Gdc2010
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Power Gig's full-size, handmade guitar / controller now on sale for $250
Ah, ha! There it is! Way back in March, we had a sit-down with folks from Seven45 Studios about their plans for Power Gig: Rise of the SixString (for PS3 and Xbox 360), focusing mainly on how they intended to rival the Rock Band and Guitar Hero franchises from a peripheral standpoint. The six string guitar accessory that ships with the game bundle today is already leaps and bounds better than what RB3 is packin' (pending Stratocaster launch plans), but an instrument we were keenly interested in at GDC was also one we couldn't photograph at the time. The company made clear that it was looking at releasing a real-deal, bona fide guitar in the future -- a full-size First Act axe that could be used with the game or with a legitimate amplifier. Now, that limited edition piece is on sale for both of the aforesaid consoles, boasting a single cutaway basswood body, humbucking pickup, and a maple neck with a rosewood fretboard. Each one is available for $249.99, but there's no telling how many will be produced. We'd also prefer to see these in larger music shops in order to give consumers an idea of the fit, finish, feel and sound, but those into taking chances can get one headed their way as we speak.%Gallery-105816%
GDCO 2010: Bigpoint's Alan Dunton on the next-gen of browser MMOs
Bigpoint has had a very successful run as a multi-game publisher over the last few years. If you're familiar with Seafight or Dark Orbit, then you have played some of the company's games. Of course, those titles -- plus the many others -- are just not enough for the devs at Bigpoint. They wanted to host, create and specify a game for the North American market. What they ended up with are a few titles -- The Mummy Online, Battlestar Galactica, and Ruined Online -- all crafted in the same amazing Unity browser engine. What this will do is allow for more flexibility, accessibility, and possibility. Bigpoint's background in free-to-play and microtransaction-based games will also help to monetize the titles -- a delicate science in itself. We were able to meet up with Alan Dunton, and he explained to us what Ruined Online meant for the company and for the future of Battlestar and The Mummy.
Erebus closed beta 2 begins tomorrow
Outspark plans to enter the second closed beta phase of their free-to-play MMORPG known as Erebus: Travia Reborn on April 14. The isometric Diablo-style action game will add a dueling system, three PvP maps, three new instanced dungeons, and an increased level cap (50) starting tomorrow. Additionally the Outspark team has added guild versus guild warfare, a new tutorial, and many tweaks to both the leveling curve and the skill system. Many changes were made based on feedback from the initial closed beta phase that wrapped in March. "The first Closed Beta was a big success. We kept it mostly in the Outspark community, but we still had thousands of people sign up to play, and the feedback they provided was invaluable. I think people who participated in the first beta are really going to like the changes we made and the new features being added for Closed Beta 2," said Ben Berens, Erebus Associate Producer. Check out our impressions of Erebus from GDC and, if you haven't already, sign up for the closed beta tests.
GDC10: En Masse's Patrick Wyatt talks MMO security
Security concerns in MMOs are nothing new. We all know the drill -- Don't share your account, avoid suspicious emails and sites, change your password regularly and so on. We go through all of that to keep our personal accounts safe, but what about the bigger picture? Patrick Wyatt from En Masse looked over this very thing at GDC this year, explaining how issues like gold farming, account theft and even plain old griefing affects the MMO community at large. He began looking at the other side of the equation: the people causing these problems in the first place and what motivates them. Money is the main motivator, of course, but there is no shortage of attackers who are just doing it for kicks. So as long as you protect your own account, it doesn't affect you, right? Wyatt addressed that false assumption as well, outlining the affect of each type of attack on the general gaming community and the game in question itself. Any event that affects the game and the community at large will of course affect every member of the community. So what's to be done? Game developers never stop working to stay ahead of "the enemy", and Wyatt illustrates quite a few possible solutions. This slideshow certainly isn't only for those in the industry. It's very informative for any MMO player, so head over to playnoevil.com and take a look at the slideshow for yourself!
Bring Dungeons and Dragons to your $15,000 game table
What happens when you marry board games and video games? The electrical pixel explosion of that chocolate into peanut butter hasn't been fully realized yet, so besides a handful of Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne and Hasbro Family Game Nights, there's not a heck of a lot going on. However, what happens when you force role-playing games and video games into a shotgun wedding? Pure magic for rich people. During GDC we took a look at a student project called SurfaceScapes that brings D&D to the Microsoft Surface. It's not just a simple "Ooooh, touch the screen to activate your character sheet!" port of the pen and paper game, but a touch-tastic experience that will blow your mind. Plot a miniature down on the Surface, and it recognizes your character. You can pull up radial menus for actions, spells, and attacks, see your line of sight, move your character, and run the entire game just using your power of touch.
