The game was R.U.S.E., the March 2010 real-time strategy game from Ubisoft that will be playable on a PC or Xbox 360, and PS3 without a touch screen.

But with a multi-touch screen is how I would sample it last Wednesday evening. Specifically, I was playing the game on a HP TouchSmart monitor which runs a several hundred dollars.

Imagine your typical RTS, which isn't quite the description R.U.S.E. seems to deserve. As noted before on this site, the game has some good twists involving its battlefield perspectives and emphasis on deception. But for this post, consider it typical, with units spawned and selected from an overhead perspective, directed toward their targets.

Tapping on a unit with your finger selects it. Pressing your finger and then dragging it diagonally creates a box that selects multiple units. Those controls are simple. Your finger does what a mouse pointer would do.

Now imagine — touching your monitor for this is fine by me — dragging two fingers across your monitor. That makes the camera pan to the side. Drag two fingers the other way and it pans the opposite way. Up and down pans work similarly.

Now take the pointer fingers of each of your hands. Press them to the edges of the monitor and, iPhone-style, drag them toward each other. The view zooms in. Spread your fingers to the edges and the view zooms out.

Place one finger on a spot on your monitor. Start drawing a circle around it with your a finger on the other hand. This rotates the view. (These controls are different from what Ubisoft had demonstrated for R.U.S.E. played on flat table-sized monitors.)

These are functions that any decent RTS player would implement. What might be harder to do with just a mouse, however, would be selecting units that are far from each other on the screen and issuing them commands nearly simultaneously. A Ubisoft developer encouraged me to try this, having me tap and move one tank in the lower left of the screen with my left pointer finger while I manipulated a vehicle on the right side of the screen with my right hand. The developer pantomimed a skilled player tapping furiously with both hands, showing me the potential of two-handed play.

Conceptually, all of this was quite good. Functionally, it wasn't great yet. I had trouble getting the unfinished version of the game to reliably read my zoom commands. But that can improve. I didn't expect to find the touch control meaningful. Once I did, I just wanted it to work. One hopes it will. Then again, one would need to have a multi-touch monitor, and this one writer does not.

Playing games with the latest tech is a Ubisoft thing. In other corners of the hotel room where I played R.U.S.E., Red Steel 2 could be played with Wii Motion Plus and Racquet Sports could be played barehanded using a proprietary Ubisoft Wii camera. The recently-released Avatar game can be played in 3D, only on 3D TVs, which very few people have.

That doesn't stop Ubi. Ever the innovator. This time, with a monitor and my fingertips.

During Kotaku's interview this week with EA CEO John Riccitiello we turned to recent news that hallowed PC real-time-strategy series Command & Conquer would be moving toward a digital model rather than a disc-based one after its next release. The series would be overseen by Might and Magic creator John Van Caneghem, who recently joined EA.

News of the transition was sending fears of a Facebook-ized, watered-down C&C among some series fans. But while not detailing exactly what the digital edition of the franchise would be like, Riccitiello was happy to explain to Kotaku the reason for the seemingly dramatic shift.

"[Van Ceneghem] and I have a shared vision that the RTS category is due for fundamental innovation and not just cooler graphics," Riccitiello said. "We've gotten to the point where you can see the particles around individual grenade explosions inside rooms where windows fall apart. That was never what made RTS good. That was just sort of eye candy on top of a very traditional game mechanic. From when Red Alert and Starcraft sort of defined the genre, it hasn't moved."

Riccitiello said he didn't want to be seen as designing the game in front of Kotaku — he's not a game designer he acknowledged — but he did offer some hints, saying. "I'm a believer that the RTS sector is more open to fundamental innovation at a metagame level than almost any genre."

Referencing EA's newly-acquired Facebook games developer Playfish, he added: "I actually think that some of what Playfish does, in terms of iterating games on a weekly basis, Some of what Facebook does, in terms of letting you collectively experience things, have not been stitched together by the game industry in terms of lessons learned there. You start applying that thinking to a C&C franchise you get something pretty special."

Riccitiello is not the first — and won't be the last — Kotaku interviewee who brings up the old saw that graphics aren't everything. But you can sometimes judge the depth of such a comment by the context in which it's provided. In the midst of talking about C&C, here's what Riccitiello said about graphical improvements and their relevance to game development and the notion of what constitutes "fundamental innovation":

"I grew up in the industry at a time when eye candy was the fundamental innovation. 1999 saw the first mass-sale of 3D games. Suddenly, you can do 3D when everything else was splines and isometric and all that stuff. We had three or four years where, ok, it was about eye candy. If all you had [before then] was 2d and scrollers, it lit us all up. And then we learned how to make 3D environments that were fun and interesting and different.

