Play Games From Any Region on Your Wii

Region locking has always seemed criminally consumer-unfriendly (publishing agreements or no). So how about a big round of applause to Datel for finally releasing their Wii Freeloader which lets you "play ANY region of Wii or GameCube game on ANY Wii." Presumably that means NTSC as well as PAL versions -- technically the product sells from UK-based Codejunkies.

How does it work? Effortlessly, or so they claim. You put the FreeLoader disc in your Wii, load it without doing anything special, it ostensibly deposits its payload, then you eject it and put in the game you want to play, "which loads and plays just like it would on its own region of Wii."

"It's own region of Wii?" That's almost as good as the annoying "all your base are belong to us" meme.

Datel boasts that the FreeLoader is "completely unofficial," works with no modifications required, only works with legitimate (as opposed to bootleg) games, and that it doesn't invalidate the warranty on the system. It may be possible to fubar your system, however, if you allow inbuilt update software on certain game discs to modify your Wii's firmware. For example, you wouldn't want region 2 code (say European Union) loading on your region 4 (say Oceania) Wii.

No word yet on whether the FreeLoader comes with its own inbuilt firmware blocking or workaround mechanisms. And no, this won't let PAL (phase alternating line) players run NTSC (national television system committee) games or vice versa, though it is possible to buy TVs that handle both signals.

The FreeLoader costs roughly $20 USD.

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Borders Teases New Video Games Lineup

As in Borders the international bookseller, and they're reportedly testing a handful of PC titles in their Oxford Street, London store with potential plans to expand to Wii and DS games.

David Kohn, Borders UK and Ireland commercial director, recognizes the fact that computer games (i.e. console and PC) are booming and either comparable or superior sales-wise to DVDs and music. "We believe there is a significant opportunity for computer games in our stores following much positive feedback from our customers and our store staff," he told MCV today, adding the Borders sees games from Nintendo in particular complementing the company's "market-leading" children's lineup.

The United Kingdom is the largest games market in Europe and the third largest in the world after the U.S. and Japan.

At the same time, major publishers are beginning to shift business toward online distribution. (Not online-only, mind you, but if sales do well, that's not so far off, even for major releases.)

You can currently buy game books from Borders online, but you have to shift to their partner, Amazon, to buy actual games and/or hardware, and Amazon's behind the curve when it comes to downloadable video games, i.e. they don't offer the latter feature at all.

So the question as I see it is: Is Borders selling games even news? Sure, the company deserves credit for finally waking up and smelling the superior moneymaker, but with games moving swiftly toward a predominantly download-driven model, are they too little, too late?

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The Mindwire V5: Electric Shock Gaming Arrives?

How would you like a device that actually induces localized electric shocks each time you're punched or shot in a game? Mindwire Limited has just the thing for roughly $200 USD and it works with the PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube, and PC. The kit consists of ten adhesive pads (you can connect up to five to your arms, legs, and stomach), the respective cabling, and the game interface itself which connects via a PS2 controller port. Feedback reportedly ranges from intense zaps all the way down to "soft massaging" sensations.

Think of it not as a fashion faux pas, but your chance to look like a sleep study patient!

The Mindwire V5 apparently reads the same signal that trigger vibratory feedback in your controller, thus it won't work with the PlayStation 3 until April, and then you'll need a PS3-to-PS2 adapter. If you have an Xbox 360, you can use it now, but you'll have to pay big bucks to get a rare 360-to-PS2 adapter (yes, they actually exist). Using a 3-in-1 PS2 adapter, you can play at least some PC games (if they support force feedback) but the games list on the official page is presently a jumble of "we think Game X works pretty much okay most of the time" and many more "not tested."

Games for PC and "third-generation consoles" driven directly via USB are listed as "currently in development," which probably means they're still trying to convince publishers who'd have to include native support that someone's actually going to drop $200 on a cable-heavy interface to somewhat masochistically experience muffled shots and body blows by way of low-capacity electric current.

Absent the vibration signal, say in the Xbox 360 where that signal's encoded, I assume the V5 is probably just reading audio cues like the Renegade Game Chair, which would mean an indeterministic relationship between events and sensations. A bum deal, in other words, if accuracy between anticipation and actuation means anything, never mind the tendency for loud music to monkey things up, or force you disable the music entirely.

This stuff always seems a little like junk science to me, having once had to market an arcade-style skiing simulation you were supposed to "steer" by sticking your fingers in a clip and "thinking" in the direction you intended to go. Needless to say it kind-of-sort-of seemed to work about half of the time, much in the way flipping a coin repeatedly will tend to produce heads as often as tails.

The idea's not innately bad, but it's probably premature, and pretty clunky-looking to boot. I hate having to wrap the Wii remote's strap around my wrist already, and now you want me to take the time to hook up nearly a dozen electrodes to my arms, legs, and chest?

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PlayStation 3 Finally Ready to Rumble

It's coming in April at last, though even with wireless and SIXAXIS support, the DUALSHOCK 3 seems a tad pricey at $55 compared to its older sibling the DUALSHOCK 2 which runs just $25. No word on charge life or whether Sony will finally ship a decent length USB-to-mini-USB cable so you can actually play more than a foot or two from your console while charging.

Care? Don't care? I've actually come to like the heft of the rumble-less controller since it's light and easy to whip around.

When can you buy it with a system (for the entire one or two of you who would've bought a PS3 already but for the lack of integrated DUALSHOCK)? It looks like the Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots bundle with an 80GB PS3 will have that honor for $500. Ships in Q2 2008, i.e. April-May-June.

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Want to Run Linux on Your Nintendo Wii?

You can, and it's actually called "homebrew," which is one of those words that always sounds like a neologism (a newly coined word) but in fact originated in the mid-nineteenth-century, meaning "an alcoholic beverage made at home." Go beer, then, and what's more, go who'd-a-thunk-it hacks that let you for-real load Linux and "embrace your inner penguin" on an unassuming white box half the size of a toaster.

Complete instructions and files are here.

You'll need a GameCube SD card adapter, a 1GB (or higher) SD card, a copy of Zelda (for the Wii), and of course, a Nintendo Wii itself. Next, you'll need to make sure your version of Zelda is one of the anointed -- apparently not all copies of Zelda are created equal. Finally, you'll have to do a bunch of extracting, copying, renaming, deleting, saving, etc., load the game, load a hacked save file and actually talk to a guy in-game to trigger the loader, which drops you out to a black and white screen, at which point you get to have fun figuring out how to load Linux itself. I don't pretend to understand it, nor do I have any intentions of trying it, but if you just want the thrill of getting away with something Nintendo doesn't want you to, by all means go for it.

Here's the hack demoed on YouTube. As you'll see, it's not exactly elegant, but then most hacks aren't, and...well...that's probably just the way hackers like it.

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Video Games May Top $62 Billion Worldwide by 2012

More data futurism for you this morning by way of Global Industry Analysts, who predict the world video games market will exceed $61-point-9 billion by 2012. For the record, it's thought that 2007 worldwide sales from video games and related hardware were around $40 billion, of which around $15.8 billion came from the U.S. alone. Growth is expected to cool somewhat in 2008, with groups like the Consumer Electronics Association suggesting U.S. sales will only rise around 13 percent to $17.9 billion -- down from 22 percent between 2006 and 2007.

In September 2006, analysts predicted the worldwide video games market would grow from $29 billion in 2005 to $44 billion in 2011. Assuming the guys behind that report (DFC Intelligence) wouldn't disagree with updated trending, GIA's adjustment represents a notable one-and-a-half year upswing. Let that be a lesson to anyone who takes long range forecasting too seriously.

Of course what analysts giveth, market forces can taketh away -- no one's really proven they have a handle on the inconstant rhythms of the world games market, especially given anomalies absolutely no one predicted like Nintendo's Wii. Which means we're as likely to be below as above GIA's figure come 2012. With the PlayStation 4 and Xbox Whatever hitting the market by 2010 or 2011, $62 billion may in fact be too conservative.

In any event, I'm assuming the number is finally going to leave projected box office and video rental revenue in the dust, with gaming becoming the number one source of digital entertainment revenue in the world.

Take that, Hollywood fashionistas!

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Game Wonks Gone Wild

Okay, if I have to read one more article bleating about the visuals in some edgy new game I think my head's going to explode like a giant bullet-riddled tomato. Seriously. I won't point any fingers at the text that set me off this morning out of politeness -- it could've been any blithely detail-free collection of words -- but suffice to say someone's "speechless" over another "top secret" game from a major publisher.

Don't anyone fall off a chair from the dizzying intrigue.

I suppose I'm in a minority when it comes to visual apathy, but I can't stand it when companies tease tender writers and induce Pavlovian adulation, especially when it all comes down to whether a couple silicon widgets are a teensy bit closer to rendering reality at analogous fidelity.

I know better water and advanced physics and all that technical gobbledygook trip a lot of propellerhead triggers, but not mine, and I make no apologies for my visual grouchiness. I care more whether Tic Tac Toe "works," not what it looks like, whether I'm playing with Xs and Os or .303 inch center-fire FMJ rimmed bullets. Crysis, for the record, mostly works because of its amazing sandbox play (in spite of its awful grammar-violating ending) and not because of its impressive overhyped visuals. The visually sumptuous Mass Effect, by contrast, often doesn't (work) -- not if you're expecting a traditional roleplaying game as opposed to a glorified talky old-school adventure, anyway.

