This Catch-22 wasn’t about to stop Pratt, though. “For us, we feel like this is the future,” he explained. “This is how a whole new group of people are connecting and having their primary connection to the CBC. We need to be here.”

Surveys indicated that not only did audiences value the podcasts, they wanted more of them. However, they didn’t want to pay for the podcasts. They were fine, though, with the idea of sponsorship, so Pratt came up with a plan to fund the podcasts in this way. Listeners, he explained, have given feedback that they appreciate that the sponsor is helping the CBC to produce podcasts.

But you won’t hear sponsorship messages on the Radio 3 podcasts because there’s no system of paying royalties to artists. Pratt said that until the CBC can find a way to compensate artists, Radio 3 won’t be making money off the music podcasts. But his team is working at devising a way for the artists to benefit even more from exposure on the Radio 3 podcasts. “One of the things we’ve heard from the audience is that they want to buy the music easily,” said Pratt, “because there’s not a lot of places to buy this music, especially when you get outside Canada.”

Why podcasts matter to musicians

Despite not being compensated for their songs being podcasted, the Radio 3 shows have become an essential channel of exposure for Canadian musicians. “Every artist,” said Lawrence, “from Feist on down to AIDS Wolf, has seen the benefit of what the podcast can do for them.” The waiver, though, gave some artists pause. Lawrence admitted that it probably seemed like Radio 3 was asking for a lot, wanting to play the songs for free. “What helped,” Lawrence said, “was when the Arcade Fire said, ‘Yeah, you can. We see the benefit of that.’ As soon as we started playing bands like the Arcade Fire and the Weakerthans and the New Pornographers, it opened the floodgates.”

As a founding member of Vancouver band the Smugglers, Lawrence is no stranger to the Canadian independent music scene. He believes that because more people can hear Canadian-made music, the size of the audience for that music has grown.

“There are a lot of very successful independent Canadian bands,” he said, and the difference between now and when he was playing with the Smugglers is access to the music: “MySpace, podcasts, YouTube. Campus radio was limited, because if you drove as far as North Van you’d lose the signal. In this new age, a podcast you can take anywhere in the world. The Arcade Fire had tracks on MySpace about three months before their album came out. There’s just more accessibility, and people share it.”

Canadian albums going gold

The numbers support Lawrence’s claim. Certification of gold records in Canada is performed by the Canadian Recording Industry Association. Selling 50,000 units of a CD in Canada nets a gold award; a platinum comes with 100,000 units sold. In the last seven years, there hasn’t been a significant increase in the number of gold or platinum albums by Canadian artists, but what has changed is the range of artists achieving gold status. In 2001, for example, Nickelback, Diana Krall, Our Lady Peace, and Sum 41 went gold. In 2007, gold albums went to the likes of Patrick Watson, Bedouin Soundclash, Feist, and the Arcade Fire.

The difference between CDs and digital albums is also interesting. According to Nielsen SoundScan figures for Canada, the top-selling CD in 2007 was Josh Groban’s Noël, while the top-selling digital album was Feist’s The Reminder. The Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible was number four on the digital-album list. There is an obvious difference between what people are buying in bricks-and-mortar stores and what they’re purchasing on-line.

Lawrence said the biggest impact his podcast has had is that he no longer has to explain what Radio 3 is. “The podcast was our first real bona fide success that crossed over into mainstream,” he said. “We’d been waiting a long time for something to click.” According to Pratt, what helped was thinking of Radio 3 as a content group, rather than a division defined by any particular platform. “We’ve really focused on being experts in new Canadian music, and we want to be where it matters to our audience.” On the Web, on satellite radio, or on podcast, Radio 3 is there.

Despite his early reticence, Lawrence has become a believer in podcasts: “I really treasure the show. We have a fantastic audience.” He talks about the audience’s passion for the music and the show, their patriotism for Canada, the fact that podcast listeners are people who seek out new things and are on the go. He thinks the podcasts tap into a collective consciousness. That his podcast has clicked with people, to the point where there have been close to 10 million downloads, continues to surprise him.

“We had one girl walk across Spain while listening to the podcast,” Lawrence said. “They all send us pictures too, so we have all these pictures of all these people doing these amazing things all over the world, and we’re the soundtrack to their life.”

[originally published in the Georgia Straight]

How TiVo will set you free

2008-02-28T08:45:00.000-08:00

TiVo is the first truly great addition to modern home-entertainment centres since the development of DVD players. High-definition televisions are fine, computers that stream media content to your living room are great, but only TiVo makes life fun, simple, and better.

Simply, TiVo is a digital-video recorder. It records television programs for you, storing them on a hard drive that lets you watch shows when you want. But there’s more to TiVo than simply hardware. When you hear people talking about TiVo, they are talking about the experience of TiVo.

TiVo was built with the user in mind. It doesn’t provide television channels, and is neither a cable or satellite provider, nor a broadcaster or network. So TiVo won’t get rid of your existing TV provider, but it will work with whatever you’ve got: cable, satellite, or DSL.

The TiVo service comes with a monthly subscription fee of about US$12.95, but that small price is worth it. You’ll more than make that up in the time you’ll save by using it.

Because you will watch less television with TiVo. When the TV is on, you will watch something you want to watch. No more channel surfing, and you can easily skip commercials—just like VCRs, remember—so the one-hour programs are only about 44 minutes of viewing time.

If you decide to watch a recording of the latest episode of House, you can fast forward, rewind, and pause, just like you would with your archaic video machine. But if you watch it “live” and you’ve missed the opening sequence that sets up the disease of the week, you can simply go back to the beginning without waiting for the machine to finish recording.

The DVR options available from the various Canadian television providers—Bell ExpressVu, Rogers, and Shaw—can all do this. But none has the range of other features you get from TiVo.

The TiVo model currently available in Canada (the 80-hour Series2 DT is $200 at major electronics retailers) is equipped with two tuners, which means that you can record two programs at the same time, while watching a third that’s archived on the hard drive. Or you can watch one show live while the machine records what’s on the other tuner.

The Season Pass feature means you no longer have to record by day, time, and channel (although you can still do this). Instead, search your TiVo for the show title you are looking for, and it automatically records the show, no matter when it airs or on what channel, as well as skipping reruns to avoid 89 episodes of The Simpsons every week. You can also search by actor, or director, or even category.

TiVo can also help you decide what to add to your schedule. By analyzing what you are already recording, and what you tell TiVo you enjoy watching using the simple “Thumbs up!” and “Thumbs down!” buttons, it will suggest what you might enjoy. If you’ve been watching Sex and the City and Brothers & Sisters, TiVo might suggest you try Cashmere Mafia.

And if you’re on the road when you find out about a Planet of the Apes marathon, you can access your TiVo over the Internet, and set the recording remotely. Or copy programs from your TiVo to your computer for archiving on DVD.

However, TiVo is not for everyone. The Series2 model cannot record in high definition, so if you currently get an HD signal from your TV provider, you’ll have to use the provider’s box, or wait until TiVo releases its high-def model in Canada, which could happen later this year.

For those with a typical satellite setup, the dual-tuner feature does not work because you can’t duplicate the signal. You can still use the TiVo to automatically record programs, but you sacrifice the ability to record one show while watching another.

The only problem I’ve had with TiVo is that I keep convincing people to get on the bandwagon, but the rewards program TiVo offers to its community—to encourage conversions—is not available to Canadians. But in the event the company resolves that mistake, make sure to tell them I sent you. I want a pair of those TiVo slippers.

[originally published in Georgia Straight Living]

Eco-gadgets

2008-02-28T08:40:00.000-08:00

Hybrid cars are all the rage, architects and planners are greening the urban landscape, and carbon credits are the new indulgences. Gadgets, too, have gone green. There’s even been a conference on the topic. The Greener Gadgets Conference, held in New York City earlier this month, addressed such topics as design for sustainability, energy efficiency, and greener materials. Here are some gadgets to keep your conscience clear.

Tuning in to turning off

Track how much electricity you’re saving—or identify the electronic toys that are using the most energy—with the PowerCost Monitor. By tapping into your electricity meter, the monitor will show you how much energy—and money—you could save by turning off unneeded appliances and flipping a few light switches. The manufacturer, Blue Line Innovations, claims that users can save between five and 20 percent on their monthly electricity bills, which has to be good. Therefore, it’s a investment at $149.99.

The other vampire slayer

The euphemism for the power used by your gadgets in standby mode is vampire power. Belkin has come up with a new, slim surge protector that works better than garlic in the fight against these vampires. The Conserve has eight outlets, two of which are always on for devices such as modems, while the remaining six turn off at the touch of a remote control, so you won’t have to crawl in the dust behind the entertainment centre to reach the surge protector. The same remote can control multiple Conserves, too. Expect them this summer at major electronics retailers for $55.

Sustainable listening

Fashionation’s Eco-Speakers look like they’ve been fashioned from leftover cardboard boxes. That’s because they are. The three-inch bookshelf speakers, which fold flat for shipping and storage, are made from 100-percent recycled materials, and come in purple, pink, aqua, green, red, or blue, or in eye-catching combinations of red/yellow, purple/blue, and blue/green. The same company also manufactures a colourful range of iPod holders made from organic hemp. The speakers are US$14.95 each.

The answer, my friend, is chargin’ in the wind

Solar power might be great for people who live in more sunny climes, but what is a Wet Coaster to do during those stretches of cloudy, rainy days? The HYmini is a handheld universal charger that turns wind power into electricity. Strap it to your arm while you’re riding your bike through the Endowment Lands, and your cellphone will be charged up by the time you’re done. Wear it while shredding the North Shore slopes and power your iPod the entire time. If the sun does come out, you can accessorize your HYmini with a solar panel to charge devices even faster. A kit including the HYmini, miniSOLAR Panel, and armband is US$69.99.

[originally published in Georgia Straight Living]

Video game review: Turok

2008-02-28T08:31:00.000-08:00

Turok is the first title from Vancouver’s Propaganda Games. A rambunctious re-creation of a character that first appeared more than 50 years ago, the new game is a science-fiction-themed first-person shooter for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.

You play as Joseph Turok, a Native American former black-ops commando who is part of a mission to apprehend Roland Kane, the leader of Wolf Pack, a rogue commando unit that disappeared three years ago. As a former member of Wolf Pack, Turok doesn’t have many friends in Whiskey Company, his new squad. You don’t know much about his past at the start of the game; you pick up details from flashbacks as you progress.