"I think now we're all at a place where we have high-definition TVs. We have PCs with staggering monitors. Everyone's mastered 3D. By and large we're choosing between 30 and 60 frames a second depending on how good we want the environment to be vs. how fluid we want. Clearly in the next set of processors we're going to get to both.

"But I could ask the question, who cares? To be honest with you, yes I do like watching sports in high def but it's not really more fun. I just like it because I spent six grand on my TV and I want a return on my investment. But it doesn't make the experience any better. And so you have to innovate in different ways."

So graphics as "fundamental innovation" in the RTS genre? In Command & Conquer? Not anymore, according to Riccitiello.

Time for something different. Something, he admitted, build on a path blazed by massively-multiplayer online games, connecting more players and doing it outside a fantasy universe.

Sounds like Command & Conquer has its marching orders.

The action-shooter Avatar: The Game hits on December 1, tying in to the upcoming movie of the same name from James Cameron. The film and the Xbox 360 / PS3 versions of the game will support 3D visuals, utilizing the more advanced digital 3D techniques that are intended to supplant the old cardboard-glasses anaglyph approach that worked with any old display.

To experience Avatar in 3D through the video games, users will need to have 3D-compatible TVs. Otherwise they'll be playing the game in its non-3D mode.

But 3D TVs are not something many folks have. Some day, if Ubisoft is right, we'll wonder how we coped without them.

Here is Yannis Mallat, head of Ubisoft Montreal, where the Avatar games are being made, from an interview with the Financial Post:

"3D is to pictures what Dolby Stereo was to sound," he said. "No one wants to go back to mono."

Sony, as we reported recently, is also pushing 3D TVs and 3D games as a big thing for the near future.

Back in the summer, I wore 3D glasses while watching Avatar being played, maybe for five minutes. And I've played a side-scroller from Blitz Games using similar digital 3D technology. Both required 3D TVs. AndbBoth were impressive, moreso for how much depth into the TV they presented, rather than for what you often expect 3D to get you: Stuff flying out toward your face. But I don't feel that I've had enough time with 3D set-ups or the games built for them to say whether Mallat is just providing hype or if he's on to something.

And without owning a 3D-compatible TV, I don't think I can assess what he's talking about any time soon.

Ubisoft counting on future of 3D gaming [Financial Post]

I make it hard for video games to be unpredictable.

Not that I make games. I play them. And by playing them, I try to examine them and test their resilience, as if tapping their fender and poking the tires, slamming the doors a few times to make sure they don't stick and assessing that, okay this thing is sturdy, before I've ever driven it.

I am, while doing this, hoping for a surprise.

I want to know everything about a game before I play it but also be caught off guard by it as it unfolds, and I don't want anyone calling that a paradox.

I want to know the scale of the thing and its scope. I check menu screens and Trophy lists to determine how many levels the game has. I start a game, just barely, and I check what percentage the game says I've completed, to determine how much more I've got. I check level lists. All in-game, of course. Consulting outside sources would be cheating. Through these means I determine that New Super Mario Bros. Wii has at least eight worlds and that Assassin's Creed II employs a rarely-seen level-counting trick.

This is, I believe, the psychology of the experienced gamer: he or she who can size up a game before having started it. It is, I propose, part of the act of playing a game. You will agree if you recognize playing a game as playing with the systems a game developer has created, and if you consider a key part of playing with systems the act of understanding them, testing them, looking for shortcuts or exploitable faults.

But that's not entirely fair, because it may be out of bounds. Few would deny that prodding at a gameplay system is the good sport. It is the act of getting better at playing a game and exposing faulty, porous game design. But prodding the level-numbering system of a game may be nothing more than an elaborate way of turning to the last page of a book, if not to read how it ends, but at least to size up the novel by measuring it, crudely, by a count of its pieces of paper.

This is a reflex that might best be turned off, because there is little gained but disappointment to know just when a game will end or how many hidden items it has tucked away in its corners. Therefore, you must understand how I can desire to know the whole thing and yet still hope to be surprised.

I can't turn this instinct off. But, like a good advocacy group, I can lay the blame for this part of my behavior on video games.

