Nukezilla » Wesley Gaddis

Notch Wants to Fund a Psychonauts Sequel

Wesley Gaddis — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 22:32:51 +0000

In the “things I always wanted to happen but I’m almost positive they never will and I have accepted that” department of Videogames there are a couple of things. A Beyond Good & Evil sequel is one of them. Another Jet Grind/Set Radio game is another. Psychonauts is another of those that I didn’t think would happen either.

In a recent interview with Digital Spy, Schafer said (with regards to a Psychonauts sequel) “I’d love to do that game, but I’d have to convince someone to just give me a few million dollars, that’s all.” I kind of just wish people would stop asking him this question unless they’re actually going to tell him something along the lines of “Well, here’s the money, get to it son!” with game show host charisma. It just feels kind of rude to me, because who doesn’t want a Psychonauts 2?

The interview got bounced around the blogocube, and Notch (of Minecraft fame) saw a post about the interview by RockPaperShotgun on twitter, and replied “How many millions exactly?”. Soon after that, Notch confirmed his genuine intention of making this happen, sending Shcafer a message on twitter saying “Let’s make Psychonauts 2 happen”.

Earlier this morning Schafer got back to Notch via email to discuss the project in private. They’re both going to GDC and will discuss the matter further at the conference.

I really hope I’m not the only one that’s thinking this, but can we declare a holiday the day this actually gets released? I’m thinking something like “Notch-mas”.

via The Escapist

2012 IGF Finalists Announced

Wesley Gaddis — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 04:58:10 +0000

The Independent Games Festival has always been my favorite part of GDC. Sure, the technical discussions of the inner-workings of how various game engines work, narrative workshops, and how to render the best shade of gray for you new space marine FPS are cool. But sometimes all I want to know about is some crazy independent games that I’ve never heard about before.

I’ve found in the past that the finalists are usually a good place to start. It limits the roughly 600-strong list of games they got this year, though there are a lot of games on there that are probably really good.

I have heard of most of the Grand-Prize finalists (and have played the earlier versions of Dear Esther and Spelunky), and I think they’re all great picks for the award. There are a lot in the sub-categories that I haven’t heard of, so I’ll probably be checking those out as the date, March 5-9, gets closer.

The full list of finalists and honorable mentions can be found here.

Glass Bottom Games’ The Savage Garden Gets Pre-Alpha Gameplay Trailer

Wesley Gaddis — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 11:16:27 +0000

Glass Bottom Games is a studio that I remember popping up earlier this year and being really intrigued by the about section on their website. I hadn’t heard anything major from them until earlier this morning, when Dan (who’s friends with one of the employees/co-founder of the studio) sent us a trailer. It seems that they’re gearing up for their Independent Games Festival debut though, as they’ve released a pre-alpha gameplay trailer for their upcoming title The Savage Garden.

The Savage Garden is being billed as a “platforming RPG”. From the trailer it looks like it draws heavily on the Metroidvania camp of platformers, so if you’re into that you should definitely take a peek.

If it looks a lot like Shadow Complex to you (which was the vibe I got), that’s most likely because it’s running on the Unreal Engine, and probably borrows a lot from those mechanics. It is a pre-alpha build, so most of what you see will probably change before the game is actually released.

All this trailer makes me want is more, which we’ll most definitely get at the Independent Games Festival in March (where The Savage Garden will be going up against about 570 other games for various awards in excellence and such), and when it gets closer to a final build.

Dropsy: an Adventure Game by Jay Tholen Announced.

Wesley Gaddis — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 21:04:28 +0000

A few years ago, I was introduced to an album by a guy named Jay Tholen. It was called Hidden Moon Jungle, and it was just the right amount of weird, synth-pop/shoegaze/prog-rock goofiness to keep me entertained enough to wait around for his next album, and the next, and every one afterwords.

His Control Me LP won best release at the 2010 True Chip til Death Awards, and now he’s making an adventure game.

Heavily influenced by the classic LucastArts games, Dropsy looks like it definitely has some quirky charm to it (much like Tholen’s music). From the Kickstarter page:

The saga started on a message board as a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ game, where posters directed the hand-less, unintelligible, and questionably human hero through various perils and journeys. After the completion of the initial game thread in 2008, I was swamped with inquiries and requests regarding the possibility of a playable Dropsy the Clown game. Now, after a little waiting and a lot of thinking, development will begin.

The funding goal has already been met, but if you want your name immortalized in the game, or some extra goodies for a discounted price, I’d recommend donating via the Kickstarter link above. The game will be free to play, barring other possible expenses (if the programming gets too complicated and Tholen has to hire someone else to help out), in which case it will only have a $5 price tag. If you donate over $5 though, you’ll have a preorder of the game. So go! Donate! You only have until November 2nd!

Reminder: The International DotA 2 Tournament Begins Tomorrow

Wesley Gaddis — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 06:09:59 +0000

As mentioned here, the public reveal of Defense of the Ancients 2 is going to be a tournament at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany. With a top prize of a cool $1 million, and a look at some of the best players in the world testing it out, if you’re interested in the game (or Esports) at all you should probably be watching that tournament tomorrow.

The first round gets started at 10am CET (+2 GTM), and you can watch it on dota2.com. You feel me, mon?