En route to your destination, your ship is shot down and crash-lands on a planet that happens to be inhabited by dinosaurs. That’s right, dinosaurs, and as one of the loading-screen tips reads: “Dinosaurs eat meat. You are meat. Run away!” As if dinosaurs weren’t enough, you’ll also have to deal with the heavily armed and armoured Wolf Pack troops, who control the planet. And the artificial intelligence controlling your enemies will have them flanking you at every opportunity.

You’ll engage in both melee and firefight combat. While you’ll have access to a variety of automatic weapons, including a few futuristic varieties, you’ll find that you’re plenty dangerous armed with only a knife and a bow. At times, you’ll find yourself in close combat, and pushing the correct button sequence will execute a special knife attack to get you out of trouble.

In addition to the single-player game, there are multiplayer modes, and you can play with up to three friends in cooperative play, in a variation on the single-player story mode.

Turok sports a cinematic look, with dizzying swoop and zoom effects used to smoothly transition between movie and interactive sequences. Not to mention the vertigo that comes from the sense of scale—what seems to be a rock wall at first may turn out to be a giant skull, foreshadowing the types of creatures you’ll confront later in the game. Don’t forget that not only are dinosaurs smart predators, they have the benefit of camouflage in this lush environment. Watch your back. Rated mature.

[originally published in the Georgia Straight]

The return of Turok

2008-02-28T08:29:00.000-08:00

Propaganda Games was formed three years ago by a group of former Electronic Arts staffers. Within months, it was acquired by Buena Vista Games, now Disney Interactive Studios. In an interview at Propaganda’s Vancouver offices, general manager and vice president Josh Holmes said the company had been working on an original concept for a third-person action game, but scrapped it when it won the right to develop the new Turok video game for Touchstone, a Disney brand.

The first Turok game—1997’s Turok: Dinosaur Hunter for the Nintendo 64—was one of the earliest first-person shooters produced for console gaming systems. Turok first appeared in a 1954 comic book in a story by Gaylord DuBois, who was known for writing outdoor-adventure comics about such characters as Tarzan, Roy Rogers, and Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. Turok changed over the years, depending on who was using him and for what purpose, but one thing has remained constant: Turok is a Native American.

“Reimagining is in vogue in entertainment today,” game director Joel Manners said. He cited Batman Begins and Battlestar Galactica as good examples of how characters have been reinvented. “There are really good stories that need to be retold in a way that is relevant to today,” Manners said. “There’s nothing irrelevant about dinosaurs,” which feature prominently in the new Turok game.

The development team was acutely aware that its protagonist was aboriginal. “It means a lot,” admitted Manners, “and it doesn’t mean anything.” The game, he explained, doesn’t make a point about heritage; it makes a point about heroism. In an effort to avoid clichés and stereotypes, Manners said, they simply treated the characters and the story with respect. “When you justify a character because of their heritage,” he said, “you have to be cautious.

“The fact that Turok is of one heritage or another is not important,” Manners continued. “He’s a hero. The heroism that he is displaying comes from his heritage, but it’s something anyone is capable of.”

Manners said the development group talked about other game genres in early meetings, but never seriously considered them. “The first-person perspective lends an intimacy. Having dinosaurs coming at you is central to the feeling of terror. It’s not as scary when you see creatures jumping on someone else.”

Propaganda, which increased its staff as it developed Turok, now employs about 150 people. Holmes said that in recent months, they’ve been organizing the company into two teams, and they’re already in preproduction on their next two titles, one of which is an action role-playing game. “We’d like to get to a point where we’ve got two games in production and one in concept,” he said. Propaganda won’t get much bigger than 200 employees, though, an optimal size for the studio, according to Holmes.

[originally published in the Georgia Straight]

Puzzle Quest takes to space

2008-02-27T09:24:00.000-08:00

I’ve lost more hours to Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords than I’m willing to admit. While my wife was in labour for twelve hours, though, the game was a godsend.

It’s a curious blend of puzzle gaming - like Bejeweled - and RPG gaming - like old-skool Final Fantasy - that has really made the most of genre-blending.

I’ve been playing PQ on my PSP - it was also created for the DS - but when the game’s publisher, D3Publisher, realized they had a sleeper hit on their hands, they wisely ported it to PS2 and on Xbox LIVE Arcade, too.

Well, D3 has just announced that the popular game is becoming a franchise with the release of Puzzle Quest: Galactrix.

This new game takes puts the hexagonal puzzle pieces and places them in a science fiction, space-aged context. The board, the publishers said in a release, “heeds to gravity according to a player’s location in the game universe.” Sounds like a new and interesting mechanic to me.

The new game is scheduled for release this fall, and will be available on Xbox LIVE Arcade, PC, and the Nintendo DS.

“Deep Red” PSP announced

2008-02-26T07:28:00.000-08:00

Releasing this June is a new red PlayStation Portable. It’s a beauty, actually. Nice red enamel and on the back a silkscreen of Kratos, the protagonist of the God of War franchise.

It’s part of a package that includes the PSP, a copy of the game Chains of Olympus, Kratos' first appearance on PSP, the movie Superbad on UMD, and a voucher to download the PSP game Syphon Filter: Combat Ops onto a Memory Stick. The God of War package deal has a MSRP of Cdn$199.99.

God of War: Chains of Olympus, the new PSP game starring Kratos, will be available on March 4 for those of you already in possession of a PSP system.

In related PlayStation news, Sony has come up with a PS3 bundle for late Q2 that includes an 80GB PS3, a new Dualshock 3 wireless controller, and a copy of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots for only Cdn$499 (suggested).

The Dualshock 3 game pad combines the rumble feature of the old PS2 controllers with the motion-sensing Sixaxis technology. They will be available in April for Cdn$54.95.

GDC 2008: That's a wrap

2008-02-22T20:26:00.000-08:00

Well, the 2008 edition of the Game Developers Conference has come to an end, and I'm signing off from San Francisco. I'll be hanging about for a couple of days to enjoy this beautiful city before heading back to Vancouver to start getting up to speed on what's coming out from the local video game developers this year.

I hope you appreciated, if not enjoyed, my coverage of this year's conference. Feel free to loiter around the comments to provide me with feedback or to discuss anything that came out of the seminars.

GDC 2008: Portal post-mortem

2008-02-22T20:23:00.000-08:00

One of the interesting things to do with video-game development is to look back at those games that succeeded, deconstructing them in an attempt to figure out what the designers threw into the crucible that made the project a success.

We can do the same with failures, but that’s too depressing. Much more fun to focus on the positive.

It’s somehow fitting that my final GDC 2008 session was an opportunity to hear the creators of Portal, the best game of 2007, talk about what went into its creation.

As with so many of the seminars this year, the room was packed full, with interested attendees swirled around the outside of the room.

Portal was a sleeper hit. It leveraged the fact that it was packaged with the Xbox 360 Orange Box edition of Valve’s Half-Life 2: Episode 2 games to became a veritable pop culture phenomenon.

From the popularity of the companion cube to the mainstream airplay of the game’s closing theme song, “Still Alive” (written by musician Jonathan Coulton), by the end of 2007, Portal was everywhere you looked.

In the GDC session, level designer and team lead Kim Swift and writer Erik Wolpaw talked about how they were able to create a narrative in a game with only two characters and one-sided dialogue.

Portal was developed by a team of anywhere between five and ten people, and Swift and Wolpaw both agreed that the story from the game wouldn’t go very far on its own, nor would the gameplay be much when separated from the story. “It would be a race to see which would fail first on their own,” said Swift.

The thing that really seemed to drive Portal to be what it became, they both said, were the constraints. Restricted time, people, and resources forced them to come up with creative solutions to problems.

Wolpaw outlined the philosophy upon which Portal’s narrative was based. “Games tell two stories,” he said. The first is the story story that is told with cutscenes and dialogue, and the second is the gameplay story, which is the story told by what the player does.

Swift and Wolpaw also stressed the importance of playtesting to Portal’s final cut. Bringing in gamers to try the game and provide feedback was something they did early on, and Swift said it was invaluable to refining the game as it was developed..

When asked how they planned to overcome the challenge of not having the same constraints in developing Portal 2, assuming that a greater budget will be afforded to them, Wolpaw joked, “I’m content to bask in the moment without people bugging me about the next one.”

We do know, however, that there will be more Portal coming. Valve has promised. I can hardly wait.

GDC 2008: Featuring Fable 2

2008-02-22T20:21:00.000-08:00

Lionhead Studios’ Peter Molyneux has a storied life in video game development. His video game, Fable, was a next-gen game before next-gen consoles existed, and made inroads into the idea that the decisions and choices players made could have an impact on the story that was being told to them.

While Molyneux wasn’t able to get Fable to do everything he had hoped, he’s been talking up the sequel for a while, and claiming that it would be able to do some of the things - and more - that he wasn’t able to do with the first game. In part because he is well aware that gamers were disappointed that Fable wasn’t able to do all it claimed to.

Today, as GDC was winding down, Molyneux packed a ballroom with about 750 people who wanted to hear him explain the main features of Fable II.

The talk was originally titled as “The big three features revealed” but Molyneux’s title card for his presentation was amended to read “Three big features revealed / Actually its [sic] four now.”

Quite simply, the big features that will be in Fable II are:

drama: consequences to player action and behaviour
combat: simple, one-button combat that anyone can play and enjoy
co-op: participate in other people’s games as a henchman to gain experience, gold, and renown that you can then apply to your game

The one interesting tidbit that Molyneux left us with is that about six hours into Fable II, “you will walk into the room and someone will ask you to do something, and you’ll have to sacrifice something so precious to you as a gamer that you’ll put down the controller and think about it.”

He did not, however, reveal the fourth feature before his time ran out.

Fable II is scheduled for release this year, and will be available exclusively on Xbox 360.

GDC 2008: Game designers rant

2008-02-22T20:18:00.000-08:00

Perhaps the most interesting and thought-provoking session at the Game Developers Conference is the annual rant. Each year, a group of people who work in game development get together and spout off about a particular them.

This year’s theme was the state of game design, and it was a solid hour of passion as the panelists took their eight minutes of time to bear their soul about the topic.

Clint Hocking - who it may seem like I am stalking this year, but I’m not. Not really - went on about how the problem in the video game industry is not creative stagnation, but a lack of courage to create games that challenge people.

Jane McGonigal implored designers to start making the real world as wonderful as they make virtual worlds.