It was the draws-itself-as-you-go map of Super Metroid that teased to me the idea that a game knows how big it is before it will tell you. And it was the inventory screens of the Nintendo 64 Zeldas that taunted with a framework that showed me how much menu space there was to contain all that I could discover in the game, inviting me to guess at the items that would fill it and forcing me to recognize when I had reached a quarter, then halfway, then sadly, near-completion (already?) of a wonderful adventure. If only, I began to hope, I was being tricked and a new, empty menu would appear at the last minute, to reveal that this game still offered more.

(Main item screen of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, as seen at the beginning of the game)

(Main item screen of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, further into the game. PIC)

So we're at Wolfenstein, a first-person-shooter from August for which I had negligible expectations, a game I was certainly not studying in advance to know its scale and its scope nor one that I expected to, finally, thankfully, surprise me.

I played the game because it was out in slow August. I played it because a first-person-shooter with super-powers feels worth trying though, for me, seldom worth finishing. I tried it because it was being made by major studios, Raven and id, but oddly being disowned by the latter party and maybe neglected by its publisher. Such is the drama that makes a game more interesting.

I played it and enjoyed it and dared to tell people that I preferred its campaign to that of Killzone 2 and F.E.A.R. 2 and the rest of the 2009 first-person-shooters I had played by then, leaving a caveat for Modern Warfare 2, though I'm not sure I needed to.

And if I had to explain why I liked it so much — me not being someone with an endless need to virtually kill supernatural Nazis and me having no affinity for earlier Wolfenstein games because I never played them — I'd have to say it's because I had tried, early, to size this game up, and better than anything else I played this year, it tricked me and surprised me.

I praise Wolfenstein because it fooled me.

The game isn't simply a first-person shooter. It is a shooter linked with a hubworld, an oddly unusual design for a game in the genre. It's built less like a Call of Duty — broken into levels you play in order — and more like Super Mario 64, with the Nazi-controlled city of Isenstadt taking the place of Princess Peach's castle. Doorways in that city to new shooter levels substitute for the paintings in Peach's castle through which Mario could leap to enter his platform-jumping levels. In Peach's castle and in Isenstadt you have some choice as to which level you'd explore next and you could have some fun just exploring the hub geography that connects them.

You'd think this would be a game structure a veteran gamer could accurately size up. It would feel all the more knowable if you saw in Wolfenstein's mini-map the implementation of a poor-man's Grand Theft Auto. Little icons appear on the lines denoting Isenstadt's streets and alleys, identifying locations where new major missions might be assigned or begun. As side goals emerge as well, the GTA scheme seems apparent: There will be essential main things to do and unessential though possibly fun tributaries to explore.

That's what I thought. That's why I was wrong.

There is something games could do but seldom do, and that is confound a gamer's level-size expectations. I played a few missions in Wolfenstein and assumed I had the measure of them, that I recognized the number of minutes and Nazis involved in each. Then I reached a level set at a farm, which I guessed to be an average-sized level and which, as it was unfolding, appeared to consist of a battle near a barn, a fight down a road, and a one-man breach of a farmhouse that would culminate in a stated goal to reach a basement. I even had to shoot a rushing horde of enemies from a second story window, which is often the sign that a level has reached its climax. But in that basement of destiny, which I fought hard to reach, was an elevator. And down that elevator was a vast military complex and the level's second half. I was radically off in my sense of how big this level would be. I'd been fooled and was happy for it.

(Concept art for Wolfenstein. PIC)

As I played more of Wolfenstein I realized that the game offered few clues with which I could guess the scale of its levels. I might as well have been predicting earthquake magnitudes. Some of my missions might have been side missions, others main, but I couldn't distinguish even when they were about to begin.

Down one street of Isenstadt I found a door to a building. Entering it started a new level, called the Officer's House. Having fought through that massive farm, gone through some other large levels set in a hospital and an archeological dig site, I guessed (wrong again!) that this level would be big. You play a level in a game based on an "officer's house" and you just assume you're going to be fighting through, maybe, a 25-room house? Or taking the battle out of the house across rooftops? Or up in a blimp? Or into the sewers? Anything to make it bigger than the terrain you'd cover just fighting in one officer's house. Except that's all it was. Just a short level. A short shooting mission in this guy's house. Just a couple of stories tall, nothing big, nothing that lasted too long. I was fooled again.

I don't think the Wolfenstein development team could have gotten away with sizing their levels so differently from each other had their game been structured like a Call of Duty or a GoldenEye or many of the other major first-person shooters. It'd seem like one level designer was lazier than the other or something.

