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Blood From Stones: Gears of War, Karen Traviss and Telling Good Stories

Posted: 29 Nov 2011 05:24 PM PST

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Blood From Stones: Gears of War, Karen Traviss and Telling Good Stories

The author of Gears' fiction on writing games without being a gamer.

By: Anthony John Agnello November 29, 2011

As a look at the writing of Gears of War 3, naturally this feature covers all aspects of the games. Here be spoilers, reader.

Karen Traviss doesn't play video games. Considering that the journalist-cum-novelist is behind five novels based on the Star Wars: Republic Commando game and the just-released Halo: Glasslands, you would think that getting some, as they say around these parts, hands-on time would be an essential part of the process, but no. "I deliberately do not play games. I've actually got an Xbox here but if I spent any time playing games I wouldn't do anything else."

Why Dota 2's Golden Age May be Over Before it Begins

Posted: 29 Nov 2011 04:55 PM PST

Hang around in any sizable MOBA (that's "multiplayer online battle arena") community these days, and prepare to witness a lot of angst over what Dota 2 -- Valve Software's standalone successor to the wildly popular Defense of the Ancients freeware mod for Warcraft III -- could mean for this growing real-time strategy subgenre. Over the past two years, Riot Games has handily carved its own little MOBA empire with the uber-successful League of Legends (which currently stands at 11.5 million active players), and smaller fish like S2 Games and Petroglyph Games have captured audiences with Heroes of Newerth and Rise of Immortals, respectively. But the still-in-beta Dota 2 stands as the ultimate wildcard... and I think I've got a good guess on what's going to happen when those floodgates finally open.

In short: a lot less than you might think.

Hajime Tabata on FF Type-0, 3rd Birthday

Posted: 29 Nov 2011 03:19 PM PST

Given the current holiday release rush, it's easy to forget that Final Fantasy Type-0, the PSP action-RPG entry in Square Enix's "Fabula Nova Crystallis series, has been out for a month in Japan. Despite not having an overseas release date yet, the title hasn't done terribly bad over there, selling around 682,000 copies so far across Asia.

"It's been pretty well received, which I'm glad for," director Hajime Tabata told Famitsu magazine in this week's issue. "There are complaints, of course, but nobody is criticizing the direction we went for here, so I think it's generally been well-received. I would have liked to see more sales, though -- It's good enough for the first game of a new series, but I would love to have more people try it out."

Square Enix Ramping Up for New Action-RPG Project

Posted: 29 Nov 2011 01:50 PM PST

Ryutaro Ichimura (far left) was the co-producer of Dragon Quest IX alongside Yuji Horii, a credit that pretty much every Japanese game developer only dreams they had on their resume. He's done some work on assorted Japan-only Dragon Quest spinoff projects in the years after DQIX's release, but overall he's been pretty quiet. What's he been up to? Laying the groundwork, as it turns out, for one of Square Enix's new projects -- a brand-new action RPG that's being developed internally within Japan.

According to an interview published in this week's Famitsu magazine, Ichimura has left the Dragon Quest team to head up this as-yet-unnamed project. The interview included several pieces of concept artwork, all of which seem themed around a dark, Gothic-influenced motif that looks a lot more like Elder Scrolls than Final Fantasy. "We do have the worldwide market in mind with this title," Ichimura told Famitsu, "and we're prepared to deploy along those lines. However, we're not trying to make a game for overseas gamers -- the challenge we're undertaking here is to present a fun game to the entire world that only Japanese people like us can make."

Half-Life Short Film Goes Back to the Very Beginning

Posted: 29 Nov 2011 01:41 PM PST

Every so often a fan-made short film comes along that can just makes you yearn for a good, full-length videogame movie made by those responsible for the short film in question. That's the exact scenario happening with Mortal Kombat following what started out as an unofficial project last year.

While there were some in Hollywood who did, once upon a time, express interest in making a movie based on Half-Life, they didn't come to Valve with any particularly good stories. That led to Gabe Newell and Valve deciding to either not make a movie at all, or to make it themselves. Brian Curtin is making a pretty good case that the staff at Valve are not the only ones who could do the series justice.

