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    What Game Developers Do When Their Games Launch

    The build-up is huge. The expectations high. Everything runs at fever pitch. That's right, game launches are big (and stressful) affairs. For consumers, it's a waiting game. More »
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    11:00 AM on Fri Nov 28 2008
    By Brian Ashcraft
    49,426 views, 57 comments

    Most discussed yanipheonu: Rex Crowle (???): "I have a large framed picture of a owl on my desk, I like to stare into more »

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    You Can't Hum a Video Game

    In 1982 the president of Arista records, Clive Davis, wrote an editorial in Billboard magazine entitled "You can't hum a video game." His point was that, although the then newly-popular pastime of gaming was giving record companies the heebie-jeebies by threatening to eat into the spending power of the youth market, music would always have the upper hand compared to this newfangled bleepy nonsense.

    Irony, she is a cruel mistress. Thirty Twenty Six years later, Gamasutra reported that Aerosmith have earned more from their Guitar Hero spin-off Guitar Hero:Aerosmith than from any single one of the fourteen albums they have released to date. The A&R man responsible for discovering Aerosmith? Step forward Clive Davis. More »

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    4:20 PM on Tue Nov 25 2008
    By Stuart Houghton
    15,259 views, 92 comments

    Most discussed kadaj24: "From First To Last are a post-hardcore band" Wtf is "post-hardcore"? What's these random subgenres these days? more »

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    I, Gamer

    New York City is difficult in the winter. Most residents still do much of their navigation on foot, and Manhattan's grid-like avenues and towering buildings can funnel the approaching winter's dry cold snaps into veritable wind tunnels. Coats never seem quite warm enough, and gloves make it clumsy to fumble for the little paper swipe card that gets me a train ride a few stops over to my nearest GameStop.

    If you're like me, maybe you get a good feeling when you hit up a game store, a little rush of positive sentiment that goes beyond the familiar aura of shelves stocked with potential adventures still gleaming in their plastic. Especially now, as the Holiday shopping season starts to get underway, these stores are filled with people buying and trading games, just like you. In one shopper's hand you see a favorite title of yours, and the two of you make eye contact and smile, because you just know, you just get it, right?

    Maybe not. More »

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    10:00 AM on Mon Nov 24 2008
    By Leigh Alexander
    13,945 views, 249 comments

    Most discussed malcolm_sex: bh y lv n nw yrk. try lvng n wnnpg, ts frggn cld s hll hr bttr prt f more »

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    Vexed by Online Bigots' Language? Psychologists Say They Want You to Be

    By now it’s sadly a common experience, hearing racist, homophobic, even anti-Semitic slurs during online games. Often it’s for no apparent reason other than as a term of abuse used against competitors, that packs more of a punch than your standard four-letter word. But a couple months back, I had a different experience, and I’m sure it’s no more uncommon for others, too. In a game of Castle Crashers — cooperative multiplayer — this guy I was playing with completely proffered some rather ugly opinions of African-Americans, and needlessly heaped racial slurs on the foes we were battling. More »

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    11:00 AM on Thu Nov 20 2008
    By Owen Good
    34,775 views, 338 comments

    Most discussed dudesgirlfriend: I cant stand playing Halo 3 online anymore. As a female gamer its difficult to be taken seriously on that game more »

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    Composing The Soundtrack To Blizzard's World

    For almost a year now, over 300 Australians, two noted Japanese gaming personalities and Sony Japan’s record label have been hard at work on a project with Blizzard Entertainment. This project encompasses World of Warcraft. And Starcraft. And Diablo. It has absolutely nothing to do with the development of a game, and absolutely everything to with developing one of the most indulgent pieces of fan-service we've seen in a while.

    It’s called Echoes of War. Or, to use it’s full name, The Music of Blizzard Entertainment: Echoes of War. More »

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    11:00 AM on Fri Nov 14 2008
    By Luke Plunkett
    17,768 views, 52 comments

    Most discussed Horusz: No Level 70 Elite Tauren Chieftain? *Sadface* more »

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    The Ballad of "Robert Jones": Arcade Tickets Were His Currency

    I started thinking about this story, which is four years old and never told, because later today I’m going to a party at the Dave & Buster’s in Milpitas. I’ve never been there before, but I think I know someone who has.

    I promise every word of this is true to the best of my recollection, and if you believe me, well, it’ll be an intriguing way to begin our Sunday.

    Back in Denver in April 2004 my friend David, also a writer at the Rocky Mountain News, had eloped with his fiance to Belize. He and Tanya held a big celebration after the fact with all of their friends at the Dave & Buster’s in Englewood. Everyone had a good time.