Mass Effect Marathon 2 Begins: Throw Money At These People As They Play Games For Three Days Straight

First DotA 2 Tournament Has $1 Million Top Prize

Wesley Gaddis — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 09:07:59 +0000

Defense of the Ancients 2 was announced by Valve last year. Other than a couple of new features that they’re adding (with the help of IceFrog, of DotA Allstars fame), and a Gamepro preview article, next to nothing has been shown of the game — in traditional Valve fashion.

All of that’s about to change at Gamescom. This Tuesday, Valve announced that the public reveal will be a $1 million top prize championship tournament — called “The International” — with 16 teams from several different countries. The whole thing will be broadcast for free in Chinese, English, German, and Russian.

One million dollars is a lot of money for a top prize in a videogame tournament. There are several tournaments that have had prizes that large, but it’s even less often that you see one so big for a game that hasn’t even been released yet.

Another interesting tidbit from the DotA 2 blog post announcing the tournament is the last line: “DotA 2 will be available for the PC and Mac later this year.” So in addition to seeing one exciting tournament with some of the best DotA players vying for a huge amount of prize money, we might get a beta announcement after the tournament. You can also add Dota 2 to your wishlist on Steam if you desire.

Steam Hacked, Credit Card Data Vulnerable

CCP Internal Newsletter Leaked, Future of EVE in Limbo

Wesley Gaddis — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 19:14:44 +0000

Having just announced Dust514 as a PS3 exclusive at E3, everything seemed to be going very well for CCP. During all of the fame, money showers, and pool parties following the big show, their internal staff newsletter Fearless got leaked. This month’s issue is called “Greed is Good?”, and with the micro-transaction features that have been implemented in the most recent expansion — Incarna — a lot of players are very upset.

And with good reason. Eve has always been purely subscription based. There was never any mention of micro-transactions until all of this interest in walking around in stations and Dust514 was announced. In the Incarna expansion, CCP added a new currency called Aurum, which is used exclusively for cosmetic items. You can buy 3,500 Aurum for one PLEX (a Pilot’s Liscence Extension, — which gives players a month of game time — which currently cost $17.50 USD, and 400mil ISK in one of the most populated trade hubs in the Galaxy). Most of the items cost slightly more Aurum then you’d get for one PLEX.

And then Fearless got leaked.

The EVE section of Fearless discusses selling cosmetic goods at appropriate rates. “No pair of pants, no matter how cool, should cost the same as a new Maserati” which is a fair assumption. However, if you take a look at this comparison of prices on this Evenews24 post, and then look at the t-shirts available (physical) on CCP’s store, you’ll notice that the shirts you can buy for your IRL body cost less than the shirts you can buy for your Avatar.

The Dust514 section of the newsletter is also kind of scary for the future of the game. As you may have heard, Dust514 is going to have a one-time fee when you first get the game on PSN, and you get the full price of the game reimbursed to you as the secondary currency (not ISK). If you’re interested in not having to buy anything at all in order to be able to succeed in the game you’re most likely out of luck.

With no subscriptions in DUST, we have to be careful about selling permanent awesomeness, as there’s a danger of saturating the market. When everyone has everything, there’s no reason to buy anything anymore. Concepts such as planned obsolescence and perceived obsolescence thus play a key role (obsolescence referring to the deliberate shortening of a product’s lifespan).

So your virtual machine gun that you bought for real money in Dust514 is probably going to be obsolete in the next patch, and it might stop working eventually.

Once this was widely spread online, and CCP Zulu (Arnar Hrafn Gylfason) posted a devblog titled Fearless, Virtual Goods, and Rage, the EVE fanbase went nuts. There were protests in Jita (one of the greatest trading hubs in the galaxy), there were anti-protests, and there were podcasts recorded about everything that had happened so far.

In the post, Zulu tried to explain what Fearless is, as well as justifying the pricing structure of the items on the Noble Exchange. “The opinions and views expressed in Fearless are just that; opinions and views. They are not CCP policy nor[sic] are they a reliable source of CCP views as a company. The employees who submitted articles to that newsletter did exactly what they were asked to do, write about theories and opinions from an exaggerated stand.”

I’d like to believe Zulu’s sentiments about the nature of the first paragraph of that blog post. However, the next part goes on about fashion, and how a $1,000 pair of jeans is comparable to a $50 pair depending on who you are. I suppose they are trying to attract more players with the moving about as your meatbody in stations, and it makes sense that how you look would be an important part of that. Being a socialite (or whatever it is that’s going to take place in stations when they’re fully implemented) won’t require a big, badass ship, but it will require flashy garments to attract your prey.

I’m going to take a wild guess and say that this post is what threw the community into the huge uproar that drew me to this topic. Two days later, in another post by Zulu, he apologizes for “not correctly portray[ing] my emotions towards the community and player base at large.” He says trust needs to be rebuilt, and the first step CCP is taking to do that is calling the CSM (Council of Stellar Management, a group of players elected by the community to give CCP feedback about the game’s direction) to Iceland this week to discuss the changes that need to be made to prevent everyone jumping ship.