Let me put that in broader context. You could give me William Gibson level virtual reality on a $100 all-in-one chip today. No, better than that, you could give me hyper-reality and jack my eyes up to see into the ultraviolet and infrared spectrums -- bionically expand my visual palette, in other words. I'd still shrug just as nonchalantly at that much more vivid renders of Manhattan's boroughs or a bunch of medieval Middle-Eastern market stalls, walls of tangly bocage in war-torn France or a bunch of decrepit ruins protruding from some steamy South American jungle. I don't care if you can make my game console or PC cough up what my Blu-ray player already can, even if I get to sort-of-kind-of "interact" with it in realtime. I care about how I'm interacting. And with games already looking pretty darned photo-real, my fuse for games that shout "Love me 'cause I'm beautiful!" from the rooftops while hiding shallow, repetitive gameplay (I'm looking at you, Assassin's Creed) is down to a nub. Same with stories about hypothetical games based on sneak-peek trailers of "in game" footage.

I'm tired beyond jaded of hearing about "top secret" games that for purely visual reasons leave jaws on the floor. Does an A.O. Scott come away from an on-location Minority Report preview dropping superlatives like bread crumbs? (No, that would be the famously hysterical Harry Knowles.) Does a Michiko Kakutani refer to first chapter book sneak peek as "mind-boggling," "jaw-dropping," and "wondrous"? (Nope, now you're mistaking her with some random Harry Potter fan.)

Why are game stories so frequently brimming with this sort of company-stoking hype? Isn't being measuredly intrigued by something better than coming to loathe a visually gorgeous but mechanically vacuous game after months of uncritical ballyhoo?

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Sony's Phil Harrison Leaving for Atari?

Corporations are hostile by nature, so it'd be easy to view news that Sony president Phil Harrison is leaving the company as somehow related to last year's poor PlayStation 3 sales. But the rumor du jour is that he's actually leaving for Atari. Yes, that Atari. The one doing so poorly of late that everyone's written them off as imminently imploding.

It seems Harrison was in fact a cheerleader for the whole casual gaming thing at Sony, and that this bizarrely risky-sounding move may reflect his disappointment with Sony Japan's sluggish engagement of casual gaming. When you evangelize something and no one's listening and then someone else (ahem, Nintendo) comes along and proves your point, it's got to be hideously frustrating.

Treat as unconfirmed at this point, but Harrison gets marquee billing in the press as one of the industry's "most respected figures," i.e. if anyone can rescue the company that's a long way from the one Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney founded in 1972, he's it. If the rumor turns out to be true, we'll certainly see.

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Electronic Arts Tenders $2 Billion for Rival Take-Two

It's Monday and the word of the day is consolidation, right after three others and a number -- Grand Theft Auto IV. The latter may be the single most important reason Electronic Arts made an unsolicited public offer of $2 billion beans on Sunday for rival Take-Two Interactive after several private offers were spurned by the company's board.

Yep, unless aliens have replaced the design crew at Rockstar with crappy-game-making androids, Grand Theft Auto IV pretty much has "top-selling game of 2008" locked up. Factor in the looming threat from newly remade rival Activision Blizzard and EA's bid thus makes sense, though maybe not if you're Take-Two's chairman Strauss Zelnick, who said in a statement yesterday that EA's proposal isn't nearly enough, and interferes with Take-Two's prep for Grand Theft Auto IV.

Translation: You'll have to pay more for us after April 29, EA.

[Thanks, New York Times]

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Nintendo: Eat Our Dust in June, Xbox 360

Nintendo America president Reggie Fils-Aime says Nintendo should finally muscle past Microsoft's Xbox 360 in total US unit sales by June 2008, but is he right?

The U.S. difference between Microsoft and Nintendo stands at roughly 10.9 and 9.4 million units respectively, or about 1.5 million units. In January the Wii outsold the Xbox 360 by around 44,000 units, which if we unwisely assume a constant similar forward rate between now and June would only net Nintendo around 176,000 units. But that's ignoring likely meteoric events between now and then, like the impending release of Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

Since its release in Japan on January 30, 2008, Super Smash Bros. Brawl has sold over 1.2 million copies, and its certainly stands to sell millions more. In the U.S. sales will probably be even bigger when the game ships to stores in early March. It took "Wii Fit" seven weeks to hit one million units, and "Wii Sports" a full 11. SSBB should easily fly past one million in less than four. You only bet against that kind of sales momentum at your peril, and even though a significant amount of sales will be to existing Wii owners, I'm predicting SSBB will at least temporarily drive Wii hardware sales to first time owners through the roof.

On the other hand, while games like Frontlines: Fuel of War, Rainbow Six Vegas 2, Turning Point, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Supreme Commander, and Too Human are probably going to sell more to the Xbox 360 converted, i.e. existing owners, Microsoft has Grand Theft Auto IV in April, and Nintendo doesn't. Betting against Grand Theft Auto IV -- especially with the free enhanced marketing it'll get by way of all the imminent, eminently bankable brainless media "controversy" stories -- isn't really an option. If any game stands to break Halo 3's sales numbers, it's Grand Theft Auto IV, and I predict the latter game will effectively eliminate any unit sales gains Nintendo makes with SSBB.

But moreover, it's not looking pretty for Nintendo post-June if stuff like Ninja Gaiden 2, Soul Calibur IV, Halo Wars, and Fallout 3 turn out to be any good. Microsoft incontrovertibly still has the best games lineup of all three consoles, especially if you're a core gamer. The Wii's new audience is much more fickle when it comes to game-based king-making. They'll buy scads of copies of "Wii Sports" and "Wii Fit" and maybe even dip their toes into Super Smash Bros. Brawl, but they won't reliably buy millions of copies of games with "Tom Clancy's" in the title, or niche others like Soul Calibur and Fallout. Microsoft's been consistently clobbering Nintendo and Sony in software sales because, coupled with its hugely successful and largely uncounted casual-oriented Xbox Live arcade experience, its games have such a broad base of appeal to so many varying demographics. Wii Sports and Wii Play may have more overall sales, but Microsoft effectively owns the rest of the top 50 chart.

If I had to bet against the Wii catching Microsoft half a year ago, I would've said no way Jose. But with Nintendo's feeble first party 2008 lineup, its thoroughly unexciting list of third party titles, and comparing that all to Microsoft's own absolutely marquee lineup, I think we may look back on or around June 2008 as the point at which -- inversely -- Microsoft's Xbox 360 finally pulled away from the Wii.

I'll be here to eat plenty of crow and celebrate Nintendo's triumph if I'm wrong.

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GDC: Meet the New Commodore "Wii" 64

File this one under "didn't see that coming," but it looks like Nintendo's planning to add Commodore 64 titles to the Wii's Virtual Console library. The Commodore 64, needless to say, rates legendary in home computing history. A computer wrapped up in a single keyboard that connected to any nearby TV as a monitor via a good old-fashioned RF unit -- I finally got one a little late (in 1989) and ended up playing my way through most of the Ultimas before taking the x86 plunge with a CompuAdd 386SX/16 that had a staggering 8MB of system RAM.

The 8-bit and roughly $600 a pop Commodore 64 sold some 30 million units between 1982 to 1994, and boasted a library of some 4,000 games. In the mid 1980s its market share approached 40 percent, outselling both IBM and Apple.

Games will reportedly cost 500 Wii points, with the first two already confirmed as Uridium and International Karate.

Would you play low-res C64 games on your Nintendo Wii? Hey, why not? Some of those 4,000 titles were pretty amazing, and as the game culture starts to extend beyond its somewhat myopic feature-blind core audience, the potential for a more mature appreciation of gameplay over graphics certainly seems in order.

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GDC: Microsoft Talks "YouTube" For Xbox 360

Didn't Microsoft already tout "YouTube" for Xbox Live with its XNA game tools suite two years ago? Not exactly. XNA, which ostensibly stands for "XNA's Not Acronymed" and sounds close enough to "DNA" to go in for the sexy factor, is actually a set of developer tools designed to allow amateur game designers to skip boilerplate busywork and get straight to the cool stuff.

By contrast, think of the new community arcade feature Microsoft introduced on Wednesday at GDC in San Francisco as "Mission: Court Indie Game Designers Phase Two."

Building on XNA, this new feature promises to make it easy for budding designers to bring garage-style games to the Live community directly. Think of it as YouTube for the Exceptionally Nerdy. And with an audience of over 10 million paying Live subscribers, how could anyone say no?

How's it work? New games will be peer-reviewed by other developers prior to being uploaded to Live Arcade, thus ensuring nothing inappropriate goes up, or something that isn't rated appropriately in terms of content. Then the hammer drops and the game goes public on Live Arcade. Bada-bing, bada-boom. Democratic and non-bureaucratic.

At the moment, you can find seven community games in the portal, but Microsoft says it expects over 1,000 by end of 2008.

My two cents: Bravo Microsoft, just bravo -- this is precisely what the industry needs to get on with growing up by way of creative independence aimed squarely at a grass roots aesthetic. Sony and Nintendo, I hope you're taking notes.