But this game, dare I uncork some over-praise, could do this because its hub-city structure allowed it to unfold with the pace of a life.

When I wake up on a November day in my apartment I don't know where and when the major missions of my day will begin. The subway steps of Brooklyn may lead me to a brief trip to work or an odyssey involving crazy beggars, mechanical difficulties, and a painful stumble on the stairs. The door to the bank could lead to a quick withdrawal or a sudden inward-turning mental scramble to calculate credits and debits. Even that trip to bed and the drift to sleep might lead to a level of unknown size and scale, maybe a brisk dream or a restless night.

These are the rhythms and surprises of our days that games, no matter how realistic they supposedly have become, so rarely recreate.

Wolfenstein could well be a game whose parts are not as good as its whole. I can't tell. I can't see those parts as separate from the delight I took in being tricked by them. I've become confident that I can see a game from across the horizon and know what it'll be when it gallops to me, that I'll at least know how tall it stands. But not this time. And I was happy for it.

Maybe, after all, this is a valid way to play a game on top of the other ways you're playing it. Maybe it is part of the game to poke around the game to see how big it is and to think you've got it figured out before it has even begun.

That is all legitimate, if the designers play back. That is all fair if the designers recognize that innate zeal among gamers to know, understand and master — and if the designers assert that just when we think we have it all figured out, they have something new to throw us off.

I'd rather not be able to know a game in advance, despite my best reflexes to try. I yearn to be tricked.

Lose/Lose is about values and value. It's about what happens if a "Game Over" screen destroys your copy of the game, as happens with Gage's game. And it's about what happens if every alien invader that you shoot down for points represents a file somewhere on your computer, a file that, if you blast that alien, is deleted forever.

As it says in red, all-caps letters on the official Lose/Lose homepage: "KILLING ALIENS IN LOSE/LOSE WILL DELETE FILES ON YOUR HARDDRIVE PERMANANTLY" [sic]

"I'm shocked anyone has played it at all," Gage said in an interview with Kotaku. "It was never meant to be made, rather a catalyst for discussion."

But Lose/Lose is being played. A list on Gage's website reports high scores generated by gamers unafraid of the damage "Lose/Lose would do to their computers. The top scorer has "slaughtered 4912 aliens" and done who knows how much damage to their computer, if the data being pulled by the game's website is accurate and real, which Gage says it is. "I think the people who've played it have added an important element to it," he said "In demonstrating that they value their data differently."

Or, perhaps, Lose/Lose players value other people's data differently. Gage said he's aware of the game being played on computers at retailers such as Best Buy or The Apple Store, an act he discourages. He equates the act with going to a store's display computer and dragging important files into the trash.

Regardless of where people are playing the game and whose data they might be destroying, the themes of Lose/Lose are still relevant. To Gage, one of the game's key attributes is that it gives the world a video game that undisputedly has real-world consequence.

"I do think it's worth questioning what this medium can convey," he said. "Lose/Lose does this by taking the standpoint that killing in video games could have consequences in real life, and it supports this statement by having consequences."

Gage isn't taking an anti-video-game violence stance. He describes himself as a hardcore gamer who is excited about the release of Modern Warfare 2 and not at all an anti-video-game-violence guy. Instead, he hopes that the Lose/Lose's real-world consequences for player aggression against virtual aliens will provoke conversations about the worth of virtual things.

He sees the game as part of the dialogue about how important the virtual parts of our lives are, a topic he believes is relevant to everything from MySpace-related suicide to griefing in video games, that touches on everything from social interactions online to banking.

"Lose/Lose is out there to try and engage us in this conversation," he said. "What does it mean that we value property differently? How can we interact with each-other successfully in an environment where my hard drive is my artistic livelihood, but yours might only contain links to YouTube? Or in which some have their primary social interactions, and others only use a place to unwind and destress. This isn't a situation that can be solved with rules or laws, but one that we have to grow into societally, and yet, it's growing ever faster than we're understanding what that means. How do we catch up?

"Personally, I've always been really interested in how the internet abstracts us from what we do or say by way of anonymity. This is the same mechanic that Lose/Lose employs. You are the entire time aware of what you're doing, but you are abstracted from it by the video game layer. This mirrors a lot of these aggressive situations on the internet.

"It also mirrors a lot of situations in real life. Situations like war, cheating, or drugs, are all Lose/Lose, and yet people do them anyway. That aspect of the project serves as a subtle way to justify the reality of the virtual world."

