Amazonys – Wii Games

Last year, EA tried something new: they released a number of titles based off brand new intellectual property. Perhaps, in hindsight, too many.

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

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

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

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

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

A Different Track: Frank Gibeau Talks Strategy [Gamasutra]

SEGA has started holding “hostess” auditions for an upcoming Ryu Ga Gotoku (aka Yakuza) game.

Between May 8 and June 19, there were over 1,500 applicants. Those screened from that pool auditioned at SEGA’s headquarters. Groups of 2~3 applicants were interviewed by the game’s creators, including Ryu Ga Gotoku designer Toshihiro Nagoshi, in a 30 minute audition.

Besides getting a screen test, the applicants were quizzed by Nagoshi. The girls also had to do line readings of bar girl game dialogue like: “Wooow!”, “So mean…”, “You’re already going home?” and “Hey sweetie, let’s sing a duet”.

Questions included their current profession, whether or not they have worked as a hostess and for how long, and if they liked karaoke. The ladies were also asked if they played video games and if they were familiar with the Ryu Ga Gotoku franchise. Many of the female applicants were familiar with Ryu Ga Gotoku 3 because fashion models from Koakuma Ageha appeared in the game as hostesses.

“The motivation for these auditions,” says Nagoshi, “was to create an opportunity to participate in this title.”

セガ、PS3「龍が如く」次回作キャバ嬢役オーディションを公開 名越総合監督「予想以上の内容で採用者を増やしたいと思っている」 [Game Watch]

My single biggest problem with the PS3? The loss of backwards compatibility. It’s a gaping hole in the system’s feature set. Then again, it may also be one that’s on the way back.

Some background: when the PS3 first launched, it was backwards-compatible, meaning you could play PlayStation 2 games on your new PlayStation 3. The 20GB and 60GB units released in North America and Japan featured hardware emulation (they literally had a PS2 chip inside), while those released in PAL territories featured software emulation (similar to how the 360 handles original Xbox games).

Later, though, this feature was removed. Anyone buying a 40GB, a later model of the 80GB or the 120GB PS3 can’t play a single PS2 game on them. It was a stupid, stupid move on the part of Sony.

A patent discovered by Siliconera, however, suggests that Sony might be re-thinking this stance. Filed in December 2008, it’s basically a patent for a method that would allow the PS3’s Cell chip to translate code from the PS2’s Emotion Engine. Not half-assed software emulation (which in previous PS3 models couldn’t run some games), full, total replication of the functionality of the Emotion Engine.

Which means, theoretically at least, you could play any PS2 game on any PS3, regardless of the model or year of release.

Whether this would allow you to play actual PS2 discs, or would just be the advance party for the sale of PS2 downloads on the PlayStation Store is unclear. We’d like the former, but with Sony being a business and all, would expect the latter.

Sony Patents Emotion Engine Emulation Technology For Cell Processors [Siliconera]

The big erotic game trend these days? Block foreign access of your website. Why? Because foreigners have been making a big deal about ero games.

Joining the likes of PC developer Minori, Yuzusoft’s website sends up a standard 403 forbidden to those trying to access the page outside of Japan. And while the VisualArts Visual Antena website cannot be accessed by foreign IPs, the site does carry this amusing message: “PLEASE PLAY THE GAME OF YOUR COUNTRY IF YOU PRAY FOR THE WORLD PEACE!:-)」”

This is less xenophobia, more we-are-scared-of-pissing-people-off. It’s just that a lot of those pissed off people live outside Japan. These recent defensive measures from erotic game makers come in the wake of the Rapelay controversy and subsequent rape game banning. Other measures include changing the titles of upcoming releases.

VisualAntena! and Yuzu_Soft [Official Sites via Canned Dogs]

One of the reasons Starcraft is still such a big hit at LAN parties is that, like most “older” PC titles, it supports multiplayer over a local network. Starcraft II will do no such thing.

