In case you have been living under a rock for the last two months, Microsoft did indeed announce their speculated motion-sensing peripheral for the 360, codenamed Project Natal, at E3. (For your geeky cocktail party needs, it’s pronounced na-TAHL, and it looks kind of like an evil robot head.) And, in case you had any doubts who M’s target market is, check out their simulated use trailer, just bursting at the seams with good clean family fun:
Aww, how utterly wholesome. Little Timmy can pretend to be a monster, Big Sis Sarah can get fashion advice, and Mom and Dad can snuggle on the couch watching Netflix movies in between all that family bonding!
(Oops, sorry. Did I get a little bit of cynic on you? Here, have a tissue.)
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s fantastic that motion-cap/facial recognition tech that sensitive will soon available for personal use. (The live demo from E3 is particularly impressive; bonus points for the blatantly bitchy shot at the Wii.) It’s definitely a revolutionary piece of equipment. But is revolutionary what their target market (read: casual gamers) really wants?
Let me know what y’all think… my answer will be forthcoming as well.
Hello, darlings. You may have noticed things have been a bit quiet around here lately, and that’s because I’ve been busy with a few other creative endeavors. But worry not, GH is not dead… I’m just going to start emphasizing quality over quantity. I expect there will be at least a post a week, and perhaps more, though not necessarily on regular days. If you’d like to be informed of updates, you have a couple options:
1. Follow me on Twitter. (I promise I tweet other things besides spamming posts.)
2. Hit the cute little RSS text located at the bottom of the right frame, or just type in gameharlot.com in your friendly google reader.
3. If you really want the star treatment, e-mail me (the harlot at game harlot dot com) and I will hand deliver update info to your mailbox. Who loves you, baby?
One of the most hyped events in a gamer’s year is coming up soon: yes, I speak of E3, claiming to be with 90% less suck this year. Regardless of whether it lives up to its claims of awesomeness, there’s already a lot of juicy gossip going around. Here are some of the more intriguing stories, ribbed for her pleasure:
- Rich Taylor, VP of communications and research for the ESA, says the public might be allowed in someday… but not this year, suckers.
- Atari says “thx but j/k” to showing up to the expo.
- Microsoft says via Twitter: “June 2009 will be an important month for Zune lovers. New product launch, that’s all I’m allowed to say. Hold off from buying an iPhone/Pre.” Unveiling a new portable gaming device, perhaps? (PS - Do any Zune lovers exist?) Also: they keep talking about something revolutionary, perhaps a camera motion capture system? Ooh, mysterious.
- Like many 3 year relationships, Sony might be trading in that old PS3 for a younger, slimmer model. Shallow, perhaps, but you gotta keep things interesting.
I’m really interested to see how E3 plays out this year. It’s kind of like our celebrity culture: we shrug when they do well, but it’s only when they fuck up that we pay attention.
IGN has a video up of “rumored leaked footage” of the upcoming sequel to one of my favorite games, Beyond Good and Evil.
If this is actual gameplay, it looks like the gorgeous bastard child of Mirror’s Edge and Assassin’s Creed. And of course, the lovely Jade seems to be badass as usual.
MMOs have become pretty ubiquitous these days; it’s a safe bet that your clueless coworkers will at least know what World of Warcraft is, even if they look at you blankly when you launch into the finer points of theorycraft and epic lootz.
According to an article on MMORPG Examiner, however, there’s still a new market out there: the Middle East.
“The absence of MMO Game publishers in the region have resulted in the state of unawareness about the concept of MMO Gaming.
Many gamers in the region have no idea that there is a genre of games where you “live” at, play and interact with thousands of others, and improve your “game life” as you play your way through. Many starting players were confused at not being able to find the “Game Over” of the game, or at not being able to aim while shooting a monster.”
Seems a new company named Game Power 7 aims to change that, with a unique challenge: making MMOs more understandable to a completely different culture. GP7 took the free Asian MMO Rappelz and tailored it to their target audience.
One of the more startling changes is the lack of chainmail bikinis, illustrated at the slideshow at the bottom of the article. While the characters mostly retain their “fantasy” look, GP7 decided to make the outfits much less revealing to keep to the higher standards of female modesty in their target countries. (Sorry, guys; no more making a female alt and dancing in your underwear in front of the AH. Tragic, I know.)
Also interesting was the process of removing any religious symbols; again, on the premise of making the game more understandable (and, obviously, less contraversial), according to Fadi Mujahid, GM at GP7: “the original story talks about three races and three gods, which is very odd to our culture. We had to modify that to make it about three nations and three kings.”
