Kyle Orland

PlayStation By Kyle Orland

Confirmed: PlayStation Move is trampoline compatible

Because we know you were wondering. Seriously, this odd setup for a Sports Champions demo unit at Gamescom 2010 made us do a definite double take. Is this now the official, Sony-recommended way to play the game?

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Gaming By Kyle Orland

The Cosplayers of Gamescom 2010

Given the hundreds of thousands of people who turned out for Gamescom 2010, the number of cosplayers in attendance was surprisingly small. Or maybe it wasn't surprising, given that this year's show didn't even encourage the costumed patrons with a feeble world record attempt or anything. As you browse this collection of photos, see if you can spot: The two guys who I suspect may have been gang members and not actually cosplayers A character that is usually not seen eating popcorn eating some popcorn Link pulling a reverse-Michael-Jackson (you'll know it when you see it) The best use of a pacifier for Day of the Tentacle cosplay you will ever see %Gallery-100135%

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PlayStation By Kyle Orland

What Killzone looked like before it was Killzone

The E3 2005 trailer for Killzone 2 quickly became well-known (infamous, even) for its supposedly unatainable levels of in-game graphical prowess. But the initial trailer for the game that would become the original Killzone has been much less well known ... until this past week at GDC Europe. Guerilla Games Managing Director Hermen Hulst showed off the circa-1999 concept video in a keynote speech in Cologne earlier this week, calling it a "showcase of technical competence" prepared for their first meeting with Sony. Even though Hulst admits there's "nothing really 'Killzone' about it" at this early stage (for instance, the Helghast and their glowing eyes don't even make a cameo appearance) we thought it was an interesting look at the pre-history of one of Sony's biggest exclusive franchises. To see the video in full, follow us past the break.

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Reviews

Reviews By Kyle Orland

Preview: Fighters Uncaged

First, the good news: Fighters Uncaged Prodcuer Luc Verdier recognizes that there have been too many casual, family-oriented games announced for the Kinect thus far, and says the game is his attempt to fix this. Now the bad news: based on a recent demo of the game at Gamescom, Fighters Uncaged utterly fails in this attempt. As you can see in this live demonstration video, the movement recognition for Fighters Uncaged is far from perfect at this point. Punches can be completely finished and retracted in the real world before they even start in the game, making it hard to string together quick combinations of moves. In fact, Verdier said combos in the final game would actually be activated using a quick-time event system, asking players to string together preset poses for an unblockable chain of attacks. A similar match-the-on-screen-pose system is already in place to dodge or block incoming attacks, and feels incredibly unwieldy.%Gallery-99720%

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Nintendo By Kyle Orland

Nintendo support was crucial to uDraw's creation

THQ may be the company publicly pushing the recently announced uDraw tablet controller for the Wii, but a presentation of the new technology at Gamescom this week emphasized just how important Nintendo's support was to the device's creation. "When we came to [Nintendo] in the beginning with the idea for uDraw, they said 'that's brilliant, let's figure out how to do this,'" THQ director Luis Gigliotti said during a presentation. "It's been an incredible partnership. ... I've been working in game development for 17-plus years and I can honestly say this is one of the smoothest collaborations with a first party I've ever had, just because everybody got it on day one." Gigliotti specifically pointed out that Nintendo's hardware design expertise was key to transforming the monstrous uDraw prototype (nicknamed "Frankenstein" by the THQ team), into the light, sleek unit shown off at the show. "[The prototype] was a like bunch of lasers and mirrors and loose parts, it was wood and it had brass on it," he recalled. "I said, 'There's no way we can get this to something like this [the current hardware] without it costing a fortune.' Nintendo said, 'Don't worry about it. You guys are software developers, we are the kings of hardware. We will figure this out.' And they did, for one reason -- the idea was solid. Everybody knew it was a good idea, so we figured out the rest."

