Index
Opposable ThumbsThe Art of Technology
This week, an animated trailer for an imaginary Zelda game got us wondering why exactly games often can't live up to the thrilling scenes we're shown in pre-release videos. We also looked at the slow redefinition of what an Online Pass can be used for, examined the legality of blocking used games sales, and spent a massively-multiplayer hour as a cat.
Madden NFL and Tecmo Bowl both agree that the Giants are going to win the Super Bowl this weekend. Personally, I'm rooting for stadium collapse.
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Boom to bust: THQ's "revolutionary" uDraw now filling warehouse shelvesFri, 03 Feb 2012 12:55:00 -0600
Back in the long-ago days of the 2010 holiday season, it looked like THQ had a hit on its hands with its out-of-left-field uDraw Game Tablet, a slate-like controller that used a stylus to let players draw on the TV. The company sold 1.7 million of them to Wii owners by early 2011, beating expectations and leading some to speculate that the uDraw might be the biggest game control revolution this side of the Kinect.
Buoyed by the initial success, THQ quickly cranked out uDraw tablets for the Xbox 360 and PS3, and got to work licensing new compatible software from big, family-friendly brands like Kung Fu Panda, Spongebob Squarepants, and Disney Princesses. But that expansion now looks like a colossal mistake, as excess uDraw inventory was a major factor in the huge financial loss reported for the company's recent 2011 holiday quarter.
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Oklahoma lawmaker proposes tax on "violent" video games (and Ultimate Card Games)Thu, 02 Feb 2012 14:42:00 -0600
When the US Supreme Court decided last year to extend full First Amendment protections to video games, many likely thought that was the last word on potential legal assaults on the medium. That's not the case though, as an Oklahoma lawmaker has now proposed a special tax to be focused on "violent video games."
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Final Fantasy XIII-2 takes place three years after Final Fantasy XIII. Vanille, Fang, Snow and Lightning are gone; either dead, encased in crystal or disappeared to unknown adventures. Serah Farron, Lightning's sister and Snow's fiancé, hides her pain while teaching the children of New Bodhum and helping her friends in NORA. Images of Lightning engaged in an epic battle haunt her dreams, but she knows her sister is gone forever.
What happened to Final Fantasy? The elaborate narrative and groundbreaking graphics of Final Fantasy VII turned the franchise from a significant cult favorite into a mainstream blockbuster in 1997. Since then, though, almost every Final Fantasy has struggled to find the correct balance between game and story, with CGI cut-scenes and anime clichés taking up as much time as the gameplay.
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Double Fine Happy Action Theater redefines what a Kinect "game" can beWed, 01 Feb 2012 15:08:00 -0600
Calling Double Fine Happy Action Theater (DFHAT) a game might not marry well with many people's definition of what a game is. A game usually has clearly stated goals and strictly defined rules that describe how you could fail to reach those goals. In DFHAT, on the other hand, it's literally impossible to either win or fail in any of 18 myraid scenes, which each use the Kinect 3D camera to transform your living room in various ways.
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The instructions underneath VVVVVV creator Terry Cavanagh's new browser-based MMO ChatChat simply read: "be a cat." These instructions also describe a dream I held between the ages of 5 and 7, so I'm eager to finally see if my dreams were realistic. Below is a short, diary-style description of my first hour as a cat.
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Kazuo Hirai has been named as President and CEO of Sony Corporation. He will take the role on 1 April, and replace Howard Stringer in both roles.
Howard Stringer will become chairman of the board of directors in June, when Yotaro Kobayashi retires. Hirai is also expected to be appointed to the board in June.
Hirai, 51, is currently Sony's executive deputy president and chairman of the company's Computer Entertainment (SCE)—or PlayStation—arm.
He joined the firm in 1984 at Sony Music, before moving to SCE America in 1995, where he played a vital role in the PlayStation's US success. A mainstay amongst PlayStation executives, he replaced Ken Kutaragi as President of Sony Computer Entertainment in 2006.
