Ambition is what drew me to Factor 5.

As a gamer I came to the studio's work a little late. I missed their Turrican days, their era of making games for the Super Nintendo and Genesis. I came upon them as an N64 gamer, spotting their logo at the intro to Star Wars: Rogue Squadron. That 1999 shooter was one of the first games to utilize the N64's RAM expansion pack for improved graphics resolution. That was the first hint to me that Factor 5 was a studio interested in pushing technology.

The next game Factor 5 game I played — still before I had become a reporter — was the one that forever charmed me to the studio. It was Star Wars: Battle for Naboo, a new-Trilogy sequel to Rogue Squadron. A hidden feature is what won me over: stuffed into its N64 cart was audio developer commentary for each of the game's levels. I'd never heard such a thing before.

This was a studio of developers with whom I wanted to speak. And I would.

At the start of the GameCube era, in 2001, I was just beginning to cover games. I played Factor 5 GameCube launch title Star Wars Rogue Squadron II: Rogue Leader as a novice reporter at my first E3. It is, to this day, among the best-looking games developed for a Nintendo platform. I don't remember talking to Factor 5's U.S. president Julian Eggebrecht then, nor for its 2003 sequel, Rebel Strike. But it was by that second GameCube game that I was writing a freebie column for IGN about the GameCube.

What I wrote about Rebel Strike highlighted the second defining characteristic of Factor 5 for me: they bit off mouthfuls at a time. Rebel Strike was not just a full new game. It housed the entirety of its predecessor, re-crafted for split-screen co-op. It contained not just audio commentary but making-of documentaries. But there were signs of rough edges: peculiar dips to black between gameplay and in-engine cutscenes; a group of on-foot side-scrolling levels that played poorly and curiously lacked audio commentary.

In 2006, I finally got paid for something I wrote about Factor 5. I was at MTV and covered the topic of developers using audio commentary. I referenced Factor 5 as a pioneer.

Factor 5 disappeared from my radar after that until I finally met Eggebrecht in person at a Sony event in 2006. He was showing, for the first of several times, the dragon-combat game Lair. He was a champion of PS3 motion control, a booster for the system's technical prowess and ambitious as ever. He wanted a game with air combat, ground combat, allusions to the ethics of modern war, hooks to the PS3's web browser, elaborate cutscenes and so much more. There were those two signatures of Factor 5 again, summed up in one word: ambition.

But Lair was rougher than Rebel Strike. Factor 5 barely attempted to hide this. In one of the more open displays of developer frustration with their own game, the studio included commentary in Lair that alluded to the game suffering from what was described as a curse of the dragon games, a problem that they said extended to personal problems among some of the staff. Following up in an e-mail, Eggebrecht said to me in 2007: "I am not a believer in ghosts, but this one was haunted."

Factor 5 faded away again, rumored over the next two years to have canceled its deal with Sony, possibly returned to working with Nintendo. Then came the news reported in Variety that Factor 5 was one of the studios suffering from having made a deal with the collapsed publisher Brash. I reached out to Eggebrecht again, who all but confirmed that the studio had been making a Superman adventure and expressing hope that the game would still come together.

"With that said," he wrote to me in November, "Things are obviously in flux and we hope that the game proves to be as indestructible as our hero…"

And then? Today's news. Factor 5 in the U.S. is no more. I've not heard back from Eggebrecht about this turn of events. The statement on the company's official website indicates that its German parent company still has projects coming.

There may be a future yet for Factor 5. There definitely was a past worth appreciating.

Corewar, a game which celebrates the 25th anniversary of its public debut this month, was pure gladiatorial combat in the arena of the processor, enjoying its peak sometime in the mid-1990s. In Corewar, human users wrote programs built to take over a virtual computer's memory (the core) and wipe out all other programs running on it.

This provided an infinite variety of programs, executing instructions and countering others, in a kind of Darwinian lesson about experimentation, mutation and survival of the fittest. The blog Tech Tinkering marked Corewar's silver anniversary with a rundown of some of the basic battle program archetypes, which of course the competition's most successful programmers modified and turned into more sophisticated code. The 19 common instructions of the Redcode language are listed and explained, along with the IMP and DWARF combatants. And, of course, the wars still rage on, so links to tutorials, guides, and competitions are provided.

If anyone here programmed Redcode and competed in Corewars, by all means, share your stories in the comments. It still strikes me as one of the most challenging, and fundamentally simple gaming experiences that can be had.

An Introduction to Corewar [Tech Tinkering]

GameTrailers has posted a look back at Chris Redfield's zombie-fighting career, from his first appearance in the original Resident Evil to his updated look for this week's Resident Evil 5. You can definitely see how the constant conflict has hardened the man. Suddenly all of those live-action flashbacks don't see so far-fetched, now do they?

