I wasn't able to do a dump (not that kind) last week, because Brian Crecente was on vacation and I was doing the Day Note to end my shift each day. I can only write so many soul-revealing personal posts 24 hours, you know?

But the Dump's back this week. My notebook's got some extras.

The IGF Gavel: I'm spending part of my weekend finishing my first round judging duties for the Independent Games Festival. This is something I always want to write more about, but I think judging, for VGAs IGF awards and other awards I'm not running, is best kept private. Nevertheless, it can have a major influence on what I write based on the exposure it grants me to more games (Being a VGA judge, for example, got me to see Assassin's Creed II a little earlier this fall than I would have otherwise). As far as the IGF judging goes, I've enjoyed doing it each of the past few years, getting a chance to see some wonderful, small, mostly PC games early. I played Braid more than a year before it was released, and World of Goo about half a year before it was out. I've played side-scrollers that you control with a Guitar Hero guitar and eventual award-winners such as Blueberry Garden. I don't want to say much about the 17 first-round games I'm judging this year yet, but just imagine having to judge a game called Don't Shit Your Pants on a scale of 1-100 in matters such as graphics, design, sound and so on. It's a fun exercise. Once I'm further into the process and I get the ok, I do hope to turn some of these IGF playing experiences into posts.

EA's PSN/XBLA Future: I interviewed EA CEO John Riccitiello a couple of Wednesdays ago and published a bunch of articles from it. But not everything. It's amazing how much you can fit in to a one-hour chat. I still have big chunks of the interview that I didn't publish. Some of that isn't post-worthy. Other stuff is good food for thought that I'll use as a basis for reporting in the future. Here's a bit I thought I'd get to but doesn't seem like I'll be able to advance any time soon. He had mentioned EA's commercially and critically successful 2009 XBLA and PSN game Battlefield 1943 a couple of times in our chat, and I asked him what his take on that market was. EA had, to the best of my memory, published only one downloadable game for the Xbox 360 and PS3 before that. He said: "We looked at [the XBLA/PSN market] and saw there's a lot of stuff up there that generates about $500,000 in terms of revenue. And they're generally spending $495,000 to a million in dev. And while that equation is very cool, it's a hobby, it's not a business. And while the gamers are having fun with it, they're not having that much fun with it. And to be honest, how many board games do you want to play on your Xbox? So we looked at that and said, 'This isn't being addressed in the right way.' So we tripled our budget and made something we thought would be really good, with no understanding of what was going to happen. We got a really great outcome with not just highly profitable business but one where consumers far and wide lauded it as a great game. We're learning from that and there will be more like that." Got that? More big XBLA/PSN games coming from EA.

Next Year, Already: There's some other stuff in my notebook about games that I can't write about yet. Publishers are always setting up new dates to define when a game they've offered an early glimpse of can be covered. It's part of the deal of seeing this stuff in advance. Let's just say there were games at Sony and Ubisoft events this week that remain under such embargoes. More exciting, though, is that I have preview copies of a trio of 2010 games that I know people will be excited about, and I'll be able to write impressions of them on Monday, Tuesday and the Monday following. I mention this as a way to show how the years keep churning. I just wrote my last disc-game review of 2009 on The Saboteur and I'm already shifting in to playing major-label 2010 games. Some folks rightfully lament the gaming media's constant look to the next big thing. It feels like eons since we last covered Halo 3: ODST in any meaningful way, for example, though that game was a big deal, just three months ago. We're trying to look back a little at least with some of the catch-up reviews we've been publishing. Hopefully we'll find other ways, too, to keep an eye on the games of recent past and the experiences gamers have with them.

Review Addendum: I always jot notes down in my notebook before I write a review, but I realize now that I omitted from my review this week of The Saboteur something that I thought was a telling problem: It takes three button presses to go from in-game action to a pannable view of your full game map. That's got to be a no-no, no?