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Gaming By Kyle Orland

Redspotgames looking to continue publishing for Dreamcast

Redspotgames, the small publisher behind relatively recent Dreamcast releases such as Last Hope, Rush Rush Rally Racing and Wind and Water: Puzzle Battles, says they are looking to continue publishing games for the long-dead system into next year. "We have seen some stuff on the PC, and we [are] talking to to the companies to see if they will agree to release on the Dreamcast," Redspotgames marketing and sales director Adrian Loudero told Joystiq at Gamescom this week. "We also have plans for 2011, maybe a new release, but this is really all I can say right now." Loudero told us that Redspotgame only sells a few thousands copies of each new Dreamcast game it releases. As such, the company has recently expanded to WiiWare and Xbox Live Arcade development to stay afloat. But he also said that he's heartened by the way the Dreamcast demo units at the company's small Gamescom booth draw double takes and appreciative play from passers-by. "I think the Dreamcast is still famous," he said. Asked if he thinks Sega should get back into the Dreamcast game-publishing business, Loudero responded enthusiastically. "Yes, of course, please."

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Gaming By Kyle Orland

Overheard @ Gamescom: A development house divided

Like many Wii games before it, the upcoming revival of Goldeneye 007 supports a number of different controllers. You'll be able to play with the Wii Remote and Nunchuk, the Classic Controller, a GameCube controller or even the Wii Zapper. But surely one of these myriad methods must be the preferred control scheme among the development team, right? Well, no, not really. "There's a house divided, at least amongst ourselves," said Activision production coordinator Graham Hagmaier while presenting a demo of the game at Gamescom this week. "A lot of us play with the Wii Remote and Nunchuk. I prefer this particular scheme [the Classic Controller], just because I used to play a lot of FPS games on [the Xbox] 360 and PS3, and for a lot of people those are very popular formats. But it just depends on your proficiency with the controller." The team's proficiency with the Wii Zapper was left unaddressed.

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Xbox

Xbox By Kyle Orland

Overheard @ Gamescom: Competitive Kinect fighting is dangerous

Since shortly after the Wii Remote first brought motion control to the masses, we've known that over-enthusiastic use (and slippery hands) can lead to controllers (and other things) getting broken. So what happens when Kinect's 3D camera turns your entire body into the controller? Well, not surprisingly, it turns out you're the one that could get broken. "Versus mode was a bit too dangerous," Fighters Uncaged producer Luc Verdier said when asked about a competitive mode for his newly announced Kinect-enabled fighting game. "It's possible to do, but people just end up hitting each other." Thus, the game's only multiplayer mode is a cooperative battle, where two players work together against the artificial intelligence. Of course, people don't usually end up killing one another while playing games like Just Dance, even if four players are moving about in an enclosed space. But Verdier said motion-controlled games where multiple players are synchronized are safer than games where the players can just "do whatever." We'd also hazard to guess that dancing players just tend to be less intentionally violent than fighting game players, especially when those fighting game players are actively playing.

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Nintendo By Kyle Orland

Preview: Goldeneye 007 (single player)

We already said this when we talked about the multiplayer gameplay in the upcoming Wii version of Goldeneye 007, but it bears repeating: This is not your Goldeneye N64 game all prettied up. In fact, an eyes-on walkthrough of the game's Jungle level at Gamescom this week showed off just how much first-person-shooter game design has changed in the last 13 years. The changes were incredibly apparent right from the start, when the developers guiding the demo sneaked up behind a guard and took him out with the kind of close-quarters combat neck-snap you might expect to see in every bit of pop culture ever (but not the original Goldeneye). Taking out two more guards with headshots ensured that the alarm wouldn't be raised and the game could remain a Splinter Cell-style stealth experience for at least a while longer.%Gallery-97627%

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Xbox

Xbox By Kyle Orland

Preview: MotionSports (Kinect)