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GDC: The "Tragic" State of PC Gaming

Game design celeb Peter Molyneux (Black and White, The Movies) says the PC gaming market is in a tragic state and fingers spotlight hogging and design stagnation as the primary culprits. "I think it's a huge tragedy," admits Molyneux in this portion of an interview to be posted in full later this week at Eurogamer. "I mean, you might as well say PC gaming is World of Warcraft and The Sims...the weird thing is everyone's got a PC, they're just not buying software for it."

All true. The PC games market today is effectively World of Warcraft and Will Wright spinoffs, with occasional anomalies like Command & Conquer, Call of Duty, and Age of Empires rearing up before being subsumed by a (mostly singular) MMO-hegemony. PC gaming in North America amounted to $911 million of an $18.9 billion industry in 2007. Even something like BioShock, critically lauded as one of the best games ever made and a spiritual successor to a beloved PC gaming franchise, nonetheless sold dramatically more on the Xbox 360 than the PC. I predict that by the end of 2008, even taking into account digitally distributed PC games which NPD's finally tracking, the top five or ten PC gaming spots will be almost exclusively Electronic Arts and Activision Blizzard titles. No one needs a crystal ball to tell you World of Warcraft, The Sims, and Spore have those seats all but locked up.

What about the casual games market? It's much bigger than any of the above, and as yet, largely untracked. "There's an enormous amount of gaming happening with PopCap, Big Fish and Reflective," says Molyneux. "The fascinating thing is when they first started, all these games came out like Peggle and Mystery Files and Alice Greensleeves and Diner Dash, and it felt quite exciting. There was a lot of innovation going on. Okay, there weren't great graphics, but there was innovation."

Except that in Molyneux's view, that innovation's completely stopped.

"They're doing the same game over and over again with a different wrapper," he says. "It's like a mini-universe in itself which is emulating what's happening in our industry."

Enter the pop-n-fresh PC Gaming Alliance (PCGA), a group of industry hardware and software mainstays including Intel, Microsoft, Dell, and AMD who yesterday said they were forming the alliance to promote PC gaming as a platform.

Insert "because PC gaming is in dire straits" at the end of that sentence. After all, do we have a Console Gaming Alliance? Or more pertinently, why don't we have one?

PC gaming isn't dead, but PC gaming as it once existed may be. Wargaming as a genre isn't dead (it'll only die when serious history-minded humans do) but wargaming as it once existed -- something that could land a huge cover story in a gaming magazine, for instance -- almost certainly is.

Is that where PC gaming's headed? Toward a small market of specialized gamers? An occasional sideshow to console gaming headliners? Is it finally Alamo time for PC gamers and snarky games magazine editors who love to make fun of gloom-and-doom peddlers?

Well, we know that the games market is growing with record numbers, not just in terms of revenues, but in terms of people who play games. A considerable portion of that market is composed of people who didn't play PC games before, and probably aren't interested in playing PC games at any point in the future. Think about mobile gamers. Think about casual gamers who've transitioned (perhaps permanently) from the PC to services like Xbox Live. Think about the people you know whose first (adult) games console is a Wii.

PCs have the largest platform footprint in the world. Nvidia alone has more GPUs floating around in PCs than the international PlayStation 2 install base, and we're talking by almost double. It's a market practically howling to be tapped back into. But can it be?

Check out Darren Gladstone's thoughts on the PCGA here. I totally agree with Darren. Without proven results to point to, the PCGA is just another bureaucratic figurehead. My own advice to the PCGA's power players: Stop being so reactive, guys -- get your legs under you first, then issue the "save the industry" press releases.

Anyway. Where do you spend most of your time gaming these days? PC or console? And has that changed much over the last couple years?

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A Little Pre-GDC Evening Reading

Tomorrow's when this year's Games Developer Conference (GDC) kicks into high gear for the enthusiast press. Don't mind that sucking sound you're hearing, it's just the water pulling back from the shoreline before the coming media tsunami.

So how about some non-GDC news to tide you over until tomorrow?

$750 million dollars. That's the slice of games development pie Dallas-Fort Worth locals are guesstimating the two cities contribute to a Texas total of$1.75 billion. Peter Raad, founder and executive director of The Guildhall at Southern Methodist University believes North Texas is the third largest gaming market in the country after San Francisco / Silicon Valley and Los Angeles.

Autodesk to buy AI middleware developer. That's kind of out of nowhere. Autodesk makes design software, but apparently sees this as a way "to simplify video game development by providing cutting-edge tools to create, animate and integrate 3D assets into game engines." So says Autodesk media and entertainment's senior veep Marc Petit, anyway. Developer Kynogan SA's tools are already used by Electronic Arts and Activision as well as in defense and security simulations, e.g. military operations.

Disney recruited Atari VP to helm new games drive. Follow-up to what I reported this morning about Disney's new games push: It looks like they've pulled in Jean-Marcel Nicolai, who worked at Atari for seven years. Atari, as you've probably heard, is in serious trouble, with its most recent losses more than double the prior period. Why pluck someone from the deck of a sinking ship to helm your new baby? Who knows, but Nicolai apparently hinted Atari's problems came down to frequent management changes.

Will Microsoft partner with Netflix? I say yes, and that it's just a matter of time. Netflix CEO Reed Hastings joined Microsoft's board of directors last March, and insiders claim Microsoft is considering foregoing an internal Blu-ray verison of its Xbox 360 because it (I think rightly) sees the future of home movie-watching as online. MSNBC speculates that announcement of a partnership could happen as early as GDC tomorrow.

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Disney Rejected THQ Offer, Designing Toy Story 3 Game In House

Say you're in movies, your growth model's frittered away to break-even, and an industry pretty much symbolized by a butt-stomping plumber is effectively cleaning your clock -- what's a corporate dinosaur to do?

Easy: If you can't (sufficiently) milk 'em, depose 'em.

The Wall Street Journal reports that's essentially what Disney did when longtime Pixar partner THQ came pitching license rights to a Toy Story 3 game tie-in. Thanks but no thanks, said Disney and Pixar, opting instead to handle creation of the game (due in 2010) in-house.

You've heard plenty recently about how game sales were up 43 percent in 2007. Weigh that against box office revenues -- up a paltry 4 percent over the same period, and even then by way of ticket price inflation, not viewer growth. Home video sales -- still bigger bucks than gaming, but not by much -- were actually down 3.2 percent.

So when the authors of the WSJ piece suggest that "it isn't clear yet whether the media companies have the stamina to become serious competitors to heavyweight game publishers," I'd probably swap "stamina" for "inclination." Companies like Disney have oceans of stamina for substantial year-over-year revenue growth, and nothing suggests gaming won't be nailing that metric for years if not decades to come.

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Microsoft: HD DVD Won't Impact Xbox 360

File this under today's "well duh" official press statement. That, or someone tell me (so I can mock appropriately) who's claiming the demise of HD DVD is going to have any discernible impact whatsoever on the Xbox 360 as a place millions of people go to play games. By my count -- and I'd probably count BioShock more than once -- some of the very best games on any system to date.

Anyway, here's Microsoft's statement (courtesy GamePro) regarding the future of the 360 in response to all the "HD DVD is dead" hoopla.

We do not believe the recent reports about HD DVD will have any material impact on the Xbox 360 platform or our position in the marketplace. As we've long stated, we believe it is games that sell consoles and Xbox 360 continues to have the largest next-gen games library with the most exclusives and best selling games in the industry. We will wait until we hear from Toshiba before announcing any specific plans around the Xbox 360 HD DVD player. HD DVD is one of the several ways we offer a high definition experience to consumers and we will continue to give consumers the choice to enjoy digital distribution of high definition movies and TV shows directly to their living room along with playback of the DVD movies they already own.

All I know is HD DVD or no HD DVD, it won't change the amount of time I game with my 360 -- pretty much an even split between it, my PC, and my PS3. And even though I already have Blu-ray by way of the latter, it won't stop me from picking up an external Xbox 360 Blu-ray player if Sony does something silly like altering the Blu-ray spec out of compliance with existing PS3s.

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Microsoft Readying Blu-ray for 360?

Most of us predicted this weeks ago, and despite the entirely understandable (if not always polite) lamenting of the HD DVD beholden, this was virtually inevitable once the studios said "make it so."

Okay, so technically it's still a rumor (go Australian insider access) but word on the street is Microsoft's prepping a standalone Blu-ray player to...I won't say "replace" so much as "complement" it's existing standalone HD DVD player, though I'm betting the latter will only remain available until Microsoft clears stock.

HD DVD as you know has suffered almost weekly setbacks since most of the major studios dropped it for Blu-ray exclusively. Warner, the final holdout, jettisoned support for the format in January. Late last week Toshiba itself halted HD DVD production and rumors suggest the format's progenitor may be close to throwing in the towel entirely.

If Sony's sales for January were in fact more Blu-ray video than software driven as I've been speculating, Microsoft releasing a Blu-ray player couldn't be more timely and demographically crucial. Sony's January numbers suggest consumers may be paying considerably more for a PS3 for the Blu-ray capability alone. Thus Microsoft needs to introduce the Blu-ray option it's been silently hedging all along, to take on Sony in a lucrative venue that's finally picked a winner.

Regarding rumors of an integrated Xbox 360 Blu-ray player: Microsoft's argument against integration ostensibly hinges on the HD battle moving online, and to downloadable content instead of physical discs. For casual, streaming, episodic content, this almost certainly makes sense.

