An alternative, albeit one not fully licensed, to console football games like Madden, Quick Hit focuses on playcalling strategy rather than in-game action. The player and team progression are designed to appeal to both fantasy football and role-playing game motifs, whereby one builds a team uniquely to his style, develops its personnel and playbook, and then advances in a persistent environment among other team owners.

Quick Hit's first major update will introduce special player skills to the playcalling dynamic. Team owners will be able to implement more than 120 special moves their players can acquire as they progress. The skills range from quarterback elusiveness, to a strong safety stonewalling a ballcarrier, to punters acing a kick's placement to win the field position battle.

The update also adds 50 new plays to the game's playbook and the ability to tag them for quick access in pressure situations. Four new head coaches, announced earlier, will also face players as opposing AIs.

Quick Hit says the update will go live by Tuesday. For more information, see the site.

Quick Hit Football [site]

Marty Schottenheimer, Jerry Glanville, Marv Levy and Herm "You Play to Win the Game" Edwards join the opposing cast in Quick Hit, which focuses on game preparation, playcalling, and player and franchise advancement as opposed to arcade running and passing action.

The coaches will head teams whose personnel and tactics conform to the types of teams they led in the NFL. Levy and Glanville, for example, would probably direct fast-paced offenses, the run and shoot for Glanville and a no-huddle pro set for Levy. Herm Edwards just plays to win the game. Hello?

OK, kidding. Quick Hit has had to put together more than 100 individual deals, the vast majority of them past players. (It's limited to using five current players by the NFLPA). These four coaches will add depth to the season simulation, said Jeffrey Anderson, the Quick Hit founder and former CEO of Turbine.

"Our users tell us they love testing their football skills against the true style of real coaches. We're all about coaching and strategy, and these four new coaches will bring even more authenticity to the single player experience," said Jeffrey Anderson, CEO at Quick Hit.

The game is free and open for signup to the general public.

At least the press release says the first of three Dragon Age Journeys chapters launches today. As of this writing the website is still only hosting the preview video for the game, but I have faith in the power of the press release. The game sees the player exploring the underground dwarven kingdom of Orzammar, taking down enemies in what the release calls "intense tactical combat." Like Dragon Age: Origins, players will choose one of six origin stories that shape the way the game's story plays out.

"Dragon Age Journeys sets the stage for Dragon Age: Origins," said Mark Darrah, Executive Producer, Dragon Age: Origins. "The team has shown the Dragon Age Franchise in a bold new light and the release of this game allows a broad audience of players to discover our dark fantasy universe for the first time."

Hopefully the whole not actually being live issue will clear up as the day progresses. For now, you've got something to refresh your browser over, and that's always exciting.

EA 2D's Ethan Levy unveiled the game in a post on Wednesday; he did not give any date of release, even ballpark. Levy did they've been working for nearly a year on a "three chapter, single player, tactical rpg delivered in Flash.

"Right now we're hard at work finishing the first chapter, Dragon Age Journeys: The Deep Roads. The game will introduce you to the dwarven city of Orzammar and the Deep Roads surrounding it where the dwarves face a persistent threat from the darkspawn hordes," Levy writes.

I know I've given Dragon Age a hard time, all in fun (at least I hope it's been seen as such. And hey, I've preordered it.) Seriously, Dragon Age: Journeys is not just a great way to extend a game's reach; it's encouraging news to gamers to see work by serious developers, backed by big names, on deeper and longer-lasting browser games.

Dragon Age: Journeys [BioWare Blog via Game Stooge]

Balloon Boy will test your knowledge of rudimentary game physics as you decide which gulls to avoid and which to shoot during a journey through the American news cycle.

Protips: You need two shots to kill a gull. Just one to pick up time and rainbow goodies. Only one shot on screen at a time

Balloon Boy was developed by Immad Akhund, Jude Gomila and James Smith, three 25-year-olds. The game's purpose seems to ask "How Many $$$ of Taxpayer Money Can you Waste?"

Balloon Boy Game - Waste Taxpayer Money! [site via Game Politics]

Warner, 25, an environmental artist who had worked at Relic Games on Dawn of War II, expected to lose copies to piracy. He'd already begun pondering what might be a third option in the ongoing zero-sum struggle between keeping gamers happy and ensuring they give you money for your work. But if nothing else, the torrenting of Raycatcher provided a good argument that someone in the indie sector should try building a game supported by product placements and in-game advertising. And after this experience he figured, why not him?

"I think people are voting - they're just not interested in paying for games any more," Warner said. "The DRM is getting cumbersome, and everyone hates it. I think we're at a point where indies have to consider a new revenue model. Because it takes a long time to make a game."