Jenova Chen thinks that mature games need to be made for the crop of aging gamers, and he’s not talking about sex and violence.

Daniel James believes that the virtual can shape the real.

The best rant - or at least the most intriguing - came from Jonathan Mak. He had everybody in the room, some 600 people, standing up and batting balloons around the room to a pop guitar soundtrack playing over the PA. I’m not sure what his point was, but it was a dramatic - and fun - expression for everyone.

Future Shop’s Winter Escape Sale

2008-02-22T11:28:00.000-08:00

Future Shop decided to have an impromptu sale. Among the things that will be cheaper for at least the next week are iPods, laptops, cameras and camcorders, televisions, and some sweet home theatre packages.

Oh, yeah, all Xbox 360 packages are $50 cheaper. That’s not just a sale price, either, but are new price points for the game consoles. And for a limited time, each Xbox 360 console sold comes with a copy of Turok.

Get out there and fight some dinosaurs.

GDC 2008: New ways of telling a story

2008-02-22T11:14:00.000-08:00

The first Far Cry, developed by Crytek, was a breathtaking display of technical ability and photorealistic graphics. It was published by Ubisoft, which then snapped up the franchise.

I expect Far Cry 2 to be far superior to the first game because of the people involved. Clint Hocking is the creative director on the project, and Patrick Redding is the narrative designer. These two guys think about the creation of video games four levels above what I’m capable of.

In a presentation this morning, Redding explained that their objective, with Far Cry 2, is to create an open world game in which players have the freedom to explore all spaces in the game, whether they are virtual spaces, systems, or the realm of humanity. It sounds like big-brain stuff and it is, but what it amounts to is that these guys are going to make meaning for a player come through in the mechanics of the game.

The idea here is that as human beings we impart story onto events and we imbue character into animated objects such as people and even animals. The Far Cry 2 team intends to let those characteristics work to their benefit.

So rather than tell a linear story, Redding said, they’ve taken a story and broken it into smaller chunks that can then be presented to the player in any order. In the literary world this is called a “shuffle text,” and what it gives an audience is the opportunity to get the same information in any order, and still be able to get meaning out of the experience.

It also means that every experience will be different, depending on the order in which you are presented with the chunks of story, and the meaning you impart onto the events and the characters.

And you’ll still get to shoot guns and blow stuff up.

GDC 2008: Will Wright in person

2008-02-22T10:50:00.000-08:00

Will Wright has been conspicuously absent from the media spotlight in the past couple of years. A media comrade and I were speculating as to exactly why this might be happening while we waited for Wright to come on stage last night. We decided we didn't know why he's been so hermit-like.

Electronic Arts, the publisher of Wright’s games, staged this exclusive party at a San Francisco nightclub as a chance to get everyone together for a party, duh, but also to give Wright a chance to do a public event. He did not disappoint.

In his 40-minute talk, Wright ranged from Star Wars to James Bond to Gilligan’s Island to Godzilla to Walt Disney. His central theme was talking about “worlds,” his word for franchise or brand or entertainment property.

In the middle of it all was a “Russian Space Minute” in which Wright told us the incredible story of a failed Soviet rocket launch.

What Wright did not talk about, though, was Spore, except to mention it as an example of something he had worked on.

At the end of his entertaining ramble, what Wright left us with is that “the value of worlds and play experiences is they help us refine our world view.”

For Wright, the best worlds (and therefore the best stories) can be deconstructed. In this way, they lead to play. The example Wright gave was the thought experiment in which you wonder which would win a battle between the Death Star, a Cylon Battlestar, and a Borg cube.

The other side of this is that the best play is generative, and therefore leads to a myriad of stories that can be told.

Bringing this all together means that worlds/story leads to play, which leads to worlds and story, in this precious and neverending cycle.

Spore, by the way, will be available for PC, Mac, and Nintendo DS on September 7.

GDC 2008: Partaking of Prototype

2008-02-22T08:31:00.000-08:00

Vancouver’s Radical Entertainment is working on a new video game that promises to reinvent open-world or sandbox games.

Producer Tim Bennison and lead designer Eric Holmes (pictured here at the promotional party for Prototype on Thursday night) took an hour to show off not only the key features of their new game, but also give attendees a glimpse at how they’ve gone about creating a completely new intellectual property.

Prototype is set in New York, and Holmes has made the city a character of sorts. This is a New York that we will all recognize, and Holmes said it was important for this story to be grounded and real. “There’s something disturbing about setting it in a real setting,” he explained. “It’s real but fantastic at the same time.”

Bennison talked about how so many games these days are doing a good job of making the same games better or by giving us more of what we’ve already seen. He’s trying to get his Prototype team to give gamers more and better.

You’ll be playing as Alex Mercer, a man with no memories but the incredible ability to be able to shape-shift and to absorb biomass, including people. As Alex absorbs people he gains all their memories and skills, as well as the ability to mimic the appearance of that person.

Did I mention that New York has been infected with a virus? Bad news.

Alex - and you - learn the story by absorbing the memories of people who have knowledge of your past. At the same time, you’ll be roaming through a New York that is familiar and horrific at the same time.

GDC 2008: All about immersion

2008-02-22T08:11:00.000-08:00

Clint Hocking is one of the best speakers to present at GDC. For (I think) every year in the past seven he’s had something interesting to talk about. And his style of speaking is dynamic, funny, and fascinating.

In the past year, it seems, Hocking’s been thinking about what is required for a game player to feel immersed in the experience. Referencing the seminal book Hamlet on the Holodeck, the games Trespasser and Guitar Hero, and lots of original Star Trek references, Hocking zipped through a look at how to classify immersion, and how to think about enhancing it for gamers.

Hocking differentiates between “sensual immersion,” which he likens to the emotional and affective sensation of being surrounded by an environment. This kind of immersion is typified by films, in which we can all get lost, and it was attempted by the developers of Trespasser, a video game that claimed it was going to be the most immersive game ever, and was based on the Jurassic Park films.

The other type of immersion, for Hocking, is “rational immersion,” which refers to the fugue state we enter when we are trying to learn a new task, or are making our brain work hard. This kind of immersion is exemplified by chess, for example, or by learning to be a Guitar Hero.

Hocking believes that getting both forms of immersion to work together is critical, because that will be the moment at which “games will be to film what film today is to radio.”

If you ever have the privilege of attending GDC, make sure you keep a spot open for a Hocking presentation. He’s one of the best shows in town.

GDC 2008: Why you should learn mathematics

2008-02-21T21:23:00.000-08:00

Because Ray Kurzweil says that we’ve been drawing linear graphs when all along we should have been drawing logarithmic graphs and he’s right.

GDC 2008: Constructing the environments for Halo 3

2008-02-21T13:44:00.000-08:00

Mike Zak has a BFA from UVic, and has been working on Halo environments since he joined Bungie halfway through the production of Halo 2. He was the environmental art lead for Halo 3, and in a session this morning, described how he and the team of artists with which he works came up with the breathtaking worlds.

Zak used one specific mission as a case study for his talk: The Storm. This mission happens fairly early in the game, and starts with Master Chief being told he needs to prevent the Covenant from activating the Ark. The mission ends when the Ark is activated, the portal opens, the Covenant escapes, and the Flood-infested ship crashes to Earth.

Besides showing off incredible concept art and preproduction sketches, Zak walked through an interesting breakdown of the level and articulated a few things he and his team were looking at when creating the environments.

“The Hook” refers to having a strong layout concept that makes the space unique, but is also easy for a player to see and navigate, while suggesting to them a tactic they might use.

“Scale” refers to getting an early sense of the size of things, which helps determine how large the space for the level needs to be. The sense of capacity, then, will help determine budget and AI requirements for building the level.

“Combat elements,” or “encounter design for laymen,” refers to the need to build a space with fronts (including safe territories for retreat), layers (in terms of basements and balconies), and blinds (for both AI and players to exploit, and includes cover).

Finally, “movement elements,” refers to how the player can traverse the space, including shortcuts, one-way paths, and ninja paths (in which the player has a distinct advantage).

I interviewed Zak for a Georgia Straight cover feature on Halo 3 last fall. This morning he told me that he’s sketching for a new project, but could not reveal a hint of what it was. Sorry.

GDC 2008: How to write and design epic games

2008-02-21T08:29:00.000-08:00

Ken Rolston’s career as a game designer started with pencil and paper role-playing games such as Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and RuneQuest. He transitioned into video games and was the lead designer on Morrowind and Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.

After retiring (for “About a week,” joked Mark Nelson), Rolston returned to the video game industry to work with Big Huge Games. Appropriate, then, that his presentation at GDC 2008 was about how to write and design “vast narratives.”

Rolston was joined by Mark Nelson, who’s been working with Rolston since Morrowind, and who is now the lead narrative designer on an as-yet-unnamed role-playing game for Big Huge Games.

They talked about the tension between them as each believes that different aspects of story are most important. Rolston believes in setting, tone, and theme, while Nelson stakes his philosophy on story and character.

In the end, the two of them admitted that all components of story are important, but what differs is when those elements are most important to the development of a game.

Setting and theme, which - once established - are static, should be put in place early on in the process, and character and story, which are dynamic and can change more quickly, become important later in development.

What they both agree on, though, is that vast narratives, like Morrowind and Oblivion, are interesting despite the challenges they create.

I’m curious to know what their next big huge game is going to be.

GDC 2008: A note on the game of the year award

2008-02-20T22:08:00.000-08:00

Last week, in my “Trigger Happy” column in the Georgia Straight, I wrote about how I believed that Super Mario Galaxy, while a very playable game, did not deserve a nomination for game of the year, and that Mass Effect was spurned by being left off the list of game of the year noms.

Tonight during the Game Developers Choice Awards, the five game of the year nominees - BioShock, Portal, Call of Duty 4, Super Mario Galaxy, and Rock Band - were announced throughout the evening. Then, at the end of the show, just before the winner was about to be announced, short clips of each of the nominees were played.

But here’s the thing. A clip of Mass Effect was played in place of Call of Duty 4.

Make of it what you will.

GDC 2008: GDC award night

2008-02-20T21:52:00.000-08:00

Award night at the Game Developers Conference is a slick and quick affair (thankfully, given that most of us have been on our feet for 12 hours by the time the awards happen). A whole whack of prizes get handed out in a scant two hours. You know what really stands out when you watch a video game award show? Short acceptance speeches. No big egos here, just big talent.