But for videophiles like me, who'll probably need terabyte storage solutions and demand nothing less than Blu-ray-analogous HD sample playback, online HD looks like a battle that won't be starting en masse until we figure out how to quickly download or stream video that easily figures in the "dozens of gigabytes" range. Anyone care to guess how long it would take on the average 1.5 Mbps DSL connection to download Season Three of Lost, which ships on six Blu-ray discs?

How long before you can buy the rumored standalone player? If it happens, sources say three months, i.e. May/June 2008 timeframe.

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Call of Duty 360, Wii Play Lead January Software Pack

Let's talk about the rest of the NPD data after last night's Sony upset. For all Sony's bluster about outselling the 360 in hardware, January belonged to Microsoft in software sales, with Call of Duty 4 charting first and 331k units sold. Nintendo followed with Wii Play at 298k units, and Guitar Hero III at 240k. Microsoft's top ten software total was 842k, while Nintendo's was 710k. If you aggregate total console software sales for January, Microsoft's lead widens dramatically.

Curiously, Sony only charted one title in the top ten: Call of Duty 4 with a relatively meager 140k. As I suggested last night in my initial NPD data reveal, it seems likely Sony's thus getting some of its hardware sales from Blu-ray specific buys, i.e. people buying the hardware as a movie player, not a game machine. Too bad we don't have any Blu-ray attach rate data at point of purchase.

Year over year sales can be confusing, since January 2008 was a four week month, compared to January 2007's weird five week spread. According to NPD's Anita Frazier, "At the top-line, on an average sales per week basis, January 200[8] was actually up nearly 18% as compared to last year, and the big winner was console software which was up nearly 50% when compared on a level playing field to last year." So good news all around for console software.

Console hardware on the other hand was down 6 percent, even with the extra week taken into account. Frazier suggests this could simply be a stocking issue. "Given the huge number of hardware systems sold in December, inventory shortages could be the biggest contributor to the softer than expected sales," she notes.

Best selling single item for the month? The Wii Nunchuk Controller, which sold 375k units in January.

And all these numbers only tell the revenue story in part. The average retail price of games was up 19 percent over last January, for which we can thank Rock Band and Guitar Hero. In fact, says NPD's Frazier -- and this is an absolutely crucial point -- 360 Rock Band was the top-selling game in dollar terms, bringing $30 million to bottom line sales for the month.

So anyone who thinks this is the beginning of a Sony comeback, think again -- Sony has a lot of work to do, to get its software sales in line with Microsoft and Nintendo's.

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PlayStation 3 Outsells Xbox 360 by 16% -- Nearly Passes Wii

To be honest, I didn't see this one coming. Certainly not in the opening month of the year and after the holiday rush. But here it is anyway, courtesy of the NPD, whose numbers are some of the most reliable in the industry. So I'll just cut to the chase and give you those January 2008 numbers:

274k - Wii
269k - PlayStation 3
251k - Nintendo DS
230k - PlayStation Portable
230k - Xbox 360

Can you believe it? I wonder if Sony CEO Jack Tretton can, or if there's not at least a little eye-rubbing and arm-pinching going on. Whatever the case, here's his ebullient reaction to the news:

Coming off a great holiday sales season we see strong momentum behind PS3 in 2008, and feel confident about the year ahead. We have an exceptionally diverse lineup of exclusive games, from Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Resistance 2 to more mainstream games such as LittleBigPlanet and SingStar. Beyond that, we have Blu-ray emerging as the de facto high def standard, the developer community is hitting their stride, consumers are recognizing the tremendous value and innovative services such as PlayStation Home are all in the works, so this is definitely shaping up to be a breakthrough year for us.

Yeah, I know, it sounds exactly like what he said a year ago when everything was in the toilet. These things have a way of playing like top 40 songs after awhile, so file it skeptically under "wait and see," and then we certainly will as everyone deploys their next rounds of salvos.

More on the rest of the numbers later, but given the fact that only one piece of PS3 software even charted (Call of Duty 4, which was #8) I'm guessing a substantial portion of the PS3's sales uptick was Blu-ray related.

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Europe Before U.S. -- Spore Launching in More Lucrative Market First

A little over a year ago I wrote a story pointing out that Europe -- not the United States -- is the crucible for most PC games, that it's where the money's at for PC game publishers. It's true. And when justifying its release of Spore to Europe two days before the U.S., Maxis's Patrick Buechner raised the point that Europe represents about 60 percent of its PC business. That's the story I've heard time and again speaking with international developers, where that market figure can range upwards of 70%.

Why? Most developers and studio heads I spoke with told me it was because retail space in the U.S. for PC titles has been dramatically reduced over the years. Check your local mall-based stores, where PC games have two or three shelves and tend to be completely bookended. Check warehouse retailers like Best Buy -- my local store just slashed its PC games section by over 50 percent of prior floor space, and pretty much dropped anything older than one month or that wasn't World of Warcraft.

In Europe, on the other hand, the bulk of retail space remains dedicated to PC titles (for now, anyway). That was certainly my experience of German game retailers last summer, where I perused stores in five or six major cities and found towering wraparound walls of PC games, all faced-forward (as opposed to bookended), and with room to spare.

Given that, it makes perfect sense for EA to avail themselves of Spore's international gravitas and tribute its largest PC games market. But it also makes me wonder -- looking strictly at the salient numbers, and even with initiatives like Microsoft's "Games For Windows" branding and standards push -- where the U.S. enthusiast PC games market is steering (hurtling? careening?) long term.

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Spore to Finally Germinate September 2008

It's Tuesday and snowy and cold as Niflheim here in eastern Iowa, but the news that Spore finally has a release date couldn't be hotter. That cheesy enough for you? It's late and I just finished writing my Lost Odyssey review for Variety, so I'm probably near enough non compis mentis to qualify for a little Velveeta.

Back to Spore, the game that lets you gin up a universe from a petri dish, evolving (sorry Intelligent Design fans) organisms into civilizations capable of intergalactic gallivanting.

So the news today is that Spore finally has a release date, and by date I don't mean "window" or "quarter" or "month," I mean September 7. That's the day, clear your calendars, plot your vacation days, make arrangements to burn EA in effigy if it turns out to be Will Wright's Black and White. The logo off the box will do.

Oh I know. It won't. He's Will Wright! He made all those Sims games! The ones I...well...don't actually play anymore... But in all seriousness, the guy elected to make a massively single-player game when all the money's clearly in Blizzard online products. Take that "single player games are for the socially inept" police.

When it ships, it'll be available for PCs, Macs, the Nintendo DS, and mobile phones. Yeah, mobile phones, i.e. "I just called to say I microbe you."

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Why Are Wii Scores Lower Than Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3?

Aggregate score repositories may be a blight on the pimply countenance of games journalism, but they may also be able to tell us something about the demographics of game sales. Using the freely available data culling tools at once such site, Next Generation's Matt Matthews asks an excellent question about the Wii: "Why are review scores for Wii games significantly lower than those of Xbox 360 and PlayStation titles?"

I've already answered that question in some detail here, but in case you missed it, let me recapitulate:

It's the games, silly.

Nintendo deserves every inch of the spotlight it's earned by merrily thrashing Microsoft and Sony in raw units sold. That number's impressive for all kinds of reasons you don't need me to remind you of here, and it arguably makes Nintendo the platform to beat in terms of base appeal.

Nevertheless, Microsoft (and at various points during 2007, Sony as well) has been absolutely beating the pants off Nintendo in retail software sales. For 2007's "top 50" software sales, the Xbox 360 outsold the Wii by a margin of 3.4 million units. But it outsold the Wii by over 10 million when you open up sales to include absolutely everything.

In essence, that tells us Nintendo's game sales are strongly front-loaded, and as we've seen, critically comprised of first-party games with a few third-party anomalies, whereas Microsoft's are distributed more evenly (both in sales and review scores) across the full range. Drop below "top 50" and people are buying more of less on the Xbox 360, but significantly less of less on the Wii. Also: Where critically acclaimed Xbox 360 games reliably crop up in the "less than 500,000 copies sold" range, Wii games that aren't "top 50" sellers are pretty much in the reviews basement, critically speaking.

I'll go out on a limb, since all opinion journalism is by definition flawed, and argue that the Wii's review scores are lower not because of some crackpot media conspiracy against the Wii, but because Nintendo quite simply has fewer laudable games. I'm not talking "casual-targeted" and "misunderstood by the enthusiast press," but tawdry media event tie-ins and others that barely (or dumbly) avail themselves of the system's central tenet (motion control). And I'll go one further by adding that I think this is really because Nintendo's third party quality control has been...let's just say a wee bit too forgiving in its rush to woo skeptical developers.

For every Mario Party 8, there's piles of stuff like: Ninjabread Man, Jenga World Tour, Looney Tunes: Acme Arsenal, Chicken Shoot, The Golden Compass, Pool Party, Far Cry Vengeance, GT Pro Series, Escape From Bug Island, Dave Mirra BMX Challenge, etc. Everyone goes ape-droppings over a game like Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and that game's going to sell millions when it hits next month, but something like Rayman Raving Rabbids 2? If you even know what that is, not so much.