Ubisoft's entry into the already burgeoning Kinect casual sports game market was roughly 60% complete in a demo at Gamescom this week, so the game was still looking pretty rough around the edges. Of the six different sports available on the menu, only downhill skiing and boxing were available to play. The skiing game was enjoyable enough, detecting slight variations in my lean to guide the on-screen skier down a pretty basic hill. The experience felt much smoother and more natural than similar games designed for the Wii balance board, which I usually find a bit twitchy in skiing simulations. I liked how the game recognized a low crouch as a way to improve aerodynamic speed, and how swooshing my arms at any time resulted in a satisfying ski pole push. Aside from some frequent graphical glitches (which made my skier look like he was showing off the bottom of his shoe), the demo was a great proof of concept. %Gallery-99778%

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Nintendo By Kyle Orland

Preview: Okamiden

Okamiden on the DS manages to capture the painterly art style of the PlayStaton 2's (and then the Wii's) beloved Okami while also adding a heavy dollop of adorableness to the mix. This really comes through in some of the animations, such as tiny wolf god Chibiterasu's darling backflip attack, or the way he flails his paws in mid-air, Saturday-morning-cartoon style, before he falls from a collapsing bridge. Okami's trademark magical paintbrush is back in the DS game, of course, and the short Gamescom demo showed it being used to manipulate the world in some of the same ways as the original game -- slashing rocks and obstacles in half, circling trees to make them bloom, and building bridges across gaps. Using the stylus to do all these things feels a bit more natural than awkwardly painting with the Wii remote, but was essentially similar. %Gallery-99717%

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Gaming By Kyle Orland

Interview: From Dust creator Eric Chahi and Guillaume Bunier, producer

Amidst so many Gamescom titles that seemed to tread familiar ground, Ubisoft's From Dust stood out with its impressive technology and wholly non-violent gameplay. We had a chance to speak with creative director Eric Chahi (who you may know as the creator of Out of This World) and producer Guillaume Bunier about their unique project. Read our interview past the break.

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Gaming By Kyle Orland

Media Molecule reveals LittleBigPlanet 2's more-than-just-music sequencer

The demo of LittleBigPlanet 2 that was shown at Cologne's Gamescom this week was similar to the build shown off to great effect at E3 a few months ago. But there was one significant level-editing feature that was being demonstrated for the first time here: a music sequencer that's also quite a bit more. LittleBigPlanet 2 Technical Director Alex Evans demonstrated the sequencer, which lets you arrange notes on a four-measure grid with the beat at the bottom and multiple octaves of notes running vertically. You choose from a selection of instrument samples including a honky tonk piano, acoustic guitar, drum kit, beatbox, and roughly 30 more that were shown in the demo (more are expected for the final game, Evans said). Notes can be built into samples, which can then be repeated and mixed further via a larger timeline object in the level creation screen.

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Gaming By Kyle Orland

How 'From Dust' turns manipulating nature into a game

We already know quite a bit about how From Dust (née Project Dust) uses a few layers of basic elements to create a highly realistic and malleable virtual world. What's been less clear was how Eric Chahi and his team were going to make an actual game out of this lava-filled sandbox. Until today, that is, when Chahi and producer Guillaume Bunier presented the first details of From Dust's gameplay in a Gamescom demonstration.%Gallery-99786%

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Gaming By Kyle Orland

Preview: The Fight

Sony had a new, roughly 60% complete build of The Fight on hand at a pre-Gamescom press event, and I have to say, my experience with the game couldn't have been more different from the one Chris Buffa had a few months ago (when the game still had its "Lights Out" subtitle). For one, I found the artificial intelligence to be at least competitive, if not overly hard. My computerized opponent -- a thin, bouncy, tattooed Asian gangster -- came at me constantly, using quick jabs to take advantage if I opened myself up with too many attacks and not enough guarding. The player who went before me actually lost to his computer opponent, a beefy black man in a wifebeater who countered an endless series of high, straight punches with some accurate low body blows. For another, I didn't notice any discernible lag between my real-life motions and the punches on screen. That's not to say there wasn't any lag -- in fact, there probably was -- but just that it wasn't easily discernible in the heat of the battle. I didn't find myself making a punching motion and then waiting for a second to see if the game would recognize it as a punch or anything like that. On the contrary, the game seemed pretty good about moving my on-screen fighter's arm almost immediately when I moved my own.