Game Developers Choice Awards

The video game industry relishes these awards, because the winners are decided by those who work in the business. Winning a GDC Award is getting a pat on the back from the entire industry. It amounts to having all the other game designers say, “I loved playing your game.”

You can get the complete list of nominees here, but here are the games and developers that took home Choice Awards this year:

Best Game Design
Portal
developed and published by Valve

Best Debut Game
Crackdown
developed by Realtime Worlds, published by Microsoft Game Studios

Best Audio
BioShock
developed by 2K Boston and 2K Australia, published by 2K Games

Best Downloadable Game
flOw
developed by thatgamecompany, published by Sony Computer Entertainment

Best Technology
Crysis
developed by Crytek, published by Electronic Arts

Innovation Award
Portal
developed and published by Valve

Best Visual Arts
BioShock
developed by 2K Boston and 2K Australia, published by 2K Games

Best Handheld Game
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
developed and published by Nintendo

Best Writing
BioShock
developed by 2K Boston and 2K Australia, published by 2K Games

Game of the Year
Portal
developed and published by Valve
(pictured above are the developers and publisher, from left to right: Realm Lovejoy, Kim Swift, Gabe Newell, and Eric Wolpaw)

Lifetime Achievement Award
Sid Meier

Pioneer Award
Ralph Baer
This guy is the father of video gaming. He got a deserved standing ovation.

Ambassador Award
Jason Della Rocca

Independent genius

The GDC Awards are always prefaced by the Independent Games Festival Awards, which recognize independent game development. One of last year’s big winners was Toronto’s Jon Mak, creator of Everyday Shooter, now available as a PlayStation Network game for the PS3.

This year, the awards went to:

Seumas McNally Grand Prize
Crayon Physics Deluxe
developed by Kloonigames

Best Web Browser Game
Iron Dukes
developed by One Ton Ghost

Technical Excellence
World of Goo
developed by 2D Boy

Design Innovation Award
World of Goo
developed by 2D Boy

Excellence in Visual Art
Fez
developed by Kokoromi

Excellence in Audio
Audiosurf
developed by Invisible Handlebar

Audience Award
Audiosurf
developed by Invisible Handlebar

Best Student Game
Synaesthete
developed by Rolling Without Slipping, DigiPen Institute

Note, too, that you can still play most of the indie games for free over here.

The new Gleemax Awards for Strategic Gameplay were handed out by Gleemax, the new online gamer community started by Wizards of the Coast. Cash prizes went to:
bronze: Quadradius
silver: Skyrites
grand prize: Desktop Tower Defense

GDC 2008: Stories best played

2008-02-20T15:44:00.000-08:00

Richard Rouse is tired of people saying that video games are not a good medium for telling stories. He believes that “best game storytelling can stand up to storytelling in any other medium.”

Rouse, of Paranoid Productions, invited Valve’s Marc Laidlaw, Blue Fang’s Steve Meretzky, and Big Huge Games’ Ken Rolston to talk about what is the best storytelling in video games.

Each panelist chose two games that they felt demonstrated how video game storytelling is worthy of attention.

Their list includes:

Loom (1990)
Thief (1998)
Torment (1999)
BioShock (2006)
Fool’s Errand (1987)
Chronicles of Riddick (2004)
Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney (2001 in Japan, 2005 in North America)
Ico (2001)

In deliberating what games should be on the list, the panelists talked about a bunch of other titles they recommend looking at. Rouse said he planned on putting that list online sometime this weekend.

GDC 2008: Help wanted

2008-02-20T12:55:00.001-08:00

The annual Game Developer Conference is really about the business of making video games, as opposed to being about the games themselves.

For example, during my walk through the North Hall at San Francisco’s Moscone Conference Center, where the event is held, there are displays for technology firms promoting their middleware software and hardware developers showing off the technology that can make playing games a better experience.

There are also numerous country pavilions encouraging coverage of the developers in their area as well as trying to drum up business to be sent their way. “Come develop games in Germany! Look at the great games coming from Norway!”

More important to the video game industry, though, are the number of post-secondary education institutions that are present here. DeVry and the Art Institutes are here, as is Vancouver Film School.

In speaking with the game developers, the one thing they all have in common - aside from wanting to have a hit game - is they all are in dire need of staff. If you have any inclination to work in the industry, to get a job making video games, get that application in now.

They need you.

GDC 2008: Deconstructing BioShock

2008-02-20T12:53:00.000-08:00

Ken Levine, from 2K Games Irrational studio in Boston, has a reputation for being a bit brusque. He’s a man of clearly formed opinions, and he isn’t timid about sharing those ideas. Nor does he have any patience for those who may not share his viewpoint, it seems.

In demoing BioShock at E3 last year, Levine was quick, short, and blunt. He seemed like he needed to be somewhere else. It turns out, he did, because, he admitted during his presentation, they were making changes to BioShock right up until the last minute.

His talk, bright and early at 9 a.m. on the first day of the conference, was entitled, “Storytelling in Bioshock: How to empower gamers to care about your stupid story.” He was scheduled in one of the larger conference rooms, and despite the early hour, a nearly 1,000 people had crammed in the room to hear what he had to say.

“I pissed off some people on this project,” Levine admitted, “because my story came very late.” Levine likens the writing of a video game to any other process that goes into development, and he thinks that the development cycle needs to accommodate last-minute changes to the story in the same way a decision may be made at the last-minute to change a spawn point.

Levine also talked about how the thing that made BioShock such a great storytelling game was the fact that he had stripped out all the storytelling from the game, and instead used the gameplay to develop a narrative. “As time went on,” he explained, “we made our story simpler.”

It’s counterintuitive, because you’d expect the story in a game to get bigger over time, but Levine said that BioShock didn’t find itself until he had initiated the “Great Character Massacre of 2006” and gotten rid of any extraneous characters.

What’s important, said Levine, is to remember “Storytelling 101”: “Who are your main characters and what do they want?”

It’s a subtle, but important distinction, differentiating between story and narrative, and for Levine, the best narrator in a video game is the world. “The thing we render best in video games is the world,” he said. “The benefits of graphics have enabled us to create detailed worlds,” that can then take the responsibility for telling the story.

Maybe Levine isn’t the horror we’ve heard about, and is simply misunderstood. Maybe not.

GDC 2008: At the beginning

2008-02-20T08:25:00.000-08:00

Well, after a six-hour delay, I finally rolled into San Francisco late last night. It's raining with apocalyptic fervor here, which reminds me fondly of Vancouver in February. Not that I was coming to San Francisco to be reminded of home, but ...

I've now settled in at the Press Room provided here at GDC, and in about two minutes will be heading off to attend a talk given by Ken Levine, the brains behind Bioshock.

I'll be back a little later to let you know what interesting things he has to say. Tonight, the GDC Awards get handed out. I'll be there, and I'll let you know how that goes, too.

Let me know if there's anything you want me to try and get the inside scoop on.

HD DVD calls it quits

2008-02-19T07:19:00.000-08:00

In a press release, Toshiba, the driving force behind the HD DVD high-def optical disk format, has announced it will stop promoting and marketing HD DVD products, including players and movies, for which it had been performing mastering tasks.

The format war is over, people. Blu-ray Disc wins this one.

Opening title sequences

2008-02-18T13:47:00.000-08:00

Great piece on CBC.ca today by Martin Morrow, looking at what he calls a revivial of title sequences in feature films.

Even better is the link to a website I've not seen before: Forget the Film, Watch the Titles, where you can watch the opening credits for such films as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Thank You For Smoking, and Existenz.

Not there, yet, is Se7en, which is one of the best opening sequences ever. Any others that you'd like to be able to watch over and over again?

GDC 2008

2008-02-18T13:40:00.001-08:00

I'm heading to San Francisco tomorrow for the annual Game Developers Conference. While some channels of the conference - mobile and serious games - are already underway, I focus my energies on the last part of the week, when commercial video game developers get together and talk about just what goes into making the games we love to play.

I'll be blogging from the show over the next few days, so stay tuned and check back regularly for exclusive news and reports from GDC 2008.

I'll be attending the GDC Awards on Wednesday night, and the Ray Kurzweil keynote speech on Thursday (the title of his talk? "The Next 20 Years of Gaming"), and I've got invites to a private party with Will Wright and the big Prototype bash.

Should be fun.

Depp, Farrell, and Law taking over for Ledger

2008-02-18T09:40:00.000-08:00

Heath Ledger's untimely death sent the bizarre and wonderful Terry Gilliam into a bit of a tailspin.

Ledger, who was at his home in New York when he accidentally overdosed on prescription medication, was on a short break from the filming of Gilliam's new film, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. The film had been shooting in London, England, and was moving to Vancouver to complete principle photography.

Gilliam, though, has quickly reimagined his script, in which "Tony," the character played by Ledger, uses a mirror to transport into different dimensions.

As reported by CinemaSpy.ca and Ain't It Cool News, instead of his original plan, to have Ledger portray "Tony" in the other dimensions, Gilliam has cast Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell, and Jude Law as the incarnations of "Tony" that appear in the other dimensions.

It's a brilliant idea that salvages something - hopefully - wonderful out of a true tragedy. The trio who have, essentially, agreed to portray incarnations of Ledger, are the best choices that could have been made. Good for them for taking on what is likely a difficult task, and in so doing honouring Ledger at the same time.

News Flash: Family Guy's MacFarlane funny in person

2008-02-16T07:37:00.000-08:00

I was at the 2008 Canadian Awards for the Electronic and Animated Arts - the Elans - last night. Last year's affair was hosted by William Shatner. This year we were treated to Seth MacFarlane, creator and writer of Family Guy (he also performs many of the voices for the show, including Peter, Stewie, and Brian).

MacFarlane launched into a 30-minute monologue to open the show, and he proved to be as funny a stand-up as he is as an animated satirical television show writer.

Riffing on how Canada is different from the United States - "everything that we do wrong, Canada does right" - MacFarlane also demonstrated that he is not afraid to push a few buttons. Not that that is a surprise to anyone who's a fan of his show. He joked about Heath Ledger, AIDS, and Jesus Christ ("it's time for America to invent a new imaginary friend").

He's clearly taken with our country, though, saying that he's from Hollywood, the land of movie making, but it was nice to be in Vancouver where they actually make the movies. He also said that his asking price for hosting the show was $100,000, which was only about 400 Canadian dollars.

What I didn't know about MacFarlane was how talented an impersonator he is. Given his ability as a voice actor, it doesn't come as a complete surprise, but his Michael J. Fox, circa Back to the Future, was uncanny. He's a passable Bryan Adams, Bill Cosby, and Bob Hope, too.