I have hopes to see a lot of information come out of this meeting with CCP and the CSM. Whoever leaked that newsletter did so knowing that they were going to cause a shitstorm as powerful as this one, and probably had a grudge against CCP. Most of my concerns are met in a forum post from The Mittani (a member of the CSM):

This blog is a promising but much-delayed first step. The events of the past few days have left me feeling skeptical of the entire situation, since the May Summit itself went peachy, yet then these issues with the NeX prices cropped up, undiscussed, out of nowhere – not to mention the Hilmar mail, Greed is Good, et cetera.
Mark me down on the ‘actions not words’ end of the scale – In Reykjavik, I’m going to want to see exactly how the NeX prices were decided upon, how they were drafted, and which suits where were behind this nonsense – and who chose to not mention this to the CSM. Perhaps most important is understanding the degree of financial motivation behind this, and why it came from CCP like a bolt from the blue, and thus how likely similar bolts from the blue might be in the future.
We’ll see how Reykjavik goes.

The Hilmar mail mentioned above cane be found here on Evenews24, and is fairly shocking. I know CCP isn’t the smallest studio in the industry, but I never would have imagined this kind of behavior. From the email: “Currently we are seeing _very predictable feedback_ on what we are doing. Having the perspective of having done this for a decade, I can tell you that this is one of the moments where we look at what our players do and less of what they say. Innovation takes time to set in and the predictable reaction is always to resist change.” If there was ever anything that bothered me about a game studio, it’s when they didn’t listen to their fanbase and started treating them like money. I know CCP is trying to find a new, interesting way to generate revenue, they are probably going to release more items at reasonable prices, and will probably take all of this into account when they get Dust514 off the ground and into beta. Hopefully CCP finds a way to quell the fans’ concerns these next couple of days in Rekjavik, as a lot of them don’t seem to be too pleased with the current state of things.

No related posts.

Haiku Impressions: EVE Online: Incarna

Wesley Gaddis — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 20:39:21 +0000

First time seeing self
Dat turret animation
Television sucks

Communicast Episode 9: “I Don’t Judge You, Kinectevin”

Wesley Gaddis — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:29:17 +0000

So E3 happened, and we weren’t really that impressed (by anything other than Dust514). We ended up talking about how awesome!(lame!) Kinect is, despite the fact that Kevin’s is his sex slave, as well as pretty much everything that was at the assorted press conferences.

I’d like to apoligize for the quality, as I’m listening to the episode before posting this and it turns out Kevin decided to record at 5kbps with crazy satellite voices. I don’t blame you for not listening to this one all the way through.

Hit this link to download.

Some silly things we talked about:

Final Fantasy VII sucks and Phantasy Star 2 is a million times better because it was on Sega Genesis or something.
Kinect is really behind.
Kevin wants to have sex with the Kinect, confirmed(he even says he’s going to edit it out).
Kevin didn’t play Persona 4 for once in the ten years since it’s been released.

The Border House Podcast Is Pretty Good; Celebrating and Discussing Diversity

Sony E3 2011 Presser: NGP = Vita, Is Cheaper Than Everyone Thought It Would Be, Uncharted Is On Everything, And I Hate Browser Crashes

Wesley Gaddis — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 02:59:30 +0000

Sony’s presser has probably been the best one I’ve seen this year. It started out with a good, tasteful apology for the PSN outage, had some surprises, and some really great products for the coming year.

There were some good things and bad things about Sony’s Presser, like the whole “Oh, we’re going to be 10 minutes late starting this because we have to hand out 3D glasses” thing. That was tight.

After everyone got their glasses and Jack Tretton made his introduction and the little spiel about the outage, there was a fairly long Uncharted demo. It took place on a boat, in the rain, and didn’t look like it was that much of a departure from the rest of the series (not necessarily a bad thing).

Nearly every console game that Sony showed off had 3D and/or Move support. They even announced a Playstation branded 24 inch Television that will be bundled with Resistance 3, a pair of Playstation 3D glasses, and a 6 foot HDMI cable for $499. This bundle was created to potentially push down the cost of 3D displays, and cause more market penetration for the technology, which I suppose I can get behind. 3D is cool.

My browser crashed right before the Dust514 — CCP’s new console MMOFPS that integrates with EVE (also my most anticipated game of forever) — was announced to be a Playstation exclusive title.

The Main focus of Sony’s presentation was the NGP, who’s official name is the Sony Vita. It’ll have a 5-inch multi-touch OLED screen, with two analog sticks, a touch sensitive pad on the back of the system, and a WiFi and 3G/WiFi model. The NGP fits into the 10-year plan that Sony announced 6 years ago at E3, and it fits into that as a “mobile content device”, as Sony now has all of this awesome content available on the PSN. It’ll retail for $249 or €249 (and we assume, £249).

There are going to be a number of Playstation exclusives in a few of the titles that were shown off by EA and Ubisoft today, including SSX getting a Mount Fuji track, Need For Speed: The Run getting a special Blu-Ray with seven additional super cars, and Battlefield 3 players will receive a copy of Battlefield 1943 on the disc due to Blu-ray’s greater storage capacity.

Like I said, overall, Sony’s presser was much more exciting than Microsoft’s, and I’m hopeful for the future of the console.