Virtusphere's virtual reality hamster ball put to the test
For eons we've wondered what it would be like to walk around in a bona fide Virtusphere, and at GDC last week we finally got our chance. The large plastic cage can turn and roll in any direction, and once replete with a wireless head-mounted display and fake gun, we were ready to take on some polygonal alien baddies. Getting into the cage is surprisingly easy, but unfortunately once we had a screen strapped to our head our well-honed sense of balance was right out the window, and we found ourselves staggering around a bit as we got used to the motion of the cage. The real military versions have a motion sensing gun controller, but we had to do all our aiming with our head, which didn't help. After a minute or so we got used to the "momentum" involved in moving the cage, which felt pretty great, but we'd say our favorite part about the experience was just being able to turn in place to confront baddies -- there's something about a few well placed steps that really blows away a left or right tug on our 360 controller's analog stick. At the end of the day the sheer size, cost, and ultra-dated graphics has us hardly pining for one of these in our living rooms, but with a bit more work on the gaming end (and a working gun pointer) we could see this as the arcade experience to beat. Check out a video of our harrowing experience (from outside and inside) after the break. %Gallery-88598%
GDC 2010: Interview with Faraway's Steph Thirion
Steph Thirion is a game designer who's been releasing some of the most inventive games I've seen on the iPhone. He started out with Eliss a little while back, and he recently announced Faraway, which I got to play at GDC. The night after I played the game (it was at a party called Gamma IV), I sat down with him to chat about developing for the iPhone, why Eliss wasn't bigger, and his biggest inspiration for the more casual gameplay of Faraway. Read on for the full interview.
Microsoft's Game Room for Xbox 'rewinds' the hits in our hands-on demo
Microsoft showed off its new retro-tastic Game Room UI for Xbox 360 in playable form at GDC last week. While the "make a virtual representation of a gaming space" idea might seem ripped straight from Sony's Home, there aren't really any actual similarities -- outside of the fact they're both in 3D, at least. You dive disembodied through the different game rooms pretty intuitively, with different company collections on the bottom "level" of the mall-like UI, and upper levels set aside for your own collections of the games. Unfortunately, once you actually select an arcade cabinet, the UI gets rather overly complex, with all sorts of modes you can play the game in, sorts of scores to be tracked and an indecipherable menu tree that makes it a real chore to exit a game. We're sure arcade fanatics, ready to pit their scores against the best of them and looking for truly in-depth functionality are going to love all this, but for us poor simpletons it's a little much to take in all at once. Luckily, Microsoft saved the best for the actual gameplay. Not only does it nicely emulate inserting coins and even entering in codes on a virtual keypad, but when playing games in the non-ranked classic mode there's a "rewind" function accessible at any time with the tug of the left trigger. The screen gets those VHS-style wavey lines and you can mend your errors instead of losing a valuable life or having to start from the beginning. It's perfect for patching over the quarter-munching difficulty of some of these games, and it might even be enough to pull us away from our polygon-drenched gorefests now and then to don an inexplicable bear avatar and spelunk some Crystal Castles. Check out a video of Game Room after the break, and stand by for a launch of the service on March 24.
GDC 2010: Hands-on with Superbrothers' Sword and Sorcery
"Superbrothers" is the alias of Craig Adams, a Toronto-based artist who specializes in pixel-based artwork and cinema. He's a big fan of musician Jim Guthrie, and after the two met a while ago (and discovered they were actually fans of each other), he was inspired to create a few music videos of the songs that he heard. Then, a little while back, Adams ran into a few guys from Capy, a game developer (they've made some great puzzle titles like Clash of Heroes for the DS and Critter Crunch for PSN) also from Toronto, and he decided to team up with them to make his first game, and release it on the iPhone. I got to play the game for the first time at GDC, and what I found was an interesting mix of art, music, and gameplay that shows just how amazing a platform like the iPhone can be, both for independent developers and for artists who just want to express themselves (or music they like) in an interactive format. Read on to find out what the game is like, and how it uses the iPhone's assets and Superbrothers' creativity to create a singular experience.
AMD lays out Open Stereo 3D Initiative at GDC
NVIDIA has certainly been more active in 3D than ATI/AMD has as of late, but it looks like the situation may be starting to change, as AMD has taken advantage of the just concluded GDC to lay out its new Open Stereo 3D Initiative. While the company isn't yet drumming up too much fanfare about it (or even issuing a press release), it does seem to have gotten things started on an ambitious note, with the initiative promising to provide consumers with "more choice, more innovation, and lower cost." In the nearer term, that will apparently translate to products like 3D-enabled ATI Eyefinity technology, 120Hz displays, stereo 3D notebooks, and various bundled solutions and shutter glasses. Of course, any actual product announcements are still a little ways off, but it looks like AMD does already have quite a few partners lined up.