How about that exclusive?

I had the chance to interview MacFarlane before the show began. I asked him why he used his own voice for the character of Brian, the dog in Family Guy. He said that originally, it was because it was the most opposite to the voice he had come up with for Peter. "There's always a character, from a writing standpoint," he continued, "that you kind of model after yourself in a lot of ways, and Brian is probably the closest."

So Brian, then, is Seth. As an animated dog.

As for the pointing monkey in Chris' closet? "It's an easy way out of a scene," he said.

I finished my three-minute interview by asking him how his broadway musical was coming along. "It's still on the drawing board," he said. And the novel? "The novel is non-existent, I don't know who you've been talking to."

I'm not sure it was in the script, but MacFarlane ended his opening monologue with the bit where Stewie is making fun of Brian's attempt to be a novelist.

The awards went to . . .

In terms of the awards handed out to Canadian-made video games, BioWare's Mass Effect was the big winner, snaking best character, best writing, best art direction, best game design, and game of the year.

Relic Entertainment's Company of Heroes took the prizes for outstanding innovation in gaming and best PC game, Slant Six's SOCOM U.S. Navy SEALs: Tactical Strike took best handheld game of the year, and Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed was awarded best console game and best original music score.

The end of it all

MacFarlane ended the show with a song and dance number. In the 100th episode of Family Guy, "Stewie Kills Lois," the writers and producers planned a musical number in which
Stewie, when he's President of the United States, sings about everyone who is on his "list," and who, therefore, had better watch out. The bit was cut at the last minute to get the episode down to time, and will end up as a special feature on an upcoming DVD release, but last night MacFarlane performed it live.

The video screen projected the fully-animated scene, and the soundtrack was missing Stewie's voice track, so MacFarlane - as Stewie - sang along with the video.

A priceless end to an amazing performance by MacFarlane and all the award nominees and winners.

So much for Super Mario Galaxy

2008-02-14T14:21:00.000-08:00

It's a very playable game, but I just don't think that Super Mario Galaxy was a groundbreaking enough game to warrant a game of the year nomination for the Game Developers Choice Awards.

At the same time, I think not giving Mass Effect a game of the year nod is a travesty.

I covered this in much greater detail in my "Trigger Happy" column in last week's Georgia Straight, and it seems that some Straight readers are taking issue with my opinion. They are actually leaving comments taking me to task about it.

Of course, the people speaking up so far are clearly fans of the game, which is par for the course when it comes to anyone being critical of Nintendo or their Italian plumber.

But there has to be someone out there who agrees with me, right?

Anyone?

When your TV show will return

2008-02-11T20:17:00.000-08:00

It looks like the film and television writers in the U.S. - who account for a great deal of entertainment north of the 49th - will be heading back to work on Wednesday. Yup, looks like the strike is over.

And while the writers haven't ratified the contract, I'm with the members of the WGA who feel that while it's not a perfect deal, it's a pretty good deal.

Assuming that everything gets back underway - it will never be back to normal; television is changed forever - I came up with a rundown of when the various network shows are going to be back on air.

You can get the complete list over at CinemaSpy.ca. The networks listed are the American networks, but most of the shows are available in Canada on either the American feeds from Canadian cable providers, or from the Canadian broadcasters who have the rights to particular shows. Lost, for example, airs on CTV in Canada. House airs on Global.

So check your local listings.

I'm disappointed that Chuck isn't likely to be back until fall. What are you going to miss most? What won't you miss at all (Bionic Woman!)?

Related note: Battlestar Galactica returns on April 4.

Lost returns from the brink

2008-02-11T10:16:00.000-08:00

I nearly gave up on Lost last season, but, like most people, the switch to flash forwards in the season three finale hooked me again.

Now that season four is underway, it seems that we'll be seeing more flash forwards. For those who have studied directing legend Alfred Hitchcock, this is a smart move. Certainly I'm interested again.

My look at Lost, season four, is the topic of this week's "Remote View" column over at CinemaSpy.ca.

Anyone else have thoughts about the first couple of episodes of season four? In particular, were the flashes in episode two flashbacks, or flash forwards?

Writers rewarded for work on video game

2008-02-10T16:17:00.001-08:00

Dead Head Fred writers Dave Ellis and Adam Cogan have been presented with the first ever Writers Guild Award for video game writing.

Dead Head Fred is a PSP game about Fred, a private investigator, who is looking into the affairs of businessman Ulysses S. Pitt. Pitt claims to be the saviour of the people, but is actually rotten to the core. He cottons to Fred, though, and Fred ends up dead.

And beheaded.

A scientist in Pitt’s employ preserves Fred’s eyes and brain and reanimates his corpse in the hope that Fred can turn the tables on the bad apple.

Fred’s new head is nothing more than his brain and eyes floating in a jar, but he collects other heads - including a corpse head that can spew fluids that it’s sucked up and a stone head that can break through walls - and Fred is able to swap one head for another depending on the situation he finds himself in.

Rated mature, Dead Head Fred is hindered by long loading times, uninspired level design, and terrible gameplay mechanics, but there are two elements of the game that are great: writing and voice work.

The main character, Fred, is voiced by John C. McGinley and the main antagonist, Ulysses S. Pitt, is performed by Jon Polito. They make the game.

Therefore, the writers of the game deserve recognition, because without their witty dialogue, there would have been nothing clever for McGinley and Polito to say.

Congrats to Ellis and Cogan. And to all the other writers who were nominated, who also deserve the recognition for their hard work.

Firefly novel released

2008-02-09T04:53:00.000-08:00

Steven Brust is a favourite author of mine.

Firefly, the television show created by Joss Whedon is a favourite of mine.

What to do when two favourites comes together? Rejoice, silly.

My Own Kind of Freedom is a fanfic novel written by Brust and set in the Firefly universe. Brust has released the novel under a Creative Commons license, which makes it free to download and share, as long as it's done so free from commercial purposes.

So I'm sharing. Download My Own Kind of Freedom.

I haven't read it, yet. Wanted to make sure I was spreading the word, first. But I've read many Brust books, and have no qualms in recommending Freedom before having read it myself.

For those of you not familiar with Brust, he's the author of a bunch of books, but notably the series of fantasy novels about Vlad Taltos, assassin and gourmet cook. Brust has a delightful sense of humour and a flare for witty dialogue, but is able to convey these things even while being deep and serious.

He's actually the perfect writer to novelize Firefly because the tone that Whedon created for that television show - funny and melancholy at the same time - is something Brust has been doing in his books all along.

Off you go, then. Download, read, and come back and let me know what you think. I'll post my own thoughts after I've had time to read it myself, which will probably be in July. Something to look forward to.

Handheld Xbox still a possibility?

2008-02-08T12:06:00.000-08:00

There've always been rumours floating around that Microsoft had a portable, handheld Xbox in the works, something to compete with the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP.

For a while, it was thought that the Zune might be this device, but now that we've seen the Zune - most have been unimpressed - we know it is not in the same market segment as the DS or PSP. And, it should be noted, Microsoft has always denied it had a portable game system in the works.

Well, in an on-stage interview with New York Times video game reporter Seth Schiesel, Shane Kim, corporate VP of Microsoft Game Studios added some fuel to the perpetual motion machine that is Xbox Portable.

When Shiesel asked about Microsoft's plans for a portable gaming device, Kim said:
Never say never ... launching a portable device is like launching another Xbox 360 ... you have to really step back and ask, devoting whatever bandwidth and resources you would have to to make the Zune a multifunction device, is that really the best way to go?

So maybe the Zune is going to be a gaming gadget after all. The Zune seems to be having troubles getting traction against the iPod, so maybe this is how Microsoft tries to keep the device relevant.

Anyone out there used a Zune? Let us know what it's like in the comments.

GTA IV website launched

2008-02-08T10:09:00.000-08:00

Well, the moment at which fans of Grand Theft Auto will be able to play the new game approaches, and today we take another step towards it.

The official website for GTA IV went live today. It is age gated, so be prepared to lie about your age if you're a minor. From the press release from Rockstar Games:

Today, you are invited to take your first steps into our fictional world of Liberty City as well. Meet-up with Niko's cousin Roman at his cab company in Broker. Be first in line for an on-stage performance in Star Junction. Test out your fizz-handling skills at the Sprunk soda HQ in Alderney. Analyze your 'Love Meet' compatibility while strolling through Algonquin, then swing by the Steinway Beer Garden in Dukes for a pint. This is only the first taste of what's out there to discover in Liberty City.

Anyone else planning on visiting Liberty City?

Legendary: The Box coming this summer

2008-02-07T09:42:00.000-08:00

E3 2007 was a different type of affair. Held in the hotels along the beach strip of Santa Monica, not the convention centre of Los Angeles, it was three days of exclusive appointments, instead of the usual free-for-all.

I didn't get a chance to book time to see the folks at Gamecock, but all journalists who hung out at the beachside motel taken over by Gamecock were all talking about Legendary: The Box, being developed by Spark Unlimited.

The game is about an art thief who steals Pandora's Box. You can imagine what happens when he opens it. If you can't, this is from the press release:

When he inadvertently opens it, he releases hordes of beasts thought to be fictional – such as werewolves and gryphons – into an unprepared modern world. A full scale war between man and myth begins, and it is quickly complicated by the actions of powerful secret societies. As the person responsible for releasing this terror, Deckard’s unwittingly become the only person capable of containing it once more and saving civilization from being destroyed by the terrifying creatures.

Today, Gamecock sent a note - from the company headquarters, the Cockpit in Austin, Texas - establishing Summer 2008 as the release date for Legendary. It's coming for PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.

Note to self: make sure to schedule time with Gamecock at the next E3 in July.

New Mass Effect story coming soon

2008-02-06T12:56:00.000-08:00

We knew it was going to be coming eventually, and now we know that the first downloadable content for Mass Effect is coming on March 10.

From the press release issued today:

“Bring Down the Sky” includes a new uncharted world that introduces the notorious and feared alien race of the Batarians. A Batarian extremist group has hijacked a mobile asteroid station in the Asgard system, setting it on a collision course with the nearby colony world of Terra Nova. Only Commander Shepard can save the millions of innocent civilians before the asteroid completes its deadly descent.

400 points gets you 90 minutes of extended story and a possible 50 Xbox Achievement points.

