General gaming

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• Same Bat-Time, Same Bat-Channel
• Making the Transition: Comic Book Films Vs. Video Game Flicks
• Dawnguard Review: Diary of the Return to Skyrim
• OP-ED: I Don't Care if the Current Gen Lasted "Way Too Long"
• Every Game is Indiana Jones
• What Telltale Learned from Bone

Same Bat-Time, Same Bat-Channel Posted: 10 Jul 2012 09:20 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 1UP COVER STORY 1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JULY 9 | HOW COMICS SHAPED GAMES Same Bat-Time, Same Bat-Channel Cover Story: What we can learn from the trajectory of comic book narrative C omic books and video games both feature incredible tales of daring feats, often dip into the fantastical or science-fiction realms, and are regarded by many as a children's past-time. But more than any other quality, the two share the most similarities in regards to their narrative style. When viewed through the lens of history, both comics and video games have similar trajectories and trends, separated by decades. Whether the writers of games are geeks at heart with a penchant for comics, or because these types of stories and heroes lend themselves to a certain narrative progression, we can see these paths in the way comic stories and video game stories developed through the years. Taking note of these trends can inform the types of plots we're seeing in video games now, and may even give us insight on the next steps of video game storytelling.

Making the Transition: Comic Book Films Vs. Video Game Flicks Posted: 10 Jul 2012 05:27 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 1UP COVER STORY 1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JULY 9 | HOW COMICS SHAPED GAMES Making the Transition: Comic Book Films Vs. Video Game Flicks Cover Story: Why games can't seem to catch up to their ink and paper counterparts. I suspect that most of us are familiar with that pang of disappointment that stems from walking out of most movie adaptations of video games. Hell, we devoted an entire month of Retronauts to chronicle our painful journey through the annals of our medium's history in film. Movies like Resident Evil, Prince of Persia, and Super Mario Bros. all did an impressively awful job at translating some of the finest titles our medium has to offer onto celluloid. It seems like the teams behind these movies were absolutely oblivious to what made the properties so popular in the first place, and decided to exploit the pop-culture love for these games in order to make a quick buck. It'd be easier to swallow if I didn't think that things could get better. But what makes this constant string of failures worse is the fact that comic books movies have been getting progressively better over the course of the past decade. Movies like The Avengers, The Dark Knight, and A History of Violence were all amazing experiences that did justice to their source material while simultaneously providing a type of entertainment wholly unique to cinema. So why is it that video game movies feel so amateur compared to that of their comic book brethren? No Respect Comics and graphic novels have been a viable medium for a better part of the 20th century, allowing ample time to evolve and flourish into the art form they now are. It took the comic quite a while to be taken seriously by the mainstream public, but with visionaries like Alan Moore and Art Spiegelman releasing seminal works, the world realized that graphic novels could quite easily be defined as literature. So when a particularly powerful comic or graphic novel receives its cinematic treatment, a similar level of care is given as when a beloved novel hits the big screen. Sadly, video games as a medium haven't quite achieved that mass, pop culture epiphany yet. They're still viewed as either childish toys, murder simulators, or sometimes both. We all know that our medium is full of hundreds of examples of amazing experiences that can entertain, educate, and awe -- the problem is that most people outside of the industry view games simply as a hobby. Hollywood is far more concerned with making a swift profit by churning out a dumbed-down adaptation.This will all change once the decision-making generation becomes populated by people who grew up with video games and truly respect the medium, but until then, we may be forced to endure continual volleys of mediocre movies. Loss of Control

Dawnguard Review: Diary of the Return to Skyrim Posted: 10 Jul 2012 04:01 PM PDT Dawnguard, Bethesda's new expansion for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, is said to be a six-to-eight-hour experience. Therefore, what follows is a chronicle of my six-to-eight hours with Dawnguard. Hour One: I begin in Whiterun, 124 hours on my game clock so far. A helpful guard tells me of the newly formed Dawnguard within five seconds of boot-up. That's efficient! He didn't even make fun of my sweetroll. The Dawnguard, it appears, has stationed itself opposite Riften, all the way across the map to the east. I decide to make the hour-long trek on foot to remind myself how to control my dark elf heroine after our six-month separate. At the moment, it's all tangled limbs and mixed-up inputs.