Other things we saw:

HD God of War: Origins and an Ico/Shadow of the Colossus bundle. Both of which will support 3D
CinemaNow will be coming to the PS3
NBA2k12 was played by Kobe. It was pretty realistic.
Medieval Moves: Deadmund’s Quest is an on rails move game.
Infamous 2 comes out tomorrow, which will be getting Move features and “unique player driven content creation” sometime this fall.
Little Big Planet 2 will also be getting Move support, increaseing the amount of good Move games tenfold.
Starhawk looks like Firefly with more explosions.
Bioshock Infinite looks like a really fun amusement park, will have Move support and there will be a new Bioshock game for Vita coming sometime in the future.
Saint’s Row: The Third comes out 15th November, with PS3 exclusive content
Star Trek game that will release at the same time as the next film.
Vita features that aren’t fully fleshed out yet and will probably be changed a dozen times before they hit the market.
a “Unique” Uncharted experience for the Vita.
Ruin is a “Social Action RPG”, with Twitter and Facebook stuff and killing Golbins. Might be cool, presentation was fairly poor though.
Modnation: Racers will also be on the Vita. You’ll be able to use all of the user-generated content on the PS3 version on the Vita.
Street Fighter X Tekken is also coming to the Vita, with Cole from Infamous as a playable character.
I completely forgot about Sly Cooper! My rage from my browser crashing during it made me forget, sorry.

No related posts.

Microsoft E3 Presser: Kinect Stole the Show From Halo 4

Wesley Gaddis — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 18:54:24 +0000

Well, that was certainly a press conference. Remember last year when a lot of Kinect stuff was demoed? And Microsoft were talking about all of that cool stuff Kinect would be able to do? Well they did a lot of that this year again, only with a few more developers showing off their games that had features from the stupid peripheral.

Here are some highlights of what was shown at the conference today:

Starting it off was a Modern Warfare 3 demo that lasted way too long. It looks like it’ll have a lot of really boring water levels, and of course huge set-piece explosions, guns, and burning cities. Oh, and you’ll be on a boat for part of a level.

Mass Effect 3 is getting some pretty interesting Kinect support: Voice recognition. The guy demoing it was choosing which item in the dialogue-trees by saying them out loud (presumably not using the controller) and issuing commands to party members in a fight.

There’s a NEW-NEW-new Xbox experience coming out sometime this year with even more Kinect support, a better looking UI than the last NXE (that reminds me a lot of the Windows 8 video that came out not too long ago). You’ll also be able to search for entertainment with your voice via “Bing”, and YouTube will be on the dashboard.

There will also be several new premium content providers (similar to ESPN currently), like UFC. You’ll be able to watch fights and bet on them against your friends (with points in the app) and look at stats in pop-out sidebars mid-fight.

There was a stray dog on the screen for a while, then it panned out to a city in ruin, then to a bunch of Romans fighting. There was a guy controlling the warrior with Kinect. The game is called Ryse, and other than that it has nearly full Kinect support, I didn’t catch much else about it.

The last thing shown was a Halo 4 teaser(which someone in IRC said was Beyond Good & Evil, and I immediately though I heard “Pey’j!” in the trailer, then got sad). Also from the spawn of Bungie’s helmeted hero, we have Halo: Combat Evolved being remastered and released with seven multiplayer maps and the original campaign from the game that started it all.

Other things that we saw:

Short Tomb Raider Demo by Crystal Dynamics.
Ghost Recon: Future Soldier had some gun customization and wielding with Kinect
Clifford Blezinski and Ice-T played Gears of War 3 together, it looks like it would be Gears of War 3.
Forza 4 “Will deliver an entirely new car experience”, as well as be “the ultimate car community”.
I’m throughly convinced that Disneyland Adventures and Star Wars Kinect are the same game, just with different assets.
Fun Labs, with body-avatar scanning, finger tracking (actually looked really cool), and scanning in 3D objects into Kinect. Overall, looks like a cool little app that allows you to play with some tech demos of things.
Tim Schafer showed off Sesame Street: Once Upon a Monster, which looks like a great kids game, and I’m happy that he gets to tell his 3 year old daughter that he’s making a game for her.
Kinect Sports 2. Now making American Football look more lame than Golf!
EA Sports games are going to be using Kinect next year.
Dance Central 2 announced, you can import all of the songs from Dance Central, which gives it over 100 songs from the get-go.
Fable: the Journey is Fable on rails, with Kinect.

Personally, I was rather disappointed by this conference. I might just be a jaded asshole, but as a non-kinect owner, and not the hugest fan of Halo or Gears I didn’t really feel like I should care about anything they had to offer. Hopefully these Kinect games and features that have been cooking for nearly two years now won’t be half-baked, and will make me want to purchase one.

Microsoft’s E3 Presser Bulletpoints Leaked… on Xbox.com?

Wesley Gaddis — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 15:13:24 +0000

In our morning haze of brewing coffee and searching for food to ready our bodies for the big day, we’ve been snooping around the internet for anything that might possibly ruin our surprise and awe when we’re watching the press conferences at this year’s E3.

According to NowGamer, Microsoft’s website was updated with what would appear to be nearly everything they would have announced at their press conference. Nowgamer lists Halo 4, Kinect Star Wars, and the Halo remake as some of the heavy hitters of the event.

There’s also a gallery on the post so you can see the website edits (which some quick clicking around the Xbox website leads me to believe they have been taken down already).

Keep an eye out on the actual conference, as I wouldn’t say this is the most reliable source I’ve ever seen, but it’s highly likely that Microsoft already has the updated webpage saved, and someone accidentally published it and immediately took it down.

E3 2011 Live Report

Wesley Gaddis — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 17:55:20 +0000

Welcome to Nukezilla’s Live Report of E3 2011. We’ll be updating this page with all the big news as and when it happens. You can see a recap of everything important at the top, a live blog with further details below and on the right, links to the latest news from around the web. We have Brett at E3 roaming the floor and John in Manchester, UK roaming the internet.