When I interviewed the developers at BioWare last fall, they told me that downloadable content will add to the overarching Mass Effect story, so playing through this expansion will enhance your overall Mass Effect experience.

I'm in. Anyone else excited about the potential of downloadable content as a way of extending and expanding upon stories?

Metal Gear Solid collection

2008-02-06T09:43:00.000-08:00

News today that Konami is releasing the first three Metal Gear Solid games in one package for the PlayStation 2 game system.

Metal Gear Solid: The Essential Collection includes the original Metal Gear Solid, developed for the original PlayStation, the director's cut of Metal Gear Solid 2, and Metal Gear Solid 3. All of it comes in a commemorative package with artwork by renowned Metal Gear Solid artist Yoji Shinkawa.

The Metal Gear games, with anti-hero Solid Snake as the protagonist, pioneered the stealth action game genre.

I just know I'm not the only one waiting patiently for Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. It's expected to be released in June.

Studio tour: Propaganda Games and Turok

2008-02-04T21:43:00.000-08:00

I spent a good chunk of the day at Vancouver’s Propaganda Games today, steeped in the Turok experience.

The day started with a presentation by game director Joel Manners. He talked about how everyone on the team was excited to be working on a game in which players got to interact with dinosaurs.

What he really meant was get hunted by dinosaurs.

His group of employees did a great job of reimagining Turok, and updating it not just technically, but also in terms of story and character.

Playing Turok

Turok is a visceral, sci-fi themed first person shooter set some 250 years from now. You are Joseph Turok, a former black ops commando who has been enlisted to help take down his old mentor, a rogue military specialist. You crash land on a planet that is infested with dinosaurs, and have to not only survive, but find a way home.

All the while you are hunted by the denizens of the world. And yes, Virginia, there are T-Rexes in this game.

Manners said that how you approach the game is up to you. You can be stealthy, or blast your way through, or even turn your enemies - dinosaurs and soldiers - against each other. “You’ve got firepower, environment, and multiple enemies,” said Manners, “and how you use them is up to you.”

Guns and knives

Game designer Ryan Greenhow talked about how Manners’ philosophy was that the player needed to “experience the game through the gun.” What that meant, said Greenhow, was that “you have to have a cool gun in your hands, and when you pull the trigger you have to have a cool reaction, and then you have to see the result of that.”

The trick, though, was figuring out how to get that “through the gun” experience for the knife. In most first-person shooter games, explained Greenhow, the knife is “the lamest weapon.” But along with the bow, the knife is one of Turok’s key weapon specialties. To keep the intensity, then, the Propaganda crew came up with “crazy knife moves” that you can execute to make fighting with a knife more visceral.

What’s missing

Manners also talked about how the team pulled vehicles from the game after spending a great deal of time working on them. While it was fun to recreate the Jeep scene from Jurassic Park, explained Manners, vehicles just didn’t fit in the Turok experience. “You’ve got to be able to smell that thing’s breath,” he said, “and you can’t get that when you’re mechanized.”

Inspired by dinosaurs

Manners said that there were two films that were particular inspirations for the new Turok video game. The first was Aliens, with its gritty reality and sci-fi background, but horror take.

The second was 28 Days Later. “The zombies in that film embodied what we wanted in our raptors,” said Manners. “Unending killing machines that are fast as hell.”

Manners said that the Turok team didn’t want Jurassic Park raptors that hunt in packs and can open doors. They wanted their raptors to be brutal and ruthless. All the better to create carnage.

What’s next

Turok is now available for PS3 and Xbox 360, and will be available for PC later this spring. While Manners admitted that it was developed with sequels in mind, he was careful not to suggest that a sequel has been confirmed for development.

It’s a fun game to play, with lots of twitch action and some shocking surprises for good measure. Nothing like having a dinosaur attack you without warning to get the blood boiling.

Don’t forget that the developers of Turok are going to be at the Granville and Robson Future Shop in Vancouver tomorrow night, to say hi, answer questions, offer game play tips, and even sign your copy of the game. For those not in Vancouver, you can participate in the online chat with these same developers. Full details are over here.

Playing Turok

2008-02-02T12:48:00.000-08:00

One of the benefits to being a video game journalist is that I sometimes get to play games before they get released. Yesterday, I spent a couple of hours playing through the first level of Turok, the reimagined version of the game developed here in Vancouver by Propaganda Games.

It's pretty great. It owes a debt to Halo and Gears of War - what first-person shooter doesn't? - but there is something subversive going on in Turok, and it has to do with the characters. One element of the original character that the Propaganda developers kept is that Turok is Native American.

It's a rare video game that makes the protagonist a person of colour.

Aside from that, Turok looks great and has some slick gameplay to offer. I sure enjoyed myself.

Plus: dinosaurs galore. And you fight them with a knife.

On Monday, I'll be at Propaganda for most of the day at a press event. I'll throw up a report later that day, so check back.

Talkin' Turok - with the developers

2008-02-01T11:33:00.000-08:00

Turok, initially a comic character, was first translated to video games in 1997 for the Nintendo 64 as Turok: Dinosaur Hunter.

The character went through a number of iterations through the years, but has been dormant since 2002.

Vancouver developer Propaganda Games - a division of Touchstone Games (part of the Disney Interactive group) - made a splash when they appeared at E3 in 2005. They didn't announce the franchise that they were going to be working on at that time, but promised with a wink that it was going to be reinventing something very cool.

Turok has been reinvented, that's for sure. The new game is a first-person shooter, and looks to have assimilated some very cool features from recent games in that genre. It's set on a distant planet in our future, and players "take on the role of Joseph Turok, a former Black Ops commando, now part of an elite Special Forces squad on a mission to take down a war criminal on a genetically-altered planet."

Well, Turok is nearly upon us. And Future Shop is giving gamers a chance to connect with each other and the creators in an online chat on launch day, Tuesday, February 5. The online chat starts at 5 p.m. PT (8 p.m. ET) and will run for 30 minutes. Access the chat at futureshop.ca and ask the game's creators any question you want, including hints on keeping Turok alive.

For those gamers who live in - or near - Vancouver, you can meet the creators in person at the Future Shop store at Granville and Robson. You'll be able to try the game, ask questions, and even get your copy signed by the guys and girls who made it. The in-store event runs for an hour from 5:30 p.m. PT.

Get more information on all this over here.

Anyone else out there planning on participating?

Breaking news: Holy crap

2008-02-01T06:09:00.001-08:00

Microsoft has made a bid to purchase Yahoo in an effort to maintain a competitive edge against Google. The offer is worth US$44.6 billion.

Shares of Yahoo are already up over 50%.

When monkeys take over

2008-01-31T11:12:00.000-08:00

This is a great example of what happens when the monkeys are able to run free. Brilliant. And believe me when I tell you there is truth here.

From Crackle: monkey uprising! superbowl commercial.

jPod riffs on life making video games

2008-01-31T11:00:00.000-08:00

Douglas Coupland’s 2006 novel jPod concerns the lives of a group of Vancouver twentysomethings working at a video-game developer called Neotronic Arts. It’s a thinly veiled reference to Electronic Arts (EA), in the same way that Microsoft was the model for the monolithic corporation in Microserfs.

jPod the book is now jPod the television series. Airing Tuesdays at 9 p.m. on CBC (only in Canada at this point), the show follows the book quite closely as Ethan Jarlewski (David W. Kopp) deals with parents who have shed responsibility. His mother, Carol (Sherry Miller), runs a grow-op in the basement of the house he grew up in, and his father, Jim (Alan Thicke), is a laid-off engineer who has become an actor in search of a speaking role.

Working with Ethan at Neotronic are Kaitlin (Emilie Ullerup), Bree (Steph Song), Cowboy (Ben Ayres), and John Doe (Torrance Coombs). All were assigned desks in the company sub-basement because of a Y2K computer glitch that grouped together employees whose last names started with the letter J. While working on a new skateboarding video game, they find themselves under the leadership of a new boss, Steve (Colin Cunningham).

jPod has plenty to say about the process of developing video games and how management can interfere to the detriment of a project. And it’s a Coupland creation, so there are tons of pop-culture references and scads of social satire. In terms of tone and theme, the television show is somewhat different: it doesn’t quite skewer consumer culture the way the book does—after all, television is an advertising medium—and it ramps up the book’s absurdity to near slapstick.

Being Coupland characters, the members of jPod are universally intelligent, with that quirky hipness the author imbues all his creations with, from Cowboy’s Robitussin binges to John Doe’s striving for statistical normalcy. The casting is uncanny, and the actors are clearly having fun with these roles. Coupland himself appears in the novel as a smart, arrogant, and manipulative character. It will be interesting to see how jPod’s writers and producers approach that plot point.

[originally published in the Georgia Straight]

These Canadian developed games kick ass

2008-01-31T10:47:00.000-08:00

Talented Canadians always make me proud. Feist is a breakout pop success. Sidney Crosby is a phenomenon and an ambassador for the game of hockey. Sarah Polley and David Cronenberg are the toast of moviedom. And in the realm of video games, too, Canadians are being heralded for their creative works.

The developers at Vancouver’s Next Level Games brought Mario’s soccer franchise to the Nintendo Wii, and with Mario Strikers Charged (rated everyone 10+), they’ve ratcheted up the intensity. At its core is soccer, so you dribble, pass, and shoot the ball in your attempts to score in your opponents’ goal.

But this is a Mario game, too, so there are supercharged moves and powerups that give your matches some added excitement. You get to create your own team of four—a captain and three sidekicks—and you can play against a friend or the Wii itself. You use the position-sensing Wii Remote, but not nearly as much as you might think. For the most part, you rely on the buttons and the thumbstick.

SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Tactical Strike (rated teen) was created by Vancouver’s Slant Six Games. This edition of Sony Computer Entertainment’s SOCOM series is a fresh take on playing as a Navy SEAL. To begin with, you don’t control your squad; as the commander, you direct the actions of your three squad members, telling them where to go and what to do, but you don’t actually move them or pull the trigger.

While demonstrating the game for the Georgia Straight, Slant Six’s design director, David Seymour, explained that “The reason this is a great game is that this is not twitch gameplay. You get all the good stuff, but with a refined interface.” He’s right. Because the game was created for the PSP and not ported from a different system, the control scheme is innovative and quick to pick up.