Games I Got In The Mail This Week But Didn't Write About (Yet?): Tekken 6 (PS3 with fancy fighting stick), Hello Kitty Party (DS).

Check for my weekly review round-up a little later, but otherwise, make way for the night and weekend crews!

Both games run on the same engine, so both share the same specs. And those are:

Minimum Specs
Processor: Core 2 Duo @ 2.0GHz
Main memory: 2GB
Graphics card: GeForce 7800 GT / ATI X1900
Graphics memory: 256MB
OS: Windows XP
Free HDD space: 15GB for Digital Version, 10GB for Disc Version (BFBC2), 10GB for Digital Version, 4GB for Disc Version (BF1943)

Recommended Specs
Processor: Quadcore
Main memory: 2GB
Graphics card: GeForce GTX 260
Graphics memory: 512MB
OS: Windows Vista or Windows 7
Free HDD space: 15GB for Digital Version, 10GB for Disc Version (BFBC2), 10GB for Digital Version, 4GB for Disc Version (BF1943)

Please, now, bore us all with tales of whether or not this game will run on your PC, and how you say it'll make you go out and upgrade, but really won't.

癒し動画 「バトルフィールド1943 ロコロコ」 [オレ的ゲーム速報＠刃]

Instead, the game has been delayed into 2010, DICE's Gordon Van Dyke telling G4TV:

We haven't released a Frostbite [DICE's game engine] built game on PC, so going into this project we lacked a starting foundation we had on Console. There are also many different and unique only challenges to the PC that has lead to us pushing the release even further to Q1 CY 2010 [early next year]. This was a hard pill to swallow, but it was absolutely needed to ensure the features and functionality that PC Players have come to expect from Battlefield on PC are not missing. Things like support for DirectX 9 and 10, higher player count (up to 32-player matches), wide peripheral support i.e. Joysticks for flying, VoIP, and ranked server provider hosting. So it was and still is the absolutely right decision, for quality's sake, to not release until it is ready.

Sad reading that a Battlefield game of all games is having trouble being ported to the PC, but everything he says makes sense. Better to wait and have them do it right than have them do it...not right.

Battlefield 1943 [G4TV]

The download only game, developed by DICE, launched on July 8 for $15 and included a map and mode that had to be unlocked through the communal effort of everyone playing the game.

"We are honoured by the reception that the game has received so far," says Gordon Van Dyke, producer on Battlefield 1943. "Watching and participating in this non-stop multiplayer action has been a real treat for us and we can't believe how fast our fans reached 43 million kills. We can now truly say that we have set a new standard for what can be done in the downloadable games category and gamers recognize the endless value that Battlefield 1943 provides for just $15."

The worldwide community challenge to unlock the Coral Sea map began on Friday, July 10 at 19:43 CET. The Xbox LIVE community reached the goal of 43 million kills in just 5 days, with the PlayStation community hitting the mark in 8 days.

Van Dyke told Kotaku that the popularity of the community unlock has him pondering including something similar in Bad Company 2.

The word went out over Twitter on the official Battlefield 1943 feed yesterday

"Think you're a Bad Ass with BF1943 weapons? What if I said you'll be able to use your Semi-Auto Rifle, Sniper Rifle, or SMG in BFBC2!"

Battlefield 1943 And Bad Company 2: Connected Somehow? [PSX Extreme]

Turns out that sometimes they do.

While efforts like Sony's Folding@Home project, which uses the collective processing power of unplayed Playstation 3's to research and better understand disease, have been around for years, it wasn't until recently that console games have started playing around with this idea of collective gaming.

Earlier this month, Battlefield 1943 stormed onto the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360. In the first-person shooter, gamers go online to fight it out in World War II's Pacific. While the game's premise of World War II battle offered little unique to the genre, there was a twist.

The game shipped with an area locked away from players' reach. To get to this hidden map, gamers had to collectively kill one another 43 million times. Once the kill count was reached, the map and new game mode becomes available to everyone, for free.

It took just five days on the Xbox 360.