GDC 2010: Ngmoco's Neil Young on how freemium will change the App Store world
On the third day of GDC 2010, Ngmoco's Neil Young took the stage in one of the largest rooms at the conference to talk about what his company had "unlearned" in its time in the App Store. Ngmoco has become a large and polarizing figure in the world of App Store development -- after starting out with a big investment from the iFund, it's moved quickly to become one of the biggest iPhone-only developers, and after starting out with a few premium titles like the very successful Rolando, have recently made waves with its "freemium" business model. Young talked about the company's history so far, and went in-depth on Ngmoco's plan for ruling the App Store and why he believes it's the "most significant shift and opportunity for [game developers] since the birth of this business." We've summarized Young's long address in this post. It was pretty incredible -- not only did Young lay out his idea of a clear plan for building and developing a large portfolio of very profitable App Store titles "at scale" (the company plans to release twenty new freemium products on the iPhone in the near future, as well as six titles on the iPad), but he made it very clear that he fervently believes that freemium and the model he's structured is the future of the video game business.
GDC 2010: The Parrot AR.Drone's augmented reality
We actually got to play with the iPhone-controlled Parrot AR.Drone quadricopter back at Macworld a little while ago, but we didn't get a chance to see the "AR" part of it (augmented reality, of course) until GDC last week. Parrot pulled out the AR targets for us, and while the games they had running were very rudimentary, we did get a good feel for the action. The verdict? It works, but it's not that fun yet. Sure enough, when the Drone's cameras picked up the weird pattern of black and white dots and/or the striped tube that the company attached to the top of a second Drone, the iPhone displayed a lock-on target or the weird robot that you can see above (that's the iPhone's video running out to a television, something that's technically a no-no under the current SDK). And when the drone moved around it, the display faithfully showed the 3D model -- it didn't look actually real, but you could fly around and interact with it. And after you blasted it with enough missiles, it exploded.
GDC 2010: Hands-on with Sketch Nation Shooter
When I was reminded of its name at GDC, I couldn't recall hearing much about Engineous Games. It's the development studio founded by Nitzan Wilnai, a former software developer at EA and Yahoo who's gone to work making iPhone games for himself. But I did recall Engenious' first title, Tatomic, which I wrote about a while ago -- it was a great puzzler that put a new spin on Tetris' falling block gameplay. Unfortunately, despite my purchase, Tatomic didn't sell as well as Wilnai would have liked, so he's decided to "create a game that would sell itself." It's called Sketch Nation Shooter, and he sat down to show it to me last week in San Francisco. He started off the demo by promising that he would make a game for me in two minutes, and sure enough, 98 seconds later, he had a custom spaceship shooter game up and running, as you can see in the photo above.
GDC 2010: Interview with Keith Lee of Booyah
Booyah is an App Store company with quite a few lessons in its past already. The founders are former developers at Blizzard (they worked on both Diablo and World of Warcraft before setting off on their own), and after their first app, Booyah Society, didn't exactly strike gold on the App Store, they went back to the drawing board on their idea of "real life achievements," and have done much better with their latest app, MyTown -- it's one of the top grossing apps around, with more users and higher engagement than the popular Foursquare. We got to sit down with CEO Keith Lee for an interview at GDC, and he told us about what they learned from Booyah Society, why Booyah is convinced that real-life social gaming is where it's at, and what they think of the iPad (and what Blizzard thinks of the iPhone). Read on for more.
GDC10: Hands-on with Star Wars: The Old Republic
I could easily spend this article telling you about the amazing LucasArts Presidio compound, its history and the incredible relics of the Star Wars universe adorning the walls and hallways. But I won't. I could also easily go on and on about how George Lucas and Star Wars inspired my childhood, and how even setting foot in the presence of such greatness was a bit overwhelming. But I won't. Instead, I will focus on the only reason you're reading this: my first impressions of Star Wars: The Old Republic and the Trooper class. Once we arrived at LucasArts HQ, we were introduced to a few members of the LucasArts and BioWare crew, then we each sat down to our very own computer with our very own Trooper class character set up to run through our very own test mission. Although we weren't playing together in the game, we were all set up in the same location to run the same mission. Interestingly enough, we weren't really given an overview of the game or an intro to the gameplay. They sat us down and told us to have fun. There was a print-out of a small cheat-sheet for help with the mission if needed, but I was honestly stuck to the monitor from the second I sat down.