I'll bet most of you with a Wii reading this own most of the games on that "top 50" list, but almost none of the ones that aren't. Or maybe I'm wrong, and you really are playing Star Trek Conquest, Alien Syndrome, Pokemon Battle Revolution, Nitrobike, Wing Island, Godzilla Unleashed, etc. But even if you are, the sales data says you're the fluke, and nowhere near the nucleus of either the critical or commercial bell curve.

And for now (with fingers crossed that it changes) the Wii's average overall game scores simply mirror that fact.

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Confessions of a Lost Odyssey Sap

Something remarkable happened to me earlier this week while wending my way through Mistwalker's new Xbox 360 exclusive RPG Lost Odyssey, and I've finally gotten up the nerve to write about it. I'd been playing the game with a planet-sized chip on my shoulder after realizing it was aiming defiantly for "conventional," rolling my eyes at the bad writing, the uneven music, the almost too pristine visual composition, and the main dude Kaim, who makes other "strong and silent types" seem positively manic.

Then suddenly, unexpectedly, inexplicably, the game reached around my trendy disenchantment, pulled me unwittingly into an emotional moment, and will-miracles-never-cease, actually got me to tear up. Which was shocking, because not even at its tenderest did Irrational's BioShock manage that.

To be fair, BioShock was never really tender. That one's probably more horrifying than heart-rending, and call me sentimental, I guess I relate more to kids losing parents and funereal post-ops than little demon-eyed zombie girls wielding hypodermics the size of turkey basters. All I know is that Lost Odyssey suddenly went from being a menial labor to something, I don't know, deeper...something more emotionally raw. And as the whole thing intensified, I realized I was finally relating to these characters who'd seemed like aphoristic marionettes for all their quips and anecdotes leading up to that point. Blame the momentarily competent voice acting, or maybe the 3D engine's unexpectedly compelling grasp of subtle human facial movement, e.g. trembling lips, tearing eyes, etc. Whatever it was, it worked.

Sure, the moment teeters toward mawkish, and don't misunderstand me, there's plenty else about Lost Odyssey that feels so safe -- timid even -- that you can't help but feel a little let down. But for that one moment, everything just came together for me, and shazam, I went with it. And it's inescapably informed every minute of my experience with the game since.

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Is Super Mario 64 the Citizen Kane of Videogaming?

Can the answer ever be more than "maybe"? Frank DiGiacomo says the answer is in fact "yes," at least for a number of LucasArts execs, in his futurism-laced Vanity Fair article "The Game Has Changed." It's a lengthy story that positively brims with starry-eyed reactions to the new realism-enhancing technology dubbed "Euphoria" in LucasArts upcoming Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, one in which DiGiacomo proceeds to unmask what he sees as "the cutting edge of a huge leap forward for the video-game industry."

Sorry break it to you like this Frank, but you're a little late to the show. Hate to say, but you kind of missed all this stuff that happened last year, and the year before that, and the year before--well, you get the picture. Or is that all you get? A picture, that is, which is what most people see when they watch five minutes of something that looks unspeakably gorgeous and maybe even, as you say, like "a huge leap forward," even though these people haven't so much as plucked up a gamepad and starting tapping.

And now you're jazzed over a couple artificial intelligence physics tricks that, as far as I can tell having watched all the videos, merely nudge the ball forward in an admittedly cool way. But to single out "Euphoria" and those "eerily lifelike reactions" that constitute all of a few seconds here and there as you in essence blast the crap out of your surroundings, seems a little narrow. "Narrow," i.e. limited in extent, amount, or scope; restricted.

That sort of narrowness or "asymmetric feature monomania" permeates gaming. Some hot new technology looks absolutely amazing, the design team hype is contagious, the media keeps the spin-top spinning, and then pfft, out plops something like the zero gravity level in Crysis. If you haven't played that, I won't spoil it for you, but for those that have, 'nuff said.

We're at a point where highlighting and drooling over the technology no longer points the way, any more than pronouncedly crediting what our eyes see in a preview (notwithstanding what our minds have to effectively grapple with in the finished product). The variables in flux today are far too many, and game design far too multifarious. Film may run the gamut from Capra to Fellini, but the medium remains fundamentally unified in the way it creates the illusion of motion at 24 frames per second projected onto (or from) a flat, two-dimensional surface. Gaming is not film, though it borrows from film, as it borrows from everything it comes in contact with (you can almost think of "gaming" as a kind of genre-Borg). It therefore probably has no Citizen Kane equivalent. It's "center" is ephemeral, and always on the move. Recognizing that is intrinsic to understanding why fetishizing this or that technology angle insufficiently apprehends what a game might actually play like.

DiGiacomo is of course a very fine writer, and his piece is full of many fine insights (as well, I should add, as just some good old-fashioned insider info for out-and-out Star Wars fans) but I can't help but feel it's all a bit too "prophecies for the video game senescent," a message from a non-gamer to a readership of non-gamers. When DiGiacomo closes with a line like "In their hoodies and lanyards and baseball caps, they do not look like gods, but after what I have just seen, it is hard not to think in those terms," it's also hard not to see such grandiloquent journalism threaten to collapse under the weight of its own portentousness.

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EA Wagers PlayStation 3, Activision Antes Up Xbox 360

Let's end the week on an entertaining note with a rousing publisher he-said-she-said. In case you missed it, earlier this week games publishing giant Electronic Arts proclaimed the PlayStation 3 would place well ahead of the Xbox 360 in 2008. And today, rival games publisher Activision responded (sort of) by claiming that no, the Xbox 360 will in fact outpace the PlayStation 3. Recall Activision is now Activision Blizzard per its acquisition by Vivendi, making it either the first or second largest game publisher in the world depending on who you talk to.

Let's look at both companies' predictions for 2008.

Electronic Arts:

- Wii takes #1 spot in North America and Europe with 12 to 14 million units.
- PlayStation 3 slots #2 in Europe, selling between 5 and 6 million units.
- Xbox 360 places a distant third in Europe, selling a paltry 1.5 to 2.5 million units.
- Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 tie in North America, giving Sony a 3.5 million overall lead.

Activision:

- Doesn't dispute EA's Wii sales prediction. It's still #1 worldwide through 2008.
- Xbox 360 sells 4 to 5 million in North America and slots #2.
- PlayStation 3 sells 3 to 4 million in North American and slots #3.

And there you have it. Activision bets on Microsoft in North America, EA bets on Sony between North America and Europe, and no one bets against Nintendo after the Wii shattered pessimistic pundit predictions.

Honestly, I'd like to see all three keep pace in this most fascinating of races for as long as they're able. The more competition idea-wise, the merrier, and something for everyone, right?

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The Writing in Video Games is Absolutely Abysmal

Well it is. I can't help but see it, I think on at least some level you know it, and now Lost producer and lead writer Damon Lindeloff has the guts to bluntly say it. Bravo, I say. Here he is reacting to video game TV and movie tie-ins in an article suggesting video games hastened the demise of the writer's guild strike.

We have that Lost game coming out soon, and having taken a closer look at how that industry works, I fear the Lost franchise will be spoiled to the point where we?ll have to take it off the air. Loose ends and all. I am truly amazed at how our creative products can be ruined by interactive media. The writing in video games is absolutely abysmal. *

(Brace for a rant.)

(Okay. Buckled up and ready?)

Now when I wholeheartedly agree with Lindeloff that video game writing is largely in the un-flushed toilet, I'm not talking about Mario. I don't mean Donkey Kong Country, or Geometry Wars. People don't play Pac-Man for the epic dotty intrigue or Smash TV for its shallow mockery of entertainment TV. This isn't an indictment of video games in general or the places where good writing's managed to peek through in spite of the considerable odds stacked against it. The majority of video games (casual, played online, mostly by women) in fact don't have plots or need protagonists or involve much engagement with story-driven text at all.

But that's not what Lindeloff's talking about.

I think it's safe to say he's referring to cinematic games. Games which, by definition, "have qualities characteristic of motion pictures." Games where the story inseparably informs the gameplay. Games that borrow wholesale (or at least attempt to, amateurishly) from TV and movies at both the formal theoretical and technical-fictive levels. Games with lengthy intros, cutscenes with elaborate motion capture mechanics, or all those blurb-tastic "dozens of hours of voice acting!" Games whose inceptive stages look an awful lot like the ones that birth your average TV show or film. Exhaustive storyboards. Green-screens. Writers in rooms or chat sessions or on conference calls collaboratively hashing out scripts or last minute script changes.

Not to excuse movies and TV shows. They have their ample percentage of crap writing too, and Lindeloff needs to do a little looking in the mirror (on behalf of his medium, anyway) before throwing stones. Lost has its own share of crappy episodes, and Lindeloff knows it.

But compared to video games? Not even in the same league, and don't even attempt an equivalency argument (it just makes us look stupid). Well, not unless your idea of good writing includes stuff like R.A. Salvatore and Rhonda Byrne, in which case that may explain a lot of the problem. There's a reason those two won't be winning any storytelling awards, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the sort of literary elitism Stephen King so eloquently trashed in his 2003 National Book Awards acceptance speech.

Which, you could argue, actually makes the point by roundabout: Game writing has the opposite problem of the one King was tackling during that important and wise speech. Game writing is way too easy on itself. And so are we -- too easy on chop-shop digital scribes and translators -- as gamers.