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Gaming By Kyle Orland

David Cage on his 'benevolent dictatorship' over Quantic Dream

For most developers, creating a game is a constant struggle between the design-based decisions of the creative team and the marketing-based decisions of the business team. Not at Quantic Dream, where David Cage's role as both CEO and lead designer means that "game design guides everything" at the company. So when Cage says "the game designer decided this, and I fully agree with it," he's actually referring to himself both times, as he pointed out at a talk at GDC Europe this week. Cage said developing a game like Heavy Rain just wouldn't work in a more democratic development environment, where everyone on the team has equal power and the majority rules on major decisions. "When you want a strong vision, you need a vision holder, you need someone who has the final cut," Cage said.

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Gaming By Kyle Orland

Red Steel 2 director unsure on Kinect, Move potential

In developing Red Steel 2, Ubisoft Creative Director Jason VanderBerge learned quite a bit about Nintendo's optional Wii MotionPlus accessory (and how people use it). So he seemed like a good person to ask about the potential of Sony and Microsoft's impending motion control accessories, the Move and Kinect. When we did just that, catching up with VanderBerge after his talk at GDC Europe this week, he was a bit ambivalent about the subject.

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Reviews

Reviews By Kyle Orland

Preview: SingStar Dance and SingStar Guitar

A music game that's just about singing? That's so 2003. Or if you're the SingStar franchise, it's so, um, today. Sony's PlayStation karaoke series has proudly focused on grading vocals for years now, but that's about the change with this fall's release of both SingStar Dance and SingStar Guitar. I got a chance to try both of these games at Sony's pre-GamesCom press event, and have written up some quick initial impressions after the break.

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Gaming By Kyle Orland

How Project Dust's world-building world was built

We're still not entirely sure what kind of game lies underneath the virtual-sandbox-with-lava of Eric Chahi's Project Dust, but after a GDC Europe talk today, we do know a little bit more about the underlying system that makes that sandbox work.

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PlayStation By Kyle Orland

Guerrilla Games working on new PS3-exclusive IP, not related to Killzone

During his just-concluded GDC Europe keynote presentation, Guerrilla Games Managing Director Herman Hulst confirmed that the company has started work on a new IP not related to the Killzone franchise. No further details were given about the new project, but Hulst said the company was looking to broaden their abilities to create not just Killzone but "any game we want to make." Hulst said he hopes the new project would bring back the "level of scope and ambition" they had when they were a startup company. To that end, Hulst said they're building a brand new studio and scaling up their team by hiring new talent. Speaking to Joystiq after the presentation, Hulst added that the project -- in "very early days in terms of conceptualizing what we're doing" -- is intended to be exclusive to PlayStation 3.

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PlayStation By Kyle Orland

Cage: Heavy Rain sold four times more in US than Sony had anticipated

We already knew Heavy Rain was an immediate success in the UK and a moderate hit in Japan. But with the game's quick disappearance from the NPD's monthly top ten in the U.S., we've been wondering whether the game's sales on this side of the ocean (which NPD pegs at just over 400,000 units so far) have lived up to expectations. Well, "lived up to expectations" might be a bit of an understatement. At a GDC Europe talk this week, Quantic Dream CEO David Cage said Heavy Rain ended up selling "four times as many copies" as publisher Sony expected. "They were shocked. 'Oh my god, what happens?'" Cage said in his charmingly stilted English. These unexpected sales presented a bit of a problem, Cage said, because the marketing spend for the game was based on the lowball expectation, not the surprisingly strong actual sales numbers. Still, Cage said Sony did a great job pushing the game in the States, especially considering the game's unorthodox concept and lack of a big franchise name, which led to some reluctance from distribution channels. Cage said Heavy Rain has already sold 1.5 million copies (up from one million in April) worldwide and the game is on track to sell two million units by the first anniversary of its February release.