Last week, as reported in PC World, the PC security firm Symantec deemed his game a Trojan that could be used to damage computers. It's damage level, as indicated by Symantec is "low." Nevertheless, the company's site warns: "OSX.Loosemaque is a Trojan that appears to be a video game, but deletes files from the home folder when a user plays it."

Gage believes he's made the risks involved with the game, which are spelled out on his website, clear enough and bristles at any attempt to label his game as malware, or malicious software. "I would rather call it dangerous software. Unfortunately," he said, distinguishing it from programs maliciously designed to harm computers. "I think it's important but sad that anti-virus companies need to protect us from projects like mine that are so up front about what they do, but I recognize that it's their business, and unfortunately many people rely on anti-virus companies as their only means of defense."

Symantec's action does demonstrate the power of Lose/Lose to suggest a game can have real-world consequences, and in that way it is a victory for Gage whose game will be presented as part of his thesis for a masters of fine arts at Parsons The New School for Design in New York.

"I think it's time we stop discussing whether or not video games and other media could be affecting us," he said, "And start addressing what it means to be affected by something like this — and how we can use this effect to strengthen the medium."

The Kotaku editorial database indicates that before Kamen Rider is released for the DS this year, Yie Ar Kung Fu may have been the only single-player fighting game ever made.

After all, why would anyone make a single-player fighting game? Isn't that just a brawler?

Ah, but they do exist.

After I checked out the new Matt Hazard game last week, a rep from that game's publisher, D3, let me try the company's Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight fighting games. There's one coming to the Wii, one to the DS, both based on a several-decades-old Japanese series that has a Power Rangers aesthetic.

The Wii one is two-player. Nothing too weird there. It's made by Eighting, developers of Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom. It's well-documented that I shouldn't try to sound knowledgeable about fighting games, and it's doubly sketchy that I actually beat the other reporter in attendance when we played the Wii version. What I can tell you authoritatively is that Dragon Knight uses a card-system for its fighting. You can strike, block, doge and jump with standard presses and waggles. But you also go into battle with a hand of cards that are associated with powers, including some Dragon Knight-specific summons attacks. The cards drain a meter that is refilled as you fight well. So.. the flow involves you using the card moves, then fighting enough to activate them again, with the added strategy of picking which card to play when.

I was about to skip the DS version, figuring it was more of the same. But then the D3 rep said it had this unusual quality, not that he suggested it was a selling point.

The DS game is made by Natsume. Both games have a single-player mode comprised of challenges that the player against one or more fighters from the show. But... the DS game only has single-player.

I was befuddled as to why they'd leave out a second-player option. I was told it's because the design of the game is more focused on leveling up your own character. The more you fight, the more powerful your character gets, in stat-progression ways that supposedly would make it hard to balance for multiplayer gaming. So the DS game may look like it's simply another fighting game with another twist.

But you'll be playing this fighting game alone, if you play it.

Which is kind of how I played Street Fighter II.

Which is why I stank at Street Fighter II.

This is different, yes?

Back on Monday I described my opportunity to try New Super Mario Brothers on the Wii and my hands-off observations of the game's innovative Super Guide helper mode. As I reported, the Super Guide could only be activated if the player got their Mario killed eight times on a given board. Because the game starts the player with only five lives, the Nintendo rep showing me the game had to lose the five lives, then select "Continue" to get another batch of five and lose more.

The Continue screen flashed by quickly and I thought I saw a number on it. This wouldn't have been strange in the old days, when games offered a finite number of Continues, limiting the number times players could replenish their lives. On an old Nintendo Entertainment System, maybe you'd have three Continues, offering four lives each. Losing lives would usually revert you back to the beginning of a level. Using a Continue could knock you back to the beginning of a series of levels. Losing all Continues might bounce you back to the beginning of a game.

I asked the Nintendo rep who was showing me Super Guide: If New Super Mario Bros. was going to be progressive and kind to its worse players, why would it offer limited continues?

The Continues don't count down, she told me. Not in this pre-release version of the game. The player can keep using Continues. If they are counted at all — and that's what I'm not clear on as of the writing of this post — they'll count up. She implied they would, that they'd show in some way that gamers needed to rely on them.

I left the demo wondering how a system that counts Continues would be regarded by gamers. Would people mind if the game exposed how many Continues they used? Would it expose Continues as an unneeded metric that complicates the calculation of the number of Lives the player used?

We'll find out in about a month exactly how the Continues system works in New Super Mario Bros. Wii. But for now, let us ponder the possible innovation of video game Continues that will tally the groups of lives you've lost.