I have to admit, I initially rolled my eyes at the whole process of “censoring” a MMO. But reading more into the story, it seems like Game Power 7 genuinely wants to bring a new style of gaming to a new market on their terms. While it may seem overly conservative to Western gamers, I think it makes sense to err on the side of caution and avoid inadvertently killing the emerging market.
Video games are a great uniting force, and the more we have in common with people from different cultures, the more we’ll realize that we’re all just geeks at heart.
File this under “things other games journalists get invited to but the Harlot will get there someday, bitches” category: Massively gets a press-exclusive first look at the beta of Champions Online. Apparently public quests (a la Warhammer) make an appearance, and the graphics look as sexy in motion as they do in the screenshots.
I’ve been ready for a good Supers MMO ever since I decided killing 10 billion snakemen wasn’t worth the character creation fun in City of Villians; here’s hoping Champions lives up to its hype.
I’d heard a bit about the new MMO The Chronicles of Spellborn but dismissed it like an unattended free sample of Cheez-its at the grocery store. (Seriously, people are disgusting.) And then I saw that the boys at Penny Arcade had declared it “not total bullshit,” and my interest was piqued, especially with the advantage of not having to hand over any money to give it a shot.
I was a little unenthusiastic at character creation, mostly because it kept booting me off the server when I was halfway through making my cute little pink-haired spellcaster. (Launch weekend FTW.) However, I managed to persevere and discover that there is no such thing as the “noob outfit” in CoS: you get to design your look right off the bat. So, after about 5 tries and suitably equipped with pink armor and a nice whompin’ mace, I was in.
The combat system is quite unusual, but I think Tycho did a beautiful job of explaining it:
“The Skilldeck solves an interesting problem in a unique way, and joy is the result. I want you to imagine your action bar in World of Warcraft, a braying menagerie of icons you might even be turning to third-party mods to manage. There’s a lot going on and - if nothing else - versatility is assured. The Skilldeck offers up an interesting riposte: no more than six of your abilities are visible at any time, on a cylinder that spins to the next row when you use a power. You construct these rows in such a way that effective combinations present themselves. The metaphor will be tortured, and you may suffer as a result, but it’s discovered some verdant place midway between a collectible card game and a slot machine you build yourself.”
I was also pleasantly surprised by how pretty the game is. I really enjoyed the unique art style, particularly on the various critters of the world. The animals look normal from a distance, but getting close reveals some amazing aesthetic touches, like dogs with spiral fur patterns and cute rabbit-eqsue characters with little antennae instead of ears. (Bonus: most animals will run from you when you get close, apparently haven spoken to the WoW critters about players’ sensless brutality.)
Unfortunately, at the end of the day the game seemed to be a variant of “kill 10 wolves” or “deliver a message to Captain Lazyface all the way across the zone.” But props to Acclaim for coming up with some innovative ideas.
A German website appears to have gotten ahold of a ton of “alleged" Bioshock 2 screens a bit early, including a delightfully close look at a Big Sister.
(According to Joystiq, these may be released to the general North American public by the time this post is published, but at least I tried, darlings.)
(Ninja Update: Funcom says j/k, doodz: “While Big Stage may be planning to implement the technology in games soon, it is not currently slated for implementation into Age of Conan.")
I played EVE Online about a year ago, just enough to have a little fun with the 14 day trial and then decide it was not for me. I will say it is a very unique game, and the culture (read: drama) surrounding it is pretty fascinating. One of the things that really stood out was the ability to level up your skillset while you were logged out of the game: queue up the skill you wanted to learn, go out with friends, and come back a little smarter.
The problem with the system was that you could only have one skill training at any given time, and if that finished before you could get back to the computer you wasted precious hours.
Well, if you are the proud owner of an iPhone, consider the problem solved with the release of a handy new app called Capsuleer 2.0. Features include skill tracking, server and buddy status, ISK management, EVE news and other cool stuff.
Massively has an interesting interview up with the creators that’s worth a read, particularly their process for streamlining logins to allow players easy access to their data.
While Capsuleer is a cool little toy, I can’t say I’m surprised to see it. In fact, I get the feeling it’s only a matter of time before we see more MMOs jump on the bandwagon and make themselves available to smartphone apps. Hell, I had a friend back in WoW who I swear spent more time “playing” the auction house than he did actually questing; I can see a mobile version of Auctioneer selling spectacularly well.
The question is, how addictive will it be to have 24/7 access to your MMO of choice? I’m reminded of the short story “Virus” by Neil Gaiman:
“Of course I spend a lot of time playing it.
So do my friends. And their friends.
And just the people you meet, you can see them,
walking down the old motorways
or standing in queues, away from their computers,
away from the arcades that sprang up overnight,
but they play it in their heads in the meantime,
combining shapes,
puzzling over contours, putting colors next to colors,
twisting signals to new screen sections,
listening to the music.”