"We were tracking all global kills per a console," said DICE's Gordon Van Dyke, the game's producer. "Every time a kill was made the server would report it."

Van Dyke used an Excel spread sheet and his knowledge of such games to track how long he thought it would take. He came up with three weeks, not five days.

Van Dyke thinks that the Playstation 3 version of the new map, which has to be unlocked separately, will likely hit early next week.

By all accounts the experiment, dubbed a community challenge, was a success. A success not just in terms of tracking the popularity of their game, but in helping to define and build a community among those gamers.

"I'm a big advocate of the community," he said. "I think (ideas like this) could blur the definition of massively multiplayer online games in particular areas, and build up that community relationship In games like this."

And the success of this communal achievement has Van Dyke, at least, thinking about including these sort of group efforts in future games.

"I will be working on (upcoming shooter) Bad Company 2, so it's definitely something we would consider in that game," he said. "But we are not going to shove it into something else because it was successful for 1943, we want to use it diligently."

Battlefield isn't the only, or the first console game to tap into communal efforts.

The Playstaton 3's Noby Noby Boy, released earlier this year, tracked all players' efforts in the game, reporting them to a database. The worldwide points were then used to unlock new areas in the game for everyone. It took players months to unlock just two of the game's extra levels.

Eric Lempel, director of Playstation Network operations and strategic planning, says these sorts of community-driven efforts and rewards are the natural evolution of this generation of consoles. An evolution anchored in online play and masses of gamers.

Lempel points to the PS3's virtual world of Home as an example of how community and building community has become an increasingly important part of console gaming.

"One of the biggest goals for us is bringing the community together," he said. "Bringing another level of entertainment to the community."

Home was recently host to a form of alternative reality game, something that wasn't fully explained to gamers, but expected them to figure out the clues, the mystery, themselves. By the time the game wrapped up this month, 3.2 million people had visited it and it had 460,000 players.

While the creators of games will likely always be the driving force behind gaming, they're quickly becoming not the only ones with an important impact on what they make.

Giving a gamer control of the environment in which they play, allowing them to unlock secrets, explore spaces, create new ideas, will inevitably change the nature of this form of entertainment. Perhaps eventually turning the concept of the artist and the audience on its head.

Well Played is a weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come. Feel free to join in the discussion.

This is the latest entry in the Battlefield franchise and the first downloadable-only console version. The shooter rolls out three Battlefield maps for ground and air action (Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal and Wake Island) and a newly unlocked airplanes-versus-carriers map Coral Sea on the XBLA Version. The map was unlocked when the 43 millionth kill was recorded — a feat the PlayStation 3 version should also achieve shortly.

Loved
Stripped Down FPS: EA DICE has limited the number of classes from five in the previous game to three. Also gone is the European front of Battlefield 1942. It gives the game a pared down feel, as if it's been whittled down to a point—a very sharp point. With fewer classes to contend with, new players can best suit their play style. That means there are also fewer variables for players to deal with, making it possible to focus on things like teamwork, how to best navigate the map, title's largely unforgiving and ultimately satisfying weapon targeting.

Air Strikes: In Battlefield 1943, a welcome addition is the ability to phone in pinpointed carpet bombing air strikes. It can be a game changer, and it adds another level of play, giving 1943 an extra layer of strategy.

Behind the Wheel: Simply put, driving is fun. The jeeps and the Japanese sedans in Battlefield 1943 drift a bit, which makes zipping around the island a blast.

Hated
Wait, M'kay?: For a game that does give players options on how they want to play it, Coral Sea pretty much does everything it can to remove those options. Two planes spawn on the deck of the aircraft carrier, and depending on how many players there are on your squad, you could spend game time just trying to get into a plane before your teammate does. (Sure, you can spend your time using an anti-aircraft cannon!) On the XBLA version, the map is selected by choosing Air Superiority in the menu, instead of Quick Match. The separation might be viewed as a hassle for some, but a blessing for others.