It's something that's been gnawing at me for a while now, but as we approach Christmas 2009 – the fifth holiday season for the Xbox 360, and fourth for the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Wii – that gnawing has turned into some serious, unchecked mastication.

After all, a new hardware generation is meant to usher in a new generation of games to go with it. And not just games that look prettier, or sound better; titles that give you something entirely new in terms of game design and mechanics, something that could only be done by taking advantage of the latest in console hardware.

Yet I think only a handful of games this console generation have done so. Which ones? Oh, I'm glad you asked. Games like:

Dead Rising – There has never been a game like Dead Rising. It's open-world in appearance, but the entire game is built around the concept of navigating an endless sea of zombies in numbers previous consoles simply couldn't get on-screen at once.

Oblivion/Fallout 3 – Two games, I know, but they do the same thing, so they go in the same listing. Nobody ever forgets that first time you leave the Imperial sewers/Vault 101 and take in the world around you, realising that Bethesda haven't crafted a level, they've built a seamless, living world well beyond the scale of previous titles like Morrowind.

Yes, they also appear on PC, but remember, these games were also built from the ground up with consoles in mind, rather than being crude ports.

Wii Sports/Wii Sports Resort – To this day, the only games that have truly delivered on the promise of the Wii Remote, integrating it so naturally within the gameplay experience that you can't imagine playing the games without it.

So as good as Modern Warfare is, as good as Mario Galaxy is, I don't call them truly "next gen" games. Why? Because they fail my "next gen" test, that's why.

Here's the test: If a game can be ported to a console in a previous generation and keep its core gameplay and overall design in place, it's not what I'm calling for the purposes of this piece a "next gen" game. Mario Galaxy was great, but really, it's a GameCube title with some star-shaking stuff thrown in. Modern Warfare? Amazing, but as the upcoming Wii port attests, it used the 360 and PS3 primarily for better graphics and sound. LittleBigPlanet? Another great game, but the PSP version shows the core experience could have been done on a PS2.

Other games I think fail this test are Halo 3, BioShock, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Uncharted, Metal Gear Solid 4…OK, pretty much everything. You get the idea. Sure, they're nice and shiny, and have lovely pre-rendered cutscenes, and there are advanced uses of physics and AI under the hood, and most important of all, advanced online connectivity, but all of those are just tweaks, improvements, icing on the cake, candy for the eyes. None of them fundamentally change the way you approach a game, or a genre.

Not like Mario Kart and F-Zero did with Parallax scrolling. Or Mario 64 with its use of 3D. Or Grand Theft Auto III with its living, breathing city. Those games re-wrote the book. You just couldn't do GTAIII on the PlayStation. Or Mario 64 on the SNES. They were true "next gen" games.

Now, I'm not saying all games NEED to be 100% innovative. That's an impossible requirement. Ridiculous, even. Not every single game idea is going to bust outside the box. I like my latest version of FIFA or Call of Duty as much as the next man, and the world will spin just fine with the majority of games simply plodding along, doing what the last one did, only slightly better. Still, a man can want, can't he?

So why do we have so few this time around? What's the problem? There's refinement under the hood. There's games that some, and especially the developers, may disagree with me on (GTAIV, for example, or Halo 3 and its extensive multiplayer modes). And there are some who could argue, with a fair point, that the same problem plagued the previous generation.

Certainly the cost of development can't help. Worlds are built with engines, and engines are built on rules. If you wanted to come up with something entirely new, you'd have to do it yourself, which for many developers and publishers in this current economic climate just isn't feasible.

It can also be argued that a single jump in the mid-90's – from the 16-bit era to the N64 and PS1 – will long be the most significant in gaming, taking us as it did from 2D to 3D, and that subsequent generations can't be relied upon to deliver the same level of innovation. Fair, to a point, but then there are still plenty of games like GTAIII that were able to innovate well past the 32-bit era.

One final possibility, however, is that there is innovation going on in today's games beyond the superficial. It's just, we can't see it. Chatting with Bethesda's Todd Howard on the subject, he put this idea forward:

"I think the visual component of it is the one that everyone notices first, and it's also the prime part that benefits from what the new hardware gives you" he says. "So it's just harder to see the innovations beyond that, but they're there. I'd guess there's just as much pure 'design innovation' with this generation as there has been in the last few."

"Look at the basis now for how games handle physics, difficulty, controls, save games, or simple load screens. I know it sounds silly, but I get excited by innovations in loading screens, because they're the worst part of a game. I'm interested in how games simply start."