A Blizzard rep has told Kotaku:

We don’t currently plan to support LAN play with StarCraft II, as we are building Battle.net to be the ideal destination for multiplayer gaming with StarCraft II and future Blizzard Entertainment games. While this was a difficult decision for us, we felt that moving away from LAN play and directing players to our upgraded Battle.net service was the best option to ensure a quality multiplayer experience with StarCraft II and safeguard against piracy.

Several Battle.net features like advanced communication options, achievements, stat-tracking, and more, require players to be connected to the service, so we’re encouraging everyone to use Battle.net as much as possible to get the most out of StarCraft II. We’re looking forward to sharing more details about Battle.net and online functionality for StarCraft II in the near future.

Which will no doubt be crushing to LAN party fiends…if, that is, they still exist.

StarCraft II Developers Talk [IncGamers]

Remember that Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li movie? Sorry to hear that. We had expunged it from our brain until we saw these clips. Time to share!

These clips are hitting the internets to help promote the movie’s DVD release. The home version includes bonus footage, commentary and a full-length comic movie “Street Fighter Round One: FIGHT!”

Exclusive Street Fighter Blu-ray & DVD Bonus Clips [Coming Soon via io9]

The popularity of pirates is waning as the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise gives way to Twilight and Harry Potter – but Captain Blood aims to cash in on the tail end of the pirate craze.

Loosely based on the Rafael Sabatini books that spawned an Errol Flynn movie and possibly a 2011 remake by director Phillip Noyce, Captain Blood follows the adventures of a doctor sold into slavery who later becomes a pirate. Developer SeaWolf picks up the story between the time when Captain Blood is no longer a slave and the time when he settles down with Olivia de Havilland.

What Is It?
Captain Blood is an action-adventure game for the Xbox 360 and PC. Players navigate Blood through linear levels on foot and through open water in his ship, the Arabella. The on-foot parts involve hacking and slashing rival pirates with a series of cutlass combos and occasionally shooting them with stolen pistols or muskets. The open water parts involve aiming cannons at attacking ships and clearing the deck of rival pirates that manage to board.

What We Saw
I played one boss fight about five times without being able to beat it and then quit out to the main menu to play a boat level where the goal is to sink four or five attacking ships.

How Far Along Is It?
Captain Blood is due out this winter. Publisher 1C says the game is still in alpha and there are some significant changes to gameplay in the works. It looks like the major gameplay elements are in place and the graphics look a lot further along than alpha.

What Needs Improvement?
Hack, Hack, Slash, Slash, Rinse, Wash, Repeat: A lot of hack ‘n’ slash games get a little repetitive and Captain Blood is no exception. Part of that comes from the weapons Blood had on him during that boss fight; as you progress through the game, you’re supposed to be buying better and better weapons which can be upgraded for more combos. Unfortunately, Blood only had the one cutlass with him and just two combos that never quite seemed to do enough damage. Worse, a lot of the animations repeated themselves during the boss fight – like a mini cut scene where the boss pulls a weapon out of his treasure chest.

Blood Falls Backwards: During the boss fight, the bad guy pirate would lob firebombs at Captain Blood. Whenever he’d get hit by the fire, Blood’s injury animation would cause him to fall backward into the fire. This would cause him more damage and he’d keep falling backward deeper and deeper into the flames until he died or the fire went out. I hope this is one of those “significant” gameplay changes the developer is still working on.

Rage Mode Doesn’t Do Much: There’s a special Rage Mode that the player can trigger with the right bumper which supposedly makes Captain Blood do more damage. All it did for me was turn the edges of the screen white and fuzzy and make the controller vibrate.

You Can’t Control The Camera. Ever: Boo!