Nintendo announced their new console; the Wii U, details here.
Sony named their new hand-held (previously known as the NGP) as the PSVita at their press conference, as well as announcing a new PS-branded 3D TV and a bunch of exclusive content for the platform.
Microsoft’s press conference happened. Halo 4, the new-new-new Xbox Experience and lots of Kinect-ish games were shown.
At EA’s press conferenceBattlefield 3 got a release date of October 25th and Mass Effect 3 got a release date of March 6th. Ubisoft’s press conference, Far Cry 3 was announced and Assasin’s Creed Revelations got a sexy trailer and gameplay demo

You can skip to the parts of the Live Blog you care about by following these links (might be a good idea to set the order to “chronological” before you do. Click the links below the E3 logo): Microsoft, Sony, EA, Ubisoft

Dear Esther Receives Indie Fund Backing, Getting Dolled up and Ready for Commercial Release

Wesley Gaddis — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 19:12:42 +0000

If you’re into single-player Half-Life 2 mods, you’ve likely already played Dear Esther. Originally released for free by a group of students from the University of Portsmouth, the mod turned some heads when it was released in 2008. I personally didn’t play it until last year, but it certainly holds up as one of the most eerie, thought provoking source mods that I have ever played.

thechineseroom announced yesterday that they finally received funding and are no longer under the label of the University of Portsmouth. Citing various legal reasons (mainly, that the university couldn’t publish a game) in a conversation with beefjack.com for their reasoning for leaving the University, Dan Pinchbeck (writer and producer of Dear Esther) is “massively grateful to the University for basically incubating the studio”.

The funding which is making this possible came from a fairly high-profile group in the indie games world, now known as The Indie Fund. This group of developers includes the team behind World of Goo, the President of Thatgamecompany, Jonathan Blow and several others.

There’s a whole blog post about the move by the Indie Fund, but this quote stuck out to me the most: “We are backing Dear Esther because it is a unique expression from a video game artist we look forward to seeing more work from in the future. Dear Esther also stands out in that it is a mod-turned-indie-game, something that would have been unlikely to get traditional publisher funding, even if it were a more standard gaming experience.” I don’t think the Indie Fund could have chosen a game that better embodies the bolded statement more than Dear Esther. Hopefully the retooled version is released soon. I’m rather aroused after looking at the videos they have on the Indie Fund page.

via: shacknews

Mojang Planning on Publishing Other Indies in the Future

Wesley Gaddis — Wed, 18 May 2011 08:45:51 +0000

There aren’t many cases of indie developers announcing that they’re interested in publishing. You’re more likely to hear about a new, awesome game coming from them than business models and revenue figures. Mojang has made oodles and oodles of money from Minecraft though, and they’re not exactly sure about what they’re going to do with it.

Daniel Kaplan — Mojang’s business development director — has this to say about their plans in an interview with GI.biz:

We are in a great spot right now, we can basically do whatever we want to. The hardest thing for us right now is to say “no” to all the deals we’re being offered. There are tonnes of opportunities out there for us right now. But we have to wait it out and figure out what’s the best thing for us to do.

Kaplan has big plans for the future of Mojang. With all of the buzz surrounding the company, it’s no wonder they’re getting all kinds of offers “from hardware manufacturers, other publishers, ad networks, all that stuff”.

The interview essentially concludes with Kaplan saying that yes, Mojang is in fact planning on doing things in the future, and their next game — Scrolls — will be released with a similar business plan as Minecraft was: start small, allow people to pay to play it as they see fit, and release updates early and often.

I’m excited to hear more of Mojang’s future plans, because I feel like they’d be a company that uses their money for awesome things, and not just their profit line. If the Minecraft business model could see success with another game, I’d be all for it.

Battledrome: Grand Minecraft Designs Revisited

Communicast 3.06: Kevin’s a Douche(?)

Wesley Gaddis — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 18:33:57 +0000

I don’t think that’s actually a fact, more-so Adushan is bitter that Kevin is busy with finals (or something else entirely) that he couldn’t make a post for this podcast.

This week you’ve got your regulars, Kevin and Adushan, as well as my main man Ben Stead, and myself(briefly). Highlights include:

Terrible internet connection, not knowing how to use a microphone/Skype, as well as my friend’s roommate bursting into the room and shouting “HEY”(may have been edited out)
People forgetting to tell me that we were changing what time we were recording
Portal 2 circlejerk (I was absent for this)
Print magazines are fun still

Hit the Mediafire link below to get it, and the blood that leaks from your ears? Bottle it, Adushan likes to drink it.

The Mediafire link.

Ragnarok Online has gone Free-to-Play

Wesley Gaddis — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 02:14:01 +0000

I’ve only played Ragnarok Online for about 6 hours total. All I really remember are the first couple of areas that I was grinding the whole time, the art being incredibly charming, and that the class system seemed really fleshed out and fairly balanced, if a little hard to grasp and more time consuming than EVE Online skill-training. Well, last week I was stumbling around the ol’ tubes and I noticed that the game had recently gone Free to Play.

The gameplay is remaining largely unchanged by the revenue model shift. Gravity Corp. had already added microtransactions back in 2007 with a system called “Kafra Store Points”, which allows players to rent equipment for 7 days, as well as permanently purchase items like clothing dyes.