Warner and another partner, Mitch Lagran, 22, formed Vancouver-based Greener Grass Games to explore just that - a free, browser-based and ad-supported game. The thought of in-game advertising may make the skin crawl for the gaming cognoscenti who form the most evangelical constituency of independent development. The practice may be, on the AAA retail level, a disappointment so far, with slender prospects until a terrible economy rebounds. And browser-based games may have yet to catch on in North America the way they have elsewhere. But games are not built for free, and these two developers- and others - think it can be done at this smaller scale.

"I don't want to do anything The Man-ish," Warner said, acknowledging the stereotypical disconnect between an indie developer, who's supposed to be making better games because he's freed from corporate trappings, and product placements, a nakedly capitalist practice.

"But in order to make games consistently, we need to make money," said Lagran (left). "Otherwise, we can't pay the rent. And if people pirate a lot, advertisements make sense."

Warner had no illusions that Raycatcher (built with another partner) was going to make him rich. Just getting it onto Steam was a learning experience and an accomplishment, he said, akin to a writer getting one's first novel published. But the aftermath - from piracy to patching - poses disincentives to the independent developer, who began wanting to make the cool game he always dreamed of making, and finds that he's inherited a lot of problems and obligations he hadn't imagined.

"The money we're making off Raycatcher, it doesn't justify working on a project for a long period of time; I can't support myself on it," Warner said. Especially when you release a game, and it has bugs, and you have to fix them. In a certain sense, when you release something for money, it's almost like you create a liability for yourself."

The way Warner (right) sees it, the game he and Lagran really wanted to make - a narrative, 3D first person adventure set in an alternate reality - can be done quicker, more cheaply, and with fewer of the headaches that come from a commercial downloadable release like Raycatcher.

In their development histories, Warner as an artist, and Lagran as a programmer, shared the same zeal for the immense back story that is created during a game's design, and only partially revealed during its play. The game they are building, untitled as of now, opens that faucet of creativity. Through exploration and observation, players uncover how they got where they are, what they're supposed to do, and advance the story to its conclusion in a game reminiscent of the Sierra and LucasArts adventures of those companies' 1990s heyday, with elements of Myst.

Such a dependence on observation lends itself to advertising. What kind will players see? Their game, still untitled, will be a 3D, first person adventure, so everything you might see in the real world is on the table, Lagran says. Unity 3D, the engine they're using, supports video texture mapping, so a television displaying a video ad is one example. Outdoors, billboards are a given. Product and brand placement could show up as a poster in a character's bedroom.

"If there's going to be a poster on the wall, and a brand on that poster, you might as well make it a real one," said Lagran, a programmer whose experience includes work as an artist on PowerUp's Night of a Million Billion Zombies. Other possibilities include getting a link to a magazine article, targeted to their player demographics. Or opening up a laptop in a university setting in the game, and getting directed to the web site of that university, in real life.

For all of these, however, Lagran and Warner have to make separate and sometimes competing sales pitches, to gamers as well as advertisers. For advertisers, they're hawking a new and effective way to reach a targeted audience's eyeballs. For gamers, they're saying in effect, don't worry, if the advertising is done well, you'll barely notice.

"I've definitely played games with (in-game advertising) and it's never bothered me," Lagran said. "The only time it does is when it's out of context, the random logo that doesn't fit, like you're in a sci-fi world and you see the Apple logo."

So it's clear that the sponsors are going to have to fit organically into this story, somehow, says Warner, who offhandedly confesses a "seething hatred" for pushy, repeated or conspicuous advertising, probably because he's studied hypnosis. "I don't hate products or people making me more aware of products - I buy my clothes the same places as everybody else. But people getting leverage on me emotionally - Axe (body spray) makes people insecure about their sexuality for example - it's very manipulative and a form of bombardment. There are more tactful ways."

And that's where his and Lagran's sensibilities as artists will help an indie developer do it better.

"I could be delusional, but I haven't seen anybody else, really, doing it at this level," Warner says - meaning advertising within fully-rendered 3D games played online.

That points to another condition of the gaming market they hope to exploit: Low expectations. Casual flash games with advertising, while showing an audience increase (67 million in 2007 to 86 million in 2008, with a 28 percent bump in ad views, isn't looked to as any kind of a memorable gaming experience. "They're almost so casual that they're not considered real games," Lagran said. "We want to capitalize on the idea that these browser games are nothing, and make one that feels like a full-fledged game that you'd download…. I think that's where the industry is going to go."

Of course, it already has, notably in Asia, with North America lagging behind. One portal under development, also based in Vancouver, is Dimerocker, and it too envisions enough potential for in-game indie advertising that it has secured venture capital and is building an API to serve ads to developers that list games there.