For those looking for a multiplayer FPS, Battlefield 1943 delivers and then some. The vehicles and dogfights mix gameplay up and keep things fresh. Perhaps the biggest compliment I can pay the game is that Battlefield 1943 made me want to get better — get better to improve my own score and skill, but also get better to help my team.

Those used to typical console shooters with forgiving auto-aiming might need to re-calibrate for 1943. Those that do will find the effort well worth the trouble.

Battlefield 1943 was developed by EA DICE and published by EA for the PlayStation Network and Xbox LIVE Arcade. Retails for US$14.99 and 1200 MS Points. Played for upwards of 15 hours.

The new map, Coral Sea, adds a fourth playing field for the downloadable World War II multiplayer shooter.

The Xbox 360 games took five days to score their 43 million kills.

The PS3 gamers are at 22.8 million kills, according to the official Battlefield 1943 site. While the PS3 version of the game was released a day later than the 360 one, the race for the 43 million kills started at the same time.

Why the discrepancy between the huge kill count on the PS3 and the huger one on the Xbox 360?

It could be that the 360 version of the game handily outsold the PS3 version (I've inquired with EA).

It could be that PS3 gamers are better at dodging bullets or that 360 gamers are better marskmen.

All that we can know for sure is that, Autobot gamers and Decepticon gamers would have been more evenly matched.

That's one of the fun facts Gordon Van Dyke of DICE dropped in a a forum post updating Battlefield's response to overwhelming first-day demand. They've added plenty of server capacity, he says, so the issues should be well behind the game. Another stat: The first day of playing on Xbox 360 saw more than 29 years of gameplay completed.

MTV Multiplayer calculates it'll take about two weeks to unlock that map on the 360, with the PS3 and PC following comparably. That is, if everyone continues to pitch in and does his or her part for victory.

Good News and Bad News!!!! [Electronic Arts UK Community via ThatVideoGameBlog

The game has already been played by over 80,000 people in a single day, and that's just going off the Xbox Live leaderboards. With the game now rolling out on PlayStation 3, and a PC version to come, this could (surprisingly) be one of the biggest online games of the year.

For reference, Bionic Commando Rearmed was hailed as a downloadable megahit after moving 100,000 in a week.

Battlefield 1943 - Over 80,000 Players Strong In Only One Day [Gamerbytes]

We've been hearing all day from readers who bought the game, fired it up, and couldn't play it. At all. There's some serious technical issues marring the game's launch at the moment, which EA claim are the result of the servers being full, courtesy of player numbers being much higher than EA were expecting.

So if you can't get into a game, that's why. In the meantime, more servers are being added, so our advice is wait a day or two, then try and get in. Sorry.

Good news and bad news [Battlefield 1943]

This is the UK launch trailer for DICE's big thing in a small package Battlefield release, but luckily for those of us in the U.S. they included a quote that lists the game at $15, so we don't get confused by the pound price tag at the end of the video.

As for the game itself, I've yet to try it out, but DICE has done good by me so far, with a few notable exceptions, so I am willing to give the old killing my teammates while trying to figure out airplane controls a go again. And don't worry PlayStation 3 owners! You'll get your chance tomorrow. Sony just really likes Thursdays.

World War II is alive and well on July 8th and 9th, when DICE's first download-only installment of the Battlefield series hits the Xbox 350 and PlayStation 3. 1200 Microsoft Points or $15 delivers 24-player battles across three maps to your console in the form of a 560MB download. The Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, and Wake Island maps should keep players going until they reach the goal required to unlock the fourth map. Once the worldwide community reaches 43 million kills between both platforms, the Coral Sea map is unlocked, doubtlessly making it impossible to find a game on the other three maps for at least a week afterwards.

Gotta love fostering community spirit through killing.

Iwo Jima is just one of three battlefields coming out with the downloadable installment of the Battlefield series next month on Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network. Along with Guadalcanal and Wake Island, players should have plenty of scenic places blow each other to pieces.