    Late in the evening, I noticed a guy sitting on a bar stool at an arcade game — Drill-o-Matic was its name. There was, literally, an ankle deep pile of tickets on the ground. Every so often a D&B employee would come by, politely stack them up, open the machine and check on the ticket stock, replacing it if necessary.

    This machine was this man’s livelihood. More »

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    10:00 AM on Tue Nov 4 2008
    By Owen Good
    20,586 views, 138 comments

    Most discussed Moterola: I'd be so pissed off if I didn't get that Motorcycle after that much work. Couldn't he have complained to more »

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    Whither the Rest of the World?

    A few months ago, Chris Plante had a thought provoking suggestion for the gaming industry: what we need is more global games. I thought it was an interesting position, and one that I more or less agree with –- but the problem isn’t simply lack of ‘global’ games. On the whole, mainstream gaming press is seriously cut off from anything outside the typical mainstream purview. It would probably do all of us some good if we started looking seriously at game development and industry news coming from elsewhere.

    As a person in an East Asian centered field, I’m constantly baffled by the deafening silence from most of the Western gaming press when it comes to East Asia (or Asia in general) outside of Japan – and we can just forget other, younger markets. Don’t get me wrong, I realize most of my colleagues don’t spend their lives neck deep in, well, non-Japanese Asiatic goodness (thank god for that), and we tend to target our news at what the readership is looking for (which is frequently ‘news that effects you!’, whatever that happens to be). Still, with all our high-minded talk of ‘improving gaming journalism,’ shouldn’t one of the key points of that be looking outside our comfort zone and outside ‘mainstream’ topics? And I don’t just mean brief looks that poke fun at weirder aspects of foreign gaming culture. Yes, the ‘Vii’ is pretty funny – but there’s more to China than cheap knockoffs, I promise. More »

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    11:00 AM on Mon Nov 3 2008
    By Maggie Greene
    4,870 views, 35 comments

    Most discussed muu: Why bother? The coverage for even the US/EU/JP markets only skim at the very top edge (I doubt we'll ever more »

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    How Gaming Is Surpassing Uncanny Valley

    It's a tech demo that doesn’t look like a tech demo. The clip was just a woman talking. Pedestrian stuff. That is, until the woman’s face changed colors. Literally. Months back a facial animation clip called “Emily” popped up online, showing off the strides that its software maker Image Metrics has made. “Our recent Emily project is something we’re all proud of,” says Image Metrics co-founder Kevin Walker. Damn well they should be.

    That tech demo wasn’t the first time Joe and Jane Q. Public had seen what Image Metrics was capable of — nor is it the end of it. Image Metrics did face work for Grand Theft Auto IV, Unreal Tournament II as well as Gnarls Barkley’s “Who’s Gonna Save My Soul” and Rock Band 2. More »

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    11:00 AM on Fri Oct 31 2008
    By Brian Ashcraft
    49,544 views, 154 comments

    Most discussed Mommar: I never found that Emily clip to be real looking. Something about the motions of her mouth were still more »

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    You Gotta Have Faith: Does Style Beat Out Realism

    Earlier this month Kotaku posted a pair of images of the lovely Faith from Mirror's Edge. One was the official rendering by Swedish dev DICE of the parkour-inspired, Asiatic heroine - and the other was a reinterpretation edited by an Asian fan, imagining what Faith would look like if she had been designed according to what he says are Asian standards of beauty.

    The post spurred more than 500 comments and touches on something quite a bit deeper than the obvious - and less-tangible - question of "Asian tastes versus European tastes." The question that many of us really seemed to be ruminating on is a simpler one more germane to the world of video games: Do we want our characters to look real? More »

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    11:00 AM on Thu Oct 30 2008
    By Leigh Alexander
    41,957 views, 271 comments

    Most discussed SabinDeus: "It's not that we hate big boobs. It's that we don't get why someone who represents values we admire would more »

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    The Rush To Review

    I almost didn’t write this. It feels a bit like beating a dead horse. But then I drank a cup of coffee and decided maybe some dead horses deserve the beating.

    How is it that so many people have reviewed LittleBigPlanet? I’m not asking this because the single player levels are so insanely hard (they are), but because a good third of the game still isn’t really playable.

    The servers for online sharing just went live two days ago for a total of about eight hours and after running sporadically with glitches, were taken right back offline be Media Molecule. Currently the servers seem back up, but a bit shakey. So how is it that Metacritic was showing yesterday 34 reviews for the game and a metascore of 95?

    I’m not saying LittleBigPlanet doesn’t deserve the acclaim, it most assuredly does, but don’t gamers deserve to read reviews based on the final product? More »

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    8:00 AM on Wed Oct 29 2008
    By Brian Crecente
    23,787 views, 220 comments