Maybe that's because we don't play movies, we watch them. We don't button-mash books, we read them. And so you can make a very reasonable argument about games being games first and good stories second (or tenth, or ten-hundredth). Hey, it's a valid point.

But here's a better one.

Is it okay that a speeding bus can jump a 50 foot gap in a freeway without incline in 1994's Speed? That dragons breed quicker than rabbits to conquer the planet practically overnight in 2002's Reign of Fire? That horizontally released bombs would drop, inertialess, straight down in 2001's Pearl Harbor? That Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum could use an everyday Apple Powerbook to upload a deadly virus into an alien mothership and ignite one of the most risible deus ex machinas in the history of popcorn cinema?

If there's one thing gamers expect in games, it's consistency. Consistency in visual aesthetics, controls, level design, etc. The only place we jump the shark? Consistency in game writing, where I gather cutscenes and other expository moments are viewed by the story-squeamish among us as a chore easily mitigated by tapping the START button.

If we expect a game to look good, if we expect a game to handle well, if we expect it to sound brilliant and run fluidly and meet all these crucial technical thresholds that sound like obsessive geekery to non-gamers, why are we accepting or even misguidedly defending aphorisms like "Suspicion is the precipice of enlightenment!" in incredibly pretty but hysterically badly written (or translated) games like Devil May Cry 4 for the PlayStation 3?

Think about it. Remember I'm not indicting puzzle games or (most) platformers or whatever you want to identify as "doesn't involve storytelling as an axial game element." I'm only targeting games that bring this on themselves by mimicking other mediums badly when there's absolutely no reason they shouldn't be transcending them.

Incidentally, if anyone has Lindeloff's number, ring him up and tell him to play BioShock before closing the door on video games completely. There's an utterly anomalous (if still flawed) game that at the very least has its compass calibrated in the right direction.

I hate hacking on my hobby, but I'm not going to shill for it either. We can continue to be blithe and juvenile and just crack jokes about storytelling in games...or we can get serious about it. The choice is yours.

* Of course the quote's a parody (see original link here). And thank you Mirror Universe Lindeloff for saying what Actual Reality Damon Lindeloff wouldn't.

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Lost--The Video Game: Our Exclusive Q&A With Its Developer

It's Thursday, which means another episode of ABC's Lost, which I'll be recapitulating to my wife later this evening over Skype because she's in Europe through the end of April. (They irritatingly block ABC's "view online" option overseas.) In skeptical but hopeful anticipation of the upcoming game based on the show, I chatted with Lost: Via Domus's producer, Gadi Pollack, who mostly plays his cards close, but offers a few interesting notes about the gameplay and production particulars.

MobyGames credits Pollack as producing Far Cry: Instincts and Far Cry: Predator as well as Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within. Lost: Via Domus ships for PC, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 3 on February 26, 2008. The full interview follows.

Game On: Let's start with an obvious, often unasked question: What if I don't watch the show? Is there a game here worth playing if I've never seen an episode of Lost?

Gadi Pollack Our main goal was to create a Lost experience for both fans and non-fans of the show. As a player you don?t need to know anything about the show because you are playing the game from Elliott?s perspective. This allows everyone to feel like they were part of the experience.

A concept render of The Black Rock, the mysterious ship inexplicably marooned on the island.

GO: How closely did Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse consult on the story? Did they come to Ubisoft and pitch the idea for the game first? Did they plot any of the episodes?

GP: We worked very closely with Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, and I would present to them the progress of the game every 5 weeks. They were really involved in the story and worked with us to give it that Lost feel.

In fact Damon Lindelof came up with the ending of the game, which is very Lostish and I am sure everyone will love it.

GO: I just read the Cuse quote where he says "they?re writing their own self-contained story that isn?t an extension of canon." Does that mean this is some great big hypothetical "elseworlds" kind of thing, with only a fleeting relationship to the Lost mothership? Would we ever potentially see this character on the show? Any reason Lindeloff and Cuse didn't go for broke and commit like the Wachowskis (or whoever) to making it official canon, say like the tie-in books?

GP: Their main goal for the game was not to answer any questions related to the show but really give everyone the experience of being in the show and on that Island. It would have been unfair for someone to be forced to buy the game in order to find out answers to the show. We all wanted to keep this game as an added experience for everyone. In saying that, you will get to know the castaways a little more and explore areas that you haven?t seen on the show.

Some actor face maps translate better than others, but Sayid's (Naveen Andrews) looks nearly photo perfect.

GO: When did you start work on the game? How long has it been in development? What portion of Ubisoft Montreal's development resources are dedicated to it?

GP: We started the project summer 2006 and at our peak of development we reached about 120 persons creating content for the game.

GO: Can you tell us a little about the game? Where in the series does it pick up, and if I can ask, whereabouts does it end? How much will be stuff we've seen before versus entirely new?

GP: The storyline of the game take place in seasons 1-2 and you will visit the landmarks up to season 3. The hard part was to keep the story in line with the events of the show.

We put the player in the middle of the main events so they can feel a part of them. We really wanted to stay true to the timeline of the show.

Our new protagonist goes for a jog around the beach.

GO: How about the lead character and photojournalist Elliott? What's his story?

GP: Elliott is a photo-journalist suffering from amnesia after the crash. Something horrible happened in his past, but he can?t remember anything. It?s up to the player to find out Elliott?s past and try to find a way home.

Yes, Elliott's kind of another "beautiful person on a beach." Maybe the show's Big Reveal will be "The survivors are really false memory amnesiacs who were en route to a Madonna video shoot!"

GO: What's the gameplay like most of the time? Third-person action adventure? Puzzle solving and carry-quests? Did I read correctly that there's going to be a camera-snapping mechanic?

GP: We developed a survival adventure game we felt would be the best genre for a Lost game. Lost is not about shooting and killing, it?s about putting the player in situations to keep them thinking on what they have to do next to progress in the game/Island and their own story.

Our main goal was to focus on creating action from the tension we put the player in, with the help of the music and mood of the game.

GO: How accurately did you attempt to map the interior locations like various island stations and outdoor areas? Will ridiculously diehard fans be able to appreciate anything special or extra?

GP: ABC and the Lost team gave us blueprints of all the hatches and we even sent our artist director to Hawaii for one week to take reference photos of the jungle and the sets that are used for the show.

We know the fans are diehard and wanted to please them, so everything that is in the game is an exact replica on what is on the Island.

We have some very exciting extras that the fans will really enjoy but for that you will have to play the game to find out what they are.

The enigmatic Dharma Hydra Hatch, where Jack (Matthew Fox) did time during season three's first six episodes

GO: I see you have some but not all of the original actors doing voiceovers. Was that a budgetary decision based on actor asking fees? Timing? Both?

GP: It?s a combination of scheduling, timing, and budget. However, we have all the main characters? likenesses and ABC helped us to pick great sound-a-likes, so players will not lose the authentic, immersive feeling of Lost.

GO: A lot of movie tie-in games, e.g. EA's Lord of the Rings: The Third Age, radically alter canon to create a meaningful play experience at the expense of plausibility, arguably alienating diehards. How did you attempt to work around that issue with Via Domus, i.e. to make it feel less like a tour of the show's "greatest moments" than a series of independently justified experiences? I'm thinking of Nikki / Paulo in the third season, for instance -- they just popped in, wham, then ended up with decidedly cooler deaths than they probably deserved (in the opinion of many).

GP: We worked closely with the Lost creative team and in fact hired the very fist Lost script writer to ensure that the main character of the game did not pop into the Lost universe just like that. You will see when you play the game that we put the main character in settings where he crosses over with other Lost characters and you see a clear connection to the Lost universe. We wanted to link the main character to the Lost universe in a way that felt natural.

What, you don't remember the part in the first season where John Locke (Terry O'Quinn) hangs out with Elliott? Prepare to suspend your disbelief to accommodate the game's narrative liberties.

GO: According to Lindelof, "In terms of solving mysteries, we leave that to the mothership...the game basically just deals with Elliott's mysteries." Is that still the case? Will fans gain any extra insight into the TV show and the central questions (what, where, and/or when is the island?) by playing the game?

GP: The fans will be able to explore more areas and talk to the other castaways, but the main focus is to provide the player with the ability to solve their own personal mystery and live the story that unfolds on the Lost island. This truly puts the fan in their own unique Lost experience.

GO: I've read that the game will have seven episodes, each lasting roughly an hour -- will this be a full- or value-priced game?

GP: The seven episodes all vary in length. The gameplay time also varies on whether players choose to explore everything or try to get from A to B as quick as possible. We estimate gameplay will last between 10 ? 12 hours.

An in-game shot of the crash site using Lost: Via Domus's 3D engine -- it certainly looks impressive.

GO: And for my one officially dumb question: Is Wikipedia right about the name being a Latin gaffe? Is it really supposed to be "Via Domum" with the "m" instead of "Via Domus"?

GP: You can?t believe everything you read on the Internet. ;)

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Nintendo Wii Damaging Japanese Arcades?

Suggests toy and amusement arcade firm Namco Bandai, anyway, but it makes sense if you accept that the Wii lets you accomplish pretty much anything you could in an arcade and more. "A lot of the types of games that people played at an arcade can now be done at home," says the company's spokesman Yuji Machida. That's exactly right, plus it's easier to coordinate playtime with friends and family when you're not worrying about traveling somewhere with set open and closing times, or that's potentially miles from home.