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Nintendo By Kyle Orland

The Red Steel 2 director's field guide to Wii Remote swingers

If there's one thing Ubisoft Creative Director Jason VanderBerge learned in playtesting Red Steel 2, it's that different people respond to the simple direction "swing the Wii Remote like a sword" in very different ways. At his talk at GDC Europe today, VanderBerge showed off just how different those swings can be, using a cane to demonstrate the movements of the seven major types of Wii Remote swingers he's identified. Besides being highly entertaining, the demonstration showed just how hard it is to train motion control players to perform even simple actions the way a developer expects. We weren't quick enough to get a video of the hilarious, high-energy performance, but we did manage to snap some pictures that show off the intensity of VanderBerge's flailing. Hit the break and see how many of these specimens you've encountered in the wild.

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PlayStation By Kyle Orland

Cage: Lack of additional Heavy Rain DLC 'unfortunate' but 'understandable'

With the chances of further downloadable episodes of Heavy Rain's "Chronicles" DLC looking all but nonexistent, we wondered how Quantic Dream CEO and creative head David Cage felt now that his game has been folded up like an origami crane. We caught up with Cage after his talk at GDC Europe today to find out. "I understand why the decision was made," Cage said of the cancellation of the planned DLC. "From a creative point of view it was not my choice. I would have really preferred a thousand times developing the Chronicles. I thought we had a lot to say about these characters, about their background. Things that were just mentioned in the game that had a true explanation in the background, and it's a little bit unfortunate that we won't be able to tell you the full story." But at the same time, Cage said he's looking forward to working on something new. "I didn't want to do everything, I wanted to move on," he said. "I didn't want to spend another two years on Heavy Rain developing Move and Chronicles and stuff. ... So a decision had to be made and it's a decision I respect. Honestly, it's not like I'm upset about it, I would have preferred to do it differently but, you know what, it makes sense." So, to sum up, Cage says he really want to finish the story through DLC, and that it's unfortunate that he didn't get to. But he also says he didn't really want to spend all that extra time on the game, and that he's happy to be moving on. So... that clears that up, yeah?

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Gaming By Kyle Orland

Develop: How is digital distribution changing the games you play?

Now that services like Xbox Live, PSN, Steam and the iPhone App Store have proven digital distribution as a market force to be reckoned with, it's time to start examining what this change means to publishers and developers. Four game industry veteran got up on stage at the Develop Conference in Brighton this week to do just that. On the one hand, some saw the increasing influence of digital distribution as having a democratizing effect on the market, letting big publishers and small indie developers compete on even footing. BioWare's Greg Zeschuk argued that, these days, a well-known brand isn't enough to sell a low-quality game on its own. "EA hasn't been throwing out half-assed content [on digital platforms]," he said. "You not only have to have the franchise but also the quality."

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Gaming By Kyle Orland

Develop: How a movie screenwriter helped save Enslaved's story

Gamers sometimes criticize games for playing too much like movies. But as Ninja Theory Designer Tameem Antonaides explained at a Develop Conference session this week, bringing in screenwriting veteran Alex Garland to consult on their upcoming game Enslaved: Odyssey to the West made their game more movie-like is some very beneficial ways. As the writer behind movies like Sunshine and 28 Days Later, Garland had a feel for how to get the most drama out of Enslaved's story scenes, Antonaides said. Garland would write scenes with very simple, reductive dialogue that looked thin on the page, Antonaides said, but gained more "meat" with an actor's performance behind them. Indeed, the short story clips shown at the conference were notable for how much they relied on body language and vocal cues to convey information without words. Antonaides said they ended up cutting the game's cutscenes down from two hours of dialogue to a lean 80 minutes, with less focus on exposition and more on drama. "If you have too much dialogue, it doesn't work," Antonaides said. "Alex changed my view of what writing meant," Antonaides said. "I felt like a schoolboy so many times talking to Alex." %Gallery-97232%

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