Stringer, 69, recommended Hirai as his successor, saying that he had "distinguished himself through his work in the PlayStation and networked entertainment businesses." Stringer commented, "he is ready to lead, and the time to make this change is now."
In the announcement, Hirai laid out his plans for the future of Sony. "The path we must take is clear," he said, "drive the growth of our core electronics businesses—primarily digital imaging, smart mobile and game; to turn around the television business; and to accelerate the innovation that enables us to create new business domains."
Sony's next big launch is the PlayStation Vita: the quad-core successor to the PSP which launches on February 22.
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At the heart of the great used game debate are legitimate fears—on both sides of the divide. Gamers are worried about their right to buy and sell games they legally bought without technological hindrance or lost content. Publishers are afraid new game sales are unsustainable when cheaper, functionally identical used versions are available mere days after release. Meanwhile, major retailer GameStop rakes in what's estimated to be billions of dollars from the used game market.
Is there a better way? Mike Kennedy seems to think so. He's setting up a new used game trading site called Parcel Gamer that he thinks can satisfy both publishers and gamers, while also undercutting GameStop's high-margin business model.
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En Masse sees most foreigners as security risk to N. American TERA serversTue, 31 Jan 2012 14:25:00 -0600
MMO operators are faced with a constant battle with hackers, gold farmers, and other exploiters, working tirelessly to identify and ban them before they can ruin the experience for honest players. But En Masse, the North American publisher of upcoming MMO TERA has announced a much simpler plan for stopping ne'er-do-wells from getting into its North American servers—simply block large swathes of the world from playing on its servers.
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AVSEQ: Engaging gem-matching fails to mesh with trippy musical visualizationsTue, 31 Jan 2012 10:10:00 -0600
AVSEQ (pronounced ay-vee-seck, I'm told) stands for Audiovisual Sequencer, putting it in a class of abstract, interactive audiovisual experiments that runs from Simon all the way through and past Electroplankton. It's a tough game to evaluate as a whole, though, because the "audiovisual" portion and the "sequencer" portion, both interesting in their own right, fail to mesh together in a satisfying way and each seem to actively work against the enjoyment of the other.
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Why game trailers are sometimes more thrilling than the games themselvesMon, 30 Jan 2012 15:08:00 -0600
Like thousands of others, I was incredibly impressed with this fake, animated trailer for an imaginary, Wind Waker-inspired Legend of Zelda game. The short video manages to capture the series' feeling of epic adventure and thrilling action in an entirely new and exciting way. Yet the more I watched the trailer and really thought about how it would translate to an actual game experience, the more I realized that this is just another example of a passive film doing things in a way that would be difficult or impossible to pull off in an interactive game.
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Recent stories about potential technical efforts to limit the future playability of used games, as well as commercial efforts to limit the content included with used copies, got us wondering: is it actually legal to hinder someone from reselling a game (or piece of a game) that they legally bought in the first place?
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Kingdoms of Amalur's "Online Pass" continues a slippery slope for used gamesFri, 27 Jan 2012 17:15:34 -0600
Review copies of Electronic Arts's Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning are starting to reach critics, who have made a surprising collective discovery: an insert containing a code to download a "House of Valor" content pack featuring "seven additional single player quests."
EA has confirmed to Ars Technica that this downloadable content will be included free with all new copies of the game, including digital copies purchased on the PC through Origin, Steam, or other services. Players who would rather purchase a pre-owned copy, however, will presumably have to pay an additional fee if they want to access to this portion of the game.
Charging used game players for such an "Online Pass" is nothing new in the game industry, of course. But implementing an Online Pass in the single-player Kingdoms of Amalur represents a continuing tumble down a slippery slope for the entire game industry.