Namco Bandai's explanation comes on the heels of a shock downward revision of its earning outlook and news the company would close a staggering one-fifth of its arcades. Sega Sammy Holdings also announced plans to close 100 of its arcades, though Sega isn't (yet) attributing any of that to pinching from Nintendo's uber-popular console.

Of course we don't have this problem in the U.S., since arcades were an endangered species well before the Wii arrived. These days, they're mostly relegated to time abyss museums located mostly (and weirdly) at truck stops along desolate stretches of interstate.

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Microsoft Slashes Xbox 360 HD DVD Add-On to $130

It was fun while it lasted, HD-DVD, but that mournful dirge you can almost hear accompanying the Xbox 360 HD DVD player's price plummeting from $180 to $130 isn't played at parties for a reason. Call it a fire sale? With five free HD DVDs in the blender, I can't see why not. Dare I suggest it's now just a matter of time before Microsoft completes the circle (more of spiral, really) by announcing an external Xbox 360 Blu-ray part?

Hold your breath, because I think we could see it happen this year, especially if the PlayStation 3 makes inroads with videophiles who purchase the system as a Blu-ray player first. Watch that happen in an even bigger hurry if Sony drops the price of the PlayStation 3 by another $50 or $100 in time for the holidays.

The Xbox 360 HD DVD drive launched in November 2006 for $200, dropped to $180 by last summer, and saw online resellers independently cut the price to $130 a month ago. Today's announcement is simply Microsoft clearing its inventory catching up.

What would it take to save HD DVD at this point? No less than...

...PlayStation 3 sales spiraling into the toilet. Whatever Sony's faults, that's simply not going to happen. Some analysts and publishers in fact see 2008 as the year Sony gets its mojo back.

...Sony, Fox, Disney, and Liongate issuing a press release that reads "About that exclusive to Blu-ray thing? Kidding!"

...Massive unrepentant international brainwashing. Hey, have you checked what's in your drinking water lately?

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Sinners In The Hands of an Angry Empire

It's late, so this'll have to be quick, and I'm dead sick to boot, but I just finished a single session of what I believe, granting that I'm half delirious, to be the most enthralling PC strategy game I've played in [insert something appropriately overkill here]. I'm talking about Ironclad and Stardock's Sins of a Solar Empire, the 4X (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) real-time strategy game you've probably never heard of, but need to run, sprint, leap, fly (if you can) etc. to grab a copy of. El pronto.

You wicked, wicked 4X real-time strategy game I can't stop playing to save myself (from exacerbating flu-based vertigo)

I'd say "it's just that good," but "good" is a crappy, pitiful adjective, and all the others like "mind-blowing," "killer," "wicked," and "superlative" are on permanent fanboy loan. Picture me giggling, flailing, and desperately trying to get your attention, and that about sums up how I feel about it at the moment.

Is it complex? Yes. Is it also astonishingly elegant in terms of the way it wrestles that complexity into one of the smartest run-everything-from-a-drop-menu-PIP interfaces I've ever seen? I'm going with "unquestionably."

I've only played as the human Trader Emergency Coalition (TEC) faction so far (you can play as two others) but a single two-player game against the computer on normal difficulty with one star surrounded by roughly 16 planets came out to about 12 hours of uninterrupted play. Manic help-me-I'm-crazed play, as in I couldn't stop even at the point I was feeling like grabbing a bucket (nothing to do with the game, of course). And I gather 12 hours is on the itty-bitty side of what you can do with this thing when you spec extra stars and really open up.

How it plays: You have planets parked in free space, connected by warp space lines and surrounded by translucent 2D gravity wells (like Tinker Toy saucers) which in turn serve as your location for infrastructure improvements and orbital defenses. I wimped out and went with "auto-placement" to focus on other stuff, so the computer guessed where best to drop guns and structures in the gravity well, which worked okay most of the game. But I can see how I'll need to get placement down pat before going up against someone really good online. The gravity well dictates ship speed (toward the planet = faster, away from it = slower) so placement in theory is going to be the difference between predictability and "whoops-crap!" hauling a-double-s.

You can build either logistical or tactical structures to pad your turf with metal and crystal extractors or military and civics labs (for research), trade ports (vulnerable little frigates can maneuver between planets to increase your money pull), and loosey-goosey stuff like "broadcast centers" that spread your culture around so you can eventually colonize hostile planets.

The research tree is monstrous. Double-sided poster stitched with flowcharts monstrous. The tech pacing for TEC feels on first pass very well-balanced. I usually see one thing or another in a game tech tree that stands out as hideously overpowered, but the upgrades in Sins are gradual enough that you really need to invest in a long path and get well down it before you're spotting tangible tactical benefits.

Of course the crux of the game involves flinging whole fleets of interstellar armed-to-the-teeth spacecraft at the other guy, fleets with a gazillion different types of gadgets and stats and special abilities. To which effect Sins serves up dozens of different types of upgradeable cruisers and frigates, as well as five intelligently discrete classes of capital ships. As in capital-A for you-know-what-kicking. Plus: They get their own complements of fighters and bombers, which launch from starboard or port and swarm enemies like gnats with contrails.

The trick of it boils down to capturing all the planets, or at least eliminating any planets owned by your opponent(s), at which point the game lets you quit or sadistically stamp out every last one.

Pirates threaten to zip in periodically in escalating strength and numbers, though if your coffers are deep enough, you can stave off attacks by putting a bounty on your opponent's head. That's right, a bounty. If yours is higher, and you have the cash in hand...well what self-respecting pirate won't go with the high bidder? Now imagine bidding and backstabbing with up to seven others online.

The intelligence gathering and fog of war elements are simple but smart. Peek on the periphery of an unexplored planet's gravity well and if you have to turn tail, follow-up mousing over the planet yields a "Last intel xxx seconds ago" report with a manifest of whatever was there at the time, which if I can just say is so much smarter than "now you see it, now you don't." You saw it. You know what you knew. It's like having a bunch of time-based tactical bookmarks.

But the thing I can't capture with words that sets this game apart from anything else I've played is the absolutely majestic pacing. It's the coolest, grandest game of tug of war you've ever played, and except for a little late game slog where you're trying to box in the bad guy (who's pinging from system to system to escape your mighty Cyclotaurite and Novalith wrath) I'm really reaching to come up with any serious functional flaws.

Anyway, I've successfully told you about all of 10% of the game, so shoot me for rambling, then scoot off to wherever you can find PC games for sale and get this. I honestly didn't think Ironclad would be able to pull it off when I saw the game a year ago (looked cool, but sounded incredibly busy). Somehow they have, pretty much with bells and whistles on. Oh yeah it's also the best looking game you're just now hearing about.

Bravo Ironclad. And shame on the gaming press for not having reviews ready day-of release, i.e. today, in lieu of more mindless screen-scraped press releases.

(Okay, okay, you want more to go on -- I'll be back to oblige after sleep laced with sick-guy drugs, but you can always scan my preview for 1UP here.)

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Grand Theft Auto The Movie That Almost Happened

Last spring a deal was very nearly in place to bring Rockstar's controversy-du-jour magnet Grand Theft Auto to the big screen, starring Marshall "Eminem" Mathers in the lead. That's the word from Ben Fritz (also, one of my editors) at Variety, whose new games blog The Cut Scene just launched. No, he's not paying me a penny to say it's definitely one for your daily RSS stack.

According to Fritz, Hollywood's been after GTA for years but Rockstar's been loathe to give up the franchise. Because they want to produce their own moviess? Who knows. Probably more what Fritz intimates when he says "God knows there have been a lot of awful videogame-based movies that hurt the property more than they helped."

For that matter, can you name a single videogame-based film that hasn't utterly sucked? I can't, though I can think of at least one game conversely inspired by a film that officially shatters the film-based-games-suck trope. The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay was a brilliant fluke on the order of cats and dogs living together, but it happened -- you can't pretend it didn't -- and let that be a lesson to startups like Brash Entertainment LLC or anyone else who may or may not be in the business of making games (as opposed to franchise sidecars).

As for a GTA-inspired movie, all I've gotta say is keep Uwe "Ed Wood" Boll far, far away. As in light years.

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Fixing Vista Performance: Nvidia Unplugged and Uncut, Part Three

Nothing hurt like switching to Vista last January, whatever hardware you had under your hood. Microsoft drew a line in the sand and shipped its new OS as developers went from shock to anger to depression to acceptance overnight before rushing to tie off driver and application code after months of delay-driven reprieves. When Vista landed on shelves, it looked fantastic, but its drivers and game performance numbers were in considerable disarray.

In the third part of my interview with Nvidia, Roy Taylor, Ken Brown, and James Wang explain why.

Part One | Part Two

DX10 for XP, annual single-card and SLI driver improvements, and driver nightmares when Vista launched

Game On: Was DX10, understood as a complete rewrite of the API, achievable or possible in a general sense on Windows XP? The cynic would say that the reason it was only offered with Vista was because Microsoft wanted to push copies of its new OS. True or false?