Rumor has it that a movie based on the amazing game Shadow of the Colossus might be in the works.
I’m rather interested to see how they’re going to handle adapting a game that’s basically a series of boss fights; I guess they could add in some epic lizard-shooting and horse-scaring action to mix things up. (Or, you know, water cooler chat with the Colossi.)
Doing business on the internet can be interesting sometimes. It’s kind of like having a nice house; at first you want to invite all of your dearest friends and everyone they know to come hang out. Then you realize that the friends-of-friends have been stealing all your stuff, and so your solution is to shove everyone out, lock the doors behind them, and hire beefy security to make sure they don’t sneak back in. (For a more concrete example, recall the whole Spore debacle where EA decided it would be best to treat everyone like game stealin’ pirates immediately.)
This is not to say I don’t have sympathy for the creators of music and games; it must be quite infuriating to spend hours of hard work and not see at least a respectable monetary response. But at the same time, one has to strike a balance between protecting one’s work and alienating one’s fans.
One solution, according to Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, is to fire your security, fling open the doors and welcome anyone to take everything in the house, play with it, and make new things with it:
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t think music should be free,” Reznor says. “But the climate is such that it’s impossible for me to change that, because the record labels have established a sense of mistrust. So everything we’ve tried to do has been from the point of view of, ‘What would I want if I were a fan? How would I want to be treated?’ Now let’s work back from that. Let’s find a way for that to make sense and monetize it.”
Over the past year, NIN.com has quietly evolved into a series of interlocking services designed to deliver maximum benefit to the fans at minimal expense to the artist. To build it out, Reznor decided to use off-the-shelf resources — Blogger, Twitter, FeedBurner, Flickr, YouTube — rather than trying to duplicate what other people had already created. “They’re going to do a better job than we are,” he explains, “and they’re going to have a lot more resources to put into it.”
“We’re using what people are already using every day anyway,” adds Sheridan, a smaller figure with a three-day growth of beard and pale, wolf-blue eyes. “It’s media on the fans’ terms, how they want to use it, instead of trying to be like this” — he wraps his arms around his torso as if trying to hold himself in — “which is the old-media strategy.”
Their most recent project is creating an iPhone app which will function as a massive database and band-centric social network.
I suppose one could assume that NIN is being naive or that this is all a clever marketing ploy, but I personally would be much more inclined to fling money at a company that promotes creativity and works with the tide of the internet than one who sits with their fingers in their ears trying to pretend that the times aren’t changing.
There’s been lots of talk lately centered on various consoles, so here’s a handy rundown of all the hot stories to impress your friends with at the next geek gathering:
First off, the rumors are true: Sony announces an upcoming price drop for the PS...2. Starting in April, you can pick one up for the “bargain” price of 99.99, but the question is, would you want to? The only thing I can see happening is unwitting parents buying one for the kids only to discover that all the hot new ultraviolent games that Junior wants to play are on PS3. Won’t someone think of the children?
Secondly, you might want to just hand over your wallet now: rumor had it that Blizzard and Microsoft were plotting (no doubt in their secret portable lair made of money and gold-painted women) together regarding the next gen of consoles. While the rumor has already been pretty thoroughly squashed (turns out they just like to “bounce ideas off each other"), a pairing would be a formidable force indeed.
And finally: if you unloaded an old game console to Circuit City before they went under, I hope you got rid of all your personal info, credit card numbers, and homemade porn (seriously?), because if not, some family is going to have a hell of a surprise with your old machine. Clearly, your console is taking revenge on you for kicking it to the curb.
So there you have it. If cheap consoles, an unholy alliance and the potential for someone else seeing your homemade porn can’t get a conversation started, you’re on your own.
According to Destructiod, 3G Studios has a new zombie game in the works, set in feudal times and “drawing heavily upon the unique world of Asian mythology.”
The catch? The title of this illustrious work is “XomB,” which, they swear, is pronounced “zombie.”
I can see the meeting now:
“Hey, I found this list of awesome myth references we could use for the title!”
“Screw that, my 12 year old son uses ‘XomB’ as his IRC handle and he says all the kids think it’s kickin’ rad.”
“Sold!”
I have no idea what’s going on here, except that it appears to involve head-sized gems, co-op play, lots of explosions, candy colors, top hats, and Verdi’s “Dies Irae,” and that’s good enough for me. You’ve really got to hand it to The Behemoth; they take basic 2D graphics and the ever classic side-scrolling platformer concept and add an incredible amount of personality and style. One could argue that the gameplay looks a lot like Castle Crashers (except for more opera and less castles) but I think that TB’s just found a very specific niche and they’ve been successful enough to continue running with it.
Downer: 2010. Oh well, a little teasing never hurt anyone.