Gravity Corp. are still allowing players to keep their subscription, if they’d like. They’ve added a “VIP”(subscriber) only server called Ymir. VIP players also receive a 50% experience gain increase, as well as lowered death penalty, and increased loot drops on both the VIP and the regular server.

In light of this news, who wants to relive that rainy afternoon with me, eating combos, playing Ragnarok, and listening to Dragonforce? I promise that the worst thing that will happen is that you’ll become horribly addicted to one of the best Korean MMORPGs that I’ve ever played for an extended amount of time, for free!

DirectX is Hurting PC Performance Issues, Say Some Developers[Updated]

Wesley Gaddis — Mon, 28 Mar 2011 17:00:49 +0000

Depending on who you ask, PCs have been falling behind in the “looking better than console games” department. Despite having superior hardware with faster speeds and more GPU cores, they still fail to push the same level of polygons at higher resolutions at the same frame rate as modern consoles do.

On consoles, you can draw maybe 10,000 or 20,000 chunks of geometry in a frame, and you can do that at 30-60fps. On a PC, you can’t typically draw more than 2-3,000 without getting into trouble with performance, and that’s quite surprising – the PC can actually show you only a tenth of the performance if you need a separate batch for each draw call.

This is — according to Richard Huddy, AMD’s GPU Developer Relations Manager — because “To a significant extent, that’s because, one way or another, for good reasons and bad – mostly good, DirectX is getting in the way”, and developers have been asking him to make it go away so they can push systems to their true, SLI/Crossfire powerhouse potential.

DirectX has been one of the most important additions to the PC market since its launch in 1995. Before that, every application (or game, in context) had to be manually written for each individual graphics architecture, making the market very splintered with about 7 or 8 different types of computers that you would have to remake your game for.

Upon reading that, I couldn’t fathom how that could be the reason consoles were outperforming PCs in a benchmarking contest. Continuing on in the extensive interview with bit-tech, it started to make more sense. The API is the one thing that’s plaguing developers from being able to push the pixels to the metal. Allowing developers lower-level access would give them what they need to help PCs retake the throne as the graphically superior platform.

This ideal world for maximizing power comes with its problems, however. Obviously, getting rid of DirectX entirely would throw the hardware vendors under the bus. The developers that don’t have the budget/contractual obligations to favor one architecture over the other(raw power and features being the most important factor, hopefully) wouldn’t allow for everyone to play everything anymore. Only big-name developers with hefty publisher funding would likely make games that work on all systems. Due to this fracture of the GPU market, the smaller hardware manufacturers would likely get the short end of the deal, as they wouldn’t get a lot of titles due to their inferior hardware (hypothetically, of course).

There would also be massive stability issues trying to get games to work on every architecture available. It most likely just wouldn’t happen, or larger publishers would end up outsourcing to firms for multi-GPU architecture releases, which just seems ridiculous if the game is already coming to PCs and consoles.

There’s a lot of popularity in the industry for this type of ecosystem to exist, as well as some dissenting opinions. From a developer’s standpoint, I can see low-level access to GPU features being a great thing — having your game look as good as the hardware actually permits would be wonderful. However, I don’t see it being great at all for smaller developers, or anyone who wants to retain their sanity if the same studio is porting the game to six or seven different GPU architectures.

Update: AMD denies Huddy’s criticism(via GI.biz)

Music Monday: Visual Hallucinations

Volition Manager Wants You To Pirate Their Games…Kind of.

Wesley Gaddis — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 02:11:29 +0000

In the ongoing discussion of whether or not PC gaming is dead and unprofitable due to piracy, Volition’s studio manager Eric Barker had some interesting things to say about the state of the platform in a recent Eurogamer post:

“Let’s make a game that’s worth stealing, and then we’ll worry about making sure they don’t”. In focusing on the quality and appearance of the game, rather then worrying about how to lock it down might lead to a better, more well-received product. It also doesn’t completely insult your customer’s trust, like Ubisoft did last year with Assassin’s Creed 2.

It’s still a bold claim, and I’m not sure what THQ thinks of this. High piracy hasn’t exactly been shown to be a direct correlation with poor sales, but most publishers would rather people pay for the game then allow them to get it for free (for whatever reason, be it malicious or just to see if the game will run on your machine).

He goes on to say, “We definitely believe PC games are great and if they’re done right and done well by a studio, they’re phenomenal”, which is true of any platform, in all honesty. Android games can be “great” if they’re “done well”, but the marketplace sucks and it’s almost impossible for people to find out about/purchase them. I hope they’re not spreading their resources too thin — having three multi-platform games currently in development — to make this dream a reality.

Hopefully for Volition, — and any other developer making PC games that follows this mantra — the pirates don’t steal all of their booty, and can remain profitable and make a worthwhile, exciting product on that wild ‘n crazy platform full of hackers and bad people.

via: 1up

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Nukezilla Review: Bulletstorm (Xbox 360)

Wesley Gaddis — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 22:50:19 +0000

Bulletstorm is the game my inner teenager wanted to play the day I learned about guns and videogames: Extreme violence, foul, raunchy (but hilarious) dialog, and more arcade-y, ridiculous notifications popping up on your screen than necessary. In this modern landscape of grey, duck-and-cover military shooters, can a game like Bulletstorm entertain? I believe it can.