Roy Taylor: I think you know it's easy to be cynical and to look for plots. The fact is that Vista is incredibly complex, and whilst many users may feel Microsoft has missed the mark, I'm happy to go on record because I've said it before, personally as Roy Taylor I hate User Account Control. I loathe it. First thing I do on any of my machines or my family's machines is turn if off. That's just my personal opinion. There are some thing about Vista which are hard to love.

But I totally respect Vista as a product. It's incredibly complex, incredibly ambitious, and it's trying to really do some new things. Personal opinions of users may vary, but I admire Microsoft's ambition. And the fact is, not making Vista backwards compatible allowed them to really try and introduce some new effects that would enrich the gaming experience.

Now you can argue as a journalist, and users can argue, whether they achieved their goal or not. And that's a fair thing to do. But we shouldn't undermine their efforts at genuinely trying to do something new, and not making DX10 backwards compatible freed them up to do that.

GO: So you're saying there were necessary and sound technical reasons for making DX10 Vista-only?

RT: I think it would be fairer to say not having to concentrate on making DX10 backwards compatible allowed them to focus on making it feature-rich, which is what users were asking for.

GO: When Vista first came out, the performance delta going from XP to Vista was significant in DX9 games alone. Recent benchmarks from sites like Firing Squad and others comparing XP and Vista suggest that the performance delta has been substantially reduced. Are you guys finally getting positive feedback?

James Wang: The general perception you're talking about where Vista seems to be slower than XP, I think a lot of that has to do with early drivers that were released, you know, the first beta drivers that most of the early stories were based upon. We've had recent stories done that compared XP to Vista performance in single and SLI and the conclusion of those reviews has been simply that most gamers will not notice a performance difference. There's either no performance difference, or it's so small it's between like 100 and 110 frames per second, or something where it's entirely a CPU-bound problem.

We knew we were getting there for single-card performance by about May 2007. So by May, we had driver performance to the point that a single GeForce 8 would perform pretty much the same under Vista as under XP. We knew that SLI still had issues, and by about the second half of last year we had that sorted out. Today I think that if you were to look at any game running in XP versus Vista, I very much doubt you'd see any meaningful difference.

GO: Why when Vista first came out were your drivers so immature, and what did it take to get them into a state of maturity?

RT: Vista as I said before is really, really complex. I think that people have gotten so used to having things just work all of the time, and yes as a user you should expect that something just works and we understand that. But the sheer enormity of the product and the radical difference in the driver device model, I think, caught us all a little bit by surprise. And yes, we had seen Vista before, and of course we had access to the builds, but when the final product came, I think that the industry had been expecting and gotten used to delays and reschedules, and then suddenly there were no more delays and reschedules and it was here.

It's an enormously complex product. I think Bill Gates famously said it cost more to develop Vista than it did to put a man on the moon. It's true. It's just hugely complex. And no matter how much time or warning you're given, it just takes time to learn something like that.

Ken Brown: I dug up some notes that I had on that subject around the time that Vista launched, and one note I have is that an Nvidia graphics driver for Vista has 20 million lines of code, which is roughly analogous to all the lines of code in Windows NT. So at the time we had to do six versions of the drivers. One for DX9, one for DX9 SLI, one for DX10, one for DX10 SLI, one for OpenGL, and another for OpenGL SLI.

So the challenge for us was writing to the new display driver model. It was managing all those different versions for both DX9 and DX10 products, which was a tougher challenge for us than our competitors because they didn't have a DX10 offering at the time.

Is that an excuse? No. We should have done a better job with our Vista drivers out of the gate. But we worked really hard on it and we devoted a lot of resources to it, to address it as quickly as we could. And by now, it's all history, because the drivers are so much better, and performance is up to par.

JW: If you think about it, it really is an entirely new driver model you're programming on, especially with DX10. It takes years. If a new programming language came out or a new architecture came out, it takes years for the compilers and the programs to grasp how to really use it. And that happened throughout 2007 with Vista.

Some of the performance issues, like with Half-Life 2 where things were 15 or 20 percent slower under Vista than XP, it took our best engineers many many months to work out the exact details. Some of it is to do with the Vista kernel, some of it is to do with our drivers, but we both have been improving dramatically this year, and you see we have a list of five of the most important Vista hotfixes on our website. Those five address specific things in the Vista kernel that are not doing things intelligently about distributing work to SLI for example. And these very, very specific things are causing a slight difference in performance.

But more importantly, you're comparing Vista to not really XP but XP with Service Pack 2. And that took, what, three, four years of refinement to get to? I think next month or the coming couple of weeks Vista SP1 is coming out. So then we're finally getting to a stage where Vista has all the basic tuning included. SP1 will include all the changes with the hotfixes, and I think you're going to see performance that's pretty much spectacular.

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Super Smash Bros. Brawl Pummels Japanese Competition

In its first day out of the chute, Super Smash Bros Brawl for the Wii sold north of 500,000 copies in Japan, shattering sales figures for all other platforms combined. By comparison, Super Mario Galaxy sold just 130,000 on its day-one Japanese opener. If that's a glimpse of the action to come when the game arrives somewhat tardy in the U.S. on March 9, Nintendo has a geyser on its hands.

It's my party and I'll brawl if I want to...

It still won't solve Nintendo's potentially serious third party problems, but I had no idea the Smash Bros. series was this popular. Maybe that explains the U.S. enthusiast press running stories with puffed up headlines like "Brawl Revelations Reach Critical Mass" or the parade of amusing rumors presently under the fanboy-scope.

Other wild and wooly Double-S-Double-B stories:

- SSBB ships on a dual-layer DVD that's apparently playing havoc with all you dirty Wii owners. Nintendo is offering to clean all affected Wiis (in Japan) for free if they're sent to its Kyoto service center with a warranty card and copy of the game. Question: Why not just use a standard DVD cleaning disc? Is there something more going on here in terms of the Wii's compatibility with dual-layer DVDs?

- Did you hear about the virtual console that's set to debut in SSBB and offer a half dozen classic Nintendo games? Well, demo versions anyway. Look for abbreviated versions of Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Ice Climber (Ice Climber? Huh?), Kirby's Adventure, Super Metroid, and Star Fox 64, though SSBB developer Masahiro Sakurai coyly suggests others may be available.

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Lost: Via Domus Trailer Surfaces

The Beginning of the End was the title of last night's spooky and spookier episode of Lost, and today there's a predictably cryptic trailer for the upcoming game to dovetail with the season premier. Other than the mediocre face-mapping and uneven voice imitation, the game (and in particular, the island) looks pretty fabulous. Check it out.

I'm not sure how I feel about a franchise tie-in that's officially "[not] an extension of canon," according to the TV show's executive producer Carlton Cuse. In a "maybe it happened, maybe it didn't" capacity, therefore, you play a photojournalist who's lost his memory in the crash, and over the course of seven episodes (worth roughly 90 minutes of gameplay a piece) must solve puzzles that parallel the events of the TV show.

As a Lost fan, I'm intrigued. As a gamer, I'm more like "What you got, Drake's Fortune wannabe?" Here's hoping it's more than just Errand Simulator meets Beautiful People on a Beach.

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Sony PlayStation 3 Meets Slim Fast?

So does the "T" in "T3" stand for Triple Tease or what? Treat this as the hearsay it almost certainly is, but gadget gossip T3 says it knows a guy (who probably knows a kid, who probably has it from a giant rabbit) who says Sony's working on a slimmer, sexier, sleeker PlayStation 3 for release in the...well, say "for release."

Why "slim"? Because they've done it to every other system they've ever released (PS1, PS2, PSP). Why not the PS3? reasons T3.

Could this be the Jenny Craig edition PlayStation 3?

Sooner? Later? It's inevitable, with that much I'd agree, but the question is, will anyone care? And by care, I mean in the "buy because I wouldn't have otherwise" sense, as opposed to the "appreciate the cosmetic nip-and-tuck though I was planning to buy it anyway" angle.

Does your PS3 take up too much shelf space? Not fit somewhere you'd like it to at all? Would you be more inclined to buy a PS3 if they reduced the size (but not the price or thermal output)? Does "sexy" really sell more to anyone outside the diehard-est?

The only thing my PS3 could do better is run a little cooler and a little quieter, though to be fair, its fan on full sounds probably a fifth the decibel level of my blow-hosing Xbox 360.

EA Confirms Rock Band Coming to Wii

It's kind of funny the way EA's John Riccitiello put it during the company's Q3 fiscal results conference call, because it's like everyone was just supposed to know Rock Band was coming to the Wii already.

"What's probably the most interesting piece right now is the coming launch on the Wii [of Rock Band]," said Riccitiello almost nonchalantly during the call.

Granted you couldn't swing a cat (or a planet-hopping plumber) recently without hitting media assumptions that this was in the can. Not only is the Wii's U.S. install base presently rivaling the Xbox 360's (9.0 million vs. 10.7 million at last count respectively), the Wii has the sort of casual demographic you could argue Rock Band was made for from the get-go. If it doesn't quickly beat the pants of Microsoft and Sony sales once it's out, I'll eat my imitation Fender Strat.

So there you go Wii fans, though that's all Riccitiello had to tease on the subject. Nothing on launch dates or features, say whether the Wii version will one-up the PS2 version and include nonlinear world tour play (anyone's guess), downloadable content (it probably will), and online play (also, one would think, a strong probability).