What Should Stay The Same?
The Boat Levels: It certainly sounds repetitive to run back and forth across the Arabella’s deck, trying to get to different cannons to fire on enemy ships. However, because the firing of the cannon requires actual skill, it’s pretty exciting. Each cannon has a limited range of side-to-side movement and its arced trajectory is realistic. A misfired shot might go over an enemy ship to land harmlessly in the ocean on the other side, or it might graze the sails and render the enemy ship sluggish in the water. Distance and timing are key in this part of the game. Small, fast ships can zigzag up to or circle in on the Arabella and rake her while dropping off boarding parties. In the time it takes them to get there, they rarely present a target for more than a few seconds. Even when they do, it can take Captain Blood a long time to get from one side of his ship to the other what with all the deck clutter and frantic crew members in the way.

The Graphics: The colors in Captain Blood were pretty vibrant and the water looked amazing. Surprisingly, the environments reduced the repetitive feel of the gameplay – and since you spend about half the game on a boat or near a boat, water appearance is all-important.

Dodge Roll: It’s mapped to the right stick which is really helpful for getting out of bad melee situations and fire that you might fall backwards into.

Quick Time Events: I actually don’t mind them in Captain Blood, perhaps because they’re not necessarily required for boss fights or opening doors. If the captain gets knocked off a ledge or a cliff, he’ll grab onto the edge and a QTE will determine whether or not you succeed in climbing back up – but the timing is forgiving. Also, instead of just mashing a button over and over again to encourage Captain Blood to try harder when climbing up the side of a cliff face, the sly dog will do cool things like parry a cutlass slash or grab a guy’s leg and fling him over the side as he climbs up, making the whole QTE both useful in thinning out mobs and way more entertaining.

Final Thoughts
Captain Blood reminds me a lot of THQ’s Conan from 2007 – it’s a simple action adventure game based on a popular (if way-old) book series. Oddly, Captain Blood is less bloody than Conan; but it still has this over-the-top violence that makes the linear levels feel more fun. So it’s like the pirate flavor of a game that was based on a book which was the barbarian flavor of Sabatini’s pirate adventures. Awesome. Go check out that Errol Flynn version if you haven’t already.

During our visit to Blizzard’s headquarters, we were given a tour of the developer’s campus, a massive office complex that houses a giant Orc statue, an employee-only library filled with nerdy reference, and plenty of things kept top secret.

Our guided tour through the halls of Blizzard took us through the mundane—the company’s fitness center—to the memento-filled—the company museum, filled with numerous awards, 31 drafts of the WoW meets South Park episode, and a copy of StarCraft that had been sent to space.) But we weren’t allowed to take photos during some portions of our visit and not all areas of the Blizzard campus were open to the press.

So what weren’t we allowed to take snaps of?

The Global Operations Room
Blizzard’s situation room monitors the goings on of World Of Warcraft activity around the world. It also keeps a close eye on things happening in the real world, thanks to CNN and The Weather Channel.

When we peeked into the darkened room, we saw a couple of Blizzard employees keeping tabs on global events, just in case a server went down by act of God or military coup. This room says serious business.

The “Project Hydra” Sign
Blizzard was rumored to be hard at work on something that wasn’t World of Warcraft or StarCraft II back in 2007. That something was allegedly codenamed “Project Hydra”—presumed to be the working code name for Diablo III—two words present on a simple plastic placard behind, we’ll assume, an extra layer of security access.

Did Blizzard put it there as a clever ruse? Is “Project Hydra” hearsay confirmed via office signage? Has the company just not yet gotten around to updating the sign to read Diablo III? Regardless, no photos, please!

Whatever Was Behind Those Black Blinds
The campus is filled with Blizzard concept art, from a Protoss starship in the library to earlier maps of Azeroth adorning the walls. Interestingly, some of the in-development artwork was hung in hallways, but carefully covered with black blinds that could be pulled down to obscure whatever it is that Blizzard is working on for the next World of Warcraft… expansion? Patch? Sequel? I was tempted to peek, but still had more StarCraft II to play that day.

If you’re a WoW player, you’re one of two things. You’re Alliance, or you’re Horde. That’s it. That’s where the line is drawn. Or…it was. Pretty soon, that won’t matter anymore.

Blizzard have begun work on a new service that will let players switch sides. Alliance to Horde. Or Horde to Alliance. Whichever way you want to turn your coat, you’ll be free to do it.