Promising, yeah, but does that really hold water when compared to more fundamental changes? Not really. "There's been innovations in AI, but it certainly hasn't kept pace with the graphic fidelity, which yields this overall feeling of it going backwards" Howard adds. "The environments are so complex now in games, that building good AI just to manoeuvre them takes serious time. But that's not an innovation, that's simply the AI doing what it could do before in a game.

"My hope is, as we developers turn the corner on how to make the games simply 'work,' that we can innovate more on how the games respond to the player, whether that is the AI, or socially, or something else."

Maybe that explains it, and in 30 years, we'll look back on the current generation as one where developers were finding their feet, laying the groundwork for sprawling, innovating and revolutionary titles of the future.

LittleBigPlanet is an innovation award machine, so it stands to reason that it would be on the list. We knew that before we even looked at it. Sure enough, there it was, nestled comfortably among other surefire innovators like Flower and Noby Noby Boy, though I suspect the latter only made it mainly for the confusion factor and the tiny frogs. The only unfamiliar game on the list is MaBoShi: The Three Shape Arcade, a WiiWare title from Mindware that I don't recall ever seeing in action.

Rounding out the list are two bigger titles, Far Cry 2 and Left 4 Dead. I'm not exactly sure where the innovation is in Far Cry 2, other than perhaps the map editing tools. Left 4 Dead, on the other severed zombie hand, pretty much created its own sub-genre, so I can definitely see where Edge is coming from.

Where are they going? Find out next week when the winner is announced at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival over in England somewhere.

Well we can pretty much guess where Nintendo ranks on the list, can't we? While Fast Company does note the fact that Nintendo hasn't done well by the hardcore, it couldn't ignore the mass-market appeal of the Wii and DS, granting them the number one spot in their countdown. Microsoft makes the list at number 8, with Xbox Live's Netflix integration cited as a major point in their favor. And Sony? *looks list up and down* Oh poor Sony.

The sad thing here is I believe there definitely is room for Sony on this list, but Fast Company seems to define innovative as successful, instead of simply rewarding innovation. Blizzard is a highly successful company, but innovative? I'd never have put them on this list. Media Molecule and Harmonix, sure, but Blizzard, Ubisoft, and Take-Two don't seem to be a good fit.

The rest of the list consists of GarageGames of InstantAction.com fame, mobile game maker Greystripe, and RealNetworks, two of which I've heard of, with only the first one seeming like a good choice. All in all, not a very innovative list of the top innovators in the industry.

The Most Innovative Companies in Gaming [Fast Company]

Ghostwire is a 'casual collection' game that uses your phone's camera to create a kind of Augmented Reality effect. You roam around the real world and use your phone to 'see' ghosts that you can then collect in a sort of Ghostbusters-meets-Pokémon affair. Some ghosts will set riddles, others will provide clues and have elaborate back stories that must be unraveled.

Swedish developer A Different Game receives €40,000 in prize money. The runners up were Rhythm/Action game Jadestone and conspiracy ARG Eclipse.

Scary ghost game wins Nokia innovation award [The Guardian]

There are decent games out there, but there is a lot of dross - derivative, badly designed and poorly implemented.

Nokia want to change all that. They have been running the Mobile Games Innovation Challenge - a competition that asks developers to submit their most innovative game designs for - running under Symbian or Java on N-Gage or standard Nokia handsets

Being Nokia, they have a certain amount of hard cash to throw at the problem and have put up prize money worth €70,000 - that's €40,000 for the winner, €20,000 for second place and €10,000 for the third runner up.

The ten finalists up for the big money are:

* Active Tecnologia e Consultoria Ltda. (Brazil) with Cinemarena – set in a movie theatre, controlling avatars on the big screen
* CreatePlayShare (India) with Ball – play any ball game on your mobile or even create your own new game
* Different Game (Sweden) with Ghost Wire – use your mobile device to communicate with ghosts
* Eclipse Interactive (UK) with Watchers – conspiracy adventure game that uses Nokia Maps and other real world tools to find locations
* Int13 (France) with Kweekies – augmented reality virtual pet game
* Jadestone (Sweden) and C4M (France) with Melokey – a music game for mobile devices where you learn to master songs and play them against other in-game characters to win the hearts of your fans
* LemonQuest (Spain) with Wave Pirates – turn into a pirate navigating the seven seas, looking for gold and glory
* Onur Yazilim (Turkey) with Comet Hunter – a 2-D shooting game which combines the excitement of shooting with natural sound effects made by players themselves
* Simlife (China) with XDancery – a music game where players can touch the screen, draw patterns on screen, shake the device or sing into it to hit the music tempo notes
* TechnoBubble (Spain) with Fun Cam – a mixed reality game that connects your camera on your mobile device to the TV

The winners will be announced at the Nokia Games Summit in Rome on 29 October.