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The rise of purely digital online game sales has changed the industry in a number of ways, but the most important change might be the introduction of games as impulse buys. Anyone with a credit card tied to their Steam account knows how scarily easy it is to, with just a few clicks, dump more money than you intended on a whole passel of games that seem vaguely intriguing. You might not have read any reviews, or even heard anything about the game outside of the Steam description, but when it's so cheap and the purchase process is so seamless, your consumptive id can often act before your conscious brain even has a chance to question whether you really want the game you're buying.
Digital stores on platforms from Sony, Microsoft, Apple, and Google have similar setups to encourage this kind of impulse purchase—enter your credit card once, then buy with a few clicks forevermore. Nintendo is the lone holdout, as it often is with online features, refusing to store credit card information for users with a Wii or 3DS. But that might change in the next console generation, with Nintendo President Satoru Iwata announcing today that the Wii U will use near-field communication technology "as a means of making micropayments."
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If you crossed the asynchronous multiplayer component of a game like Words With Friends with a simple but engaging turn-based strategy game, what you'd end up with would look a whole lot like Hero Academy. This free-to-play iOS game, developed by the same team behind Orcs Must Die, is an excellent way to get in some satisfying strategy gaming in quick bursts. Just make sure you have some friends to bring along.
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A recent Kotaku post cites "one reliable industry source" to suggest that the still-unannounced successor to Microsoft's Xbox 360 will somehow prevent used games from being played on the system. The idea remains an unconfirmed rumor, of course, but it's something that members of the game industry have floated repeatedly in the past. It's also a move that would likely find hefty support from publishers looking for a way to stop what they see as erosion of their profits thanks to used games (the reality is a bit more complicated than that, but we won't rehash that old argument here).
The renewed debate got us wondering, though: how might such a used-game prevention system actually work on a technical level?
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Fans of the iOS version of Quarrel, released last August, already know that the game's mix of Scrabble-style anagram making with Risk-style positional battles makes for a truly addictive mix. The Xbox Live version, hitting the Marketplace today for 400 Microsoft points ($5), adds a crucial online multiplayer feature but takes away some of the interface simplicity that makes the iOS version so easy to get into.
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The primary reason Blizzard gave this morning for announcing its decision not to host a Blizzcon fan gathering this year was that the company is "heavily focused on getting Diablo III, [World of Warcraft's] Mists of Pandaria, and [Starcraft II's] Heart of the Swarm into players' hands as soon as possible." While this is probably true, the justification doesn't fully explain the decision to my satisfaction.
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The first three DLC packs for Gears of War 3 seem to each have been created with different players in mind. "Horde Command" was obviously aimed at fans of Horde mode, and the fact that all three of the new maps in this first DLC pack were later bundled for free with remakes of two maps from the original Gears of War suggests the lasting value of the pack lay in the fortification upgrades. The second DLC pack, "Raam’s Shadow," was geared towards campaign fans, and now "Fenix Rising" (available for 800 Microsoft Points, or $10) seems aimed directly at Gears 3's online multiplayer die-hards.
Five new multiplayer maps make up the bulk of the new content in this DLC offering, and each one is designed to represent a distinct stage in the journey of series protagonist Marcus Fenix. While all five maps are playable in Versus, Horde, and Beast modes, we focused mainly on Versus mode in our testing.
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Crowd-sourced biotech: gamers tweak protein, give it big activity boostTue, 24 Jan 2012 15:05:38 -0600
"Citizen science" is a recent movement to get interested members of the public involved in scientific research. Participants—who may or may not have scientific training—can perform tasks that can't be automated well, such as analyzing images. One of the most successful citizen science projects has been FoldIt, a game based on the biochemistry of how proteins form structures in three dimensions.
When asked to figure out the likely structure of a protein, FoldIt players have done remarkably well, in some cases surpassing the best algorithms devised by computer scientists. But until recently, all they've been asked to do is figure out how existing proteins fold. That has now changed; the people behind the FoldIt project have added tools that allow players to engineer new variants of an old protein. Once again, the gamers have come through, figuring out changes that dramatically improve the protein's activity.