J. Joly (he goes by his first initial), Dimerocker's founder and VP of content, considers his venture very much borne of the indie-scene aesthetic, envisioning a portal where users and developers communicate with no middlemen, in a give-and-take of release, adoption, feedback, revision and re-release. The portal is also geared toward distributing games built with the Unity 3D engine, which Greener Grass Games is using. Both studios consider it the fastest way to get a professional quality game into production.

"A great Unity game can be done with a 2 or 3 man team and $100,000," Joly said. That translates to considerable development agility and, by using the advantages of browser-based games, can target them to specific emerging markets such as, say, Brazil, skipping the overhead of traditional retail or downloadable releases, while making money back using Joly's API. Lagran and Warner contend they don't need eye-popping numbers to do well. "I think we're looking at between 50,000 and 100,000 impressions in a month, and we should be pretty good."

That's the concept, anyway. It's not something so ahead of the cutting edge that everyone's shooting it down, but it's not to say in-game indie advertising is unqualifiedly the next great thing.

"I'm a venture capitalist; I support the little guy," said Jeremy Liew, managing director of Lightspeed Venture Partners, with an expertise in social media and casual gaming. "The short story here is in-game advertising has been a little bit of a disappointment. It's not lived up to expectations as a major driver of revenue. That was true even when the ad market was strong, and obviously there's an advertising recession going on right now."

Even though recent (and not exactly disinterested) research projects a $2 billion in-game ad market by 2012, the company releasing that sort of figure, IGA Worldwide, is itself in trouble, trying to secure additional funding but also exploring selling itself off, after losses of $11 million in 2007 and $26 million in 2008. Microsoft also just laid off a quarter of the workforce at Massive, its advertising service.

Sure, the scale of the ad sales operation undertaken by an indie game house might not be so large that it needs to hit the kind of numbers larger publishers want to see. But "I guess it depends on what you define as a success," Liew said. "The challenge still is one of demand. And if you're smaller and more targeted, you do have fewer things to offer."

Liew understands Lagran and Warner's instinct to shift to web-based games, but wonders if the in-game advertising is even necessary. "Piracy is what led people in Asia to shift to free-to-play games with digital distribution models," Liew said. "This is a solved problem. Perhaps we can consider using the solutions that are out there."

Dimerocker would be one of those solutions, with plans for a traditional model of free play leading to premium content, with some microtransaction capabilities. But that doesn't particularly differentiate that portal from the others in that space, which is part of the reason why Joly's pushed into it.

This of course is the business plan; what it may meet in reality bears watching.

"Most marketers characterize in-game advertising as experimental," Liew said. "Given the major budget cuts people are seeing, they're not feeling super experimental. And given the context that this has not lived up to expectations, in a recessionary environment, it's going to be a tough challenge for them."

Perhaps, but at least the price of failure, if it comes to that, will be comparatively low. The episodic nature of their project allows them to either continue a successful IP, or cut their losses without having wasted time and development on a full game nobody really preferred.

"Right now, we're 10 grand in the hole, and it's all borrowed money, friends and family," Warner said. "Even if the first episode is a bomb, my mom isn't gonna get the repo man after us."

And they're banking on the goodwill of gamers who will give a game a chance and understand the tradeoff - that free content has to be supported some way. It's true that their exploration of advertising came about, in a sense, because gamers would not support a previous effort with their own money, and worse, pirates stole it. But gamers shouldn't feel that in-game ads are some form of punishment.

"DRM," said Lagran, "would be a punishment."

In Playboy Manager, you'll play a talent agent managing the careers of Playboy's hottest (and nudest) up and coming models. The objective is to get her bedded by Hef named Playmate, with a room in the Playboy Mansion. I guess that guy at left is your character.

Flackery describes it as "The luxurious Playboy lifestyle presented in an online game packed full of wit, style, and pictures which can only be described as titillating," and says the game will combine elements of turn-based gaming and trading cards. Of course, there's no way any of this could be real-time. Too much afk - or jfk, really.

Jolt Online Gaming is handling the development. They're taking preregistrations now, offering a chance to win a lifetime supply of porn as sign-up inducements.

Playboy Casual MMO Announced for PC [Video Games Blogger]

Version 2.0 - as revealed to GameReactor - will feature a new button layout for the virtual navigation bar and will be Wii Speak compatible. Users will be able to use a built-in mail client to access their Wii Mail. Tabbed browsing will be supported by a floating 'tab cube' that will show thumbnails of up to 6 open tabs.