Created by Torontonian Jonathan Mak, Everyday Shooter (rated everyone) is a delightful twist on the Asteroids-inspired games in which you use one joystick to control a ship and another to control firing. What Mak did was create a game where not only are no two levels alike, but playing it is—get this—soothing. This is largely because of the game’s true genius: its soundtrack. Instead of using sound effects of explosions and firing lasers, Mak uses guitar riffs, so as you move your ship from one location to another on the screen, you hear notes being played on an electric guitar. And when you destroy a fleet of enemy ships, you hear complementary guitar sounds. Put it all together, and you get a smooth, harmonizing solo-guitar soundtrack that you create by playing the game. Which begs the question: do guitars make a sound in outer space? Everyday Shooter is available from Sony Computer Entertainment for the PS3, through the PlayStation Network.

All of this Canadian video-game talent will be officially recognized at the second annual Canadian Awards for the Electronic and Animated Arts—the Elans—at the Centre in Vancouver for Performing Arts on February 15. Last year’s emcee was William Shatner; this year, organizers have confirmed Seth MacFarlane—creator, writer, and star of Family Guy—as host. If you want to go, a limited number of tickets are available to the public through www.theelans.com.

[originally published in the Georgia Straight]

New Canadian bands for 2008

2008-01-29T16:02:00.001-08:00

CBC.ca has a great photo feature up taking a look at 10 "hot new Canadian bands."

At the top of the list is Tokyo Police Club. Their song, "Your English is Good," was one of the best singles to hit the airwaves in 2007. Quick and catchy, exuberant and full of energy, they are an easy pick.

Also on the list are Calgary's Woodpigeon, Toronto's Crystal Castles, Halifax's Jenn Grant, and Vancouver's (but born in Kenya and raised in London, Ontario) Shad.

Good stuff to look forward to.

HD DVD as the Black Knight

2008-01-29T11:02:00.000-08:00

Great bit in the Wired Blog Network on Epicenter, comparing HD DVD (the Toshiba-championed high-def DVD format) to the Black Knight, from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Recall the scene in which Arthur (Graham Chapman) confronts the Black Knight, who won't allow anyone to cross the bridge he guards:

King Arthur cuts off Black Knight's left arm.

King Arthur
Now stand aside, worthy adversary.

Black Knight
'Tis but a scratch.

King Arthur
A scratch? Your arm's off!

Black Knight
No, it isn't!

King Arthur
Well, what's that then?

Black Knight
I've had worse!

King Arthur
You liar.

Black Knight
Come on, you pansy!

It's a great metaphor for the extraordinary efforts the HD DVD group is making to keep themselves relevant. We learned today that despite cutting the price of their HD DVD players by up to 50%, Toshiba still got outsold by Blu-ray at a 2-1 margin.

Toshiba still plans to spend $2.7 million for a 30-second Super Bowl commercial.

Like the headline at Wired reads: It's not just a flesh wound.

New Bond film gets titled

2008-01-24T09:33:00.000-08:00

Quantum of Solace.

Hmmm.

Grand Theft Auto IV: April 29

2008-01-24T07:39:00.001-08:00

The highly anticipated Grand Theft Auto IV will be available worldwide - on both PS3 and Xbox 360 - on April 29.

Rockstar Games had hoped to get the game out the door last fall - it would have helped with the financial status of parent company Take Two Interactive - but perhaps wisely held the game to make sure it was polished and ready.

Fans, I'm confident, approve, despite how anxious some are to play the game. GTA IV has the potential to set sales records.

The latest game in the franchise is set in Liberty City. You'll play as Nikloai Bellic, searching the city for a person of importance.

GameDaily has a round-up of eight new features in the game:

Technology: your character can use computers, Internet, mobile phones
More difficult police alert system: not so easy to get away
Role-playing features removed: customizing character and leveling up are gone
Going up: you'll be able to get onto the roofs of those skyscrapers
Aim control: free aim and zoom features for weapons
Hail a taxi: a safer way to get across town, especially given #2
How to make friends and influence people: networking has become a game mechanic
Multiplayer: perhaps even cooperative play

I'm looking forward to this. Plus, it looks amazing. What do you think?

Internal Soundtrack: Horse Soldier, Horse Soldier

2008-01-23T11:28:00.000-08:00

If all country music sounded like Corb Lund, I’d be first on the wagon train to Calgary.

Lund was a founding member of seminal Edmonton punk band the smalls, but found his way back to his roots a few years ago. Lund grew up in and around Taber, Alberta, just outside Calgary, and along with his band, the Hurtin’ Albertans, has found a unique sound that blends country, rock, folk, bluegrass, roots. Hell, he blends pretty much anything he wants.

You may recognize his name from his last hit, “The Truck Got Stuck.”

“Horse Soldier, Horse Soldier” is the song that found its way into my head early this morning. It’s less comedic than “The Truck” and more epic.

It comes from the fifth album by Lund and the Hurtin’ Albertans, titled Horse Soldier! Horse Soldier! (note the punctuational differences) and released last fall. The entire album is a tribute to horses and the people who have ridden them throughout history.

This song in particular traces the horse solider (duh) through the conflicts of modern history. It’s a story, actually, which makes sense, because Lund is, in fact, a modern-day storyteller, a troubadour for our age.

And it’s got this as a hook:

I'm a hussar, I'm a Hun, I'm a wretched Englishman
Routing Bonaparte at Waterloo
I'm a dragoon on a dun, I'm a Cossack on the run
I'm a horse soldier, timeless, through and through
I’m a horse soldier, eternal, through and through

Lund is the kind of musician my father and I can both listen to when trapped together in a car - or truck. And Marty Robbins. That’s a special thing.

Canadian Awards for the Electronic and Animated Arts

2008-01-22T12:16:00.000-08:00

Wow, it's like the week of award nomination announcements.

The Elan Awards - the Canadian Awards for the Electronic and Animated Arts - announced the various shortlists this morning in Vancouver.

The event, which will be hosted by Seth MacFarlane (creator, writer, and star of Family Guy), is on February 15 in Vancouver. Tickets are available to the public.

These awards actually recognize animation and video games, which means the list is loooong. You can get the entire list over here, but here's the list of video game nominees:

Game of the Year
Assassin’s Creed
Company of Heroes: Opposing Forces
Mass Effect
Skate

Best Console Game
Assassin’s Creed
Mass Effect
Scarface
Skate

Best PC Game
Company of Heroes
War Hammer 40,000 Dawn of War: Dark Crusade
Power Rangers: Super Legends

Best Sound Design
Crash of the Titans
Need for Speed ProStreet
Skate
Mass Effect

Best Original Music Score
Assasins Creed
Mass Effect
Company of Heroes
War Hammer 40,000 Dawn of War: Dark Crusade

Best Character
Commander Shepard (Mass Effect)
Crash Bandicoot (Crash of the Titans)
Death Jr. (Science Fair of Doom)
Tony Montana (Scarface)

Best Art Direction
Assassin’s Creed
Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts
Mass Effect
Skate

Best Handheld Game of the Year
Chicken Little: Ace in Action
High School Musical Sing It
Socom U.S. Navy Seals: Tactical Strike
Sonic Rivals

Best Game Design of the Year
Assassins Creed
Mario Strikers Charged
Mass Effect
Skate

Best Mobile/Casual/Arcade Game of the Year
Skate
Candace Kane's Candy Factory

Best Writing for a Game Production
Company of Heroes
Company of Heroes: Opposing Forces
Mass Effect
Scarface

Outstanding Innovation in Gaming
Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts
Mass Effect
Skate
War Hammer 40,000 Dawn of War: Dark Crusade

International Video Game of the Year
The Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar
Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
Crysis

Nominees for Game Developers Choice Awards

2008-01-22T10:20:00.000-08:00

The nominees for the Game Developers Choice Awards were announced this morning.

BioShock and Portal lead the pack, each with five nominations, including Game of the Year.

I'm very pleased to see Mass Effect (Game Design, Writing, Audio, Innovation) and Everyday Shooter (Best Debut, Best Downloadable), two of my favourites of 2007, getting some recognition.

Notable titles missing from this list? Surprisingly, not much. Maybe Heavenly Sword (pictured here) for Visual Art. Maybe Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction for Game Design. Looks like Uncharted: Drake's Fortune claimed the Sony Computer Entertainment quota.

And Vampire Rain. Kidding. I kid.

Mass Effect deserved a Game of the Year nomination, though. Certainly over Super Mario Galaxy, which was fine for what it was: a rehash of the franchise.

Anyone out there note any other glaring omissions?

Here's the complete list of categories and nominees, which will be handed out at GDC 2008 in San Francisco on Wednesday, February 20:

Best Game Design
BioShock
Call of Duty 4
Mass Effect
Portal
Super Mario Galaxy

Best Visual Art
Assassin's Creed
Team Fortress 2
Crysis
BioShock
Uncharted: Drake's Fortune

Best Technology
Halo 3
Crysis
Call of Duty 4
Portal
Assassin's Creed

Best Writing
Portal
God of War II
Mass Effect
Half-Life 2: Episode 2
BioShock

Best Audio
Call of Duty 4
Everyday Shooter
BioShock
God of War II
Mass Effect

Best Debut
Crackdown (Realtime Worlds)
flOw (ThatGameCompany)
The Witcher (CD Projekt)
Everyday Shooter (Queasy Games)
Aquaria (Bit Blot)

Innovation
Rock Band
Portal
flOw
Peggle
Mass Effect

Best Handheld Game
Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass
Phase
Contra 4
Peggle (for iPod)

Best Downloadable Game
Pac-Man Championship Edition
Everyday Shooter
Peggle
Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords (XBLA version)
Flow

Game of the Year
BioShock
Call of Duty 4
Portal
Rock Band
Super Mario Galaxy

White PS3 coming to America

2008-01-22T08:05:00.000-08:00

A number of gaming sites (here, here, here, and here) are reporting that Sony is ready to announce the release of a white PS3 - sorry, ceramic white - in North America.

The console has been on shelves in Japan since last November. It's one of the 40GB units, so it will not have backwards compatibility or memory card slots.

The white - sorry, ceramic white - PS3 will ship with a ceramic white DualShock 3 controller. Now with more rumble.

No availability date has been announced, but we like the idea of crisp white in the spring.

Anyone out there like the idea of mixing up their black and white peripherals, a la Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney?

Xbox LIVE Arcade Awards

2008-01-21T14:35:00.000-08:00

While we're on the topic of awards, Microsoft is giving gamers the chance to select the winners of the first-ever Xbox LIVE Arcade Awards.

Voting begins Tuesday, January 22 at 2:00 a.m. PT (5:00 a.m. GT) and runs through Wednesday, January 30 at 11:59 p.m. PT (January 31 at 02:59 a.m. ET).