There’ll apparently be rules governing the use of the service, but in a nutshell, here’s how Blizzard explain it:

There’s still much work to do and many details to iron out, but the basic idea is that players will be able to use the service to transform an existing character into a roughly equivalent character of the opposing faction on the same realm. Players who ended up creating and leveling up characters on the opposite factions from their friends have been asking for this type of functionality for some time, and we’re pleased to be getting closer to being able to deliver it.

So there you have it. Sounds great for those itching for a change, but I can see some more hardcore role-players within the community being a little upset.

Faction-Change Service in the Works [Blizzard]

Dreamkiller is a first-person shooter starring a “punk rock chick psychologist” who projects herself into her patients’ dreams to cure their psychotic behavior by killing their nightmares.

Sound familiar? If it does and you’re not thinking of the anime, Paprika, it’s likely because Dreamkiller sounds a lot like Painkiller. Painkiller you might remember is that 2004 PC first-person shooter about a guy murdering his way through Purgatory developed by People Can Fly. You might also remember its 2007 sequel, Painkiller: Overdose, which was way less popular and developed by Painkiller fans at Mindware Studios. Dreamkiller is the successor of that second Painkiller – the fan-made one – and whether you hated that game or not, you have to admit Dreamkiller sounds a whole lot cooler than Painkiller: The Emotional Kind.

Like Overdose, Dreamkiller relies on its absurd premise as a means to give the player a lot of weapons with which to murder pretty much everything the player encounters in various levels. The levels in Dreamkiller are actually the nightmares of patients which psychologist Dr. Alice Drake enters using some weird superpower to “cure” them by killing everything she finds in their dreams.

For our first look at the game, Dr. Alice entered the mind of a young woman who suffers from agateophobia – the fear of being insane. Aptly, the nightmare takes place in an insane asylum that sometimes morphs into an orphanage or a World War I-era hospital, suggesting some seriously effed up patient history. Dr. Alice is dropped into a nice-looking waiting room in the hospital with a graveyard right outside the windows and a grenade launcher by the door leading deeper into the asylum – apparently “left” there by the patient for Dr. Alice. In addition to arsenals provided by patients, the good doctor can also use telekinesis and fire balls thanks to a dragon tattoo on her right hand.

Almost as soon as she left the room, the good doctor was assaulted by insane asylum patients wearing giant head vices that look suspiciously like tiki masks. You can guess the rest: Dr. Alice starts shooting, the enemies keep mobbing and eventually a bigger boss shows up to do a lot of damage before the doctor is able to dispatch it with the grenade launcher. It’s early days yet for Dreamkiller, so a lot of dialogue and cut scenes weren’t in place. However, it sounds like as the player progresses through a patient’s dream, Dr. Alice discovers the source of their deep-seated phobias as well as a pattern to their nightmares that suggests a far more sinister and supernatural problem that prescription drugs just won’t fix.

Aside from the plot and the fact that the main character is a chick, Dreamkiller also introduces some new elements to its shooter style that weren’t in Overdose. In addition to the dragon tattoo powers, for example, Dr. Alice can “project” herself out of a melee situation by sending her shadow running ahead of her and then magically teleporting to where her shadow winds up. You can’t go through doors, sadly, but melee combat and running down hallways should sure be interesting. To power the “projection” trick and the dragon tattoo stuff, Dr. Alice has to collect magic pickups in addition to ammo, health and experience points (which level up weapons, not Dr. Alice). She also has a kill meter which presumably does something cool – but it was hard to tell what with such an early build of the game.

Dreamkiller is coming out for PC and Xbox 360 this October. Death match multiplayer is planned, but there’s no word on how many or if there will be split-screen multiplayer or not. So far, Mindware isn’t thinking of doing a demo, but that’s not a definitely “no demo ever” just yet. Even if the answer turns out to be no and we all have to wait four months to find out if the game is any good, we can still dream.