GDC 2010: Hands on with Pocket Creatures
One of the best things about going to a convention like GDC is what we in the business call "doing research," which you might know as "playing games." We often get to check out the latest and greatest that developers are working on, and so when Tactile Entertainment offered us a chance to check out their upcoming Pocket Creatures title, we gladly took it. The company is founded by four friends from Denmark, one of whom used to be the Development Manager at Crytek (makers of the PC graphics engine and its flagship shooter Crysis), and Pocket Creatures, due out later this year, is their first title. The game's backstory tells of an island somewhere with an egg in an ancient temple, and in an intro movie, the egg hatches to reveal the game's main creature character. But the game isn't merely a virtual pet simulator. While you can pet the little guy to make him happy or slap him to make him sad, the rest of the game actually embodies a pretty complex ecosystem, of which the creature and his emotions and abilities are only a part. %Gallery-88237%
GDC10: First look at Divine Souls
What, you've never heard of Divine Souls? You Philistine! Actually, it's not the public school system that has failed you here -- Divine Souls is only now crossing the waters of the Pacific (and Atlantic) in its worldwide debut. Created by Korean development studio Game Prix under the title of St. Soul, the renamed Divine Souls is being brought over to North America and Europe through an agreement with publisher Outspark. Divine Souls's makeup is part steampunk, part brawler, part co-op, and part traditional MMORPG, so don't expect the normal routine in this one -- it actually feels more of a hybrid of several MMOs. Massively sat down with the game at last week's GDC to put this title through its paces. Channel your inner Karate Kid, and hit the jump for the full scoop!
GDC Roundup, day four
The tenth annual Game Developers Conference is in full swing in San Francisco, CA, and our sister sites Joystiq and Massively are on the scene! No matter what kind of games you're into, there's a ton of news on its way out of the convention, and we're compiling some of the stuff that might matter to you in daily roundups just for you. If you want the whole GDC news experience, check out all of Massively's and Joystiq's coverage, or previous roundups. I apologize for my appalling lack of Michael Sacco-ness. Saccosity? Massively's Interview with DC Universe Online "We're hitting major milestones right now. We're pushing as hard as we can right now to get a launch date out there. [...] We're trying to get it in your hands as quick as possible. The great thing about Sony is we really are taking our time. We have been given the opportunity to make this right." Fable 2 Episodes Massively Successful "That was hugely successful. There were something like over half a million. I think it was 600,000 downloads of the first episode, which was very, very cool." "Save your fork, there'll be pie" After confessing to having a big appetite for Borderlands, the Gears of War developer used the pie analogy to explain to Joystiq how games without any sort of DLC "hooks" are becoming increasingly rare. GDC 2010 Microtalks: Big ideas, tiny speeches Ten lecturers -- all from different sectors of the game industry -- each spoke for five minutes and each were allowed to use 20 different slides. Naughty Dog's Richard Lemarchand set the stage for the speakers, announcing the theme of the talks as "come play with us." Massively's Interview with Dungeons and Dragons Online Today, the numbers speak for themselves. Their revenue is up 500%, they've had over one million new players, and you'll be hard-pressed to find anyone who would refer to the game as "forgotten." Turbine has arguably set the standard for a hybrid free-to-play business model, and it's paid off very well. However, it wasn't always a sure thing and it certainly wasn't a snap decision. GDC 2010: The Future of Champions Online At the end of our brief discussion on the future of Champions, Bill had this to say, "Past that, I think it's just about remaining as responsible as possible to what the community is telling us they want." That sounds the right approach to us.
GDC 2010: Civilization V probably Mac-bound (eventually)
I've been working like crazy for TUAW here at GDC 2010 (and there's a lot more coverage yet to come), but I did take a little time for myself this afternoon and go see the demo that Firaxis is showing off here of this fall's Civilization V. The latest and greatest Civ is quite different from the past iterations. As you can see in the above photo, the squares have become hexes for the first time ever, units will no longer stack (I know!), and culture will grow only as you pay gold to grow it, one hex at a time. Even though I really only went to see this game because I'm such a huge fan, I did get to ask one question for you: when is this game coming out on the Mac? The rep was noncommittal, as you might expect, but he did say that every single previous version of Civilization has eventually come to the Mac, and that Civ V would probably not be an exception. He didn't have a timeline, but given the recent arrivals in the world of Mac gaming, I'd guess that it'll be sooner rather than later. The game's not due out until fall on PC, but I'll keep an eye out for it. Here's hoping that Valve's big announcement will encourage other great game companies to hit our platform as early as they can.
Playcast Media nabs support from big name publishers, aims to bring STB gaming to US
GDC is winding down here in San Francisco, but Playcast Media is hoping to snag its 15 minutes by announcing new partnerships with Atari, Capcom, Codemasters and THQ (to name a few) for use in its "console-free games-on-demand" service. 'Course, streaming games in through a set-top-box is nothing new, but few operators in the States offer such a thing with any real substance behind it. Playcast's solution enables titles to be pushed through existing cable and telco STBs, and we're told that the US market is next in line to get gifted. We're not given any significant details beyond that, but we're pretty jazzed about big name publishers signing on to finally give this distribution method a bit of credence. Now, if only this Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300HD shipped with a SIXAXIS controller, we'd be golden.