The public get to have a say in the following categories:

Best Overall Arcade Game
Best Classic Game
Best Original Game
Best Family Friendly Game
Best Competitive Multiplayer Game
Best Cooperative Multiplayer Game

Other award categories - fans don't get a say in these, though - include:

Best selling game
Most played game
Highest rated game
Staff choice

The winners of the new awards will be announced at GDC in February.

Play some indie games, vote for your favourite

2008-01-21T12:29:00.000-08:00

The excellent Independent Games Festival, which occurs every year during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, has unveiled the website where you, the gamer, can vote for your favourite indie game. The winner of the audience award gets a US$2,500 prize.

And get this: all the games that are in the running for the audience award are available to play - for free - either online or as a download.

The game pictured here is Tri-Achnid, a Flash game you can play in your web browser. You move a three-legged spider through a primordial environment by moving its legs and creating web threads. It's fully engaging and it'll take some practice to get the hang of moving your creature around.

There are 11 games up for the audience award - from a total 173 entries - and all 11 are available to play over at the IGF site.

The full list of IFG finalist games is available here.

Sarah Connor Chronicles

2008-01-21T09:11:00.000-08:00

Anyone seen the new television series, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles? The first two episodes were pretty good, I thought, largely because they did such a great job of remaking the first two films - we don't talk about the third film, Rise of the Machines, in my circle.

The real treat, though, is watching Summer Glau as River Tam, oops, I meant Cameron Phillips. What was the line from that television commercial starring the video game geeks? "She kicks high."

Yeah, that's it exactly.

Anyhow, over at CinemaSpy.ca is my latest television column, and this week I write about just what makes The Sarah Connor Chronicles so good.

Anyone out there watching this?

Video game review: Super Mario Galaxy

2008-01-20T15:42:00.000-08:00

The latest adventure for the Italian plumber with a soft spot for Princess Peach takes place in outer space. As you’d expect from the developers at Nintendo, the galaxies and planets you visit are wild and wacky. Using both the Wii Remote and Nunchuk, you’ll guide Mario from planet to planet in a search for star bits, power stars, and grand stars. You need the energy from these stars to chase after Bowser, who has - once again - kidnapped your beloved princess. Physics makes up a great deal of the innovation in this game. Gravity is something to consider when running and jumping, because when you fall off the edge of a planet, your demise comes about because of black holes. While this is by no means a true two-player game, a second person can help you out by picking up another Wii Remote and using it to collect star bits and fire them at enemies. Super Mario Galaxy is quirky and very playable - just what we expected. Rated everyone.

[originally published in the Georgia Straight]

Internal Soundtrack: Weighty Ghost

2008-01-19T10:50:00.000-08:00

It didn't take much for "Weighty Ghost" to find its way onto the internal soundtrack this morning. It's cold and rainy here in Vancouver, and even though the morning light appears earlier than a month ago, it was still dark and grey.

At some point, while in the swimming pool with my 9-month-old daughter, I caught a guitar lick wafting through the air. Instantly, this song, by Halifax band Wintersleep (off their album Welcome to the Night Sky), was rolling through my head, the choral chorus suddenly there: "Oh, have you seen my ghost? Seen my ghost, seen my ghost? Oh, have you seen my ghost, staring at the ground?"

The banjo twang and organ drone give the song a melancholy that was quite appropriate as we walked home in the drizzle.

What happened with Rock Band in Canada?

2008-01-17T09:31:00.000-08:00

I should have realized something was going on when I didn't receive a review copy of Rock Band last November. But because there are so many games that end up in my mailbox at that time of year, I didn't, actually, even notice it was missing.

It wasn't until I was talking with some gamers over the holiday break that I realized something had really snafued the release of Rock Band into Canada.

It seems that MTV Games just couldn't make the games fast enough to meet demand. And, as is often the case, the Canadian market got shorted as a result.

My investigation into what happened was the focus of my video game column, "Trigger Happy," that publishes in the Georgia Straight. You can read the entire article here.

Despite the claims of many consumers who are angry at their local games store, the fact that Rock Band never appeared on time or in quantities to meet demand was not due to any error by the retailers.

Video game writers nominated for Writers Guild Awards

2008-01-17T09:05:00.000-08:00

The Writers Guild of America, currently on strike over contract issues with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, has released its nomination list for the new category of Videogame Writing.

The nominees are:

Crash of the Titans: written by Christopher Mitchell (Sierra Entertainment)
Dead Head Fred: written by Dave Ellis and Adam Cogan (D3 Publisher)
The Simpsons Game: lead writer Matt Selman, writers Tim Long and Matt Warburton, dialogue Jeff Poliquin (EA)
The Witcher: lead story designer Artur Ganszyniec, dialogue Sebastian Stepien, additional dialogue Marcin Blacha, writers Sande Chen and Anne Toole (Atari)
World in Conflict: story design Christofer Emgard, story consultant Larry Bond, script consultant Ed Zuckerman (Sierra Entertainment)

Each of these writers is deserving of recognition for their efforts - without writers there would be no games, actually - but I'm pulling for The Witcher, as the writing team on that game included Anne Toole, who I interviewed last spring. Go, Anne!

The WGA Awards are handed out on February 9. The full list of nominees is posted here.

Only Nintendo profiting from Wii: Suda 51

2008-01-17T08:52:00.001-08:00

Courtesy of CVG by way of MCV, an interesting claim from Japanese game designer Suda 51 - otherwise known as Goichi Suda, the creator of the slick and bizarre Killer 7.

Suda claims that third-party games released for the Wii just haven't been selling. His new game, No More Heroes (pictured here), has already hit shelves in Japan, and is scheduled for release in North America by Ubisoft in mid-February.

In speaking with CVG, Suda said, "Whilst the sales weren't as high as I hoped, other titles for Wii aren't selling so well either. Only Nintendo titles are doing well. This isn't just because of the current situation in Japan, as this is happening outside Japan."

I - and others - have been suggesting this is a problem for the long-term success of the Wii. This year will be critical for Nintendo unless the company wants to continue operating in its own little Wii world.

Steve Jobs’ Macworld 2008 keynote

2008-01-15T12:29:00.000-08:00

Apple fanatics were hoping for some exciting news at Steve Jobs’ keynote to open Macworld 2008. Negative types figured nothing could compare to last year’s unveiling of the iPhone.

Dummies.

Steve today took the cover of the new MacBook Air, a laptop so thin it fits in an envelope. At just three-quarters of an inch thick, the new portable computer is as thin as two iPod Touches. That’s awfully thin.

The MacBook Air weighs only 3 pounds, sports a full-size keyboard (my sausage fingers are grateful), and a 13.3-inch backlit display with built in camera. The track pad mirrors the iPod Touch and iPhone interface, which means more control over the desktop.

There is no optical drive in the Air, though. It installs software by borrowing a DVD drive from another computer on the network.

It borrows the drive.

If you don’t have a drive for it to borrow, you can always get a USB SuperDrive to hook up to it.

You’ll only have to make ~~two decisions~~ one decision after deciding - as I did - that you need a MacBook Air on your desk. You can have a 1.6 or 1.8 GHz processor (Intel Core 2 Duo) and you can have either a 80GB hard drive or a 64GB solid-state drive (although the solid-state drive looks to add more than $1,000 to your sticker price).

It seems there are only two configurations at this point. the 1.6 GHz processor comes with the 80GB hard drive and is listing for $1,899. The 1.8 GHz processor ships with the 64GB solid-state drive, and costs $3,248. ~~But this is the model that is only 0.16 inches thick.~~ Further research reveals that at its thickest point, the Air - regardless of configuration - is 0.76 inches, but the computer tapers down to 0.16 inches at the edges, giving the system a knife-edged look.

Only drawback at this point is that users can’t change the battery, so you’d better stay close to a power source if you’re going to be using your Air for more than five hours.

Here are some other tidbits that Jobs thrilled us with:

Time Capsule, an Airport Extreme base station with a 500GB or 1TB hard drive, to allow for easy Time Machine backups
iPod Touch owners in Canada who wish they could have some of the iPhone features now get them: Mail, Maps, notes, stocks, weather updates are all enabled for the Touch
iTunes 7.6 now offers movie rentals from all major studios. If you live in the U.S. Canadians have to wait. Again.
Apple TV Take 2 doesn’t require a computer, but connects to your network itself and enables users to get digital movie rentals from iTunes (again, only for U.S. customers)
Anyone purchasing a DVD distributed by 20th Century Fox will automatically get an iTunes Digital Copy of the film. By inserting the new DVD into your computer, you enter a code and get an automatic download - to your iTunes - of the same film. Then you can watch it on your computer or even transfer it to your iPod. The first release to include this feature is the Family Guy Star Wars spoof, Blue Harvest

All in all, a good day to be a Mac fan. Hope you’ve got lots of money.

Anything in today’s Jobs keynote that got you excited? Pissed off? Let us all know in the comments.

Twenty mysterious games

2008-01-15T08:18:00.001-08:00

Gamasutra, the web presence of the CMP Game Group (who publish Game Developer Magazine and produce the Game Developers Conference) is always a great place to find interesting articles about video games and gaming.

Yesterday, at Gamasutra, writer John Harris' look at twenty mysterious games published, in which he investigates games which "hide some aspect of their play or workings from the player. These are games in which the unraveling of hidden knowledge is essential to the game. These are games in which the player must solve mysteries - thus the word 'mysterious.' "

This is the fourth article in a series that Gamasutra editors call "Game Design Essentials," which look at design lessons that can be learned from certain types of games, and it is fascinating reading.

Earlier articles in the series include 20 unusual control schemes, 20 open world games, and 20 difficult games.

Any games you would add to those lists? What about new lists that you think might be interesting?

Resistance 2 confirmed

2008-01-14T08:40:00.001-08:00

It's not news, at this point, but we have confirmation that Resistance 2, the sequel to Insomniac Games' Resistance: Fall of Man, is well under way.

Game Informer magazine has the game as its cover story for its February issue, and scoops that Resistance 2 will boast eight-player co-operative play, 60 player multiplayer, and two campaigns, although I'm not sure what that refers to.

The first game was a launch title for the PlayStation 3, and was on my list of best games of 2006. I found it to be a better story and game than Gears of War, actually. (Let the flaming begin.)

Now we just need to scrounge up a release date for Resistance 2. It'd be nice to see it this year.