Skyrim First Western-Made Game to Score Perfectly in Japan's Famitsu

Posted: 29 Nov 2011 01:14 PM PST

This week's issue of Japan's Famitsu magazine features a major first worth noting, especially if you're interested in how Western-developed games are seen and treated over there. For the first time in the mag's 25-year history, a Western-developed game -- Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim -- has notched a perfect 40/40 review score, only the seventeenth game to do so.

"The overwhelming detail packed into the game really pulls you in," Famitsu assistant editor Norihiro Fujiwara wrote in his review. "From the music to the story and setting, everything is excellently done -- the main story isn't all that long, but there's an extremely large selection of subquests. Even the area around the first village you visit is packed with just a shocking amount of detail and volume. It's just pure fun to adventure around the vast world while pondering over which skills to acquire. It may be tough for light users to get hands-on with some aspects of it, but the gameplay system -- a mix of Oblivion and Fallout -- is overall easy to get to grips with."

Review: Serious Sam 3's 16(!)-player Co-Op is Seriously Insane

Posted: 29 Nov 2011 01:00 PM PST

I interviewed John Romero, one of the co-creators of Doom and Quake, a few months ago. I asked him what games he was playing, and he didn't include a modern shooter in his answer. I asked why and he replied, "[Modern shooters,] they're really slow. Like Gears is crazy slow 'cause you're just a bullet sponge. They've altered the FPS paradigm to something I'm not even interested in playing. I don't want to be a bullet shield; I want to be skillful, nimble, and fast." The school of shooter design that Romero helped create with Doom and Quake is all but gone from the gaming scene. Its passing seems to have gone unnoticed by the world at large. After all, we're all having a blast with our Call of Duty-clones and RPG-hybrid moral choice simulators.

Serious Sam 3: Before First Encounter is a game that requires you to be skillful, nimble, and fast. It's a revival and a natural extension of a Doom-style breed of shooter that was left in the dust bin by most designers over a decade ago. You won't find an overwrought story, regenerating health, or RPG-lite skill progression here. Serious Sam 3 is the anti-Deus Ex, the anti-Modern Warfare, and it's damn fun.

Xbox 360 Enjoys its Biggest Sales Week Ever With Nearly 1M Consoles Sold

Posted: 29 Nov 2011 01:00 PM PST

Xbox 360 Kinect bundle

Coming a day after news that the Wii sold over 500,000 units on Black Friday, Microsoft has announced the Xbox 360 had an even more impressive sales performance last week. Over 960,000 consoles were sold in the United States alone last week, according to the company's internal figures.

It's a huge figure, good enough for Microsoft to call it the biggest sales week in the history of Xbox. Upwards of 800,000 consoles were sold during a 24-hour span. Counting both bundles and standalone units, more than 750,000 Kinect sensors were sold during the week in the U.S.

Verizon Bringing 26 Channels of Live TV to Xbox 360 in December

Posted: 29 Nov 2011 12:22 PM PST

Comcast Xbox 360 app

Verizon customers will soon be able to watch a selection of live television on their Xbox 360 -- provided they meet certain requirements.

Verizon was among the companies that Microsoft announced it had come to an agreement with in October. Whereas others were content providers like HBO, UFC, and Syfy, Verizon (along with Comcast, the app for which is pictured above) won't operate in the same fashion. Xbox 360 owners who are Xbox Live Gold members and subscribe to both Verizon FiOS TV and Internet services will have access to live TV right through their Xbox 360 without any additional hardware.

Final Fantasy XIII-2 Receives a Dash of Assassin's Creed: Revelations

Posted: 29 Nov 2011 11:16 AM PST

Final Fantasy XIII-2 Assassin's Creed Revelations Ezio Auditore outfit

Final Fantasy XIII-2 will allow players to dress up like the main character from the most recent Assassin's Creed games next year thanks to a deal between Square Enix and Ubisoft.

Square Enix today announced that the costume worn by Ezio Auditore in Assassin's Creed: Revelations will be wearable (sans Hidden Blades) by Noel Kreiss in FFXIII-2. Kreiss is one of the main protagonists in XIII-2, while Ezio has been the character players have spent most of their time playing as in the Assassin's Creed series, having starred in Assassin's Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations.

Posted by Shri Krishna

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