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Like all great platform games, Dustforce is a game about managing a character's momentum. Unlike most platform games, though, the game has a relentless focus on maintaining that momentum in a single, perfect, unbroken line; a focus that's equal parts wonderful and maddening.
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Indie Game: The Movie draws tears, TV deal in successful Sundance debutMon, 23 Jan 2012 16:10:00 -0600
It has become a bit of a cliche in the game industry to talk about the last time a game made you cry. But this weekend's Sundance premiere of Indie Game: The Movie seems to be introducing a new question that may seem a bit ridiculous to those familiar with the checkered history of video game cinema: when is the last time a movie about a video game made you cry? Or, even better, made your mom cry?
"When we showed it in Salt Lake City, that was an overwhelming audience of regular people sobbing," Lisanne Pajot, half of the two-person team that created Indie Game: The Movie, told Ars in a recent phone call from the film festival. "This movie tends to kick mothers right in the heart. It's not something we anticipated."
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Hello Opposable Thumbs readers.
I'm Kyle Orland, and by now you've probably heard that I'll be taking over Ars Technica's gaming section from the storied Ben Kuchera. Ben has left some incredibly big shoes to fill, and I hope I'll live up to his legacy of providing exemplary gaming coverage of the kind you can't find elsewhere.
A little bit on my background: I've been writing about games professionally since I started a Mario fansite called "Super Mario Bros. HQ" in 1997 at the age of 14 (the site still stands, growing moldier by the day, at http://www.smbhq.com). I've got degrees in journalism and computer science from the University of Maryland class of 2004 (go Terps!) and, in 2006, I quit a job doing HTML code-monkey work for NPR's internal website to write about video games full time as a freelancer.
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Microsoft's recent XBox Live update has led to washed-out colors and sub-1080p playback in certain videos, and the company plans to release a fix—but only for one of those problems. XBox Live liaison Major Nelson says a update is incoming for the color issues, but the restriction of non-Zune videos to 720p video output has yet to receive public acknowledgement.
The XBox Live update in question was released early in December, and was derided out of the gate for a new Terms of Use that prevents users from bringing class-action lawsuits against the company. The same update has turned out to produce some display problems and highly questionable restrictions on video content.
Users have found that colors in the dashboard and during video playback are now washed out and blacks are less black, though color during gameplay appears unaffected. Microsoft has also restricted the resolution of non-Zune videos to 720p resolution, as found in tests by Eurogamer, while Zune videos are able to play at full 1080p resolution.
A fix is coming for the colorspace issue, but Major Nelson provided no timeframe. We'll keep waiting for an acknowledgement, and fix, of the resolution restrictions.
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Resident Evil 6 is in development and on the way, Capcom announced today in a press release. The new installment of the horror series is set ten years after the initial outbreak in Raccoon City, and may feature the infection of the President of the United States alongside thousands of others.
Capcom has released a trailer for the game, which features the president making a case for explaining the source of the virus that has infected all of the in-game hostile creatures, believing it may slow a resurgence in bioterrorist activity. Leon S. Kennedy, one of the major characters in this installment alongside Chris Redfield, describes the infected area of Tall Oaks as "Raccoon City all over again."
Resident Evil 6 is set for release on November 20 of this year on XBox 360 and PlayStation 3, with a PC version to follow at an unspecified date. We've embedded the new trailer below for your viewing pleasure.
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Microsoft Windows Phone 8 details leak Microsoft's Windows Phone 8 will support NFC and content sharing with computers and tablets, according to a leaked video.
(telegraph technology)
Indonesia detains 96 bound for Australia INDONESIA has detained 96 asylum seekers who had attempted to reach Australia, after their boat capsized in Java waters.
(heraldsun world)
Hubble captures sharp picture of 'barred spiral' galaxy just like our own Milky Way Hubble has captured an incredibly sharp view of the heart of a galaxy just like ours - showing the 'bar' of glowing gas being pulled towards the black hole at the galaxy's centre.
(dailymail sciencetech)
Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric) release is ready for download.