The browser should be available for 500 Wii Points, but existing owners should be able to get a free upgrade once the app is released in December.

Wii - Opera Browser 2.0 - details [GoNintendo]

Once the initial shock of daylight and antialiased fonts has worn off, they will probably need to chill out with a quick dungeon hack. Tombs Of Asciiroth is a labour of love — recreating the look and feel of an ASCII roguelike in Firefox.

There is full-length quest to be had wandering the titular Tombs, and the usually obscure keyboard commands are illustrated with a nice tutorial level with pop-up tip windows.

It can be a bit slow, and you will need to install Google Gears if you want to save your game, but there is plenty of old school fun to be had. You can't not like a game that includes the phrase "Use the sword against hostile Ampersands".

The Tombs Of Asciiroth [Icculus.org]

[blog.instantaction.com]

Compatible with PLAYSTATION 3 (PS3) and Wii, MEGA Series may be delivered via the broadband connection of each console and is accessible through the device's Internet browser, which both use custom Flash players from Adobe. MEGA Series programming will be based on Cartoon Network and Adult Swim shows. MEGA Series content is designed to be played simultaneously with streaming video and delivered episodically over time, providing a real-time immersive experience for fans.

The service wil be launched at the latest early 2008, and there better be a karaoke MC Pee Pants game or I'm going to be very disappointed. I WANT CANDY! Kim Phu

Cartoon Network to Deliver Digital Games to PS2, Wii [Games Industry]

Thanks Ben

NBA 07
Need for Speed Carbon
Mobile Suit Gundam
Motorstorm
Tony Hawk Project 8
Call of Duty 3
PS3 Music Browser
PS3 Picture Browser
PS3 Movie Browser

Brian Crecente

Pedro J. Est banez, a homebrewster who we assume is too frugal to purchase the already-available Opera browser, is apparently hard at work on creating a homebrew browser. Meant to cost users nothing, this browser, dubbed Okiwi, is to support .pdf files, JavaScript, file uploading, as well as a few other features. No word on release date as of right now.

I know nothing about the DS homebrew scene, but free is always good, and it sounds like at this point, anything is better than Opera Eliza Gauger

Homebrew Okiwi Web Browser [DSfanboy, via Aeropause]

A reader sent us a link to Opera's press release about their browser coming to the Wii. We (not wii) reported on this last week during E3, but the press release seems to have more details.

In particular, Opera says that Wii browers will be able to use their Wii-motes to check out the interweb between games.

"Nintendo is clearly visionary in leading the gaming industry into the new era in gaming, and a wonderful partner for Opera," says Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. "We are thrilled to expand our partnership with Nintendo, and work with them to deliver the best gaming experience on the Wii console and the Nintendo DS ."

"For our Wii console launch in 2006, we required a browser that was fast and secure with support for the latest standards including AJAX. Opera proved perfect for our purposes and is an exceptional addition to both the Nintendo DS and the Wii console," said Genyo Takeda, senior managing director and general manager, Integrated Research & Development Division, Nintendo Co., Ltd.

It would be cool if Opera Wii went beyond using the pointer for web navigation and let you use motion control to surf the net. I'd love to be able to slash at and shoot pop-ups and don't even get me started on all the potential inherent in using the Wii-mote on porn sites. —Brian Crecente

Opera Press Releases

This June will see the Japanese launch of the new DS Opera browser, seyz Nintendo Power magazine. The browser lets folks surf the web via their Dual Screen. Word 'round the campfire is that it will launch in the US this December. No word on a Euro release. Typical.

In a recent interview, Opera's Berit Hanson describes how the browser works with the NDS. "In fit-to-width mode, Opera uses both screens for scrolling up or down a page with both screens completing the view," explains Hanson. "In DS mode, an overview of the Web page is displayed on the lower screen and a pink square can be moved around an area of the page. The area you have selected is shown on the upper screen."

Another neat little feature is ability to hand write the URL. "You can currently write in English or Japanese," says Hanson. Not a time savor for those with chicken scrawl handwriting.

Full Article [Eurogamer]

the Opera Internet Browser

We don't quite get this. Even using a web browser on most Pocket PCs is an excruciating ordeal. Visiting simple sites on a baseball card sized screen is like trying to remove your wisdom teeth by head-butting a doorknob: definitely painful and not the most efficient way to do things. Shrink that screen down to the size of a postage stamp and it looks like you're going to pay $40 bucks merely for what you could alreadyon your DS for free: not read the Internet web sites you want to read.

Still, Opera is a very cool web browser and we're intrigued to see what solutions they can come up with to make web browsing on the DS viable. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

Opera Due in December [4 Color Rebellion]