Who will win one of the most prestigious mobile gaming prizes of 2008? [Game Challenge via NokNok.tv]

Found among this list of just eight machines is the advent of holographic play fields, the tilt mechanism, flippers, and player mods.

The full list includes Brokers Tip, Humpty Dumpty, Wizard, Hot Tip, Checkpoint, The Twilight Zone, Revenge From Mars and my personal favorite, The Addams Family.

Found among these games is not just a collection of new pinball technology, but a short history of the game that blends so well the mechanical with the virtual.

Top 8 Most Innovative Pinball Machines of All Time [Popular Mechanics]

Similar in concept to our character creator, it allows you, the players, to create missions and story arcs for your characters and others to participate in. You'll be able to pick the map, villain group, and objectives, as well as write the dialog and any clues needed for the missions. When you are satisfied with it, you can upload it and have other players across all servers play it and rate it. Fame will come to the players whose stories rate the best overall.

What Positron so nonchalantly tosses out in a forum post could be one of the most significant advances in the history of the MMO. While games like Asheron's Call 2 toyed around with giving players some degree of control over the game, full-on user-generated content is completely new to the genre. Back at GDC 2007 when Phil Harrison talked about Gaming 3.0, where the experience was driven by user-created content and community interaction, I never thought I would see the concept applied to a game like City of Heroes. I don't like to bandy about the term 'revolutionary', but damn if it doesn't apply here. As Leigh put it, this could very well be the beginning of MMO 2.0.

A Message From Positron - 4 Year Anniversary! [City of Heroes Forums via Eurogamer]

The World's 50 Most Innovative Companies [BusinessWeek via Gamasutra]

Guinness Book of World Records

Publisher:  WB Games

Platform: Wii

Category: Strategy Sim

Release Date: 10/30/08

It is comforting to know that Warner Bros. cares deeply about making a substantive impact on the gaming industry with deep, thoughtful titles.

The biggest difference between the two games is that Assassin's Creed allows the users to do just about anything, moving up and over the whole sandbox environment using Parkour-style moves, but doesn't reward players for the fluidity and beauty that authentic Parkour demands. On the other side, Crackdown has specific Xbox Achievements that encourage players to be more fluid and artistic with their movements, but permits fewer grab points and forces the player into a more linear, less free and experimental path. What Robertson doesn't refer to is the upcoming game Mirror's Edge, based solely around the art of Parkour. If these two elements are married in Mirror's Edge, it could be a big Free Running hit. Then again, if it's only those elements, I can't imagine long-term play possibilities for the game.

Game Culture Vultures: Parkour

The Three Most Important Moments In Gaming, And Other Lessons From Sid Meier [MTV News]

While some of the inclusions will be contested—Warhawk gets props for dumping single player?—and some are certainly recycled—Ultima Online "innovated" with its graphical overhaul years ago—the argument could be made that at least these efforts were successful. Others, like Portal just being Portal, will probably find few detractors.

They might not have been my choices, but I suppose I'll have to back that up with my own list.

TOP 10 GAME DESIGN INNOVATIONS 2007 [Next-Gen.biz]

I'm sure a lot of you have similar stories to this one: New Publisher Division, first six months: "We need to differentiate ourselves! Let's create radically innovative titles. Let's show the other guys how it's done!" A year later, of the 12 titles released, only one is a hit. Another two have been fairly successful, but with flaws.

Sales steps in: "We're not selling squat!" A coup d'etat ensues. Next year's portfolio is 50% clones, and 50% minor incremental innovations. Sales go up, but churn is high because players lose interest. We need to understand and plan this better. We need to realize that incremental innovation is what most players feel comfortable with. But radical innovation brings new players and renews the interest of existing ones who are done with their favorite genre.

The problem is in striking that healthy balance between "Oh god, not another [Bejeweled/Final Fantasy/insert game of your choice here] rip off" and investing in 'different' games that wind up flopping (see: Okami). That line is obviously going to be different for casual developers vs. studios making games for a 'hardcore' audience, but there's got to be a healthy balance somewhere.

Innovation in Casual Games: A Rallying Cry