From his birth as a desperate attempt to steal some of Nintendo's thunder by artist Naoto Ōshima and programmer Yuji Naka, to his latest rash of sub-par console titles, GameTap's Sonic the Hedgehog Retrospective covers it all. Thankfully, however, the first three episodes of the 24-minute special are dedicated to the 2D Sonic classics, only delving into the 3D games during the last segment. This basically means you get a lovely chunk of Sonic at his best, with only a brief mention of the dark days that were to come. Someone give GameTap's editor a cookie!

What elements from the first two games would you like to see pop-up in Resident Evil 5.

We'll be posting our own impressions of the game a bit later in the day. To hold you over here's part one of Gametrailer's Resident Evil retrospective.

There's a nice look back on various forms of copy protection and games. If you make it, they will pirate it - and it's an entertaining look back at some of the ways companies have tried to outsmart the piraters, sometimes somewhat successfully and sometimes not at all. But is there ever going to be an end in sight?:

With bandwidth expanding and more and more games publishers exploring digital distribution, there's little doubt that we're entering a new phase in the history of copy protection and those who would defeat it. What's more, the demand for games as a chosen form of entertainment has never been higher. All this considered, it's impossible to believe that the cat-and-mouse game of piracy and copy protection will not reach new levels of intensity, with new technologies deployed on each side, and that some of them will surely create new hurdles for even those who simply wish to purchase and play the newest games. Ah, for the heady days of the code wheel.

I'm always entertained to see what new forms of copy protection crop up in weird places, but when watching surreptitious deals going on in Taipei or even seeing the amount of odd stuff one can find on the internet, it does seem like something of a losing battle, no? At least the old school manuals and inbox extras required to complete a game were creative, if nothing else.

A History of Copy Protection [Next Generation via PlayNoEvil]

... SimRomes stick around for a reason. As much as I loved the alien nature of the Egypt in Tilted Mill's Children of the Nile, Rome remains the most accessible ancient city. A century of movies and books have primed us for gladiators, togas, legions on the march...much moreso than, say, Sophoclean drama, chitons and peltasts.

Oh, sure, they're generally wildly historically inaccurate (what else is new?), but panem et circenses, people - who needs realistic class conflict, slavery, and rioting when you've got red-caped legions and chariot racing? The wisdom of Roman satirists still holds true today. Anyways, it's a fun look back at one popular theme if you're a closet (or not) classics geek, or just a fan of some of the titles.

A History of the Ancients Game [Flash of Steel via Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

The folks at Computer and Video Games recently interviewed Jade Empire's senior producer, Diarmid Clarke about the process of making the game, the ideas behind it and it's translation from the Xbox to the PC. I very much enjoyed Jade Empire and often a game with a very different look and feel over other games will attract my attention more than the latest, most awesome, deserted space wasteland shoot em up game. The gameplay mechanic may have been a titch stale, but the story, missions and beautiful surroundings more than made up for it in my opinion.

One of my favorite quotes from the article didn't really have much to do with the game itself but rather the fanaticism of the internet and how things can quickly blow out of proportion.

Within 24 hours of us registering the name for Dragon Age, one of the fans had found it and posted on our site. He was saying: "Hey, guess what, BioWare have got this Dragon Age, and boy, is it gonna suck." Immediately, we had someone replying: "You've got to be kidding, it's going to have thousands of dragons flying around everywhere." All we'd done was register a name that at the time, we may or may not have been going to use, but yeah, some people get pretty fanatical. I think you could just post the name, and the fans would just design the game for you - the speculation is unbelievable.

Truer words were never spoken. Flynn De Marco

Looking Back... Jade Empire [Computer and Video Games]

In honor of Castlevania's 20th anniversary, IGN has put together quite an extensive retrospective of the uber popular side scrolling, vampire slaying adventure. The 10 page history takes us from the early days of Castlevania's 8-bit glory on the NES, through it's long, rocky history on multiple platforms and leaves us with the authors hope's and dreams for Castlevanias of the future. This is quite a hefty and well written article, so if you're looking for some good weekend reading about the vampire franchise that refuses to die, this is the story for you. Flynn De Marco

Castlevania: The Retrospective [IGN]

It starts with eyes full of gore: E3 1995 and the debut of the Virtual Boy.

The house of Mario was also busy pushing its ill-fated Virtual Boy system, calling it a "unique gameplay experience" (sounds familiar) and committing to spending $25 million to promote it. Nintendo claimed that over 100 third-party developers were working on games for it. Atari (the old one, that is) was also getting into the exciting world of futuristic virtual realities by showing off its own VR headset for the Jaguar console.

And, of course, E3 ends with Kotaku storming the showfloor, making even the most out-of-touch higher-ups realize what a slum the convention had become. Florian Eckhardt

E3: The Good Stuff