OP-ED: I Don't Care if the Current Gen Lasted "Way Too Long" Posted: 10 Jul 2012 03:42 PM PDT This generation of game consoles has been a strange and noteworthy one, and not just because it marked a dramatic shift as things like downloadable content, online passes, online gameplay, the notion of games as a service, and so on became increasingly significant aspects of the business. The consoles themselves have been around for an unusually long time without being replaced, let alone without us getting some sort of official details on their successors. Square Enix's Julien Merceron thinks this generation has lasted too long and that console manufacturers have made a huge mistake in not bringing out new consoles more quickly. From a business perspective, there are reasons to believe he may have a point, but as a gamer I'm happy with the way things have played out. Merceron, who is Square Enix's worldwide technology director, spoke with GamesIndustry.biz about the pros and cons of having complex hardware in a console. According to him, complex hardware makes selling a console more difficult initially as quality games are harder to come by. In the long-term, it can help to ensure games get better and better looking over the life of the hardware. He said this is less of an issue now because online functionality can help to manage longevity. "And I would suggest that maybe we don't want long generations. We have Sony and Microsoft talking about this generation lasting 7,8,9 or even 10 years and it's the biggest mistake they've ever made.

Every Game is Indiana Jones Posted: 10 Jul 2012 03:18 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 1UP COVER STORY 1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JULY 9 | HOW COMICS SHAPED GAMES Every Game is Indiana Jones Cover Story: If gaming has a name, it must be... S teven Spielberg and George Lucas' franchise-creating Raiders of the Lost Ark came out in 1981. Around that same time, the video game industry was starting to move past single-screen arcade games and into the world of more in-depth adventure. A year after Indiana Jones took the summer box office by storm, Pitfall came out on the Atari 2600, and quickly became the second best-selling game on the system, moving more than four million units. While Pitfall Creator David Crane wasn't influenced by Indiana Jones, the similarities were apparent even if it was incidental. In the early days of gaming, Pitfall was the closest most players could get to feeling like Indiana Jones. It was more exciting than Pac-Man and Pong, and it featured a hero on the cusp of a grand adventure with a more realistic purpose.

What Telltale Learned from Bone Posted: 10 Jul 2012 03:02 PM PDT Feature Share it: Tweet 1UP COVER STORY 1UP COVER STORY | WEEK OF JULY 9 | HOW COMICS SHAPED GAMES What Telltale Learned from Bone Cover Story:Why Telltale's latest comic adaptation trumps their first. P oor Bone just can't get a break; though Jeff Smith's award-winning fantasy comic earned great success and much acclaim during its 13-year run, attempts to adapt this beloved property to another format have resulted in nothing but false starts. Fans grew excited for the possibility of an animated film in the late '90s, but meddling from execs at Nickelodeon Pictures -- which included the insistence of adding boy band songs to a story that features a mix of elements from Pogo, Disney's Uncle Scrooge and Lord of the Rings -- had Bone's creator rightfully running for the hills. But in the mid '00s, when the comic finally reached its conclusion, hope seemed just over the horizon; the newly formed Telltale Games had purchased the rights to Bone, and planned to retell the story through a series of episodic adventure games. If you happened to love Jeff Smith's comic and that dearly departed genre at the time, this project promised to be peanut butter meets chocolate: The Next Generation. Unfortunately, the results weren't so great; though all the pieces seemed primed to fall into place, something just felt off about the whole production. And, evidently, Telltale thought so, too; after just two episodes, Bone quietly faded into the background as the company began working on the LucasArts revivals that brought them a great deal of attention during those rocky early days. Seven years of successes later, and Telltale has recently struck gold with The Walking Dead, another comic adaptation that's gone incredibly right, and has received its share of praise since launching in April. So -- aside from its lack of immensely popular TV tie-in -- what did Bone do wrong that The Walking Dead did so right?

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