I wasn’t expecting much out of Bulletstorm when I preordred it. I thought it would be a relatively fun Unreal Engine FPS with some voice acting by Steven Blum (of Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo, and about 100 other works that everyone has heard of), and some great game design — People Can Fly did make Painkiller, after all.

The campaign mode of the game is easily what shines the brightest about Bulletstorm. The plot — while somewhat clichéd in parts — kept me engaged up until the several almost-endings that it has. The story plays to the tune of a group of ex-military assassins (the leader being Grayson Hunt, whom the player controls) going rogue and trying to get revenge for all of the heinous acts that the corrupt leader of the dominant military power in the universe had them do back in the day.

Fast-forward a few years after these events, and we find Dead Echo (the name of Hunt’s team) and their “pirate ship” drunkenly assaulting their former General Sarrano’s battle cruiser, which is en-route to a mutant-infested vacation resort planet. After realizing that they stand no chance in regular combat against the cruiser, Hunt decides to ram into it, causing both to plummet to the planet below, where the remainder of the game takes place.

After crash-landing on a resort/vacation planet infested with hordes of mutants, the team is in pretty bad shape. One member, Ishi, is badly injured in the crash and recieves a botched brain modification, causing the AI meant to keep his brain alive to occasionally take over his actions and have him do the most logical thing to preserve his life. The other two members of the crew are murdered by mutants swarming the ship trying to take power cells and whatever other supplies they can find.

From there, it’s a lot of dick jokes, political intrigue, and deus ex machina. I wouldn’t say it’s for everyone (certainly not for you if you’re too mature for phallic references getting dropped every five minutes or so), but if you just let yourself get into it (with your dick) I think you will enjoy it. There were several cutscenes and conversations between waves of enemies that had me genuinely laughing from my gut, so I was entertained for the whole campaign.

Finding new gameplay concepts in the FPS genre hasn’t been something that I would call an every day occurrence. We’ve had the same walk-shoot-walk-shoot-cover-shoot-cutscene-get better gun etc. etc. experiences for the majority of the genre’s existence (barring several examples like Half-Life, Bioshock, and a few others). Bulletstorm follows that formula to some extent, but adds in a couple of new mechanics that I haven’t seen anywhere else.

Of these, I’d say the Leash (a grappling hook that launches enemies toward the player) and the slide (the player slides along the ground really fast) make the game feel fresher than most of the other FPS games that I’ve seen announced for this jam-packed first quarter of the year. If the game played like a “normal” FPS, I don’t think the skillshot system would work nearly as well as it does.

Skillshots in Bulletstorm work kind of like combo points in fighting games. If you kill an enemy in certain, horrifically sadistic ways, you’ll get a certain amount of points: . You get a multiplier if you kill more than one person in the same way (explosions, or using the secondary fire to shoot more than one person at the same time), as well as chaining together certain moves. It’s a really different way of approaching combat, as you’re constantly trying to get more points to upgrade your weapons and buy more ammo.

The skillshots work well in the campaign for making you try to think like Grayson Hunt (brutally violent and reckless), but they also work very well in the score attack mode, Echoes. In Echoes, you essentially run through short sections of the campaign trying to max out your skillshot points. It’s great if you just want to play for about 5 minutes without any of the dialog or cutscenes from the campaign mode.

Bulletstorm also has a co-op multiplayer mode called Anarchy. It reminds me of the Horde gametype from Gears of War, or Firefight in the last couple of Halo games. The rounds that I played were relatively fun, as you’re basically just killing wave after wave of mutants and getting skillshot combos with your bros. I haven’t played it extensively, but I can see myself playing it regularly if I managed to get a full group of friends into a party for a couple of hours of mutant-massacring.

You can customize your avatar, and you level up to get more options for it (kind of like in Halo: Reach). The points you gain from killing dudes are used similarly to the points in the campaign, as well as in Echoes, as you are scored for the whole wave, and you then use the points to purchase upgrades as you progress through the waves.

Overall, I found Bulletstorm to be a reliable, funny, and well-designed shooter. I can see the new mechanics drawing me back if I ever just want to kick the shit out of something, and the humor is so juvenile I can’t help but find it hilarious. Like I said earlier, Bulletstorm is the game that my 15-year old self has wanted to play for years, and I’m really glad I got into it as much as I did.

Source Mods You Should Care About: The Hidden

Wesley Gaddis — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 23:47:05 +0000

Some of my favorite experiences in games have been when I’ve gotten really afraid, or tense about events that are happening onscreen. I guess it’s because these emotions are some of the easiest to sense in yourself (to me, at least), but going through my typical day I don’t usually feel scare or get horribly tense. That’s where this week’s Source Mods You Should Care About game comes in; The Hidden.

The Hidden is my favorite multi-player Source game that isn’t directly supported by Valve (that honor goes to Left 4 Dead 2). If I had to compare it to another game type, I would say that it’s a lot like Juggernaut in Halo, where one player has various perks (in this case, it’s a very fun jump/wall climbing mechanic and invisibility), and the rest of the players are I.R.I.S. (Infinitum Research Intercept Squad) soldiers with various weapons and items to aid them in spotting and killing “The Hidden” (the invisible player).

The majority of the players in the game — the I.R.I.S. soldiers — are allowed one primary and one secondary weapon which can be switched before the round starts. They are tasked with doing the nearly impossible: killing an invisible target. Thankfully they have items like a laser reticule, sonic motion sensors, guns, and some sort of paintball-pepper spray gun to help them spot and eliminate the Hidden.

As the Hidden though, the player’s tools are fairly limited. He only has a knife and 3 pipe bombs. This is where the map design and ingenuity of the player really come in — and the freakishly powerful pounce ability given to the Hidden by the scientists that created him. Using this ability, the Hidden can dart around the map and hold onto any surface for a limited time to hide or pounce on his enemies.

Overall, the game is a really tense, challenging experience. It was nominated for best Half-Life 2 mod in the IGF back in 2006, if that’s any indication of how good it is (that’s also the year that Dystopia and Eclipse were nominated). The last developer blog update was posted in 2009, and the last update to the game was released in 2007. I think it’s safe to say that this game is dead. The forum and community are almost nonexistent, there were about three servers with a handful of people in them when I played last night.

The Hidden is a great game. Albeit unfinished, I still get a good couple of hours of enjoyment out of it when ever I re-install. Maybe some day it will get the updates that it needs to completely balance everything and make all of the hidden abilities work properly. For now though, we only have the fourth version of the beta, which you can download over on good ol’ Moddb if you want to give it a shot.

Doom 3 Source Code Released

No Kim Jong-il in Homefront, Deems Japanese Ratings Organization

Wesley Gaddis — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 21:16:35 +0000

Much like the fairly recent Medal of Honor debacle with the naming of the insurgent faction in the game (who shall forever remain nameless due to the impending heart attack you will have after hearing its name), a recent story about the yet to be released Homefront has many similarities. The only difference is where the censorship is happening, and who is forcing it on the work.

Having the premise of a North Korean invasion of the United States, Homefront was most likely going to contain Kim Jong-il or some caricature of him (specifically, his son controls the empire established in the game world). Being that North Korea’s militant motives are still a fairly touchy subject, it would make sense that the Japanese publisher/distributor of the game, and the Japanese Computer Entertainment Ratings Organization (CERO) wouldn’t want to provoke anyone that is still in power. According to AndriaSang, the image of Kim Jong-il has been completely removed from the Japanese version of the game, as well as any mention of North Korea as a malicious military superpower.

It’s a very touchy situation, and I can understand why the Japanese government-affiliated organizations and publishers wouldn’t want media that pokes fun at or over-satirizes heads of state. I guess it’s because videogames are serious business, but in a world where Team America or that episode of South Park with the image of Muhammad in it exist, I can’t help but think that having incumbent politicians in fictional, or satirical media would have little to no effect.

via: Gamespot

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Haiku Impressions: Bulletstorm Demo

Wesley Gaddis — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 19:31:39 +0000

Oh my god killing
kill more ways for more points, man
Spike Spiegle says so

Timesplitters 4 a Possibilty, Pending Crysis 2 Reception

Wesley Gaddis — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 20:53:38 +0000

If I’ve ever said that a game was my jam before, I lied. Timesplitters: Future Perfect is in fact, my jam. Free Radical, the company that fathered the Timesplitters games, was bought by Crytek in 2009, and was re-christened Crytek UK, which you may recognize as the studio that is responsible for Haze, and the multiplayer code for Crysis 2. The last game in the Timesplitters series was released in 2005.

For fans of Timesplitters this quote from a CVG article with Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli might make you a bit giddy for a future release in the series:

Yeah, we have been discussing it [Timesplitters], but nothing has been confirmed yet, so let’s see after Crysis 2.

According to the CVG post, Timesplitters 4 (called that for the simplicity of it being the 4th game in the series) was in development around the time Free Radical got purchased by Crytek. After they had more or less finished the Crysis 2 multiplayer code, Crytek UK was adamant about getting the word out that they were in fact looking to get to work on another project of their own creation — more than likely to be Timesplitters 4 or something in the vein of that series. What they do next is up to what the publishers want and think will be profitable.

Regardless of whether we get a new Timesplitters game or not, I’m excited to see what the outcome of these publisher talks will bring. It will most definitely be something to watch out for, monkey-blasting and time-traveling antics aside.

via: That VideoGame Blog

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Pure Pwnage Not Renewed for Second Season, Future of Series Uncertain

Wesley Gaddis — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 23:15:48 +0000

Many have fond memories of the fairly popular web series Pure Pwnage. If you’re a bit fuzzy, it’s likely that you’ve at least heard the phrase “BOOM! HEADSHOT!”, which was coined by FPS Doug (one of the show’s major characters). I remember watching it back in high school eagerly waiting for the next episode to surface on the show’s website.

I had stopped following it though, mainly due to the fact that it continued on a Canadian television network and the only way for me to watch it was to illegitimately obtain a copy of it. According to a post on their forums though, the TV series is going to be cut short, as it isn’t going to be renewed for a second season.

The post talks of the series feeling “unfinished”, and mentions possible “production of a Pure Pwnage feature-length movie, especially since the TV show’s cancellation”. Hopefully for fans of the series this will come to fruition and will be a worthwhile endeavor. Nothing gave me tingles like the announcement and release of Serenity after Firefly was canceled.

It sucks to hear about a piece of media getting canceled, especially when it has as large and dedicated a fanbase as Pure Pwnage does. You can try to be optimistic about the future of it, hoping that you’ll finally get closure. Sometimes, though, the best thing you can do is just remember the good memories you have of the show, and keep that hope somewhere in the back of your mind.